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There is evidence that our risk attitudes towards monetary gambles change depending on the absolute probability of obtaining a payoff. In this study, I investigate our moral risk attitudes about various scenarios -- concerning harms or benefits, and interpersonal or intrapersonal tradeoffs -- and examine whether the same effect exists. (Note: This is an updated study from the one at https://osf.io/y3vwr. Reasons for updates given below.)

I consider two variants of immanent critique ala Jaeggi and Putnam which both seem wedded to forms of metaphysical realism, and I intend to show how Rorty’s denial of the ‘functional’ as a category weighs against Jaeggi’s account of the role of “functional-ethical” norms in the analysis of real crisis. I argue that Jaeggi’s ‘immanent’ criticism relies on untenable metaphysical notions of progress and that, despite her argument that immanent critique draws its own standards from the object of criticism, she ends up sneaking strong foundations into her critique through her notion of crisis. Charles Taylor provides a non-foundational model of critique which avoids relativism and provides an effective tool for argumentation. I argue that his hermeneutical model integrates elements of both internal and immanent modes of critique and therefore provides an advance over both; it is also free from the metaphysical presuppositions and corresponding deficiencies plaguing Jaeggi and Putnam’s models of immanent critique. Ultimately, the idea of an error-reducing transitions does not rely on untenable presuppositions and is far more plausible; Taylor’s straightforward examples make his method less abstract and more practical in implementation than Jaeggi’s crisis-induced transformation involving historical learning processes with its blend of Hegelianism and pragmatism.

This work makes a contribution to a theory of the general conditions by which—via language and sign use—the intelligible structure of the content of thought comes about and changes, which in turn affects our collective practices, affordances, and causal powers— in short, our doings. It is argued that this latter point is the reality of the intelligible and the only possible test of metaphysical realism. Through this it develops a ‘metaphysics of modernism’ by constructing a concept of sense derived from the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilles Deleuze, among others. After elaborating the framework of sense, it looks to its emergence out of social embeddedness through a concept of common sense, understood aesthetically in terms of the construction of forms of life. There it investigates the relation between sense and value-form in Marx, aesthetic judgment in the work of Kant, the relationship between aesthetics and language-use in the late Wittgenstein, and the political aesthetics of contemporary art and media. Finally, this work indicates the limit of common sense in a concept of nonsense, taken as the intercession of the absolute within language and thought, which in turn points to the conditions for the contingent, ampliative capacity of thinking as the essential activity of reasoning, i.e. the organon of the new. In this final part, it focuses on the writings of Samuel Beckett, whose work is incessantly concerned with the liminal space of thought and language encountering its own transcendental humiliation as the indicative affect of the subject of modernity

Two key groups of researchers have worked in parallel to advance health equity—one on the descriptive component (those in public health sciences, e.g., epidemiologists) and one on the normative component (those in the humanities and social sciences, e.g., philosophers and ethicists). Yet a significant gulf exists between their respective research. Consequently, advances in thinking regarding the philosophical underpinnings and normative requirements of health equity have been largely divorced from the design of public health interventions that seek to reduce health inequities. As a consequence, public health interventions aiming to advance health equity may fail to target the most appropriate populations or the most ethically important health disparities and therefore likely fail to achieve the most ‘equitable’ health outcomes. At the same time, without empirically testing different philosophical criteria of health equity, philosophers will end up producing guidance for the design and implementation of public health interventions that may ultimately have undesirable (or less desirable) outcomes in practice. To discuss the contours of this challenge and possible avenues to address it, a meeting was held on December 5, 2022 at the University Club of Toronto with support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Public Health Ontario, Western University, and the University of Toronto. In this meeting report, we summarize the workshop proceedings, report key findings based on the expert contributions of meeting participants, and identify next steps.

First study in a project to map the patterns of moral beliefs regarding the use of artificial intelligence for environmental ends. Research Question: Agentic intention is an important factor in moral judgments, with intentional (foreseen) harms being judged less morally permissible than accidental (unforeseen) ones. Will this pattern replicate across different moral agents (human vs. AI) and how will harm and unfairness be judged when they are in aid of environmental gains?

This is a test of the test-retest reliability of moral decisions, with an additional point of asking people not only is an action appropriate but if they would perform the action.

In this study, we will examine the effects of short educational videos about ethical issues on viewers' ethical reasoning and intellectual humility.

