About

Shawn Tinghao Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington. His research primarily focuses on issues in ethics and moral psychology. Wang advocates for a functionalist and pluralist approach to theorizing the nature of blame. He critiques contemporary moral psychology for being too centered on guilt and argues for recognizing the moral values of other often overlooked emotions such as shame and embarrassment. Beyond ethics, his work also addresses topics including intellectual humility, intellectual pride, and the epistemic role of intuitions. Prior to joining the University of Washington, Wang worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Salzburg in Austria. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 2022.

Research topics

• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Mathematical economics
• Statistics
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Mathematics
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Embarrassment and the Social Dimensions of Moral Agency

  European Journal of Philosophy · 2026-02-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Unlike guilt and shame, embarrassment is rarely considered by philosophers to be a morally relevant emotion.This downplaying of embarrassment is well justified, given traditional views on moral agency. However, recent theorists have argued that the traditional views are too individualistic and overlook the external social conditions that they believe are part and parcel of our moral agency. Their alternative approach is often referred to as the “socially scaffolded accounts” of moral agency. In this paper, I argue that, if the socially scaffolded accounts are on the right track, then we should re‐examine the moral value of embarrassment. More specifically, I propose a moral alerting model to account for embarrassment's moral value and risks. The basic claim is that a kind of embarrassment—what I will refer to as moral embarrassment—plays an attention‐directing role in the process of responding to an audience's evaluative feedback. The moral alerting model demonstrates an intriguing tension between moral embarrassment's value and risks: though it is valuable in contributing to moral agency by virtue of its attention‐directing role, it causes systematic risks when it comes to successfully engaging with the social feedback that one is sensitive to.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Deserved guilt? A challenge from small wrongdoings

  Inquiry · 2026-01-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Intellectual Humility: Beyond the Learner Paradigm

  Erkenntnis · 2024-09-04

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Functionalist Accounts of Blame

  The Journal of Ethics · 2023-11-30 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beyond killing one to save five: Sensitivity to ratio and probability in moral judgment

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2023 · 6 citations

  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Epistemology

  A great deal of current research on moral judgments centers on moral dilemmas concerning tradeoffs between one and five lives. Whether one considers killing one innocent person to save five others to be morally required or impermissible has been taken to determine whether one is appealing to consequentialist or non-consequentialist reasoning. But this focus on tradeoffs between one and five may obscure more nuanced commitments involved in moral decision-making that are revealed when the numbers and ratio of lives to be traded off are varied, and when the probabilities of each outcome occurring are less than certain. Four studies examine participants' reactions to scenarios that diverge in these ways from the standard ones. Study 1 examines the extent to which people are sensitive to the ratio of lives saved to lives ended by a particular action. Study 2 verifies that the ratio rather than the difference between the two values is operative. Study 3 examines whether participants treat probabilistic harm to some as equivalent to certainly harming fewer, holding expected ratio constant. Study 4 explores an analogous issue regarding the sensitivity of probabilistic saving. Participants are remarkably sensitive to expected ratio for probabilistic harms while deviating from expected value for probabilistic saving. Collectively, the studies provide evidence that people's moral judgments are consistent with the principle of threshold deontology.

  PublisherDOI

• Response-Dependence in Moral Responsibility: A Granularity Challenge

  American Philosophical Quarterly · 2022-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract According to the response-dependence view of moral responsibility, a person is morally responsible just in case, and in virtue of the fact that, she is an appropriate target for reactive attitudes. This paper raises a new puzzle regarding response-dependence: there is a mismatch between the granularity of the reactive attitudes and of responsibility facts. Whereas the reactive attitudes are comparatively coarse-grained, responsibility facts can be quite fine-grained. This poses a challenge for response-dependence, which seeks to ground facts about responsibility in facts about the reactive attitudes. Specifically, reactive attitudes are not enough for grounding facts about degrees of moral responsibility. The response-dependence view thus requires significant revisions or supplementations.

  PublisherDOI

• Sensitivity to shifts in probability of harm and benefit in moral dilemmas

  Cognition · 2021 · 11 citations

  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Epistemology
  PublisherDOI

• The Communication Argument and the Pluralist Challenge

  Canadian Journal of Philosophy · 2021 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Computer Science

  Abstract Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a context-specific, function-based approach constitutes the most promising modification of the communication argument.

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• Shame and the Scope of Moral Accountability

  The Philosophical Quarterly · 2020-08-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The experimental critique and philosophical practice

  Philosophical Psychology · 2017-11-20 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Some experimental philosophers have criticized the standard intuition-based methodology in philosophy. One worry about this criticism is that it is just another version of the general skepticism toward the evidential efficacy of intuition, and is thereby subject to the same difficulties. In response, Weinberg provides a more nuanced version of the criticism by targeting merely the philosophical use of intuition. I contend that, though Weinberg’s approach differs from general skepticism about intuition, its focus on philosophical practices gives rise to a new difficulty. Most extant experimental surveys investigate intuitions about particular cases through vignettes giving little contextual information. However, philosophical practices crucially depend on intuitions about general claims and typically provide more contextual background. I argue that, due to these two differences between surveys’ and philosophers’ appeals to intuition, Weinberg’s critique lacks enough support from current experimental data. I conclude that experimental philosophers who engage in the negative program should pay more attention on testing philosophers’ use of general intuitions and context-rich intuitions.

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Frequent coauthors

• Dana Kay Nelkin

  2 shared

• Arseny A. Ryazanov

  University of California, San Diego

  2 shared

• Craig R. M. McKenzie

  2 shared

• Samuel C. Rickless

  2 shared

Labs

• Shawn Tinghao Wang LabPI