This study investigates the relationship between moral schemas and corruption in public procurement. It adopts a moral schema framework to examine procurement-induced corruption from Uganda. Experiences, attitudes, and values of respondents are used to construct future behavior of public procurement staff. The schema framework was built around the premise that procurement-related corruption is a function of the social framework and human nature paradox, constructing logical justification for the acts of corruption. The study uses data from 474 public procurement staff to (...) demonstrate that social identity, ethical egoistic, legislative, amoral, and religious moral schemas account for 78.51% of the variance in moral schema of respondents. All these schemas were found to be significant predictors, accounting for 73.3% of public procurement corruption. The paper urges managers of procuring and disposing entities to utilize moral scripts in reducing corruption. Managers are encouraged to engage in morally responsible behaviors to promote ethics and value-for-money transactions. The paper provides an alternative framework for examining corruption in sub-Saharan Africa where explicit elaboration of insights on corruption is still lacking. (shrink)

This book empirically investigates the social practice of ascribing moral responsibility to others for the things they failed to do, and it discusses the philosophical relevance of this practice.0In our everyday life, we often blame others for things they failed to do. For instance, we might blame our neighbour for not watering our plants during our vacation. Interestingly, the attribution of blame is typically accompanied by the attribution of causal responsibility. We do not only blame our neighbour for not watering (...) our plants, but we do so because we believe that not watering the plants caused them to dry up and die. In this book, I investigate how we make moral and causal judgments about omissions. I discuss different philosophical perspectives on this matter, and I outline to what extent the actual social practice is in line with philosophical theories. (shrink)

En juin 1988, paraît dans Nature un article où est affirmée la possibilité d'un effet moléculaire sans présence physique de molécule ; l'eau se comporterait comme un support liquide sur laquelle des signaux moléculaires pourraient être enregistrés. Cette thèse est soutenue par Jacques Benveniste, un chercheur de l'Inserm alors reconnu pour ses travaux sur les médiateurs de l'allergie. Le jour de la parution de l'article, le journal Le Monde parle d'une découverte qui "pourrait bouleverser les fondements de la physique". C'est (...) le début d'une immense polémique à laquelle Luc Montagnier, prix Nobel de médecine en 2008, a redonné récemment une certaine actualité. L'objectif de ce livre est de proposer un éclairage sociologique sur cette controverse. Après une description des étapes de la controverse, l'auteur s'attache à démontrer que le contenu des arguments et des contre-arguments qui font la trame de la dispute renvoie à des conceptions divergentes des modalités de mise en oeuvre des normes au principe du jugement scientifique. Aucun des protagonistes ne remet complètement en cause ces normes, mais tous s'affrontent sur la façon dont il convient de les mettre en oeuvre. C'est à la découverte des coulisses du processus de légitimation d'une thèse scientifique que le lecteur est convié à partir de l'étude de cette controverse qui a notamment contribué à relancer les débats sur l'homéopathie. (shrink)

Spirituality is a contentious concept in the social sciences. This is above all due to the increasing number of different definitions of spirituality that are used in the field. Some scholars argue that given this heterogeneity, spirituality is not an analytic concept. Scholars use the concept to denote forms of belief that are not part of conventional religiosity. Therefore, spirituality refers to transformations of religion in modern societies. This paper shows that spirituality is generally defined in relation to religion or (...) religiosity. Thus, different concepts of spirituality can be distinguished according to the way they draw the boundaries between religiosity and spirituality. This approach reveals the most important communalities and differences of different perspectives on spirituality as a scientific concept which allows a better assessment of empirical results from research on spirituality. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that normative considerations play an important role in causal cognition. For instance, when an agent violates a moral rule and thereby produces a negative outcome, she will be judged to be much more of a cause of the outcome, compared to someone who performed the same action but did not violate a norm. While there is a substantial amount of evidence reporting these effects, it is still a matter of debate how this evidence is to (...) be interpreted. In this paper, we engage with the three most influential classes of explanations, namely, (a) the Norm‐Sensitive Cognitive Process View, (b) the Normative Concept View, and (c) the Pragmatics View. We will outline how these theories explain the empirical results and in what ways they differ. We conclude with a reflection on how well these strategies do overall and what questions they still leave unanswered. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Dans ces "bulles" de pensées, traversées par un fourmillement de références à l'histoire culturelle et à la philosophie classique, Pascale Seys porte un regard "dézoomé", tantôt grave, tantôt léger, sur nos façons d'agir et de penser. -- Provided by publisher.

