I work primarily at the intersection of the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of psychology, where I investigate the mental structures that generate human beings' intuitions and the processes by which those structures arise. I also work in the history and philosophy of science, where I study the rise of evolutionary thought in biology and other historical instances of contentious theory change. Finally, I also work on philosophical methodology, where I am interested in appraising and improving different forms of philosophical naturalism, especially as it relates to ongoing debates in metaethics. These areas of my research program are connected by my interest in identifying philosophical and scientific beliefs that people are especially resistant to relinquishing and trying to understand the reasons for that recalcitrance.
In my dissertation, I develop an account of humans’ intuitions about the compatibility of determinism with free will and moral responsibility. In “Explaining Folk (In)Compatibilism,” I provide a psychological model that explains the pattern of intuitions people report when asked about compatibilism. In “Intention-Sensitivity in The Evolution of Moral Responsibility Judgment,” I offer an evolutionary account explaining the emergence of the mental structures which lead modern humans to generate those intuitions. Finally, in "Why Philosophical Compatibilism Rings Psychologically Hollow," I show that although they are popular among philosophers, theories of compatibilism generally do not describe a form of free will that matches up with peoples' intuitive concept of free will.
Descriptions of my projects are provided below, along with drafts available for download.
Conceptual Revision: How Darwin’s Analogy Supported His Theory Published at Biology and Philosophy [open-access link]
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.
Intention-Sensitivity in The Evolution of Moral Responsibility Judgment [download a draft]
Moral responsibility judgment (MRJ) refers to the task of assigning blame or praise in response to observing some morally-valenced event. MRJ is a psychological process that humans universally and automatically carry out each and every day. Recently, some theorists have advanced evolutionary accounts aiming to explain why and how MRJ emerged. Here I resolve a crucial deficit of these accounts by offering an evolutionary explanation for how and why intentionality came to figure 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 for use in the earliest forms of MRJ. Intention-sensitivity would also have increased the fitness benefits of MRJ, particularly with respect to adaptive partner choice, by improving users’ evaluations of the desirability of potential cooperative partners. I argue that since discriminating between intentional and non-intentional behavior was a capacity both available and useful for MRJ, we ought to infer that it was indeed used in that application from the outset. This perspective makes sense of the wide variety of comparative, developmental, and cross-cultural psychological data which suggest that moral responsibility judgment is closely linked in human psychology to assessing transgressors’ intentions.
Why Philosophical Compatibilism Rings Psychologically Hollow [download a draft]
The view that free will and determinism are compatible is popular among professional philosophers, but is generally rejected by laypeople the world over. I suggest this is largely because philosophical theories defending compatibilism rarely if ever take on board our actual intuitive free will concept. By investigating the developmental roots of the psychology of free will, we can understand why laypeople tend to disavow compatibilism. The final assessment clarifies why philosophical formulations of compatibilism do not, and perhaps cannot, connect up with any psychologically-meaningful notion of free will.
Debunking Moral Responsibility Judgment: Harder Than You'd Think! [download a draft]
In this paper I look at what happens when we try to levy an Evolutionary Debunking Argument (EDA) against moral responsibility judgment (MRJ). I show that attempting to debunk MRJ in this way is far trickier than are standard EDAs against propositional moral beliefs, such as "stealing is wrong." This is because, based on our best evidence regarding the evolutionary functions of MRJ and the modern human MRJ psychology, there is a surprisingly close alignment between the ultimate evolutionary grounding for MRJ and the proximate, reflective groundings people offer to justify their responsibility judgments. This parallel between proximate and ultimate groundings for MRJ is a feature conspicuously absent in the case of standard EDAs against moral belief, where the very misalignment between these two levels of explanation is what apparently poses such a threat to our moral beliefs in the first place. The failure of this EDA to debunk everyday moral responsibility judgments does not show that they are thereby vindicated or underwritten by evolutionary theory, but it does show that debunking moral responsibility judgment using evolutionary theory is harder than one might have thought, especially compared to debunking treatments that target moral beliefs by the same approach.
Explaining Folk (In)compatibilism [in preparation]
In this paper, I draw on evidence from developmental psychology to argue that humans possess two core representational systems, the tension between which gives rise to the pattern of compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions we find empirically. What I call “Agential Representation” (AR) is the system we deploy for reasoning about the behaviors of choicy intentional agents. “Mechanistic Representation” (MR), on the other hand, is what we use for reasoning about causally-closed mechanisms, such as those composed of inanimate objects. I claim that structural constraints on human thought, which reflect the respective structural features of these representational systems, prevent us from simultaneously representing one and the same entity as being both a bona fide agent, with real choices and intentional control over their actions, and at the same time as a mechanistic system of cause and effect 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.