Background:Clinical ethics committees have been broadly implemented in university hospitals, general hospitals and nursing homes. To ensure the quality of ethics consultations, evaluation should be...

In this paper I examine whether different suggestions made in the philosophy of perception can help us to explain and understand the phenomenal character of emotional experience. After having introduced the range of possible positions, I consider qualia-theory, reductive pure intentionalism and reductive impure intentionalism. I argue that qualia-theory can easily explain why emotions are phenomenal states at all but that it cannot account for the “inextricable link thesis” which is quite prominent in the philosophy of emotion. Reductive pure and (...) impure intentionalism, in turn, seem to fit better with this thesis but they have difficulties to explain what makes emotions phenomenal states at all. Therefore, I finally discuss whether non-reductive intentionalism might be an option for explaining the phenomenal character of emotional experience. (shrink)

This volume examines minimality in cooperation and shared agency from various angles. It features essays written by top scholars in the philosophy of mind and action. Taken together, the essays provide a genuine contribution to the contemporary joint action debate. The main accounts in this debate present sufficient rather than necessary or minimal criteria for there to be cooperation. Much discussion in the debate deals with robust rather than more attenuate and simple cases of cooperation or shared agency. Focusing on (...) such minimal cases, however, may help to explain how cooperation comes into existence and how minimal cooperation interrelates with more complex cases of cooperation. The contributors discuss minimality in cooperation by focusing on particular aspects. For example, they consider how social roles might deliver minimal cooperation constraints or what the minimal contextual criteria are for cooperation to emerge. Readers will find the answers to these and other questions: What is minimally cooperative behavior? By what steps could full members of a society organized by conventions, norms and institutions be constructed from creatures with minimal social skills and cognitive abilities? What do we experience of actions when we act together with a purpose? (shrink)

The social interface between reproductive medicine and embryonic stem cell research has been investigated in a pilot study at a large IVF clinic in central China. Methods included observation, interviews with hospital personnel, and five in-depth qualitative interviews with women who underwent IVF and who were asked for their consent to the donation of embryos for use in medical (in fact human embryonic stem cell) research. This paper reports, and discusses from an ethical perspective, the results of an analysis of (...) these interviews. The participants talked of extreme social pressure to become pregnant. Once they had a baby, ‘spare’ embryos lost practical significance due to the Chinese one-child policy. In the context of decision making about donating embryos to research, the women used the clinical distinctions between ‘good and bad quality’ embryos and also between frozen and transferred embryos, as guiding moral distinctions. In the absence of concrete information about what sort of research their embryos should be used for, the women interviewed either refused consent (for fear that the embryo would be given to another couple) or accepted, expressing motives of solidarity with other women in a similar situation. This reveals that they filled the knowledge gap with an image of research improving fertility treatment. (shrink)

Abstract:We discuss the role that transnational corporations (TNCs) should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...) responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

In this article, we propose a pluralistic approach to the explanation of social understanding that integrates literature from social psychology with the theory of mind debate. Social understanding in everyday life is achieved in various ways. As a rule of thumb we propose that individuals make use of whatever procedure is cognitively least demanding to them in a given context. Aside from theory and simulation, associations of behaviors with familiar agents play a crucial role in social understanding. This role has (...) been neglected so far. We illustrate the roles of fluency and associations in social understanding in false belief tasks. (shrink)

Diagnosing emotion disturbances should be informed by current knowledge about normal emotion processes. I identify four major functions of emotion as well as sources for potential dysfunctions and suggest that emotions should only be diagnosed as pathological when they are clearly dysfunctional, which requires considering eliciting events, realistic person-specific appraisal patterns, and adaptive responses or action tendencies. Evidence from actuarial research on the reported length of naturally occurring emotion episodes (including potential determinants) illustrates appropriateness criteria for the clinical evaluation of (...) emotion duration—an essential element in the DSM-5 symptom catalogue for major depression episodes, especially in bereavement. The need for more actuarial evidence on normal emotion responses and its consideration by the clinical community is highlighted. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika Fiebich is (...) PhD student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

