Professor Neil Levy

Professor Neil Levy
Senior Research Fellow

Professor Neil Levy specializes in empirical approaches to ethics and social issues. He has published widely on many topics in philosophy, ranging from philosophy of mind to bioethics. He has published more than 150 articles in refereed journals, and 7 books, including, most recently, Consciousness and Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Journal Articles

  • Does encouraging a belief in determinism increase cheating? Reconsidering the value of believing in free will.

    Nadelhoffer, T, Shepard, J, Crone, DL, Everett, JAC, Earp, BD, Levy, N
    October 2020
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    Journal article
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    Cognition
    A key source of support for the view that challenging people's beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests.

  • The Surprising Truth About Disagreement

    LEVY, N
    June 2020
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    Journal article
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    Acta Analytica

  • Virtue signalling is virtuous

    Levy, N
    April 2020
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    Journal article
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    Synthese

  • Rationalization enables cooperation and cultural evolution.

    Levy, N
    April 2020
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    Journal article
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    The Behavioral and brain sciences
    Cushman argues that the function of rationalization is to attribute mental representations to ourselves, thereby making these representations available for future planning. I argue that such attribution is often not necessary and sometimes maladaptive. I suggest a different explanation of rationalization: making representations available to other agents, to facilitate cooperation, transmission, and the ratchet effect that underlies cumulative cultural evolution.
    Rationalization, Cultural Evolution

  • Belie the belief? Prompts and default states

    Levy, N
    January 2020
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    Journal article
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    Religion, Brain and Behavior
    © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Sometimes agents sincerely profess to believe a claim and yet act inconsistently with it in some contexts. In this paper, I focus on mismatch cases in the domain of religion. I distinguish between two kinds of representations: prompts and default states. Prompts are representations that must be salient to agents in order for them to play their belief-appropriate roles, whereas default states play these roles automatically. The need for access characteristic of prompts is explained by their vehicles: prompts are realized in symbolic systems or even artifacts that make them inapt for automatic regulation of inference and behavior. I argue that some mismatch cases are explained by the fact that agents often report the contents of prompts when they report their beliefs, but behavior is controlled by prompts only when they are made salient to agents. I show that a number of otherwise puzzling findings in the cognitive science of religion, concerning belief intuitiveness, are illuminated by the distinction.
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Books and Chapters

  • Socializing responsibility

    Levy, N
    April 2018
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    Chapter
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    Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility

  • Divine Free Will

    Mawson, TJ
    Edited by:
    Timpe, K, Levy, N, Griffith, M
    November 2016
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    Chapter
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    The Routledge Companion to Free Will

  • Persistent Vegetative State, Akinetic Mutism and Consciousness

    Davies, WH, levy, N
    Edited by:
    sinnott-armstrong, W
    March 2016
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    Chapter
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    Finding Consciousness: The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage

  • Naturalism and Free Will

    Levy, N
    February 2016
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    Chapter
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    The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism

  • Neuroscientific threats to free will

    Shepherd, JL
    Edited by:
    Timpe, K, Griffiths, M, Levy, N
    January 2016
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    Chapter
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    Routledge Companion to Free Will
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