Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Paul Rehren  at Utrecht University on his recent paper (co-authored with  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong  at Duke University) " How Stable are Moral Judgments ?" ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2022). Paul Rehren Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. One issue has, however, been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgments over time [but see, Helzer et al. 2017 ]. In our paper, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and I argue that there are four main reasons for philosophers and psychologists to consider the stability of moral judgments. First, the stability of moral judgments can shed light on the role of moral values in moral judgments. Second, lay people seem to expect moral judgments to be stable in a way that contrasts with tastes. Third, philosophers also assume that  their  moral judgments do and sh...

This post is by Phil Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett . It is a reply to the post we published on Tuesday on Metaethics and Mental Time Travel . In Metaethics and Mental Time Travel , Fileva and Tresan (F&T) fairly and accurately reconstructed (improved?) and intricately dissected our paper. We cannot follow every twist and turn in a short blog post so concentrate on the key issue. They partially agree with us that semantic knowledge detached from diachronic self-awareness is insufficient for moral agency but disagree (i) whether that awareness needs to be "richly experiential" and (ii) the nature of diachronic deficits in the cases we discuss (see their discussion of these cases which is deeper than ours). As they say, Representations with past- or future-oriented, autobiographical content, crucially, awareness of one’s past actions or future options as consistent or inconsistent with one’s principles do seem necessary : but MTT involves experiential repres...

We are Iskra Fileva and Jonathan Tresan . Both of us teach philosophy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Rochester, respectively. We recently wrote a paper in response to " Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency ," by Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett published in Mind in 2010. We summarize our paper " Metaethics and Mental Time Travel " here. When we make moral judgments, we often experientially project ourselves into the past or the possible futures, a capacity dubbed “mental time travel” (MTT). For instance, in judging whether her mom was wrong to keep her away from her dad after the parents divorced, Sally may try to recall what it was like to be her father’s daughter. Was it a good experience or a bad one? Was the mother rightly protective or just trying to spite the dad? Sally’s evaluation will likely be informed not just by propositional memories (e.g., “My father was born in June”) but by richly detailed and vivid fi...

This post is by Josh May , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He presents his book, Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind  (OUP, 2018). May’s research lies primarily at the intersection of ethics and science. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011. Before taking a position at UAB, he spent 2 years teaching at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. My book is a scientifically-informed examination of moral judgment and moral motivation that ultimately argues for what I call optimistic rationalism, which contains empirical and normative theses. The empirical thesis is a form of (psychological) rationalism, which asserts that moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally driven by reasoning or inference. The normative thesis is cautiously optimistic, claiming that moral cognition and motivation are, in light of the science, in pretty good shape---at least, the empirical ev...

This post is by Bart Streumer . Bart Streumer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. In this post he introduces his book Unbelievable Error s, which has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Widespread beliefs can be systematically mistaken. Take religious beliefs: if God does not exist, these beliefs are all mistaken. But you may think that some widespread beliefs cannot be mistaken in this way. For example, consider normative judgements: our beliefs about what is right or wrong, or about what there is reason to do or to believe. Could these beliefs be systematically mistaken? In my book Unbelievable Errors, I argue that they are. I argue that normative judgements ascribe normative properties, but that these properties do not exist. This means that all normative judgements are false. For example, the belief that stealing is wrong ascribes the property of being wrong to stealing, but this property does not exist, which means that this belief is...