Scholars@Duke
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Chauncey Stillman Distinguished Professor of Practical Ethics
Philosophy
walter.sinnott-armstrong@duke.edu
Duke Box 90743, Durham, NC 27708-0743
Duke University Box 90432, 203B West Duke Bldg, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

MENTAL DISORDERS AS FAILURES OF ATTENTION

Journal Article Critica-Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia · August 1, 2024 The DSM–5 characterizes mental disorders as significant disturbances in cognition, emotion, or behavior. But what might unite the disturbances on this list? We hypothesize that mental disorders can all be meaningfully characterized as failures of attention ... Full text Cite

A Personalized Patient Preference Predictor for Substituted Judgments in Healthcare: Technically Feasible and Ethically Desirable.

Journal Article The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · July 2024 When making substituted judgments for incapacitated patients, surrogates often struggle to guess what the patient would want if they had capacity. Surrogates may also agonize over having the (sole) responsibility of making such a determination. To address ... Full text Cite

Does it matter who harmed whom? A cross-cultural study of moral judgments about harm by and to insiders and outsiders.

Journal Article Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · January 2024 This cross-cultural study compared judgments of moral wrongness for physical and emotional harm with varying combinations of in-group vs. out-group agents and victims across six countries: the United States of America (N = 937), the United Kingdom (N = 995 ... Full text Cite

Fear of Missing Out's (FoMO) relationship with moral judgment and behavior.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2024 Across three online studies, we examined the relationship between the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and moral cognition and behavior. Study 1 (N = 283) examined whether FoMO influenced moral awareness, judgments, and recalled and predicted behavior of first-p ... Full text Cite

Moral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology.

Journal Article Nature human behaviour · December 2023 Moral foundations theory (MFT) holds that moral judgements are driven by modular and ideologically variable moral foundations but where and how these foundations are represented in the brain and shaped by political beliefs remains an open question. Using a ... Full text Cite

Where is the golden mean of intellectual humility? Comments on Ballantyne

Journal Article Journal of Positive Psychology · January 1, 2023 In his admirable review, Ballantyne characterizes intellectual humility (IH) as a personal way ‘to manage evidence … in seeking truth.’ However, not every way of managing truth is virtuous. Since IH is supposed to be an intellectual virtue, we propose that ... Full text Cite

Dahl’s Definition of Morality

Journal Article Psychological Inquiry · January 1, 2023 Full text Cite

Who did it? Moral wrongness for us and them in the UK, US, and Brazil

Journal Article Philosophical Psychology · January 1, 2023 Morality has traditionally been described in terms of an impartial and objective “moral law”, and moral psychological research has largely followed in this vein, focusing on abstract moral judgments. But might our moral judgments be shaped not just by what ... Full text Cite

Experimental Ethics

Chapter · January 1, 2023 Cite

Morality Without God?

Book · January 1, 2023 Some argue that atheism must be false, since without God, no values are possible, and thus "everything is permitted." Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that God is not only not essential to morality, but that our moral behavior should be utterly independent ... Cite

Prestimulus oscillatory brain activity interacts with evoked recurrent processing to facilitate conscious visual perception.

Journal Article Sci Rep · December 22, 2022 We investigated whether prestimulus alpha-band oscillatory activity and stimulus-elicited recurrent processing interact to facilitate conscious visual perception. Participants tried to perceive a visual stimulus that was perceptually masked through object ... Full text Link to item Cite

A functional neuroimaging investigation of Moral Foundations Theory.

Journal Article Social neuroscience · December 2022 Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits that the human mind contains modules (or "foundations") that are functionally specialized to moralize unique dimensions of the social world: Authority, Loyalty, Purity, Harm, Fairness, and Liberty. Despite this strong ... Full text Cite

Bad dream frequency predicts mental health needs during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Journal Article Journal of affective disorders reports · December 2022 Full text Cite

Certain prosocial motives limit redistribution aimed at equality.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · December 2022 Full text Cite

Neural and Cognitive Signatures of Guilt Predict Hypocritical Blame.

Journal Article Psychological science · November 2022 A common form of moral hypocrisy occurs when people blame others for moral violations that they themselves commit. It is assumed that hypocritical blamers act in this manner to falsely signal that they hold moral standards that they do not really accept. W ... Full text Cite

Race and resource allocation: an online survey of US and UK adults' attitudes toward COVID-19 ventilator and vaccine distribution.

Journal Article BMJ open · November 2022 ObjectiveThis study aimed to assess US/UK adults' attitudes towards COVID-19 ventilator and vaccine allocation.DesignOnline survey including US and UK adults, sampled to be representative for sex, age, race, household income and employmen ... Full text Cite

Good scientific practice in EEG and MEG research: Progress and perspectives.

Journal Article NeuroImage · August 2022 Good scientific practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules, recommendations, and guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for furt ... Full text Cite

Free will without consciousness?

Journal Article Trends in cognitive sciences · July 2022 Findings demonstrating decision-related neural activity preceding volitional actions have dominated the discussion about how science can inform the free will debate. These discussions have largely ignored studies suggesting that decisions might be influenc ... Full text Cite

How Stable are Moral Judgments?

Journal Article Review of philosophy and psychology · July 2022 Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining wh ... Full text Cite

Computational ethics.

Journal Article Trends in cognitive sciences · May 2022 Technological advances are enabling roles for machines that present novel ethical challenges. The study of 'AI ethics' has emerged to confront these challenges, and connects perspectives from philosophy, computer science, law, and economics. Less represent ... Full text Cite

Freedom from what? Separating lay concepts of freedom.

