Results for 'altruistic reasons'

971 found
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  1. Effective Altruism and Requiring Reasons to Help Others.Thomas Sinclair - 2024 - Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (1):62-77.
    Theron Pummer's impressive new book The Rules of Rescue seeks to defend effective altruism without taking on the controversial moral theoretical commitments. Through an exploration of the framework of requiring reasons and permitting reasons that is the backbone of his argument, this article raises some doubts about how successful Pummer's strategy of avoidance can be.
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  2. Moral Reason, Moral Sentiments and the Realization of Altruism: A Motivational Theory of Altruism.JeeLoo Liu - 2012 - Asian Philosophy 22 (2):93-119.
    This paper begins with Thomas Nagel's (1970) investigation of the possibility of altruism to further examine how to motivate altruism. When the pursuit of the gratification of one's own desires generally has an immediate causal efficacy, how can one also be motivated to care for others and to act towards the well-being of others? A successful motivational theory of altruism must explain how altruism is possible under all these motivational interferences. The paper will begin with an exposition of Nagel's proposal, (...)
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  3. Why Not Effective Altruism?Richard Yetter Chappell - 2024 - Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (1):3-21.
    Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.
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  4. Patient Informed Choice for Altruism.David J. Doukas & John Hardwig - 2014 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 23 (4):397-402.
    Abstract:Respect for persons protects patients regarding their own healthcare decisions. Patient informed choice for altruism (PICA) is a proposed means for a fully autonomous patient with decisionmaking capacity to limit his or her own treatment for altruistic reasons. An altruistic decision could bond the patient with others at the end of life. We contend that PICA can also be an advance directive option. The proxy, family, and physicians must be reminded that a patient’s altruistic treatment refusal (...)
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  5. Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue.Stefan Riedener, Dominic Roser & Markus Huppenbauer (eds.) - 2021 - Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos.
    Effective altruism has become a worldwide phenomenon. The movement combines empathy and reason in the attempt to improve the world. Adherents don’t let moral gut instincts dictate their altruistic efforts, but use evidence and reflection to do the most good they can. Effective altruism originated, and primarily grew, in strongly secular environments—such as philosophy departments or Silicon Valley. So far, a religious perspective on this movement has been lacking. What can people of faith learn from effective altruism? What may (...)
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  6. Effective Altruism and Extreme Poverty.Fırat Akova - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Warwick
    Effective altruism is a movement which aims to maximise good. Effective altruists are concerned with extreme poverty and many of them think that individuals have an obligation to donate to effective charities to alleviate extreme poverty. Their reasoning, which I will scrutinise, is as follows: -/- Premise 1. Extreme poverty is very bad. -/- Premise 2. If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do (...)
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  7. When should an effective altruist donate?William MacAskill - manuscript
    Effective altruism is the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize positive impact on others with a given unit of resources, and the taking of action on that basis. It’s a philosophy and a social movement that is gaining considerable steam in the philanthropic world. For example, GiveWell, an organization that recommends charities working in global health and development and generally follows effective altruist principles, moves over $90 million per year to its top recommendations. Giving (...)
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  8. Compensated Altruism and Moral Autonomy.Theron Pummer - forthcoming - Social Philosophy and Policy.
    It is sometimes morally permissible not to help others even when doing so is overall better for you. For example, you are not morally required to take a career in medicine over a career in music, even if the former is both better for others and better for you. I argue that the permissibility of not helping in a range of cases of “compensated altruism” is explained by the existence of autonomy-based considerations. I sketch a view according to which you (...)
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  9.  72
    Why restrict medical effective altruism?Travis Quigley - 2024 - Bioethics 38 (5):452-459.
    In a challenge trial, research subjects are purposefully exposed to some pathogen in a controlled setting, in order to test the efficacy of a vaccine or other experimental treatment. This is an example of medical effective altruism (MEA), where individuals volunteer to risk harms for the public good. Many bioethicists rejected challenge trials in the context of Covid‐19 vaccine research on ethical grounds. After considering various grounds of this objection, I conclude that the crucial question is how much harm research (...)
