On Monday, March 10, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Claire Horisk’s talk “Derogatory Speech – Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:
In discussions of how to mitigate political and cultural polarization, we are often told that we should listen to our opponents. But should we listen regardless of what they say – even to derogatory speech? From the standpoint of philosophy, the prescription to listen lacks subtlety, and we cannot reach greater subtlety without a philosophical account of listening itself. In my recent work, I distinguish between listening and hearing and argue that listening to derogatory speech in the context of a conversation is sometimes morally wrong. In this talk, I expand my account, particularly with respect to how power dynamics affect who counts as a conversational participant.
The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Johannes Bavendiek, Marvin Jonas Laesecke, and Aileen Wiechmann present some results from their study on the perception of civil disobedience.
The Perception of Civil Disobedience
Johannes Bavendiek, Marvin Jonas Laesecke, and Aileen Wiechmann
Civil disobedience is a highly topical issue in light of current political events and protests. For example, groups of protesters like the “Letzte Generation” in Germany currently use this form of protest, fighting current climate change legislation. However, the legitimation of civil disobedience in their case was questioned by wider parts of society. Further, the definition of non-violence as an essential condition for civil disobedience turned out vague and unclear. In which cases is a protest violent in people’s eyes, and which kind of civil disobedience is considered legitimate? Does it make a difference who’s affected by the consequences of civil disobedience or does only the manner of the protest matter? These questions will be explored in this survey.
As a part of political philosophy, different philosophers over time have defined the term “civil disobedience” and discussed its potential influence on society, (in)justice, and democracy. Philosophers like Henry David Thoreau, John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, or Jürgen Habermas are some of them (see, e.g., Thoreau 1849, Rawls 1999, Arendt 2000, Habermas 1983). In the following, we focus on Jürgen Habermas’ definition. His work is one of the most recent ones focusing on civil disobedience as a part of modern democracy, and he refers to Rawls’ definition of the term. Focusing on Habermas seems fitting because the context of a modern democracy makes the definition most applicable to a survey addressed to people in Germany nowadays.
According to Jürgen Habermas (with reference to John Rawls), civil disobedience is a form of protest often aiming for a change in government policy and/or laws, and a protest has to meet four conditions to be classified as civil disobedience (cf. Habermas 1983, 34ff.). The protest has to be
determined by conscience,
a deliberate infringement,
a public act, and
non-violent.
We chose to approach this with an online questionnaire and created a number of vignettes in which a company intended to clear woodland and resettle a village in favor of coal mining. A protest group used (a) different variants of civil disobedience against (b) either police officers or civilians. All of the above-named conditions were always fulfilled except for the last one. Only the manner of protest as well as the group of affected people were varied.
Regarding the manner of civil disobedience (a), we created three different levels of (non)violence, ranging from nonviolent (peacefully not clearing the forest) to a more violent manner (blocking people on the street) to the most violent manner (throwing rocks at people). Changing the manners of protest allowed us to compare the perception of different levels of (non)violence and to evaluate which manners of protests were perceived as more or less violent and as more or less legitimate. Additionally, the variation of people affected by the protests (b) allowed us to investigate whether who’s affected by the consequences makes a difference in the judgement of (non)violence and (il)legitimacy. This leaves us with the five between-subjects variations displayed in Table 1.
Affected Group / Manner of Protest
Peaceful
Blocking
Throwing
Civilians
1
2
3
Police
1
4
5
Table 1: Between-subjects variations
Here is a translation of the vignette for variation 1:
A company plans to clear an old forest for coal mining and relocate a village in the process. The company complies with all legal standards, legally purchases the mining rights, and compensates the village’s inhabitants. However, a group of people filed a lawsuit against this deforestation, as they do not see coal mining as sustainable in terms of climate protection but rather as a threat to the future. The courts do not uphold this complaint. Even after long demonstrations, no change can be brought about at the company. The clearing of the forest comes closer, and the group decides to occupy the forest illegally by chaining themselves to the trees. They do this because it is not in their conscience for the forest to be cleared for coal mining or for the village to be relocated. The group also invites the press to draw public attention to their concerns. The group does not voluntarily comply with the eviction order but allows the police to remove them peacefully.
