Is the human mind receptive to reasons? A confrontation with experimental social psychology

Raphaël Künstler (Université Toulouse II-Jean Jaurès)

We are pleased to invite you to the next session of the Empirically Informed Philosophy of Mind online Seminar 

Who: Raphaël Künstler (Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès)
When: Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 — 5:00–6:30 pm (CET)
Where: Online via Zoom:
https://pantheonsorbonne.zoom.us/j/92782580594?pwd=a5p3WfunQQxJICrjJaUenFJFzmllbx.1
What: Is the human mind receptive to reasons? A confrontation with experimental social psychology

Do social psychology experiments that vary the situational parameters of subjects' decision-making have implications for our conception of moral psychology, or even ethics? Situationist philosophers answer this question in the affirmative. While the first wave of situationism believes that social psychology should lead us to abandon the existence of character and, correlatively, virtue ethics (Harman 1999, Doris 2002), the second wave questions the possibility of holding ordinary agents morally responsible after learning about their behavior in situations invented by psychologists (Zhang 2018). The situationist threat is considered to primarily affect the attribution of responsibility based on the conception of responsibility as the capacity to respond to reasons (Nelkin 2005). Several articles seek to maintain the moral responsibility of ordinary agents on the basis of a modal argument (Brinks 2013, Hardova 2017, McKenna 2018). But as Sartorio (2018) has pointed out, this argument changes the subject. however, Sartorio’s own defense of moral responsibility is not convincing. In this presentation, I will propose another strategy for defending responsibility conceived as sensitivity to reasons, that is, a strategy that questions the moral judgment presupposed by the formulation of the problem to be solved.

For any questions, please contact:
Sacha Behrend — [email protected]
Elodie Boissard — [email protected]

Program

• 17 Sept 2025: Géraldine Carranante — Can we list what we can see?
• 1 Oct 2025: Jérôme Dokic — Two levels of confusion between Imagination and Memory
• 12 Nov 2025: Margherita Arcangeli — Episodic Memory through the lens of Aphantasia
• 3 Dec 2025: James Grayot — How do embodied and extended minds internalize contents?
• 13 Jan 2026: Raphaël Künstler — Is the human mind receptive to reasons? A confrontation with experimental social psychology
• 4 Feb 2026: Constant Bonard — Can a Belief–Desire Theory Explain All Affective States?
• 11 March 2026: Lucie Berkovitch — TBA

Organizers:

Sacha Behrend — Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Hradec Králové (Czech Republic) / Affiliated Researcher, Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques (IHPST), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Elodie Boissard — Postdoctoral Researcher, Bordeaux Neurocampus Department / Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives et Intégratives d’Aquitaine (UMR 5287), Université de Bordeaux, CNRS