In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. (...) SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (shrink)

Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short. For thousands of years it has existed and has been growing older; but in the earlier part of this period it cannot boast of any continuous progress toward a riper and richer development. In the fourth century before our era that giant thinker, Aristotle, built it up into an edifice comparing very favorably with any other science of that time. But this edifice stood without undergoing any noteworthy changes or (...) extensions, well into the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. Only in recent times do we find an advance, at first slow but later increasing in rapidity, in the development of psychology. The general causes which checked the progress of this science and thus made it fall behind the others can readily be stated:— "The boundaries of the Soul you cannot find, though you pace off all its streets, so deep a foundation has it," runs a sentence of Heraclitus, and it hits the truth more fully than its author could ever have expected. The structures and functions of our mental life present the greatest difficulties to scientific investigation, greater even than those presented by the phenomena, in many respects{4} similar, of the bodily life of the higher organisms. These structures and processes change so unceasingly, are so fleeting, so enormously complex, and dependent on so many factors hidden yet undoubtedly influential, that it is difficult even to seize upon them and describe their true substance, still more difficult to gain an insight into their causal connections and to understand their significance. We are just now beginning to recognize the full force of these difficulties. (shrink)

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism. James Griffin and Yael Tamir raise questions concerning Raz's notion of group rights and its application to claims of cultural and political autonomy, while Will Kymlicka and Bernhard Peters examine Raz's theory of multicultural society. Lukas Meyer investigates (...) the applicability of the notion of harm in the intergenerational context. Other papers are devoted to fundamental theoretical tenets of Raz's work. Hillel Steiner and Andrei Marmor examine Raz's account of value pluralism and incommensurability in light of what these authors consider to be goods whose equal distribution must be valued for its own sake. Robert Alexy and Timothy Endicott discuss traditional issues of jurisprudence and legal philosphy with special attention to Raz's contribution. Rüdiger Bittner, Bruno Celano, and J. E. Penner discuss and criticize aspects of Raz's theory of practical reason. Jeremy Waldron presents a critique of Raz's interpretation of authority.This volume concludes with a chapter by Joseph Raz in which he responds to arguments in the foregoing essays. (shrink)

This essay attempts to develop an account of the abilities which free action involves. I argue that the notion of ability which is especially relevant for the purpose of understanding free action is correctly given a compatibilist interpretation. More importantly, it turns out that persons who act freely have the ability to do otherwise than they do. Acting with the ability to do otherwise is not a distinctive mark of free action, however, since anyone who merely acts intentionally possesses that (...) ability. The central idea of this essay emerges as a result of this conclusion: I suggest that we will better understand free action if we abandon the traditional emphasis on free agents' ability to do otherwise and look instead to their ability to criticize courses of action in light of applicable normative standards. ;This suggestion yields two conditions of freedom. The first is that persons act freely only if they competently criticize the courses of action they perform or have control over their failure to do so. The second condition states that persons act freely only if they have control over whether or not they act as they do. They have this control just in case their conduct is counterfactually controllable through certain practical judgments they might arrive at were they to reflect critically on their actions. ;The first condition of freedom is particularly interesting because it shows freedom of action to be a normative notion. The second condition and the accompanying account of control are of especial interest in virture of the challenges which the possibilities of overdetermined action and weak-willed action pose for them. I use the notion of linked counterfactual dependence to address the challenge of overdetermination. The necessarily exceptional character of weak-willed action allows my account to distinguish weakness of will from psychological compulsion. ;I further propose that the two conditions of freedom afford a fruitful characterization of responsibility as liability to one sort of criticism. (shrink)

There are many cases of conduct for which responsibility can plausibly be ascribed to a group, in addition to any responsibility ascribable to the group's constituent members. It is important to be able to make such ascriptions because without them we are unable to assign responsibilities for many sorts of humanly-caused harms for which responsibility cannot reasonably be ascribed to individuals alone. Two recent theories of collective responsibility advance our understanding of why it is important to be able to hold (...) groups accountable, but they apply only to a limited spectrum of groups, and rely on the plausibility of importing unnecessary individualistic assumptions into discussions of collective responsibility. ;I argue that we can justify ascription of collective responsibility without engaging in difficult metaphysical or ontological disputes. In particular, in order legitimately to ascribe collective responsibility we need not demonstrate that groups are capable of exhibiting intentions, or that groups can be considered 'moral persons'. We may reasonably consider organized groups to take action, and we may justly blame or praise them, when their members engage in what I call 'joint purposive behavior', as when an automobile manufacturer knowingly markets faulty vehicles. I argue, further, that certain unorganized groups, or 'random collectivities', can justly be blamed for promoting values and attitudes conducive to harmful behavior, as when a hate group advocates violent actions against minorities, or praised as groups for promoting values that encourage laudable behavior. ;I argue that most objections to collective responsibility rely on various misunderstandings of what it means for a group to be collectively responsible, notably, the belief that if a group is responsible its members cannot also be individually responsible, and the belief that collective responsibility 'distributes' among the individuals in the responsible group. In addition, I argue that large-scale environmental problems such as global warming lend themselves to a collectivist analysis, and that a view of collective responsibility that balances the harm-prevention and fault-finding purposes of responsibility ascription may help us to resolve such problems. (shrink)

This is a collection of papers that helped shape the field of formal semantics in linguistics.

