I am happy to announce that the paper I have written with Albert Newen (Bochum, Philosophy) and Kai Kaspar (Cologne, Psychology) got accepted for publication with Philosophical Psychology.

In the paper we were interested in how people make moral judgments about agents. Going beyond extent research, we investigated the relevance of social roles and the hierarchical structures that follow from them. It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent and their freedom and ability to do other than they actually did. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We present an experiment to support this claim.

If you’d like a pre-print version, please send me an e-mail.