Illness -- Loneliness -- Violation -- Love.

"Le païen et le laïcard applaudissent le Traité d'athéologie, le catholique s'émerveille d'un retour au sacré amorcé dans Cosmos [...], à l'instar du royaliste qui communie de concert avec le mélenchoniste au retour du programme commun demandé avec force par le philosophe populaire ; un juif peut se rassurer de le voir vanter Israël tandis qu'un propalestinien saluera sa condamnation des "vengeances" israéliennes! [...] Cet engouement généralisé, ou quasi, ne s'explique pas autrement que par le génie instinctif qu'Onfray possède de (...) la technique médiatique - principalement pulsionnelle et propice à donner au peuple ce qu'il réclame [...]" Si les élites se contentent de "croire" au très médiatique philosophe Onfray, Rémi Lélian nous rappelle qu'en matière de pensée, il ne saurait exister aucune complaisance. Et de juger sur pièces "l'oeuvre" en question. Pour un constat accablant et sans appel. (shrink)

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of (...) judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements. (shrink)

Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, whereas moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds—a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient. Diverse lines of research support dyadic morality. First, perceptions of mind are linked to moral judgments: dimensions (...) of mind perception (agency and experience) map onto moral types (agents and patients), and deficits of mind perception correspond to difficulties with moral judgment. Second, not only are moral judgments sensitive to perceived agency and experience, but all moral transgressions are fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced suffering—that is, interpersonal harm—even ostensibly harmless acts such as purity violations. Third, dyadic morality uniquely accounts for the phenomena of dyadic completion (seeing agents in response to patients, and vice versa), and moral typecasting (characterizing others as either moral agents or moral patients). Discussion also explores how mind perception can unify morality across explanatory levels, how a dyadic template of morality may be developmentally acquired, and future directions. (shrink)

This thesis addresses one of the central questions in political philosophy, the question of political obligation why people have a duty to support the political institutions of their countries. The traditional and dominant answer to this question is voluntarism, which claims that people have such a duty because they have consented to the ruling of their states. The thesis systematically refutes this voluntarist approach, criticizes some of today's leading non-voluntarist alternatives to the voluntarist one, and advances a new way of (...) looking at the problem, which is derived from a transcendental argument. (shrink)

As a general concept, aesthetic education and art education are connected; to a certain extent, the two can be taken as one or two sides of the same coin. However, the specific questions involved are how they are connected and how to connect them in teaching practice. To answer these questions, I define aesthetic education as more general and theoretical and define art education as less general and more practical, that is, teaching students to read art works. Exploring the answers (...) to the first question, this essay offers an examination of an important aesthetic concept in Chinese art theory, inscape, and relates it to the teaching of how to read Chinese landscape painting. On the one hand, this aesthetic concept... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 221 Seiten: 199-218.

Around the world, private and public organizations use software called legal expert systems to compute taxes. This software must comply with the laws they are designed to implement. As such, a bug or an error in a program that leads to tax miscalculations can have heavy legal and democratic consequences. However, increasing evidence suggests that some legal expert systems may not comply with the law. Moreover, traditional software development processes mean that legal expert systems are difficult to adapt to the (...) continuous flow of new legislation. To prevent further software decay and to reconcile these systems with the growing demand for algorithmic transparency, we argue that there is a need for a new development process for legal expert systems. This new system must be built to comply with the law, in particular the GDPR. It must also respect democratic transparency. For these reasons, we present a solution built by lawyers and computer scientists: C atala, a new programming language coupled with a pair programming development process. (shrink)

Ordinary people often make moral judgments that are consistent with philosophical principles and legal distinctions. For example, they judge killing as worse than letting die, and harm caused as a necessary means to a greater good as worse than harm caused as a side-effect (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006). Are these patterns of judgment produced by mechanisms specific to the moral domain, or do they derive from other psychological domains? We show that the action/omission and means/side-effect distinctions affect nonmoral representations (...) and provide evidence that their role in moral judgment is mediated by these nonmoral psychological representations. Specifically, the action/omission distinction affects moral judgment primarily via causal attribution, while the means/side-effect distinction affects moral judgment via intentional attribution. We suggest that many of the specific patterns evident in our moral judgments in fact derive from nonmoral psychological mechanisms, and especially from the processes of causal and intentional attribution. (shrink)

This paper argues that in daycare centres in France, where children are cared for from four months to age three, the competence of female staff members is usually denied and unvalued vis à vis the expert opinions. The paper highlights empirical research on early childhood and gender, providing pragmatic access to children's languages of desire, a language mostly ignored. Incorporating the ideas of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the paper draws upon the conceptualization of Fernand Deligny who took care of autistic (...) children in mapping what he called ‘lines of wandering’, an idea that shows how desire can become accessible. In the present ‘society of control’ which Deleuze analyses and which coexists with Foucault's discipline and biopower, such lines of flight enable the emergence of a new narrative for young children's desire, and for the competence of the female staff members in their departure from the highway of normalization. (shrink)

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states. Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction, an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment and during moral judgment. In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the (...) actor's mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms : Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms. (shrink)

This paper argues that in daycare centres in France, where children are cared for from four months to age three, the competence of female staff members is usually denied and unvalued vis à vis the expert opinions. The paper highlights empirical research on early childhood and gender, providing pragmatic access to children's languages of desire, a language mostly ignored. Incorporating the ideas of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the paper draws upon the conceptualization of Fernand Deligny who took care of autistic (...) children in mapping what he called ‘lines of wandering’, an idea that shows how desire can become accessible. In the present ‘society of control’ which Deleuze analyses and which coexists with Foucault's discipline and biopower, such lines of flight enable the emergence of a new narrative for young children's desire, and for the competence of the female staff members in their departure from the highway of normalization. (shrink)

��Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning? An answer demands a detailed account of the moral principles in question. We investigated three principles that guide moral judgments: (a) Harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (b) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side effect of a goal, and (c) harm involving physical contact with the victim is worse than harm involving no physical contact. Asking whether (...) these principles are invoked to explain moral judgments, we found that subjects generally appealed to the first and third principles in their justifications, but not to the second. This finding has significance for methods and theories of moral psychology: The moral principles used in judgment must be directly compared with those articulated in justification, and doing so shows that some moral principles are available to conscious reasoning whereas others are not. (shrink)

When we evaluate moral agents, we consider many factors, including whether the agent acted freely, or under duress or coercion. In turn, moral evaluations have been shown to influence our (non-moral) evaluations of these same factors. For example, when we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have acted freely, not under force. Here, we investigate the cognitive signatures of this effect in interpersonal situations, in which one agent (“forcer”) forces (...) another agent (“forcee”) to act either immorally or morally. The structure of this relationship allowed us to ask questions about both the “forcer” and the “forcee.” Paradoxically, participants judged that the “forcer” forced the “forcee” to act immorally (i.e. X forced Y), but that the “forcee” was not forced to act immorally (i.e. Y was not forced by X). This pattern obtained only for human agents who acted intentionally. Directly changing participants’ focus from one agent to another (forcer vs. forcee) also changed the target of moral evaluation and therefore force attributions. The full pattern of judgments may provide a window into motivated moral reasoning and focusing bias more generally; participants may have been motivated to attribute greater force to the immoral forcer and greater freedom to the immoral forcee. (shrink)

Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. According to this hypothesis, the negative emotional response triggered by a morally bad action drives the attribution (...) of intent to the actor, or the judgment that the actor acted intentionally. We test this hypothesis by presenting cases of morally bad and morally good action to seven individuals with deficits in emotional processing resulting from damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). If normal emotional processing is necessary for the observed asymmetry, then individuals with VMPC lesions should show no asymmetry. Our results provide no support for this hypothesis: like normal individuals, those with VMPC lesions showed the same asymmetry, tending to judge that an action was intentional when it was morally bad but not when it was morally good. Based on this finding, we suggest that normal emotional processing is not responsible for the observed asymmetry of intentional attributions and thus does not mediate the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. (shrink)

American Political Science Association Meeting, New Orleans, 1985. Belew, R. K. "E,volut,ioi1. Leariiing, and Culture: Computational Metaphors for Adaptive Algorithms? Complex Systems 4 (1990}: 11-49. Banner, J. T. The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univcrsitv Press. 1980.

Is the basis of criminality an act that causes harm, or an act undertaken with the belief that one will cause harm? The present study takes a cognitive neuroscience approach to investigating how information about an agent’s beliefs and an action’s conse- quences contribute to moral judgment. We build on prior devel- opmental evidence showing that these factors contribute differ- entially to the young child’s moral judgments coupled with neurobiological evidence suggesting a role for the right tem- poroparietal junction (RTPJ) (...) in belief attribution. Participants read vignettes in a 2 2 design: protagonists produced either a negative or neutral outcome based on the belief that they were causing the negative outcome (‘‘negative’’ belief) or the neutral outcome (‘‘neutral’’ belief). The RTPJ showed significant activation above baseline for all four conditions but was modulated by an interaction between belief and outcome. Specifically, the RTPJ response was highest for cases of attempted harm, where protag- onists were condemned for actions that they believed would cause harm to others, even though the harm did not occur. The results not only suggest a general role for belief attribution during moral judgment, but also add detail to our understanding of the inter- action between these processes at both the neural and behavioral levels. (shrink)

Based on recordings of spontaneous speech of ethnically Chinese Singaporeans who have received an English-medium education, this is a study of the indigenized Singaporean variety of English.

A professor’s experience of attending the 17th annual Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) Conference on pedagogies of hope demonstrates her desire to experiment on an immanent plane. As she looks back on her past experiences of depression, working in a revolutionary psychiatric clinic, experiencing a near catatonic state, and an action research study of women in early childhood education at the precipice of an immanent plane, the reader is led on their own journey to consider deeply the differences between transcendence (...) and immanence. In the end, the author’s story of returning from a catatonic state through bodily movements and triumph in human relationships and connections demonstrates how one moves out of his or her own disconnection between mind and body. Further, the meaning in the experiences of the action research project - the phenomenon - occurs when a misrepresented group of early childhood workers discovers their own power and voice in overcoming transcended expertise. They rise in immanence like the Humpty Dumpties that needed to exchange and word their new agency, connecting in a worldwide rhizome (image of thought). Finally, the reconceptualists in early childhood education are asked to take in these experiences and play with them in order to resist transcendence and to determine their own outcome as an organization. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition May 2012. (shrink)

Finance ethics have drawn increasing attention from both government regulators and academic researchers. This paper addresses the issue of insider trading ethics. Previous studies on insider trading ethics have failed to provide convincing arguments and consistent results. In particular, the arguments against insider trading are based primarily on moral and philosophical grounds and lack empirical rigor. This study intends to establish and examine the relationship between the ethical issue and economic issue of insider trading. We argue that the ethics of (...) insider trading is in essence an economic rather than a moral issue. It is so far not clear to what extent insider trading may increase or decrease shareholders wealth. Until then, we must take care to avoid over-regulating insider trading. (shrink)

Moral judgments, whether delivered in ordinary experience or in the courtroom, depend on our ability to infer intentions. We forgive unintentional or accidental harms and condemn failed attempts to harm. Prior work demonstrates that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex deliver abnormal judgments in response to moral dilemmas and that these patients are especially impaired in triggering emotional responses to inferred or abstract events, as opposed to real or actual outcomes. We therefore predicted that VMPC patients would deliver (...) abnormal moral judgments of harmful intentions in the absence of harmful outcomes, as in failed attempts to harm. This prediction was confirmed in the current study: VMPC patients judged attempted harms, including attempted murder, as more morally permissible relative to controls. These results highlight the critical role of the VMPC in processing harmful intent for moral judgment. (shrink)

Moral intuitions are strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs. Moral philosophers ask when they are justified. This question cannot be answered separately from a psychological question: How do moral intuitions arise? Their reliability depends upon their source. This chapter develops and argues for a new theory of how moral intuitions arise—that they arise through heuristic processes best understood as unconscious attribute substitutions. That is, when asked whether something has the attribute of moral wrongness, people unconsciously substitute a different question about a (...) separate but related heuristic attribute (such as emotional impact). Evidence for this view is drawn from psychology and neuroscience, and competing views of moral heuristics are contrasted. It is argued that moral intuitions are not direct perceptions and, in many cases, are unreliable sources of evidence for moral claims. (shrink)

