Philosophers have used the terms 'impersonal' and 'personal value' to refer to, among others things, whether something's value is universal or particular to an individual. In this paper, I propose an account of impersonal value that, I argue, better captures the intuitive distinction than potential alternatives, while providing conceptual resources for moving beyond the traditional stark dichotomy. I illustrate the practical importance of my theoretical account with reference to debate over the evaluative scope of cultural heritage.

The young Edmund Husserl stressed that the success of his philosophy hinged upon his ability to determine the subject and the predicate of impersonal propositions and their expressions, such as ‘It is raining’. This essay accordingly investigates the tenability of Husserl’s early thought, by executing the first study of his analysis of impersonal propositions from the late 1890s. This examination reshapes our understanding of the inception of phenomenology in two ways. First, Husserl pinpoints the subject by outlining why (...) impersonal expressions are employed during communication. This contravenes interpretations of the early Husserl as uninterested in intersubjectivity. Second, by studying how Husserl determines the predicate by investigating existential propositions, I show that Husserl, in the late 1890s, came to his final view on the concept of being. (shrink)

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

David Benatar has argued both for anti-natalism and for a certain pessimism about life's meaning. In this paper, I propose that these positions are expressions of a deeply impersonal philosophical temperament. This is not a problem on its own; we all have our philosophical instincts. The problem is that this particular temperament, I argue, leads Benatar astray, since it prevents him from answering a question that any moral philosopher must answer. This is the question of rational authority, which requires (...) the moral philosopher to say why existing human agents have strong practical reasons to comply with the philosopher's dictates. A purely impersonal ethical system can never do this, and this is why Benatar has no answer to this question. (shrink)

The Impossibility of Poetry Adorno's aesthetic theory bears the profound scars of his personal experience of fascism. Even after Auschwitz, he feared that modern bourgeois society is a breeding ground for new forms of fascist terror. It was said that, after Auschwitz, one could no longer write poems. But Adorno insisted that postwar art is an indispensable means for telling the truth about how the social order was fundamentally changed by that catastrophe.1 Not to tell the truth is to be (...) guilty of complicitous silence; yet, the unbearable truth is that society is pervasively and radically evil. As long as…. (shrink)

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a (...) property to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)

The study investigated assessment of sex and age impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour among post graduate students’ of Federal Universities of South-South, Nigeria. The study which is a survey research, involved a multi-stage stratified random sampling technique of 440 males and 490 females from 3 universities and 3 faculties of the same universities in South-South, Nigeria. Sample was selected through stratified random sampling approach. The study adopted frequencies, percentages, factor analysis and multiple classification analysis statistical tools. A questionnaire developed and (...) validated by the researcher titled: “Academic Dishonest Behaviour Questionnaire’’ (ADBQ) with Cronbach coefficient alpha reliability of 0.83 was used for data collection. Two research questions and one hypothesis were formulated for the study. The findings indicated that the students used for this study were involved in Sex and Age impersonation aspect of academic dishonest behaviours. Female students were seen to be more involved than male in impersonation, Students ages 25-29years are more culpable in impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour. It is therefore recommended among others that there should be synergy among stakeholders in the educational process to fight this art of impersonation. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between Baukunst and Zeitwille in the practice and pedagogy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the significance of the notions of civilization and culture for his philosophy of education and design practice. Focusing on the negation of metropolitan life and mise en scene of architectural space as its starting point, it examines how Georg Simmel’s notion of objectivity could be related to Mies’s understanding of civilization. Its key insight is to recognize that Mie’s practice (...) and pedagogy was directed by the idea that architecture should capture the driving force of civilization. The paper also summarizes the foundational concepts of Mies’s curriculum in Chicago. It aims to highlight the importance of the notions of Zeitwille and impersonality in Mies van der Rohe’s thought and to tease apart the tension between the impersonality and the role of the autonomous individual during the modernist era. (shrink)

The Buddha, unlike the Upaniṣadic or Brahmanical way, has avoided the concept of the self, and it seems to be left with limited conceptual possibilities for free will and moral responsibility. Now, the question is, if the self is crucial for free will, then how can free will be conceptualized in the Buddhist ‘no-self’ (anattā) doctrine. Nevertheless, the Buddha accepts a dynamic notion of cetanā (intention/volition), and it explicitly implies that he rejects the ultimate or absolute freedom of the will, (...) but not the minimal power of free will. It seems that the Buddha’s view shifts from agent causation (independent ownership) to a causal sequence of impersonal processes (psychophysical factors). This paper claims to shed clarity on ‘whether free will is viable in the context of the anattāvāda in Buddhism.’ It mainly studies the secondary sources (even though it has also discussed the primary sources) and their interpretations of freedom of the will and how it further does argue for a compatibility approach of free will in Buddhist thought. (shrink)

A classic objection to act-consequentialism is that it is overdemanding: it requires agents to bear too many costs for the sake of promoting the impersonal good. I develop the complementary objection that act-consequentialism is underdemanding: it fails to acknowledge that agents have moral reasons to bear certain costs themselves, even when it would be impersonally better for others to bear these costs.

