Often, when several norms are present and may be in conflict, individuals will display a self-serving bias, privileging the norm that best serves their interests. Xiao and Bicchieri (J Econ Psychol 31(3):456–470, 2010) tested the effects of inequality on reciprocating behavior in trust games and showed that—when inequality increases—reciprocity loses its appeal. They hypothesized that self-serving biases in choosing to privilege a particular social norm occur when the choice of that norm is publicly justifiable as reasonable, (...) even if not optimal for one of the parties. In line with the literature on motivated reasoning, this justification should find some degree of support among third parties. The results of our experimental survey of third parties support the hypothesis that biases are not always unilateral selfish assessments. Instead, they occur when the choice to favor a particular norm is supported by a shared sense that it is a reasonable and justifiable choice. (shrink)

In this article, we demonstrate that individuals use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their self-serving behavior is justified, which in turn affects the distribution of resources in business situations. Specifically, we explore how ambiguous contextual cues and individual beliefs can jointly form motivated reasoning. Across two experimental studies, we find that whereas individual ideologies that endorse status hierarchies can strengthen the relationship between contextual ambiguity and motivated reasoning, individual beliefs rooted in fairness and equality (...) can weaken it. Our findings contribute to person–situation theories of business ethics and provide evidence that two ubiquitous factors in business organizations—contextual ambiguity and social dominance orientation—give rise to motivated reasoning, enabling decision makers to engage in self-serving distributions of resources. (shrink)

We distinguish two types of cases that have potential to generate quasi-cyclical preferences: self-involving choices where an agent oscillates between first- and third-person perspectives that conflict regarding their life-changing implications, and self-serving choices where frame-based reasoning can be “first-personally rational” yet “third-personally irrational.” We argue that the distinction between these types of cases deserves more attention in Bermúdez's account.

In this essay, I propose a standard of practical rationality and a grounding for the standard that rests on the idea of autonomous agency. This grounding is intended to explain the “normativity” of the standard. The basic idea is this: To be autonomous is to be self-governing. To be rational is at least in part to be self-governing; it is to do well in governing oneself. I argue that a person's values are aspects of her identity—of her “ (...) class='Hi'>self-esteem identity”—in a way that most of her ends are not, and that it therefore is plausible to view action governed by one's values as self-governed. This is also plausible on independent grounds. Given this, I say, rational agents comply with a standard—the “values standard”—that requires them to serve their values, and to seek what they need in order to continue to be able to serve their values. Footnotesa I am grateful to many people for helpful comments and discussion over the many years in which I have been developing the ideas in this essay. With apologies to those whose help escapes my memory, I would like to thank Nomy Arpaly, Sam Black, Michael Bratman, Justin D'Arms, Dan Farrell, Pat Greenspan, Don Hubin, Dan Jacobson, Marina Oshana, Michael Ridge, Michael Robins, David Sobel, Pekka Väyrynen, and David Velleman. I presented early versions of some of the ideas in this essay to audiences in the departments of philosophy at the University of Alberta, the University of Maryland at College Park, l'Université de Montréal, the University of Southern California, and the University of Florida, to the 1999 Conference on Moral Theory and Its Applications, Le Lavandou, France, and to the 2001 Conference on Reason and Deliberation, Bowling Green State University. I am grateful for the helpful comments of those who participated in the discussions on all of these occasions and especially to the other contributors to this volume, and its editors. I owe special thanks to Ellen Paul for encouraging me to integrate my thinking on identity with my thinking on rationality and for her useful comments. (shrink)

Self-deception is commonly viewed as a condition that bespeaks irrationality. This paper challenges that view. I focus specifically on the connection between self-deception and practical reasoning, an area which, despite its importance for understanding self-deception, has not been systematically explored. I examine both how self-deception influences practical reasoning and how this influence affects the rationality of actions produced by practical reasoning. But what is self-deception? There are many accounts, yet there is probably (...) none sufficiently well known and compelling to serve as an adequate background given my purposes. Hence, I shall briefly present my own account of self-deception and, on that basis, explore its connections with practical reasoning and rational action. (shrink)

In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a consent order to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The order decreed the AICPA to lessen its longstanding ethics code which had until then banned the receipts of commissions, referral fees and contingent fees. The FTC alleged that the AICPA banned receipt of the fees as an attempt to restrain trade (FTC, 1990).In the present study, we sought to determine if CPAs'' preference for bans on commissions, referral fees and (...) contingent fees is related to their moral reasoning whereby CPAs perceive the bans to serve as a means of resolving ethical issues. While determining this matter cannot prove whether the bans did or did not actually result in restrained trade, it can offer insight into the perceived ethical importance to CPAs of the overturned rules. Based on a random sample of AICPA members and using Rest''s Defining Issues Test (DIT) to measure moral reasoning, we did not find a CPA''s moral reasoning to be related to his/her preference for ethics rules which ban commissions, referral fees or contingent fees. However, our results did indicate that most CPAs prefer banning commissions, referral fees and contingent fees, with those CPAs holding a higher financial stake in public accounting, namely partners, favoring banning referral fees and contingent fees significantly less than CPAs with a lesser stake. Further, we noted a significant negative relationship between financial stake and moral reasoning. These results seem to suggest that self-interest among CPAs may influence their moral reasoning.Further study is needed to examine the relationship between self-interest of CPAs and their moral reasoning. If self-interest clouds moral judgments made by CPAs, capital markets are in danger. Rendering an independent audit opinion must exclude self-interest. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Reinhold Niebuhr's ethics of self-restraint, though promising, is based on an incomplete and imprecise moral psychology. Although Niebuhr claims that reason cannot provide a sufficient grounding to motivate self-restraint, he does not disclose which human capacity might serve this purpose. I suggest that we can address this oversight by strengthening Niebuhr's tentative embrace of David Hume, and by developing a concept of the emotions in order to explain how human beings can cultivate (...) a stable inclination to self-restraint. This project is informed by and in the service of feminist critiques of Niebuhr and social concerns. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is used in adjudicating claims of self-defence. In US law, an individual may use defensive force if her beliefs that a threat is imminent and that force is required are beliefs that a reasonable person would have. In English law, it is sufficient that beliefs in imminence and necessity are genuinely held; but the reasonableness of so believing is given an evidential role in establishing the genuineness of the beliefs. There is, of course, much contention (...) over how to spell out when, and in virtue of what, such beliefs are reasonable. In this chapter, we identify some distinctive issues that arise when we consider that implicit racial bias might be implicated in the beliefs in imminence and necessity. Considering two prominent interpretations of the reasonable person standard, we argue that neither is acceptable. On one interpretation, we risk unfairness to the defendant-who may non-culpably harbour bias. On another, the standard embeds racist stereotypes. Whilst there are formulations of the defence that may serve to mitigate these problems, we argue that they cannot be avoided in the presence of racist social structures. (shrink)

