When can one say that a new theory is truer than the old one it contradicts, even though neither is absolutely true? We are primarily concerned with the case in which the conflicting theories offer answers to the same questions, and so we do not introduce considerations of "logical width". We propose that part of the new theory is truer than part of the old one when the former part gets right whatever the latter-part got right while the former does (...) not make any new mistakes. Pragmatic considerations will determine the relative importance of whatever new mistakes the new theory does make as a whole. To avoid artificial counterexamples, we restrict the parts compared to those that are "convex". A "convex" theory is one that holds in all cases intermediate between any two cases in which it holds. (shrink)

How does character information inform judgments of blame? Some argue that character information is indirectly relevant to blame because it enriches judgments about the mental states of a wrongdoer. Others argue that character information is directly relevant to blame, even when character traits are causally irrelevant to the wrongdoing. We propose an empirical synthesis of these views: a Two Channel Model of blame. The model predicts that character information directly affects blame when this information is relevant to the wrongdoing that (...) elicits blame. Further, the effect of character information on blame depends on judgments about the true self that are independent of judgments of intentionality. Across three pre-registered studies (N = 662), we found support for all three predictions of the Two Channel Model. We propose that this reflects two distinct functions of blame: a social regulatory function that encourages norm compliance and a pedagogical function that encourages personal improvement. (shrink)

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects (...) are not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment. (shrink)

In a single convenient resource, this book organizes and presents clearly the documents of the Catholic church pertaining to medical ethics.

How do people evaluate causal relationships? Do they just consider what actually happened, or do they also consider what could have counterfactually happened? Using eye tracking and Gaussian process modeling, we investigated how people mentally simulated past events to judge what caused the outcomes to occur. Participants played a virtual ball‐shooting game and then—while looking at a blank screen—mentally simulated (a) what actually happened, (b) what counterfactually could have happened, or (c) what caused the outcome to happen. Our findings showed (...) that participants moved their eyes in patterns consistent with the actual or counterfactual events that they mentally simulated. When simulating what caused the outcome to occur, participants moved their eyes consistent with simulations of counterfactual possibilities. These results favor counterfactual theories of causal reasoning, demonstrate how eye movements can reflect simulation during this reasoning and provide a novel approach for investigating retrospective causal reasoning and counterfactual thinking. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

A well-ingrained and recommended engineering practice in safety-critical software systems is to separate safety concerns from other aspects of the system. Along these lines, there have been calls for operating systems that implement ethical controls in an ethical layer separate from, and not amenable to tampering by, developers and modules in higher-level intelligence or cognition layers. There have been no implementations that demonstrate such a marshalling of ethical principles into an ethical layer. To address this, we present three different tracks (...) for implementing such systems, and offer a prototype implementation of the third track. We end by addressing objections to our approach. (shrink)

Abstract:This visual essay invites renewed reflection on the iconography of the people. In the spring of 2020, Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei prohibited citizens from leaving their homes to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19. Doing little to manage the spread of the virus, these curfew events gave new aesthetic and political meaning to a familiar visual genre: photographs of empty streets. For more than a century, and especially in the summer of 2020, images of crowds (...) and mass protests have provided both governments on the one hand, and protesting multitudes on the other with an aesthetic representation of the people. But this interest in collective assemblies has tended to engage only one side of the equation. To fully appreciate the visual power of the people, it is also necessary to understand those images from which people are strikingly absent. (shrink)

This article examines methodological and ethical issues of ethnographic research through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy. Levinas is relevant to a critical analysis of ethnographic methods because his philosophy turns on the problematic relationship between self and other, among other important problems that define and guide contemporary anthropological research, including questions of responsibility, justice, and solidarity. This article utilizes Levinas's philosophy to outline a phenomenology of the “doing” of fieldwork, emphasizing the contingency of face-to-face encounters over controlled research design. (...) This account provides a basis for going beyond the polarized opposition between objective and subjective ethnographic approaches. Levinas allows for an ethically informed ethnography premised upon an acknowledgement of risk and uncertainity over researcher control or reflexivity. Providing a handful of concrete examples, the article argues that critical self-reflection about the fundamental face-to-face dimension of fieldwork is central to ethnography's ethical possibilities. (shrink)

Hoerl & McCormack propose a two-system account of temporal cognition. We suggest that, following other classic proposals where cognitive systems are putatively independent, H&M's two-system hypothesis should, at a minimum, involve a difference in the nature of the representations upon which each system operates, and a difference in the computations they carry out. In this comment we offer two challenges aimed at showing that H&M's proposal does not meet the minimal requirements and.

