Participation in victim-offender mediation can reduce the risk of reoffending. However, relatively little is known about how VOM affects the intermediate psychological changes underlying this effect. It was hypothesized that VOM increases feelings of responsibility, guilt, and shame among offenders as well as empathy toward the victim. It was also expected that VOM leads to feelings of moral failure among offenders, increasing their intention to desist, and improving their relation with the victim, relatives, and community. Lastly, it was hypothesized that (...) offenders may experience reduced rejection, concerns about condemnation, threat to their social moral identity, and victim blame following VOM. To this end, we compared psychological changes in offenders who participated in a VOM program in the Netherlands with those of offenders who were willing to but did not participate. A quasi-experimental, pre- and postmeasure research design was used to compare these groups. Our findings tentatively suggest that offenders who participate in VOM have more responsibility-taking and victim empathy, feel more guilt and shame, and experience higher moral failure than offenders who do not participate in VOM do. Offenders also reported feeling significantly less awkward about meeting the victim again after VOM. Future research should address how and to what degree these psychological changes translate into a lower risk of reoffending. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that lives and activities can be meaningful or meaningless, but few have appreciated that they can also be anti-meaningful. Anti-meaning is the polar opposite of meaning. Our purpose in this essay is to examine the nature and importance of this new and unfamiliar topic. In the first part, we sketch four theories of anti-meaning that correspond to leading theories of meaning. In the second part, we argue that anti-meaning has significance not only for our attempts to (...) theorize about meaning in life, but also for our ability to lead meaningful lives in the modern world. (shrink)

This monograph is a detailed study, and systematic defence, of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT), first conceived by C.D. Broad. The book offers a coherent, logically perspicuous and ideologically lean formulation of GBT, defends it against the most notorious objections to be found in the extant philosophical literature, and shows how it can be derived from a more general theory, consistent with relativistic spacetime, on the pre-relativistic assumption of an absolute and total temporal order. -/- The authors devise (...) axiomatizations of GBT and its competitors which, against the backdrop of a shared quantified tense logic, significantly improves the prospects of their comparative assessment. Importantly, neither of these axiomatizations involves commitment to properties of presentness, pastness or futurity. The authors proceed to address, and defuse, a number of objections that have been marshaled against GBT, including the so-called epistemic objection according to which the theory invites skepticism about our temporal location. The challenge posed by relativistic physics is met head-on, by replacing claims about temporal variation by claims about variation across spacetime. -/- The book aims to achieve the greatest possible rigor. The background logic is set out in detail, as are the principles governing the notions of precedence and temporal location. The authors likewise devise a novel spacetime logic suited for the articulation, and comparative assessment, of relativistic theories of time. The book comes with three technical appendices which include soundness and completeness proofs for the systems corresponding to GBT and its competitors, in both their pre-relativistic and relativistic forms. -/- The book is primarily directed at researchers and graduate students working on the philosophy of time or temporal logic, but is of interest to metaphysicians and philosophical logicians more generally. (shrink)

This paper sheds further light on the contextual boundaries in the relationship between high-performance work practices and employee wellbeing. In particular, we analyze whether this relationship is moderated by health-oriented leadership behavior which describes the extent to which leaders value, are aware of, and protect their followers’ health at work. Our analyses are based on employee data from Germany, covering two points in time. Findings show positive associations between HPWPs and happiness-related and health-related wellbeing outcomes. The positive relationship between HPWPs (...) and employee wellbeing is weaker the more employees experience leadership behavior in terms of staff care. Thus, our results provide further evidence for a substitutive or compensatory effect between HRM and leadership. (shrink)

There has been a long history of arguments over whether happiness is anything more than a particular set of psychological states. On one side, some philosophers have argued that there is not, endorsing a descriptive view of happiness. Affective scientists have also embraced this view and are reaching a near consensus on a definition of happiness as some combination of affect and life-satisfaction. On the other side, some philosophers have maintained an evaluative view of happiness, on which being happy involves (...) living a life that is normatively good. Within the context of this debate we consider how people ordinarily understand happiness, and provide evidence that the ordinary understanding of happiness reflects aspects of both evaluative and descriptive views. Similar to evaluative views, normative judgments have a substantive role in the ordinary understanding of happiness. Yet, similar to descriptive views, the ordinary understanding is focused on the person’s psychological states and not the overall life they actually lived. Combining these two aspects, we argue that the ordinary understanding of happiness suggests a novel view on which happiness consists in experiencing positive psychological states when one ought to. This view, if right, has implications for both philosophical and psychological research on happiness. (shrink)

