In her book Uneasy Virtue, Julia Driver presents an account of motive or trait utilitarianism, one that has been taken as “the most detailed and thoroughly defended recent formulation” of consequential virtue ethics. On Driver's account character traits are morally virtuous if and only if they generally lead to good consequences for society. Various commentators have taken Driver to task over this account of virtue, which she terms “pure evaluational externalism.” They object that, on Driver's account of virtue, it could (...) turn out that traits traditionally understood as pernicious are actually virtuous. While many writers have speculated about the forms new 'virtues' might take in a hypothetical world, I will argue that at least one trait that is seemingly pernicious but would have to be counted as virtuous by Driver already exists. (shrink)

A discussion of why a strong doctrine of 'reason' may not be worth sustaining in the face of modern scientific speculation, and the difficulties this poses for scientific rationality, together with comments on the social understanding of religion, and why we might wish to transcend common sense.

Consistent materialists are almost bound to suggest that , if it exists at all, is no more than epiphenomenal. A correct understanding of the real requires that everything we do and say is no more than a product of whatever processes are best described by physics, without any privileged place, person, time or scale of action. Consciousness is a myth, or at least a figment. Plotinus was no materialist: for him, it is Soul and Intellect that are more real than (...) the phenomena we misdescribe as material. Nor does he suppose that consciousness depends on language (as Stoics and modern materialists have sometimes said): wordless experience is actually superior. And much of what counts towards our present consciousness is to be discarded. It is better not to remember most of what now seems more significant to us; better to discard images; better that the intellect be than , losing any sense of separation between subject and object. The goal of the Plotinian intellectual is to join , but it is a mark of the good dancer that she is not conscious of what she does. There is therefore a strange confluence between Plotinus and modern materialists: our experience at least is transitory, deceitful, epiphenomenal, and is to be encountered when we have shed our illusions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Drawing inspiration from Fred Dretske, L. S. Carrier, John A. Barker, and Robert Nozick, we develop a tracking analysis of knowing according to which a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. We show that our sensitivity analysis handles numerous Gettier-type cases and lottery problems, blocks pathways leading to skepticism, and validates the (...) epistemic closure thesis that correct inferences from known premises yield knowledge of the conclusions. We discuss the plausible views of Ted Warfield and Branden Fitelson regarding cases of knowledge acquired via inference from false premises, and we show how our sensitivity analysis can account for such cases. We present arguments designed to discredit putative counterexamples to sensitivity analyses recently proffered by Tristan Haze, John Williams and Neil Sinhababu, which involve true statements made by untrustworthy informants and strange clocks that sometimes display the correct time while running backwards. Finally, we show that in virtue of employing the paradox-free subjunctive conditionals codified by Relevance Logic theorists instead of the paradox-laden subjunctive conditionals codified by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis. (shrink)

This Essay presents law’s evolution as a paradoxical union of the finite and the infinite. At any given point in time, law is a finite body of norms, which can be identified. At the same time, law’s evolution is infinite because rule-mutations that alter those norms are indeterminable. In modern legal systems, law’s evolution occurs under the constraining influence of master texts, which provide normative durability by enshrining the fundamental norms of a legal system and fortifying them against change. Despite (...) this stabilizing role, however, master texts are themselves open to mutations. Therefore, law’s evolution under the constraints of a master text mediates the paradoxical union of law’s finite and infinite nature. (shrink)

The shape of a life hypothesis holds that the temporal sequence of good or bad times in a life can itself be a valuable feature of that life. This is generally thought to be incompatible with additivism about lifetime well-being, which holds that lifetime well-being is fully determined by momentary well-being. This discussion examines Dale Dorsey’s recent argument that these views are in fact compatible. I argue that accepting the conjunction of these views requires stronger commitments than Dorsey recognizes. (...) After arguing that these commitments are problematic, I conclude that we should reject the compatibility claim. (shrink)

