- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the K... moreWalter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He holds secondary appointments in Duke’s Law School and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and he is affiliated with the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He has published widely on applied ethics, empirical moral psychology and neuroscience, epistemology, informal logic, and philosophy of law, religion, and psychiatry.edit
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In Chapter 4, the authors explore whether neuroscience undermines morality. The authors distinguish, analyze, and assess the main arguments for neuroscientific skepticism about morality and argue that neuroscience does not undermine all... more
In Chapter 4, the authors explore whether neuroscience undermines morality. The authors distinguish, analyze, and assess the main arguments for neuroscientific skepticism about morality and argue that neuroscience does not undermine all of our moral judgments, focusing the majority of their attention on one argument in particular—the idea that neuroscience and psychology might undermine moral knowledge by showing that our moral beliefs result from unreliable processes. They argue that the background arguments needed to bolster the main premise fail to adequately support it. They conclude that the overall issue of neuroscience undermining morality is unsettled, but, they contend, we can reach some tentative and qualified conclusions. Neuroscience is, then, not a general underminer, but can play a constructive role in moral theory, although not by itself. In order to make progress, neuroscience and normative moral theory must work together.
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Whenever psychologists, neuroscientists, or philosophers draw conclusions about moral judgments in general from a small selected sample, they assume that moral judgments are unified by some common and peculiar feature that enables... more
Whenever psychologists, neuroscientists, or philosophers draw conclusions about moral judgments in general from a small selected sample, they assume that moral judgments are unified by some common and peculiar feature that enables generalizations and makes morality worthy of study as a unified field. We assess this assumption by considering the six main candidates for a unifying feature: content, phenomenology, force, form, function, and brain mechanisms. We conclude that moral judgment is not unified on any of these levels and that moral science should adopt a more fine-grained taxonomic approach that studies carefully defined groups of moral judgments.
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Contemplating why we find some things funny, the authors provide cognitive and evolutionary perspectives on humor and its importance to humans.
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Research Interests: Psychology and Philosophy
Foreword Philip Campbell Contributors 1. Introduction: Deviance, classification and bio-prediction Ilina Singh and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong 2. Behavioural Biomarkers: What Are They Good For? Towards the Ethical Use of Biomarkers Matthew... more
Foreword Philip Campbell Contributors 1. Introduction: Deviance, classification and bio-prediction Ilina Singh and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong 2. Behavioural Biomarkers: What Are They Good For? Towards the Ethical Use of Biomarkers Matthew Baum and Julian Savulescu 3. Bioprediction in Youth Justice Charlotte Walsh 4. The Inclusion of Biological Risk Factors in Violence Risk Assessments John Monahan 5. Bioprediction in Criminal Cases Christopher Slobogin 6.The Limits of Legal Use of Neuroscience Colin Campbell and Nigel Eastman 7. Rethinking the Implications of Discovering Biomarkers for Biologically-Based Criminality Paul Root Wolpe 8. MAOA and the Bioprediction of Antisocial Behavior: Science Fact and Science Fiction Joshua W. Buckholtz and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg 9. Genetic biomarker research of callous-unemotional traits in children: Implications for the law and policy making Essi Viding and Ewan McCrory 10. The neural code for intentions in the human brain John Dylan-Haynes 11. Biomarkers: Potential and challenges Michael Rutter 12. Neuroimaging-based Automatic Classification of Schizophrenia Vince D. Calhoun and Mohammad R. Arbabshirania
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Debates about freedom of will and action and their connections with moral responsibility have raged for centuries, but the opposing sides might disagree because they use different concepts of freedom. Based on previous work, we... more
Debates about freedom of will and action and their connections with moral responsibility have raged for centuries, but the opposing sides might disagree because they use different concepts of freedom. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that people who assert freedom in a determined (D) or counterfactual-intervener (CI) scenario assert this because they are thinking about freedom from constraint and not about freedom from determination (in D) or from inevitability (in CI). We also hypothesized that people who deny that freedom in D or in CI deny this because they are thinking about freedom from determination or from inevitability, respectively, and not about freedom from constraint. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two main online studies. Study I supported our hypotheses that people who deny freedom in D and CI are thinking about freedom from determinism and from inevitability, respectively, but these participants seemed to think about freedom from constraint when they were later considering modified scenarios where acts were not determined or inevitable. Study II investigated a contrary bypassing hypothesis that those who deny freedom in D denied this because they took determinism to exclude mental causation and hence to exclude freedom from constraint. We found that participants who took determinism to exclude freedom generally did not deny causation by mental states, here represented by desires and decisions. Their responses regarding causation by desires and decisions at most weakly mediated the relation between determinism and freedom or responsibility among this subgroup of our participants. These results speak against the bypassing hypothesis and in favor of our hypothesis that these participants were not thinking about freedom from constraint.
