Gunnar Björnsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 334311 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gunnar Björnsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gunnar |
| FAMILY NAME | Björnsson |
| SIGNATURE | BJÖRNSSON G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3112-0673 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Being implicated: On the fittingness of guilt and indignation over outcomes
When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motiva…
Collective Responsibility and Collective Obligations Without Collective Moral Agents
It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligat…
Determinism and attributions of consciousness
The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent's behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or whether it is mediated by notions linked to agency - notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation…
Group Duties Without Decision-Making Procedures
Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties…
Strategic Content: Representations of Epistemic Modality in Biosemantics (and Success Semantics)
A central idea in Ruth Millikan's biosemantics is that a representation's content is restricted to conditions required for the normal success of actions that it has as its function to guide. This article raises and responds to a problem for this idea. The problem is that the success requirement seems to block us from saying that epistemic modal judgements represent our epistemic circumstances. For the normal success of actions guided by these jud…
Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents
Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own (analogs of) beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “corporate” agent…
Motivational internalism
A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments
Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested tha…
Strawson on ‘if’ and ⊃
This paper is concerned with Sir Peter Strawson’s critical discussion of Paul Grice’s defence of the material implication analysis of conditionals. It argues that although Strawson’s own ‘consequentialist’ suggestion concerning the meaning of conditionals cannot be correct, a related and radically contextualist account is able to both account for the phenomena that motivated Strawson’s consequentialism, and to undermine the material implication a…
Meaning as a Normative Concept: An interview with Allan Gibbard
Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents
Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own (analogs of) beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “corporate” agent…
Strawson on ‘if’ and ⊃
This paper is concerned with Sir Peter Strawson’s critical discussion of Paul Grice’s defence of the material implication analysis of conditionals. It argues that although Strawson’s own ‘consequentialist’ suggestion concerning the meaning of conditionals cannot be correct, a related and radically contextualist account is able to both account for the phenomena that motivated Strawson’s consequentialism, and to undermine the material implication a…
Meaning as a Normative Concept: An interview with Allan Gibbard
Strawson on ‘if’ and ⊃
This paper is concerned with Sir Peter Strawson’s critical discussion of Paul Grice’s defence of the material implication analysis of conditionals. It argues that although Strawson’s own ‘consequentialist’ suggestion concerning the meaning of conditionals cannot be correct, a related and radically contextualist account is able to both account for the phenomena that motivated Strawson’s consequentialism, and to undermine the material implication a…
A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments
Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested tha…
Motivational internalism
Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents
Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own (analogs of) beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “corporate” agent…
Strategic Content: Representations of Epistemic Modality in Biosemantics (and Success Semantics)
A central idea in Ruth Millikan's biosemantics is that a representation's content is restricted to conditions required for the normal success of actions that it has as its function to guide. This article raises and responds to a problem for this idea. The problem is that the success requirement seems to block us from saying that epistemic modal judgements represent our epistemic circumstances. For the normal success of actions guided by these jud…
Collective Responsibility and Collective Obligations Without Collective Moral Agents
It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligat…
Determinism and attributions of consciousness
The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent's behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or whether it is mediated by notions linked to agency - notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation…
Group Duties Without Decision-Making Procedures
Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties…
Being implicated: On the fittingness of guilt and indignation over outcomes
When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motiva…
Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Free Will and Agency (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Law (3 works)