The full preregistration document can be found in the project main folder or through this link: https://osf.io/7qz92

To test accounts of harm moralisation, Royzman & Borislow (2022) designed six vignettes [Royzman, E.B., & Borislow, S.H. (2022). The puzzle of wrongless harms: Some potential concerns for dyadic morality and related accounts. Cognition, 220, 104980]. In all of them, an agent acts intentionally and with foresight to further their interests in a way that results in harming a person. For instance, in the Dating story, Jen dumps her boyfriend, Greg, so as to better pursue her career. After reading the story, participants are asked (along with some other comprehension questions) (a) whether, in acting the way they do, the protagonist acted selfishly (“put their interests first”) or not and (b) whether the protagonist’s act is morally wrong. Royzman and Borislow claim that a combination of a positive answer to (b) and a negative answer to (b)—that is, the modal response combination in their dataset—falsifies several accounts of harm moralisation. In this project, we dispute this conclusion.

Real life moral decisions are special, as decision makers face two normative standards on their choices simultaneously: Not only do they need to choose what is rational given probabilistic uncertainty over outcomes, as in all kinds of decisions, but also what is right given their moral point of view. However, risk, i.e. probabilistic uncertainty, in moral decisions has received limited attention to date (but see Meder et al. 2019, Shou et al. 2020,). For instance, the two most famous moral dilemma studies (Greene et al. 2001, Awad et al. 2008) assume that moral decisions would be taken under certainty. In other cases, such as when authors have introduced the condition of risk to moral decisions, they do not (fully) consider the distinctly moral drivers for sensitivity to risk in moral decisions (Meder et al. 2019, Shou et al. 2020, Kortenkamp & Moore 2014, Tsalikis 2008, Fleischhut 2013). In this study, we aim to fill this gap by introducing probabilistic outcomes next to other well-known factors to sacrificial moral dilemmas and studying a moral explanation of their influence. First, we address the question whether probability of outcomes at all represents a relevant factor in moral decision-making, compared to other well-known influential factors, such as dilemma emotionality and number and age of involved parties. Second, we check whether the general pattern of neglecting probabilities in high-affect decisions that has been proven for other types of decisions (Pachur et al. 2014), also applies to the moral domain. Third, we test whether participants consider probabilities in moral dilemmas differently according to their moral profile. This last step is particularly relevant, since moral theories suggest a distinct treatment of probabilities: Consequentialists have a moral reason to include probabilities in their moral judgments, while deontologists should stick to a moral rule irrespective of outcome probabilities or at least irrespective of probabilities below a certain materiality threshold (Hansson 2013). The multi-factor design of the current study also allows to check which other factors, if not probability, might drive deontologists’ decisions under risk. To address these questions, we examine moral dilemmas in a conjoint survey experiment (Hainmueller et al. 2013; Bansak et al., 2019), where respondents face a choice about moral acceptability of inflicting harm on one person to save a number of people. • RQ1: [p relevant at all?] How does probability affect decisions in moral dilemmas next to other morally relevant factors? • RQ2: [general patterns of considering p] Does p-neglect in high-affect decisions also exist in the moral domain? • RQ3: [moral patterns of considering p] Does decision makers’ moral point of view influence the way/ extent to which they consider probabilities?

This is a follow-up in a series of studies investigating how different different types of entity are perceived to be capable of different components of moral agency - intentional action, right/wrong action, and responsibility. This specific study seeks to investigate (1) which kinds of mental/social capacities are attributed to different kinds of entity, and how those attributions (2) predict attributions of the three components of moral agency.

Children conceived in order to donate biological material to save the life of an already existing child are known as 'saviour siblings'. The primary reasons that have been offered against the practice are: (i) creating a saviour sibling has negative impacts on the created child and (ii) creating a saviour child represents a wrongful procreative motivation of the parents. In this paper we examine to what extent the creation of saviour siblings actually presents a special case in procreative ethics. Although we do not deny that there is a unique feature present in the saviour sibling case—namely, that the child was created to save their sibling’s life, we argue that the distinctive feature of being a saviour sibling does not make the procreative act wrong. Our claim is that the features that would make the creation of a particular saviour sibling (im)permissible are the same features that would make the creation of any child (im)permissible. Our conclusion is that saviour siblings—in relation to the reasons for the (im)permissibility of their creation—are not a special case for procreative ethics.

This scoping review is meant to survey existing literature regarding moral values in medical AI development.