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Normative ethical theories and religious traditions offer general moral principles for people to follow. These moral principles are typically meant to be fixed and rigid, offering reliable guides for moral judgment and decision-making. In... more
Normative ethical theories and religious traditions offer general moral principles for people to follow. These moral principles are typically meant to be fixed and rigid, offering reliable guides for moral judgment and decision-making. In two preregistered studies, we found consistent evidence that agreement with general moral principles shifted depending upon events recently accessed in memory. After recalling their own personal violations of moral principles, participants agreed less strongly with those very principles-relative to participants who recalled events in which other people violated the principles. This shift in agreement was explained, in part, by people's willingness to excuse their own moral transgressions, but not the transgressions of others. These results have important implications for understanding the roles memory and personal identity in moral judgment. People's commitment to moral principles may be maintained when they recall others' past violations, but their commitment may wane when they recall their own violations.
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ABSTRACT Several philosophers and psychologists have argued that evidence of moral framing effects shows that many of our moral judgments are unreliable. However, all previous empirical work on moral framing effects has used... more
ABSTRACT Several philosophers and psychologists have argued that evidence of moral framing effects shows that many of our moral judgments are unreliable. However, all previous empirical work on moral framing effects has used between-subject experimental designs. We argue that between-subject designs alone do not allow us to accurately estimate the extent of moral framing effects or to properly evaluate the case from framing effects against the reliability of our moral judgments. To do better, we report results of our new within-subject study on four types of moral framing effects, and we discuss the implications of our findings for the reliability of moral judgments. Overall, our results strengthen the evidence from moral framing effects against the reliability of some of our moral judgments.
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Does the accessibility of different memories shift agreement with moral principles?
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Philosophers often argue about whether fetuses, animals, or AI systems do or do not have moral status. We will suggest instead that different entities have different degrees of moral status with respect to different moral reasons in... more
Philosophers often argue about whether fetuses, animals, or AI systems do or do not have moral status. We will suggest instead that different entities have different degrees of moral status with respect to different moral reasons in different circumstances for different purposes. Recognizing this variability of moral status will help to resolve some but not all debates about the potential moral status of AI systems in particular.
