Aside from the local (mostly Western) efforts to subject animal experimentation to public scrutiny, the extent of animal experimentation, the acceptance of alternative methods and the fate of animals in laboratories depend on experimenters’ morality (as defined by social psychology), whose shaping is of crucial importance for the future of animal use in science. Meanwhile, sociological and ethnographic research in laboratories demonstrates that in the matter of animal use the experimenters are unreflective, ethically incompetent, and incapable of taking a critical (...) view of the received morality. This appears to result largely from their higher education which is known to cause a regression in moral development, inculcate a routine exploitation and/or objectification of animals, and ignore both the scientific premises and moral consequences of animal subjectivity. From all we know, it is researchers’ morality rather than pressing needs and expectations of humanity that interferes with a major restriction of invasive animal research in general and a wide, proactive acceptance of alternative methods in particular. (shrink)

True Darwinian Ethics -/- Darwin’s model for the evolution of morality as presented in Descent of Man (1871) is shown to comprise three major stages that are here referred to as empathic premorality, tribal morality, and universalizing morality. Empathy, the key component of Darwin’s “social instincts” that started moral evolution, is here recognized as the principal cognitive device that conveys epistemic credibility to moral agency. The two constitutive elements of the tribal morality are conscience that Darwin conceived of as a (...) conflict between a lasting social motive and an immediate selfish impulse, and true altruism that evolved as a result of group (community) selection. Darwin’s genius recognized the uniqueness of group selection in human evolution as being dependent on mental faculties and speech that facilitated habit formation through praise and blame form other group members, with empathy as a gauge of others’ emotional reactions. Contrary to repeated claims, Darwin did not derive morality from reciprocity that he (and his contemporaries) considered to be “a low motive”, and adduced it only as a mechanism of habit formation. The universalizing morality was brought about by the increasing powers of intellect that led to respecting individual lives (rather than group interests only) and extending humane concerns beyond one’s group, ultimately to all sentient beings, which places Darwin among the spiritual fathers of modern humanitarianism. In terms of substantive ethics, Darwin’s views support moral individualism that requires to treat each subject according to his/her individual characteristics rather than any group membership. Darwin’s moral individualism and universalism have been elaborated by Peter Singer as the principle of equal consideration of interests and the expanding circle of ethics, respectively. Darwin’s model of moral evolution, which starts with intuitive but epistemically reliable moral agency and then allows for its rational improvement, provides a way out of the moral subjectivism of evolutionary ethics that reduces morality to an adaptation to social life. The primary or core morality that relies on empathy and implements reciprocity supports welfare (wellbeing) of a group and its members. Welfare (which has been defined by Darwin) is a basic “terminal” (ultimate) value that constitutes an objective, measurable fact. Since the primary morality supports welfare, it is objectively good, which justifies an ethical reasoning that such morality ought to be extended (with appropriate adjustments) to all sentient beings. Confusion over the status of morality is largely due to the lack of appreciation of its complexity: not only had its motivational apparatus (known as the moral agency) evolved by superposition of many emotional and pure cognitive mechanisms, but it has subsequently been co-opted to implement prudential, religious and possibly other norms that are accidental and sometimes contrary to its original social function. Those secondary morality norms are now enforced by the moral agency but lack moral objectivity and thus may support the perception of moral subjectivism and relativism. In short, true Darwinian ethics is based on the scientific axiology that recognizes evolutionary origins of all values, requires respecting all values that are experienced by each and every subject according to its individual characteristics, and calls for a critical assessment of each and every received morality. (shrink)

The issue widely discussed under the heading of “naturalization of morality” in-volves at least three major components of “morality”: value-laden experience which is the source of all genuine values; received morality, a system of behaviors and attitudes that are transmitted from generation to generation and control the exchange of primary values; and an analytic-evaluative agency, here referred to as ethics, that assesses norms and assumptions underlying received moralities against an independent knowledge of values. This task requires the use of both (...) scientific information and domain-specific ways of ethical reasoning that are appropriate for the subject. While the transmission of moral systems is fully explicable and thus naturalized in terms of evolutionary theory and psychology, the ongoing naturalization of ethics appears to be more complex. (shrink)

In the evolution of the vertebrates and probably a few other animals (Metazoa), biological values have been translated (subjectivized) into affective experience that necessarily involves the consciousness of external objects/events (as different from one’s body), which is tantamount to the origins of subjectivity. Mammals, birds and other vertebrates are experiencing subjects even though their negative and positive experience greatly vary in scope. Some mammals are capable of vicarious experience and may act as empathic agents, and some of them, at least (...) the great apes, use true reflective self-consciousness and thus perceive themselves as agents, which generates attributive feelings. The balance of positive and negative experience determines the intrinsic value of (an individual) life. Every subjective life is autotelic in striving to maximize this balance. A subjective life may also have a social value that is measured in terms of the impact on intrinsic values of other lives. The social value of life is contingent upon an agency, that is, conscious intentional actions that impact intrinsic value of other lives. The difference between the social value of a subjective life and an instrumental value of an individual comes down to the difference between agent causation and event causation. The moral agency refers to a subcategory of agent causation that involves the awareness of impact on another subject’s wellbeing (interests). The moral agency is at present known only in the hominids (including the chimpanzees) which understand causality and use reflective self-consciousness, which in turn enables them to perceive themselves as agents and attribute to themselves responsibility. The moral agency originated as a motivational mechanism of reciprocity execution , and thus as an adaptation for group life, which is why it favors ingroup members and often promotes norms that harm other groups. The human moral agency is frequently used by third parties to implement group norms that are based on ideologies (religious or secular) and may actually harm both group members and the entire groups. Any received, bioculturally evolved morality is unlikely to be good in either absolute or universal sense. Therefore, the moral capacity alone does not make a human life categorically more valuable, even if human motivation were dominated by moral agency (which is true only of some people). The life of a vertebrate has, therefore, two values, intrinsic and social. Each can be negative or positive, and may vary to a large extent independently of the other, whereby a joint value of a subjective life cannot be sensibly assessed and compared without prior assessments of the intrinsic and social component separately. In the absence of objective reasons to rate the intrinsic value of a human life as categorically higher than that of other mentally advanced mammals, and in consideration of the observed range of social values of human lives, some of which approach zero and some are highly negative (lower than any thinkable negative values of non-human lives), the doctrine of extraordinary and inalienable (innate) human „dignity” is groundless and unethical, as it leads to a depreciation of the lives of non-human subjects, and often preempts the need to impart a real social value to one’s own life. (shrink)

Values are relational properties that can be defined only in relation to a goal-directed system. Biological values originated with living systems and subjective values originated with the origin of vertebrate (and possibly others’) mind through a conversion (subjectivization) of biological values. While this conversion is understandable in adaptive (functional) terms, the evolutionary mechanism whereby positive and negative meanings in the mind were assigned to molecular and/or neuronal configurations in the brain, so far defies our comprehension. Whatever their origin, the primary (...) subjective values are experienced by most if not all vertebrates, and the hominid conceptual values are all ultimately derived from experiential values. (shrink)

Having positive experience is, by defintion, in the interest of every subject. Whether being alive per se, in addition to having positive experiences, is in a subject's interest depends of her/his cognitive development. Only a reflectively self-conscious subject can take and thus have an interest in one's own individual existence and may not want to die regardless of the expected experience. Since most non-human subjects (except for a few mammalian and avian species) are not aware of their subjective existence they (...) cannot take and thus have interest in their lives per se. However, they do have interest in maximizing rewarding experience and minimizing suffering. (shrink)

Most Enlightenment thinkers believed that the World’s order (as ultimately based on divine laws) is good and thus every gain of knowledge will have good consequences. Scientific process was assumed to entail moral progress. In fact some moral progress did occur in the Western civilization and science contributed to it, but it is widely incommensurate with the progress of science. The Enlightenment’s concept of a concerted scientific and moral progress proved largely wrong for several reasons. (1) Public morality and science (...) evolve largely independently and may either enhance or inhibit each other. (2) There are no objective values to be read in the World’s order and simply followed. Instead, our real, subjective values and the moral systems they fuel have all been generated and shaped by evolution rather than designed to be universally good, and thus ought to be managed rather than simply followed. (3) Our evolved morality is flawed, deficient, prone to doctrinal manipulation and refractory to progress. (4) The majority of people show metaethical incompetence in failing to take a reasoned critical stand toward the principles and assumptions of received morals. This makes moral progress largely dependent on those who reach metaethical competence by transcending the conventional stages of moral development. (shrink)

DARWIN’s (1859, 1871) discoveries have profound ethical implications that continue to be misrepresented and/or ignored. In contrast to socialdarwinistic misuses of his theory, Darwin was a great humanitarian who paved the way for an integrated scientific and ethical world view. As an ethical doctrine, socialdarwinism is long dead ever since its defeat by E. G. Moore although the socialdarwinistic thought is a hard-die in the biological community. The accusations of sociobiology for being socialdarwinistic are unfounded and stem from the moralistic (...) fallacy that is, a false assumption that morality is good by definition. Both social and developmental psychology demonstrate that the moral agency is a motivational device for executing reciprocity that remains at the core of any morality across all studied societies and throughout the ontogeny of moral judgment. The level of true universalizing ethical reflection (KOHLBERG’s postconvential stages or GIBBS’s existential phase) is achieved by a small minority of humans, thus showing that Homo sapiens is a moral but not an ethical animal. While the origin of reciprocity has been perfectly explained by sociobiology, the evolutionary assembly of affective and cognitive elements that make up the moral agency is being successfully studied by the social/personality/developmental psychology as extended to non-human primates. As DARWIN (1871) expected, the key innovation for the evolution of moral agency was the emergence of empathy that evolved independently at least three times: in elephants, dolphins and primates. Empathy has a motivational power of its own; it is also necessary for moral agency that requires two cognitive abilities: reflective self-consciousness and understanding of causality; the two make possible the attribution of responsibility. All these requirements are met by the chimpanzees whose moral agency operates in dyads. In contrast, the human moral agency allows for a third party intervention that opens up vast opportunities for ideologies, especially religions, to use and misuse the moral agency to enforce a reciprocation that may be harmful to both individuals and the entire group. Also, the moral agency is known to enforce enhanced intragroup cohesion and loyalty in response to conflict and war, which suggests that the two prima facie opposed human universals, morality and warfare, may have coevolved. The most important ethical consequence that follows from the increasing understanding of the primate moral agency is that every received morality is ethically flawed, none can be taken as a paragon of goodness, and each needs corrections by science-informed ethics. In fact, Darwin pioneered the integration of science and ethics, an approach that has come to be appreciated only recently under the heading of consilience. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Remsen attacked moral objections to killing birds for museum collections, objections that are frequently raised by the general public and scientific community alike. The only grounds for moral objections against killing birds that Remsen considers and rejects are reverence for all life or personal, that is sentimental reasons. What Remsen ignores is avian sentience and the moral imperative of respecting it.

This is the second, out of two papers, in which we identify all logics between C1 and S5 having the same theses without iterated modalities. All these logics can be divided into certain groups. Each such group depends only on which of the following formulas are theses of all logics from this group:,,, ⌜∨☐q⌝, and for any n > 0 a formula ⌜ ∨ ⌝, where has not the atom ‘q’, and and have no common atom. We generalize Pollack’s result (...) from [1], where he proved that all modal logics between S1 and S5 have the same theses which does not involve iterated modalities. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 179-203.

Teoria cywilizacji Marcuse oferuje udaną syntezę freudyzmu i marksizmu. Podejście Marcusego, które znalazło swój najdobitniejszy wyraz w Erosie i cywilizacji, miało na celu całkowite przeformułowanie nauki o popędach Freuda, uhistorycznienie jej i sprzęgnięcie z zagadnieniem strukturalnej przemocy czy zinstytucjonalizowanymi (oraz zinternalizowanymi) mechanizmami represji. Twierdzę, że wspomniane przeformułowanie stanowi kamień węgielny dla idiosynkratycznej wersji teorii krytycznej Marcusego, która w mojej interpretacji posiada wyraźne akcenty protoakceleracjonistyczne. Artykuł krótko rekapituluje "dialektykę cywilizacji" Marcusego i wskazuje na jej zaskakujące zbieżności z akceleracjonistyczną wersją post-kapitalizmu w (...) refleksji Marcusego nad polityką, technologią oraz rolą sztuki i wyobraźni estetycznej w zakwestionowaniu afirmatywnego (desublimującego) charakteru kultury. (shrink)

This paper is a systematic comparison between two well–known and theologically relevant concepts – the sublime as developed in Kant’s third Critique, and Marion’s saturated phenomenon. Although it discusses the significant and apparent similarities between them, it also criticizes Marion’s identification of the sublime as a possible example of a saturated phenomenon. This is primarily because of the different origins and philosophical presuppositions guiding the elaboration of these two ideas. Kant’s aim is to confine the reception of the phenomenon to (...) the conditions of experience, so that both in the case of judg-ments of beauty and judg-ments of the sublime, the subject achieves pleasure through self-centred appreciation of its rational capacities. Marion’s saturated phenomenon, on the other hand, aims at dispensing with the ‘metaphysical’ horizon of either the object, or the transcendental subject, in favour of passive appropriation of givenness. Although both are meant to describe what happens when the limits of understanding are breached, in the sublime this breach only serves to reinforce the capacity of the rational subject, whereas in the saturated phenomenon it points to the possibility of apprehension of the totally Other as purely given. (shrink)

The emotion of disgust is suggested to be an adaptation that evolved to keep us away from sources of infection. Therefore, individuals from populations with greater pathogen stress should have a greater disgust sensitivity. However, current evidence for a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and the intensity of infectious diseases in the environment is limited. We tested whether disgust and contamination sensitivity changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disgust was assessed in 984 women in 2017 and 633 women in (...) 2020 by a set of photographs depicting sources of infection and Pathogen and Moral of Three-Domain Disgust Scale. Further, contamination sensitivity among participants in two waves was measured by Contamination Obsessions and Washing Compulsions Subscale of Padua Inventory. State anxiety was measured with the Polish adaptation of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory only during the second wave of data collection. Women from the COVID-19 pandemic group assessed the photographs depicting sources of infection as more disgusting, scoring higher on Padua Inventory, but lower on Moral Disgust Domain as compared to women from before the pandemic. In addition, anxiety levels during pandemic positively correlated with scores from Pathogen Disgust Domain, Padua Inventory, and the ratings of the photographs. The participants of the study scored higher in state anxiety than the norms determined for the Polish population. Summarizing, we present evidence for differences in individual levels of disgust sensitivity in relation to pathogen stress, supporting the idea that disgust evolved to serve as protection from pathogens. (shrink)

Relations between theory and empirical knowledge belong to basic problems in philosophy of science and have been undergone detailed philosophical reflection, including epistemological aspects. During last several dozen years, due to development of computer technology, numerical simulations became a common tool in natural sciences. Their epistemological aspects, however, have not worked out yet. A specific role of computer simulations manifests in subcellular biology, where possibilities of performing experiments and observations are limited. Computer simulation is complementary to observation and experiment and (...) comes into complex relations with them. It allows us to come to a conclusion if experiment or observations are impossible to perform. In particular, simulations allow researchers to estimate the parameters that cannot be measured. (shrink)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a careful description of the progressive unfolding of Spirit. Its dialectic is the education of consciousness. There are three stages of unhappy consciousness: external beyond, changing individual, and achieved reconciliation. Being aware of its own mutability, the self yearns for reconciliation, which can only come from the external beyond, from the unchanging. The quest of unhappy consciousness for reconciliation is characterized by the three stages of devotion, sacramental desire and labour, and self-mortification. The self, constituted (...) by what is other, is never able to achieve lasting satisfaction; it desires the unity of self-consciousness. Through the experience of itself, the self comes to a clearer self-awareness and transgresses its own limits. (shrink)

The contour of a family of filters along a filter is a set-theoretic lower limit. Topologicity and regularity of convergences can be characterized with the aid of the contour operation. Contour inversion is studied, in particular, for iterated contours of sequential cascades. A related problem of continuous extension of maps between maximal elements of sequential cascades to full subcascades is solved in full generality.

Recent years have seen the appearance of many English-language hand books of logic and numerous monographs on topical discoveries in the foundations of mathematics. These publications on the foundations of mathematics as a whole are rather difficult for the beginners or refer the reader to other handbooks and various piecemeal contribu tions and also sometimes to largely conceived "mathematical fol klore" of unpublished results. As distinct from these, the present book is as easy as possible systematic exposition of the now (...) classical results in the foundations of mathematics. Hence the book may be useful especially for those readers who want to have all the proofs carried out in full and all the concepts explained in detail. In this sense the book is self-contained. The reader's ability to guess is not assumed, and the author's ambition was to reduce the use of such words as evident and obvious in proofs to a minimum. This is why the book, it is believed, may be helpful in teaching or learning the foundation of mathematics in those situations in which the student cannot refer to a parallel lecture on the subject. This is also the reason that I do not insert in the book the last results and the most modem and fashionable approaches to the subject, which does not enrich the essential knowledge in founda tions but can discourage the beginner by their abstract form. A. G. (shrink)

This book presents the theory of the validity of legal norms, aimed at the practice of law, in particular the jurisdiction of the constitutional courts. The postpositivist concept of the validity of statutory law, grounded on a critical analysis of the basic theories of legal validity elaborated up to now, is introduced. In the first part of the book a contemporary German nonpositivist conception of law developed by Ralf Dreier and Robert Alexy is analysed in order to answer the question (...) whether the juristic concept of legal validity should include moral standards or criteria. In the second part, a postpositivist concept of legal validity and an innovative model of validity discourse, based on the juristic presumption of the validity of legal norms, are proposed. The book is a work on analytical legal theory, written from a postpositivist, detached point of view. (shrink)

The paper contains an exposition of some non standard approach to gentzenization of modal logics. The first section is devoted to short discussion of desirable properties of Gentzen systems and the short review of various sequential systems for modal logics. Two non standard, cut-free sequent systems are then presented, both based on the idea of using special modal sequents, in addition to usual ones. First of them, GSC I is well suited for nonsymmetric modal logics The second one, GSC II (...) is devised specially for symmetric, i.e. Blogics. GSC I and GSC II are not different formalizations, from the theoretical point of view GSC I may be seen as a simplification of the more general approach present in GSC II. They are considered separately, mainly because Blogics demand different, and more complicated, strategy in completeness proof, whereas non symmetric logics are easily and uniformly characterised by means of Fitting's Consistency Properties. The weakest modal logic captured by this formalization is minimal regular logic C, but many stronger logics are obtainable by addition of suitable structural rules, which conforms to Do en's methodology. Both variants of GSC satisfy also other, besides cut-freedom, desirable properties. (shrink)

(1996). Educational policy in Poland in the period of transition. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 674-679.