In variation 2, the last part is changed to the following:
The group does not voluntarily comply with the eviction order. When the eviction is announced, they also block the access roads to the forest to avoid the eviction. Civilians are blocked in their everyday lives.
In variation 3, it reads:
The group does not voluntarily comply with the eviction order. When the eviction is announced, they also block the access roads to the forest to avoid the eviction. Civilians are blocked in their everyday lives. When the civilians try to break up the blockade by carrying all kinds of objects and the now chained demonstrators to the side, the demonstrators take stones and throw them at the civilians.
In variations 4 and 5, “civilians” is simply replaced with “policemen.”
A total of 265 participants took part in our survey. Our findings are summarized in Figure 1, below, reporting the results of χ² tests between two variations for the yes-or-no questions “Is this kind of protest justified in a democracy?” (Justification) and “Would you classify this type of protest as violent?” (Violence).
Figure 1: Results of χ² tests between two variations for Justification and Violence
Comparing the manners of protest, we did not find a significant difference between peaceful protest and blocking civilians or policemen (neither regarding Justification nor Violence). However, the evaluation for throwing rocks significantly differs from peaceful protest and blocking people (regarding both Justification and Violence). This means that it didn’t matter to our participants whether the group protested peacefully or if they blocked someone; both of these manners were perceived as significantly less violent and more legitimate than throwing rocks.
Surprisingly, it didn’t make a difference (neither regarding Justification nor Violence) to our participants whether civilians or policemen were affected (“Blocking Civilians” vs. “Blocking Policemen” as well as “Throwing Rocks at Civilians” vs. “Throwing Rocks at Policemen” are not evaluated significantly different). Another surprising result is that about one-third of our participants didn’t consider throwing rocks violent in case civilians were affected. Also, one-third considered the peaceful protest to be illegitimate. About 38% even considered it to be violent.
Arendt, Hannah (2000): In der Gegenwart. Übungen zum politischen Denken II, Munich: Piper.
Habermas, Jürgen (1983): “Ziviler Ungehorsam – Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat. Wider den autoritären Legalismus in der Bundesrepublik,” in Peter Glotz (ed.): Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 29–53.
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194.
Rawls, John (1999): A Theory of Justice, revised edition, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Thoreau, Henry David (1849): “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (ed.): Æsthetic Papers, Boston and New York: E. Peabody and G. P. Putnam, 189–211.
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel present some results from their study on the perception of the moral obligation to help others.
The Perception of the Moral Obligation to Help Others
Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel
The United Nations calculated a donation amount for development aid in the 1970s that wealthy countries could contribute to prevent the global consequences of absolute poverty – 70 cents per 100 earned dollars. In 2013, only Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden reached this donation target. At that time, Germany was at 0.38–0.43 cents (cf. Singer 2013, 344). The bottom line is that we could contain extreme global poverty and its consequences relatively easily, but the reality is different.
Peter Singer raises the question of whether we have an obligation to help those in need and to whom we have moral obligations (by “we,” Singer means individuals in wealthy industrialized countries – including himself). Singer argues that we should, for example, prevent a certain level of absolute poverty because absolute poverty is bad, because we could prevent a level of absolute poverty without having to make comparable sacrifices, and if we can prevent something bad without having to make a comparable sacrifice, we should do so (cf. Singer 2013, 356f.). Singer reinforces the last premise by pointing out that it only requires us to prevent bad things and not to promote good things (this corresponds to the consequentialism of utilitarianism; cf. Singer 2017, 36).
Singer illustrates the principle of the obligation to help with a thought experiment about a child in a pond that is in danger of drowning. Here is how Singer himself describes the “drowning child”:
To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.
I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do. (Singer 1997, par. 1f.)
The principle should be applied equally to all cases, regardless of whether I am the only person potentially helping, e.g., by saving the child in the pond, or one of many, e.g., by donating (cf. Singer 2017, 37). Although Singer does not regard failure to help as intentional killing but as a moral challenge (cf. Singer 2013, 354), he emphasizes elsewhere that absolute poverty means a death sentence and that the diseases responsible for this are preventable (cf. Singer 2013, 341f.).
