The paper argues that the philosophical underpinnings of rational choice theory are vitiated by consideration of the phenomenon of backward-looking motives, such as gratitude, fidelity, and many forms of honesty. Attempts to describe the actions and decisions of those acting from such motives in the terms of rational choice theory fail, and the model of human conduct which is implicit in the theory is both inadequate in itself and pernicious in its general influence. A picture may emerge of (...) the human person as a repository of atomistic ‘experiences’, inhabiting a present from the vantage-point of which his relations to past and future ‘selves’ are contingent, and his responsibilities and commitments correspondingly fluid. And in economics, a supposedly ‘neutral’ account of rational choice in fact encourages and sustains a simple-minded utilitarian ethic. (shrink)

This study aims to enrich our understanding of the relationship between political connections and the adoption of environmental corporate socially responsible investments. In addition to the individual-level political connections, i.e., entrepreneurs’ personal ties to government officials, we propose in China the creation of Communist Party of China branches in privately owned firms serve as organizational and institutionalized dimensions of political connection building. Drawing on the social exchange theory, this paper details how CPC branches function in privately owned firms and how (...) entrepreneurs are motivated by the reciprocal logic to engage in ECSR. We also supplement this main effect by examining the boundary conditions of it at the firm and regional level. Using a dataset with 17,690 firm observations in China, we find that the existence of CPC branches gives rise to the ECSR investments and the firm-level contingencies such as centralized governance and financial constraints, and the regional-level contingencies such as the development of the market system, are important moderators that shape the association of political links and ECSR investments. These findings have ample implications to understand the ECSR activities and extend social exchange theory beyond the individual level on which it is typically applied. (shrink)

This article focuses on justified responses to “immoral” behavior and crimes committed by patients undergoing neuromodulation therapies. Such patients could be held morally responsible in the basic desert sense—the one that serves as a justification of severe practices such as backward‐looking moral outrage, condemnation, and legal punishment—as long as they possess certain compatibilist capabilities that have traditionally served as the quintessence of free will, that is, reasons‐responsiveness; attributability; answerability; the abilities to act in accordance with moral reasons, second‐order (...) volitions, or Deep Self. Recently leading compatibilist neuroethicists added the condition of not feeling alienated from desires motivating a person's action. This article argues against such attempts to determine conditions under which patients undergoing neuromodulation should be subject to negative reactive attitudes and legal punishment. Compatibilism should not be used to justify basic desert moral responsibility and legal punishment. Instead, a new way of thinking about the function of moral responsibility attribution is proposed for patients with neuromodulation. Their compatibilist capabilities should serve as important indicators for determining appropriate, forward‐looking courses of action, such as quarantining and restorative treatment, to ensure the public safety and well‐being of the patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, AristotelesBrandon C. LookPaola-Ludovika Coriando. Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003. Pp. ix. + 318. €28,00.What is a singular thing? Is there a first or last principle that allows us to call something an individual or one? What is the relation between the particular and the universal? Does the being of a particular mean the separation from the universal, or, on (...) the contrary, is the universal a post facto aggregation of individual subjects? What constitutes the individuality of man? This book, based on a lecture course given at the University of Freiburg, addresses these difficult questions and their answers by Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle.The author claims to limit the discussion to these philosophers because their philosophies represent distinct stations in the development of the question of individuation and the nature of individuality and, at the same time, because their different positions are both explicitly and implicitly related to each other (15). Coriando begins her discussion with Nietzsche, a philosopher one might not have linked at all to the "problem of individuation" per se, and moves backward in time to Leibniz and finally to Aristotle. The point of this order of presentation, the reader is told, is to trace back the essentials of the question of individuation to its origin: Aristotle (16). This strategy is largely successful.Nietzsche's primary concern, of course, is with the nature of the individual, or more particularly, the individual Mensch, and how he is distinguished from or distinguishes himself from the rest of the world. The answer, for Nietzsche, is to be found in his concept of the "will to power," which provides what Coriando calls his "ontological principle of individuation": the inherent drive for perspectival self-affirmation and self-increase (131). There is also, however, an "ethical principle of individuation": the attitude of a person vis-à-vis the eternal recurrence of the same. In accepting and letting go of the entirety of the world and its eternal recurrence, one "becomes who one is," and one can know one's individuality.Whereas Nietzsche tries to approach the problem of individuation independently of the entire western tradition of metaphysics, Leibniz is squarely within this tradition. Indeed, [End Page 121] in his first philosophical work, the Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation, the sixteen-year-old Leibniz throws himself into a scholastic fray, carving out a strongly nominalist position. Leibniz's belief that only genuine individuals exist would, of course, stay with him throughout his career; the problem will be, as Coriando nicely shows, to give a precise account of the nature of individual substance. Coriando focuses on two works in her discussion, On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance and, to a much greater extent, the Monadology. The view that she extracts from these works should not be surprising. The principle of individuation, for Leibniz, rests in the active force of a monad and in the particular representation of the rest of the world from the monad's own point of view. Put this way, there is an interesting commonality with Nietzsche at work here.A similar commonality is shown with the thought of Aristotle. Here the principal concern is to explicate Aristotle's conception of ousia in De anima and MetaphysicsZ, H, and Q. Naturally, this leads into an account of how matter can be living and a further explication of Aristotle's energeia and entelecheia. In the end, it becomes clear that the set of concepts—energeia, conatus, will to power—are all, if not equivalent, at least performing largely the same role in guaranteeing the being of individuals. What has become "lost" in Aristotle's philosophy, however, is a notion like the perspectivalism present in Leibniz and Nietzsche, something that Coriando does not discuss at any length.This book offers a broad perspective on the question of individuation, and the choice of Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle allows Coriando to highlight interesting answers to this metaphysical problem. I do have two small quibbles. First, the problem of individuation, or the desire for a principium individuationis is so much a problem associated with medieval philosophy that... (shrink)

This article sets out a forward-looking account of moral responsibility on which the ground-level practice is directly sensitive to aims such as moral formation and reconciliation, and is not subject to a barrier between tiers. On the contrasting two-tier accounts defended by Daniel Dennett and Manuel Vargas, the ground-level practice features backward-looking, desert-invoking justifications that are in turn justified by forward-looking considerations at the higher tier. The concern raised for the two-tier view is that the ground-level (...) practice will be insufficiently responsive to the forward-looking aims that are held to justify it. On the single-tier alternative, forward-looking considerations can more readily motivate substantial revisions, which the practice, due to serious and pervasive deficiencies, requires. (shrink)

Behavioural spillovers refer to the influence that a given intervention targeting behaviour 1 exerts on a subsequent, non-targeted, behaviour 2, which may or may not be in the same domain (health, finance etc.) as one another. So, a nudge to exercise more, for example, could lead people to eat more or less, or possibly even to give more or less to charity depending on the nature of the spillover. But what if spillovers also operate backwards; that is, if the expectation (...) of behaviour 1 influences behaviour 0 that precedes it? For example, a person may form an intention to exercise prompted by a policy intervention but overeat at present as a result. We define such a possibility as a "spillunder". In the proposed article, we critically review the few papers that we have identified through a narrative literature review which have demonstrated spillunder effects to date, and we propose a conceptual framework. Based on evidence about the human mind and behaviour from psychology and economics, we argue that spillunder effects may be more common than the limited empirical findings suggest. We propose six representative mechanisms through which the prospect of behaviour 1 may impact behaviour 0: executive functions, moral licensing and moral cleansing, emotion regulation, energization, construal level, and savouring and dread. We further discuss the policy and practical implications of spillunder effects and examine methodological issues that need to be considered when empirically testing these effects. As with our earlier paper on spillovers, we aim to motivate other behavioural scientists to research behavioural spillunders more systematically and extensively, and to prompt decision makers to consider these effects when designing behavioural interventions. (shrink)

The ‘structural injustice’ framework is an increasingly influential way of thinking about historical injustice. Structural injustice theorists argue against reparations for historical injustice on the grounds that our focus should be on forward-looking responsibility for contemporary structural injustice. Through the use of a case study – the Caribbean Community 10-Point Plan for reparations from 2014 – I argue that this reasoning is flawed. Backward-looking reparations can be justified on the basis of state liability over time. The value (...) of backward-looking reparations is that they ensure that historical perpetrators do not evade their reparative obligations and that affected communities are taken seriously. However, I argue that this backward-looking approach should be supplemented by a forward-looking structural injustice approach and the ‘social connection model’ of responsibility, which can expand the scope of responsible agents and forms of injustice that warrant repair and explain how citizens living now can be expected to pay for crimes of the past. (shrink)

Climate change involves changes in the climate system caused by polluting human activities and the social and natural effects of these changes. The historical and anthropogenic grounds of climate change play an important role in climate justice claims. Many climate justice scholars believe that principles of climate justice should account for the historical and anthropogenic sources of climate change. Two main backward-looking principles have been proposed: the polluter pays principle (PPP) and the beneficiary pays principle (BPP). The BPP (...) emerged in the literature on climate justice in response to certain objections raised against the PPP. In this paper, I focus on two of these objections: the causation objection and the excusable ignorance objection. Defenders of the BPP have traditionally assumed that this principle is not vulnerable to those objections, which renders the BPP superior to the PPP. In this paper, I challenge this underlying assumption. My argument here is simple: moving from the PPP to the BPP in response to any of these objections might be unjustified because the BPP is affected by at least some of the considerations giving rise to these objections. (shrink)

I reflect on the past, present, and future of the field of bioethics. In so doing, I offer a very situated overview of where bioethics has been, where it now is, where it seems to be going, where I think we could do better, and where I dearly hope the field will be heading. I also propose three ways of re‐orienting our theoretic tools to guide us in a new direction: (1) adopt an ethics of responsibility; (2) explore the responsibilities (...) of various kinds of actors and relationships among them; (3) expand the types of participants engaged in bioethics. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 329-344, October 2011.

This paper provides theoretical support for two historical principles for the allocation of remedial responsibility for paying the costs of pollution caused by humans. These remedial principles are based upon particular forms of backward-looking connection with the pollution in question. The suggestion is that we can have reasons to pay the costs of pollution when we are members of communities which were responsible for the original polluting acts in question and/or which have benefited from the polluting acts. In (...) seeking to provide support for backward-looking remedial duties, the paper aims to bolster understandings of the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) which place the primary burden of meeting the costs of pollution upon those communities which caused the pollution in the first place. Thus, in supporting the “beneficiary pays” principle in general, and the “polluter pays” principle in some cases, I challenge interpretations of CBDR which maintain that backward-looking principles are unfair, since they impose duties upon present day generations who were not themselves responsible for the polluting acts in question. (shrink)

Natural language provides motivation for studying modal backwards-looking operators such as “now”, “then” and “actually” that evaluate their argument formula at some previously considered point instead of the current one. This paper investigates the expressive power over models of both propositional and first-order basic modal language enriched with such operators. Having defined an appropriate notion of bisimulation for first-order modal logic, I show that backwards-looking operators increase its expressive power quite mildly, contrary to beliefs widespread among philosophers of (...) language and formal semanticists. That in turn presents a strong argument for the use of operator-based systems in the semantics of natural language, instead of systems with explicit quantification over worlds and times that have become a de-facto standard for such applications. The popularity of such explicit-quantification systems is shown to be based on the misinterpretation of a claim by Cresswell, which led many philosophers and linguists to assume that introducing “now” and “then” is expressively equivalent to explicitly quantifying over worlds and times. (shrink)

Offering a detailed study of early 20th-century essayist, poet, novelist, political campaigner, and theologian G.K. Chesterton, author Stephen R.L. Clark ...

Do future generations of a wrongdoing group have a responsibility to preserve the memory of the past? If so, what manner of responsibility is it? In this essay, I critically examine the categories of forward-looking and backward-looking collective responsibility to see what they might offer to this discussion. I argue that these concepts of responsibility are ambiguous in ways that threaten to prevent important questions from being raised. I draw my examples from contemporary German practices of preserving (...) the memory of the Holocaust and World War II, especially the stolpersteine, which are memorial plaques for individual victims embedded in the sidewalks of German cities. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 10, October 2022.

This paper draws some bold conclusions from modest premises. My topic is an old one, the Neohumean view of practical rationality. First, I show that this view consists of two independent claims, instrumentalism and subjectivism. Most critics run these together. Instrumentalism is entailed by many theories beyond Neohumeanism, viz. by any theory that says rational actions maximize something. Second, I give a new argument against instrumentalism, using simple counterexamples. This argument systematically undermines consequentialism and rational choice theory, I show, using (...) detailed examples of their many social science applications. There is no obvious fix. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Backwards-looking operators Saarinen, E. [1979. “Backwards-Looking Operators in Tense Logic and in Natural Language.” In Essays on Mathematical and Philosophical Logic, edited by J. Hintikka, I. Niiniluoto, and E. Saarinen, 341–367. Dordrecht: Reidel] that have the material in their scope depend on higher intensional operators, are known to increase the expressivity of some intensional languages and have thus played a central role in debates about approaches to intensionality in terms of implicit parameters vs. variables explicitly quantifying over (...) them. The current contribution takes a look at these operators from a type-logical perspective. It is shown that extending Gallin's translation from intensional type logic to two-sorted type theory so as to include a version of Yanovich's backwards-looking operators, does not increase the expressive power of formulae with exclusively intensional parameters. The result, which makes use of a theorem by Zimmermann : 65–77]), is illustrated by pertinent examples from the literature. The paper closes by indicating alternative strategies of incorporating backwards-looking operators. (shrink)

