IMMORALITY AND IRRATIONALITY

The Immorality of Textualism

The Immorality of Having Children

This paper defends the Famine Relief Argument against Having Children, which goes as follows: conceiving and raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be far better spent on famine relief; therefore, conceiving and raising children is immoral. It is named after Peter Singer’s Famine Relief Argument because it might be a special case of Singer’s argument and becaus...

Harm Mediates Disgust-Immorality Link 1 RUNNING HEAD: Harm Mediates Disgust-Immorality Link Harm Mediates the Disgust-Immorality Link

Many acts are disgusting, but only some of these acts are immoral. Dyadic morality predicts that disgusting acts should be judged as immoral to the extent that they seem harmful. Consistent with this prediction, three studies reveal that perceived harm mediates the link between feelings of disgust and moral condemnation—even for ostensibly harmless “purity” violations. In many cases, accounting...

Irrationality and Cognition

The strategy of this paper is to throw light on rational cognition and epistemic justification by examining irrationality. Epistemic irrationality is possible because we are reflexive cognizers, able to reason about and redirect some aspects of our own cognition. One consequence of this is that one cannot give a theory of epistemic rationality or epistemic justification without simultaneously g...

Rational Irrationality

We present a game-theoretic account of irrational agent behavior and define conditions under which irrational behavior may be considered quasi-rational. To do so, we use a 2-player, zero-sum strategic game, parameterize the reward structure and study how the value of the game changes with this parameter. We argue that for any “underdog” agent, there is a point at which the asymmetry of the game...