Presents an historical analysis of social contract theory by considering the works of prominent philosophers.

Human Dignity The mercurial concept of human dignity features in ethical, legal, and political discourse as a foundational commitment to human value or human status. The source of that value, or the nature of that status, are contested. The normative implications of the concept are also contested, and there are two partially, or even wholly, … Continue reading Human Dignity →.

Proposals to release genetically engineered organisms in the wild raise complex ethical issues related to their safe and equitable implementation. While there is broad agreement that community and public engagement is vital to decision‐making in this context, more discussion is needed about who should be engaged in such activities and in what ways. This article identifies Indigenous peoples as key stakeholders in decisions about gene‐editing in the wild and argues that engagement activities need not only include Indigenous peoples but also (...) be designed, conducted, and analyzed in ways that confront longstanding power imbalances that dismiss Indigenous expertise. We offer specific recommendations to guide deliberative activities to not only be inclusive of Indigenous peoples but also to empower their diverse, situated knowledges. We call on those committed to the inclusive design of broad public deliberation to pursue strategies that shift dominant power dynamics to include Indigenous communities in more meaningful ways. (shrink)

John Rawls is an influential critic of standard utilitarianism, which he classifies as “teleological” in the sense that it specifies utility as the sole rational end independent of any moral concepts or principles and then maintains that morally right actions are those which maximize this independent good. In Rawls′ view, John Stuart Mill relies on a pluralistic conception of happiness together with certain fundamental principles of human psychology to construct an extraordinary utilitarianism that gives absolute priority to a liberal basic (...) institutional structure similar to that of justice as fairness. This chapter shows that Rawls’ interpretation is problematic even on its own terms. According to the author, Rawls has opened up the possibility of deontological utilitarianisms which could serve as reasonable members of a democratic consensus. Indeed, perhaps Mill may still be properly interpreted as a deontological utilitarian, despite his avowed hedonism. (shrink)

David Émile Durkheim, life and times -- Moral solidarity and the new social science: Durkheim's study of the individual in society and society in the individual -- Morality, law, the state, and politics -- Establishing a social science -- Education as social science and cultural politics -- The "revelation" of religion -- Odds and ends: Durkheim's unfinished works on morality and the family and his war writings -- Further readings.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Geoffrey Scarre has recently argued that the version of qualitative hedonism which I attribute to Mill is unsatisfactory for various reasons. In his view, even if it is formally compatible with value monism, involves non-hedonistic elements and offers an implausible account of the relationship between and pleasures. In this paper, I show that his objections, which are similar in spirit to those pressed earlier by Bradley, Moore and others against Mill, are unfounded where not confused. The Mill/Riley line does (...) not rely on non-hedonistic standards and has sufficient flexibility to account for many different kinds of pleasures and pleasing activities. It remains a coherent version of qualitative hedonism, worthy of further consideration and study. (shrink)

Trait Selective Abortions (TSA) have come under critique as a medical practice that presents potential disabled infants as burdens and lacking the potential for meaningful lives. This paper, using the author’s background as a disabled person, contends that the philosophy underpinning TSAs reflects liberal society’s lack of a theory of needs. The author argues for a care ethics based approach informed by disability analyses to engage with TSAs.

This thesis is about making decisions when we are uncertain about what will happen, how valuable it will be, and even how to make decisions. Even the most sure-footed amongst us are sometimes uncertain about all three, but surprisingly little attention has been given to the latter two. The three essays that constitute my thesis hope to do a small part in rectifying this problem. The first essay is about the value of finding out how to make decisions. Society spends (...) considerable resources funding people (like me) to research decision-making, so it is natural to wonder whether society is getting a good deal. This question is so shockingly underresearched that bedrock facts are readily discoverable, such as when this kind of information is valuable. My second essay concerns whether we can compare value when we are uncertain about value. Many people are in fact uncertain about value, and how we deal with this uncertainty hinges on these comparisons. I argue that value comparisons are only sometimes possible; I call this weak comparability. This essay is largely a synthesis of the literature, but I also present an argument which begins with a peculiar view of the self: it is as if each of us is a crowd of different people separated by time (but connected by continuity of experience). I’m not the first to endorse this peculiar view of the self, but I am the first to show how it supports the benign view that value is sometimes comparable. We may be uncertain of any decision rules, even those that would tell us how to act when we face uncertainty in decision rules. We may be uncertain of how to decide how to decide how to... And so on. If so, we might have to accept infinitely many decision rules just to make any mundane decision, such as whether to pick up a five-cent piece from the gutter. My third essay addresses this problem of regress. I think all of our decisions are forced: we must decide now or continue to deliberate. Surprisingly, this allows us to avoid the original problem. I call this solution “when forced, do your best”. (shrink)

The paper concerns the essential and permanent place of roles and rules in human life, or what I call ‘the dilemma of compliance.’ The paper begins with previous scholarship warning therapists and psychologists about the danger of unknowingly reinforcing violent and toxic social expectations. A distinction is drawn between conformity and compliance, with the former standing for rote and mindless following of rules, and the latter a self-conscious and flexible way of relating to rules and roles. The paper argues that (...) following rules and filling roles is unavoidable, and, consequently, a human life is always a double-life, divided between pre-existing, generic roles, and our private and unique way of relating to those roles. The crucial difficulty is learning to comply with rules and roles rather than merely conforming to them. Two extreme cases are examined to develop this problem of rules, roles, and living a double-life: schizophrenia and censorship. It is argued that schizophrenia and censorship are cases in which the place of rules and roles become overbearing and urgent. Finally, the paper argues that attention to the dilemma of compliance highlights the significance of trauma-informed care, as trauma is often connected to how one fits or does not fit into a social milieu constituted by roles, rules, and expectations. The arguments are developed primarily in historical, philosophical, and clinical terms. (shrink)

In this paper we outline the activities of young girls in a Toba community of northern Argentina and examine the effect of girl helpers on time allocation of nursing women. Activity budgets were obtained for 41 girls aged 3 to 15 using spot observations. Girls spent substantial portions of observations engaged in helping behaviors. Individual values varied with age, anthropometric characteristics, and birth order. Activity budgets of 21 nursing women were obtained through focal observation sessions. Women living in households with (...) girls aged 7 to 15 allocated 17% less time to domestic work and 9% more time to socializing during afternoon observation sessions. For nursing women in this community, direct childcare (provided by the infant’s own mother) seemed to be a priority. Living with a girl helper did not have any measurable effect on the frequency or duration of nursing, or on the time that women spent caring for their infants. Based on these findings, hypotheses are outlined for future work on the effect of girl helpers on women’s fertility. (shrink)

John Gray, much influenced by Isaiah Berlin and building on work by the late John Rees and the late Fred Berger, has recently stated three ‘fatal’ objections which virtually all analysts seem to find persuasive against John Stuart Mill's classic doctrine of liberty. First, Gray thinks it ‘an obvious objection to Mill's project that conceptions of harm vary with competing moral outlooks, so that no Principle of Liberty whose application turns on judgements about harm can expect to resolve disputes between (...) exponents of opposed moral perspectives’. Even if we overlook Mill's strange silence in the matter and supply him with a reasonable definition of harm, it remains clear that the liberty principle ‘is not, and cannot be, the very simple principle Mill sought’. For ‘Mill's principle is in its very nature radically incomplete. It tells us what we may not do, but not what we ought to do.’ To know when liberty should in fact be restrained, ‘we must look to other principles—chiefly the Principle of Utility itself’. But if general utility alone can ‘tell us how much liberty may be given up for how much harm-prevention’, then ‘there can be no question of adherence to [an] exceptionless principle such as Mill's Principle of Liberty’. Thus, even if we believe that Mill's version of utilitarianism is coherent, his judgements about the regulation of conduct must depend on a highly complex and controversial moral doctrine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience, Institutions, and EpistemologyRiley Paterson, MA (bio)I am grateful for these comments on my paper, “The Dilemma of Compliance,” because they illuminate the limitations of the paper’s emphasis. The paper is, above all, meant to caution or warn providers of subtle but serious harm that can occur in institutional settings. I want to attune providers to the ways in which institutional coercion and violence occur in the ordinary process (...) of following rules and filling of roles. Thus I write that the goal is “to become self-conscious observers of systems of compliance, rather than unconscious conformers.” Institutional coercion is a social process like any other and thus involves intersubjective dynamics. These dynamics do not appear as measurable, physical structures, but rather as invisible patterns in time, made visible only by being named and grasped experientially. I am offering language that can help make these invisible dynamics visible, so that providers can navigate institutions differently.My desire to caution and attune other providers can be explained partly by the conditions in which I wrote the paper: making sense of my time in forensic mental health, where I worked with clients who were mandated mental health treatment upon avoiding or exiting incarceration. I was processing my own experience of submitting monthly “compliance reports” to various agencies. I was concerned with the experiential process of navigating coercive environments. Thus my commenter is correct to try and widen our consideration, as my paper is indeed limited by its focus on the lived experience of censorship, oppression, and institutional coercion.This emphasis means that I am neglecting other dimensions, such as the positive role of rules in organizing communities, and the way in which some mental health institutions are working on creating safe and healing formal environments. I also believe, however, that the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and mental health broadly need to be careful about institutions, rules, and roles. We are not, in my estimation, in danger of providing too many safe spaces in which healing can occur. Quite the opposite, psychiatry and psychotherapy have, since their outset, been intertwined with troubling political motivations, and we continue to struggle with the manipulative tendencies of the field (Carr, 2018; Cabanas & Illouz, 2021).I, therefore, would like to take this opportunity to restate the core argument of my paper, and to situate this argument within the context of my other publications and the overall project they belong to. There is likely some ambiguity about [End Page 385] the central thrust of my paper. When commenting on my discussion of schizophrenia, my commenter refers to it as “the seeming central topic of the paper.” This is understandable. Schizophrenia is the topic I discuss that has the most obvious clinical implications. Indeed, I am making an argument about the phenomenological intelligibility of schizophrenia. With both my discussions of schizophrenia and censorship, however, I am making both immanent arguments and transcendent arguments. In other words, although I am making arguments about both schizophrenia and censorship, those arguments need to be understood as an example of a broader problem of coercion within human relationships. My intent is to highlight general dynamics present within human relationships and communities that contribute to institutional violence and the excessive regulation of individuals. My concern is with rules, roles, and coercion in general; schizophrenia and censorship provide exaggerated examples of what is fundamentally an ordinary, daily experience. Mental health institutions are uniquely involved in coercive institutional processes, but almost all human environments carry some danger of coercion and oppression in terms of fitting, belonging, or conforming with rules and roles. My exploration of schizophrenia and censorship is certainly meant to illuminate those particular topics, but the broader point concerns all human experience.The phenomenological or experiential thrust of the paper must be situated within my broader analysis that also includes institutional and epistemological dimensions. My reviewer is correct to point out that with schizophrenia, censorship, or trauma, the crucial dimension is communities in which people feel safe enough to learn, grow, and develop their capacities. In this vein, my reviewer points to Geel as an admirable model of communally driven care. I am largely in agreement with this line of thinking. In... (shrink)

"First published by Oxford University Press, 1916."--Title page verso.

John Stuart Mill provides a classic defense of individual and group rights to liberty with respect to purely private or self-regarding matters: The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself … directly, and in the first instance, … his independence is, of right, absolute.… From this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; (...) freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived. (shrink)

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a show that focused on teaching children an ethics of caring for oneself and care for others. This article examines those ethics through the songs “I Like You As You Are” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It contends that these songs focus on a celebration of the self and others, welcoming individuals as they are into the community, and embracing authenticity. This article looks to understand these ethics in a contemporary setting and argues that Mister (...) Rogers and the communal ethics of care that he taught are needed. (shrink)

How does mutual intelligibility impact the political sphere? This paper uses Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a means of examining this connection. I argue that Wittgenstein’s paradigm of a dialectical world suggests that his analysis of mutual intelligibility in understanding experiences is necessary in a pluralistic democracy. I conclude that via his theory of social reality politics is a dynamic dialectical process of communicating experiences.

Joseph J. Fins calls for a reconsideration of severe brain injury treatment, including discussion of public policy and physician advocacy.

Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of (...) the right.Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era. (shrink)

(2006). Utilitarian Liberalism: Between Gray and Mill. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, The Political Theory of John Gray, pp. 117-135.

The paper argues that normative reasons are of two fundamental kinds, practical which are value related, and adaptive, which are not related to any value, but indicate how our beliefs and emotions should adjust to fit how things are in the world. The distinction is applied and defended, in part through an additional distinction between standard and non-standard reasons (for actions, intentions, emotions or belief).

Heyman's analysis of addiction suggests that drug taking is irrational. The irrationality of drug taking, however, may depend on the acceptance of mainstream society's view of what is valuable. Consideration of the addict's viewpoint and cultural aspects of drug taking may be useful in trying to fathom the “rationality” of drug taking.