Critical notice of Guy Fletcher's 'Dear Prudence: The Nature and Normativity of Prudential Discourse' and Dale Dorsey's 'A Theory of Prudence'.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

The visual system adapts to a wide range of visual features, from lower-level features like color and motion to higher-level features like causality and, perhaps, number. According to some, adaptation is a strictly perceptual phenomenon, such that the presence of adaptation licenses the claim that a feature is truly perceptual in nature. Given the theoretical importance of claims about adaptation, then, it is important to understand exactly when the visual system does and does not exhibit adaptation. Here, we take as (...) a case study one specific kind of adaptation: visual adaptation to size. Supported by evidence from four experiments, we argue that, despite robust effects of size adaptation in the lab, (1) size adaptation effects are phenomenologically underwhelming (in some cases, hardly appreciable at all), (2) some effects of size adaptation appear contradictory, and difficult to explain given current theories of size adaptation, and (3) prior studies on size adaptation may have failed to isolate size as the adapted dimension. Ultimately, we argue that while there is evidence to license the claim that size adaptation is genuine, size adaptation is a puzzling and poorly understood phenomenon. (shrink)

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon earlier studies, estimating a dynamic logit model that interacts a continuous measure of resource dependence with an indicator of regime type using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816-2006. We find that an increase (...) in resource dependence at time t - 1 increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence at t, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. We go beyond existing empirical studies to show that increases in resource dependence have persistent and substantial cumulative effects on autocracies' likelihood of becoming democratic over the long-term, showing that the total effect of resource dependence on regime type is much larger than the short-term (one period) effect indicates. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the intelligibility of modal metaphysics has been vindicated. Quine's arguments to the contrary supposedly confused analyticity with metaphysical necessity, and rigid with non-rigid designators.2 But even if modal metaphysics is intelligible, it could be misconceived. It could be that metaphysical necessity is not absolute necessity – the strictest real notion of necessity – and that no proposition of traditional metaphysical interest is necessary in every real sense. If there were nothing otherwise “uniquely metaphysically significant” about (...) metaphysical necessity, then paradigmatic metaphysical necessities would be necessary in one sense of “necessary”, not necessary in another, and that would be it. The question of whether they were necessary simpliciter would be like the question of whether the Parallel Postulate is true simpliciter – understood as a pure mathematical conjecture, rather than as a hypothesis about physical spacetime. In a sense, the latter question has no objective answer. In this article, I argue that paradigmatic questions of modal metaphysics are like the Parallel Postulate question. I then discuss the deflationary ramifications of this argument. I conclude with an alternative conception of the space of possibility. According to this conception, there is no objective boundary between possibility and impossibility. Along the way, I sketch an analogy between modal metaphysics and set theory. (shrink)

It is often assumed that adaptation — a temporary change in sensitivity to a perceptual dimension following exposure to that dimension — is a litmus test for what is and is not a “primary visual attribute”. Thus, papers purporting to find evidence of number adaptation motivate a claim of great philosophical significance: That number is something that can be seen in much the way that canonical visual features, like color, contrast, size, and speed, can. Fifteen years after its reported discovery, (...) number adaptation’s existence seems to be nearly undisputed, with dozens of papers documenting support for the phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to offer a counterweight — to critically assess the evidence for and against number adaptation. After surveying the many reasons for thinking that number adaptation exists, we introduce several lesser-known reasons to be skeptical. We then advance an alternative account — the old news hypothesis — which can accommodate previously published findings while explaining various (otherwise unexplained) anomalies in the existing literature. Next, we describe the results of eight pre-registered experiments which pit our novel old news hypothesis against the received number adaptation hypothesis. Collectively, the results of these experiments undermine the number adaptation hypothesis on several fronts, whilst consistently supporting the old news hypothesis. More broadly our work raises questions about the status of adaptation itself as a means of discerning what is and is not a visual attribute. (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