Dans ces "bulles" de pensées, traversées par un fourmillement de références à l'histoire culturelle et à la philosophie classique, Pascale Seys porte un regard "dézoomé", tantôt grave, tantôt léger, sur nos façons d'agir et de penser. Prenant le pouls d'un monde pressé, elle nous invite à réfléchir au temps qui passe, à l'ambiguïté du bonheur et aux affres du désir, à la splendeur du cosmos, aux vertus du retard, des voyages et de la poésie, autant de mythologies de notre quotidien (...) qui nécessitent, pour être considérées pour ce qu'elles sont, de "déplacer l'éléphant".0. (shrink)

What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings in experimental philosophy of causation, providing a comprehensive survey of key issues such as the perception (...) and learning of causal relations, omission, normative considerations, mechanism, voluntariness and legal theories of causation. With novel contributions from both experts and rising stars, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation demonstrates the value of empirical work and opens new domains of inquiry at the cutting edge of the field. (shrink)

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (shrink)

The omission effect, first described by Spranca and colleagues, has since been extensively studied and repeatedly confirmed. All else being equal, most people judge it to be morally worse to actively bring about a negative event than to passively allow that event to happen. In this paper, we provide new experimental data that challenges previous studies of the omission effect both methodologically and philosophically. We argue that previous studies have failed to control for the equivalence of rules that are violated (...) by actions and omissions. Once equivalent norms are introduced, our results show that the omission effect is eliminated, even if the negative outcome of the behavior is foreseen and intended by the agent. We show that the omission effect does not constitute a basic, moral disposition but occurs exclusively in complex moral situations. Building on these empirical results, we cast doubt onto two influential explanations of the omission effect, the Causal Relevance Hypothesis and the Overgeneralization Hypothesis, and provide a novel explanation of the phenomenon. Furthermore, we discuss various ramifications of the interplay between our understanding of omissions and legal systems. (shrink)

Marx says of alienated labor that it does not "belong" to the worker, that it issues in a product that does not belong to her, and that it is unfulfilling, unfree, egoistically motivated, and inhuman. He seems to think, moreover, that the first of these features grounds all the others. All of these features seem quite independent, however: they can come apart; they share no obvious common cause or explanation; and if they often occur together this seems accidental. It is (...) not clear, then, how Marx's concept of alienated labor could possess the strong unity which he takes it to have. I defend a reinterpretation of the concept which explains this unity. The various features of alienated labor, I argue, all follow from a single, hitherto underappreciated feature of its formal motivational structure: the fact that such labor is motivated not by its product but by an incentive. (shrink)

A growing literature is taking an institutionalist and governance perspective on how algorithms shape society based on unprecedented capacities for managing social complexity. Algorithmic governance altogether emerges as a novel and distinctive kind of societal steering. It appears to transcend established categories and modes of governance—and thus seems to call for new ways of thinking about how social relations can be regulated and ordered. However, as this paper argues, despite its novel way of realizing outcomes of collective steering and coordination, (...) it can nevertheless be grasped with an old and fundamental figure in political philosophy: that of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Comparing algorithmic governance with this figure serves to highlight their similarities as socio-political arrangements, and specifically to clarify how algorithmic governance parallels the apolitical traits of the Leviathan—it eliminates the political as it requires compliance and forgoing contestation to best fulfill its role and to produce satisfying outcomes. (shrink)

We propose a philosophical theory of scientific models. Our main claim is that they should be understood as fictions. We illustrate the relevance of the claim by illustrations drawn from the history of science, and we propose a typology.

What are the main features that influence our attribution of moral responsibility? It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent, and the agent’s freedom and ability to do otherwise. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We (...) will present an experiment to support this claim. (shrink)

Since its origin, bioethics has attracted the collaboration of few social scientists, and social scientific methods of gathering empirical data have remained unfamiliar to ethicists. Recently, however, the clouded relations between the empirical and normative perspectives on bioethics appear to be changing. Three reasons explain why there was no easy and consistent input of empirical evidence into bioethics. Firstly, interdisciplinary dialogue runs the risk of communication problems and divergent objectives. Secondly, the social sciences were absent partners since the beginning of (...) bioethics. Thirdly, the meta‐ethical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ created a ‘natural’ border between the disciplines. Now, bioethics tends to accommodate more empirical research. Three hypotheses explain this emergence. Firstly, dissatisfaction with a foundationalist interpretation of applied ethics created a stimulus to incorporate empirical research in bioethics. Secondly, clinical ethicists became engaged in empirical research due to their strong integration in the medical setting. Thirdly, the rise of the evidence‐based paradigm had an influence on the practice of bioethics. However, a problematic relationship cannot simply and easily evolve into a perfect interaction. A new and positive climate for empirical approaches has arisen, but the original difficulties have not disappeared. (shrink)

