Getting to know you: Accuracy and error in judgments of character

Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading-based model of the socio-cognitive processes underlying trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate

I knew I Shouldn’t Do It; But I Did It: Davidson on Causal Strength and Weakness of Will

Reasons for action is a widely employed methodology in practical philosophy, and especially in moral philosophy. Reasons are facts that explain and justify actions. But, conceptually, if reasons were causes, incontinent actions would be impossible. When an agent ranks an evaluation about what to do as his best judgement, it entails that he has a reason for acting as that judgement prescribes. But when an agent acts incontinently, he acts in accordance to an intention that is not aligned with his best evaluative judgement. Yet, if the agent’s best evaluative judgement provides him a reason for action, this reason should also be his strongest reason, and therefore, the strongest cause. How then can it be possible that an agent incontinently acts according to a reason of inferior causal strength? In this paper, I analyze how Davidson’s argument for the possibility of incontinent actions interacts with his causal theory of actions. I argue that Davidson’s proposal does not fully respect the two principles of intentional rationality, that he himself claims to be compelling. Lastly, I sketch some initial steps that might be helpful to drawing more precise conceptual distinctions in terms of the rationality of incontinent actions

Online Shaming

Online shaming is a subject of import for social philosophy in the Internet age, and not simply because shaming seems generally bad. I argue that social philosophers are well-placed to address the imaginal relationships we entertain when we engage in social media; activity in cyberspace results in more relationships than one previously had, entailing new and more responsibilities, and our relational behaviors admit of ethical assessment. I consider the stresses of social media, including the indefinite expansion of our relationships and responsibilities, and the gap between the experiences of those shamed and the shamers’ appreciation of the magnitude of what they do when they shame; I connect these to the literature suggesting that some intuitions fail to guide our ethics. I conclude that we each have more power than we believe we do or than we think carefully about exerting in our online imaginal relations. Whether we are the shamers or the shamed, we are unable to control the extent to which intangible words in cyberspace take the form of imaginal relationships that burden or brighten our self-perceptions

Knowledge-First Theories of Justification

Knowledge-first theories of justification give knowledge priority when it comes to explaining when and why someone has justification for an attitude or an action. The emphasis of this entry is on knowledge-first theories of justification for belief. As it turns out there are a number of ways of giving knowledge priority when theorizing about justification, and in what follows I offer an opinionated survey of more than a dozen existing options that have emerged in the last two decades since the publication of Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits. I first trace several of the general theoretical motivations that have been offered for putting knowledge first in the theory of justification. I then go on to examine existing knowledge-first theories of justification and their standing objections. These objections are largely, but not exclusively, concerned with the extensional adequacy of knowledge-first theories of justification. There are doubtless more ways of giving knowledge priority in the theory of justification than I cover here, but the resulting survey will be instructive as it highlights potential shortcomings that would-be knowledge-first theorists of justification may wish either to avoid or else to be prepared with a suitable error theory

Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Mind

This chapter locates our overall approach within the dialectic of contemporary philosophical debates and provides an overall framework for discussion. First, I introduce the problem of mental normativity. I show how this problem poses a prima facie threat to the common assumption in epistemology and metaethics that beliefs and other attitudes are governed by robust normative requirements. Secondly, I motivate philosophical inquiry about an ethics of mind by tracing this field back to recent debates in the ethics of belief. I characterize the ethics of mind as being concerned with two main questions: 1. How can we be responsible for our attitudes? 2. What attitudes should we have? Finally, I give an overview over the structure of the book and summarize the chapters

The true self: A psychological concept distinct from the self

A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish people’s understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral, and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology

Personal Identity

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity

Knowing Better, Reasoning Together

We take ourselves to have some knowledge about what’s right and wrong to do. But how easy is this knowledge to get? In the first two chapters of this dissertation I argue for the novel conclusion that it is harder to have moral knowledge than non-moral knowledge due to the fact that moral beliefs have more practically at stake. More specifically, in chapter 1 I argue that moral beliefs are subject to a higher epistemic standard than non-moral beliefs. Roughly, epistemic standards mark how good of an epistemic position an agent needs to be in in order for her beliefs to receive epistemic credit like knowledge. The higher epistemic standard of moral beliefs offers the only unified explanation to date of long-standing puzzling asymmetries between moral and non-moral epistemology, like how moral testimony, unlike non-moral testimony, is problematic and moral expertise, unlike non-moral expertise, is non-existent. Even so, one may wonder why moral beliefs have such a higher epistemic standard. In chapter 2 I argue that the best account of what fixes the higher epistemic standard for moral beliefs is a practical-stakes account wherein the practical upshots of holding a belief affect how demanding the standard is. Importantly, my account differs from traditional practical-stakes accounts of epistemic standards. First, it locates features of morality as a subject matter, like being subject to the reactive attitudes and the way that moral beliefs typically motivate whereas non-moral beliefs don’t, as that which functions to raise the standard. Second, the stakes that are relevant outrun those stemming from the interests of the individual person whose belief is under assessment, and include the practical interests of other agents. This last feature makes the picture of moral knowledge I offer essentially social, as whether or not one has moral knowledge depends in part on the interests of others. In the end, the view I offer in these chapters presents a perhaps surprising picture of moral epistemology as systematically different from non-moral epistemology. In chapter 3 I investigate in more detail the social basis of moral knowledge by considering one particular view of the nature of moral facts, constructivism. According to this view, moral facts are determined by what would be the result of a hypothetical choice procedure amongst an idealized group of agents. Here I argue that the best moral epistemology on offer for the constructivist requires an agent to be able to respond to the objections that relevant others would have to the content of one’s belief in order for that belief to count as knowledge. In this way, moral knowledge for constructivists requires the ability to reason together with others about morality. After considering social constraints on moral knowledge, in chapter 4 I turn to consider whether normativity may likewise have a social basis. Here, I consider social-based views of normativity wherein an agent’s reasons for action are determined by the social institutions, practices, and relations (IPRs) she takes part in. I argue that existing views have trouble ensuring that certain intuitively bad social practices--namely, oppressive ones--aren’t a source of reasons. In light of this, I develop a novel positive view, Looping Social Constructivism, according to which an agent’s reasons are a function of the IPRs she takes part in, after they are idealized. Specifically, they are idealized such that each role in the IPR has the same ability to determine how rights, responsibilities, and power are distributed across the IPR. Looping Social Constructivism is able to avoid issues of oppressive IPRs given its unique use of idealization on the social level: instead of idealizing the individual agents taking part in an IPR, we idealize structural features of the IPR itself