This paper explores gender barriers to the formation of the female mentor – male protégé relationship. The authors consider both physiological as well as social gender as a way to help understand the scarcity of these relationships. A number of gender-related factors are considered, including organizational demographics, relational demography, sexual liaisons, gender stereotypes, gender behaviors, and power dynamics. The paper concludes with directions for future research that will help provide further insights into the development and success of the female mentor (...) – male protégé relationship. (shrink)

This article traces the emergence of ecomedia in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. I take this emergence as an opportunity to think through the relations of sensing technologies and animals as well as the transformative potential of these relations for critical thought. I turn to the camera trap and the Geiger counter first to understand how these sensor-based media are used to generate data around environmental inquiry as well as how they may be reassembled to help us take measure of the (...) aftereffects of the 3.11 disasters through and with located relationships and encounters among species, human and nonhuman. By exploring how ecomedia invite nonhuman makings to enter the analytical frame, I hope to arrive at an understanding of environmental harm not as a futurological threat but as an ongoing event that calls for new forms of agentic thinking and enactments of multispecies struggle and collaboration. (shrink)

Focal brain metabolic effects detected by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) represent prospective indices of clinical status and guides to treatment design. Sampling bilateral pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC), anterior middle cingulate cortex (aMCC), and thalamus in 40 adult patients and 16 healthy controls, we examined relationships of the neurometabolites glutamate+glutamine (Glx), creatine+phosphocreatine (Cr), and choline-compounds (Cho) with OCD diagnosis and multiple symptom types. The latter included OC core symptoms (Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale - YBOCS), depressive symptoms (...) (Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale - MADRS), and general functioning (Global Assessment Scale - GAS). pACC Glx was 9.7% higher in patients than controls. Within patients, Cr and Cho correlated negatively with YBOCS and MADRS, while Cr correlated positively with the GAS. In aMCC, Cr and Cho correlated negatively with MADRS, while Cr in thalamus correlated positively with GAS. These findings present moderate support for glutamatergic and cingulocentric perspectives on OCD. Based on our prior metabolic model of OCD, we offer one possible interpretation of these group and correlational effects as consequences of a corticothalamic state of elevated glutamatergic receptor activity alongside below-normal glutamatergic transporter activity. (shrink)

Background Ensuring individual free and informed decision‐making for research participation is challenging. It is thought that preliminarily informing communities through ‘community sensitization’ procedures may improve individual decision‐making. This study set out to assess the relevance of community sensitization for individual decision‐making in research participation in rural Gambia. Methods This anthropological mixed‐methods study triangulated qualitative methods and quantitative survey methods in the context of an observational study and a clinical trial on malaria carried out by the Medical Research Council Unit Gambia. (...) Results/discussion Although 38.7% of the respondents were present during sensitization sessions, 91.1% of the respondents were inclined to participate in the trial when surveyed after the sensitization and prior to the informed consent process. This difference can be explained by the informal transmission of information within the community after the community sensitization, expectations such as the benefits of participation based on previous research experiences, and the positive reputation of the research institute. Commonly mentioned barriers to participation were blood sampling and the potential disapproval of the household head. Conclusion Community sensitization is effective in providing first‐hand, reliable information to communities as the information is cascaded to those who could not attend the sessions. However, further research is needed to assess how the informal spread of information further shapes people's expectations, how the process engages with existing social relations and hierarchies (e.g. local political power structures; permissions of heads of households) and how this influences or changes individual consent. (shrink)

This qualitative study describes the lived experience of physicians who work in communities that have experienced a public mass shooting. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seventeen physicians involved in eight separate mass casualty shooting incidents in the United States. Four major themes emerged from constant comparative analysis: The psychological toll on physicians: “I wonder if I'm broken”; the importance of and need for mass casualty shooting preparedness: “[We need to] recognize this as a public health concern and train physicians to (...) manage it”; massive media attention: “The media onslaught was unbelievable”; and commitment to advocacy for a public health approach to firearm violence: “I want to do whatever I can to prevent some of these terrible events.”. (shrink)