Under the premises of universalization, impartiality, and equality, the spatial aspect – distance or proximity to the person in need – should be obsolete, according to Singer. In light of globalization, with today’s improved communication and transport conditions, distance can no longer be an excuse for lack of assistance (cf. Singer 2017, 37f.). Singer concedes: “The fact that a person is physically close to us […] may increase the likelihood that we will help them, but this does not prove that we should help them rather than any other person who happens to be at a greater distance” (Singer 2017, 37).
Singer argues that there is a certain level of extreme poverty that we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance in figures. On the one hand, he uses the amount calculated by the United Nations, which would be sufficient for basic development aid: 70 cents per 100 dollars earned. According to the World Bank in 2008, this would correspond to 1.25 dollars per day for a person’s basic needs (note currency-dependent purchasing power; cf. Singer 2013, 341). In 2008, the wealthy industrialized countries donated 19–43 cents for every 100 dollars earned (cf. Singer 2013, 344).
Based on Singer’s above-outlined thoughts, we wanted to investigate how spatial and social distance or proximity, as well as personal cost, influence the perception of moral obligation. To do this, we developed a vignette in which a child needs help from our subject. Between subjects, we varied (a) whether the child needs a new kidney directly from the subject or money for the same medical purpose, (b) whether our subject is said to know the child or not, and (c) whether the child is from the same neighbourhood, the same federal state, or a far-away country from the Global South. This resulted in a total of twelve different scenarios.
As an example, here is a translation of the vignette where a child from the neighbourhood, which the subject is said to know, needs money:
Imagine the following situation: You are informed that a child you know has life-threatening problems with his only kidney and, therefore, needs a donor organ. The child lives in your neighbourhood. You could donate one-third of your monthly income for the next two years without being at risk of losing your livelihood. With your help, the child would be saved.
After reading the vignette, subjects were asked to answer two yes-or-no questions: “Would you donate your money [kidney]?” and “Regardless of whether you would donate your money [kidney] yourself, do you think that someone in such a situation should donate their money [kidney]?” In the following, we will only look at the former question.
The online survey was programmed with LimeSurvey, and 630 subjects from Bilendi successfully participated (i.e., they did not fail an attention check and completed the survey).
A surprising finding is that more participants said they would donate a kidney than money (χ² ≈ 5.620, p < 0.05); see Figure 1. This increased willingness could be due to the fact that donating a kidney is perceived as more immediate and life-saving, while donating money is often perceived as less urgent.
Figure 1: Kidney vs. money
At the same time, we found that the willingness to donate does not change between the neighbourhood and the federal state (χ² ≈ 0.030, p > 0.1) but between the federal state and the far-away country (χ² ≈ 7.608, p < 0.01); see Figure 2.
Figure 2: Neighborhood vs. federal state and federal state vs. far-away country
Lastly, we didn’t find a significant difference when it comes to knowing the child or not (χ² ≈ 3.414, p > 0.05); see Figure 3.
Figure 3: Known vs. unknown
Our results are partly consistent with Peter Singer’s assumptions. Nevertheless, they show that people’s willingness to help – at least in our hypothetical scenarios – seems to decrease with distance. Also, the type of aid (kidney vs. money) seems to play a role, while social proximity does not. Of course, these results need to be taken with a grain of salt, and further, more elaborate research is necessary. Interestingly enough, there is a discrepancy between given answers and actual behavior, as illustrated by the low numbers of organ donations in reality. While respondents signal a high willingness to help in hypothetical scenarios, practical implementation falls short of these expectations.
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. (Link)
Singer, Peter (1997): “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle,” New Internationalist 289. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2013): Praktische Ethik, translated by Oscar Bischoff, Jean-Claude Wolf, Dietrich Klose, and Susanne Lenz, 3rd edition, Stuttgart: Reclam. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2017): Hunger, Wohlstand und Moral, translated by Elsbeth Ranke, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. (Link)
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Frederike Lüttich and Jule Rüterbories present some results from their study on the perception of responsibility in accidents involving autonomous and human-controlled vehicles.
The Perception of Responsibility in Accidents Involving Autonomous and Human-Controlled Vehicles
Frederike Lüttich and Jule Rüterbories
The relevance of autonomous systems as potential moral agents is growing with their use in areas such as medicine, the military, and traffic, where they have – or will have – to make decisions in ethical contexts. The capacity of such systems to act has far-reaching legal and ethical implications. A frequently discussed example (see, e.g., Goodall 2014, Awad et al. 2018, Cecchini, Brantley, and Dubljević 2023) is this one: Although autonomous vehicles promise greater safety, they are not flawless. In the event of unavoidable accidents, they have to make decisions about which lives to protect. The programming of such systems is complex and raises key ethical questions. Below, we examine the perception of responsibility in accidents involving autonomous and human-controlled vehicles.
