Philosophers have stood nearly alone in claiming that "trust in AI" and "trustworthy AI" is conceptual nonsense. In this empirical paper we find instead that it is perfectly coherent and that philosophers may have lost the plot on "trust".
Full Citation: Ethan Landes, Scott Claessens, and Jim A. C. Everett. Trust in AI is Not a Conceptual Confusion. Ergo, 2027.
Why do people find LLM-generated moral advice convincing? Worryingly, it is because it strikes them as "good enough".
Full Citation: Ethan Landes, Kathryn B. Francis, and Jim A. C. Everett. People defer to AI moral advice, but not blindly. Cognition, 272:106504, July 2026.
We argue that AI moral advice can be used responsibly to help develop one's own morality, but only if we take the right epistemic stance towards it.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes, Cristina Voinea, and Radu Uszkai. Rage against the authority machines: how to design artificial moral advisors for moral enhancement. AI & Society, 40(4):2237–2248, April 2025.
This project developed a way to measure and test whether interventions changed a person's conceptual content, focusing on the concepts DINOSAUR and PLANET. Easily my favorite of my own experimental papers.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes and Kevin Reuter. Conceptual Revision in Action. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, April 2025.
A paper in which I argue that if conceptual engineers are serious about improving the concepts people use, the methods of conceptual engineering should look nothing like the methods of armchair philosophy.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Conceptual Engineering Should be Empirical. Erkenntnis, February 2025.
An experimental paper examining how people's interpretations of novel concepts are affected by what those novel concepts are called.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Is it a tastytaste or a greedgrab? The importance of label choice in language design. Philosophical Psychology, 0(0):1–28, 2025.
There are different ways of understanding the claim that conceptual engineering is or is not a new method of philosophy. We distinguish three, mapping out how they differ, how plausible they are, and how to go about more definitely establishing each.
Full Citation: Krzysztof Sękowski and Ethan Landes. Conceptual engineering is old news. The Philosophical Quarterly, pages pqae087, July 2024.
Some authors have tried to defend thought experiments from empirical critique by arguing said passages argue by argument, not intuition. This paper argues that because thought experiments have changed many people's minds and the purported arguments aren't very good, intuition denial makes the problem it tries to solve worse.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes. The threat of the intuition-shaped hole. Inquiry, 66(4):539–564, April 2023.
A paper exploring how philosophers learn from one another.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts. Philosophical Studies, 180(1):207–225, January 2023.
A short discussion of the way much scholarship on AI "empathy" inappropriately commodifies empathy and should instead emphasize improving our own human capacities for caring about others.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes and J.A.C. Everett. AI Should Develop Human Empathy, Not Replace It. In Anat Perry and C. Daryl Cameron, editors, Empathy and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges, Advances, and Ethical Considerations. Cambridge University Press, 2027.
This paper uses public health messaging at the start of COVID to draw broader lessons about the ethics and efficacy of language choice.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes. How Language Teaches and Misleads: "Coronavirus" and "Social Distancing" as Case Studies. In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Steffen Koch, and Kevin Scharp, editors, New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Synthese Library, 2025.
In a study across 12 countries we find that even though people distrust moral advice from AI more than moral advice from humans, AI moral advice is still persusasive.
Full Citation: Scott Claessens, Konrad Bocian, Paulo Boggio, Grégory Fiorio, Léo Fitouchi, Zeynep Genc, Ivar R Hannikainen, Lea C Kamitz, Tamino Konur, Ethan Landes, Peng Liu, Katarzyna Miazek, Waldir M Sampaio, Jorge Suárez, Pierce Veitch, Onurcan Yilmaz, Hongbo Yu, and Jim A C Everett. Trust in artificial moral advisors across cultures. March 2026.
The University of St Andrews, 2021
My dissertation argues that yes, experimental philosophy can reveal facts about philosophers' epistemic standing. But to tell a full picture of the epistemology of philosophy, I argue we need to also draw insights from anthropology, sociology, and lexicography.
Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Philosophy and philosophy: the subject matter and the discipline. PhD thesis, The University of St Andrews, June 2021.