We are unlikely to stop seeking pleasure, as this would prejudice our health and well-being. Yet many psychoactive substances providing pleasure are outlawed as illicit recreational drugs, despite the fact that only some of them are addictive to some people. Efforts to redress their prohibition, or to reform legislation so that penalties are proportionate to harm have largely failed. Yet, if choices over seeking pleasure are ethical insofar as they avoid harm to oneself or others, public health strategies should foster (...) ethical choice by moving beyond current risk management practices embodied in the harm reduction movement. The neuroscience of pleasure has much to offer neuroethics and public health strategies. Distinguishing between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ fosters new understandings of addiction. These hold promise for directing the search for pharmacotherapies which prevent addiction and relapse or disrupt associated neuromechanisms. They could inform new research into creating lawful psychoactive substances which give us pleasure without provoking addiction. As the health and well being of human and other animals rests upon the experience of pleasure, this would be an ethical objective within public health strategy. Were ethical and neurobiological obstacles to ending addiction to be overcome, problems associated with excessive consumption, the lure of unlawful psychoactive substances and the paucity of lawful means to achieve pleasurable altered states would remain. Non-addictive designer drugs, which reliably provided lawful access to pleasures and altered states, would ameliorate these public health concerns insofar as they fostered citizens’ informed, ethical choices according to a neurobiological taxonomy of pleasures. (shrink)

Proponents of strict rule-based theories of judicial reasoning in common-law systems have offered a number of criticisms of analogical alternatives. I explain these criticisms and show that at best they apply equally well to rule-based theories. Further, I show how the analogical theories explain a feature of judicial common-law reasoningthat rule-based theories ignore. Finally, I show that reason-based, analogical theories of common-law judicial reasoning, such as those offered by John Horty and Grant Lamond, offer especially strong rejoinders to the rule-theorist (...) objections and persuasive accounts of distinguishing. (shrink)

Intuition—spontaneous, nondeliberative assessment—has long been indispensable in theoretical and practical philosophy alike. Recent research by psychologists and experimental philosophers has challenged our understanding of the nature and authority of moral intuitions by tracing them to “fast,” “automatic,” “button-pushing” responses of the affective system. This view of the affective system contrasts with a growing body of research in affective neuroscience which suggests that it is instead a flexible learning system that generates and updates a multidimensional evaluative landscape to guide decision and (...) action. With this latter view in mind, I revisit some of the classic hypothetical scenarios used in experimental moral psychology. (shrink)

Surprisal and Valuation in the Predictive Brain.

The mainstream philosophical approach to inference, which insists on sentence-like representations and a linguistic capability, excludes non-human animals as possible agents capable of making inferences. However, an abundance of studies show that many animal species exhibit behaviors that seem to rely on some kind of reasoning. My focus here are the transitive inference tasks, which most species solve quite successfully. These findings put pressure on the mainstream views, and still lack a convincing explanation. I introduce the concept of affective representations, (...) which satisfy the semantic and structural requirements for participating in inferences. I also argue for a broader conception of inference, and show how we can apply this view to explain the results of the transitive inference studies. Finally, I suggest it is more useful to think of flexibility of thought in terms of a continuous range, rather than a dichotomy of flexible vs. inflexible. (shrink)

According to the research on the influence of resources on mate selection, the amount of financial resources affects an individual’s choice of "luxuries" and "necessities" among mate selection cues, while the amount of time resources affects cue diversity. However, for a long time, researchers only paid attention to the impact of financial resources and ignored the role of time resources. Therefore, this paper draws lessons from the relevant research on the influence of time on decision-making and proposes to study mate (...) selection from the perspective of decision-making. Additionally, current research concerning the influence of resources on the choice of a spouse focuses more on results and neglects to examine the process. Therefore, based on the relevant theories, this paper makes several theoretical assumptions regarding the influence mechanism of resource availability on mate choice decisions, gender differences and the actor-partner effect. (shrink)

Medical decision making by patients is respected as a lawful exercise of free will and agency unless patients are found to lack “competence.” Yet measures of competence in medical decision making typically assess only cognitive abilities. Emotionality is involved in decision making and may affect how far patients’ decisions to accept or refuse medical treatment embody free will. Moreover, neurodivergence, or atypical neurological makeup, is often diagnosed as neurodegeneration, neurodysfunction, neural damage, or neural difference and frequently leads to difficulties in (...) considering the emotional aspects of decisions that standard tests do not measure or disclose. Neurodiversity activists assert that their neural differences are not pathologies to be treated or cured but are alternative ways of being that should be accepted as neuroequal. Nevertheless, who may claim to be neurodiverse is uncertain. We focus on atypical emotionality to consider the limits of neurodiversity in relation to measures of competence, particularly in relation to end-of-life decision making. (shrink)

