Some individuals devalue positivity previously associated with negativity (Winer & Salem, 2016). Positive emotions (e.g. happiness) may be seen as threatening and result in active avoidance of futu...

Philosophical discussions of apologies have focused on apologizing for wrong actions. Such a focus overlooks an important dimension of moral failures, namely, failures of character. However, when one attempts to revise the standard account of apology to make room for failures of character, two objections emerge. The first is rooted in the psychology of shame. The second stems from the purported social function of apologies. This paper responds to these objections and, in so doing, sheds further light both on why (...) we apologize (when we are in the wrong) and on why we accept apologies (when others are). (shrink)

The goal of this project is to argue for ethics as a necessary component of the institutional health. The authors offer an epidemiology of ethics for a large, metropolitan, very-high-research-activity university in the U.S. Where epidemiology of a pandemic looks at quantifiable data on infection and exposure rates, control, and broad implications for public health, an epidemiology of ethics looks to parallel data on those same themes. Their hypothesis is that knowing more about how undergraduates are exposed to ethics will (...) help us understand to what extent they are infected with interest in ethics literacy, and potentially what immunity they develop against unethical and unprofessional conduct. These data also tell a story about the ethical health of institutions: to what extent its members are empowered to cultivate a culture of ethics and inoculated against ethical missteps. The authors argue that pro-ethics inoculation at research institutions is shaped by issues of complexity, connotation, and collaboration. These issues make assessment of where ethics is taught all the more difficult. The methodology used in this project can readily be taken up by other institutions, with much to be learned from inter-institutional comparisons about the distribution of ethics across the curriculum and within the disciplines. (shrink)

This is a condensed version of an in-process book on the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence. In this 48,000 word essay, I first develop a probabilistic framework for articulating the argument, and then use this framework to answer in detail many of the objections commonly raised against it. Along the way, I present some of the fine-tuning evidence itself and consider major objections against the evidence; further, there are two major sections dealing with the multiverse objection, particularly that based on (...) inflationary cosmology. (shrink)

Invasive neurotechnologies are a frequent subject of discussion in neuroethics. Technologies, like deep brain stimulation and implantable brain-computer interfaces, are thought to hold significant promise for human health and well-being, but they also raise important ethical questions about autonomy, safety, stigma, privacy, and agency, among others. The terms ‘invasive’ and ‘invasiveness’ are commonly applied to these and other neurotechnologies, yet the concept of invasiveness itself is rarely defined or delimited. Some have suggested that invasiveness may have multiple meanings – physical, (...) emotional, or lifestyle – and that confusion about how people use the terms may lead to harm, especially for users of invasive devices. It is uncertain if debates in neuroethics contribute to this confusion. To investigate this, we conducted a study of how the term ‘invasiveness’ is used in neuroethics. We found that neuroethicists almost always use ‘invasiveness’ to refer to the physical features of interventions, and rarely to refer to other senses of invasiveness. We also found that referencing invasiveness does not determine which ethical issues are prioritized for a given type of neurotechnology. Overall, this study affirms the importance of understanding the meaning and use of the concept of invasiveness in ethical discussion of neurotechnology while also suggesting the need for further work in the area and consideration for rethinking what forms of technology we consider to be invasive. (shrink)

Organizations do moral wrong. States pursue unjust wars, businesses avoid tax, charities misdirect funds. Our social, political, and legal responses require guidance. We need to know what we’re responding to and how we should respond to it. We need a metaphysical and moral theory of wrongful organizations. This book provides a new such theory, paying particular attention to questions that have been underexplored in existing debates. These questions include: where are organizations located as material objects in the natural world? What’s (...) the metaphysical relation between organizations and their members? Can organizations be blameworthy for attitudes and character traits, as well as for actions? What about feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame—can organizations feel these emotions and why does this matter? How and why are members implicated in organizations’ wrongs? How should organizations’ reparative costs be apportioned among members? The book answers these questions. It argues that organizations are material objects with humans as material parts—much like how a pizza is a material object with slices as material parts. This picture helps us make sense of organizations’ blameworthiness, including blame for organization-level actions, attitudes, and character traits. The book argues that organizations can experience moral self-awareness—a crucial component of guilt, remorse, and shame. Members can be implicated in organizations’ actions in numerous ways—and, it is argued, members’ level of implication should determine their share of organizations’ reparative burdens. (shrink)

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend the evil-god challenge by (...) showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections. (shrink)

