Kelly Aguirre, Phil Henderson, Cressida J. Heyes, Alana Lentin, and Corey Snelgrove engage with different aspects of Robert Nichols’ Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Henderson focuses on possible spaces for maneuver, agency, contradiction, or failure in subject formation available to individuals and communities interpellated through diremptive processes. Heyes homes in on the ritual of antiwill called “consent” that systematically conceals the operation of power. Aguirre foregrounds tensions in projects of critical theory scholarship that aim for dialogue and (...) solidarity with Indigenous decolonial struggles. Lentin draws attention to the role of race in undergirding the logic of Anglo-settler colonial domination that operates through dispossession, while Snelgrove emphasizes the link between alienation, capital, and colonialism. In his reply to his interlocutors, Nichols clarifies aspects of his “recursive logics” of dispossession, a dispossession or theft through which the right to property is generated. (shrink)

Heightened political polarization challenges civic educators seeking to prepare youth as citizens who can navigate affective boundaries. Current approaches to civic education do not yet account for the emotional basis of citizenship. This paper presents an argument for critical affective literacy in civic education classrooms. Drawing from concepts and theories in critical emotion studies, affective citizenship, and agonistic political theory, critical affective civic literacy challenges the rationalistic bent of civic education, and offers instructional strategies for educating the political emotions of (...) students. The voices of late-arrival migrant youth enacting affective citizenship are featured in order to help illuminate the contributions of critical affective literacy to social studies research and practice. (shrink)

Dubbed 'the oracle' by no less an authority than James Madison, Montesquieu stands as a theoretical founder of the liberal political tradition. But equally central to his project was his account of the relationship of law to each nation's particular customs and place, a teaching that militates against universal political solutions. This teaching has sometimes been thought to stand in tension with his liberal constitutionalism. In this book, Keegan Callanan argues that Montesquieu's political particularism and liberalism are complementary and (...) mutually reinforcing parts of a coherent whole. In developing this argument, Callanan considers Montesquieu's regime pluralism, psychological conception of liberty, approach to political reform, and account of 'the customs of a free people', including the complex interaction of religion and commerce. Callanan concludes that, by re-orienting our understanding of liberalism and redirecting our attention toward liberty's distinctive preconditions, a return to Montesquieu's political philosophy leaves us better prepared to confront liberal democracy's contested claim to universality. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained healthcare resources the world over, requiring healthcare providers to make resource allocation decisions under extraordinary pressures. A year later, our understanding of COVID-19 has advanced, but our process for making ethical decisions surrounding resource allocation has not. During the first wave of the pandemic, our institution uniformly ramped-down clinical activity to accommodate the anticipated demands of COVID-19, resulting in resource waste and inefficiency. In preparation for the second wave, we sought to make such ramp down (...) decisions more prudently and ethically. We report the development of a tool that can be used to make fair and ethical decisions in times of resource scarcity. We formed an interprofessional team to develop and use this tool to ensure that a diverse range of stakeholder perspectives were represented in this development process. This team, called the clinical activity recovery team, established institutional objectives that were combined with well-established procedural values, substantive ethical principles and decision-making criteria by using a variation on the well-known accountability for reasonableness ethical framework. The result of this is a stepwise, semiquantitative, ethical decision tool that can be applied to resource allocation challenges in order to reach fair and ethically defensible decisions. This ethical decision tool can be applied in various contexts and may prove useful at both the institutional and the departmental level; indeed this is how it is applied at our centre. As the second wave of COVID-19 strains healthcare resources, this tool can help clinical leaders to make fair decisions. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Laudato si’, with its articulation of a familial ecology reflecting Francis’s Latin American context, expands the subject of solidarity in Catholic social teaching and thought. Yet, this ecological vision of family fails to attend to the problem of gender subordination latent in Catholic social teaching, including in its approaches to ecology. A vision of solidarity that eradicates gender and ecological subordination must elaborate a familial ecology characterized by both mercy and equality.