To investigate this, we created an online questionnaire in which we presented a vignette about a car and a pedestrian at a traffic light. Between subjects, we varied (a) whether the car was operated autonomously or was human-driven, (b) whether it hit the pedestrian or swerved and crashed into a wall (the outcome is deadly either for the pedestrian or for the driver), and (c) whether the pedestrian (rightfully) used a crosswalk or illegally crossed a red traffic light. This resulted in a total of eight different combinations, as shown in Table 1.
Behavior of Pedestrian / Car
Hits Pedestrian
Hits Wall
Legally Uses Crosswalk
1
2
Illegally Crosses Red Light
3
4
Table 1: Between-subjects variations (presented either with an autonomous or human-driven car)
Here is a translation of the vignette for variation 1 with a self-driving car:
Imagine standing on a foggy main road and observing the following scenario: A self-driving car is driving at approximately 50 km/h towards a traffic light, which is being crossed by a woman illegally on red. The self-driving car’s sensors notice the woman too late, and it is unable to brake. The self-driving car could swerve. In doing so, it would surely hit a house wall and be completely destroyed. The self-driving car does not swerve and hits the woman. The woman dies.
After reading the vignette, participants were asked to answer the following yes-or-no question: “Is the self-driving car [the person driving] morally responsible?” At the end of the survey, and after passing an attention check, participants provided socio-demographic data, including gender, age, and level of education.
420 participants successfully passed the attention check and completed the survey. 209 women, 210 men, and one non-binary person took part. Their age ranged from 18 to 74 years, averaging 52 years. According to their statements, two people had no school-leaving qualifications, 195 had a lower secondary school leaving certificate, 95 had a technical college or university entrance qualification, 113 had a university degree, seven had a doctorate, and eight were currently studying.
Let us compare cases with (a) autonomously or human-driven cars, (b) the pedestrian or the wall being hit, and (c) the pedestrian (legally) using a crosswalk or (illegally) crossing a red traffic light.
Regarding (a), 56% of participants do not attribute responsibility to the autonomous vehicle, while 42% consider the human driver not to be responsible (χ² ≈ 7.942, p < 0.01); see Figure 1.
Figure 1: Self-driving car vs. human-driven car
Regarding (b), if the pedestrian dies, 70% of participants say that the car or driver is responsible. If the driver dies, the attribution of responsibility drops to 34% (χ² ≈ 46.662, p < 0.001); see Figure 2.
Figure 2: Pedestrian dies vs. driver dies
And finally, regarding (c), in scenarios where the pedestrian illegally crosses the road at a red light, 54% do not think the car or driver is responsible. If the pedestrian legally uses a crosswalk, this drops to 43% (χ² ≈ 5.002, p < 0.05); see Figure 3.
Figure 3: Illegally crossing vs. legally crossing
The attribution of responsibility is complex and highly dependent on the situation. The results show that responsibility is attributed more often to human-controlled vehicles than autonomous ones. Factors such as compliance with traffic regulations and the person affected by the crash further influence this.
To gain more detailed insights in the future, open questions and alternative scenarios would be useful. Demographic data could have revealed additional differences in age, gender, and education. The study was limited to German participants, so possible cultural differences were not considered. Also, a basic understanding of machine ethics and automation levels is essential to grasp the ethical and technical challenges of autonomous vehicles fully. Further studies should explore these aspects in more depth.
Awad, Edmond, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Jonathan Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan (2018): “The Moral Machine Experiment,” Nature 563, 59–64. (Link)
Cecchini, Dario, Sean Brantley, and Veljko Dubljević (2023): “Moral Judgment in Realistic Traffic Scenarios. Moving Beyond the Trolley Paradigm for Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles,” AI & Society. (Link)
Gogoll, Jan, and Julian Müller (2016): “Autonomous Cars. In Favor of a Mandatory Ethics Setting,” Science and Engineering Ethics 23 (3), 681–700. (Link)
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. (Link)
Organized by the University of Basel’s Institute for Biomedical Ethics, the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Oxford Institute, and the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics, next year’s “Experimental Philosophical Bioethics Summit” will take place in Basel from June 25 to 27. Confirmed keynote speakers are Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh) and Edmond Awad (University of Exeter and University of Oxford).