Questa è un'eccellente revisione delle interazioni gene/ambiente sul comportamento e, nonostante sia un po' datata, è una lettura facile e utile. Iniziano con studi gemelli che mostrano l'impatto travolgente della genetica sul comportamento. Notano gli studi sempre più noti di Judith Harris che estendono e riassumono i fatti che l'ambiente domestico condiviso non ha quasi alcun effetto sul comportamento e che i bambini adottati crescono fino ad essere diversi dai loro fratellastri e sorelle come le persone scelte a caso. Un (...) punto fondamentale che loro (e quasi tutti coloro che discutono di genetica comportamentale) non riescono a notare è che le centinaia (migliaia a seconda del tuo punto di vista) degli universali comportamentali umani, comprese tutte le basi delle nostre personalità, sono determinate al 100% dai nostri geni, senza variazioni nella normalità. Tutti vedono un albero come un albero e non come una pietra, cercano e mangiano cibo, si arrabbiano e geloso ecc. Quindi, quello di cui stanno parlando per lo più qui è quanto ambiente (cultura) può influenzare il grado in cui vengono mostrati i vari tratti, piuttosto che il loro aspetto. Infine, discutono di eugenetica nel solito modo politicamente corretto, non riuscendo a notare che noi e tutti gli organismi siamo i prodotti dell'eugenetica della natura e che i tentativi di sconfiggere la selezione naturale con la medicina, l'agricoltura e la civiltà nel suo complesso sono disastrosi per qualsiasi società che persiste nel farlo. Fino al 50% di tutte le concezioni, o circa 100 milioni/anno, finiscono in un aborto spontaneo precoce, quasi tutti senza che la madre ne sia a conoscenza. Questo abbattimento naturale dei geni difettosi guida l'evoluzione, ci mantiene relativamente geneticamente sani e rende possibile la società. La disgenica è sufficiente a distruggere la civiltà, ma la sovrappopolazione sarà doprima. Coloro che desiderano un quadro aggiornato completo per il comportamento umano dalla moderna vista a due systems possono consultare il mio libro 'La struttura logica dellafilosofia, psicologia, Mind e il linguaggio in Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle' 2nd ed (2019). Coloro che sono interessati a più dei miei scritti possono vedere 'TalkingMonkeys--Filosofia, Psicologia, Scienza, Religione e Politica su un Pianeta Condannato--Articoli e Recensioni 2006-2017' 3rd ed (2019). (shrink)

Vi è prepotente orient-amento nella civiltà orientale contemporanea, un imperioso richiamo ad orient-arsi verso l’est, appunto. Daremo degli esempi di questo moto epocale, che appare sostanzialmente un moto dell’Anima, nel senso Hillman. Ma cos’è l’Oriente? Forse l’Oriente: “Non è una realtà naturale, ma un idea, e più precisamente un’idea occidentale, con una storia e una patologia di miti e di significati nascosti” (Clarke 1996).

I argue for the usefulness of the evolutionary kind of biological individual.

Hasker’s “social” Trinity theory is subject to considerable philosophical problems. More importantly, the theory clashes with the clear New Testament teaching that the one God just is the Father alone. Further, in light of five undeniable facts about the New Testament texts, we can know that the authors of the New Testament thought that the only God was just the Father himself, not the Trinity. Hasker can neither deny these facts nor defeat the strong evidence they provide that in affirming (...) a triune God in the late 4th century, catholic tradition departed from apostolic teaching about the one God. (shrink)

Joshua Greene has argued that the empirical findings of cognitive science have implications for ethics. In particular, he has argued (1) that people’s deontological judgments in response to trolley problems are strongly influenced by at least one morally irrelevant factor, personal force, and are therefore at least somewhat unreliable, and (2) that we ought to trust our consequentialist judgments more than our deontological judgments when making decisions about unfamiliar moral problems. While many cognitive scientists have rejected Greene’s dual-process theory of (...) moral judgment on empirical grounds, philosophers have mostly taken issue with his normative assertions. For the most part, these two discussions have occurred separately. The current analysis aims to remedy this situation by philosophically analyzing the implications of moral dilemma research using the CNI model of moral decision-making – a formalized, mathematical model that decomposes three distinct aspects of moral-dilemma judgments. In particular, we show how research guided by the CNI model reveals significant conceptual, empirical, and theoretical problems with Greene’s dual-process theory, thereby questioning the foundations of his normative conclusions. (shrink)

