It is often thought that an agent may be held morally responsible for bringing about a negative outcome only if they could have done otherwise. Inspired by previous research linking moral judgment to free will ascriptions and representations of …
Dependency theories of causal reasoning, such as causal Bayes net accounts, postulate that the strengths of individual causal links are independent of the causal structure in which they are embedded; they are inferred from dependency information, …
Causal analysis lies at the heart of moral judgment. For instance, a general assumption of most ethical theories is that people are only morally responsible for an outcome when their action causally contributed to it. Considering the causal relations …
When is it allowed to carry out an action that saves lives, but leads to the loss of others? While a minority of people may deny the permissibility of such actions categorically, most will probably say that the answer depends, among other factors, on …
In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of …
Cognitive psychological research focusses on causal learning and reasoning while cognitive anthropological and social science research tend to focus on systems of beliefs. Our aim was to explore how these two types of research can inform each other. …