Journal Article Consciousness and cognition · May 2022 Debates about freedom of will and action and their connections with moral responsibility have raged for centuries, but the opposing sides might disagree because they use different concepts of freedom. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that people who ... Full text Cite

Which features of patients are morally relevant in ventilator triage? A survey of the UK public.

Journal Article BMC medical ethics · March 2022 BackgroundIn the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many health systems, including those in the UK, developed triage guidelines to manage severe shortages of ventilators. At present, there is an insufficient understanding of how the public vie ... Full text Cite

Which Agent? Questions for Schechter

Journal Article Journal of Consciousness Studies · January 1, 2022 Full text Cite

How AI Can Aid Bioethics

Journal Article Journal of Practical Ethics · December 14, 2021 This paper explores some ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to improve human moral judgments in bioethics by avoiding some of the most common sources of error in moral judgment, including ignorance, confusion, and bias. It sur ... Full text Cite

Some common fallacies in arguments from M/EEG data.

Journal Article NeuroImage · December 2021 Like all humans, M/EEG researchers commit certain fallacies or mistakes in reasoning. This article surveys seven well-known but still common fallacies, including reverse inference, hasty generalization, hasty exclusion, inferring from group to individual, ... Full text Cite

Making moral principles suit yourself.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · October 2021 Normative ethical theories and religious traditions offer general moral principles for people to follow. These moral principles are typically meant to be fixed and rigid, offering reliable guides for moral judgment and decision-making. In two preregistered ... Full text Cite

Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis.

Journal Article Nature human behaviour · August 2021 Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitaria ... Full text Cite

Valence framing effects on moral judgments: A meta-analysis.

Journal Article Cognition · July 2021 Valence framing effects occur when participants make different choices or judgments depending on whether the options are described in terms of their positive outcomes (e.g. lives saved) or their negative outcomes (e.g. lives lost). When such framing effect ... Full text Cite

Contrastive mental causation

Journal Article Synthese · February 1, 2021 Any theory of mind needs to explain mental causation. Kim’s (upward) exclusion argument concludes that non-reductive physicalism cannot meet this challenge. One classic reply is that mental properties capture the causally relevant level of generality, beca ... Full text Cite

Indecision Modeling

Journal Article 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2021 · January 1, 2021 AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act in ways which ali ... Cite

Moral framing effects within subjects

Journal Article Philosophical Psychology · January 1, 2021 Several philosophers and psychologists have argued that evidence of moral framing effects shows that many of our moral judgments are unreliable. However, all previous empirical work on moral framing effects has used between-subject experimental designs. We ... Full text Cite

Indecision Modeling.

Conference AAAI · 2021 Cite

How Much Moral Status Could Artificial Intelligence Ever Achieve?

Chapter · January 1, 2021 Philosophers often argue about whether fetuses, animals, or AI systems do or do not have moral status. We will suggest instead that different entities have different degrees of moral status with respect to different moral reasons in different circumstances ... Full text Cite

Which factors should be included in triage? An online survey of the attitudes of the UK general public to pandemic triage dilemmas.

Journal Article BMJ open · December 2020 ObjectiveAs cases of COVID-19 infections surge, concerns have renewed about intensive care units (ICUs) being overwhelmed and the need for specific triage protocols over winter. This study aimed to help inform triage guidance by exploring the view ... Full text Open Access Cite

Exposure to opposing reasons reduces negative impressions of ideological opponents

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · November 1, 2020 Americans have become increasingly likely to dislike, distrust, and derogate their ideological opponents on contemporary social and political issues. We hypothesized that a lack of exposure to compelling reasons, arguments, and evidence from ideological op ... Full text Cite

Effects of sub-chronic methylphenidate on risk-taking and sociability in zebrafish (Danio rerio).

Journal Article Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol · August 2020 Attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) is the most common psychiatric disorder in children affecting around 11% of children 4-17 years of age (CDC 2019). Children with ADHD are widely treated with stimulant medications such as methylphenidate (Rital ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Adapting a kidney exchange algorithm to align with human values

Journal Article Artificial Intelligence · June 1, 2020 The efficient and fair allocation of limited resources is a classical problem in economics and computer science. In kidney exchanges, a central market maker allocates living kidney donors to patients in need of an organ. Patients and donors in kidney excha ... Full text Cite

How does inequality affect our sense of moral obligation?

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · April 2020 Tomasello's novel and insightful theory of obligation explains why we sometimes sense an obligation to treat each other equally, but he has not yet explained why human morality also allows and enables much inequality in wealth and power. Ullman-Margalit's ... Full text Cite

Moral conformity and its philosophical lessons

Journal Article Philosophical Psychology · February 17, 2020 The psychological and philosophical literature exploring the role of social influence in moral judgments suggests that conformity in moral judgments is common and, in many cases, seems to be motivated by epistemic rather than purely social concerns. We arg ... Full text Cite

Artificial artificial intelligence: Measuring influence of AI 'Assessments' on moral decision-making

Journal Article AIES 2020 - Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · February 7, 2020 Given AI's growing role in modeling and improving decision-making, how and when to present users with feedback is an urgent topic to address. We empirically examined the effect of feedback from false AI on moral decision-making about donor kidney allocatio ... Full text Cite

Some ethics of deep brain stimulation

Chapter · January 16, 2020 Case reports about patients undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) for various motor and psychiatric disorders-including Parkinson's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and treatment resistant depression-have sparked a vast literature in neuroethics. ... Full text Cite

Disgust Theory Through the Lens of Psychiatric Medicine

Journal Article Clinical Psychological Science · January 1, 2020 The elicitors of disgust are heterogeneous, which makes attributing one function to disgust challenging. Theorists have proposed that disgust solves multiple adaptive problems and comprises multiple functional domains. However, theories conflict with regar ... Full text Cite

Translation and validation of the moral foundations vignettes (MFVs) for the portuguese language in a Brazilian sample

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · January 1, 2020 The Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) – a recently developed set of brief scenarios depicting violations of various moral foundations – enables investigators to directly examine differences in moral judgments about different topics. In the present study, ... Cite

AI Methods in Bioethics.

