Psychopaths have long been of interest to moral philosophers, since a careful examination of their peculiar deficiencies may reveal what features are normally critical to the development of moral agency. What underlies the psychopath's amoralism? A common and plausible answer to this question is that the psychopath lacks empathy. Lack of empathy is also claimed to be a critical impairment in autism, yet it is not at all clear that autistic individuals share the psychopath's amoralism. How is empathy characterized in (...) the literature, and how crucial is empathy, so described, to moral understanding and agency? I argue that an examination of moral thinking in high-functioning autistic people supports a Kantian rather than a Humean account of moral agency. (shrink)

Science is highly dependent on the technologies needed to observe scientific objects. In How Scientific Instruments Speak, Bas de Boer develops a philosophical account of instruments in scientific practice, focusing on the cognitive neurosciences. He argues for an understanding of scientific instruments as mediating technology.

According to a Kantian conception truthfulness is characterised as a requirement of respect for the agency of another. In lying we manipulate the other’s rational capacities to achieve ends we know or fear they may not share. This is paradigmatically a failure of respect. In this paper we argue that the importance of truthfulness also lies in significant part in the ways in which it supports our agential need to make sense of the world, other people, and ourselves. Since sense-making (...) is something we do together, and that we can support or undermine, it generates norms of interaction that constitute a further, distinct, mode of recognition and respect for another’s agency. But the requirements of truthfulness and support for sense-making sometimes conflict. Through a series of cases, we analyze why and when a rigid insistence on truthfulness is disrespectful of the other and undermining of their agency. (shrink)

The recent, influential Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment (Haidt, Psychological Review 108, 814–834, 2001) proposes a primary role for fast, automatic and affectively charged moral intuitions in the formation of moral judgments. Haidt’s research challenges our normative conception of ourselves as agents capable of grasping and responding to reasons. We argue that there can be no ‘real’ moral judgments in the absence of a capacity for reflective shaping and endorsement of moral judgments. However, we suggest that the empirical literature (...) indicates a complex interplay between automatic and deliberative mental processes in moral judgment formation, with the latter constraining the expression and influence of moral intuitions. We therefore conclude that the psychological literature supports a normative conception of agency. (shrink)

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control (...) are possible is of great practical significance. Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sense distinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, and the varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) — and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moral responsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil. (shrink)

The book follows on the heels of the acclaimed Criticism of Heaven, being the second volume of a five volume series called Criticism of Heaven and Earth.

Recent studies reveal some of the neurophysiological mechanisms involved in drug addiction. This prompts some theorists to claim that drug addiction diminishes responsibility. Stephen Morse however rejects this claim. Morse argues that these studies show that drug addiction involves neither compulsion, coercion, nor irrationality. He also adds that addicted people are responsible for becoming addicted and for failing to take measures to manage their addiction. After summarizing relevant neuroscience of addiction literature, this chapter engages critically with Morse to argue that (...) a subgroup of addicted people does meet plausible criteria for compulsion, coercion, or irrationality; that few addicted people are fully responsible for becoming addicted; and that some addicted people can be at least partly excused for failing to manage their addiction. Pickard and Lacey’s “responsibility without blame” approach is also suggested as a fruitful basis for future work in this field. (shrink)

This is the first detailed study to explore the little-understood notions of "knowing who someone is," "knowing a person's identity," and related locutions. It locates these notions within the context of a general theory of believing and a semantical theory of belief- and knowledge-ascriptions.The books's main contention is that what one knows, when one knows who someone is, is not normally an identity in the numerical sense of "a = b," but rather a certain sort of predication to know who (...) someone is is just to know that that person is F, where "F" is a predicate that is "important," in a technical sense defined by the authors, for the purposes determined by context. Their book offers a rigorous formal semantics for ascriptions of knowing and of knowing-who in particular, solving such well-known problems and paradoxes as Kripke's Puzzle, and Quines difficulties with de re belief, along the way.The authors apply their analysis to each of several important issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethical theory in which the previously unexamined notion of "knowing who" has loomed large-the mechanics of linguistic referring, the foundations of epistemic logic, problems of self-knowledge and self-regarding belief, universalizability and "Golden Rule" arguments in ethics, and moral "personalism" versus "impartialism."Stephen Boër is Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. William Lycan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina and author of Logical Form in Natural Language. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the Critique (...) of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light. (shrink)

Background In the course of the last four decades, the profession of physiotherapy has progressively expanded its scope of responsibility and its focus on professional autonomy and evidence-based clinical practice. To preserve professional autonomy, it is crucial for the physiotherapy profession to meet society's expectations and demands of professional competence as well as ethical competence. Since it is becoming increasingly popular to choose a carrier in private practice in Denmark this context constitutes the frame of this study. Physiotherapy in private (...) practice involves mainly a meeting between two partners: the physiotherapist and the patient. In the meeting, power asymmetry between the two partners is a condition that the physiotherapist has to handle. The aim of this study was to explore whether ethical issues rise during the first physiotherapy session discussed from the perspective of the physiotherapists in private practice. Methods A qualitative approach was chosen and semi-structured interviews with 21 physiotherapists were carried out twice and analysed by using a phenomenological framework. Results Four descriptive themes emerged: general reflections on ethics in physiotherapy; the importance of the first physiotherapy session; the influence of the clinical environment on the first session and; reflections and actions upon beneficence towards the patient within the first session. The results show that the first session and the clinical context in private practice are essential from an ethical perspective. Conclusions Ethical issues do occur within the first session, the consciousness about ethical issues differs in Danish physiotherapy private practice, and reflections and acts are to a lesser extent based on awareness of ethical theories, principles and ethical guidelines. Beneficence towards the patient is a fundamental aspect of the physiotherapists' understanding of the first session. However, if the physiotherapist lacks a deeper ethical awareness, the physiotherapist may reason and/or act ethically to a varying extent: only an ethically conscious physiotherapist will know when he or she reflects and acts ethically. Further exploration of ethical issues in private practice is recommendable, and as management policy is deeply embedded within the Danish public sector there are reasons to explore public contexts of physiotherapy as well. (shrink)

Recent advancements in therapeutic and diagnostic medicine, along with the creation of large biobanks and methods for monitoring health technologies, have improved the prospects for preventing, treating, and curing illness. These same advancements, however, give rise to a plethora of ethical questions concerning good decision-making and best action. These ethical questions engage policymakers, practitioners, scientists, and researchers from a variety of fields in different ways. Collaborations between professionals in the medical and health sciences and the social sciences and humanities often (...) take an asymmetrical form, as when social scientists use ethnographic approaches to study the moral issues and practices of physicians. The ethics laboratory described in this article is a cross-sectoral and inter-disciplinary forum for collaborative investigation on important moral topics. It offers an experimental way of unpacking implied assumptions, underlying values, and comparable notions from different professional healthcare fields. The aim of this article is to present the ethics laboratory’s methodology. The article offers a model and a hermeneutical framework that rests on a dialogical approach to ethical questions. The model and the framework derive from a Danish research project, _Personalized Medicine in the Welfare State_. This article uses personalized medicine as a point of reference, though it offers an argument for the applicability of the model more broadly. (shrink)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. (1) While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. (2) While ‘being there for you’, partners (...) take care of each other in mutually dependent ways. (3) While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners (re-)relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. (4) While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (shrink)

Edward P Thompson’s disapproval of Methodism (which was his own background) is well known, especially in The Making of the English Working Class. There he describes it as religious terrorism with a destructive moral machinery and all too reactionary. However, through a close reading of the sections on Methodism, this article reveals an ambivalence within Thompson’s own text. Again and again, he notes in passing that radicals emerged from the Methodist ranks, so much so that the Methodist Conference worked hard (...) to deal with the problem. It would seem that Thompson has stumbled across a political tension within theology, one that he was to explore in much greater detail in his study of Blake. (shrink)

What does it mean to know something - scientifically, anthropologically, socially? What is the relationship between different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing? How is knowledge mobilised in society and to what ends? Drawing on ethnographic examples from across the world, and from the virtual and global "places" created by new information technologies, Anthropology and Science presents examples of living and dynamic epistemologies and practices, and of how scientific ways of knowing operate in the world. Authors address the nature (...) of both scientific and experiential knowledge, and look at competing and alternative ideas about what it means to be human. The essays analyze the politics and ethics of positioning "science", "culture" or "society" as authoritative. They explore how certain modes of knowing are made authoritative and command allegiance (or not), and look at scientific and other rationalities - whether these challenge or are compatible with science. (shrink)

In light of the general lack of awareness of the long history of Western-Marxist fascination with the Bible, this article offers a synopsis of part of that history. After showing how the Bible was an important element in the work of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, it the offers a critique of the current engagements with it by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton and Giorgio Agamben. The third section deals with the most significant element of the religious (...) Left in recent years, namely liberation theology. It closes with some comments concerning the growth of Marxist biblical studies and some suggestions for the way Marxism might reconnect with a non-reified biblical tradition. (shrink)

This paper offers a two dimensional variation of Standard Deontic Logic SDL, which we call 2SDL. Using 2SDL we can show that we can overcome many of the difficulties that SDL has in representing linguistic sets of Contrary-to-Duties (known as paradoxes) including the Chisholm, Ross, Good Samaritan and Forrester paradoxes. We note that many dimensional logics have been around since 1947, and so 2SDL could have been presented already in the 1970s. Better late than never! As a detailed case study (...) illustrating the power of 2SDL, we examine the system DL of Deontic Logic of Andrew Jones and Ingmar Pörn offered in 1985 to solve the Chisholm paradox of Contrary to Duties. The critical examination is done using logics and methods available in 1985 and solutions are proposed using what was available in 1985. (shrink)

This book addresses universal tendencies of human vowel systems from the point of view of self-organisation. It uses computer simulations to show that the same universal tendencies found in human languages can be reproduced in a population of artificial agents. These agents learn and use vowels with human-like perception and production, using a learning algorithm that is cognitively plausible. The implications of these results for the evolution of language are then explored.

This study examines cheating behaviors among 422 business students at two public Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business-accredited business schools. Specifically, we examined the simultaneous influence of attitudinal characteristics and motivational factors on reported prior cheating behavior, the tendency to neutralize cheating behaviors, and likelihood of future cheating. In addition, we examined the impact of in-class deterrents on neutralization of cheating behaviors and the likelihood of future cheating. We also directly tested potential mediating effects of neutralization on cheating behavior. (...) Using structural equations modeling procedures, we conducted an assessment of the validity of a modified version of the K. J. Smith, Davy, Rosenberg, and Haight model of cheating behavior and its antecedents. The modified model included motivation as a potential predictor of cheating behavior. Results supported the differentiation of the theoretical constructs within the specified process model. Furthermore, tests of the aforementioned theoretical model indicated a significant positive relation between extrinsic motivation and prior cheating and a significant negative relation between both intrinsic motivation and academic performance, and prior cheating. Finally, prior cheating had a significant positive relation, whereas deterrents had a significant negative relation to likelihood of future cheating. (shrink)

A person suffering a mental illness or disorder may differ dramatically from his or her previous well self. Family and close friends who knew the person before the onset of illness tend to regard the illness as obscuring their loved one's true self and see the goal of treatment as the restoration of that self. ‘He is not really like this,’ they will say with increasing desperation. Treatment teams and others, who have no acquaintance with the person when well, respond (...) to what they see in front of them and do sometimes make harmful judgments of character based on the person's presentation when ill. (shrink)

This article introduces _the Ethics Laboratory_ as an inter-sectorial and cross-disciplinary dialogical forum which can be viewed as an educational tool for moral learning. _The Ethics Laboratory_ represents a platform for the informal, collaborative investigation, in strict confidentiality, of ethical questions that have social consequences and/or legal concerns and bridges boundaries between research communities, institutions and patients. Its methodological structure proposes an experimental, open-ended way of unpacking implied assumptions, underlying values, comparable notions and observations from different professional fields. In connection (...) with a large social science project on precision medicine, we conducted four Ethics Laboratories followed by eight interviews with a selected number of participants. Through these interviews we learnt how this exploratory dialogical forum heighten moral awareness on issues that are shared among stakeholders who work to implement precision medicine in Denmark. Though the framework was developed specifically to foster ethical reflection within precision medicine, its dialogical structure lends itself to other professional areas and can easily be adopted and carried out. (shrink)

It seems to be a truism that whenever we do something - and so, given the omnipresence of trying (Hornsby 1980), whenever we try to do something - we want to do that thing more than we want to do anything else we can do (Davidson 1970). However, according to Frog, when we have will power we are able to try not to do something that we ‘really want to do’. In context the idea is clearly meant to be that (...) what we really want to do and what we most want to do are one and the same. But how is this meant to be so much as possible? It seems to require that our desire not to do what we most want to do is both our strongest desire and not our strongest desire. And that is a blatant contradiction. This is the so-called ‘paradox of self-control’ (Mele 1987). The aim of our paper is to explain how to make sense of the story of Frog and Toad. (shrink)

A central feature of complexity is that it is based on non-linear, recursive relations. However, in most current accounts of complexity such relations, while non-linear, are based on the reductive relations of a Newtonian onto-epistemological framework. This means that the systems that are emergent from the workings of such relations are a narrowly reduced spectrum of complex systems. It is argued that John Dewey’s trans-actional relations, relations that are characterized by an irreducible internal distinction, can function as an exemplar of (...) the less reductive relations seen in living complex systems. Conceptualizing complex relations and complex systems in a less reductive way allows indeterminate concepts such as epistemological limits and the generative production of meaning, which are inextricably linked, to be considered. Methodologically, such lessened reduction highlights functional systems, revealing aspects of the biopsychosocial human ‘complex system of complex systems’ that are hidden from view in a Newtonian framework. (shrink)

In this commentary on Anneli Jefferson’s Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? I endorse her capacitarian approach to responsibility but suggest that the effects of at least some mental/brain disorders on the agent’s psychology show that we cannot neatly separate the epistemic condition from the control condition when assessing agential capacity. I then discuss the labeling issue in the context of rival attributionist accounts of responsibility which hold that agents are responsible if their actions are attributable to them. The incorporation of (...) mental disorders into identity through social processes may open agents with mental or brain disorders open to unfair blame. However, we cannot fully understand the effects of the disorders on agential capacity without closely attending to the social environment that shapes the way the disorder is conceived, enacted, perceived, and responded to over time. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the existence of psychopaths undermines moral rationalism. I examine a recent empirically based argument for this claim and conclude that rationalist accounts of moral judgement and moral reasoning are perfectly compatible with the evidence cited.

A diagnosis of schizophrenia is often taken to denote a state of global irrationality within the psychiatric paradigm, wherein psychotic phenomena are seen to equate with a lack of mental capacity. However, the little research that has been undertaken on mental capacity in psychiatric patients shows that people with schizophrenia are more likely to experience isolated, rather than constitutive, irrationality and are therefore not necessarily globally incapacitated. Rational suicide has not been accepted as a valid choice for people with schizophrenia (...) due in part to a belief that characteristic irrationality prevents autonomous decision-making. Since people with schizophrenia are often seen to lack insight into the nature of their disorder, both psychiatric and ethical perspectives generally presume that suicidal acts result directly from mental illness itself and not from second-order desires. In this article, I challenge notions of global irrationality conferred by a diagnosis of schizophrenia and argue that, where delusional beliefs are unifocal, schizophrenia does not necessarily lead to a state of mental incapacity. I then attempt to show that people with schizophrenia can sometimes be rational with regard to suicide, where this decision stems from a realistic appraisal of psychological suffering. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Die Passage über das Mittelmeer ist in den letzten Jahren zu einer der tödlichsten Migrationsrouten der Welt geworden. Während die Mitgliedsstaaten der Europäischen Union gegen die sogenannte „Flüchtlingskrise“ eine militärische und diskursive Fluchtabwehrpolitik betreiben und die Seenotrettung geflüchteter Menschen aussetzen und kriminalisieren, begreifen normative politische Theorien der Migration Fluchtbewegungen als ein politisches oder moralisches Problem sowie als Krise für etablierte Demokratien. Gegen den Topos der „Flüchtlingskrise“ und die implizite Normalisierung von Grenzen in einem Großteil gegenwärtiger politiktheoretischer Debatten zu Migration (...) und Flucht entwickelt der vorliegende Beitrag eine politische Theorie der Grenze aus der Perspektive postkolonialer und Schwarzer kritischer Theorie. Dazu werden zunächst Kolonialität und Rasse als bislang vernachlässigte analytische Kategorien in die politische Theorie eingeführt, um die koloniale Gegenwart von Grenzregimen und die Rassifizierung von Grenzen zu rekonstruieren. Im Rückgriff auf die Figur des Schwarzen Mittelmeers, die aus der radikalen Schwarzen Tradition stammt und im Kontext gegenwärtiger Migrationsrouten von Afrika nach Europa aktualisiert wird, wird sodann ein alternatives Register für eine politische Theorie der Grenze entwickelt: Erstens wird das europäische Grenzregime als eine rassistische Politik der Vergrenzung verstanden; zweitens werden die postkolonialen Ambivalenzen und rassifizierten Dimensionen einer Politik der Solidarität mit geflüchteten Menschen problematisiert; drittens werden Fluchtbewegungen als widerständige politische Imaginationen und Praktiken nachgezeichnet, die die Widersprüche hegemonialer Konzeptionen von Demokratie und Zugehörigkeit aufzeigen. Abschließend wird die Epistemologie des Schwarzen Mittelmeers für eine Kritik des dominanten Krisennarrativs der Demokratie und für eine selbstreflexive Auseinandersetzung mit den kognitiven Grenzen der politischen Theorie selbst produktiv gemacht. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION In the first part of this study I will deal with the publications of Husserl's first period, ie Ueber den Begriff der Zahl (his "Habilita- ...

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be considered as (...) having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel. (shrink)

The condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is metaphysically strange. Can there really be several distinct persons operating in a single body? Our view is that DID sufferers are single persons with a severe mental disorder. In this paper we compare the phenomenology of dissociation between personality states in DID with certain delusional disorders. We argue both that the burden of proof must lie with those who defend the metaphysically extravagant Multiple Persons view and (...) that there is little theoretical motivation to yield to that view in light of the fact that the core symptoms of DID bear remarkable similarity to the symptoms of these other disorders where no such extravagance is ever seriously entertained. (shrink)

A group of 71 university students were first asked to explain 3 conceptual metaphors. Then the participants' cognitive styles were classified into "analytic" or "holistic" and "imager" or "verbalizer" by means of the Riding (1991) computer-assisted test of cognitive styles. The results of the experiment revealed cognitive style variables in participants' preferred strategies to explain the metaphors: (a) "holistic thinkers" were more likely than "analytic" ones to blend their conception of the target domain with the source domain, and (b) "imagers" (...) were more likely than "verbalizers" to refer to stereotypical images to explain the metaphors. (shrink)