Certain attributes are particularly desirable for public educational websites, and websites for ethics education in particular. Among the most important of these attributes is wide accessibility through adherence to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for HTML code. Adherence to this standard produces webpages that can be rendered by a full range of web browsers, including Braille and speech browsers. Although almost no academic websites, including ethics websites, and even fewer commercial websites are accessible by W3C standards, as illustrated (...) by the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science 〈http://onlineethics.org〉, even websites created on limited budgets and with an undergraduate student staff can fulfill these standards. Other desirable attributes, such as provision of annotation for all links and the use of annotated links to give the user alternate ways of ordering and organizing content, are important for making full use of the educational possibilities of hypermedia for websites. (shrink)

Many philosophers assert that psychological verbs generate opaque contexts and that the object of a psychological verb cannot be replaced with a co‐referring expression salva veritate as the objects of non‐psychological verbs can be. I argue that the logical and linguistic concerns which govern this assertion do not transfer to observational and experimental situations because the criteria that we use in order to verify that an observed subject has one hypothesized desire rather than another provide inconclusive evidence when we (...) don't allow for all regular substitutions in psychological contexts. This becomes more obvious when we contextualize intentional behavior within the appropriate framework by recognizing that, in order to make sense of any desire attribution, we must understand the subject experiencing the desire to be pursuing each desired situation as a means to a further overarching goal. I conclude that the object of desire should always be read de re. (shrink)

The ability to attribute beliefs and desires is taken by many to be an essential component of human social cognition, enabling us to predict, explain and shape behaviour and other mental states. In this paper, I argue that there are certain basic responses to attributed attitudes which have thus far been overlooked in the study of social cognition, although they underlie many of the moves we make in our social interactions. The claim is that belief and desire attributions (...) allow for the possibility to agree or disagree and to approve or disapprove, respectively. These evaluative responses may seem obvious but they are of considerable theoretical interest because they can’t be reduced to other roles of belief and desire attribution and are always an open possibility for attributers. What’s more, the responses of agreement/disagreement and approval/disapproval are indispensable for such attributions to be intelligible to us in the first place. (shrink)

Being a formal and general as well as the most widely accepted approach to practical rationality, rational decision theory should be crucial for justifying rational morals. In particular, acting morally should also be rational in decision theoretic terms. After defending this thesis, in the critical part of the paper two strategies to develop morals following this insight are criticized: game theoretical ethics of cooperation and ethical intuitionism. The central structural objections to ethics of cooperation are that they too directly aim (...) at the rationality of moral action and that they to do not encompass moral values or a moral desirability function. The constructive half of the paper takes up these criticisms by developing a two-part strategy to bring rationality and morals in line. The first part is to define ‘moral desirability’. This is done, using multi-attribute utility theory, by equating several adequate components of an individual’s comprehensive utility function with the moral desirability function. The second part is to introduce mechanisms, institutions, in particular socially valid moral norms, that provide further motivation for acting in accordance with morals. (shrink)

According to the desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied. This theory faces the problem of prudential neutrality: it apparently cannot avoid saying that, from the point of view of prudence or self-interest, you ought to be neutral between satisfying an existing desire of yours and replacing it with an equally strong desire and satisfying the new desire. It also faces the problem of remote desires: it regards (...) as directly relevant to your well-being even desires whose objects are intuitively too irrelevant to (or ‘remote’ from) your life to affect your welfare. In this article, I argue that desire theorists can answer both objections by appealing to hidden desires – ones that it is psychologically realistic to attribute to the agents in the cases on which the two problems are based, even though they are not mentioned in descriptions of those cases. (shrink)

Interactionists about folk psychology argue that embodied interactions constitute the primary way we understand one another and thus oppose more standard accounts according to which the understanding is mostly achieved through belief and desire attributions. However, also interactionists need to explain why people sometimes still resort to attitude ascription. In this paper, it is argued that this explanatory demand presents a genuine challenge for interactionism and that a popular proposal which claims that belief and desire attributions (...) are needed to make sense of counternormative behavior is problematic. Instead, the most promising conception of belief and desire ascriptions is the communicative conception which locates them in the context of declarative and imperative communication, respectively. Such a communication can take both verbal and non-verbal form. (shrink)

This paper disputes the widespread assumption that beliefs and desires may be attributed as theoretical entities in the service of the explanation and predic- tion of human behavior. The literature contains no clear account of how beliefs and desires might generate actions, and there is good reason to deny that principles of rationality generate a choice on the basis of an agent’s beliefs and desires. An alter- native conception of beliefs and desires is here introduced, according to which an attribution (...) of belief is, in a certain sense, an assertion on the believer’s behalf and an attribution of desire is, in a certain sense, a command on the desirer’s behalf. In terms of this conception of the attribution of beliefs and desires, we can begin to understand how attributions of beliefs and desires can be explanatory, although we still cannot expect the attribution of beliefs and desires to generate predictions based on an assumption of rationality. Finally, the reality of beliefs and desires is likened to the reality of money; it is the reality of things governed by objective norms. (shrink)

