This article explores aggravated and exemplary damages in terms of their structure. It argues that the awards are distinguishable and once they have been appropriately analysed it can be seen that aggravated damages have a secure foundation in the private law and are importantly different from other compensatory awards. The article then argues that many of the reasons given in favour of exemplary damages are not consistent with the structure of that award. The article concludes by insisting that exemplary damages (...) should be abolished as they are in serious tension with the nature of civil liability. (shrink)

The account of marriage Kant presents in the Rechtslehre strikes most readers as cold, legalistic and obsessed with sex. It seems to ignore at least nearly all of the morally valuable aspects of marriage. Consequently, most have felt that this is a feature of Kant 's theory best ignored. Against this view, this article argues that Kant 's focus is appropriate, that his understanding of marriage is much more romantic than is commonly thought and that it presents a thought-provoking alternative (...) to the picture of marriage found in the modern law. (shrink)

520 "Allan Beever lays the foundation for a timely philosophical and empirical study of the nature of law with a detailed examination of the structure of evolving law through declaratory speech acts. This engaging book demonstrates both how law itself is achieved and also its ability to generate rights, duties, obligations, permissions and powers. Structured into three distinct parts - the philosophy of law and jurisprudence, the structure of the social word and the ontology of law, and the (...) reconstruction of the philosophy of law - the author provides insight into law as a human institution and reveals that central debates are often based on misunderstandings of interpretation and intentionality. Inspired by the philosophy of John Searle alongside other well-respected legal theorists, the author also analyses both sides of the mainstream jurisprudential divide in its current state, in particular the theory of legal positivism. Examining all aspects of law and answering the important question of 'What is Law?', this book will be an invaluable resource for academics and advanced students in law schools and philosophy departments. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that tort law is, or ought to be understood as, a system of personal responsibility and corrective justice. Moreover, it is often assumed that these notions are identical, or at least compatible. In fact, however, personal responsibility and corrective justice are very different concepts and they produce very different pictures of the law. The article demonstrates this by comparing the way in which personal responsibility and corrective justice deal with three important problems: the presence of non-subjective (...) standards in the law, the place of liability insurance, and the relationship between law and politics. (shrink)

This article examines the declaratory theory of law and defends it from the most prominent modern attack on it. It explains that the real declaratory theory is not the caricature of it criticized in modern writing and that, in fact, the theory properly understood is remarkably close to the position adopted by some of the theory’s most notable opponents. The article further examines the common law’s continuing commitment to the declaratory theory, a commitment that remains strong despite the considerable hostility (...) of the academy. It explains that this commitment reflects the nature of the common law. (shrink)

Challenging the assumptions of modern political and legal philosophy, this book presents a historical account of the development of thinking about justice and political obligations.

In this surprising book, Allan V. Horwitz argues that our current conceptions of mental illness as a disease fit only a small number of serious psychological conditions and that most conditions currently regarded as mental illness are cultural constructions, normal reactions to stressful social circumstances, or simply forms of deviant behavior.

Reflections on the life and works of Scotus -- The early works of Scotus -- Duns Scotus at Oxford -- A Scotistic approach to the ultimate why-question -- God's knowledge : a study in Scotistic methodology -- William of Alnwick on Scotus and divine concurrence -- Scotus on the origin of possibility -- Scotus's lectures on the Immaculate Conception -- Scotus's ethics -- Scotus's eschatology : some reflections -- Scotism -- An Oxford dialogue on language and metaphysics -- Ockham and (...) the textbooks -- Ockham's conception of matter. (shrink)

ArgumentNeuroscience research has created multiple versions of the human brain. The “social brain” is one version and it is the subject of this paper. Most image-based research in the field of social neuroscience is task-driven: the brain is asked to respond to a cognitive (perceptual) stimulus. The tasks are derived from theories, operational models, and back-stories now circulating in social neuroscience. The social brain comes with a distinctive back-story, an evolutionary history organized around three, interconnected themes: mind-reading, empathy, and the (...) emergence of self-consciousness. This paper focuses on how empathy has been incorporated into the social brain and redefined via parallel research streams, employing a shared, imaging technology. The concluding section describes how these developments can be understood as signaling the emergence of a new version of human nature and the unconscious. My argument is not that empathy in the social brain is a myth, but rather that it is served by a myth consonant with the canons of science. (shrink)

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory (...) like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions," a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia. (shrink)

PREFACE A volume of essays on Wittgenstein, arguably this century's greatest philosopher, certainly would require no apology. However, one which combines ...

