Consumers’ engagement in morally-questionable behaviors poses a serious threat to firms. To further the understanding of consumers’ behavior, this study explores the association and conflicts between their ethical and legal judgments. In addition, it examines the way consumers’ judgments depend on their mind-sets and the legal liability criterion of action. In two experiments, participants were asked to judge the ethicality and legality of consumers’ morally-questionable behaviors. Behavior activity and participants’ mind-sets were manipulated. The results show that consumers are more likely (...) to judge a behavior to be legal when they consider it ethical than when they consider it unethical. Nevertheless, conflicts between ethical and legal judgments are prevalent. Furthermore, ethical judgments, legal judgments, and the occurrence of conflicts between them depend on activity and on consumers’ mind-sets. Finally, consumers report uncertainty about the ethicality and legality of a wide range of morally-questionable behaviors. Thus, the results paint a picture of individuals who perceive the law to be often beyond their reach or in conflict with their ethical principles. They portray both ethical and legal judgments as dynamically-changing, subjective, and context-dependent. Theoretical contribution and business applications are discussed. (shrink)

We explore the computational complexity of justification, stability and relevance in incomplete argumentation frameworks (IAFs). IAFs are abstract argumentation frameworks that encode qualitative uncertainty by distinguishing between certain and uncertain arguments and attacks. These IAFs can be completed by deciding for each uncertain argument or attack whether it is present or absent. Such a completion is an abstract argumentation framework, for which it can be decided which arguments are acceptable under a given semantics. The justification status of an argument in (...) a completion then expresses whether the argument is accepted (in), not accepted because it is attacked by an accepted argument (out) or neither (undec). For a given IAF and certain argument, the justification status of that argument need not be the same in all completions. This is the issue of stability, where an argument is stable if its justification status is the same in all completions. For arguments that are not stable in an IAF, the relevance problem is of interest: which uncertain arguments or attacks should be investigated for the argument to become stable? In this paper, we define justification, stability and relevance for IAFs and provide a complexity analysis for these problems under grounded, complete, preferred and stable semantics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What’s the good of getting angry with a person? Some would argue that angry emotions like indignation or resentment are intrinsically good when they are an apt response. But many think this answer is not fully satisfactory. An increasing number of philosophers add that accusatory anger has value because of what it communicates to the blamee, and because of its downstream cultivating effects on the blamee. Mediators and conflict resolution strategists share an interest with philosophers in the value of (...) reactive attitudes for interpersonal communication, but prominent thinkers from those fields arrive at rather different verdicts about the effects of accusatory anger. On a more therapeutic approach to interpersonal conflict, angry accusation is commonly understood to obfuscate mutual understanding and to have bad downstream effects on the blamee. Below, I discuss how the compassionate communication approach casts doubt on the purported valuable effects of angry accusation, and I provide empirical support for this worry. I argue that philosophers should reconsider their empirical assumptions about the human psychology of discord, and hypothesize that accusatory anger is unlikely to have the communicative and cultivating effects that it is purported to have. I conclude by highlighting further empirical and ethical questions this hypothesis generates. (shrink)

Mental health-care clinicians report that they hold patients responsible for morally objectionable behaviour but at the same time consider blaming attitudes to be inappropriate. These practices present a conundrum for all Strawsonian theories of responsibility. In response to this conundrum, Pickard has proposed severing the Strawsonian connection between being responsible and being an appropriate target of blaming attitudes. In this article I will argue that her solution fails to explain the practices at stake and provide an alternative solution that uncovers (...) an under-theorized stance we take towards those whose abilities are underdeveloped or compromised. (shrink)

Communication and cultivation accounts of responsibility argue that blaming has an important communicative and agency-cultivating function when addressed at someone we consider to be deserving of blame. On these accounts, responsible agents are agents who can understand negative reactive attitudes and are sensitive to their moral-agency cultivating function. In this paper I examine our reproachful engagements with agents whose moral agency is underdeveloped or compromised. I discuss how these engagements compare to blaming on CC accounts and argue reproachful engagements can (...) have an important communicative and agency-cultivating pointe. I then go on to propose an addition to CC-accounts that explains how underdeveloped and compromised agents can be held responsible. I will show how this addition resolves ambiguities in accounts from McKenna, Vargas and McGeer. I conclude the paper by anticipating an objection CC accounts could raise: that reproach and blame are co-extensive. (shrink)