Advancements in artificial intelligence and (social) robotics raise pertinent questions as to how these technologies may help shape the society of the future. The main aim of the chapter is to consider the social and conceptual disruptions that might be associated with social robots, and humanoid social robots in particular. This chapter starts by comparing the concepts of robots and artificial intelligence and briefly explores the origins of these expressions. It then explains the definition of a social robot, as well (...) as the definition of humanoid robots. A key notion in this context is the idea of anthropomorphism: the human tendency to attribute human qualities, not only to our fellow human beings, but also to parts of nature and to technologies. This tendency to anthropomorphize technologies by responding to and interacting with them as if they have human qualities is one of the reasons why social robots (in particular social robots designed to look and behave like human beings) can be socially disruptive. As is explained in the chapter, while some ethics researchers believe that anthropomorphization is a mistake that can lead to various forms of deception, others — including both ethics researchers and social roboticists — believe it can be useful or fitting to treat robots in anthropomorphizing ways. The chapter explores that disagreement by, among other things, considering recent philosophical debates about whether social robots can be moral patients, that is, whether it can make sense to treat them with moral consideration. Where one stands on this issue will depend either on one’s views about whether social robots can have, imitate, or represent morally relevant properties, or on how people relate to social robots in their interactions with them. Lastly, the chapter urges that the ethics of social robots should explore intercultural perspectives, and highlights some recent research on Ubuntu ethics and social robots. (shrink)

The introduction (about 6,000 words) to _The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism_, in three sections: utilitarianism’s place in recent and contemporary moral philosophy (including the opinions of critics such as Rawls and Scanlon), a brief history of the view (again, including the opinions of critics, such as Marx and Nietzsche), and an overview of the chapters of the book.

This brief commentary has three goals. The first is to argue that ‘‘framework debate’’ in cognitive science is unresolvable. The idea that one theory or framework can singly account for the vast complexity and variety of cognitive processes seems unlikely if not impossible. The second goal is a consequence of this: We should consider how the various theories on offer work together in diverse contexts of investigation. A final goal is to supply a brief review for readers who are compelled (...) by these points to explore existing literature on the topic. Despite this literature, pluralism has garnered very little attention from broader cognitive science. We end by briefly considering what it might mean for theoretical cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper is a study about Philadelphia’s comprehensive user engagement sites (CUESs) as the authors address and examine issues related to the upcoming implementation of a CUES while seeking solutions for its disputed questions and plans. Beginning with the federal drug schedules, the authors visit some of the medical and public health issues vis-à-vis safe injection facilities (SIFs). Insite, a successful Canadian SIF, has been thoroughly researched as it represents a paradigm for which a Philadelphia CUES can expand upon. Also, (...) the existing criticisms against SIFs are revisited while critically unpackaged and responded to in favor of the establishment. In the main section, the authors propose the layout and services of the upcoming CUES, much of which would be in congruent to Vancouver’s Insite. On the other hand, the CUES would be distinct from Insite, as the authors emphasize, in that it will offer an information center run by individuals in recovery and place additional emphasis on early education for young healthcare professionals by providing them a platform to work at the site. The paper will also briefly investigate the implementation of a CUES site under an ethical scope of the Harm Reduction Theory. Lastly, the authors recommend some strategic plans that the Philadelphia City government may consider employing at this crucial stage. (shrink)

