Theorists seeking evidence of moral cognition – whether in human infants, nonhuman animals, or any other population – would benefit from a minimalistic description of what moral cognition is. However, such a definition has proven elusive. Some argue that debates over the existence (or not) of moral cognition in various populations turn on unresolvable semantic disagreement over how to characterize the moral domain. I acknowledge a semantic dimension to some disputes and identify another problem: Often, while sidestepping semantics, researchers rely (...) on logically circular operationalizations, defining moral cognition in terms of elements that are already implicitly understood to be features of moral cognition, while failing to answer the question of what makes these features, or their combination, uniquely moral. The present article proposes a single solution to both problems. The issue of semantics is addressed by the identification of a naturally emerging and distinctive cognitive modality that is necessary to all definitions of moral cognition. The problem of circularity is overcome by a reduction of moral cognition to elements that are, in themselves, nonmoral. I call this distinctive combination of nonmoral elements the “molecular” structure of moral cognition. (shrink)

Bermúdez's “rational framing effects” are consequences of a counterintuitive phenomenon that I call “normative polyphony”: the reality that a single action may, with logical consistency, sustain diverse positive and negative judgments. I show that normative polyphony emerges from “ontological polyphony” – that is, diverse possible framings of relevant details – and illustrate this “polyphony principle” through a reading of Dostoevsky's (1993) Crime and Punishment.

By examining corporate social responsibility and power within the context of the food supply chain, this paper illustrates how food retailers claim to address food waste while simultaneously setting standards that result in the large-scale rejection of edible food on cosmetic grounds. Specifically, this paper considers the powerful role of food retailers and how they may be considered to be legitimately engaging in socially responsible behaviors to lower food waste, yet implement practices that ultimately contribute to higher levels of food (...) waste elsewhere in the supply chain. Through interviews with key actors in the Australian fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain, we highlight the existence of a legitimacy gap in corporate social responsibility whereby undesirable behaviors are pushed elsewhere in the supply chain. It is argued that the structural power held by Australia’s retail duopoly means that supermarkets are able to claim virtuous and responsible behaviors, despite counter claims from within the fresh food industry that the food supermarkets’ private quality standards mean that fresh food is wasted. We argue that the supermarkets claim CSR kudos for reducing food waste at the expense of other supply chain actors who bear both the economic cost and the moral burden of waste, and that this is a consequence of supermarkets’ remarkable market power in Australia. (shrink)

Informed consent, a cornerstone of research ethics, ensures participant protection and informed participation, particularly in online settings. Despite its significance, engagement with online consent forms remains low, underscoring the need for improved presentation strategies. This study investigates the impact of interactive elements and diverse presentation formats on the comprehension and engagement of online informed consent documents among a broad demographic beyond the commonly studied student populations. Employing a between-subjects experimental design, we explored six versions of online consent forms varying in (...) interactivity, readability, and visual formatting to identify optimal strategies for enhancing participant comprehension and engagement. Our findings reveal that interactive formats significantly improve comprehension and perceived readability, highlighting the pivotal role of design in facilitating informed consent. The study also examines the influence of individual differences, such as self-efficacy and trust in science, on the effectiveness of consent forms, providing insights into the nuanced dynamics between participant characteristics and consent form engagement. These results advocate for integrating interactive elements and thoughtful design in consent forms to foster a more informed and engaged participant base. Implications for research ethics, best practices in consent form development, and future research directions are also discussed, emphasizing the need for ongoing innovation in the consent process to adapt to the evolving landscape of online research. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on research ethics by offering evidence-based recommendations for enhancing the informed consent process, ultimately promoting participant-centered research practices. (shrink)

This paper attempts to quantify the development of the key monetary values and changes in monetary trust that occurred during Roman times under ever-increasing prices. To track those developments, the paper introduces a minimal-parameter model that builds on available numismatic data relating to the Roman landmark coinages and on papyrological findings. The modelling produces a series of graphs which clearly signal the occurrence of a later crisis of confidence. It is argued that the monetary measures typically taken by the Roman (...) authorities actually fostered a crisis of confidence, and even made it inevitable. (shrink)

Black women and their babies matter. In this commentary, we explore the current challenges that Black women face when pregnant and what is needed to ensure an anti-racist approach to prenatal and p...