Abstracts for presentations and posters can be submitted until January 31, 2025. The call reads:
We invite junior and senior researchers working in bioethics or other relevant fields, and using or engaging with methods of cognitive science, moral psychology, empirical bioethics, and experimental philosophy, to submit contributions.
Abstract for conference presentation – guidelines:
To submit an abstract for a conference presentation, please send an email with the subject line “Conference Submission for Bioxphi 2025” to bioxphi2025@unibas.ch by January 31st, 2025.
The body of the email should include a proposed title for the presentation, the (list of) author(s) and affiliation(s), and a 500 word abstract outlining the topic/study, methods, and (if available) results.
Please also indicate if any data have already been collected/analyzed or whether the study is in-progress.
Abstract for poster presentation – guidelines:
We will favor poster submissions that have a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, or (other) early-career researcher(s) as the first author.
To submit an abstract for the poster presentation, please send an email with the subject line “Poster Submission for Bioxphi 2025” to bioxphi2025@unibas.ch by January 31st, 2025.
The body of the email should include a proposed title for the poster, a list of authors and affiliations, and a 300 word abstract outlining the topic/study, methods, and (if available) results.
Please clearly indicate if the first author is a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, or other early-career researcher (within 5 years of PhD); please also indicate if any data have already been collected/analyzed or whether the study is in-progress. In addition to empirical work, we will consider purely theoretical posters that engage with BioXPhi or empirical bioethics.
In many communities, there is a shared sense that if someone disses you, it is pretty normal to react by punching them. But academia is not like that. In academia, if someone disses your research, it would be considered wildly abnormal to react by punching them. This shared understanding then has a very large impact on behavior. If you understand how academia works, you almost certainly will not react to someone who disses your research by punching them. This is an example of the power of norms.
One common view about the power of norms is that they operate by having an impact on people’s beliefs. For example, one might think that people observe that academics never never punch each other and therefore conclude that punching people is bad (or that punching people would lead to negative social consequences, or some other belief of this sort). I don’t think that this is the right way to understand the power of norms, and I want to sketch a very different approach.
To begin with, let’s note an obvious but deeply important fact about how people make decisions. Typically, when we face a choice, there are an enormous number of possible options, but we only consider a small subset of these options. For example, suppose someone points out a problem in my research, and I am trying to figure out how to respond. Perhaps I would consider three possible options: address the issue by doing further empirical work, or by doing further computational work, or just don’t do anything. As for all other possible options, I simply would not think about them at all. Take the possible of trying to learn some organic chemistry in the hopes that this will give me a valuable insight into the problem. Most likely, this option just would not occur to me.
Now let’s note a second key fact. When it comes to the options that people don’t consider, people might not form any belief about whether those options are good or bad. Thus, suppose someone says: “I notice that he did not respond to this problem by learning organic chemistry. Is that because he believes that learning organic chemistry wouldn’t be a good way to address it?” The correct answer would be: “No! He hasn’t formed any beliefs at all about whether learning organic chemistry would be a good way to address this problem. The whole possibility has not occurred to him.”
This is where we see the power of norms. When an option violates a norm, people tend not to think about it all. (For experimental evidence, see this paper.) So if there is a norm in academia that you can’t respond to disses by punching people, the usual upshot would be that people who are dissed just don’t even consider the possibility of responding to disses with punches. The whole idea just never occurs to them. My point is that this is the power of norms: they completely transform our lives by having an impact on which possibilities occur to us and which do not.
This phenomenon is not a matter of existing norms leading people to conclude that certain options are bad. It is something much more fundamental. Indeed, if someone does form the belief that a particular option is bad, this would show that the norm was not exerting the sort of power one might have expected it to have. Consider an academic who thinks: “Well, there are clear disadvantages to punching this person.” The very fact that an academic is thinking this at all should make us think that the norm does not have the kind of grip on them we would expect it to have.
