ABSTRACTPrevious studies have identified two powerful ways to regulate emotional responses to a stressor: experiencing incidental positive emotions and using cognitive reappraisal to reframe the stressor. Several cognitive and motivational theories of positive emotion support the formulation that incidental positive emotions may facilitate cognitive reappraisal. To test the separate and interacting effects of positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal, we first adapted an established picture-based reappraisal paradigm by interspersing blocks of positive emotion inducing and neutral pictures. Across two pre-registered studies, reappraisal (...) effectively decreased self-reported negative emotions and increased self-reported positive emotions; however, experiencing incidental positive emotions did not facilitate reappraisal success. In another preregistered study, we employed a more powerful positive emotion induction via virtual reality, used a social stress anticipation task, and... (shrink)

A persistent belief in American culture is that males both outperform and have a higher inherent aptitude for mathematics than females. Using data from two school districts in two different states in the United States, this study used longitudinal multilevel modeling to examine whether overall performance on standardized as well as classroom tests reveals a gender difference in mathematics performance. The results suggest that both male and female students demonstrated the same growth trend in mathematics performance (as measured by standardized (...) test scores) over time, but females' mathematics grade-point average is significantly higher than males. These results are discussed in the context of present day standardized assessment in the United States that may motivate teachers to focus on higher expectations for mathematics performance regardless of gender, thus challenging cultural beliefs that stigmatize mathematics as masculine in the United States. (shrink)

The State Council's decision to implement the "Project for Determining the Historical Periods of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasties" as a key project for the Ninth Five-Year Plan period is meeting with enthusiastic support in historical and archaeological circles. I am aware that my knowledge of history is very meager and that I have little to say in this matter. However, I also feel that China's ancient civilization belongs to the entire nation and to all generations of the Chinese (...) people; it is a precious heritage of humanity as a whole. All people have the responsibility to study history and love their country. Now, as implementation of the "project" is starting up, I take the liberty of contributing a few of my opinions for the consideration of historians and archaeologists, as an earnest sign of my dedication to the science of history. (shrink)

With the increasing degrees A.I.s and machines are applied across different social contexts, the need for implementing ethics in A.I.s is pressing. In this paper, we argue for a pluralist hybrid model for the implementation of moral A.I.s. We first survey current approaches to moral A.I.s and their inherent limitations. Then we propose the pluralist hybrid approach and show how these limitations of moral A.I.s can be partly alleviated by the pluralist hybrid approach. The core ethical decision-making capacity of an (...) A.I. based on the pluralist hybrid approach consists of two systems. The first is a deterministic algorithm system that incorporates different moral rules for making explicit moral decisions. The second is a machine learning system that calculates the value of the variables required by the application of moral principles. The pluralist hybrid system is better than the existing proposals as (i) it better addresses the moral disagreement problem of the top-down approach by including different moral principles, while (ii) it reduces the opacity of ethical decision-making compared with a bottom-up system by implementing explicit moral principles for moral decision making. (shrink)

I argue that the criteria governing the aptness of emotions directed towards fictional entities, such as characters and events in fiction, are structurally identical to the criteria governing the aptness of emotions directed towards real entities in the following sense: in both cases, aptness is characterized in terms of fittingness, justification, and being salience-tracking, and each of these notions is understood in an analogous way across reality- and fiction-directed emotions. The only differences are that, in the case of fiction-directed emotions, (...) fictional truth rather than truth is relevant to fittingness, and salience in the context of engaging with the fiction replaces salience in the real context. Other asymmetries between the aptness criteria of fiction- and reality-directed emotions that seem to conflict with this claim are reducible to these two differences or stem from the failure to distinguish between emotions directed towards the content of a fiction and the fiction itself. (shrink)

This paper gives a new and richer account of open-mindedness as a moral virtue. I argue that the main problem with existing accounts is that they derive the moral value of open-mindedness entirely from the epistemic role it plays in moral thought. This view is overly intellectualist. I argue that open-mindedness as a moral virtue promotes our flourishing alongside others in ways that are quite independent of its role in correcting our beliefs. I close my discussion by distinguishing open-mindedness from (...) what some might consider its equivalent: empathy and tolerance. (shrink)

This article aims to advance our understanding of the interaction between moral and artistic value by asking what it means that an artwork's moral virtue or defect is an artistic virtue or defect and how we can prove or disprove such a claim. I approach these questions first by distinguishing between intrinsic and contextual value interactions and then by examining two strategies commonly used to establish claims about contextual value interaction: (1) appealing to the counterfactual dependence of the work's artistic (...) value on its moral virtue or defect and (2) arguing that the work is artistically valuable (or defective) and morally valuable (or defective) for the same reasons. I argue that these strategies fail. I then propose new directions for research on the interaction between moral and artistic value. (shrink)

