Journal Entries Wesley Buckwalter

When does hate speech cross the line into incitement of violence? And how does incitement get prosecuted around the world when it leads to violent atrocities like genocide? Are legal categories like incitement to genocide in international law all that effective at preventing or deterring this kind of speech? In her paper, Shannon Fyfe walks us through these complicated legal and philosophical questions as they played out in the trial of three media executives held by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for incitement during the Rwandan genocide. She also discusses incitement in domestic jurisdictions and the January 6 attacks in Washington DC.


Links and Resources



Shannon Fyfe
The paper
Rwanda Genocide: 100 days of slaughter
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Genocidal Language Games by Lynne Tirrell
Background in Austin's Speech Act Theory
Speech Acts by Mitchell Green
Holocaust and genocide denial
Genocide: A Normative Account by Larry May


Paper Quotes
The judgements handed down by the ICTR in the Media case established that certain types of speech can constitute or contribute to some of the most harmful crimes under international law. By distinguishing between genocidal hate speech, genocidal incitement speech, and genocidal participation speech, I have shown how speech act theory justifies the international criminal law that places individual criminal responsibility on the perpetrators of these forms of speech. My account responds to two debates that pervade the intersection of hate speech and international criminal law: namely, the balancing of freedom of expression with the prevention of violence, and the challenge in imposing individual criminal liability for the inchoate crime of incitement to genocide.
Special Guest: Shannon Fyfe.

Disgust is often thought of as a negative emotion, and even moreso when it comes to morality. Many have argued that the feeling we have when we are morally disgusted by others has a questionable evolutionary history, is not always reliably produced, and has inspired acts of great evil in our past. In his paper, Victor Kumar argues that it's not all bad though, and that moral disgust can sometimes be a fitting response to moral wrongs. Specifically, he argues that disgust is fitting when it is evoked by moral wrongs that pollute social relationships by eroding shared expectations of trust. In these cases, moral disgust can help right certain wrongs, serve as a useful tool for social signalling, and enourage political organization.


Links and Resources



Victor Kumar
The paper
Is Disgust a "Conservative" Emotion?
How Disgust Affects Social Judgments
Martha Nussbaum, "From Disgust to Humanity"
Steve Stich on disgust
Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust By Daniel Kelly
Does Disgust Influence Moral Judgment? by Joshua May


Paper Quotes


Many philosophers are skeptical of moral disgust, perhaps because they assume that it is tied exclusively to conservative norms and values. I have shown, to the contrary, that disgust is implicated in important moral norms and values that are shared by liberals and conservatives. Disgust is repurposed in ways that support these norms and values, by motivating an important form of punishment, tracking the spread of moral violations, and expressively coordinating collective action. Disgust accurately reflects the nature of certain wrongs that commonly elicit moral revulsion. Instead of ridding ourselves of disgust, then, we would do better to understand its fittingness and unfittingness, its uses and its hazards, and thus arrive at a richer appreciation of its suitability for moral life.
Special Guest: Victor Kumar.

As we learn more and more about the brain, researchers are developing new neuroscientific methods that can help diagnose patients with traumatic brain injury. For example, some of these methods might even be able to tell us that patients who otherwise appear unresponsive are actually still "alive inside". That's an amazing idea, but the story doesn't stop there. As such technology develops, it raises a number of ethical questions about how it works and how to use. In this paper, Andrew and his coauthors investigate the benefits, harms, and costs of using neuroimaging to detect human consciousness.


Links and Resources



Andrew Peterson
The paper
Experiences of family of individuals in a locked in, minimally conscious state, or vegetative state with the health care system
Ethical issues in neuroimaging after serious brain injury with Charles Weijer
Practice guideline update recommendations summary: Disorders of consciousness
Jason Karlawish
Adrian Owen


Paper Quotes


The practice guideline update is a milestone in the history of neurology. Recommendations to use investigational neuroimaging methods are but one aspect of the guideline, and there is a need for further normative analysis of its rich content. We encourage continued debate on these issues. Bringing clarity to the underlying ethics of caring for brain‐injured patients can assist clinicians and health care institutions as they incorporate the guideline in clinical practice.


We think that investigational neuroimaging could facilitate access to opportunity for DoC patients. As the guideline highlights, investigational neuroimaging could function as a gatekeeper for continued rehabilitation, and it might also be used as a neural prosthetic, based on future technical improvements. Neuroimaging assessment could also inform clinical decisions that best reflect a patient’s values, even if pursuing those values are inconsistent with standard notions of quality of life. Opportunity‐based frameworks for healthcare justice still require conceptual refinement, and further work needs to be done to thoroughly apply such a framework to the DoC context. However, we believe that this is a promising avenue of future research to explicate the justice claims that DoC patients (or other disabled populations) have to investigational neuroimaging and other novel therapies.
Special Guest: Andrew Peterson.

An enormous amount of research in philosophy and cognitive science has been devoted to belief representation in theory of mind, or the capacity we have to figure out what other people believe. Because of all this focus on belief, one might be tempted to think that belief is one of the most basic theory of mind capacities we have. But is that really what the evidence shows? Jonathan and his coauthors argue that it doesn’t show that at all. Instead, they argue that it’s actually the capacity to figure out what others know—rather than what they believe—that’s the more basic capacity.


