By Anu Sawhney (CAS’20)
Victor Kumar is no stranger to challenging questions. An assistant professor of philosophy at BU’s College of Arts & Sciences, he takes the most pressing questions posed through moral philosophy and tries to answer them using scientific methodology. He created the Mind and Morality Lab in 2017 to bring BU scientists and philosophers together to engage in this kind of interdisciplinary research.
Casey Lewry (CAS’19) is also drawn to investigating challenging questions. A philosophy and psychology major, she found out about the Mind and Morality Lab after attending one of Kumar’s talks. Intrigued, Lewry decided to approach the professor about investigating some of her ideas together.
Together they have teamed up to study how empathy and reasoning are used together to influence attitudes towards certain social groups.
“[Hypothetically], if I don’t like a particular social group—for example, people who are gay—but I feel empathy towards my brother who comes out as gay, I can reason that there’s no relevant difference between him and other people who are gay, so I am capable of feeling empathy towards and accepting the whole group,” explains Lewry, while demonstrating how the study would work.
“We’re interested in the conditions under which this occurs: What are the relevant factors that allow or inhibit one to expand empathy from an individual to a group? One factor we’re particularly interested in is whether it matters if the trait is perceived as inherent or adopted/chosen,” she adds. They are currently designing a psychological study to investigate this, thanks to a Karbank Fellowship Lewry received from the philosophy department to continue the research with Kumar through the summer and after graduation.
“Professor Kumar is able to synthesize these ideas into something coherent and then push them further,” she says. “Overall, we work really well together because we both have the same interests—morality and moral progress—and are interested in using both psychological and philosophical methods to better understand them.”
The lure of interdisciplinarity
Though Kumar, who received a Peter Paul Career Development Professorship in Fall 2019 for his work as a junior faculty member, now specializes in moral psychology, ethics, and cognitive neuroscience, he concedes that this was not where he started out academically. The interdisciplinary nature of his liberal arts foundation changed his path. “When I was an undergraduate, I was a double major in biology and psychology, and I thought I would go to grad school for one of those subjects.” During his senior year, however, he took a philosophy class and realized that a lot of the questions he had were not exclusively being worked on in science departments. So he changed his pursuit and became an academic who helps natural science and philosophy majors work together.
In this way, Victor has been searching for the same answers to some of the same questions he had in his science classes. These questions are usually at the intersection of cognitive science and ethics, in particular medical ethics, evolutionary theory, and social justice. “I was always interested in old, pressing philosophical questions about morality that seemed to me more like empirical questions—the questions that scientific methodology could help answer.”
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Anu Sawhney (CAS’20) is a senior majoring in philosophy and political science and minoring in journalism. She’s interested in cultural reporting and spends a lot of her free time reading, tweeting, and on the hunt for Boston’s best restaurants.
(Photos: Victor Kumar and Cawey Lewry)