Il s’agit d’un excellent examen des interactions génétiques / environnement sur le comportement et, en dépit d’être un peu daté, est une lecture facile et utile. Ils commencent par des études jumelles qui montrent l’impact écrasant de la génétique sur le comportement. Ils notent les études de plus en plus connues de Judith Harris qui étendent et résument les faits que l’environnement familial partagé n’a presque aucun effet sur le comportement et que les enfants adoptés grandissent pour être aussi différents (...) de leurs demi-frères et soeurs que les personnes choisies au hasard. Un point fondamental qu’ils (et presque tous ceux qui discutent de la génétique comportementale) ne parviennent pas à noter est que les centaines (des milliers selon votre point de vue) des universels comportementaux humains, y compris toutes les bases de nos personnalités, sont 100% déterminés par nos gènes, sans aucune variation dans les normales. Tout le monde voit un arbre comme un arbre et non une pierre, cherche et mange de la nourriture, se met en colère et jaloux, etc. Donc, ce dont ils parlent surtout ici, c’est de la quantité d’environnement (culture) qui peut influer sur la mesure dans laquelle les divers traits sont montrés, plutôt que leur apparence. Enfin, ils discutent de l’eugénisme de la manière politiquement correcte habituelle, à défaut de noter que nous et tous les organismes sommes les produits de l’eugénisme de la nature et que les tentatives de vaincre la sélection naturelle avec la médecine, l’agriculture, et la civilisation dans son ensemble, sont désastreuses pour toute société qui persiste à le faire. Jusqu’à 50% de toutes les conceptions, soit environ 100 millions par an, se terminent par un avortement spontané précoce, presque tous sans que la mère soit au courant. Cet abattage naturel de gènes défectueux stimule l’évolution, nous maintient relativement génétiquement sains et rend la société possible. Dysgenics est suffisant pour détruire la civilisation, mais la surpopulation sera do ild’abord. Ceux qui souhaitent un cadre complet à jour pour le comportement humain de la vue moderne de deuxemssyst peuvent consulter mon livre 'The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein et John Searle' 2nd ed (2019). Ceux qui s’intéressent à plus de mes écrits peuvent voir «Talking Monkeys --Philosophie, Psychologie, Science, Religion et Politique sur une planète condamnée --Articles et revues 2006-2017' 3rd ed (2019) et autres. (shrink)

This paper proceeds in two parts. In the first part, I set out Fodor’s concerns about abduction in his recent books, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way and In Critical Condition. In the second part, I attempt to meet these concerns by suggesting how - within the framework of the Massive Modularity Hypothesis - abduction functions, specifically in the context of means-end reasoning to connect Input Modules and Output Modules. My suggestion will be that natural selection is the Mother of (...) Abductive Inference and that it is evidenced in all sorts of sub-doxastic Means-End Reasoning contexts and for a variety of species. I will eventually discuss two representative cases to illustrate this suggestion: namely, dead reckoning and spatial reorientation. (shrink)

Some recent exchanges (Gebharter 2017a,2017b; Baumgartner and Cassini, 2023) concern whether composition can have conditional independence properties analogous to causal relations. If so, composition might sometimes be detectable by the application of causal search algorithms. The discussion has focused on a particular algorithm, PC (Spirtes and Glymour, 1991). PC is but one, and in many circumstances not the best, of a host of causal search algorithms that are candidates for methods of discovering composition provided appropriate statistical relations obtain. The discussion (...) raises two issues: 1. Does the structure of the composition relation entail probability relations such that PC and like algorithms cannot discover composition from frequency data about kinds; and 2. what can be discovered—and how—about the composition of systems by PC or related causal search algorithms that exploit conditional independence relations. Baumgartner and Cassini answer the first question positively: constitution entails probability relations incompatible with discovery by PC. They do not engage the second question, but we will. (shrink)