Journal Article AJOB empirical bioethics · January 2020 Full text Cite

Do framing effects debunk moral beliefs?

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · September 2019 May argues that framing effects do not undermine moral beliefs, because they affect only a minority of moral judgments in small ways. We criticize his estimates of the extent of framing effects on moral judgments, and then we argue that framing effects wou ... Full text Cite

The need for feasible compromises on conscientious objection: response to Card.

Journal Article Journal of medical ethics · August 2019 Robert Card criticises our proposal for managing some conscientious objections in medicine. Unfortunately, he severely mischaracterises the nature of our proposal, its scope and its implications. He also overlooks the fact that our proposal is a compromise ... Full text Cite

Responsibility for forgetting

Journal Article Philosophical Studies · May 1, 2019 In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our ... Full text Cite

The central role of disgust in disorders of food avoidance.

Journal Article Int J Eat Disord · May 2019 BACKGROUND: Individuals with extreme food avoidance such as Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) experience impairing physical and mental health consequences from nutrition of insufficient variety or/and quantity. Identifying mechanisms contri ... Full text Link to item Cite

Against Some Recent Arguments for ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’: Reasons, Deliberation, Trying, and Furniture

Journal Article Philosophia (United States) · March 15, 2019 Many philosophers claim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In light of recent empirical evidence, however, some skeptics conclude that philosophers should stop assuming the principle unconditionally. Streumer, however, does not simply assume the principle’s truth ... Full text Cite

A reason-based explanation for moral dumbfounding

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · March 1, 2019 The moral dumbfounding phenomenon for harmless taboo violations is often cited as a critical piece of empirical evidence motivating anti-rationalist models of moral judgment and decision-making. Moral dumbfounding purportedly occurs when an individual rema ... Cite

Responsibility Without Freedom? Folk Judgements About Deliberate Actions.

Journal Article Frontiers in psychology · January 2019 A long-standing position in philosophy, law, and theology is that a person can be held morally responsible for an action only if they had the freedom to choose and to act otherwise. Thus, many philosophers consider freedom to be a necessary condition for m ... Full text Cite

Do framing effects debunk moral beliefs?

Journal Article BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES · January 1, 2019 Link to item Cite

When Do People Want AI to Make Decisions?

Conference AIES 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · December 27, 2018 AI systems are now or will soon be sophisticated enough to make consequential decisions. Although this technology has flourished, we also need public appraisals of AI systems playing these more important roles. This article reports surveys of preferences f ... Full text Cite

Adapting a Kidney Exchange Algorithm to Align with Human Values

Conference Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · December 27, 2018 Full text Cite

What’s Wrong with Joyguzzling?

Journal Article Ethical Theory and Moral Practice · February 1, 2018 Our thesis is that there is no moral requirement to refrain from emitting reasonable amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) solely in order to enjoy oneself. Joyriding in a gas guzzler (joyguzzling) provides our paradigm example. We first distinguish this clai ... Full text Cite

Be it ever so humble: Proposing a dual-dimension account and measurement of humility

Journal Article Self and Identity · January 2, 2018 What does it mean to be humble? We argue that humility is an epistemically and ethically aligned state of awareness–the experience of ourselves as a small part of a larger universe and as one among a host of other morally relevant beings. So conceived, hum ... Full text Cite

Moral decision making frameworks for artificial intelligence

Conference International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, ISAIM 2018 · January 1, 2018 The generality of decision and game theory has enabled domain-independent progress in AI research. For example, a better algorithm for finding good policies in (PO)MDPs can be instantly used in a variety of applications. But such a general theory is lackin ... Cite

Adapting a kidney exchange algorithm to align with human values

Conference 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2018 · January 1, 2018 The efficient allocation of limited resources is a classical problem in economics and computer science. In kidney exchanges, a central market maker allocates living kidney donors to patients in need of an organ. Patients and donors in kidney exchanges are ... Cite

Does neuroscience undermine morality?

Chapter · January 1, 2018 In Chapter 4, the authors explore whether neuroscience undermines morality. The authors distinguish, analyze, and assess the main arguments for neuroscientific skepticism about morality and argue that neuroscience does not undermine all of our moral judgme ... Full text Cite

Are Proselfs More Deceptive and Hypocritical? Social Image Concerns in Appearing Fair.

Journal Article Frontiers in psychology · January 2018 Deception varies across individuals and social contexts. The present research explored how individual difference measured by social value orientations, and situations, affect deception in moral hypocrisy. In two experiments, participants made allocations b ... Full text Cite

Neuromarketing: Ethical Implications of its Use and Potential Misuse

Journal Article Journal of Business Ethics · September 1, 2017 Neuromarketing is an emerging field in which academic and industry research scientists employ neuroscience techniques to study marketing practices and consumer behavior. The use of neuroscience techniques, it is argued, facilitates a more direct understand ... Full text Cite

Moral conformity in online interactions: rational justifications increase influence of peer opinions on moral judgments

Journal Article Social Influence · July 3, 2017 Over the last decade, social media has increasingly been used as a platform for political and moral discourse. We investigate whether conformity, specifically concerning moral attitudes, occurs in these virtual environments apart from face-to-face interact ... Full text Cite

I'm not the person I used to be: The self and autobiographical memories of immoral actions.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · June 2017 People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors inves ... Full text Cite

Mind control as a guide for the mind

Journal Article Nature Human Behaviour · May 26, 2017 The human brain is a complex network that supports mental function. The nascent field of network neuroscience applies tools from mathematics to neuroimaging data in the hope of shedding light on cognitive function. A critical question arising from these em ... Full text Cite

Implicit moral evaluations: A multinomial modeling approach.