Knowing one’s past thoughts and attitudes is a vital sort of self-knowledge. In the absence of memorial impressions to serve as evidence, we face a pressing question of how such self-knowledge is possible. Recently, philosophers of mind have argued that self-knowledge of past attitudes supervenes on rationality. I examine two kinds of argument for this supervenience claim, one from cognitive dynamics, and one from practical rationality, and reject both. I present an alternative account, on which knowledge of (...) past attitudes is inferential knowledge, and depends upon contingent facts of one’s rationality and consistency. Failures of self-knowledge are better explained by the inferential account. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is two-fold. It is, first, to reconstruct Kant's argument against self-murder, and, second, to analyze the function of the principle of self-preservation of reason with regard to the prohibition of self-murder. I argue that self-murder is contrary to the principle of self-preservation of reason and violates the trustee-relationship between the homo phaenomenon and the homo noumenon. The analysis shows that moral self-preservation in Kant is a rational principle which serves (...) to secure the possibility of moral faith and self-perfection. ;In the first part of the dissertation, I provide a comprehensive analysis of Kant's argument against self-murder by examining all of the relevant statements in his works, the Nachlass, as well as the lectures recorded by Herder, Powalski, Collins, and Vigilantius. Since self-murder violates a perfect duty to oneself, key-topics of the analysis are: the dual status of the duty of self-preservation as both inner duty of right and duty of virtue, the right and end of humanity, as well as Kant's model of self-possession in terms of proprietas. The analysis makes clear that self-murder destroys the moral self and must be distinguished from sacrificing one's life in order to preserve one's moral integrity. ;In the second part of the dissertation, I interpret the duty of self-preservation and the prohibition of self-murder in the context of Kant's doctrine of the faith of reason and the principle of self-preservation of reason. I first provide an overview of the debate on self-preservation and its implications for an understanding of modern rationality and summarize the different meanings of -preservation in Kant. I then argue that the "principle of self-preservation of reason" consists in what Kant calls "the maxim of healthy reason" and that it grounds the faith and the unity of reason. Against the background of this analysis, I interpret the trustee-relationship between the homo phaenomenon and the homo noumenon as a model of moral self-obligation. Entrusting the homo phaenomenon to the homo noumenon, I contend, means to entrust life to practical reason and to subject oneself to the moral law. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to the material-heuristics hypothesis, people’s socioeconomic position affects their perceptions about the socioeconomic environment, including how society distributes opportunities and rewards and to what extent people are responsible for their own economic situation. These perceptions, in turn, affect attitudes toward wealth redistribution. In contrast to the material-heuristics hypothesis are the more familiar material self-interest hypothesis, which relates redistributive attitudes to one’s personal interest in gaining or losing from redistribution; and the self-serving reasoning hypothesis, according (...) to which perceptions of how society distributes opportunities and rewards are a consequence rather than a cause of attitudes toward redistribution, which are, in turn, driven by material self-interest. All three hypotheses connect socioeconomic position and attitudes toward redistribution, but only the material-heuristics and the self-serving reasoning arguments account for why perceptions of the causes of wealth and poverty vary across economic groups and why this variation matters for attitudes toward redistribution. Ignoring the role of such perceptions can lead to the simplistic attribution of attitudes toward redistribution to personal self-interest. (shrink)

The main hypothesis of studies presented in this article is that episodic implicit evaluations toward task-relevant objects determine thinking and decisions by actively placing them within or outside the scope of attention. In these studies we also aimed to test the impact of regulatory focus on implicit evaluations and goal pursuit. We applied the Promotion-Prevention Self-control Scale as a measure of mind-set during thinking in the Wason Selection Task in Study 1 and Island Decision Game in Study 2. Directly (...) after learning of the tasks, participants evaluated objects that constituted the task’s content. The findings are in line with the hypothesis stating that goals influence the way in which objects are automatically evaluated. The effects of promotion mind-set were more pronounced in both studies. Promotion-focused individuals positively assessed objects that serve as a confirmation. The implicit evaluations by prevention-oriented individuals disclosed their falsifying approach to the WST. The positive implicit evaluation of correct objects suggests their sensitivity to information useful for falsification and is consistent with their tendency to cautiously self-control thinking. (shrink)

Reasoning under uncertainty, that is, making judgements with only partial knowledge, is a major theme in artificial intelligence. Professor Paris provides here an introduction to the mathematical foundations of the subject. It is suited for readers with some knowledge of undergraduate mathematics but is otherwise self-contained, collecting together the key results on the subject, and formalising within a unified framework the main contemporary approaches and assumptions. The author has concentrated on giving clear mathematical formulations, analyses, justifications and consequences (...) of the main theories about uncertain reasoning, so the book can serve as a textbook for beginners or as a starting point for further basic research into the subject. It will be welcomed by graduate students and research workers in logic, philosophy, and computer science as a textbook for beginners, a starting point for further basic research into the subject, and not least, an account of how mathematics and artificial intelligence can complement and enrich each other. (shrink)

Recent experiments in moral psychology have been taken to imply that moral reasoning only serves to reaffirm prior moral intuitions. More specifically, Jonathan Haidt concludes from his moral dumbfounding experiments, in which people condemn other people’s behavior, that moral reasoning is biased and ineffective, as it rarely makes people change their mind. I present complementary evidence pertaining to self-directed reasoning about what to do. More specifically, Albert Bandura’s experiments concerning moral disengagement reveal that moral reasoning (...) often does contribute effectively to the formation of moral judgments. And such reasoning need not be biased. Once this evidence is taken into account, it becomes clear that both cognition and affect can play a destructive as well as a constructive role in the formation of moral judgments. (shrink)

The free energy principle says that any self-organising system that is at nonequilibrium steady-state with its environment must minimize its free energy. It is proposed as a grand unifying principle for cognitive science and biology. The principle can appear cryptic, esoteric, too ambitious, and unfalsifiable—suggesting it would be best to suspend any belief in the principle, and instead focus on individual, more concrete and falsifiable ‘process theories’ for particular biological processes and phenomena like perception, decision and action. Here, I (...) explain the free energy principle, and I argue that it is best understood as offering a conceptual and mathematical analysis of the concept of existence of self-organising systems. This analysis offers a new type of solution to long-standing problems in neurobiology, cognitive science, machine learning and philosophy concerning the possibility of normatively constrained, self-supervised learning and inference. The principle can therefore uniquely serve as a regulatory principle for process theories, to ensure that process theories conforming to it enable self-supervision. This is, at least for those who believe self-supervision is a foundational explanatory task, good reason to believe the free energy principle. (shrink)

It has become common to distinguish between two kinds of ethical concepts: thick and thin ones. Bernard Williams, who coined the terms, explains that thick concepts such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude and so forth” are marked by having greater empirical content than thin ones. They are both action-guiding and world-guided: -/- If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason for action… At the same time, their application is guided by the world. A concept (...) of this sort may be rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation. -/- Thin concepts are concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, obligation and duty. Judgments applying thick concepts have been seen as lending support to the possibility of explaining moral knowledge, and objectivity in ethics. It appears that due to their empirical content – their world-guidedness – judgments employing thick concepts can be true or false, depending on whether they get the worldly facts right. In addition they provide reasons for action – they are action-guiding – and thus may provide the starting point of a realist account of practical reasons: the view that reasons are facts and whether or not a person has a reason to act does not (normally) depend on her attitudes. The cruelty of an action is a reason not to perform it or to prevent it; that an action is kind is a reason in its favour. Of course these remarks aren’t conclusive – far from it. But even so, some non-cognitivists may regard them as completely wrongheaded, and so does Bernard Williams even though he is not a non-cognitivist. However, he believes that having a practical reason does depend on a person’s attitudes and motives. A certain worry about thick concepts will make clear what the problem is. It has most expressly been raised by Simon Blackburn, who sees it as undermining even the most superficial plausibility of moral cognitivism, as well as the claim that the properties picked out by thick concepts provide reasons. While we may readily accept that the kindness of an action or the fact that it is required by justice is a reason to perform it, there are many thick concepts whose action-guiding role we would reject. Some derogatory – e.g., racist or sexist - words express thick concepts too, Blackburn notes. And surely there are no racist or sexist truths. Furthermore there are concepts that some people use evaluatively (like chaste or obscene), but many of us do not regard the propositions in which those concepts feature as even prima facie reason giving. In raising these points, Blackburn claims that it is morally objectionable to regard the facts asserted in propositions which employ thick concepts as action-guiding because it leads to “a conservative and ultimately self-serving complacency.” As he sees it, the problem is that if we believe that the correct application of thick concepts yields evaluative truths and that evaluative truths state reasons for actions, we seem to be committed to accepting that some people are, say, fat, derog., and therefore to be ridiculed, and that there is at least a pro tanto reason to lead a chaste life, or feel affection towards cute women. Therefore, the view that all evaluative properties provide reasons for action or for attitudes such as admiration, affection or (dis)approval must be rejected. I will call this worry henceforth Blackburn’s challenge. The challenge is that understanding judgments employing thick concepts as expressing evaluative truths and providing reasons for actions or for attitudes leads to a morally unacceptable view. Blackburn suggests instead that we should separate the conditions for applying thick concepts and the reasons that we have in virtue of the concept applying. She may be cute, yes, but that is not a reason for “admiration and arousal.” -/- …it is morally vital that we proceed by splitting the input from the output in such a case. By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism. -/- According to Blackburn, the meaning of thick concepts is made up of two distinct and in principle separable components: a descriptive one and the expression of an attitude. The truth-aptness and cognitive appearance of judgments employing thick concepts is explained by the descriptive component alone. Blackburn writes “[w]e get nothing but detachable and flexible attitudes, coupled with delineations of traits of character or action”. I will call this reply to Blackburn’s challenge the separability thesis. I agree with Blackburn that any account of thick concepts has to face and answer the challenge that he poses. In this paper, I will focus on one reply to the challenge which denies separability, namely Bernard Williams’s. Williams answers Blackburn’s challenge, while holding on to a cognitivist understanding of thick concepts. But his particular brand of cognitivism is peculiar: Williams rejects the separability thesis, and claims that correct applications of thick concepts yield evaluative (and not just descriptive) knowledge. But this is a special kind of knowledge. It is confined to a local community. The members of a community which uses certain thick concepts may have reasons to act accordingly, but the non-members do not. And even the reasons of members remain a little fragile: they may not want to continue using their concepts upon thorough reflection. The local knowledge view allows Williams to answer Blackburn’s challenge, because even though thick concepts are evaluative concepts and their application can yield evaluative knowledge, no one who isn’t a member of the relevant community has reason to be guided by the concept. Complementing a cognitivist view of thick concepts with reasons internalism allows Williams to answer the challenge. My aim in this paper is to show that Williams’s position is, despite its initial attraction, untenable. In particular, I am going to show why the internal reasons view is incompatible with Williams’s own understanding of thick concepts. My modest result is that the internalist view of reasons does not help to answer Blackburn’s challenge. My aim in this paper is not to answer the challenge but, rather, to explore the possibility of developing Williams’s attenuated version of cognitivism, and the possibility of combining it with reasons internalism. (shrink)

Robert Dunn, David Finkelstein and Richard Moran have recently contributed to broadening the debate on self-knowledge within the analytic tradition. They raise questions concerning the sort of awareness that may have a healing effect in psychoanalytic therapy, and enhance the relevance to self-knowledge of a deliberative, and practically committed, attitude toward oneself. They reject, however, that self-observation could play a significant role in a strictly first-person attitude toward oneself, since they conceive of it as essentially detached and, (...) in this respect, similar to the kind of attitude that a third party might adopt. I will appeal to Simone Weil's distinction between two sorts obedience and to the contrast between two characters in *The Karamazov Brothers* to elucidate a kind of self-awareness that involves a kind of observation that is constitutively committed. This line of reasoning will also serve to elucidate a fundamental sort of self-knowledge that derives from the subject's capacity to acknowledge her own position within the ethical world and is closely associated to the goal of psychoanalytic therapy. (shrink)

Soon after taking power, three leaders of nonviolent African independence movements, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia immediately turned to violent means to suppress internal opposition. The paper examines the reasons for the success of their Gandhian nonviolent tactics in ousting British colonial governments and argues that these new heads of state lost confidence in nonviolence due to a mixture of self-serving expediency, a lack of understanding of nonviolence's many different forms, (...) and the constraints of inheriting a state already dependent on the use of force. (shrink)

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I (...) raise two concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect. (shrink)

'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that (...) modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics. (shrink)

Drawing on notions of alienation, reification and rationalization in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer explored the phenomenon of reason as such concerning the subject and the species, and diagnosed the pathologies of occidental societies. Reason provides the means for a vulnerable being to subordinate nature and serve its desire for self-preservation. However, this reason is instrumental since it objectifies the world and reifies other beings in order to render them manipulable. It is a subjective reason because (...) it promotes the subject's own ends and aims at the subject's survival at the expense of the individual's inner world of unconscious desires and instincts and the reconciliation of human beings with the external world. The myth of Ulysses is magnificantly interpreted by Horkheimer and Adorno along such anthropological lines. As I see it, this anthropology inexorably connects the advent of civilization with the reifying power of reason from the start. Against the early Frankfurt School anthropological explanation of reason, I defend the distinction between communicative and strategic rationality that presupposes a different anthropology from the Freudian one that informed the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Key Words: Adorno • alienation • critique • culture • Enlightenment • Freud • Habermas • Horkheimer • Lukács • Marcuse • paradox of reason • reason • self-preservation • subjectivity. (shrink)

In recent years the category of the aesthetic has been judged inadequate to the tasks of literary criticism. It has been attacked for promoting class-based ideologies of distinction, for cultivating political apathy, and for indulging irrational sensuous decadence. _Aesthetic Reason_ reexamines the history of aesthetic theorizing that has led to this critical alienation from works of art and proposes an alternative view. The book is a defense of the relevance and usefulness of the aesthetic as a cognitive resource of human (...) experience. It challenges the contemporary critical tendency to treat aesthetic value as separate from the realms of human agency and sociopolitical change. The argument unfolds through a review of the cognitivist traditions in post-Enlightenment aesthetic theory and through Singer’s own articulation of a model of ethical subjectivity that is derived from the Greek concept of akrasia, which recognizes the intrinsic fallibility of human action. His focus on akratic subjectivity is aimed at revealing how the artwork has the potential to enhance human development by cultivating habits of self-transformation. Along these lines, he shows that the aesthetic has affinities with the logic of reversal/recognition in Greek tragedy and with theories of subject formation based on intersubjective recognition. The marking of these affinities sets up a discussion of how the aesthetic can serve protocols of rational choice-making. Within this perspective, aesthetic practice is revealed to be a meaningful social enterprise rather than an effete refuge from the conflicts of social existence. The theoretical scope of the book encompasses arguments by Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Derrida, Althusser, and Nancy. Singer’s exposition of "akratic subjectivity" is advanced through readings of literary texts by Sophocles, Melville, Beckett, Joyce, and Faulkner as well as visual texts by Caravaggio, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Gerhard Richter. (shrink)

Why do agent-relative reasons have authority over us, reflective creatures? Reductive accounts base the normativity of agent-relative reasons on agent-neutral considerations like ‘having parents caring especially for their own children serves best the interests of all children’. Such accounts, however, beg the question about the source of normativity of agent-relative ways of reason-giving. In this paper, I argue for a non-reductive account of the reflective necessity of agent-relative concerns. Such an account will reveal an important structural complexity of practical (...) class='Hi'>reasoning in general. Christine Korsgaard relates the rational binding force of practical reasons to the various identities or self-conceptions under which we value ourselves. The problem is that it is not clear why such self-conceptions would necessitate us rationally, given the fact that most of our identities are simply given. Perhaps, Harry Frankfurt is right in arguing that we are not only necessitated by reason, but also, and predominantly by what we love. I argue, however, that “the necessities of love” (in Frankfurt’s phrase) are not to be separated from, but should be seen as belonging to the necessities of reason. Our loves, concerns and related identities provide for a specific and important structure to practical reflection. They function on the background of reasoning, having a specific default role: they would lose their character as concerns, if there was a need for them to be cited on the foreground of deliberation or if there was a need to justify them. This does not mean that our deep concerns cannot be scrutinised. They can only be scrutinised in an indirect way, however, which explains their role in grounding the normativity of agent-relative reasons. It appears that this account can provide for a viable interpretation of Korsgaard’s argument about the foundational role of practical identities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Global Health Careers:Serving the Navajo CommunityMaricruz Merino, Jonathan Iralu, and Sonya ShinGallup Indian Medical Center (GIMC) sits on a hilltop in Gallup, New Mexico, a town of 20,000 in the four corners region of the Southwestern United States. From its third story windows one can see the red cliffs of the nearby Navajo Nation, a 27,000 square mile reservation that reaches into Arizona, northern New Mexico, and the (...) southern edges of Utah. It is a vast, rural landscape that houses more than 350,000 Navajos. For many on the reservation, healthcare is provided by Indian Health Service hospitals such as GIMC."Are you going to stay?" is a common question for new doctors at GIMC. The Navajo know that their geographic location, while beautiful and attractive to many young providers, will also be the reason they leave. It is hard for doctors to be away from their own homelands. Aging parents get sick, [End Page 86] educational opportunities arise, and children who need to be near extended family are born. But to the Navajo, the story of an individual provider is not so important or memorable. All they know is that providers come and go."Are you here to experiment on us?" is yet another question. Years of exploitation and efforts to destroy traditional ways and language have made many Navajo wary of healthcare providers, no matter how genuine their intentions. Many are so fearful of the hospital—they regard it as "the place to go die."Yet despite this initial suspicion, the Navajo are welcoming people at heart, and tend to develop relationships of trust with their providers. Parents will begin to talk about their grief over a son that has committed suicide or a daughter who died from alcoholic cirrhosis. The elderly will tell you how they care for their five orphaned grandchildren while they can barely take care of their own diabetes. A carpenter tells you he has not worked in a year and feels worthless. An HIV-positive woman will tell you she has been sleeping in a dry river bed because she has no place to go. It quickly becomes apparent that as a physician you will be treating patients with enormous social challenges in addition to complex medical conditions.The origins of the Federal Government's involvement in the healthcare of American Indians and Alaskan Natives (AI/ANs) in the 19th century arose out of both legal obligation and concern for self- preservation. Health services were promised to AI/ ANs in exchange for land, settlements, and agreements. In addition, infectious diseases endemic on reservations as a consequence of crowding and abject poverty, including smallpox and tuberculosis, were seen as a major public health concern. The responsibility of Native American health was first granted to the War Department, then to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and finally to the Public Health Service in 1955 under the heading of the IHS, or Indian Health Service (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2004; National Library of Medicine, 1994).Since then, the IHS has had many successes. Vaccination rates have gone up, and rates of pneumonia and tuberculosis have gone down significantly. Maternal and infant mortality have declined, and life expectancy has increased (Indian Health Services, 1999). Nonetheless, these improvements remain overshadowed by glaring health disparities among AI/ANs across a broad spectrum of diseases, both communicable and non-communicable, acute and chronic. Native Americans experience higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease than the general United States population. They are also more likely to die from alcohol-related causes and in accidents. Life expectancy remains more than five years less than that of the general U.S. population (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2004; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000).Underlying these health indicators is the continued impoverished status of most AI/ANs. In Navajo, almost half of the population lives below the poverty line. According to the Navajo Nation, the current unemployment rate is 42% (Navajo Nation Department of Economic Development, 2011). Many Navajo on the reservation do not have running water or electricity. They heat with wood, which they chop and haul themselves—regardless... (shrink)

Bereby‐Meyer, Hayakawa, Shalvi, Corey, Costa and Keysar investigate lying for self‐serving reasons. Participants in their experiments had to report the outcome of rolling a die only known to them. They inflated their outcomes less, and thus lied less, when using a foreign language than when using their native language. The authors suggest that lying for self‐serving reasons is an automatic tendency that can be overcome by speaking in a foreign language. [71].

This paper engages with the recent dignity-based argument against hate speech proposed by Jeremy Waldron. It’s claimed that while Waldron makes progress by conceptualising dignity less as an inherent property and more as a civic status which hate speech undermines, his argument is nonetheless subject to the problem that there are many sources of citizens’ dignitary status besides speech. Moreover, insofar as dignity informs the grounds of individuals’ right to free speech, Waldron’s argument leaves us balancing hate speakers’ dignity against (...) the dignity of those whom they attack. I suggest instead that a central part of the harm of hate speech is that it assaults our self-respect. The reasons to respect oneself are moral reasons which can be shared with others, and individuals have moral reasons to respect themselves for their agency, and their entitlements. Free speech is interpreted not as an individual liberty, but as a collective enterprise which serves the interests of speakers and the receivers of speech. I argue that hate speech undermines the self-respect of its targets in both the agency and entitlement dimensions, and claim, moreover, that this is a direct harm which cannot be compensated for by other sources of self-respect. I further argue that hate speakers have no basis to respect themselves qua their hate speech, as self-respect is based on moral reasons. I conclude that self-respect, unlike dignity, is sufficient to explain the harm of hate speech, even though it may not be necessary to explain its wrongness. (shrink)

This book is about bridging the current deeply-held divide between sentience and reason. It focuses on the pragmatic role of sentient experience and its unceasing and inseparable interplay with the exercise of reason. Part I of the book deals first with the need for synthesizing the hitherto separate "truth-finding" knowledge traditions: the third-personal scientific-technological, and the first-personal humanistic-wisdom tradition. A conceptual framework for a mind reality is then proposed. Drawing from the unifying natural laws in current physical and biological sciences, (...) the mind reality is portrayed in terms of one interlocking open dynamic system with both a manifested and a covert aspect. In this entire system, each individual mind constantly "co-creates" and "co-evolves" with other collective or group minds at various levels. It is also presumed that the basic unit of interaction in the mind reality is thought or intent. Supporting evidence from psychology, parapsychology and the ancient perennial philosophies is presented. The second part of the book addresses the pragmatic consequences of the proposed mind reality. At the individual level, it is argued that sentient experience can serve the function of guiding, affirming and fostering an individual's life's work. A selection of existing first-personal accounts is presented to illustrate this point. At the collective level, the current dominant collective thought of "new capitalism" has the unfortunate consequences for humanity's sense of freedom, education and morality. Such consequences pertain to the "exteriorization" and the "deconstruction" of the intrinsic self and intrinsic values. To avoid this to happen, a collective effort at changing consciousness becomes necessary: the core task lies with the closure of the reason and sentience divide. (shrink)

A RELATIVISTIC THEORY OF PHENOMENOLOCICAL CONSTITUTION: A SELF-REFERENTIAL, TRANSCENDENTAL APPROACH TO CONCEPTUAL PATHOLOGY. (Vol. I: French; Vol. II: English) -/- Steven James Bartlett -/- Doctoral dissertation director: Paul Ricoeur, Université de Paris Other doctoral committee members: Jean Ladrière and Alphonse de Waehlens, Université Catholique de Louvain Defended publically at the Université Catholique de Louvain, January, 1971. -/- Universite de Paris X (France), 1971. 797pp. -/- The principal objective of the work is to construct an analytically precise methodology which can (...) serve to identify, eliminate, and avoid a certain widespread _conceptual fault_ or _misconstruction_, called a "projective misconstruction" or "projection" by the author. It is argued that this variety of error in our thinking (i) infects a great number of our everyday, scientific, and philosophical concepts, claims, and theories, (ii) has largely been undetected, and (iii), when remedied, leads to a less controversial and more rigorous elucidation of the transcendental preconditions of human knowledge than has traditionally been possible. The dissertation identifies, perhaps for the first time, a _projective_ variety of self-referential inconsistency, and proposes an innovative, self-reflexive approach to transcendental argument in a logical and phenomenological context. The strength of the approach lies, it is claimed, in the fact that a rejection of the approach is possible only on pain of self-referential inconsistency. The argument is developed in the following stages: A general introduction identifies the central theme of the work, defines the scope of applicability of the results reached, and sketches the direction of the studies that follow. The preliminary discussion culminates in a recognition of the need for a _critique of impure reason_. The body of the work is divided into two parts: Section I seeks to develop a methodology, on a purely formal basis, which is, on the one hand, capable of being used to study the transcendental foundations of the special sciences, including its own proper transcendental foundation. On the other hand, the methodology proposed is intended as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool for dealing with _projective_ uses of concepts. The approach initiates an analysis of concepts from a perspective which views _knowledge as coordination_. Section I describes formal structures that possess the status of preconditions in such a coordinative account of knowledge. Special attention is given to the preconditions of _identifying reference_ to logical particulars. The first section attempts, then, to provide a self-referential, transcendental methodology which is essentially revisionary in that it is motivated by a concern for conceptual error-elimination. Phenomenology, considered in its unique capacity as a self-referential, transcendental discipline, is of special relevance to the study. Section II accordingly examines a group of concepts which come into question in connection with the central theme of _phenomenological constitution_. The "_de-projective methodology_" developed in Section I is applied to these concepts that have a foundational importance in transcendental phenomenology. A translation is, in effect, proposed from the language of consciousness to a language in which preconditions of referring are investigated. The result achieved is the elimination of self-defeating, projective concepts from a rigorous, phenomenological study of the constitutive foundations of science. The dissertation was presented in a two volume, double-language format for the convenience of French and English researchers. Each volume contains an analytical index. (shrink)

The aim of this paper to analyse the central argument of Cottingham’s (1998) Philosophy and the Good Life, and to strengthen and develop it against misinterpretation and objection. Cottingham’s argument is an objection to ‘ratiocentrism’, the view that the good life can be understood in terms of and attained by reason and strength of will. The objection begins from a proper understanding of akrasia, or weakness of will, but its focus, and the focus of this paper, is the relation between (...) reason and the passions in the good life. Akrasia serves to illustrate ratiocentrism’s misunderstanding of this relation and of the nature of the passions themselves. In § I, I outline and clarify the objection. In § II, I present and provisionally elaborate on Cottingham’s diagnosis of what a corrected understanding of the passions makes necessary for the good life, viz. the rediscovery and reclamation of the source of our passions, our childhood past. In § III, I discuss whether ratiocentrism could accept and absorb the critique as developed so far. Cottingham (1998: 162) is aware that his claim, with its emphasis on self-knowledge, could be reinterpreted by ratiocentrism as no more than the need for reason to work with a different source of information regarding the passions in order to master them. I briefly present three further objections to show why this is a mistake. In § IV, I argue that Cottingham’s diagnosis is not quite right, and I seek to emphasise aspects of self-discovery that I believe Cottingham overlooks or underplays. What is needed is a set of interrelated dispositions, viz. acceptance, vulnerability, courage, and compassion; these can be inculcated and sustained by the journey Cottingham defends, but it is the dispositions, rather than the journey, that are properly considered a necessary part of the good life. (shrink)

In this thesis I propose an account of knowledge of one’s own mental states. My goal is set on a unified transparency account of self-knowledge. It is unified, because the proposal will account for the generation of beliefs about mental states of all types, regardless of whether they are propositional, non-propositional, experiential or non-experiential. My account will thereby be applicable to knowledge of any mental state, from beliefs and desires to fears, hopes, and sensations such as pain. Moreover, it (...) will be a transparency account because it holds on to Gareth Evans’s observation that self-ascribing mental states is done by attending outwards instead of inwards. There is a sense in which we attend to the world when we find out whether we believe something, and my proposal aims to capture this intuition. The core idea I am exploring is the following: generally, when one produces a first-order mental state, one also forms a corresponding, dispositional second-order belief about that state. Both attitudes share elements of their production, which ensures reliability while retaining fallibility. For instance, when you form a belief ‘there is a red car’ by perceiving a red car, you also generate the dispositional belief ‘I believe that there is a red car,’ if everything goes right. I argue that almost all features that make self-knowledge special can be explained with this basic idea. The assumption that the production of a first-order mental state and a second-order belief about the state go hand in hand has surprising explanatory power. Moreover, there are at least no obvious reasons why the assumption should be ruled out. The upshot will be a view that we should take seriously as a contender for an explanation of self-knowledge. I will not be able to conclusively show that it is the best explanation, but I argue that it is one worth thinking about. The thesis is structured in three parts. The first part focuses on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and the transparency idea. These chapters serve as the setup for my later proposed view. Chapter 1 and 2 discuss what exactly we want to explain when we say that we aim to explain self-knowledge. I thereby provide an overview of the conceptual landscape of self-knowledge and argue that we should understand the peculiarity of self-knowledge in terms of features of belief and belief-formation. Moreover, I commit myself to the view that the peculiarity has something to do with our cognitive access to mental states and relate that to the goal of a unified account of self-knowledge. Chapter 3 discusses how we ought to understand the other qualification of my goal: a transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide an overview of transparency accounts in the literature and lay out the path to avoid common problems of transparency accounts. In the second part I propose the single process model of self-knowledge as a unified, transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide the core principles of the view and show how it explains the features of self-knowledge I aim to explain. Chapter 4 focuses on attitudes, both propositional and non-propositional. Chapter 5 expands the view to phenomenal states, such as being in pain. The third part connects the epistemological discussion of the single process model to research on cognition. Chapter 6 proposes a cognitive story of predictive processing that is compatible with the single process model. I thereby discuss the plausibility of the predictive processing idea and its empirical support. I provide a predictive processing story of self-knowledge that fits with the single process model of self-knowledge. In chapter 7 I discuss extended mental states. Clark & Chalmers propose that at least some mental states, such as beliefs, can be extended to external devices. Given that my aim is a unified account, I ought to say something about knowledge of these extended beliefs. I argue that they cannot be known by the same processes as non-extended mental states because beliefs about extended beliefs show different features than beliefs about our non-extended states that we formed by introspection. Hence, even if my view cannot account for them this is not a problem, because they are not formed by genuine introspection. Instead, we come to know extended mental states by a distinct process that we might call extended introspection. Finally, chapter 8 provides a brief conclusion of the thesis for and points out some placed that require further development. The account is promising as an explanation of self-belief and self-knowledge, but whether it is correct also depends on future research outside the scope of philosophy. (shrink)

Drawing on notions of alienation, reification and rationalization in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer explored the phenomenon of reason as such concerning the subject and the species, and diagnosed the pathologies of occidental societies. Reason provides the means for a vulnerable being to subordinate nature and serve its desire for self-preservation. However, this reason is instrumental since it objectifies the world and reifies other beings in order to render them manipulable. It is a subjective reason because (...) it promotes the subject's own ends and aims at the subject's survival at the expense of the individual's inner world of unconscious desires and instincts and the reconciliation of human beings with the external world. The myth of Ulysses is magnificantly interpreted by Horkheimer and Adorno along such anthropological lines. As I see it, this anthropology inexorably connects the advent of civilization with the reifying power of reason from the start. Against the early Frankfurt School anthropological explanation of reason, I defend the distinction between communicative and strategic rationality that presupposes a different anthropology from the Freudian one that informed the Dialectic of Enlightenment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Reference:Theory and Didactics between Language and LiteratureSvend Erik Larsen (bio)Semiotics of Self-ReferenceLiterary metafiction constitutes the extreme case of self-referential texts. Therefore we can either discard it as generally irrelevant for the understanding of the cultural functions of texts, or use it as a point of departure for the formulation of both general and basic aspects of such functions. The position taken in this essay will opt (...) for the last possibility, although I know full well that already the term "metafiction" itself inevitably triggers a variety of skeptical reactions. Does it not just refer to some author's self-centered ruminations in the ivory tower? Or a topic for the nerds of literary studies with a taste for theoretical acrobatics? If so, in both cases following metafictional inclinations results in complete isolation from both the context of literature and its readers.However, one may also adopt the opposite position. The metafictional features of literature constitute one of the means by which literature reaches out to its context and also engages its readers. And critical endeavors are not necessarily devoid of anything but their own concepts. They may instead pave the way for methodological and didactic considerations that ultimately make difficult literature more accessible as a cultural phenomenon. Rather than dwelling upon subtle theoretical differences in the definition of what metafiction is, I will therefore engage in a methodological approach: what kind of questions can we put to the texts, and what kind of answers can we reasonably come up with when using metafiction in a methodological and didactic framework?I shall begin by proposing a set of definitions broader than metafiction that will allow me to zoom in on it as a relevant methodological concept that opens for didactic reflections. The notion of metalevel will constitute my starting point. In its broadest sense, a metalevel indicates a position outside a given field of objects or meanings and in relation to it. But rather than relating [End Page 13] to the content of the field in question, the metalevel is supposed to serve as a platform enabling us to observe and evaluate basic principles and function of the field. This is the role of, for example, the theory of science or of epistemology in relation to the particular knowledge of various sciences. We may call it an epistemological metalevel.In a more restricted sense, a metalevel comprises a level in relation to a given sign system — rather than to a given field of objects — from which we can observe and evaluate the basic principles defining the function, range and validity of the sign system. This is the role of, for example, musicology in relationto the acoustic arts, art criticism in relation to the visual arts, medicine in relation to bodily symptoms. We may call it an inter-semiotic metalevel.Finally, in its most restricted sense, a metalevel points toward a level inside a given sign system from which we can refer to this sign system itself,but not in relation to a given field of objects or in relation to another sign system. We may call this level an intra-semiotic metalevel. In this context, language is a unique system, which in this capacity shapes literature as a particular linguistic phenomenon. Only inside the semiotic system of language can the intra-semiotic metalevel have two different functions:The first function is as a science of language, linguistics, which is itself a verbal sign system. In verbal scientific descriptions and arguments we may scrutinize the natural or everyday language as a medium, that is, its basic linguistic structures and principles, without taking into consideration its content, which it may share with other media. Texts and pictures may refer to the same phenomenon even if such references do not overlap completely. All other sciences differ from linguistics in this respect, because they cannot deal scientifically with their non-verbal objects through the same non-verbal medium as that which makes up the object, but need the support of a linguistic metalevel or at least of signs that are linguistically anchored. Even mathematics or other strictly formal sign systems are based on natural languages. We may refer to... (shrink)

This article argues that Hobbes can be considered Machiavellian, although not in the usual meaning of the term (a meaning to which Machiavelli himself did not adhere), that is the reduction of politics to the recourse to force and deceit. Hobbes’ Machiavellism is not to be found only where it would be expected (political realism, the need to use force and trickery) but also where it is not usually sought: in recognizing that the sovereign has to take his people into (...) account and to act in their favour, if only for self-serving reasons. (shrink)

'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that (...) modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics. (shrink)

In this paper, Sarah Stitzlein considers the consequences of honesty on our democracy, especially for citizens' ability to engage in civic inquiry together as they face shared problems. Honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy; it develops trust and fosters the sorts of relationships among citizens that enable civic dialogue and reasoning. Post-truth attitudes and truth decay pose serious obstacles to good civic reasoning as citizens struggle to draw clear distinctions between fact and opinion, weigh personal (...) beliefs and emotions over facts, and increasingly distrust traditionally respected sources of information. Stitzlein employs a Deweyan pragmatist account of truth and a distinctly social account of democracy to build a case for foregrounding honesty in the development of citizens. She describes how schools can employ communities of inquiry to cultivate habits of honesty within citizenship education. She explains how a better democracy — one grounded in a wider understanding of social life and relationships — might head off the temptation to be dishonest for self-serving reasons, focusing on how dishonesty jeopardizes our relationships to each other as citizens and our ability to engage in civic reasoning together to fulfill shared goals. (shrink)

Respect and self-respect are the cornerstone motivations in Kantian moral psychology. But “respect” is an ambiguous term. As Stephen Darwall has argued, sometimes respect refers to a constraint on practical reason, but at other times it refers to a person-directed pro-attitude. In this article, I argue that this distinction is a problem regarding self-respect since self-respect, in the latter sense, lacks warrant. Furthermore, I discuss Nietzsche’s conception of “self-reverence,” which in some ways serves as a replacement (...) for Kantian self-respect in the pro-attitude sense. I argue that, in Nietzsche’s view, the value that a person anticipates and aspires to realize in the future warrants self-reverence, even in cases where the person cannot fully articulate this value. This kind of self-directed value is what Nietzsche means when he claims in Beyond Good and Evil §287, “The noble soul has reverence for itself.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.2 (2001) 85-97 [Access article in PDF] Reading's Reason Iain Morland [W]e must first of all recognize [...] how modes of reasoning that were once necessary can spring out of particular situations and be put to new tasks. —Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural Introduction: Reading after Reason? Reading is unreasonable. If, as Theodor Adorno has contended, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, then surely (...) reading—whether of poetry, philosophy, or newsprint—is doubly obscene ["Cultural Criticism" 34]. For Adorno, such barbarism means inattentiveness to barbaric historical truths; it is the misuse of rhetorical reflexivity for the perpetuation, rather than the critique, of social conditions. In other words: to write poetry after Auschwitz is to reproduce, and thereby implicitly condone, a contradictory society within which lyric verse and mass murder are coexistent. By extension, reading—as a pastime within the culture industry—appears to achieve nothing but the expression of such cultural reification. Reading is, as Adorno has written of criticism, "self-satisfied contemplation" in the face of systematized dissatisfaction ["Cultural Criticism" 34]. The Enlightenment had characterized reading as a process of educational reasoning, a dialogue with professional intellectuals about progress and truth. Although this idea carries a rather didactic undertone, as Michel de Certeau has pointed out ["Reading" 166-67], its representation of the book as a mobile repository of thought and criticism seems reasonable enough. Yet, in the face of such barbarism as Auschwitz, the practice of reading appears shamefully futile—a blindfolded refusal of historical truth, rather than an informed response to its implications.Reading is not alone in its unreasonableness: reason too has become unreasonable, Max Horkheimer has argued in Eclipse of Reason. Consequently, Horkheimer proposes that the "denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render" [187]. Objective reason, Horkheimer suggests, has been eclipsed by its insipid, subjective counterpart, rationality. Rationality defines what is reasonable as what is useful; it does not seek truth as an end in itself. Reason has thus become merely a mental tool with which one can make effective plans in neocapitalist society. In short, rationality privileges means over ends. This subjective pastiche of reason, like poetry after Auschwitz, dumbly reiterates the status quo through devising ever more efficient procedures by which tasks may be carried out. It does not criticize the objective ends that are actually furthered by such procedures. Similarly, poetry (for example, that of James Fenton) invents ornate and affective representations of modern barbarism without removing the conditions within which barbarism thrives. In this regard, reading is [End Page 85] the negative counterpart of Adorno's "dialectical critic of culture," who "both participate[s] in culture and [does] not participate" ["Cultural Criticism" 33]: reading seems to be uncritical for the same reasons that a cultural commentator is critical.The valorization of procedure, of means over ends, is why the practice of reading seems complacently to ignore the demands of society and culture. Insofar as rationality considers reasonable only those procedures that have instant, efficient results, reading remains in essence unreasonable. Reading is not a procedure whereby certain tasks may be accomplished—whether ethical demands for political change, or capitalist invitations to unlimited consumerism. Put differently, although reading has consequences, there is no procedural connection between the practice of reading and its consequences. Consider the case of ethical demands: reading may certainly serve as a preparation or grounding for future political activity. However, such preparatory reading is inevitably superseded by the activity that it incites. It is not itself a procedure for political change, but simply part of the means to a political end. This situation is mirrored in the opposite case, that of capitalist enticement: reading interrupts bookselling. A consumer's reading time extends indeterminably beyond the moment of expenditure, unlike their usage of a product with a predetermined life span.Likewise, when I wrote in the opening paragraph that it "seems reasonable enough" that a book ought to be a repository of thought and criticism, I too have employed reason in merely a rational sense. I have defined the process of reading a book as reasonable only if... (shrink)

This paper serves both as a discussion of Henry’s (Ethical Theory Moral Practice, 5:255–270, 2002) interpretation of Aristotle on the possibility of akrasia – knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway – and an indication of the importance of desire in Aristotle’s account of moral reasoning. As I will explain, Henry’s interpretation is advantageous for the reason that it makes clear how Aristotle could have made good sense of genuine akrasia, a phenomenon that we seem to observe in (...) the real world, while maintaining non-trivial distinctions between temperance (sôphrosunê), self-indulgence (akolasia), self-control (enkrateia) and akrasia. There are, however, some interpretive challenges that follow from Henry’s account and this paper is intended to explain and resolve those. (shrink)

Background Physicians face competing values of truth-telling and beneficence when deception may be employed in patient care. The purposes of this study were to assess resident physicians' attitudes towards lying, explore lie types and reported reasons for lying. Method After obtaining institutional review board review and receiving exempt status, posts written by Loma Linda University resident physicians in response to forum questions in required online courses were collected from 2002 to 2007. Responses were blinded and manually coded by two investigators (...) using NVivo software. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data were performed with links to various attributes. A 95% binomial proportion CI was used to analyse the attribute data. Results The study found that the majority of residents would disclose the truth about medical errors. Similarly, many residents would disclose the truth regarding unanticipated events, especially if the error was serious enough to result in a malpractice suit. However, many residents would not reveal a near miss event because they believe it has no impact on patient health. Some residents would deceive the insurance company for additional patient benefits. Of those willing to lie, only a small group gave self-serving reasons. Conclusions This study demonstrates that the ethical issues related to deception that trouble attending physicians also exist at the resident physician level. Residents primarily lie for altruistic reasons and rarely for egoistic or self-serving purposes that may or may not result in harm to patients, insurance companies and/or physicians themselves. (shrink)

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict— what I call a conflict’s evaluative ‘structure’—as grounds for a rational way of responding to that (...) conflict. Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of ‘self-governance’. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society’s deliberating over the question, ‘What kind of society should we be?’ In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one. (shrink)

Self‐sacrifice does not necessarily involve conflict between morality and self‐interest, and when making sacrifices we do not necessarily harm our self‐interest. While people may reasonably care about their own well‐being, a person's well‐being is not, for that person, a source of value or reasons for action. People act for reasons, i.e. for what appears to them to be adequate reasons, regardless of whether or not they serve their well‐being. Sometimes, the reasons that appear to be conclusive, even (...) when conforming with them affects the agent adversely, are moral reasons. (shrink)

Liberalism is a distinctively modern political conception. Only in modern times do we find, as the object of both systematic reflection and widespread allegiance and institutionalization, the idea that the principles of political association, being coercive, should be justifiable to all whom they are to bind. And so only here do we find the idea that these principles should rest, so far as possible, on a core, minimal morality which reasonable people can share, given their expectably divergent religious convictions and (...) conceptions of the meaning of life. No longer does it seem evident—as it did, let us say, before the seventeenth century—that the aim of political association must be to bring man into harmony with God's purposes or to serve some comprehensive vision of the good life. The causes of this transformation are various, and not all of them lie at the level of moral principle. But a change in moral consciousness has certainly been one of the factors involved. As Hegel observed, modern culture is inherently a reflective one: notions of principle are essential to our self-understanding and thus to the stability of the social forms in which we participate. Modern culture has no room for a dichotomy between “in principle” and “in practice.” It is worth determining, then, what new moral conceptions have been responsible for the emergence of modern liberalism. Not only will we thereby better understand how we have become who we are, we will also have a surer grasp of the principles that sustain our political life. (shrink)

In Passion and reason, acclaimed social psychologist Richard Lazarus and co-author Bernice Lazarus attempt a project they say is unique. Their goal is to provide a popular account of the emotions for the lay reader which is comprehensive, does not over-simplify, and can serve as a guide to greater self-knowledge and understanding. The book is intended to strike a balance between the naive `formulaic genre' of typical self-help books on the subject, while at the same time avoiding the (...) complexity and technical jargon typical of academic treatises. The theoretical basis of the book is Lazarus's own work on emotion, of which Emotion and adaptation (Lazarus, 1991) is the most recent and thorough expression... (shrink)

