Alejandro Rosas

Verified

Alejandro verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Alejandro verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD
• Professor at National University of Colombia

We review some processing assumptions that underlie the currently used measures of moral judgement with moral dilemmas, contrasting them with the overlooked possibility that the primary mechanism consists in assessing a net balance of the costs versus benefits of the sacrificial action. Different dilemmas scenarios present different net balances of...

Current views about what makes us human are mainly drawn from knowledge generated by experimental paradigms comparing human infants to (mainly) chimpanzees. Though there is still debate about where the cognitive barrier lies, it seems clear that apes lack a full-blown understanding of false belief and hardly exhibit capacities for shared intentiona...

Evolutionary ethics debunks moral realism – or value realism in general (Street S, Philos Studi 127:109–166, 2006) – but this is not the same as debunking the authority of moral claims, for moral realism is not the only possible explanation of the source of moral authority. However, a few influential evolutionary philosophers do believe that evolut...

The mainstream version of the dual-process model of moral cognition claims that utilitarian responses (URs) to sacrificial moral dilemmas are the outputs of controlled cognitive processes. This version predicts that interfering with cognitive resources should elicit more intuitive-deontological responses. Attempts in the literature to experimentall...

In the sacrificial moral dilemma task, participants have to morally judge an action that saves several lives at the cost of killing one person. According to the dual process corrective model of moral judgment suggested by Greene and collaborators (2001; 2004; 2008), cognitive control is necessary to override the intuitive, deontological force of th...

“Reasonableness” sets countless legal standards in America. It also informs standards within foreign jurisdictions, from Lithuanian contract law to Dutch tort law. Legal theorists often assume that reasonableness is vague and variegated, a flexible term with no essential conceptual core across languages, cultures, and jurisdictions. This Article qu...

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. More...

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across ( k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inc...

In this paper we explore whether an action’s severity of outcome (somewhat bad v. very bad) influences attributions of intentionality, knowledge and moral judgment. In between-subjects studies conducted in twelve countries from the Americas, Asia and Europe, we found a robust severity effect on all DVs (except for India). The effect arises to simi...

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law?...

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in eleven different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of l...

It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper, we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitar...

Investigadores pertenecientes a la tradición de la psicología del desarrollo cognitivo han llevado a cabo estudios que sugieren que existe un vínculo entre la percepción de daño y el dominio moral. Frente a esta propuesta unificadora del dominio moral han surgido críticas desde la psicología cultural. Haidt publicó en 1993 uno de los estudios más i...

A wide consensus among researchers into the origins of life states that simple life, in its origins, contained at least three molecular structures: replicators, metabolic enzymes, and membranes. In itself, this view allows to hypothesize that, in the path leading to this self-supporting triad, many partial combinations of these three elements and t...

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ord...

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ord...

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all s...

Outside Western, predominantly secular-liberal environments, norms restricting bodily and sexual conduct are widespread. Moralization in the so-called purity domain has been treated as evidence that some putative violations are victimless. However, respondents themselves disagree: They often report that private yet indecent acts incur self-harm, or...

The field of machine ethics is concerned with the question of how to embed ethical behaviors, or a means to determine ethical behaviors, into artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The goal is to produce artificial moral agents (AMAs) that are either implicitly ethical (designed to avoid unethical consequences) or explicitly ethical (designed to beh...

Outside Western, predominantly secular-liberal environments, norms restricting bodily and sexual conduct are widespread. Moralization in the so-called purity domain has been treated as evidence that some putative violations are victimless. However, respondents themselves disagree: They often report that private yet indecent acts incur self-harm, or...

((A free e-print of this paper can be downloaded at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TVjGbz3bd73VMexvIGqU/full)) In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution [WWA] influenced by an agent's violations of best judgment and/or resol...

( Download final version at https://bit.ly/2uF2SLi ) We propose two adjustments to the classic view of shared intentionality (our capacity to share mental states of various sorts) as based on conceptual-level cognitive skills. The first one takes into account the fact that infants and young children display this capacity, but lack conceptual-level...

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. More...

Research on moral judgment with moral dilemmas suggests that "utilitarian" responses (UR) to sacrificial high-conflict dilemmas are due to decreased harm aversion, not only in individuals with clinical conditions, but also in healthy participants with high scores in antisocial personality traits. We investigated the patterns of responses to differe...

Scientific explanations of human higher capacities, traditionally denied to other animals, attract the attention of philosophers and other workers in the humanities. They are often viewed with suspicion and skepticism. Against this background, I critically examine the dual-process theory of moral judgment proposed by Greene and collaborators and th...

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition w...

I defend resentment as a legitimate and necessary moral attitude by neutralizing an objection that points to its hostile and morally repugnant character. The argument proceeds by embedding resentment in a view of morality as a social and communicative practice, supported by a common knowledge of apparently inborn moral expectations. In virtue of th...

