There is no subject to which the writers of ethical textbooks have devoted more attention than that of the relations between pleasure and desire, and yet it is surprising how little agreement their efforts have produced in philosophical circles. This failure seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that the question is only one among the many problems of conation, and can only be discussed in that context. In consequence, there remains a very wide gap between (...) what psychologists have to say about the analysis of conation and what ethical writers have to say about the problems of moral psychology. 1 My object in writing this article is to help to bring this deplorable state of affairs to an end by expounding a theory of the relations between pleasure and desire, which is based upon a careful analysis of the facts of conation. (shrink)

Upshot: Douglas Robinson argues for a revision of the extended mind theory that incorporates intersubjectivity and qualia. Robinson argues that “material extendedness” is less important than accounting for the subjective experience of what he terms “body-becoming-mind,” and that this experience, rather than mere computational equivalence between intra- and transcranial cognition, is the strongest argument in favour of the EMT.

Individuals from diverse disciplines, including neurology, physiology, psychology, mathematics, and engineering have contributed to this volume.

I ARGUE THAT SPINOZA’S DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF ’CONATION’ IS A CONSISTENT ANALYSIS BASED UPON HIS CLAIM THAT TELEOLOGICAL OR FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION IS EITHER REDUCIBLE TO CAUSAL EXPLANATION (IN TERMS OF DRIVES) OR IS NOT GENUINELY EXPLANATORY. SEVERAL IMPORTANT CONSEQUENCES OF THIS FOR SPINOZA’S ACCOUNT OF HUMAN APPETITION ARE PURSUED, AND SOME CONSEQUENCES FOR HIS POLITICAL THEORY ARE MENTIONED IN CLOSING.

In search of good -- A Socratic question -- Flourishing and well-being -- Mind and value -- Utilitarianism -- Rawls and the priority of the right -- Right, wrong, should -- The elimination of moral rightness -- Rules and good -- Categorical imperatives -- Conflicting interests -- Whose good? The egoist's answer -- Whose good? The utilitarian's answer - Self-denial, self-love, universal concern -- Pain, self-love, and altruism -- Agent-neutrality and agent-relativity -- Good, conation, and pleasure -- "Good" and (...) "good for" -- "Good for" and advantage -- "Good that" and "Bad that" -- Pleasure and advantage -- Good for S that P -- The "for" of "good for" -- Plants, animals, humans -- Ross on human nature -- The perspectival reading of "good for" -- The conative approach to well-being -- Abstracting from the content of desires and plans -- The faulty mechanisms of desire formation -- Infants and adults -- The conation of an ideal self -- The appeal of the conative theory -- Conation hybridized -- Strict hedonism -- Hedonism diluted -- Prolegomenon to flourishing -- Development and flourishing: the general theory -- Development and flourishing: the human case -- More examples of what is good -- Appealing to nature -- Sensory un-flourishing -- Affective flourishing and un-flourishing -- Hobbes on tranquility and restlessness -- Flourishing and un-flourishing as a social being -- Cognitive flourishing and un-flourishing -- Sexual flourishing and un-flourishing -- Too much and too little -- Comparing lives and stages of life -- Adding goods: Rawls's principle of inclusiveness -- Art, science, and culture -- Self-sacrifice -- The vanity of fame -- The vanity of wealth -- Making others worse-off -- Virtues and flourishing -- The good of autonomy -- What is good and why -- The sovereignty of good -- The importance of what is good for us -- Good's insufficiency -- Promises -- Retribution -- Cosmic justice -- Social justice -- Pure antipaternalism -- Moral space and giving aid -- Slavery -- Torture -- Moral rightness revisited -- Lying -- Honoring the dead -- Meaningless goals and symbolic value -- Good-independent realms of value -- Good thieves and good human beings -- Final thoughts. (shrink)

How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed alternative theory both of emotions, desires (...) and evaluative judgements and of their rational interconnections. The result is an innovative theory of practical rationality and of how we can control not only what we do but also what we value and who we are as persons. (shrink)

What kind of activity are non-human animals capable of? A venerable tradition insists that lack of language confines them to ‘mere behaviour’. This article engages with this ‘lingualism’ by developing a positive, bottom-up case for the possibility of animal agency. Higher animals cannot just act, they can act intelligently, rationally, intentionally and for reasons. In developing this case I draw on the interplay of behaviour, cognition and conation, the unduly neglected notion of intelligence and its connection to rationality, the (...) need to recognize that reasons are objective conditions, and the difference between the ability to act for reasons and the capacity to reflect on reasons. (shrink)

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and formal representational structure of perceptual states, and develops a formal semantics for them. The account is elaborated by an explanation of how the representational form is embedded in an iconic format. These structures are then situated in (...) current theoretical accounts of the processing of perceptual representations, with an emphasis on the formation of perceptual categorizations. An exploration of the relationship between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-clarifies the distinction between perceiving, with its associated capacities, and thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing on a broad range of historical and contemporary research, rather than relying on introspection or ordinary talk about perception, Perception: First Form of Mind is a scientifically rigorous and agenda-setting work in the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists assume that mental imagery is a cognitive state, that it represents things as being a certain way. However, I argue that imagery is a conative state: it represents things as to be made a certain way. I challenge the traditional assumption by targeting an increasingly popular cognitive account that identifies mental imagery, such as inner speech, with predictions of sensory input. This predictive account faces both empirical and theoretical problems. The account not only fails to capture the (...) salience effects exhibited by mental imagery, it also cannot explain why subjects should not spend their lives minimizing prediction error by engaging in fantasy. These shortcomings highlight what I call the conative profile of imagery, which includes its salience, motivational, and performance effects. I argue that an alternative, conative view of imagery, according to which mental images are goal states, is best able to account for its conative profile. (shrink)

I argue that denial plays a central but insufficiently recognized role in addiction. The puzzle inherent in addiction is why drug use persists despite negative consequences. The orthodox conception of addiction resolves this puzzle by appeal to compulsion; but there is increasing evidence that addicts are not compelled to use but retain choice and control over their consumption in many circumstances. Denial offers an alternative explanation: there is no puzzle as to why drug use persists despite negative consequences if these (...) consequences are not straightforwardly known. I describe the nature of the causal knowledge that one's drug use is causing negative consequences; map the conceptual landscape of denial and explain how it can block such knowledge; and explore some of the processes and mechanisms that have been studied by philosophy and the cognitive sciences and which may underpin denial in addiction, including well-established information-processing biases, motivational influences on belief formation and self-deception, and cognitive deficits with respect to insight and self-awareness. I conclude by suggesting that addiction is as much a disorder of cognition as a disorder of conation. (shrink)

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes (...) up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

I argue that Gauthier's constrained-maximizer rationality is problematic. But standard Maximizing Rationality means one's preferences are only rational if it would not maximize on them to adopt new ones. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, it maximizes to adopt conditionally cooperative preferences. (These are detailed, with a view to avoiding problems of circularity of definition.) Morality then maximizes. I distinguish the roles played in rational choices and their bases by preferences, dispositions, moral and rational principles, the aim of rational action, and rational (...) decision rules. I argue that Maximizing Rationality necessarily structures conclusive reasons for action. Thus conations of any sort can base rational choices only if the conations are structured like a coherent preference function; rational actions maximize on such functions. Maximization-constraining dispositions cannot integrate into a coherent preference function. (shrink)

The idea of epistemic temperance is introduced and explicated through a discussion of Plato's understanding of it. A variety of psychological and epistemic phenomena are presented which arise due to epistemic intemperance, or the inappropriate influence of conations on cognition. Two cases familiar to philosophers, self-deception and racial prejudice, are discussed as the result of epistemic intemperance though they are not typically seen as having a common cause. Finally, epistemic temperance is distinguished from epistemic justice, as these have been conflated.

This article brings together mindfulness and habitus theory in relation to developing wise leaders. In particular, we present new insights about the intersection of time, subjective and intersubjective experience, and mindfulness that are relevant to developing embodied wisdom in leaders. We show that temporal competence is essential for shaping habitus and developing embodied wisdom. Further, and to extend theoretical understandings of mindfulness in leadership, we argue that temporal capabilities developed through mindfulness can foster embodied wisdom by creating a specific ‘wisdom (...) habitus’ that includes values and ethics. The system of dispositions that comprise one’s habitus is, however, largely unconscious and implicit and we discuss how mindfulness renders habitus, including ethical conation accessible to development for the bodily ability to act wisely. This article then establishes a framework that leadership development programs in business schools can adopt for understanding habitus and mindfulness to enable embodied wisdom to develop in leaders. Finally, we show that a mindfulness perspective offers valuable contributions to research on leadership. (shrink)

It is argued that trust is a performative kind and that the evaluative normativity of trust is a special case of the evaluative normativity of performances generally. The view is shown to have advantages over competitor views, e.g., according to which good trusting is principally a matter of good believing (e.g., Hieronymi, 2008; McMyler, 2011), or good affect (e.g., Baier, 1986; Jones, 1996), or good conation (e.g., Holton, 1994). Moreover, the view can be easily extended to explain good (and (...) bad) distrust, where the latter is understood as aimed (narrow-scoped) forbearance from trusting. The overarching framework—which assimilates the evaluative norms of trusting (and distrusting) to performance-theoretic norms—supplies us with an entirely new lens to view traditional philosophical problems about what is involved in trusting and distrusting well and badly, and thus, places our capacity to make progress on problems in this area on a new footing. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for each psychopathological (...) disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

Teleosemantics holds that the contents of psychological states depend crucially on the functions of such states. Etiological accounts of function hold that the functions of things depend on their histories, especially their evolutionary or learning histories. Etiological teleosemantics combines these two features. Consider the case of beliefs. Since selection rests on the stable effects of things, since beliefs have no obvious effects independent of unstable desires, and since desires themselves have mental content, beliefs may seem a hard case for etiological (...) teleosemantics. But David Papineau deploys the effects of beliefs mediated by conation in an artful way to evade these difficulties. I argue that accounts with such an architecture are false. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas’s account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a na¨ıve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ (...) and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas’s doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas’s ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas’s account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas’s account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

Central to Holmes Rolston’s Environmental Ethics is the theoretical quest of most enviromnental philosophers for a defensible concept of intrinsic value for nonhuman natural entities and nature as a whole. Rolston’s theory is similar to Paul Taylor’s in rooting intrinsic value in conation, but dissimilar in assigning value bonuses to consciousness and self-consciousness and value dividends to organic wholes andelemental nature. I argue that such a theory of intrinsic value flies in the face of the subject/object and fact/value dichotomies (...) of the metaphysical foundations of modem science—a problem Rolston never directly confronts. The modern scientific world view is obsolete. A post-modem scientific world view provides for a range of potential values in nature actualizable upon interaction with consciousness. The bestthat a modem scientific world view can provide are subject-generated—though not necessarily subject-centered—values in nature. (shrink)

Contemporary just war theory usually addresses armed conflicts between two group agents, assuming that one is an aggressor and the other a defender. This paper discusses conflicts between two ethnonational groups, both of which include defenders and aggressors. The normative questions that this essay addresses are two: Are minimalists entitled to join their maximalist conationals in fighting the maximalists on the other side, and if so, in which circumstances? If so, what should minimalists have aimed to achieve by resorting to (...) force and coercion? (shrink)

This book offers a novel account of Aquinas's theory of the human act. It argues that Aquinas takes a human act to be a composite of two power-exercises, where one relates to the other as form to matter. The formal component is an act of the will, and the material component is a power-exercise caused by the will, which Aquinas refers to as the 'commanded act.' The book also argues that Aquinas conceptualizes the act of free choice as a hylomorphic (...) composite: it is, materially, an act of the will, but it inherits a form from reason. As the book aims to show, the core idea of Aquinas's hylomorphic action theory is that the exercise of one power can structure the exercise of another power, and this provides a helpful way to think of the presence of cognition in conation and of intention in bodily movement. (shrink)

Preface.--Novius organum.--The world as habit.--Cosmogony.--Vertebrate evolution.--On phyletic affinities.--The difficulties of evolution.--"Extruding the subject."--Affection and conation.--The illusion of immediate experience.--The biogenic psychoses.--The social psychosis.--The nature of man.

Central to Holmes Rolston’s Environmental Ethics is the theoretical quest of most enviromnental philosophers for a defensible concept of intrinsic value for nonhuman natural entities and nature as a whole. Rolston’s theory is similar to Paul Taylor’s in rooting intrinsic value in conation, but dissimilar in assigning value bonuses to consciousness and self-consciousness and value dividends to organic wholes andelemental nature. I argue that such a theory of intrinsic value flies in the face of the subject/object and fact/value dichotomies (...) of the metaphysical foundations of modem science—a problem Rolston never directly confronts. The modern scientific world view is obsolete. A post-modem scientific world view provides for a range of potential values in nature actualizable upon interaction with consciousness. The bestthat a modem scientific world view can provide are subject-generated—though not necessarily subject-centered—values in nature. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an overview of the conceptual terrain of what we call conative accounts of personal identity. These are views according to which the same-person relation in some sense depends on a range of broadly conative phenomena, especially desires, behaviours and conventions. We distinguish views along three dimensions: what role the conations play, what kinds of conations play that role, and whether the conations that play that role are public or private. We then offer a more detailed (...) consideration of direct private conativism—the version of conativism that we favour—before considering how conativists ought respond to a general worry, according to which any conativist view will lead us to be radically pluralist about persons. (shrink)

This paper subjects to critical analysis four common arguments in the sociopolitical theory literature supporting the cultural nationalist thesis that liberal democracy is viable only against the background of a single national public culture: the arguments that (1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (Schnapper); (2) the levels of trust that democratic politics requires can be attained only among conationals (Miller); (3) democratic deliberation requires communicational transparency, possible in turn only within a shared national public (...) culture (Miller, Barry); and (4) the economic viability of specifically industrialized liberal democracies requires a single national culture (Gellner). I argue that all four arguments fail: At best, a shared cultural nation may reduce some of the costs liberal democratic societies must incur; at worst, cultural nationalist policies ironically undermine social integration. The failure of these cultural nationalist arguments clears the way for a normative theory of liberal democracy in multinational and postnational contexts. (shrink)

If reason is a real causal force,operative in some, but not all ofour cognition and conation, then itought to be possible to tell anaturalistic story that distinguishes themind which is moved byreason from the mind which is movedby forces other than reason.This essay proposes some steps towardthat end. I proceed by showingthat it is possible to reconcile certainemerging psychological ideasabout the causal powers of themind/brain with a venerablephilosophical vision of reason as the facultyof norms. My accountof reason is psychologistic, (...) social, and consistent with anevolutionary approach to mind. The account preserves thenormativity by deflating it. But I argue that onlysuch deflated normativity has any chance of beingmade naturalistically respectable. (shrink)

A causally efficacious conscious will is a small part of our everyday activities, but a part that deserves to be recognized, studied, and cherished, perhaps as a fundamental, emotion- and conation-related, right hemispheric neuronal process. Such brain functions might be less in doubt if we consider all the pieces of the larger pie, especially those where our passions and desires reside.

Environmental policy has a size bias. Small organisms, such as microorganisms, command less attention from environmentalists than larger organisms, such as birds and large mammals. A simple thought experiment involving microscopic polar bears and giant microorganisms illustrates the importance of size in environmental ethics. Given the positive correlation between body size and brain size, there is probably a basis for a size bias in environmental ethics using ethical frameworks based on conations. This paper examines the relevance of the size of (...) organisms in environmental ethics. It emphasizes the need to understand the theoretical reasons for the importance of size, and not to base a size bias merely on a subjective anthropocentric prejudice favouring large organisms. (shrink)

The question "What is the good life?" is perhaps the most basic question in all of ethics. The four major paradigms of the good life that have been proposed by various philosophers are: (1) hedonism, (2) various forms of desire-satisfactionism, (3) objective value pluralism, and (4) the hybrid theory--i.e., a combination of (1) and (3). In my dissertation, I critique the leading accounts of flourishing (or wellbeing) and defend an objective value pluralistic theory of flourishing that is based on what (...) I call the "Capacities View of Flourishing" (CVF). According to the central evaluative axiom of the CVF, the flourishing of any creature consists in the development and exercise of the capacities that are essential to that kind of creature. While the basic idea behind the CVF has appealed to an impressive list of philosophers from ancient to modern times, the purported explanatory grounds upon which it is based (about what makes a capacity essential to a given kind of creature) has been difficult to explicate. After considering various popular proposals of what it is for a capacity to be essential to a given kind of creature and showing why they are defective in different ways, I propose a novel modal interpretation of the notion of an essential capacity that is immune to the problems of the other popular accounts. According to the modal interpretation of the CVF, the flourishing of a kind of creature K consists in the development and exercise of the capacities that are necessary to K (i.e., that are required for membership in the class K). In the case of human beings more specifically, I argue that there are four basic capacities that are jointly necessary for membership in the class 'human being.' These are the capacity to know (cognition), the capacity to desire (conation), the capacity to feel (feeling), and the capacity to act (agency). And in the last crucial stage of my defense of the modal interpretation of the CVF, I show how four widely recognized objective goods of knowledge, virtue, pleasure, and achievement are the ideal states of the four basic human capacities of cognition, conation, feeling, and agency. I conclude my defense of objective value pluralism by responding to a famous argument against the objectivity of values: the so-called "argument from relativity." In response to this argument, I first show how the objectivity of values is compatible with a moderate form of (non-conventionalist) evaluative relativism that recognizes a plurality of human goods that are not subsumable under a "unitary" true good. I then argue that the hypothesis that there is a plurality of objective human goods is a better inference to the best explanation of the diversity of human values than the hypothesis that there are no objective human goods at all. Lastly, I show why objective value skepticism has absurd implications as it entails that nothing is genuinely good or bad for anyone. The overall conclusion of my dissertation is that of the leading paradigms of the good life, an objective value pluralistic account of flourishing that explains why certain states are good for us by virtue of their being the ideal realization of the capacities that are essential to us is not only deeply appealing, but on closer scrutiny, the most viable theory of flourishing available. (shrink)

RésuméDans une importante série de publications, et dans un ouvrage sous presse intituléThe instinctoid nature of basic needs, le Dr Maslow à développé une théorie de la motivation dont le présent article résume à grands traits ľune des thèses principales. – Contrairement à la tendance essentielle de la Psychologie américaine, qui est ?expliquer ľaction humaine à partir ?un très petit nombre de besoins purement physiologiques , ľauteur pense qu'il est indispensable de faire place à des besoins ?un ordre plus relevé. (...) Notamment, ľhomme désire la sécurité, ľamour, ľestime de soi, ľinformation, un système de valeurs, la beauté, enfin ľactualisation de soi‐même.Ľexistence de ces besoins et leur caractére fondamental sont démontrés par ľexpérience clinique et par le fait que leur non‐satisfaction entraîne divers troubles. Dautres impulsions humaines, telles que ľagression, les perversions, etc., souvent présentées comme instinctives, constituent en réalité des réactions secondaires à la frustration des besoins fondamentaux.Ces higher needs ont apparu plus tardivement que les besoins physiologiques dans la vie de ľindividu aussi bien que dans celle de ľespèce. Ils sont moins urgents à satisfaire, plus fragiles, plus aisés à réprimer et àétouffer, plus dépendants de conditions complexes, internes aussi bien qu'externes. Leur satisfaction est essentielle pour le bonheur, la sérénité, la santé, la longévité de ľindividu et pour sa faculté de coopération avec autrui. Ce sont eux également qui jouent dans les psychothérapies les plus efficaces. II est à noter que, contrairement à la conception traditionnelle qui favorise un certain ascétisme, ľobservation clinique montre que c'est sur la base ?une satisfaction préalable des besoins biologiques, qu'apparaissent et se développent le mieux les besoins supéieurs.De cette vue nouvelle résultent une série de conséquences capitales:1. La dichotomie cognition‐conation est radicalement fausse et doit faire place à la thèse ?une interpénétration.2. Pareillement inacceptables sont les oppositions de ľégoïsme et de ľaltruisme, de ľinstinctif et du rationnel, de ľapollinien et du dionysiaque.3‐4. La morale devrait moins insister sur ľinhibition que sur la spontanéité, et la culture moins sur la répression des besoins que sur leur gratification.5. Le système des valeurs authentiques doit être déduit, non plus de spéculations logiques ou de ľautorité?une Révélation, mais de la pleine connaissance de ľhomme.6. Les besoins éievés étant affectés ?une certaine fragilityé, le rôle de la culture est, non pas de les inhiber, mais de les protéger.7. Education et psychothérapie doivent moins faire appel áľinhibition et au contrôle qu'à la spontanéité et àľépanouissement.8. Traditionnellement, aux deux directions fondamentales de la pensée politique, libérale ou réactionnaire, correspondent deux vues de ľindividu humain, dont ľune insiste sur ľinfluence du milieu et ľautre sur les facteurs internes héréditaires. Les considérations qui précèdent imposent au libéralisme de faire place aux facteurs innés et aux théoriciens des facteurs innés ?admettre un certain libéralisme. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has almost exclusively been focused on multicellular organisms. However, because microorganisms form the base of the world’s food chains, allowing for the existence of all higher organisms, the complexities of the moral considerability of microorganisms deserve attention. Despite the impossible task of protecting individual microorganisms—the paradigmatic example of the limitations to a Schweitzerian “reverence for life”—microorganisms can be considered to have intrinsic value on the basis of conation, along with their enormous instrumental value. This intrinsic value even (...) manifests itself at the individual level, although in this case the ethic can only be regulative (an ethical principle). Biocentrism is the most appropriate ethical framework for microorganisms, and the most useful normative framework for implementing the preservation and conservation of microorganisms. This ethic has implications for how we deal with disease-causing microorganisms. (shrink)

Description from a book review by J. G. Beebe-Center: "Mr. Allen's book develops in detail the view that pleasure and unpleasure are essentially manifestations of the progression and thwarting of impulses. Part one is a brief summary of the principal theories of feeling. Part two is devoted to "sensory" or "bodily" pleasure and unpleasure. These forms of feeling, it is argued, 'depend on an analogue of conation existing in the organism, a nisus to maintain, or to carry out to (...) the full extent, the functioning proper to the bodily system.' Part three -- the piece de resistance (about half the book) -- deals with the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to the main instincts. Parts four, five and six take up a number of classical problems: the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to sensation, their relation to desire, the relativity of feelings, the qualitative variety of feelings, and the psychology of values. The author shows throughout a rare combination of historicophilosophical sophistication and of first-hand familiarity with the modern experimental literature.". (shrink)