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

We show that under the proper forcing axiom the class of all Aronszajn lines behave like [Formula: see text]-scattered orders under the embeddability relation. In particular, we are able to show that the class of better-quasi-order labeled fragmented Aronszajn lines is itself a better-quasi-order. Moreover, we show that every better-quasi-order labeled Aronszajn line can be expressed as a finite sum of labeled types which are algebraically indecomposable. By encoding lines with finite labeled trees, we are also able to deduce a (...) decomposition result, that for every Aronszajn line [Formula: see text] there is an integer [Formula: see text] such that for any finite coloring of [Formula: see text] there is subset [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] isomorphic to [Formula: see text] which uses no more than [Formula: see text] colors. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Language of Psychopathy Why a Moral Grounding Traits versus Behaviors Primates, Communication, and Serial Killers.

In Aristotle's Discovery of the Human, noted political theorist Mary P. Nichols explores the ways in which Aristotle brings the gods and the divine into his "philosophizing about human affairs" in his Nicomachean Ethics. Her analysis shows that, for Aristotle, both piety and politics are central to a flourishing human life. Aristotle argues that piety provides us not only an awareness of our kinship to the divine, and hence elevates human life, but also an awareness of a divinity that (...) we cannot entirely assimilate or fathom. Piety therefore supports a politics that strives for excellence at the same time that it checks excess through a recognition of human limitation. Proceeding through each of the ten books of the Ethics, Nichols shows that this prequel to Aristotle's Politics is as theoretical as it is practical. Its goal of improving political life and educating citizens and statesmen is inseparable from its pursuit of the truth about human beings and their relation to the divine. In the final chapter, which turns to contemporary political debate, Nichols's suggestion of the possibility of supplementing and deepening liberalism on Aristotelian grounds is supported by the account of human nature, virtue, friendship, and community developed throughout her study of the Ethics. (shrink)

This paper relies on experimental methods to explore the psychological underpinnings of folk intuitions about free will and responsibility. In different conditions, people give conflicting responses about agency and responsibility. In some contexts, people treat agency as indeterminist; in other contexts, they treat agency as determinist. Furthermore, in some contexts people treat responsibility as incompatible with determinism, and in other contexts people treat responsibility as compatible with determinism. The paper considers possible accounts of the psychological mechanisms that underlie these conflicting (...) responses. (shrink)

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in (...) cultural evolution, which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

Rational Rules argues that moral learning can be understood in terms of general-purpose rational learning procedures. Nichols provides statistical learning accounts of some fundamental aspects of moral development, combining aspects of traditional empiricist and rationalist approaches.

Precaution is usually associated with the intuition that it is better to be safe than sorry, and/or that it is sometimes necessary to act in advance of scientific certainty to prevent harmful outcomes. At this point, we cannot entirely prevent climate change, but we can affect how harmful such change is. Adaptation may therefore be understood as a precautionary measure against the damage due to climate change. 'The' precautionary principle alone is too vague to shape adaptation policy, but a limited (...) catastrophic precautionary principle may productively guide adaptation policy makers. I argue in this paper that an explicit commitment to a precautionary approach based on the catastrophic precautionary principle could and should be made to strengthen the adaptation policies introduced at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (shrink)

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental lexicon. Network measures at different levels of analysis (degree, network distance, and closeness centrality) were used to investigate the influence of network structure on picture naming accuracy and errors by people with (...) Anomic, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's aphasia. Our results reveal that word retrieval is influenced by the multiplex lexical network structure in at least two ways—(a) the accuracy of production and error type on incorrect productions were influenced by the degree and closeness centrality of the target word, and (b) error type also varied in terms of network distance between the target word and produced error word. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate that network science techniques, particularly the use of the multiplex lexical network to simultaneously represent semantic and phonological relationships among words, reveal how the structure of the mental lexicon influences language processes beyond traditionally examined psycholinguistic variables. We propose a framework for how the multiplex lexical network approach allows for understanding the influence of mental lexicon structure on word retrieval processes, with an eye toward a better understanding of the nature of clinical impairments, like aphasia. (shrink)