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  10. Uncovering the Moral Heuristics of Altruism: A Philosophical Scale.Julian Friedland, Kyle Emich & Benjamin M. Cole - 2020 - PLoS ONE 15 (3).
    Extant research suggests that individuals employ traditional moral heuristics to support their observed altruistic behavior; yet findings have largely been limited to inductive extrapolation and rely on relatively few traditional frames in so doing, namely, deontology in organizational behavior and virtue theory in law and economics. Given that these and competing moral frames such as utilitarianism can manifest as identical behavior, we develop a moral framing instrument—the Philosophical Moral-Framing Measure (PMFM)—to expand and distinguish traditional frames associated and disassociated with (...)
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  11. Kant and Aristotle on Altruism and the Love Command: Is Universal Friendship Possible.Stephen R. Palmquist - 2017 - Aretè: International Journal of Philosophy, Human & Social Science 2:95-110.
    This article examines the plausibility of regarding altruism in terms of universal friendship. Section 1 frames the question around Aristotle’s ground-breaking philosophy of friendship. For Aristotle, most friendships exist for selfish reasons, motivated by a desire either for pleasure(playmates) or profit (workmates); relatively few friendships are genuine, being motivated by a desire for shared virtue (soulmates). In contrast to this negative answer to the main question, Section 2 examines a possible religious basis for affirming altruism, arising out of the (...)
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  12. Ethical Reflections on Genetic Enhancement with the Aim of Enlarging Altruism.David DeGrazia - 2016 - Health Care Analysis 24 (3):180-195.
    When it comes to caring about and helping those in need, our imaginations tend to be weak and our motivation tends to be parochial. This is a major moral problem in view of how much unmet need there is in the world and how much material capacity there is to address that need. With this problem in mind, the present paper will focus on genetic means to the enhancement of a moral capacity—a disposition to altruism—and of a cognitive capacity that (...)
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  13. Explaining human altruism.Michael Vlerick - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2395-2413.
    Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is puzzling. The evolution of altruistic cooperative behavior—in which an organism’s action reduces its fitness and increases the fitness of another organism —only makes sense when it is directed at genetically related organisms or when one can expect the favor to be returned. Therefore, evolutionary theorists such as Sober and Wilson have argued that we should revise Neo-Darwininian evolutionary theory. They argue that human (...)
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  14. Parity, moral options, and the weights of reasons.Chris Tucker - 2022 - Noûs 57 (2):454-480.
    The (moral) permissibility of an act is determined by the relative weights of reasons, or so I assume. But how many weights does a reason have? Weight Monism is the idea that reasons have a single weight value. There is just the weight of reasons. The simplest versions hold that the weight of each reason is either weightier than, less weighty than, or equal to every other reason. We’ll see that this simple view leads to paradox in (...)
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  15. The Relationship Between Altruism and Religious Attitude among University Students from Different Departments.Sevde Düzgüner & Kenan Sevinc - 2020 - Theosophia (1):53-69.
    As in other branches of social sciences, many studies on altruism have been conducted in the field of psychology. Altruism, which is at the intersection point of social psychology, positive psychology and the psychology of religion, is based on the prioritization of the other rather than oneself. Providing a roadmap for social relations, religions glorifies altruistic behavior. For this reason, it has been accepted that there is a natural relationship between altruism and religious attachment. In this article, the relationship (...)
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  16. The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty.Amod Lele - 2013 - Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20:702-734.
    The Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva tells his audience to give out alcohol, weapons and sex for reasons of Buddhist compassion, though he repeatedly warns of the dangers of all these three. The article shows how Śāntideva resolves this issue: these gifts, and gifts in general, attract their recipients to the virtuous giver, in a way that helps the recipients to become more virtuous in the long run. As a consequence, Śāntideva does recommend the alleviation of poverty, but assigns it (...)
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  17. Kitcher’s Revolutionary Reasoning Inversion in Ethics.Christine Clavien - 2012 - Analyse & Kritik 34 (1):117-128.
