A debunking explanation for moral progress

Selective Debunking Arguments, Folk Psychology and Empirical Moral Psychology

Reflecting on the significance of his early research on the neuropsychology of moral judgment, Joshua Greene raises an important and increasingly pressing kind of question: “Where does one draw the line between correcting the nearsightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely?” and goes on to more directly wonder “How far can the empirical debunking of human moral nature go?” ...

Progress in Dialectometry: Toward Explanation

Dialectometric techniques analyze linguistic variation quantitatively, allowing one to aggregate over what are frequently rebarbative geographic patterns of individual linguistic variants, such as which word is used for a particular concept in a language area, or which sounds are used in particular words. This leads to general formulations of the relation between linguistic variation and explan...

Slavery, Carbon, and Moral Progress

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the BNaïve Conception,^ and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of mora...

Order Effects in Moral Judgment. Searching for an Explanation

Research on moral judgment has shown that the order in which dilemmas are presented to subjects often has a strong influence on their judgment. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying order effects are still opaque. In this paper we aimed to isolate the features that a scenario must exhibit in order to influence judgment of subsequent scenarios. For this enterprise, we identified sever...

Debunking the first myth about debunking