BA, Oberlin College, 2020, Philosophy

I will define the meaning of subjective well-being that I believe is the most intrinsic normative good, explain why improving the subjective well-being of sentient individuals ought to be the highest ethical priority, and provide reasons for why finding a way to measure subjective well-being would essentially benefit decision-makers and grassroots altruists. Subjective well-being is a dauntingly nebulous property to attempt to measure with precision, but I will comment on the progress that philosophers and social scientists have made in this field. Although (1) there is no set of well-being criteria that is applicable to every sentient individual (including non-human animals) and (2) most sentient individuals are unable to communicate with us about their level of subjective well-being use or relevant experiential factors, we may yet be able to develop an intrapersonally and interpersonally cardinal method to measure subjective well-being.

Committee: Todd Ganson (Advisor) Subjects: Ethics; Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; Psychology; Welfare

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2019, Accounting

Tax compliance, or lack thereof, has been a consistent public policy issue throughout history. Based on the latest tax gap estimates for years 2008 - 2010, the IRS determined an estimated annual tax gap of about $458 billion. The majority of the tax gap (70%) relates to the individual income tax and further study is necessary in order to understand individual tax compliance behavior. Tax compliance literature historically focused on the impact of economic factors on taxpayer behavior. More recent research, however, has begun to incorporate moral, psychological and social attributes of human behavior in the quest to understand individual income tax compliance (Roth 1989, Kirchler 2007). Through a 3 (peer group) x 2 (income type) experimental tax task, this study intends to gain more understanding of the effects of peers on individual tax compliance behavior. Both tax morality and socioeconomics are explored as potential moderators of the relationship between peers and income tax compliance.

Committee: Timothy Fogarty (Committee Chair); Timothy Fogarty (Advisor); Gary Previts (Committee Member); Gregory Jonas (Committee Member); Christopher Burant (Committee Member) Subjects: Accounting; Economics

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2019, Philosophy, Applied

In this dissertation, I construct scientifically and practically adequate moral analogues of cognitive heuristics and biases. Cognitive heuristics are reasoning “shortcuts” that are efficient but flawed. Such flaws yield systematic judgment errors, cognitive biases. For example, the availability heuristic infers an event's probability by seeing how easy it is to recall similar events. Since dramatic events like airplane crashes are disproportionately easy to recall, this heuristic explains systematic overestimations of their probability (availability bias). The research program on cognitive heuristics and biases (e.g., Daniel Kahneman's work) has been scientifically successful and has yielded useful error-prevention techniques, cognitive debiasing. I try to apply this framework to moral reasoning to yield moral heuristics and biases. For instance, a moral bias of unjustified differences in animal-species treatment might be explained by a moral heuristic that dubiously infers animals' moral status from their aesthetic features. While the basis for identifying judgments as cognitive errors is often unassailable (e.g., per violating laws of logic), identifying moral errors seemingly requires appealing to moral truth, which, I argue, is problematic within science. Such appeals can be avoided by repackaging moral theories as mere “standards-of-interest” (a la non-normative metrics of purported right-making features/properties). However, standards-of-interest do not provide authority, which is needed for effective debiasing. Nevertheless, since each person deems their own subjective morality authoritative, subjective morality (qua standard-of-interest and not moral subjectivism) satisfies both scientific and practical concerns. As such, (idealized) subjective morality grounds a moral analogue of cognitive biases, subjective moral biases (e.g., committed non-racists unconsciously discriminating). I also argue that cognitive heuristic is defined by its relation to rationa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sara Worley Ph.D. (Advisor); Richard Anderson Ph.D. (Other); Theodore Bach Ph.D. (Committee Member); Michael Bradie Ph.D. (Committee Member); Michael Weber Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Ethics; Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; Psychology