So let’s distinguish the ways that norms can impact beliefs vs. the ways that norms can truly have a power over you and transform your whole way of thinking about life. To begin with, it’s clear that norms can indeed change your beliefs. If I ask you what you think about responding to a particular academic criticism by starting a fistfight, you might think about that option and go through a process in which you infer something from the fact that you never observe anyone performing this behavior. But this is not an example of the power of norms! On the contrary, it is an example of a case in which norms are not able to exert their full power. When we are truly in the grip of a norm, it’s not just that the norm impacts what we think of an option – it’s that it impacts which options we even think of at all.
From October 25 to 26, the workshop “Methodological Trends and Challenges in Contemporary Philosophy,” organized by Martin Justin, Maja Malec, Olga Markič, Nastja Tomat, and Borut Trpin, will take place at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The announcement reads:
Contemporary analytic philosophers have expanded their methodological toolkit beyond traditional philosophical inquiry, embracing a wide array of approaches that intersect with various disciplines. These methods include (but are not limited to) experimental approaches, which involve empirical testing and data collection to inform philosophical hypotheses; non-idealized and naturalized epistemology, which considers the real-world complexities of knowledge acquisition and justification; computer simulations and probabilistic modeling, which enable philosophers to explore complex systems and uncertainties in reasoning; neuroscientific methods, which offer insights into the neural underpinnings of cognitive processes and decision-making; formal ontology, which provides rigorous frameworks for analyzing concepts and categories; conceptual engineering, which involves the deliberate design and modification of conceptual frameworks to address philosophical problems; evolutionary modeling, which investigates the emergence and evolution of cognitive capacities and norms; and feminist perspectives, which critically examine power dynamics and social structures in philosophical discourse.
The upcoming workshop aims to delve into these methodological trends, showcasing recent research that employs these diverse approaches and addressing the challenges and opportunities they present for contemporary philosophy. Over the course of two days, the workshop will feature a total of 14 talks, evenly distributed with 7 talks scheduled for each day. Each keynote talk will span 75 minutes, while contributed talks will be allocated 45 minutes. This workshop seeks to enrich our understanding of contemporary philosophical inquiry and inspire new avenues of research.
October 25, 9:00–17:30 (UTC+2)
Jan Sprenger (University of Turin): “Semantic Modeling between Empirical Data and Norms of Rationality”
Olga Markič (University of Ljubljana): “Roles of Philosopher in Interdisciplinary Research”
Timothy Tambassi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice): “Is Extensible Markup Language Perspectivist?”
Thomas Engeland (University of Bonn): “What Would Methodological Naturalism in Ethics Be?”
Paweł Polak (Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow) and Roman Krzanowski (Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow): “Ethics in Silico – Computer Modeling of Ethical Concepts in Autonomous AI Systems”
Michal Hladky (University of Geneva): “End of Logical Positivism? #toosoon”
Rafal K. Stepien (Austrian Academy of Sciences): “The Absent Elephant – Non-Western Methods in Contemporary Philosophy”
October 26, 9:00–16:45 (UTC+2)
Borut Trpin (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Maribor, and University of Ljubljana): “Revisiting Epistemic Coherence From A Posterior-Probability Perspective”
Martin Justin (University of Maribor): “The Value of Social Coherence in Science – An Agent-Based-Modelling Exploration”
Raimund Pils (University of Salzburg): “Integrating Empirical Research and Philosophical Theorizing on the Scientific Realism Debate for Science Reporting”
Juan de Jager (University of Ljubljana): “Making Porosity More Porous – An Open Call for Brainstorming After Tanya Luhrmann’s Recent Findings”
Danilo Šuster (University of Maribor): “Open-Mindedness and the Appeal to Ignorance”
Nastja Tomat (University of Ljubljana): “Bounded Epistemic Rationality as a Link Between the Normative and the Descriptive”
Dunja Šešelja (Ruhr University Bochum): “When Expert Judgment Fails – Epistemic Trespassing and Risks to Collective Inquiry”
The “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, continues. They write:
We are looking forward to the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The workshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. Except for the opening keynote session, all sessions will have two presentations. Please email to register and receive the links (by the day before the session you hope to attend would be ideal).