Links and Resources



Jonathan Phillips
The Paper
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?
Knowledge wh and false beliefs: Experimental investigations
Knowledge before belief : Response-times indicate evaluations of knowledge prior to belief
Do non-human primates really represent others’ ignorance?
How do non-human primates represent others' awareness of where objects are hidden?
Laurie Santos and The Comparative Cognition Laboratory
John Turri and the Philosophical Science Lab
Fiery Cushman and the Moral Psychology Research Lab
Ori Friedman and the UWaterloo Child Cognition Lab
Alia Martin and the Infant and Child Cognition Lab
Joshua Knobe


Paper Quotes


Since the 1970’s, research has explored belief attribution in a way that brings together numerous areas of cognitive science. Our understanding of belief representation has benefitted from a huge set of interdisciplinary discoveries from developmental studies, cognitive neuroscience, primate cognition, experimental philosophy, and beyond. The result of this empirical ferment has been extraordinary, giving us lots of insight into the nature of belief representation.


We hope this paper serves as a call to arms for cognitive scientists to join researchers who have already begun to do the same for knowledge representation. Our hope is that we can marshal the same set of tools and use them to get a deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge. In doing so, we may gain better insight into the kind of representation that may— at an even more fundamental level— allow us to make sense of others’ minds.
Special Guest: Jonathan Phillips.

Can the fact that something is morally wrong to believe affect whether the evidence you have justifies that belief? In her paper, Georgi Gardiner argues that the answer is "no". We should follow the evidence where it leads and align our beliefs with the evidence. And if we do that, she argues, we’ll discover that morally wrong beliefs—such as racist beliefs--simply don’t align with the evidence. On this view, racist beliefs are irrational because they are unsupported by evidence or reflect cognitive errors in statistical reasoning, not because they are immoral.


Links and Resources



Georgi Gardiner
The paper
On the Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias by Tamar Gendler
Varieties of Moral Encroachment by Renée Jorgensen Bolinger
Radical moral encroachment: The moral stakes of racist beliefs by Rima Basu
Doxastic Wronging by Rima Basu & Mark Schroeder
Beyond Accuracy: Epistemic Flaws with Statistical Generalizations by Jessie Munton


Paper Quotes


"Advocates of moral encroachment aim to describe a person whose beliefs are epistemically impeccable—well supported by the evidence and conscientiously considered—yet morally wrong because racist. My contention is that no such belief can exist. If a belief is morally wrong then there is some corresponding prior epistemic error. The belief is not well supported by the evidence and/or it is not interpreted through a morally appropriate understanding, and that understanding is not epistemically well supported. If a belief is epistemically well supported it cannot be racist since no true fact is genuinely racist. With the right background understanding we see that since everyone is equal, any differences based on gender, race, and so on are morally insignificant."
Special Guest: Georgi Gardiner.

You've heard about "social-distancing" but what about emotional "self-distancing", can that help make you wiser? Are different people wiser than others and why? Is wisdom a stable trait and if so how should we measure it? In recent years there's been an explosion of research in cognitive science into answering these questions. But along with this there's also been many disagreements between researchers about what wisdom is, how best to measure it, how it develops, and how it manifests across different situations or cultures. In this episode, Igor Grossmann discusses the efforts of the Wisdom Task Force, a group of researchers who came together in the summer of 2019 to provide a systematic evaluation of dominant theoretical and methodological positions on wisdom, and to try and reach a common position or consensus on the state of the art in wisdom research in empirical psychology.


Links and Resources



Igor Grossmann
The Paper
Wisdom and Culture lab website
On Wisdom podcast
Toronto Wisdom Task Force conference presentations


Paper Quotes


"For laypersons and some scientists, wisdom can mean many things (Grossmann & Kung, 2018; Sternberg & Glück, 2019). Conceptualizations of wisdom often appear idiosyncratic, reflecting culture-bound attitudes toward abilities (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995; Rattan, Savani, Naidu, & Dweck, 2012), favored leadership styles (House et al., 2004), or culturallyrelevant moral characteristics (e.g., Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Miller et al., 1990). These considerations notwithstanding, empirically oriented wisdom scientists around the world converge of a set of morally-grounded aspects of meta-cognition as a common psychological signature of wisdom.


Building on the commonalities across many construct operationalizations in empirical sciences, the Wisdom Task Force has proposed the common wisdom model, defining wisdom’s psychological characteristics as morally-grounded excellence in social-cognitive processing. The task force established that by excellence in social-cognitive processing empirical scientists typically refer to PMC—i.e., features of meta-comprehension and meta-reasoning that apply to problem-solving in domains that have consequences for other people. By moral grounding, empirical wisdom scholars typically refer to a set of inter-related aspirational goals: balance of self- and otheroriented interests, pursuit of truth (vs. dishonesty), and orientation toward shared humanity. Future generations of psychological scientists can build on these insights, establishing a common language for a psychometrically sound construct operationalization across multiple levels of analysis (e.g., state vs. trait), and with an eye toward possible ways to nurture wisdom in challenging times."
Special Guest: Igor Grossmann.