Doing without Deliberation: Automatism, Automaticity, and Moral Accountability,

Actions performed in a state of automatism are not subject to moral evaluation, while automatic actions often are. Is the asymmetry between automatistic and automatic agency justified? In order to answer this question we need a model or moral accountability that does justice to our intuitions about a range of modes of agency, both pathological and non-pathological. Our aim in this paper is to lay the foundations for such an account

Less Blame, Less Crime? The Practical Implications of Moral Responsibility Skepticism

Most philosophers believe that wrongdoers sometimes deserve to be punished by long prison sentences. They also believe that such punishments are justified by their consequences: they deter crime and incapacitate potential offenders. In this article, I argue that both these claims are false. No one deserves to be punished, I argue, because our actions are shot through with direct or indirect luck. I also argue that there are good reasons to think that punishing fewer people and much less harshly will have better social consequences, at a reduced overall cost, then the long prison sentences that are usually seen as required for social protection

Neuromarketing: Ethical and Political Challenges

Ethicists and ordinary people are typically more worried by interventions that alter agents’ mind by directly altering their brains than interventions than are focused on the environment, and thereby indirectly change minds. I argue that the causal route to changing minds is not itself important. Moreover, some of the most powerful techniques whereby behavior is altered without the consent or knowledge of agents involve environmental manipulations: manipulations of social space, for the benefit of those in the business of increasing consumption. I argue that insofar as we are fixated on internal interventions, we overlook ways in which our autonomy as agents is impaired. Once we recognize the power of environmental manipulations, however, we should come to see social space as a legitimate target for political control

Chapter 5 Addiction

In popular, philosophical and many scientific accounts of addiction, strong desires and other affective states carry a great deal of the explanatory burden. Much less of a role is given to cognitive states than to affective. But as Pickard and Ahmed (2016; see also Pickard 2016) note, addiction may be as much or more a disorder of cognition as of compulsion or desire. Pickard’s focus is on denial. In this chapter my focus will be different. I will argue that in many cases at least, we can explain the lapses of abstinent addicts by way of processes that do not involve motivated reasoning (as denial or self-deception plausibly do). Mechanisms that have the role of updating beliefs in response to evidence may alter addicts’ judgments concerning what they have most reason to do (in the precise circumstances in which they find themselves), and thereby cause them to act accordingl

No trespassing! Abandoning the novice/expert problem

The novice/expert problem is the problem of knowing which apparent expert to trust. Following Alvin Goldman’s lead, a number of philosophers have developed criteria that novices can use to distinguish more from less trustworthy experts. While the criteria the philosophers have identified are indeed useful in guiding expert choice, I argue, they can’t do the work that Goldman and his successors want from them: avoid a kind of testimonial scepticism. We can’t deploy them in the way needed to avoid such scepticism, because it would take genuine expertise to do so. I argue that attempts to deploy them in this sort of deep way involve a kind of transgression akin to, and at least as unreliable as, epistemic trespassing. We should give up trying to solve the novice/expert problem and instead promote better epistemic trust

Chapter 7 Socializing Responsibility

There is a near universal consensus that the bearers of moral responsibility are the individuals we identify with proper names. I suggest that if we take the exercise of agency as a guide to the identification of agents, we may find that agents sometimes extend into the world: they may be constituted by several individuals and/or by institutions. These extended agents may be responsible for morally significant outcomes. I argue that institutions or extended agents may also be responsible for the failure of individuals to satisfy the epistemic conditions on moral responsibility. Individuals may believe virtuously but falsely, due to the way in which cues to reliability are socially distributed. I conclude by suggesting that a focus on individual responsibility may have distracted us from the urgent task of reforming the institutional actors responsible for widespread ignorance about morally significant facts

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency

Commercial Transactions

The emphasis of this article reflects the degree to which commercial law today is statutory. Particularly in California, where the Uniform Commercial Code has only been in effect since January 1, 1965, few cases construing that statute reached the appellate courts during the year 1967. However, the state legislature in 1967 amended 25 sections of the California Commercial Code. Although these amendments cover a wide range of substantive problems, they can be viewed in the light of the policy of the code as enunciated in section 1102(2)(c), [t]o make uniform the law among the various jurisdictions. In addition, one group of these amendments can best be analyzed by the effect upon freedom of contract

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency

Real-time 3D Archaeological Field Recording: Development of an interoperable open-source GIS data entry system.

This project will develop and test a real-time 3D data recording interface for on-the-field archaeological excavations that will be applicable to different time periods, contexts and recording nomenclature. In 2010, this open-source, OS independent, web-based GIS application called ArchField was developed for excavations in Jordan. It is now imperative to begin the second stage of streamlining the software to make it easily adapted to different archaeological projects. The proposed application is an open GIS that can communicate with different spatially oriented user interfaces (e.g. Google Earth) for visualization and analysis. This system is built by archaeologists for archaeological excavation and digital conservation. Its ability includes association of all field data with 3D coordinates and auto-generation of for daily top plans in real-time. The end goal is to provide an easily available and user-friendly digital archaeological system to facilitate the dissemination online of advanced digital recording and mapping techniques to a broad audience