In many immigrant groups, women gain less command of the host country language than the men. Using life story interviews with marriage migrants from Turkey, now living in Denmark, this article investigates this limited language learning, linking it to these women's lives as they primarily unfold in three social locations: households, workplaces and language schools. During their first years in Denmark a gendered division of work may relegate the women to the Turkish- or Kurdish-speaking home environment. When they subsequently enter (...) work, their poor Danish skills only allow them access into jobs with little host country interaction. The available language education becomes fragmented after childbirth and often remains inadequate to substantially raise the women's command of Danish. Furthermore, national legislation may unintentionally impede language learning. As a result, even women with expressed ambitions of acquiring Danish may continue living below a `language threshold' that precludes them from gaining broader access to host country resources. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to determine to what extent contemporary cross-cultural and developmental research can shed light on the role that narrative practices might play in the development of folk psychology. In particular, I focus on the role of narrative practices in the development of false belief understanding, which has been regarded as a milestone in the development of folk psychology. Second, I aim to discuss possible cognitive procedures that may underlie successful performance in false belief tasks. Methodologically, I (...) distinguish between two kinds of narrative practices: ‘mentalistic narrative practice’, and ‘behavioral-contextual narrative practice’ behavior of another person in a specific socio-situational context). Whereas the former is more prevalent in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures, the latter is predominantly used by members of Eastern cultures. Mentalistic narrative practices correlate with cultural divergences in the development of false belief understanding throughout ontogeny but do not seem to play the key role. The analysis shows that conceptual change and the acquisition of mental state terms is essential for passing the false belief task, and that theory is likely to be the cognitive mechanism involved here such as proposed by Theory Theory. However, Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis trumps over Theory Theory to account for the varieties and ambiguities people typically meet when understanding each other in everyday life. (shrink)

In this article I defend pluralist theory against various objections. First, I argue that although traditional theories may also account for multiple ways to achieve social understanding, they still put some emphasis on one particular epistemic strategy. Pluralist theory, in contrast, rejects the so-called ‘default assumption’ that there is any primary or default method in social understanding. Second, I illustrate that pluralist theory needs to be distinguished from integration theory. On one hand, integration theory faces the difficulty of trying to (...) combine traditional theories of social understanding that have contradictory background assumptions. On the other hand, pluralist theory goes beyond integrating traditional theories by accounting for a variety of factors that may play a role in social understanding but have been neglected in such theories, including stereotype activation, social and personal relationships, contextual features, individual moods, perceptions, and so on. Third, I argue that if the default assumption is rejected, pluralist theorists need to provide another positive account of why particular cognitive processes are more likely to come into play in a specific instance of social understanding than others in order to provide a genuine alternative to traditional theories. I discuss three versions of pluralist theory that meet this challenge by pointing to normativity, fluency, and interaction. (shrink)

A definition of emotion common to the affective sciences is an urgent desideratum. Lack of such a definition is a constant source of numerous misunderstandings and a series of mostly fruitless debates. There is little hope that there ever will be agreement on a common definition of emotion, given the sacred traditions of the disciplines involved and the egos of the scholars working in these disciplines. Our aim here is more modest. We propose a list of elements for a working (...) definition of emotion and discuss the justification for the inclusion of elements from our respective perspectives (philosophy and psychology). This working partial definition may at least serve as a litmus test to examine theories of emotion, old and new, across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

For decades, philosophers and psychologists have assumed that children understand other people’s behavior on the basis of Belief Reasoning (BR) at latest by age 5 when they pass the false belief task. Furthermore, children’s use of BR in the true belief task has been regarded as being ontogenetically prior. Recent findings from developmental studies challenge this view and indicate that 4- to 5-year-old children make use of a reasoning strategy, which is cognitively less demanding than BR and called perceptual access (...) reasoning (PAR), in true belief tasks. I appeal to research on fluency to explain these findings. On my account, 4- to 5- year-old children understand other people’s behavior by means of BR if they experience cognitive strain (such as in false belief tasks) but they revert to simpler heuristics PAR when such an experience is missing (such as in true belief tasks). (shrink)

Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that all members (...) of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-à-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for cooperation as a three-dimensional phenomenon lying on the continua of a cognitive, a behavioural, and an affective axis. Traditional accounts of joint action argue for cooperation as involving a shared intention. Developmental research has shown that such cooperation requires rather sophisticated social cognitive skills such as having a robust theory of mind - that is acquired not until age 4 to 5 in human ontogeny. However, also younger children are able to cooperate in various (...) ways. Moreover, the coordinated behaviours of the agents can be more or less complex. Finally, phenomenological considerations and findings from social psychology illustrate that affective states and agent-specificities may play a central role in cooperative activities. I end with discussing the implications of my analysis that speak in favour of a pluralist account of social cognition. (shrink)

