A new resolution of the mind-body problem that reconciles materialism and idealism.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Weightiest Knowledge Truth and its Incorporation Knowledge and Self‐Knowledge.

Incorporated groups include businesses, universities, churches and the like. Organized to act as single centers of agency, they also routinely satisfy the three conditions that make an agent fit to be held responsible: they face significant choices, can recognize the relative value of different options, and are able to choose in sensitivity to such values. But is it redundant to hold a corporate agent responsible for something, when certain members are also held responsible for the individual parts they play? No (...) it is not, for it is often possible for a corporate entity to be fully fit to be held responsible, when this is not true of the individual members; they may be able to make excuses that are not available at the corporate level. Does the case made for corporate responsibility extend to unincorporated collectivities like nations or religions? Not strictly but it does explain why it may be sensible to treat those collectivities as if they had corporate responsibility in certain domains. (shrink)

The Herald of Free Enterprise, a ferry operating in the English Channel, sank on March 6, 1987, drowning nearly two hundred people. The official inquiry found that the company running the ferry was extremely sloppy, with poor routines of checking and management. “From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness.”1 But the courts did not penalize anyone in what might seem to be an appropriate measure, failing to identify individuals in the company or on (...) the ship itself who were seriously enough at fault. As one commentator put it, “The primary requirement of finding an individual who was liable . . . stood in the way of attaching any significance to the organizational sloppiness that had been found by the official inquiry.”2 In a case like this it can make good sense to hold that while the individuals involved may not bear a high degree of personal responsibility, together as a corporate enterprise they should carry full responsibility for what occurred. Although the members may not fully satisfy the conditions for being held personally responsible—although there are mitigating circumstances that excuse them in some mea-. (shrink)

Many scholars believe that traditional courses in ethics (especially business ethics) have not been successful in making students ethical. The best that educators can hope is that these courses will help build ethical awareness. It is thus apparent that the apparatus used to teach ethics does not inspire the intellectual leap needed between the abstract awareness of ethical issues to the functional changes in behavior and decision-making. This paper posits that the creative arts, including literature, poetry, music, pictorial art, and (...) film, may provide the tools to help bridge that gap. The creative arts can profoundly impact individuals and cause social change by gradually implanting values and changing beliefs. They can instill morals by using stories, sounds, and images and arouse the passion needed to change behaviors. (shrink)

My purpose here is to examine the question of how the law can be incorporated within morality and how the existence of the law can impinge on our moral rights and duties, a question (or questions) which is a central aspect of the broad question of the relation between law and morality. My conclusions cast doubts on the incorporation thesis, that is, the view that moral principles can become part of the law of the land by incorporation.

Increasingly there are calls for climate services to be “co-produced” with users, taking into account not only the basic information needs of users but also their value systems and decision contexts. What does this mean in practice? One way that user values can be incorporated into climate services is in the management of inductive risk. This involves understanding which errors in climate service products would have particularly negative consequences from the users’ perspective (e.g., underestimating rather than overestimating the change in (...) an impact variable) and then prioritizing the avoidance of those errors. This essay shows how inductive risk could be managed in climate services in ways that serve user values and argues that there are both ethical and practical reasons in favor of doing so. (shrink)

Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today’s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, (...) or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today’s and tomorrow’s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens’ visions of a future 30–40 years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes. (shrink)

Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today’s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, (...) or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org ), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today’s and tomorrow’s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens’ visions of a future 30–40 years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes. (shrink)

This article reviews the reasons scholars hold that driverless cars and many other AI equipped machines must be able to make ethical decisions, and the difficulties this approach faces. It then shows that cars have no moral agency, and that the term ‘autonomous’, commonly applied to these machines, is misleading, and leads to invalid conclusions about the ways these machines can be kept ethical. The article’s most important claim is that a significant part of the challenge posed by AI-equipped machines (...) can be addressed by the kind of ethical choices made by human beings for millennia. Ergo, there is little need to teach machines ethics even if this could be done in the first place. Finally, the article points out that it is a grievous error to draw on extreme outlier scenarios—such as the Trolley narratives—as a basis for conceptualizing the ethical issues at hand. (shrink)