Journal Article Cognition · January 2017 Implicit moral evaluations-i.e., immediate, unintentional assessments of the wrongness of actions or persons-play a central role in supporting moral behavior in everyday life. Yet little research has employed methods that rigorously measure individual diff ... Full text Cite

How to Allow Conscientious Objection in Medicine While Protecting Patient Rights.

Journal Article Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees · January 2017 Paradigmatic cases of conscientious objection in medicine are those in which a physician refuses to provide a medical service or good because doing so would conflict with that physician's personal moral or religious beliefs. Should such refusals be allowed ... Full text Cite

Moral decision making frameworks for artificial intelligence

Conference AAAI Workshop - Technical Report · January 1, 2017 The generality of decision and game theory has enabled domain-independent progress in AI research. For example, a better algorithm for finding good policies in (PO)MDPs can be instantly used in a variety of applications. But such a general theory is lackin ... Cite

Distinct neuronal patterns of positive and negative moral processing in psychopathy.

Journal Article Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · December 2016 Psychopathy is a disorder characterized by severe and frequent moral violations in multiple domains of life. Numerous studies have shown psychopathy-related limbic brain abnormalities during moral processing; however, these studies only examined negatively ... Full text Cite

Abnormal fronto-limbic engagement in incarcerated stimulant users during moral processing.

Journal Article Psychopharmacology · September 2016 RationaleStimulant use is a significant and prevalent problem, particularly in criminal populations. Previous studies found that cocaine and methamphetamine use is related to impairment in identifying emotions and empathy. Stimulant users also hav ... Full text Cite

An Empirical Refutation of 'Ought' Implies 'Can'

Journal Article Analysis (United Kingdom) · July 1, 2016 Full text Cite

Blame, not ability, impacts moral "ought" judgments for impossible actions: Toward an empirical refutation of "ought" implies "can".

Journal Article Cognition · May 2016 Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that "ought ... Full text Cite

Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes.

Journal Article Consciousness and cognition · January 2016 An increase in brain activity known as the "readiness potential" (RP) can be seen over central scalp locations in the seconds leading up to a volitionally timed movement. This activity precedes awareness of the ensuing movement by as much as two seconds an ... Full text Cite

Scrupulous Treatment

Chapter · 2016 Cite

Moral foundations vignettes: a standardized stimulus database of scenarios based on moral foundations theory.

Journal Article Behavior research methods · December 2015 Research on the emotional, cognitive, and social determinants of moral judgment has surged in recent years. The development of moral foundations theory (MFT) has played an important role, demonstrating the breadth of morality. Moral psychology has responde ... Full text Cite

Scrupulous agents

Journal Article Philosophical Psychology · October 3, 2015 Scrupulosity (a form of OCD involving obsession with morality) raises fascinating issues about the nature of moral judgment and about moral responsibility. After defining scrupulosity, describing its common features, and discussing concrete case studies, w ... Full text Cite

Hypnotizing Libet: Readiness potentials with non-conscious volition.

Journal Article Consciousness and cognition · May 2015 The readiness potential (RP) is one of the most controversial topics in neuroscience and philosophy due to its perceived relevance to the role of conscious willing in action. Libet and colleagues reported that RP onset precedes both volitional movement and ... Full text Cite

My Brain Made Me Do It — So What?

Internet Publication · March 2015 Link to item Cite

Does Philosophy Matter?

Internet Publication · March 2015 Link to item Cite

The DSM-5 Definition of Mental Disorder

Journal Article Public Affairs Quarterly · 2015 Cite

What's wrong? Moral understanding in psychopathic offenders.

Journal Article Journal of research in personality · December 2014 Full text Cite

Are moral judgments unified?

Journal Article Philosophical Psychology · July 4, 2014 Full text Cite

Moral psychology, volume 4: Free will and moral responsibility

Book · January 1, 2014 Traditional philosophers approached the issues of free will and moral responsibility through conceptual analysis that seldom incorporated findings from empirical science. In recent decades, however, striking developments in psychology and neuroscience have ... Cite

Introduction

Chapter · January 1, 2014 Cite

Predictive accuracy in the neuroprediction of rearrest.

Journal Article Social neuroscience · January 2014 A recently published study by the present authors reported evidence that functional changes in the anterior cingulate cortex within a sample of 96 criminal offenders who were engaged in a Go/No-Go impulse control task significantly predicted their rearrest ... Full text Cite

Introduction

Chapter · 2014 Cite

Interview by Simon Cushing

Journal Article Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics · 2014 Cite

Introduction

Book · January 1, 2014 Full text Cite

Subcomponents of psychopathy have opposing correlations with punishment judgments.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · October 2013 Psychopathy research is plagued by an enigma: Psychopaths reliably act immorally, but they also accurately report whether an action is morally wrong. The current study revealed that cooperative suppressor effects and conflicting subsets of personality trai ... Full text Cite

Barking up the wrong free: readiness potentials reflect processes independent of conscious will.

