Philosophers spend a lot of time worrying about rules. We worry about how one ought to live, about the rules of justification for beliefs and actions, about what it would be like if the rules of reason were rigorously followed, about what the rules are for scientific enquiry, about which rules govern the meaning of signs and the intentions of agents, and so on. Sometimes, we argue that there are no such rules as most of us want to believe (...) there are, rules which apply to all of us collectively and to each of us individually, which are beyond our ability to change, and whose violation is in some simple sense wrong. To this we often respond that without such rules we are all made somehow less, that our normative deliberations are a sham, or even that the whole business of living becomes somehow pointless. (shrink)

The author argues that only when the two harms are morally relevant to one another may an agent take into account the number of people he can save. He defends an orbital conception of morally relevant harm, according to which harms that fall within the of a given harm are relevant to it, while all other harms are not. The possibility of preventing a harm provides both a first-order reason to prevent that harm, and a second-order (...) reason not to consider preventing irrelevant harms. This understanding of a morally relevant harm avoids two objections to such a concept recently raised by Alastair Norcross: identifying a point along a continuous scale of harms at which the divide between relevant and irrelevant harms occurs, and the entailment that the mere possibility of preventing harm that one is morally forbidden from preventing can determine which of two other actions morality requires. (shrink)

In an earlier article, I introduced the “restricting claims principle” to explain what is right about the means principle: the idea that it is harder to justify causing or allowing someone to suffer harm if using him as a means than if causing or allowing harm as a side effect. The RCP appeals to the idea that claims not to be harmed as a side effect push to restrict an agent from doing what she would otherwise be free (...) to do for herself or others, given an appropriate account of her baseline freedom. Claims not to be harmed as a means are not in that way ‘‘restricting.’’ The original RCP relied on a counterfactual account of the agent’s baseline freedom: What could the agent permissibly do if the patient were not present? I argue here that that counterfactual baseline fails. The revised RCP relies instead on a ‘‘toolkit baseline’’: Do the patient claims concern the property the agent needs to use? This toolkit baseline reflects the different ways that agents relate to others: as fellow agents with whom they divide up the resources of the world, and as patients who might be affected by their actions. The toolkit baseline, resting on this agent-patient divide, provides a superior account of an agent’s baseline freedom, and a better account of the moral ground for the means principle. (shrink)

Lawyers and philosophers have found it challenging to construct an account of when an act causes harm that is broad enough to address multiple agent problems but not so broad that it fails to distinguish between genuinely harming a person and imposing a condition on a person that we deem undesirable. Thus, we may think an act causes harm only if it makes a difference to a person and, more specifically, makes things worse for that person. If the (...) effect is the same whatever the one agent does in virtue of what a second agent does or is prepared to do, it may seem that what the one agent does makes no difference. Multiple agent problems are endemic. Legal hypotheticals include the example of two fires, each ‘tortiously’ set, converging on a single barn. The physician faces a multiple agent problem when he or she understands that refusing to provide the fertility treatment a patient demands will just lead to another physician providing the treatment instead. And corporations face the problem when they project that conscientiously refraining from drilling for oil at a particular site will not safeguard that site but rather open the door to equally deleterious activities of still other corporations. This paper argues that a useful first step in developing an account of harm in the multiple agent context is to recognize that often, even if the individual agent cannot make things better for a person, the group can. It seems, however, that a fully adequate account will also show how and when the harm that the group imposes on a person devolves to the agent. This paper proposes such an account. Requirements include: that the agent is a member of a group implicated in the harm; that the agent participate in the bringing about of that harm; and that the agent’s non-participation would not have made things worse for the person. To avoid the charge of harm, then, and still participate in the harm that is done by the group, the agent’s participation must make things better for the person; simply not making things worse, once the other conditions are satisfied, is not enough to avoid the charge of harm. Advantages of the proposed account include its ability to discern as an exception cases in which the agent’s non-participation would have made things worse for the person and to distinguish cases involving a mix of natural and man-made causes. (shrink)

This paper presents a series of studies (total N=579) which demonstrate that folk judgments concerning the reasonableness of decisions and actions depend strongly on whether they engender positive or negative consequences. A particular decision is deemed more reasonable in retrospect when it produces beneficial consequences than when it produces harmful consequences, even if the situation in which the decision was taken and the epistemic circumstances of the agent are held fixed across conditions. This finding is worrisome for the law, where (...) the reasonable person standard plays a prominent role. The legal concept of reasonableness is outcome-insensitive: whether the defendant acted in a reasonable fashion or not depends exclusively on her context of action, no matter how things play out. Folk judgments of reasonableness are thus inconsistent with the legal concept of reasonableness. Problematically, in common law jurisdictions, the decision whether a defendant’s behavior was reasonable or not is frequently (though not necessarily) delegated to a lay jury. (shrink)

Principles are investigated that allow one to establish a preference ordering between possible actions based on the question of whether the acting agent himself or other agents will benefit or be harmed by the consequences of an action. It is shown that a combination of utility maximization, an altruist principle, and weak negative utilitarianism yields an ordering that seems to be intuitively appealing, although it does not necessarily reflect common everyday evaluations of actions.