The use of hypothetical moral dilemmas-which pit utilitarian considerations of welfare maximization against emotionally aversive "personal" harms-has become a widespread approach for studying the neuropsychological correlates of moral judgment in healthy subjects, as well as in clinical populations with social, cognitive, and affective deficits. In...

A growing literature in neuropsychology studies moral judgment with moral dilemmas, testing subjects with neural damage or with anti-social personality traits. It seems to confirm a tendency to counterintuitive utilitarian moral judgment, i.e., these subjects abnormally approve sacrificing an innocent person to save several lives. We argue that emp...

A growing literature in neuropsychology studies moral judgment with moral dilemmas, testing subjects with neural damage or with anti-social personality traits. It seems to confirm a tendency to counterintuitive utilitarian moral judgment, i.e., these subjects abnormally approve sacrificing an innocent person to save several lives. We argue that emp...

Can moral norms be unified under one superordinate content, such as harm? Following the discovery that children at an early age distinguish between moral and conventional norms, this question has been the focus of a recent inter-disciplinary debate. Influential critics of the moral-conventional distinction have argued that the moral domain is pluri...

In their answers to questions regarding “personal moral dilemmas”, patients with lesions to the Frontal Cortex –FC– or Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex –vmPFC– display a disposition to directly injure another person in order to save lives, thus revealing a possible lack of empathy. However, their answers are normal when they evaluate behaviors lackin...

In this article we discuss factors presumably responsible for the Knobe effect and offer a novel explanation. The Knobe effect refers to a peculiar asymmetry in attributions of intentionality to the foreseen side-effects of an action, depending only on their moral assessment and with no other changes in the circumstances: the bad effects, but not t...

In their answers to questions regarding "personal moral dilemmas", patients with lesions to the Frontal Cortex –FC– or Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex –vmPFC– display a disposition to directly injure another person in order to save lives, thus revealing a possible lack of empathy. However, their answers are normal when they evaluate behaviors lackin...

Experimental economics provides evidence that social preferences drive human cooperation in the lab, but the dominant microeconomic model of a rational agent, Homo oeconomicus, denies such preferences. Assuming the evidence is cogent, what follows for the claim that humans cooperate on the basis of rational egoism? I describe three possible answers...

In this paper I claim that social preferences are necessary mechanisms for cooperation. Social preferences include altruistic ones, and these imply a non-instrumental interest in the welfare of other agents. This claim challenges a view common among economists and game theorists, according to which rational egoism is sufficient for cooperation and...

In an experimental critique of the moral/conventional (M/C) distinction, Kelly et al. (2007) present new experimental data about responses to transgressions involving harm, where the novelty is that transgressors are grown-ups, rather than children. Their data do not support the moral/conventional distinction. The contrast between grown-up and scho...

In a unified theory of human reciprocity, the strong and weak forms are similar because neither is biologically altruistic and both require normative motivation to support cooperation. However, strong reciprocity is necessary to support cooperation in public goods games. It involves inflicting costs on defectors; and though the costs for punishers...

Quisiera despejar algunos prejuicios ofreciendo una idea actualizada del proyecto como fue esbozado por el mismo Darwin. Creo que el estudio del proyecto de explicación darwiniana de la moral (EDM) en su versión original proporciona dos enseñanzas teóricas muy importantes, una para la 1losofía moral y otra para la teoría de la evolución por selecci...

Evolutionary explanations of altruism and human cooperation, first set forth by pioneers such as Darwin, Hamilton and Trivers, suggest that biology might be capable of offering a plausible scientific explanation of the core of human morality. According to this project, morality and human cooperation arise when resources are scarce; they cannot be e...

Evolutionary explanations of altruism and human cooperation, first set forth by pioneers such as Darwin, Hamilton and Trivers, suggest that biology might be capable of offering a plausible scientific explanation of the core of human morality. According to this project, morality and human cooperation arise when resources are scarce; they cannot be e...

Reciprocity, Altruism and the Civil Society: In Praise of Heterogeneity, BruniLuigino. Routledge, 2008, xiii + 158 pages. - Volume 26 Issue 1 - Alejandro Rosas

Evolutionary game theory has shown that human cooperation thrives in different types of social interactions with a PD structure. Models treat the cooperative strategies within the different frameworks as discrete entities and sometimes even as contenders. Whereas strong reciprocity was acclaimed as superior to classic reciprocity for its ability to...

I describe the project of a Darwinian explanation of morality following Darwin’s basic ideas as expressed in The Descent of Man. In contrast to the traditional interpretation, I argue that Darwin did not assume, nor is it necessary to assume in a Darwinian perspective, an inevitable conflict between individual and group selection in the explanation...

Samir Okasha, Evolution and the Levels of Selection, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006, 263 pp. + xii.

