Papers by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Clean Hands
Scrupulous moral judgments vary from moral judgments made by those without Scrupulosity. The cont... more Scrupulous moral judgments vary from moral judgments made by those without Scrupulosity. The content of Scrupulous moral judgments are perfectionist, which conflates what is ideal with what is obligatory, conflates the moral evaluation of thoughts and actions, and is influenced by chronic doubt and intolerance of uncertainty. Anxiety motivates Scrupulous moral judgments. Scrupulosity is both judgment-driven—one’s judgments evoke anxiety—and anxiety-driven—anxiety prompts rationalizing judgments and even causes beliefs. Anxiety leads to systematic distortions in one’s moral judgments. Anxiety leads one to act in a way that soothes one’s anxiety. Genuine moral judgments respond to all morally relevant features, not just a narrow set thereof. Anxiety narrows one’s attention, often to features that are not the most morally relevant, and is unresponsive to counterevidence. Scrupulous moral thought leads to excessive precision and to focus on features that rationalize one’s anxiety.
Deleted Journal, Jun 14, 2024
Clean Hands
Responsibility admits of degrees, and Scrupulosity seems to diminish responsibility for harms cau... more Responsibility admits of degrees, and Scrupulosity seems to diminish responsibility for harms caused to some degree. We focus on whether Scrupulosity provides an excuse that reduces or removes moral liability responsibility for bad actions or consequences. More precisely, we distinguish attributability, answerability, and accountability responsibility. Our question is whether someone with Scrupulosity is accountability responsible—whether it is fitting to feel anger, resentment, or indignation toward them—for harms they cause. We consider two compatibilist theories of responsibility: deep-self theories and reasons-responsiveness theories. Unlike deep-self theories, reasons-responsiveness theories can distinguish scrupulous actions by distinguishing responding to reasons from responding to anxiety. Finally, we address whether present responsibility can be traced to one’s previous bad decisions and cases in which one was clearly responsible.
Clean Hands
We are sometimes justified in encouraging, pressuring, or requiring those with Scrupulosity to se... more We are sometimes justified in encouraging, pressuring, or requiring those with Scrupulosity to seek treatment, even if they object on moral grounds. The justification for treating OCD does not apply to Scrupulosity. Possible justifications for treatment over moral objection are harm to self or others, distress, future gratitude, community treatment standards, and internal incoherence of one’s beliefs due to arbitrariness, conflation, or fixation. All of these justifications avoid explicit appeals to the therapist’s own moral standards. Some forms of treatment raise no distinctive moral issues, but some raise ethical issues because they require the person to do things the person considers immoral. This can be alleviated in part by good communication with the therapist about the point of such treatment.
Clean Hands, 2019
Scrupulosity is a mental illness. This is not determined simply by inclusion in or exclusion from... more Scrupulosity is a mental illness. This is not determined simply by inclusion in or exclusion from the current DSM. The features that characterize Scrupulosity needn’t be disordered, and this chapter addresses skepticism—eliminativism and social constructionism—about mental illness more generally. Illnesses, according to skeptics about mental illness, require physical markers and a value-free diagnosis. These are not present for Scrupulosity, nor are they present for many mental illnesses. The chapter considers dysfunction and harm as definitive of mental illness. It then examines the DSM-5 definition of mental illness and finds that Scrupulosity fits that definition.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2011
Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has re... more Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether “moral judgments” are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment of moral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmfu...
Clean Hands
Scrupulosity dates back millennia and is widely reported in Catholic and Protestant traditions ov... more Scrupulosity dates back millennia and is widely reported in Catholic and Protestant traditions over the last half-century. This chapter looks more generally at obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is characterized by obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are recurrent and persistent, intrusive and unwanted, unjustified, and anxiety-evoking. Also, OCD needs to be distinguished from a different condition with a similar name: obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). Whereas OCD is an anxiety disorder, OCPD is a personality disorder, that is, a disorder in those stable traits that make up one’s personality. The chapter addresses difficulties in determining whether obsessions are beliefs: normal tests of beliefs fail in the case of OCD and Scrupulosity. It next considers compulsions, repetitive behaviors performed in response to obsessions that aim to prevent or reduce anxiety or distress.