Degeneracy is a poorly understood process, essential to natural selection. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the concept of degeneracy was commandeered by the colonial imagination. A rigid understanding of species, race, and culture grew to dominate the normative thinking that persisted well into the burgeoning new industrial age. A 20th-century reconfiguration of the concept by George Gamow highlighted a form of intraorganismic variation that is still underexplored. Degeneracy exists in a population of variants where structurally different components perform a (...) similar, but not necessarily identical, function with respect to context. The presence of degeneracy increases a system’s complexity and robustness against perturbations. The loss of a genetic component in biological systems, for example, can be compensated by redundant elements , or by degenerate elements . A historical survey of the use of the term “degeneracy” reveals how and why the processes it once designated, and the mechanisms it now represents, have largely escaped the purview of contemporary science. Despite confusion and general oversight, degeneracy has been characterized by select researchers at the molecular, genetic, and neuronal levels. The concept is a potent analytical tool to understand selection, variation, and transmission. (shrink)

What are we doing to our climate? Emissions from fossil fuel burning have raised carbon dioxide concentrations 35 percent higher than in the past millions of years. This increase is warming our planet via the greenhouse effect. What is climate change doing to and for us? Dry regions are drier and wet ones wetter. Wildfires have increased threefold, hurricanes more violent, floods setting record heights, glaciers melting, and seas rising. Parts of Earth are increasingly uninhabitable. Climate change requires us to (...) act as a global community. Climate justice enjoins emitters to pay the social‐environmental costs of fossil fuel burning. This would expedite green solar, wind, and next‐generation nuclear energy sources. Individuals should conserve resources, waste less food, and eat a plant‐rich diet. (shrink)

Introduction Origin of this book The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ...

A defining characteristic of primary emotions is that they occur in wide variety of species. Secondary emotions are thought to be restricted to humans and other primates. We report evidence from two studies investigating claims of primary and secondary emotions in non-primate species. Study 1. We surveyed 907 owners about emotions that they had observed in their animal. Participants reported primary emotions more frequently than secondary emotions and self-conscious emotions more frequently than self-conscious evaluative emotions. Jealousy was reported at very (...) high levels (81% of dogs and 79% of horses), which was surprising as jealousy is generally defined as a secondary emotion. Study 2. Forty dog owners were interviewed about the contexts and behaviours that led them to claim their animal was jealous. There was coherence and consistency in the behavioural descriptions of jealousy. We claim that such reports provide evidence for the existence of secondary emotions in non-primate species as predicted by theorists such as Buck (Citation1999). (shrink)

Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This important new collection (...) of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

Professor Robinson provides a new critique of the often neglected problem of classification within the criminal law. He presents a discussion of the present conceptual framework of the law, and offers explanations of how and why formal structures do not match the operation of law in practice. In this scholarly exposition of applied criminal theory, Robinson argues that the current operational structure of the criminal law fails to take account of its different functions. He goes on to suggest new sample (...) codes of criminal conduct and criminal adjudication which mark a real departure from the pragmatic approach which presently dominates code-making. This rounded exploration of the structure of systems of criminal law is an important work for law teachers and policy makers world-wide. (shrink)

Having a criminal justice system that imposes sanctions no doubt does deter criminal conduct. But available social science research suggests that manipulating criminal law rules within that system to achieve heightened deterrence effects generally will be ineffective. Potential offenders often do not know of the legal rules. Even if they do, they frequently are unable to bring this knowledge to bear in guiding their conduct, due to a variety of situational, social, or chemical factors. Even if they can, a rational (...) analysis commonly puts the perceived benefits of crime greater than its perceived costs, due to a variety of criminal justice realities such as low punishment rates. These conclusions are reinforced by studies of crime rates following rule changes. Many show no change in deterrent effect. Those that purport to show a deterrent effect commonly have persuasive non-deterrence explanations, such as a change in incapacitative effect. The few studies that segregate deterrent and incapacitative effects tend to reinforce the conclusion that rule formulation has a deterrent effect only in those unusual situations in which the preconditions to deterrence exist. Even there, the deterrent effects are quite minor and unpredictable, hence inadequate grounds to influence criminal law rule making. (shrink)

