Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics University of Melbourne, Parkville, 3010, Australia and.

Abstract:Robert Sugden has suggested a normative standard of freedom as ‘opportunity’ that is supposed to help realign normative economics – with its traditional rational choice orientation – with behavioural economics. While allowing preferences to be incoherent, he wants to maintain the anti-paternalist stance of orthodox welfare economics. His standard, though, presupposes that people respond to uncertainty about their own future preferences by dismissing any kind of self-constraint. We argue that the approach lacks psychological substance: Sugden's normative benchmark – the ‘responsible (...) person’ – can hardly serve as a convincing role model in a contractarian setting. An alternative concept is introduced, and some implications are briefly discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I survey four key questions about willpower: How is willpower possible? Why does willpower fail? How does willpower relate to other self-regulatory processes? and What are the connections between willpower and weakness of will? Empirical research into willpower is growing rapidly and yielding some fascinating new findings. This survey emphasizes areas in which empirical progress in understanding willpower helps to advance traditional philosophical debates.

Addiction is almost universally held to be characterized by a loss of control over drug-seeking and consuming behavior. But the actions of addicts, even of those who seem to want to abstain from drugs, seem to be guided by reasons. In this paper, I argue that we can explain this fact, consistent with continuing to maintain that addiction involves a loss of control, by understanding addiction as involving an oscillation between conflicting judgments. I argue that the dysfunction of the mesolimbic (...) dopamine system that typifies addictions causes the generation of a mismatch between the top-down model of the world that reflects the judgment that the addict ought to refrain from drugs, and bottom-up input caused by cues predictive of drug availability. This constitutes a powerful pressure toward revising the judgment and thereby attenuating the prediction error. But the new model is not stable, and shifts under the pressure of bottom-up inputs in different contexts; hence the oscillation of all-things-considered judgment. Evidence from social psychology is adduced, to suggest that a similar process may be involved in ordinary cases of weakness of will. (shrink)

“Neurodiversity” is associated with the struggle for the civil rights of all those diagnosed with neurological or neurodevelopmental disorders. Two basic approaches in the struggle for what might be described as “neuro-equality” are taken up in the literature: There is a challenge to current nosology that pathologizes all of the phenotypes associated with neurological or neurodevelopmental disorders ); there is a challenge to those extant social institutions that either expressly or inadvertently model a social hierarchy where the interests or needs (...) of individuals are ranked relative to what is regarded as properly functioning cognitive capacities. In this paper, we explore some of the reasons justifying which make it an important tool for achieving greater neuro-equality, while still recognizing its limitations for achieving this goal. Particularly, we explore how an appeal to functionality and neurological diversity can support a re-seeing of at least certain forms of ASD. (shrink)

Although thought suppression is a commonly used self-control strategy that has far-reaching consequences, its effect on ethical decision making is unclear. Whereas ironic process theory suggests that suppressing ethics-related thoughts leads to mental rebounds of ethicality and decreased unethical behavior, ego depletion theory suggests that thought suppression can lead to reduced self-control and increased unethical behavior. Integrating the two theories, I propose that the effect of thought suppression on unethical behavior hinges on the content of the suppressed thoughts. Participants who (...) suppressed ethics-related [-unrelated] thoughts engaged in less [more] cyber bullying, cheating, and dishonesty compared to participants in the control conditions. Explicit and implicit moral awareness was found to mediate this moderated effect. Experiment 4 further demonstrated that suppressing ethics-related thoughts reduces self-control performance on a subsequent amoral task, but not on subsequent ethical decision making. (shrink)

A main strength of neuroimaging and neuroscience is its reductionist focus on the brain. A limitation is that it runs the possibility of ignoring larger social factors. The brain image may not necessarily indicate the brain’s neuroplastic ‘rewiring’ over time from genomic, epigenetic, environmental and social conditions. These factors are all necessary to understand the diverse nature of our brains, especially complex concerns such as addiction. For addiction to emerge it requires an intersection of genetic, environmental and social influences. It (...) is foreseeable to ignore this multi-factorial interaction in the clinical setting when interpreting predictive brain imaging scans. This paper argues that relying too heavily on clinical neuroimaging in the treatment of patients who present a vulnerability to addiction can lead to cases of biological reductionism ignoring the influence social systems have on brain responses. (shrink)