This book takes a fresh look at Socrates as he appeared to three ancient writers: Aristophanes, who attacked him for his theoretical studies; Plato, who immortalized him in his dialogues; and Aristotle, who criticized his political views. It addresses the questions of the interrelation of politics and philosophy by looking at Aristophanes' Clouds, Plato's Republic, and Book II of Aristotle's Politics--three sides of a debate on the value of Socrates' philosophic life. Mary Nichols first discusses the relation between Aristophanes (...) and Plato, showing that the city as Socrates' place of activity in the Republic resembles the philosophic thinktank mocked in Aristophanes' Clouds. By representing the extremes of the Republic's city, Plato shows that the dangers attributed by Aristophanes to the city are actually inherent in political life itself. They were to be moderated by Socratic political philosophy rather than Aristophanean comedy. Nichols concludes by showing how Aristotle addressed the question at issue between Plato and Aristophanes when he founded his political science. Judging Plato's and Aristophanes' positions as partial, Nichols argues that Aristotle based his political science on the necessity to philosophy of political involvement and the necessity to politics of philosophical thought. (shrink)

: Kühberger et al. show that producing the Langer effect is considerably more difficult than has been assumed. Although their results clearly demonstrate a need for further exploration of the Langer effect, none of their arguments undermines the evidence against simulation theory that we presented in Nichols et al. . In our study the actor subjects did show an effect, but the prediction subjects did not predict it, despite the fact that they were provided with all the details of (...) the actor's situation. Further, we report additional evidence that corroborates our empirical case against simulation theory. (shrink)

The Companion to Montesquieu provides a first port-of-call for readers new to the study of Montesquieu, even as it makes major contributions to the specialist literature. The volume will attract scholars of multiple disciplines and readers interested in concepts like liberty, cosmopolitanism, sovereignty, and slavery treated in the thematic chapters.

This ground-breaking handbook provides multi-disciplinary insight into Chinese morality, cognition and emotion by collecting in one place a comprehensive collection of essays focused on Chinese morality by world-leading experts from more than a dozen different academic fields of study. Through fifteen substantive chapters, readers are offered a holistic look into the ways morality could be interpreted in China, and a broad range of theoretical perspectives, including ecological, anthropological and cultural neuroscience.

Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.

James F. Keenan defines mercy as “the willingness to enter the chaos of another.” Mercy thus defined, he argues, is the distinctive characteristic of Christian morality. This essay asserts that mercy is, in fact, a public virtue, one that can be affirmed across a broad range of religious and moral traditions. As a public virtue, mercy ought to shape both affective and effective responses to the Syrian refugee crisis in the United States.

Discussions of harm are central in the climate ethics literature. Especially in the rapidly emerging body of work addressing the question of whether or not individuals are morally responsible for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whether or in what way individuals’ emissions are harmful is a hotly debated question. John Nolt’s recent paper, “How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions?” illustrates the prevalence of this framing (Nolt 2011). Here I take a step back and ask what we mean (...) by the concept “harmful” when talking about climate change. I argue, as several respondents to Nolt have suggested (e.g., Attfield 2011, Odenbaugh 2011), that we should not be so quick to apply our standard .. (shrink)

According to recent accounts of the imagination, mental mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination‐based inputs (pretense representations) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. That is, such a mechanism should produce similar outputs whether its input is the belief that p or the pretense representation that p. Unfortunately, there seem to be clear counterexamples to this hypothesis, for in many cases, imagining that p and believing that p have quite different psychological (...) consequences. This paper sets out some central problem cases and argues that the cases might be accommodated by adverting to the role of desires concerning real and imaginary situations. (shrink)

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, fancifully dubbed 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our lives. In the latter half of the 20th century mindreading became the object of sustained scientific and theoretical research, capturing the attention of a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, anthropology, and cognitive psychopathology. What has been missing is a detailed and integrated account of the mental components that underlie this remarkable capacity. Nichols and Stich develop and defend a (...) new account of the psychological mechanisms underlying mindreading. They maintain that it is, as common sense would suggest, vital to distinguish between reading others' minds and reading one's own. In reading other minds, the imagination plays a central role. As a result, the authors begin with an explicit and systematic account of pretence and imagination which proposes that pretence representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, the 'Possible World Box', which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The mechanisms underlying pretence get recruited when people attempt to understand others and predict their behaviour. In some cases, we use our own mental mechanisms to simulate the mental processes of another, as suggested by the 'simulation theory' of mindreading. However, mindreading also implicates very different kinds of mechanisms that rely on rich bodies of information, as suggested by information-based accounts of mindreading. In addition, the authors argue, reading other minds involves important processes that don't fit into either category. None of these mechanisms, though, explain how we read our own minds, which, according to the authors, requires invoking an entirely independent set of mechanisms.What we find, then, is an intricate web of mental components to explain our fascinating and multifarious knack of understanding minds. This account provides a valuable framework for future work on mindreading and has broad implications for philosophical debates that have surrounded the issue for the last quarter century. (shrink)

Reid's unusual primary/secondary quality distinction is drawn along epistemic lines. Reid takes an epistemic turn because of Locke's failure to draw a metaphysical distinction. Secondary qualities differ from primary qualities in virtue of the fact that we acquire notions of secondary qualities via the mediation of sensations. Primary qualities require no such mediation. In one respect, the analysis I set out renders qualities relative to agents. I address whether Reid advocates a dispositional theory of secondary qualities, whether the phenomenology of (...) color underlying Reid's theory is tenable, and whether Reid's distinction coheres well with his theory of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Inspired and in honor of the work of noted political theorist Mary P. Nichols, the essays in this volume explore political ideas and implications in a range of works of philosophy, literature, and film from classical antiquity to the present day, creating an interdisciplinary conversation across genres.

Corruption presents an assurance problem to businesses: all businesses are best off if none act corruptly but in the event that corruption occurs are better off if they act corruptly than if they do not, and because there is no assurance that other actors are not cheating a business does not know how to act. The usual solution to an assurance problem – criminal sanctions imposed on cheaters – does not work in a corrupt system. Integrative Social Contract Theory suggests (...) a solution to the assurance problem. Application of Integrative Social Contract Theory to corruption demonstrates that in the case of corruption it has advantages over international law, and that the theory's elegance lies in its recognition of norms generated by multiple communities. (shrink)

A disturbing economic reality confronts consumers today: thousands of farm workers are enslaved in U.S. agricultural fields, forced to work without pay amid deplorable conditions and under the constant threat of violence. If structural economic injustices perpetuate modern‐day agricultural slavery, then it is necessary to promote consumer practices that resist these abusive dynamics. But a consumption‐oriented strategy does not necessarily restore either personal agency or communal relations damaged by agricultural trafficking. This essay proposes a framework for aesthetic solidarity that cultivates (...) affective bonds necessary for building communities of resistance characterized by mutuality, equality, and participation. (shrink)

An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.

Solar radiation management is a form of geoengineering that involves the intentional manipulation of solar radiation with the aim of reducing global average temperature. This paper explores what precaution implies about the status of solar radiation management. It is argued that any form of solar radiation management that poses threats of catastrophe cannot constitute an appropriate precautionary measure against another threat of catastrophe, namely climate change. Research of solar radiation management is appropriate on a precautionary view only insofar as such (...) research aims to identify whether any forms of solar radiation management could be implemented without creating new or exacerbating existing threats of catastrophe. (shrink)

