BLAME AND RESPONSIVENESS TO MORAL REASONS: ARE PSYCHOPATHS BLAMEWORTHY?

Abstract: Many philosophers believe that people who are not capable of grasping the significance of moral considerations are not open to moral blame when they fail to respond appropriately to these considerations. I contend, however, that some morally blind, or ‘psychopathic,’ agents are proper targets for moral blame, at least on some occasions. I argue that moral blame is a response to the normative commitments and attitudes of a wrongdoer and that the actions of morally blind agents can express the relevant blame‐grounding attitudes insofar as these agents possess the capacity to make judgments about non‐moral reasons.     

Coherence,Literary and Epistemic

Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. In this article I argue against this claim. Although various nonepistemic notions of coherence figure in literary criticism, the epistemic concept has a mirror image in the literary–critical concept of thematic coherence. Moreover, evidence from literary criticism suggests that thematic coherence can be valuable from a literary‐evaluative standpoint because it can be valuable from an epistemic standpoint, in particular by enhancing the credibility of a work's themes or author. My analysis of the notion of thematic coherence thus provides novel support for literary cognitivism, the view that a work's literary‐aesthetic merits can depend on its epistemic merits.     

Foundations of Wildlife protection attitudes

The history of ideas normally invoked by animal liberationists and their opponents cannot account for our basic wildlife protection attitudes, which actually developed out of the worldwide species‐classification project begun by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. These attitudes, formed in terms of a pre‐evolutionary and pre‐ecological belief in fixed and immutable species, were weakened to some degree by the rise of evolutionary theory and ecological science, since evolution provides a mechanism for the replacement of extinct species and depicts extinction as natural, and ecology teaches that ecosystems naturally adjust when species are lost. Wildlife protection attitudes are preservationist in so far as they are concerned with the preservation of species and conservationist in so far as they are concerned with the lives of individual animals and populations. From all perspectives except that of animal liberation, wild animals are predominantly viewed in terms of instrumental value: as a means to the continuation of species, the maintenance of healthy ecosystems, and for various other anthropocentric purposes. These various perspectives fit together within an aesthetic conception of wildlife which is strongly Platonic. From an aesthetic standpoint, wild animals, as exemplications of various species, are more analogous to mass‐produced toys, admired for their design or structure, than the natural equivalent of original works of art admired for their own sakes.     

Partisan Bias and Information Discounting in Economic Judgments

Research shows that partisanship biases people's views about the economy. Yet, there is little understanding of the factors, if any, that might mitigate the influence of partisanship on these judgments or the effect of partisanship on metacognitive judgments. This study uses an experimental design to show that partisanship continues to bias economic judgments even when subjects receive direct and neutral information about specific aspects of the economy. Moreover, it extends our understanding of partisan bias by showing it has a direct effect on people's metacognitive assessments of their own attitudes—particularly the degree of uncertainty people have in their own economic judgments. However, it appears that people are aware of the conflict between their partisan‐based judgment and economic information since we observe increases in economic uncertainty when information is counter to a subject's partisan predisposition. The results provide new insight into the extent of partisan bias and the difficulty of countering partisan‐based judgments.     

Expressivism and the Normativity of Attitudes

Many philosophers believe that judgments about propositional attitudes, or about which mental states are expressed by which sentences, are normative judgments. If this is so, then metanormative expressivism must be given expressivist treatment. This might seem to make expressivism self‐defeating or worrisomely circular, or to frustrate the explanatory ambitions central to the view. I argue that recent objections along these lines to giving an expressivist account of expressivism are not successful. I shall also suggest that in order to deal with these worries, Dreier's influential response to the so‐called ‘problem of creeping minimalism’ must be slightly revised.     

Defending the Objective List Theory of Well‐Being

The objective list theory of well‐being holds that a plurality of basic objective goods directly benefit people. These can include goods such as loving relationships, meaningful knowledge, autonomy, achievement, and pleasure. The objective list theory is pluralistic (it does not identify an underlying feature shared by these goods) and objective (the basic goods benefit people independently of their reactive attitudes toward them). In this paper, I discuss the structure of this theory and show how it is supported by people's considered judgments. I then respond to three objections. First, I argue that there is no conceptual reason to favor a monistic theory of well‐being over a pluralistic one (such as the objective list theory). Second, I argue that states of affairs can benefit people even though they hold no positive reactive attitudes toward them. And, third, I argue that objective list theorists can identify a fairly‐determinate list of basic goods.     

Normative Explanation And Justification*

Normative explanations of why things are wrong, good, or unfair are ubiquitous in ordinary practice and normative theory. This paper argues that normative explanation is subject to a justification condition: a correct complete explanation of why a normative fact holds must identify features that would go at least some way towards justifying certain actions or attitudes. I first explain and motivate the condition I propose. I then support it by arguing that it fits well with various theories of normative reasons, makes good sense of certain legitimate moves in ordinary normative explanatory discourse, and helps to make sense of our judgments about explanatory priority in certain cases of normative explanation. This last argument also helps to highlight respects in which normative explanation won't be worryingly discontinuous with explanations in other domains even though these other explanations aren't subject to the justification condition. Thus the paper aims not only to do some constructive theorizing about the relatively neglected topic of normative explanation but also to cast light on the broader question of how normative explanation may be similar to and different from explanations in other domains.     