This book explores the dramatic evolution of a feminist movement that mobilised to challenge a women’s prison system in crisis. Through in-depth historical research conducted in the Australian state of Victoria that spans the 1980s and 1990s, the authors uncover how incarcerated women have worked productively with feminist activists and community coalitions to expose, critique and resist the conditions and harms of their confinement. Resisting Carceral Violence tells the story of how activists—through a combination of creative direct actions, reformist lobbying (...) and legal challenges—forged an anti-carceral feminist movement that traversed the prison walls. This powerful history provides vital lessons for service providers, social justice advocates and campaigners, academics and students concerned with the violence of incarceration. It calls for a willingness to look beyond the prison and instead embrace creative solutions to broader structural inequalities and social harm. (shrink)

Although workplace bullying is common and has universally harmful effects on employees’ outcomes, little is known about workplace bullies. To address this gap in knowledge, we draw from the tenets of social exchange and displaced aggression theories in order to develop and test a model of workplace bullying that incorporates the effects of employees’ individual differences, perceptions of their work environments, and perceptions of supervisory treatment on their tendencies to bully coworkers. The results of mediated moderation analyses that examine responses (...) from two samples of working adults support our hypotheses. Specifically, we find evidence of an indirect relationship between entitlement and coworker bullying through perceptions of abusive supervision that is stronger for employees who report lower levels of felt accountability than employees who report higher levels of felt accountability. This study makes important theoretical and practical contributions to abusive supervision research, bullying research, and organizational efforts to promote ethical work environments devoid of interpersonal mistreatment by providing novel insight into how employees’ entitlement and felt accountability combine to influence their tendencies to perceive themselves as victims of abusive supervision and culprits of coworker bullying. (shrink)

Residency training in the Netherlands is to be restructured over the coming years. To this end a general competence profile for medical specialists has been introduced. This profile is nearly the same as the Canadian CanMEDS 2000 model, which describes seven general areas of medical specialist competence, one of which is professionalism. In order to establish a training programme for residents and their instructors based on this competence, it is necessary to develop a vision that does justice to everyday medical (...) practice. The two most prevailing views of professionalism—as personal, or as a behavioural characteristic—fall short of this. Only when professionalism is understood as reflective professionalism does it encompass the fundamental contextuality of medical treatment. This means that the focus of training and assessment must be shifted to accountability for treatment. (shrink)

New and recent axioms for cooperative games with transferable utilities are introduced. The non-negative player axiom requires to assign a non-negative payoff to a player that belongs to coalitions with non-negative worth only. The axiom of addition invariance on bi-partitions requires that the payoff vector recommended by a value should not be affected by an identical change in worth of both a coalition and the complementary coalition. The nullified solidarity axiom requires that if a player who becomes null weakly loses (...) from such a change, then every other player should weakly lose too. We study the consequence of imposing some of these axioms in addition to some classical axioms. It turns out that the resulting values or set of values have all in common to split efficiently the worth achieved by the grand coalition according to an exogenously given weight vector. As a result, we also obtain new characterizations of the equal division value. (shrink)

We introduce three natural collective variants of the well-known axiom of desirability, which require that if the contributions of a first coalition are at least as large as the contributions of a second coalition, then the payoff in the first coalition should be as large as the payoff in the second coalition. These axioms are called coalitional desirability and average coalitional desirability. The third variant, called uniform coalitional desirability, applies only to coalitions with the same size. We show that coalitional (...) desirability is very strong: no value satisfies simultaneously this axiom and efficiency. To the contrary, the combination of either average coalitional desirability or uniform coalitional desirability with efficiency and additivity characterizes the equal division value. (shrink)

Résumé On attribue souvent à John Stuart Mill une théorie de la liberté fondée sur un principe de non-nuisance qui conduirait à une critique radicale du paternalisme politique et juridique. Cependant, en analysant de plus près la portée de ce principe ainsi que son mode de justification, il est possible d’en donner une interprétation qui soit compatible avec certaines formes de paternalisme. On peut ainsi considérer De la liberté comme une des sources du paternalisme libéral et plus précisément d’un paternalisme (...) perfectionniste visant à préserver et à promouvoir l’autonomie des individus. (shrink)

Les théories de la démocratie délibérative ont profondément renouvelé notre conception de la citoyenneté. La délibération collective suppose que le citoyen se conforme à un ensemble de règles procédurales et soit capable d’exposer les raisons justifiant ce qui, à ses yeux, serait la meilleure décision à prendre. Une telle aptitude à délibérer s’acquiert et fait partie de la formation du citoyen. L’objectif de cette contribution est d’apporter quelques éléments de réflexion sur la manière dont on peut apprendre à délibérer, sur (...) ce que cela signifie et sur ce qu’on doit attendre d’un tel apprentissage. Nos démocraties ont plus que jamais besoin d’une culture de la délibération qui s’exerce dès l’école et qui ne saurait se réduire à la maîtrise du raisonnement et de l’argumentation. (shrink)

La doctrine classique de la Common Law est la cible de nombreuses critiques de la part de Hobbes et de Bentham. Tous deux remettent en cause les principes qui fondent et justifient cette composante fondamentale du droit anglais. Sont notamment visés le caractère coutumier qui lui est attribué, sa prétendue rationalité ainsi que l’interprétation qu’en font les juges. Moment décisif dans l’histoire des théories du droit, cette controverse tend à faire prévaloir l’idée d’un droit créé par un acte de volonté (...) sur un droit non écrit, tiré de la coutume, que les juges s’efforcent d’appliquer et de perpétuer. Mais, au-delà de leur portée critique, les textes de Hobbes et Bentham présentent des divergences qui font apparaître deux conceptions distinctes de la Common Law et de la décision judiciaire. (shrink)