In this study, we explore the global effect of the Internet on democracy over the period of 1992 to 2002 by observing the relationships between measures related to democracy and Internet prevalence. Our findings suggest that while Internet usage was not a very powerful predictor of democracy when examining full panel data from 1992 to 2002, it was a stronger predictor when we study data from just the years 2001 to 2002. We hypothesize that the jump in the ability of (...) Internet penetration indicators to explain variation in democratization that occurred in 2000 suggests that the Internet may have only recently come into its own as a positive force for democratization. However, these results are not globally consistent, and we show that some regions do not enjoy a positive Internet/democracy correlation suggesting that the Internet can be used both as a tool for democratization as well as an instrument for authoritarianism. (shrink)

How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to indeterminist free will may be resilient in the face of scientific evidence against such free (...) will. (shrink)

En la presente investigación se reflexionará sobre la guerra y su naturaleza en el contexto del sistema filosófico de Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, estableciendo como su fundamento ontológico la categoría del ser-para-sí o autoafirmación, aquella necesidad de toda autoconciencia que pretende ser libre, y que se alcanza a través del proceso dialéctico del reconocimiento. Se contrastará esta concepción con la clásica noción de guerra justa planteada por Tomás de Aquino, examinando el lugar que la negatividad del mal tiene en ambos (...) sistemas metafísicos, con el fin de determinar si es posible entender la eticidad de ambas guerras en un mismo sentido. (shrink)

When we learn of atrocities committed by psychopaths and by suicide terrorists, we are shocked by the evident lack of normal feeling for their fellow human beings. (By suicide terrorists, I mean to include not just the people who..

As we age, many physical, perceptual and cognitive abilities decline, which can critically impact our day-to-day lives. However, the decline of many abilities is concurrent; thus, it is challenging to disentangle the relative contributions of different abilities in the performance deterioration in realistic tasks, such as road crossing, with age. Research into road crossing has shown that aging and a decline in executive functioning is associated with altered information sampling and less safe crossing decisions compared to younger adults. However, in (...) these studies declines in age and EFs were confounded. Therefore, it is impossible to disentangle whether age-related declines in EFs impact on visual sampling and road-crossing performance, or whether visual exploration, and road-crossing performance, are impacted by aging independently of a decline in EFs. In this study, we recruited older adults with maintained EFs to isolate the impacts of aging independently of a decline EFs on road crossing abilities. We recorded eye movements of younger adults and older adults while they watched videos of road traffic and were asked to decide when they could cross the road. Overall, our results show that older adults with maintained EFs sample visual information and make similar road crossing decisions to younger adults. Our findings also reveal that both environmental constraints and EF abilities interact with aging to influence how the road-crossing task is performed. Our findings suggest that older pedestrians' safety, and independence in day-to-day life, can be improved through a limitation of scene complexity and a preservation of EF abilities. (shrink)

Based on a survey of deans and marketing department chairs, this study explores the business and marketing curriculum in the areas of ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and sustainability. The findings indicate that there was limited support for providing students with an understanding of these topics, in believing the concepts provide a competitive advantage in the job market, or would be utilized by students at a later point in their education. Finally, the value placed on research in these areas was (...) considerably less than on theory development or applied and pedagogical research. (shrink)

Throughout the 20th century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, including Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of contemporary philosophers. Typically, these arguments make use (...) of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal to intuition, little or no defense is offered, and in many cases it is hard to see what else could be said in support of these premises. A number of authors have suggested that the intuitions undergirding these skeptical arguments are universal – shared by everyone who thinks reflectively about knowledge. In this paper we will offer some evidence indicating that they are far from universal. Rather, the evidence suggests that many of the intuitions epistemologists invoke vary with the cultural background, socio- economic status and educational background of the person offering the intuition. And this, we will argue, is bad news for the skeptical arguments that rely on those intuitions. The evidence may also be bad news for skepticism itself – not because it shows that skepticism is false, but rather because, if we accept one prominent account of the link between epistemic intuitions and epistemic concepts, it indicates that skepticism may be much less interesting and much less worrisome than philosophers have taken it to be. (shrink)

In this chapter, we outline the methods and aims of experimental philosophy as a methodological movement within philosophy, and suggest ways in which it may be employed in the study of Chinese philosophy.