In the past decade Mary Wollstonecraft has become an increasingly important figure in the history of political thought. However, relatively few interpretations of her work exist. This piece focuses on Wollstonecraft's least-read text, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe . It provides a new interpretation of this work, one that stresses its relation to the Scottish Enlightenment. The argument is that Wollstonecraft's text can be (...) read as a novel move initiated from within the discourse of ‘manners’ that J.G.A. Pocock, especially, has shown to be key to understanding the period in general and the Scots in particular. Wollstonecraft challenged the central claim of the Scottish four-stage historical thesis that extant European manners marked the development of a higher level of moral and civic virtue. At the same time, however, she appropriated the Scots’ underlying notion of a civilizing process. By rewriting the history of manners from a perspective that denied their necessary connection to morals, Wollstonecraft sought to explain the French Revolution's violence as a predictable consequence of moral underdevelopment, while simultaneously defending the Revolution itself as a positive moment in the evolution of civilization based on intellectual progress. This attempt to shift the Scottish Enlightenment discursive paradigm of manners in the course of articulating a ‘moral view’ of the French Revolution, I argue, constitutes the view of history held by the most important early-modern feminist. (shrink)

Many environmentalists believe that the ethos of capitalism is a primary cause of environmental degradation, arguing that only a fundamental shift away from the materialism and competition of the marketplace will allow humans to live within the earth's carrying capacity. A different strand of contemporary thought, free market environmentalism, argues the opposite: private ownership, individual choice, and the creative forces of human ingenuity are the best available means to solve ecological problems. This essay considers how Christian ecological ethics should respond (...) to free market environmentalism, identifying its moral claims and the theoretical questions it poses to our field while also critiquing the shortcomings that accompany its economic view of human nature and character. We advocate a pragmatic approach that engages in a mutually educative dialogue toward the shared goal of protecting the earth and all its inhabitants. (shrink)

From Harry and Louise through the McCaughey septuplets, this book explains stories and issues in health care ethics that have appeared in the news media.

In the 2008 Instruction Dignitas personae (The Dignity of the Person), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith presented once again the teaching of the Church on in vitro fertilization. Much of this teaching was contained in the earlier Instruction Donum vitae (The Gift of Life, 1987), but the new document brings the teaching of the Church up to date. Because the teaching is not accepted in the secular scientific community and is often unknown in the Catholic community, this (...) article explores the process of IVF, the view of the Church concerning it, and the fundamental principles underlying the Church’s teaching. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.4 (Winter 2010): 709–722. (shrink)

Men often make riskier decisions than women across a wide range of real-life behaviors. Whether this sex difference is accentuated, diminished, or stable under stressful conditions is, however, contested in the scientific literature. A critical blind spot lies amid this contestation: Most studies use standardized, laboratory-based, cognitive measures of decision making rather than complex real-life social simulation tasks to assess risk-related behavior. To address this blind spot, we investigated the effects of acute psychosocial stress on risk decision making in men (...) and women using a standardized cognitive measure and a novel task that simulated a real-life social situation. Participants were exposed to either an acute psychosocial stressor or an equivalent control condition. Stressor-exposed participants were further characterized as high- or low-cortisol responders. Results confirmed that the experimental manipulation was effective. On the IGT, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders made significantly riskier decisions than those characterized as high-cortisol responders. Similarly, in the online chatroom, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders were, relative to those in the Non-Stress group, significantly more likely to make risky decisions. Together, these results suggest that at lower levels of cortisol both men and women tend to make riskier decisions in both economic and social spheres. (shrink)

This article tracks Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as an emergent organizational process that places the employee at its center. Predominantly, research on CSR tends to focus on external pressures and outcomes leading to a neglect of CSR as a dynamic and developing process that relies on the involvement of the employee as a major stakeholder in its co-creation and implementation. Utilizing case study data drawn from a study of a large multinational energy company, we explore how management relies on employees' (...) interaction with CSR as the process of initiation → implementation → maturation develops. Employee involvement grows from a minor element in the CSR initiation stage to a vital contributory factor in CSR's success in the later stages of the process. The article offers new insights into a processual and interactional approach to CSR that accounts for the actions of different actors involved at each stage. Most unusually, it also recognizes the dual impact this has on broader issues concerning the management and involvement of employees through CSR actions, and gaining legitimacy in the eyes of not only external stakeholders but internal too. (shrink)

Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy explores new forms of philosophizing in the age of globalization by challenging the conventional border between the East and the West, as well as the traditional boundaries among different academic disciplines. This rich investigation demonstrates the importance of cross-cultural thinking in our reading of philosophical texts and explores how cross-cultural thinking transforms our understanding of the traditional philosophical paradigm.