Journal Article Experimental brain research · September 2013 In the early 1980s, Libet found that a readiness potential (RP) over central scalp locations begins on average several hundred milliseconds before the reported time of awareness of willing to move (W). Haggard and Eimer Exp Brain Res 126(1):128-133, (1999) ... Full text Cite

Neuroprediction of future rearrest.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · April 2013 Identification of factors that predict recurrent antisocial behavior is integral to the social sciences, criminal justice procedures, and the effective treatment of high-risk individuals. Here we show that error-related brain activity elicited during perfo ... Full text Cite

Memory and Law

Book · January 24, 2013 The legal system depends upon memory function in a number of critical ways, including the memories of victims; the memories of individuals who witness crimes or other critical events; the memories of investigators, lawyers and judges engaged in the legal p ... Full text Cite

Preface

Book · January 24, 2013 Cite

Preface

Journal Article Memory and Law · January 24, 2013 Cite

What is Addiction?

Chapter · 2013 Cite

What makes killing wrong?

Journal Article Journal of medical ethics · January 2013 What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities. This account implies that it is not even pro tanto morally wrong to kill patients who are un ... Full text Cite

Killing versus totally disabling: a reply to critics.

Journal Article Journal of medical ethics · January 2013 Full text Cite

Can psychopathic offenders discern moral wrongs? A new look at the moral/conventional distinction.

Journal Article Journal of abnormal psychology · May 2012 A prominent view of psychopathic moral reasoning suggests that psychopathic individuals cannot properly distinguish between moral wrongs and other types of wrongs. The present study evaluated this view by examining the extent to which 109 incarcerated offe ... Full text Cite

Neuroprediction, Violence, and the Law: Setting the Stage.

Journal Article Neuroethics · April 2012 In this paper, our goal is to (a) survey some of the legal contexts within which violence risk assessment already plays a prominent role, (b) explore whether developments in neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict violence, ... Full text Cite

Does Morality Have an Essence?

Journal Article Psychological Inquiry · April 1, 2012 Full text Cite

Mental Illness and Ethical Responsibility

Book · 2012 Mental illnesses devastate individuals and families. They also raise profound and important theoretical and practical issues for us all. How can we tell whether someone really is mentally ill instead of just eccentric? When people with mental illnesses cau ... Cite

Free Constrastivism

Chapter · 2012 Cite

Introduction

Chapter · January 1, 2012 Full text Cite

Neurolaw and Neuroprediction: Potential Promises and Perils

Journal Article Philosophy Compass · 2012 Cite

Is morality unified? Evidence that distinct neural systems underlie moral judgments of harm, dishonesty, and disgust.

Journal Article Journal of cognitive neuroscience · October 2011 Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMR ... Full text Cite

Neuroimages as evidence in a mens rea defense: No Impact

Journal Article Psychology, Public Policy, and Law · August 1, 2011 Recent developments in the neuropsychology of criminal behavior have given rise to concerns that neuroimaging evidence (such as MRI and functional MRI [fMRI] images) could unduly influence jurors. Across four experiments, a nationally representative sample ... Full text Cite

Why We Laugh Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams Jr. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011. 373 pp. $29.95, £22.95. ISBN 9780262015820.

Other Science · June 10, 2011 Contemplating why we find some things funny, the authors provide cognitive and evolutionary perspectives on humor and its importance to humans. ... Full text Cite

Experimental Ethics

Chapter · 2011 Cite

Insanity Defenses

Chapter · 2011 Cite

Moral Skepticism

Chapter · 2011 Cite

Consequentialism

Chapter · 2011 Cite

Emotion and reliability in moral psychology

Journal Article Emotion Review · January 1, 2011 Instead of arguing about whether moral judgments are based on emotion or reason, moral psychologists should investigate the reliability of moral judgments by checking rates of framing effects in different kinds of moral judgments under different conditions ... Full text Cite

Neural basis of moral verdict and moral deliberation.

Journal Article Social neuroscience · January 2011 How people judge something to be morally right or wrong is a fundamental question of both the sciences and the humanities. Here we aim to identify the neural processes that underlie the specific conclusion that something is morally wrong. To do this, we in ... Full text Cite

Neurolaw and Consciousness Detection

Journal Article Cortex · 2011 Cite

Hemispheric Asymmetries During Processing of Immoral Stimuli

Journal Article Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience · December 2010 Cite

Preface

Journal Article Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet · November 24, 2010 Cite

Alternatives and defaults: Knobe's two explanations of how moral judgments influence intuitions about intentionality and causation

Journal Article Behavioral and Brain Sciences · August 1, 2010 Knobe cites both relevant alternatives and defaults on a continuum to explain how moral judgments influence intuitions about certain apparently non-moral notions. I ask (1) how these two accounts are related, (2) whether they exclude or supplement supposed ... Full text Cite

Abnormal moral reasoning in complete and partial callosotomy patients.

Journal Article Neuropsychologia · June 2010 Recent neuroimaging studies suggest lateralized cerebral mechanisms in the right temporal parietal junction are involved in complex social and moral reasoning, such as ascribing beliefs to others. Based on this evidence, we tested 3 anterior-resected and 3 ... Full text Cite

Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: an Empirical Study.

Journal Article Review of philosophy and psychology · June 2010 In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge, Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these cases. A ... Full text Cite

Personality Disorders and Responsibility: Learning from Peay

Journal Article Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology · 2010 Cite

Moral Intuition

Chapter · 2010 Cite

Moral Reasoning

Chapter · 2010 Cite

Lessons from Libet

Chapter · 2010 Cite

Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet

Book · 2010 We all seem to think that we do the acts we do because we consciously choose to do them. This commonsense view is thrown into dispute by Benjamin Libet's eyebrow-raising experiments, which seem to suggest that conscious will occurs not before but after the ... Full text Cite

Does Good Need God?

