Current developments in empirical moral psychology have spawned a new perspective on the traditional metaethical question of whether moral judgment is based on reason or emotion. Psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists such as Joshua Greene argue that there is empirical evidence that emotion is essential for one particularly important subclass of moral judgments: so-called ?deontological judgments.? In this paper, I scrutinize this claim and argue that neither the empirical evidence for Greene's dual process-theory of moral judgment nor the normative conclusions it (...) is supposed to yield can be maintained. More specifically, I argue that the evidence from neuroimaging relies on a problematic reverse inference, that the behavioral data are flawed, and that the findings from focal brain damage do not support the model. From a normative point of view, Greene fails to show that we ought to discount the intuitions that give rise to deontological judgments because they respond to morally irrelevant factors: firstly, I show that they do not pick up on the factors Greene deems to be morally irrelevant in the first place, and secondly, I argue that there generally is reason to trust our deontological intuitions. (shrink)

This contribution gives an overview of Einstein's work on unified field theory. It characterizes this work from four perspectives, by looking at its conceptual, representational, biographical, and philosophical dimensions.

La obra de Sauer abre paso a la formación del saber ambiental de nuestro tiempo y contribuye a su desarrollo en América Latina. El artículo sigue una serie de temas profundizados por el autor, y concluye recordándonos que el aterrador impacto del moderno mundo Occidental, no cancela la verdad de que el la historia del hombre ha sido marcadamente pluralista, y que no existen leyes generales de la sociedad, sino únicamente acuerdos culturales.

This paper takes up an underdeveloped argument of Charles Taylor that linguisticality is constitutive of moral agency. Taylor’s position is part of a set of contemporary arguments that language, especially as dialogue or discourse, is the normative framework which grounds or validates fundamental norms or values. Taylor’s contribution to this “dialogical turn” is substantial and innovative, but it is not without weakness. Rather than deal with all the issues involved in this dialogical turn, I argue just that language does ground (...) morality as a distinctively human way of creating meaning, that is, as Taylor argues, constitutive of the self and self-understanding. Self-understanding, or the appropriation of moral self-consciousness, is what is meant by the authenticity and autonomy which constitute moral authority. I argue in essence that language provides a necessary and constitutive link between private and public spheres of meaning in a way that renders moral discourse meaningful and constitutively human. (shrink)

In this crisply written book, Hanno Sauer offers the first book-length treatment of debunking arguments in ethics, developing an empirically informed and philosophically sophisticated account of genealogical arguments and their significance for the reliability of moral cognition. He breaks new ground by introducing a series of novel distinctions into the current debate, which allows him to develop a framework for assessing the prospects of debunking or vindicating our moral intuitions. He also challenges the justification of some of our moral judgments (...) by showing that they are based on epistemically defective processes. His book is an original, cutting-edge contribution to the burgeoning field of empirically informed metaethics, and will interest philosophers, psychologists, and anyone interested in how - and whether - moral judgment works. (shrink)

Die ersten vier von Brentanos 25 Habilitationsthesen fordern eine Erneuerung der Philosophie - worauf diese Forderung jedoch abzielt, ist nicht so klar. Vielfach wird behauptet, daß dieses Ziel eng verwandt mit der Konzeption einer wissenschaftlichen Philosophie im Sinne Russells und des Logischen Empirismus sei. Diese insbesondere auch von Rudolf Haller vertretene Auffassung setzt aber voraus, daß der katholisch-klerikale Kontext, in den der junge Priester Brentano eingebunden war, nur die unwesentliche Hülle eines eigentlichen Kernes bildet. Dagegen wird gezeigt, daß dieser Kontext (...) nicht so ablösbar, sondern vielmehr für das Verständnis der Habilitationsthesen unabdingbar ist. Es ergibt sich, daß das, worauf die vier ersten Thesen abzielen, eine Erneuerung der philosophia perennis aus dem Geiste des Thomas von Aquin und im Rahmen der Vorgaben der Kirchenlehre ist. (shrink)

Die Religionsschrift und die Predigten Schleiermachers sind sowohl theoretische Entfaltung als auch literarisch-rhetorischer Vollzug von Religionskommunikation. Beiden Aspekten geht Mirjam Sauer nach. Im Licht frühromantischer Literaturproduktion und spätaufklärerischer Predigten interpretiert sie die erschlossenen Kommunikationsmodelle als Beiträge zu einer Theologie religiöser Rede an der Schwelle zur Moderne.

