All of my research revolves around the following question: can empirical findings have implications for ethics? Accordingly, I look at what empirical research reveals about the development, physiology, and function of human moral belief and behavior, and then consider to what extent such findings can weigh in on ethical and metaethical discussions.
In particular, “Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions” (Nature Scientific Reports, 2018) examines whether children's ability to understand rules–a major constituent of moral thought–is primarily shaped by cultural factors or genetically instilled cognitive programs. The debunking papers investigate to what extent evolutionary biology can influence the debates within metaethics. Specifically, they assess whether the possibility that our moral beliefs were shaped by natural selection leads to moral skepticism. "Neurons and normativity: A critique of Greene's notion of unfamiliarity" (Philosophical Psychology, 2020) and “Brains, trains, and ethical claims: Reassessing the normative implications of moral dilemma research" (Philosophical Psychology, forthcoming) scrutinize Josh Greene’s attempt to use cognitive neuroscience to support consequentialism and undermine deontology. Finally, the situationism papers ask whether findings in social psychology can undermine fundamental assumptions about character found in Aristotelian virtue ethics.
Published Articles:
“Brains, trains, and ethical claims: Reassessing the normative implications of moral dilemma research"
Philosophical Psychology (forthcoming) (with Bertram Gawronski)
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: Joshua Greene has argued that the empirical findings of cognitive science have implications for ethics. In particular, he has argued (1) that people’s deontological judgments in response to trolley problems are strongly influenced by at least one morally irrelevant factor, personal force, and are therefore at least somewhat unreliable, and (2) that we ought to trust our consequentialist judgments more than our deontological judgments when making decisions about unfamiliar moral problems. While many cognitive scientists have rejected Greene’s dual-process theory of moral judgment on empirical grounds, philosophers have mostly taken issue with his normative assertions. For the most part, these two discussions have occurred separately. The current analysis aims to remedy this situation by philosophically analyzing the implications of moral dilemma research using the CNI model of moral decision-making—a formalized, mathematical model that decomposes three distinct aspects of moral dilemma judgments. In particular, we show how research guided by the CNI model reveals significant conceptual, empirical, and theoretical problems with Greene’s dual-process theory, thereby questioning the foundations of his normative conclusions.
"Neurons and normativity: A critique of Greene's notion of unfamiliarity"
Philosophical Psychology (2020) 33(8), 1072-1095. DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2020.1787972
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: In his article “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual, conscious reasoning system more than our automatic, emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene’s argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling, and thus should be abandoned.
"Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions"
Nature Scientific Reports (2018) 8, 16326, 1-14 (with Cristine Legare, Sarah Kim, and Gedeon Deak). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-34756-2
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: Cognitive flexibility, the adaptation of representations and responses to new task demands, improves dramatically in early childhood. It is unclear, however, whether flexibility is a coherent, unitary cognitive trait, or is an emergent dimension of task-specific performance that varies across populations with divergent experiences. Three-to 5-year-old English-speaking U.S. children and Tswana-speaking South African children completed two distinct language-processing cognitive flexibility tests: the FIM-Animates, a word-learning test, and the 3DCCS, a rule-switching test. U.S. and South African children did not differ in word-learning flexibility but showed similar age-related increases. In contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed an age-related increase in rule-switching flexibility but South African children did not. Verbal recall explained additional variance in both tests but did not modulate the interaction between population sample (i.e., country) and task. We hypothesize that rule-switching flexibility might be more dependent upon particular kinds of cultural experiences, whereas word-learning flexibility is less cross-culturally variable.
"The sexual selection of hominin bipedalism"
Ideas in Ecology and Evolution (2018) 11(1), 47-60. DOI: 10.4033/iee.2018.11.6.n
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin of hominin bipedalism and show how most, if not all, fail in the face of the need for an unusually strong selection pressure. For example, some hypotheses maintain that hominins became bipedal so they could use their hands for carrying infants, food, or other valuable objects. But extant apes are able to carry objects in one of their front limbs (while walking with the other three), and thus it does not seem plausible that our hominin ancestors went through the troublesome transition to bipedalism just so they could carry objects a little more efficiently. After I show that past hypotheses are wanting in the face of this challenge, I argue that there is only one selection pressure powerful enough to instigate a strange and problematic evolutionary adaptation like bipedalism, and that is sexual selection. Specifically, from the fact that bipedal locomotion is an important strategy for intimidating others and ascending the dominance hierarchy in extant apes, I argue that for no particular selective reason bipedal locomotion became a signal for high fitness (much as a large and intricate tail became a signal for high fitness for peahens), and this led to the trait being continuously reinforced in spite of all its deleterious fitness consequences.