This book is intended to serve as an introduction to the thought of James V. Schall, arguably one of the best, perhaps even the only, authentically Thomistic political scientist writing today. In contrast to main currents in contemporary Thomism, Schall remains conversant with the great tradition of political philosophy and therefore appreciates the complex and relatively imprecise nature of political reflection. In this book, the distinguished theorist addresses a wide range of subjects, including the question of overpopulation, the thought of (...) Charles McCoy and Leo Strauss, the role of Christianity in political philosophy, and the challenges that the democratic project pose to human beings' perception of the truth. As a meditation on practical and theoretical political questions, self-consciously proceeding from the perspectives of both nature and grace, the book provides a unique picture of what a genuine Thomistic political science might look like. (shrink)

In Proclus dianoia is the Soul's thinking activity, through which it makes itself into a divided image of Nous. This dissertation examines various aspects of Procline dianoia. Dianoia's thoughts are logoi, because in the Greek philosophical tradition, logos came to mean a division of a prior unity . Proclus' theory of dianoia rejects induction, and is a conscious development of Plato's theory of anamnesis , because induction is unable to yield a true universal . The source of Soul's logoi is (...) not a pre-natal vision of reality, but rather its ontological dependence on Nous. The Soul's ousia is a fullness of logoi which are images of the eide in Nous. The Soul projects these multiple oudiodeis logoi into even greater multiplicity. In so doing, Soul makes itself into the image of Nous, and the paradigm of Body. For this reason all dianoia is metaphorical, because it either understands Nous through the image which itself is, or understands Body through itself as paradigm . Dianoia, therefore, has two parts. Dialectic is the Soul's grasp of Nous through itself as image, and mathematics is the Soul's grasp of Body through itself as paradigm . The Soul's attention to Body may cause it to cease its dianoetic activity, because it takes on Body's passivity. Philosophical discussion may rescue such a fallen soul, turning it back towards itself, away from the body. In Procline terms, philosophy restores the Soul's autokinesis, or self-motion . The particular Nous of which Soul is an image, and which dianoia divides, is the Nous which serves as a measure for Soul's dividing activity. And because Time is the measure of the Soul's motion, this particular Nous is the monad of Time . Dianoia has as its aim to leave behind all divided thinking, and to be content with the unity of Nous, and the simplicity of the One. This is accomplished through that in the Soul which is higher than dianoia, the nous of the Soul, and its own one. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the important role which an obligation to provide reasons can play in avoiding some of the systematic difficulties encountered in the theory of rational social choice. The paper builds on some of the insights offered by theories of structure-induced equilibrium. It argues that the obligation to provide reasons for certain choices, reasons which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the (...) space of possible choices "concept-sensitive" in a very useful way. Concept-sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space so that some of the difficulties for achieving an equilibrium in social choice, difficulties which arise out of an excess of rational doing, are avoided. The resulting equilibrium is path dependent, of course, but because it is dependent on a choice path which "makes sense" (or is ordered by thought precisely because it is concept-sensitive), it is not the sort of arbitrary path dependent social choice which was of such concern to Kenneth Arrow in his original Nobel prize winning work. The paper illustrates its points with examples taken from the law. The law is a method of making social choices which emphasizes (in a very self-conscious way, and one which has no parallel either in politics or the market) the justificatory significance of the obligation to give publicly accountable reasons which attend to those issues arising in an ordered way out of a highly structured adjudicative process. Thus, the paper has as one of its ambitions the bringing together of two accounts of rational decision-making which, to this point at least, have not had much contact, namely, the theory of rational social choice and the theory of legal reasoning. (shrink)

Projection does not reliably serve cognition; it all too often contributes to failures of knowledge. Our projecting not only imaginatively misrepresents the world by attributing a feature of ourself to it. In doing so it can misrepresent us as lacking that feature. It is an act of the imagination which re-locates unwanted attributes into a motivated misrepresentation which distorts our grasp of reality and of ourselves. The imaginative act itself is not consciously intended so that we take the resulting picture (...) at face value, despite the distortion. Without a strong reason to question this misperception the projection remains undetected and the misrepresentation affects our relations to others. Projection serving motivated self-deception thus evades correction. Realistic self-knowledge becomes possible through psychoanalysis when the patient's projections are received by the analyst as communications impinging on her capacity for sympathy. I show how the psychology of sympathy we find in Hume and Smith provides a philosophical frame of reference for understanding this interaction between sympathy and projection. I bring sympathy together with contemporary Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to explain how psychoanalytic interpretation engages with this interaction to reduce the effects of projection and enable a self-knowledge grounded in the subject's own experience of herself. (shrink)

Inference is elementary and ubiquitous: Cognition always goes beyond the data. Thinking—including problem solving, decision making, judgement, planning, and argumentation—is here defined as the deliberate application and coordination of one's inferences to serve one's purposes. Reasoning, in turn, is epistemologically self-constrained thinking in which the application and coordination of inferences is guided by a metacognitive commitment to what are deemed to be justifiable inferential norms. The construction of rationality, in this view, involves increasing consciousness and control of logical (...) and other inferences. This metacognitive conception of rationality begins with logic rather than ending with it, and allows for developmental progress without positing a state of maturity. (shrink)

‘The Debauched Commons: A Dark Parable’ summarizes issues regarding intellectual property rights and immaterial culture through a nuanced reading of how First Nations Peoples worldwide have been forced by forms of neoliberal-capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons to ring-fence and/or commodify their lived traditions, in many cases dating back 100,000 years and clearly predating any and all Western (First World) concepts of ownership. The intention of the structuralist-inspired reading of this enforced defensive position is to emphasize and clarify issues concerning (...) prior art and moral rights, two of the most ambiguous and gamed elements of copyright and patent law. Drawing upon the international context of the _Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples_ (2007) and the _Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Heritage_ (2003), this essay will focus, in part, on the travails of Aboriginals in Australia as representative of First Peoples worldwide and their long-exploited and long-expropriated traditions, inclusive of land, but foremost _lived knowledge_, but also their often compromised position _vis-à-vis_ various Australian state and Commonwealth legislation concerning recognition of their copyright, moral rights, and intellectual property rights. In this complex dance between tradition, heritage, and law, the so-called public domain often also becomes a de facto warehouse for the eventual conversion of intangible rights to collectively held and stored cultural property, which is then leveraged and/or converted to cultural capital by both public institutions and private companies. The primary premise of the analytic to be applied is that commodification of knowledge is more or less co-equal to the digitization of culture and the regimes of expropriation and/or outright theft associated with platform cultures. Platform culture, in turn, implicates otherwise benign, or apparently benign institutions (for example, academia and the art world) claiming to advance understanding and resolution of the twin nemeses of post-contemporary cultural politics—diversity and justice. The subtle machinations of what has come to be called the art-academic industrial complex will thus be analyzed for implicit and explicit practices that are reducible to the appropriation of native rites and rights, and laws and lores, for self-serving reasons inclusive of radical-chic posturing and politically correct tokenism. (shrink)

Three of the readings sections in this anthology treat specifically ethical problems: a) Determinism, Freedom, and Responsibility, b) Responsibility, Blame, and Punishment, and c) Self-love and the Claims of Morality. Related material is treated in the section on Reason and Religious Faith. A particularly well-balanced section on modern versions of the mind-body problem is contained in a section entitled Mind and Its Place in Nature. Finally, in the section on Human Knowledge: Its Grounds and Limits, the focus is on (...) the lines that are drawn between rationalism and empiricism. The selections generally achieve their objective of being intensive rather than representative. It is difficult to say what type of college course this anthology could best serve as a text for, but its incorporation of a good deal of quite recent material make it valuable as an ancillary text in the areas mentioned.—E. A. R. (shrink)