Clean Hands, 2019
Morality is central to our lives and regulates our behavior even absent external punishment or re... more Morality is central to our lives and regulates our behavior even absent external punishment or reward. Because morality is complicated, it is best studied from multiple perspectives and disciplines. We here propose studying morality from the perspective of psychiatry. Moral psychiatry, as we call this new subfield, focuses on mental illnesses whose content is closely related to morality, using psychiatric conditions to illuminate morality. This ultimately sheds light on ordinary moral functioning without unrealistically idealizing our psychology. Scrupulosity is an example of how psychiatric conditions can illuminate morality and test philosophical theories in various ways.
In recent years, diminished belief in free will or increased belief in determinism have been asso... more In recent years, diminished belief in free will or increased belief in determinism have been associated with a range of antisocial or otherwise negative outcomes: unjustified aggression, cheating, prejudice, less helping behavior, and so on. Only a few studies have entertained the possibility of prosocial or otherwise positive outcomes, such as greater willingness to forgive and less motivation to punish retributively. Here, five studies (open data, materials, and pre-print at https://osf.io/hmy39/) explore the relationship between belief in determinism and another positive outcome or attribute, namely, humility. The reported findings suggest that relative disbelief in free will is reliably associated in our samples with at least one type of humility—what we call ‘Einsteinian’ humility—but is not associated with, or even negatively associated with, other types of humility described in the literature.
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 5, 2015
Patients with Scrupulosity, a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with moral or religious obses... more Patients with Scrupulosity, a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with moral or religious obsessions and/or compulsions, appear to make moral judgments that are stricter or more stringent than others' moral judgments. This may suggest that Scrupulosity is a condition characterized by higher moral standards. This chapter explains why those with Scrupulosity are, instead, making systematically distorted moral judgments. First, it describes Scrupulosity as a distinctive form of OCD that characteristically exhibits three features: perfectionism, moral thought-action fusion, and chronic doubt. These features, which individually are compatible with genuine moral judgments, are the expression of underlying anxiety and thus lead to judgments that are distorted in at least three ways: (1) Anxiety narrows one's attention to a small, self-focused range of factors that will best soothe one's anxiety, at the expense of other factors that may be morally more important. (2) Anxiety leads one to focus on some factors that are not morally relevant. (3) Anxiety makes one's judgments inflexible.
Philosophical Psychology, 2014
Scrupulosity (a form of OCD involving obsession with morality) raises fascinating issues about th... more Scrupulosity (a form of OCD involving obsession with morality) raises fascinating issues about the nature of moral judgment and about moral responsibility. After defining scrupulosity, describing its common features, and discussing concrete case studies, we discuss three peculiar aspects of moral judgments made by scrupulous patients: perfectionism, intolerance of uncertainty, and moral thought-action fusion. We then consider whether mesh and reasons-responsiveness accounts of responsibility explain whether the scrupulous are morally responsible.