This article evaluates communicative approaches to responsibility within the Strawsonian tradition. These approaches consider reactive attitudes to be forms of moral address and consider responsiveness to moral address a condition on responsible agency. The article consists of a critical and a positive part. In the first part, I identify a risk for these theories. They often provide an overly narrow account of how we can communicate with others about perceived moral disregard. I argue that, when read this way, a conversational (...) approach has implausible implications and falls prey to a familiar objection to Strawsonian theory: it would incorporate social injustices inherent to our responsibility practices. In particular, it would affirm ableist attitudes towards autistic individuals, by exempting them as moral agents on the basis of irrelevant criteria. In the second part, I propose an inclusive reading of the communicative approach. This inclusive account steers clear of ableism towards autistic individuals and accommodates diversity. Although it is also derived from our practices and psychologies, it does not incorporate the biases and injustices that are part of those practices, and instead it provides us with a means to criticize them. (shrink)

In this paper I ask what implicit attitudes tell us about our freedom. I analyze the relation between the literature on implicit attitudes and an important subcategory of theories of free will—self-disclosure accounts. If one is committed to such a theory, I suggest one may have to move to a more social conceptualization of the capacity for freedom. I will work out this argument in five sections. In the first section, I discuss the specific theories of free will that are (...) central to this paper. In the second section, I will show that implicit-bias research raises questions about people’s capacities to exercise free will. In the third section, I will consider how an individual may overcome these failures and argue that the individual ability for self-regulation is significantly limited. One could stop here and conclude that free will is a limited capacity. But I argue that this conclusion would be too hastily drawn. I will instead continue to ask what would be required for free will. By discussing how failures of free will are due to social structures and may be therefore repaired by changing social structures in section 4, I will arrive at an alternative conclusion about the capacity for free will in section 5. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article, we explore what are ethical forms of holding service users responsible in mental health care contexts. Hanna Pickard has provided an account of how service users should be held responsible for morally wrong or seriously harmful conduct within contexts of mental health care, called the clinical stance. From a clinical stance one holds a person responsible for harm, but refrains from emotionally blaming the person and only considers the person responsible for this conduct in a detached (...) sense. Her account is based on what are considered best practices in the treatment of people with borderline personality disorder and addiction. We ask if this account generalizes across different diagnostic criteria and different clinical contexts. To begin to answer this question, we compare the clinical stance to an account of what are considered best practices in the treatment of service users at a specialized clinic for people with autism spectrum disorder in the Netherlands. We refer to this alternative account as the nurturing stance and highlight relevant similarities and differences between the clinical stance and the nurturing stance. We conclude with suggestions for further research and theorizing. (shrink)

Background Genome scientists and Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of genetics (ELSI) scholars commonly inhabit distinct research cultures – utilizing different research methods, asking different research questions, and valuing different types of knowledge. Collaborations between these two communities are frequently called for to enhance the ethical conduct of genomics research. Yet, little has been done to qualitatively compare genome scientists’ and ELSI scholars’ perspectives on collaborations with each other and the factors that may affect these collaborations.Methods 20 semi-structured interviews with (...) US-based genome scientists and ELSI scholars were conducted between June–September 2021. Interviews were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis.Results Genome scientists and ELSI scholars provided different understandings of the value and goals of their collaborations with each other. Genome scientists largely perceived ELSI expertise to be relevant for human subjects research; they described ELSI scholars as communicators who help the public and/or study participants better understand genomics research. In comparison, ELSI scholars viewed themselves as developing and implementing policies; they expressed frustration at how scientists can misunderstand their research methods or negatively perceive them. A combination of factors – both structural (e.g., criteria for promotion) and cultural (e.g., perceptions of what colleagues value and respect) – seemed to shape these diverging perspectives.Conclusion Academic institutions, funders, and researchers commonly call for collaborations between genome scientists and ELSI scholars, but under-consider how their different conceptual frameworks, research methods, goals, norms, and values, conjoin to affect such partnerships. Acknowledging, exploring, and addressing the complex interplay between these factors could help to more effectively facilitate collaborations between genome scientists and ELSI scholars. (shrink)

Genes have long been used to validate social inequality. The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, by Kathryn Paige Harden, attempts not only to reclaim genetic research on human behavior from its eugenic past but also to argue that genetic research can be used to understand and enhance social equality. This review essay illustrates why embracing a political agenda in which genetics matter for social equality will not in practice advance efforts to reduce social inequality. It argues that (...) the points raised in The Genetic Lottery would be important in an alternate world in which structural inequalities have ceased to exist, but not in the world we live in today. (shrink)

