Value Theory
Ethics:
"I have teaching interests in ethics from Plato to the present. I have published on Socratic and Platonic ethics, Aristotle’s virtue theory, medieval Islamic ethical theory, and Maimonides’s ethics and moral psychology."
Patrick Kain’s interests in ethics include both the history of moral philosophy and recent work in ethics and metaethics. Kain is particularly interested in origins and nature of Kantian approaches to ethics, from the early modern period to contemporary debates, and ranging from foundational questions about value, dignity, and obligation, to the moral status of human beings and other animals, and to connections between moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, and the human sciences. Kain is also active in thinking about the nature of academic freedom and the freedom of expression.
"My work in ethics has largely centered on issues in applied ethics, particularly in the ethics of speech. What duties do we have as speakers and listeners? When is it appropriate to hold others accountable for violating these duties through practices of informal social punishment (e.g. through call-outs, naming and shaming, and dissociation)? When is it appropriate to hold others accountable through mechanisms of formal social punishment (e.g., firing or sanctioning an employee)? What principles guide the exercise of discretion in determining the shape of our associations? And how should intermediaries (publishers, broadcasters, social media platforms, and search engines) think about content-moderation and its relationship to free speech values? In addition to these issues, which are addressed in my forthcoming book, Private Censorship, I have developing interests in the ethics of data science and artificial intelligence and am currently a core faculty member of Purdue’s interdisciplinary Governance and Responsible A.I. Lab."
"My work in ethics is historically based. I focus on questions such as the ground of value, the value of the individual, freedom and determinism, and metaphysics of the will. I explore these issues in the context of my work on Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher."
Moral Psychology:
"I came to philosophy through psychology, and my research has always focused on scientific theories of the mind, with a focus on the role of evolutionary history. My current focus is on the evolution of norms, or cultural values, and on the theoretical problems raised by the many conflicting ways norms are represented across the social sciences. This includes concerns about the nature of norms in general, but also certain specific types of norms, such as moral norms, norms of sustainability and environmentalism, and norms of democracy. This focus on norms is a natural extension of earlier work on the evolution of religion, morality, and culture in general, some of which focuses on purely theoretical issues, and has been published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Journal of Cognition and Culture, while other work, published in Philosophical Psychology and Social Cognition, is empirical, using methods from experimental philosophy to measure folk intuitions about metaethics and the concept of morality. Finally, one strand of my research focuses on applying scientific theory, rather than developing it: I argue for climate solutions that focus on internalizing norms of sustainability and environmentalism, rather than merely complying with them as a means of avoiding punishment and gaining approval. Work on this topic has been published in Nature Sustainability, Sustainability, Sustainability Science, and Ecology and Society."
"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab.
This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022). Presently in the PuNCs Lab we're empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships, with a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures."
"My work in ethics and moral theory is typically applied. It has explores how the insights of the cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary sciences, especially the character of human moral psychology, can most fruitfully be applied to challenges like climate change, misinformation and polarization, and systemic injustice. I have done work on implicit social bias, social norms, and moral disgust."
Evan Westra specializes in empirically informed moral psychology. He writes on topics such as virtue signaling, moral character, hypocrisy, moral development, and the relationship between social norms and moral progress.
Aesthetics:
"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab.
This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022). Presently in the PuNCs Lab we're empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships, with a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures."