According to Fischer and Ravizza, an agent has guidance control over some action A, whenever A is issued from one of their own moderately reasons-responsive mechanisms. This involves two elements: the process P leading to their action being suitably responsive to reasons-; and their taking an attitude towards processes of kind P such that they see themselves as the agents of the behaviour those processes issue. For the purposes of this paper, I assume that guidance control (...) amounts to actually guiding some action. I present, and defend, a counterexample in which an agent intentionally acts via a suitably reasons-responsive process which they have taken responsibility for and yet, intuitively, does not actually guide their action. On this basis, I argue that taking responsibility for a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism is not sufficient for having guidance control. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a (...) complex, compatibilist form of control. In this paper, I pursue a negative and a positive task. First, I argue that grounding doxastic responsibility in guidance control requires too much for agents to be the proper targets for attributions of doxastic responsibility. I will focus my criticisms on three cases in which McCormick's account gives the intuitively wrong verdict. Second, I develop a modified conception of McCormick's notion of “ownership of belief,” which I call Weak Doxastic Ownership. I employ this conception to argue that responsibility for belief is possible even in the absence of guidance control. In doing so, I argue that the notion of doxastic ownership can do important normative work in grounding responsibility for belief without being subsumed under or analyzed in terms of the notion of doxastic control. (shrink)

Central to Fischer and Ravizza's theory of moral responsibility is the concept of guidance control, which involves two conditions: (1) moderate reasons-responsiveness, and (2) mechanism ownership. We raise a worry for Fischer and Ravizza's account of (1). If an agent acts contrary to reasons which he could not recognize, this should lead us to conclude that he is not morally responsible for his behaviour; but according to Fischer and Ravizza's account, he satisfies the conditions for guidance (...) class='Hi'>control and is therefore morally responsible. We consider ways in which the account of guidance control might be mended. (shrink)

Theories based on Frankfurt’s (Am Philos Q 15(2):157–162, 1978) view of action have recently been developed to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. What these theories share is that they aim to distinguish between actions and mere bodily movements without appealing to psychological states as causes. Instead, agents have guidance control over their actions. In this paper I argue that the versions of the theory that have been proposed are problematic. I propose to pay attention to Frankfurt’s (...) other claim instead: that actions and mere bodily movements are inherently different. I argue that Anscombe’s approach to action does take this inherent distinction seriously, and is able to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on 'guidance control'. This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops an account of both components. The (...) authors go on to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

Previously, I have argued that moral responsibility for actions is associated with guidance control. This sort of control does not necessarily involve the freedom to do otherwise. In this paper I extend the view to apply to omissions. That is, moral responsibility for an omission is associated with guidance control of that omission. This helps to provide a systematic, unified account of moral responsibility.

I investigate what we mean when we hold people responsible for beliefs. I begin by outlining a puzzle concerning our ordinary judgments about beliefs and briefly survey and critique some common responses to the puzzle. I then present my response where I argue a sense needs to be articulated in which we do have a kind of control over our beliefs if our practice of attributing responsibility for beliefs is appropriate. In developing this notion of doxastic control, I (...) draw from John Fischer's discussions of “guidance control”. A central feature of this kind of control is the idea of “ownership”. I argue that we can own our beliefs and that we expect each other to do so. We take responsibility for our beliefs and taking responsibility includes taking control of them. I end by considering objections to my view as well as some implications of it. (shrink)

Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much m advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his act DEGREES from an impersonal point of view.... It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember that while he (...) is a descendant of the past he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. Herbert S. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I shall explore the relationship between the control required for action and the control required for moral responsibility. I shall argue that there is an incongruity between Frankfurt’s account of guidance control presented in his theory of action and his commitment to the claim that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility. This inconsistency centres around the role of abilities to do otherwise in our analyses of action and moral responsibility. After (...) outlining the problem for Frankfurt, I shall then motivate one way of resolving this tension. This solution provides a unified role for abilities to do otherwise in our analyses of control. (shrink)

I argue that we should give up the fight to rescue causal theories of action from fundamental challenges such as the problem of deviant causal chains; and that we should rather pursue an account of action based on the basic intuition that control identifies agency. In Section 1 I introduce causalism about action explanation. In Section 2 I present an alternative, Frankfurt’s idea of guidance. In Section 3 I argue that the problem of deviant causal chains challenges causalism (...) in two important respects: first, it emphasizes that causalism fails to do justice to our basic intuition that control is necessary for agency. Second, it provides countless counterexamples to causalism, which many recent firemen have failed to extinguish – as I argue in some detail. Finally, in Section 4 I argue, contra Al Mele, that control does not require the attribution of psychological states as causes. (shrink)

The design of collaborative robotics, such as driver-assisted operations, engineer a potential automation of decision-making predicated on unobtrusive data gathering of human users. This form of ‘somatic surveillance’ increasingly relies on behavioural biometrics and sensory algorithms to verify the physiology of bodies in cabin interiors. Such processes secure cyber-physical space, but also register user capabilities for control that yield data as insured risk. In this technical re-formation of human–machine interactions for control and communication ‘a dissonance of attribution’ :7684, (...) 2019. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805770115) is created between perceptions of phenomena, materials and decision-making. This reconfigures relations not only between humans and machines, objects and subjects, but possibly disrupts attributive functions in the social system of Law. What it requires is shifting a legal accountability for action from a sovereignty of the human to a new materialist account based on a ‘cognitive assemblage’ between physiological data, computation and algorithmic sensing. This paper investigates the function of law as a guidance system to acknowledge this account of sensory and algorithmic computation as autonomous ‘sensing agents’ that may be accountable in situations of risk. This assemblage of robotic computation and sensory determination requires a clearer legal differentiation across the current static terminologies of person, property, liability and rights that maintain strict separations of object from subject. To neglect this, we argue, law will solely impute attributions of error to humans despite evidence of operation via mutual control. (shrink)

Implantable brain-computer interfaces are being developed to restore speech capacity for those who are unable to speak. Patients with locked-in syndrome or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis could be able to use covert speech – vividly imagining saying something without actual vocalisation – to trigger neural controlled systems capable of synthesising speech. User control has been identified as particularly pressing for this type of BCI. The incorporation of machine learning and statistical language models into the decoding process introduces a contribution to (...) the output that is beyond the user’s control. Whilst this type of ‘shared control’ of BCI action is not unique to speech BCIs, the automated shaping of what a user ‘says’ has a particularly acute ethical dimension, which may differ from parallel concerns surrounding automation in movement BCIs. This paper provides an analysis of the control afforded to the user of a speech BCI of the sort under development, as well as the relationships between accuracy, control, and the user’s ownership of the speech produced. Through comparing speech BCIs with BCIs for movement, we argue that, whilst goal selection is the more significant locus of control for the user of a movement BCI, control over process will be more significant for the user of the speech BCI. The design of the speech BCI may therefore have to trade off some possible efficiency gains afforded by automation in order to preserve sufficient guidance control necessary for users to express themselves in ways they prefer. We consider the implications for the speech BCI user’s responsibility for produced outputs and their ownership of token outputs. We argue that these are distinct assessments. Ownership of synthetic speech concerns whether the content of the output sufficiently represents the user, rather than their morally relevant, causal role in producing that output. (shrink)

Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly context-sensitive, fine-grained (...) class='Hi'>control processes required to select, revise and correct strategies during self-control exertion? The skill model borrows conceptual tools from ‘hierarchical models’ recently developed in the context of motor skills, and asserts that self-control crucially involves the ability to manage the implementation and monitoring of regulatory strategies as the self-control exercise unfolds. Skilled agents are able do this by means of flexible practical reasoning: a fast, context-sensitive type of deliberation that incorporates non-propositional representations into the formation and revision of the mixed-format intentions that structure self-control exertion. The literatures on implementation intentions and motivation framing offer corroborating evidence for the theory. As a surprising result, the skill of self-control that allows agents to overcome the contrary motivations they experience is self-effacing: instead of continuously honing this skill, expert agents replace it with a different one, which minimizes or prevents contrary motivations from arising in the first place. Thus, the more expert you are at self-control, the less likely you are to use it. (shrink)

This exploration aims to solve the problems of imperfect psychological health education system and poor educational effects on college students. Here, ideological and political education is integrated with mental health education to investigate the role of collaborative intervention in guiding college students to resist negative emotions. First, an overview is offered of research on ideological and political education, mental health education, and negative emotions by the literature survey method. Moreover, a comprehensive investigation is also conducted on research objects, through the (...) questionnaire, to understand the current situation of negative emotions of college students. And finally, an intervention experiment is taken on the negative emotions of college students by combining ideological and political education with mental health education. The results show that after 10 weeks of intervention experiment by combining ideological and political education with mental health education, there are significant differences in depression, negative emotions, somatization symptoms, and interpersonal problems between the treatment group and the control group. Besides, there are significant differences in depression, negative emotions, somatization symptoms, and interpersonal problems between sophomores in the treatment group and the control group. Moreover, there are significant differences in depression, negative emotions, somatization symptoms, and interpersonal problems between male participants in the treatment group and the control group. In summary, ideological and political education integrated with mental health education has a positive guidance effect on the negative emotions of college students, greatly improving the negative emotions of the students, helping the students to regulate their emotions, and benefiting their study and life a lot. The purpose of integrating ideological and political education with mental health education is to provide reference for refining the mental health education system of college students and strengthening the positive guidance of negative emotions of college students. (shrink)

Do people sometimes exercise self-control in such a way as to bring it about that they do not act on present-directed motivation that continues to be motivationally strongest for a significant stretch of time (even though they are able to act on that motivation at the time) and intentionally act otherwise during that stretch of time? This paper explores the relative merits of two different theories about synchronic self-control that provide different answers to this question. One is due (...) to Sripada (Noûs 1–38, 2012) and the other to Mele (Irrationality, 1987; Autonomous agents, 1995; Motivation and agency, 2003). Special attention is paid to evidence Sripada offers for an affirmative answer to the question, and some guidance is offered on the project of finding evidence for an affirmative answer. (shrink)

Mere capacity views hold that agents who can intervene in an unfolding movement are performing an agentially controlled action, regardless of whether they do intervene. I introduce a simple argument to show that the noncausal explanation offered by mere capacity views fails to explain both control and action. In cases where bodily subsystems, rather than the agent, generate control over a movement, agents can often intervene to override non-agential control. Yet, contrary to what capacity views suggest, in (...) these cases, this capacity to intervene does not amount to agential control or action. I illustrate this with a case study of how passive breathing, a mere behavior, is misclassified by mere capacity views. I end by revisiting the central alternative to mere capacity views: causal control views. Advances in our understanding of how agents exert control over unfolding movements indicate that the nature of control is characterized by ubiquitous, small-scale causal interventions. (shrink)

In this essay I focus upon John Martin Fischer’s notion of taking on responsibility. In his view moral actors must acquire a proper self-understanding to take on moral responsibility. I question whether Fischer steps out of his role as a subjectivist, when he maintains that having only guidance control is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. I suggest that subjectivists are committed to the notion that taking on responsibility includes the acquisition of a proper phenomenology of freedom. I (...) compare actors who have not acquired a sense of regulative control to actors whom Fischer identifies as nonresponsible actors. (shrink)

John Fischer and Mark Ravizza defend in this book a painstakingly constructed analysis of what they take to be a core condition of moral responsibility: the notion of guidance control. The volume usefully collects in one place ideas and arguments the authors have previously published in singly or jointly authored works on this and related topics, as well as various refinements to those views and some suggestive discussions that aim to show how their account of guidance (...) class='Hi'>control might fit into a more comprehensive account of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current ethical (...) class='Hi'>guidance and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

Mere capacity views hold that agents who can intervene in an unfolding movement are performing an agentially controlled action, regardless of whether they do intervene. I introduce a simple argument to show that the noncausal explanation offered by mere capacity views fails to explain both control and action. In cases where bodily subsystems, rather than the agent, generate control over a movement, agents can often intervene to override non-agential control. Yet, contrary to what capacity views suggest, in (...) these cases, this capacity to intervene does not amount to agential control or action. I illustrate this with a case study of how passive breathing, a mere behavior, is misclassified by mere capacity views. I end by revisiting the central alternative to mere capacity views: causal control views. Advances in our understanding of how agents exert control over unfolding movements indicate that the nature of control is characterized by ubiquitous, small-scale causal interventions. (shrink)

Occupational fraud frequently involves the direct or indirect participation of professional accountants. To reduce fraud, companies often focus on the incentive/pressure and opportunity legs of the fraud triangle, perhaps believing that rationalization is beyond their control. We argue that rationalization reduction is necessary to minimize occupational fraud. We propose that educators and PA consider incorporating fences as controls to reduce rationalization. Because they focus on compliance and risk avoidance and are non-negotiable, fences appeal to accountant’s Myers Briggs personalities and (...) conventional level of moral development. Educators can teach students about the fences used in practice, and explain how they help new professionals resist pressures and temptations. By adding fences to existing professional guidance, accountants can reduce the likelihood that they will be a party to fraud. (shrink)

The leading idea of our theory of moral responsibility is that responsibility is associated with control. But we contend that there are two distinct kinds of control. Regulative control involves alternative possibilities: it is a kind of dual power of free action. In contrast, guidance control does not, by its nature, involve alternative possibilities. Whereas typically it might be thought that regulative and guidance control go together, the Frankfurt-type cases show that they are (...) separate and distinct sorts of control. And, whereas typically it is thought that moral responsibility requires regulative control, we claim that moral responsibility—for actions, omissions, and consequences—simply requires guidance control. Thus, although we do not believe that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities, we preserve the traditional association of moral responsibility with control. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer’s most recent collection of essays, Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value, is both incredibly wide-ranging and impressively detailed. Fischer manages to cover a staggering amount of ground in the free will debate, while also providing insightful and articulate analyses of many of the positions defended in the field. In this collection, Fischer focuses on the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. In the first section of his book, Fischer defends Frankfurt cases as an (...) important and useful tool in rejecting the necessity of regulative control for moral responsibility. In the second section, Fischer turns his attention to his own account of guidance control. In this essay, I first focus on Fischer’s defense of Frankfurt cases, specifically his response to the argument that the assumption of determinism in such cases is question-begging. I then analyze two objections to Fischer’s account of guidance control. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the metaphor of the pilgrimage, which Fischer introduces in the opening essay of his collection. (shrink)

An interesting aspect of Ernest Sosa’s (2017) recent thinking is that enhanced performances (e.g., the performance of an athlete under the influence of a performance-enhancing drug) fall short of aptness, and this is because such enhanced performances do not issue from genuine competences on the part of the agent. In this paper, I explore in some detail the implications of such thinking in Sosa’s wider virtue epistemology, with a focus on cases of cognitive enhancement. A certain puzzle is then highlighted, (...) and the solution proposed draws from both the recent moral responsibility literature on guidance control (e.g., Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer 2012) as well as from work on cognitive integration in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008; Pritchard 2010; Palermos 2014; Carter 2017). (shrink)

Four key guidance points in the UNAIDS guidance document, Ethical Considerations in HIV Preventive Vaccine Research, are compared with analogous statements in three other recently issued documents dealing with international research. Those documents are: the Declaration of Helsinki, as revised in 2000; the report of the U.S. National Bioethics Advisory Commission, issued in 2001; and a current (2001) draft revision of the 1993 CIOMS International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects. The four guidance points compared (...) with statements on similar issues in the other three documents are Guidance Point 2, which deals with making available a safe and effective vaccine after trials are completed; the second half of Guidance Point 4, which requires that the desired outcome should potentially benefit the population from which research participants are drawn; Guidance Point 11, which discusses what should be provided to a control group in a vaccine trial; and Guidance Point 16, which addresses the care and treatment to be provided for trial participants who become infected with HIV during the trial. The analysis and comparison concludes that the UNAIDS guidance points are at least as ethically sound as analogous points in these other documents, and for the most part are ethically superior in providing greater benefits to research participants and to others. Nevertheless, they are subject to the criticism that they are too ‘aspirational’ and not sufficiently ‘pragmatic’. (shrink)

The development of an ethics program is a method frequently used for organising responsible behaviour within organisations. For such a program, certain preconditions have to be created in the structure, culture and strategy. In this organisational context, managers have to take their decisions in a responsible way. This process of decision-making, embedded in an ethics program, is the main focus of this article. Ethics programs often influence decision-making in a formal way; certain norms and types of behaviour are formalised and (...) controlled within the organisation. Subsequently, individual managers have to infer the meaning of responsible behaviour from the demands laid down in the ethics program. Such a formal ethics program has some important advantages but the dangers of such an approach are often ignored. This article discusses both the advantages and disadvantages of a formal ethics program and adds two alternative ways of stimulating responsible behaviour in the organisation. In a monological approach the reflections of the decision makers on their own values are central in differentiating between right and wrong. In a dialogical approach, the communications between decision makers and other stakeholders involved are the foundations for determining a responsible solution. Because each approach is appropriate for certain issues, a well-chosen combination is justified. Such an ethics program should be strict on certain issues but leave room for reflection and interaction on other issues. (shrink)

Some natural philosophers in the 17th century believed that they could control their own innards, specifically the animal spirits coursing incessantly through brain and nerves, in order to discipline or harness passion, cognition and action under rational guidance. This chapter addresses the mechanisms thought necessary after Eden for controlling the physiology of passion. The tragedy of human embedding in the body, with its cognitive and moral limitations, was paired with a sense of our confinement in sequential time. I (...) use two strands of 17th-century natural philosophy to exemplify forms of the perceived connection between physiology, memory, and the passions. I deal at length with Cartesian mechanism, and more briefly with Restoration natural philosophy in England. These are fruitful historical domains for connecting cognition and culture, since relations of domination, disruption, or accommodation between present and past are in play for both selves and societies. Despite the difficulty of integrating affect with cognition in theories of brain and mind, the capacity to treat passion and memory together is crucial for future cognitive science to address issues which outsiders care about. (shrink)

Religions commonly are taken to provide general orientation in leading one's life. We develop here the idea that religions also may have a much more concrete guidance function in providing systematic decision biases in the face of cognitive-control dilemmas. In particular, we assume that the selective reward that religious belief systems provide for rule-conforming behavior induces systematic biases in cognitive-control parameters that are functional in producing the wanted behavior. These biases serve as default values under uncertainty and (...) affect performance in any task that shares cognitive-control operations with the religiously motivated rule-conforming behavior the biases were originally developed for. Such biases therefore can be unraveled and objectified by means of rather simple tasks that are relatively well understood with regard to the cognitive mechanisms they draw on. (shrink)

Do you love animals? Do you enjoy making sure animals and people are safe? Read this book to learn about becoming an animal control officer.

The leading ethical position on placebo-controlled clinical trials is that whenever proven effective treatment exists for a given condition, it is unethical to test a new treatment for that condition against placebo. Invoking the principle of clinical equipoise, opponents of placebo-controlled trials in the face of proven effective treatment argue that they (1) violate the therapeutic obligation of physicians to offer optimal medical care and (2) lack both scientific and clinical merit. We contend that both of these arguments are mistaken. (...) Clinical equipoise provides erroneous ethical guidance in the case of placebo-controlled trials, because it ignores the ethically relevant distinction between clinical trials and treatment in the context of clinical medicine and the methodological limitations of active-controlled trials. Placebo controls are ethically justifiable when they are supported by sound methodological considerations and their use does not expose research participants to excessive risks of harm. (shrink)

An interesting aspect of Ernest Sosa's (2017) recent thinking is that enhanced performances (for example, the performance of an athlete under the influence of a performance‐enhancing drug) fall short of aptness, and this is because such enhanced performances do not issue from genuine competences on the part of the agent. This paper explores in some detail the implications of such thinking in Sosa's wider virtue epistemology, with a focus on cases of cognitive enhancement. A certain puzzle is then highlighted, and (...) the solution proposed draws both from the recent moral responsibility literature on guidance control (e.g., Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer 2012) and from work on cognitive integration in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008; Pritchard 2010; Palermos 2014; and Carter 2017). (shrink)

Perceptual processes differ from cognitive, this paper argues, in functioning to be causally controlled by proximal stimuli, and being modular, at least in a modest sense that excludes their being isotropic in Jerry Fodor's sense. This claim agrees with such theorists as Jacob Beck and Ben Phillips that a function of stimulus-control is needed for perceptual status. In support of this necessity claim, I argue, inter alia, that E.J. Green's recent architectural account misclassifies processes deploying knowledge of grammar as (...) perceptual. _Pace_ Beck and Phillips, however, I argue a function of stimulus-control is insufficient for perceptual as opposed to cognitive status. One consideration in favour of such insufficiency, noted but (I argue) not convincingly rebutted by these theorists, concerns perpetually grounded demonstrative thought. Two other considerations trade on the fact that a function of stimulus-control can arise not from blind nature but intentional design or social institutions, where so-functioning processes may but need not be perceptual. I offer two cases where such processes are cognitive, viz. skilful play-by-play announcing of ongoing events, and voluntary visualizing of ongoing events under the guidance of apt play-by-play announcements, dubbed announcement-driven visualizing (ADV). The cognitive status of these three diverse phenomena cannot be explained by an absence of a perception-like representational format or content (for ADV has such) or by a presence of personal-level mental states causally mediating between stimuli and outputs (for perception has such). A bettter explanation invokes, I argue, the non-modular character of the generating process. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that doxastic responsibility, i.e., responsibility for holding a certain doxastic attitude, is not based on direct doxastic control. There are two different kinds of direct doxastic control to be found in the literature, intentional doxastic control and evaluative doxastic control. Although many epistemologists agree that we do not have intentional doxastic control over our doxastic attitudes, it has been argued that we have evaluative doxastic control over (...) the majority of our doxastic attitudes. This has led to the assumption that doxastic responsibility is based on evaluative doxastic control. In the first part of this paper I will introduce the notion of doxastic responsibility and the framework of doxastic guidance control as well as the approaches to direct and indirect doxastic control. I will then argue that doxastic responsibility is not based on direct doxastic control by showing that doxastic responsibility is neither based on intentional nor on evaluative doxastic control. (shrink)

This practical work, first published as the Compendium Theologiae Asceticae in Hong Kong 1921, was written by a Belgian Capuchin novice-master to guide Franciscan novices and religious in the practice of the spiritual life according to the simple ideals of St Francis. Aiming at the reformation of man’s soul from sin, to increase the life of Christ within oneself, it offers detailed counsels for self-control through custody of the senses, the appetites, the tongue, the will and the intellect. But (...) the practice of poverty does not prohibit the use of intelligence as an unnecessary luxury. St Bonaventure’s completion of the first Founder’s rule prescribes study to prevent idle aridity and to equip scientifically the Christian preacher. Thus he explains the Franciscan passage: ‘And those who are illiterate shall not be anxious to learn; but let them endeavour to have what is to be above all things desired, the spirit of the Lord and His holy operation’. (shrink)

This practical work, first published as the Compendium Theologiae Asceticae in Hong Kong 1921, was written by a Belgian Capuchin novice-master to guide Franciscan novices and religious in the practice of the spiritual life according to the simple ideals of St Francis. Aiming at the reformation of man’s soul from sin, to increase the life of Christ within oneself, it offers detailed counsels for self-control through custody of the senses, the appetites, the tongue, the will and the intellect. But (...) the practice of poverty does not prohibit the use of intelligence as an unnecessary luxury. St Bonaventure’s completion of the first Founder’s rule prescribes study to prevent idle aridity and to equip scientifically the Christian preacher. Thus he explains the Franciscan passage: ‘And those who are illiterate shall not be anxious to learn; but let them endeavour to have what is to be above all things desired, the spirit of the Lord and His holy operation’. (shrink)

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the defence domain raises challenges for the ethical governance of these systems. A recent shift from the what to the how of AI ethics sees a nascent body of literature published by defence organisations focussed on guidance to implement AI ethics principles. These efforts have neglected a crucial intermediate step between principles and guidance concerning the elicitation of ethical requirements for specifying the guidance. In this article, we outline (...) the key normative choices and corresponding tradeoffs that are involved in specifying guidance for the implementation of AI ethics principles in the defence domain. These correspond to: the AI lifecycle model used; the scope of stakeholder involvement; the accountability goals chosen; the choice of auditing requirements; and the choice of mechanisms for transparency and traceability. We provide initial recommendations for navigating these tradeoffs and highlight the importance of a pro-ethical institutional culture. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious visual experience in the control and guidance of human behaviour? According to some recent treatments, the role is surprisingly indirect. Conscious visual experience, on these accounts, serves the formation of plans and the selection of action types and targets, while the control of 'online' visually guided action proceeds via a quasi-independent non-conscious route. In response to such claims, critics such as (Wallhagen [2007], pp. 539-61) have suggested that the notions of (...) class='Hi'>control and guidance invoked are unacceptably vague, and that that the image of 'zombie systems' guiding action fails to take account of the possibility that there is genuine but unconceptualized, unnoticed, and/or unreportable experience taking place and guiding or controlling the actions. I address both sets of concerns. I try to show that refining and clarifying the key notions of control and guidance leaves the original argument intact, as does the appeal to unconceptualized, unnoticed, or unreportable experiences. The exercise serves, however, to highlight an important complex of considerations concerning the relations between control, agency, and experience. Better understanding these relations is, I suggest, an important source of insights concerning the nature of phenomenal experience. (shrink)

Responsibility gaps concern the attribution of blame for harms caused by autonomous machines. The worry has been that, because they are artificial agents, it is impossible to attribute blame, even though doing so would be appropriate given the harms they cause. We argue that there are no responsibility gaps. The harms can be blameless. And if they are not, the blame that is appropriate is indirect and can be attributed to designers, engineers, software developers, manufacturers or regulators. The real problem (...) lies elsewhere: autonomous machines should be built so as to exhibit a level of risk that is morally acceptable. If they fall short of this standard, they exhibit what we call ‘a control gap.’ The causal control that autonomous machines have will then fall short of the guidance control they should emulate. (shrink)

Our understanding of neuronal migration has been advanced by multidisciplinary approaches. At the cellular level, tangential and radial modes of neuronal migration contribute to different populations of neurons and have differential dependence on glial cells. At the molecular level, extracellular guidance cues have been identified and intracellular signal transduction pathways are beginning to be revealed. Interestingly, mechanisms guiding axon projection and neuronal migration appear to be conserved with those for chemotactic leukocytes. BioEssays 24:821–827, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The use of placebo controls in clinical trials remains controversial. Ethical analysis and international ethical guidance permit the use of placebo controls in randomized trials when scientifically indicated in four cases: (1) when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition under study; (2) when withholding treatment poses negligible risks to participants; (3) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and withholding treatment does not pose a risk of serious harm to participants; and, more controversially, (4) (...) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and the research is intended to develop interventions that can be implemented in the population from which trial participants are drawn, and the trial does not require participants to forgo treatment they would otherwise receive. The concept of methodological reasons is essential to assessing the ethics of placebo controls in these controversial last two cases. This article sets out key considerations relevant to considering whether methodological reasons for a placebo control are compelling. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on normative cognition by providing a lineage explanation of human social norm psychology. This approach builds upon theories of goal-directed behavioral control in the reinforcement learning and control literature, arguing that this form of control defines an important class of intentional normative mental states that are instrumental in nature. I defend the view that great ape capacities for instrumental reasoning and our capacity (or family of capacities) for shared (...) intentionality coadapted to each other and argue that the evolution of this capacity has allowed the representation of social norms and the emergence of our capacity for normative guidance. (shrink)

Abstract:One of the themes that runs through Dewey’s Experience and Education is an argument to the effect that education aims at self-control. The details of this argument reveal close affinity between Dewey’s philosophy of education and the ideals of the Enlightenment. They are also strikingly similar to John Locke’s thoughts about freedom and education published in the seventeenth century. Comparison of their texts shows that Dewey and Locke worked with similar distinctions between positive and negative freedom. They both saw (...) freedom and guidance as compatible, and conceived of self-control as dependent on autonomy-friendly habits instilled through education. (shrink)

In October 2013, the Declaration of Helsinki was revised a seventh time in its 50 year history. While it is the most widely accepted set of ethical principles for the protection of patients participating in medical research, the Declaration of Helsinki has also been subject of constant controversy. In particular, its paragraph on the use of placebo controls in clinical trials divides the research community into active-control and placebo orthodox proponents, both continuously demanding revisions of the Declaration of Helsinki (...) in favour of their position. The goal of the present project is to compare the mainly theoretical controversy with regulatory implementation. We distributed a questionnaire to national drug regulatory authorities from different countries to collect information on the authorities’ respective approaches to interpretation and implementation of the Declarations’ placebo paragraph in the conduct of medical research. Our findings suggest that the majority of drug regulatory authorities have established a practice of a middle ground, allowing placebo controls in some instances. Various interpretations of “serious harm” and “methodological reasons” are proposed as well as safeguards to avoid abuse of the option to use placebo-controls. Leaving the placebo paragraph open to various interpretation is a result of the Declaration of Helsinki’s character as a guidance document. With the current version controversy will continue. The Declaration should be continued to be strengthened to enforce the appreciation of conducting medical research with the highest ethical standard. (shrink)

Since the pioneering work of [Aglioti, S., DeSouza, J. F., & Goodale, M. A. . Size-contrast illusions deceive the eye but not the hand. Current Biology, 5, 679–685] visual illusions have been used to provide evidence for the functional division of labour within the visual system—one system for conscious perception and the other system for unconscious guidance of action. However, these studies were criticised for attentional mismatch between action and perception conditions and for the fact that grip size is (...) not determined by the size of an object but also by surrounding obstacles. Stoettinger and Perner [Stoettinger, E., & Perner, J., . Dissociating size representations for action and for conscious judgment: Grasping visual illusions without apparent obstacles. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 269–284] used the diagonal illusion controlling for the influence of surrounding features on grip size and bimanual grasping to rule out attentional mismatch. Unfortunately, the latter objective was not fully achieved. In the present study, attentional mismatch was avoided by using only the dominant hand for action and for indicating perceived size. Results support the division of labour: Grip aperture follows actual size independent of illusory effects, while finger-thumb span indications of perceived length are clearly influenced by the illusion. (shrink)

In this recent addition to the Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law series, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer the culmination of their efforts of the last several years to devise a comprehensive account of moral responsibility, based in large part on their notion of “guidance control”. This comprehensive account is presented not as the last word on the matter, but rather as a “philosophical explanation”. This valuable contribution to current debate offers rich resources for those concerned (...) to dispel some of the confusion at the intersection of ascriptions of legal and moral responsibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Controlled human infection (CHI) models have been developed for numerous pathogens in order to better understand disease processes and accelerate drug and vaccine testing. In the past, some researchers conducted highly controversial CHIs with vulnerable populations, including children. Ethical frameworks for CHIs now recommend vulnerable populations be excluded because they cannot consent to high risk research. In this paper we argue that CHI studies span a wide spectrum of benefit and risk, and that some CHI studies may involve minimal (...) risk. The categorical exclusion of children from CHIs therefore departs from the standard approach to evaluating research risks, as international regulations and ethical guidance for pediatric research generally permit non‐beneficial research with low risks. The paradigm in research ethics has also shifted from focusing on protecting vulnerable participants to recognizing that inclusion can be important as a matter of justice, providing new reasons to question this default exclusion of children from CHIs. Recognizing that pediatric CHIs can raise complex ethical issues and are easy to sensationalize in ways that may threaten the public’s trust in research and sponsor institutions, we conclude by describing additional complexities that must be addressed before pediatric CHIs beyond licensed vaccine studies might be ethically acceptable. (shrink)