Information theory offers a measure of "mutual information" which provides an appropriate measure of tracking efficiency for the naturalistic epistemologist. The statistical entropy on which it is based is arguably the best way of characterizing the uncertainty associated with the behavior of a system, and it is ontologically neutral. Though not appropriate for the naturalization of meaning, mutual information can serve as a measure of epistemic success independent of semantic maps and payoff structures. While not containing payoffs as terms, mutual (...) information places both upper and lower bounds on payoffs. This constitutes a non-trivial relationship to utility. (shrink)

This paper shows how Aquinas gradually developed his view on angelic speech. His major texts are summarized and compared to those of contemporaries (sections II-III). Next the texts are analyzed, focusing on three issues: the notion of ‘word’ (section IV), the role of the will (section V), and the need of signification (section VI). With regard to each of these topics, Aquinas’ thought evolved, first by juxtaposing and later by integrating Augustinian and Aristotelian viewpoints. Aquinas reaches his mature position in (...) the Summa Theologiae by radically reinterpretating the meaning of ‘word’ and denying that angelic speech has a semiotic structure. (shrink)

Skyrms describes how evolutionary models are helping us understand unselfish or cooperative behaviour in humans and animals. Mechanisms which can stabilize cooperative behaviour are sensitive to population densities, however. This creates the need for agent-based evolutionary models which depict individual interactions, spatial locations, and stochastic effects. One such model suggests that hostile environments may provide conditions conducive to the emergence and stabilization of cooperative behaviour. In particular, simulations show that random extinctions can keep population densities low, provide ongoing colonization opportunities, (...) and insulate cooperative communities from invasion. Agent-based and population models play complementary roles in furthering our understanding evolutionary processes. (shrink)

Principles are investigated that allow one to establish a preference ordering between possible actions based on the question of whether the acting agent himself or other agents will benefit or be harmed by the consequences of an action. It is shown that a combination of utility maximization, an altruist principle, and weak negative utilitarianism yields an ordering that seems to be intuitively appealing, although it does not necessarily reflect common everyday evaluations of actions.

Moral norms are the rules of morality, those that people actually follow, and those that we feel people ought to follow, even when they don’t. Historically, the social sciences have been primarily concerned with describing the many forms that moral norms take in various cultures, with the emerging implication that moral norms are mere arbitrary products of culture. Philosophers, on the other hand, have been more concerned with trying to understand the nature and source of rules that all cultures ought (...) to follow, with relatively little regard for what people actually do. The tension between the two approaches has to do with whether there are any standards higher than the whims of culture in determining right and wrong. Typically, the social sciences say “no”, pointing at the diversity of moral beliefs. Most philosophers (along with people of moral conviction) feel that there must be some deeper source of morality than the trends and fads of culture. Unfortunately, the nature and source of such standards has remained something of a mystery. Recent work on the evolution of norms has changed this picture dramatically. (shrink)

Empirical research in the field of legal interpretation shows that, in many cases, analogy argumentation is complex rather than simple. Traditional analytical approaches to analogy argumentation do not explore that complexity. In most cases analogy argumentation is reconstructed as a simple form of argumentation that consists of two premises and a conclusion. This article focuses on the question of how to analyze and evaluate complex analogy argumentation. It is shown how the pragma-dialectical approach provides clues for analyzing complex analogy argumentation (...) and how the criteria for evaluating analogy argumentation can be used to reconstruct these types of complex analogy argumentation in Dutch case law. The critical questions in the argumentation scheme do not only serve as a tool for analyzing arguments justifying analogy argumentation, but are also helpful in analyzing arguments against a specific analogy argumentation. (shrink)

In legal decisions standpoints can be supported by formal and also by substantive interpretative arguments. Formal arguments consist of reasons the weight or force of which is essentially dependent on the authoritativeness that the reasons may also have: In this connection one may think of linguistic and systemic arguments. On the other hand, substantive arguments are not backed up by authority, but consist of a direct invocation of moral, political, economic, or other social considerations. Formal arguments can be analyzed as (...) exclusionary reasons: The authoritative character excludes—in principle—substantial counterarguments. Formal arguments are sometimes used to conceal value judgements based on substantial arguments. This paper deals with reconstructing problems regarding this strategic use of formal arguments in legal decisions, with a focus on linguistic argumentation. (shrink)