Social desirability bias is a pervasive measurement challenge in the social sciences and survey research. More clarity is needed to understand the performance of social desirability scales in diverse groups, contexts, and cultures. The present study aims to contribute to the international literature on social desirability measurement by examining the psychometric performance of a short version of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale in a nationally representative sample of teachers in Kazakhstan. A total of 2,461 Kazakhstani teachers completed the MCSDS – (...) Form C in their language of choice. The results failed to support the theoretical unidimensionality of the original scale. Instead, the results of Random Intercept Item Factor Analysis model suggest that the scale answers depend more on the method factor rather than the substantial factor that represents SDB. In addition, an alternative explanation indicates that the scale seems better suited to measuring two SDB correlated factors: attribution and denial. Internal consistency coefficients demonstrated unsatisfactory reliability scores for the two factors. The Kazakhstani version of the MCSDS – Form C was invariant across geographic location, language, and partially across age groups. However, no measurement invariance was demonstrated for gender. Despite these limitations, the analysis of the Kazakhstani version of the MCSDS – Form C presented in this study constitutes a first step in facilitating further research and measurement of SDB in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and other collectivist countries. (shrink)

In his moral writings, Kant states that moral duty cannot be derived from “the special characteristics of human nature.” This statement is untenable if one takes seriously Kant 's moral views on sexual desire. Instead close study reveals that considerations based on both morality and nature play a role here. The combination of these two elements leads to inconsistencies and difficulties in Kant 's understanding of sexual desire, but they enable us to better understand the importance Kant attributes (...) to marriage within his philosophy of law. (shrink)

I am very grateful to both Edward Erwin and Peter Fonagy for their thoughtful and engaging comments. I do not have space to deal fully with all the issues they raise, but I will try to clarify some key points at which perhaps I implied more than I intended, or failed to be clear. Erwin states that I claim the following principle is a method for inferring causes: “if X is causally relevant to the occurrence of Y, then the incidence (...) of Ys in the class of Xs and Ys will be different compared with the incidence of Ys in the class of non-Xs and Ys” (Erwin 2012, 217). This is not so. The method I attribute to Grünbaum is given in what follows the principle in the quotation given on p. 199, namely, “To validate a .. (shrink)

According to the Desire-Based Reasons Model reasons for action are provided by desires. Many, however, are critical about the Model holding an alternative view of practical reason, which is often called valued-based. In this paper I consider one particular attempt to refute the Model, which advocates of the valued-based view often appeal to: the idea of reason-based desires. The argument is built up from two premises. The first claims that desires are states that we have reason to have. The (...) second argues that desires do not add to the stock of reasons the agent has for having them. Together the two theses entail that desires are based on reasons, which they transmit but to which they cannot add. In the paper I deal with a counterexample to the second premise: tie-breaking desires. I first distinguish two interesting cases and argue that only the second challenges the premise. Then I move onto analyze this challenge by focusing on Ruth Chang’s recent employment of it. I show that contrary to its counterintuitive appearance, the challenge can be sustained. However, I also argue that Chang overlooks the full potential of one particular response to the challenge: the introduction of higher-order reasons determining the normative significance of these desires. At the same time, I show that this response has a problem that Chang does not consider. As a result, the response can only partially disarm the challenge of tie-breaking desires; or not at all, depending on what significance we attribute to the counterexamples. (shrink)

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a person’s life. (...) Studies 2a–b found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear. (shrink)

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental (...) control, people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (shrink)

Social desirability can be conceived as a proxy for self-deception, as it involves a positive attribution side and a denial side. People with mental disorders have lower scores on measures of social desirability, which could depend on cognitive load caused by symptoms. This suggests that self-deception is an active strategy and not merely a faulty cognitive process.

For many people, the phenomenon of divine hiddenness is so total that it is far from clear to them that God exists at all. Reasonably enough, they therefore do not believe that God exists. Yet it is possible, whilst lacking belief in God’s reality, nonetheless to see it as a possibility that is both realistic and attractive; and in this situation, one will likely want to be open to the considerable benefits that would be available if God were real. In (...) this paper I argue that certain kinds of desire for God can aid this non-believing openness. It is possible to desire God even in a state of non-belief, since desire does not require belief that its object exists. I argue that if we desire God in some particular capacity, and with some sense of what would constitute satisfaction, then through the desire we have knowledge -- incomplete yet vivid in its personal significance -- about the attributes God would need in order to satisfy us; thus, if God is real and does have those attributes, one knows something about God through desiring him. Because desire does not require belief, neither does the knowledge in question. Expanding on recent work by Vadas and Wynn, I sketch the epistemology of desire needed to support this argument. I then apply this epistemology to desire for God. An important question is how one might cultivate the requisite kinds desire for God; and one way, I argue, is through engaging with certain kinds of sacred music. I illustrate desire’s religiously epistemic power in this context, before replying to two objections. (shrink)

