Project description
Investigating the 'veil of ignorance' to increase impartiality
Views rooted in bias or prejudice tend to influence individuals when discussing controversial social matters. Consequently, the challenge of enhancing impartiality has become crucial for humanity. The MSCA-funded IMPARTIAL project aims to explore the methodological suitability of a specific tool employed by philosophers to encourage impartial reasoning: the ‘veil of ignorance’ (VOI) thought experiment. This thought experiment seeks to eliminate knowledge regarding one's gender, race, income, and other morally irrelevant attributes that may distort judgment. The project will assess the extent to which irrelevant factors impact VOI reasoning, evaluate the effectiveness of such reasoning, and explore the philosophical implications arising from the results.
Objective
We are living in an age of increased moral disagreement and polarization. One explanation for this trend is partiality. People on one or both sides of contested social issue (abortion, COVID-19, climate change, etc.) do not give equal or adequate weight to the interests of all those concerned. Their views are based on bias or prejudice. Finding ways of increasing impartiality may therefore be one of the most important tasks that humanity currently faces. My project attempts to contribute to this task. In particular, I will investigate one particular device that philosophers have used to promote impartial reasoning, namely the so called “veil of ignorance” thought experiment — an attempt to abstract from knowledge about one’s gender, race, income and other morally irrelevant characteristics that might distort one’s judgments.
Previous research has only focused on people’s actual choices behind the veil of ignorance. My project, in contrast, will investigate the methodological appropriateness of this thought experiment. (1) How robust is the VOI (i.e. to what extent are the judgments people arrive at by engaging in the thought experiment influenced by irrelevant factors)? (2) How effective is the VOI (i.e. to what extent does it fulfill the function it was supposed to fulfill)? (3) What are the larger philosophical implications of these findings?
The framework that I will use in investigating these questions is that of experimental philosophy. That is, I will run empirical studies on people’s intuitions to inform philosophical argumentation. Being supervised by leading experts at the Universities of Tokyo (outgoing phase), Graz (return phase), Oxford (secondment) and Auckland (secondment), my research has the potential to significantly impact a number of debates in both philosophy and psychology — and hopefully, it can also make a small contribution to making morality more impartial in public discourse.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionethics
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophypolitical philosophy
- social sciencespsychologycognitive psychology
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global FellowshipsCoordinator
8010 Graz
Austria