My current research interests are largely in ethics and decision theory. My publications for Rethink Priorities can be found here.
I started my career as a philosopher of biology and cognitive science, and I still do research in these areas. I have particular interests in the history of evolutionary theorizing, especially Darwin's and especially about the nature of human and animal minds.
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Ethics and Decision Theory
Clatterbuck, H. and Fischer, B. (2025). Navigating uncertainty about sentience. Ethics, 135(2), 229-258.
Clatterbuck, H., Castro, C, and Muñoz Morán, A. (2024). Risk alignment in agentic AI systems. arXiv:2410.01927 [cs.CY]
Philosophy of Biology
Clatterbuck, H. (2024). Reason and morality in the Descent of Man. In: Gayon, E., Huneman, P., Petit, V., Veuille, M. (eds). 150 Years of the Descent of Man. Springer. [draft]
Clatterbuck, H. (2022). Darwin's causal argument against creationism. Philosophers' Imprint, 22.
Clatterbuck, H. (2020). A defense of low probability scientific explanations. Philosophy of Science, 87, 91-112.
Slater, M. and Clatterbuck, H. (2018). A pragmatic approach to the possibility of de-extinction. Biology & Philosophy, 33(4).
Clatterbuck, H. (2015). Drift beyond Wright-Fisher. Synthese, 192(11), 3487-3507.
Clatterbuck, H., Sober, E., and Lewontin, R. (2013). Selection never dominates drift (nor vice versa). Biology & Philosophy, 28(4), 577-592.
Barrett, M., Clatterbuck, H., Goldsby, M., Helgeson, C., McLoone, B., Pearce, T., Sober, E., Stern, R., and Weinberger, N. (2012). Puzzles for ZFEL, McShea and Brandon’s zero force evolutionary law. Biology & Philosophy, 27(5), 723-735.
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Clatterbuck, H. and Gentry, H. (accepted). Learning incommensurate concepts. Synthese.
Clatterbuck, H. (2024). Hume's externalist gambit. Philosophy of Science, 91(5), 1296-1305.
Dedhe, A., Clatterbuck, H., Piantadosi, S., and Cantlon, J. (2023). Origins of hierarchical logic. Cognitive Science. 47(2), 13250.
Clatterbuck, H. (2018). The logical problem and the theoretician's dilemma. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 97(2), 322-350.
Clatterbuck, H. (2018). Using causal models to think about mindreading. In K. Andrews and J. Beck (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Animal Minds (pp. 247-257). New York: Routledge.
Clatterbuck, H. (2018). Dennett's Canon and major cognitive transitions. Revista Teorema, 38(3).
Clatterbuck, H. (2016). Darwin, Hume, Morgan, and the verae causae of psychology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 60, 1-14. [Winner of the 2017 SHPS-C Article Prize]
Clatterbuck, H. (2015). Chimpanzee mindreading and the value of parsimonious mental models. Mind & Language, 30(4), 414-436. [Target article of a symposium at the Brains Blog]
Miscellaneous
Clatterbuck, H. (2021). Review of Ben Bradley, Darwin's Psychology. Quarterly Review of Biology, 96(3), 209-210.
Clatterbuck, H. (2013). The epistemology of thought experiments: a non-eliminativist, non-Platonic account. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 3(3), 309-329.