Si l’on peut parler d’un désir de Dieu inscrit dans le coeur de l’homme, qu’en est-il du côté de Dieu ? Dieu désire-t-il entrer en communion avec chacun de nous ? Y aurait-il du désir dans la Trinité sainte ? Après avoir élaboré une nouvelle conception du désir, Jean-Baptiste Lecuit s’interroge sur le désir de l’homme pour Dieu : en quoi consiste-t-il ? Quel exaucement lui est-il offert ? Par quelles voies ? Est-il naturel à tout être humain ? En (...) un renversement de perspective, l’auteur s’interroge aussi sur la possibilité que Dieu désire l’être humain et son salut. Il met au jour un courant ininterrompu de Pères de l’Église, de mystiques et de théologiens qui, malgré l’avis contraire d’Augustin et de Thomas d’Aquin, n’a cessé de reconnaître et d’annoncer un tel désir, de façon toujours plus insistante. Ce parcours passionnant dans la Tradition de l’Église débouche sur une réflexion justifiant l’attribution à Dieu d’un désir pour l’homme et montrant sa portée théologique et spirituelle. Carme déchaux de la Province de Paris, Jean-Baptiste Lecuit est professeur de théologie de l’université catholique de Lille. Il a publié aux Éditions du Cerf, L’Anthropologie théologique à la lumière de la psychanalyse (2007) ; Quand Dieu habite en l’homme (2010). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Desire and Ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan:A Response to Professor DeighAccording to the "orthodox" interpretation of Hobbes's ethics, the laws of nature are the products of means-end thinking. According to the "definitivist" interpretation recently offered by John Deigh, the laws of nature are generated by reason operating on a definition of "law of nature," where the content of this definition is given by linguistic usage.2 I aim to accomplish (...) two things in this note. First, I want to locate as clearly as possible the point at which the orthodox and definitivist interpretations must disagree. Second, I want to show that once the claim on which these interpretations disagree is made clear, it is the orthodox interpretation that turns out to be the superior.31.Deigh takes as the initial test case for the various interpretations of Hobbes's moral theory the passage in chapter fifteen of Leviathan commonly known as "the reply to the fool." The fool, it will be recalled, argues that the precept that covenants be kept is not a rule of reason; Hobbes argues that the fool's "specious reasoning is neverthelesse [End Page 259] false," for to break a valid covenant is to violate a dictate of reason.4 Deigh summarizes his criticism of the orthodox interpretation of this passage as follows.On [the orthodox] interpretation, the dispute between Hobbes and the Fool concerns the deliverances of reason when reason is exercised in the service of self-interest, that is, when its exercise consists in determining the fittest means to achieving the ends set by egoistic desires. Such an exercise falls outside of the definition of reason that Hobbes gives in chapter five. It exemplifies strategic or means-to-end thinking and not deduction. Indeed, it corresponds to what Hobbes, in chapter three, defines as seeking... Hence, the orthodox interpretation of the laws of nature implies that Hobbes, in expounding the laws of nature, went back on the notion of reason he defined in chapter five. It implicitly attributes a fundamental inconsistency to Hobbes's philosophy.5The laws of nature—among which is the rule requiring the keeping of covenants6 —are held by Hobbes to be precepts of reason.7 Hobbes deems them, collectively, a science,8 by which he means that they are the deliverances of reason that pertain to a specific subject-matter.9 But, argues Deigh, Hobbes understands reason in a very specific way, a way that is distinct from the sort of means-end thinking that Hobbes describes in detail in chapter three and labels "seeking." Thus the orthodox interpretation of Hobbes's moral theory is at odds with Hobbes's own conception of the laws of nature individually as dictates of reason and collectively as the science of the true moral philosophy.It is of course true that the sort of thinking that Hobbes calls "seeking" and the sort of thinking that Hobbes calls "reasoning" are fundamentally different. Seeking takes its origin from experience: we have seen certain events following other events, and we retain a trace of that experience in imagination. Thus when we have some desire, there arises "the Thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we ayme at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our power."10 Those that are able to engage in this sort of thinking well are prudent,11 and on Hobbes's view, humans with comparable experience will exhibit a comparable degree of prudence.12 And because seeking requires only desire to regulate thought and some experience of events succeeding other events, there is nothing distinctively human about this form of thinking, and indeed Hobbes acknowledges that prudence is common to humans and other animals.13 By contrast, the process that Hobbes calls "reasoning" [End Page 260] is characterized independently of desire. All that is essential to reasoning is that it involves the drawing of consequences that follow from sentences formed from aptly-defined general terms.14 Thus all deliverances of reason are, either explicitly or implicitly, conditional in form: necessarily, if p... (shrink)

Africa’s current socio-economic predicament is often solely attributed to political and economic mismanagement. However, such an analysis is far from comprehensive, as it fails to account for the historical, sociological and psychological causes of the current unsatisfactory social conditions in the continent. Consequently, using the critical and prescriptive techniques of philosophic reflection, this paper examines four apparent mental impediments to desirable social transformation in contemporaryAfrica, namely, conservatism, feeble social consciousness, blind acceptance of the white-black dichotomy, and a fixation with foreign (...) paradigms of managing public affairs. The paper calls for an interdisciplinary approach to the verifying, mitigating and/or eliminating of these impediments. (shrink)

Some eliminativists have predicted that a developed neuroscience will eradicate the principles and theoretical kinds (belief, desire, etc.) implicit in our ordinary practices of mental state attribution. Prevailing defenses of common-sense psychology infer its basic integrity from its familiarity and instrumental success in everyday social commerce. Such common-sense defenses charge that eliminativist arguments are self-defeating in their folk psychological appeal to the belief that eliminativism is true. I argue that eliminativism is untouched by this simple charge of inconsistency, and (...) introduce a different dialectical strategy for arguing against the eliminativist. In keeping with the naturalistic trend in the sociology and philosophy of science, I show that neuroscientists routinely rely on folk psychological procedures of intentional state attribution in applying epistemically reliable standards of scientific evaluation. These scientific contexts place ordinary procedures of attribution under greater stress, producing evidence of folk psychological success that is less equivocal than the evidence in mundane settings. Therefore, the dependence of science on folk psychology, when combined with an independently plausible explanatory constraint on reduction and an independently motivated notion of theoretical stress, allows us to reconstitute the charge of (neurophilic) eliminativist inconsistency in a more sophisticated form. (shrink)

Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side- effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for business ethics has been done. Then, we (...) present new experimental results that expand the attribution asymmetry to virtue and vice. We also examine whether it matters to people that an effect was produced as a primary or side- effect, as well as how consumer habits might be affected by this phenomenon. These results lead to the conclusion that it appears to be in a businessperson’s self-interest to be virtuous. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.1 (2004) 148-152 [Access article in PDF] Paul W. Ludwig. Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv + 398 pp. Cloth, $65. This is a very ambitious and very important, but also importantly flawed, book. It issues from an excellent stable, the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and admirably maintains that (...) stable's thoroughbred tradition of sophisticated interdisciplinarity and equally sophisticated interfacing between the ancient subject matter and the target contemporary readership. It aims not merely to interpret the ancient world but also to change the modern. It takes for its subject matter rival constructions of eros (unitalicized, since this is mostly not used as a mere transliteration of the Greek word): a sometimes deadly, sometimes fructifying, amalgam of altruistic and selfish passion, emotion, and reasonable calculation. The flaws lie not so much in the conception as in the execution. This is one of those books in which the whole is palpably less than the sum of its parts, some of which are quite exceptionally thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is partial, too, in that it selects its source texts very precisely and deliberately but neglects others that a less partial (in another sense) reader might have expected the author to tackle at comparable length and with comparable assiduity. It suffers, probably, from an overlong period of gestation. It would have benefited, certainly, from a Maxwell Perkins in the editorial cutting room.Eros is currently, if the pun may be permitted, a sexy topic in ancient or classical studies. Ludwig's own generally accurate listing of works cited (381-92—not, he stresses, xiii, a "bibliography") includes nearly a score of articles and books in the titles of which "eros" or "erotic" appears, one of them a translated article by Freud (Ludwig cites in all eight Freudian works, having no truck with feminist or other rejections of any or all versions of Freudian psychodynamic theory). To these could be added (exempli gratia) Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.'s Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value(which appeared early enough, in 1999, for Ludwig to have taken it into account) or Thomas F. Scanlon's Eros and Greek Athleticsand Victoria Wohl's Love Among the Ruins. The Erotics of Democracy(which did not—they were also published in 2002). It is odd, however, that Ludwig seems to have overlooked Wohl's 1999 article, "The Eros of Alcibiades," which treats a subject that Ludwig himself could hardly not treat, and unfortunate that he did, in that the article appears in revised form in Wohl's new book, the chief premise of which is that "the erotics of democracy is not merely a trope but a dense point of convergence within Athenian social relations and subjectivity."Both Plato's Symposiumand Greek athletics bulk large in Ludwig's account, the former understandably more so than the latter. Indeed, Ludwig begins with a minutely detailed account of—just one speech from—the Symposium, that attributed to "Aristophanes," to which he counterpoints the views that he thinks he can confidently attribute to the "real" Aristophanes, the author of the extant comedies (on which Ludwig concentrates especially, including Clouds, Wasps, and Birds; he promises to return to Lysistrataand Ecclesiazusae). Besides [End Page 148] Plato and Aristophanes, Ludwig's author of choice is Thucydides, at any rate the Thucydides of the Periclean Funeral Oration and of the account of the Athenians' "erotic" decision to go to war in and over Sicily in 415. As for Wohl's claim (above), Ludwig could not agree more. The devil, however, is in the details.And, this is a very detailed book indeed. Ludwig first defines what he means and understands by eros in a variety of subtle and acute ways. It is a "predicament to be experienced and perhaps ameliorated rather than a problem to be solved once and for all" (18); it "occurs in cases in which the desire, whether sexual or not, becomes obsessional" (13, my emphasis); and it was... (shrink)

This essay unites musicology's concern with the discursive force of organized sound, and sound studies' concern with the discursive force of sonic environments, recording formats and media networks, to consider how the widely transmitted medieval song ‘Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai’ attributed to Jaufre Rudel produces sonograms that map distance and desire in the chasm between the Islamic East and the Christian West. The first half of the essay examines ‘Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai’ in (...) the context of transcultural sound networks, medieval notions of global geography and the material formatting of songs. The second half considers a 1977 recording of the song by the Clemencic Consort, and the 2000 opera by Finish composer Kaija Saariaho called L'Amour de loin with a libretto by the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf. In both cases, the song is sonically reimagined to express modern-day strife in the Middle East. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 77 - 102 Hobbes has long been associated with the sexual ‘libertinism’ of the Restoration period. The connections that are commonly made are crude, misrepresenting his philosophy; moreover, the attitude to sexual matters expressed in many of his published works was quite puritanical. Yet there are elements of his thought that could be taken to support a libertine agenda: hostility to Augustinian teaching on lust and chastity; the idea that marriage laws are merely (...) human; a recognition of self-regarding elements in sexual psychology; and the idea that desires in themselves are not sins. On this last point, however, Hobbes’s distinction between desires and intentions to act, combined with his account of the role of imagination in desire, does make it possible to attribute to him a distinctly non-libertine theory of how sexual behaviour is modified in civil society. (shrink)