As all philosophical concepts, also the concept of person constitutes itself referring to a particular problem. The analysis drafted by Marcel Mauss regarding the genesis of the aforementioned category permits to analyse the problematic nucleus to which such concept refers to, disclosing that it responds to the necessity of solving the ancient problem of the link between mind and body in a specific perspective. In this respect, Bergsonian theory of images represents a solid attempt of passing not only the habitual (...) solution of the problem represented by the concept of person, but also the problem itself whereto refers. The deleuzian reading of Henri Bergson’s theory leads him to define the impersonal and pre-individual field sketched out by Bergson as a plane of immanence, and this last as “a life”. The ultimate aim of this paper is to analyse the nature of such plane and to suggest an interpretation of the latest Gilles Deleuze’s piece of writing, "L’immanence: une vie..." that unveils its profound Bergsonism. (shrink)

In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a (...) desire to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. (shrink)

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant’s revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the process, (...) he introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new. -/- Keywords: concepts, becoming, multiplicity, singularity, the middle [au milieu], difference, intensity, time, system, the new. (shrink)

A brief study of the logical, linguistic, psychological and ontological problem of ‘impersonalia’, which is to say of assertions such as ‘it’s raining’ or ‘es blitzt’ which seem to have no subject. Such assertions cause problems not only for defenders of traditional subject-predicate views of assertive sentences, but also for those, such as Frege, who defended a view in terms of functions and arguments.

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value either (...) when it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

This paper argues for a new understanding of Strawson’s distinction between personal, impersonal, and self-reactive attitudes. Many Strawsonians take these basic reactive attitude types to be distinguished by two factors. Is it the self or another who is treated with good- or ill-will? And is it the self or another who displays good- or ill-will? On this picture, when someone else wrongs me, my reactive attitude is personal; when someone else wrongs someone else, my reactive attitude is impersonal; (...) and when I wrong someone else, my attitude is self-reactive. Against this account, I argue that the basic reactive attitude types are better distinguished according to whether they express partial or impartial concern. This fits Strawson’s discussion in “Freedom and Resentment”, and it allows us to see an important point that the alternative approach obscures. Namely, while attitudes like resentment, gratitude, shame, and pride can arise as responses to our own treatment and behavior, they can also arise as third-party responses to the treatment and behavior of our family members, romantic partners, and close friends. Similarly, attitudes like moral indignation and disapprobation also have a wider scope than is often acknowledged; they can arise as responses to others’ treatment, but they can also arise as responses to our own treatment when we react impartially to circumstances involving ourselves. (shrink)

A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective impersonal laws. Asma argued that our contemporary imaginative cognition is evolutionarily conserved-it has structural and functional similarities to premodern Homo sapiens’s cognition. This article will outline the essential features of mythopoetic cognition or adaptive imagination, delineate the adaptive sociocultural advantages of mythopoetic cognition, explain the phylogenetic and ontogenetic mechanisms that give rise to human mythopoetic mind, show (...) how mythopoetic cognition challeng­es contemporary trends in cognitive science and philosophy, and recognize and outline empirical approaches for a new cognitive science of the imagination. (shrink)

Socialist republicans advocate public ownership and control of the means of production in order to achieve the republican goal of a society without endemic domination. While civic republicanism is often attacked for its conservatism, the relatively neglected radical history of the tradition shows how a republican form of socialism provides powerful conceptual resources to critique capitalism for leaving workers and citizens dominated. This analysis supports a programme of public ownership and economic democracy intended to reduce domination in the workplace and (...) wider society. I defend this socialist republicanism from both the Marxist objection that it overlooks the impersonal nature of domination under capitalism and the left-liberal objections that property-owning democracy or worker codetermination are sufficient to suppress dominating relationships. The resulting position identifies the need for more ambitious institutional grounds for republican liberty than is often supposed, while offering us a distinctive emancipatory justification for socialism. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Jenefer Robinson’s personalist account of pictorial expression. [1] According to personalism, a picture possesses the expressive properties we attribute to it because we take it that someone expresses E in the work. Robinson’s particular strategy exploits the concept of an implied persona who ‘unifies’ and ‘specifies’ what is expressed. [2] Dominic Lopes challenges this view by attacking what he takes to be a flawed assumption motivating the personalist account: the priority of figure expression. [3] Once (...) we acknowledge this flaw, he argues, there is no good reason to prefer personalism to an impersonalist theory. I will argue that Robinson qua personalist can pre-empt this strike by clarifying the relation between (a) what a picture expresses and (b) what is depicted as expressing in the picture. Rather than leading with the idea that personalism unifies or determines the meaning, I argue that impersonalism diminishes it and that, should it be accepted, we would be left with an impoverished view of what specific art pieces can mean. (shrink)