    This paper examines three specific issues raised by The Ethical Project. First, I discuss the varieties of altruism and spell out the differences between the definitions proposed by Kitcher and the ways altruism is usually conceived in biology, philosophy, psychology, and economics literature. Second, with the example of Kitcher’s account, I take a critical look at evolutionary stories of the emergence of human ethical practices. Third, I point to the revolutionary implications of the Darwinian methodology when it is thoughtfully applied (...)
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  18. Sterba’s Argument From Non-Question-Beggingness for the Rationality of Morality.Duncan MacIntosh - 2014 - International Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (1):171-189.
    James Sterba describes the egoist as thinking only egoist reasons decide the rationality of choices of action, the altruist, only altruistic reasons, that each in effect begs the question of what reasons there are against the other, and that the only non-question-begging and therefore rationally defensible position in this controversy is the middle-ground position that high-ranking egoistic reasons should trump low ranking-altruistic considerations and vice versa, this position being co-extensive with morality. Therefore it is (...)
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  19. Solidarity - Enlightened Leadership.Ignace Haaz - 2016 - In Christoph Stückelberger, Walter Fust & Obiora F. Ike (eds.), Global Ethics for Leadership: Values and Virtues for Life. Globethics.net. pp. 163-174.
    Solidarity could be defined in the broad sense either as a means or as an end. Considered as an end, solidarity is the motive of any virtuous action based on altruistic reasons, such as helping others to rescue someone in order to prevent a harmful situation. E. g. contributing to lift and rescue a heavy person, lying unconscious in the street on the floor, who is being handled by rescuers, but who might be needing an additional person, could (...)
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  20. Divine Forgetting and Perfect Being Theology.Christopher Willard-Kyle - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
    I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait (omniscience). But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain (...)
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  21. Are we living at the hinge of history?Will MacAskill - 2022
    In the final pages of On What Matters, Volume II, Derek Parfit comments: ‘We live during the hinge of history... If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period... What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history.’ This passage echoes Parfit's comment, in Reasons and Persons, that ‘the next few centuries will be the most important in human history’. -/- But is the claim that we live at (...)
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  22. The Moral Significance of Empathy.William Jefferson - 2019 - Dissertation, The University of Oxford
    In this thesis, I argue that empathy is morally significant because it plays an important role in informing our moral deliberations. Empathy should be thought of not as an alternative to rational deliberation about how we are to act, but rather as an important input into such deliberation. -/- I focus on exploring what we learn when we empathize with the suffering of another person. Standard epistemic defences of empathy say only that such empathy will give us knowledge of which (...)
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  23. Effective Justice.Roger Crisp & Theron Pummer - 2020 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (4):398-415.
    Effective Altruism is a social movement which encourages people to do as much good as they can when helping others, given limited money, time, effort, and other resources. This paper first identifies a minimal philosophical view that underpins this movement, and then argues that there is an analogous minimal philosophical view which might underpin Effective Justice, a possible social movement that would encourage promoting justice most effectively, given limited resources. The latter minimal view reflects an insight about justice, and our (...)
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  24. Relational Desires and Empirical Evidence against Psychological Egoism.Joshua May - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):39–58.
    Roughly, psychological egoism is the thesis that all of a person's intentional actions are ultimately self-interested in some sense; psychological altruism is the thesis that some of a person's intentional actions are not ultimately self-interested, since some are ultimately other-regarding in some sense. C. Daniel Batson and other social psychologists have argued that experiments provide support for a theory called the "empathy-altruism hypothesis" that entails the falsity of psychological egoism. However, several critics claim that there are egoistic explanations of the (...)
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  25. On the Concept and Ethics of Vaccination for the Sake of Others.Steven R. Kraaijeveld - 2023 - Dissertation, Wageningen University and Research
    This dissertation explores the idea and ethics of vaccination for the sake of others. It conceptually distinguishes four different kinds of vaccination—self-protective, paternalistic, altruistic, and indirect—based on who receives the primary benefits of vaccination and who ultimately makes the vaccination decision. It describes the results of focus group studies that were conducted to investigate what people who might get vaccinated altruistically think of this idea. It also applies the different kinds of vaccination to ethical issues surrounding COVID-19, such as (...)