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Foreword Robert Hare Chapter 1 - Introduction Kent A. Kiehl and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong DIAGNOSIS OF PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 2 - Assessment of Psychopathy: The Hare Psychopathy Checklist Measures Adelle Forth, Sune Bo, and Mickey Kongerslev... more
Foreword Robert Hare Chapter 1 - Introduction Kent A. Kiehl and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong DIAGNOSIS OF PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 2 - Assessment of Psychopathy: The Hare Psychopathy Checklist Measures Adelle Forth, Sune Bo, and Mickey Kongerslev Chapter 3 - Alternatives to the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (PCL-R) Katherine A. Fowler and Scott O. Lilienfeld DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 4 - Developmental Conceptualizations of Psychopathic Features Dustin A. Pardini and Amy L. Byrd Chapter 5 - Adolescent Psychopathy and the Law Michael J. Vitacco and Randall T. Salekin DECISION-MAKING AND PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 6 - The decision-making impairment in psychopathy: Psychological and neurobiological mechanisms Michael Koenigs and Joseph P. Newman Chapter 7 - Do Psychopaths Make Moral Judgments? Jana Schaich Borg and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 8 - Functional Imaging and Psychopathy Nathanial Anderson and Kent A. Kiehl Chapter 9 - Structural Brain Abnormalities and Psychopathy Marina Boccardi GENETICS OF PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 10 - Quantitative genetic studies of psychopathic traits in minors: Review and implications for the law Essi Viding, Natalie M. G. Fontaine, and H. Larsson Chapter 11 - The Search for Genes and Environments that Underlie Psychopathy and Antisocial Behavior: Quantitative and Molecular Genetic Approaches Irwin D. Waldman and Soo Hyun Rhee TREATMENT OF PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 12 - Treatment of Adolescents with Psychopathic Features Michael F. Caldwell RECIDIVISM AND PSYCHOPATHY Chapter 13 - Psychopathy and Violent Recidivism Marnie E. Rice and Grant T. Harris Chapter 14 - Taking Psychopathy Measures 'Out of the Lab' and into the Legal System: Some Practical Concerns John F. Edens, Melissa S. Magyar, and Jennifer M. Cox RESPONSIBILITY OF PSYCHOPATHS Chapter 15 - Criminal Responsibility and Psychopathy: Do Psychopaths have a Right to Excuse? Paul Litton Chapter 16 - Why Psychopaths are Responsible Samuel H. Pillsbury DETENTION OF PSYCHOPATHS Chapter 17 - Preventive Detention of Psychopaths and Dangerous Offenders Stephen J. Morse Chapter 18 - Some Notes on Preventive Detention and Psychopathy Michael Louis Corrado Chapter 19 - Psychopathy and Sentencing Eric Luna INDEX
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Imagine that you are a judge presiding over the trial of a ... COURTS ARE BEGINNING TO ALLOW BRAIN IMAGES AS EVIDENCE, BUT CURRENT TECHNOLOGY IS NOWHERE NEAR TRUSTWORTHY ENOUGH TO DETERMINE OR ABSOLVE GUILT BY SCOTT T. GRAFTON, WALTER P.... more
Imagine that you are a judge presiding over the trial of a ... COURTS ARE BEGINNING TO ALLOW BRAIN IMAGES AS EVIDENCE, BUT CURRENT TECHNOLOGY IS NOWHERE NEAR TRUSTWORTHY ENOUGH TO DETERMINE OR ABSOLVE GUILT BY SCOTT T. GRAFTON, WALTER P. ...
Research Interests: Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Science, Developmental Biology, and 15 moreClimate Change, Computational Biology, Biotechnology, Cancer, Biology, Cell Cycle, Ecology, Drug Discovery, Evolution, Astrophysics, Functional Genomics, Astronomy, DNA, Cell Signalling, and Earth Science
We investigated whether prestimulus alpha-band oscillatory activity and stimulus-elicited recurrent processing interact to facilitate conscious visual perception. Participants tried to perceive a visual stimulus that was perceptually... more
We investigated whether prestimulus alpha-band oscillatory activity and stimulus-elicited recurrent processing interact to facilitate conscious visual perception. Participants tried to perceive a visual stimulus that was perceptually masked through object substitution masking (OSM). We showed that attenuated prestimulus alpha power was associated with greater negative-polarity stimulus-evoked ERP activity that resembled the visual awareness negativity (VAN), previously argued to reflect recurrent processing related to conscious perception. This effect, however, was not associated with better perception. Instead, when prestimulus alpha power was elevated, a preferred prestimulus alpha phase was associated with a greater VAN-like negativity, which was then associated with better cue perception. Cue perception was worse when prestimulus alpha power was elevated but the stimulus occurred at a nonoptimal prestimulus alpha phase and the VAN-like negativity was low. Our findings suggest th...