It is a mistake to think that we cannot be morally responsible for forgetting because, as a matter of principle, forgetting is outside of our control. Sometimes we do have control over our forgetting. When forgetting is under our control there is no question that it is the proper object of praise and blame. But we can also be morally responsible for forgetting something when it is beyond our control that we forget that thing. The literature contains three accounts of (...) the blameworthiness of forgetting over which the agent has no control—the tracing account, the liberalized awareness condition, and attributionism. Even though these are competing accounts of the blameworthiness of harmful forgetting they are compatible with one another. In particular, it is possible to come up with a position that endorses the tracing account for certain kinds of harmful forgetting and attributionism for other kinds of harmful forgetting. (shrink)

In August 2019, the fifth international congress of the 'International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein' (IASPES) took place at the University of Cologne. Of the 57 papers presented at this prominent conference prepared and chaired by the historian and theologian Harm Klueting, 54 were accepted for publication in revised versions. Professor Klueting was able to add three other contributions -- among them by the director of the Research Institute of the German Province of the (...) Carmelites at Bamberg, the historian and theologian Edeltraud Klueting, who acts as co-editor. The congress volume, published only a little more than a year after the congress despite significant constraints due to the Corona pandemic, contains 29 contributions in English, 21 in German, and seven in Spanish or French on the subjects 'Biographical questions', 'Edith Stein and thinkers of the past', 'Edith Stein and other contemporary thinkers', 'Anthropology -- Women and men', 'Philosophy -- phenomenology and Christian philosophy', 'Society and politics', 'Theology and spirituality', and 'Experiences with Edith Stein'. (shrink)

Evolving signaling systems can be said to induce partitions on the space of world states as they approach equilibrium. Formalizing this claim provides a general framework for understanding what it means for language to “cut nature at its seams”. In order to avoid taking our current best science as providing the adaptive target for all evolving systems, the state space of the world must be characterized exclusively in terms of the coincidence of stimuli and payoffs that drives the evolution of (...) cognitive complexity. Cognition exploits the reliable clustering of events in this space. Using this framework to analyze our ordinary concepts of truth and justification, it appears that while justification can be a simple matter of conforming to historically entrenched strategies, truth cannot be fully specified on the basis of the system’s causal history, but requires a robust clustering in the larger world state space. (shrink)

This richly illustrated book discusses the ways in which astronomy expanded after 1945 from a modest discipline to a robust and modern science. It begins with an introduction to the state of astronomy in 1945 before recounting how in the following years, initial observations were made in hitherto unexplored ranges of wavelengths, such as X-radiation, infrared radiation and radio waves. These led to the serendipitous discovery of more than a dozen new phenomena, including quasars and neutron stars, that each triggered (...) a new area of research. The book goes on to discuss how after 1985, the further, systematic exploration of the earlier discoveries led to long-term planning and the construction of new, large telescopes on Earth and in Space. Key scientific highlights described in the text are the detection of exoplanets, the unexpected discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe, a generally accepted model for the large-scale properties of the Universe and the ΛCDM theory that explains how the galaxies and stars of the present Universe were formed from minute irregularities in the homogenous gas that filled the early Universe. All these major scientific achievements came at a price, namely the need to introduce two new phenomena that are as yet unexplained by physics: inflation and dark energy. Probably the deepest unsolved question has to be: Why did all of this start with a Big Bang? (shrink)

In the present study, we examine the process through which abusive supervision impacts employee creativity. Specifically, we test whether abusive supervision is associated with lower levels of employee creativity and if this effect is mediated by employee sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion. Results showed that abusive supervision had an indirect negative relationship with employee creativity via its impact on employee sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the negative effects of abusive supervision on employee (...) creativity and the processes by which they occur. (shrink)

Stories about near-death experiences draw much attention from the general public and are extensively discussed by medical doctors and neuroscientists. However, though eschatology belongs to their core business, only few theologians participate in the debate. This article proposes a theological interpretation of NDEs as ‘private revelations’. I first give a critical analysis of the development of the modern, allegedly ‘scientific’, concept of NDE. This concept changes concrete personal testimonies into statistical data that are used as scientific evidence for the existence (...) of an immortal soul. Next, the main criticisms against this concept from neurosciences, study of mysticism and philosophy of mind are discussed. Finally, I argue that ‘private revelation’ is a useful model for a theological understanding of NDEs and that an analogy from Thomas Aquinas’ view on prophetic dreams can help to account for the specific circumstance of imminent death. The interpretation I propose can do justice to the impression NDEs make on people, but can also accept and meet some of the most important criticisms raised against the modern concept of NDEs. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Jonathan Quong tries to offer further support for “the proposition that there are sometimes agent-relative prerogatives to harm nonliable persons.” In this brief paper, I will demonstrate that Quong’s argument implicitly relies on the premise that the violinist in Thomson’s famous example has a right not to be unplugged. Yet, first, Quong provides no argument in support of this premise; and second, the premise is clearly wrong. Moreover, throughout his paper Quong just question-beggingly and without (...) argument assumes that one cannot lose rights in other ways than by one’s own responsible action. I conclude that Quong has failed to provide further support for his thesis. (shrink)