One influential philosophical account of desire treats it as a species of propositional attitude, possessing broadly the same kinds of content as belief while differing in direction of fit. However, this arguably neglects more basic forms of desire. It seems an open possibility, for example, that animals that lack propositional attitudes might still have simple desires mediated by sensations like hunger and thirst. In this essay, I will argue the case for the existence of these basic desires, and (...) suggest a strategy for understanding them. I begin by briefly discussing some different approaches to the psychological ascription of desires, and examine some candidate forms of behaviour that might be constitutive of a creature's having a basic desire. I go on to argue that a form of behaviour known as motivational trade-off offers a particularly promising framework for attributions of basic desire. (shrink)

Imagine you are casually browsing an online bookstore, looking for an interesting novel. Suppose the store predicts you will want to buy a particular novel: the one most chosen by people of your same age, gender, location, and occupational status. The store recommends the book, it appeals to you, and so you choose it. Central to this scenario is an automated prediction of what you desire. This article raises moral concerns about such predictions. More generally, this article examines the (...) ethics of artificial social cognition—the ethical dimensions of attribution of mental states to humans by artificial systems. The focus is presumptuous aim attributions, which are defined here as aim attributions based crucially on the premise that the person in question will have aims like superficially similar people. Several everyday examples demonstrate that this sort of presumptuousness is already a familiar moral concern. The scope of this moral concern is extended by new technologies. In particular, recommender systems based on collaborative filtering are now commonly used to automatically recommend products and information to humans. Examination of these systems demonstrates that they naturally attribute aims presumptuously. This article presents two reservations about the widespread adoption of such systems. First, the severity of our antecedent moral concern about presumptuousness increases when aim attribution processes are automated and accelerated. Second, a foreseeable consequence of reliance on these systems is an unwarranted inducement of interpersonal conformity. (shrink)

One way to defend humane animal agriculture is to insist that the deaths of animals aren’t bad for them. Christopher Belshaw has argued for this position in the most detail, maintaining that death is only bad when it frustrates categorical desires, which he thinks animals lack. We are prepared to grant his account of the badness of death, but we are skeptical of the claim that animals don’t have categorical desires. We contend that Belshaw’s argument against the badness of animal (...) death relies on overly simplistic thought experiments and isn’t sufficiently careful in how it attributes mental states to animals. We present some cases of animal behavior from recent work on animal cognition that are most plausibly understood as spurred by categorical desires and we show how an independently plausible account of mental content—Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics—supports our attribution of categorical desires in those cases. We end by arguing that even if you’re wary of our reliance on teleosemantics, you should still accept it due to considerations about moral risk. (shrink)

When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory (...) and predictive roles of attitude attribution. The primary goal of this thesis is to fill this lacuna and to articulate the indispensability of such reactions – agreement/disagreement and endorsement/disapproval – for social cognition. In the process of doing it I also show how these initial reactions ground certain further possible responses in intersubjective communication: manipulation, negotiation or adoption of attributed attitudes. The second aim of this thesis is to explicate what is it about belief and desire attributions that makes the responses I’ve described possible. Because one can agree or disagree both with beliefs and assertions and endorse or disapprove both desires and requests, I argue that we should understand belief attributions in terms of assertions and desire attributions in terms of requests. When we think what someone believes and wants, we treat her as a conversation partner because her attitudes call for the same responses as speech acts do, even if she hasn’t made any explicit assertion or request herself. In short, beliefs and desires have communicative significance. Given such significance, we can also see what one needs to take into consideration when attributing these attitudes to another. My answer in the thesis is that belief and desire attributions have to be grounded in facts about the behaviour and well-being of attributees and that these facts also constitute the nature of beliefs and desires. (shrink)

This research examined the influence of social-, genetic-, and brain-based explanations on attributions of others’ behaviors. Participants were university students in Studies 1, 2, and 3. Participants read a vignette about an individual who possessed several undesirable behaviors and answered related questions. The first two studies had within-subjects designs. Participants in Study 1 were provided with social-, genetic-, and brain-based explanations for the individual’s behavior. The order of the genetic- and brain-based explanations was reversed in Study 2. Study 3 (...) used the same materials, but had a between-subjects design where participants were assigned to one of three groups that differed in their explanation: social, genetic, or brain. Participants also completed measures of social desirability and free will beliefs in all three studies. Consistently, biological explanations had more influence than social explanations on ratings of others’ responsibility, capacity for change, and sentencing considerations. There was inconsistent evidence across the three studies, however, that brain-based explanations had more influence than genetic-based explanations. Interestingly, Free will scores were associated with aspects of the individual’s behavior in the social condition but not in the biological conditions. Additional social cognition research is needed to determine whether brain-based explanations are just one specific instantiation of biological explanations or whether they are unique in this regard when it comes to the attributions we make about others’ behaviors. (shrink)