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Scrupulous moral judgments vary from moral judgments made by those without Scrupulosity. The content of Scrupulous moral judgments are perfectionist, which conflates what is ideal with what is obligatory, conflates the moral evaluation of... more
Scrupulous moral judgments vary from moral judgments made by those without Scrupulosity. The content of Scrupulous moral judgments are perfectionist, which conflates what is ideal with what is obligatory, conflates the moral evaluation of thoughts and actions, and is influenced by chronic doubt and intolerance of uncertainty. Anxiety motivates Scrupulous moral judgments. Scrupulosity is both judgment-driven—one’s judgments evoke anxiety—and anxiety-driven—anxiety prompts rationalizing judgments and even causes beliefs. Anxiety leads to systematic distortions in one’s moral judgments. Anxiety leads one to act in a way that soothes one’s anxiety. Genuine moral judgments respond to all morally relevant features, not just a narrow set thereof. Anxiety narrows one’s attention, often to features that are not the most morally relevant, and is unresponsive to counterevidence. Scrupulous moral thought leads to excessive precision and to focus on features that rationalize one’s anxiety.
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Scrupulosity is closely connected to OCD, despite some appearances and informal characterizations of Scrupulosity as a concern with sin. Those with Scrupulosity have obsessions and/or compulsions. The Penn Inventory of... more
Scrupulosity is closely connected to OCD, despite some appearances and informal characterizations of Scrupulosity as a concern with sin. Those with Scrupulosity have obsessions and/or compulsions. The Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity-Revised (PIOS-R) captures the religious features of Scrupulosity. A secular presentation is less common or has been diagnosed less often, but a non-religious presentation is still possible. The distinctive features of Scrupulosity are perfectionism, chronic doubt and intolerance of uncertainty, and moral thought-action fusion. None of these features are exclusive to Scrupulosity, but they mutually reinforce each other and together characterize the condition.
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Scrupulosity is not religious devotion or moral virtue. Those with Scrupulosity are concerned with moral behavior primarily as a way to reduce their underlying doubts and anxiety. Moral character requires attention to, concern for, and... more
Scrupulosity is not religious devotion or moral virtue. Those with Scrupulosity are concerned with moral behavior primarily as a way to reduce their underlying doubts and anxiety. Moral character requires attention to, concern for, and responsiveness to the morally relevant features of situations, acts, and people. Moral character also requires a stable set of underlying traits and beliefs that noncoincidentally lead to the appropriate motivations and endorsements. Some with Scrupulosity are ego-dystonic, rejecting their scrupulous symptoms, but one might also reject one’s own character. Those whose Scrupulosity is ego-syntonic—who endorse their scrupulous symptoms—also differ from those with moral character because those with Scrupulosity display fixation on certain issues to the exclusion of others, are inflexible with respect to circumstances, are overly concerned with merely possible—not probable—events, have an inflated sense of personal responsibility, and care about moral iss...
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Findings demonstrating decision-related neural activity preceding volitional actions have dominated the discussion about how science can inform the free will debate. These discussions have largely ignored studies suggesting that decisions... more
Findings demonstrating decision-related neural activity preceding volitional actions have dominated the discussion about how science can inform the free will debate. These discussions have largely ignored studies suggesting that decisions might be influenced or biased by various unconscious processes. If these effects are indeed real, do they render subjects' decisions less free or even unfree? Here, we argue that, while unconscious influences on decision-making do not threaten the existence of free will in general, they provide important information about limitations on freedom in specific circumstances. We demonstrate that aspects of this long-lasting controversy are empirically testable and provide insight into their bearing on degrees of freedom, laying the groundwork for future scientific-philosophical approaches.
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Technological advances are enabling roles for machines that present novel ethical challenges. The study of 'AI ethics' has emerged to confront these challenges, and connects perspectives from philosophy, computer science, law, and... more
Technological advances are enabling roles for machines that present novel ethical challenges. The study of 'AI ethics' has emerged to confront these challenges, and connects perspectives from philosophy, computer science, law, and economics. Less represented in these interdisciplinary efforts is the perspective of cognitive science. We propose a framework - computational ethics - that specifies how the ethical challenges of AI can be partially addressed by incorporating the study of human moral decision-making. The driver of this framework is a computational version of reflective equilibrium (RE), an approach that seeks coherence between considered judgments and governing principles. The framework has two goals: (i) to inform the engineering of ethical AI systems, and (ii) to characterize human moral judgment and decision-making in computational terms. Working jointly towards these two goals will create the opportunity to integrate diverse research questions, bring together multiple academic communities, uncover new interdisciplinary research topics, and shed light on centuries-old philosophical questions.
