prof. dr. Maureen Sie

Bio

Maureen Sie research interests are in philosophy of action, moral psychology and meta-ethics, specializing in moral responsibility, free will, self-control and the adaptive unconscious.

In March 2017 Sie was appointed a full professor philosophy of moral agency at TSHD and director of the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, & Philosophy of Science (TiLPS). Before that she was professor of philosophical anthropology on behalf of the Socrates Foundation, at the Institute of Philosophy, Leiden and Associate Professor of Meta-ethics & Moral Psychology at the department of Philosophy, Erasmus University in Rotterdam. From 2009 to 2014 she has led a small research-group funded by a prestigious personal grant of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research, exploring the implications of the developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscience for our concept of moral agency, reasons-responsiveness (free will), and personal responsibility.

Expertise

Most recently Sie has published on implicit bias and moral responsibility, engaging with the empirical literature on the mechanisms and impact of implicit biases; the social dimension of moral responsibility, engaging with the philosophical discussion on free will; the importance of emotions (tokens of appraisal, sentiments) to our everyday moral practices, engaging with the empirical literature on influences on our behaviour that escape our awareness and attention; moral hypocrisy, criticising the widely shared paradigm in social psychology that we are all moral hypocrites; and love as the 'biological platform' of morality.

In her older publications she has been concerned with the neuroscientific challenges to free will (in Trends in Cognitive Science, Vol 12/1 pp 3-4 (2008)); Free Will as an Illusion (Lexington Books, pp 273-289), and how to justify blame without free will (a monograph published with Rodopi).

Highlights

More information can be found on my personal webpage (https://maureensie.wordpress.com) and my Academia webpage (http://tilburguniversity.academia.edu/MaureenSie)

Recent publications

1. Using Stars for Moral Navigation - An Ethical Exploration into Celebr…

   Archer, A., & Sie, M. (2023). Using Stars for Moral Navigation: An Ethical Exploration into Celebrity. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 40 (2), 340-357.

2. Minds - Big questions for linguistics in the age of AI

   Backus, A., Cohen, M., Cohn, N., Faber, M., Krahmer, E., Laparle, S., Maier, E., Miltenburg, E. V., Roelofsen, F., Sciubba, E., Scholman, M., Shterionov, D., Sie, M., Tomas, F., Vanmassenhove, E., Venhuizen, N., & Vos, C. D. (2023). Minds: Big questions for linguistics in the age of AI. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 40(1), 301-308.

3. Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias and The Impact of Social Categ…

   Sie, M. (2022). Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias and The Impact of Social Categorization. In D. Pereboom, & D. Nelkin (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Responsibility (pp. 668-96). Oxford University Press.

4. Why Ethical Reflection Matters: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy

   Engelen, B., & Sie, M. (2021). Why Ethical Reflection Matters: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy. In B. Engelen, & M. Sie (Eds.), Second Thoughts: First Introductions to Philosophy Open Press TiU.

5. Second Thoughts - First Introductions to Philosophy

   Sie, M., & Engelen, B. (Eds.) (2021). Second Thoughts: First Introductions to Philosophy. (1 ed.) Open Press TiU.