In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be (...) even one successful impersonal action rationalization. In what follows we bolster our case against an essential connection between action and the de se (or indexicality), first by developing a range of new action models and secondly by responding to challenges from Dilip Ninan, Stephan Torre, and José Luis Bermúdez . (shrink)

We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, (...) Stalnaker, Kamp) and 'cautious' updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange (Eckardt). (shrink)

Can it be better or worse for a person to be than not to be, that is, can it be better or worse to exist than not to exist at all? This old 'existential question' has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy. There are roughly two reasons for this renewed interest. Firstly, traditional so-called “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counter-intuitive implications in regard to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future, not yet existing people. (...) Secondly, it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for someone, and that only moral theories that are in this sense “person affecting” can be correct. The implications of this Person Affecting Restriction will differ radically, however, depending on which answer one gives to the existential question. Melinda Roberts (2003) and Matthew Adler (2009) have defended an affirmative answer to the existential question using an assumption that one can asribe a zero level of wellbeing to a person in a world in which that person doesn't exist. Contrariwise, Derek Parfit (1984), John Broome (1999), and others have worried that if we take a person’s life to be better for her than non-existence, then we would have to conclude that it would have been worse for her if she did not exist, which is absurd: Nothing would have been worse or better for a person if she had not existed. The paper suggests that an affirmative answer to the existential question can avoid such absurdities: One can claim that, say, it is better for a person to exist than not to exist, without implying that it would have been worse for a person if she had not existed or that her level of wellbeing would then have been lower. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna and brings him into dialogue with Western philosophers of religion, primarily in the recent analytic tradition. Sri Ramakrishna’s expansive conception of God as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality, Maharaj argues, opens up an entirely new paradigm for addressing central topics in the philosophy of religion, including divine infinitude, religious diversity, the nature and epistemology of mystical experience, and the problem of evil.

Digital records, from chat transcripts to social media posts, are being used to create chatbots that recreate the conversational style of deceased individuals. Some maintain that this is merely a new form of digital memorial, while others argue that they pose a variety of moral hazards. To resolve this, I turn to classical Chinese philosophy to make use of a debate over the ethics of funerals and mourning. This ancient argument includes much of interest for the contemporary issue at hand, (...) including the use of impersonators of the dead to help the bereaved to deal well with their grief. I connect this historical discussion with a modern trend in clinical psychology that reframes therapeutic interventions with bereaved individuals. The trend directs practitioners away from facilitating detachment and toward affirming continuing bonds. I conclude that these chatbots can offer an important source of support to mourners, but also discuss parameters and features of social context that will be important to avoid the moral hazards identified by sceptics. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that (...) a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

In his 1927 Analysis of Matter and elsewhere, Russell argued that we can successfully infer the structure of the external world from that of our explanatory schemes. While nothing guarantees that the intrinsic qualities of experiences are shared by their objects, he held that the relations tying together those relata perforce mirror relations that actually obtain (these being expressible in the formal idiom of the Principia Mathematica). This claim was subsequently criticized by the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman as true but (...) trivial, insofar as from a closed body of observations (or “Ramsey sentence”) one can always generate other equally-satisfactory networks of relations, provided they respect the original set’s cardinality. Since any model thus generated will be empirically adequate, “[t]he defence is therefore driven back from the fairly safe fictitious-real classification to the much less tenable ‘trivial’ and ‘important’” (Newman 1928). Given the definitional rigour afforded by the initial appeal to isomorphism (via one-to-one correspondences in extension), the received assessment, shared by Russell himself, is that retreating to a pragmatic adjudication would betoken a fatal blow. However, I suggest that reliance on “importance” can be avoided if we incorporate an impersonal criterion of diachronic precedence. When collecting observations, an ordinality emerges alongside the cardinality which gives that underived structure an irrevocable epistemological privilege. Hence, I argue that, all other things being equal, any construct parasitic on an antecedent theory ought to be regarded as inferior/dispensable, since it was generated by an algorithm lacking the world-involving pedigree of its host structure. (shrink)

Given reductionism about people, personal persistence must fundamentally consist in some kind of impersonal continuity relation. Typically, these continuity relations can hold from one to many. And, if they can, the analysis of personal persistence must include a non-branching clause to avoid non-transitive identities or multiple occupancy. It is far from obvious, however, what form this clause should take. This paper argues that previous accounts are inadequate and develops a new proposal.