Margaret Cavendish was an English natural philosopher. Influenced by Hobbes and by ancient Stoicism, she held that the created, natural world is purely material; there are no incorporeal substances that causally affect the world in the course of nature. However, she parts company with Hobbes and sides with the Stoics in rejecting a participate theory of matter. Instead, she holds that matter is a continuum. She rejects the mechanical philosophy's account of the essence of matter as simply extension. For Cavendish, (...) matter is also essentially living, sensing, and rational. She also rejects the mechanical philosophy's explanation of change solely in terms of transference of motion. Her own explanation of change relies upon a notion of "occasional cause." This paper argues that Cavendish's occasional causes are not to be confused with those of Malebranche; hers have some efficient causal powers. It traces the concept of an occasional cause from the ancient Stoics, through Galen, to Renaissance natural philosophers such as J. B. van Helmont, and ultimately to Cavendish and to Descartes. Thus, the aim of the paper is to explicate Cavendish's non-mechanical model of natural change and to show how the key concept in this model, that of "occasional cause," has a long philosophical pedigree. L'anglaise Margaret Cavendish pratique la philosophic naturelle. Sous l'influence de Hobbes et du stoïcisme ancien, elle a soutenu que le monde naturel créé est purement matériel ; dans le cours de la nature, il n'y a pas de substances incorporelles qui affectent causalement le monde. Elle se sépare néanmoins de Hobbes et rejoint les Stoïciens dans son rejet d'une théorie de la matière particulaire. Elle considère au contraire que la matière est un continuum. Elle rejette l'explication de l'essence de la matière comme simple extension, fournie par la philosophic mécaniste. Pour Cavendish, la matière est de plus essentiellement vivante, sentante et rationnelle. Elle rejette aussi l'explication mécaniste du changement en simples termes de transmission de mouvement. Sa propre explication du changement s'appuie sur la notion de cause occasionnelle. Cet article defend l'idée que les causes occasionnelles de Cavendish ne doivent pas être confondues avec celles de Malebranche ; les siennes ont des pouvoirs causaux efficients. Il permet done de suivre l'histoire du concept de cause occasionnelle des anciens Stoïciens, en passant ensuite par Galien jusqu'aux Philosophes de la nature de la Renaissance, comme J. B. van Helmont, et finalement jusqu'à Cavendish et Descartes. Le but de cet article est ainsi de rendre explicite le modèle que Cavendish donne du changement naturel et de montrer comment le concept clé de ce modèle, celui de cause occasionnelle, est le produit d'une longue filiation philosophique. (shrink)

Augustin est bien connu comme défenseur d’une « théorie privative » du mal. On peut lire, par exemple, dans les Confessions que « le mal n’est que la privation du bien, à la limite du pur néant ». Le problème, cependant, avec les théories privatives du mal est qu’elles ne nous offrent pas, généralement, une explication robuste ni de l’activité du mal, ni de son pouvoir à causer des effets bien réels ; effets desquels l’expérience demande, malgré tout, une explication (...) rationnelle. Or, selon Augustin, la privation seule ne permet pas de rendre compte de toutes les manifestations du mal. L’explication privative du mal est, certes, la plus étudiée par la littérature ; mais elle ne constitue qu’une partie du tableau. Cet article veut souligner quatre moments de l’explication du mal qu’Augustin propose : le mal comme privation ; le mal comme parasite par rapport à l’être ; le mal comme perversion de la volonté ; et finalement, le mal comme conflit d’intérêts. Chacun de ces moments éclaire un type de mal, mais aucun ne permet à lui seul de rendre compte du problème. Pris ensemble, cependant, et gardant leurs différences respectives à l’esprit, la réponse d’Augustin à la question du mal se révèle beaucoup plus sophistiquée et exhaustive qu’on ne voudrait souvent l’admettre lorsqu’on se limite uniquement à la théorie de la privation. | : Augustine is well-known for advocating a ‘privation theory’ of evil. In Confessions, he writes that “evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.” The problem with privation theories of evil generally is that they do not provide a robust enough account of the activity and power of evil to cause the very real effects for which experience demands a rational explanation. For Augustine, however, privation alone does not fully account for evil in all of its manifestations. The privation account of evil receives much scholarly treatment, but it is only part of the complete Augustinian picture. This paper outlines four accounts of evil in Augustine : evil as privation, as parasitic on being, as perversion of the will, and as conflict of interest. Each deals with a kind of evil, but none alone provides a complete account. Taken together, however, with their differences in mind, Augustine’s explanation of evil is shown to be much more sophisticated and comprehensive than is often recognised when one limits one’s understanding of Augustine’s conception of evil to the privation theory alone. (shrink)