Journal Article Encompass Ethics Magazine · 2010 Cite

Wording effects in moral judgments

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · January 1, 2010 As the study of moral judgments grows, it becomes imperative to compare results across studies in order to create unified theories within the field. These efforts are potentially undermined, however, by variations in wording used by different researchers. ... Full text Cite

Neurolaw.

Journal Article Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · January 2010 Less than three decades ago, the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience joined forces to form cognitive neuroscience. More recently, neuroscience has combined with social psychology and with economics to produce social neuroscience and neuroeconom ... Full text Cite

Morality

Book · 2009 Cite

Moral perception and heuristics

Journal Article Modern Schoolman · January 1, 2009 Full text Cite

MIXED-UP META-ETHICS

Journal Article NOUS · 2009 Cite

Replies to copp, timmons, and railton

Journal Article Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · November 1, 2008 Full text Cite

Précis of moral scepticisms

Journal Article Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · November 1, 2008 Full text Cite

Pollsters with Dirty Tricks

Other Valley News · September 25, 2008 Cite

REPLIES TO DREIER AND MCNAUGHTON

Journal Article Philosophical Books · July 2008 Full text Cite

Moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments.

Journal Article Cognition · July 2008 An extensive body of research suggests that the distinction between doing and allowing plays a critical role in shaping moral appraisals. Here, we report evidence from a pair of experiments suggesting that the converse is also true: moral appraisals affect ... Full text Cite

A contrastivist manifesto

Journal Article Social Epistemology · July 1, 2008 General contrastivism holds that all claims of reasons are relative to contrast classes. This approach applies to explanation (reasons why things happen), moral philosophy (reasons for action), and epistemology (reasons for belief), and it illuminates mora ... Full text Cite

Can neurological evidence help courts assess criminal responsibility? Lessons from law and neuroscience.

Journal Article Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · March 2008 Can neurological evidence help courts assess criminal responsibility? To answer this question, we must first specify legal criteria for criminal responsibility and then ask how neurological findings can be used to determine whether particular defendants me ... Full text Cite

Is moral phenomenology unified?

Journal Article Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences · March 1, 2008 In this short paper, I argue that the phenomenology of moral judgment is not unified across different areas of morality (involving harm, hierarchy, reciprocity, and impurity) or even across different relations to harm. Common responses, such as that moral ... Full text Cite

Intention, temporal order, and moral judgments

Journal Article Mind and Language · February 1, 2008 The traditional philosophical doctrine of double effect claims that agents' intentions affect whether acts are morally wrong. Our behavioral study reveals that agents' intentions do affect whether acts are judged morally wrong, whereas the temporal order o ... Full text Cite

Brain Images as Legal Evidence

Journal Article Episteme · January 1, 2008 This paper explores whether brain images may be admitted as evidence in criminal trials under Federal Rule of Evidence 403, which weighs probative value against the danger of being prejudicial, confusing, or misleading to fact finders. The paper summarizes ... Full text Cite

Moderate Classy Pyrrhonian Moral Scepticism

Journal Article The Philosophical Quarterly · 2008 This précis summarizes my book 'Moral Skepticisms', with emphasis on my contrastivist analysis of justified moral belief and my Pyrrhonian moral scepticism based on meta-scepticism about relevance. This complex moral epistemology escapes a common paradox f ... Full text Link to item Cite

Preventive War, What Is It Good For?

Chapter · January 1, 2008 This chapter argues that although Bush's preventive war in Iraq is morally wrong, and his policy is too broad, some exceptional preventive wars can still be morally justified. It develops and defends a version of consequentialism about war. It then critici ... Full text Cite

Evidence and Law

Journal Article Episteme: A Journal of Social Philosophy · 2008 Cite

Section B: Ethics

Journal Article Interdisciplinary Core Philosophy, Philosophical Issues · 2008 Cite

Moral Skepticisms

Journal Article Philosophical Books · 2008 Cite

Introduction

Journal Article Episteme: A Journal of Social Philosophy · 2008 Cite

Introduction

Chapter · 2008 Cite

Introduction

Chapter · 2008 Cite

Introduction

Chapter · 2008 Cite

What is addiction?

Journal Article Alcohol Research and Health · 2008 This issue of Alcohol Research & Health examines addiction to multiple substances - that is, combined dependence on alcohol and other drugs (AODs), including marijuana, cocaine, and opioids. It seems fitting, then, to begin the issue with a look at wha ... Cite

Replies to Hough, Baumann and Blaauw

Journal Article Philosophical Quarterly · January 1, 2008 I reply to comments by Gerry Hough, Peter Baumann and Martijn Blaauw on my book Moral Skepticisms. The main issues concern whether modest justifiedness is epistemic and how it is related to extreme justifiedness; how contrastivists can handle crazy contras ... Full text Cite

Moderate classy pyrrhonian moral scepticism

Journal Article Philosophical Quarterly · January 1, 2008 This précis summarizes my book 'Moral Skepticisms', with emphasis on my contrastivist analysis of justified moral belief and my Pyrrhonian moral scepticism based on meta-scepticism about relevance. This complex moral epistemology escapes a common paradox f ... Full text Cite

R. M. Hare (1919-)

Chapter · December 13, 2007 Full text Cite

Reflections on Reflection in Robert Audi's Moral Intuitionism

Chapter · September 1, 2007 This chapter argues that Audi's views on moral intuitions, specifically concerning whether they can be justified without being based on inference, raise a number of questions Audi has yet to address. First, it asks, can moral intuitions be justified withou ... Full text Cite

Brain Scans Go Legal

Journal Article Scientific American Mind · December 2006 Full text Cite

Which Evidence Law? A Response to Schauer

Journal Article PENNumbra, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review · November 2006 Cite

Classy Pyrrhonism

Chapter · May 1, 2006 This essay invokes a technical framework of contrast classes within which Pyrrhonians can accept (or deny) knowledge claims that are relativized to specific contrast classes, but avoid all unrelativized knowledge claims and all presuppositions about which ... Full text Cite

Consequences, action, and intention as factors in moral judgments: an FMRI investigation.

