Law, Economics, and Morality examines the possibility of combining economic methodology and deontological morality through explicit and direct incorporation of moral constraints into economic models. Economic analysis of law is a powerful analytical methodology. However, as a purely consequentialist approach, which determines the desirability of acts and rules solely by assessing the goodness of their outcomes, standard cost-benefit analysis is normatively objectionable. Moderate deontology prioritizes such values as autonomy, basic liberties, truth-telling, and promise-keeping over the promotion of good outcomes. It (...) holds that there are constraints on promoting the good. Such constraints may be overridden only if enough good is at stake. While moderate deontology conforms to prevailing moral intuitions and legal doctrines, it is arguably lacking in methodological rigor and precision. Eyal Zamir and Barak Medina argue that the normative flaws of economic analysis can be rectified without relinquishing its methodological advantages and that moral constraints can be formalized so as to make their analysis more rigorous. They discuss various substantive and methodological choices involved in modeling deontological constraints. Zamir and Medina propose to determine the permissibility of any act or rule infringing a deontological constraint by means of mathematical threshold functions. Law, Economics, and Morality presents the general structure of threshold functions, analyzes their elements and addresses possible objections to this proposal. It then illustrates the implementation of constrained CBA in several legal fields, including contract law, freedom of speech, antidiscrimination law, the fight against terrorism, and legal paternalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTShould conciliating with disagreeing peers be considered sufficient for reaching rational beliefs? Thomas Kelly argues that when taken this way, Conciliationism lets those who enter into a disagreement with an irrational belief reach a rational belief all too easily. Three kinds of responses defending Conciliationism are found in the literature. One response has it that conciliation is required only of agents who have a rational belief as they enter into a disagreement. This response yields a requirement that no one should (...) follow. If the need to conciliate applies only to already rational agents, then an agent must conciliate only when her peer is the one irrational. A second response views conciliation as merely necessary for having a rational belief. This alone does little to address the central question of what is rational to believe when facing a disagreeing peer. Attempts to develop the response either reduce to the first response, or deem necessary an unnecessary doxastic revision, or imply that rational dilemmas obtain in cases where intuitively there are none. A third response tells us to weigh what our pre-disagreement evidence supports against the evidence from the disagreement itself. This invites epistemic akrasia. (shrink)

We examine whether the "evidence of evidence is evidence" principle is true. We distinguish several different versions of the principle and evaluate recent attacks on some of those versions. We argue that, whatever the merits of those attacks, they leave the more important rendition of the principle untouched. That version is, however, also subject to new kinds of counterexamples. We end by suggesting how to formulate a better version of the principle that takes into account those new counterexamples.

The case study aims to reveal the praxis that serves the media during ethnic-violence conflicts. The article closely reads reports of the Israeli media covering the clashes between Israeli Arabs and the police, in the first days of the second Intifada. We analyze how mainstream Hebrew media covered the unfolding events, and also refer to reports in Arab-language newspapers. Two prominent trends shaped the frame through which events were reported: Inclusion and exclusion. Israel's Hebrew-language media excluded the Arab citizens from (...) the general Israeli public, while, at the same time, equating them with the residents of the Palestinian Authority. That is, the media framed the Arab Israeli citizens as Palestinians, blurring the line between the riots within Israel and the armed violence in the West Bank and Gaza. This coverage changed after the first and most intense days of riots; Israeli journalists then switched to a more civil framing after establishing an inner as well as an outer discourse. (shrink)

Suppose we learn that we have a poor track record in forming beliefs rationally, or that a brilliant colleague thinks that we believe P irrationally. Does such input require us to revise those beliefs whose rationality is in question? When we gain information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational, we are in one of two general cases. In the first case we made no error, and our beliefs are rational. In that case the input to the contrary is misleading. In (...) the second case we indeed believe irrationally, and our original evidence already requires us to fix our mistake. In that case the input to that effect is normatively superfluous. Thus, we know that information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational is either misleading or superfluous. This, I submit, renders the input incapable of justifying belief revision, despite our not knowing which of the two kinds it is. (shrink)

We revisit the analogy suggested by Madelung between a non-relativistic time-dependent quantum particle, to a fluid system which is pseudo-barotropic, irrotational and inviscid. We first discuss the hydrodynamical properties of the Madelung description in general, and extract a pressure like term from the Bohm potential. We show that the existence of a pressure gradient force in the fluid description, does not violate Ehrenfest’s theorem since its expectation value is zero. We also point out that incompressibility of the fluid implies conservation (...) of density along a fluid parcel trajectory and in 1D this immediately results in the non-spreading property of wave packets, as the sum of Bohm potential and an exterior potential must be either constant or linear in space. Next we relate to the hydrodynamic description a thermodynamic counterpart, taking the classical behavior of an adiabatic barotopric flow as a reference. We show that while the Bohm potential is not a positive definite quantity, as is expected from internal energy, its expectation value is proportional to the Fisher information whose integrand is positive definite. Moreover, this integrand is exactly equal to half of the square of the imaginary part of the momentum, as the integrand of the kinetic energy is equal to half of the square of the real part of the momentum. This suggests a relation between the Fisher information and the thermodynamic like internal energy of the Madelung fluid. Furthermore, it provides a physical linkage between the inverse of the Fisher information and the measure of disorder in quantum systems—in spontaneous adiabatic gas expansion the amount of disorder increases while the internal energy decreases. (shrink)

The divergence point analysis procedure is aimed at obtaining an estimate of the onset of the influence of an experimental variable on response latencies (e.g., fixation duration, reaction time). The procedure involves generating survival curves for two conditions, and using a bootstrapping technique to estimate the timing of the earliest discernible divergence between curves. In the present paper, several key extensions for this procedure were proposed and evaluated by conducting simulations and by reanalyzing data from previous studies. Our findings indicate (...) that the modified versions of the procedure performed substantially better than the original procedure under conditions of low experimental power. Furthermore, unlike the original procedure, the modified procedures provided divergence point estimates for individual participants and permitted testing the significance of the difference between estimates across conditions. The advantages of the modified procedures are illustrated, the theoretical and methodological implications are discussed, and promising future directions are outlined. (shrink)

Both left libertarians, who support the redistribution of income and wealth through taxation, and right libertarians, who oppose redistributive taxation, share an important view: that, looming catastrophes aside, the state must never redistribute any part of our body or our person without our consent. Cécile Fabre rejects that view. For her, just as the undeservedly poor have a just claim to money from their fellow citizens in order to lead a minimally flourishing life, the undeservedly ‘medically poor’ have a just (...) claim to help from fellow citizens in order to lead such a life. Such obligatory help may in principle involve even the supply of body parts for transplantation. The state ought to exact such resources from the medically rich whenever doing so would secure the prospect of a minimally flourishing life to the medically poor without denying that prospect to anyone else. Fabre criticizes Ronald Dworkin's belief in ‘a prophylactic line that comes close to making the body inviolate, that is, making body parts not parts of social resources at all’. For her, ‘Duties to help. . . do not stop at material resources: they involve the body. . . in invasive ways’. (shrink)

This article looks at the way people determine the antecedent of a pronoun in sentence pairs, such as: Albert invited Ron to dinner. He spent hours cleaning the house. The experiment reported here is motivated by the idea that such judgments depend on reasoning about identity . Because the identity of an individual over time depends on the causal-historical path connecting the stages of the individual, the correct antecedent will also depend on causal connections. The experiment varied how likely it (...) is that the event of the first sentence would cause the event of the second for each of the two individuals . Decisions about the antecedent followed causal likelihood. A mathematical model of causal identity accounted for most of the key aspects of the data from the individual sentence pairs. (shrink)

The Self-Intimation thesis has it that whatever justificatory status a proposition has, i.e., whether or not we are justified in believing it, we are justified in believing that it has that status. The Infallibility thesis has it that whatever justificatory status we are justified in believing that a proposition has, the proposition in fact has that status. Jointly, Self-Intimation and Infallibility imply that the justificatory status of a proposition closely aligns with the justification we have about that justificatory status. Self-Intimation (...) has two noteworthy implications. First, assuming that we never have sufficient justification for a proposition and for its negation, we can derive Infallibility from Self-Intimation. Interestingly, there seems to be no equivalently simple way to derive Self-Intimation from Infallibility. This asymmetry provides reason for thinking that bottom-level justification rather than top-level justification drives the explanation for why the levels of justification align. Second, Self-Intimation suggests a counterintuitive treatment of information concerning what justificatory status a proposition has. It follows from Self-Intimation that we always have justification for the truth about whether a proposition is justified for us, and therefore, that higher-order evidence could change what we should believe on this matter only by misleading us. This permits forming beliefs about whether a proposition is justified for us without regard to higher-order evidence, and thus reveals a reason for thinking that top-level justification is evidentially inert. (shrink)

The Madelung equations map the non-relativistic time-dependent Schrödinger equation into hydrodynamic equations of a virtual fluid. While the von Neumann entropy remains constant, we demonstrate that an increase of the Shannon entropy, associated with this Madelung fluid, is proportional to the expectation value of its velocity divergence. Hence, the Shannon entropy may grow due to an expansion of the Madelung fluid. These effects result from the interference between solutions of the Schrödinger equation. Growth of the Shannon entropy due to expansion (...) is common in diffusive processes. However, in the latter the process is irreversible while the processes in the Madelung fluid are always reversible. The relations between interference, compressibility and variation of the Shannon entropy are then examined in several simple examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for classical diffusive processes, the “force” accelerating diffusion has the form of the positive gradient of the quantum Bohm potential. Expressing then the diffusion coefficient in terms of the Planck constant reveals the lower bound given by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in terms of the product between the gas mean free path and the Brownian momentum. (shrink)

We present a new theoretical construct labeled motivational readiness. It is defined as the inclination, whether or not ultimately implemented, to satisfy a desire. A general model of readiness is described which builds on the work of prior theories, including animal learning models and personality approaches, and which aims to integrate a variety of research findings across different domains of motivational research. Components of this model include the Want state, and the Expectancy of being able to satisfy that Want. We (...) maintain that the Want concept is the critical ingredient in motivational readiness: without it, readiness cannot exist. In contrast, some motivational readiness can exist without Expectancy. We also discuss the role of incentive in motivational readiness. Incentive is presently conceived of in terms of a Match between a Want and a Perceived Situational Affordance. Whereas in classic models incentive was portrayed as a first order determinant of motivational readiness, here we describe it as a second order factor which affects readiness by influencing Want, Expectancy, or both. The new model’s relation to its theoretical predecessors, and its implications for future research, also are discussed. (shrink)

The present paradigm involved manipulating the congruency of the perceptual processing during the study and test phases of a recognition memory task. During each trial, a gaze-contingent window was used to limit the stimulus display to a region either inside or outside a 108 square centred on the participant’s point of gaze, constituting the Central and Peripheral viewing modes respectively. The window position changed in real time in concert with changes in gaze position. Four experiments documented better task performance when (...) viewing modes at encoding and retrieval matched than when they mismatched (i.e., perceptual specificity effects). Viewing mode congruency effects were demonstrated with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli. The present research is motivated and discussed in terms of theoretical views proposed in the 1970s including the levels-of-processing framework and the proceduralist viewpoint. In addition, implications for current processing and multiple systems views of memory are outlined. (shrink)

The alignment of bargaining positions is crucial to a successful negotiation. Prior research has shown that similarity in language use is indicative of the conceptual alignment of interlocutors. We use latent semantic analysis to explore how the similarity of language use between negotiating parties develops over the course of a three-party negotiation. Results show that parties that reach an agreement show a gradual increase in language similarity over the course of the negotiation. Furthermore, reaching the most financially efficient outcome is (...) dependent on similarity in language use between the parties that have the most to gain from such an outcome. (shrink)

The article argues that youth’s exposure to thin-idealizing content posted by their adored celebrities on interactive and highly engaging social networking sites poses potential challenges for these young people. Celebrity SNS presence responds to youth’s desire for social connectedness, public approval, and fame, which are highlighted at the time of their identity search and establishment. SNS content likely interacts with teens’ unique developmental characteristics, personal background, and interests to propel processes such as identification and social comparison with famous personae leading (...) to negative body image perceptions. The article suggests that even ostensibly “innocent” SNS content that presents thin-idealizing images and messages about the body may place pressures on youth and encourage a preoocupation with and risky behaviors associated with body image even unintentionally. The article further recognizes that netusers, readers, and social networking sites all share in the responsibility to minimize the risks posed to youth in this context. (shrink)

In _Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish-Eye_, Eyal Aviv offers an account of Ouyang Jingwu, a revolutionary Buddhist thinker and educator. The book surveys the life and career of Ouyang and his influence on modern Chinese intellectual history.

Epistemically akratic agents believe both p and that believing p is irrational for them. Some of the costs of thinking that epistemic akrasia can be rational are clear. It is hypocritical, and outright weird, to have beliefs that we consider irrational, let alone to reason with or act on those beliefs. However, as Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (2020) and Brian Weatherson (2019) have argued, the weirdness of akrasia does not obviously tell against its rationality. Here I argue that views permitting epistemic akrasia (...) fare worse than previously thought. These views imply that we should sometimes have beliefs that we know for certain are either irrational or false. And while having a belief that we know to be irrational is straightforwardly irrational, the additional possibility that the belief may be false cannot make having it any more rational. (shrink)