Professor Robinson provides a new critique of the often neglected problem of classification within the criminal law. He presents a discussion of the present conceptual framework of the law, and offers explanations of how and why formal structures do not match the operation of law in practice. In this scholarly exposition of applied criminal theory, Robinson argues that the current operational structure of the criminal law fails to take account of its different functions. He goes on to suggest new sample (...) codes of criminal conduct and criminal adjudication which mark a real departure from the pragmatic approach which presently dominates code-making. This rounded exploration of the structure of systems of criminal law is an important work for law teachers and policy makers world-wide. (shrink)

The case outlined below is the basis for the In That Case section of the “Ethics and Epistemology of Big Data” symposium. Jordan receives reports from two separate personal genomic tests that provide intriguing data about ancestry and worrying but ambiguous data about the potential risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. What began as a personal curiosity about genetic inheritance turns into an alarming situation of medical uncertainty. Questions about Jordan’s family tree are overshadowed by even more questions about Alzheimer’s disease (...) and healthy ageing. As a parent, Jordan is unsure whether to share these results and what it would mean for their children to learn about their genetic inheritance and potential future health. Furthermore, Jordan is unsure how to make sense of these reports in light of current knowledge of the risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and in the absence of effective treatments or robust preventative guidelines. (shrink)

With attention to the experiences, agency, and rights of tuberculosis patients, this symposium on TB and ethics brings together a range of different voices from the social sciences and humanities. To develop fresh insights and new approaches to TB care and prevention, it is important to incorporate diverse perspectives from outside the strictly biomedical model. In the articles presented in this issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, clinical experience is married with historical and cultural context, ethical concerns are brought (...) to bear on global health, and structural analyses shed light upon the lived experience of people living with TB. The relational and reciprocal dimensions of care feature strongly in these discussions, which serve as a poignant reminder that behind each of the yearly deaths from TB is a deeply personal story. No single discipline holds a monopoly on how to care for each of these people, but strong cases are made for support from mental health and social workers in addressing the kaleidoscope of needs in TB prevention. As the World Health Organization moves towards the goal of eliminating TB globally by 2050, attending to the needs of TB patients serves global interests to lower disease burden and to develop better integrated communities worldwide. (shrink)

How does our understanding of what it means to be rational affect our interpretation of the world around us? ... Essayists discuss the nature and extent of rationality - its content, focus, and the intrinsic guidelines for using the term "rational" when describing persons or actions. The distinguished contributors to this collection include Max Black, Steven J. Brams, James H. Bunn, Christopher Cherniak, Murray Clarke, Marjorie Clay, Paul Diesing, Antony Flew, John T. Kearns, D. Mark Kilgour, Hilary Kornblith, Charles (...) H. Lambros, Duncan MacIntosh, Alistair MacLeod, Robert G. Meyers, Erwin Segal, Zeno G. Swijtink, Brice R. Wachterhauser, and Paul Weirich. (shrink)

Conventionality and aptness are two dimensions of metaphorical sentences thought to play an important role in determining how quick and easy it is to process a metaphor. Conventionality reflects the familiarity of a metaphor whereas aptness reflects the degree to which a metaphor vehicle captures important features of a metaphor topic. In recent years it has become clear that operationalizing these two constructs is not as simple as asking naïve raters for subjective judgments. It has been found that ratings of (...) aptness and conventionality are highly correlated, which has led some researchers to pursue alternative methods for measuring the constructs. Here, in four experiments, we explore the underlying reasons for the high correlation in ratings of aptness and conventionality, and question the construct validity of various methods for measuring the two dimensions. We find that manipulating the processing fluency of a metaphorical sentence by means of familiarization to similar senses of the metaphor (“in vivo conventionalization”) influences ratings of the sentence's aptness. This misattribution may help explain why subjective ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated. In addition, we find other reasons to question the construct validity of conventionality and aptness measures: for instance, we find that conventionality is context dependent and thus not attributable to a metaphor vehicle alone, and we find that ratings of aptness take more into account than they should. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMetaphors pervade discussions of critical issues and influence how people reason about these domains. For instance, when crime is a beast people are more likely to suggest enforcement-oriented approaches to crime-reduction ; reading that crime is a virus, on the other hand, leads people to suggest systemic reforms for the affected community. In the current study, we find that extending metaphoric language into the descriptions of policy interventions bolstered the persuasive influence of metaphoric frames for important issues. That is, in (...) response to a crime virus people were even more likely to endorse social reforms that were described as “treatments,” while in response to a crime beast people were even more likely to endorse “attacking” the problem with harsh enforcement tactics. Of note, people were not simply drawn to extensions of previously instantiated metaphors: when extended metaphors were paired with a conceptually incongruent policy intervention (e... (shrink)