This investigation applies a social cognition framework to examine moral awareness in business situations. Using a vignette-based instrument, the investigation compares the recall, recognition, and ascription of importance to moral-versus strategy-related issues in business managers (n = 86) and academic professors (n = 61). Results demonstrate that managers recall strategy-related issues more than moral-related issues and recognize and ascribe importance to moral-related issues less than academics. It also finds an inverse relationship between socialization in the business context and moral awareness. (...) Future directions for moral awareness research and the practical implications for these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Via a close reading of The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, this chapter examines how Simone de Beauvoir's analogical thinking about race and gender shape her arguments concerning oppression and freedom. First, Beauvoir uses gender as an analytical category to examine women's oppression. In contrast, Beauvoir uses race, age, class and ethnicity as descriptive experiences that provide evidence for her analysis of women's oppression. Second, Beauvoir's analysis of women's oppression relies on an uncritical analogical method to develop arguments (...) about gender oppression, with the race/gender analogy granted special prominence. Third, the substance of Beauvoir's analogies undermines her theory of existentialist freedom: manipulating root metaphors that depict Black people as silent slaves or non‐independent women as complicit in their own subordination makes existential freedom difficult if not impossible for the majority of human beings. (shrink)

What is the relationship between war propaganda and nationalism, and what are the effects of each on support for, or participation in, violent acts? This is an important question for international criminal law and ongoing speech crime trials, where prosecutors and judges continue to assert that there is a clear causal link between war propaganda, nationalism, and mass violence. Although most legal judgments hinge on the criminal intent of propagandists, the question of whether and to what extent propaganda and nationalism (...) interact to cause support for violence or participation remains unanswered. Our goal here is to contribute to research on propaganda and nationalism by bridging international criminal law and the behavioral and brain sciences. We develop an experiment conducted with Serbian participants that examines the effects of propaganda as identified in the latest international speech crime trial as causing mass violence, and thereby test hypotheses of expert witness Anthony Oberschall’s theory of mass manipulation. Using principal components analysis and Bayesian regression, we examine the effects of propaganda exposure and prior levels of nationalism as well as other demographics on support for violence, ingroup empathy, and outgroup empathy. Results show that while exposure to war propaganda does not increase justifications of violence, specific types of war propaganda increase ingroup empathy and decrease outgroup empathy. Further, although nationalism by itself is not significant for justifying violence, the interaction of increased nationalism and exposure to violent media is significant for altering group empathies. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to international criminal law and the cognitive science of nationalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June (...) class='Hi'>Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

Many governments are failing to act sufficiently strongly on climate change. Given this, what should motivated affluent individuals in high-consumption societies do? This paper argues that social norms are a particularly valuable target for individual climate action. Within norm-promotion, the paper makes the case for a focus on anti-fossil fuel norms specifically. Section 1 outlines gaps in the existing literature on individuals’ climate change obligations. Section 2 characterises social norms. Section 3 provides seven reasons why social norms are a particularly (...) worthy target for individual climate actors. Section 4 asks which social norms individuals should emphasise, arguing that anti-fossil fuel norms have advantages over emissions reduction and offsetting norms. Section 5 outlines the pathways and mechanisms individuals might exploit to promote anti-fossil fuel norms. (shrink)

Words appear to be denizens of the external world or, at any rate, not wholly mental, unlike our pains. It is the norm for philosophical accounts of words to reflect this appearance by offering various socio-cultural conditions to which an adequate account of wordhood must cleave. The paper argues, to the contrary, that an adequate account of word phenomena need avert to nothing other than individual psychology along with potential external factors that in-themselves do not count as linguistic. My principal (...) leverage will be that, by everyone’s lights, whatever words are, they are syntactically combinable and possess structural properties. But such conditions cannot be externally realised; instead, they are aspects of our internally realised cognitive capacity. It will also be argued, however, that the position is consistent with much of our common lore about words, albeit sans an externalist linguistic ontology. (shrink)

According to doxastic accounts of self-deception, self-deception that P yields belief that P. For doxastic accounts, the self-deceiver really believes what he, in self-deception, professes to believe. I argue that doxastic accounts are contradicted by a phenomenon that often accompanies self-deception. This phenomenon – which I term ‘secondary deception’ – consists in the self-deceiver's defending his professed (deceit-induced) belief to an audience by lying to that audience. I proceed to sketch an alternative, non-doxastic account of how we should understand self-deception (...) in terms of the self-deceiver's misrepresentation of himself as believing that P. (shrink)

Experts often communicate probabilities verbally (e.g., unlikely) rather than numerically (e.g., 25% chance). Although criticism has focused on the vagueness of verbal probabilities, less attention has been given to the potential unintended, biasing effects of verbal probabilities in communicating probabilities to decision-makers. In four experiments (Ns = 201, 439, 435, 696), we showed that probability format (i.e., verbal vs. numeric) influenced participants’ inferences and decisions following a hypothetical financial expert’s forecast. We observed a format effect for low probability forecasts: verbal (...) probabilities were interpreted more pessimistically than numeric equivalents. We attributed the difference to directionality, a linguistic property that biases attention toward an outcome. In the high-probability conditions, the directionality of verbal and numeric probabilities aligned (both were positive), whereas they differed in the low-probability conditions (verbal probabilities were more negative). Participants inferred recommendations congruent with the communicated direction and these inferences mediated the effect of probability format on decisions. (shrink)

In this chapter, I present a new theodicy, which I call the connection building theodicy. The basic idea behind this theodicy is that virtuous responses to evil allow for certain types of ongoing, intrinsically valuable connections of appreciation, contribution, and what I call “intimacy” between personal agents. Because of their ongoing character, arguably, the value of these connections will eventually outweigh the disvalue of the evils that God must allow in order for them to exist. After presenting the basic idea (...) of the theodicy, I consider a series of objections, and argue for its philosophical, theological, and practical fruitfulness. I do not claim this theodicy offers the sole reason why God allows evil, only that it provides an important and neglected set of reasons. (shrink)

Glowacki's account overlooks the role of religion in the regulation of cooperation, tolerance, and peace values. We interrogate three premises of Glowacki's argument and suggest that approaching religion as an adaptive system reveals how religious commitments and practices likely had a more substantial impact on the evolution of peace and conflict than currently presumed.

Within John Dewey's pragmatic naturalism, consciousness, meaning, and value were conceptualized as ontologically real phenomena. During the century that has passed since Dewey's time, naturalism has come to be dominated by physicalist and realist perspectives within which the reality of consciousness, meaning, and value are problematic. Given this historical tension in naturalism, the present paper does the following: describes why consciousness, causality, and the body were all at home in Dewey's naturalism, and why Dewey's naturalism fell out of favour during (...) the century that followed, describes a sample of unsuccessful twentieth-century attempts to get consciousness back into naturalism, including the contemporary embodiment movement, presents a recently developed holist, post-naturalist philosophy of embodiment that challenges the physicalist and realist assumptions at work in most contemporary forms of naturalism, and presentsWST as an intra-disciplinary framework for scholarship, and as a potential means of addressing the scholarship-culture tensions that have emerged during the zeitgeist of naturalism. (shrink)

We argue that limiting the theory of extreme self-sacrifice to two determinants, namely, identity fusion and group threats, results in logical and conceptual difficulties. To strengthen Whitehouse's theory, we encourage a more holistic approach. In particular, we suggest that the theory include exogenous sociopolitical factors and constituents of the religious system as additional predictors of extreme self-sacrifice.

Proponents of natural normativity maintain that the moral evaluation of human beings shares a certain common conceptual pattern with the evaluation of other living things. The adequacy of this analogy has been challenged, with opponents arguing that because humans are rational, there is a gap between what is natural and what is normative for humans. Rational creatures, the argument goes, are importantly different from non-rational living things in that reason includes the ability to step back from what is natural and (...) ask whether it is good that our nature is constituted as it is. Micah Lott has attempted a response to this challenge. After evaluating his proposal, I offer a reply that attempts to resolve an important dilemma, namely, that the naturalist either lacks a satisfying response to the authority-of-nature challenge or is forced to abandon naturalism. (shrink)

The foundational principles of representative democracy are under attack globally. What we desperately need are enlightened and persuasive public intellectuals who can help us see through the fog of our fear, anger, and disillusionment, to find our rational political commitments again. One of these public intellectuals is undoubtedly Yuval Noah Harari, the bestselling author of three recent books – Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari is also a frequent contributor in the popular press, and a (...) guest on shows, podcasts, panels, and as a keynote speaker. Add to all this that Harari is acting on his lofty academic ideals through ‘Sapienship’, a multidisciplinary organization he cofounded that advocates for global responsibility, clarifies the global conversation, and focuses attention on the most important global challenges. I single out Harari because I presume many readers will be familiar with his work. He is certainly one of the fastest rising stars of public intellectualism. Unfortunately, his work is undercut by the philosophical positions he put forth in his first bestselling book, Sapiens. In this review/critique I wish to show that in order for Harari advance a coherent political or ideological argument, he must first shore up his philosophical commitments. (shrink)

My claim is clear and unambiguous: no machine will pass a well-designed Turing Test unless we find some means of embedding it in lived social life. We have no idea how to do this but my argument, and all our evidence, suggests that it will not be a necessary condition that the machine have more than a minimal body. Exactly how minimal is still being worked out.

Every day we make choices, but our degree of investment in them differs, both in terms of pre-verbal experience and verbal justification. In an earlier experimental study, participants were asked to pick the more attractive one among two human faces, and among two abstract figures, and later to provide verbal motivations for these choices. They did not know that in some of the cases their choices were manipulated. Against claims about our unreliability as conscious agents, the study found that in (...) about half the cases the manipulations were detected. In the present study, we investigated whether varying degrees of choice investment could be an explanatory factor for such findings. We analysed the verbal justifications of the participants along a set of semantic categories, based on theoretical ideas from phenomenology and cognitive linguistics, and formulated a matrix of eleven markers of choice investment. We predicted a greater degree of investment when motivating choices of faces than figures, manipulated than actual choices, and detected than non-detected manipulations. These predictions were confirmed, but with various strength. This allows us to argue for both consilience and differences between pre-verbal choice investment and the corresponding verbal motivations of the choices made, and thus for conscious awareness of choice making. (shrink)

ABSTRACT William Cooney has recently argued (The Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 6, pp. 201–204) that the social programme of affirmative action, though controversial, can be supported by the doctrine of double effect in that, according to the doctrine, responsibility falls on the side of intended consequences and not on that of unintended consequences. The point of affirmative action is to include certain disadvantaged groups; it is not to exclude other groups, though this is an inevitable and foreseeable by‐product. In (...) this article I contend that Cooney's argument ignores two important conditions of the doctrine of double effect; namely, that the good which results from the intended effect must be at least commensurate with the harm that results from the unintended effect; and, that the intended good effect is causally separate from the unintended harmful effect. Any use of the doctrine which neglects these conditions leads to morally problematic cases. Further, once we take the conditions into account, we have good reason to think that the doctrine of double effect has no relevance to the affirmative action debate. (shrink)

Self‐management programmes provide strategies to optimise health while educating and providing resources for living with enduring illnesses. The current paper describes the development of a community‐based programme that combines a transdiagnostic approach to self‐management with mindfulness to enhance psychological coping for older people with long‐term multimorbidity. The six steps of intervention mapping (IM) were used to develop the programme. From a needs assessment, the objectives of the programme were formulated; the theoretical underpinnings then aligned to the objectives, which informed programme (...) design, decisions on implementation, programme adoption and evaluation steps. Bandura's social cognitive theory informed the methods and practical strategies of delivery. Among the features addressed with participants are transdiagnostic dimensions such as fatigue, pain, breathlessness, sleep disturbances. The programme utilises mindfulness to aid coping and ameliorate the psychological distresses associated with chronicity. Findings from an initial feasibility study and subsequent pilot assisted in conceptualising our programme. In conclusion, applying IM gave the planners confidence the programme is robust and evidence‐based with clearly articulated links between the behavioural goals and design elements to obtain the desired outcomes. (shrink)

Anthropology continues to develop both in terms of theory and in relation to the ways in which fieldwork is conducted. Dislocating Anthropology? seeks to capture and represent these developments through a collection of ethnographic essays that are cutting edge, but which do not represent a complete break with what has gone before. In recent years anthropologists have increasingly come to accept that fieldwork in bounded and discrete places is no longer tenable. People can no longer be represented in these static, (...) parochial terms. At the start of the 21st century, and with the possibility of internet connections almost anywhere, we have the potential to move even when we are stationary. Each of the contributors to this collection have identified and attempted to understand sets of relationships that are both temporally and spatially dynamic, that appear to flow into and out of 'the field.' Together, the chapters shed light on a number of methodological conundrums, or dislocations, relating, for example, to locality, identity, fieldwork, and reflexivity. The book is concerned with dislocation as both practice and process, and as such extends a theme that has arguably been central to Anthropology since Malinowski's Trobriand ethnography. (shrink)

Recent defenders of Philippa Foot, such as Michael Thompson and John Hacker-Wright, have argued that it is a mistake to think that Ft aims to justify a substantive conception of human soundness and defect. instead, she relies on the acceptance of certain groundless moral norms to underwrite her views about what is characteristically human. I maintain that this is a weakness and that the Footian-style proponent of natural normativity needs to provide a story about how we might achieve justified self-confidence (...) regarding moral norms. In this paper, I offer a coherentist model for doing so, thereby addressing the justification gap. (shrink)

Human kinship systems play a central role in social organization, as anthropologists have long demonstrated. Much less is known about how cultural schemas of relatedness are transmitted across generations. How do children learn kinship concepts? To what extent is learning affected by known cross-cultural variation in how humans classify kin? This review draws on research in developmental psychology, linguistics, and anthropology to present our current understanding of the social and cognitive foundations of kinship categorization. Amid growing interest in kinship in (...) the cognitive sciences, the paper aims to stimulate new research on the ontogeny of kinship categorization, a rich domain for studying the nexus of language, culture, and cognition. We introduce an interdisciplinary research toolkit to help streamline future research in this area. (shrink)