Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

A central tenet of contemporary moral psychology is that people typically reject active forms of utilitarian sacrifice. Yet, evidence for secularization and declining empathic concern in recent decades suggests the possibility of systematic change in this attitude. In the present study, we employ hypothetical dilemmas to investigate whether judgments of utilitarian sacrifice are becoming more permissive over time. In a cross-sectional design, age negatively predicted utilitarian moral judgment (Study 1). To examine whether this pattern reflected processes of maturation, we asked (...) a panel to re-evaluate several moral dilemmas after an eight-year interval but observed no overall change (Study 2). In contrast, a more recent age-matched sample revealed greater endorsement of utilitarian sacrifice in a time-lag design (Study 3). Taken together, these results suggest that today’s younger cohorts increasingly endorse a utilitarian resolution of sacrificial moral dilemmas. (shrink)

In his paper “The challenge of brain death for the sanctity of life ethic”, Peter Singer advocates two options for dealing with death criteria in a way that is compatible with efficient organ transplantation policy. He suggests that we should either redefine death as cortical death or go back to the old cardiopulmonary criterion and scrap the Dead Donor Rule. We welcome Singer’s line of argument but raise some concerns about the practicability of the two alternatives advocated by him. We (...) propose adding a third alternative that also – as the two previous alternatives – preserves and extends the possibility of organ transplantation without using anyone without their consent. Namely, we would like to draw readers’ attention to a proposal by Robert Veatch, formulated 42 years ago in his 1976 book “Death, dying, and the biological revolution” and developed further in his later publications. Veatch argues for a conscience clause for the definition of death that would permit people to pick from a reasonable range of definitional options. This autonomy-based option, we believe, is more likely to be practicable than the two options advocated by Singer. Furthermore, we present data from a study with Lithuanian participants that suggest that there is quite pronounced variation of preferences concerning death determination. (shrink)

Conservatives and liberals disagree sharply on matters of morality and public policy. We propose a novel account of the psychological basis of these differences. Specifically, we find that conservatives tend to emphasize the intrinsic value of actions during moral judgment, in part by mentally simulating themselves performing those actions, while liberals instead emphasize the value of the expected outcomes of the action. We then demonstrate that a structural emphasis on actions is linked to the condemnation of victimless crimes, a distinctive (...) feature of conservative morality. Next, we find that the conservative and liberal structural approaches to moral judgment are associated with their corresponding patterns of reliance on distinct moral foundations. In addition, the structural approach uniquely predicts that conservatives will be more opposed to harm in circumstances like the well-known trolley problem, a result which we replicate. Finally, we show that the structural approaches of conservatives and liberals are partly linked to underlying cognitive styles. Collectively, these findings forge a link between two important yet previously independent lines of research in political psychology: cognitive style and moral foundations theory. (shrink)

The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanations for patterns in human behavior challenges the notion of personal (...) autonomy and, in turn, undermines libertarian arguments against state paternalism appealing to autonomy and personal choice. (shrink)

Logic is widely held to be a normative discipline. Various claims have been offered in support of this view, but they all revolve around the idea that logic is concerned with how one ought to reason. I argue that most of these claims—while perhaps correct—only entail that logic is normative in a way that many, if not all, intellectual disciplines are normative. I also identify some claims whose correctness would make logic normative in a way that sets it apart from (...) other disciplines. I argue that we have no reason think that these claims are correct. In other words, logic is not a distinctively normative discipline. (shrink)

Though corporate social responsibility (CSR) is on the agenda of most major corporations, corporate executives still largely support the view that corporations should maximize the returns to their owners. There are two lines of defence for this position. One is the Friedmanian view that maximizing owner returns is the social responsibility of corporations. The other is a position voiced by many executives, that CSR and profits go together. This article argues that the first position is ethically untenable, while the latter (...) is not supported by empirical evidence. The implication is that there may be good reason for firms to deviate from a maxim of profit maximization. (shrink)

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also (...) whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

John Rawls's claim to have demonstrated the superiority of his own two principles of justice to the principle of utility has generated fairly extensive critical discussion. However, this discussion has almost completely disregarded those of Rawls's arguments that are concerned with practicability, despite the significance accorded to them by Rawls himself. This article addresses the three most important of Rawls's objections against the practicability of utilitarianism: that utilitarianism would generate too much disagreement to be politically workable, that a utilitarian society (...) would be vulnerable to social instability, and that publicly adopting the principle of utility as the ultimate criterion of right and wrong would undermine the self-respect of some citizens. It is argued that Rawls's objections are either exaggerated or mistaken, and that this may have an impact on the assessment of `justice as fairness' as well as the utilitarian doctrine. Key Words: justice as fairness • feasibility • disagreement • stability • self-respect. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 51-58, January/February 2022.

Owing to the problem of inescapable clashes, epistemic accounts of might-counterfactuals have recently gained traction. In a different vein, the might argument against conditional excluded middle has rendered the latter a contentious principle to incorporate into a logic for conditionals. The aim of this paper is to rescue both ontic mightcounterfactuals and conditional excluded middle from these disparate debates and show them to be compatible. I argue that the antecedent of a might-counterfactual is semantically underdetermined with respect to the counterfactual (...) worlds it selects for evaluation. This explains how might-counterfactuals select multiple counterfactual worlds as they apparently do and why their utterance confers a weaker alethic commitment on the speaker than does that of a would-counterfactual, as well as provides an ontic solution to inescapable clashes. I briefly sketch how the semantic underdetermination and truth conditions of mightcounterfactuals are regulated by conversational context. (shrink)

We are living through a radicalized, unsettling moment in Western politics as what seemed the drift of history towards democracy, greater individual freedoms, increased fairness and greater international cooperation is at least temporarily reversed. As we finished production of this issue, ISPA was also concluding its 4th Biennial conference at a most overtly political venue— The United States Air Force Academy—which is simultaneously a Mecca for modern architecture lovers as well as an indisputable seat of the projection of American power. (...) This fact was underscored as our philosophical discussions were occasionally interrupted by fighter jets buzzing the campus. Thus, it should make sense that even in the slow-moving world of applied philosophy, the times would lead us to produce this most overtly political issue. This development was not by design but rather by accretion—but one we eventually embraced as a legitimate extension of the exploration of the conjunction of architecture and philosophy. (shrink)

What can we hope to learn about brains from the free energy principle? In adopting the “primordial soup” physical model, Bruineberg et al. perpetuate the unsupported notion that the free-energy principle has a meaningful physical – and neuronal – interpretation. We examine how minimization of free energy arises in physical contexts, and what this can and cannot tell us about brains.

La reflexion sur l'experience politique est au coeur de L'Esprit des lois. a l'instar de nombreux auteurs du XVIIIe siecle, Montesquieu s'interroge sur la perennite des Republiques animees par la vertu. L'essor de l'economie, dans les grands etats europeens, nuit a l'expression des vertus et - corrompt les moeurs pures -. Or en l'absence de devouement civique, les etats peuvent-ils fonder le lien social et garantir la liberte politique? La vertu patriotique, passion dominante des cites antiques, peut-elle devenir caduque sans (...) prejudice pour l'homme moderne? En revenant sur l'inscription de Montesquieu dans la tradition du liberalisme politique, cette etude explore les voies plurielles tracees par Montesquieu face au - mal politique - incarne dans le despotisme. Elle invite a approfondir la reflexion consacree au concept de societe civile.". (shrink)

In a profile in the November, 2012 issue of the magazine Architect, activist-architect Raphael Sperry, a founder of the group Architects Planners & Designers for Social Responsibility discussed his petition to amend the AIA’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to include a prohibition on “the design of spaces intended for long-term solitary isolation and execution.”1 This issue is both serious and timely. It deserves contemplative attention before any action is taken. The purpose of this letter is to provide the (...) the architecture profession a condensed analysis of the possible justification for taking the action Mr. Sperry advocates. After review and consideration, we are persuaded that Mr. Sperry’s proposal does merit action by the AIA. (shrink)