In the area of investment, responsibility may be expressed via four types of ethical concern: value-based ethics resulting in the exclusion of so-called "vicious" companies from the investment portfolio; fructification-oriented ethics with a view to long-term investment; consequence-based ethics aimed at initiating a behavioural change in the investment target; and ethics envisaged as a discriminating criterion in the search of the best financial performance. No single formula of responsible investment is available, and the "responsible" approach necessarily implies the active involvement (...) of a free acting subject striving to tackle fundamental ethical issues. The practice of responsible investment cannot be reduced to simply applying a particular legal rule or mathematical formula. (shrink)

While many with schizophrenia experience deficits in metacognition it is unclear whether those deficits are related to other features of illness. To explore this issue, the current study classified participants with schizophrenia as possessing a deficit in both awareness of their own emotions and those of others , aware of their own emotions but unaware of the emotions of others and aware of their own emotions and of other’s emotions . Groups were compared on assessments of neurocognitive function, symptoms, and (...) history of sexual trauma. ANCOVA controlling for education found that the group unaware of their own emotions and those of others demonstrated poorer verbal memory, processing speed, executive function, less emotional discomfort and higher levels of disorganization symptoms relative to the other groups. The group aware of their own emotions but not those of others had a significantly higher report of childhood sexual abuse. (shrink)

If James has a latent tuberculosis infection , he is at risk of developing active tuberculosis disease but he is not yet sick. LTBI is a liminal space between health and illness. Diagnosed with LTBI, James could be conceptualised as having a liminal body. Treatments for LTBI are available, but why would a person seek treatment for a disease he does not yet have? One thing is definite: James needs to be educated about the symptoms and severity of active tuberculosis (...) disease. (shrink)

The paper criticizes criminal law scholarship for helping to construct and failing to expose analytic structures that falsely claim a higher level of rationality and coherence than current criminal law theory deserves. It offers illustrations of three such illusions of rationality. First, it is common in criminal law discourse for scholars and judges to cite any of the standard litany of "the purposes of punishment" -- just deserts, deterrence, incapacitation of the dangerous, rehabilitation, and sometimes other purposes -- as a (...) justification for one or another liability rule or sentencing practice. The cited "purpose" gives the rules an aura of rationality, but one that is, in large part, illusory. Without a principle defining the interrelation of the "purposes," nearly any rule can be justified by some "purpose of punishment." Thus, a decision maker can switch among distributive principles as needed to provide an apparent rationale for whichever rule the person prefers, even if that preference is not based on rational criteria. A second example is found in a central mechanism for determining an offenderâs blameworthiness: the use of an individualized objective standard. The widely used mechanism avoids the problems acknowledged to attend a strictly objective standard. A person's situation and capacities are central to an assessment of whether a person can be fairly blamed for a violation, and the individualized objective standard allows the decision maker to take these into account. At the same time, the mechanism avoids reversion to a completely subjective standard, which might exempt many blameworthy cases from liability. In reality, however, the mechanism only shifts the form of the problem. Codes that use the individualized objective standard fail to provide a principle by which one can determine those characteristics of an offender with which the objective standard ought to be individualized and those with which it ought not. Without a governing principle, the issue again is left to the discretion of decision makers, with no guidance as to how that discretion is to be exercised. A final illusion obscures whether the criminal justice system is, in fact, in the business of "doing justice." The "criminal justice" system imposes "punishment" and encourages moral condemnation of those found "guilty" of "crimes." But while the system cultivates its doing-justice image, it increasingly shifts to a system of essentially preventive detention, where a violator's sanction is derived more from what is needed to incapacitate him from committing future offenses than to punish him for a past offense. There are great advantages to the deception, but also serious costs and inefficiencies. The paper discusses why some illusions are more objectionable than others and what the existence of such illusions says about modern criminal law scholarship. (shrink)

We seem to prefer that medicine and medical care be provided through altruistic motives. Even the pharmaceutical industry justifies its behavior in terms of altruistic purposes. But economists have known since Adam Smith that self-interested behavior can create large and growing social benefits. This is true for medical care as well as for other goods. First, I consider specifically the case of pharmaceutical promotion, both to physicians and to consumers. I argue that such promotion is highly beneficial to patients and (...) leads to health improvements. I consider some criticisms of promotion, and show that they are misguided. I then provide some evolutionary explanations for our erroneous beliefs about medical care. (shrink)