Journal Article Journal of cognitive neuroscience · May 2006 The traditional philosophical doctrines of Consequentialism, Doing and Allowing, and Double Effect prescribe that moral judgments and decisions should be based on consequences, action (as opposed to inaction), and intention. This study uses functional magn ... Full text Cite

Moral Skepticisms

Book · February 1, 2006 Moral Skepticisms provides a detailed overview of moral epistemology, addressing such profound questions as: Are any moral beliefs true? Are any justified? Is moral knowledge possible? These questions lead to fundamental issues about the nature of morality ... Full text Cite

Moral Intuitionism Meets Empirical Psychology

Chapter · January 26, 2006 This chapter claims that recent developments in psychology and brain science cast considerable doubt on moral intuitionism. In arguing for this claim, it first develops a set of six principles concerning when non-moral beliefs require justifying beliefs to ... Full text Cite

Moral Dilemmas

Chapter · 2006 Cite

Perspectives on Climate Change Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics

Book · 2005 This book explores the interplay between science, economics, politics, and ethics in understanding the challenge that climate change poses to the international community. ... Cite

Word Meaning in Legal Interpretation

Journal Article San Diego Law Review · 2005 Cite

Introduction

Journal Article Advances in the Economics of Environmental Resources · January 1, 2005 Full text Cite

God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist

Book · 2004 The book is composed of six chapters that alternate between Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, so that each separate point can be discussed as it arises. ... Cite

Can You Believe It?

Other Dartmouth Alumni Magazine · 2004 Cite

Moral Skepticism

Internet Publication · 2004 Link to item Cite

Experience and Foundationalism in Audi's The Architecture of Reason

Journal Article Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · July 2003 Full text Cite

Experience and Foundationalism in Audi’s The Architecture of Reason

Journal Article Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2003 Cite

Consequentialism

Internet Publication · 2003 Link to item Cite

Weak and Strong Judicial Review

Journal Article Law and Philosophy · 2003 Full text Link to item Cite

For goodness' sake

Journal Article Southern Journal of Philosophy · January 1, 2003 Full text Cite

Recusal and Bush v. Gore

Journal Article Law and Philosophy · December 1, 2002 Full text Cite

A light theory of color

Journal Article Philosophical Studies · January 1, 2002 Traditional theories locate color in primary qualities of objects, in dispositional properties of objects, in visual fields, or nowhere. In contrast, we argue that color is located in properties of light. More specifically, light is red iff there is a prop ... Full text Cite

How to avoid deviance (in logic)

Journal Article History and Philosophy of Logic · January 1, 2002 We show that classical two-valued logic is included in weak extensions of normal three-valued logics and also that normal three-valued logics are best viewed not as deviant logics but instead as strong extensions of classical two-valued logic obtained by a ... Full text Cite

What's in a Contrast Class?

Journal Article Analysis · 2002 Full text Link to item Cite

What is Consequentialism? A Reply to Howard-Snyder

Journal Article Utilitas · November 2001 Cite

Criminal Law and Multiple Personality Disorder: The Vexing Problems of Personhood and Responsibility

Journal Article Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal · 2001 Cite

Gert, Bernard

Chapter · 2001 Cite

R. M. Hare

Chapter · 2001 Cite

What is Consequentialism? A Reply to Howard-Snyder

Journal Article Utilitas · January 1, 2001 If there is a moral reason for A to do X, and if A cannot do X without doing Y, and if doing Y will enable A to do X, then there is a moral reason for A to do Y. This principle is plausible but mysterious, so it needs to be explained. It can be explained b ... Full text Cite

Responsibility and fault

Other LAW AND PHILOSOPHY · January 1, 2001 Link to item Cite

Expressivism and Embedding

Journal Article Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · November 2000 Full text Cite

Value judgment: Improving our ethical beliefs

Other PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH · 2000 Cite

From 'is' to 'ought' in moral epistemology

Journal Article Argumentation · January 1, 2000 Many philosophers claim that no formally valid argument can have purely non-normative premises and a normative or moral conclusion that occurs essentially. Mark Nelson recently proposed a new counterexample to this Humean doctrine: All of Dahlia's beliefs ... Full text Cite

Begging the question

Journal Article Australasian Journal of Philosophy · December 1, 1999 Full text Cite

Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character

Other Ethical Theory and Moral Practice · 1999 Cite

"MPP, RIP" RIP

Journal Article Philosophical Papers · January 1, 1999 Full text Cite

Impartiality

Chapter · 1999 Cite

Moral Skepticism

Chapter · 1999 Cite

Marcus, Ruth Barcan

Chapter · 1999 Cite

A Perspectival Theory of Law

Journal Article Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy · 1999 Cite

An Argument for Descriptivism

Journal Article Southern Journal of Philosophy · January 1, 1999 Full text Cite

Explanation and justification in moral epistemology

Conference PROCEEDINGS OF THE TWENTIETH WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL 1 · January 1, 1999 Link to item Cite

You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had: A Reply to Marquis on Abortion

Journal Article Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition · 1999 Full text Link to item Cite

Some varieties of particularism

Journal Article Metaphilosophy · January 1, 1999 Analytic particularism claims that judgments of moral wrongness are about particular acts rather than general principles. Metaphysical particularism claims that what makes true moral judgments true is not general principles but nonmoral properties of parti ... Full text Cite

Entrapment in the Net?