Zeki and co-workers recently proposed that perception can best be described as locally distributed, asynchronous processes that each create a kind of microconsciousness, which condense into an experienced percept. The present article is aimed at extending this theory to metacognitive feelings. We present evidence that perceptual fluency—the subjective feeling of ease during perceptual processing—is based on speed of processing at different stages of the perceptual process. Specifically, detection of briefly presented stimuli was influenced by figure-ground contrast, but not by symmetry (...) or the font of the stimuli. Conversely, discrimination of these stimuli was influenced by whether they were symmetric and by the font they were presented in , but not by figure-ground contrast. Both tasks however were related with the subjective experience of fluency . We conclude that subjective fluency is the conscious phenomenal correlate of different processing stages in visual perception. (shrink)

Presents results of free‐recall experiments conducted in France, Gabon and Nepal, to test predictions of a cognitive model of religious concepts. The world over, these concepts include violations of conceptual expectations at the level of domain knowledge (e.g., about ‘animal’ or ‘artifact’ or ‘person’) rather than at the basic level. In five studies we used narratives to test the hypothesis that domain‐level violations are recalled better than other conceptual associations. These studies used material constructed in the same way as religious (...) concepts, but not used in religions familiar to the subjects. Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed a distinctiveness effect for such material. Experiment 3 shows that recall also depends on the possibility to generate inferences from violations of domain expectations. Replications in Gabon (Exp. 4) and Nepal (Exp. 5) showed that recall for domain‐level violations is better than for violations of basic‐level expectations. Overall sensitivity to violations is similar in different cultures and produces similar recall effects, despite differences in commitment to religious belief, in the range of local religious concepts or in their mode of transmission. However, differences between Gabon and Nepal results suggest that familiarity with some types of domain‐level violations may paradoxically make other types more salient. These results suggest that recall effects may account for the recurrent features found in religious concepts from different cultures. (shrink)

Influential classical and recent approaches to explicate confirmation, explanation, or explanatory power define these relations or degrees between hypotheses and evidence. This holds for both deductive and Bayesian approaches. However, this neglects the role of data, which for many everyday and scientific examples cannot simply be classified as evidence. I present arguments to sharply distinguish data from evidence in Bayesian approaches. Taking into account this distinction, we can rewrite Schupbach and Sprenger’s measure of explanatory power and show the strengths of (...) this adaptation by applying it to the example of the detection of gravitational waves in physics. (shrink)

Decisions in security contexts, including armed conflict, law enforcement, and disaster relief, often need to be taken under circumstances of limited information, stress, and time pressure. Since AI systems are capable of providing a certain amount of relief in such contexts, such systems will become increasingly important, be it as decision-support or decision-making systems. However, given that human life may be at stake in such situations, moral responsibility for such decisions should remain with humans. Hence the idea of “meaningful human (...) control” of intelligent systems. In this opinion paper, we outline generic configurations of control of AI and we present an alternative to human control of AI, namely the inverse idea of having AI control humans, and we discuss the normative consequences of this alternative. (shrink)

Existentialist philosophy offers an understanding of how trying to eliminate ambiguities that inevitably mark the human condition only seemingly leads to freedom. This existentialist outlook can also serve to shed light on how democratic politics may similarly show tendencies which aim at overcoming immanent tensions. Such tendencies in democratic politics can be clarified using Sartre’s notion of ignorance – and truth as its counterpart. His concept of ignorance goes beyond merely facts or knowledge and refers to a mode of being. (...) It expresses a subject’s desire to avoid, rather than confront, resistances stemming from the world. Based on a distinction of different forms in which this orientation can manifest itself, this article shows how democratic politics, too, can be threatened by ignorance as a way of doing politics. This ignorance comes in different guises which all express a desire to eliminate tensions that democratic politics cannot overcome without undermining itself. (shrink)

Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared (...) to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to respond to manifest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and repetition of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than on the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-flow. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This “swamps” working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and ritual behaviors in normal adults. Gradual calibration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system's normal input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of empirical predictions follow from this synthetic model. (Published Online February 8 2007) Key Words: childhood ritual; compulsion; event boundaries; evolutionary psychology; obsessive-compulsive disorder; ritual; thought intrusion. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to shed new light on a lesser-known stage of the development of Hans Reichenbach’s thought, namely his research, output and teaching activities at Istanbul University. I argue that the experience of Turkish exile was decisive in the elaboration of Reichenbach’s probability theory of meaning and knowledge. His work Experience and Prediction, produced while in Istanbul, should therefore be put in its Turkish context of elaboration and reception. To this end, I will take into consideration not (...) only Reichenbach’s efforts to popularize and extend the Berlin Group’s program of scientific philosophy in Turkey and throughout Europe in the 1930s, but also the forgotten work of Reichenbach’s students—most of them women—at Istanbul University. (shrink)

This paper argues that emotional inferences about characters in a text are not as specific as previously assumed.

This article identifies power, subjectivity, and practices of freedom as neglected but significant elements for understanding the ethics of social entrepreneurship. While the ethics of social entrepreneurship is typically conceptualized in conjunction with innate properties or moral commitments of the individual, we problematize this view based on its presupposition of an essentialist conception of the authentic subject. We offer, based on Foucault’s ethical oeuvre, a practice-based alternative which sees ethics as being exercised through a critical and creative dealing with the (...) limits imposed by power, notably as they pertain to the conditioning of the neoliberal subject. To this end, we first draw on prior research which looks at how practitioners of social enterprises engage with government policies that demand that they should act and think more like prototypical entrepreneurs. Instead of simply endorsing the kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity implied in prevailing policies, our results indicate that practitioners are mostly reluctant to identify themselves with the invocation of governmental power, often rejecting the subjectivity offered to them by discourse. Conceiving these acts of resistance as emblematic of how social entrepreneurs practice ethics by retaining a skeptical attitude toward attempts that seek to determine who they should be and how they should live, we introduce three vignettes that illustrate how practices of freedom relate to critique, the care for others, and reflected choice. We conclude that a practice-based approach of ethics can advance our understanding of how social entrepreneurs actively produce conditions of freedom for themselves as well as for others without supposing a ‘true self’ or a utopian space of liberty beyond power. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, (...) but the fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

The field of bioethics is increasingly coming into contact with empirical research findings. In this article, we ask what role empirical research can play in the process of ethical clarification and decision-making. Ethical reflection almost always proceeds in three steps: the description of the moral question,the assessment of the moral question and the evaluation of the decision-making. Empirical research can contribute to each step of this process. In the description of the moral object, first of all, empirical research has a (...) role to play in the description of morally relevant facts. It plays a role in answering the “reality-revealing questions” (what, why,how, who, where and when), in assessing the consequences and in proposing alternative courses of action. Secondly, empirical research plays a role in assessing the moral question. It must be acknowledged that research possesses “the normative power of the factual,” which can also become normative by suppressing other norms. However, inductive normativity should always be balanced out by a deductive form of normativity. Thirdly, empirical research also has a role to play in evaluating the decision-making process. It can rule out certain moral choices by pointing out the occurrence of certain unexpected consequences or effects. It can also be useful, however, as a sociology of bioethics in which the discipline of bioethics itself becomes an object of research. (shrink)

In the wake of the chimpanzee genome publication, Pascal Gagneux, James J. Moore and Ajit Varki consider the ethical and scientific challenges for scientists who work on captive great apes.

The last two decades have seen a massive increase in the scholarly interest in technology, and have provoked new lines of thought in philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. Gilbert Simondon (1924 - 1989) was one of Frances's most influential philosophers in this field, and an important influence on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler. His work is only now being translated into English. Chabot's introduction to Simondon's work was published in French in 2002 and is now available in (...) English for the first time. It is the most accessible guide to Simondon's important but often opaque work. Chabot provides an excellent introduction to Simondon, positioning him as a philosopher of technology, and he describes his theory of individuation including his crystalline ontology. He goes on to offer a bridge between these two concerns, exploring how they are related. (shrink)

Evolutionary adaptation has been suggested as the hallmark of life that best accounts for life’s creativity. However, current evolutionary approaches still fail to give an adequate account of it, even if they are able to explain both the origin of novelties and the proliferation of certain traits in a population. Although modern-synthesis Darwinism is today usually appraised as too narrow a position to cope with all the complexities of developmental and structural biology—not to say biosemiotic phenomena—, Darwinism need not be (...) if we separate metaphor from reality in natural selection in order to show the axiological complexity of this concept. This can shed light on the relationship between biosemiotics and biological evolution. (shrink)