See also Michael Wilson's response to my article on sexual selection:
"Sexual selection explains much in human evolution, but probably not bipedalism"
Ideas in Ecology and Evolution (2018) 11(1), 61-63. DOI: 10.4033/iee.2018.11.7.c
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: Sexual selection results in an enormous diversity of bizarre and seemingly excessive traits: beards, manes, colorful tufts of hair and plumage, tusks, horns, antlers, breasts, sexual swellings, patches of colorful skin, elaborate songs and mating displays, and the building of ornate structures with no other use than attracting mates. Sexual selection’s broad and varied powers can easily seduce one into attributing it as the source of almost any peculiar trait. Dale (2018), having fallen under the spell of sexual selection, proposes that bipedalism evolved in the hominin lineage due to sexual selection, as an arbitrary badge of status. As far as I am aware, this is a novel hypothesis, but it follows a long tradition of attributing any peculiar and seemingly inexplicable trait, such as large human brains, to sexual selection.
Papers Under Review:
*Titles have been redacted to protect blind review
Debunking Paper #1
Abstract: The reliability of our moral belief-forming faculties (MBFs) has been called into question by the evolutionary debunking argument (EDA). According to the EDA, because natural selection is the primary driver of evolution, and there is no obvious fitness benefit for our MBFs to be reliable, then it is overwhelmingly likely that our MBFs are unreliable. In this paper, I explore a largely unaddressed worry for the EDA. Specifically, the EDA assumes that the evolution of our MBFs was driven by the process of natural selection, broadly construed, but as an up-to-date understanding of evolutionary theory shows us, this is potentially problematic. Indeed, there are actually a number of processes that drive natural selection, and some of these processes abide by different criteria than others. Could it be the case that our MBFs evolved as a result of one of these particular types of selection? And could such a selection process lead to reliable MBFs? This paper attempts to answer these questions by exploring the possibility that our MBFs were significantly shaped by sexual selection.
Debunking Paper #2
Abstract: The causal premise of the evolutionary debunking argument contends that human moral beliefs are explained by the process of natural selection. While it is universally acknowledged that such a premise is fundamental to the debunker’s case, the vast majority of philosophers focus instead on the epistemic premise that natural selection does not track moral truth and the resulting skeptical conclusion. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to concentrate on the causal premise. So far, the upshot of this small but growing literature has been that the causal premise is likely false due to the seemingly persuasive evidence that our moral beliefs are in fact not the result of natural selection. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. Specifically, I advocate the Innate Biases Model (IBM), which contends that there is not only compelling evidence for an evolved cognitive capacity for acquiring and implementing norms but also for the existence of an evolutionarily instilled set of cognitive biases that make it either more or less likely that we adopt certain moral beliefs. After I spend the majority of the paper presenting theoretical and empirical evidence in support of this view, I consider its implications for the evolutionary debunking argument.
Debunking Paper #3
Abstract: The evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) appeals to evolutionary theory to defend moral skepticism. While initial discussions concerning the EDA largely ignored its empirical details, some philosophers have recently argued that nuanced differences in such details can have a significant effect on the outcome of the argument. For example, Michael Deem (2016) and Jessica Isserow (2019) discuss the possibility that moral belief is actually a by-product of our more general reasoning capacities. If this is the case, they argue, it may lend more credence to the idea that our moral beliefs are true. In particular, if our general reasoning capacities evolved to be reliable, and our moral beliefs are generated from our general reasoning capacities, then it’s not implausible to believe that our moral beliefs are true. In this paper, I argue that this possibility will not be of much help for the moral realist because it is very difficult to see how the capacities posited by this hypothesis could generate true moral beliefs.
