Today, resilience is used in many societal contexts for understanding how things respond to risks and for improving their performance in this regard, having also become a prominent approach for adapting to climate change. Yet, despite the broad appeal of resilience and resilience-based approaches within and outside academia, there are persisting puzzles about how to interpret resilience, its relation to competing concepts and approaches, or its desirability. Some proponents of resilience advise caution with the normative use of the term, noting (...) that resilience is a purely descriptive and ambivalent quality, which can be good in some circumstances but not in others. Critics have also noted that resilience approaches can be technocratic and that they tend to conceal the needs and vulnerabilities of the poor. -/- These examples demonstrate the need for reflecting on the status and significance of a term that is so widely used in academia and across the science-policy divide, but whose meaning and value are so fiercely disputed. Given that resilience is already informing many large-scale and significant societal efforts, they also raise the need to ask under which conditions such efforts could be just. -/- This work uses philosophical perspectives from ethics, metaethics and justice theory for revisiting recent debates on the meaning and normative status of this concept, with special emphasis on understanding the normative guidance that diverse interpretations of resilience can offer and disclosing the implications that this may have for achieving justice in and through resilience-based interventions. (shrink)

Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an answer to this question by assessing the relationship between the metaphysical structure of different normative properties and a plausible constraint on which properties are eligible for perceptual awareness which I call (...) the Counterfactual Strengthening Test. Along the way I consider and reject a few other possible constraints on perceptual awareness. I defend the view that moral perception is restricted to the perception of evaluative and pro tanto deontic properties. I conclude with a few gestures toward what this limitation on moral perception may mean for broader moral epistemology. (shrink)

Cette introduction à une collection d'articles sur la normativité propose d'adopter les divisions trouvées habituellement en éthique pour aborder la normativité. Ainsi, il semble utile de diviser les questions en cinq groupes: l'ontologie normative, la sémantique normative, l'épistémologie normative, la psychologie normative, et finalement, les questions normatives substantielles.

Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...) of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? -/- Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? -/- This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind. (shrink)

Human cooperation and group living are based on societies in which individuals not only care about their own interests but share common norms and values – such as morality and prosocial behavior. As early as the 18th century, Immanuel Kant postulated autonomy as the key to human morality. Kant explained that a rational agent with a free will would necessarily make moral – not immoral – decisions. However, the fundamental question of how moral behavior acquires normative weight remains unresolved until (...) the present day, especially when moral behavior entails personal costs for the individual. This dissertation builds on Kant’s thesis and aims to investigate important building blocks of moral autonomy at preschool age. Therefore, children’s own prosocial decisions as well as their normative and descriptive expectations about others’ prosocial actions are assessed and linked to fundamental underlying mechanisms such as cultural learning and collective intentionality. Study 1 assessed whether preschoolers enforce agreed-upon prosocial ver-sus selfish sharing norms in a group dictator game. Three- and 5-year-old children and two hand puppets had the opportunity to agree on how to distribute re-sources between themselves and a group of passive recipients. The findings sug-gest that preschoolers understand prosocial, but not selfish, agreements as binding even though prosocial sharing norms are associated with personal costs. Study Set 2 assessed in two experiments whether observed choice increases the children’s own prosocial sharing behavior. In Experiment 1, children observed an adult model who was provided with costly choice, non-costly choice, or no choice. As a next step, children were given the opportunity to decide how many stickers they would like to share with a sad animal puppet. Experiment 2 aimed to investigate possible age effects. The study design was reduced to condition and, a second test trial was added. Taken together, the results of Study Set 2 suggest that 5-year-old’s prosocial sharing behavior increases when previously having observed someone who intentionally acts prosocially at a personal cost. Study 3 investigated preschoolers’ descriptive expectations about the causal agent of prosocial and selfish actions, based on agents’ prior history of voluntary versus involuntary prosocial behavior. The results show that children at the age of 5.5 years use information about the circumstances and intentions of previous actions to generate descriptive expectations about other’s future prosocial behavior. From 4 years of age, children distinguish between an agent who shares voluntarily and an agent who shares only involuntarily. Taken together, this dissertation shows that preschool aged children infer and enforce prosocial – but not selfish – sharing norms. They engage in prosocial sharing which is affected by observed choice and they form descriptive expectations about others tendency to behave prosocial or selfish on the base of knowledge about the agents prosocial versus selfish intentions. (shrink)