This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Exploring emotions, in terms of their evolutionary origin; their basic neurobiological substratum, and their functional significance in autonomous agents, we propose a model of minimal functionality of emotions. Our aim is to provide a naturalized explanation – mostly based on an interactivist model of emergent representation and appraisal theory of emotions – concerning basic aesthetic emotions in the formation of aesthetic judgment. We suggest two processes the Cognitive Variables Subsystem (CVS) which is fundamental for the accomplishment of the function (...) of heuristic learning; and Aesthetic Appraisal Subsystem (AAS) which primarily affects the elicitation of aesthetic emotional meanings. These two subsystems (CVS and AAS) are organizationally connected and affect the action readiness of the autonomous agent. More specifically, we consider the emotional outcome of these two subsystems as a functional indication that strengthens or weakens the anticipation for the resolution of the dynamic uncertainty that emerges in the particular interaction. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of aesthetics has explored to what extent ordinary people are committed to aesthetic realism. Extant work has focused on attitudes to normativism – a key commitment of realist positions in aesthetics – the claim that aesthetic judgments/statements have correctness conditions, invariant between subjects, such that there is a fact of the matter in cases of aesthetic disagreement. The emerging picture is that ordinary people strongly and almost universally reject normativism and thus there is no strong realist tendency in (...) ordinary people’s thinking about the aesthetic. This has been taken to dissolve the traditional puzzle in aesthetics of how to best account for the fact that (a) aesthetic judgments seem intersubjectively valid, while (b) aesthetic experience seems subjective. This paper presents studies which further enrich our understanding of ordinary thinking about the aesthetic: ordinary thinking about the aesthetic may not be so vehement in its rejection of normativism; and where previous results suggested that, in many cultures, the dominant trend is to reject correctness conditions for aesthetic judgments, the current results suggest participants think aesthetic judgments have correctness conditions (albeit perhaps very finely relativized to specific circumstances of judgment). (shrink)

Practical wisdom and judgment, rather than seen as ‘things’ hidden inside the mind, are best talked of, we suggest, as emerging developmentally within an unceasing flow of activities, in which practitioners are inextricably immersed. Following a performative line of thinking, we argue that when practitioners (namely, individuals immersed in a practice, experiencing their tasks through the emotions, standards of excellence and moral values the practice engenders or enacts) face a bewildering situation in which they do not know, initially at (...) least, how to proceed, the judgment they exercise emerges out of seeking to establish a new orientation to their puzzling surroundings. They do so through actively trying to be in touch with their felt emotions and moral sensibilities, while attempting to articulate linguistically the feelings experienced in order to get a clearer view of relevant aspects of the situation at hand. Coming to a judgment involves moving around within a landscape of possibilities, and in so doing, being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move, and assessing which one (or combination of moves) seems best in resolving the initial tension aroused in one’s initial confusion. (shrink)

This paper presents a regress challenge to the selective psychological debunking of moral judgments. A selective psychological debunking argument conjoins an empirical claim about the psychological origins of certain moral judgments to a theoretical claim that these psychological origins cannot track moral truth, leading to the conclusion that the moral judgments are unreliable. I argue that psychological debunking arguments are vulnerable to a regress challenge, because the theoretical claim that ‘such-and-such psychological process is not moral-truth-tracking’ relies upon moral judgments. We (...) must then ask about the psychological origins of these judgments, and then make a further evaluative judgment about these psychological origins… and so on. This chain of empirical and evaluative claims may continue indefinitely and, I will argue, proponents of the debunking argument are in a dialectical position where they may not simply call a halt to the process. Hence, their argument cannot terminate, and its debunking conclusion cannot be upheld. (shrink)

Teachers’ social-emotional competence is considered important to master the social and emotional challenges inherent in their profession and to build positive teacher-student relationships. In turn, this is key to both teachers’ occupational well-being and positive student development. Nonetheless, an instrument assessing the profession-specific knowledge and skills that teachers need to master the social and emotional demands in the classroom is still lacking. Therefore, we developed the Test of Regulation in and Understanding of Social Situations in Teaching (TRUST), which is a (...) theory-based situational judgment test measuring teachers’ knowledge about strategies for emotion regulation and relationship management in emotionally and socially challenging situations with students. Results from three studies (N = 166 in-service teachers, N = 73 in-service teachers, N = 107 pre-service teachers) showed satisfactory internal consistency for both the emotion regulation and relationship management subtests. Furthermore, confirmatory factor analyses supported the differentiation between the two facets of social-emotional competence. Regarding convergent validity, results from Study 3 revealed a positive association between the profession-specific TRUST and pre-service teachers’ general emotional intelligence. Furthermore, small to moderate correlations with the Big Five personality traits provided evidence for the discriminant validity of TRUST. In Studies 1 and 2, we found evidence for a correlation with external criteria, that is, teachers with higher test scores reported providing more emotional support for students and having better teacher-student relationships. For teachers’ occupational well-being, we found a link with symptoms of depersonalization and job satisfaction, but none for emotional exhaustion. We will discuss the use of TRUST in research, for the evaluation of interventions, in teacher education, and professional development and will illustrate ideas for enhancing the tool. (shrink)

Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. However, it has been previously shown that some sacrificial dilemmas fail to present a genuine contrast between utilitarian and deontological options. (...) Here, I raise deeper problems for this research paradigm. Even when sacrificial dilemmas present a contrast between utilitarian and deontological options at a philosophical level, it is misleading to interpret the responses of ordinary folk in these terms. What is currently classified as “utilitarian judgment” does not in fact share essential features of a genuine utilitarian outlook, and is better explained in terms of commonsensical moral notions. When subjects deliberate about such dilemmas, they are not deciding between opposing utilitarian and deontological solutions, but engaging in a richer process of weighing opposing moral reasons. Sacrificial dilemmas therefore tell us little about utilitarian decision-making. An alternative approach to studying proto-utilitarian tendencies in everyday moral thinking is proposed. (shrink)

The book asks how, and how much, we can improve our ethical standards—not lift our behaviour closer to our standards but refine the standards themselves. To answer this question requires answering most of the major questions of ethics. So the book includes a discussion of what a good life is like, where the bounds of the natural world come, how values relate to that world (e.g. naturalism, realism), how great human capacities—the ones important to ethics—are, and where moral norms come (...) from. Throughout the book, the question of what philosophy can contribute to ethics arises. Philosophical traditions, such as most forms of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, are, the book contends, too ambitious. Ethics cannot be what philosophers in those traditions expect it to be because agents cannot be what these philosophies require them to be. The book starts by questioning the adequacy of both appeals to intuition and the coherence method of justification in ethics (e.g. wide reflective equilibrium) and ends with a description of the sort of justification available to us. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Section 1: Rational Judgment and Understanding Section 2: The Structure of Systematicity Section 3: Systematicity as Methodological Maxim? Section 4: Nature and Rational Structure.

This essay examines the significantly different approaches of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt to the problem of judgment in democratic theory and practice.

In the Typic chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant aims to enable moral judgment by means of the law of nature, which serves as the ‘type’, or formal analogue, of moral law. The present monograph is the first comprehensive study of this key text. It provides a detailed commentary on the Typic, situates it within Kant’s ethics and his theory of symbolic representation, and critically engages with the relevant secondary literature.

Discussions of the account of judgment offered in the Fourth Meditation tend to focus on its role in Descartes' epistemology and his response to skepticism. The main focus of the Fourth Meditation is the true and the false, and it completes the discussion conducted in the Second and Third Meditation about truth and falsity and the proper use of the truth rule. This chapter summarizes Descartes' view of the nature of judgment before examining more closely the account of (...) the will unfolding in the Fourth Meditation, and the kind of indifference Descartes appeals to in defending his controversial doctrine of free choice. Descartes' problematic account of the will and its freedom is developed in an epistemological and theodical context, the aim being to warrant the truth rule and, perhaps even more importantly, to draw a line between God's and our own responsibility for our cognitive errors. (shrink)

We describe a computational model of two central aspects of people's probabilistic reasoning: descriptive probability estimation and inferential probability judgment. This model assumes that people's reasoning follows standard frequentist probability theory, but it is subject to random noise. This random noise has a regressive effect in descriptive probability estimation, moving probability estimates away from normative probabilities and toward the center of the probability scale. This random noise has an anti-regressive effect in inferential judgement, however. These regressive and anti-regressive effects (...) explain various reliable and systematic biases seen in people's descriptive probability estimation and inferential probability judgment. This model predicts that these contrary effects will tend to cancel out in tasks that involve both descriptive estimation and inferential judgement, leading to unbiased responses in those tasks. We test this model by applying it to one such task, described by Gallistel et al. ). Participants' median responses in this task were unbiased, agreeing with normative probability theory over the full range of responses. Our model captures the pattern of unbiased responses in this task, while simultaneously explaining systematic biases away from normatively correct probabilities seen in other tasks. (shrink)

Includes twelve of the most important modern critical discussions of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, written by the leading Kant scholars and aestheticians of the twentieth century.

It has sometimes been suggested that people represent the structure of action in terms of an action tree. A question now arises about the relationship between this action tree representation and people’s moral judgments. A natural hypothesis would be that people first construct a representation of the action tree and then go on to use this representation in making moral judgments. The present paper argues for a more complex view. Specifically, the paper reports a series of experimental studies that appear (...) to show that people’s moral judgments can actually impact their representations of the action tree itself. (shrink)

The standard by which we apply decision-making for those unable to do so for themselves is an important practical ethical issue with substantial implications for the treatment and welfare of such individuals. The approach to proxy or surrogate decision-making based upon substituted judgement is often seen as the ideal standard to aim for but suffers from a need to provide a clear account of how to determine the validity of the proxy's judgements. Proponents have responded to this demand by providing (...) the truth-conditions for the substituted judgement in terms of counterfactual reasoning using a possible worlds semantics. In this paper, I show how these underpinnings fail to support the substituted judgement approach as a reasonable standard for decision-making. Firstly, I show how this counterfactual element has been poorly interpreted. I then explain how various accounts have failed to reflect problems and limitations associated with providing an interpretation of their truth-conditions using counterfactuals. Finally, I argue that, even when we attend to the initial problems of providing a counterfactual analysis, it still deeply problematic as a means of determining the validity of substituted judgements for two main reasons. Firstly, making determinate judgements as to the truth-value of these judgements will often not be possible and, secondly, there is a strong requirement when interpreting many counterfactual claims to charitably accede to their being true. I conclude that substituted judgements, as interpreted through counterfactual reasoning and possible worlds semantics, do not therefore provide an adequate standard for surrogate decision-making. (shrink)

I shall argue, however, that there can be genuine ambivalence between a judgment that A is v and a judgment that A is not v. Such ambivalence may, moreover, be precisely of the kind that appears to be either impossible or destructive for ethics. Objectivist ambivalence, as we shall call it, is neither an accidental nor peripheral feature of our value discourse. At the same time it is not destructive to ethics or to value judgments in general, but (...) only to certain received philosophical conceptions of ethics and value. Once the phenomenon of objectivist ambivalence of value judgment is identified, it can be analyzed, and in conducting that analysis I shall set out three aspects that are involved in it. The analysis of the mental attitude of ambivalence will have consequences for the logic of values. We shall see that this logic allows and invites tensions in a non-mysterious way. (shrink)

Editor’s AbstractIn this essay (adapted from a lecture), Huang Yushun rejects what he calls the trend toward “New Confucian Religion” (xin rujiao), emphasizing the ways that Confucianism as a secular, lived philosophy must develop in the modern world. Echoing Li Minghui's claim that Confucianism and liberalism are compatible, Huang advocates “Confucian liberalism” (rujia ziyouzhuyi) and criticizes many themes central to earlier essays in this volume.

This paper draws on findings from qualitative interviews with queer and trans patients and with physicians providing care to queer and trans patients in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to explore how routine practices of health care can perpetuate or challenge the marginalization of queers. One of the most common “measures” of improved cultural competence in health care practice is self-reported increases in confidence and comfort, though it seems unlikely that an increase in physician comfort levels with queer and trans patients (...) will necessarily mean better health care for queers. More attention to current felt discomfort in patient–provider encounters is required. Policies and practices that avoid discomfort at all costs are not always helpful for care, and experiences of shared discomfort in queer health contexts are not always harmful. (shrink)

In R_ousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment_, Denise Schaeffer challenges the common view of Rousseau as primarily concerned with conditioning citizens’ passions in order to promote republican virtue and unreflective patriotic attachment to the fatherland. Schaeffer argues that, to the contrary, Rousseau’s central concern is the problem of judgment and how to foster it on both the individual and political level in order to create the conditions for genuine self-rule. Offering a detailed commentary on Rousseau’s major work on education, (...) Emile, and a wide-ranging analysis of the relationship between Emile and several of Rousseau’s other works, Schaeffer explores Rousseau’s understanding of what good judgment is, how it is learned, and why it is central to the achievement and preservation of human freedom. The model of Rousseauian citizenship that emerges from Schaeffer’s analysis is more dynamic and self-critical than is often acknowledged. This book demonstrates the importance of Rousseau’s contribution to our understanding of the faculty of judgment, and, more broadly, invites a critical reevaluation of Rousseau’s understanding of education, citizenship, and both individual and collective freedom. (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics have seen an amazing revival over the past decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that descriptions of what used to be seen as specific to aesthetic experience can instead be viewed as a general model for human cognition. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed and debated than the dense, complex paragraphs inserted into Kant's Critique of Judgment as sections (...) 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime. This book is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these sections. The Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility between different intellectual and affective faculties. These lessons thus try to isolate the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits. (shrink)

One important distinction in psychology is between inferences based on associative memory and inferences based on analysis and rules. Much previous empirical work conceive of associative and analytical processes as two exclusive ways of addressing a judgment task, where only one process is selected and engaged at a time, in an either-or fashion. However, related work indicate that the processes are better understood as being in interplay and simultaneously engaged. Based on computational modeling and brain imaging of spontaneously adopted (...) judgment strategies together with analyses of brain activity elicited in tasks where participants were explicitly instructed to perform similarity-based associative judgments or rule-based judgments (n = 74), we identified brain regions related to the two types of processes. We observed considerable overlap in activity patterns. The precuneus was activated for both types of judgments, and its activity predicted how well a similarity-based model fit the judgments. Activity in the superior frontal gyrus predicted the fit of a rule-based judgment model. The results suggest the precuneus as a key node for similarity-based judgments, engaged both when overt responses are guided by similarity-based and rule-based processes. These results are interpreted such that similarity-based processes are engaged in parallel to rule-based-processes, a finding with direct implications for cognitive theories of judgment. (shrink)

On a traditional interpretation of the substituted judgement standard a person who makes treatment decisions on behalf of a non-competent patient ought to decide as the patient would have decided had she been competent. I propose an alternative interpretation of SJS in which the surrogate is required to infer what the patient actually thought about these end-of-life decisions. In clarifying SJS it is also important to differentiate the patient's consent and preference. If SJS is part of an autonomy ideal of (...) the sort found in Kantian ethics, consent seems more important than preference. From a utilitarian perspective a preference-based reading of SJS seems natural. I argue that the justification of SJS within a utilitarian framework will boil down to the question whether a non-competent patient can be said to have any surviving preferences. If we give a virtue-ethical justification of SJS the relative importance of consent and preferences depends on which virtue one stresses-respect or care. I argue that SJS might be an independent normative method for extending the patient's autonomy, both from a Kantian and a virtue ethical perspective. (shrink)

The construction industry is usually characterized as a fragmented system of multiple-organizational entities in which members from different technical backgrounds and moral values join together to develop a particular business or project. The greatest challenge in the construction process for the achievement of a successful practice is the development of an outstanding reputation, which is built on identifying and applying an ethical framework. This framework should reflect a common ethical ground for myriad people involved in this process to survive and (...) compete ethically in today’s turbulent construction market. This study establishes a framework for ethical judgment of behavior and actions conducted in the construction process. The framework was primarily developed based on the essential attributes of business management identified in the literature review and subsequently incorporates additional attributes identified to prevent breaches in the construction industry and common ethical values related to professional engineering. The proposed judgment framework is based primarily on the ethical dimension of professional responsibility. The Ethical Judgment Framework consists of descriptive approaches involving technical, professional, administrative, and miscellaneous terms. The framework provides the basis for judging actions as either ethical or unethical. Furthermore, the framework can be implemented as a form of preventive ethics, which would help avoid ethical dilemmas and moral allegations. The framework can be considered a decision-making model to guide actions and improve the ethical reasoning process that would help individuals think through possible implications and consequences of ethical dilemmas in the construction industry. (shrink)

A framework is presented to better characterize the role of individual differences in information processing style and their interplay with contextual factors in determining decision making quality. In Experiment 1, we show that individual differences in information processing style are flexible and can be modified by situational factors. Specifically, a situational manipulation that induced an analytical mode of thought improved decision quality. In Experiment 2, we show that this improvement in decision quality is highly contingent on the compatibility between the (...) dominant thinking mode and the nature of the task. That is, encouraging an intuitive mode of thought led to better performance on an intuitive task but hampered performance on an analytical task. The reverse pattern was obtained when an analytical mode of thought was encouraged. We discuss the implications of these results for the assessment of decision making competence, and suggest practical directions to help individuals better adjust their information processing style to the situation at hand and make optimal decisions. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to examine the possible relationships between the different dimensions of aesthetics on the one hand, and medical practice and medical ethics on the other hand. Firstly, I consider whether the aesthetic perception of the human body is relevant for medical practice. Secondly, a possible analogy between the artistic process and medical action is examined. The third section concerns the comparison between medical ethical judgements and aesthetic judgement of taste. It is concluded that the mutual (...) relevance between the aesthetic sphere, moral judgement and medical practice can be understood only if we recognize these spheres as distinct. (shrink)

It is something of a commonplace of Butlerian interpretation that the main interest and achievements of Butler's moral philosophy are in normative ethics, and not metaethics. He wishes to bring moral enlightenment to citizens and not, to philosophers, epistemological enlightenment. Nonetheless for that he makes a number of remarks which, if we were collecting for some bizarre purpose metaethical forms of words, we would note down and include in our collection. Thus he makes some progress towards the development of a (...) moral epistemology, a theory of moral judgment. My purpose here is to assess those steps, and to see how far the structure which results can be called a theory. I have the impression that much of the reluctance among scholars to allow that Butler does have a theory of moral judgment is caused by the metaethical blinkers that they themselves wear; what is in fact the beginnings of an unfashionable and unconventional theory is seen as unsophisticated confusion. But I shall not overdo praise of Butler. I shall suggest that Aristotle does a somewhat better job of developing this type of theory. (shrink)