Johnson takes us into every nook and cranny of social life, from the meaning of "I love you" to the ravages of social oppression.

This paper argues that the practical reach and ethical impact of the One Health paradigm is conditional on satisfactorily distinguishing between interconnected and interdependent factors among human, non-human, and environmental health. Interconnection does not entail interdependence. Offering examples of interconnections and interdependence in the context of existing One Health literature, we demonstrate that the conversations about One Health do not yet sufficiently differentiate between those concepts. They tend to either ignore such distinctions or embrace bioethically untenable positions. We conclude that (...) careful conceptual differentiation can prevent One Health stakeholders either from overreaching or under-reaching the practical and ethical boundaries of this developing paradigm. (shrink)

The Covid‐19 crisis has underscored the importance of the collection and analysis of clinical and research data and specimens for ongoing work. The federal government recently completed a related revision of the human subjects research regulations, founded in the traditional principles of research ethics, but in this commentary, we argue that the analysis underpinning this revision overemphasized the importance of informed consent, given the low risks of secondary research. Governing the interests of a community is different from governing the interests (...) of individuals, and here we suggest that, moving forward, the analyses of the risks of secondary research protocols be assessed from the perspective of the former. (shrink)

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability (...) and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a “Reflectionist” view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values. (shrink)

When I first read Snow, I was deeply conscious, page by page, of its enormously dense character. It was clear from the outset that this novel was much more than the account of a Westernized Turkish journalist's failed attempt to cover a suicide wave among young girls in the provincial Turkish city of Kars. Almost from the start, the multidimensional narrative about Turkish youth weaved together all sorts of strains of political, religious, and social conflicts in a drama about coming (...) of age in a land whose culture is never far from that of Europe and vice versa. Here was an incredibly sensitive effort to probe the social dynamics of a culture that was scarcely understood in Europe (and scarcely understood at home).Having finished the novel's four hundred and some pages, I was deeply impressed with what I had read but depressed by how little of what I had read I was in a position to comprehend; it was simply too richly detailed and nuanced for me to digest. Too much was going on. For days, if not weeks, after having put Snow down, my mind would drift back to the novel, alighting on a theme or a character from the novel that had left me wondering and moved me further to ponder its meaning. The subtlety that went into writing the book, the confusions implicit in the strivings of its characters, and the consequent hopelessness of their situations hit me like a ton of bricks. In a way that was difficult to articulate, I could experience something of the hopes, fears, and confusions that ran through the minds of those characters. The vicarious experience of a culture that was at once familiar and deeply alien, the comprehension of which was imperative to European society, was powerfully and skillfully expressed without being trumpeted. Thus it was impossible to forget things that did not enter directly into the story but were nevertheless clearly insinuated in the narrative: for example, the continual reference to things Armenian in a place from which Armenians had long since disappeared—but above all the snow, falling silently and gently, scarcely observed by the protagonists, on nearly every page, without ever having the slightest impact on the narrative. The continual dusting of snow on all sorts of scenes, violent, touching, amusing, intriguing, lent the story an almost eerie poetic quality that only a master storyteller could weave into sadness and tragedy (Is this an allusion to Joyce's “The Dead”?). It was clear that one reading would not suffice for me to absorb the content of this novel.About a year later, I decided to tackle the book once again in the hope of obtaining a more ordered sense of the personalities and situations it presents. This time, it was clear that reading the book was of necessity a systematic project. So I decided to read it chapter by chapter, daily, in order to “live” with it. That procedure considerably enhanced the enjoyment involved in the act of reading, but in the end I scarcely grasped much more than I had done originally. When I was finished, I was satisfied with myself for having fulfilled a demanding task, but my lack of further enlightenment on turning the last page left me almost as unsatisfied as I had been the first time. It was not that I had failed to deepen my understanding of difficult and confusing themes that were crucial to comprehending European problems. Still, I was not less aware than after my first reading of the work that much of the Turkish experience described in it was eluding me—so much so that it would be worth my while to pick up Snow a third time. Need I say more? (shrink)

