Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems. One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in the future. We posit that humans have (...) an evolved cognitive system that implements this strategy which we conceptualize as a revenge system. The revenge system produces a second adaptive problem: losing downstream gains from the individual on whom retaliatory costs have been imposed. We posit, consequently, a subsidiary computational system designed to restore particular relationships after cost-imposing interactions by inhibiting revenge and motivating behaviors that signal benevolence for the harmdoer. The operation of these systems depends on estimating the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer and the expected future value of the relationship with the harmdoer. We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture. (shrink)
Psychologists' emerging interest in spirituality and religion as well as the relevance of each phenomenon to issues of psychological importance requires an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of each construct. On the basis of both historical considerations and a limited but growing empirical literature, we caution against viewing spirituality and religiousness as incompatible and suggest that the common tendency to polarize the terms simply as individual vs. institutional or ′good′ vs. ′bad′ is not fruitful for future research. Also cautioning against (...) the use of restrictive, narrow definitions or overly broad definitions that can rob either construct of its distinctive characteristics, we propose a set of criteria that recognizes the constructs' conceptual similarities and dissimilarities. Rather than trying to force new and likely unsuccessful definitions, we offer these criteria as benchmarks for judging the value of existing definitions. (shrink)
The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)
The essays in this volume are certainly first rate, as is Natanson's introduction, which attempts to outline the more salient features of phenomenology as a method for philosophy and a philosophical evaluation of the other sciences. Included are Erwin Straus' "The Upright Posture," a translation of Sartre's "Faces" and "Official Portraits," Schutz's "Some Leading Concepts of Phenomenology," and Spiegelberg's "How Subjective is Phenomenology?" A balance between actual phenomenological analyses and historical and critical evaluations of phenomenology itself is attempted and achieved. (...) Other contributors include Aron Gurwitsch, James Street Fulton, Harmon Chapman, Michael Kullman and Charles Taylor, Fritz Kaufmann, and Paul-Louis Landsberg.—E. A. R. (shrink)
The clinical application of the concept of patient autonomy has centered on the ability to deliberate and make treatment decisions (decisional autonomy) to the virtual exclusion of the capacity to execute the treatment plan (executive autonomy). However, the one-component concept of autonomy is problematic in the context of multiple chronic conditions. Adherence to complex treatments commonly breaks down when patients have functional, educational, and cognitive barriers that impair their capacity to plan, sequence, and carry out tasks associated with chronic care. (...) The purpose of this article is to call for a two-component re-conceptualization of autonomy and to argue that the clinical assessment of capacity for patients with chronic conditions should be expanded to include both autonomous decision-making and autonomous execution of the agreed-upon treatment plan. We explain how the concept of autonomy should be expanded to include both decisional and executive autonomy, describe the biopsychosocial correlates of the two-component concept of autonomy, and recommend diagnostic and treatment strategies to support patients with deficits in executive autonomy. (shrink)
The societal and ethical impacts of emerging technological and business systems cannot entirely be foreseen; therefore, management of these innovations will require at least some ethicists to work closely with researchers. This is particularly critical in the development of new systems because the maximum degrees of freedom for changing technological direction occurs at or just after the point of breakthrough; that is also the point where the long-term implications are hardest to visualize. Recent work on shared expertise in Science & (...) Technology Studies (STS) can help create productive collaborations among scientists, engineers, ethicists and other stakeholders as these new systems are designed and implemented. But collaboration across these disciplines will be successful only if scientists, engineers, and ethicists can communicate meaningfully with each other. The establishment of a trading zone coupled with moral imagination present one method for such collaborative communication. (shrink)
In Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together, Michael Bratman refines, systematizes, and defends his “planning theory” of shared agency, various elements of which were sketched in a series of earlier essays on the topic. The book is analytically rigorous and fairly technical at points, but organized and written with extraordinary clarity. It represents a valuable contribution to the literature on shared intention and joint activity, and is essential reading for philosophers working in that area.Bratman takes as his (...) central foils Margaret Gilbert and John Searle, both of whom argue that there is a fundamental discontinuity between individual agency and shared agency in that the resources needed to explain the latter extend beyond those that enable us to explain the former. According to those theorists, an adequate account of shared agency requires appeal to “some new and fundamentally different kind of practical element” : an irreducible “joint commitment” on Gilbert’s .. (shrink)
RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é o de ilustrar a oposição dos comunitaristas ao contratualismo, a partir da análise de um caso específico: a crítica de Michael Sandel ao voluntarismo contido na teoria de Rawls. Sandel chama de "voluntarismo" a tese pela qual princípios políticos e morais se legitimam a partir de um exercício da vontade individual, sob a forma da "escolha" ou do "consentimento". Esta tese, como procuraremos argumentar, está na base do contratualismo moderno, embora somente em Rawls (...) ela atinja sua formulação mais perfeita. Sandel propõe como alternativa ao voluntarismo o que ele chama de "cognitivismo", inspirado na visão de mundo dos antigos. Segundo o cognitivismo, os princípios políticos e morais são derivados de fins ou "bens" que são mais descobertos do que propriamente escolhidos. ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to illustrate the opposition between communitarianism and contratualism, from the analysis of a specific case: Michael Sandel's criticism of voluntarism in the theory of Rawls. For Sandel "voluntarism" is the thesis according to which political and moral principles are legitimate from an exercise of individual will, such as "choice" or "consent". We shall argue that this thesis is the grounding basis of modern contractualism, although only with Rawls it reaches its purest form. Sandel suggests as an alternative to voluntarism what he calls "cognitivism", inspired in the ancient understanding of the world. According to cognitivism, the legitimation of political and moral principles streams from ends or "goods" which are discovered rather than chosen. (shrink)
Resenha LÖWY, Michael. Romantismo e messianismo : ensaios sobre Lukács e Walter Benjamin. Trad. Myriam Vera Baptista e Magdalena Pizante Baptista, 2. ed. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2012. 213p.
If you have ever had to move house, you will know this: the worst part is the sofa. You cannot do it alone. Nor will it be enough for me to just lift one end waiting for you to lift the other. We will have to work together to get the job done. If spaces are tight, we will even have to find a practical solution to a tantalizing mathematical puzzle: the moving sofa problem.Joint actions like that are part and (...) parcel of everyday life. But what exactly is special about acting together? After all, the actions of two strangers also depend on one another when one exits and the other enters through a revolving door, when they happen to walk side-by-side along a forest path, or when they exchange blows in a pub brawl.The problem is that two patterns of social behavior might look identical, even though one is a case of joint action and the other is not. There need not be an observable difference between the movements of old friends taking their morning constitutional together, on the one hand, a .. (shrink)