The aim of the present study is to focus exclusively on the Basilica scholia of John Xiphilinos: to collect and record a list of his scholia and to analyse and evaluate specific lengthy scholia of his in detail. Scholia attributed to Xiphilinos have the heading “of the nomophylax”. We also encounter scholia under the heading “of Ioannes”, and it remains doubtful whether they can also be attributed to Xiphilinos. Based on the evidence some of the scholia with the heading “of (...) Ioannes” are certainly attributed to the antecessor Ioannes Kobidas. Xiphilinos takes into account older legal material including antecessorian writings, as well as works of Athanasius of Emesa and Theodorus of Hermoupolis. Xiphilinos’ references to the rheton raise the question whether he had actually consulted manuscripts of the Digest. Arguments are brought in favour of this hypothesis. (shrink)

This book engages in an analysis of the ideals of freedom and social justice. Rolle examines and questions Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World by David Walker, which encourages slaves to embrace a theologically-based understanding of freedom and participate in insurrectionist activities to overthrow slavery.

In 1902, the Calabrian brigand Giuseppe Musolino was tried on several counts of murder and many crimes of lesser magnitude. While the tale of the brigand’s 1898 false conviction, imprisonment, escape and then revenge sparked a national debate about the political and cultural meaning of brigandage, the trial came to focus on Musolino’s emotional state at the time of his crimes. Was he a cold-blooded and calculating killer who manipulated southerners into believing he was a folk hero? Or was he (...) an angry, passionate and insane murderer victimized by his own feelings? Both jurists and scientists weighed in to determine his culpability. By turning a political question of banditry or brigandage into a psychological question of morbid or criminal emotions, the trial politicized the criminal character. This article examines the perspectives on emotions that shaped Musolino’s trial, and how psychiatric knowledge came to challenge legal notions of insanity and culpability. It argues that the determination of emotions as motives served to de-legitimize the rationale and political motives of the defendant, in turn politicizing his emotions and character. At the same time, the cause of Musolino’s crime and his culpability represented the failures of national unification and the ongoing tensions between the North and South of Italy. The introduction of psychiatric expertise into the criminal court pushed judgement and punishment to examine increasingly who a person was as opposed to what that person had done. The court’s definition of who a person ‘was’, was a matter of how that person felt. (shrink)

We investigated the automaticity of implicit sequence learning by varying perceptual load in a pure perceptual sequence learning paradigm. Participants responded to the randomly changing identity of a target, while the irrelevant target location was structured. In Experiment 1, the target was presented under low or high perceptual load during training, whereas testing occurred without load. Unexpectedly, no sequence learning was observed. In Experiment 2, perceptual load was introduced during the test phase to determine whether load is required to express (...) perceptual knowledge. Learning itself was unaffected by visuospatial demands, but more learning was expressed under high load test conditions. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that perceptual load is not required for the acquisition of perceptual sequence knowledge. These findings suggest that perceptual load does not mediate the perceptual sequence learning process itself, supporting the automaticity of implicit learning, but is mandatory for the expression of pure perceptual sequence knowledge. (shrink)

A clear introduction to the major works of Kierkegaard that highlights the Lutheran framework of his thought, the book combines exposition of the texts within their philosophical, theological, and historical context with an engaging critical dialogue that brings Kierkegaard into debate with twenty-first century thought.

Voor het eerst hebben jongeren onder de achttien in Duitsland en België deze maand gestemd, bij de Europese verkiezingen. Nederlandse leeftijdsgenoten hebben dit recht (nog) niet. Te beïnvloedbaar, ze kunnen nog niet verantwoord stemmen, klinkt het. Deze tegenwerpingen zijn oneerlijk. Ze gelden ook voor miljoenen anderen die al wel stemrecht hebben.

In this new and expanded edition of their controversial 1994 book, the authors update their analysis of what's gone wrong with Women's Studies programs. Their three new chapters provide a devastating and detailed examination of the routine practices found in feminst teaching and research.

The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies - termed the post-soul era - created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of 'Black aesthetic time' - a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide (...) in the process of cultural production - she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders - or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a forward-looking account of the difference between the responsibility of children and the responsibility of adults. I do so by means of criticizing agency-cultivation accounts of responsibility. According to these accounts, the justification for holding a person to a norm is the cultivation of their moral agency, and children are, just like adults, considered responsible to the extent that they can have their moral agency cultivated in this manner. Like many forward-looking accounts, these accounts claim (...) that the purpose of holding adults to norms is similar to the purpose of holding children to norms. I argue that the justifications for holding adults to norms are different because of the particular ways in which adults can be in moral disagreement with one another, and the consequences that this has. Moral disagreement is relevant to consequentialist accounts because it impacts on whether and how we can secure beneficial outcomes via holding someone to a norm. One of the upshots of this analysis is that the forward-looking justification for holding adults to norms is qualitatively different from how and why we should hold children to norms. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an important addition to Strawsonian theory. In the first section I briefly discuss the Strawsonian approach to responsibility. Then I discuss in some detail the stance we, according to Strawsonians, take towards people who lack the abilities to comply with moral norms. This ‘objective stance’ is inconsistent with the stance that is considered typical and desirable in psychiatric contexts and care-relationships more generally speaking. In order to resolve this conflict I formulate an additional stance that (...) allows Strawsonian theory to account for this. (shrink)

Providing effective feedback to patients in a rehabilitation training program is essential. As technologies are being developed to support patient training, they need to be able to provide the users with feedback on their performance. As there are various aspects on which feedback can be given, it is important to ensure that users are not overwhelmed by too much information given too frequently by the assistive technology. We created a rule-based set of guidelines for the desired hierarchy, timing, and content (...) of feedback to be used when stroke patients train with an upper-limb exercise platform which we developed. The feedback applies to both success on task completion and to the execution of compensatory movements, and is based on input collected from clinicians in a previous study. We recruited 11 stroke patients 1–72 months from injury onset. Ten participants completed the training; each trained with the rehabilitation platform in two configurations: with motor feedback and with no motor feedback. The two conditions were identical, except for the feedback content provided: in both conditions they received feedback on task success; in the MF condition they also received feedback on making undesired compensatory movements during the task. Participants preferred the configuration that provided feedback on both task success and quality of movement. This pilot experiment demonstrates the feasibility of a system providing both task-success and movement-quality feedback to patients based on a decision tree which we developed. (shrink)

By conceptualizing woman as the problem, we repeat rather than deconstruct or analyze the social relations that construct or represent us as a problem in the first place. If the problem is defined in this way, woman remains in her traditional position : the 'guilty one', the deviant, the other. It is more productive and accurate to locate both men and women as characters within a larger context: the relations of gender. From this feminist perspective men and women are both (...) prisoners of gender, although in highly differentiated but interrelated ways.1. (shrink)

L'évidence du concept de la « différence » entre hommes et femmes imprègne le discours féministe contemporain. Pour aborder ce concept de façon critique, j'utilise un corpus littéraire qui nous aide à voir l'évident, le non-remarqué et l'habituel dans nos positions sexuales : les fictions utopiques en forme d'inversion des rôles sexuaux. Après une discussion détaillée de ces textes, je suggère que la vision utopique de l'écrivaine anglaise Katharine Burdekin pointe en direction d'un sentier qui pourrait nous mener hors des (...) interminables débats sur l'« essentialisme » et le « constructivisme social » comme explications de la « différence ».The obviousness of the concept of "difference" between men and women permeates contemporary feminist discourse, which has devoted much energy to explicating the sources of this " difference ". In order to take a critical look at this concept, I draw on a body of literature that helps us to see the obvious, the unnoticed, the habitual in our gendered positions : Utopian fictions cast as sex-role reversals. After discussing these texts in some detail, I argue that the Utopian vision of the british writer Katharine Burdekin hints at a path that can lead us out of the endless debates over "essentialism" and "social constructionism" as explanations of "difference". Ce texte a pour objet l'évident, et la façon dont les choses que l'on considère évidentes glissent doucement dans l'invisibilité. Je soutiendrai que c'est précisément l'évident qui doit être rendu visible, et qu'afin de récupérer l'évident nous devons trouver un point de vue, un lieu d'où l'évident perd son évidence, est délesté de l'attribut du "cela va sans dire". (shrink)

This paper presents the NeoCrawler – a tailor-made webcrawler, which identifies and retrieves neologisms from the Internet and systematically monitors the use of detected neologisms on the web by means of weekly searches. It enables researchers to use the web as a corpus in order to investigate the dynamics of lexical innovation on a large-scale and systematic basis. The NeoCrawler represents an innovative web-mining tool which opens up new opportunities for linguists to tackle a number of unresolved and under-researched issues (...) in the field of lexical innovation. This paper presents the design as well as the most important characteristics of two modules, the Discoverer and the Observer, with regard to the usage-based study of lexical innovation and diffusion. (shrink)

We define and study the notions of stability and relevance for precedent-based reasoning, focusing on Horty’s result model of precedential constraint. According to this model, precedents constrain the possible outcomes for a focus case, which is a yet undecided case, where precedents and the focus case are compared on their characteristics (called dimensions). In this paper, we refer to the enforced outcome for the focus case as its justification status. In contrast to earlier work, we do not assume that all (...) dimension values of the focus case or the precedent cases have been established with certainty: rather, each dimension is assigned a set of possible values. We define a focus case as stable if its justification status is the same for every choice of the possible values. For focus cases that are not stable, we study the task of identifying relevance: which possible values should be excluded to make the focus case stable? In addition, we introduce the notion of possibility to verify if a user can assign an outcome to an unstable focus case without making the case base of precedents inconsistent. We show how the tasks of identifying justification, stability, relevance and possibility can be applied for human-in-the-loop decision support. Finally, we discuss the computational complexity of these tasks and provide efficient algorithms. (shrink)

This chapter provides a review of the hypothesis that synesthetic-like perception is present in infants and toddlers. Infants and very young children exhibit evidence of functional hyperconnectivity between the senses, much of which is reminiscent of the cross-sensory associations observed in synaesthetic adults. As most of these cross-sensory correspondances cannot be easily explained by learning, it is likely that these represent natural associations between the senses. In average adults, these 'natural associations' are felt only intuitively rather than explicitly. These observations (...) have led to the proposal of the 'neonatal synaesthesia hypothesis', which purports that all individuals are born synaesthetic, with explicit conscious perception of these natural cross-modal associations dissipating over development in typical individuals. This dissipation is likely the result of experience-dependent synaptic pruning and/or inhibition of cross-sensory neural connections. At the same time, cross-modal associations matching those common in the environment might be assumed to be learned. This hypothesis is re-evaluated in light of recent research findings, and is examined in the context of current evolutionary models of neuronal recycling and emerging evidence of longitudinal changes in children with synaesthesia. (shrink)

At the heart of the ongoing climate crisis is the impact of anthropogenic activity on the oceans and the seas of the planet. The complexity and the scale of planetary changes, though, often feel elusive, or even unintelligible. This article aims to discuss the need to address the particularities and agency of the ocean, specifically exploring the role of art in empowering people to realize their bonds to the planet’s oceans and seas. After discussing the problematics of the long-established separation (...) of land from sea, just like of culture from nature, the article presents theoretical positions that oppose these constructed binaries and approach oceans and seas as living bodies and at the same time as a medium. Four different artistic works are analysed with the goal to draw conclusions on how to live and be with the ocean, acknowledging its fluidity, diversity and complexity. (shrink)

Personal space is the distance that people tend to maintain from others during daily life in a largely unconscious manner. For humans, personal space-related behaviors represent one form of non-verbal social communication, similar to facial expressions and eye contact. Given that the changes in social behavior and experiences that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, including “social distancing” and widespread social isolation, may have altered personal space preferences, we investigated this possibility in two independent samples. First, we compared the size of (...) personal space measured before the onset of the pandemic to its size during the pandemic in separate groups of subjects. Personal space size was significantly larger in those assessed during the onset of the pandemic. Lastly, we found that the practice of social distancing and perceived risk of being infected with COVID-19 were linked to this personal space enlargement during the pandemic. Taken together, these findings suggest that personal space boundaries expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic independent of actual infection risk level. As the day-to-day effects of the pandemic subside, personal space preferences may provide one index of recovery from the psychological effects of this crisis. (shrink)

Infants possess only rudimentary face-processing skills, evidence from patients treated for congenital cataract and from monkeys deprived of face input for several months postnatally indicates that this early experience plays a key role in the ultimate development of expert face processing. This article provides evidence that early visual deprivation disrupts some but not all aspects of face processing and that the deficits caused by early visual deprivation are face-specific, but that it is visual deprivation rather than the lack of input (...) from faces per se that causes the deficits to occur. The evidence is placed from visually deprived monkeys and humans into a broader context showing the role of biased experience on the development of expert face processing. (shrink)

This paper examines how scientific understanding is enhanced by virtual entities, focusing on the case of the synthetic cell. Comparing it to other virtual entities and environments in science, we argue that the synthetic cell has a virtual dimension, in that it is functionally similar to living cells, though it does not mimic any particular naturally evolved cell (nor is it constructed to do so). In being cell-like at most, the synthetic cell is akin to many other virtual objects as (...) it is selective and only partially implemented. However, there is one important difference: it is constructed by using the same materials and, to some extent, the same kind of processes as its natural counterparts. In contrast to virtual reality, especially to that of digital entities and environments, the details of its implementation is what matters for the scientific understanding generated by the synthetic cell. We conclude by arguing for the close connection between the virtual and the artifactual. (shrink)