Four principal papers and a total of 43 peer commentaries on the evolutionary origins of morality. To what extent is human morality the outcome of a continuous development from motives, emotions and social behaviour found in nonhuman animals? Jerome Kagan, Hans Kummer, Peter Railton and others discuss the first principal paper by primatologists Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal. The second paper, by cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm, synthesizes social science and biological evidence to support his theory of how our hominid (...) ancestors became moral. In the third paper philosopher Elliott Sober and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that an evolutionary understanding of human nature allows sacrifice for others and ultimate desires for another's good. Finally Brian Skyrms argues that game theory based on adaptive dynamics must join the social scientist's use of rational choice and classical game theory to explain cooperation. (shrink)

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy. It is often contrasted with similarly inclusive pain, or suffering, which is similarly thought of as including all our feeling bad. Contemporary psychology similarly distinguishes between positive affect and negative affect.[1..

I develop and defend a hedonistic view of the constitution of human subjectivity, agency and value, while disassociating it from utilitarian accounts of morality and from the view that only pleasure is desired. Chapter One motivates the general question, "What really is of value in human living?", and introduces evaluative hedonism as an answer to this question. Chapter Two argues against preference satisfaction accounts of pleasure and of welfare, and begins the explication and defense of the hedonist's conception of pleasure (...) as immediate experiencing liked for its own sake in its experiential moment, and which obtains or not in an experiential moment regardless of what obtains at other times. Chapter Three begins the task of finding a motivational theory that will support, or at least cohere with, evaluative hedonism. I here work toward my own position by discussing, criticizing and distinguishing some aspects of the views of earlier hedonistic writers, both ancient and modern. Chapter Four further explains the hedonist's conception of pleasure, and treats some contextualist objections to its tenability suggested by Plato, Moore and Anscombe. In the course of answering these objections, the view of consciousness belonging to the hedonist's view of mind is contrasted with that which the objections presuppose. Chapter Five first outlines the general kind of hedonistic view resulting from the work of the earlier sections, and then develops a specific view of this kind, drawing on contemporary work in philosophy, psychology and psychobiology. The result is an account of action, and of the kind of attention and consciousness connected with it, in which pleasure has a central organizing role. Such an account, if sustained and filled out by ongoing scientific work, would further motivate, and cohere with, evaluative hedonism and the related contention that the dimension of subjectivity in which human value consists is in the lives of human beings and other higher vertebrates much the same. (shrink)

Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky's (D&M-S's) language suggests that, unlike Kent Berridge, they may allow that the activity of a largely subcortical system, which is presumably often introspectively and cognitively inaccessible, constitutes affectively felt experience even when so. Such experience would then be phenomenally conscious without being reflexively conscious or cognitively access-conscious, to use distinctions formulated by the philosopher Ned Block.

One can share Block's aim of distinguishing “phenomenal” experience from cognitive function and agree with much in his views, yet hold that the inclusion of representational content within phenomenal content, if only in certain spatial cases, obscures this distinction. It may also exclude some modular theories, although it is interestingly suggestive of what may be the limits of the phenomenal penetration of the representational mind.

Interpreting VTA dopamine activity as a facilitator of affective engagement fits Depue & Collins's agency dimension of extraverted personality and also Watson's and Tellegen's (1985) engagement dimension of state mood. Serotonin, by turning down the gain on dopaminergic affective engagement, would permit already prepotent responses or habits to prevail against the behavior-switching incentive-simulation-driven temptations of the moment facilitated by fickle VTA DA. Intelligent switching between openly responsive affective engagement and constraint by long-term plans, goals, or values presumably involves environment-sensitive balancing (...) of these neuromodulators, such as socially dominant primates may show. (shrink)

Rolls's preliminary definitions of emotion and speculative restriction of consciousness, including emotional sentience, to humans, display behaviorist prejudice. Reinforcement and causation are not by themselves sufficient conceptual resources to define either emotion or the directedness of thought and motivated action. For any adequate definition of emotion or delimitation of consciousness, new physiology, such as Rolls is contributing to, and also the resources of other fields, will be required.

