Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance (...) to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud. (shrink)

Altruistic self-sacrifice is rare, supererogatory, and not to be expected of any rational agent; but, the possibility of giving up one's life for the common good has played an important role in moral theorizing. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008) has argued in a recent paper that intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice suggest that something has gone wrong in philosophical debates over the trolley problem. We begin by showing that her arguments face a series of significant philosophical objections; however, our project (...) is as much constructive as critical. Building on Thomson's philosophical argument, we report the results of a study that was designed to examine commonsense intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice. We find that a surprisingly high proportion of people judge that they should give up their lives to save a small number of unknown strangers. We also find that the willingness to engage in such altruistic self-sacrifice is predicted by a person's religious commitments. Finally, we show that folk-moral judgments are sensitive to agent-relative reasons in a way that diverges in important ways from Thomson's proposed intuitions about the trolley problem. With this in mind, we close with a discussion of the relative merits of folk intuitions and philosophical intuitions in constructing a viable moral theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an empirically-driven approach to the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual representations. I begin by clarifying Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between a non-conceptual capacity to picture significant aspects of our world, and a capacity to stabilize semantic content in the form of conceptual representations that signify those aspects of the world that are relevant to our shared practices. I argue that this distinction helps to clarify the reason why cognition must be understood as embodied and situated. Drawing (...) on recent models of attention and valuation, I then argue that the human brain constructs a dynamic model of the world that it has encountered, encoding higher-level regularities in the form of linguistically structured representations. And I conclude by arguing that this approach to cognition provides a set of critical resources for understanding the situated nature of social cognition. (shrink)

Aftereffects induced by invisible stimuli constitute a powerful tool to investigate what type of neural information processing can occur in the absence of visual awareness. This approach has been successfully used to demonstrate that awareness of oriented gratings or translating stimuli is not necessary to obtain a robust orientation-specific or motion-specific aftereffect. We exploit motion-induced blindness to investigate the related question of the influence of visual awareness on the formation of negative afterimages. Our results show that MIB does not affect (...) the persistence and intensity of afterimages. Thus, there is no significant contribution to the formation of afterimages beyond the sites mediating MIB. (shrink)

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also (...) shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

In German-speaking countries the term spiritual care becomes more and more popular, not only in the realm of palliative care but also amongst pastoral care takers. In this article I argue that favouring of the term 'spiritual care' is not only a tribute to the changing situation in German-speaking countries, but also a way pastoral care takers want to deal with the challenges they face in a secular, multicultural society. I will discuss whether the use of the term 'spiritual care' (...) is a way to 'lower the profile' of pastoral care and trying to be less explicit about the institution the pastors represent and the worldview they hold. This might look like an easy escape but does not foster the interaction in a multi-cultural space. (shrink)

Grundannahme dieses Buches ist es, dass Subjekte einem Bildungsprozess unterliegen, der hauptsächlich durch deren Sozialität bestimmt wird. Constanze Junker vertritt dabei die These, dass der soziale Subjektivierungsprozess selbst seine Möglichkeitsbedingungen für radikale Befreiung enthält. Diese Möglichkeitsbedingung auch politischer Widerständigkeit beruht auf einer absoluten Negativität, die sich aus der Sozialität der Subjektivierung ergibt. Verbindungsglied der Theorie sozialer Subjektivierung mit Befreiung ist ein Existenzstreben. Dieses wird - anders als bei Butler - selbst als sozial konstituiert und als Ressource absoluter Negativität beschrieben.

Many people believe that the research-based pharmaceutical industry has a ‘special’ moral obligation to provide lifesaving medications to the needy, either free-of-charge or at a reduced rate relative to the cost of manufacture. In this essay, I argue that we can explain the ubiquitous notion of a special moral obligation as an expression of emotionally charged intuitions involving sacred or protected values and an aversive response to betrayal in an asymmetric trust relationship. I then review the most common arguments used (...) to justify the claim that the pharmaceutical industry has a special moral obligation and show why these justifications fail. Taken together, these conclusions call into question the conventional ideologies that have traditionally animated the debate on whether the pharmaceutical industry has special duties of beneficence and distributive justice with respect to the impoverished in dire need of their products. (shrink)

In this book, Binder shows that at the heart of the most prominent arguments in favour of value-neutral approaches to overall freedom lies the value freedom has for human agency and development. Far from leading to the adoption of a value-neutral approach, however, ascribing importance to freedom’s agency value requires one to adopt a refined value-based approach. Binder employs an axiomatic framework in order to develop such an approach. She shows that a focus on freedom’s agency value has far reaching (...) consequences for existing results in the freedom ranking literature: it requires one to move beyond a person’s given all-things-considered preferences to the values underlying a person’s preference formation. Furthermore, it requires, as Binder argues, one to account for those differences between choice options which really matter to people. Binder illustrates the implications of her analysis for the evaluation of public policy and human development with the capability approach: only if sufficient importance is ascribed to freedom’s agency value can the capability approach keep its promises. ​. (shrink)

This chapter examines the recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy that has targeted the commonsense understanding of group minds. It begins by setting up the conceptual and empirical terrain on which claims about the group mind in commonsense psychology have been constructed. The chapter explains an analysis of the cross‐cultural data, which suggest a greater willingness to ascribe collective mentality in East Asian cultures. It addresses that the different strands of data together support the claim that commonsense psychology is (...) committed to a form of methodological holism, which allows for properties of individuals that critically depend on group membership. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this does not cut against philosophical and scientific attempts to defend the existence of collective intentions and group minds; it merely suggests that such projects must move beyond commonsense strategies for predicting and explaining individual behavior. (shrink)

We welcome Mikhalevich & Powell’s (2020) (M&P) call for a more “‘inclusive”’ animal ethics, but we think their proposed shift toward a moral framework that privileges false positives over false negatives will require radically revising the paradigm assumption in animal research: that there is a clear line to be drawn between sentient beings that are part of our moral community and nonsentient beings that are not.

Nineteenth-century German classical philology underpins many structures of the modern humanities. In this book, Constanze Güthenke shows how a language of love and a longing for closeness with a personified antiquity have lastingly shaped modern professional reading habits, notions of biography, and the self-image of scholars and teachers. She argues that a discourse of love was instrumental in expressing the challenges of specialisation and individual formation (Bildung), and in particular for the key importance of a Platonic scene of learning (...) and instruction for imagining the modern scholar. The book is based on detailed readings of programmatic texts from, among others, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, Thiersch, Dilthey, Wilamowitz and Nietzsche. It makes a case for revising established narratives, but also for finding new value in imagining distance and an absence of nostalgic longing for antiquity. (shrink)

There are many ways to advance our understanding of the human mind by studying different kinds of sociality. Our aim in this introduction is to situate claims about extended cognition within a broader framework of research on human sociality. We briefly discuss the existing landscape, focusing on ways of defending socially extended cognition. We then draw on resources from the recent literature on the socially extended mind, as well as the literature on collective intentionality, to provide a framework for thinking (...) about the social dimension of individual minds. We then turn to a brief overview of the individualistic approaches advanced by Ludwig and Spaulding in this volume. And we close with a discussion of the transformative role of the social mind in individual life presented by Kern and Moll, as well as the distributed approach to interacting systems defended by Goldstone and Theiner. (shrink)

Background: The transition to child care is a challenging time in a child’s life and leads to elevated levels of cortisol. These elevations may be influenced by the quality of the mother-child-relationship. However, remarkably little is known about cortisol production in response to the beginning of child care among children-at-risk such as children with an immigrant background. However, attending kindergarten or any other child day-care institution can for example have a compensating effect on potential language deficits thus improving the educational (...) opportunities of these children. Method: Data of a subsample of N = 24 “hard-to-reach” mother-child dyads was collected in the context of the psychoanalytic early prevention project “First Steps”. The project focuses on the earliest integration of children with an immigrant background by supporting parenting capacities in the critical phase of migration and early parenthood. Children’s hair cortisol concentration (HCC) was assessed one week before (mean age = 38.77 months) and three months after kindergarten entry (mean age = 42.26 months). Hair analysis was conducted for both times of measurement, reflecting the first 3 months after kindergarten entry and 3 months prior. Furthermore, the emotional quality of the mother-child-relationship was assessed with the help of the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS) shortly before kindergarten entry when the children were about three years old (mean age = 37.2). Results and Conclusion: Children’s mean cumulated HCC was higher after kindergarten entry than before. The increase correlated negatively with several dimensions of the EAS. Repeated measures ANCOVA revealed that particularly responsive children and children who had experienced less intrusive mother-child-relationships demonstrated lower elevations in HCC after kindergarten entry. Furthermore, a decreased EA score was found in all EA dimensions, besides the dimension “mother’s non-hostility”, indicating problematic EA within the mother-child-relationships of the sample. The results suggest that children with an immigrant background who experience more emotional available mother-child-relationships seem to regulate stress induced by kindergarten entry more effectively, indicated by lower cortisol elevations after entry. This implicates that supporting early mother-child-relationships by intervention may have a positive effect on the children’s ability to regulate stress induced by kindergarten entry thus promoting child development. (shrink)

This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting interests and values; any story about accountability in (...) a massively distributed collaboration must therefore involve models of such interests and values and their methodological and epistemic effects. (shrink)

Dynamic Consent is both a model and a specific web-based tool that enables clear, granular communication and recording of participant consent choices over time. The DC model enables individuals to know and to decide how personal research information is being used and provides a way in which to exercise legal rights provided in privacy and data protection law. The DC tool is flexible and responsive, enabling legal and ethical requirements in research data sharing to be met and for online health (...) information to be maintained. DC has been used in rare diseases and genomics, to enable people to control and express their preferences regarding their own data. However, DC has never been explored in relationship to historical collections of bioscientific and genetic heritage or to contexts involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.In response to the growing interest by First Peoples throughout Australia in genetic and genomic research, and the increasing number of invitations from researchers to participate in community health and wellbeing projects, this article examines the legal and ethical attributes and challenges of DC in these contexts. It also explores opportunities for including First Peoples' cultural perspectives, governance, and leadership as a method for defining DC on cultural terms that engage best practice research and data analysis as well as respect for meaningful and longitudinal individual and family participation. (shrink)

Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors ‐ gender, education, politics and religion ‐ affect intuitive moral judgments (...) in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test, we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction, these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag sollen Iris Marion Youngs gerechtigkeitstheoretische Überlegungen zu Unterdrückungsformen und Mechanismen ihrer Stabilisierung zur Analyse der Situation der Pflege in Deutschland und der politischen Diskurse darüber fruchtbar gemacht werden. Ausgehend von Youngs These, dass das bloße Postulat formal gleichberechtigter Teilhabe unterschiedlicher Gruppen an politischen Meinungsbildungs- und Entscheidungsprozessen nicht automatisch auch zu deren gleichberechtigter und wirksamer Interessensvertretung führt, werden resultierende gesellschaftliche Ungerechtigkeiten, von denen Pflegende und die Pflege betroffen sind, den „Fünf Formen der Unterdrückung“ ihrer gleichnamigen Theorie zugeordnet. Diese (...) Unterdrückungsformen werden erläutert und auf die aktuelle Situation der Pflege hin interpretiert. Im Fazit wird der Bezug zum Thema gerechter Partizipation und damit ihre Bedeutung für die aktuellen pflegepolitischen Diskurse in sozial- und gerechtigkeitstheoretischer Perspektive betont. Die Analysen Youngs können zum Verständnis politischer Prozesse und zu deren bewussten Mitgestaltung durch Pflegende beitragen. Konsequenzen ergeben sich insbesondere für die Pflegepädagogik, da auf dieser Basis ein kritisches pflegepolitisches und professionelles Selbstverständnis gefördert werden kann. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag sollen Iris Marion Youngs gerechtigkeitstheoretische Überlegungen zu Unterdrückungsformen und Mechanismen ihrer Stabilisierung zur Analyse der Situation der Pflege in Deutschland und der politischen Diskurse darüber fruchtbar gemacht werden. Ausgehend von Youngs These, dass das bloße Postulat formal gleichberechtigter Teilhabe unterschiedlicher Gruppen an politischen Meinungsbildungs- und Entscheidungsprozessen nicht automatisch auch zu deren gleichberechtigter und wirksamer Interessensvertretung führt, werden resultierende gesellschaftliche Ungerechtigkeiten, von denen Pflegende und die Pflege betroffen sind, den „Fünf Formen der Unterdrückung“ ihrer gleichnamigen Theorie zugeordnet. Diese (...) Unterdrückungsformen werden erläutert und auf die aktuelle Situation der Pflege hin interpretiert. Im Fazit wird der Bezug zum Thema gerechter Partizipation und damit ihre Bedeutung für die aktuellen pflegepolitischen Diskurse in sozial- und gerechtigkeitstheoretischer Perspektive betont. Die Analysen Youngs können zum Verständnis politischer Prozesse und zu deren bewussten Mitgestaltung durch Pflegende beitragen. Konsequenzen ergeben sich insbesondere für die Pflegepädagogik, da auf dieser Basis ein kritisches pflegepolitisches und professionelles Selbstverständnis gefördert werden kann. (shrink)

This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It is argued that collective mentality should be only be posited where specialized subroutines are integrated in a way that yields skillful, goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to concerns that are relevant to a group as such.