In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is just the latest step in the long evolution of good and evil and everything in between. What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes (...) at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose--and why we need them. We humans were born to cooperate, but everywhere we find ourselves in conflict. The way we live together has changed fundamentally in recent decades: global mobility, demographic upheaval, migration movements, and digital networking, have all called the moral foundations of human communities into question. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share. If we understand the origin of our morality, we can understand its future too. With philosophical expertise and empirical data, Sauer explains how processes of biological, cultural, social, and historical evolution shaped the moral grammar that defines our present. Seven chapters recount the crucial moral upheavals of human history showing how the emergence of humankind five million years ago, the rise of first civilizations 5,000 years ago, and the dynamics of moral progress in the last fifty years are interrelated. This genealogical perspective allows us, on the one hand, to see the contradictions and potential conflicts of our moral identities; on the other, it makes clear that we share fundamental values that apply to all human beings at all times. Sauer's elegant prose, translated into English by Jo Heinrich, brings the history of humanity to vivid new life. (shrink)

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. Michel Fouc...

In light of recent empirical data, many psychologists and philosophers have turned away from rationalism about moral judgment and embraced sentimentalism. In the process, they have rejected the classical “moral signature” as a way of distinguishing moral from conventional norms in favor of a sentimentalist approach to carving out the moral domain. In this paper, we argue that this sentimentalist turn has been made prematurely. Although we agree that the experiments reveal that the classical approach is flawed, we propose to (...) replace it with an alternative, according to which a norm is moral precisely if it is justifiable to all. This does not hold for most norms based on disgust or loyalty to a particular community. We accommodate the fact that such norms are not merely conventional by introducing a third domain, the domain of ethics. Our proposal reveals that (psychological) rationalism is still a viable option, as a lot of the experimental evidence that features emotions concerns the domain of ethics rather than morality. (shrink)

Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment—but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moral intuitions. Sauer (...) proposes that when we make moral judgments we draw on a stable repertoire of intuitions about what is morally acceptable, which we have acquired over the course of our moral education—episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Moral judgments are educated and rationally amenable moral intuitions. -/- Sauer engages extensively with the empirical evidence on the psychology of moral judgment and argues that it can be shown empirically that reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment. He offers detailed counterarguments to the anti-rationalist challenge (the claim that reason and reasoning play no significant part in morality and moral judgment) and the emotionist challenge (the argument for the emotional basis of moral judgment). Finally, he uses Joshua Greene's Dual Process model of moral cognition to test the empirical viability and normative persuasiveness of his account of educated intuitions. Sauer shows that moral judgments can be automatic, emotional, intuitive, and rational at the same time. (shrink)