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. In (...) Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

Telenomic Agency: Towards a proper functions theory of normativity (pdf) is a recent paper on the biological basis of normativity. This paper attempts to show that the notion of biological function/malfunction has more to offer our understanding of genuine agency than is usually acknowledged. It is suggested that moral and rational normativity attach to signals in very specific biological regulatory systems, and that the complexity of these systems accounts for much of the phenomenological richness of agency, as well as showing (...) the error in standard counterexamples. If this is correct, it turns out that the incommensurability between "is" and "ought" may be due to the requirements of the systems within which descriptive and overtly normative language have their biologically normative roles, rather than to any incompleteness in naturalistic accounts. One consequence is that moral language can have objective (and naturalistically specifiable) truth conditions, without special moral facts and without reducibility to naturalistic description. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory offers the possibility of building an epistemology that requires neither a theory of truth nor a definition of knowledge, thus bypassing some of the more notable difficulties with standard approaches to epistemology. Following a critique of one of the most popular approaches to thinking about cultural evolution I argue for a frequentist approach to evolutionary epistemology, and that cultural transmission should be understood as coordinated phenotypic variability within groups of closely related organisms. I construct a formal system which (...) allows the analysis of the evolution of networks of multiple interacting populations. Of particular epistemological interest is the relationship between genetic evolution and the evolution of cultural entities. The information-theoretic notion of "mutual information" is employed to quantify the transfer of information from the environment as it determines genetic fitnesses into the distribution of acquired traits Two simple models are constructed and analyzed. A two-level model of the navigation of a colony of bacteria demonstrates how selection on inherited traits affects the acquisition of information on the level of transient behavioral traits. A three-level model of bumblebee foraging shows how information about the environment is caught up in distributions of acquired foraging preferences--a bee-analog of human cognitive states. The Appendix contains an analytic proof of information gain under selection. (shrink)

This book is devoted to the so-called moral virtues, especially those moral virtues of which Christian tradition upholds that they are given by God to the faithful. For instance patience, humility and justice. There are not only different interpretations of these infused moral virutes, but it is also not unambiguous in the theology of Aquinas how these virtues are related to the virtues human beings acquire on their own accord. What is the relationship with Scripture, how do these virtues clour (...) the imitation of Christ, and what do these virtues tell about the moral life of non-Christians? (shrink)

The evolution of economic altruism is one of the most vigorous areas of study at the intersection of biology, economics, and philosophy. The basic problem is easily understood. Biological organisms, be they people or paramecia, have ample opportunity to confer benefits on others at relatively low cost to themselves. If conferring such benefits becomes common, the overall productivity of the population in which it occurs is increased. Presumably, there is no advantage to refusing such benefits, but it is also the (...) case that there is considerable advantage to pursuing a strategy according to which such benefits are accepted, but not conferred. In populations where individuals interact at random with others and when individuals play pure strategies (i.e., they always confer or do not confer benefits), the inevitable outcome is that altruistic behavior is driven to extinction. (Axelrod 1984) Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that self-sacrificing behavior is common in nature. (Sober and Wilson 1998) Consequently, individuals must not be interacting at random. The pressing question is then: what patterns of non-random interaction are responsible for the prevalence of altruistic behavior, and more theoretically, what sorts of plausible mechanisms exist that could generate the right kind of non- 1 The research reported here was supported by Canada ????? grant # ????? and the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia. (shrink)

Research on abusive supervision is imbalanced in two ways. First, with most research attention focused on the destructive consequences of abusive supervision, there has been relatively little work on subordinate-related predictors of perceptions of abusive supervision. Second, with most research on abusive supervision centered on its main effects and the moderating effects of supervisor-related factors, there is little understanding of how subordinate factors can moderate the main effects of perceptions of abusive supervision on workplace outcomes. The current study aims to (...) advance knowledge of the roles of subordinates in the formation of and reactions to perceptions of abusive supervision. Specifically, based on victim precipitation theory, the authors examined subordinates’ personality traits and self-reports of task performance as antecedents of perceptions of abusive supervision. The results show that subordinates high in neuroticism or low in conscientiousness had high levels of perceived abusive supervision partially through their self-reported deleterious job performance. In addition, the authors investigated the moderating effect of subordinates’ personality on the relationship between perceptions of abusive supervision and subordinates’ interpersonal deviance. Consistent with trait activation theory, subordinates low in both agreeableness and extraversion were more likely to engage in deviant behaviors in response to perceptions of abusive supervision than subordinates high in either or both agreeableness and extraversion. (shrink)

