My research is split between three main projects. In the first of these, which forms the foundation of my dissertation, I advance an evolutionary account of moral responsibility judgment and the representation of intentionality in human beings. The second project, which complements the first, explains the how humans' representational structures give rise to the pattern of philosophical intuitions regarding free will and determinism that we observe in the experimental philosophy literature. The third project is in the history and philosophy of science. In it, I elucidate the structure of Charles Darwin's analogical argument in his most famous work, On The Origin of Species. This last project has been accepted for publication, but I plan to continue my historically-focused philosophical work going forward. Summaries of these three projects are provided below.
Intention-Sensitivity in The Evolution of Moral Responsibility Judgment
Moral responsibility judgment is the process of assigning blame or praise in response to observing some morally-valenced event, a psychological process that humans universally and automatically carry out each and every day. Given its ubiquity in human psychology, some theorists have advanced evolutionary accounts aiming to explain why and how moral responsibility judgment emerged, as well as how those evolutionary details can inform our understanding of modern-day moral practices. Here I contribute to this literature by resolving one crucial deficit of recent evolutionary accounts: I offer an evolutionary explanation for how and why intentionality figures so centrally in humans’ moral responsibility judgments. Being sensitive to others’ intentions is a capacity which pre-dates moral cognition in hominin evolutionary history, which made it available to moral responsibility judgment upon the later emergence of the latter. Intention-sensitivity would also have increased the fitness-enhancements offered by moral responsibility judgment, particularly with respect to adaptive partner choice, by improving users' predictions about the desirability of potential cooperative partners. I conclude that since discriminating between intentional and non-intentional behavior was a capacity both available and useful for moral responsibility judgment, we ought to infer that it was indeed used in that application from the outset. This perspective makes good sense of the wide variety of comparative, developmental, and cross-cultural psychological evidence, all of which suggest that moral responsibility judgment is inextricably linked up to the assessment of transgressors’ intentions.
Choicy Agents in a Mechanistic World
In this project, I argue that humans possess two representational cognitive systems whose mutual incompatibility leads to some of the most intractable and long-standing philosophical issues pertaining to free will and moral responsibility. The first system, which I call Agential Representation, is what we use for reasoning about the behaviors of entities that strike us as choicy agents (such as a classmate, or my dog, etc.). The other system, which I call Mechanistic Representation, is what we use for reasoning about the behaviors of entities that strike us as causally-closed inanimate objects (shoes, meteorites, cutlery, etc.). Drawing on empirical results from developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and experimental philosophy, I describe these representational systems and characterize the nature of their incompatibility. My claim is that structural constraints on human thought prevent us from simultaneously representing an entity (such as a classmate, or my dog, etc.) as being both a bona fide agent, with choices and control over their possible actions, and at the same time as a mechanistic system, whose behavior is fully determined by the complete set of causal interactions in which it figures. This incompatibility between Agential Representation and Mechanistic Representation leads people to incompatibilist intuitions: the belief that free will could not exist in a deterministic world.
Revising Our View of Darwin’s Analogical Argument Accepted at Biology and Philosophy [Preprint]
Charles Darwin argued that natural selection produces species analogously to how artificial selection produces breeds. Previous analyses have focused on the formal structure of Darwin’s analogical argument, but few authors have investigated how it is that Darwin’s analogy succeeds in yielding support for his theory in the first place. This topic is particularly salient since at first blush, Darwin's analogical argument appears to undermine the inference he aims to make with it. Darwin held that natural selection produces new species, but artificial selection produces only varieties—a fact which led many of Darwin’s contemporaries to see the analogy as counterevidence to his theory, rather than evidence in favor. I argue that the key to understanding how Darwin’s analogy supports his theory is to recognize three core conceptual revisions to the ‘received view’ of artificial selection for which he argued. Only on Darwin’s resultant ‘revised view’ of artificial selection did his analogical argument support, rather than undermine, his theoretical explanation for the origin of species. These revisions are: 1) the sufficiency of mere differential reproduction for producing evolutionary change; 2) the limitless variation of organisms; and 3) the age and stability of Earth’s geological history. I show why Darwin needed to establish these particular conceptual modifications in order for his analogical argument to generate theoretical support, and I further suggest that accounts focused on the formal aspects of Darwin’s analogy cannot capture the significance of Darwin’s conceptual revisions to the success of his analogical argument.