Foucault appears now and again in the work of Charles Taylor, but fleetingly, almost hauntingly. This is not surprising because Taylor and Foucault share many ideas and yet remain starkly opposed. This is especially true of Taylor's most recent work, his monumental Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. In it he is characteristically brilliant, in the sense that he attempts to illuminate a great many things all at once. Foucault is mentioned here and there in (...) that work, along with a great many others. However, I would claim that Foucault's presence is much more sustained than the index would have us believe. In fact, one might say that Foucault is the shadow cast by Taylor's brilliance. (shrink)

Like Kant, Foucault challenges us to rethink the way we relate freedom and truth by stressing the idea of "maturity" understood as a release from the "self-incurred tutelage" (the expression is from Kant) that otherwise characterizes so much of our lives. Though, rather than linking freedom and truth via the concept of autonomy (or lawfulness), as Kant does, Foucault outlines a possible experience of ethics as an individualizing ideal that contrasts with the model of establishing codes within a conception (...) of moral order. Foucault's project can be read as attempting to decouple ethics from the epistemological concern with the objectivity of a moral order in order to reconnect it to the formation of a political sensibility that sees truth(fulness) in a certain practice of freedom, as opposed to seeing our freedom confirmed or granted by a certain kind of (mode of relating to the) truth. I call this reading of Foucault's investigations into ethics the "methodological/prescriptive" approach (asking and responding to what we can do, ethically-speaking) and contrast it with the sketch of an alternative reading which I call "ontological/historical" (asking and responding to what we are, ethically-speaking). This reading, instead of pushing beyond Kant in the direction of a Nietzschean sensibility, rather challenges Kant's moral law from the space of a Hegelian insistence on the (historical) realization or actualization of freedom in and through the normative constraints structuring existing power-relations. (shrink)

This work considers the novelty of Neoplatonism against platonic philosophy, characterising the former by three principie points: the monopolaristic conception, the One which is productive (a self difftisive One-Good) remaining as indefinable or ineffable and its consequences and implications. Plotino's metaphysics, therefore, finds itself before a new problem, not put by Plato: to give reason of the One, and with this, of the production of the many from the One, and in its resolution he introduces an irreductable novelty into (...) not only the platonic categories, but also into Greek thought (as the idea of positive infinitude). (shrink)

Background The fourth section of the 1967 Abortion Act states that individuals (including health care practitioners) do not have to participate in an abortion if they have a conscientious objection. A conscientious objection is a refusal to participate in abortion on the grounds of conscience. This may be informed by religious, moral, philosophical, ethical, or personal beliefs. Currently, there is very little investigation into the impact of conscientious objection on service users in Britain. The perspectives of service users are imperative (...) in understanding the real-world consequences and potential impact of conscientious objection and should be considered when creating and reviewing policies and guidelines. This research provided a platform for women and those who can become pregnant to share their experiences and opinions at a time when these voices are largely excluded in the great tradition of Western political philosophy and law-making processes. Method Five service users were interviewed using a narrative interview approach to uncover their abortion journeys and experiences of conscientious objection. Findings The findings were presented as found poems and uncovered that doctors are not always: informing service users that they have a conscientious objection to abortion, giving service users enough information to access abortion (indirect referral), treating them non-judgmentally, and providing medically correct information. Service users did not experience burdens such as long waiting times and were still able to access legal abortion. However, service users did experience negative emotional effects, as they were often left feeling scared, angry, and hopeless when they were not referred and/or were mistreated. Conclusions Findings indicate that conscientious objection could work in practice. However, it is currently failing some individuals on an emotional level, as not all doctors are adhering to guidelines. Conscientious objection in Britain needs to be addressed, to ensure service users receive fair, impartial, non-judgmental care. (shrink)

Good historical writing not only gives us insight into the past, it also loosens the hold the present has on us and enables us to engage that present with increased critical self-awareness. By exploring the relationship between ethnicity and culture in the formation of the self-consciousness of Greeks as Greeks in the ancient world, Jonathan M. Hall enables us to grasp more coherently the dynamic and complex ways that ethnic identities are formed and the different roles such identities (...) can play in the elaboration of cultural identities. Such understanding is crucial for the world we live in because, as he notes in his opening discussion of the debates surrounding the sense of “Britishness,” “ethnic and national categorization has assumed an increasing importance” within contemporary cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Self-deception poses tantalizing conceptual conundrums and provides fertile ground for empirical research. Recent interdisciplinary volumes on the topic feature essays by biologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, and psychologists (Lockard & Paulhus 1988, Martin 1985). Self-deception's location at the intersection of these disciplines is explained by its significance for questions of abiding interdisciplinary interest. To what extent is our mental life present--or even accessible--to consciousness? How rational are we? How is motivated irrationality to be explained? To what extent are our beliefs (...) subject to our control? What are the determinants of belief, and how does motivation bear upon belief? In what measure are widely shared psychological propensities products of evolution? (shrink)

Many theories of social justice maintain that concern for the social bases of self-respect grounds demanding requirements of political and economic equality, as self-respect is supposed to be dependent on continuous just recognition by others. This paper argues that such views miss an important feature of self-respect, which accounts for much of its value: self-respect is a capacity for self-orientation that is robust under adversity. This does not mean that there are no social bases of (...) self-respect that such theories ought to incorporate. It means that they are different: they consist of the motivational and epistemic resources needed to develop and maintain such robustness. (shrink)

Non‐reflectivist real self views claim that people are morally responsible for all and only those bits of conduct that express their true values and cares, regardless of whether they have endorsed them or not. A phenomenon that is widely cited in support of these views is inverse akrasia, that is, cases in which a person is praiseworthy for having done the right thing for the right reasons despite her considered judgment that what she did was wrong. In this (...) paper I show that non‐reflectivist real self views are problematic by focusing on the related but neglected phenomenon of inverse enkrasia, which occurs when an agent commits wrongdoing by following a mistaken evaluative judgment that, unbeknownst to her, runs contrary to her true values and cares. Intuitively, inverse enkratics are blameworthy for their actions although the latter don't express their real selves; therefore, non‐reflectivist real self views are false. I assess the implications of this result for the viability of the quality of will paradigm and conclude that the latter survives unscathed to the problems besetting real self views. The lesson is that defenders of the quality of will paradigm should stop talking about real selves altogether. (shrink)

The mechanisms invoked to demonstrate how self-deception can occur without intention or awareness imply that self-deceptive beliefs are nevertheless the outcome of inappropriate and often egoistically driven processes. In contrast, models of pragmatic reasoning suggest that self-deception may well be the “reasonable” output of a more generalized, adaptive approach to hypothesis testing.

The classical tragedies relate conflicts, choices and dilemmas that have meaningful parallels in our own experience. Many of the normative dimensions of tragedy, however, rely critically on the causal and motivational efficacy of divine forces. In particular, these narratives present supernatural interventions invading their characters’ practical deliberations and undermining their claims to autonomous agency. Does this dynamic find any analogy in a contemporary, secular conception of moral agency? It does, but it is an analogy that challenges certain standard philosophical accounts (...) of agentive self-governance. (shrink)

사람들은 행복하게 살고 싶어한다. 하지만 현실은 그렇지가 않다. 고통과 괴로움으로부터 벗어나 평화롭고 행복한 삶을 살아보고자, 사람들은 불행의 원인을 각자 분석하다. 사람들은 불행의 이유나 원인을 보통 자신의 바깥에서 혹은 외적 요인에서 찾는다. 그것이 성공적일 때조차, 그것은 응급처치 정도의 의미는 있어도, 근본적인 문제의 해결과는 거리가 멀다. 근본적인 문제의 해결은 밖이 아닌 안쪽, 즉 ‘나’의 변화에 있다. 본고는 주로 이 주제를 다루고 있다. 그 ‘나’의 ‘변화’문제를 논의하기 위해 필자는 우선 두 개의 서로 다른 자아, 즉 표층의 나와 심층의 나, 비본래적이 나와 본래적인 나, (...) 에고와 셀프를 구분한다. 번뇌와 고통은 보통 전자를 참나로 착각하면서 생겨난다는 것이 정설이다. 고통으로부터 빠져 나와 행복의 길로 나아가기 위해서 ‘나’가 변해야 한다고 할 때, 그것이 바로 에고 기반의 삶에서 셀프 기반의 삶으로 옮겨가는 것을 의미한다. 필자는 이 과정을 총 일곱 단계에 걸쳐서 소개한다. 이것이 필자가 제시하는 참나로 가는 오솔길들이다. 여기서 참나는 기본적으로, 형이상학적 혹은 존재론적 시각에서 이해되는 참나 개념과 달리, 고통이나 괴로움에서 벗어나 개인 및 인류의 평화와 행복으로 나아가는 능력을 갖추고 있는 ‘나’ 혹은 그러한 부류의 이상적인 ‘나’와 관련해서 이해된다. (shrink)

This response addresses seven main issues: (1) alleged evidence that in some instances of self-deception an individual simultaneously possesses “contradictory beliefs”; (2) whether garden-variety self-deception is intentional; (3) whether conditions that I claimed to be conceptually sufficient for self-deception are so; (4) significant similarities and differences between self-deception and interpersonal deception; (5) how instances of self-deception are to be explained, and the roles of motivation in explaining them; (6) differences among various kinds of self- (...) deception; (7) whether a proper conception of self-deception implies that definitive ascriptions of self-deception to individuals are impossible. (shrink)

Arguments about the discursive shaping of our inner lives explain the shaping powers of normalising forces on individual and collective social action, but, I argue here, do not adequately account for the actions of those who choose to follow alternative ways of being. Meta- Reality brings into this picture those aspects of being that are ‘beyond language’, and theorises human consciousness as stratified. I argue that it provides a fuller theoretical explanation for the motivations of five contemporary British visual artists. (...) Drawing on a discourse analysis, I explore why these artists go against the current stream of consumerist and work norms in order to find the time to make art. I summarise and compare Rose’s theory of a multiple interior self formed through our active participation in specific social processes with Bhaskar’s theory of individual uniqueness at a level of consciousness that also connects us to all others. (shrink)

This book makes the argument that since Asian American women live in the periphery of the multicultural West, they need to strengthen the psychological process of self integration, assimilating neither to traditional cultural demands or those of the larger society.

In this paper I dispute Eliot Deutsch's claim [See Deutsch, Eliot (1996) Self-deception: a comparative study, in: Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake (Eds) Self and Deception: a cross-cultural enquiry (Albany, State University of New York Press), pp. 315-326] that examining self-deception from the perspective of non-Western traditions (i.e. how it is understood in those cultures) can help us to better understand the nature of the phenomenon in one's own culture. Although the claim appears to be uncontrover-sial (...) and perhaps even self-evident, I shall argue that it is fundamentally mistaken. What is important about both the claim and my critical assessment of it is not what it tells us about self-deception. I shall show that it tells us little about self-deception; that Deutsch confuses ignorance with self-deception; and that he straightforwardly equivocates on the concept. Instead, what is interesting is what Deutsch's treatment of self-deception in comparative perspective can tell us about comparative philosophy. The significance of what follows in this paper is less about self-deception than it is about comparative philosophy. (shrink)

On Frankfurt's view of free will, in its simplest form, an agent is free just in case her second-order volitions -- those second-order desires she wishes to be effective -- are in accord with her first-order volitions -- those first-order desires that one actually acts upon. That is, an agent has free will just in case she has the desires she wants to have and they are the desires she acts upon. But now consider an agent who lacks free will (...) because her first-order volitions and second-order volitions conflict. Suppose also that, with enough therapy, she could alter her first-order volitions to be in accord with her second-order volitions. So it is true that she can alter her first-order volitions. Still, there is the question of what she should she do. A natural response that a real self theorist might make is that the agent should change her first-order volitions in order to reflect her second-order volitions. But this is not, in principle, the only option available to our agent. Instead of changing her first-order volitions to reflect her second-order volitions, she might also consider simply revising her second-order volitions to fit with her first-order volitions. In fact, since second-order volitions are arguably more reasons responsive, it could turn out for our agent that changing her second-order volitions is actually the most rational option to take. This applies to even the most recent developments of real self, hierarchical, reasons responsive, and even intention embedded accounts of free will. Indeed, there is empirical evidence that people change their conceptions of themselves quite readily in the face of cognitive dissonance of the kind faced by desire conflicts. But this way of attaining free will does not seem to comport with our conception of a free agent. Free will seems too easy to obtain if all that is required is that our second-order volitions are in accord with our first-order volitions, and I see no particularly principled way of arguing that we shouldn't consider changing our second-order volitions instead of changing our first-order volitions. Secondly, this conception of free will is also subject to other counter examples. A person, for instance, may not be able to respect hierarchies due to some personality trait or other, but she might also be the kind of person for whom even were this trait lacking, still would not want to respect hierarchies. Here we have case in which a person's first order volitions and second order volitions coincide, but we do not want to call her free either. Additional evidence that this cannot be the right conception of free will comes from ideas put forth in the literature on practical rationality: I can be in situations in which the only rational action for me to take is to change my desires (MacIntosh), but if we cannot make irrational decisions, and these are understood as decisions to act in ways that go against our current desires, then being in a situation in which I choose to change my current desires should not be possible, thereby challenging any conception of free will that requires the changing of desires, whether first-order or second-order. I conclude, then, that any compatibilist conception of free will of the kind mentioned will be ultimately unsatisfying. (shrink)

Philosophy: the intersubjectivity of Sophos, the one and the real self, of the mystic, pure consciousness..

A "non-Aristotelean General Semantics" is proposed as a nostrum for civilization's ills.--R. D. G.

There is little fear that the concept of motivational bias as proposed by Mele is likely to dampen the current academic ferment (see Mele's Introduction) with respect to self-deception for several reasons: (a) like philosophy, science has more recently abandoned the heuristic of a rational human mind; (b) the concept is parsimonious, applicable to many research topics other than self-deception, and, therefore, scientifically serviceable; (c) as a proximal mechanism it addresses process rather than function, that is, how rather (...) than why questions; (d) it is not as interesting a question as why there is a high prevalence of “real” self-deception (i.e., “garden-variety self-deception” as described by Mele, see sect. 6); and (e) a more penetrating issue is whether “real” self-deception is adaptive. (shrink)

Real engagement (instead of compliance) -- Clarity -- Context -- Challenge -- Culture -- Conclusion -- Encore.

The puzzle of the self-torturer raises intriguing questions concerning rationality, cyclic preferences, and resoluteness. Interestingly, what makes the case puzzling has not been clearly pinpointed. The puzzle, it seems, is that a series of rational choices foreseeably leads the self-torturer to an option that serves his preferences worse than the one with which he started. But this is a very misleading way of casting the puzzle. I pinpoint the real puzzle of the self-torturer and, in the (...) process, reveal a neglected but crucial dimension of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

As state-of-art technology can create artificial images that are indistinguishable from real ones, it is urgent to understand whether believing that a picture is real or not has some import over affective phenomena such as sexual arousal. Thus, in two pre-registered online studies, we tested whether 60 images depicting models in underwear elicited higher self-reported sexual arousal when believed to be (N = 57) or presented as (N = 108) real photographs as opposed to artificially generated. (...) In both cases, Realness correlated with significantly higher scores on self-reported sexual arousal. Consistently with the literature on downregulation of emotional response to fictional works, our result indicates that sexual images that are perceived to be fake are less arousing than those believed to portray real people. (shrink)

How should driverless vehicles respond to situations of unavoidable personal harm? This paper takes up the case of self-driving cars as a prominent example of algorithmic moral decision-making, an emergent type of morality that is evolving at a high pace in a digitised business world. As its main contribution, it juxtaposes dilemma decision situations relating to ethical crash algorithms for autonomous cars to two edge cases: the case of manually driven cars facing real-life, mundane accidents, on the one (...) hand, and the dilemmatic situation in theoretically constructed trolley cases, on the other. The paper identifies analogies and disanalogies between the three cases with regard to decision makers, decision design, and decision outcomes. The findings are discussed from the angle of three perspectives: aspects where analogies could be found, those where the case of self-driving cars has turned out to lie in between both edge cases, and those where it entirely departs from either edge case. As a main result, the paper argues that manual driving as well as trolley cases are suitable points of reference for the issue of designing ethical crash algorithms only to a limited extent. Instead, a fundamental epistemic and conceptual divergence of dilemma decision situations in the context of self-driving cars and the used edge cases is substantiated. Finally, the areas of specific need for regulation on the road to introducing autonomous cars are pointed out and related thoughts are sketched through the lens of the humanistic paradigm. (shrink)

How should driverless vehicles respond to situations of unavoidable personal harm? This paper takes up the case of self-driving cars as a prominent example of algorithmic moral decision-making, an emergent type of morality that is evolving at a high pace in a digitised business world. As its main contribution, it juxtaposes dilemma decision situations relating to ethical crash algorithms for autonomous cars to two edge cases: the case of manually driven cars facing real-life, mundane accidents, on the one (...) hand, and the dilemmatic situation in theoretically constructed trolley cases, on the other. The paper identifies analogies and disanalogies between the three cases with regard to decision makers, decision design, and decision outcomes. The findings are discussed from the angle of three perspectives: aspects where analogies could be found, those where the case of self-driving cars has turned out to lie in between both edge cases, and those where it entirely departs from either edge case. As a main result, the paper argues that manual driving as well as trolley cases are suitable points of reference for the issue of designing ethical crash algorithms only to a limited extent. Instead, a fundamental epistemic and conceptual divergence of dilemma decision situations in the context of self-driving cars and the used edge cases is substantiated. Finally, the areas of specific need for regulation on the road to introducing autonomous cars are pointed out and related thoughts are sketched through the lens of the humanistic paradigm. (shrink)

Mele's jointly sufficient conditions for self-deception preclude definitive ascriptions of self-deception in practice. Consequently, actual ascriptions of self-deception require large inferences and may frequently be in error. It is recommended that attention be directed toward actual practices of ascription to understand how children learn and adults dispense what is ultimately a moral judgment.

The ability to distinguish between an individual's own actions and those of another person is a requirement for successful joint action, particularly in domains such as group music making where precise interpersonal coordination ensures perceptual overlap in the effects of co-performers' actions. We tested the hypothesis that such coordination benefits from simultaneous integration and segregation of information about ‘self’ and ‘other’ in an experiment using a musical joint action paradigm. Sixteen pairs of individuals with little or no musical training (...) performed a dyadic synchronization task on a pair of electronic music boxes. The relationship between pitches produced by paired participants (same vs. different) and the relationship between movement frequencies required to trigger synchronous tones (congruent vs. incongruent) were varied in a repeated measures design. The results indicate that interpersonal coordination was most accurate when sounds were different in pitch but movement frequency was congruent. Under other conditions, participants often drifted apart, resulting in poor coordination, especially with same sounds and incongruent movements across co-performers. These findings suggest that interpersonal coordination was facilitated when simultaneous self-other integration and segregation occurred across sensory modalities in an asymmetrical manner where pitch relations favoured segregation via auditory streaming while movement congruence favoured integration via visuo-motor coupling. Such self-other representational balance may enable co-performers to maintain autonomous control while attending, anticipating, and adapting to each other's timing when joint action requires precise temporal coordination. (shrink)

Self-deception raises complex questions about the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. In this book, Alfred Mele addresses four of the most critical of these questions: What is it to deceive oneself? How do we deceive ourselves? Why do we deceive ourselves? Is self-deception really possible? -/- Drawing on cutting-edge empirical research on everyday reasoning and biases, Mele takes issue with commonplace attempts to equate the processes of self-deception with those of stereotypical interpersonal (...) deception. Such attempts, he demonstrates, are fundamentally misguided, particularly in the assumption that self-deception is intentional. In their place, Mele proposes a compelling, empirically informed account of the motivational causes of biased beliefs. At the heart of this theory is an appreciation of how emotion and motivation may, without our knowing it, bias our assessment of evidence for beliefs. Highlighting motivation and emotion, Mele develops a pair of approaches for explaining the two forms of self-deception: the "straight" form, in which we believe what we want to be true, and the "twisted" form, in which we believe what we wish to be false. -/- Underlying Mele's work is an abiding interest in understanding and explaining the behavior of real human beings. The result is a comprehensive, elegant, empirically grounded theory of everyday self-deception that should engage philosophers and social scientists alike. (shrink)

This book gives a convincing philosophical explanation for the strong persistence of our diverse folk psychological intuitions about the self. For this purpose it introduces, on the one hand, the distinction between subject and self model as proposed by Metzinger, on the other hand, the distinction between a social/normative and a cognitive/organic perspective on the self. The book argues that one needs to take into account both distinctions, if one wants to answer notoriously difficult questions like the (...) one that gives the book its title: Is the self real? (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to bring a phenomenological perspective to bear on a specific problem: how to understand the diminished sense of reality that is often reported by persons who have suffered severe and prolonged interpersonal trauma. For this purpose I turn to resources from two traditions. First, I present a phenomenological account of the intersubjective constitution of objective experience, which is then complemented by a developmental account of how the very small child comes to inhabit a world (...) of shared mind-independent things. On this basis, I aim to show how the sense of reality, as the clear and dependable sense of the difference in experience between inner life and external reality, is an interpersonal developmental achievement that goes hand in hand with the development of the sense of self. I will in particular draw on Husserlian phenomenology and Winnicott’s psychoanalytic perspective on developmental psychology. (shrink)