Questioning the causal inheritance principle

Mental causation, though a forceful intuition embedded in our commonsense psychology, is difficult to square with the rest of commitments of physicalism about the mind. Advocates of mental causation have found solace in the causal inheritance principle, according to which the mental properties of mental states share the causal powers of their physical counterparts. In this paper, I present a variety of counterarguments to causal inheritance and conclude that the requirements for causal inheritance are stricter than what standing versions of said principle imply. In line with this, physicalism may be destined to epiphenomenalism unless multiple realizability turns out false

Fuller and the Folk: The Inner Morality of Law Revisited

The experimental turn in philosophy has reached several sub-fields including ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This paper is among the first to apply experimental techniques to questions in the philosophy of law. Specifically, we examine Lon Fuller's procedural natural law theory. Fuller famously claimed that legal systems necessarily observe eight principles he called "the inner morality of law." We evaluate Fuller's claim by surveying both ordinary people and legal experts about their intuitions about legal systems. We conclude that, at best, we should be skeptical of Fuller's inner morality of law in light of the experimental data

Autonomía, libertad y bienestar: sobre la justificación del paternalismo legal

Al margen de cuestiones sustantivas del paternalismo legal, desde la refutación inicial de Mill hasta hoy, se ha producido un rico debate sobre su fundamentación normativa. En la sección I, recojo algunas de las posturas prominentes en este debate. En la sección II, desarrollo ambas vertientes del antipaternalismo de Mill, a través de tanto la lectura liberal de Dworkin como la libertariana de Arneson, concluyendo que el antipaternalismo fuerte recae sobre un argumento endeble. En la sección III, defiendo la postura paternalista débil, lo cual remite la discusión sobre justificación a la pregunta por los ideales normativos universalizables

Trolleys, Triage and Covid-19: The Role of Psychological Realism in Sacrificial Dilemmas

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels--but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favored utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas—and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people’s robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how hypothetical scenarios in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) should strive for more experiential and psychological realism, otherwise their results might not generalize to real-world moral dilemmas

The Typicality Effect in Basic Needs

According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a strong effect of this kind: (1) Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. (2) They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. (3) The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. (4) These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. (5) Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical (e.g., exemplar or prototype) structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile.Austrian Science Fund (FWF)Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT)Japan Society for the Promotion of Science PE21001Karl-Franzens-Universitat Graz (Start-Up Grant), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion PID2020-119791RA-I00Austrian Science Fund (FWF) P3316

Gender stereotypes underlie child custody decisions

Using hypothetical divorce cases we examine the role of gender stereotypes in decisions about child custody. Good mothers received greater custody allocations than did good fathers across a tightly-matched pair of vignettes in three culturally-distinct samples: Argentina, Brazil and the United States (Study 1). Two follow-up studies indicated that the warmth dimension of stereotype content partly accounted for the asymmetry in custody awards: The proportion of maternal-primary custody was predicted by the tendency to ascribe warmth-related traits—such as friendliness, generosity or trustworthiness—to mothers (Study 2) and associate them to female over male nouns (Study 3). We also found that endorsing shared custody mitigated the asymmetry in custody awards documented in our studies. Together, these results highlight the interplay of stereotyped attitudes and egalitarian commitments in the context of judicial decisions about child custody.El material suplementario contiene los estudios citados en el resumen.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

The dark path to eternal life: Machiavellianism predicts approval of mind upload technology

Mind upload, making a digital copy of one’s brain, is a part of the transhumanistic dream of eternal life and the end of suffering. It is also perceived as a viable route toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, AI safety research has alerted to one major risk in creating AGI by mind upload: namely, that mind upload tech-nology could appeal primarily to callous and selfish individuals who then abuse this technology for their personal gain—and, potentially, at a considerable cost to the welfare of humankind. Therefore, it is important to un-derstand whether people’s acceptance of mind upload is associated with pathological and/or antisocial traits. To this end, the present research examined whether individual differences in Dark Triad traits predict attitudes toward mind upload in a sample of 1007 English-speaking adults. A pre-registered structural equation model revealed that Machiavellianism (but not psychopathy) was associated with favorable views about mind upload, both directly and indirectly through utilitarian moral attitudes. These results therefore substantiate the concerns voiced by AI safety researchers—namely, that mind upload technology could be adopted disproportionately by individuals with an antisocial personality.</p

Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people’s grasp of how legal systems function in practice

Might-counterfactuals and the principle of conditional excluded middle

Owing to the problem of inescapable clashes, epistemic accounts of might-counterfactuals have recently gained traction. In a different vein, the might argument against conditional excluded middle has rendered the latter a contentious principle to incorporate into a logic for conditionals. The aim of this paper is to rescue both ontic mightcounterfactuals and conditional excluded middle from these disparate debates and show them to be compatible. I argue that the antecedent of a might-counterfactual is semantically underdetermined with respect to the counterfactual worlds it selects for evaluation. This explains how might-counterfactuals select multiple counterfactual worlds as they apparently do and why their utterance confers a weaker alethic commitment on the speaker than does that of a would-counterfactual, as well as provides an ontic solution to inescapable clashes. I briefly sketch how the semantic underdetermination and truth conditions of mightcounterfactuals are regulated by conversational context