Journal Article Ethics and Information Technology · January 1, 1999 Internet stings to catch child molesters raise problems for popular tests of entrapment that focus on causation, initiative, counterfactuals, and subjective predisposition. An objective test of entrapment works better in the context of the Internet. The be ... Full text Cite

Moral Dilemmas

Chapter · 1997 Cite

Morality, Normativity, and Society

Other The Philosophical Review · October 1996 Cite

The Philosophy of Law Classic and Contemporary Readings with Commentary

Book · 1996 PHILOSOPHY OF LAW examines such topics as the concept of law, the dispute between natural law theorists and legal positivists, the relations between law and morality, criminal responsibility and legal punishment, rights of the individual ... ... Cite

Morality and Action

Other International Journal of Philosophical Studies · 1996 Cite

Nihilism and Scepticism About Moral Obligations

Journal Article Utilitas · November 1995 Cite

The Structure of Justification

Other The Philosophical Quarterly · July 1995 Cite

Modality, Morality and Belief Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus

Book · 1995 This collection of original essays honours one of the most influential philosophical pioneers of the twentieth century, Ruth Barcan Marcus. ... Cite

Moral Dilemmas

Chapter · 1995 Cite

Nihilism and scepticism about moral obligations

Journal Article Utilitas · January 1, 1995 Full text Cite

Moral Imagination

Other Mind · July 1994 Cite

The Truth of Performatives

Journal Article International Journal of Philosophical Studies · March 1, 1994 Full text Cite

Contemporary Perspectives on Constitutional Interpretation

Book · 1993 Brings together ten of the nation's finest and most provocative legal scholars to present their views on constitutional interpretation. All of these papers are very recent, and four were written especially for this volume. ... Cite

Human Morality

Other Philosophical Books · 1993 Cite

Some Problems for Gibbard's Norm-Expressivism

Journal Article Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition · 1993 Full text Link to item Cite

Contemporary Perspectives on Constitutional Interpretation

Journal Article Boston University law review. Boston University. School of Law · September 1992 Cite

Playing by the Rules

Other Philosophical Books · April 1992 Cite

An Argument for Consequentialism

Journal Article Philosophical Perspectives · 1992 Full text Link to item Cite

Risks, National Defense, and Nuclear Deterrence

Journal Article Public Affairs Quarterly · 1992 Full text Link to item Cite

Intuitionism

Chapter · 1992 Cite

Moral Dilemmas

Chapter · 1992 Cite

The wrongful intentions principle

Journal Article Philosophical Papers · January 1, 1991 Full text Cite

MORAL EXPERIENCE AND JUSTIFICATION

Journal Article The Southern Journal of Philosophy · January 1, 1991 Full text Cite

Twenty Years of Moral Epistemology: A Bibliography

Journal Article The Southern Journal of Philosophy · 1991 Cite

20 YEARS OF MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Journal Article The Southern Journal of Philosophy · January 1, 1991 Full text Cite

On Primoratz's Definition of Terrorism

Journal Article Journal of Applied Philosophy · January 1, 1991 ABSTRACT  In “What is terrorism?” Igor Primoratz defines ‘terrorism’ as “the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them, or other people, into a course of action they otherwise would not tak ... Full text Cite

The Ethics of the Bomb

Other Dartmouth Alumni Magazine · February 1990 Cite

A Defence of Modus Tollens

Journal Article Analysis · 1990 Full text Link to item Cite

Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict

Other Philosophical Books · July 1989 Cite

Promises which cannot be kept

Journal Article Philosophia · December 1, 1988 Full text Cite

Moral Dilemmas

Book · 1988 Cite

A resolution of a paradox of promising

Journal Article Philosophia · December 1, 1987 Full text Cite

Spreading the Word

Other Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · September 1987 Cite

Insanity vs. Irrationality

Journal Article Public Affairs Quarterly · 1987 Full text Link to item Cite

Moral Realisms and Moral Dilemmas

Journal Article The Journal of Philosophy · 1987 Full text Link to item Cite

Moral Dilemmas and 'Ought and Ought Not'

Journal Article Canadian Journal of Philosophy · 1987 Full text Link to item Cite

A Defense of Modus Ponens

Journal Article The Journal of Philosophy · 1986 Full text Link to item Cite

Moral Dilemmas and Incomparability

Journal Article American Philosophical Quarterly · 1985 Full text Link to item Cite

A Solution to Forrester's Paradox of Gentle Murder

Journal Article The Journal of Philosophy · 1985 Full text Link to item Cite

`Ought' Conversationally Implies `Can'

Journal Article The Philosophical Review · 1984 Full text Link to item Cite

Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry

Other Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, · June 1983 Cite

The Life of the Mind

Other Grolier’s Masterplots: 1979 Annual · 1979 Cite

A Definition of Terrorism

Journal Article Journal of Applied Philosophy Cite

What is Philosophy?

Internet Publication Cite

Turning the Tables

Software Software for teaching truth tables ... Link to item Cite

Induction vs. Deduction

Internet Publication Cite

Statistical Applications

Internet Publication Cite

Moral Decision Making Frameworks for Artificial Intelligence

Conference The generality of decision and game theory has enabled domain-independent progress in AI research. For example, a better algorithm for finding good policies in (PO)MDPs can be instantly used in a variety of applications. But such a general theory is lackin ... Cite