Month: July 2024

Hot Off The Press: “Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

“Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy,” a new entry into the “Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory” series, edited by Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar, comprises 17 chapters. See below for the table of contents.

  • Antonio Gaitán, Fernando Aguiar, and Hugo Viciana: “The Experimental Turn in Moral and Political Philosophy”

Part 1 – Methods and Foundations

  • Ivar R. Hannikainen, Brian Flanagan, and Karolina Prochownik: “The Natural Law Thesis Under Empirical Scrutiny”
  • Philipp Schoenegger and Ben Grodeck: “Concrete Over Abstract – Experimental Evidence of Reflective Equilibrium in Population Ethics”
  • Dana Kay Nelkin, Craig R. M. McKenzie, Samuel C. Rickless, and Arseny Ryazanov: “Trolley Problems Reimagined – Sensitivity to Ratio, Risk, and Comparisons”
  • Lieuwe Zijlstra: “The Psychology of Metaethics – Evidence For and Against Folk Moral Objectivism”
  • Thomas Pölzler: “The Explanatory Redundancy Challenge to Moral Properties”
  • Cuizhu Wang: “Belief Distributions and the Measure of Social Norms”
  • Mariìa Jimeìnez Buedo: “Coming Full Circle – Incentives, Reactivity, and the Experimental Turn”

Part 2 – Normative Ethics and Legal and Political Philosophy

  • Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola: “Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians”
  • Aurélien Allard and Florian Cova: “What Experiments Can Teach Us About Justice and Impartiality – Vindicating Experimental Political Philosophy”
  • Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg and Yuval Feldman: “A Behavioral Ethics Perspective on the Theory of Criminal Law and Punishment”
  • Douglas Husak: “Behavioral Ethics and the Extent of Responsibility”
  • François Jaquet: “Against Moorean Defences of Speciesism”

Part 3: Applied Issues

  • Blanca Rodrìguez: “Experimental Bioethics and the Case for Human Enhancement”
  • Norbert Paulo, Leonie Alina Möck, and Lando Kirchmair: “The Use and Abuse of Moral Preferences in the Ethics of Self-Driving Cars”
  • Urna Chakrabarty, Romy Feiertag, Anne-Marie McCallion, Brain McNiff, Jesse Prinz, Montaque Reynolds, Sukhvinder Shahi, Maya von Ziegesar, and Angella Yamamoto: “Adaptive Preferences – An Empirical Investigation of Feminist Perspectives”
  • Anastasia Chan, Marinus Ferreira, and Mark Alfano: “Reactionary Attitudes – Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter Movement”

Literature

Viciana, Hugo, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar (eds.) (2023): Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy, New York: Routledge. (Link)

The Folk Concept of Luck

Posted on by Mario Attie-Picker

This text was first published at xphiblog.com on February 28, 2019.

Discussions of moral luck usually start by presenting a pair of agents who engage in the same behavior but bring about very different outcomes. Drunk driving is the usual example. One driver – the lucky driver – arrives home without harming anyone. The second driver – the unlucky driver – hits a passerby. The question is then posed: are they equally blameworthy? Much ink has been spilled on that question (and rightly so). But an interesting issue arises even before we get there, namely, what’s going on with our attributions of luck. It seems odd to call the second driver unlucky. An accident caused by drunk driving seems to be the very opposite of a case in which a bad outcome is simply due to luck. What drives this intuition?

Philosophical accounts of luck often point to features such as lack of control, modal fragility and low probabilities as central to luck attributions. We can fill in the details in the case above in such a way as to have all three features present. And yet, it still seems unintuitive to claim that the accident was due to (bad) luck.

In a new paper, I argue that this is because the folk concept of luck is sensitive to normative considerations. In particular, it is influenced by a normative evaluation of an agent’s action and its relation to the ensuing outcome. Roughly, luck attributions are sensitive to whether the valence of the action matches the valence of the outcome. The idea is that when the valences do not match, we are more inclined to attribute luck (explaining why it seems fitting to describe the first driver as lucky, for it’s a case of bad action/good outcome). And similarly, we are less likely to attribute luck when the valences do match (e.g., bad action/bad outcome, as with the “unlucky” driver).

I tested this hypothesis across five different studies. In one study, I manipulated both the valence of the action and the valence of the outcome, and measured luck attributions. Here is an example of one vignette.

Negligent Action

About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon forgets to wash his hands. As a result, the chances of a failed [successful] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.

As a matter of fact, the procedure fails [succeeds].

Virtuous Action

About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon takes special precautions, reviewing each part of the procedure carefully. As a result, the chances of a successful [failed] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.

As a matter of fact, the procedure succeeds [fails].

Participants indicated their agreement with the following statement, “It was due to luck that the procedure failed [succeeded]” using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “disagree” to “agree”.

Here are the results:

The results followed the predicted pattern: luck attributions were highly sensitive to whether the valence of the outcome matched the valence of the action. (It’s worth saying that this effect remained significant after controlling for judgments about subjective probabilities, modal fragility, causality, and lack of control).

