The many moral rationalisms. This project addresses the foundations of morality. It contributes to our self-understanding by generating new insights into the objectivity of morality and into the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment.
Agency, Rationality, and Emotion. This project addresses the puzzling and multiple connections between emotion and reason. Emotion, long viewed as an impediment to rationality, actually helps us reason well. Our image of good public deliberation as unemotional needs to be challenged and our understanding of the place of reason and emotion in human life needs to be revised. The project engages and contributes to new international research on emotion and rationality thereby contributing to Austral ....Agency, Rationality, and Emotion. This project addresses the puzzling and multiple connections between emotion and reason. Emotion, long viewed as an impediment to rationality, actually helps us reason well. Our image of good public deliberation as unemotional needs to be challenged and our understanding of the place of reason and emotion in human life needs to be revised. The project engages and contributes to new international research on emotion and rationality thereby contributing to Australia's international reputation for excellence in philosophy.
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Pathologies of moral cognition. The saying "Nice guys finish last" captures the thought that moral cognition makes us vulnerable to exploitation. This project aims to examine this hypothesis by investigating three aspects of moral cognition that might lead us to form false beliefs or render us vulnerable to manipulation by others: our beliefs about punishment; our tendency to identify with groups; and our willingness to trust others. The project is designed to involve empirical investigation of ....Pathologies of moral cognition. The saying "Nice guys finish last" captures the thought that moral cognition makes us vulnerable to exploitation. This project aims to examine this hypothesis by investigating three aspects of moral cognition that might lead us to form false beliefs or render us vulnerable to manipulation by others: our beliefs about punishment; our tendency to identify with groups; and our willingness to trust others. The project is designed to involve empirical investigation of the circumstances in which moral behaviour can have harmful side-effects; it also entails theoretical analysis intended to improve our ability to construct robust theories of cooperative and punitive behaviour.Read moreRead less
Challenges to moral responsibility. Agents deserve various kinds of benefits and burdens (such as punishment) only if they are morally responsible for their actions. This project aims to assess several sorts of alleged threats to our moral responsibility, and thereby to better the social allocation of goods to individuals.
Conscience and conscientious objection in health care. Medical professionals sometimes decline to provide particular forms of safe, beneficial and legal health care, on the grounds that provision would go against their consciences. Bioethicists and policy makers have failed to identify legitimate limits to the scope of appeals to conscientious objection in health care. This is in large part because the underlying concept ''conscience" is unclear. This project aims to advance bioethical debate by ....Conscience and conscientious objection in health care. Medical professionals sometimes decline to provide particular forms of safe, beneficial and legal health care, on the grounds that provision would go against their consciences. Bioethicists and policy makers have failed to identify legitimate limits to the scope of appeals to conscientious objection in health care. This is in large part because the underlying concept ''conscience" is unclear. This project aims to advance bioethical debate by producing a philosophically and psychologically informed analysis of conscience, and by applying this to discussions about the legitimate limits to conscientious objection in health care. It is expected to result in academic and non-academic publications and enable improvements to Australian health care policy.Read moreRead less
Moral conservatism, human enhancement and the 'Affective Revolution' in moral psychology. Debates between moral conservatives and liberals, about whether enhancing human mental and physical abilities above normal limits is ethically acceptable, have been intractable. Recent developments in moral psychology can be used to transform understandings of these debates and enable us to develop just policies to regulate enhancement technologies.