Greetings, everyone! Adam Kolber has graciously invited me to contribute during the month of July as a guest-blogger. I will be posting 1-2 times per week over the next month, primarily to discuss my work and interests in neuroethics and law, including some issues that I haven't done any work on yet but which I hope might interest readers. I would like to begin, in this post, by briefly introducing myself, and by explaining how I came to be involved in neuroethics.
I received my PhD in Philosophy with a Cognitive Science Minor from the University of Arizona. For the past four years, I have been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tampa, in Tampa Florida. For the past year or so, I have also been owner and moderator of The Philosophers' Cocoon, a safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers to congregate and discuss their work and professional issues. Although I wrote my dissertation, "A Non-Ideal Theory of Justice", in political philosophy, I have always had very wide research interests, and have published and presented papers in a variety of areas, including:
- Free will and quantum mechanics
- Human rights
- Theoretical (Kantian) ethics
- Political legitimacy and humanitarian intervention
- The ethics of voting
- Consciousness
- Experimental moral philosophy
My 2012 article, "Bad News for Conservatives? Moral Judgments and the Dark Triad Personality Traits: A Correlational Study", which found a number of significant relationships between traditionally "conservative" moral and political judgments and the Dark Triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy), received some news coverage. It was also -- not all that surprisingly -- the subject of a pretty harsh reply article. As I will explain in more detail in a later post, although I am a bit embarrassed by some errors the reply article brings to light, I believe the critique of my paper is incorrect on several fronts. The author claims: (1) I shouldn't have used simple correlation analyses (actually,I should have), and (2) despite essentially confirming my results with different statistical methods, that is not clear what pychological construct my results measure (this despite the fact that, in the article, I state explicitly that the aim of the study is not to measure any psychological construct at all, but rather responses to particular moral questions). I am also in the process of gathering new data for a follow-up study to address the author's concerns more definitively.
Anyway, I will explain all of this in more detail in a later post. I will also explain other interests I have in neuroethics, including some issues about psychopaths and moral and legal responsibility, as well as how I think my work on free will is relevant to moral and legal responsibility, as well. Before I get to all of this, however, I would like to explain how I got into neuroethics, and what led me to examine the relationships between personality traits and moral-political judgments in the first place. And so this is what I will do next...in my next post... :)
Fantastic! Welcome to the blog!
Posted by: Adam Kolber | 07/02/2013 at 05:33 PM