The nature and role of the patient in biomedicine comprise issues central to bioethical inquiry. Given its developmental history grounded firmly in a backlash against 20th-century cases of egregious human subjects abuse, contemporary medical bioethics has come to rely on a fundamental assumption: the unit of care is the autonomous self-directing patient. In this article we examine first the structure of the feminist social critique of autonomy. Then we show that a parallel argument can be made against relational autonomy as (...) well, demonstrating how this second concept of autonomy fails to take sufficiently into account an array of biological determinants, particularly those from microbial biology. Finally, in light of this biological critique, we question whether or to what extent any relevant and meaningful view of autonomy can be recovered in the contemporary landscape of bioethics. (shrink)

Allan Hazlett challenges the philosophical assumption of the value of true belief. He critiques the view that true belief is better for us than false belief, and the view that truth is "the aim of belief". An alternative picture is provided, on which the fact that some people love truth is all there is to "the value of true belief".

In this research, we examine the relationship between employee psychological entitlement and employee willingness to engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior. We hypothesize that a high level of PE—the belief that one should receive desirable treatment irrespective of whether it is deserved—will increase the prevalence of this particular type of unethical behavior. We argue that, driven by self-interest and the desire to look good in the eyes of others, highly entitled employees may be more willing to engage in UPB when their (...) personal goals are aligned with those of their organizations. Support for this proposition was found in Study 1, which demonstrates that organizational identification accentuates the link between PE and the willingness to engage in UPB. Study 2 builds on these findings by examining a number of mediating variables that shed light on why PE leads to a greater willingness among employees to engage in UPB. Furthermore, we explored the differential effects of PE on UPB compared to counterproductive work behavior. We found support for our moderated mediation model, which shows that status striving and moral disengagement fully mediate the link between PE and UPB. PE was also linked to CWB and was fully mediated by perceptions of organizational justice and moral disengagement. (shrink)

This paper concerns would-be necessary connections between doxastic attitudes about the epistemic statuses of your doxastic attitudes, or ‘higher-order epistemic attitudes’, and the epistemic statuses of those doxastic attitudes. I will argue that, in some situations, it can be reasonable for a person to believe p and to suspend judgment about whether believing p is reasonable for her. This will set the stage for an account of the virtue of intellectual humility, on which humility is a matter of your higher-order (...) epistemic attitudes. Recent discussions in the epistemology of disagreement have assumed that the question of the proper response to disagreement about p concerns whether you ought to change your doxastic attitude towards p. My conclusion here suggests an alternative approach, on which the question of the proper response to disagreement about p concerns the proper doxastic attitude to adopt concerning the epistemic status of your doxastic attitude towards p.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITYVolume 9, Issue 3Allan HazlettDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.11Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITYVolume 9, Issue 3Allan HazlettDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.11Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITYVolume 9, Issue 3Allan HazlettDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.11Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In 1975, Colwyn Trevarthen first presented his groundbreaking explorations into the early origins of human intersubjectivity. His influential model dictates that, during intimate and playful spontaneous face-to-face protoconversations, the emotions of both the 2–3-month-old infant and mother are nonverbally communicated, perceived, mutually regulated, and intersubjectively shared. This primordial basic interpersonal interaction is expressed in synchronized rhythmic-turn-taking transactions that promote the intercoordination and awareness of positive brain states in both. In this work, I offer an interpersonal neurobiological model of Trevarthen’s intersubjective (...) protoconversations as rapid, reciprocal, bidirectional visual-facial, auditory-prosodic, and tactile-gestural right brain-to-right brain implicit nonverbal communications between the psychobiologically attuned mother and the developing infant. These co-constructed positive emotional interactions facilitate the experience-dependent maturation of the infant’s right brain, which is in an early critical period of growth. I then address the central role of interpersonal synchrony in intersubjectivity, expressed in a mutual alignment or coupling between the minds and bodies of the mother and infant in face-to-face protoconversations, as well as how these right brain-to-right brain emotional transmissions generate bioenergetic positively charged interbrain synchrony within the dyad. Following this, I offer recent brain laterality research on the essential functions of the right temporoparietal junction, a central node of the social brain, in face-to-face nonverbal communications. In the next section, I describe the ongoing development of the protoconversation over the 1st year and beyond, and the co-creation of a fundamental energy-dependent, growth-promoting social emotional matrix that facilitates the emergence of the highly adaptive human functions of mutual play and mutual love. In the final section, I discuss the clinical applications of this interpersonal neurobiological model of intersubjectivity, which has a long history in the psychotherapy literature. Toward that end, I offer very recent paradigm-shifting hyperscanning research that simultaneously measures both the patient and therapist during a psychotherapeutic interaction. Using the Trevarthen’s two-person intersubjective model, this research demonstrates changes in both brains of the therapeutic dyad and the critical role of nonverbal communications in an emotionally-focused psychotherapy session. These studies specifically document interbrain synchronization between the right temporoparietal junction of the patient and the right temporoparietal junction of the clinician, a right brain-to-right brain nonverbal communication system in the co-constructed therapeutic alliance. Lastly, I discuss the relationship between the affect communicating functions of the intersubjective motivational system and the affect regulating functions of the attachment motivational system. (shrink)

