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Below are papers either published, forthcoming, or in progress. Comments are always welcome (and much appreciated).

Articles

Relational Desires and Empirical Evidence against Psychological Egoism (PDF; penultimate draft)

Forthcoming in: European Journal of Philosophy (already published online)

Abstract: Roughly, psychological egoism is the thesis that all of a person’s intentional actions are ultimately self-interested in some sense; psychological altruism is the thesis that some of a person’s intentional actions are not ultimately self-interested, since some are ultimately other-regarding in some sense. C. Daniel Batson and other social psychologists have argued that experiments provide support for a theory called the “empathy-altruism hypothesis” that entails the falsity of psychological egoism. However, several critics claim that there are egoistic explanations of the data that are still not ruled out. One of the most potent criticisms of Batson comes from Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. I argue for two main theses in this paper: (1) we can improve on Sober and Wilson’s conception of psychological egoism and altruism, and (2) this improvement shows that one of the strongest of Sober and Wilson’s purportedly egoistic explanations is not tenable. A defense of these two theses goes some way toward defending Batson‘s claim that the evidence from social psychology provides sufficient reason to reject psychological egoism.

Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study (PDF; open access)

Forthcoming in: Review of Philosophy & Psychology (formerly European Review of Philosophy), Psychology and Experimental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 3 (2010), Edouard Machery, Tania Lombrozo, & Joshua Knobe (eds.).

Co-authors: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Jay G. Hull, and Aaron Zimmerman

Abstract: In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. The cases we focus on are two that are crucial to Stanley’s project:  one in which the protagonist does not have practical interest in the truth of the proposition she claims to know (Low Stakes) and one in which the protagonist does have such practical interest (High Stakes).  We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these cases.  Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make, regarding the salience of an alternative, in his critique of Stanley (“The Irrelevance of the Subject,” 2006). Our data indicate that neither raising the possibility of error nor raising stakes moves people from attributing knowledge to denying it.  However, the raising of stakes (but not alternatives) does affect the level of confidence people have in their attributions of knowledge.  We argue that our data cast doubt on what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our common-sense judgments about such cases are.

Reviews

Review of Experimental Philosophy ed. by Knobe & Nichols (2008, OUP), Philosophical Psychology, forthcoming. (PDF; penultimate draft)

Review of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain by Tamler Sommers (2009, McSweeney’s), Metapsychology, Vol. 13, No. 53 (2009). (HTML; open access)

Review of Willing, Wanting, Waiting by Richard Holton (2009, OUP), Metapsychology, Vol. 13, No. 23 (2009). (HTML; open access)

In Progress

(Drafts may be available upon request.)

What in the World Is Weakness of Will? (with Richard Holton) [PDF; draft]

Abstract: At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (forthcoming) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question about an ordinary concept here is one apt for empirical investigation. Our plan is to evaluate Mele’s studies and report some experiments of our own in order to investigate what in the world the ordinary concept of weakness of will is. We conclude that neither Mele nor Holton (previously) was quite right and offer a tentative proposal of our own: the ordinary notion is more like a prototype or cluster concept.

The Possibility of Acting from Duty (tentative title of my dissertation)

Abstract: Kant famously argued that morally praiseworthy actions are only those that are done “from duty.” While there has been a great deal of debate about such conceptions of moral worth (especially whether the standard is too high), I focus on a more descriptive issue. Modern Kantian accounts of human action, psychology, agency, and practical reason attempt to at least make room for something like the capacity to act from duty in this Kantian sense. I argue that this Kantian capacity requires two other capacities: (a) the ability to act on other-regarding (roughly unselfish) ultimate motives, and (b) the ability of “Reason” (roughly our conception of what we have reason to do or believe) to produce new motivations in us. The existence of these psychological capacities requires the denial of both psychological egoism and what we might call “empiricist conceptions of motivation” or perhaps even the “Humean theory of motivation.” By focusing on the nature of motivation, self-regulation, agency, weakness of will, and will-power as well as drawing on empirical work on these issues, I argue that these two key theses are rather implausible. I conclude that we do have the capacity to act from duty.

“Philosophy 101 and Experimental Philosophy”

Abstract: During a recent stint teaching Introduction to Philosophy, I seized the opportunity to mix in some experimental philosophy. I did this in two ways: (a) I put a few articles on experimental philosophy on the syllabus, and (b) I ran a survey at the end of the course to gain information on students’ impressions of philosophy having taken the course. The results were quite interesting given that things turned out almost exactly opposite from what I expected, at least for the hypotheses I was most interested in testing. First, I expected students to largely dislike the course. (After all, most students seem to loath philosophy!) Second, I expected to find most students drawn to the topic of experimental philosophy. Third, I expected students to find the material on experimental philosophy rather interesting. But, for the most part, the results don’t support any of these predictions.