What do we do?

Our view is that the best moral philosophy and ethics must be consistent with a psychologically realistic picture of human judgment and decision-making. On the other hand, for scientific work to have real ethical relevance, it has to be informed by in-depth philosophical understanding of the problems we are trying to solve.

We therefore aim to advance studies in philosophical moral psychology through combining rigorous scientific research practices with high-quality philosophical ethics. 

Specifically, we use interdisciplinary methods from experimental philosophy (especially subfield like experimental bioethics - aka bioXphi) and moral psychology (the scientific study of the processes that underlie and explain moral judgment, reasoning, agency and behaviour) to advance our understanding of morality.

Principles of beneficence and respect for autonomy are pillars of contemporary medical ethics. But do these explicit principles cohere with the moral reasoning of ordinary patients? And are they extended to all patients equitably? Patients sometimes feel that their decisions are disrespected, or their wellbeing isn't cared for. Certain social groups - such as women, ethnic minorities, or immigrants - are especially likely to feel that they aren't "listened to", that their pain is dismissed, that they aren't believed, or that their rights to make their own medical decisions have been violated - despite being legally competent to make decisions and give consent. We're interested in the experience of harm and injustice in medicine, and in investigating how moral reasoning, and psychological processes such as stereotyping, may contribute to violations of medical ethics. 

We are currently funded by a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers grant to specifically investigate how conceptions of autonomy can be gendered or subject to stereotypes and how this impacts respect for women's autonomous decision-making in different cultural and linguistic settings.

Consent is morally transformative and suffuses our everyday moral and social lives. Valid consent makes the difference between permissible sex and rape; between a medical exam and assault; between entering a person’s home and trespass; between an economic transaction and theft. We need consent to include participants in research, to collect private information, to borrow things, to exchange money, to perform medical procedures, to cut someone’s hair, and to enter into legally binding contracts. Despite the centrality of consent to everyday moral and social life, however, little psychological research has investigated how people determine whether someone else has given valid consent, nor how attributions of consent figure in moral reasoning–how attributing the presence (or lack) of valid consent affects attributions of responsibility, obligations, and permissions to different parties. This line of research aims to understand how people reason about, and navigate, consent-based moral interactions. 

Moral psychology has been dominated by the study of judgments and behaviors concerning strangers: individuals who stand in no particular relationship to one another, and who may or may not interact in the future. These studies commonly have participants make decisions that impact anonymous others, or judge the moral acceptability of hypothetical actions taken by thinly-described agents, as in sacrificial “trolly problem” dilemmas where participants must judge the permissibility of killing one person to save a greater number. However, the vast majority of our moral judgments in everyday life do not concern strangers. Rather, they concern familiar others with whom we stand in particular, often ongoing relationships. The stakes of such moral judgments for the maintenance of our personal social networks typically are higher than the stakes of analogous judgments pertaining to strangers. Moreover, moral judgments about interactions between strangers often will differ in systematic ways from judgments about interactions between friends, family members, or other familiar individuals in the same situation. This line of research seeks to understand how our moral psychology is shaped by social-relational roles and norms that govern dyadic interactions in everyday life.