Michael Lacewing’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

Is there a best way to live? If so, is this a form of ethical life? The answer, I believe, turns on what we can say about the nature and place of the passions – emotions and desires – in our lives, including in particular, our ability to be truthful about our passions and our relations with other people. I approach the question through the work of Bernard Williams. I consider first what it might be for a way of life to be ‘objectively’ best, before looking more closely at the psychological conditions of such a life, using ideas from psychoanalysis on the way we hide our true passions from ourselves and the effect this can have on our understanding of both ourselves and others. I end by considering whether we can say that a truthful life is the best life, and whether it places universal and material constraints on how best to live.

In this paper, I argue against a perceptual model of moral epistemology. We should not reject the claim that there is a sense in which, on some occasions, emotions may be said to be perceptions of values or reasons. But going further than this, and taking perception as a model for moral epistemology is unhelpful and unilluminating. By focusing on the importance of the dispositions and structures of the self to moral knowledge, I bring out important disanalogies between moral epistemology and typical cases of perceptual expertise. As a result, how we gain, or fail to gain, moral knowledge should not be understood in terms of the operation of a perceptual capacity. © 2015 The Author dialectica

Does it make sense for non-theists to feel gratitude for their existence? The question arises because gratitude is typically thought to be directed towards a person to whom one is grateful. Hence the theist may be grateful to God for their existence, experienced as a gift. But can the non-believer feel something similar without being irrational? Can there be gratitude for existence but not to anyone? After analysing gratitude and how we can best understand the idea of non-directed gratitude, I discuss the conditions that need to apply for non-directed gratitude to be appropriate. I end by discussing whether theism provides a psychologically richer and more satisfying framework for understanding existential gratitude.

It has often been observed that, in general, different psychotherapies do equally well. Some have taken this as good evidence that therapeutic action in psychotherapy rests not on the factors specific to individual therapies, but on common factors. I argue against this view in favor of a theory of therapeutic action deriving from psychodynamic psychotherapy. This identifies the therapeutic relationship (and with it, many so-called common factors) and “psychodynamic insight” as therapeutic factors. I review the evidence from outcome studies and from studies into two concepts related to insight, specifically reflection function and psychological defense. I argue that the best interpretation of the evidence supports the claim that insight, in interrelation with the therapeutic relationship, contributes to therapeutic action.

In this article, I provide a guide to some current thinking in empirical moral psychology on the nature of moral intuitions, focusing on the theories of Haidt and Narvaez. Their debate connects to philosophical discussions of virtue theory and the role of emotions in moral epistemology. After identifying difficulties attending the current debate around the relation between intuitions and reasoning, I focus on the question of the development of intuitions. I discuss how intuitions could be shaped into moral expertise, outlining Haidt’s emphasis on innate factors and Narvaez’s account in terms of a social-cognitive model of personality. After a brief discussion of moral relativism, I consider the implications of the account of moral expertise for our understanding of the relation between moral intuitions and reason. I argue that a strong connection can be made if we adopt a broad conception of reason and a narrow conception of expertise.

The central question of ethics is ‘How should I live?’. It covers not only actions (‘what should I do?’), but more broadly, our reactions and our characters, questions of what we should feel and how we should be as people. This has been the central concern of theories of virtue. Aristotle claimed that a virtue is a character trait that enables us to ‘stand well’ in relation to our desires and emotions. To be virtuous with regard to a type of emotion – anger, sadness, joy, fear, etc. – is to feel that type of emotion ‘at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way’ ( Nicomachean Ethics , Book 2, Ch. 6, 1106b).

From its inception, psychoanalysis has been troubled by the problem of suggestion. I defend an answer to the problem of suggestion understood as a methodological concern about the evidential basis of psychoanalytic theory. This purely methodological approach is relatively uncommon in discussions in psychoanalysis. I argue that suggestion in psychoanalysis is best understood in terms of experimenter expectancy effects. Such effects are not specific to psychoanalysis, and they can be corrected for by relying on the corroboration of findings by different researchers. This response to the problem of suggestion faces several challenges, and a reply to these is offered. I argue that the psychodynamic model of mind, if not the metapsychological and etiological claims of psychoanalysis, can be vindicated in light of the actual agreement that exists.

I am very grateful to both Edward Erwin and Peter Fonagy for their thoughtful and engaging comments. I do not have space to deal fully with all the issues they raise, but I will try to clarify some key points at which perhaps I implied more than I intended, or failed to be clear. Erwin states that I claim the following principle is a method for inferring causes: “if X is causally relevant to the occurrence of Y, then the incidence of Ys in the class of Xs and Ys will be different compared with the incidence of Ys in the class of non-Xs and Ys” (Erwin 2012, 217). This is not so. The method I attribute to Grünbaum is given in what follows the principle in the quotation given on p. 199, namely, “To validate a claim of causal relevance, we must first divide the reference class C into two subclasses, the Xs and the non-Xs. And then we must show that the incidence of Ys among the Xs is different from what it is among the non-Xs.” And this clearly is epistemological, not ontological, because it speaks of what we need to do to validate a claim. Furthermore, Grünbaum repeatedly employs this method in examples, such as those regarding visits to the library and derogatory remarks (Grünbaum 1984, 73; 1993, 164). Grünbaum’s statement of the method is itself grounds to attribute to him the view that to validate a causal claim, statistical knowledge, namely the relative incidence of Ys among Xs and non-Xs, is necessary.1 And it is striking that Grünbaum’s statement of the method is made without qualification. Erwin notes the only two examples, I believe, where Grünbaum provides any indication that statistical data might not be needed. One is his response to Erwin’s example of the autistic boy whose head-banging ceases after shock treatment is administered as a punishment. Grünbaum comments that the inference, that the shock punishments caused the head-banging to cease, is justified because we know the ‘natural history’ of the condition. But such knowledge is knowledge of what behavior, symptoms, and so on, are likely to occur at each stage of the condition, for example, knowledge of the probability of symptoms such as head-banging going into spontaneous remission. The second is Grünbaum’s remark that statistical knowledge regarding the particular case can be replaced by background theoretical knowledge in astronomical inferences regarding planetary motion. But such theoretical knowledge may yet be statistical, and in the case of Newton’s laws of motion, statistical evidence was relevant (indeed, it was precisely this kind of evidence that led to their qualification and the confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity). Nor does Erwin’s analogy between watermelons and baseballs provide a counterexample: Although we may rely on the analogy to infer that a watermelon will break a window, this is insufficient without the additional background knowledge that baseballs very often break windows, which is statistical knowledge. I suspect that Grünbaum would similarly only allow analogy to have heuristic, not probative, value.2 However, the central question is whether the kind of background knowledge that enables causal inferences based on thematic affinity need not be statistical. Grünbaum notes that there are such “special further conditions under which thematic affinity does indeed warrant causal inferences” (1993, 129). He never specifies the conditions but presents six examples.3 In all six, the background knowledge described involves statistical information, in most cases, knowledge of the probability of the effect occurring by means other than the thematically similar cause. Grünbaum even comments of two cases that the warrant is derived from Mill’s joint method of agreement and difference (1993, 132). The centrality of statistical knowledge is reaffirmed in Grünbaum’s (1993, 219) remark that “To guard against inductive fallacies of causal inference, methods of controlled inquiry or their equivalents from relevant background knowledge are important. Such inquiry often employs reasoning akin to that of Mill’s joint method of agreement and...