Proposals to release genetically engineered organisms in the wild raise complex ethical issues related to their safe and equitable implementation. While there is broad agreement that community and public engagement is vital to decision‐making in this context, more discussion is needed about who should be engaged in such activities and in what ways. This article identifies Indigenous peoples as key stakeholders in decisions about gene‐editing in the wild and argues that engagement activities need not only include Indigenous peoples but also (...) be designed, conducted, and analyzed in ways that confront longstanding power imbalances that dismiss Indigenous expertise. We offer specific recommendations to guide deliberative activities to not only be inclusive of Indigenous peoples but also to empower their diverse, situated knowledges. We call on those committed to the inclusive design of broad public deliberation to pursue strategies that shift dominant power dynamics to include Indigenous communities in more meaningful ways. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. The Handbook brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of the relationship between the mechanisms of the brain and the psychology of mind. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. Drawing on a wide range of neuroimaging techniques, (...) neuropsychological assessment, and clinical research, scientists are beginning to understand the biological mechanisms for emotions. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as: How do people experience life emotionally? Why do people respond so differently to the same experiences? What can the face tell us about internal states? How does emotion in significant social relationships influence health? Are there basic emotions common to all humans? This volume brings together the most eminent scholars in the field to present, in sixty original chapters, the latest research and theories in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression; Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Adaptation, Culture, and Evolution; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade. (shrink)

As legal scholar Ariela Dubler notes, the institution of marriage casts a long shadow across contemporary social life. Much more than a way of conferring social sanction on sexual and romantic relationships, marriage unlocks a wide range of social goods, from inheritance rights to medical records access. In addition, though, and as generations of feminists, queer activists, and others have made clear, this institution is part of a wider network of power relationships that it helps to shore up and conceal. (...) Critics most often point to the way the marital regime quietly reinforces patriarchal, bourgeois liberal, and heteronormative assumptions, hiding them in the shadow of putatively benign, private, and natural social structures. This article brings the overlooked connections between marriage and race out of the shadows and more fully into view. Using and refining a fourfold notion of racial invisibility developed in Taylor’s Black Is Beautiful, we consider two respects in which this ocularcentric metaphor for racialized epistemic short-circuiting is particularly appropriate for discussing the marital regime. (shrink)

Taking our lead from Solomon’s emphasis on the importance of the intentional object of emotion, we review the history of repeated attempts to make this object disappear. We adduce evidence suggesting that in the case of James and Schachter, the intentional object got lost unintentionally. By contrast, modern constructivists seem quite determined to deny the centrality of the intentional object in accounting for the occurrence of emotions. Griffiths, however, downplays the role objects have in emotion noting that these do not (...) qualify as intentional. We argue that these disappearing acts, deliberate or not, generate fruitless debate and add little to the advancement of our understanding of emotion as an adaptive mechanism to cope with events that are relevant to an organism’s life. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate social cognition and its relation to interaction in autism from the perspective of a pluralist account of social understanding by considering behavioral as well as neuroscientific findings. Traditionally, researchers have focused on mental state reasoning in autism, which is uncontroversially impaired. A pluralist account of social cognition aims to explore the varieties of social understanding that are acquired throughout ontogeny and may play a role in everyday life. The analysis shows that children with autism are (...) well able to understand other people’s behavior by considering social rules and norms, scripts, and stereotypes. Moreover, some individuals with autism succeed in understanding other people’s behavior in terms of mental states by employing explicit behavioral rules as a compensatory strategy. The paper ends with a discussion of the social cognitive functions in autism and their relation to the motivation of individuals with autism to engage in social interaction. (shrink)

This paper examines women’s experiences with decision-making about non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT). Such tests offer knowledge about chromosomal disorders early in pregnancy, without the risk of miscarriage associated with invasive procedures such as amniocentesis. Based on qualitative interviews with women in Germany who used, or declined, NIPT, we show how some women, who would not consider amniocentesis due to the risk of miscarriage, welcome the knowledge provided by, and the additional agency resulting from, NIPT. For others, declining the offer to (...) “know more” becomes increasingly difficult to articulate. The absence of risk strips women of a “good reason” to justify their decision not to test, thus implicitly challenging their “right not to know.” Moreover, NIPT heightens moral dilemmas within relationships with partners, existing children, and sometimes other close relatives. While clinically “non-invasive,” we argue that NIPT changes decision-making in an ethically and socially highly significant way. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The transition from modern to postmodern society leads to changing expectations about the purpose and responsibility of leadership. Habermas’s social theory provides a useful analytical tool for understanding current societal transition processes and exploring their implications for the responsibility of business vis-à-vis society. We argue that integrative responsible leadership, in particular, can contribute to the reconciliation of business with societal goals. Integrative responsible leadership understood in a Habermasian way is not only a strategic endeavor but also a communicative endeavor. An (...) essential part of integrative responsible leadership in light of the current societal transformation processes is the facilitation of discourses about a shared base of norms and values. This is exemplified alongside current societal developments like the European migration crisis or the emerging nationalist and fundamentalist movements in some countries. We specify how and when leadership should resort to communicative action and discuss the implications for leadership. (shrink)

How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. This book explores the relationship between music and emotion, bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers .

By attempting to divorce attributions of value from judgments of the interest of the attributor, developing the concept ofa locus of value, exploring the interconnections between the goods of individuals and the goods of populations and species, and suggesting the reasonableness ofthe attributions of rights to certain sorts of individuals, I try to indicate the degree to which an environmental ethic can be atomisticwithout being anthropocentric.

Emotion is conceptualised as an emergent, dynamic process based on an individual's subjective appraisal of significant events. It is argued that theoretical models of emotion need to propose an architecture that reflects the essential nature and functions of emotion as a psychobiological and cultural adaptation mechanism. One proposal for such a model and its underlying dynamic architecture, the component process model, is briefly sketched and compared with some of its major competitors. Recent empirical evidence in support of the model is (...) reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the dynamic aspect of emotion processes, in particular the sequence of appraisal checks and the synchronisation of response systems, as well as the capacity of the model to predict individual differences in emotional responding. (shrink)

Although company narratives frequently emphasize impressive sales numbers and market leadership, such an organizational “top dog” narrative can backfire when companies are accused of engaging in unethical conduct. This research demonstrates, through a series of nine (_N_ = 3872) experimental studies, that an organizational top dog (vs. underdog) narrative increases the intended punishment of company moral transgressions but not non-moral transgressions. Such differences in intended punishment emerge because observers infer that organizations with a top dog narrative use predominantly dominance-based strategies (...) to achieve their status, whereas companies with an underdog narrative are less likely perceived as employing such strategies. We provide preliminary evidence that a debiasing intervention decreases the harsher punishment of organizations with a top dog narrative but does not affect the punishment of organizations with an underdog narrative. (shrink)

Earth’s life-support system is facing megaproblems of sustainability. One important way of how these problems can be addressed is through innovation. This paper argues that responsible innovation that contributes to sustainable development consists of three dimensions: innovations avoid harming people and the planet, innovations ‘do good’ by offering new products, services, or technologies that foster SD, and global governance schemes are in place that facilitate innovations that avoid harm and ‘do good.’ The paper discusses global governance schemes based on deliberation (...) as a means to foster such responsible innovation. These schemes can provide voluntary soft-law regulations that complement and extend national and international hard-law regulations and facilitate collective innovation that contributes to SD goals. The article addresses the facilitative role of governments and international organizations in overcoming problems of deliberation and offers illustrative examples of such governance schemes. (shrink)

Unfortunately there is a typo in section 2.3.1, paragraph 7 “Referring to recent findings from verbal versions of the true belief task that suggest that 4- to 5-year-old children pass such tasks not via belief reasoning but simpler heuristics that draw on perceptual access, Fiebich argues that 4- to 5-year-olds are still engaged in cognitively demanding belief reasoning when passing verbal versions of the false belief task.”.

Models of cognitive vulnerability claim that depressive symptoms arise as a result of an interaction between negative affect and cognitive reactions, in the form of dysfunctional attitudes and negative inferential style. We present a model that complements this approach by focusing on the appraisal processes that elicit and differentiate everyday episodes of emotional experience, arguing that individual differences in appraisal patterns can foster negative emotional experiences related to depression (e.g., sadness and despair). In particular, dispositional appraisal biases facilitating the elicitation (...) of these emotions more frequently and more intensely. This, in turn, is likely to have a negative influence on cognitive processing and emotion regulation in general. (shrink)

: We discuss the role that transnational corporations should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...) responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

Recently, several states in the US have made it more difficult to receive nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the hope of better orienting parents towards vaccination. However, little is known about how public-facing school staff implement and enforce mandate policies, including why or how often they steer parents towards nonmedical exemptions. This study focused on Michigan, which has recently added an additional burden for families seeking nonmedical exemptions. We used an anonymous online survey to assess Michigan public-school employees (...) (n = 157) about their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding Michigan's school enrollment vaccine mandate policy. Our main conclusions are that frontline school staff are generally knowledgeable about vaccines and immunization policy, but are at best ambivalent about their role in immunization governance, believing that other agents should be responsible for ensuring that children are vaccinated. Furthermore, some respondents indicated low vaccine confidence, which was associated with increased ambivalence about, or opposition to, their role in immunization governance. As more jurisdictions within and beyond the US consider introducing or tightening childhood vaccine mandates, it is increasingly important to understand how these policies can be improved by attending to the attitudes and roles of relevant frontline actors. (shrink)