People have worried about the compatibility of anti-individualism and knowledge of the contents of one's thoughts. Skepticism about such knowledge rears its ugly head. The first—classic—response to such worries was Tyler Burge's contention that a subclass of judgments about one's own mental states are cogito-like: they are self-verifying, thereby guaranteed to be true. Finn Spicer has recently put forward an interesting argument against Burge's claim. In this paper, I defend Burge's account of self-verification against Spicer's argument.

In recent years, the theoretical work of Gilligan in women's psychological development has led to the development of the concept of moral orientation or moral voice in contrast to the concept of moral reasoning or moral judgment developed by Kohlberg. These concepts have been of particular interest in gender studies, especially as applied to adolescence. These concepts of moral orientation and moral reasoning are being increasingly employed in healthcare ethics studies in a wide variety of settings. The recent work (...) has included studies of physicians, nurses, dentists, veterinarians, social workers, teachers of medical ethics, and hospital ethics committees. However, the study of moral development in healthcare providers has been hampered because collecting the necessary data from healthcare workers has been labor intensive and extremely time consuming. More efficient methods are needed. (shrink)

Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are (...) context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control. (shrink)

Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are (...) context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control. (shrink)

A study of physicians and medical students was conducted to determine the various philosophical positions they hold with respect to ethical decision-making in medicine and their epistemological presuppositions in relationship to the subjective-objective controversy in value theory. The study revealed that most physicians and medical students tend to be objectivists in value theory, i.e., believe that value judgements are knowledge claims capable of being true or false and are expressions of moral requirements and normative imperatives emanating from an external value (...) structure or moral order in the world, but that most physicians and medical students are inconsistent in the philosophical foundations of their medical ethical decision-making, i.e., in decision-making regarding values they tend to hold beliefs which are incompatible with other beliefs they hold about values. The study also revealed that most physicians and medical students think more emphasis should be placed upon medical ethics in medical education. (shrink)

Increasing use is made of techniques which are supposed to make policy decisions more ‘rational’. Rather little attention, however, has been paid to the relation between these techniques and the logic of choice, the political process, value judgements and assumptions. This short paper will investigate these questions in relation to a particularly fashionable technique, that of cost-benefit analysis.

Descartes famously argued, on purely conceptual grounds, that even an extremely powerful being could not trick him into mistakenly judging that he was thinking. Of course, it is not necessarily true that Descartes is thinking. Still, Descartes claimed, it is necessarily true that if a person judges that she is thinking, that person is thinking. Following Tyler Burge (1988) we call such judgments ‘self-verifying.’ More exactly, a judgment j performed by a subject S at a time t (...) is selfverifying if and only if the fact that S has made j at t entails that j is true at t.2 Burge follows Descartes in claiming that the category of conceptually self-verifying judgments includes (but is not restricted to) judgments that give rise to sincere assertions of sentences of the form, ‘I am thinking that p’. We call such judgments ‘cogito’ judgments. In this paper I argue that Burge’s Cartesian insight is hard to reconcile with Fregean accounts of the content of thought. Theorists have tried to account for the self-verifying status of cogito judgments by arguing that the second-order judgment that one is thinking that p contains the thought that p as a part of it. I argue (§1) that the accuracy of the containment model is entailed by a Russellian view of content (according to which ‘‘belief’’ contexts are both extensional and transparent) when the Russellian view is attached to some fairly uncontroversial assumptions. The accuracy of the containment model is also entailed by non-hierarchical Fregean views of content according to which expressions in oblique contexts both denote and express first-level senses (§2), but there are compelling arguments against non-hierarchical Fregean views (§3). Moreover, the extremely plausible account of self-verification provided by Russellianism is not entailed by theories that follow Frege in accepting a hierarchy of senses and so allow that expressions in oblique contexts express senses that are not identical to the senses they there denote (§4).. (shrink)

We will study several weak axiom systems that use the Subtraction and Division primitives (rather than Addition and Multiplication) to formally encode the theorems of Arithmetic. Provided such axiom systems do not recognize Multiplication as a total function, we will show that it is feasible for them to verify their Semantic Tableaux, Herbrand, and Cut-Free consistencies. If our axiom systems additionally do not recognize Addition as a total function, they will be capable of recognizing the consistency of their Hilbert-style deductive (...) proofs. Our axiom systems will not be strong enough to recognize their Canonical Reflection principle, but they will be capable of recognizing an approximation of it, called the "Tangibility Reflection Principle". We will also prove some new versions of the Second Incompleteness Theorem stating essentially that it is not possible to extend our exceptions to the Incompleteness Theorem much further. (shrink)

Abstract In slogan form, the thesis of this paper is that beliefs are self-verifying fictions: We make them up, but in so doing, they come to exist, and so the fiction of belief is in fact true. This picture of belief emerges from a combination of three independently motivated views: (1) a phenomenal intentionalist picture of intentionality, on which phenomenal consciousness is the basis of intentionality; (2) what I will call a “self-ascriptivist” picture of derived representation, on (...) which non-fundamental representational features are a matter of our ascribing contents to ourselves or our mental states or contents; and (3) a representationalist picture of the attitudes, on which the attitude components of mental states (e.g., the “belief” bit of a belief that P) are represented contents. This paper outlines and motivates the view of beliefs as self-verifying fictions, compares the view to alternative views of belief, and contrasts beliefs on the resulting picture to other belief-like mental states. (shrink)

Self-verifying judgments like _I exist_ seem rational, and self-defeating ones like _It will rain, but I don’t believe it will rain_ seem irrational_._ But one’s evidence might support a self-defeating judgment, and fail to support a self-verifying one. This paper explains how it can be rational to defy one’s evidence if judgment is construed as a mental performance or act, akin to inner assertion. The explanation comes at significant cost, however. Instead of (...) causing or constituting beliefs, judgments turn out to be mere epiphenomena, and self-verification and self-defeat lack the broader philosophical import often claimed for them. (shrink)

This essay develops an account of the link between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. It does so by articulating a Kantian account of moral psychology by way of aesthetic reflective judgements of sublimity. Since judgements of sublimity enrich the picture of a Kantian subject by forcefully revealing the unbounded power of the faculty of reason, I investigate the possibility that judgements of this kind could serve as a basis for moral motivation. The paper first shows how judgements of sublimity help (...) a subject recognize reason's unbounded nature, and proceeds to analyse the practical effects of a subject judging itself sublime. When judgements of sublimity have as their object the unbounded and unsythesizable power of reason, they may thereby serve as the basis for both the recognition of our moral vocation, and the grounds for determining the will to act from respect for it. Since a judgement of sublimity produces for Kant the experience of an enlivening emotion and an outflowing of vital forces, the paper then develops Kant's concept of “life” motivated by a recognition of its practical orientation. In this way sublimity rather than beauty can be interpreted as symbolic hypotyposis of morality. The paper then takes up less favourable interpretations of the practical effects of self-predicated judgements of sublimity, and constructs critical responses to such positions. I conclude, following Adorno, by stressing the historical and social dimension of the capacities for both making sublime judgements, and being morally enlivened by them. (shrink)

Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one (...) of the main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this paper, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated. (shrink)

Judgment internalism about evaluative judgments is the view that there is a necessary internal connection between evaluative judgments and motivation understood as desires. The debate about judgment internalism has reached a standoff some time ago. In this paper, I outline a new argument for judgment internalism. This argument does not rely on intuitions about cases, but rather it has the form of an inference to the best explanation. I argue that the best philosophical explanations of how we (...) know what we desire require that judgment internalism is true, which gives us a good reason to believe that judgment internalism is true. (shrink)

We can make a distinction between the conceptual role of the first person and the reference of the first person. By ‘conceptual role’ I mean the use that is made of the term: the kinds of procedures that we use in verifying judgements using the term and the kinds of actions we perform on the basis of judgements involving the term. In “Self-Notions,” Perry talks about conceptual role using the phrase, ‘epistemic/pragmatic relations’. He says there are “normally (...) class='Hi'>self-informative” ways of getting information and “normally self-dependent” ways of acting. These ways of getting information about the self, and ways of acting dependent on the self, constitute what I am calling the conceptual role of the first person. Perry indeed says, “I believe that what is special about self-notions is that they are the normal repository of normally self-informative ways of perceiving, and the normal motivator of normally self-dependent ways of acting.”. (shrink)

We can make a distinction between the conceptual role of the first person and the reference of the first person. By ‘conceptual role’ I mean the use that is made of the term: the kinds of procedures that we use in verifying judgements using the term and the kinds of actions we perform on the basis of judgements involving the term. In “Self-Notions,” Perry talks about conceptual role using the phrase, ‘epistemic/pragmatic relations’. He says there are “normally (...) class='Hi'>self-informative” ways of getting information and “normally self-dependent” ways of acting. These ways of getting information about the self, and ways of acting dependent on the self, constitute what I am calling the conceptual role of the first person. Perry indeed says, “I believe that what is special about self-notions is that they are the normal repository of normally self-informative ways of perceiving, and the normal motivator of normally self-dependent ways of acting.”. (shrink)

Many legal theorists see legal judgment as a largely professional or technical task. This is not how law sees itself. When looked at from the perspective of the engaged judge, law requires from us that we arrive at a certain internal governance of our thoughts and emotions. Legal scholarship and legal procedure tell us that law creates true reasons that override other, personal, reasons, even those of the utmost importance to us. A philosophical understanding of law requires a distinct (...) argument that explains how such overriding reasons can be associated with the law and how there can be a personal duty to adapt our reasoning when we make authoritative legal judgments in order to change the lives of others. The philosophy of law needs to explain how legal judgment can be a form of self-mastery. (shrink)

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these (...) observed asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

ExtractIn developing moral theories, philosophers seek to fulfill at least two tasks: to guide moral judgment and to guide moral deliberation. In moral judgment, moral agents assess moral status. In moral deliberation, moral agents decide how to act. It is important to work out how these two things are related. One suggestion is to posit a direct connection between them according to which moral agents are required to deliberate in terms of correct moral judgment. There are various (...) ways of spelling out this requirement. For example, moral agents might be required to rank prospective actions according to a correct moral judgment of them and choose the highest ranked action. Moral agents would thus be required to choose the morally best action available to them. Alternatively, moral agents might be required to separate prospective actions into those that are permissible actions and those that are impermissible and choose, perhaps on non-moral grounds, from the class of morally permissible actions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Frege characterizes judgement as the acknowledgement of the truth of a thought, appearing thereby to rule out false judgement. First in this paper I explain Frege’s characterization so that it does not have this consequence. Frege is not saying that for a subject S to judge that p is for S to acknowledge the truth of the thought that p. Rather, he is articulating judgement’s nature within self-consciousness. From within, to judge means to acknowledge a truth. Second, I (...) suggest that this articulation is centrally operative in Frege’s argument for the indefinability of truth. As Frege argues, it follows from judgement’s self-consciousness that truth is indefinable. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s views regarding suicide are usually interpreted as a response to Christian, Kantian, and Schopenhauerian ethics. Here, they are defended on the basis of his notion of life as an aesthetic phenomenon in order to provide extramoral responses to such challenges as the following: a) whether the self can deliver the right kind of judgment regarding her life, b) how suicide can be considered an empowerment of the will, and c) whether suicide can be considered an exercise of (...) freedom by the subject who thereby cancels the very grounds and means for will and action. Reconstructed as a response to Hegel’s argument against suicide on the grounds that one is not the master of oneself and that one therefore lacks the proper means to judge one’s life, Nietzsche’s position provides the epistemic footing to ground an alternate notion of self-mastery as well as the necessary insight regarding one’s life. It is shown that this reading of Nietzsche’s argument is in alignment with his non-dualism and expressivist views regarding agency. Finally, a response is formulated to the socially-grounded arguments prohibiting suicide on the basis of this reading of Nietzsche’s position. (shrink)

Is self-disclosure of negative information a viable strategy for a company to lessen the damage done to consumer responses? Three experiments assessed whether self-disclosing negative information in itself lessened the damaging impact of this information compared to third-party disclosure of the same information. Results indicated that mere self-disclosure of a negative event positively affected consumers’ choice behavior, perceived company trustworthiness, and company evaluations compared to third-party disclosure. The effectiveness of the self-disclosure strategy was moderated by the (...) initial reputation of a company, such that its impact was only observed for companies that had a poor reputation at the outset. For them, self-disclosure considerably lessened the impact of negative information compared to third-party disclosure. For companies that enjoyed a positive reputation, type of disclosure did not affect consumer responses. Mediation analysis showed that perceptions of company trustworthiness underlie the effects of the self-disclosure strategy on consumer judgment. (shrink)

Judgement is traditionally seen as applicable in two spheres of human endeavour: the theoretical (or the sphere in which we consider both what must be the case and what is likely to be the case) and the practical (or the sphere in which we consider what we ought to do, either because it is in our interests or because morality requires it). Now insofar as we are speaking of ‘judgement’ two conceptual assumptions are being made. Firstly, we are assuming that (...) there are imponderables and complexity, and secondly, despite the imponderables and complexity, that there is still room for the exercise of reason. Granted this view of judgement we can state our two main theses. Firstly, we shall argue that, despite the pressures of market forces, employee needs, and shareholder interests, there is still room in business practice for judgements so understood. Secondly, we shall argue that these judgements need not inevitably be directed down the single track of the financial interests of the company and its shareholders. The second thesis can be understood as a moral thesis in either of two ways. Either it can be seen as the thesis that companies have broad social responsibilities extending well beyond the immediate interests of the company, or as the thesis that companies share the social interests of the communities to which they belong; they are citizens writ large, to gloss Plato. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the role of self-construal in sharpening reputation judgment on earnings management cases. This study involves a personality variable that can provide sharper insights into individual assessments, namely self-construal. The study uses an experimental case with involved participants to judge the ethics of earnings management done by other managers (the target managers). Participants of this study consist of 109 master’s degree students majoring in accounting and management who acts as fellow managers. Participants provide (...) ethical judgment and reputation judgment of the target managers. This study indicates that ethical judgment on earnings management behavior differs depending on the target managers’ self-construal. In addition, ethical judgment has a positive and significant effect on reputation judgment. The following analysis showed that ethical judgment mediates the effect of earnings management behavior that self-construal moderates on reputation judgment. Studies that highlight the impact of managers’ reputation engaging in earnings management are still limited. This study used a behavioral approach, especially involving self-construal, to scrutinize the behavior of individuals within the organization, which is previous studies have not yet involved that personality factor. This research’s results imply that a manager’s response to peer’s behavior is helpful to design an appropriate management control system for organizations. This study only used earnings management scenarios in order to increase earnings. Earnings management can be in the form of actions to increase or decrease earnings. (shrink)

A two stage model was developed and tested to explain how ethical leadership relates to followers’ ethical judgment in an organizational context. Drawing on social learning theory, ethical leadership was hypothesized to promote followers’ self-leadership focused on ethics. It was found that followers’ perceived accountability fully accounts for this relationship. In stage two, the relationship between self-leadership focused on ethics and moral judgment in a dual decision-making system was described and tested. Self-leadership focused on ethics (...) was only related to moral judgment when followers use active judgment as opposed to their intuition. This provides support that a deliberate application of self-leadership focused on ethics leads to higher moral judgment. Theoretical and practical implications as well as future research opportunities are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I shall enquire how ethics fits into key ideas in the system of metaphysics of Leslie Armour: the metaphor of patterns, his views on the self,and the grounds of moral judgments.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called the subjectivist fallacy (SbF). The SbF occurs when one concludes that something is true for one person (a subject) but not true for another person (another subject), when, in fact, it is true objectively for all persons. SbF is a fallacy of relativism. Relativism, in general, means the truth‐value of a judgment is neither necessary nor universal; however, there are multiple kinds of relativism. SbF is not (...) only a fallacious depiction of relativity; it is also self‐refuting. To avoid this fallacy, one needs to ground arguments with claims that are objective or that hold universally. When the claims on which an argument is based are objectively verifiable or pertain to a set of individuals universally, then the logical necessity of the argument's conclusion may be determined. (shrink)

Different from the autonomy of understanding in cognition and the autonomy of practical reason in praxis, the heautonomy in the judgement of taste is reflexive. The reflexivity consists not only in the fact that the power of judgement legislates to its own usage but also, and more importantly, it legislates to itself through its own operative process. This normativity, based on the self-referential structure of pure aesthetic judgement and the a priori principle of subjective, internal purposiveness, can be regarded (...) as a self-discovering and self-flourishing principle that organically grows out of the aesthetic experience and, at the same time, regulates its growth in return. In this scenario, aesthetic freedom can be identified as a third kind of freedom different from Kant’s transcendental freedom and practical freedom – a flexible and living freedom with spontaneous legislation, but not bound by any determinate laws. (shrink)

We examined whether auditors' attitude to the evidence may be driven by their perception of the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. Following previous research on motivated reasoning, we assumed that the self-fulfilling prophecy effect could be interpreted as a potential motivational/incentive factor supporting auditor's reluctance to release going concern opinions. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating in a laboratory experiment that auditors' perceptions of the self-fulfilling prophecy effect can bias their professional judgment. To this extend, the Hogarth (...) and Einhorn's belief-adjustment model was employed in order to estimate auditors' attitudes in regards to both aggravating and mitigating evidence. Our results indicate that the fear of provoking the self-fulfilling prophecy creates a directional goal which leads auditors to process the audit evidence in a manner more likely to yield the desired conclusion. Auditors' motivated by the fear of causing the self-fulfilling prophecy effect offered a greater sensitivity to the positive evidence and, at the same time, a lower tendency to favor negative evidence. We also provide a discussion of the implications of our results for both regulators and the auditing profession. (shrink)

The notions of acting against one's better judgment and self-deception are notoriously problematic. Often, they have been deemed incoherent in a tradition which may be traced back to Socrates. My inquiry into these notions, unlike many others, explicitly draws upon considerations pertaining to the interpretation of speech and action and the role which rationality plays within it, the nature of psychological explanation and the framework in which it is embedded. This work is motivated by the view that, if (...) carried out properly, a study of the mind which focuses on deviant phenomena will also improve understanding of standard cases of action and belief-formation. ;The possibility of acting against one's better judgment seems, prima facie, to be at odds with our notion of action. I begin by critically examining several arguments purporting to show that akrasia is in fact incompatible with the notion of a free intentional action. I show that, overall, an agent appears more rational, and thus more intelligible, if instances of local irrationality of this kind are acknowledged as such rather than re-interpreted as non-akratic actions. The position I reject represents the agent as significantly more inconsistent than necessary, and in some sense, undermines the endeavor of a psychological explanation. ;I proceed to argue that reasons play a unique role in the context of explaining actions. At the same time, the framework of action explanation must be expanded so as to include additional familiar elements such as emotions and fantasies in order to improve understanding of the choices we make. I argue that the causal influence of these elements cannot be fully captured as merely a source of reasons for actions; thus, some of the mental causes responsible for our actions lie outside the realm of reasons. Finally, I show how expanding the explanatory framework of actions makes the phenomenon of akrasia less puzzling in some respects; indeed, this expansion should incline us to expect that persons would act akratically on occasion. ;My discussion of self-deception focuses on two major questions: whether every case of self-deception involves the presence of an intention to form a belief and to what extent this phenomenon warrants a view of the mind as divided. With respect to the first question, I suggest that a view which refrains from interpreting every case of self-deception as involving an intention to form a belief is psychologically more plausible and accounts for some key cases for which the intentionalist view fails to account. As for the second question, I contend that there are at least two ways in which the mind may be properly seen as divided, yet divisions which introduce homuncularism should be rejected. What emerges from my discussion of self-deception, as well as the preceding discussion of akrasia, is a view of the mind that essentially incorporates both rational and non-rational elements. (shrink)

Supporters of the Evaluative Judgment Theories of Emotion mainly explore emotions from the perspective of cognitive evaluation and advocate that emotions are evaluative judgments. The Perceptual Theories of Emotion have made some modifications to the evaluative judgment of emotions, attempting to propose better theories. The Perceptual Theories of Emotion advocate verifying the similarities between emotions and perceptions through analogical reasoning. However, the Perceptual Theories of Emotion also have their problems. Compared to the Evaluative Judgment Theories of (...) Emotion and the Perceptual Theories of Emotion, the Embodied Emotion Theory has significant advantages, mainly reflected in avoiding the drawbacks of over-intellectualize emotions by evaluative judgments; infants and animals can also understand emotions through non-conceptualized ways of self-awareness and understanding of social rules and norms; the core relational property of emotions revealed in the embodied emotion theory demonstrates the action orientation of emotions, connects the organism’s body and external environment, and integrates both biological and social aspects, further clarifying the complexity and diversity of emotions. (shrink)