Human emotional experience is organized at multiple levels, only some of which are easily penetrable by or dependent on language. Affects connected with mammalian parental care seem involved in Anna Wierzbicka's example of the experience of Jesus in Gethsemane. However, such affects are not characterizable as she requires, using only NSM's short list of linguistic semantic universals. Following her methodology, even using an enriched NSM really exhaustive of linguistic semantic universals, may involve serious losses of cognitive opportunity. Specifically, it forecloses (...) any possibility of linking language with other cognitive resources to construct novel concepts, as may be needed to understand the deep biologically-based structure of emotion—which, after all, goes far deeper in us than language does. (shrink)

Editorial Introduction to ‘Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives’. The four principal papers presented here, with interdisciplinary commentary discussion and their authors’ responses, represent contemporary approaches to an evolutionary understanding of morality -- of the origins from which, and the paths by which, aspects or components of human morality evolved and converged. Their authors come out of no single discipline or school, but represent rather a convergence of largely independent work in primate ethology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and dynamic systems modelling (...) on related problems, conjectures and tentative conclusions. In inviting contributions I deliberately made no attempt to define morality more sharply than common language and understanding have left it, including our ordinary responses to right and wrong, but not all of the very diverse thinking about this and other practical concerns -- and about what we should make of all these -- that ethics encompasses. This was not because of any lack of past definitions of morality, but because the history of controversy over these makes it advisable not to prejudge the question pending our inquiry's results. From these we may see some outlines of plausible answers begin to emerge, only a brief sketch of some of which I can attempt here, sampling the hypotheses, scientific support, critical discussion of this, and refinement of positions in authors’ responses. (shrink)

A somewhat simplified version of Jerrold J. Katz's theory of the analytic/synthetic distinction for natural languages is presented. Katz's account is criticized on the following grounds. (1) the antonymy operator is not well defined; it leaves certain sentences without readings. (2) The account of negation is defective; it has the consequence that certain nonsynonymous sentences are marked as synonymous. (3) The account of entailment is defective; it has the consequence that analytic sentences entail synthetic ones. (4) Katz's (...) account of indeterminable sentences is criticized; it has the consequence that certain logical truths are not marked as analytic. (5) Katz's semantics provides no account of truth, so that he is unable to show that analytic sentences are true and that indeterminable sentences are not. (shrink)

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust -- despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing (...) a growing need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides. In a new foreword to this edition of The Silent World of Doctor and Patient , Alexander Morgan Capron outlines the changes in medical ethics practice that have occurred since the book was first published in 1984, paying particular attention to the hotly debated issues of physician-assisted suicide and informed consent in managed care. (shrink)

This article analyzes the question of how the size of bribes should impact criminal sanctions. In contrast to the commonly held view that punishment should increase with the size of the bribe, we argue to the contrary: that the punishment of the bribee should decrease with the size of the bribe. Our conclusion is based both on a philosophical argument and an economic argument. We argue that all else being equal, as an agent’s reservation price for selling public interests decreases, (...) the culpability of the agent willing to receive a bribe increases. In addition, from an economic perspective, the expected social harm of an official acting with a low reservation price for bribes is much greater than one acting with a high reservation price: both the susceptibility of being bribed as well as the potential for social harm is much greater when the reservation price is low. (shrink)

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) was an Israeli philosopher and scientist. For decades, his thinking and persona were the embodiment of a Judaism in Israel. Getting to know him is getting to know a great Israeli thinker and also invites a window into the life of Israel and its problems.