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2020
's Clean Hands: Philosophical Lessons from scrupulosity is an intriguing and informative work. Th... more 's Clean Hands: Philosophical Lessons from scrupulosity is an intriguing and informative work. The subject matter covered in this monograph is a special type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) named 'scrupulosity'. It is a philosophically interesting psychiatric condition because it is widely characterised by an obsession with morally and religiously relevant affairs. Like other forms of OCD, scrupulosity also involves pathological obsessions and difficulties in controlling one's thoughts and behaviours. Yet, the content of scrupulosity brings distinctive moral and philosophical issues which are not necessarily shared with other forms of OCD. When it comes to having an OCD about hand washing, for instance, we would not feel puzzled about whether the compulsive behaviour is a virtuous action. Yet, we would, when it comes to scrupulosity: if a person with scrupulosity spends unusually long hours on checking the receipts of their customers every day to ensure that they didn't accidentally overcharge them, should we view their 'dedication' as a virtuous action, or should we view it as a pathological behaviour which might require psychiatric treatments? It is also unclear whether it is people with scrupulosity who need treatment to lower their atypically high standards, or, whether we, people without scrupulosity, who need a strong dose of moral enhancement. In this carefully organised monograph, Summers and Sinnott-Armstrong argue that scrupulosity is better characterised as a psychiatric condition rather than as moral sainthood. To persuade their readers that scrupulosity is indeed a psychiatric condition which sometimes might warrant treatment, Summers and Sinnott-Armstrong offer a very comprehensive introduction to scrupulosity in the first four chapters, equipping their readers with the necessary knowledge of scrupulosity to examine the philosophical implications brought about by scrupulosity. Chapter 1 introduces 14 cases of scrupulosity to help readers get a sense about what it is like to have scrupulosity. Chapter 2 delineates the general features of OCD, and Chapter 3 explains why scrupulosity is now understood as a special type of OCD by most psychiatrists and the famous DSM-5. After establishing the link between OCD and scrupulosity, Summers and Sinnott-Armstrong shift their attention to mental illness in Chapter 4. They argue that while currently many mental illnesses' physical markers remain unknown and the diagnosis of mental illnesses requires the doctors to make certain value judgements, these concerns nonetheless are not significant enough for one to conclude that mental illness is merely a myth. Chapter 5 addresses questions regarding whether or not people with scrupulosity are virtuous. Concerning these questions, Summers and Sinnott-Armstrong give a
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2010
In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge, Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitio... more In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge, Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make, regarding the salience of an alternative, in his critique of Stanley. Our data indicate that neither raising the possibility of error nor raising stakes moves most people from attributing knowledge to denying it. However, the raising of stakes (but not alternatives) does affect the level of confidence people have in their attributions of knowledge. We argue that our data impugn what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our common-sense judgments about such cases are.
Questions of Character, 2016
Biopsychosocial theories of mental illness claim that biological, psychological, and social facto... more Biopsychosocial theories of mental illness claim that biological, psychological, and social factors are all central to every mental illness. This general approach cannot be assessed or employed properly without specifying the precise relation between mental illnesses and these three levels of understanding. This chapter distinguishes disjunctive, causal, explanatory, therapeutic (or treatment), and constitutive (or definitional) versions of biopsychosocial theories. However, all of these claims are uncontroversial and not distinctive of the biopsychosocial approach, except the constitutive claim. That constitutive claim is inaccurate, because almost all mental illnesses are and should be defined by their psychological symptoms instead of their biological or social causes. These lessons are applied to case studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, disinhibited social engagement disorder, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and scrupulosity.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2010
... Abstract: It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understandin... more ... Abstract: It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. ... I just want to make as much profit as I can. ...
Moral knowledge?: new readings in moral epistemology! edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Mark Ti... more Moral knowledge?: new readings in moral epistemology! edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Mark Timmons. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-19-508989-8 (pbk.
G. E. Moore’s diatribe against the naturalistic fallacy in 1903 set the stage for most of twentie... more G. E. Moore’s diatribe against the naturalistic fallacy in 1903 set the stage for most of twentieth-century moral philosophy. The main protagonists over the next sixty years were intuitionists and emotivists, both of whom were convinced by Moore that empirical science is irrelevant to moral philosophy and common moral beliefs. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, when a wider array of moral theories entered the scene and applied ethics became popular, few moral philosophers paid much attention to developments in biology and psychology. This isolation must end. Moral philosophers cannot continue to ignore developments in psychology, brain science, and biology. Of course, philosophers need to be careful when they draw lessons from empirical research. As Moore and his followers argued, we should not jump straight from descriptive premises in psychology or biology to positive moral conclusions or normative conclusions in moral epistemology. That would be a fallacy.2 Nonetheless, psychology can ...
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Papers by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong