This chapter contains sections titled: 1 2 3 4 Acknowledgments References.

The perceptual model of emotions maintains that emotions involve, or are at least analogous to, perceptions of value. On this account, emotions purport to tell us about the evaluative realm, in much the same way that sensory perceptions inform us about the sensible world. An important development of this position, prominent in recent work by Peter Goldie amongst others, concerns the essential role that virtuous habits of attention play in enabling us to gain perceptual and evaluative knowledge. I think (...) that there are good reasons to be sceptical about this picture of virtue. In this essay I set out these reasons, and explain the consequences this scepticism has for our understanding of the relation between virtue, emotion, and attention. In particular, I argue that our primary capacity for recognizing value is in fact a non-emotional capacity. (shrink)

The perceptual model of emotions maintains that emotions involve, or are at least analogous to, perceptions of value. On this account, emotions purport to tell us about the evaluative realm, in much the same way that sensory perceptions inform us about the sensible world. An important development of this position, prominent in recent work by Peter Goldie amongst others, concerns the essential role that virtuous habits of attention play in enabling us to gain perceptual and evaluative knowledge. I think (...) that there are good reasons to be sceptical about this picture of virtue. In this essay I set out these reasons, and explain the consequences this scepticism has for our understanding of the relation between virtue, emotion, and attention. In particular, I argue that our primary capacity for recognizing value is in fact a non-emotional capacity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ought We to Require Emotional Capacity as Part of Decisional Competence?Paul S. Appelbaum* (bio)AbstractThe preceding commentary by Louis Charland suggests that traditional cognitive views of decision-making competence err in not taking into account patients’ emotional capacities. Examined closely, however, Charland’s argument fails to escape the cognitive bias that he condemns. However, there may be stronger arguments for broadening the focus of competence assessment to include emotional capacities, centering (...) on the ways in which emotions aid humans in processing information. Before emotional capacities are added to the list of functions essential for decisional competence, though, the feasibility and utility of such a reorientation must be demonstrated.To what extent ought persons’ capacities to experience emotion be taken into account when determining whether they should be deemed competent to make their own decisions? In the previous article, Louis Charland (1998) argues that traditional models of decision-making competence—of which the MacArthur Competence Treatment Study is a typical example—are mistaken in focusing narrowly on persons’ cognitive abilities to the neglect of emotional factors. In contrast, he suggests, constructs of competence ought explicitly to require a capacity to experience emotions, which he believes is central to meaningful decision making, before deeming persons competent.Charland, as he acknowledges, is not the first to suggest that the presence of some degree of emotional capacity is a necessary element of competence, but his argument is among the most elaborate to date and is certainly worth closer examination. Looked at carefully, however, Charland’s argument does not make quite the case for the determination of emotional capacity in competence assessment that he claims for it. Indeed, as I demonstrate below, Charland may share the same “pernicious [End Page 377] cognitive bias” that he ascribes to more traditional approaches. However, despite what I identify as the problems in Charland’s argument, others have raised more disturbing questions about the lack of attention to emotional issues in competence assessment. Thus, I am not ready to reject entirely the possibility that determinations of decisional competence ought to consider emotional factors. I conclude by outlining the questions that remain to be answered to identify more clearly the potential benefits of such an approach.The Construct of Decision-Making CompetenceSome preliminary comments about the nature of the dominant construct of decision-making competence may provide a useful frame for my response to Charland’s paper. Contemporary ideas of competence are tied inextricably to the ideal of self-determination in modern Western societies. Such societies are committed to respect for individual choice, both as a good in its own right and on the grounds that each person knows best what choices will maximize his or her own welfare. In general, therefore, states will not intervene to prevent persons from acting on their decisions, even when the choices they make—like the decision to smoke or to refuse potentially life-saving medical care—may objectively be thought to be detrimental to them.In some cases, however, the presumption that people will act in their own interests, as well as the notion that there is something intrinsically valuable in respecting their choices, fails (Buchanan and Brock 1989). When people’s minds are so disordered that they cannot be said to be making meaningful choices, other values come into play. Such people are called “incompetent.” When persons reach that point, the state’s interest in protecting its citizens becomes primary and someone else must make decisions on their behalf. Note that the size of this group must be sharply limited, lest a liberal society’s commitment to self-determination be undermined: There is no more profound infringement of the rights of citizens than the determination that they are incompetent. Thus, the criteria for incompetence must be selected in a deliberately narrow fashion—alternately, one might say that the standards for competence are made intentionally broad—so that all but a tiny percentage of citizens will be permitted to make decisions on their own.In the Anglo-American world, the process of formulating criteria of competence by and large has been left to the common law courts. Over the course of centuries they have identified the capacities that are, in... (shrink)

This essay raises a challenge for the perceptual theory of emotion. According to the perceptual theory, emotions are perceptual states that represent values. But if emotions represent values, something should explain why. In virtue of what do emotions represent the values they do? A psychosemantics would answer this, and that’s what the perceptual theorist owes us. To date, however, the only perceptual theorist to attempt a psychosemantics for emotion is Jesse Prinz. And Prinz’s theory, I argue, faces an important difficulty: (...) It makes the pairing of any given emotion with its respective value entirely arbitrary. But that’s a problem. It seems—and this is a major contention of this essay—that an emotion, in virtue of how it feels, bears a natural or non-arbitrary link to the value it represents. And this datum makes it all the more difficult to provide a viable psychosemantics for the evaluative content of emotion. (shrink)

Anger has potential epistemic value in the way that it can facilitate a process of our coming to have knowledge and understanding regarding the issue about which we are angry. The nature of anger, however, may nevertheless be such that it ultimately undermines this very process. Common non-philosophical complaints about anger, for instance, often target the angry person as being somehow irrational, where an unformulated assumption is that her anger undermines her capacity to rationally engage with the issue (...) about which she is angry. Call this assumption the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger. Such a charge is pernicious when levelled at the anger of those in positions of marginalisation or oppression, where it can threaten to silence voices on the very issue of the injustices that they face. In this paper I thus provide a much-needed interrogation of this charge. Firstly, and drawing on empirical literature on the effects of anger on decision-making, I flesh out the charge and why it poses a threat to how the epistemic value of anger has been defended. Secondly, I argue that the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger can nevertheless be unwarranted, at least within a common context of political anger. (shrink)

In _A Relational Moral Theory: African ethics in and beyond the continent_ ( 2022 ), Thaddeus Metz proposes an African moral theory according to which we ought to respect and honour the capacity of individuals to be party to harmonious relationship. He aims to present a moral theory that should ‘be weighed up against at least contemporary Western moral theories’ (p. 2). As Metz intends his theory to be a serious contender with other moral theories, I assess how his (...) moral theory can be applied and contribute to contemporary moral discussions _‘beyond the continent’_, as the subtitle of the book puts it. In particular, as Metz’s relational moral theory is grounded on the value of harmony, an important question is how well his theory handles _disharmony_ especially if his theory is to have application in our non-ideal world in which disharmony is rife. And here, I hold up Metz’s account to one area of disharmony, disruptive emotions and affective injustice. By first establishing how disruptive emotions and affective injustice pose a challenge to similar relational moral theories grounded in harmony, I argue that Metz’s theory has distinct advantages in the way in which it can indeed engage with such phenomena. I close the paper by considering the objection that Metz’s account is limited in making sense of a common form of disruptive emotion in response to structural injustices where affective injustice can arise, but ultimately conclude that such a limitation is superficial. (shrink)

The first goal of this paper is to develop a theoretical and practical framework which can help to measure the emotional value generated by organizations in quantitative terms. Its second goal is to use data obtained from the UCAN in Spain as a case study to illustrate the quantification of the emotional value generated, with a view to factoring that value into a social accounting system. Ever greater recognition of the social role of organizations in recent years (...) has led to a need for a consistent definition of the concept of socio-emotional value, and for instruments that can be used to measure that value in terms of generic social accounting. Taking the current lack of standardization in such models and instruments, especially those that deal with emotional value as its starting point, the paper proposes a new instrument for measuring that value quantitatively in such a way as to overcome some of the limitations of earlier proposals. The underlying perspective is that the monetary values identified in market and non-market transactions do not accurately account for all the value generated for different stakeholders, and that adjustments are required through a correction factor applied to the value variables identified. The quantification of the socio-emotional value generated by an organization is seen as a more comprehensive indicator of its performance, given that it provides more information and takes into account the value generated for stakeholders as a whole in all dimensions. (shrink)

Rogers suggests that human spirituality comprises the interplay of three foundational human dynamics: suffering, interconnecting, and valuing. The spiritual orientations that result from these clusters of dynamics are primarily integrating or disintegrating. The dominant spiritual orientation in this country has been disintegrating; and this orientation has characterized the attitude of the majority population toward African Americans since the beginning of slavery, fostering radical separation, displacing the suffering of the majority onto a minority, and defining the experience and perspectives of the (...) majority as normative without regard for the minority. Rogers explores the effects of this disintegrating spiritual orientation in terms of the dynamics of oppression using the ideas of 'being' and 'non-being'. The key to ameliorating oppression is to recognize the liberating capacity of suffering as potentially subversive within ever-enlarging contexts addicted to increasing material consumption and sensual gratification. ;Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the dissertation. ;Chapter 2 provides an overview of the primary methodology for research in 'formation theory' as developed by Adrian van Kaam. Using issues from the philosophy of science, the chapter also discusses the basis for divergence from the standard methodology based in the anomalous character of the researcher's 'formative event' and perspective relative to concerns that have been researched using formation theory. ;Chapter 3 considers a conceptualization of spirit as questing for meaningfulness, which provides the experiential ground for relating spirituality and liberation: Since oppression precipitates meaninglessness through disintegration, the reaffirmation of an integrative spirituality provides the ground for meaningfulness, which in turn grounds liberation, or transcendence. ;Chapter 4 presents the construct of human spirituality using the three foundational foci of spiritual formation: suffering, relating, and valuing. ;Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation using the two principle laws of thermodynamics to develop an analogous understanding for the necessity of suffering in maintaining an integrative and liberating spirituality. It also considers implications of the dissertation for liberation of oppressed peoples, the development of science and social policy, and formation theory. (shrink)

This article gives a brief introduction to the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool-Treatment (MacCAT-T) and critically examines its theoretical presuppositions. On the basis of empirical, methodological and ethical critique it is emphasised that the cognitive bias that underlies the MacCAT-T assessment needs to be modified. On the one hand it has to be admitted that the operationalisation of competence in terms of value-free categories, e.g. rational decision abilities, guarantees objectivity to a great extent; but on the other hand it bears (...) severe problems. Firstly, the cognitive focus is in itself a normative convention in the process of anthropological value-attribution. Secondly, it misses the complexity of the decision process in real life. It is therefore suggested that values, emotions and other biographic and context specific aspects should be considered when interpreting the cognitive standards according to the MacArthur model. To fill the gap between cognitive and non-cognitive approaches the phenomenological theory of personal constructs is briefly introduced. In conclusion some main demands for further research to develop a multi-step model of competence assessment are outlined. (shrink)

The paper considers the problem of various different forms of pre‑cognitive affective appraisal and their role in the process of gaining self-knowledge. According to the phenomenological approach, if we are to understand our inner states (our emotional experiences), these cannot be extracted from the context within which they arise. Emotions not only refer to the inner states of the subject, but also to the outer world to which they are a form of response. Brentano, Husserl and Scheler claimed that emotions (...) are directed towards values. It is to this essential feature of emotional experience that I would like to turn. I shall therefore re-examine Sartre’s views concerning affectivity (i.e. the capacity to reveal evaluatively significant qualities of one’s environment), as well as the dual-aspect theory of (reflective and non-reflective) consciousness. The main argument of this paper is that a plausible account of the essential role of affectivity in the emotions may be provided on the basis of a phenomenological theory of pre-reflective consciousness and its relation to reflexivity. I will focus on three different claims about pre-reflective (affective) consciousness. According to the first of these, a large part of cognition is of a prelinguistic (pre-reflective) nature; I argue that the evaluative content of emotion is not only conceptually determined, but may also take a non-conceptual form (as affective appraisal). The second claim refers to the notion of affect, which ought to be distinguished from (unintentional) bodily sensations. The third conceives of the relation between pre-reflective (affective) consciousness and reflective consciousness (propositional attitudes) as normative (rather than causal). I aim to demonstrate that a plausible view of emotional affectivity must appeal to a phenomenological account of the pre-reflective aspect of consciousness. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have focused on whether and how emotions threaten autonomy, insofar as they lie outside the sphere of rational agency. That is, they have conceptualized emotional vulnerability as passivity. Second, they have considered how emotions are insensitive to rational judgment, focusing on cases in which emotions are dissonant or recalcitrant. Third, in recognizing the motivational force of emotions, philosophers have tracked their negative impact on rational deliberation. Indeed, emotions are often contrastive elements in rational deliberation. They appear to (...) defeat deliberative judgments about what to do, survive rational deliberation or preempt the very possibility of rational deliberation. But there are more interesting cases in which it is apparent that emotions bear a rather complicated relation to autonomy. Love and shame provide powerful examples of the ambivalences and complexities of such a relation. In analyzing such complexities, my aim is to present a case for appreciating various dimensions of vulnerability and, correspondingly, for exposing the importance of emotional vulnerability for agential autonomy. This view is rooted in a general account of agential autonomy marked by mutual respect and recognition of others, as a normative response to constitutive vulnerability, understood as the capacity to affect and be affected by others as well as by external agentive and non-agentive causes. (shrink)

This book is a discussion of Heidegger's, Sartre's and Marcel's rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the scepticism to which it leads and its objectivist conception of human existence. It compares this rejection with Wittgenstein's rejection of these conceptions of man, his relation to the knowledge of what belongs to the world in which he lives. It concentrates on the existentialist critiques of consciousness as a substance and of the self as such a substance, of each person's body as something external to (...) which he is causally related, and of others as at best indirectly accessible to us. It discusses Sartre's positive views on these questions and the way he falls into a form of solipsism himself. It then considers Sartre's rejection of determinism and his conception of freedom as our capacity for choice. In a concluding chapter the book sketches a non-objectivist account of the self, its development, its 'bad faith', its capacity to emerge from it, and its knowledge of itself, free from the objections considered earlier. It then considers some new objections directed at its own account. Contents: Man in the World; Man's Way of Being: Existential Dualism; The Personal Dimension: Emotions and Value Judgements; Sartre and our Identity as Individuals; Mind and Body: Rejection of Cartesian Dualism; Sartre on the Self and the Other: Rejection of Cartesian Solipsism; Human Separateness and the Possibility of Communion: Marcel's Rejection of Sartrean Solipsism; Sartre: Freedom as Something to which Man is Condemned; Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Change: A Non-Objectivist View and its Defense. (shrink)

This book is a discussion of Heidegger's, Sartre's and Marcel's rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the scepticism to which it leads and its objectivist conception of human existence. It compares this rejection with Wittgenstein's rejection of these conceptions of man, his relation to the knowledge of what belongs to the world in which he lives. It concentrates on the existentialist critiques of consciousness as a substance and of the self as such a substance, of each person's body as something external to (...) which he is causally related, and of others as at best indirectly accessible to us. It discusses Sartre's positive views on these questions and the way he falls into a form of solipsism himself. It then considers Sartre's rejection of determinism and his conception of freedom as our capacity for choice. In a concluding chapter the book sketches a non-objectivist account of the self, its development, its 'bad faith', its capacity to emerge from it, and its knowledge of itself, free from the objections considered earlier. It then considers some new objections directed at its own account. Contents: Man in the World; Man's Way of Being: Existential Dualism; The Personal Dimension: Emotions and Value Judgements; Sartre and our Identity as Individuals; Mind and Body: Rejection of Cartesian Dualism; Sartre on the Self and the Other: Rejection of Cartesian Solipsism; Human Separateness and the Possibility of Communion: Marcel's Rejection of Sartrean Solipsism; Sartre: Freedom as Something to which Man is Condemned; Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Change: A Non-Objectivist View and its Defense. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

There is a kind of power no one should have over anyone else, even if they don’t do anything with this power, or even if they only use this power for good. The republican tradition of political philosophy calls this kind of power domination. Here, I develop a theory of domination, and use this theory to advance our understanding of political legitimacy and justification. My account of domination refines recent neo-republican attempts to identify dominating social power with the capacity (...) to interfere arbitrarily with the choices of others. I argue that this capacity is not sufficient for domination. Instead, domination requires that one agent possess “impositional” power over someone else: power enough to make their refusal to cooperate more costly than cooperation across a wide range of forms that cooperation might take. But not all impositional power is domination; impositional power is domination to the extent that those wielding it do so in “deliberative isolation”—in accord only with their own sense of what’s best. The nature of domination, what it takes to minimize it, and its connection to deficits in political values like freedom and equality, are the subject of Chapter 2. The remainder of the dissertation uses the results of that chapter to construct a non-voluntarist alternative to the standard liberal account of how to reconcile political power with freedom and equality. Chapters 3 and 4 show how consent—actual or hypothetical—is not necessary to legitimize political power. What is necessary is that such power enable us to fulfil our duties against dominating others, while remaining accountable to us so that the state does not itself become a source of domination. How duties against domination can legitimize states is the primary subject of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 turns to the question of what we owe our fellow citizens as we cooperate together in the task of holding the state accountable. The answer to this question amounts to a repurposing and reformulation of public reason liberalism. Adviser: Joseph Mendola. (shrink)

BackgroundRadiotherapy is an essential component of cancer treatment, yet many countries do not have adequate capacity to serve all patients who would benefit from it. Allocation systems are needed to guide patient prioritization for radiotherapy in resource-limited contexts. These systems should be informed by allocation principles deemed relevant to stakeholders. This study explores the ethical dilemmas and views of decision-makers engaged in real-world prioritization of scarce radiotherapy resources at a cancer center in Rwanda in order to identify relevant principles.MethodsSemi-structured (...) interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 22 oncology clinicians, program leaders, and clinical advisors. Interviews explored the factors considered by decision-makers when prioritizing patients for radiotherapy. The framework method of thematic analysis was used to characterize these factors. Bioethical analysis was then applied to determine their underlying normative principles.ResultsParticipants considered both clinical and non-clinical factors relevant to patient prioritization for radiotherapy. They widely agreed that disease curability should be the primary overarching driver of prioritization, with the goal of saving the most lives. However, they described tension between curability and competing factors including age, palliative benefit, and waiting time. They were divided about the role that non-clinical factors such as social value should play, and agreed that poverty should not be a barrier.ConclusionsMultiple competing principles create tension with the agreed upon overarching goal of maximizing lives saved, including another utilitarian approach of maximizing life-years saved as well as non-utilitarian principles, such as egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and deontology. Clinical guidelines for patient prioritization for radiotherapy can combine multiple principles into a single allocation system to a significant extent. However, conflicting views about the role that social factors should play, and the dynamic nature of resource availability, highlight the need for ongoing work to evaluate and refine priority setting systems based on stakeholder views. (shrink)

Our innate capacity for voice is with us from the beginnings of life. The concept of voice is a complex issue rooted in the core of the self. Once we become aware of ourselves, we realize our capacity for self-expression. Self-expression is part of the cooperative network of communication between the self and others as we share emotions, thoughts, and ideas. Voice facilitates a connection between the world of one individual and the world of another. The purpose of (...) this article was to explore and discover the processes, influences, attitudes and beliefs that affect a woman's ability to define her menopausal voice. A woman's voice expresses her knowledge, set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices in the form of language. Voice becomes a manifestation of the essence of self, and when listened to, breaks the silence of non-existence. A menopausal woman's voice is the voice that expresses the entirety of her existence at that particular stage in life. Post-menopausal women were asked to define their menopausal voices. They were interviewed in depth and their information was collected through semi-structured interviews. This approach used a qualitative methodology with a focus on meaning of their voices rather than measurement. The format was narrative research using life stories and thematic analysis. As a result, five themes: The Voice of Wisdom, The Voice of Aging, The Voice of relationship, The Voice of Spirit, and the Voice of Knowledge emerged after analyzing the women's stories. Each theme represents the complexities that influenced the participants? competence to ascribe meaning to their voices. This article identifies the meanings that menopausal women associated with the concept of voice and how it changed during menopause. (shrink)

Should a person who cannot appreciate the moral significance of legal norms qualify as a blameworthy actor simply because he has the capacity to comply with them for non-moral reasons? Such a person may lack any empathy for other human beings and view moral norms as arbitrary restraints on his self-interested behavior: does he nevertheless deserve moral blame when he makes an instrumentally “rational choice” to breach a norm governing his action? Should our answers to these questions depend on (...) whether we believe that the actor is morally responsible for lacking these moral emotions and understandings? In short, must we concern ourselves with those aspects of the agent's character – his goals, desires, values, emotions, and perceptions of what courses of action are available to him – that motivate his rational choices? Or are questions about what motivates the actor to exercise his capacity for rational choice irrelevant to our judgments concerning his moral culpability for violating some governing norm? One way of thinking about such questions is to ask what attributes a person must possess to qualify as an appropriate addressee of moral norms and a suitable object of moral blame. Must a moral agent have the capacity to respond to moral norms as a reason for his choices? Must he also be able to control those aspects of his character that impair his capacity to make moral choices? Most legal theorists insist that moral agents do not need such capacities to be fairly blamed for violating the minimal moral restraints that the criminal law imposes on their self-interested acts. (shrink)

The 1992 incorporation of an article by referendum in the SwissConstitution mandating that the federal government issue regulations onthe use of genetic material that take into account the dignity ofnonhuman organism raises philosophical questions about how we shouldunderstand what is meant by ``the dignity of nonhuman animals,'' andabout what sort of moral demands arise from recognizing this dignitywith respect to their genetic engineering. The first step in determiningwhat is meant is to clarify the difference between dignity when appliedto humans (...) and when applied to nonhumans. Several conceptions of humandignity should be rejected in favor of a fourth conception: the rightnot to be degraded. This right implies that those who have it have thecognitive capacities that are prerequisite for self-respect. In the caseof nonhuman organisms that lack this capacity, respecting their dignityrequires the recognition that their inherent value, which is tied totheir abilities to pursue their own good, be respected. This value isnot absolute, as it is in the case of humans, so it does not prohibitbreeding manipulations that make organisms more useful to humans. But itdoes restrict morally how sentient animals can be used. In regard togenetic engineering, this conception requires that animals be allowedthe uninhibited development of species specific functions, a positionshared by Holland and Attfield, as opposed to the Original Purposeconception proposed by Fox and the Integrity of the Genetic Make-upposition proposed by Rolston. The inherent value conception of dignity,as here defended, is what is meant in the Swiss Constitution article. (shrink)

ver since the traditional criteria for medical decision-making capacity (understanding, appreciation, reasoning, evidencing a choice) were formulated, they have been criticized for not taking sufficient account of emotions or values that seem, according to the critics and in line with clinical experiences, essential to decision-making capacity. The aim of this paper is to provide a nuanced and structured overview of the arguments provided in the literature emphasizing the importance of these factors and arguing for their inclusion in competence (...) evaluations. Moreover, a broader reflection on the findings of the literature is provided. Specific difficulties of formulating and measuring emotional and valuational factors are discussed inviting reflection on the possibility of handling relevant factors in a more flexible, case-specific, and context-specific way rather than adhering to a rigid set of operationalized criteria. (shrink)

Scientists, humanists, and art lovers alike value art not just for its beauty, but also for its social and epistemic importance; that is, for its communicative nature, its capacity to increase one's self-knowledge and encourage personal growth, and its ability to challenge our schemas and preconceptions. However, empirical research tends to discount the importance of such social and epistemic outcomes of art engagement, instead focusing on individuals' preferences, judgments of beauty, pleasure, or other emotional appraisals as the (...) class='Hi'>primary outcomes of art appreciation. Here, we argue that a systematic neuroscientific study of art appreciation must move beyond understanding aesthetics alone, and toward investigating the social importance of art appreciation. We make our argument for such a shift in focus first, by situating art appreciation as an active social practice. We follow by reviewing the available psychological and cognitive neuroscientific evidence that art appreciation cultivates socio-epistemic skills such as self- and other-understanding, and discuss philosophical frameworks which suggest a more comprehensive empirical investigation. Finally, we argue that focusing on the socio-epistemic values of art engagement highlights the important role art plays in our lives. Empirical research on art appreciation can thus be used to show that engagement with art has specific social and personal value, the cultivation of which is important to us as individuals, and as communities. (shrink)

Which and how much of our current drives –individually and as a global community– are driven by ancestral, inherited traits or imprinted on our animal condition? An attempt to approximate this intriguing query is explored here. It pertains to our identity, social constructions, and our ecological interaction. The origin of our species has its roots in ancestral habits, behaviors and a survival drive, transformed from changing environmental conditions. We were not born in a mother-of-pearl cradle nor were protected by magical (...) agents. We grew on the thread of time within the complex nature of bio-ecological interactions. They carved our identity, our genetic expression and the possible origin of our beliefs, resulting in an arch of various behaviors and cultural phenotypes. The biological nature of our construction dragged through millennia through species trials with variable rates of survival times provided traces of inconstant and multiple evolutive chains. Our modern cultural contexts –norms, priorities, values– appear as newly born. Yet, socio-cultural ecology upon which our brain organization and behavioral constructs derive include shared basic behavioral drives with non-human primates. The emergence of humans with a sophisticated language allowed the development of complex virtual constructs based on symbolism and the instruments of culture. This has enhanced cognitive capacity and emotional interaction supported by processes anchored in neural networks distributed within cortical and subcortical levels. Basic, essential neural connectivities were preserved during the evolutionary development of the species. The biological matrix and inheritance are usually segregated from the social and cultural construction. Sophistication of our cultural development tends to set up a divisive fault from primitive foundations of non-human animal behavior (survival, territory, reproduction, prevalence, access to nutrients). These are basic templates and underlie essential individual and group basic drives, and cultural constructs. Humans have not ceased from being territorial (whether applied to virtual or material dimensions). Various forms of social inequities have been expressed in our time and through human history. On evolutive terms, the notion of individual social status within the social structure of a gregarious community generated the probability of an individual ascending or descending that hierarchy. Thus, becoming a potential figure of leadership, or the subordinate or the marginalized. Is there an evolutive antecedent for human social inequities? How do we construct a different future? Post-industrial societies became increasingly dependent on material consumerism and technological cultures, to the point of embraining them; conceptually becoming technological hybrids. Are these a developmental must, or an uncontrolled spin-off of human inventiveness affecting our future? Construction of supernatural agents played a significant role in the socialization/domestication processes. Agents’ intentionality flourished through altered states of conscience, or under fear of natural phenomena attributed to supposed inhabitants of the Natural Kingdom or virtual beings. This imaginary universe, reinforced by ritual behaviors, contributed to control personal/collective distress of various possible origins and conditioned our degrees of emotional and cognitive freedom. (shrink)

While much discussion in bioethics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of medicine concerns the proper handling and uses of value considerations, there has been little discussion about how to identify or recognize values in medical/scientific discourse. This article presents a heuristic method for identifying values in such discourses. Values are defined as descriptions or conditions that guide human action and are praise- or blameworthy. Values manifest themselves in discourses in one or more of three dimensions: linguistic, causal, and descriptive; (...) each with distinctive “subtypes”. By recognizing the various ways that values manifest in discourses, a “values scholar” can ask relevant questions of the discourse and thereby come to recognize potential evaluative meanings in the discourse. Numerous examples are provided from the author's own research program. Strengths, limitations, and paths to developing the model are briefly discussed. (shrink)

While numerous studies have examined the relationships between facial actions and emotions, they have yet to account for the ways that specific spontaneous facial expressions map onto emotional experiences induced without expressive intent. Moreover, previous studies emphasized that a fine-grained investigation of facial components could establish the coherence of facial actions with actual internal states. Therefore, this study aimed to accumulate evidence for the correspondence between spontaneous facial components and emotional experiences. We reinvestigated data from previous research which secretly recorded (...) spontaneous facial expressions of Japanese participants as they watched film clips designed to evoke four different target emotions: surprise, amusement, disgust, and sadness. The participants rated their emotional experiences via a self-reported questionnaire of sixteen emotions. These spontaneous facial expressions were coded using the Facial Action Coding System, the gold standard for classifying visible facial movements. We corroborated each facial action that was present in the emotional experiences by applying stepwise regression models. The results found that spontaneous facial components occurred in ways that cohere to the their evolutionary functions based on the rating values of emotional experiences (e.g., the inner brow raiser might be involved in the evaluation of novelty). This study provided new empirical evidence for the correspondence between each spontaneous facial component and first-person internal states of emotion as reported by the expresser. (shrink)

What is the root cause of ethical failure? Why is preoccupation with ethics more a part of the problem than a part of the solution? What makes ethical conduct a natural expression of who we are? What enables us to be ourselves in our relations with others? Ethical failure has become a significant concern in public life, in organizations and in educational institutions. The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores how qualities of character and personality either make ethical conduct possible (...) for the individual or foster ethical failure. David Levine discusses how ethical conduct is a special way of relating to others, one that secures respect for their integrity by assuring that what they do can express who they are. He argues that this special way of relating to others results not from knowledge of, or a stated commitment to, rules, norms and values, but from the way we experience ourselves, especially from our ability to make a positive emotional investment in being and having a self. Traditionally, emphasis on the importance of values and ethics in shaping conduct tends to be connected to the need to find fault in self and others, fostering an atmosphere where the self is put at risk in its relations to others. This means that an excessive emphasis on ethics, rather than assuring ethical conduct, tends instead to create interpersonal settings marked by emotional assault. Because of this, talk about ethics often expresses ambivalence about ethical conduct, which makes the familiar combination of preoccupation with ethics and ethical failure unsurprising. The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores the ways in which the interpersonal world of work either fosters a feeling of safety or encourages various forms of emotional assault. Presenting case studes and applying psychoanalytic object relation theory and self psychology, this book explores the factors underlying ethical failure and the capacity for ethical conduct. It will be of interest to scholars and practioners in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, sociology, organizational dynamics, management and public administration. (shrink)

Background: People with a personality disorder suffer from enduring inflexible patterns in cognitions and emotions, leading to significant subjective distress, affecting both self and interpersonal functioning. In clinical practice, Dance Movement Therapy is provided to clients with a PD, and although research continuously confirms the value of DMT for many populations, to date, there is very limited information available on DMT and PD. For this study, a systematic literature review on DMT and PD was conducted to identify the content (...) of the described DMT interventions and the main treatment themes to focus upon in DMT for PD.Methods: A systematic search was conducted across the following databases: EMBASE, MEDLINE, PubMed, WEB OF SCIENCE, PsycINFO/OVID, and SCOPUS following the PRISMA guidelines. The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme for qualitative studies was used to rank the quality of the articles. The Oxford Center for Evidence-based Medicine standards were applied to determine the hierarchical level of best evidence. Quantitative content analysis was used to identify the intervention components: intended therapeutic goals, therapeutic activities leading to these goals, and suggested therapeutic effects following from these activities. A thematic synthesis approach was applied to analyze and formulate overarching themes.Results: Among 421 extracted articles, four expert opinions met the inclusion criteria. Six overarching themes were found for DMT interventions for PD: self-regulation, interpersonal relationships, integration of self, processing experiences, cognition, and expression and symbolization in movement/dance. No systematic descriptions of DMT interventions for PD were identified. A full series of intervention components could be synthesized for the themes of self-regulation, interpersonal relationships, and cognition. The use of body-oriented approaches and cognitive strategies was in favor of dance-informed approaches.Conclusions: Dance movement therapists working with PD clients focus in their interventions on body-related experiences, non-verbal interpersonal relationships, and to a lesser extent, cognitive functioning. A methodological line for all intervention components was synthesized for the themes of self-regulation, interpersonal relationships, and cognition, of importance for developing systematic intervention descriptions. Future research could focus on practitioners' expertise in applying DMT interventions for PD to develop systematic intervention descriptions and explore the suitability of the identified themes for clinical application. Clients' experiences could offer essential insights on how DMT interventions could address PD pathology and specific PD categories. (shrink)

The article propounds a justification of public health interventionism grounded on personal health as an intermediate human end in the ethical domain, on an interpretation of Aristotle. This goes beyond the position taken by some liberals that health should be understood as a prudential good alone. A second, but independent, argument is advanced in the domain of the political, namely, that population health can be justified as a political value in its own right as a primary social good, (...) following an interpretation of John Rawls’s evolved understanding of such goods in his later works. The article sets the scene for these positions by highlighting how liberal theories focusing on freedom as non-interference, or making the harm principle the basis of legitimate public health interventions, undercut the capacity of the state to actively promote population health. The article points to theoretical resources on legitimacy and liberty—the ‘salient coordinator account’ of authority and freedom as non-domination—that may help avoid this risk. The role of reflective equilibrium incorporating incompletely theorized mid-level principles is emphasized to ensure that interventions are soundly justified. The application of these principles would ensure that interventions do not exceed the proper moral/political boundaries limiting the role of government. (shrink)

Increasing public concern for the welfare of fish species that human beings use and exploit has highlighted the need for better understanding of the cognitive status of fish and of their ability to experience negative emotions such as pain and fear. Moreover, studying emotion and cognition in fish species broadens our scientific understanding of how emotion and cognition are represented in the central nervous system and what kind of role they play in the organization of behavior. For instance, on a (...) macro neuro-architecture level the brains of fish species look dramatically different from those of mammals, while such a dramatic difference does not (always) occur at the level of emotion- and cognition-related behavior. Here, therefore, we discuss the evidence of emotion and cognition in fish species related to underlying neuro-architecture and the role that emotion and cognition play in the organization of behavior. To do so we use a framework encompassing a number of steps allowing a systematic approach to these issues. Emotion and cognition confer on human and non-human animals the capacity to compliment and/or override immediate reflexes to stimuli and so allow a large degree of flexibility in behavior. Systematic research on behavior that in mammals is indicative of emotion and cognition has been conducted in only a few fish species. The data thus far indicate that in these species brain-behavior relationships are not fundamentally different from those observed in mammals. Furthermore, data from other studies show evidence that behavior patterns related to emotion and cognition vary between fish species as well within fish species, related to sex and life history stage for example. From a welfare perspective, knowledge of such variability will potentially help us to design optimal living conditions for fish species kept by humans. (shrink)

We introduce a novel paradigm for studying the cognitive processes used by listeners within interactive settings. This paradigm places the talker and the listener in the same physical space, creating opportunities for investigations of attention and comprehension processes taking place during interactive discourse situations. An experiment was conducted to compare results from previous research using videotaped stimuli to those obtained within the live face-to-face task paradigm. A headworn apparatus is used to briefly display LEDs on the talker’s face in four (...) locations as the talker communicates with the participant. In addition to the primary task of comprehending speeches, participants make a secondary task light detection response. In the present experiment, the talker gave non-emotionally-expressive speeches that were used in past research with videotaped stimuli. Signal detection analysis was employed to determine which areas of the face received the greatest focus of attention. Results replicate previous findings using videotaped methods. (shrink)

Originally conceptualised as a set of capacities for understanding and managing emotions, emotional intelligence (EI) has become associated, mainly due to the work of Daniel Goleman, with life success skills, prosocial attitudes and moral and civic virtues. But EI, which may not in itself be teachable, need not lead to these outcomes, which may not necessarily converge. Also, what counts as life success, prosocial attitudes and moral and civic virtues can only be determined, if at all, by facing the (...) class='Hi'>value questions involved as value questions, not by conflating them with applied science. (shrink)

Nel corso degli ultimi 20 anni c’è stata una espansione globale in materia di istruzione dottorale e in particolare di ‘dottorati professionali’. Difficoltà nell’avanzamento e nel completamento diventano sempre più il centro dell’attenzione per tutti i tipi di dottorato. È stato riconosciuto che una serie di fattori al di là di quelli prettamente demografici potrebbe influire sulla possibilità di completare gli studi. C’è ancora molto da imparare sul motivo per cui l’avanzamento e il completamento del dottorato sono così impegnativi. In (...) questo articolo vorremmo mettere in evidenza un settore che sembra trascurato dalla ricerca: l’esperienza emotivamente complessa del percorso di dottorato.Offriamo un contributo al dibattito su ciò che è necessario per facilitare il successo e intrinsecamente un soddisfacente avanzamento all’interno di un programma di dottorato professionale. Noi sosteniamo che una maggiore attenzione debba essere prestata al cammino esperienziale di studenti di dottorato dal momento che essi hanno il difficile compito di integrare la loro vita personale, professionale e accademica. Il nostro interesse per le risorse emotive di cui gli studenti possono avvalersi durante il loro percorso di dottorato è iniziato con la progettazione e lo sviluppo del nostro primo dottorato professionale in materia di sanità e cura. Attraverso la nostra iniziale esperienza con due gruppi di studenti, abbiamo riflettuto sullo sviluppo del dottorato professionale, in generale, e trasversalmente a diverse altre discipline, per comprendere meglio come facilitare una buona esperienza di dottorato e una conclusione nei tempi.L’importanza di partecipare all’esperienza emotiva all’interno del complesso percorso di dottorato professionale ci ha portato al concetto di ‘nourished scholarship’ . Si definisce la nozione di ‘nourished scholarship’ come un percorso di apprendimento che lega i valori personali, significativi e attuali, allo sviluppo e al contributo professionale. Tale nutrimento emotivo è caratterizzato da una soddisfacente esperienza di scambio tra il sé, l’apprendimento e la comunità di pratica/studio. La nostra opinione è che tale nutrimento emotivo sia una risorsa fondamentale da cui gli studenti attingono al momento di negoziare le sfide complesse del percorso professionale di dottorato. Al fine di illustrare il significato di ‘nourished scholarship’ descriviamo alcune delle sue dimensioni emotive chiave. Queste dimensioni possono essere agevolate in vari modi, ma qui ne segnaliamo uno in particolare: il sostegno reciproco e la supervisione di gruppo facilitata. Al fine di illustrare le dimensioni della ‘nourished scholarship’ quindi noi riflettiamo su un caso specifico, quello di una coorte di studenti di dottorato professionale. Sono state estratte alcune loro esperienze per illustrare sette dimensioni che sono importanti per contribuire all’esperienza di ‘nourished scholarship’ come una risorsa di sostegno:- Sperimentare i benefici di appartenenza- Aiutarsi vicendevolmente a contenere l’ansia- Vivere la crescente fiducia- Accettare comunanza e unicità- Miglioramento personale, identità professionale e accademica attraverso la chiarificazione dei valori- Sperimentare i benefici di relazionarsi ad una più ampia comunità scientifica- Accettare i ritmi dei tempi in cui ricevere dei tempi attivi.Inoltre, in questo articolo si riflette su come la particolare struttura del programma di dottorato è stata in grado di sostenere lo sviluppo di queste risorse. Ci sono state tre caratteristiche chiave che crediamo siano state fondamentali nel modo in cui il programma è stato progettato e realizzato:a) ‘Cohortness’ in cui gli studenti si impegnano con il programma come un gruppo in viaggio.b) Supervisione di coorte: anche se tutti studiavano diversi argomenti, si è formato un gruppo insieme a due facilitatori accademici per discutere il processo, l’esperienza del percorso e il loro apprendimento.c) Una strategia di valutazione flessibile che permette agli studenti di progredire in modo personale e non lineare.Il valore potenziale di questo articolo per i programmi educativi è che fornisce un quadro per focalizzare l’attenzione sull’importanza del percorso emotivo e sui modi per sostenere la motivazione degli studenti e la resilienza. Noi crediamo che questo quadro abbia un potenziale trasferibile ad altre situazioni in cui tali risorse emotive possono essere importanti.During the past 20 years there has been a global expansion in doctoral education and in particular professional doctorates. Difficulties with progression and completion have increasingly become the focus of attention within both academic and professional contexts. It has been acknowledged that a range of factors, beyond demographics, could be influential in whether students are able to sustain their studies to completion. In this paper we stress the importance of conceptualising professional doctoral studies as a personal, professional and academic journey that is sustained by emotional factors that may need more explicit attention. As such, our contribution is the delineation of a phenomenon that we call ‘nourished scholarship’. We wish to illustrate how such ‘nourished scholarship’ functions as a resource for sustaining motivation and integration through the doctoral journey. We offer seven dimensions that a doctoral programme needs to embody in order to facilitate ‘nourished scholarship’: belonging, containing anxiety, growing confidence, commonality and uniqueness, values clarification, scholarly community, and negotiating the rhythms of receptive and active times. We illustrate these dimensions in the context of a professional doctorate programme that emphasises ‘cohort supervision’ as the primary resource for facilitating such nourished scholarship. We believe that this notion has transferable potential to other provisions where such emotional resources may be important. (shrink)

Increasing public concern for the welfare of fish species that human beings use and exploit has highlighted the need for better understanding of the cognitive status of fish and of their ability to experience negative emotions such as pain and fear. Moreover, studying emotion and cognition in fish species broadens our scientific understanding of how emotion and cognition are represented in the central nervous system and what kind of role they play in the organization of behavior. For instance, on a (...) macro neuro-architecture level the brains of fish species look dramatically different from those of mammals, while such a dramatic difference does not (always) occur at the level of emotion- and cognition-related behavior. Here, therefore, we discuss the evidence of emotion and cognition in fish species related to underlying neuro-architecture and the role that emotion and cognition play in the organization of behavior. To do so we use a framework encompassing a number of steps allowing a systematic approach to these issues. Emotion and cognition confer on human and non-human animals the capacity to compliment and/or override immediate reflexes to stimuli and so allow a large degree of flexibility in behavior. Systematic research on behavior that in mammals is indicative of emotion and cognition has been conducted in only a few fish species. The data thus far indicate that in these species brain-behavior relationships are not fundamentally different from those observed in mammals. Furthermore, data from other studies show evidence that behavior patterns related to emotion and cognition vary between fish species as well within fish species, related to sex and life history stage for example. From a welfare perspective, knowledge of such variability will potentially help us to design optimal living conditions for fish species kept by humans. (shrink)

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)

Biomass such as crops and agricultural waste is increasingly used as the primary resource for products like bioplastics and biofuels. Incorporating the needs, knowledge, skills and values of biomass producers in the design of global value chains – the steps involved in creating any finished product from design to delivery – can contribute to sustainability, reliability and fairness. However, how to involve biomass producers, especially if they are resource poor, remains a challenge. To make sure that inclusion in (...) global biobased value chains is both fair and effective, the capabilities of relevant actors need to be taken into account, especially of those producing biomass. Access to resources determines to what extent a specific actor can participate in a global value chain. Therefore, differences in capabilities should be a central consideration when new (biobased) value chains are designed. Using the capability approach as an ethical framework to realize inclusion, we discern three complementary strategies for setting up inclusive value chains. Firstly, designing for local conversion factors second, providing adaptive design for new capabilities, and third, investing in local conversion factors. Applying these strategies can lead to context-sensitive design of biorefineries that allow for true inclusion of local stakeholders. We support these claims with reference to case-studies of sugarcane production in Jamaica, modified tobacco in South Africa and the non-edible parts of corn (stover) in the US. (shrink)

This paper extends my prior analysis of Hegel’s solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion to moral philosophy. So doing provides a uniform account of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains, i.e. empirical knowledge and morals. It argues that the Pyrrhonian Dilemma refutes both foundationalist and coherentist models of justification, and raises serious issues about the justificatory adequacy of contemporary forms of moral constructivism. It explicates and defends Kant’s account of the autonomy of reason as the self-critical regulation of (...) one’s own thought and judgment in view of relevant principles, standards, evidence and alternative analyses. It argues that Kant’s account of autonomy is defensible independently of transcendental idealism and of natural causality. Due to our fallibility and incomplete knowledge and understanding, our individual critical self-assessment requires the constructive mutual criticism of others. Hence maximally rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains is in part, ineliminably, a social and historical phenomenon. These aspects of rational justification are consistent with, and ultimately support, realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and strict objectivity about basic moral principles. One’s own maximally rational justification of non-formal, substantive claims or views accordingly requires recognition of one’s justificatory dependence upon the constructive criticism of others. This requires recognizing their capacities for critical assessment and rational justification. This is the most fundamental form of mutual recognition in Hegel’s analysis. It provides direct and powerful justification for Kant’s thesis that we ought and must respect all others as autonomous rational agents, as agents who can think and act on the basis of justifying reasons. This justification is independent of Kant’s account of ‘dignity’ or the incommensurable value of rational agency. (shrink)

Subjectivism is the mainstream view of practical reason. According to subjectivism, what has value for an agent must ultimately be grounded in what the agent actually desires. Subjectivism is motivated by a conservative view of the scope and extent of practical reason. Against this view, my dissertation argues that any coherent conception of an end must endow practical reason with a scope that goes beyond anything that subjectivism could accommodate. ;Subjectivism correctly grasps that nothing can count as an end (...) for an agent if she is incapable of recognizing it as such; value cannot exist independently of our capacity to appreciate it. I argue that the right conclusion to draw from this is that practical reason constitutes its own object by properly judging on practical matters. The grounds for taking a certain object to bear value lie not in the attributes of a certain object but in the nature of the activity of pursuing ends. According to the concept of practical reason I defend in this dissertation, which I call "the constitutive conception of practical reason", practical reason must set its objects from its own resources rather than find them in an external reality. ;But if practical reason does not track any independently existing objects, how can we distinguish between correct and incorrect judgements? It seems that this conception faces a dilemma: Either the activity of reason is merely a source of formal constraints, or it is an arbitrary, ungrounded exercise. I argue that this dilemma gets its grip on us only from an illegitimate separation of the rational and non-rational parts of human nature. This separation leads us to to think of our cognitive and conative powers as independent. However, the proper understanding of practical reason requires us to see our desires, emotions, etc. as presenting us with appearances of the good, as providing perspectives on something which we represent as the proper object of our pursuit. In forming an overarching conception of the good by reflectively assessing the claims of these different perspectives, practical reason sets its object. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, human and veterinary surgeons faced the challenge of a medical marketplace transformed by technology. The socioeconomic value ascribed to their patients was changing, reflecting the increasing mechanization of industry and the decreasing dependence of society on nonhuman animals for labor. In human medicine, concern for the economic consequences of fractures “pathologized” any significant level of posttherapeutic disability, a productivist perspective contrary to the traditional corpus of medical values. In contrast, veterinarians adapted to (...) the mechanization of horsepower by shifting their primary professional interest to companion animals; a type of patient generally valued for the unique emotional attachment of the owner and not their productive capacity. The economic rationalization of human fracture care and the “sentimental” transformation of veterinary orthopedic expertise indicate how these specialists utilized increasingly convergent rhetorical arguments to justify the application of innovative fracture care technologies to their human and animal patients. (shrink)

The phenomenon whereby severely disabled persons self-report a higher than expected level of subjective well-being is called the “disability paradox.” One explanation for the paradox among brain injury survivors is “response shift,” an adjustment of one’s values, expectations, and perspective in the aftermath of a life-altering, disabling injury. The high level of subjective well-being appears paradoxical when viewed from the perspective of the non-disabled, who presume that those with severe disabilities experience a quality of life so poor that it might (...) make their lives not worth living. This presumption has profound consequences, for it may inform end-of-life choices made in advance directives, or influence decisions made by surrogates on behalf of persons who are unable to direct their own medical treatment. -/- Peterson et al propose a cautious, well-considered plan to use fMRI-based brain-computer interfaces to assess the decision making capacity of covertly aware, behaviorally non-responsive individuals who retain high levels of preserved cognition. Their plan, if it succeeds, could eventually restore autonomy and empower some severely disabled persons, allowing them to participate in clinical decision making. Peterson et al discuss possible in-principle objections to their proposal, among them the “argument from psychological health,” and the “changing sets of values” objection. These objections both presume that deviations from a pre-injury norm could indicate diminished decision making capacity. This presumption threatens the autonomy of the patient who is capable of making decisions, but whose post-injury decisions appear to diverge from pre-injury preferences or values. In light of the potential for response shift, and the disability paradox, it should not be inferred that changes in values or preferences are unreflective of the true current preferences of a brain-injured person, nor are they conclusive evidence of diminished capacity. Presuming diminished capacity on the basis of unexpected or unconventional preferences has, in the past, been used to disempower patients whose autonomy and capacity would not have been doubted had they made choices that accorded with the expectations or values of others. We must be cautious, and vigilant, to prevent similarly diminishing the autonomy of covertly aware, behaviorally non-responsive individuals on the basis of empirically and ethically questionable inferences about their decision making capacity. (shrink)

Patient-centred communication is widely regarded as a best practice in contemporary medical care, both in terms of maximising health outcomes and respecting persons. However, not all patients communicate in ways that are easily understood by clinicians and other healthcare professionals. This is especially so for patients with non-speaking intellectual disabilities. We argue that assumptions about intellectual disability—including those in diagnostic criteria, providers’ implicit attitudes and master narratives of disability—negatively affect communicative approaches towards intellectually disabled patients.Non-speakingintellectually disabled patients may also be (...) taken to lack decision-making capacity and resultingly, may be given very little role in determining their care. But, given evidence of the heterogeneous communicative practices available to non-speaking patients, efforts should be made to extend patient-centred communication to them. We offer four suggestions for doing so: (1) treating those with non-speaking intellectual disabilities as potential communicators; (2) lengthening appointment times to develop relationships necessary for communication; (3) disentangling capacity from communication in concept and in practice; and (4) recognising the bidirectional connection between supported decision-making and patient-centred communication. (shrink)

Hans-Johann Glock develops a capacity-based alternative to the currently widespread view that concepts and experiences are mental representations. He claims that experiences must be explained by way of perceptual and sensory capacities and that concepts must be explained by way of intellectual ones, in particular, by way of capacities for classification and reasoning. Glock does not, however, identify concepts with intellectual capacities. He rather conceives of them as rules that guide the application of capacities. He defines the relationship between (...) perceptions and concepts by coupling rationalistic, Aristotelian, and Kantian motifs: perceptions are to be strictly distinguished from concepts; perceptual capacities genetically, causally, and conceptually precede conceptual ones; and conceptual capacities must, in principle, be applicable to objects of experience. Glock's “capacity approach” can accordingly be understood as a variant of non-conceptualism. (shrink)

For politics to measure up to reason, two requirements have long been acknowledged: first, that the ends of political action be universal, and second, that the pursuit of such universal ends consist in political self-determination, that is, in self-government.Aristotle set the stage for all further political inquiry by distinguishing political association through the universality of its end or good, while identifying the end of politics with political activity itself, an activity in which citizens rule over one another while presiding over (...) all other associations, which fall under political dominion owing to the particularity of their pursuits. Aristotle joined the universality of politics with the activity of self-rule by recognising political activity to be an end in itself that is also a master end for the sake of which all other conduct is to be pursued. As such, politics was itself the highest good, making ethics possible by overcoming the hegemony of instrumental action, whose every end is devoid of intrinsic value, leaving conduct ultimately pointless.Two corollary difficulties, however, undermine Aristotle's enterprise. On the one hand, he is unable to give the universal end of political association a non-arbitrary content. Politics may claim universality by being both an end in itself and a master end, but this is just a recipe for ‘might makes right’, where any prevailing rule would be identical with the highest good. Appeal to a distinctly human function or to forms of rule that pursue the common good rather than the particular interests of some ruler can provide no remedy. (shrink)

We introduce a novel paradigm for studying the cognitive processes used by listeners within interactive settings. This paradigm places the talker and the listener in the same physical space, creating opportunities for investigations of attention and comprehension processes taking place during interactive discourse situations. An experiment was conducted to compare results from previous research using videotaped stimuli to those obtained within the live face-to-face task paradigm. A headworn apparatus is used to briefly display LEDs on the talker's face in four (...) locations as the talker communicates with the participant. In addition to the primary task of comprehending speeches, participants make a secondary task light detection response. In the present experiment, the talker gave non-emotionally-expressive speeches that were used in past research with videotaped stimuli. Signal detection analysis was employed to determine which areas of the face received the greatest focus of attention. Results replicate previous findings using videotaped methods. (shrink)

This article advocates for a hermeneutic model for children-AI interactions in which the desirable purpose of children’s interaction with artificial intelligence systems is children's growth. The article perceives AI systems with machine-learning components as having a recursive element when interacting with children. They can learn from an encounter with children and incorporate data from interaction, not only from prior programming. Given the purpose of growth and this recursive element of AI, the article argues for distinguishing the interpretation of bias within (...) the artificial intelligence ethics and responsible AI discourse. Interpreting bias as a preference and distinguishing between positive and negative bias is needed as this would serve children's healthy psychological and moral development. The human-centric AI discourse advocates for an alignment of capacities of humans and capabilities of machines by a focus both on the purpose of humans and on the purpose of machines for humans. The emphasis on mitigating negative biases through data protection, AI law, and certain value-sensitive design frameworks demonstrates that the purpose of the machine for humans is prioritized over the purpose of humans. These top–down frameworks often narrow down the purpose of machines to do-no-harm and they miss accounting for the bottom-up views and developmental needs of children. Therefore, applying a growth model for children-AI interactions that incorporates learning from negative AI-mediated biases and amplifying positive ones would positively benefit children’s development and children-centric AI innovation. Consequently, the article explores: What challenges arise from mitigating negative biases and amplifying positive biases in children-AI interactions and how can a growth model address these? To answer this, the article recommends applying a growth model in open AI co-creational spaces with and for children. In such spaces human–machine and human–human value alignment methods can be collectively applied in such a manner that children can become sensitized toward the effects of AI-mediated negative biases on themselves and others; enable children to appropriate and imbue top-down values of diversity, and non-discrimination with their meanings; enforce children’s right to identity and non-discrimination; guide children in developing an inclusive mindset; inform top-down normative AI frameworks by children’s bottom-up views; contribute to design criteria for children-centric AI. Applying such methods under a growth model in AI co-creational spaces with children could yield an inclusive co-evolution between responsible young humans in the loop and children-centric AI systems. (shrink)

It is largely agreed that if constructivism contributes anything to meta-ethics it is by proposing that we understand ethical objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept” (Rawls 1980/1999: 307). Constructivists defend this “practical” conception of objectivity in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists place their theory “somewhere in the space between (...) realist and relativist accounts of ethics” (O’Neill 1988: 1). Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of certain features of morality, such as its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency, which escape rival theories (Korsgaard 1996b, Korsgaard 2003b). To this extent, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. The legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including some constructivists — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Some critics object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and thus must be combined with a fully-fledged meta-ethics (Hussain and Shah 2006); others argue that it tacitly relies on realism (Timmons 2003; Shafer-Landau 2003; Larmore 2008). Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In this chapter, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories, reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics. Even though the term is ambiguous, I retain the qualification “Kantian” for the constructivist theory I outline, and for two reasons. First, while the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist variants, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they bind us in the first person. Practical cognitions are common knowledge because they are such that all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning and find them authoritative. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. This is the second reason for keeping the qualification “Kantian”. On this formulation, constructivism is antagonistic to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known; but it is also a rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical in itself. How constructivism differs over the realist theories of practical reason is the least understood aspect of this debate. This essay aims to make the case that practical reason is both discursive and emotional. In contrast to foundational and anti-realist accounts of practical reasoning, it attempts to show that the moral feeling of respect plays a cognitive but non-evidential role in the account of the cognitive and practical powers of reason. The argument proceeds as follows. In section 1, I consider some prominent constructivist arguments against the model of applied knowledge and show that they are driven by non-cognitivist assumptions about the practicality of ethics and the legitimacy of epistemological claims. In section 2, I argue that these arguments do not succeed in disposing of the idea of practical knowledge as incoherent, because they trade on an ambiguity regarding the proper object of practical knowledge. To solve this ambiguity, I turn to Anscombe’s contrast between “practical” and “speculative” knowledge as models for understanding action. I thus suggest that Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge as knowledge of oneself as an agent is an important resource for Kantian constructivism. This finding prompts us to reset the current dispute about the ontological and epistemological commitments of Kantian constructivism, as illustrated in section 3. While constructivism does not postulate any moral ontology prior to reasoning, it attributes to reasoning the cognitive powers to establish a distinctive relation between the agent and her action. The task of sections 4-7 is to account for the distinctive features of Kantian constructivism understood as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. In section 4, I argue that in order for reasoning to accomplish its normative tasks, it should be conceived as a self-legislating activity. I respond to some objections to the idea of self-legislation as the form of rational willing by offering a dialogical view of practical reason. In section 5, I propose a non-standard interpretation of Kant’s argument of “the fact of reason” to show that the constructivist account of self-legislation does not build on realism about value, as its detractors claim. The “basis of construction” is the subjective experience of respect for the self-legislative capacity itself. This moral feeling conveys our awareness of rational agency and shows our responsiveness to the demands of practical reason. It is an emotional mode of practical knowledge of oneself as an agent (in the sense specified in section 2), but not as a mode of moral discernment. In section 6, I show how practical knowledge of oneself as an agent relates to practical knowledge about what one ought to do. I thus account for the relation between respect as emotional moral consciousness and respect as a deliberative constraint. Finally, in section 7, I reply to the objection of subjectivism. I explain how the complex sort of objectivity that Kantian constructivism affords is at the same time more ambitious and more modest than is generally assumed. (shrink)

