Psychopaths, good intentions, and the problem of conceptualization

Sometimes when an agent acts badly, we excuse her from blame because she meant well. What she intended, perhaps, was good, even if her external behaviors were not. But it is extraordinarily difficult to specify precisely what counts as a good intention – or, for that matter, a bad or a neutral one. Psychopaths provide the most lurid illustrations of this problem. Sometimes, they clearly intend to hurt others when they act. But they do not really understand that others have moral standing, so there is also a sense in which they take themselves to be doing something morally innocuous when they hurt others. Is their intention a bad one? Or is it a neutral one? The way we answer will probably determine whether we believe that psychopaths are blameworthy and properly subject to retributive punishment. The difficulties surrounding psychopaths, I think, are surface manifestations of a deeper, underlying puzzle which concerns the various ways of conceptualizing morally significant actions. To solve this puzzle, we will require an account not only of what agents ought to intend, but also of how they ought to intend it. Developing this account is a major goal of my current research.

Publications:

Altruism and desert

Altruistic sacrifices usually have morally desirable effects on their beneficiaries. They also have morally undesirable effects on the agents who perform them – altruistic agents, by sacrificing, make themselves worse off. That much, I take it, is widely appreciated. But there is another moral dimension to altruism that is not widely appreciated. Altruistic sacrifice is a display of virtue, and virtuous agents deserve to be rewarded rather than punished. Since an altruistic agent makes herself worse-off by acting altruistically, she prevents herself from receiving what she deserves. That represents an additional morally undesirable effect. It can be a significant effect – significant enough to change what we all-things-considered morally ought to do – when certain realistic conditions are satisfied. This effect, I contend, has important implications for social policy: Many questions in this domain concern the extent to which we ought to rely on voluntary altruism, as opposed to rewards or coercion, in order to induce agents to behave in desirable ways.

Publications:

Posthumanism and moral philosophy

A number of writers both inside and outside of academia have argued that we can and should create posthumans, intelligent beings with mental capacities far beyond our own. Their empirical claims seem plausible enough. But their evaluative claims have yet to receive sufficient attention from moral philosophers. One area which has been particularly neglected, in my view, is the way in which posthumanism interacts with more mainstream problems in moral philosophy. If posthuman lives are as good as the posthumanists claim, might the prospect of a posthuman future provide grounds for rejecting anti-natalism? And might the possibility of lives much better than our own force us to reexamine previous work in population ethics, particularly that focused on the minimal level of well-being required for a life to contribute moral value to a state of affairs? I take a nuanced but generally optimistic or “pro-posthuman” view: We morally ought to create posthumans, if it can be done in the right way.

Presentations:

  • “Posthumanism and Anti-Natalism”, International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden 2018
  • “Transhuman Lives and the Critical Level of Well-Being”, Interdisciplinary Workshop on Human Enhancement. University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany 2016