This study draws on the ecological perspective of teacher agency to examine the manifestation of English teachers' agency toward the ongoing curriculum reform in China and the factors that impact it. This study surveyed 353 high school English teachers and then collected data from three case study participants through in-depth interviews. The findings showed that the majority of teachers surveyed exhibited positive attitudes and beliefs about implementing the reform and inclinations to change, but the teachers also showed a constrained state (...) of agency in practice. Teacher agency developed as the teachers exerted sustained pedagogical change and reflection on reform-based practices. Through the findings, prior experiences and reform-oriented beliefs were found to mediate teachers' agency, and reform-related experiences were more influential than future goals in shaping agency. The factors of perceived school culture that involved teachers' interaction with students, colleague cooperation, and administrative support also medicated teachers' agency in practice. Implications are proposed for policymakers and school leaders to help teachers coordinate inconsistencies between high-stakes examination preparation and holistic education and make positive sense of professional development in the context of educational changes. (shrink)

People disagree about whether “moral facts” are objective facts like mathematical truths (moral realism) or simply products of the human mind (moral antirealism). What is the impact of different meta-ethical views on actual behavior? In Experiment 1, a street canvasser, soliciting donations for a charitable organization dedicated to helping impoverished children, primed passersby with realism or antirealism. Participants primed with realism were twice as likely to be donors, compared to control participants and participants primed with antirealism. In Experiment 2, online (...) participants primed with realism as opposed to antirealism reported being willing to donate more money to a charity of their choice. Considering the existence of non-negotiable moral facts may have raised the stakes and motivated participants to behave better. These results therefore reveal the impact of meta-ethics on everyday decision-making: priming a belief in moral realism improved moral behavior. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 163-188, January 2022.

We outline the rationale and preliminary results of using the State Context Property (SCOP) formalism, originally developed as a generalization of quantum mechanics, to describe the contextual manner in which concepts are evoked, used, and combined to generate meaning. The quantum formalism was developed to cope with problems arising in the description of (1) the measurement process, and (2) the generation of new states with new properties when particles become entangled. Similar problems arising with concepts motivated the formal treatment introduced (...) here. Concepts are viewed not as fixed representations, but entities existing in states of potentiality that require interaction with a context---a stimulus or another concept---to `collapse' to observable form as an exemplar, prototype, or other (possibly imaginary) instance. The stimulus situation plays the role of the measurement in physics, acting as context that induces a change of the cognitive state from superposition state to collapsed state. The collapsed state is more likely to consist of a conjunction of concepts for associative than analytic thought because more stimulus or concept properties take part in the collapse. We provide two contextual measures of conceptual distance---one using collapse probabilities and the other weighted properties---and show how they can be applied to conjunctions using the pet fish problem. (shrink)

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind, reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or neutral intention; participants (...) made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction, and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent. These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information. (shrink)

Autocatalytic networks have been used to model the emergence of self‐organizing structure capable of sustaining life and undergoing biological evolution. Here, we model the emergence of cognitive structure capable of undergoing cultural evolution. Mental representations (MRs) of knowledge and experiences play the role of catalytic molecules, and interactions among them (e.g., the forging of new associations) play the role of reactions and result in representational redescription. The approach tags MRs with their source, that is, whether they were acquired through social (...) learning, individual learning (of pre‐existing information), or creative thought (resulting in the generation of new information). This makes it possible to model how cognitive structure emerges and to trace lineages of cumulative culture step by step. We develop a formal representation of the cultural transition from Oldowan to Acheulean tool technology using Reflexively Autocatalytic and Food set generated (RAF) networks. Unlike more primitive Oldowan stone tools, the Acheulean hand axe required not only the capacity to envision and bring into being something that did not yet exist, but hierarchically structured thought and action, and the generation of new MRs: the concepts EDGING, THINNING, SHAPING, and a meta‐concept, HAND AXE. We show how this constituted a key transition toward the emergence of semantic networks that were self‐organizing, self‐sustaining, and autocatalytic, and we discuss how such networks replicated through social interaction. The model provides a promising approach to unraveling one of the greatest anthropological mysteries: that of why development of the Acheulean hand axe was followed by over a million years of cultural stasis. (shrink)