We argue that sensitivity to the distinction between the tensed notion of being something and the tensed notion of being located at the present time serves as a good antidote to confusions in debates about time and existence, in particular in the debate about how to characterise presentism, and saves us the trouble of going through unnecessary epicycles. Both notions are frequently expressed using the tensed verb ‘to exist’, making it systematically ambiguous. It is a commendable strategy to avoid using (...) that verb altogether in these contexts and to use quantification and a location predicate instead. (shrink)

The so-called Disability Paradox arises from the apparent tension between the popular view that disability leads to low well-being and the relatively high life-satisfaction reports of disabled people. Our aim in this essay is to make some progress toward dissolving this alleged paradox by exploring the relationship between disability and various “goods of life”—that is, components of a life that typically make a person’s life go better for her. We focus on four widely recognized goods of life (happiness, rewarding relationships, (...) knowledge, achievement) and four common types of disability (sensory, mobility, intellectual, and social) and systematically examine the extent to which the four disability types are in principle compatible with obtaining the four goods of life. Our findings suggest that that there is a high degree of compatibility. This undermines the widespread view that disabilities, by their very nature, substantially limit a person’s ability to access the goods of life, and it provides some guidance on how to dissolve the Disability Paradox. (shrink)

This article is an attempt at a systematic account of decision making under greater uncertainty than what traditional, mathematically oriented decision theory can cope with. Four components of great uncertainty are distinguished: (1) the identity of the options is not well determined (uncertainty of demarcation) ; (2) the consequences of at least some option are unknown (uncertainty of consequences); (3) it is not clear whether information obtained from others, such as experts, can be relied on (uncertainty of reliance); and (4) (...) the values relevant for the decision are not determined with sufficient precision (uncertainty of values). Some possible strategy types are proposed for each of these components. Decisions related to environmental issues are used to illustrate the proposals. (shrink)

The safety conception of knowledge holds that a belief constitutes knowledge iff relevantly similar beliefs—its epistemic counterparts—are true. It promises an instructive account of why certain general principles of knowledge hold. We focus on two such principles that anyone should endorse: the closure principle that knowledge is downward closed under competent conjunction elimination, and the counter-closure principle that knowledge is upward closed under competent conjunction introduction. We argue that anyone endorsing the former must also endorse the latter on pains of (...) an unacceptable form of bootstrapping. We devise new formal models to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for these principles to hold on conceptions that construe knowledge in terms of true counterparts. These conditions state that counterparts of premise and conclusion beliefs are coordinated in certain ways whenever these beliefs stand in the relevant inferential relations. We show that the safety conception faces insuperable problems vindicating these coordination principles, because its epistemic counterpart relation is symmetric. We conclude that it thus proves unable to account for minimal closure properties of knowledge. More generally, our formal results establish parameters within which any conception must operate that construes knowledge in terms of true counterparts. (shrink)

Clear-cut cases of decision-making under risk (known probabilities) are unusual in real life. The gambler’s decisions at the roulette table are as close as we can get to this type of decision-making. In contrast, decision-making under uncertainty (unknown probabilities) can be exemplified by a decision whether to enter a jungle that may contain unknown dangers. Life is usually more like an expedition into an unknown jungle than a visit to the casino. Nevertheless, it is common in decision-supporting disciplines to proceed (...) as if reasonably reliable probability estimates were available for all possible outcomes, i.e. as if the prevailing epistemic conditions were analogous to those of gambling at the roulette table. This mistake can be called the tuxedo fallacy. It is argued that traditional engineering practices such as safety factors and multiple safety barriers avoid this fallacy and that they therefore manage uncertainty better than probabilistic risk analysis (PRA). PRA is a useful tool, but it must be supplemented with other methods in order not to limit the analysis to dangers that can be assigned meaningful probability estimates. (shrink)