Kant held that “an incentive can determine the will [Willkür] to action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim”, a view dubbed the “Incorporation Thesis” by Henry Allison (hereafter, “IT”). Although many see IT as basic to Kant’s views on agency, it also seems irreconcilable with the possibility of a kind of weakness, the kind exhibited by a person who acts on incentives that run contrary to principles she holds dear. The problem is this: (...) According to IT, if an incentive determines the will of the weak person when she acts contrary to her principles, then it must be the case that she incorporated that incentive into her maxim. But that in turn means that she has made it her principle to act on the wayward incentive, and so is not, after all, exhibiting weakness in failing to follow her own principles, but at best simply dropping one principle in favor of another. So either the weak person does not incorporate the wayward incentive into her maxim and IT is false, or she does incorporate it and weakness is impossible. (shrink)

We begin by introducing our readers to the Extended Mind Thesis and briefly discuss a series of arguments in its favour. We continue by showing of such a theory can be resisted and go on to demonstrate that a more conservative account of cognition can be developed. We acknowledge a stalemate between these two different accounts of cognition and notice a couple of issues that we argue have prevented further progress in the field. To overcome the stalemate, we propose to (...) focus on the ethical implications of these theories. We link work conducted on the Extended Mind Thesis with contemporary transhumanist research and claim that extended may be ethically preferred over embedded because it is a more progressive and inclusive theory. (shrink)

This article presents a response to Néron and Norman’s contention that the language of citizenship is helpful in thinking about the political dimensions of corporate responsibilities. We argue that Néron and Norman’s main conclusions are valid but offer an extension of their analysis to incorporate extant streams of literature dealing with the political role of the corporation. We also propose that the perspective on citizenship adopted by Néron and Norman is rather narrow, andtherefore provide some alternative ways in which corporations (...) and citizenship might be brought together. We conclude by suggesting that, rather than simply applying the concept of citizenship to corporations, we now need to go further in exploring how corporations might play an active role in reconfiguring the whole notion of citizenship itself. (shrink)

"In this paper, I explore the ways that phenomenological concepts like intercorporeality and mutual incorporation offer new tools in trying to make sense of human experiences via mediating systems. In particular, I think about how the COVID-19 pandemic hastened a large population into mediated interactions, and what is lost, perhaps contingently or perhaps intrinsically, when human experiences are mediated in this way. I look to research in presence, skillful interaction, and enactive social cognition to argue that there remains something (...) ineffable or at least extremely hard to pin down about intercorporeality, and embodied togetherness has not yet been replicated in the mediating systems we currently embrace. Keywords: intercorporeality, participatory sense-making, mediating technologies, presence. ". (shrink)

What is the cognitive value of the concept of truth? What epistemic difference does the concept of truth make to those who grasp it? This paper employs a new perspective for thinking about the concept of truth and recent debates concerning it, organized around the question of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. The paper aims to defend a substantively correct and dialectically optimal account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. This perspective is employed in (...) understanding the critical discussion around what Hartry Field has called “the incorporation model” for extending a deflationary view of truth to foreign sentences. Field's original intentions in discussing the incorporation model were to defend the deflationary view from some counterintuitive consequences concerning the understanding of truth attributions to foreign sentences. However, more recently, philosophers unencumbered by deflationary commitments have taken over the incorporation model for their own inflationary purposes. In particular, and in my terms, these philosophers can be understood as making what I argue is the ultimately too radical suggestion that the cognitive value of the concept of truth is to allow the incorporation not only of the linguistically foreign, but also of the conceptually alien. I clarify this dialectic en route to explaining and arguing for the cognitive inflationary view, according to which the cognitive value of the concept of truth is is to make possible the proprietary kind and quality of knowledge allowed by reflective clarity over the concepts and thoughts that one already has. (shrink)

The Incorporated Self demonstrates that although embodiment has long been a central concern of the theoretical humanities, its potential to alter epistemology and open up new areas of dualistic inquiry has not been pursued far enough. This anthology collects the the works of scholars from a broad range of disciplines, each examining the nature of the body and the necessity of embodiment to the human experience -- for our self awareness, our sense of identity, and the workings of the mind.

In this paper we discuss whether the relation between formulas in the relating model can be directly introduced into the language of relating logic, and present some stances on that problem. Other questions in the vicinity, such as what kind of functor would be the incorporated relation, or whether the direct incorporation of the relation into the language of relating logic is really needed, will also be addressed.

This chapter contains sections titled: Arguments for Divine Incorporeality Arguments Against Divine Incorporeality The Immanence of God Works cited.

This essay considers the relationship between literature and film through a reading of Isabel Coixet's film My Life Without Me. The first half of the essay explores how two recent theorisations of the term incorporation allow us to read, on the one hand, the film's relationship to Nanci Kincaid's short story 'Pretending the Bed is a Raft' in particular and to literature in general and, on the other, the narrative consequences of the protagonist Ann's decision to keep her terminal (...) illness a secret. In the first instance, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's definition of incorporation in Remediation helps explain how the film does not adapt the short story upon which it is supposedly based, but in fact only repurposes it. Literary aspects of the film's mise-en-scène, plot and imagery, however, signal My Life Without Me' s incorporation of literature. In the second instance, the essay explores how Jacques Derrida's theory of incorporation's role in mourning helps the viewer understand the film's plot development out of Ann's secret. In the second half of the paper, Leo Bersani's idea of impersonal intimacy is developed into a theory of literature. The conclusion posits that impersonal intimacy defines the literary in contrast to cinema's tendency to full disclosure. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a Kantian moral psychology and use it to generate an analysis of the emotional attitude, love. At the heart of this moral psychology is a distinction between rational and subrational motives, and the thesis that interpersonal emotional attitudes like love are governed by a norm of respect. I show how an analysis of love that relies on this moral psychology—which I call “the incorporation conception” of love—tightly fits with paradigmatic cases of romantic love, reveals (...) both the continuities and differences between romantic and other forms of love, and also explicates our ambivalence about certain cases. Finally, I argue that this analysis, although it sees love as essentially a bundle of volitions, has the resources to respond to both David Velleman’s and Niko Kolodny’s critiques of volition-based analyses of love. Taken as a whole, the discussion provides an argument for both this analysis of love and the moral psychology it presupposes. (shrink)

Most current statistical natural language processing models use only local features so as to permit dynamic programming in inference, but this makes them unable to fully account for the long distance structure that is prevalent in language use. We show how to solve this dilemma with Gibbs sam- pling, a simple Monte Carlo method used to perform approximate inference in factored probabilistic models. By using simulated annealing in place of Viterbi decoding in sequence models such as HMMs, CMMs, and CRFs, (...) it is possible to incorporate non-local structure while preserving tractable inference. We use this technique to augment an existing CRF-based information extraction system with long-distance dependency models, enforcing label consistency and extraction template consistency constraints. This technique results in an error reduction of up to 9% over state-of-the-art systems on two established information extraction tasks. (shrink)

Ethics is central to science and engineering. Young engineers need to be grounded in how corporate social responsibility principles can be applied to engineering organizations to better serve the broader community. This is crucial in times of climate change and ecological challenges where the vulnerable can be impacted by engineering activities. Taking a global perspective in ethics education will help ensure that scientists and engineers can make a more substantial contribution to development throughout the world. This paper presents the importance (...) of incorporating the global and cross culture components in the ethic education. The authors bring up a question to educators on ethics education in science and engineering in the globalized world, and its importance, necessity, and impendency. The paper presents several methods for discussion that can be used to identify the differences in ethics standards and practices in different countries; enhance the student’s knowledge of ethics in a global arena. (shrink)

Contrasting two standard models of corporate responsibility—the so-called “collectivist” and “individualist” model—this essay proposes a third option, namely, a discursive conception of responsibility and examines whether and how this conception can be applied to the corporate level. It does so by taking a careful look at one of the preconditions of individual discursive responsibility, i.e. discursive practical reason, and discussing how corporate agents can meet this precondition. Building on this new concept, the essay also offers a novel approach to justifying (...) corporate responsibility by referring to an argument advanced by Rainer Forst stating that a fundamental human right to justification is the normative core of any kind of responsibility and combining it, in a second step, with an argument recently proposed by Philip Pettit and Christian List showing the impossibility of forming consistent group attitudes and beliefs as a function of the attitudes and beliefs of individual group members. Finally, this essay outlines certain preliminary conclusions about the incorporation of responsibility in a corporate context. (shrink)

Part of what makes working with modals such a tricky business is that apparent modal forms are deployed in all sorts of ways in language. In this paper I explore an interesting example of an apparent modal—the Blofeld case—which was introduced by Gilles and von Fintel as part of their argument against context of assessment accounts of epistemic modals. I argue that the example is subtle, and that the apparent modal may not be an epistemic modal at all—it could be (...) a scalar modifier that merges or “incorporates” with the matrix verb, weakening the meaning of the matrix verb. If apparent modals are used as scalar modifiers and are subject to movement and incorporation, then the surface language of modality may be throwing us some crafty head fakes. Caution is advised. (shrink)

As has been noted by Alvin Goldman, there are some very interesting similarities between his Veritistic Social Epistemology (VSE) and Sandra Harding's Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST). In the present paper, it is argued that these similarities are so significant as to motivate an incorporation of FST into VSE, considering that (i) a substantial common ground can be found; (ii) the claims that go beyond this common ground are logically compatible; and (Hi) the generality of VSE not only does justice (...) to the inclusive ambition of FST, but even solves a well-discussed problem for the latter. (shrink)

Incorporating patients' spiritual beliefs into health care decision making is essential for ethically good care. Gadow's three-level ethical framework of ethical immediacy, ethical universalism, and relational narrative is presented as a tool for enhancing nurses' ability to explore and deepen understandings of patients' spiritual beliefs, given that these and their experiences are often expressed in a language that seems foreign to nurses. The demographic and cultural shifts that lead to the necessity to understand patients who use principles and metaphors that, (...) while commonly understood within their spiritual tradition, may seem incomprehensible to outsiders, are here set in the Canadian context. A case study on palliative sedation is used to illustrate how the ethical framework can help to reveal the spiritual certainties, principles and narratives patients bring to their health care experiences. (shrink)

The population of most non-dominant ethnic groups in the USA is growing dramatically. Faculty members are challenged to develop curricula that adequately prepare our future nurses. An increased focus on clinical ethics has resulted from the use of sophisticated technology, changes in health care financing, an increasing elderly population and the shift of care from inpatient to outpatient settings. Nurses frequently face situations demanding resolution of ethical dilemmas involving cultural differences. Nursing curricula must include content on both ethics and cultural (...) sensitivity. Active student participation is an important element providing a foundation for ethical practice. A proposed educational format was introduced with graduating baccalaureate students. In a pilot study, curricular content on cultural sensitivity and ethical practice was taught in separate modules. Students were then asked to identify and problem solve an ethical dilemma involving patients and professional caregivers from vastly different cultures. Course faculty members provided discussion questions to guide the students' thinking. (shrink)

As has been noted by Alvin Goldman, there are some very interesting similarities between his Veritistic Social Epistemology (VSE) and Sandra Harding's Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST). In the present paper, it is argued that these similarities are so significant as to motivate an incorporation of FST into VSE, considering that (i) a substantial common ground can be found; (ii) the claims that go beyond this common ground are logically compatible; and (iii) the generality of VSE not only does justice (...) to the inclusive ambition of FST, but even solves a well-discussed problem for the latter. (shrink)

Incorporation mystique et subjectivité féminine d’après le Livre d’Angèle de Foligno. Comment qualifier, dans le cadre d’une histoire de la subjectivité, la piété compassionnelle dont témoigne Angèle de Foligno († 1309) dans le Mémorial et les Instructions? En choisissant trois motifs qui déclinent la figure de l’incorporation mystique (dévotions à l’eucharistie, aux plaies du Christ et aux instruments de la Passion), cette étude met au jour les origines monastiques d’une piété fusionnelle et affective, d’abord élaborée dans un environnement (...) spécifiquement masculin aux XIe-XIIe siècles, puis investie par la dévotion des mulieres religiosae (moniales, béguines, recluses ou tertiaires) à partir du XIIIe siècle. Placée dans une perspective de longue durée, la piété d’identification au Christ et à ses souffrances d’Angèle révèle ainsi une sensibilité religieuse aux référents mixtes, masculins et féminins, mais qui a été infléchie par la position sociale des femmes et leurs aspirations propres dans le champ de la piété. (shrink)

Incorporating patients' spiritual beliefs into health care decision making is essential for ethically good care. Gadow's three-level ethical framework of ethical immediacy, ethical universalism, and relational narrative is presented as a tool for enhancing nurses' ability to explore and deepen understandings of patients' spiritual beliefs, given that these and their experiences are often expressed in a language that seems foreign to nurses. The demographic and cultural shifts that lead to the necessity to understand patients who use principles and metaphors that, (...) while commonly understood within their spiritual tradition, may seem incomprehensible to outsiders, are here set in the Canadian context. A case study on palliative sedation is used to illustrate how the ethical framework can help to reveal the spiritual certainties, principles and narratives patients bring to their health care experiences. (shrink)

Construction grammar organizes its basic elements of description, its constructions, into networks that range from concrete, lexically-filled constructions to fully schematic ones, with several levels of partially schematic constructions in between. However, only few corpus studies with a constructionist background take this multi-level nature fully into account. In this paper, we argue that understanding language variation can be advanced considerably by systematically formulating and testing hypotheses at various levels in the constructional network. To illustrate the approach, we present a corpus (...) study of the Dutch naar-alternation. It is found that this alternation primarily functions at an intermediate level in the constructional network. (shrink)

For the past two decades, the issue of the body and essentialism has dominated feminist theory. In general, it is assumed that the body has been devalued and repressed by the Western metaphysical tradition. In this article, I make two claims to the contrary. First, as poststructuralist theory has tirelessly demonstrated, Western thought has continually tried to ground thought in some foundational substance, such as the body. Second, the most provocative, fruitful and radical aspects of recent feminism and poststructuralism concern (...) the event of incorporeality. What makes incorporeality such an urgent issue is its tie with anti-foundationalism. If there is not a direct or proper passage between what is and what is thought, then thinking can be considered as a force or event in its own right. By disrupting the traditional philosophical series that ties thought to some grounding body, thinkers as diverse as Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray and Foucault have opened the possibility of a theory of the incorporeal. (shrink)

The issue of the relationship between predictive processing (PP) and the free energy principle (FEP) remains a subject of debate and controversy within the research community. Many researchers have expressed doubts regarding the actual integration of PP with the FEP, questioning whether the FEP can truly contribute significantly to the mechanistic understanding of PP or even undermine such integration altogether. In this paper, I present an alternative perspective. I argue that, from the viewpoint of the constraint-based mechanisms approach, the FEP (...) imposes an important constraint, namely variational free energy, on the mechanistic architecture proposed by PP. According to the constraint-based mechanisms approach, high-level cognitive mechanisms are integral parts of extensive heterarchical networks that govern the physiology and behavior of agents. Consequently, mechanistic explanations of cognitive phenomena should incorporate constraints and flows of free energy as relevant components, given that the implemented constraints operate as long as free energy is available. Within this framework, I contend that the FEP provides a relevant constraint for explaining at least some biological cognitive mechanisms described in terms of Bayesian generative models that minimize prediction errors. (shrink)

This paper investigates the role of a pre-existing body-model that is an enabling constraint for the incorporation of objects into the body. This body-model is also a basis for the distinction between body extensions (e.g., in the case of tool-use) and incorporation (e.g., in the case of successful prosthesis use). It is argued that, in the case of incorporation, changes in the sense of body-ownership involve a reorganization of the body-model, whereas extension of the body with tools (...) does not involve changes in the sense of body-ownership. (shrink)