Derrida wrote extensively on "the question of the animal." In particular, he challenged Heidegger's, Husserl's, and other philosophers' work on the subject, questioning their phenomenological criteria for distinguishing humans from animals. Examining a range of Derrida's writings, including his most recent _L'animal que donc je suis_, as well as _Aporias_, _Of Spirit_, _Rams_, and _Rogues_, Leonard Lawlor reconstructs a portrait of Derrida's views on animality and their intimate connection to his thinking on ethics, names and singularity, sovereignty, and the (...) notion of a common world. Derrida believed that humans and animals cannot be substantially separated, yet neither do they form a continuous species. Instead, in his "staggered analogy," Derrida asserts that all living beings are weak and therefore capable of suffering. This controversial claim both refuted the notion that humans and animals possess autonomy and contradicted the assumption that they possess the trait of machinery. However, it does offer the foundation for an argument-which Lawlor brilliantly and passionately defines in his book-in which humans are able to will this weakness into a kind of unconditional hospitality. Humans are not strong enough to keep themselves separate from animals. In other words, we are too weak to keep animals from entering into our sphere. Lawlor's argument is a bold approach to remedying "the problem of the worst," or the complete extermination of life, which is fast becoming a reality. (shrink)

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif. : Stone Bridge Press, 1994.

In the wake of ethical scandals and close ethical scrutiny throughout business and the accounting professional today, Brooks/Dunn's BUSINESS & PROFESSIONAL ETHICS, 9E provides the ethical insights and strategies you need for corporate and professional success. Learn why ethical behavior is so important and how to recognize potential pitfalls that involve much more than memorizing rules. You master the skills to develop a corporate culture of integrity that maintains stakeholder support and enables directors and auditors to complete their jobs. You (...) also learn how to use ethical strategies to make decisions, as this edition examines the latest information on governance scandals, legal liability and professional accounting and auditing issues. More than 130 cases and readings highlight new and classic cases of fraud, bankruptcy and unprofessional practices to help you better understand appropriate codes of conduct and sound ethical reasoning while strengthening your persuasive and leadership skills for success. (shrink)

The author offers perspectives that can assist healthcare managers in achieving the highest ethical standards as they face their roles as healthcare providers, employers, and community service organizations. He also examines how to comply with relevant laws and regulations, provide high quality patient care with limited resources, and more.

In this chapter, Dahan Katz defends relational conceptions of retribution and desert. She clarifies the ways in which such relational conceptions avoid major worries associated with retributive theory, while addressing further worries that arise distinctively with respect to such an approach. In doing so, Dahan Katz provides further defense of the response-retributive theory of punishment that she has proposed elsewhere, while defending a wider set of views within the retributive tradition.

This paper offers a response retributive theory of punishment, taking the role of the punisher as well as the relations between the parties to punishment to be central to retributive justification. It proposes that punishment is justified in terms of the ethics of appropriate response, and more precisely, in terms of the duty agents have to dissociate from the devaluation inherent in the culpable wrongdoing of others. The paper demonstrates that on such account, while the harm and suffering involved in (...) punishment are rightly imposed, they are not good, grounding a further duty to mitigate our retributive practices. The result is a moderate vision of retributive justification, which has the resources to justify, not only criminal punishment, but punishment as imposed across a wide variety of relations: private, institutional and political. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the theory of excuse, or more precisely, exculpatory excuse, and the question of what it is that justifies the category of excuse. I address different potential grounds for the law of excuse, which are often run together in ways that confound rather than clarify, focusing on the role of blamelessness and unfairness of expectations in the theory of excuse.

We develop an evidence-based theoretical account of how widely shared cultural beliefs about gender, race, and class intersect in interpersonal and other social relational contexts in the United States to create characteristic cultural “binds” and freedoms for actors in those contexts. We treat gender, race, and class as systems of inequality that are culturally constructed as distinct but implicitly overlap through their defining beliefs, which reflect the perspectives of dominant groups in society. We cite evidence for the contextually contingent interactional (...) “binds” and freedoms this creates for people such as Asian men, Black women, and poor whites who are not prototypical of images embedded in cultural gender, race, and class beliefs. All forms of unprototypicality create “binds,” but freedoms result from being unprototypical of disadvantaging rather than advantaging statuses. (shrink)

Analyzes the meaning expressed in music, the social and psychological sources of meaning, and the methods of musical communication This is a book meant for ...