Tag: Virtue

Call: “Valence Asymmetries”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Isidora Stojanovic, Lorenza D’Angelo, Morgan Moyer, and Michelle Stankovic organizing a conference on “Valence Asymmetries,” which will take place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra from March 19 to 20, 2026.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until September 30. The call reads:

The Valence Asymmetries ERC team is happy to announce that it will be organizing the first VALENCE ASYMMETRIES conference on March 19th–20th 2026 at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The event is funded by Isidora Stojanovic’s ERC Advanced Grant “Valence Asymmetries: the positive, the negative, the good and the bad in language, mind and morality” (GA n° 101142133).

This interdisciplinary event will discuss themes which are central to the Valence Asymmetries project, including the role of valence asymmetries in perception, emotion, morality, language, and communication. Discussion will draw upon insights from philosophy, psychology, and linguistics.

There will be invited talks by Hans Alves, Frederique de Vignemont, Saif Mohammad, and Pascale Willemsen. There is also room for 4–6 additional talks, to be selected from open submissions. Each selected talk will be assigned a 50 min slot, including discussion.

We especially encourage submissions on the relation between value, valence, and polarity; theoretical and empirical accounts of valence asymmetries in language, including in negative strengthening, scalar inferences, and irony; the asymmetry between virtue and vice, and between praise and blame, in normative and applied ethics; as well as other discussions of valence asymmetries in linguistics, cognitive science, moral psychology, and cognate areas.

If you are interested in presenting your work at this venue, please submit a 2-page abstract to valence.asymmetries@upf.edu by Sep 30th, with the subject line “valence asymmetries submission.”

Call: “Moral Epistemology and Social Progress”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Antonio Gaitán Torres and Hugo Viciana organize a workshop on “Moral Epistemology and Social Progress – Experimental and Philosophical Perspectives,” which will take place at the Universidad de Sevilla from November 4 to 5.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until September 17. The call reads:

This focused workshop explores the intersection of empirical research on moral cognition and philosophical theories of social and moral progress. We bring together experimental philosophers and moral epistemologists to examine how empirical findings about moral intuitions, attitude change, and intellectual virtues inform our understanding of moral improvement at both individual and societal levels. The workshop features invited speakers alongside selected contributions from an open call for abstracts, fostering intimate discussion among researchers working at the forefront of experimental and theoretical approaches to moral progress. Submissions addressing experimental studies of moral judgment, philosophical accounts of moral progress, or the epistemology of moral improvement are particularly welcome.

We welcome submissions for 3–4 additional presentations at this workshop. Interested researchers should submit an abstract of 350–750 words addressing topics at the intersection of moral epistemology, experimental philosophy, and social progress. Abstracts might explore empirical studies of moral cognition, philosophical theories of moral improvement, experimental metaethics, intellectual virtues, the psychology of moral change, or related themes in moral epistemology. Please send your abstract to both hviciana@us.es and agaitan@hum.uc3m.es with the subject line “November Workshop.” The deadline for submissions is 17 September 2025. Selected presenters will have approximately 30 minutes for their presentation followed by discussion.

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)