This study compares the neural substrate of moral decision making processes between Korean and American participants. By comparison with Americans, Korean participants showed increased activity in the right putamen associated with socio-intuitive processes and right superior frontal gyrus associated with cognitive control processes under a moral-personal condition, and in the right postcentral sulcus associated with mental calculation in familiar contexts under a moral-impersonal condition. On the other hand, American participants showed a significantly higher degree of activity in the bilateral (...) anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) associated with conflict resolution under the moral-personal condition, and in the right medial frontal gyrus (MFG) associated with simple cognitive branching in non-familiar contexts under the moral-impersonal condition when a more lenient threshold was applied, than Korean participants. These findings support the ideas of the interactions between the cultural background, education, and brain development, proposed in the field of cultural psychology and educational psychology. The study introduces educational implications relevant to moral psychologists and educators. (shrink)

Our pollution of the environment seems set to lead to widespread problems in the future, including disease, scarcity of resources, and bloody conflicts. It is natural to think that we are required to stop polluting because polluting harms the future individuals who will be faced with these problems. This natural thought faces Derek Parfit’s famous Non-Identity Problem ( 1984 , pp. 361–364). The people who live on the polluted earth would not have existed if we had not polluted. Our polluting (...) behaviour does not make these individuals worse off. It may therefore seem that we do not harm them by polluting. Parfit argues that we should replace person-affecting principles with an impersonal principle of beneficence, Principle Q ( 1984 , p. 360.). I argue that Principle Q cannot give an adequate account of our duties to refrain from polluting. I consider attempts to solve the Non-Identity Problem by denying that to harm someone an agent must make them worse off. I argue that such responses provide a partial solution to the Non-Identity Problem. They do show that we harm future individuals in a morally relevant sense by polluting. Nonetheless, this is only a partial solution. The Non-Identity Problem still suggests that our harm-based reasons not to pollute are less strong than we intuitively believe. Thus on its own an appeal to the claim that we harm future individuals is not able to give a fully satisfactory account of why we are required not to pollute. (shrink)

In the Sociology of Emotion and Affect Studies, affects are usually regarded as an aspect of human beings alone, or of impersonal or collective atmospheres. However, feelings and emotions are only specific cases of affectivity that require subjective inner selves, while the concept of ‘atmospheres’ fails to explain the singularity of each individual case. This article develops a theory of social affect that does not reduce affect to either personal feelings or collective emotions. First, I use a Spinozist understanding (...) of the ‘body’ to conceptualize the receptivity and mutual constitution of bodies, to show how affects do not ‘belong’ to anybody; they are not solely attributable either to the human or to any kind of body alone, but emerge in situations of the encounter and interaction. Next I build upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s concept of transmissions to show how we can theorize affect as an emerging transmission between and among bodies. Finally, I demonstrate how we now have a complete conceptual frame for theorizing affect in relation to all bodies in any given social scene, the grand composition of which I call affectif. (shrink)

The self can be understood in objective metaphysical terms as a bundle of properties, as a substance, or as some other kind of entity on our metaphysical list of what there is. Such an approach explores the metaphysical nature of the self when regarded from a suitably impersonal, ontological perspective. It explores the nature and structure of the self in objective reality, that is, the nature and structure of the self from without. This is the objective self. I am (...) taking a different approach. In addition to objective reality, which is usually understood and explored from an impersonal, quasi-observational and metaphysically realist perspective, we can also explore the nature and structure of subjective reality. The nature and structure of subjective reality is defined by the nature and structure of first-personal, conscious experience. Subjective reality is as real as objective reality, and a metaphysical realist such as myself can endorse the existence of both kinds of ontology. The mental states that, as experienced from the first-personal or subjective perspective, capture the nature and structure of subjective reality, are included in objective reality. The questions to explore in a subjective ontology of the self concern the nature and structure of the self from the first-personal or subjective perspective, that is, the nature and structure of the self from within. This is the subjective self. (shrink)