Individual and group selection are usually conceived as opposed evolutionary processes. Though cases of synergy are occasionally recognized, the evolutionary importance of synergy is largely ignored. However, synergy is the plausible explanation for the evolution of collectives as higher level individuals i.e., collectives acting as adaptive units,...

Recent developments in evolutionary game theory argue the superiority of punishment over reciprocity as accounts of large-scale human cooperation. I introduce a distinction between a behavioral and a psychological perspective on reciprocity and punishment to question this view. I examine a narrow and a wide version of a psychological mechanism for...

Views on the evolution of altruism based upon multilevel selection on structured populations pay little attention to the difference between fortuitous and deliberate processes leading to assortative grouping. Altruism may evolve when assortative grouping is fortuitously produced by forces external to the organism. But when it is deliberately produc...

En la filosofía kantiana la explicación de los organismos, como ejemplos de diseño complejo, es un problema de difícil solución. Como entidades materiales deberían ser explicables por leyes mecánicas. Por su diseño, exigen una explicación por causas finales. Ambas explicaciones son inaceptables. Pero, ¿ofrece Kant acaso alguna explicación alternati...

1. I n t r o d u c c I ó n : l a P a r a d o j a d e l a lt r u I s m o. La existencia del altruismo como rasgo adaptativo – y no meramente accidental – en los seres vivos plantea un reto particular a la teoría de la evolución por selección natural. Un comportamiento altruista es aquél gracias al cual un organismo aumenta la aptitud de otro organis...

Is morality biologically altruistic? Does it imply a disadvantage in the struggle for existence? A positive answer puts morality at odds with natural selection, unless natural selection operates at the level of groups. In this case, a trait that is good for groups though bad (reproductively) for individuals can evolve. Sociobiologists reject group...

La tentativa de articular un seleccionismo aplicable a la epistemología es motivada por una postura al mismo tiempo naturalista y mecanicista, además de rechazar explicaciones que cometan petición de principio. El conocimiento y los procesos que lo generan son consi derados, por tanto, fenómenos naturales, que deben ser explicados empleando los mis...

En este ensayo abordo los intentos, relativamente recientes, de dar una explicación de la moralidad como adaptación por selección natural. Mi exposición tiene una introducción y cuatro partes: en la primera explico en qué consiste la paradoja del altruismo biológico. En la segunda expongo la solución que apela a la selección de grupos, recientement...

Los sociobiólogos han defendido una posición "calvinista" que se resume en la siguiente fórmula: si la selección natural explica las actitudes morales, no hay altruismo genuino en la moral; si la moral es altruista, entonces la selección natural no puede explicarla. En este ensayo desenmascaro los presupuestos erróneos de esta posición y defiendo q...

RESUMEN: Los sociobiólogos han defendido una posición “calvinista” que se resume en la siguiente fórmula: si la selección natural explica las actitudes morales, no hay altruismo genuino en la moral; si la moral es altruista, entonces la selección natural no puede explicarla. En este ensayo desenmascaro los presupuestos erróneos de esta posición y d...

Classical evolutionary explanations of social behavior classify behaviors from their effects, not from their underlying mechanisms. Here lies a potential objection against the view that morality can be explained by such models, e.g. Trivers’reciprocal altruism. However, evolutionary theory reveals a growing interest in the evolution of psychologica...

Sober and Wilson have recentlyclaimed that evolutionary theory can do whatneither philosophy nor experimental psychologyhave been able to, namely, ``break the deadlock''in the egoism vs. altruism debate with anargument based on the reliability of altruisticmotivation. I analyze both their reliabilityargument and the experimental evidence ofsocial p...

El dualismo sustancial cartesiano y el problema mente-cuerpo suscitaron en la modernidad una reacción monista, que suprime la interacción ontológica dualistay concibe el problema como un conflicto entre discursos explicativos. Kant introduce la distinción entre fenómeno y nóumeno como una distinción de perspectivas, con la intención de resolver el...

La filosofía se ha preocupado desde susorígenes por el sentido de la vida humana. Estapreocupación es la que subyace a la "Filosofíade la Historia", disciplina que surge en laépoca moderna con la pregunta por la existencia o inexistencia de un progreso en la historia. Autores como Kant consideran que el progreso,para poder valer como tal, ha de aco...

Economic experiments have consistently shown that human sub-jects cooperate in social dilemmas, in spite of the contrary predictions of game theory. Some social scientists have argued that moral emotions can explain this anomaly. I briefly present the experimental evidence for such anomalous behavior and for the thesis that emotions explain it. I a...

La filosofía política no es en el fondo algo muy diferente a la articulación conceptual de muchas de las intuiciones que el ser humano tiene sobre la necesidad de vivir en sociedad y sobre la necesidad de vivir lo mejor posible en sociedad. Por eso, no es si

Incluye bibliografía e índice