Cooperation enables humans to reshape entire environments and build complex societies. Although often celebrated, cooperation also has hidden costs. By presenting core mechanisms behind its emergence,...

Why do we hurt people in the name of morality? Here we elaborate on the theory that moral judgment is an evolutionary strategy for choosing sides in conflicts. Hurting wrongdoers is part of the strat...

A recent strand of literature argues that the importance of epistemic virtues is overstated and that knowledge generation and transmission benefit from traits that can be characterised as epistemic vi...

YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

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In this episode of Future of Journalism we discuss one of the hottest topics in journalism right now which is how people are responding to the growing role of AI in news and wider society. We’ll look ...

On factory farming, the Holocaust and hypocrisy

YouTube video by The Dissenter

Well-known flaws in conventional polling methods may be creating the incorrect perception that many Americans think political violence is justified.

On Information Asymmetries, Value Differences and Genetics

The fascinating exceptions in the animal kingdom to patterns of longevity.

Hicks et al. (Ethics Inf Technol 26:38, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 , 2024) argue that ChatGPT is indifferent to truth and produces bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005). Warning against hype around these tools in education, they offer supporting semantic and pragmatic arguments. This article shows how existing responses in Fisher (Ethics Inf Technol 26:67, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09802-5 , 2024), Tigard (AI Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-025-00743-3 , 2025), and Gunkel and Coghlan (Ethics Inf Technol 27:23, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-025-09828-3 , 2025) fail to address the argument on its own terms or only partially address it. Clarifying their case, I offer a novel rebuttal that addresses their framework fully and on its own terms. I provide responses to both the semantic and pragmatic strands of their case. Semantically, I show that the Frankfurtian critique of ChatGPT has implausible implications and is incoherent in its broader aims. However, the reasons for its failure provide important insights into the functional nature of Large Language Models. Drawing on Wright (Philos Rev 82:2, 1973), and Houkes and Vermaas (Technical functions: on the use and design of artefacts. Springer, Dordrecht, 2010) I distinguish between several different philosophical models of functionality and offer a novel analogy to better understand the nature of LLMs. Pragmatically, I present evidence that the rhetoric of bullshit is counterproductive in the educational field, a key policy arena. I set out a new typology of approaches to GenAI in education and describe how the bullshit-frame is inconsistent with current pedagogical consensus on best practice. I show how this rhetoric undermines key elements in emerging harm reduction strategies, and obscures potential opportunities in both the technology and the educational reforms that face us. This casts doubt on the value of Frankfurtian-style critiques but leaves the door open to better targeted AI-critical concepts.

Historical psychology is an emerging area of research aimed at understanding how historical processes influence the mind, including people’s beliefs, …

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Jack sits down with philosophers Jason Hill and Elizabeth S. Anderson to tackle a timely and urgent question: How do we do philosophy during difficult times? From the rise of AI and shifting political...

In recent decades, a large body of work has highlighted the importance of emotional processes in moral cognition. Since then, a heterogeneous bundle of emotions as varied as anger, guilt, shame, contempt, empathy, gratitude, and disgust have been proposed to play an essential role in moral psychology. However, the inclusion of these emotions in the moral domain often lacks a clear functional rationale, generating conflations between merely social and properly moral emotions. Here, we build on (i) evolutionary theories of morality as an adaptation for attracting others' cooperative investments, and on (ii) specifications of the distinctive form and content of moral cognitive representations. On this basis, we argue that only indignation ("moral anger") and guilt can be rigorously characterized as moral emotions, operating on distinctively moral representations. Indignation functions to reclaim benefits to which one is morally entitled, without exceeding the limits of justice. Guilt functions to motivate individuals to compensate their violations of moral contracts. By contrast, other proposed moral emotions (e.g. empathy, shame, disgust) appear only superficially associated with moral cognitive contents and adaptive challenges. Shame doesn't track, by design, the respect of moral obligations, but rather social valuation, the two being not necessarily aligned. Empathy functions to motivate prosocial behavior between interdependent individuals, independently of, and sometimes even in contradiction with the prescriptions of moral intuitions. While disgust is often hypothesized to have acquired a moral role beyond its pathogen-avoidance function, we argue that both evolutionary rationales and psychological evidence for this claim remain inconclusive for now.