In his last years, St. Augustine became impatient with the doctrinal questions and requests for advice on practical matters of ecclesiastical discipline frequently referred to in correspondence of his last decade. Scholars have often attributed his uncharacteristic reluctance to address these matters to the diminishing competence and energy of old age. This article demonstrates that his evident unwillingness to respond at length to such queries relates rather to his desire to sequester increased time for meditation. Throughout his Christian life, (...) he described and refined his practice of meditation; it gathered urgent importance as he neared death. Augustine’s lifelong search for “God and the soul,” articulated in his first writings, evolved through his meditation, changing from an intellectual effort to achieve a vision of God by the use of reason to a search for the truth of his own life. In meditation he sought to recall in detail God’s loving leading within the chaos and pain of his youthful desires and throughout his life. I explore his understanding of “God is love” from his earliest (extant) treatise, De beata uita (386 CE), his Easter sermons on First John (415 CE), to his Enchiridion (421 CE) as the core of his developing understanding of God’s activity in himself. (shrink)

This article argues that Epictetus employs the terms orexis and hormê in the same manner as the older Stoics. It then shows, on the basis of this claim, that the older Stoics recognized a distinction between dispositional and occurrent forms of motivation. On this account of Stoic theory, intentional action is in each instance the product of two forms of cognition: a value ascription that attributes goodness or badness to some object, conceiving of its possession as beneficial or harmful to (...) the agent, together with a situational judgment about appropriate action. The resulting interpretation suggests that the Stoic theory of motivation as a whole — and not merely the Stoic analysis of the pathê — has the basic shape of a practical syllogism, with more psychological depth than commentators have recognized. (shrink)

Polus admires orators for the tyrannical power they have. However, Socrates argues that orators and tyrants lack power worth having: the ability to satisfy one's wishes or wants (boulēseis). He distinguishes wanting from thinking best, and grants that orators and tyrants do what they think best while denying that they do what they want. His account is often thought to involve two conflicting requirements: wants must be attributable to the wanter from their own perspective (to count as their desires), but (...) wants must also be directed at objects that are genuinely good (in order for failure to satisfy them to matter). We offer an account of wanting as reflective, coherent desire, which allows Socrates to satisfy both desiderata. We then explain why he thinks that orators and tyrants want to act justly, though they do greater injustices than anyone else and so frustrate their own wants more than anyone else. (shrink)

In daily life, perceivers often need to predict and interpret the behavior of group agents, such as corporations and governments. Although research has investigated how perceivers reason about individual members of particular groups, less is known about how perceivers reason about group agents themselves. The present studies investigate how perceivers understand group agents by investigating the extent to which understanding the ‘mind’ of the group as a whole shares important properties and processes with understanding the minds of individuals. Experiment 1 (...) demonstrates that perceivers are sometimes willing to attribute a mental state to a group as a whole even when they are not willing to attribute that mental state to any of the individual members of the group, suggesting that perceivers can reason about the beliefs and desires of group agents over and above those of their individual members. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the degree of activation in brain regions associated with attributing mental states to individuals—i.e., brain regions associated with mentalizing or theory-of-mind, including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and precuneus—does not distinguish individual from group targets, either when reading statements about those targets' mental states (directed) or when attributing mental states implicitly in order to predict their behavior (spontaneous). Together, these results help to illuminate the processes that support understanding group agents themselves. (shrink)

The belief-desire model of action explanation is deeply ingrained in multiple disciplines. There is reason to think that it is a cultural artifact. But is there an alternative? In this discussion, I will consider the radical critique of this action explanation model by Rüdiger Bittner, which argues that the model appeals to dubious mental entities, and argues for a model of reasons as responses to states or events. Instead, for Bittner, agents are reason-selectors—selecting the states or events to respond (...) to and selecting the ones the agent is disposed to respond to. By getting rid of the explanatory role of beliefs, this model runs into difficulties over errors usually attributed to false beliefs. These can be resolved by expanding the notion of dispositions to cover the case of false belief. But this suggests that the belief-reason model serves to divide the category of dispositions in an arbitrary or culturally specific way. (shrink)

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for (...) robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question - also explored in the experiment - whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook. (shrink)

A ‘Radical Simulationist’ account of how folk psychology functions has been developed by Robert Gordon. I argue that Radical Simulationism is false. In its simplest form it is not sufficient to explain our attribution of mental states to subjects whose desires and preferences differ from our own. Modifying the theory to capture these attributions invariably generates innumerable other false attributions. Further, the theory predicts that deficits in mentalizing ought to co-occur with certain deficits in imagining perceptually-based scenarios. I (...) present evidence suggesting that this prediction is false, and outline further possible empirical tests of the theory. (shrink)

A good reason to have a language containing a truth-predicate is that it makes it possible to formulate 'truthfulness attributions' and that truthfulness attributions are of great help in the transmission of true beliefs, the latter being, of course, a desirable end in itself. I argue that, given a language and a conceptual system more or less like ours, truthfulness attributions cannot be effectively replaced by other kinds of statements.