Discovering laws of nature was a way to worship a law-giving God, during the Scientific Revolution. So why should we consider it worthwhile now, in our own more secularized science? For historical perspective, I examine two competing early modern theological traditions that related laws of nature to different divine attributes, and their secular legacy in views ranging from Kant and Nietzsche to Humean and ‘governing’ accounts in recent analytic metaphysics. Tracing these branching offshoots of ethically charged God-concepts sheds light on (...) how our ethical ideals and ideas of natural order can still be valuably integrated. Early modern intellectualists valued the law-governed order of nature as a sign of divine Reason. In turn, Reason traditionally ascribed to God has now been partly reclaimed for humans, reframing the value of natural order anthropocentrically, in terms of the value of our own intelligence. Alternatively, Reason may be reclaimed for nature itself, as in an ‘objective’ idealism or metaphysical rationalism. However, beyond divine Reason, an influential voluntarist tradition in theology stressed a connection between laws of nature and God’s Power or free Will. Tracking how divine Power has been reinvested in human beings provides a broader context for instrumentalism and related lineages of empiricism. But secularization can also transfer Power from God to the impersonal natural world. In this light, current scientific interest in lawlike order may also reflect the inherent value of brute necessity or inhuman causal power in nature: this is a deeper way to reject anthropocentrism and to show our respect for the environment. (shrink)

Although fairness is a key moral trait, limited research focuses on participants' observed fairness behavior because moral traits are generally measured through self-report. This experiment focused on day-to-day interpersonal fairness rather than impersonal justice, and fairness was assessed as observed behavior. The experiment investigated whether a self-reported fairness trait would moderate a situational influence on observed fairness behavior, such that individuals with a stronger fairness trait would be less affected by a situational influence than those with a weaker fairness (...) trait. We used an iterated resource game in which participants could withdraw resources as they chose, and we manipulated the number of resources bogus players withdrew. The number of resources participants withdrew was the behavioral measure of fairness. Results confirmed the expected moderation of the unfairness manipulation by a fairness trait on observed behavior. Those reporting a stronger fairness trait were unaffected by the manipulation, whereas those reporting a weaker fairness trait were more strongly influenced. (shrink)

How comes that two organisms can interact with each other or that we can comprehend what the other experiences? The theories of embodiment, intersubjectivity or empathy have repeatedly taken as their starting point an individualistic assumption (the comprehension of the other comes after the self-comprehension) or a cognitivist one (the affective dimension follows the cognitive process). The thesis of this book is that there are no two isolated entities at the origin which successively interact with each other. There is, rather, (...) an impersonal stratum – the original affectivity (Gefühlsdrang) – which lets the living organisms be constitutively attuned with the expressive dimension of the life from the very beginning. The book aims to rethink the issue of corporality on the basis of a biosemiotics of the interaction between lived body (Leib) and environment (Umwelt). The human emotions reveals themselves as devices that experiment further attunement levels and expose the human being – because of her ex-centricity – to the alienation in various forms of the psychopathological existence. This is an unprecedented perspective that turns to psychopathology to reread against the light the watermark weaving the structure of personal singularity. What emerges is an intermediate territory confining both with philosophy and psychiatry: the psychopathology of ordo amoris. The author advances the project of a new psychopathology of ordo amoris, not only tackling with the 19th-century tradition of psychiatry and phenomenological psychopathology, but also with the contemporary disputes on intersubjectivity in phenomenology and with those on schizophrenia as disruption of aida or as disembodiment process in psychiatry. What results from his project is the first systematic study on the international level showing the relevance of Schelerian concepts of body schema (Leibschema) and order of feeling (ordo amoris) to understand the disruptions of emotional regulation on the psychopathological dimension as well as on the formation process of the singularity. (shrink)

The ethics of biological procreation has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet, as I show in this paper, much of what has come to be called procreative ethics is conducted in a strangely abstract, impersonal mode, one which stands little chance of speaking to the practical perspectives of any prospective parent. In short, the field appears to be flirting with a strange sort of practical irrelevance, wherein its verdicts are answers to questions that no-one is (...) asking. I go on to articulate a theory of what I call existential grounding, a notion which explains the role that prospective children play in the lives of many would-be parents. Procreative ethicists who want their work to have real practical relevance must, I claim, start to engage with this markedly first-personal kind of practical consideration. (shrink)