In standard Bayesian probability revision, the adoption of full beliefs (propositions with probability 1) is irreversible. Once an agent has full belief in a proposition, no subsequent revision can remove that belief. This is an unrealistic feature, and it also makes probability revision incompatible with belief change theory, which focuses on how the set of full beliefs is modified through both additions and retractions. This problem in probability theory can be solved in a model that (i) lets the codomain of (...) the probability function be a hyperreal-valued rather than the real-valued closed interval [0, 1], and (ii) identifies the full beliefs as the propositions whose probability is either 1 or infinitesimally smaller than 1. In this model, changes in the probability function will result in changes in the set of full beliefs (belief set), which constitutes a submodel that can be conceived as the “tip of the iceberg” within the larger model that also contains beliefs on lower levels of probability. The patterns of change in the set of full beliefs in this modified Bayesian model coincides with the corresponding pattern in a slightly modified version of AGM revision, which is commonly conceived as the gold standard of (dichotomous) belief change. The modification only concerns the marginal case of revision by an inconsistent input sentence. These results show that probability revision and dichotomous belief change can be unified in one and the same framework, or – if we so wish – that belief change theory can be subsumed under a modified version of probability revision that allows for iterated change and for the removal of full beliefs. (shrink)

It is almost universally acknowledged that risks have to be weighed against benefits, but there are different ways to perform the weighing. In conventional risk analysis, collectivist risk-weighing is the standard. This means that an option is accepted if the sum of all individual benefits outweighs the sum of all individual risks. In practices originating in clinical medicine, such as ethical appraisals of clinical trials, individualist risk-weighing is the standard. This implies a much stricter criterion for risk acceptance, namely that (...) the risk to which each individual is exposed should be outweighed by benefits for that same individual. The different choices of risk-weighing methods in different policy areas seem to have emerged from traditional thought patterns and social relations, rather than from explicit deliberations on possible justifications for the alternative ways to weigh risks against benefits. It is not obvious how the prevalent differences in risk-weighing practices can be reconstructed in terms of consistent underlying principles of preventive health or social priority-setting. (shrink)

In the most common approaches to belief dynamics, states of belief are represented by sets that are closed under logical consequence. In an alternative approach, they are represented by non-closed belief bases. This representation has attractive properties not shared by closed representations. Most importantly, it can account for repeated belief changes that have not yet been satisfactorily accounted for in the closed approach.

Close connections between probability theory and the theory of belief change emerge if the codomain of probability functions is extended from the real-valued interval [0, 1] to a hyperreal interval with the same limits. Full beliefs are identified as propositions with a probability at most infinitesimally smaller than 1. Full beliefs can then be given up, and changes in the set of full beliefs follow a pattern very close to that of AGM revision. In this contribution, iterated revision is investigated. (...) The iterated changes in the set of full beliefs generated by repeated revisions of a hyperreal probability function can, semantically, be modelled with the same basic structure as the sphere models of belief change theory. The changes on the set of full beliefs induced by probability revision satisfy the Darwiche–Pearl postulates for iterated belief change. (shrink)

Clear-cut cases of decision-making under risk (known probabilities) are unusual in real life. The gambler’s decisions at the roulette table are as close as we can get to this type of decision-making. In contrast, decision-making under uncertainty (unknown probabilities) can be exemplified by a decision whether to enter a jungle that may contain unknown dangers. Life is usually more like an expedition into an unknown jungle than a visit to the casino. Nevertheless, it is common in decision-supporting disciplines to proceed (...) as if reasonably reliable probability estimates were available for all possible outcomes, i.e. as if the prevailing epistemic conditions were analogous to those of gambling at the roulette table. This mistake can be called the tuxedo fallacy . It is argued that traditional engineering practices such as safety factors and multiple safety barriers avoid this fallacy and that they therefore manage uncertainty better than probabilistic risk analysis (PRA). PRA is a useful tool, but it must be supplemented with other methods in order not to limit the analysis to dangers that can be assigned meaningful probability estimates. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We critically review two extant paradigms for understanding the systematic interaction between modality and tense, as well as their respective modifications designed to do justice to the contingency of time’s structure and composition. We show that on either type of theory, as well as their respective modifications, some principles prove logically valid whose truth might sensibly be questioned on metaphysical grounds. These considerations lead us to devise a more general logical framework that allows accommodation of those metaphysical views that (...) its predecessors rule out by fiat. (shrink)

New technologies and practices, such as drug testing, genetic testing, and electronic surveillance infringe upon the privacy of workers on workplaces. We argue that employees have a prima facie right to privacy, but this right can be overridden by competing moral principles that follow, explicitly or implicitly, from the contract of employment. We propose a set of criteria for when intrusions into an employee''s privacy are justified. Three types of justification are specified, namely those that refer to the employer''s interests, (...) to the interests of the employee her- or himself, and to the interests of third parties such as customers and fellow workers. For each of these three types, sub-criteria are proposed that can be used to determine whether a particular infringement into an employee''s privacy is morally justified or not. (shrink)

Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on safe contraction, provides some new results (...) and offers a list of unsolved problems that are in need of investigation. (shrink)

The precautionary principle has often been described as an extreme principle that neglects science and stifles innovation. However, such an interpretation has no support in the official definitions of the principle that have been adopted by the European Union and by the signatories of international treaties on environmental protection. In these documents, the precautionary principle is a guideline specifying how to deal with certain types of scientific uncertainty. In this contribution, this approach to the precautionary principle is explicated with the (...) help of concepts from the philosophy of science and comparisons with general notions of practical rationality. Three major problems in its application are discussed, and it is concluded that to serve its purpose, the precautionary principle has to (1) be combined with other decision principles in cases with competing top priorities, (2) be based on the current state of science, which requires procedures for scientific updates, and (3) exclude potential dangers whose plausibility is too low to trigger meaningful precautionary action. (shrink)

Moral theory has mostly focused on idealized situations in which the morally relevant properties of human actions can be known beforehand. Here, a framework is proposed that is intended to sharpen moral intuitions and improve moral argumentation in problems involving risk and uncertainty. Guidelines are proposed for a systematic search of suitable future viewpoints for hypothetical retrospection. In hypothetical retrospection, a decision is evaluated under the assumption that one of the branches of possible future developments has materialized. This evaluation is (...) based on the deliberator’s present values, and each decision is judged in relation to the information available when it was taken. The basic decision rule is to choose an alternative that comes out as morally acceptable (permissible) from all hypothetical retrospections. (shrink)

The safety conception of knowledge holds that a belief constitutes knowledge iff relevantly similar beliefs—its epistemic counterparts—are true. It promises an instructive account of why certain general principles of knowledge hold. We focus on two such principles that anyone should endorse: the closure principle that knowledge is downward closed under competent conjunction elimination, and the counter-closure principle that knowledge is upward closed under competent conjunction introduction. We argue that anyone endorsing the former must also endorse the latter on pains of (...) an unacceptable form of bootstrapping. We devise new formal models to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for these principles to hold on conceptions that construe knowledge in terms of true counterparts. These conditions state that counterparts of premise and conclusion beliefs are coordinated in certain ways whenever these beliefs stand in the relevant inferential relations. We show that the safety conception faces insuperable problems vindicating these coordination principles, because its epistemic counterpart relation is symmetric. We conclude that it thus proves unable to account for minimal closure properties of knowledge. More generally, our formal results establish parameters within which any conception must operate that construes knowledge in terms of true counterparts. (shrink)

Several attempts have been made to transfer the concept of informed consent from medical and research ethics to dealing with affected groups in other areas such as engineering, land use planning, and business management. It is argued that these attempts are unsuccessful since the concept of informed consent is inadequate for situations in which groups of affected persons are dealt with collectively (rather than individually, as in clinical medicine). There are several reasons for this. The affected groups from which informed (...) consent is sought cannot be identified with sufficient precision. Informed consent is associated with individual veto power, but it does not appear realistic to give veto power to all individuals who are affected for instance by an engineering project. Most importantly, the concept of informed consent puts focus on the public’s acceptance of ready-made proposals rather than on its participation in the decision-making process as a whole, which includes the development of alternatives for the decision. Therefore, the concept of informed consent is not applicable to a company’s relations with groups and collectives. It may, however, be applicable to a company’s relations with individual persons such as customers and employees. (shrink)

Daniel Weiskopf has recently raised an apparently powerful objection against the so-called “extended mind thesis” with regard to beliefs. His argument is that since alleged cases of “extended beliefs” lack a characteristic feature of beliefs properly so called (newly acquired beliefs are usually integrated with already existing beliefs rapidly, automatically and unconsciously), they do not count as genuine beliefs properly so called. We defend the extended mind thesis by arguing that Weiskopf is wrong. First, we suggest an alternative account of (...) informational integration that is compatible with externally stored beliefs’ being beliefs properly so called, emphasizes the crucial role action plays for cognition, and stresses the embodied and situationally embedded nature of human cognizers. Second, we argue that even if informational integration were usually rapid, automatic, and unconscious, this would not be an essential feature of beliefs. Third, we argue that even if rapid, automatic, and unconscious informational integration were characteristic of our commonsense conception of beliefs, externally stored “beliefs” would still be sufficiently similar to beliefs properly so called for them to be grouped together for all practical and scientific purposes. (shrink)