Le droit naturel soutient l’hypothèse d’une connexion nécessaire entre le droit et la morale. Pour les positivistes, cette thèse impliquerait l’invalidité de toute loi injuste. Lex iniusta non est lex. Cette maxime a malheureusement été la source de nombreux malentendus. À travers cette formule, le positivisme attribue au droit naturel une thèse que personne ne défend réellement. Notre objectif est de comprendre la genèse de ce malentendu et d’exposer la manière dont les théories contemporaines du droit naturel tentent de démêler (...) les confusions véhiculées par cette maxime. Le droit naturel ne conteste pas nécessairement la validité des lois injustes mais il permet, à partir de la signification « focale » des concepts juridiques, de comprendre en quoi ces lois sont à la fois juridiquement et moralement défectueuses. (shrink)

La médiation pénale fait partie des procédures qui peuvent être proposées comme alternatives aux poursuites. Elle permet aux personnes de se réapproprier la résolution des conflits qui les concernent, en suivant une procédure plus souple et en favorisant à la fois la réparation, la responsabilisation et la resocialisation. L’article vise à analyser le sens et la portée de cette pratique à partir de la théorie pénale républicaine tirée des travaux de Philip Pettit et John Braithwaite. Une telle approche permet de (...) saisir les effets de la médiation sur la domination en lien avec l’infraction ainsi que ses vertus restauratives. Mais elle met également en lumière des formes de soumission et de dépendance qui peuvent altérer le processus de médiation. Si, dans une perspective républicaine, la médiation s’avère plus juste que la répression, elle peut aussi, dans certains cas, reproduire des rapports de domination auxquels l’institution judiciaire doit accorder une vigilance particulière. (shrink)

We study the finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which the players are restricted to choosing strategies which are implementable by a machine with a bound on its complexity. One player has to use a finite automaton while the other player has to use a finite perceptron. Some examples illustrate that the sets of strategies which are induced by these two types of machines are different and not ordered by set inclusion. Repeated game payoffs are evaluated according to the limit of (...) means. The main result establishes that a cooperation at almost all stages of the game is an equilibrium outcome if the complexity of the machines the players may use is limited enough and if the length T of the repeated game is sufficiently large. This result persists when more than T states are allowed in the player’s automaton. We further consider a variant of the model in which the two players are restricted to choosing strategies which are implementable by perceptrons and prove that the players can cooperate at most of the stages provided that the complexity of their perceptrons is sufficiently reduced. (shrink)

We introduce a new allocation rule, called the sequential equal surplus division for rooted forest TU-games. We provide two axiomatic characterizations for this allocation rule. The first one uses the classical property of component efficiency plus an edge deletion property. The second characterization uses standardness, an edge deletion property applied to specific rooted trees, a consistency property, and an amalgamation property. We also provide an extension of the sequential equal surplus division applied to the problem of sharing a river with (...) bifurcations. (shrink)

This chapter outlines ways in which Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism is manifest in his later conception of philosophy and the negative attitude he held toward his times. The chapter tries to make clear how these two areas of Wittgenstein’s thought are connected and reflect an anti-scientistic worldview he held, one intimated in Philosophical Investigations §122. -/- It is argued that the later Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy is marked out against two scientistic claims in particular. First, the view that the scientific method is (...) superior to all other means of learning or gaining knowledge. Second, the view that scientific knowledge is superior to all other kinds of knowledge and understanding. Wittgenstein’s opposition to these claims is brought out through examining a fundamental aim of his later philosophy, producing the ‘kind of understanding which consists in “seeing connections”’ (PI §122), and his attempts to expose certain philosophical confusions. It is argued that these reflect his antiscientistic worldview. -/- Through discussion of Oswald Spengler’s influence on Wittgenstein, the chapter outlines how Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism underwrites his negative cultural outlook and how this is connected with the anti-scientistic elements of his later philosophy discussed. The work of Ray Monk (1999; 1990) and Hans-Johann Glock (1996) is instrumental in what follows. (shrink)

Wittgenstein criticised prevailing attitudes toward the sciences. The target of his criticisms was ‘scientism’: what he described as ‘the overestimation of science’. This collection is the first study of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism - a theme in his work that is clearly central to his thought yet strikingly neglected by the existing literature. The book explores the philosophical basis of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism; how this anti-scientism helps us understand Wittgenstein’s philosophical aims; and how this underlies his later conception of philosophy and the kind (...) of philosophy he attacked. An outstanding team of international contributors articulate and critically assess Wittgenstein’s views on scientism and anti-scientism, making Wittgenstein and Scientism essential reading for students and scholars of Wittgenstein’s work, on topics as varied as the philosophy of mind and psychology, philosophical practice, the nature of religious belief, and the place of science in modern culture. (shrink)