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Like all humans, M/EEG researchers commit certain fallacies or mistakes in reasoning. This article surveys seven well-known but still common fallacies, including reverse inference, hasty generalization, hasty exclusion, inferring from... more
Like all humans, M/EEG researchers commit certain fallacies or mistakes in reasoning. This article surveys seven well-known but still common fallacies, including reverse inference, hasty generalization, hasty exclusion, inferring from group to individual, inferring from correlation to causation, affirming a disjunct, and false dichotomy. These fallacies are illustrated with classic EEG research by Libet and collaborators, but many researchers (not just Libet) continue to commit them in all areas of research (not just M/EEG). This article gives practical suggestions about how to spot and avoid each fallacy.
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Valence framing effects occur when participants make different choices or judgments depending on whether the options are described in terms of their positive outcomes (e.g. lives saved) or their negative outcomes (e.g. lives lost). When... more
Valence framing effects occur when participants make different choices or judgments depending on whether the options are described in terms of their positive outcomes (e.g. lives saved) or their negative outcomes (e.g. lives lost). When such framing effects occur in the domain of moral judgments, they have been taken to cast doubt on the reliability of moral judgments and raise questions about the extent to which these moral judgments are self-evident or justified in themselves. One important factor in this debate is the magnitude and variability of the extent to which differences in framing presentation impact moral judgments. Although moral framing effects have been studied by psychologists, the overall strength of these effects pooled across published studies is not yet known. Here we conducted a meta-analysis of 109 published articles (contributing a total of 146 unique experiments with 49,564 participants) involving valence framing effects on moral judgments and found a moderate effect (d = 0.50) among between-subjects designs as well as several moderator variables. While we find evidence for publication bias, statistically accounting for publication bias attenuates, but does not eliminate, this effect (d = 0.22). This suggests that the magnitude of valence framing effects on moral decisions is small, yet significant when accounting for publication bias.
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ABSTRACT The psychological and philosophical literature exploring the role of social influence in moral judgments suggests that conformity in moral judgments is common and, in many cases, seems to be motivated by epistemic rather than... more
ABSTRACT The psychological and philosophical literature exploring the role of social influence in moral judgments suggests that conformity in moral judgments is common and, in many cases, seems to be motivated by epistemic rather than purely social concerns. We argue that there is strong reason to suppose that moral conformity leads to unreliable moral judgments, and, insofar as this is true, the prevalence of conformity proves a problem for both humility as a moral virtue and for some views in moral epistemology.
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The elicitors of disgust are heterogeneous, which makes attributing one function to disgust challenging. Theorists have proposed that disgust solves multiple adaptive problems and comprises multiple functional domains. However, theories... more
The elicitors of disgust are heterogeneous, which makes attributing one function to disgust challenging. Theorists have proposed that disgust solves multiple adaptive problems and comprises multiple functional domains. However, theories conflict with regard to what the domains are and how they should be delineated. In this article, we examine clinical evidence of aberrant disgust symptoms in the contamination subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder, blood-injury-injection phobia, and posttraumatic stress disorder to adjudicate between two prevailing theories of disgust. We argue that the pattern of disgust sensitivities in these psychiatric disorders sheds new light on the domain structure of disgust. Specifically, the supported domain structure of disgust is likely similar to an adaptationist model of disgust, with more subdivisions of the domain of pathogen disgust. We discuss the implications of this approach for the prevention and treatment of psychiatric disorders relevant to ...
Research Interests: Psychology and Disgust
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A large hunk of research in moral psychology is devoted to self-reports, which represent the end product of a complex and diverse bundle of underlying cognitive processes.1 There is more to the moral processing, however, than what can be... more
A large hunk of research in moral psychology is devoted to self-reports, which represent the end product of a complex and diverse bundle of underlying cognitive processes.1 There is more to the moral processing, however, than what can be discerned from introspection or straightfor-ward paper-and-pencil methodologies. A complete account must include all of the processes — explicit or implicit, articulated or unspoken — that go into everyday moral responses.