Newman, Lockhart, and Keil recently published their finding that when judging a person’s overall moral goodness or badness across a lifetime, we seem biased toward the end of life (at Cognition here). According to this theory, we do not judge the moral qualities of a person’s lifetime character by merely adding up the ‘moral points’ of her individual actions over that life. Instead, if Scrooge or Andrew Carnegie turns things around at the end of their lives, we will attribute much greater goodness to them across their whole lives because we give greater consideration to what people do at the end of their lives than we give to the rest of their lives, when determining the moral character of a life. I think that the data presented by Newman et al. are open to at least two other explanations, however.
Continue reading "Aggregating for lifetime character (and well-being): is there an end-of-life bias?" »
Tim Scanlon's new book Moral Dimensions provides an elegant account according to which an agent's mental states are relevant to the question as to whether that agent is blameworthy but not to the question as to whether the agent's behavior itself is morally wrong.
As the philosopher Kristen Bell points out to me, however, the empirical data indicate that people's actual judgments show exactly the opposite pattern. People's wrongness judgments actually depend more on the agent's mental states than their blame judgments do.
Continue reading "Moral Dimensions Meets the Empirical Data" »
One of the most influential arguments in the philosophical study of well-being is Robert Nozick's famous 'experience machine' thought experiment. Suppose that you had the opportunity to enter a machine that would give you the subjective experience of having an extraordinary life -- it would seem to you that you were a rock star and a great philosopher and a devoted spouse, all at the same time -- even though, all the while, you would really just be lying there inside the machine. Would you choose to plug in? Many people say no, and Nozick therefore infers that we not only value having positive subjective experiences but also having a life that is in reality a good one.
In a forthcoming paper, Felipe De Brigard challenges this conclusion by conducting an innovative series of experimental studies. At the heart of his approach is a new thought experiment, which we might call the 'inverted experience machine.'
Continue reading "The Inverted Experience Machine" »
Steve Campbell from Michigan kindly directed my attention to a new paper that uses the methods of experimental philosophy to investigate the objectivity-question in metaethics. This paper by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley is entitled 'The Psychology of Metaethics: Exploring Objectivism' (downloadable from HERE). I have a couple of questions below but I think I need to explain the paper a bit first.
Continue reading "Experimental Metaethics" »
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