Gunnar BjörnssonHead of Department
About me
After receiving my PhD from Stockholm University in 1998, I've held postdoctoral and research fellowships at the University of Connecticut, Stockholm University and the University of Gothenburg, an Associate Professorship at Linköping University, and a Professorship at Umeå University, before taking up my current position. I've recently led a research projects on moral motivation (in Gothenburg) and one on responsibility in complex systems (in Umeå). I also coordinated the Gothenburg Responsibility Project from its inception in 2011 until 2015, when we secured a 10-year SRC grant and recruited Professor Paul Russell to lead the project. My current research project, Explanations of Responsibility, is funded by the SRC and is concerned with developing a general theory of moral responsibility and the psychology of responsibility attributions. Apart from research, my time has been devoted to co-authoring several books in Swedish on critical thinking and informal logic.
Research interests
Most of my research interests fall into metaethics, moral psychology, naturalized theories of cognition, philosophy of language, and moral responsibility. In the area of moral responsibility, I work on unified accounts of responsibility and attributions of responsibility, with a particular interest in moral responsibility skepticism and attributions of responsibility to groups and organizations. The guiding idea has been to start with an empirically adequate account of why attributions of responsibility display the patterns they do. Based on such an account, we can understand why people are prone to skepticism when considering the possibility of determinism or external causes of actions, and why people are tempted to attribute shared moral responsibility to groups and to hold nations and
corporations responsible while being worried that lack of individual control undermines responsibility. With that understanding, we are then better placed to determine the correctness of compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions and judgments and attributions of moral responsibility to groups.
In metaethics, my main interests have been moral disagreement and the relation between moral judgment and moral motivation, and what these tell us about the nature of moral judgment. My effort to understand moral disagreement has been largely guided by an effort to understand disagreement phenomena more generally, in particular disagreement about what seems to be relative or subjective matters of fact: taste, epistemic modalities, and certain kinds of normative judgments. Based on completely general accounts of attributions of disagreement and attributions of correctness and incorrectness, I have argued that such attributions do not lend any support to absolutist accounts of moral judgments.
My attempt to understand the relation between moral judgments and motivation have used a similar method, beginning with an attempt to understand why we classify certain states of mind as judgments of moral wrongness, and how information about an agent’s motivational states affects such attributions. Some aspects of these classifications might seem to support motivational internalism—the idea that moral judgments necessarily involve motivational states such as desires—whereas others point in the opposite direction. Motivational internalism seems to go particularly well with the idea that moral judgments are non-cognitive states while being in tension with the idea that moral judgments are beliefs in non-subjective facts. Here I have argued that the best account for classificatory intuitions falls within a broadly non-cognitivist tradition without assuming that moral judgments are necessarily motivating.
Selected recent publications
Björnsson, G. and Hess, K. M. 2017: “Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporations”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94, pp. 273–98
Björnsson, G. 2015: “Disagreement, correctness, and the evidence for metaethical absolutism”, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 10, pp. 160–187.
Björnsson, G., McPherson, T. 2014: “Moral Attitudes for Non-Cognitivists: Solving the specification problem”, Mind, 124: 1–38.
Björnsson, G. 2014: “Essentially Shared Obligations”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 38 Forward-Looking Collective Moral Responsibility, pp. 103–120.
Björnsson, G., Persson, K. 2013: “A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 87: 611-39.
Björnsson, G., Persson, K. 2012: “The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility”, Noûs 46(2): 326–354.
Björnsson, G., Finlay, S. 2010: “Metaethical contextualism defended”, Ethics 121:1 pp. 7-36.