Roman Catholic moral theology follows a centuries-old tradition of moral reflection. Contemporary Roman Catholic moral theory applies these traditional arguments to the realm of medical ethics, including the issues of active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Unavoidable moral limits on licit medical intervention sometimes require that the moral duty to treat, cede to the duty to cease treatment when measures become more harmful than beneficial to the patient. This does not reduce the need for the compassionate use of palliative care in (...) response to suffering. However, it does mean that rather than being excessively committed to maintaining mere biological human life, or actively seeking death, that we learn a sober realism about the limits of human life. Catholic moral analysis examines an act objectively, both in its relation to the agent and as a material event in the world. This allows both the virtuous or vicious intentions of the agent and the effects of the action to be included in its moral evaluation. Thus, Catholic moral analysis is both quasi-deontological and quasi-consequentialist. Objectively, active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, as acts of deliberate killing, are seen as repugnant, in that they fail to incarnate a benign inner intention or to form an agent in virtue. Catholic moral theology is extremely skeptical that an act of intending death directly can be consonant with a sincere compassion for the dying, suffering person and views it as a direct negation of the precious gift of human life. (shrink)

Recently, we showed that conscious and unconscious rewards affect the active maintenance of goal-relevant information differently. Here, we elaborate on the mechanisms enabling the boosting or disrupting effects of consciously processed high rewards, and discuss a few methodological and theoretical implications that may be worth considering in future research on the role of reward processing in working memory performance.

In this paper, I offer two arguments in support of the proposition that there are sometimes agent-relative prerogatives to impose harm on nonliable persons. The first argument begins with a famous case where most people intuitively agree it is permissible to perform an act that results in an innocent person’s death, and where there is no liability-based or consequentialist justification for acting. I show that this case is relevantly analogous to a case involving the intentional imposition of lethal defensive (...) harm on a nonliable person. In the final part of the paper, I provide a second, independent, argument in support of the proposition that there are agent-relative permissions to foreseeably harm or kill nonliable people under certain conditions. (shrink)

The present study expands on the growing literature concerning organizational politics by assessing the impact of team-level OP on employee performance outcomes as well as investigating the degree to which these effects are mediated by team conflict. The results, based on multilevel structural equation modeling with a sample of 349 employees from 78 firms in China, lent support for a cross-level mediating role for team conflict between political climate and employee performance. Further, moderator analyses demonstrated that political climate acted as (...) a condition for task conflict to trigger relationship conflict. Thus, the results of this study contribute to both the political climate literature and the conflict literature by clarifying the processes by which climate can influence employee performance. (shrink)

During the last two decades virtue ethics has become the focal point of renewed ethical and theological interest. To lead a good life, it proves useful to watch those who have mastered the art of living. The conviction that living is an art is at the heart of virtue ethics. Living a good life requires exercise, and is a question of acquiring a virtuous character rather than of complying with external ethical and legal rules. This renaissance partly builds on Thomas (...) Aquinas. He in turn recovered Aristotelian, Ciceronian and Augustinian thought on virtue ethics. The interpretation and development of virtues and vices form the core of his authorship, as the 'secunda pars' of his 'Summa Theologiae' readily displays. And yet, the most important virtues for him are not the moral ones, such as Justice, Temperance, Prudence and Fortitude, but those virtues that are both infused by and aimed at God: Faith, Hope and Love. These are virtues that the philosophers of antiquity were not aware of. To account for them, Aquinas had to adapt the classical understanding of virtues. For Aquinas, the moral virtues come to full fruition only when they are embedded in a life before God, a life lived exercising the God given theological virtues. By ignoring Faith, Hope and Love, the present discussion of virtue ethics not only ignores those virtues that were for Aquinas of utmost importance, but also fails to arrive at a complete understanding of his view of the moral virtues. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Theory of Event Coding predicts that exposure to affective cues can automatically trigger affectively congruent behaviour due to shared representational codes. An intriguing hypothesis from this theory is that exposure to aversive cues can automatically trigger actions that have previously been learned to result in aversive outcomes. Previous work has indeed found such a compatibility effect on reaction times in forced-choice tasks, but not for action selection in free-choice tasks. Failure to observe this compatibility effect for aversive cues in (...) free choice tasks suggests that control processes aimed at directing behaviour toward positive outcomes may overrule the automatic activation of affectively congruent responses in case of aversive cues. The present study tested whether minimising such control could cause selection of actions that have been learned to result in aversive outcomes. Results showed incidental exposure to aversive cues biased selection of behaviours with learned aver... (shrink)