There is a clear distinction between genuine and fraudulent reasoning. Being seduced by the latter can result in horrific consequences. This paper explores how we can arm ourselves, and others with the ability to recognize the difference between genuine and pseudo-reasoning, with the motivation to maintain an unbending commitment to follow the “impersonal” “norm-driven” rules of reason even in situations in which “non-reasonable” strategies appear to support short-term bests interests, and with the confidence that genuine reasoning is the best (...) defense against the pseudo-reasoning. It also provides a simple table of “markers” whereby genuine reasoning can be distinguished from the “fake stuff.”. (shrink)

Justice and Libertarianism The term ‘justice’ is commonly used in several different ways. Sometimes it designates the moral permissibility of political structures (such as legal systems). Sometimes it designates moral fairness (as opposed to efficiency or other considerations that are relevant to moral permissibility). Sometimes it designates legitimacy in the sense of it being morally impermissible for others to interfere forcibly with the act or omission (e.g., my failing to go to dinner with my mother may be wrong but nonetheless (...) legitimate). Finally, sometimes it designates what we owe each other in the sense of respecting everyone’s rights. Of course, these notions are closely related. What we owe each other may, but need not, be partly based on issues of fairness. Legitimacy and permissibility of political structures are largely, but perhaps not entirely, determined by what rights of non-interference individuals have. Nonetheless, these are distinct notions and we shall focus only on what we owe each other. Justice as what we owe each other is not concerned with impersonal duties (duties owed to no one, i.e., that do not correspond to anyone’s rights). If there are impersonal duties, then something can be just but nonetheless morally impermissible. For brevity, we shall often write of actions being permissible or agents having a moral liberty, but this should always be understood in the interpersonal sense of violating no one’s rights. Libertarianism is sometimes advocated as a derivative set of rules (e.g., derived from rule utilitarian or contractarian doctrines). Here, however, we reserve the term for the natural rights doctrine that agents initially fully own themselves. Agents are full self-owners just in case they own themselves in precisely the same way that they can fully own inanimate objects. Stated slightly differently, full self-owners own themselves in the same way that a full chattel-slaveowner owns a slave. Throughout, we are concerned with moral ownership and not legal ownership.. (shrink)

Man, in the Heraclitean principle of change, is an embodiment of continuity and discontinuity. To what end man’s being transcends to, is an interrogative of important discourse in this paper. Does Man flux from life to death; in nothingness, and from death, in nothingness, to life in somethingness? What does it mean to be human, to die and to experience change and human transcendence? The frequent nature of death, the death of loved ones, colleagues and friends elicit lamentations and sorrows, (...) but more importantly, it expresses human incapacity, fear of the unknown, lack of knowledge of death, and of what it means to die. Such attitude or confusion, may have informed the interrogative of Job (14:14): If man dies shall he live again? It also agitates the triad; if a man lives to die, does he die to live? If God is life, is God death also? If life is a means to an end, is death the end? (Adadevo, 2008; 38). These interrogatives exemplify the character and paradox of human existence; the more the knowledge of man about man, the more Man understands that he knows little about his being. It is argued here that, as a being that encapsulate change, discontinuity and continuity, man’s dissolution in death is not an external and public fact that creates a sense of loss and sadness to humanity, but an internal possibility of his being. It is the fulfillment of the Man project of self-liberation, self-transcendence, and a process of surpassing Man’s existential condition. We shall argue further that, in death, man ceases to be the impersonal social being among beings and has freed himself from the servitude of the anonymous “they” and thereby opened himself to his own most potentiality for being. In birth, there is the change of non-being to being, of nothingness to somethingness (somaticity), then to pure being after death; to a spiritual reality. A conclusion is argued that, in death, Man further becomes the most vitalizing fact of life and the cardinal indicator of authentic selfhood. (shrink)

The non-identity problem is usually considered in the forward-looking direction but a version of it also applies to the past, due to the fact that even minor historical changes would have affected the whole subsequent sequence of births, dramatically changing who comes to exist next. This simple point is routinely overlooked by familiar attitudes and evaluative judgments about the past, even those of sophisticated historians. I shall argue, however, that it means that when we feel sadness about some historical tragedy, (...) or think of one possible course of history as better than another, these judgments and attitudes can be understood in terms of two opposing perspectives on the past: an impersonal standpoint concerned only with how much value each course of history contains, and a person-centred standpoint concerned with harms and benefits to the people who had actually existed. In this paper, I will set out these radically different visions of what matters in history and point out some of their surprising implications. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of "inorganic sexuality" in the work of Italian writer and philosopher Mario Perniola. The main objective is to develop the controversial and original aspects of Perniola's thought within his aesthetic theory of feeling. Perniola elaborates the so-called "thing that feels", namely a feeling in which the neutral and impersonal dimensions of the things flow into organic life and vice versa. This perspective, as will be clarified, by dissolving the vitalist and spiritualist drives of the (...) subject, enlarges the horizon of aesthetic feeling by welcoming what is commonly left outside of it: the inorganic and material world, in its surprising aspects, but also in its uncanny and disturbing ones. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to show the significance and the value of neutral sexuality, which opens up a space of experiences beyond the traditional metaphysical oppositions such as masculine/feminine, organic/inorganic, alive/dead, real/virtual, gender/sex. (shrink)