The spectral fluctuations of quantum (or wave) systems with a chaotic classical (or ray) limit are mostly universal and faithful to random-matrix theory. Taking up ideas of Pechukas and Yukawa we show that equilibrium statistical mechanics for the fictitious gas of particles associated with the parametric motion of levels yields spectral fluctuations of the random-matrix type. Previously known clues to that goal are an appropriate equilibrium ensemble and a certain ergodicity of level dynamics. We here complete the reasoning by establishing (...) a power law for the ħ dependence of the mean parametric separation of avoided level crossings. Due to that law universal spectral fluctuations emerge as average behavior of a family of quantum dynamics drawn from a control parameter interval which becomes vanishingly small in the classical limit; the family thus corresponds to a single classical system. We also argue that classically integrable dynamics cannot produce universal spectral fluctuations since their level dynamics resembles a nearly ideal Pechukas–Yukawa gas. (shrink)

The public defence of science has never been more important than now. However, it is a difficult task with many pitfalls, and there are mechanisms that can make it counterproductive. This article offers advice for science defenders, summarized in ten commandments that warn against potentially ineffective or even backfiring practices in the defence of science: Do not portray science as a unique type of knowledge. Do not underestimate scientific uncertainty. Do not describe science as infallible. Do not deny the value-ladenness (...) of science. Do not associate with power. Do not blame the victims of disinformation. Do not aim at convincing the anti-scientific propagandists. Do not contribute to the legitimization of pseudoscience. Do not attack religion when it does not conflict with science. Do not call yourself a “sceptic”. (shrink)

This article argues that, contrary to the received view, prioritarianism and egalitarianism are not jointly incompatible theories in normative ethics. By introducing a distinction between weighing and aggregating, the authors show that the seemingly conflicting intuitions underlying prioritarianism and egalitarianism are consistent. The upshot is a combined position, equality-prioritarianism, which takes both prioritarian and egalitarian considerations into account in a technically precise manner. On this view, the moral value of a distribution of well-being is a product of two factors: the (...) sum of all individuals' priority-adjusted well-being, and a measure of the equality of the distribution in question. Some implications of equality-prioritarianism are considered. (shrink)

In fungi, cell fusion between genetically unlike individuals triggers a cell death reaction known as the incompatibility reaction. In Podospora anserina, the genes controlling this process belong to a gene family encoding STAND proteins with an N‐terminal cell death effector domain, a central NACHT domain and a C‐terminal WD‐repeat domain. These incompatibility genes are extremely polymorphic, subject to positive Darwinian selection and display a remarkable genetic plasticity allowing for constant diversification of the WD‐repeat domain responsible for recognition of non‐self. Remarkably, (...) the architecture of these proteins is related to pathogen‐recognition receptors ensuring innate immunity in plants and animals. Here, we hypothesize that these P. anserina incompatibility genes could be components of a yet‐unidentified innate immune system of fungi. As already proposed in the case of plant hybrid necrosis or graft rejection in mammals, incompatibility could be a by‐product of pathogen‐driven divergence in host defense genes. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 2 Heft: 2 Seiten: 371-400.

Fluorescence microscopy is the primary tool for studying complex processes inside individual living cells. Technical advances in both molecular biology and microscopy have made it possible to image cells from many genetic and environmental backgrounds. These images contain a vast amount of information, which is often hidden behind various sources of noise, convoluted with other information and stochastic in nature. Accessing the desired biological information therefore requires new tools of computational image analysis and modeling. Here, we review some of the (...) recent advances in computational analysis of images obtained from fluorescence microscopy, focusing on bacterial systems. We emphasize techniques that are readily available to molecular and cell biologists but also point out examples where problem‐specific image analyses are necessary. Thus, image analysis is not only a toolkit to be applied to new images but also an integral part of the design and implementation of a microscopy experiment. (shrink)

While self?evaluation leads to valuable results in some schools, it appears that in other schools this is true only to a lesser extent or not at all. This raises the question of how differences in the results of self?evaluations can be explained. This study looks at to what extent the results of self?evaluation are determined by the way in which self?evaluation is conducted, by characteristics relating to the general functioning of the school and by the support which schools enjoy. One (...) thousand seven hundred and eighty?six school principals and team members from 96 schools (primary and secondary) were surveyed by means of a written questionnaire. The data collected were then analysed using multi?level structural equation modelling. The results provide strong empirical evidence that ?attitude with regard to self?evaluation?, ?self?evaluation as a policy action? and ?self?evaluation as an act of research? are powerful predictors of the quality of self?evaluations. (shrink)