Self-deception makes best sense as a self-defensive mechanism by which the self protects itself from painful reality. Hence, we typically imagine self-deceivers as people who cause themselves to believe as true what they want to be true. Some self-deceivers, however, end up believing what they do not want to be true. Their behaviour can be explained on the hypothesis that the function of this behaviour is protecting the agent's perceived focal benefit at the cost of inflicting short-term harm, which (...) is a basis for a unified account of the phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that this view is narrow. Cases of altruistic, benevolent, and even self-punishing self-deception also exist. There, the function is not the self-deceiver's benefit. In fact, self-deception may have no function at all. Therefore, I put forward a novel account that analyses the function of self-deception on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Information about the environment is captured in human biological systems on a variety of interacting levels – in distributions of genes, linguistic particulars, concepts, methods, theories, preferences, and overt behaviors. I investigate some of the basic principles which govern such a hierarchy by constructing a comparatively simple three-level selection model of bee foraging preferences and behaviors. The information-theoretic notion of ''''mutual information'''' is employed as a measure of efficiency in tracking a changing environment, and its appropriateness in epistemological applications is (...) discussed at some length. In particular, information accumulated in mid-level preference distributions exhibits suggestive properties for the purposes of naturalistic epistemology. It also appears that the novelty of scientific objects and representations and the rapidity of scientific change relative to genetic change need present no obstacle to the use of such models in explanations of scientific progress and the reliability of scientific judgement. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the similarities betweenthe dialectical procedure in the pragma-dialecticaltheory and dialectical procedures in AI and Law. I dothis by focusing on one specific type of reasoning inlaw: analogy argumentation. I will argue that analogyargumentation is not only a heuristic forfinding new premises, but also a part of thejustification of legal decisions. The relevantcriteria for the evaluation of analogy argumentationare not to be found at the logical level of inference,but at the procedural level of the discussion. I (...) willproceed as follows. I start with an outline ofPrakken's theory of argumentation frameworks andprocedural models. Then, I will discuss Peczenik'sanalysis of analogy argumentation and try to combineit with the descriptive-normative research ofMacCormick and Summers. Finally, I propose asystematization of the criteria for the evaluation ofanalogy argumentation within the framework of apragma-dialectical notion of an argumentation scheme. (shrink)

The terms 'transcendence' and 'immanence' are often used casually and as self-evident. The spatial imagery contained in their meaning determines the way they are understood and used: as opposites, like 'there' and 'here'. As a consequence, the two concepts are seen as mutually exclusive when applied to God's being and to his activity and presence in our world and in our history. This view on the relationship between God and world is characteristic not only of deism and pantheism, but also (...) of theism. However, in the view of Thomas Aquinas, such an opposition cannot adequately capture the central tenets of the Christian faith. This book explores Aquinas' thought on transcendence and immanence in his discussions of creation, analogy, the Trinity, grace and Christ, and offers interpretations in which God's transcendence and his immanence do not exclude but imply one another. >br/>The papers contained in this volume were originally presented at the third international conference of the Thomas Instituut at Utrecht in 2005. (shrink)

The topics of ethical conduct and governance in academic research in the business field have attracted scientific and public attention. The concern is that research misconduct in organizations such as business schools and universities might result in practitioners, policymakers, and researchers grounding their decisions on biased research results. This study addresses ethical research misconduct by investigating whether the ethical orientation of business researchers is related to the likelihood of research misconduct, such as selective reporting of research findings. We distinguish between (...) deontological and consequentialist ethical orientations and the competition between researchers and investigate the moderating role of their perceived autonomy. Based on global data collected from 1031 business scholars, we find that researchers with a strong deontological ethical orientation are less prone to misconduct. This effect is robust against different levels of perceived autonomy and competition. In contrast, researchers having a consequentialist ethical orientation is positively associated with misconduct in business research. High levels of competition in the research environment reinforce this effect. Our results reveal a potentially toxic combination comprising researchers with a strong consequentialist orientation who are embedded in highly competitive research environments. Our research calls for the development of ethical orientations grounded on maxims rather than anticipated consequences among researchers. We conclude that measures for ethical governance in business schools should consider the ethical orientation that underlies researchers’ decision-making and the organizational and institutional environment in which business researchers are embedded. (shrink)

Whereas Pettit distinguishes between responsibility for the enactment of a directly harmful act and responsibility for the arrangement or constitution that channels the formation of a corporate agent’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, we should acknowledge the existence of yet a third level of responsibility: the enactment of corporate arrangements that makes the enactment of harmful corporate actions likely or unavoidable.