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  26. The Economics of Morality.Dillon Bowen - 2016 - Journal of Practical Ethics 4 (1).
    Altruism is embedded in our biology and in our culture. We offer our bus seats to the disabled and elderly, give directions to disoriented tourists, and donate a portion of our income charity. Yet for all the good it does, there are deep problems with altruism as it is practiced today. Nearly all of us, when asked, will say that we care about practicing altruism in a way that effectively improves the lives of others. Almost none of us, when asked, (...)
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  27. Engelhardt on the Family.Hon-Lam Li - 2013 - International Journal of Chinese and Comparative Philosophy of Medicine (153-160).
    Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. offers erudite and compelling arguments for the view that all families should try to realize the traditional family. Although I tend to agree with him from my personal standpoint, I doubt that this view can be justified to those with whom we are in reasonable disagreement about the family. I make three critical points. First, though Engelhardt stops short of saying that the state should encourage people to form traditonal families, or discourage those who do not, some (...)
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  28. (1 other version)Donating gametes for research and therapy: a reply to Donald Evans.Donna Dickenson - 1997 - Journal of Medical Ethics 23 (2):93-95.
    There has been a troublesome anomaly in the UK between cash payment to men for sperm donation and the effective assumption that women will pay to donate eggs. Some commentators, including Donald Evans in this journal, have argued that the anomaly should be resolved by treating women on the same terms as men. But this argument ignores important difficulties about property in the body, particularly in relation to gametes. There are good reasons for thinking that the contract model and (...)
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  29. Networks of Gene Regulation, Neural Development and the Evolution of General Capabilities, Such as Human Empathy.Alfred Gierer - 1998 - Zeitschrift Für Naturforschung C - A Journal of Bioscience 53:716-722.
    A network of gene regulation organized in a hierarchical and combinatorial manner is crucially involved in the development of the neural network, and has to be considered one of the main substrates of genetic change in its evolution. Though qualitative features may emerge by way of the accumulation of rather unspecific quantitative changes, it is reasonable to assume that at least in some cases specific combinations of regulatory parts of the genome initiated new directions of evolution, leading to novel capabilities (...)
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  30.  74
    (1 other version)We Owe It to Others to Think for Ourselves.Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - In Jonathan Matheson & Kirk Lougheed (eds.), Epistemic Autonomy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 306-322.
    We are often urged to figure things out for ourselves rather than to rely on other people’s say-so, and thus be ‘epistemically autonomous’ in one sense of the term. But why? For almost any important question, there will be someone around you who is at least as well placed to answer it correctly. So why bother making up your own mind at all? I consider, and then reject, two ‘egoistic’ answers to this question according to which thinking for oneself is (...)
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  31. A niggle at Nagel: causally active desires and the explanation of action.Charles Pigden - 2009 - In Constantine Sandis (ed.), New essays on the explanation of action. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 220--40.
    This paper criticizes an influential argument from Thomas Nagel’s THE POSSIBILTIY OF ALTRUISM, an argument that plays a foundational role in the philosophies of (at least) Philippa Foot, John McDowell and Jonathan Dancy. Nagel purports to prove that a person can be can be motivated to perform X by the belief that X is likely to bring about Y, without a causally active or biffy desire for Y. If Cullity and Gaut are to be believed (ETHICS AND PRACTICAL REASONING) this (...)
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  32. Forgiving While Resenting: Justifying Elective Forgiveness.Cristina Roadevin - 2018 - Ethical Perspectives 25 (2):257-284.
    Philosophers have proposed accounts of forgiveness in which the victim is warranted in forgiving only if the wrongdoer makes amends for the wrong done. According to such an account, forgiveness is made rational by the wrongdoer apologizing. But this account creates a puzzle because it seems to render cases of undeserved elective forgiveness (where there is no apology or repentance) unjustified. My aim in the present contribution is to argue that electively forgiving unrepentant wrongdoers can be justified if we accept (...)