A growing interest across disciplines in the nature of empathy has sparked a debate over the place of empathy in morality. Proponents are eager to capitalize on the apparent close connection between empathy and altruism, while critics point to serious problems in our exercise of empathy - we are naturally biased, empathize too much or too little, and prone to making all sorts of mistakes in empathizing. The proponents have a promising response, that it is not empathy simpliciter, but empathy (...) in some “proper” form, that does the work they claim for it. This paper aims to propose a cautiously optimistic position for the proponent by rethinking the suggested approach. I argue that empathy plays two important roles in morality, one epistemic and the other relational, but the proponent must be careful not to exaggerate the contribution that empathy, even in its “proper” form, can make to our moral life. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for a distinct and novel right-based account of risks and I call it the Sophisticated High-risk Thesis. I argue that there is a distinction between rights-infringing risk impositions and no-rights-infringing risk impositions. An action imposing a high risk of harm infringes rights, whereas an act imposing a low risk of harm does not. I also suggest three principles that govern the permissibility of highly risky actions. If a highly risky action meets the conditions specified by (...) any of these three principles, it can be justified. These principles are the consent principle*, the prevent disaster principle* and the reciprocity principle**. I show that the Sophisticated High-risk Thesis is, in general, better than the alternative Risk Thesis defended by McCarthy. (shrink)

This article argues that linguistically endangered minority groups often face endangerment due to structural linguistic injustice that arises from past injustices and ongoing unjust social processes. Language revitalization is often a justified way of reforming unjust social structures. I connect this discussion to another debate, namely, whether historical injustice (and the requirement for its correction) may be superseded. I ask: which changing circumstances might lead to the supersession of structural linguistic injustice? Of the many reasons to reform unjust social structures, (...) I focus on dignity-based concerns. Historically-sensitive dignity-based concerns are relevant for judging whether supersession of structural linguistic injustice has occurred. My view is largely present-oriented, but history still plays a role in deciding the strength of justificatory bases for structural reformation. (shrink)

Very little attention has been paid towards examining John Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy as a self-standing theory. Nevertheless, it offers a highly original way of thinking about state legitimacy. In this paper, I will offer a sketch of what such an account might look like. At its heart is the idea that the legitimacy of the state resides not in the consent of the governed, nor in the state’s conformity with the appropriate principles of justice, but rather in citizens’ (...) endorsement of the state and its underlying constitutional principles on the basis of their own comprehensive conceptions of justice. Such an account offers a stable middle ground between popular alternatives, and has a way of not just solving, but dissolving, the problem of legitimacy. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that an artwork having certain non-aesthetic properties explains its having a certain aesthetic property. One interesting feature of such an explanation is its selectivity—it cites only some of the non-aesthetic properties on which the presence of the aesthetic property depends. Hence a question arises as to what distinguishes the selected non-aesthetic properties from the unselected ones. I answer this question by proposing a selection principle modeled on Laura Franklin-Hall’s selection principle for causal explanation, according to which (...) an explanation selects a package of factors that maximizes the ratio of delivery to cost. (shrink)

Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a normative framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled proactively to facilitate the decision process: beliefs (...) for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e. saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants’ actual choice and saccade behaviors in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns. (shrink)

This essay depicts the emergence of the notion of predetermined fate in early China by focusing on the changing meaning of the word ming 命. Many scholars have long interpreted the term ming in the Lunyu 論語 as a kind of inevitable fate, but I show that it is still subject to change depending on the will of an anthropomorphic Heaven. In the Warring States period, however, Heaven became increasingly conceived as following fixed patterns in its behavior, and the growing (...) belief in the validity of these patterns lead to the idea that the course of the future is more or less fixed and predictable. I argue that the idea of predetermined and predictable ming was a result of these changed conceptions of Heaven and the future. (shrink)

Perhaps the year 1996 will be entered in history as an important year in Sino-American relations.

Carens has done more than any other political theorist or philosopher to develop the normative perspective of prospective migrants from within the liberal democratic tradition, but he has not sufficiently engaged with the other side of the argument – in particular, with the value of political community and the principle of collective self-determination. What is at stake for the immigrant-receiving country that might justify its claim to control immigration? I first examine Carens’ theory of social membership and its connection to (...) political community. I then discuss his method of ‘political theory from the ground up’ and his interpretation of democratic principles. I conclude with a discussion of the principle of collective self-determination. (shrink)

Simion and Kelp develop the obligation-based account of trustworthiness as a compelling general account of trustworthiness and then apply this account to various instances of AI. By doing so, they explain in what way any AI can be considered trustworthy, as per the general account. Simion and Kelp identify that any account of trustworthiness that relies on assumptions of agency that are too anthropocentric, such as that being trustworthy, must involve goodwill. I argue that goodwill is a necessary condition for (...) being trustworthy and further suggest a network account of trustworthy AI, which retains the goodwill as the essential requirement for the concept of trustworthiness and meanwhile predicts that current AI can be trustworthy. The alternative account suggests that the focus of trustworthy AI is not merely AI technology, but the whole network of AI involving AI technology, AI designers, AI companies, and other social and legal institutions. A trustworthy AI requires that AI technology is reliable and that other involved agents are trustworthy. (shrink)

The principle of fairness suggests that it is wrong for free riders to enjoy cooperative benefits without also helping to produce them. Considerations of fairness are a familiar part of moral experience, yet there is a great deal of controversy as to the conditions of their application. The primary debate concerns whether cooperative benefits need to be voluntarily accepted. Many argue that acceptance is unnecessary because such theories are too permissive and acceptance appears to be absent in a variety of (...) cases where considerations of fairness nevertheless seem applicable. In this paper, I defend the claim that acceptance is necessary by suggesting that these worries can be disarmed, and that theories that deny the necessity of acceptance face deep challenges in articulating an understanding of cooperative benefits that does not also appeal to a person’s acceptance of them. (shrink)