Developmental and neuroscience works have demonstrated that the moral judgment is influenced by theory of mind, which refers to the ability to represent the mental states of different agents. However, the neural and cognitive time course of interactions between moral judgment and ToM remains unclear. The present event-related potential study investigated the underlying neural substrate of the interaction between moral judgment and ToM by contrasting the ERPs elicited by moral judgments for self and for others in (...) moral dilemmas. In classic moral dilemmas, the agents must choose between the utilitarian choice and the non-utilitarian choice. The ERPs were recorded from participants who made moral judgments for self and for others when the agent made utilitarian or non-utilitarian choices during the dilemma. The results revealed that the moral judgment for others elicited a larger frontal late positive component than that for self when the agents made utilitarian choices, while no difference was observed on early components of N1, P2, and N2. Moreover, individual differences in mentalizing ability were negatively correlated with the LPC amplitudes. These findings suggested that ToM modulated the late controlled process but not the early automatic process during moral judgments. (shrink)

Recently, the ethical rather than just the economic resonance of entrepreneurship has attracted attention with researchers highlighting entrepreneurship and ethics as interwoven processes of value creation and management. Recognising that traditional normative perspectives on ethics are limited in application in entrepreneurial contexts, this stream of research has theorised entrepreneurship and ethics as the pragmatic production of useful effects through the alignment of public—private values. In this article, we critique this view and use Kant's concept of reflective judgement as discussed in (...) his Critique of the Power of Judgement to theorise ethical entrepreneurial practice as the capacity to routinely break free from current conventions through the imaginative creation and use of self-legislating maxims. Through an analysis of the narratives of 12 entrepreneurs, we suggest there are three dimensions to reflective judgement in entrepreneurial contexts: (1) Social Performance; (2) Public Challenge and; (3) Personal Autonomy. Whilst the entrepreneurs were alive to the importance of commercial return, their narratives demonstrated further concern for, and commitment to, standards that they rationally and imaginatively felt as being appropriate. In our discussion, we integrate the findings into existing theoretical categories from entrepreneurship studies to better appreciate ethics within the context of value creation. (shrink)

According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions can be taken to be constituted by facts about the subject’s best opinions about them formed under certain optimal conditions. This paper aims to defend this account against three main objections which have been made to it by Boghossian, Miller and implicitly by Wright himself. It will be argued that Miller’s objection is implausible because it fails to take into account the partial-determination claim in this account. Boghossian’s objection (...) also fails because it is based on an unjustified reductionist reading of Wright’s account. However, Wright’s own attempt to resist Boghossian’s objection seems to display a shift from his Judgement-Dependent account to an Interpretationist account of self-knowledge, in which case Wright’s new account would face the same problem which he himself has previously put forward in the case of Davidson’s Interpretationist account of self-knowledge. Nonetheless, I will argue that Wright does not need to make such a move because Boghossian’s objection is not applicable to his account. (shrink)

The question of whether content externalism poses a threat to the traditional view of self-knowledge has been much debated. Compatibilists have tried to diffuse the threat by appealing to the self-verifying character of reflexive judgments about our own thoughts, while incompatibilists have strenuously objected that this does not suffice. In my paper I argue that this debate is fundamentally misconceived since it is based, on both sides, on the problematic notion of ‘knowledge of content’. What this shows, (...) I argue, is not that content externalism is unobjectionable, but that the real challenge to content externalism is not an epistemological one. The real difficulty concerns the content externalist’s seemingly necessary commitment to the idea that individuals have an incomplete grasp of the concepts that go into their own thoughts. This idea poses a threat not to self-knowledge, I argue, but rather to our first- and second-order reasoning abilities. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on the role of digital platform labour in the development of today’s artificial intelligence, predicated on data-intensive machine learning algorithms. Focus is on the specific ways in which outsourcing of data tasks to myriad ‘micro-workers’, recruited and managed through specialized platforms, powers virtual assistants, self-driving vehicles and connected objects. Using qualitative data from multiple sources, we show that micro-work performs a variety of functions, between three poles that we label, respectively, ‘artificial intelligence preparation’, ‘artificial intelligence (...) verification’ and ‘artificial intelligence impersonation’. Because of the wide scope of application of micro-work, it is a structural component of contemporary artificial intelligence production processes – not an ephemeral form of support that may vanish once the technology reaches maturity stage. Through the lens of micro-work, we prefigure the policy implications of a future in which data technologies do not replace human workforce but imply its marginalization and precariousness. (shrink)