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  33. Cluelessness.Hilary Greaves - 2016 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (3):311-339.
    Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses (...)
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  34. Three Paradoxes of Supererogation.Daniel Muñoz - 2021 - Noûs 55 (3):699-716.
    Supererogatory acts—good deeds “beyond the call of duty”—are a part of moral common sense, but conceptually puzzling. I propose a unified solution to three of the most infamous puzzles: the classic Paradox of Supererogation (if it’s so good, why isn’t it just obligatory?), Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. I conclude that supererogation makes sense if, and only if, the grounds of rightness are multi-dimensional and comparative.
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  35. (1 other version)Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017.Michael Starks - 2017 - Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press.
    This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and edited to bring them up to date (2017). The copyright page has the date of the edition and new editions will be noted there as I edit old articles or add new ones. All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and (...)
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  36. Supererogation and Intentions of the Agent.Alfred Archer - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (2):447-462.
    It has been claimed, by David Heyd, that in order for an act to count as supererogatory the agent performing the act must possess altruistic intentions (1982 p.115). This requirement, Heyd claims, allows us to make sense of the meritorious nature of acts of supererogation. In this paper I will investigate whether there is good reason to accept that this requirement is a necessary condition of supererogation. I will argue that such a reason can be found in cases where (...)
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  37. The Self-Absorption Objection and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics.Jeff D’Souza - 2018 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92 (4):641-668.
    This paper examines one of the central objections levied against neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics: the self-absorption objection. Proponents of this objection state that the main problem with neo-Aristotelian accounts of moral motivation is that they prescribe that our ultimate reason for acting virtuously is that doing so is for the sake of and/or is constitutive of our own eudaimonia. In this paper, I provide an overview of the various attempts made by neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists to address the self-absorption objection and argue (...)
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  38. Tapping into the unimpossible: Philosophical health in lives with spinal cord injury.Luis de Miranda, Richard Levi & Anestis Divanoglou - forthcoming - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 29 (7):1203-1210.
    Background We investigated the personal philosophies of eight persons with a tetraplegic condition (four male, four female), all living in Sweden with a chronic spinal cord injury (SCI) and all reporting a good life. Our purpose was to discover if there is a philosophical mindset that may play a role in living a good life with a traumatic SCI. Methods Two rounds of in-depth qualitative interviews were performed by the same interviewer, a philosophical practitioner by training (de Miranda). The second (...)
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  39. Gene Mobility and the Concept of Relatedness.Jonathan Birch - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (4):445-476.
    Cooperation is rife in the microbial world, yet our best current theories of the evolution of cooperation were developed with multicellular animals in mind. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is an important case in point: applying the theory in a microbial setting is far from straightforward, as social evolution in microbes has a number of distinctive features that the theory was never intended to capture. In this article, I focus on the conceptual challenges posed by the project of extending Hamilton’s (...)
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  40. Empirical Work in Moral Psychology.Joshua May - 2017 - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Provides an overview of empirical research relevant to philosophical questions about moral thought, feeling, reasoning, and motivation. Topics include: free will and moral responsibility, egoism and altruism, moral judgment and motivation, weakness and strength of will, moral intuitions, and moral knowledge. [Originally published in 2012. Updated and expanded in 2017.].
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  41. Contingency and value in social decision making.Marcus Selart & Daniel Eek - 1999 - In Peter Juslin & Henry Montgomery (eds.), Judgment and Decision Making: Neo-Brunswikian and Process-Tracing Approaches. Erlbaum. pp. 261-273.
    This chapter discusses different perspectives and trends in social decision making, especially the actual processes used by humans when they make decisions in their everyday lives or in business situations. The chapter uses cognitive psychological techniques to break down these processes and set them in their social context. Most of our decisions are made in a social context and are therefore influenced by other people. If you are at an auction and bidding on a popular item, you will try to (...)