In Ruling Passions, Simon Blackburn contends that we should reject sensibility theory because it serves to support a conservative complacency. Blackburn's strategy is attractive in that it seeks to win this metaethical dispute – which ultimately stems from a deep disagreement over antireductionism – on the basis of an uncontroversial normative consideration. Therefore, Blackburn seems to offer an easy solution to an apparently intractable debate. We will show, however, that Blackburn's argument against sensibility theory does not succeed; it is no (...) more supportive of conservative complacency than Blackburn's noncognitivism. A victory for noncognitivism cannot be so easily won. (shrink)

One way to interpret the work of Joshua Greene (2001; 2008; 2014) is that the wave of empirical research into moral decision-making is a way for us to become more confident in our ability to gain moral knowledge. We argue that empirical research into moral judgment has shown (both survey-based and brain-based) that the grounds of moral judgment are opaque on several dimensions. We argue that we cannot firmly grasp what the morally relevant/irrelevant features of a decision context are, understand (...) which cognitive system responds to said features, and further know that we are actually basing our judgment upon what we take to be the morally relevant features. That is, we argue that moral judgment is very much like other kinds of judgment: Deeply influenced by facts about the decision-context and the decision-maker. However, if moral judgment is merely the exercise of our general judgment making faculty, we shouldn’t be surprised by this result. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making moral judgments. (shrink)

We initially characterize what we’ll call existence problems as problems where there is evidence that a putative entity exists and this evidence is not easily dismissed; however, the evidence is not adequate to justify the claim that the entity exists, and in particular the entity hasn’t been detected. The putative entity is elusive. We then offer a strategy for determining whether an existence problem is philosophical or scientific. According to this strategy (1) existence problems are characterized in terms of causal (...) roles, and (2) these problems are categorized as scientific or philosophical on the basis of the epistemic context of putative realizers. We argue that the first step of the strategy is necessary to avoid begging the question with regard to categorization of existence problems, and the second step categorizes existence problems on the basis of a distinction between two ways in which an entity can be elusive. This distinction between kinds of elusiveness takes as background a standard account of inference to the best explanation. Applying this strategy, we argue that the existence of a multiverse is a scientific problem. (shrink)

Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education presents what the late Lawrence Kohlberg regarded as the definitive statement of his educational theory. Addressing the sociology and social psychology of schooling, the authors propose that school culture become the center of moral education and research. They discuss how schools can develop as just and cohesive communities by involving students in democracy, and they focus on the moral decisions teachers and students face as they democratically resolve problems. As the authors put it: "...we (...) propose an educational renewal of our democratic society.... We have attempted to establish schools that do more than just teach about democratic citizenship, that are themselves democratic societies.". (shrink)

The current chapter provides an overview of research on responses in moral dilemmas where maximization of outcomes for the greater good (utilitarianism) conflicts with adherence to moral norms (deontology). Expanding on a description of the traditional paradigm to study moral-dilemma judgments (i.e., the trolley problem), the chapter reviews the most prominent dual-process account of moral-dilemma judgments, normative conclusions that have been derived from this account, and criticisms raised against this line of work. The following sections review advances in the development (...) of alternative approaches that aim to address shortcomings of the traditional dilemma paradigm as well as the implications of this work for psychological theories of moral-dilemma judgments and philosophical inferences about the normative implications of moral-dilemma research. The chapter concludes with a review of research on the links between moral-dilemma judgments and social impressions. (shrink)

In his article “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual, conscious reasoning system more than our automatic, emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral (...) problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene’s argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling, and thus should be abandoned. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Tristan Haze offers two examples that, he claims, are counterexamples to Nozick's Theory of Knowledge. Haze claims his examples work against Nozick's theory understood as relativized to belief forming methods M. We believe that they fail to be counterexamples to Nozick's theory. Since he aims the examples at tracking theories generally, we will also explain why they are not counterexamples to Dretske's Conclusive Reasons Theory of Knowledge.

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (shrink)

Visual number adaption is a widely accepted phenomenon. This paper advances an alternative explanation for putative cases of the phenomenon. We propose that such cases may simply reflect observers adapting to the items in perceived displays, rather than their numerical quantity. Three experiments motivate consideration of this novel proposal and call into question the evidential basis for received formulations of the number adaptation hypothesis.