WHAT INFLUENCES BELIEVING CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE DISCLOSURES? THE ROLES OF DEPICTED MEMORY PERSISTENCE, PARTICIPANT GENDER, TRAUMA HISTORY, AND SEXISM

This vignette study investigated factors that influence believing child sexual abuse disclosures. College student participants ( N = 318) in a university human subject pool completed measures about their own trauma history and responded to questions about sexist attitudes. Participants then read vignettes in which an adult disclosed a history of child sexual abuse, rated disclosures for accuracy and believability, and judged the level of abusiveness. Continuous memories were believed more than recovered memories. Men believed abuse reports less than did women, and people who had not experienced trauma were less likely to believe trauma reports. Gender and personal history interacted such that trauma history did not impact women's judgments but did impact men's judgments. Men with a trauma history responded similarly to women with or without a trauma history. High sexism predicted lower judgments of an event being abusive. Hostile sexism was negatively correlated with believing abuse disclosures. Results are considered in light of myths about child sexual abuse.     

Know Thyself

ABSTRACT— Self-knowledge has never been a central topic in empirical psychology. There are pockets of research on self-knowledge in different subdisciplines of the field, but until now there has been little communication between them. I believe that these areas will converge in the next few years into a cohesive study of how people form judgments about their past, current, and future selves and about the accuracy of these judgments. I discuss theoretical developments in this area, the costs of poor self-knowledge, how people can know themselves better, and some of the obstacles to the study of self-knowledge.     

Slavery,Carbon, and Moral Progress

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the “Naïve Conception,” and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of moral progress from the past—the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade—with a view to what can be learned from this for a contemporary struggle for moral progress: the movement to decarbonize the global economy. I close with some thoughts about how moral progress actually occurs.     

Moral Emotions

Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions and on that of their objectivity as revealers of value: emotions are neither simply natural nor socially constructed, and they apprehend objective values, but those values are multi‐dimensional and relative to human realities. The “axiological” position I defend jettisons the usual foundations for ethical judgments, and grounds these judgments instead on a rationally informed reflective equilibrium of comprehensive emotional attitudes, tempered with a dose of irony.     

Neosentimentalism and the valence of attitudes

Neosentimentalist accounts of value need an explanation of which of the sentiments they discuss are pro-attitudes, which attitudes are con-attitudes, and why. I argue that this project has long been neglected in the philosophical literature, even by those who make extensive use of the distinction between pro- and con-attitudes. Using the attitudes of awe and respect as exemplars, I argue that it is not at all clear what if anything makes these attitudes pro-attitudes. I conclude that neither our intuitive sense of the distinction nor the vague accounts of it that exist in the philosophical literature are especially helpful in sorting out the hard cases. What is needed is a more explicit and thorough account of what the valence of our attitudes consists in.     

Narratives or Sources? Active Learning and the Teaching of Ancient Jewish History and Texts

During my career, I have regularly taught a survey course on the history of Jews and Judaism in the Persian, Greek, and early Roman periods (ca. 520 BCE – 70 CE). Student performance in the course has long concerned and puzzled me. By the end of the course students demonstrated familiarity with the narratives and concepts we covered, but most did not really “think historically.” They had great difficulties using and applying the historical tools they learned to new situations and evidence. In 2006 and again in 2010 I overhauled the course not only to improve it, but also to figure out how my students learned history. Using a wiki exercise, I traced how students learned and then applied these insights the next time I taught the course. In this essay I report on what I learned.     

Martin Luther's Theology of Creation

This article considers Luther's theology of creation with a view to the contemporary relevance of its fundamental standpoint. For some, the writers of past generations who do not share our scientific and cultural standpoint ought to be excluded from discussions of the theology of creation, but I argue that consideration of the individual, contemporary, corporeal and dialogical character of Luther's theology of creation shows that it contains a great deal from which we can learn today.     

Cryptonormative Judgments

A cryptonormative judgment, roughly speaking, is a judgment that is presented by the agent who makes it as non‐normative (either generally or in some particular respect), but that is in fact normative (either generally or in that particular respect). The idea of cryptonormativity is familiar from debates in social theory, social psychology, and continental political philosophy, but has to my knowledge never been treated in analytic metaethics, moral psychology or epistemology except in passing. In this paper, I argue, first, that cryptonormative judgments are pervasive: familiar cases from everyday life are most naturally diagnosed as cryptonormative judgments. Secondly, they reveal that normative judgment is a state that can be quite deeply non‐transparent to its bearer, in a way that is not, for example, assimilable to the phenomenon of self‐deception. Thirdly, they shed light on debates over amoralism and lend some support to a picture of normative psychology that links normative judgment constitutively to motivation. In the conclusion, I make some remarks about the social and political insidiousness of cryptonormativity, looking forward to future work.     

Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first‐order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher‐order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be.