Recent behavioral experiments, along with imaging experiments and neuropsychological studies appear to support the hypothesis that emotions play a causal or constitutive role in moral judgment. Those who resist this hypothesis tend to suggest that affective mechanisms are better suited to play a modulatory role in moral cognition. But I argue that claims about the role of emotion in moral cognition frame the debate in ways that divert attention away from other plausible hypotheses. I suggest that the available data may (...) be more plausibly explained by appeal to predictive and evaluative mechanisms, which are neither wholly affective nor straightforwardly cognitive. By recognizing this fact, we can begin to see why questions about the role of emotion in moral psychology are likely to be empirically misguided. (shrink)

A surprisingly large number of lottery prizes go unclaimed every year. This leads us to suspect that what people bet on is not only money, but also good mood. We conducted three studies to explain, from an emotional perspective, why people play lottery games. We first conducted two survey studies to assess mood state reported by online (Study 1a) and offline lottery buyers (Study 1b) at different stages of lottery play. The results revealed that participants’ highest mood appeared before knowing (...) whether they had won. In Study 2, we manipulated the means of reward (lottery tickets vs. cash) and compared participants’ mood changes at different stages of a rewards game in the laboratory. We found the following: first, lottery group participants were generally in a better mood; second, 42% of lottery group participants did not come to the laboratory to collect scratch cards; and third, lottery group participants took more time to return to the laboratory to check their tickets than participants in the cash group. In Study 3, we examined whether priming good or bad mood could influence participants’ preferences for cash versus lottery tickets. The results revealed that participants who were primed for poor mood had a higher preference for lottery tickets compared with their good mood counterparts. These findings suggest that what our participants sought in lottery play was not only money, but improved mood. (shrink)

The dual-track theory of moral reasoning has received considerable attention due to the neuroimaging work of Greene et al. Greene et al. claimed that certain kinds of moral dilemmas activated brain regions specific to emotional responses, while others activated areas specific to cognition. This appears to indicate a dissociation between different types of moral reasoning. I re-evaluate these claims of specificity in light of subsequent empirical work. I argue that none of the cortical areas identified by Greene et al. are (...) functionally specific: each is active in a wide variety of both cognitive and emotional tasks. I further argue that distinct activation across conditions is not strong evidence for dissociation. This undermines support for the dual-track hypothesis. I further argue that moral decision-making appears to activate a common network that underlies self-projection: the ability to imagine oneself from a variety of viewpoints in a variety of situations. I argue that the utilization of self-projection indicates a continuity between moral decision-making and other kinds of complex social deliberation. This may have normative consequences, but teasing them out will require careful attention to both empirical and philosophical concerns. (shrink)

Value and uncertainty are the critical components of decision and action. To think of the affective system as at the core of action is to draw attention to the role of affect in representing and combining these two dimensions, and orchestrating a wide range of mental capacities—attention, perception, memory, inference, motivation, and monitoring—in light of these evaluative representations. The commentators have helpfully enriched our appreciation of the various ways in which affect can contribute to the attunement, cuing, motivation, control, and (...) ongoing assessment of decision and action. (shrink)

The role of affection in the mass production of information and the post-truth phenomenon has returned a bias to the analysis of emotions, under which they appear as a key agent in disinformation systems, or as a distorting element that must be eliminated in order to have an "objective" access to the truth through the strict use of reason. In this work we will defend that both positions incur in problematic approaches, and that both are based on premises that deserve (...) a review. From this critical exercise, we will suggest a transversal proposal of minimums from which to carry out the analysis of emotions in the study of post-truth. (shrink)

Craig Callender attempts to overturn conventional wisdom within decision theory by contending that rational intertemporal choices need not always conform to an exponential discounting function. He argues that there are cases in which hyperbolic discounting is the height of rationality. This paper does not seek to undermine Callender’s conclusions, but instead raises two interrelated theoretical concerns with his way securing them. The first concern is with his dismissal of influential dual-system explanations of rationality. It is argued that Callender’s criticisms of (...) said explanations fail to assess them at anything like their full weight. It is then suggested that dual-systems approaches in cognitive science do have substantial theoretical problems, but that Callender fails to identify them. The second concern builds on the first and suggests that Callender’s arguments against consensus normative standards might motivate a more dramatically reimagined notion of rationality than the one he seems to embrace. (shrink)