ArgumentThroughout his career as a writer, Sigmund Freud maintained an interest in the evolutionary origins of the human mind and its neurotic and psychotic disorders. In common with many writers then and now, he believed that the evolutionary past is conserved in the mind and the brain. Today the “evolutionary Freud” is nearly forgotten. Even among Freudians, he is regarded to be a red herring, relevant only to the extent that he diverts attention from the enduring achievements of the authentic (...) Freud. There are three ways to explain these attitudes. First, the evolutionary Freud's key work is the “Overview of the Transference Neurosis”. But it was published at an inopportune moment, forty years after the author's death, during the so-called “Freud wars.” Second, Freud eventually lost interest in the “Overview” and the prospect of a comprehensive evolutionary theory of psychopathology. The publication of The Ego and the Id, introducing Freud's structural theory of the psyche, marked the point of no return. Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance. Explanations one and two are probably correct but also uninteresting. Explanation number three assumes that there is a fundamental difference between Freud's evolutionary narratives and the evolutionary accounts of psychopathology that currently circulate in psychiatry and mainstream journals. The assumption is mistaken but worth investigating. (shrink)

Dream reports were collected from normal subjects in an effort to determine the degree to which dream reports can be used to identify individual dreamers. Judges were asked to group the reports by their authors. The judges scored the reports correctly at chance levels. This finding indicated that dreams may be at least as much like each other as they are the signature of individual dreamers. Our results suggest that dream reports cannot be used to identify the individuals who produced (...) them when identifiers like names and gender of friends and family members are removed from the dream report. In addition to using dreams to learn about an individual, we must look at dreams as telling us about important common or generic aspects of human consciousness. (shrink)

“Technological determinism” is predominantly employed as a critic’s term, used to dismiss certain classes of theoretical and empirical claims. Understood more productively as referring to claims that place a greater emphasis on the autonomous and social-shaping tendencies of technology, technological determinism is a valuable and prominent perspective. This article will advance our understanding of technological determinism through four contributions. First, I clarify some debates about technological determinism through an examination of the meaning of technology. Second, I parse the family of (...) claims related to technological determinism. Third, I note that constructivist and determinist insights may each be valid given particular scope conditions, the most prominent of which is the scale of analysis. Finally, I propose a theoretical microfoundation for technological determinism—military–economic adaptationism—in which economic and military competition constrain sociotechnical evolution to deterministic paths. This theory is a special case of a general theory—sociotechnical selectionism—which can be regarded as also including constructivist theories as special cases. Greater understanding of, respect for, and engagement with technological determinism will enhance the study of technology and our ability to shape our sociotechnical systems. (shrink)

In “The Myth of Factive Verbs” (Hazlett 2010), I had four closely related goals. The first (pp. 497-99, p. 522) was to criticize appeals to ordinary language in epistemology. The second (p. 499) was to criticize the argument that truth is a necessary condition on knowledge because “knows” is factive. The third (pp. 507-19) – which was the intended means of achieving the first two – was to defend a semantics for “knows” on which <S knows p> can be true (...) even if p isn’t true. The fourth (Ibid.) – which seemed necessary for the success of the third – was to defend a pragmatic account of the fact that utterances of <S knows p> typically imply p, on which the implication in those cases is down to conversational implicature. In this paper I’ll go after these goals again, with an emphasis on the second. Our topic will be whether the factivity of “knows” (whatever this amounts to) supports the truth condition on knowledge. A new goal will be to defend my argument against some criticisms from John Turri (2011) and Savas Tsohatzidis (forthcoming). We’ll first look at the truth condition (§1) and factive presupposition (§§2 – 3), before turning to replies to Turri and Tsohatzidis (§§4 – 7). (shrink)