In a different study, the perceived valence of the action was not manipulated across conditions but rather depended on the moral views of the participants themselves. Participants read a story about a university president faced with the task of deciding whether or not to cancel an upcoming talk by a controversial speaker. The perceived valence of the president’s action, and hence the normative relation to the outcome (success or failure at creating a positive environment at the university), thus varied with individual differences in judgments about what the president should do.

Here are the results:

Luck attributions differed significantly among participants with different moral views responding to the same scenario. For example, when the president decided to let the speaker give the talk and the decision led to a good outcome, participants who disagreed with the decision judged the outcome as lucky. Those who judged the president’s action as morally right, however, did not attribute the success to luck.

It thus seems that normative considerations are an important element in our folk notion of luck. That is to say, describing the first driver as lucky already involves a normative evaluation of her action and the ensuing outcome. And our refusal to attribute luck to the second driver can be partly explained by the fact that we are not inclined to attribute luck when bad actions bring about bad outcomes.

Any thoughts you might have would be very much appreciated!

Literature

Attie-Picker, Mario (2021): “Is the Folk Concept of Luck Normative?,” Synthese 198, 1481–1515. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “Priority of Needs?”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Members of the interdisciplinary research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures,” funded by the German Research Foundation, have summarized the results of more than six years of research in the volume “Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice,” edited by Bernhard Kittel and Stefan Traub. The research group’s mission statement reads:

The objective of the research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures” is to empirically contribute to establishing a positive and informed normative theory of need-based justice. This theory should provide answers to four questions: (i) How do individuals identify their needs and which distributions are considered sufficient for those needs? (ii) On the collective level, what is considered need-based justice and which processes lead to acceptance of those needs? (iii) Which collective dynamics unfold during this acceptance process in the context of (un-)stable political compromises? (iv) Which incentive-based effects of the collective level can be observed on the individual level, and is a need-based redistribution sustainable?

See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Identification of Needs

Part 2 – Structures and Processes of the Recognition of Needs

Part 3 – Welfare Consequences of Prioritizing Need-Based Distributions

Part 4 – Differentiation

Literature

Kittel, Bernhard, and Stefan Traub (eds.) (2024): Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice, Cham: Springer. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Volume 5 of the “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy,” edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, just hit the shelves! It comprises a total of 16 chapters on no less than 480 pages. See below for the table of contents.

  • Alexander Max Bauer and Jan Romann: “Equal Deeds, Different Needs”
  • John Bronsteen, Brian Leiter, Jonathan Masur, and Kevin Tobia: “The Folk Theory of Well-Being”
  • Shannon Brick: “Deference to Moral Testimony and (In)Authenticity”
  • Florian Cova: “Calibrating Measures of Folk Objectivism”
  • Justin Sytsma: “Resituating the Influence of Relevant Alternatives”
  • Samuel Murray, Elise Dykhuis, and Thomas Nadelhoffer: “Do People Understand Determinism? The Tracking Problem for Measuring Free Will Beliefs”
  • Natalja Deng, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, and James Norton: “Investing the Three Ts of Present-Bias – Telic Attitudes, Temporal Preferences and Temporal Ontology”
  • Blake McAllister, Ian Church, Paul Rezkalla, and Long Nguyen: “Empirical Challenges to the Evidential Problem of Evil”
  • Eric Mandelbaum, Jennifer Ware, and Steven Young: “The Sound of Slurs – Bad Sounds for Bad Words”
  • Rebecca Zhu, Mariel Goddu, and Alison Gopnik: “Providing Explanations Shifts Preschoolers’ Metaphor Preferences”
  • Adrian Ziólkowski and Tomasz Zyglewicz: “Truth-Conditional Variability of Color Ascriptions”
  • Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg: “Practices Make Perfect – On Minding Methodology When Mooting Metaphilosophy”
  • Nat Hansen, Kathryn Francis, and Hamish Greening: “Socratic Questionnaires”
  • N. Ángel Pinillos: “Bank Cases, Stakes and Normative Facts”
  • Jon Bebb and Helen Beebee: “Causal Selection and Egalitarianism”
  • Kevin Reuter: “Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness”

Literature

Knobe, Joshua, and Shaun Nichols (eds.) (2024): Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, volume 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Link)

Call: “Experimental Philosophy Society at the APA-E”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Experimental Philosophy Society will host a session at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York, which takes place from January 8 to 11, 2025.

Papers or extended abstracts can be submitted until July 5. The call reads:

The Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS) will host a 3-hour session on the group program of the 2025 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, which will be held Jan. 8–11 at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel (811 7th Avenue 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019, USA), in midtown Manhattan.

The session will consist of three 55-minute slots (no commentators) in which researchers can present their latest work. Presentations on any topic in experimental philosophy are welcome. There is no specific theme for the session.

All presenters must register for the APA conference. Remote presentation or participation will not be possible.

Please submit your paper (preferred) or extended abstract (allowable) to James Beebe at jbeebe2@buffalo.edu by July 5, 2024.

Please do not submit a paper or abstract if you will not commit to participating, should your submission be accepted. In the past, the XPS has encountered difficulties when people see if their submission gets accepted, use the acceptance to apply for travel funding, and then decide whether they will attend only long after the deadline for making changes to the APA program.