In recent work, T.M. Scanlon has unsuccessfully challenged the doctrine of double effect (DDE). First, comparing actions reflecting faulty moral deliberations and involving merely foreseen harm with actions reflecting less faulty moral deliberations involving intended harm suggests that proponents of DDE do not confuse the critical and the deliberative uses of moral principles. Second, Scanlon submits that it is odd to say to a deliberating agent that the permissibility of the actions she ponders depends on the intention with (...) which she will act. I argue that this can be explained without appeal to the claim that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility. (shrink)

Moral norms are the rules of morality, those that people actually follow, and those that we feel people ought to follow, even when they don’t. Historically, the social sciences have been primarily concerned with describing the many forms that moral norms take in various cultures, with the emerging implication that moral norms are mere arbitrary products of culture. Philosophers, on the other hand, have been more concerned with trying to understand the nature and source of rules that all cultures ought (...) to follow, with relatively little regard for what people actually do. The tension between the two approaches has to do with whether there are any standards higher than the whims of culture in determining right and wrong. Typically, the social sciences say “no”, pointing at the diversity of moral beliefs. Most philosophers (along with people of moral conviction) feel that there must be some deeper source of morality than the trends and fads of culture. Unfortunately, the nature and source of such standards has remained something of a mystery. Recent work on the evolution of norms has changed this picture dramatically. (shrink)

Specialist Sport Programs are an underexamined activity that combines the best features of two different contexts for adolescent development: a sporting program and a secondary school. A mixed-methods study was conducted to determine the influence of participation in SSPs on the educational outcomes of lower secondary students in Western Australia. The results demonstrated a significant improvement in specialist students' mean grade for Mathematics over the course of a year, while their mean grade for all other subjects, and their level of (...) engagement with school, remained stable over the same period of time. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with key stakeholders. Overall, the participants felt that SSPs had a positive influence on students' engagement with school, and that this engagement had a positive impact on their academic achievement. Taken together, the results of this research suggest that there is a role for SSPs in promoting positive educational outcomes for lower secondary students attending public schools located in low SES areas. (shrink)

Debate concerning the social impact of obesity has been ongoing since at least the 1980s. Bioethicists, however, have been relatively silent. If obesity is addressed it tends to be in the context of resource allocation or clinical procedures such as bariatric surgery. However, prominent bioethicists Peter Singer and Dan Callahan have recently entered the obesity debate to argue that obesity is not simply a clinical or personal issue but an ethical issue with social and political consequences. This article critically examines (...) two problematic aspects of Singer and Callahan's respective approaches. First, there is an uncritical assumption that individuals are autonomous agents responsible for health-related effects associated with food choices. In their view, individuals are obese because they choose certain foods or refrain from physical activity. However, this view alone does not justify intervention. Both Singer and Callahan recognize that individuals are free to make foolish choices so long as they do not harm others. It is at this point that the second problematic aspect arises. To interfere legitimately in the liberty of individuals, they invoke the harm principle. I contend, however, that in making this move both Singer and Callahan rely on superficial readings of public health research to amplify the harm caused by obese individuals and ignore pertinent epidemiological research on the social determinants of obesity. I argue that the mobilization of the harm principle and corresponding focus on individual behaviours without careful consideration of the empirical research is itself a form of harm that needs to be taken seriously. (shrink)

The governance of nanotechnology seeks to limit its risks, without constraining opportunities. The literature on the effectiveness of approaches to governance has neglected approaches that impact directly on the behavior of a researcher. We analyze the effectiveness of legal regulations versus regulation via self-commitment. Then, we refine this model by analyzing competition and autonomy as key contingency factors. In the first step, qualitative interviews with nanotechnology researchers are conducted to reflect this model. In the second step, its empirical relevance is (...) tested using a survey of 90 nanotech researchers. The results indicate that legal regulations, as well as self-commitment to an informal CoC reduce the scope of behavior. Finally, that competition and autonomy affect the relative strength of these governance factors. (shrink)

Can computer systems ever be considered moral agents? This paper considers two factors that are explored in the recent philosophical literature. First, there are the important domains in which computers are allowed to act, made possible by their greater functional capacities. Second, there is the claim that these functional capacities appear to embody relevant human abilities, such as autonomy and responsibility. I argue that neither the first (Domain-Function) factor nor the second (Simulacrum) factor gets at the central issue in (...) the case for computer moral agency: whether they can have the kinds of intentional states that cause their decisions and actions. I give an account that builds on traditional action theory and allows us to conceive of computers as genuine moral agents in virtue of their own causally efficacious intentional states. These states can cause harm or benefit to moral patients, but do not depend on computer consciousness or intelligence. (shrink)

