The inconsistency between pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, known as the “attitude-behaviour” gap, is exceptionally pronounced in scenarios associated with “green” choice. The current literature offers numerous explanations for the reasons behind the “attitude-behaviour” gap, however, the generalisability of these explanations is complex. In addition, the answer to the question of whether the gap occurs between attitudes and intentions, or intentions and behaviours is also unknown. In this study, we propose the moral dimension as a generalisable driver of the “attitude-behaviour” gap (...) and investigate its effectiveness in predicting attitudes, pro-environmental intentions and subsequent behaviours. We do so by using Hunt–Vitell’s moral philosophy-based framework of ethical decision-making, which conceptualises morality as the central decision-making parameter. The results from 557 US MTurk participants revealed that the manipulation of moral dimensions, specifically deontology and teleology, impacted ethical evaluation of presented dilemmas, however, failed to translate into subsequent intentions and behaviours. This finding suggests (i) that the moral dimension has an effect in shaping attitudes toward environmental issues, and (ii) that gap occurs between attitudes and intentions rather than intentions and behaviours. Further investigation of what strengthens and/or overrides the effects of the moral dimension would help understand the reasons why moral attitudes do not always translate into subsequent intentions and behaviours in the pro-environmental domain. (shrink)

"Like H. H. Price, who said that 'Clarity is not enough' in the intellectual realm, we may say that clarity is all the less sufficient in the ethical realm." Indeed few will want to reproach this author with overvaluing clarity or with placing excessive emphasis on precision. He constantly prefers the suggestive to the exact. Though the book deals with ethical questions, the aim is not to present a general theory of ethics, but to derive ethical and political consequences from (...) the phenomenology of man. What, in fact, emerges is a loosely related series of studies, which have in common the primacy of the concrete subject. The first part of the book is devoted to a phenomenological ontology of the concrete subject. The conclusions are not novel, but they do provide a necessary background for the later studies. The second part of the book considers ethical questions, and presents an interesting trichotomy of values into embodied values, such as holiness as embodied in God; values which are never realized once and for all and which require repeated actualization, such as charity; and values which must be protected and fortified, such as political liberty. Also included are studies of the ethical aspects of lying and of being ashamed. Rotenstreich claims that lying is morally reprehensible because truth is an ethical value. To support this latter contention, he argues that truth is demanded by rationality, the essence of man, and that man has a duty to develop his essence. The third and last part of the book is devoted to political questions.—F. S. M. (shrink)

The views of Ziff in this collection of essays are always challenging and frequently are marked by brilliant insight. Thirteen essays are found in this volume, all of which had been previously published, with the exception of "Truth in Poetry," in which Ziff argues that it is not appropriate to ask if what a poem says is true since poems are not statements. The essays can be divided into three groups, the first group dealing with aesthetics, the second group treating (...) of topics in the philosophy of language, and the third dealing with the philosophy of mind. Also included is an essay "About God." The five essays in aesthetics, which take up roughly half the book, constitute one of the most distinguished bodies of work in contemporary analytic aesthetics. Besides "Truth and Poetry," this group contains "Art and the Object of Art," in which Ziff argues that art is not an illusion, and "Reasons in Art Criticism" in which he tries to determine what is acceptable as a reason why a painting is good. Also included is an essay in which Ziff seeks to give a plausible characterization of pictorial representation and one examining some of the problems in defining a work of art. The four essays in the philosophy of language supplement the author's Semantic Analysis. They are largely concerned with exploring the boundary between syntax and semantics. There is an essay examining ungrammaticalness and one examining how ungrammatical sentences can be understood. Another treats of ambiguity while the fourth attempts to show that active and passive sentences are not synonymous. The essays in the philosophy of mind are a much less well-knit group. The three essays take up the problem of other minds, the feeling of robots and an argument against behaviorism. The chief value of this collection is in gathering together Ziff's important contributions in the field of aesthetics. It also has value for its stimulating and original thought in other fields. Highly recommended.—F. S. M. (shrink)

The present essay is organized into five main sections. We begin with a few preliminary remarks about "cloud computing," which are developed more fully in a later section. This is followed by a brief overview of the evolution of Helen Nissenbaum's framework of "privacy as contextual integrity." In particular, we examine Nissenbaum's "Decision Heuristic" model, described in her most recent work on privacy, to see how it enables the contextual-integrity framework to respond to privacy challenges posed by new and emerging (...) technologies. We then apply that heuristic device to questions surrounding one aspect of cloud computing -- viz., "cloud storage" technology. In particular, we focus on current practices affecting Google Docs as an instance of a cloud-storage system. (shrink)

An updated and extended second edition supporting the findings of its well-known predecessor which claimed that courts employ common-sense notions of causation in determining legal responsibility.

The defining principle of evolutionary biology is that all species, extant and extinct, evolved from ancient prokaryotic cells. Their initial appearance and adaptive evolution are proposed to have been accompanied by a cellular sentience, by feelings, subjectivity or, in a word, 'consciousness'. Prokaryotic cells, such as archaea and bacteria, have natural unitary, valence-marked 'mental' representations. They process and evaluate sensory information in a context-dependent manner. They learn, establish memories, and communicate using biophysical fields acting on excitable membranes. Symbiotic eukaryotic cells, (...) which evolved much later, initiated a compound cellular subjectivity utilizing 'senomic' and 'ephaptic' principles that evolved into the varieties of consciousness seen in multicellular species. This Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) model provides a novel framework within which to approach fundamental issues such as the origins of life and the emergence of mind. (shrink)

F. S. McNeilly; XIII—Immorality and the Law, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 167–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.

This paper proposes a Cournot game organized by three competing firms adopting bounded rationality. According to the marginal profit in the past time step, each firm tries to update its production using local knowledge. In this game, a firm’s preference is represented by a utility function that is derived from a constant elasticity of substitution production function. The game is modeled by a 3-dimensional discrete dynamical system. The equilibria of the system are numerically studied to detect their complex characteristics due (...) to difficulty to get an explicit form for those equilibria. For the proposed utility function, some cases with different value parameters are considered. Numerical simulations are used to provide an experimental evidence for the complex behavior of the evolution of the system. The obtained results show that the system loses its stability due to different types of bifurcations. (shrink)

Upshot: In this response, I address the points raised in the commentaries, in particular those related to the scalability and robustness of the mechanism CALM, to its relation with the CAES architecture, and to the transition from sensorimotor to symbolic.

The people of classical Athens did not regard suicide as a crime committed by the victim. Instead, the Athenians regarded suicide as a crime committed by the instrument that the victim used, or by the victim's hand as opposed to the victim himself. This non-human agent was culpable, just like non-human agents were blamed for accidental deaths. Although suicide victims were innocent, inanimate agents were guilty. In Sophocles'Ajax, for example, the sword that the hero turned upon himself was blamed for (...) his death. The Athenian response to suicide was more about objects than it was about people. (shrink)

O presente texto procura entender as razões que levaram o filósofo e crítico escocês Hugh Blair a tomar Voltaire como um modelo para o historiador moderno. Inicia-se o estudo com uma breve exposição de alguns elementos da concepção de história no pensamento voltairiano e então se passa à consideração que o autor britânico faz deles.The present text aims to understand the reasons that took the Scottish philosopher and critic Hugh Blair to take Voltaire as a model to the modern historian. (...) This study begins with a brief description of some elements of history conception according to Voltaire´s thinking and then the consideration that the British author makes of it. (shrink)