In this paper, we consider one of the ways in which shared valuing is normatively significant. More specifically, we analyze the processes that can reliably provide normative grounding for the standing to rebuke others for their failures to treat something as valuable. Yet problems with grounding this normative standing quickly arise, as it is not immediately clear why shared valuing binds group members together in ways that can sustain the collective pursuit of shared ends. Responding to this difficulty is no (...) easy task, since doing so requires demonstrating that the standing to call on one's fellow participants because of shared forms of valuing is not merely a side effect of members authority to call on their fellow participants to do their fair share in a collective endeavor. This is, to the best of our knowledge, a problem that the sparse literature on shared valuing has yet to consider. We argue that the best way to address this difficulty is to consider the real‐world complexity of how forms of valuing come to be shared within well‐structured collectives and how members internalize the evaluative tendencies that sustain shared valuing. To accomplish those ends, we examine two different ways that shared valuing is cultivated within well‐structured groups and the corresponding ways that members internalize forms of valuing; specifically, we examine differences between forms of valuing that are passed downward from the top of a group, as they are in the U.S. Military, and forms of valuing that bubble‐up through local patterns of interaction, as they do among the Zapatistas of Chiapas. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie aktuellen Entwicklungen und Anforderungen in der pflegeberuflichen Bildung, das Ausbildungsziel im Pflegeberufegesetz vom 17. Juli 2017 und die Explikationen in der dazugehörigen Ausbildungs- und Prüfungsverordnung für die Pflegeberufe fordern eine stärkere Ausrichtung auf die Entwicklung ethischer Kompetenzen explizit ein. Bislang liegen tendenziell übergreifende Definitionen und Darlegungen zu ethischen Kompetenzen in der Pflege vor, deren Verdienst es ist, das Spezifische der Pflegeethik zu konturieren und erstmals ethische Kompetenzen für das Feld zu konkretisieren. In methodischer und didaktischer Hinsicht ist indes eine (...) spezifische Differenzierung gemäß unterschiedlicher Bildungsniveaus relevant. Lehrende werden ihre Lehre nicht mehr nur im Sinne einer allgemeinen Förderung ethischer Kompetenz entwickeln können, sondern müssen dabei den jeweiligen Verantwortungsbereich und das angezielte Qualifikationsniveau der Lernenden berücksichtigen. Ziel der Darlegungen ist es, konkrete Kompetenzniveaus für die Anbahnung professionsethischer Kompetenzen zu operationalisieren, die einerseits die Anforderungen aus dem zukünftigen Pflegeberufegesetz aufgreifen und andererseits anstehende curriculare Entwicklungsprozesse unterstützen. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 66 Heft: 5 Seiten: 737-745.

Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific rather (...) than universally held. This being the case, we argue that mere appeal to the intuitive implausibility of collective consciousness does not offer any genuine insight into the nature of mentality in general, nor the nature of consciousness in particular. (shrink)

Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and an (...) analysis of those components of the moral system that are uniquely human and uniquely moral. In this paper we present the theoretical motivations for adopting LA in the study of moral cognition: (a) the distinction between competence and performance, (b) poverty of stimulus considerations, and (c) adopting the computational level as the proper level of analysis for the empirical study of moral judgment. With these motivations in hand, we review recent empirical findings that have been inspired by LA and which provide evidence for at least two predictions of LA: (a) the computational processes responsible for folk-moral judgment operate over structured representations of actions and events, as well as coding for features of agency and outcomes; and (b) folk-moral judgments are the output of a dedicated moral faculty and are largely immune to the effects of context. In addition, we highlight the complexity of the interfaces between the moral faculty and other cognitive systems external to it (e.g., number systems). We conclude by reviewing the potential utility of the theoretical and empirical tools of LA for future research in moral psychology. (shrink)