Twentieth-century action theory has concentrated on the relationship of intention to action, and thereby the relationship of belief as an occurrent state of the agent to the agent’s action. This stress on belief appears to be predicated on the view that our actions are primarily guided by our understanding of the relevant conditions of action, a view encouraged by the fact that we can and do attribute beliefs to ourselves and others to explain instances of the failure of an action (...) toachieve a desired outcome. I argue that, to the contrary, there is no compelling reason to conclude that such attributions imply that our actions are guided by occurrent beliefs. The alternative view offered is that our actions are typically guided by habit, but in cases of pragmatic failure we attribute putative prefailurebeliefs on the basis of the overall intention of action and relevant background understanding. (shrink)

Objective: To examine changes in patients’ desired control of the deep brain stimulator and perception of global life control throughout DBS.Methods: A consecutive cohort of 52 patients with Parkinson’s disease was recruited to participate in a prospective longitudinal study over three assessment points. Semi-structured interviews assessing participants’ desire for stimulation control and perception of global control were conducted at all three points. Qualitative data were coded using content analysis. Visual analog scales were embedded in the interviews to quantify participants’ (...) perceptions of control over time.Results: Participants reported significant increases in their perception of global control over time and significant declines in their desired control of the stimulation. These changes were unrelated to improvements in motor symptoms. Improvements in global control were negatively correlated with a decline in desired stimulation control. Qualitative data indicate that participants have changed, nuanced levels of desired control over their stimulators. Increased global life control following DBS may be attributed to increased control over PD symptoms, increased ability to engage in valued activities, and increased overall self-regulation, while other domains related to global control remained unaffected by DBS.Conclusions: There are few empirical data documenting patients’ desire for stimulation control throughout neuromodulation and how stimulation control is related to other aspects of control despite the growing application of neuromodulation devices to treat a variety of disorders. Our data highlight distinctions in different types of control and have implications for the development of patient-controlled neurostimulation devices. (shrink)

Young children’s failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247–254]. We (...) tested this model with an ‘avoidance false belief task’ in which subjects predict the behavior of a character, who wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken about which of three locations it is in. The task has two equally correct answers—in seeking to avoid the location where she mistakenly believes the object to be, the character might equally go to the location where the object actually is, or to the remaining empty location. However, the model predicts that subjects will prefer one of these answers, selecting the object’s actual location over the empty location. This bias was confirmed in a series of five experiments with children aged between 4 and 8 years of age. A sixth experiment ruled out two rival explanations for children’s biased responding. Two further experiments found the opposite bias in adults. These findings support one selection model as an account of belief-desire reasoning in children, and suggest that a different model is needed for adults. The process of selecting contents for mental state attributions shows a developmental shift between 8 years of age and adulthood. (shrink)

I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two (...) fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral propositions. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in this way. (shrink)

In the context of animal cognitive research, anthropomorphism is defined as the attribution of uniquely human mental characteristics to animals. Those who worry about anthropomorphism in research, however, are immediately confronted with the question of which properties are uniquely human. One might think that researchers must first hypothesize the existence of a feature in an animal before they can, with warrant, claim that the property is uniquely human. But all too often, this isn't the approach. Rather, there is an a (...) priori argument against attributing some properties to animals. Which features are thought to be uniquely human on a priori grounds? The class can be quite large, including psychological states such as beliefs and desires, personality traits such as confidence or timidity, emotions such as happiness or anger, social organizational properties such as culture or friendship, moral behavior such as punishment or rape. For convenience, I will refer to the members of the class as "psychological properties". One critic includes feeling, purpose, intentionality, consciousness, and even cognition in his list of psychological properties that are incorrectly attributed to animals (Kennedy 1992). Among the critics, there is quite a bit of disagreement about what counts as an anthropomorphic attribution, and this alone should raise questions about the charge. We can identify two different questions about the practice of attributing psychological properties to animals within a scientific context. First we can ask whether it is scientifically respectable to examine questions about the mental, psychological, cultural, etc. states of animals. Those who bemoan anthropomorphism think that we ought not even ask such questions. I will look at the worries about asking the question, and argue that there is no special problem with it. The second question arises with an affirmative answer to the first. Given that it is scientifically respectable to examine whether an animal has a psychological property, there must be some scientifically respectable method for doing the examination.. (shrink)

In this paper, we take issue with the belief–desire model of second- and third-person action interpretation as it is presented by both theory theories and cognitivist versions of simulation theory. These accounts take action interpretation to consist in the (tacit) attribution of proper belief–desire pairs that mirror the structure of formally valid practical inferences. We argue that the belief–desire model rests on the unwarranted assumption that the interpreter can only reach the agent's practical context of action through (...) inference. This assumption betrays a deep-seated bias toward disengaged, observational interpretation strategies. On our alternative picture, the interpreter can start off on the assumption of a shared practical context and proceed to reason discourse in those cases in which this assumption runs aground. Following Brandom's non-formalist account of reason discourse, we suggest that interpreting other people's actions in terms of reasons is not a matter of following the principles of formally valid practical syllogisms, but of endorsing practical material inferences that are correct in virtue of a shared practical world. (shrink)

I defend a Mengzian version of the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, according to which humans think about one another’s beliefs and desires—and reasons for action—in order to solve our social living problems through cooperation, rather than through competition and deception, as the more familiar Machiavellian version has it. Given this framework, and a corresponding view about the function of belief attribution, I argue that while apes need not attribute propositional attitudes to pass the “false belief task,” we should not conclude that (...) apes may be behaviorists. Rather, the Mengzian Social Intelligence Hypothesis perspective offers another interpretation of ape behavior, intermediate between behaviorist and propositional attitude schemas. I argue that the false belief task can be solved by individuals who have an agency schema which takes others to be minded beings who have goals, emotions, and perceptions, but who fail to consider propositional attitudes or reasons for behavior. I then argue that a true test of belief attribution in great apes would be one that shows they seek explanations in terms of reasons for behavior. However, no such test yet exists. (shrink)