Sfruttando alcune considerazioni, presenti in Richard (1997), riguardo questioni pragmatiche e psicologiche connesse alla semantica russelliana per i verbi psicologici si propone un modello teorico in cui, attraverso l’introduzione di alcuni enunciati strategici, ad es. “Lois non realizza che Superman è Clark Kent”, alcuni problemi connessi al diverso comportamento di Lois con gli individui Superman e Clark Kent, sembrerebbero risolti fornendoci corrette predizioni riguardo il comportamento di un agente razionale. Scopo di questo lavoro è estendere il modello ad (...) alcuni casi riguardanti l’etica delle credenze e mostrare, attraverso un caso paradigmatico nella letteratura specialistica, alcune potenziali conferme empiriche del modello stesso. (shrink)

The causal premise of the evolutionary debunking argument contends that human moral beliefs are explained by the process of natural selection. While it is universally acknowledged that such a premise is fundamental to the debunker’s case, the vast majority of philosophers focus instead on the epistemic premise that natural selection does not track moral truth and the resulting skeptical conclusion. Recently, however, some have begun to concentrate on the causal premise. So far, the upshot of this small but growing literature (...) has been that the causal premise is likely false due to the seemingly persuasive evidence that our moral beliefs are in fact not the result of natural selection. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. Specifically, I advocate the Innate Biases Model, which contends that there is not only compelling evidence for an evolved cognitive capacity for acquiring norms but also for the existence of an evolutionarily instilled set of cognitive biases that make it either more or less likely that we adopt certain moral beliefs. (shrink)

The approximate number system (ANS) enables organisms to represent the approximate number of items in an observed collection, quickly and independently of natural language. Recently, it has been proposed that the ANS goes beyond representing natural numbers by extracting and representing rational numbers (Clarke & Beck, 2021a). Prior work demonstrates that adults and children discriminate ratios in an approximate and ratio-dependent manner, consistent with the hallmarks of the ANS. Here, we use a well-known “connectedness illusion” to provide evidence that these (...) ratio-dependent ratio discriminations are (a) based on the perceived number of items in seen displays (and not just non-numerical confounds), (b) are not dependent on verbal working memory, or explicit counting routines, and (c) involve representations with a part-whole (or subset-superset) format, like a fraction, rather than a part-part format, like a ratio. These results vindicate key predictions of the hypothesis that the ANS represents rational numbers. (shrink)

Many models of cognitive ability and disability rely on the idea of cognition as abstract reasoning processes implemented in the brain. Research in cognitive science, however, emphasizes the way that our cognitive skills are embodied in our more basic capacities for sensing and moving, and the way that tools in the external environment can extend the cognitive abilities of our brains. This chapter addresses the implications of research in embodied cognition and extended cognition for how we think about cognitive impairment (...) and rehabilitation, how cognitive reserve mitigates neural impairment, and the distinction between medical and social models of disability. (shrink)

1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.

In a recent paper, Berger and Nanay consider, and reject, three ways of addressing the phenomenon of unconscious perception within a naïve realist framework. Since these three approaches seem to exhaust the options open to naïve realists, and since there is said to be excellent evidence that perception of the same fundamental kind can occur, both consciously and unconsciously, this is seen to present a problem for the view. We take this opportunity to show that all three approaches considered remain (...) perfectly plausible ways of addressing unconscious perception within a naïve realist framework. So far from undermining the credibility of naïve realism, Berger and Nanay simply draw our attention to an important question to be considered by naïve realists in future work. Namely, which of the approaches considered is most likely to provide an accurate account of unconscious perception in each of its purported incarnations? (shrink)