In recent research, dual-process theories of cognition have been the primary model for explaining moral judgment and reasoning. These theories understand moral thinking in terms of two separate domains: one deliberate and analytic, the other quick and instinctive. -/- This book presents a new theory of the philosophy and cognitive science of moral judgment. Hanno Sauer develops and defends an account of "triple-process" moral psychology, arguing that moral thinking and reasoning are only insufficiently understood when described in terms of a (...) quick but intuitive and a slow but rational type of cognition. This approach severely underestimates the importance and impact of dispositions to initiate and engage in critical thinking – the cognitive resource in charge of counteracting my-side bias, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, and breakdowns of self-control. Moral cognition is based, not on emotion and reason, but on an integrated network of intuitive, algorithmic and reflective thinking. -/- Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper argues that we need to rethink what the object of economic analysis is; that is, what the intelligible relations of an economy are. The paper starts by acknowledging that economies are a constitutive element of human habitats. It also agrees that modern economic analysis based on the price-auction market has provided substantial knowledge about the operation of economies. However, I argue that a more fruitful line of inquiry than the price-auction market is to focus on the schemes of (...) personal and social meaning that set the context for economies. In developing this argument, I describe how such schemes function as a network of human relationships which provide the conditions of the possibilities of the emergence of economic technologies. That is, the explanandum of economy is not the classical price-auction market but the recurrent social cooperative structure (order) of economy in which markets are embedded. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day, it has rarely been doubted that whenever formal aesthetic methods meet their iconological counterparts, the two approaches appear to be mutually exclusive. In reality, though, an ahistorical concept is challenging a historical analysis of art. It is especially Susanne K. Langer´s long-overlooked system of analogies between perceptions of the world and of artistic creations that are dependent on feelings which today allows a rapprochement of these positions. Krois’s insistence on (...) a similar point supports this analysis. - I - Unbestritten bis heute gilt, formwissenschaftliche und ikonologische Methoden scheinen sich grundsätzlich auszuschließen, da die ersteren auf ahistorischen und die letzteren auf historischen Grundlagen aufbauen. Dem entgegen soll mit diesem Beitrag gezeigt werden, wie insbesondere die Forschungen Susanne K. Langers und ergänzend diejenigen von John M. Krois eine Annäherung beider Positionen ermöglichen. (shrink)

This book is an anthology about transformation processes. It brings together contributions that were made during the 16th International Congress of the German Society for Semiotics 2021. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was finally not held in attendance at the TU Chemnitz, in Germany, but took place online. 11 sections with different focuses from archaeology, architecture, design, digital humanities, on the body, from the field of literature & youth and subcultures, media, fashion, environment, and carto/atlas semiotics and sign philosophy (...) had each published their own call for papers. -/- The focus of the IMAGE & Cultural study sections' call, published with the volume, was to understand images as agents - according to art and cultural studies scholar Aby M. Warburg - and to recognize and understand not only their potential for cognition, but also their potential for action. As an active part of culture, they not only convey it, but at the same time stimulate action. In this respect, images can be understood not only as documents and testimonies of collective history, but also as active carriers and repositories of affectively effective elements of communication. As agents of cultural transformation processes, images take on a status of their own within the human capacity for expression and action. The essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this. (shrink)

Global sourcing largely occurs from so-called emerging markets and developing economies. In these contexts, substantial leverage effects for sustainability in supply chains can be expected by reducing adverse impacts on society and minimising related risks. For this ethical end, an adequate understanding of the respective sourcing contexts is fundamental. This case study of South Africa’s mining sector uses institutional theory and the notion of institutional uncertainty to empirically analyse the challenges associated with establishing social sustainability. The case study research is (...) informed by 39 semi-structured interviews with top management representatives and various state and non-state decision makers in SA. Our findings suggest that sustainability in the institutional field is mainly shaped by the Social and Labour Plan institution, induced by state actors and mining companies’ practices. However, four weakening factors were identified that adversely affect this regulative institution, drive institutional uncertainty and allow for mining companies’ gradual decoupling. Contrastingly, complementing pressures of non-state actors limit institutional uncertainty and push toward mainstreaming the stipulations of the institution. This study contributes to the business ethics literature by providing an in-depth exploration of institutional uncertainty’s drivers and barriers within an upstream SC setting and shedding light on multiple actors’ interplay and relevance in sector-wide sustainability. The findings are condensed into three main propositions as well as an analytical framework as a basis for follow-up research. This case study helps practitioners understand and manage complexity that results from actor plurality and institutional uncertainty in EMDEs. (shrink)

Many believe that moral education can cause moral progress. At first glance, this makes sense. A major goal of moral education is the improvement of the moral beliefs, values and behaviors of young people. Most would also consider all of these improvements to be important instances of moral progress. Moreover, moral education is a form of social learning, and there are good reasons to think that social learning processes shape episodes of progressive moral change. Despite this, we argue that instead (...) of being a cause of moral change, the main effect of moral education is often to provide stability or continuity. In addition, we will argue that even when the conditions are right for moral education to contribute to moral change, it is far from clear that the resulting changes will always, or even most of the time, end up being progressive. (shrink)