This is a project about how participants classify (or misclassify) categories of false speech. We will study experimentally whether providing participants with the opportunity to comment and express themselves alongside a binary question (“Is this speech a lie or not?”) produces more accurate results than merely asking participants to answer the binary question with no opportunity to comment. We will also study the effects on accuracy of exposing participants to a moral frame, with and without the opportunity to comment. The moral frame is introduced by exposing some participants to a moral evaluation of the speaker’s speech act and giving some of those participants the opportunity to comment on the moral evaluation. Each participant will view five different vignettes, each involving one of the variants of false speech in which we are interested: a. Mistaken Statement—henceforth “Mistake”; b. Instructed Insincerity—henceforth “Instructed”; c. True, Sincere Deceptive Statement—henceforth “Deception”; d. Lie; e. True, Sincere Deceptive Statement to Protect a Confidence—henceforth “Confidence”. Each vignette depicts a different social scenario in which the false speech is made: 1. Friends, 2. Doctor-Patient, 3. Workplace Review, 4. Sports Practice Attendance, 5. Job Promotion. So, there are five vignettes illustrating each type of false speech, one for each social scenario, yielding twenty-five variants. Each participant sees a vignette illustrating each of the speech type variants once and a vignette illustrating each of the social scenarios once. The order of presentation on each of the two dimensions is randomized. So, for example, a participant might see (1d) Lie—Friends, Instructed—Doctor-Patient, (3a) Mistake—Workplace Review, and so forth. A participant will never see any context or speech type more than once. Each participant will be placed in one of four frames that remains constant for that participant across all five vignettes that she is presented with: A (neutral frame, binary classification only); B (neutral frame with opportunity to comment); C (moral frame, binary classification only); D (moral frame with opportunity to comment). This represents the between-participant aspect of our design: each participant sees the same classification question or pair of questions for all five vignettes she sees: A, B, C, or D.

No- and low-alcohol beverages are currently experiencing high sales growth in the UK, but academic research regarding the production, regulation, marketing and consumption of these drinks remains limited. This article presents research findings from ethnographic customer observations and semi-structured staff interviews at Club Soda’s temporary “alcohol-free off-licence” in London – the UK’s first shop that sold exclusively no- and low-alcohol drinks. I analyse the demographics of who came to the off-licence, and how and why they engaged with no- and low-alcohol drinks. Findings suggest that relatively equal numbers of non-drinkers and current drinkers were customers of the off-licence, but there were differences across gender, ethnicity, and age groups. No- and low-alcohol drinks supported customers’ alcohol-free lifestyles or attempts to drink mindfully. However, whether customers were former drinkers, lifelong abstainers or current drinkers influenced what products they sought from the off-licence and shaped how these products were used in (non-)drinking practices. This paper also highlights the role of the off-licence as a stigma-free, sober space where customers could try no- and low-alcohol products, prior to purchase, and find connection with others.

The emphasis placed on the baking of traditional soda-bread in a Bastable oven on the open hearth has created a charming image of spartan self-sufficiency throughout rural Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But shop-bought bread, produced in small-scale commercial ovens located in villages and towns, was a common item of both rural and urban diet throughout the nineteenth century. This paper explores both the means of production and the possible scale of production in a cluster of villages in the Blackwater valley in the west of county Waterford. An important implication may be that the traditional soda-bread was in fact a source of variety in a diet of commercially available bread.

One goal of feminist philosophy is to challenge unjust systems of power like patriarchy, which privilege some social groups while oppressing others. In this three-chapter dissertation, I argue that to achieve this goal, we need a better understanding of privilege and its implications. In chapter one, I raise objections to some existing philosophical accounts of privilege. These accounts are either too broad in defining privilege as always advantageous or they are vague regarding what privilege comprises. I provide an account of privilege which clarifies that privilege is generally advantageous and that privilege includes tangible resources and options to do certain things or be a certain way. In chapter two, I utilize my account of privilege in the context of feminist debates on relational autonomy. Recently, strong substantive and constitutive accounts of relational autonomy have come under criticism. Critics argue these accounts generate perverse conclusions about oppressed agents. I show these accounts generate the same perverse conclusions about privileged agents. Critics also argue these accounts are poorly suited to achieve feminist goals, which are to combat systems of power and to offer an account for how autonomy is influenced by oppression and privilege. I defend an alternative account of relational autonomy given by Andrea Westlund and explain how it avoids the perverse conclusions while still achieving the second goal, as it can explain how oppression and privilege can influence autonomy. However, I argue that autonomy alone is not enough to achieve the first goal of combatting systems of power. In chapter three, I investigate the issue of vaccine hesitancy, where parents delay or refuse routine vaccinations for their children. Some empirical literature suggests a proportion of these parents are privileged. However, this literature lacks a clear definition of privilege. I supplement and strengthen this research with my account of privilege. I demonstrate how my account of privilege captures additional elements of parents’ privilege. Using my account of privilege, I show how privilege can potentially influence some of the reasons parents have for delaying or refusing vaccines. I also clarify how my discussion impacts public health policies aimed at addressing vaccine hesitancy.