Psychopathic behavior is characteristically amoral, but to date research studies have largely failed to identify any systematic differences in moral judgment capability between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. In this study, we investigate whether significant differences in moral judgment emerge when taking into account the phenotypic heterogeneity of the disorder through a well-validated distinction between psychopathic subtypes. Three groups of incarcerated participants [low-anxious psychopaths (n 1⁄4 12), high-anxious psychopaths (n 1⁄4 12) and non-psychopaths (n 1⁄4 24)] completed a moral judgment test involving (...) hypothet- ical dilemmas. The moral dilemmas featured personal (i.e. involving direct physical harm) or impersonal (i.e. involving indirect or remote harm) actions. Compared to non-psychopaths, both groups of psychopaths were significantly more likely to endorse the impersonal actions. However, only the low-anxious psychopaths were significantly more likely to endorse the personal harms when commission of the harm would maximize aggregate welfare the utilitarian choice. High-anxious psychopaths and non-psychopaths did not significantly differ in their personal moral judgments. These results provide novel laboratory evidence of abnormal moral judgment in psychopaths, as well as additional support for the importance of considering psychopathic subtypes. (shrink)

Many philosophers recognize that, as a matter of psychological fact, one can believe something valuable without valuing it. I argue that it is also possible to value something without believing it valuable. Agents can genuinely value things that they neither believe disvaluable nor believe valuable along a scale of impersonal value.

Morality seems to require us to attend to the good of others, but does not require that we assign any importance to our own good. Standard forms of consequentialism thus appear vulnerable to the compulsory self-benefit objection: they require agents to benefit themselves when doing so is entailed by the requirement of maximizing overall impersonal good. Attempts to address this objection by appealing to ideally motivated consequentialist agents; by rejecting maximization; by leveraging consequentialist responses to the more familiar special (...) relationships and demandingness objections; or by appealing to dual rankings of moral and all-things-considered reasons fall short of adequately answering this objection. A satisfactory response to the compulsory self-benefit objection is elusive because of consequentialism struggles to account for directed options (in this case, an option not to maximize one’s own good but not that of others) and for moral considerations that do not rest on the value of outcomes or states of affairs. (shrink)

Patrick Byrne argues that MacIntyre’s account of practical reasoning is inadequate because it is based upon a notion of flourishing that places too much emphasis on impersonal facts, likewise because it is excessively focused on means without considering the role of desire for ends, and because it is does not account for the role of feelings in explaining how knowledge of ends is attained. In this essay, I argue that MacIntyre’s account provides adequate responses to each of these concerns. (...) But more broadly, I argue that Byrne is right to suggest that a Lonerganian perspective offers important insights that can extend MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian practical philosophy. Specifically, Lonergan’s account of the generalized empirical method may inform MacIntyre’s theory of rival, and potentially incommensurable traditions, explaining how standards of argument are both transcultural and historically articulated. (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued that if we examine our lives in context of the cosmos at large, sub specie aeternitatis, we cannot escape life's meaninglessness. To see our lives as meaningful, we have to shun the point of view of the cosmos and consider our lives only in the narrower context of the here and now. I argue that this view is incorrect: life can be seen as meaningful also sub specie aeternitatis. While criticizing arguments by, among others, Simon Blackburn, (...) Nicholas Rescher, and Thomas Nagel, I show that what determines assessments of the meaning of a life are the standards of meaningfulness one endorses rather than the size of the context in which that life is assessed. Employing non-demanding standards of meaningfulness to assess a life is compatible with examining it in the context of the cosmos at large. That is also the case if we accept Nagel's claim that to examine a life sub specie aeternitatis is to examine it externally, impersonally and objectively: life can be evaluated as meaningful also when under these perspectives if the standards of meaningfulness we adopt are not overly challenging. Nor does the contingency of our existence, realized sub specie aeternitatis, render our life meaningless. Contrary to a commonly accepted view, then, examining our lives sub specie aeternitatis does not necessitate that we see them as meaningless. (shrink)

