Date: Thursday, 12th June 2025
Venue: D002 (QS Vienna) and Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/92936053342?pwd=rmn17eP5dgRh6VqhW91t5DE8EYmrXf.1
Meeting ID: 929 3605 3342
Passcode: 154211
Chair: Günther Knoblich
Title: Joint Action at the Roots of Ethical Cognition
Abstract:
Processes likely to be evolutionarily ancient and to appear early in development (perhaps linked to philosophers’ *moral sentiments*) influence adults’ ethical intuitions.
What is the best computational description of these processes?
The leading answers involve principles.
Thus Greene (2015; 2017) models fast processes as operating in accordance with deontological principles such as ‘do not harm.’
On such a view, basic moral processes yield values adaptive in a pre-historic world.
This talk defends a speculative alternative, one which involves capacities for joint action and no principles. Joint action is (so the proposal) at the root of ethical cognition in two ways:
it enables us to converge on what feels disgusting, bitter, unfitting, or otherwise wrong;
and, as I will explain, joint actions enable us to turn these feelings into a form of normative guidance by upholding norm-like patterns of behavior.
While full-blown normative attitudes and legal codes are important tools for modern societies, the impossibility of explicitly codifying every useful value indicates that joint-action-based forms of normative guidance are indispensable.
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP to get access to the lecture hall.
Best regards,
Fanni
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FANNI TAKÁTSY
Lab Manager/Research Coordinator,
Social Mind Center
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CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY
Quellenstrasse 51. | 1100 Vienna, Austria
http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/
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