Situationism Paper #1
Abstract: The situationist critique—which contends that peoples’ behavior is not so much predicted by their character traits but, instead, by the situations that they find themselves in—usually divides theorists into two groups: those who contend that Aristotelian virtue ethics is completely undermined by the critique and those who maintain that virtue ethics is untouched by it. However, I believe that there is a way that we can both acknowledge the cogent aspects of the critique and also continue to view virtue ethics as a compelling—and in some ways more practical—alternative to deontology and consequentialism. In particular, if we are to cultivate the metavirtue of integrity, along with the traditional Aristotelian virtues, we can develop our character traits in such a way that we can overcome the influence of situations. Indeed, practicing the metavirtue of integrity, with a specific understanding of the power of situational influence, enables us to actualize the cross-situational consistency that Aristotelian virtue ethics requires because it not only brings sufficient attention to the problem, but it also encourages us to understand the remedy as not so much a further first-order virtue, but an additional ingredient required for the proper functioning of the first-order virtues.
Papers In Preparation:
"Evolution, Robot Rights, and the Social-Relational Approach to Moral Standing"
Abstract: Mark Coeckelbergh and David Gunkel argue in favor of a social-relational approach to moral standing. According to this view, when deciding which entities have rights that ought to be respected, we should not be so concerned with cognitive and emotional capacities—that is, with ‘intrinsic’ capacities. Instead, we should be concerned with the entity’s ‘extrinsic’ capacities, i.e. its capacities to interact and relate socially. If it has such capacities—and, in effect, the ability to behave as if it had the requisite mind states and emotions to generate such behavior—then that is enough to show that it deserves our moral respect. As many social robots fulfill this criteria, this social-relational approach can be seen as a way of endowing many robots with rights. In this paper, I argue that we should be wary of this social-relational outlook because it rests on an intuition that stems from our tendency to anthropomorphize, and there is good reason to believe that such a tendency was instilled in us by evolution. As our hominin ancestors evolved more complex cognitive capacities, they were increasingly able to outthink other animals, and this made them a formidable apex predator in their own right. One particular capacity that would have been especially useful to this end is the capacity to quickly predict the behavior of other animals. What sort of mechanism would have enabled our ancestors to do this effectively? One likely possibility: a mechanism that assumes other animals have mental states in such a way that our ancestors could then analyze those “mental states” and make behavioral predictions. The result was a psychological tendency to attribute complex cognitive capacities to other beings, even when those beings lacked such capacities. If this is true, we now have reason to be wary of our psychological tendency to anthropomorphize, as this tendency was instilled in us not to track truths about the world, but to increase the fitness of our ancestors. And because the intuition upon which the social-relational approach to moral standing is founded upon stems from this tendency, we now have less reason to endorse the social-relational approach.
"Evolution, Situationism, and Virtue Ethics"
(Co-Authored with Isaac Wiegman)
Abstract: The situationist critique has proved itself to be a significant hurdle for Aristotelian virtue ethics. If it is in fact true that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to cultivate robust character traits such that we can respond consistently and appropriately to morally salient situations, then it’s difficult to see the pull of virtue theory. In this paper, we defend the existence of virtues against the situationist critique by appealing to evolutionary theory. In particular, theories of indirect reciprocity have shown us that cooperation can evolve in populations if individuals cooperate selectively with those who have a reputation for cooperation (rather than defection). According to this account, the language of virtues originated via reputation tracking to stabilize cooperation (across a wide range of ventures, for which distinct virtues are critical), and virtuous dispositions were called into existence by the very language that picks them out. As such, they function to advertise one’s value as a cooperative partner. But, if these theories are correct and if cooperation is based in part on cooperative traits that can be (and are) tracked via the language of virtue, then such traits must exist.