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  42. Parity, Pluralism, and Permissible Partiality.Chris Tucker - forthcoming - In Eric Siverman & Chris Tweed (eds.), Virtuous and Vicious Partiality. Routledge.
    We can often permissibly choose a worse self-interested option over a better altruistic alternative. For example, it is permissible to eat out rather than donate the money to feed five hungry children for a single meal. If we eat out, we do something permissibly partial toward ourselves. If we donate, we go beyond the call of moral duty and do something supererogatory. Such phenomena aren’t easy to explain, and they rule out otherwise promising moral theories. Incommensurability and Ruth Chang’s (...)
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  43. The Heart of the Problem with Longtermism (Draft).Ben Bramble - manuscript
    In this critique of longtermism, I attack its Heart, the idea that there is intrinsic value in the addition of each new happy being to the world. I provide new responses to longtermists' two main arguments for the Heart (The Argument from Extinction and The Argument from Miserable Beings). I then sketch an alternative view to longtermism, which I call Future Sentimentalism, a view that does a better job of explaining our future-regarding reasons. Finally, I consider an important objection (...)
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  44. Being Good in a World of Need: Some Empirical Worries and an Uncomfortable Philosophical Possibility.Larry S. Temkin - 2019 - Journal of Practical Ethics 7 (1):1-23.
    In this article, I present some worries about the possible impact of global efforts to aid the needy in some of the world’s most desperate regions. Among the worries I address are possible unintended negative consequences that may occur elsewhere in a society when aid agencies hire highly qualified local people to promote their agendas; the possibility that foreign interests and priorities may have undue influence on a country’s direction and priorities, negatively impacting local authority and autonomy; and the related (...)
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  45. Ibn Khaldun on Solidarity (“Asabiyah”)-Modern Science on Cooperativeness and Empathy: a Comparison.Alfred Gierer - 2001 - Philosophia Naturalis 38 (1):91-104.
    Understanding cooperative human behaviour depends on insights into the biological basis of human altruism, as well as into socio-cultural development. In terms of evolutionary theory, kinship and reciprocity are well established as underlying cooperativeness. Reasons will be given suggesting an additional source, the capability of a cognition-based empathy that may have evolved as a by-product of strategic thought. An assessment of the range, the intrinsic limitations, and the conditions for activation of human cooperativeness would profit from a systems approach (...)
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  46.  13
    Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109.
    The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and (...)
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  47. Prawdziwie darwinowska etyka.Andrzej Elzanowski - 2010 - Lectiones Et Acroases Philosophicae 3:13-57.
    True Darwinian Ethics -/- Darwin’s model for the evolution of morality as presented in Descent of Man (1871) is shown to comprise three major stages that are here referred to as empathic premorality, tribal morality, and universalizing morality. Empathy, the key component of Darwin’s “social instincts” that started moral evolution, is here recognized as the principal cognitive device that conveys epistemic credibility to moral agency. The two constitutive elements of the tribal morality are conscience that Darwin conceived of as a (...)
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  48. Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: A Modern Philosophical Dialogue about Policymaker Ignorance.Scott Scheall - 2023 - Substack.
    How should we conceive of policymakers for the purposes of political analysis? In particular, if we wish to explain and predict political decisions and their consequences, if we wish to ensure that political action is as effective as it can be, how should we think of policymakers? Should we think of them as they are commonly conceived in traditional political analysis, i.e., as uniquely knowledgeable and as either altruistic (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their constituents’ interests) (...)
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  49. Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109.
    The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and (...)
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  50.  36
    THE INTUITION OF KNOWING: ITS BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION AND NATURAL TRIGGERING-CONDITIONS.Nathan J. Fox - 2017 - Dissertation, Open University (Uk)
    Over the last hundred years, competing and incompatible positions in relation to basic problems of knowledge and the use of the verb ‘to know’ have multiplied; and the prospect of a consensus solution emerging with respect to any of the problems has not seemed particularly good. We have a Gordian knot. Even so, I suggest that we also have a way to cut it. This will involve identifying why the cognitive mechanism that produces our intuitions of knowing evolved and was (...)
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