(DRAFT: I'll update when the book is published.) This started as a book about desire. I was hoping to complement what I had said about belief in my (2022). To believe something, I argued, is to be positioned to do, think and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argued that believing is not representational, that belief states are not causes or causal powers, and that the objects of belief are ways the (...) world might be and not representations of things. Believing is not so much a response to the world as a way of being positioned in it, a way of having an environment, as Frege put it. (Frege 1956, 306) I was trying to put the believer as a rational agent positioned in a world at the heart of my account. I hoped an account of desire could round out this picture of a rational agent’s psychology. But as I thought about desire, I came to see that two ideas about the nature of goodness, one negative and one positive, were really at the heart of my thinking. The negative idea is that there is no such thing as what philosophers have variously called intrinsic goodness or simple goodness or absolute value. I guess I am a nihilist about that. The positive idea is that our world is rich in what I will call sortal quality, what others have called goodness-of-a-kind or attributive goodness. I came to think that sortal quality is at the heart not just of desire but also of pleasure and moral worth. A picture of moral psychology had come into view. And so I re-organised the book. I still say a lot about the nature of desire, or ‘wanting’ as I prefer to call it, and I think my view does complement my externalist view of belief. Wanting, I will argue, is a matter of falling short relative to a standard one falls under, failing to be as good as one could be. If believing is about having an environment to respond to, then desire is about fitting into it well. And so my book offers a comprehensive picture of a moral agent in a world where nothing is simply or absolutely good but where many kinds of things, including people, can be very good and even splendid. (shrink)

Resumen. Las familias regiomontanas viven una situación particular dada la violencia que se vive en la ciudad. Aunado a ello, los conflictos familiares se hacen presentes. El presente estudio tuvo como objetivo, conocer el sesgo que hay en la perspectiva de los jóvenes universitarios sobre los conflictos que se viven en las familias regiomontanas. Sujetos. Participaron 250 jóvenes universitarios cuyas edades comprendían de los 16 a los 28 años, 29% de hombres y 71% de mujeres. Instrumento. Se utilizó un cuestionario (...) de autoaplicación de 36 preguntas que analizaba las categorías de: comunicación, reglas, respeto, violencia, consumo de alcohol y economía, buscando la atribución endogrupal o exogrupal al grupo familiar del encuestado. El tiempo promedio de aplicación fue de 15 minutos. Resultados. Se encontró la presencia de deseabilidad social en las respuestas referentes hacia sus propias familias en cada una de las dimensiones. La distancia euclidiana mostró una diferencia significativa entre la percepción de conflictos dentro de las familias de la comunidad y en las familias de los encuestados. Esta distancia fue del 50% aproximadamente en cada una de las dimensiones analizadas. Estos resultados proveen datos empíricos que demuestran la deseabilidad social en la percepción de los jóvenes universitarios respecto de los problemas familiares. Palabras claves. Conflictos familiares, deseabilidad social, jóvenes universitarios, percepción, sesgo.. The families in the Metropolitan Area of Monterrey live in a particular situation given the violence that is lived in the city. Combined to it, the familiar conflicts become present. The present study had like objective, to know the bias that there is in the perspective of college students on the conflicts that are lived in the Regiomontanus families. Subjects. The sample was composed by 250 college students, 29% of men and 71% of women, whose ages oscillated between 16 to the 28 years,. Instrument. A self-report questionnaire of 36 questions was used to analyze the categories of: communication, rules, respect, violence, alcohol consumption and economy, looking for the endogroup or exogroup attribution to the familiar group of the participants. The time average of application was of 15 minutes. Results. The presence of social desirability in the referring answers was towards the families of the participants in each one of the dimensions. The Euclidian distance showed a significant difference between the perceptions of conflicts within the families of the community and in the families of the survey ones. This distance was of approximately 50% in each one of the analyzed dimensions. These results provide empirical data that demonstrate social desirability in the perception of the college students with respect to the familiar problems. Keywords. College students, familiar conflicts, perception, social desirability, bias. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine two versions of the so-called “hierarchical” approach to personal autonomy, based on the notion of “second-order desires”. My primary concern will be with the question of whether these approaches provide an adequate basis for understanding the dynamics of autonomy-ascription. I begin by distinguishing two versions of the hierarchical approach, each representing a different response to the oft-discussed “regress” objection. I then argue that both “structural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Frankfurt, Bratman) and “procedural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Dworkin, Christman, Mele) (...) have difficulties accommodating the dynamics of how the attribution of autonomy to persons is claimed, disputed, and resolved. Although they differ in details, both shortcomings can be traced to viewing autonomy as a metaphysical rather than a normative, practical matter. I conclude by suggesting that these difficulties underscore the advantages of a more constructivist and pragmatist. (shrink)

If the conceptions of belief, desire, and action resemble phlogiston in their scientific standing, how is it that so many true, singular, causal claims about human behavior are made using these concepts? Alexander Rosenberg appeals to the distinction between attributive and referential uses of language to handle this objection. It is argued that this does not work, and that the truth of our singular, causal explanations of human behavior is little short of miraculous given his account of the nomological (...) situation. (shrink)