"The Co-Evolution of Virtue and Desert: Debunking Intuitions About Intrinsic Value"
(Co-Authored with Isaac Wiegman)
Abstract: Thomas Hurka’s recursive account of value aims to expand the class of intrinsic goods considerably, placing concepts of virtue and desert within the realm of second and third order intrinsic goods, respectively. Moreover, he points out four key symmetries between virtue and desert and argues that these symmetries are an additional reason to think that desert and virtue are intrinsic goods. As interesting and compelling as the intuitions and symmetries are, their evidential value vis a vis intrinsic goodness is hostage to alternative explanations. If there is a plausible competing explanation for these symmetries and intuitions, then the (putative) fact that desert and virtue are intrinsic goods looks a much less obvious choice for the best explanation. As it turns out, there are plausible evolutionary explanations for these intuitions about desert and virtue as well as their symmetries. These evolutionary explanations suggest that it is adaptive to value desert and virtue separately from their instrumentality for other goods. Consequently, these explanations debunk intuitions about the intrinsic value of desert and virtue.
"Situationism, Virtue Ethics, and Personality Change"
Abstract: Situationists have long argued that the viability of Aristotelian virtue theory should be called into question on the grounds that a significant amount of empirical evidence suggests that peoples’ behavior is not so much predicted by their character traits but, instead, by the situations that they find themselves in. While this has proven to be a cogent objection to virtue theory, there is an important aspect of the empirical literature that has yet to be considered in the context of this critique. Specifically, psychologists have shown that there are interesting, important, and predictable ways that our personalities change over the course of our lives. For example, many studies agree that with regard to mean level change, people often become more self-confident, self-controlled, conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable as they age, with the most amount of change occurring in early adulthood. As these personality traits are closely related to a person’s inclination and ability to act virtuously, such findings have intriguing implications for the situationist outlook. For instance, the famous Milgram obedience studies are important for the situationist critique insofar as they showed that supposedly compassionate people would severely harm an innocent person because they were told to do so by an authority figure. However, if it is the case that agreeableness is relatively low in adolescence and early adulthood, then it seems likely that individuals at this stage of life are more resistant to the commands of authority figures. Then again, because younger individuals score lower on self-control and conscientiousness, perhaps that means they are more susceptible to other types of situations, such as those that induce temptation to cheat on a significant other. An important aspect of this new perspective is the need to have nuanced knowledge about each particular character trait. Only through such a discrete understanding can we speculate about which specific situations might be more or less influential at a given stage of life.
In particular, “Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions” (Nature Scientific Reports, 2018) examines whether children's ability to understand rules–a major constituent of moral thought–is primarily shaped by cultural factors or genetically instilled cognitive programs. The debunking papers investigate to what extent evolutionary biology can influence the debates within metaethics. Specifically, they assess whether the possibility that our moral beliefs were shaped by natural selection leads to moral skepticism. "Neurons and normativity: A critique of Greene's notion of unfamiliarity" (Philosophical Psychology, 2020) and “Brains, trains, and ethical claims: Reassessing the normative implications of moral dilemma research" (Philosophical Psychology, forthcoming) scrutinize Josh Greene’s attempt to use cognitive neuroscience to support consequentialism and undermine deontology. Finally, the situationism papers ask whether findings in social psychology can undermine fundamental assumptions about character found in Aristotelian virtue ethics.
Published Articles:
“Brains, trains, and ethical claims: Reassessing the normative implications of moral dilemma research"
Philosophical Psychology (forthcoming) (with Bertram Gawronski)
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: Joshua Greene has argued that the empirical findings of cognitive science have implications for ethics. In particular, he has argued (1) that people’s deontological judgments in response to trolley problems are strongly influenced by at least one morally irrelevant factor, personal force, and are therefore at least somewhat unreliable, and (2) that we ought to trust our consequentialist judgments more than our deontological judgments when making decisions about unfamiliar moral problems. While many cognitive scientists have rejected Greene’s dual-process theory of moral judgment on empirical grounds, philosophers have mostly taken issue with his normative assertions. For the most part, these two discussions have occurred separately. The current analysis aims to remedy this situation by philosophically analyzing the implications of moral dilemma research using the CNI model of moral decision-making—a formalized, mathematical model that decomposes three distinct aspects of moral dilemma judgments. In particular, we show how research guided by the CNI model reveals significant conceptual, empirical, and theoretical problems with Greene’s dual-process theory, thereby questioning the foundations of his normative conclusions.