Two problems are considered here. One relates to who has moral status, and the other relates to who has moral responsibility. The criteria for mattering morally have long been disputed, and many humans and nonhuman animals have been considered “marginal cases,” on the contested edges of moral considerability and concern. The marginalization of humans and other species is frequently the pretext for denying their rights, including the rights to health care, to reproductive freedom, and to bodily autonomy. There is broad (...) agreement across cultural and philosophical traditions about the capacities and responsibilities of moral agents. I propose an inclusive and expansive way of thinking about moral status, situating it not in the characteristics or capacities of individuals, but in the responsibilities and obligations of moral agents. Moral agents, under this view, are not privileged or entitled to special treatment but rather have responsibilities. I approach this by considering some African communitarian conceptions of moral status and moral agency. I propose that moral agency can also be more expansive and include not just individual moral agents but collective entities that have some of the traits of moral agents: power, freedom, and the capacity to recognize and act on the demands of morality and acknowledge and respect the rights of others. Expanding who and what is a moral agent correspondingly extends moral responsibility for respecting rights and fostering the conditions for the health and well-being of humans and animals onto the collective entities who uniquely have the capacity to attend to global-scale health threats such as pandemics and human-caused climate change. (shrink)

In our target article, we argued that the number sense represents natural and rational numbers. Here, we respond to the 26 commentaries we received, highlighting new directions for empirical and theoretical research. We discuss two background assumptions, arguments against the number sense, whether the approximate number system represents numbers or numerosities, and why the ANS represents rational numbers.

Cognitive flexibility, the adaptation of representations and responses to new task demands, improves dramatically in early childhood. It is unclear, however, whether flexibility is a coherent, unitary cognitive trait, or is an emergent dimension of task-specific performance that varies across populations with divergent experiences. Three-to 5-year-old English-speaking U.S. children and Tswana-speaking South African children completed two distinct language-processing cognitive flexibility tests: the FIM-Animates, a word-learning test, and the 3DCCS, a rule-switching test. U.S. and South African children did not differ in (...) word-learning flexibility but showed similar age-related increases. In contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed an age-related increase in rule-switching flexibility but South African children did not. Verbal recall explained additional variance in both tests but did not modulate the interaction between population sample (i.e., country) and task. We hypothesize that rule-switching flexibility might be more dependent upon particular kinds of cultural experiences, whereas word-learning flexibility is less cross-culturally variable. (shrink)

This article is the preface to a completed book manuscript, United Nations Human Rights Ethics. Based on the indivisibility of human rights, the Four Freedoms Speech, and the Preamble of the Universal Declaration, the book takes freedom of expression as the one human right. Other rights are modes of this one. For example, one exercises freedom of expression (speech) by exercising the right to life, access to courts, etc.. The book argues that human rights are primarily an ethical concept (introduced (...) by Rousseau) rather than a concept of international law. (shrink)

The article explains my third argument for panpsychism, based on disolving all properties, including dispositional physical properties like mass, energy, and force, into phenomenal properties. I thus reject a dual-property version of panpsychism. I seek to show, contrary to Paul Churchland, that the general panpsychist hypothesis has some explanatory value, and makes a cosmology consisting in comparative psychology possible. The mental life even of so-called physical particles in physics is hypothesized to help explain their behavior.

The concept of the subject, of what Hegel calls absolute negativity, already appears early in the logic of being.1 Absolute negativity, negation of the negation, occurs throughout the logic as identity in difference understood as self-identification under different descriptions. First, the subject refers to itself merely under an incomplete description. Secondly, it refers to something other than itself under a second description which is logically required by the first. (For example, the description of being in general requires some determinate description (...) of being in particular). But this second description is dialectically excluded by the assumption that the first description is complete. Thirdly, the subject negates its negation of the other. It discovers itself in the other, under the other description, and thus comes to refer to itself less incompletely. This is Hegel in the analytic mode. (shrink)

As part of the development of the Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System, we have implemented a memory store to allow a robot to retain knowledge from previous exp...

An overview of relational approaches to ethics, which contrast with individualist and holist ones, particularly as they feature in the Confucian, African, and feminist/care traditions.