Mental causation, though a forceful intuition embedded in our commonsense psychology, is difficult to square with the rest of commitments of physicalism about the mind. Advocates of mental causation have found solace in the causal inheritance principle, according to which the mental properties of mental statesshare the causal powers of their physical counterparts. In this paper, I present a variety of counterarguments to causal inheritance and conclude that the conditions for causal inheritance are stricter than what standing versions of said (...) principle imply. In line with this, physicalism may be destined to epiphenomenalism unless multiple realizability turns out false. (shrink)

Since the introduction of a new criterion for determining death (i.e., the brain death criterion) in 1968, the research community has been embroiled in debates about whether this criterion should b...

Some philosophers have claimed that pleasures and pains are characterized by their particular or . Most contemporary writers reject this view: they hold that hedonic states have nothing in common except being liked or disliked (alternatively: pursued or avoided) for their own sake. In this article, I argue that the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or scientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. I also argue that analysing hedonic states (...) in terms of liking or wanting is implausible. If it is correct that pleasures and pains are not united by any particular hedonic tone, we should instead simply conclude that there are several different hedonic tones. This pluralistic understanding of the hedonic tone view has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be fairly plausible as a philosophical account of pleasure and pain. (shrink)

Since it is Hume who famously asked how an "ought" can ever possibly be deduced from an "is," it is Hume who is typically cast as the representative of empiricism's inadequacy for doing the work of ethics. Yet, as I will show, in his description of the proper functioning of the passions that necessarily involve other persons and their evaluations of us, Hume provides a naturalistic description that is not reductive of value, but rather incorporates values into the very ground (...) of empirical description. Contemporary moral philosophers who dismiss Hume's complex account of the passions as unnecessary for understanding his account of morals, and then fault the account of morals for its failure to move beyond mere description to any kind of normative assessment, ignore how the detail of Hume's own account of the passions suggests a way that an empirical account can in fact be value-laden, as we shall see. (shrink)

Building on previous works which argued that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions, this paper proposes a constraint on exhaustification which restricts the conditions under which an exhaustivity operator can be licensed. We show that this economy condition allows us to derive a number of generalizations, such as, in particular, the ‘Implicature Focus Generalization’: scalar implicatures can be embedded under a downward-entailing operator only if the scalar term bears pitch accent. Our economy condition also derives specific predictions regarding (...) the licensing of so-called Hurford disjunctions. (shrink)

When a terminally ill patient kills herself, using a drug prescribed by a physician for this purpose, in bioethical literature this would be described as a case of physician-assisted suicide. This would also be a case of suicide according to the standard account of suicide in the philosophical literature. However, in recent years, some authors have argued that terminally ill self-killing in fact should not be considered suicide. In this paper, we don’t try to address the philosophical merits of such (...) arguments. Instead, we ask whether these considerations align with the way non-philosophers think about suicide. We present empirical evidence from four studies that address different concerns raised about terminally ill self-killing being a suicide. We conclude that the raised concerns cannot be supported by the folk understanding of suicide. (shrink)

In discussing the atomists' theory of vision modern accounts have quite neglected to take into account two sections of Alexander of Aphrodisias on this topic. Nearly identical in length and content, they contain objections to the atomist theory of vision by means of the . In form they consist of a series of questions purporting to contain atomist doctrine. Each question is followed by objections to its subject-matter. Most of the questions contain doctrine known to us already from other sources.

There is a move towards more use of engagement strategies in responsible investment. This change in strategies is motivated by a number of claims about the effectiveness of engagement versus exclusion of companies from the investment universe. This paper examines the basis for three central claims: That engagement, in contrast to exclusion, does not reduce the investment universe; That exclusion reduces an investor's influence on a company; and That engagement with exclusion is necessarily a more effective means of influencing companies (...) than pure exclusion. All three claims are argued to be open to challenge. It is possible that the move towards more engagement reflects bureaucratic incentives and political considerations among institutional investors, rather than arguments about the effectiveness and efficiency of engagement. (shrink)

Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they ‘allow for exceptions’. Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences, they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation. Building on previous works, we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for (...) their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates. The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ, which has similar coverage but is based on a very different architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions. (shrink)

Socioscientific issues receive considerable public attention and there are concerns that people in general are not able or willing to deal with information at odds with what they believe to be true. In this study, we focused on students’ beliefs about two controversial issues: whether consumption of the artificial sweetener aspartame and use of cell phones, respectively, represent any serious health risks. Our aim was to investigate whether students’ trust in the information was related to prior beliefs, the nature of (...) the message, and students’ critical reading strategies. Results showed interactions between prior beliefs about the issues and text condition (risk vs. no risk) on trust in conclusions that indicated a confirmation bias assumption. Additionally, students trusted conclusions ascertaining that there were risks more than conclusions ascertaining that there were no risks. Finally, students’ self-reported use of critical reading strategies implied less trust in both types of conclusions. (shrink)

This paper sets out asking what is to be gained from grounding the pursuit of a cosmopolitan morality in the evolutionary history of our morals, namely, by ascertaining some of the natural constraints under which normative ethical theory must operate. In Section II, I review two major forms of altruism: kin-based and reciprocal altruism. Experimental evidence is cited to support the view that biological altruism involves a carefully self-interested calculation to enhance adaptive fitness to the social environment. In Section III, (...) I explain that, in natural selection, these self-interested calculations about relatedness and reciprocation don’t happen consciously, but rather, almost instantaneously, as heuristics. These heuristics are advantageous to the organism and thus, over time, hardwired to its ‘emotional framework’. Emotional contagion, guilt, envy, and inequity aversion are covered as examples of the emotions at work in altruistic behavior. What can ethical deliberation on cosmopolitan morality adopt from a naturalistic examination of the evolution of altruism? According to situationists, what we do is best explained by inherent tendencies to respond to features of our situation. The pursuit of cosmopolitan morality via the evolutionary history of altruism reiterates this situationist conclusion, and seems to carry a recommendation for polity: to adjust our environment in response to findings about human nature as to better correspond with our proposed moral ends. (shrink)

The Chinese Room argument is a variant of Turing’s test which enables Searle to defend his biological naturalism, according to which computation is neither sufficient nor constitutive of the mind. In this paper, I examine both strands of his anticomputationalist stance, argue that computation is constitutive of natural language understanding and suggest a path toward the physicalist reduction of intentionality for propositional speech acts.

While it is commonly accepted that corporations have negative duties to respect human rights, the question of whether rights also imply positive duties for corporations is contentious. The recent reports of the United Nations special representative on business and human rights contend that corporations do not have positive duties, but the arguments this is based on are flawed from an ethical point of view. In particular, the reports fail to consider the implications of interactions between corporations and states. For rights (...) to be secured, corporations may face duties to use their power to pressure governments into performing their assigned duties, and duties not to undermine the role of the government. The interaction of corporations and governments also has implications for choosing effective instruments to advance human rights. International initiatives that do not take this interaction into account will be ineffective or, at worst, counterproductive. (shrink)

A pesar de que, a grandes rasgos, el análisis marxista del proceso de alienación sigue vigente, ha llegado a perder toda su fuerza revolucionaria. La razón parece encontrarse en que la dinámica del consumo integra y supera a un tiempo las carencias propias de la alienación, complementando el papel de trabajador con el de consumidor. De hecho, es una idea común que en la sociedad de consumo el sujeto se ha liberado de las trabas que limitaban el desarrollo de su (...) personalidad, y que parece tener a toda la industria al servicio de sus deseos. Detrás de este supuesto encontramos una trasformación de fondo de los conceptos de libertad, sujeto y realidad. Pero algunos autores como Z.Baumann han puesto en duda que el consumismo sea un sistema plegado al sujeto y que no sea pertinente hablar de alienación del consumidor. (shrink)