"Neurons and normativity: A critique of Greene's notion of unfamiliarity"
Philosophical Psychology (2020) 33(8), 1072-1095. DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2020.1787972
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: In his article “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual, conscious reasoning system more than our automatic, emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene’s argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling, and thus should be abandoned.
"Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions"
Nature Scientific Reports (2018) 8, 16326, 1-14 (with Cristine Legare, Sarah Kim, and Gedeon Deak). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-34756-2
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: Cognitive flexibility, the adaptation of representations and responses to new task demands, improves dramatically in early childhood. It is unclear, however, whether flexibility is a coherent, unitary cognitive trait, or is an emergent dimension of task-specific performance that varies across populations with divergent experiences. Three-to 5-year-old English-speaking U.S. children and Tswana-speaking South African children completed two distinct language-processing cognitive flexibility tests: the FIM-Animates, a word-learning test, and the 3DCCS, a rule-switching test. U.S. and South African children did not differ in word-learning flexibility but showed similar age-related increases. In contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed an age-related increase in rule-switching flexibility but South African children did not. Verbal recall explained additional variance in both tests but did not modulate the interaction between population sample (i.e., country) and task. We hypothesize that rule-switching flexibility might be more dependent upon particular kinds of cultural experiences, whereas word-learning flexibility is less cross-culturally variable.
"The sexual selection of hominin bipedalism"
Ideas in Ecology and Evolution (2018) 11(1), 47-60. DOI: 10.4033/iee.2018.11.6.n
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin of hominin bipedalism and show how most, if not all, fail in the face of the need for an unusually strong selection pressure. For example, some hypotheses maintain that hominins became bipedal so they could use their hands for carrying infants, food, or other valuable objects. But extant apes are able to carry objects in one of their front limbs (while walking with the other three), and thus it does not seem plausible that our hominin ancestors went through the troublesome transition to bipedalism just so they could carry objects a little more efficiently. After I show that past hypotheses are wanting in the face of this challenge, I argue that there is only one selection pressure powerful enough to instigate a strange and problematic evolutionary adaptation like bipedalism, and that is sexual selection. Specifically, from the fact that bipedal locomotion is an important strategy for intimidating others and ascending the dominance hierarchy in extant apes, I argue that for no particular selective reason bipedal locomotion became a signal for high fitness (much as a large and intricate tail became a signal for high fitness for peahens), and this led to the trait being continuously reinforced in spite of all its deleterious fitness consequences.
See also Michael Wilson's response to my article on sexual selection:
"Sexual selection explains much in human evolution, but probably not bipedalism"
Ideas in Ecology and Evolution (2018) 11(1), 61-63. DOI: 10.4033/iee.2018.11.7.c
(online version) (pdf version)
Abstract: Sexual selection results in an enormous diversity of bizarre and seemingly excessive traits: beards, manes, colorful tufts of hair and plumage, tusks, horns, antlers, breasts, sexual swellings, patches of colorful skin, elaborate songs and mating displays, and the building of ornate structures with no other use than attracting mates. Sexual selection’s broad and varied powers can easily seduce one into attributing it as the source of almost any peculiar trait. Dale (2018), having fallen under the spell of sexual selection, proposes that bipedalism evolved in the hominin lineage due to sexual selection, as an arbitrary badge of status. As far as I am aware, this is a novel hypothesis, but it follows a long tradition of attributing any peculiar and seemingly inexplicable trait, such as large human brains, to sexual selection.
Papers Under Review:
*Titles have been redacted to protect blind review
Debunking Paper #1
Abstract: The reliability of our moral belief-forming faculties (MBFs) has been called into question by the evolutionary debunking argument (EDA). According to the EDA, because natural selection is the primary driver of evolution, and there is no obvious fitness benefit for our MBFs to be reliable, then it is overwhelmingly likely that our MBFs are unreliable. In this paper, I explore a largely unaddressed worry for the EDA. Specifically, the EDA assumes that the evolution of our MBFs was driven by the process of natural selection, broadly construed, but as an up-to-date understanding of evolutionary theory shows us, this is potentially problematic. Indeed, there are actually a number of processes that drive natural selection, and some of these processes abide by different criteria than others. Could it be the case that our MBFs evolved as a result of one of these particular types of selection? And could such a selection process lead to reliable MBFs? This paper attempts to answer these questions by exploring the possibility that our MBFs were significantly shaped by sexual selection.