Higher order cognitive processes, including ethical decision making (EDM), are influenced by the experiencing of discrete emotions. Recent research highlights the negative influence one such emotion, anger, has on EDM and its underlying processes. The mechanism, however, by which anger disrupts the EDM has not been investigated. The current study sought to discover whether cognitive appraisals of an emotion-evoking event are the driving mechanisms behind the influence of anger on EDM. One primary (goal obstacle) and one secondary (certainty) appraisal (...) of anger were examined. Study results suggest that appraisals of certainty are the driving mechanism behind the negative relationship between anger and EDM. Certainty appraisals led to less application of EDM-promoting strategies and more unethical social motives. Findings further highlight the value of investigating appraisals of emotional events, given their cognitive nature, for their potential effects on cognitive operations, such as EDM. Future directions and implications are discussed. (shrink)

To put frameworks of Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation (R(R)I) into practice, engagement methods have been developed to study and enhance technoscientific experts’ capacities to reflexively address value considerations in their work. These methods commonly rely on engagement between technoscientific experts and social scholars, which makes them vulnerable to structural barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration. To circumvent these barriers, we adapt Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) for broader use within technoscientific communities. We call this adaptation: reflexive practitioner dialogues. While (...) the primary aim of this article is to introduce and explain the methodological adaptation, we also analyze results from a pilot study with participants who are involved in research on contemplative practices such as mindfulness meditation. The analysis is guided by research questions that sought to assess whether and under what conditions the practitioner dialogues support reflexive and practical engagement with value considerations in participants’ work. The results indicate that reflexive practitioner dialogues can stimulate reflexive awareness of value conflicts and help re-direct decision-making responsively. We characterize the conditions facilitating such responsiveness as “value exnovators,” highlighting the oft-unacknowledged interpersonal relational practices that support collaborative engagement with value considerations. We suggest that “exnovation”—exposing the strengths of given practices for their improvement—can support R(R)I practices by directing analytical attention to their micro-level carriers. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to critically evaluate the deductive model of ethical applications, which is based on normative ethical theories like deontology and consequentialism, and to show why a number of models have failed to furnish appropriate resolutions to practical moral problems. Here, for the deductive model, I want to call it a “Linear Mechanical Model” because the basic assumption of this model is that if a normative theory is sacrosanct, then the case is as it (...) is. The conclusion derived from the case will also be correct, true and acceptable. However, traditional ethicists used to apply their ethical theories, but they did not know which moral theory was effective on the ground level of reality. The study will show readers how ethical theories are in conflict with each other in the case of euthanasia. In more precise words, “which ethical theories are said to be applied, meta-ethical or normative, or both for the resolution of ethical problems? If normative theories are said to be applied, how the application can take place when it is contrary to our experience, that (then) in a situation of moral crises, no one really applies a theory?” For that, my argument is the linear model has failed because it is rigid, often ignores the agents’ intrinsic values, and has no space to amend it, no matter how bizarre the consequence is. Its alternative is the Inductive model. For that, the paper will take three moral principles (autonomy, beneficence including maleficence, and justice) of Beauchamp & Childress. This suggests us for resolving value-laden moral problems, we should consider some steps such as a) recognising moral issues to start with; b) developing the moral imagination; c) sharpening analytical/critical skills; d) testing out disagreements; e) effecting decisions and behavior; and f) implementation, closure, and process are of vital importance, in other words, it starts with the free and informed consensus of all interested parties, but this model also has been failed because the model could not give a systematic organization to their way of resolution. Here, my argument is that the inductive model provides resolution of the practical problem but ignores what is ethically obligatory, permissible, or wrong in that situation, and there are no appropriate suggestions in the case of a moral crisis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 255-259 [Access article in PDF] On the Evolution of Depression Mike W. Martin Keywords: Depression, morality, mental disorders, psychobiology, evolutionary psychiatry. In "Depression as a Mind-Body Problem," Walter Glannon outlines a psychosocial-physiological explanation of depression as a psychological response to chronic stress—today, especially social stress—in which cortisol imbalances disrupt neurotransmitters. Accordingly, treatment for depression should combine psychopharmacology and psychotherapy—a valuable reminder in light (...) of the current restrictions on funding for health care (Hobson and Leonard 2001). My comments focus, however, on Glannon's objections to evolutionary theorists who explain our capacity for depression as adaptive to the natural and social environment. His objections are implausible because he fails to distinguish depression as a mood and a disorder. What Is Depression? Explaining the psychology, sociology, physiology, and evolution of depression presupposes knowing what depression is and hence what is being explained. As a blunt but important distinction, let us contrast depression as a mood and as a mood disorder.As a mood, depression is a state of low spirits, typically involving painful and low affect (of a kind needing further specification). Not all negative low moods are depressions. It is notoriously difficult to distinguish depression from grief, sadness, gloom, and a host of additional ways to feel down—especially because today many people use "I'm depressed" as a blanket expression for virtually any low mood. For the purposes of this paper, it is not necessary to attempt a full-blown analysis of depressed moods (and emotions). I would emphasize, however, that depressed moods involve values. They involve negative evaluations of ourselves, major events in our lives, life in its entirety, or the values that have been guiding us. Typically, to be depressed is to experience such things as feelings of worthlessness, dejection about failures, despair and hopelessness, and loss of caring and commitment. Thus, we might be sad or grieving but not depressed because we retain a solid grip on what is valuable and worthwhile. In any case, there should be no general presumption that depressed moods are all bad or undesirable. Instead, we should be prepared to appreciate the importance of depressed moods in connection with questions of value, identity, and even moral insight (Martin 2000). Depressed persons are not necessarily sick.In contrast, depression as a mood disorder is, by definition, pathologic. Moreover, usually it is not a depressed mood, although it involves depressed moods. On the one hand, depression as a disorder is defined as pathologic, a notion that is itself understood in terms of values—the values of health and, indirectly, moral values that define what is culturally acceptable. Thus, even severe [End Page 255] grief can be nonpathologic, even though it involves depressed moods, when it is within the range of "culturally-sanctioned responses" (APA 2000, xxxi). On the other hand, only sometimes is depression a single pathologic mood, as in major depressive episodes that can strike with a terrifying and suicidal severity (APA 2000, 375). Usually, however, the pathology is not a single depressed mood, but instead a longer-term state involving recurring depressed moods and additional features, such as poor concentration, insomnia, poor appetite or overeating, and so on. For some purposes, such as research funding and billing insurance companies and government health providers, these pathologies can be equated with what is currently in the DSM. Yet, there are many additional states of suboptimal health, in which the DSM criteria are only partly met.What does Glannon mean by depression? He does not define it, but he makes it perfectly clear that he intends depression as a disorder. Or rather, it is a set of mental disorders, including the "depressive disorders" of major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, depressive disorder not otherwise specified, and a variety of bipolar disorders and some anxiety disorders. Glannon sometimes indicates his primary topic is "severe depression," which of course is not a DSM category (nor always a mark of pathology). For the most part, however, he says his topic is "chronic depression," which might suggest dysthymia, "a chronically depressed mood for most of... (shrink)

Many debates in arenas such as bioethics turn on questions regarding the moral status of human beings at various stages of biological development or decline. It is often argued that a human being possesses a fundamental and inviolable moral status insofar as she is a “person”; yet, it is contested whether all or only human beings count as persons. Perhaps there are non-human person, and perhaps not every human being satisfies the definitional criteria for being a person. A further question, (...) which will be the primary focus of this paper, concerns what essential features of personhood endow persons, human or otherwise, with their moral status and the inherent rights they concomitantly possess. A survey of the history of philosophical theorizing on what it means to be a person yields a broad consensus upon the key capacities being rational thought, self-consciousness, and autonomous volition. It is not sufficient, however, simply to cite these capacities, but to explain why these particular capacities bear moral import. A more recent concern has developed regarding the possible future existence of so-called “post-persons” who, due to their enhanced cognitive and emotive capacities, may be morally superior to mere persons and thereby possess a higher moral status. This paper will conclude with an analysis of the extent to which this concern is warranted. (shrink)