If harm is restricted to mean perceptible damage suffered by an agent against his wishes, so that his mere dislike with no evidence of injury is excluded, then Mill's liberty principle arguably is ‘one very simple principle’ as he claims. But even so, what of John Gray's charge that the liberty principle relies on a ‘radically defective’ notion of individuality or autonomy that is incompatible with every civil society's cultural and moral traditions? If he is correct about this, then Mill's (...) principle lacks appeal even if it can be stated in a definite and coherent manner. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we develop this fragmented model into (...) a nascent theory of the cognitive architecture of belief storage. (shrink)

I defend a new argument for causal finitism, the view that nothing can have an infinite causal history. I begin by defending a number of plausible metaphysical principles, after which I explore a host of novel variants of the Littlewood-Ross and Thomson’s Lamp paradoxes that violate such principles. I argue that causal finitism is the best solution to the paradoxes.

The American conservative movement is a force of anti-reflexivity insofar as it attacks two key elements of reflexive modernization: the environmental movement and environmental impact science. Learning from its mistakes in overtly attacking environmental regulations in the early 1980s, this counter-movement has subsequently exercised a more subtle form of power characterized by non-decision-making. We examine the conservative movement’s efforts to undermine climate science and policy in the USA over the last two decades by using this second dimension of power. The (...) conservative movement has employed four non-decision-making techniques to challenge the legitimacy of climate science and prevent progress in policy-making. We argue that reflexive modernization scholars should focus more attention on similar forces of anti-reflexivity that continue to shape the overall direction of our social, political and economic order, and the life chances of many citizens. Indeed, better understanding of the forces and effectiveness of anti-reflexivity may very well be crucial for societal resilience and adaptation, especially in the face of global environmental problems like climate change. (shrink)

The thesis of self-elusiveness says, roughly, that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest from the first-person perspective. This thesis has a long history. Yet many who endorse it do so only in a very specific sense. They say that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest as an object from the first-person perspective; they say that self-experience is not a species of ‘object-consciousness’. Yet if consciousness outstrips object-consciousness, then we are left with the possibility that there is another sense (...) in which the self is phenomenally manifest. Alas, efforts to articulate just what this form of self-experience comes to—often a holy grail of sorts for those in, and influenced by, the phenomenological tradition—have remained stubbornly obscure. This essay attempts a partial remedy. Taking a cue from Bernard Lonergan, I suggest that self-experience, while not a species of object-consciousness, is nonetheless partially grounded in it. The result is a view that is compatible with self-experience being representational and relational, contra tradition. (shrink)

Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in (...) animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible. (shrink)

This short article discusses the nature of research and art practice and makes a case for the necessary intermingling of these activities. It does not attempt to define a space for art to operate as research, quite the opposite: research is an operating structure for the process and production of, among other things, art. It is regarded as integral to the processes of thinking, making, and reflecting, and it is important to note that curiosity, creative enquiry, and critical reflection underpin (...) much that is considered research in various fields. The author asserts that these processes are not necessarily discipline-specific although particular disciplines have specific procedures and goals. It is argued that "provisionality" is central to what art can offer other disciplines; it can make a virtue of incompleteness. The author suggests that art open itself up to quizzical scrutiny and help others to recognise that research has long been, and will continue to be, a driving force within its makeup. The article posits an expanded notion of the artwork that is essentially provisional and reliant on spectatorial involvement. (shrink)

Not all actions that are legal are necessarily morally correct. However, there are few protections for providers who are pressured to comply with actions and procedures that infringe on their religious beliefs regarding human dignity. The right of health care providers to freely act on religious convictions and refrain from cooperating with morally reprehensible tasks is often eschewed in favor of political correctness or is branded as discrimination. Adequate safeguards are urgently needed for health care workers at all levels to (...) ensure that they can continue to care for the sick and most vulnerable members of the community without violating the dictates of their conscience. This article examines the free exercise of religion as it pertains to medical provider conscience protections. The author argues for conscience protection legislation with a right of action. (shrink)

A paper that explores the extent to which images remain resistant to their assimilation by the linguistic and technical systems that society has developed. It uses Damisch´s theory of /cloud/ to comment upon and refract Flusser´s notion of the technical image, proposing a productive incompleteness that the image continually feeds into our relationship to the world. With the image, laterality is as significant as linearity. Its form does not presuppose how it should be approached or understood; the provisionality heralded by (...) /cloud/ and by the nature of the image can problematise, confound, or even offer an antidote to a systematising drive in the mediated world we inhabit. (shrink)