Debunking Paper #2
Abstract: The causal premise of the evolutionary debunking argument contends that human moral beliefs are explained by the process of natural selection. While it is universally acknowledged that such a premise is fundamental to the debunker’s case, the vast majority of philosophers focus instead on the epistemic premise that natural selection does not track moral truth and the resulting skeptical conclusion. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to concentrate on the causal premise. So far, the upshot of this small but growing literature has been that the causal premise is likely false due to the seemingly persuasive evidence that our moral beliefs are in fact not the result of natural selection. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. Specifically, I advocate the Innate Biases Model (IBM), which contends that there is not only compelling evidence for an evolved cognitive capacity for acquiring and implementing norms but also for the existence of an evolutionarily instilled set of cognitive biases that make it either more or less likely that we adopt certain moral beliefs. After I spend the majority of the paper presenting theoretical and empirical evidence in support of this view, I consider its implications for the evolutionary debunking argument.
Debunking Paper #3
Abstract: The evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) appeals to evolutionary theory to defend moral skepticism. While initial discussions concerning the EDA largely ignored its empirical details, some philosophers have recently argued that nuanced differences in such details can have a significant effect on the outcome of the argument. For example, Michael Deem (2016) and Jessica Isserow (2019) discuss the possibility that moral belief is actually a by-product of our more general reasoning capacities. If this is the case, they argue, it may lend more credence to the idea that our moral beliefs are true. In particular, if our general reasoning capacities evolved to be reliable, and our moral beliefs are generated from our general reasoning capacities, then it’s not implausible to believe that our moral beliefs are true. In this paper, I argue that this possibility will not be of much help for the moral realist because it is very difficult to see how the capacities posited by this hypothesis could generate true moral beliefs.
Situationism Paper #1
Abstract: The situationist critique—which contends that peoples’ behavior is not so much predicted by their character traits but, instead, by the situations that they find themselves in—usually divides theorists into two groups: those who contend that Aristotelian virtue ethics is completely undermined by the critique and those who maintain that virtue ethics is untouched by it. However, I believe that there is a way that we can both acknowledge the cogent aspects of the critique and also continue to view virtue ethics as a compelling—and in some ways more practical—alternative to deontology and consequentialism. In particular, if we are to cultivate the metavirtue of integrity, along with the traditional Aristotelian virtues, we can develop our character traits in such a way that we can overcome the influence of situations. Indeed, practicing the metavirtue of integrity, with a specific understanding of the power of situational influence, enables us to actualize the cross-situational consistency that Aristotelian virtue ethics requires because it not only brings sufficient attention to the problem, but it also encourages us to understand the remedy as not so much a further first-order virtue, but an additional ingredient required for the proper functioning of the first-order virtues.
Papers In Preparation:
"Evolution, Robot Rights, and the Social-Relational Approach to Moral Standing"
Abstract: Mark Coeckelbergh and David Gunkel argue in favor of a social-relational approach to moral standing. According to this view, when deciding which entities have rights that ought to be respected, we should not be so concerned with cognitive and emotional capacities—that is, with ‘intrinsic’ capacities. Instead, we should be concerned with the entity’s ‘extrinsic’ capacities, i.e. its capacities to interact and relate socially. If it has such capacities—and, in effect, the ability to behave as if it had the requisite mind states and emotions to generate such behavior—then that is enough to show that it deserves our moral respect. As many social robots fulfill this criteria, this social-relational approach can be seen as a way of endowing many robots with rights. In this paper, I argue that we should be wary of this social-relational outlook because it rests on an intuition that stems from our tendency to anthropomorphize, and there is good reason to believe that such a tendency was instilled in us by evolution. As our hominin ancestors evolved more complex cognitive capacities, they were increasingly able to outthink other animals, and this made them a formidable apex predator in their own right. One particular capacity that would have been especially useful to this end is the capacity to quickly predict the behavior of other animals. What sort of mechanism would have enabled our ancestors to do this effectively? One likely possibility: a mechanism that assumes other animals have mental states in such a way that our ancestors could then analyze those “mental states” and make behavioral predictions. The result was a psychological tendency to attribute complex cognitive capacities to other beings, even when those beings lacked such capacities. If this is true, we now have reason to be wary of our psychological tendency to anthropomorphize, as this tendency was instilled in us not to track truths about the world, but to increase the fitness of our ancestors. And because the intuition upon which the social-relational approach to moral standing is founded upon stems from this tendency, we now have less reason to endorse the social-relational approach.