October 9, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)
Shaun Nichols (Cornell University): “The PSR and the Folk Metaphysics of Explanation”
November 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Monica Ding (King’s College London): “Non-Factive Understanding – Evidence from English, Cantonese, and Mandarin”
María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “Digital Interventions to Boost Vaccination Intention – A Report”
December 11, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Elis Jones (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research): “The Problem of Baselining – Philosophy, History, and Coral Reef Science”
April H. Bailey (University of Edinburgh) and Nicholas DiMaggio (University of Chicago Booth School of Business): “Of Minds and Men”
January 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Ajinkya Deshmukh (The University of Manchester) and Frederique Janssen-Lauret (The University of Manchester): “Reincarnation and Anti-Essentialism – An Argument Against the Essentiality of Material Origins”
Ethan Landes (University of Kent) and Justin Sytsma (Victoria University of Wellington): “LLM Simulated Data – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”
February 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė (University of Cambridge), Jasmina Stevanov (University of Cambridge), Ryan P. Doran (University of Cambridge), Katherine A. Symons (University of Cambridge), and Simone Schnall (University of Cambridge): “Transformed by Beauty – Exploring the Influence of Aesthetic Appreciation on Abstract Thinking”
Poppy Mankowitz (University of Bristol): “Experimenting With ‘Good’”
March 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Kathryn Francis (University of Leeds), Maria Ioannidou (University of Bradford), and Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Does Dietary Identity Influence Moral Anthropocentrism?”
Jonathan Lewis (University of Manchester), James Toomey (University of Iowa), Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada), and Brian D. Earp (National University of Singapore): “Normative Authority, Epistemic Access, and the True Self”
In our “Faces of X-Phi” series, experimental philosophers from all around the globe answer nine questions about the past, present, and future of themselves and the field. Who would you like to see here in the future? Just leave a suggestion in the comments! Today, we present Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen.
The Past
(1) How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
I started out studying music as an undergrad. I loved playing guitar but then quickly became disillusioned with the prospect of a career in music. Then I took a couple of philosophy classes and found myself really enjoying them. But the kind of philosophy I was attracted to then was pretty different from what I most enjoy now: It involved diagnosing the ills of present-day capitalism and calling for a radical ontological/metaphysical shift to uproot the cause of all social and political evils.
(2) And how did you end up doing experimental philosophy?
I had been doing theoretical metaethics during my MA in Madrid, writing about whether moral judgments are inherently motivating or not. Then, in my first week as a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, I was extremely lucky that Stephen Laurence had organized a conference with a line-up of excellent philosophers, psychologists, and economists. I asked Fiery Cushman a few questions after his talk, and that developed into the opportunity to visit the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard. I had no experience whatsoever running experiments, but Fiery was the best mentor you could possibly ask for. Then, back in Sheffield, Steve would get me thinking about how the empirical work we were doing brought to bear on questions in philosophy. So, it was a combination of luck and Steve and Fiery’s diligence and mentorship.
(3) Which teachers or authors have influenced you the most on your philosophy journey – and how?
Besides Steve and Fiery, Blanca Rodríguez López and Noel Struchiner had a huge influence on me. Blanca turned me on to empirically-informed ethics when I was an MA student in Madrid and I wasn’t sure whether there was a place for me in philosophy. Years later, Noel proposed many of the ideas about how moral psychology underpins the law that have become a focus of my research and helped to establish what we now call experimentaljurisprudence.
The Present
(4) Why do you consider experimental philosophy in its present form important?
For two reasons.
The first has to do with communication and understanding. We all know the disappointing feeling of sitting through a talk (or being halfway through a paper) thinking, “I have no idea what this is about,” and being unable to engage. Then there is its mirror image: the frustration at the end of your own talk as you realize that, despite your best efforts, you did not make yourself understood. It’s sad because we all devote so much time and energy to carrying out this work, and a big reason to do so is so we can share it with our peers. In my opinion, experimental philosophy helps overcome this problem (as do many other disciplines) by establishing a regimented language. This language allows people to convey hours upon hours of intellectual labor in a 20-minute talk pretty effectively. It’s kind of miraculous and very rewarding to participate in that kind of exchange.
The second reason is the democratizing aspect of experimental philosophy. There are many influential publications authored by scholars from underrepresented countries and lower-ranking institutions – and I suspect this is because there is less weight placed on the name tag and the institution, and more on the ideas and the work themselves. Though, of course, things could always be better in this regard.
