Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Thomas Mulligan , a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics . He talks about his new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State . A striking feature of the philosophical debate about justice is that our most popular theories are rejected by the people who would have to live under them.   Since the 1970s, libertarianism and egalitarianism have dominated political philosophy despite being unpalatable to the public; we know, for example, that “empirical studies provide almost no support for egalitarianism, understood as equality of outcomes, or for Rawls’s difference principle” ( Konow 2003 : 1199). The goal of this book is to provide a theory of justice that is consonant with human intuition and more conceptually compelling than these competitors on the right and the left.  Although you wouldn’t know it from our politics, there is deep normative agreement about the structure of a just economy.  Human beings ...

Emilian Mihailov  (pictured below) is the Executive Director of the Research Centre in Applied Ethics (CCEA) and a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest. Currently he is working on the implications of experimental moral psychology and neuroscience for normative and applied ethics. I will present some ideas I developed in my paper “ Is deontology a moral confabulation? ”, recently published in Neuroethics . Here is a provoking thought. What if the effort of philosophical theorizing is an exercise in moral confabulation to polish off track emotional responses, admitingly hard to resist given their evolutionary roots? Joshua Greene speculates that if you mix the fact we are largely driven by strong emotional responses with the tendency to make up plausible sounding stories to justify or explain these responses, you get deontological moral philosophy. As a philosopher who has done some work in the Kantian tradition, was I confabulating? I the pap...

This post is by James Andow  (pictured above), a Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Reading. James’s research interests are in philosophical methodology, in particular, on intuitions and experimental philosophy. In this post he summarises his paper ‘ Expecting Moral Philosophers to be Reliable ’. You can read the paper in draft form here . Consider the following case: A bomb is about to go off. It’s a big one. If this bomb goes off, every single living thing will die instantaneously and painlessly, and the universe will be rendered incapable of ever supporting life again. There is but one way to stop the bomb: pushing a big red button. Pushing the button would stop the bomb from going off. Pushing the button would also cure all disease, eradicate poverty, remove the Tories from government, provide everyone with a free kitten, stop climate change, and bring Duke Ellington back. Is it morally permissible to push the button? If you thought of an answer, y...