"Evolution, Situationism, and Virtue Ethics"
(Co-Authored with Isaac Wiegman)
Abstract: The situationist critique has proved itself to be a significant hurdle for Aristotelian virtue ethics. If it is in fact true that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to cultivate robust character traits such that we can respond consistently and appropriately to morally salient situations, then it’s difficult to see the pull of virtue theory. In this paper, we defend the existence of virtues against the situationist critique by appealing to evolutionary theory. In particular, theories of indirect reciprocity have shown us that cooperation can evolve in populations if individuals cooperate selectively with those who have a reputation for cooperation (rather than defection). According to this account, the language of virtues originated via reputation tracking to stabilize cooperation (across a wide range of ventures, for which distinct virtues are critical), and virtuous dispositions were called into existence by the very language that picks them out. As such, they function to advertise one’s value as a cooperative partner. But, if these theories are correct and if cooperation is based in part on cooperative traits that can be (and are) tracked via the language of virtue, then such traits must exist.
"The Co-Evolution of Virtue and Desert: Debunking Intuitions About Intrinsic Value"
(Co-Authored with Isaac Wiegman)
Abstract: Thomas Hurka’s recursive account of value aims to expand the class of intrinsic goods considerably, placing concepts of virtue and desert within the realm of second and third order intrinsic goods, respectively. Moreover, he points out four key symmetries between virtue and desert and argues that these symmetries are an additional reason to think that desert and virtue are intrinsic goods. As interesting and compelling as the intuitions and symmetries are, their evidential value vis a vis intrinsic goodness is hostage to alternative explanations. If there is a plausible competing explanation for these symmetries and intuitions, then the (putative) fact that desert and virtue are intrinsic goods looks a much less obvious choice for the best explanation. As it turns out, there are plausible evolutionary explanations for these intuitions about desert and virtue as well as their symmetries. These evolutionary explanations suggest that it is adaptive to value desert and virtue separately from their instrumentality for other goods. Consequently, these explanations debunk intuitions about the intrinsic value of desert and virtue.
"Situationism, Virtue Ethics, and Personality Change"
Abstract: Situationists have long argued that the viability of Aristotelian virtue theory should be called into question on the grounds that a significant amount of empirical evidence suggests that peoples’ behavior is not so much predicted by their character traits but, instead, by the situations that they find themselves in. While this has proven to be a cogent objection to virtue theory, there is an important aspect of the empirical literature that has yet to be considered in the context of this critique. Specifically, psychologists have shown that there are interesting, important, and predictable ways that our personalities change over the course of our lives. For example, many studies agree that with regard to mean level change, people often become more self-confident, self-controlled, conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable as they age, with the most amount of change occurring in early adulthood. As these personality traits are closely related to a person’s inclination and ability to act virtuously, such findings have intriguing implications for the situationist outlook. For instance, the famous Milgram obedience studies are important for the situationist critique insofar as they showed that supposedly compassionate people would severely harm an innocent person because they were told to do so by an authority figure. However, if it is the case that agreeableness is relatively low in adolescence and early adulthood, then it seems likely that individuals at this stage of life are more resistant to the commands of authority figures. Then again, because younger individuals score lower on self-control and conscientiousness, perhaps that means they are more susceptible to other types of situations, such as those that induce temptation to cheat on a significant other. An important aspect of this new perspective is the need to have nuanced knowledge about each particular character trait. Only through such a discrete understanding can we speculate about which specific situations might be more or less influential at a given stage of life.