Although scars never disappear completely, in time most people will basically get used to them. In this paper I explore what it means to habituate to scars against the background of the phenomenological concept of incorporation. In phenomenology the body as Leib or corps vécu functions as a transcendental condition for world disclosure. Because of this transcendental reasoning, phenomenology prioritizes a form of embodied subjectivity that is virtually dis-embodied. Endowing meaning to one’s world through getting engaged in actions and (...) projects is most successful indeed when one’s body is “absent,” “transparent,” or, at least, if it is not in the center of one’s attention. This taken-for-granted nature can be disturbed by discomfort, disability, and disfigurement. Incorporation, so I explain, aims at maintaining or restoring the body’s taken-for-grantedness. My analysis of the case of a woman who successfully habituated to her mastectomy scar demonstrates, however, that habituation to a perceptible scar can only be understood partly in terms of incorporation. Next to a decrease of explicit attention for the scar and the discomfort it produces, the scar should also stop being a sign that refers to something else than itself. This is only possible, I argue, by taking the body’s materiality seriously, rather than it being wiped out as a result of transcendental reasoning. (shrink)

Businesses frequently exclude spiritual values, viewing such values as impositions that belong in business as much as a priest belongs at a bachelor party. Yet spirituality should not be viewed as impositions from without, but as inclusions from within. Spiritual values should be included in a company to the extent that these values are shared by the principals of a firm. Excluding spiritual values found in a “convergent consensus” runs contrary to freedom and liberty that Milton Friedman, among others, champions. (...) Furthermore, the exclusion of such values from a business threatens to alienate business persons from their moral integrity. By cultivating what I will call “the spiritual imagination,” businesses can facilitate fidelity between the convergent values of its principals, and the actions, policies, and culture of a company. (shrink)

We posit a model of emotion and nonverbal behavior (NVB) that incorporates a perspective of consciousness. We leverage an understanding of the neural pathways innervating NVB to describe the complexity of its neural architecture and the links between those pathways and mental states. We suggest that all NVB are activated by both cortical and subcortical structures, allowing for unconscious, coordinated movements across multiple channels as well as conscious, less coordinated movements; that mental states are associated with both cortical and subcortical (...) structures; and thus that NVB will occur in multiple channels, both unconsciously and consciously, and differ across time. We discuss the implications of this model for future theory and research. (shrink)

How should we understand the relation between corporate agency, corporate moral agency and corporate moral patienthood? For some time, corporations have been treated as increasingly ontologically and morally sophisticated in the literature. To explore the limits of this treatment, I start off by redeveloping and defending a reductio that historically has been aimed at accounts of corporate agency which entail that corporations count as moral patients. More specifically, I argue that standard agents are due a certain type of moral concern, (...) but corporate agents are not due that type of concern, so they are not agents of, at least, the standard type. Diagnosis: because corporations plausibly lack qualia, they are ‘zombie agents’ that mimic real agents. This explains why they are neither standard agents nor standard moral patients: they are not standard agents because they lack mental states, and because they lack experiences, they are, at best, morally notable rather than morally respectable. However, I then argue that we nevertheless have instrumental reasons to include them in our moral responsibility practices, both because that is what notability involves and bluffingly, and both when it comes to treating them as moral agents and as moral patients. Hence, we may treat corporations as part of our moral responsibility practices to a limited extent anyway. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of human–computer interactions when the computer can interpret and express a kind of human-like behavior, offering natural communication. A conceptual framework for incorporating emotions with rationality is proposed. A model of affective social interactions is described. The model utilizes the SAIBA framework, which distinguishes among several stages of processing of information. The SAIBA framework is extended, and a model is realized in human behavior detection, human behavior interpretation, intention planning, attention tracking behavior planning, and behavior (...) realization components. Two models of incorporating emotions with rationality into a virtual artifact are presented. The first one uses an implicit implementation of emotions. The second one has an explicit realization of a three-layered model of emotions, which is highly interconnected with other components of the system. Details of the model with implicit implementation of emotional behavior are shown as well as evaluation methodology and results. Discussions about the extended model of an agent are given in the final part of the paper. (shrink)