When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related (...) but importantly different answer: What is required for fitting guilt and indignation is that the agent is relevantly implicated in that outcome: that the agent’s morally substandard responsiveness to reasons, or substandard caring, is relevantly involved in a normal explanation of it. This answer, it is further argued, makes sense because when an agent’s substandard caring is so involved, the outcome provides a lesson against such caring, a lesson central to the function of guilt and indignation. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is of great importance to US criminal and tort law. According to the law, whether or not an agent acted reasonably does not depend on features of the outcome which are not under her control. Mock juror attributions of reasonableness, however, are shown to be outcome-dependent. A series of experiments reveals that this outcome-dependence does not constitute a bias, since the very folk concept of reasonableness is outcome-sensitive. Consequently, the law makes a mistaken assumption as to (...) what kind of concept of reasonableness lay jurors will apply in court. This conceptual misalignment, it is argued, could lead to serious injustice in US trials. This paper presents a series of studies (total N=579) which demonstrate that folk judgments concerning the reasonableness of decisions and actions depend strongly on whether they engender positive or negative consequences. A particular decision is deemed more reasonable in retrospect when it produces beneficial consequences than when it produces harmful consequences, even if the situation in which the decision was taken and the epistemic circumstances of the agent are held fixed across conditions. This finding is worrisome for the law, where the reasonable person standard plays a prominent role. The legal concept of reasonableness is outcome-insensitive: whether the defendant acted in a reasonable fashion or not depends exclusively on her context of action, no matter how things play out. Folk judgments of reasonableness are thus inconsistent with the legal concept of reasonableness. Problematically, in common law jurisdictions, the decision whether a defendant’s behavior was reasonable or not is frequently (though not necessarily) delegated to a lay jury. (shrink)

As aesthetic beings, we are receptive to and engaged with the sensuous phenomena of life while also knowing that we are targets of others’ awareness: we are both aesthetic agents and aesthetic objects. Our psychological health, our standing within our communities, and our overall wellbeing can be profoundly affected by our aesthetic surroundings and by whether and how we receive aesthetic recognition from others. When our embodied selves and our cultural products are valued, and when we have rich opportunities (...) for aesthetic experience and for the exercise of aesthetic agency, the aesthetic can foster and sustain wellbeing and help to make our lives worthwhile. But when we are subjected to aesthetic blight, restriction of our aesthetic agency, and aesthetic devaluing of our embodied selves and our communities’ cultural products, the aesthetic can do great harm: such aesthetic maneuvers play a significant role in oppression and social hierarchy related to race, gender, fatness, and disability. This essay explores the notions of aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents, their relations with each other, and the unique affordances of persons’ status as simultaneously aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents. It examines the prospects for bodily aesthetic experience to promote wellbeing and, at the end, considers how the aesthetic might play a role in establishing forms of mutual vulnerability and recognition to combat oppressive social hierarchies. (shrink)

In debates over the legitimacy of markets for live human organs, much hinges on the moral standing of desperate exchanges. Can people in desperate circumstances genuinely choose to sell their organs? Alternatively if they do choose to sell, then surely is it their choice? While sales are banned in most of the Western world due to fears that the poor will be exploited, advocates of these markets find such prohibition unconscionably paternalistic; and from the standpoint of contemporary liberal theory, paternalism (...) is anathema. Is it possible to provide grounds for blocking such desperate exchanges which are not at the same time paternalistic?In ‘Imposing Options on People in Poverty: the Harm of a Live Donor Organ Market', Simon Rippon argues that some options in the market do in fact harm. According to Rippon, if we focus on possible negative consequences of increasing an agent's options, one can develop an argument against human organ markets which is not paternalistic or focused on the idea of exploitation. Whether his account is, as stated, non-paternalistic is an open question, but his analysis of the implications of increased commercial options provides an illuminating and original critique of the human organ markets.Rippon labels his opponents' view the ‘Laissez-choisir Argument’ . According to LC, blocking exchanges …. (shrink)

Most intuitively forceful criticisms of utilitarianism, I believe, reduce to two basic objections. Both arise from the relentlessness of the utilitarian injunction to promote the overall good. On the one hand, this means that agents are permitted to perform an act of any kind whatsoever–provided only that the consequences of that act are better than those of any alternative. In particular, this means that it is permissible to impose tremendous sacrifices or injuries upon someone, if this is the only (...) way to ensure even greater gains for others. But in allowing agents to deliberately impose harm on someone for the sake of others, utilitarianism seems to permit acts which are morally unacceptable. Intuitively, we want to say that rights, or other moral prohibitions, forbid treating people in certain ways–ways allowed by utilitarianism. This, then, is the first major objection: utilitarianism permits too much. (shrink)