(5) Do you have any critical points to make about experimental philosophy in its current state?
My criticisms are along the lines of this, this, and this. These are criticisms I direct at my own research, and I think many experimental philosophers are already acutely aware of these issues. But maybe it’s worth saying anyway.
Experimental philosophy grew out of a concern about the limitations of the introspective (N = 1) method of elaborating on one’s own philosophical intuitions. As experimental philosophers, most of us probably rehash this concern over and over again when we introduce students to experimental philosophy or answer questions about what X-Phi is. That’s all well and good, but what are the limitations of that study you or I are working on right now in 2024? For the field to continue to develop, we should remain vigilant in this sense.
Here are just three examples of how people are doing this already:
There is the concern that our experiments may not accurately capture how people use concepts spontaneously, which has led to an uptick in natural language processing research (see the work of Lucien Baumgartner or Piotr Bystranowski).
There is the concern that what we have learned about folk morality, for example, based on people’s self-reports, may not have much to do with their actual behavior. Work by Kathryn Francis and Eric Schwitzgebel, among others, has contributed greatly to this question.
And, of course, the concern that existing studies, most of which nowadays are conducted in English on Prolific, may not represent people’s intuitions and philosophical concepts in other languages or in non-Western cultures. As everyone knows, the cross-cultural work of Steve Stich and Edouard Machery (together with dozens of collaborators around the world) has been extremely fruitful in this regard.
(6) Which philosophical tradition, group, or individual do you think is most underrated by present-day philosophy?
Possibly every philosophical tradition that developed outside the mainstream European and English-speaking countries. There has to be so much neglected philosophy throughout history simply because it was written in a minority language. The Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy draw attention to a related problem that affects contemporary scholars. It also impacts up-and-coming students of philosophy who may be discouraged from going into academia by the thought that they won’t be able to convey their ideas as eloquently as they’d like.
The Future
(7) How do you think philosophy as a whole will develop in the future?
That is a hard question, so my answer is probably wrong, but I can offer some wild speculation: Philosophy will shift from being thought of as a discipline with a proprietary set of topics to being thought of as an approach or as a set of questions that can arise about many other existing academic disciplines and non-academic pursuits.
If we think of philosophy in the first way, it is tempting to give in to the idea that science is intruding in philosophy and philosophy is receding and surrendering its intellectual terrain. But when thinking of philosophy as an approach to existing disciplines or even specific phenomena, there is no reason to think that we will need less philosophy in the future: within artificial intelligence, a philosophy of artificial intelligence or a theory of personhood; within sustainability studies, an environmental or moral philosophy, and so on.
(8) What do you wish for the future of experimental philosophy?
Most of all, I would like to avoid The Bleak Future. The bleak future I’m thinking of is one where philosophy has been swept into the downward spiral of the humanities and plays an ever-smaller role in public affairs. The few remaining philosophers watch from the sidelines as teams of computer scientists and engineers – with the help of a few natural and social scientists – shape the future, generate awesome knowledge, and improve society.
So, my wish for the future is for experimental philosophers to help establish the value of philosophy within academia and beyond. I’m hopeful that this can be done; we have good exemplars already!
(9) Do you have any interesting upcoming projects?
Together with colleagues in the Psychology Department in Granada, Neele Engelmann and I are studying how people apply rules using the letter vs. spirit framework, asking whether participants’ decisions can be modeled using the same tools that cognitive psychologists use to explain behavior on simple visual interference tasks like the Stroop or Flanker test.
I’m also excited about the research a group of us at the University of Granada is doing on how law and morality mutually influence each other by triangulating legal corpora, experiments, and time-series data. So far, we have focused specifically on euthanasia, but the long-term goal is to pursue this question in a more general way.
A third, early-stage project is inspired by research on action understanding as inverse planning. We know that when people do something bad, we quite naturally want to infer whether they did so intentionally (“Given that they did x, did they have bad intentions?”), perhaps as a step in deciding whether they are to blame. Applying the “inverse planning” idea, we are examining whether these intentionality inferences are themselves carried out by spontaneously inverting the conditional probability and asking oneself, “Supposing they did have bad intentions, would they do x?” as a form of Bayesian reasoning.
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)
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