In an attempt to explore further the Madelung fluid-like representation of quantum mechanics, we derive the small perturbation equations of the fluid with respect to its basic states. The latter are obtained from the Madelung transform of the Schrödinger equation eigenstates. The fundamental eigenstates of de Broglie monochromatic matter waves are then shown to be mapped into the simple basic states of a fluid with constant density and velocity, where the latter is the de Broglie group velocity. The normal modes (...) with respect to these basic states are derived and found to also satisfy the de Broglie dispersion relation. Despite being dispersive waves, their propagation mechanism is equivalent to that of sound waves in a classical ideal adiabatic gas. We discuss the physical interpretation of these results. (shrink)

Entlang zweier ineinander verschränkter Erzählungen – einer epistemischen Verschiebung im Internationalen Recht, in der die Bedeutung forensischer Praktiken schrittweise auf Kosten derjenigen menschlicher Zeugen zugenommen hat, und der Karriere des »Kampfschadengutachters« Marc Garlasco – wird die Entstehung einer analytischen Methode zur Untersuchung von Gewaltereignissen, wie sie sich in räumliche Artefakte und gebaute Umgebungen einschreiben, und deren Rolle in der Untersuchung von Kriegsverbrechen verfolgt. Moving along two intertwining narrations – the epistemic shift in International Law towards an emphasis on forensic practices (...) to the detriment of human witnesses and the career of »battle damage assessor« Marc Garlasco – the paper follows the development of an analytical method to examine events of violence that inscribe themselves in spatial artifacts and constructed environments, and outlines the method's role in the investigation of war crimes. (shrink)

Detecting that two images are different is faster for highly dissimilar images than for highly similar images. Paradoxically, we showed that the reverse occurs when people are asked to describe how two images differ—that is, to state a difference between two images. Following structure-mapping theory, we propose that this disassociation arises from the multistage nature of the comparison process. Detecting that two images are different can be done in the initial (local-matching) stage, but only for pairs with low overlap; thus, (...) “different” responses are faster for low-similarity than for high-similarity pairs. In contrast, identifying a specific difference generally requires a full structural alignment of the two images, and this alignment process is faster for high-similarity pairs. We described four experiments that demonstrate this dissociation and show that the results can be simulated using the Structure-Mapping Engine. These results pose a significant challenge for nonstructural accounts of similarity comparison and suggest that structural alignment processes play a significant role in visual comparison. (shrink)

A Buchner and E. Erdfelder (this volume) provide a commentary on our analysis of response bias correction in the process dissociation procedure. Unfortunately, this commentary fails to address the substantive issues that were raised in M. J. Wainwright and E. M. Reingold (1996). In the present article, we attempt to clarify some of their misrepresentations and the inconsistency inherent in their position. ©1996 Academic Press..

Buchner, Erdfelder, and Vaterrodt-Plunnecke (1995) advocated an exposition of the process dissociation procedure within the framework of multinomial modeling. Among the misleading aspects of this exposition is its tendency to obscure the overlap between processes. In contrast, clarifying these crucial interactions leads to a general classification of response bias corrections to the process dissociation procedure. This scheme, in which corrective models are classified on the basis of process interactions, clarifies the assumptions underlying previously proposed corrections. As an illustration of the (...) framework, three such corrections are derived. These corrective models are evaluated by applying them to the data reported by Buchner et al. (1995). © 1996 Academic Press, Inc. (shrink)

Reingold and MerikleÕs (1988, 1990) critique of the classic dissociation paradigm identified several issues as inherent problems that severely undermine the utility of this paradigm. Erdelyi (2004) extending his prior analysis (Erdelyi, 1985, 1986) points out several additional factors that may complicate the interpretation of empirically obtained dissociations. The goal of the present manuscript is to further discuss some of these commonly neglected interpretive difficulties. Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

_A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot._.

_A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot._.

Many voting rules and, in particular, the plurality rule and Condorcet-consistent voting rules satisfy the simple-majority decisiveness property. The problem implied by such decisiveness, namely, the universal disregard of the preferences of the minority, can be ameliorated by applying unbiased scoring rules such as the classical Borda rule, but such amelioration has a price; it implies erosion in the implementation of the widely accepted majority principle . Furthermore, the problems of majority decisiveness and of the erosion in the majority principle (...) are not necessarily severe when one takes into account the likelihood of their occurrence. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the severity of the two problems, comparing simple-majoritarian voting rules that allow the decisiveness of the smallest majority larger than 1/2 and the classical Borda method of counts. Our analysis culminates in the derivation of the conditions that determine, in terms of the number of alternatives k, the number of voters n, and the relative (subjective) weight assigned to the severity of the two problems, which of these rules is superior in light of the dual majoritarian approach. (shrink)

What it means for an action to have moral worth, and what is required for this to be the case, is the subject of continued controversy. Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right. Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right. These theorists, though they oppose one another, share something important in (...) common. They focus almost exclusively on the moral worth of right actions. But there is a negatively valenced counterpart that attaches to wrong actions, which we will call moral counterworth. In this paper, we explore the moral counterworth of wrong actions in order to shed new light on the nature of moral worth. Contrary to theorists in both camps, we argue that more than one kind of motivation can affect the moral worth of actions. (shrink)

This paper merges the non-expected utility approach (Tversky and Kahneman, J Risk Uncertain 5:297–323, 1992 and Quiggin, J Econ Behav Organ 3:323–343, 1982) into Akerlof’s (Quart J Econ 84:488–500, 1970) model of Market for Lemons. We derive the results for different probability weighting functions and analyze the phenomenon of market failure in light of non-expected utility maximization. Our main finding suggests that when the proportion of traded lemons is high (low), the problem of market failure is mitigated (enhanced). In addition, (...) for the case of Cumulative Prospect Theory, we show that (a) the higher the loss aversion is, the more pronounced is the market failure; (b) gain-domain elevation is negatively related to the extent of market failure; and (c) the value function is (i) negatively monotonic in the gain-domain diminishing sensitivity parameter when the market is characterized by a high proportion of “peaches,” and (ii) positively monotonic in the loss-domain diminishing sensitivity parameter when the market is characterized by a high proportion of “lemons.”. (shrink)

On the origin of film and the resurrection of the people : D.W. Griffith's Intolerance -- The actor of the crowd : The great dictator -- Howard Hawks' idea of genre -- What is a cinema of Jewish vengeance? : Tarantino's Inglourious basterds.

In two experiments during the study phase participants read unrelated context-target word pairs presented below a line drawing of the context word. During test the strong cue group was presented with context words, line drawings, and stems of target words. The line drawings were not presented in the weak cue group. Stems were paired with the same context words as at study , paired with different context words , or corresponded to unstudied words . In Experiment 1 participants were instructed (...) to complete stems with the first word that came to mind . The priming effect for new associations was twice as large in the strong cue group. In Experiment 2 the process dissociation procedure was applied and participants completed stems with studied words or with unstudied words . Results indicated that consciously controlled and automatic retrieval processes mediated the associative effect in both groups. (shrink)

Is it ever rational to suspend judgment about whether a particular doxastic attitude of ours is rational? An agent who suspends about whether her attitude is rational has serious doubts that it is. These doubts place a special burden on the agent, namely, to justify maintaining her chosen attitude over others. A dilemma arises. Providing justification for maintaining the chosen attitude would commit the agent to considering the attitude rational—contrary to her suspension on the matter. Alternatively, in the absence of (...) such justification, the attitude would be arbitrary by the agent's own lights, and therefore irrational from the agent's own perspective. So, suspending about whether an attitude of ours is rational does not cohere with considering it rationally preferable to other attitudes, and leads to a more familiar form of epistemic akrasia otherwise. (shrink)

This preregistered experiment examined two proximate drivers of retributive punishment attitudes: the motivation to make the perpetrator suffer, and understand the wrongfulness of his offense. In a sample of 514 US adults, we presented criminal case summaries that varied the level of suffering (absent vs. present) and understanding (absent vs. present) experienced by the perpetrator and measured punishment judgments and attitudes. Our results demonstrate, as predicted, that participants were more satisfied by the sentence and less punitive when they believed that (...) the perpetrator had suffered from the punishment or that he understood the wrongfulness of his actions. This pattern held across crimes of varying seriousness (theft vs. aggravated robbery) and across two narrative perspectives (participant as victim vs. participant as third party). However, joint evidence of suffering and understanding did not strengthen this effect, contrary to predictions. We discuss the implications of these findings for leading philosophical theories of punishment. (shrink)

Phenotypic divergence among animal species may be due in part to species‐specific (SS) regulation of gene expression by small, non‐coding regulatory RNAs termed “microRNAs”. This phenomenon can be modulated by several variables. First, microRNA genes vary by their level of conservation, many of them being SS, or unique to a particular evolutionary lineage. Second, microRNA expression levels vary spatially and temporally in different species. Lastly, while microRNAs bind the 3′UTR of target genes in order to silence their expression, the binding (...) sites themselves are often non‐conserved. The variability of the miRNA‐target paradigm between different species is thus multifactorial, and this paradigm has only just started to gain attention from researchers in various fields. Here we present and discuss recent findings regarding the characteristics and implications of SS microRNA regulation. (shrink)