In recent years, the idea has been gaining ground that our traditional conceptions of knowledge and cognition are unduly limiting, in that they privilege what goes on inside the ‘skin and skull’ of an individual reasoner. Instead, it has been argued, knowledge and cognition need to be understood as embodied, situated, and extended. Whether these various interrelations and dependencies are ‘merely’ causal, or are in a more fundamental sense constitutive of knowledge and cognition, is as much a matter of controversy (...) as the degree to which they pose a challenge to ‘traditional’ conceptions of cognition, knowledge and the mind. In this paper we argue that when the idea of ‘extendedness’ is applied to a core concept in epistemology and the philosophy of science—namely, scientific evidence—things appear to be on a much surer footing. The evidential status of data gathered through extended processes—including its utility as justification or warrant—do not seem to be weakened by virtue of being extended, but instead are often strengthened because of it. Indeed, it is often precisely by virtue of this extendedness that scientific evidence grounds knowledge claims, which individuals may subsequently ascribe to themselves. The functional equivalence between machine-based gathering, filtering, and processing of data and human interpretation and assessment is the crucial factor in deciding whether evidence has been gathered, rather than the distinction between intra- and extracranial processes or individual and social processes. To prioritize biological processes here, and to assert the superiority of human cognitive capacities seems both arbitrary and unwarranted with respect to gathering evidence, and ultimately would lead to an unattractive skepticism about many of the methods used in science to gather evidence. In other words, conceiving of scientific evidence as ‘impersonal’ not only better captures the character of evidence-gathering in practice, but also makes sense of a large amount of evidence-gathering that ‘personal’ accounts fail to either acknowledge or accurately describe. Whilst we suggest it is likely that all internally-distributed evidence-gathering processes are merely contingently internal processes, a significant number of externally-distributed evidence-gathering processes are necessarily externally-distributed. Some evidence can only be gathered by extended epistemic agents. (shrink)

There are kinds of dialogue that support social justice and others that do the reverse. The kinds of dialogue that support social justice require that anger be bracketed and that hiding in safe spaces be eschewed. All illegitimate ad hominem/ad feminem attacks are ruled out from the get-go. No dialogical contribution can be down-graded on account of the communicator’s gender, race, or religion. As well, this communicative approach unapologetically privileges reason in full view of theories and strategies that might seek (...) to undermine reasoning as just another illegitimate form of power. On the more positive side, it is argued in this paper that social justice dialogue will be enhanced by a kind of “communicative upgrading,” which amplifies “person perception,” foregrounds the impersonal forces within our common social spaces rather than the “baddies” within, and orients the dialogical trajectory toward the future rather than the past. Finally, it is argued in this paper that educators have a pressing responsibility to guide their students through social justice dialogue so that their speech contributes to the amelioration of injustice, rather than rendering the terrain more treacherous. (shrink)

Hume’s understanding of sympathy in section 2.1.11 of the Treatise—that it is a mental mechanism by means of which one sentient being can come to share the psychological states of another—has a particularly interesting implication. What the sympathizer receives, according to this definition, is the passing psychological “affection” that the object of his sympathy was experiencing at the moment of observation. Thus the psychological connection produced by Humean sympathy is not between the sympathizer and the “other” as a “whole person” (...) existing through time, but between the sympathizer and the other’s current mental state, detached from his or her diachronic psychological life. Some commentators profess themselves dissatisfied with the impersonality of this “limited sympathy”. John Bricke, for example, argues that the Humean sympathizer sympathizes with “atomistically rendered desires of some individual who is, thus far, of no further concern,” while Philip Mercer writes more bluntly that Hume’s definition omits the “practical concern for the other” that is the essence of sympathy’s contribution to moral psychology. (shrink)

Novels like Fight Club or American Psycho are said to be instances of unreliable narration: the first person narrator presents an evidently distorted picture of the fictional world. The film adaptations of these novels are likewise said to involve unreliable narration. I resist this extension of the term ‘unreliable narration’ to film. My argument for this rests on the observation that unreliable narration requires a personal narrator while film typically involves an impersonal narrator. The kind of ambiguous story-telling that (...) we find in literary fiction with unreliable narrators, where for certain descriptions it is unclear whether what we’re told is an accurate account of what’s happening in the story world or not, can instead be achieved by conventionalized filmmaking techniques for reporting the contents of mental states, like the point of view shot, but especially the more ambiguous blended perspective shot. (shrink)