We introduce the problem of technical debt, with particular focus on critical infrastructure, and put forward our view that this is a digital ethics issue. We propose that the software engineering process must adapt its current notion of technical debt – focusing on technical costs – to include the potential cost to society if the technical debt is not addressed, and the cost of analysing, modelling and understanding this ethical debt. Finally, we provide an overview of the development of educational material – based on a collection of technical debt case studies - in order to teach about technical debt and its ethical implications

How and why does morality, religiosity, and political ideology, vary within and between cultures? To what extent does moral, religious and political variation reflect differences in individual experience, as opposed to differences in shared cultural history? And how do these variables relate to one another? The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ predicts that: moral values reflect expected value of the corresponding type of cooperation; and that political conservatives value existing cooperative relationships more than liberals do. Previous research also suggests that religiosity varies as a function of existential insecurity (and may be mediated by morality). Here we gather data on: morality, religion and politics; individual expectations about the value of cooperation; and a range of national-level social, ecological and economic variables, from samples of ~300 participants in 40 Indo-European language groups (N≈12,000). We analyse this data using cultural phylogenetic techniques and multi-level modelling.

This study aims to see whether describing what a prospective patient learns in terms of knowledge vs. understanding affects how free, autonomous, and informed they take their subsequent consent to be. Subjects will be divided into four groups based on whether they're told they know vs. understand how a side-effect might be brought about and whether they know vs. understand that side-effect.

Our study concerns the origins of public support for spending on climate mitigation policy. Focusing on the UK, we seek to explain why support for such spending remains high, despite much of the benefit going to other countries who are more geographically exposed to the negative effects of a changing climate. This is puzzling in an academic sense, given a lack of public support for comparable spending on issues like foreign aid. We propose two frameworks for understanding public support: risk and altruism. Under the first, respondents' support is a function of their perception that the UK is at risk from climate change. Under the second, support stems from a desire to help those in other countries more exposed. We use a survey experiment to try to prime both the risk and altruistic components of climate change, and see how support varies accordingly. We anticipate that our findings will make an important contribution to the academic literature on climate change support, but will also be of interest to policymakers seeking to maximise public consent for spending going forwards.

This paper outlines a relatively un-noticed fallacy—in the sense of a “mistake in reasoning”—concerning the attribution of motives. It is this: when an agent has multiple motives to perform an action (each of which may be individually sufficient, and each of which she may consciously entertain), it is a mistake to conclude without further evidence that the worst motive (morally speaking) is the main motive. For obvious reasons, it is hereby dubbed the “worst motive” fallacy. We outline the fallacy and present experimental results confirming that we are indeed systematically inclined to commit it.

Manipulation of justice/injustice to determine whether this influences beliefs about God as moral authority.

We are interested in determining whether the extent to which--including the number of behaviors and the duration of those behaviors--individuals took steps to mitigate their exposure to the COVID-19 coronavirus will affect their perception of the normative relations amongst individuals engaging in collective action (e.g., going on a walk together).

The study asks how much harm is justified in reaching a given immigration goal and squares those identified levels of harm with what specific enforcement of immigration regulations U.S. citizens would support. Attitudes of the public towards immigration regulations is elicited in a survey and survey experiment conducted on a U.S. national sample with quotas proportional with respect to gender, age, and education.

Some normative theorists appeal to the notion of basic needs. They argue that when it comes to issues such as international development, justice to future generations, basic rights or limits of development our first priority should be that everybody is able to meet these needs. But what are basic needs? In a series of studies we attempt to inform discussions about this question by gathering empirical evidence about ordinary speakers’ intuitions about the concept of basic needs. Study 1 is an explorative study that employs a free-listing task and an explanation task. The purpose of this study is to acquire a first rough sense of ordinary speakers’ intuitions about the concept that can then inform the materials and hypotheses of further studies.

The moral judgment and decision-making literature has been traditionally focused on two theories from moral philosophy: consequentialism and deontology. Contractualism, a third influential family of moral theories, has been mostly neglected, despite its importance for the field of normative ethics. A recent paper (Levine et al., 2018) provides preliminary empirical evidence that subjects’ judgments of moral acceptability are better explained by contractualist thinking than consequentialism or deontology in a hypothetical moral dilemma. In this study, we design a new incentivised moral decision task to investigate whether subjects also act as contractualists when their decisions have actual monetary consequences for them and other participants. We also examine judgments of moral acceptability in this new task. This study is a replication of the experiment pre-registered as "Contractualism - Pre-study" from the same project with a larger sample size.

Moral psychologists often take inspiration from normative theories developed in moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of how people actually make moral judgments and decisions. Two types of such theories have been extensively studied in the literature: consequentialism and deontology. Surprisingly, a third influential family of ethical theories originating in the social-contract tradition, contractualism, has been largely neglected by psychological investigation. This study is part of a larger project which empirically investigates the role played by contractualist concerns in moral judgment and decision making. In this experiment, we try to replicate results from the treatment condition of "Contractualism - Main study" using an alternative study lay-out in which participants are presented with only three options (instead of eight, corresponding to the three scenarios) and enter the number of tickets that they want to give to the second player (from 0 to 5) in a text box that appears if and only if they select the third scenario. We do not display end balances for each option.