The actions performed by individuals, as consumers and citizens, have aggregate negative consequences for the environment. The question asked in this paper is to what extent it is reasonable to hold individuals and institutions responsible for environmental problems. A distinction is made between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility. Previously, individuals were not seen as being responsible for environmental problems, but an idea that is now sometimes implicitly or explicitly embraced in the public debate on environmental problems is that (...) individuals are appropriate targets for blame when they perform actions that are harmful to the environment. This idea is criticized in this paper. It is argued that instead of blaming individuals for performing actions that are not environmentally friendly we should ascribe forward-looking responsibility to individuals, a notion that focuses more on capacity and resources than causation and blameworthiness. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that a great share of forward-looking responsibility should also be ascribed to institutional agents, primarily governments and corporations. The urge to ascribe forward-looking responsibility to institutional agents is motivated by the efficiency aim of responsibility distributions. Simply put, if responsibility is ascribed to governments and corporations there is a better chance of creating a society in which the opportunities to act in an environmentally friendly way increase. (shrink)

According to David Albert, there are certain situations where we can cause events that lie in our past. In response to a well-known objection that we never observe backward causation, he argues that there are good reasons why we can’t tell when it obtains. However, I identify another difficulty with Albert’s view: at face value, it has the unattractive consequence that backward causation is not just possible, but rife. In this article, I show how this implication can be (...) blocked. I then use my analysis to defend Albert’s account from a second well-known objection, namely, that it allows us to control the past. (shrink)

Philosophy says that life must be understood backwards. But . . . it must be lived forward. . , , It is more and more evident that life can never be really understood in Time. It was a pleasure to read Jason Thompson’s serious and thought-provoking piece, and I am grateful to the editors for giving me a chance to comment. The idea that the self is revealed in narrative is a popular one among different schools of psychotherapy, both in (...) terms of technique and theory; and my response addresses both these issues in turn. As a clinician, I have always liked people’s stories. As a junior psychiatrist, I used to love the moment when I first met someone and could say to them, ‘You were born; and then what .. (shrink)

Lyman Tower Sargent has had a personal and professional impact upon me. I cannot separate the effects of reading his work from engaging with him as a mentor—and more. Hence, this piece will focus on personal and professional texts and their contexts. I revisit Sargent's “An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia,” an essay he contributed to my Future Females: A Critical Anthology. I include passages from my novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: (...) A Fake Memoir which describe protagonist Sondra Lear's relationship with Thurston Howell III, interactions stemming from my longstanding association with Sargent. I describe a prominent male scholar's positive—almost utopian—influence on what I am here calling a retrospective autobiographical portrait of the professor as a young woman. This piece emphasizes that a festschrift contribution is about reciprocity between author and honoree. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate backward-looking accounts of death's badness. I begin by reviewing deprivationism—the standard, forward-looking account of death's badness. On deprivationism, death is bad for its victims when it deprives them of a good future. This account famously faces two problems—Lucretius’s symmetry problem and the preemption problem. This motivates turning to backward-looking accounts of death's badness on which death is bad for its victim (in a respect) when it involves a decline from a (...) good life. I distinguish three different backward-looking accounts of death's badness in terms of decline, and I argue for the attractiveness of one in particular. I conclude by considering how the backward-looking consideration of decline might factor into our overall account of death's badness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Edward Bellamy's influential utopian novel Looking Backward dramatizes the epistemological impact of an increasingly media-saturated urban environment on turn-of-the-century American culture and identity. Bellamy's fanciful adaptation of the telephone receives particularly careful analysis in this essay. Deprived of its transmitting function, this denatured instrument both disrupts Bellamy's utopian project and, more subtly, registers the effect of mass media technologies on the construction and coherence of subjectivity. Lowenstein ultimately argues that Bellamy's novel rehearses the displacement of an epistemology (...) rooted in the search for ontological certainty by what Anthony Giddens calls an epistemology of social reflexivity. (shrink)

How the science of probabilistic extreme event attribution might inform climate change adaptation is hotly debated. Central to these debates is an understanding that event attribution’s backward-lo...

When social reformers blame the current ills of Western culture on the loss of community, they often evoke an ideal past in which societies were characterized by shared values, respect for tradition, commitment to the common good, and similar attributes. Communitarians assert that community was prominent in the past, and argue that reclaiming the role community formerly played is necessary to counter the negative effects of individualism and liberal thinking. Considering the relevance of community for our moral and political life (...) today, Derek Phillips offers the first thorough critique of the historical, often nostalgic, claims that underlie dominant versions of communitarian philosophy. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Publications in Science, Technology, & Human Values need to have an author. For this reason, I have put my name at the head of this text. I have also provided the title.1 But I must emphasize that the words below are not mine. I have done nothing more, in this case, than transcribe an audio-tape recording2 that has recently come into my possession and submit it to the journal's editor. This latter step seemed to me to be appropriate in view (...) of the tape's unique character. If you choose to read on, it will soon become clear why I came to believe that wider distribution was essential. It is no exaggeration, I believe, to suggest that the publication of this transcript may mark a turning-point in human history. As a result, there are likely to be many enquiries about its authenticity. Let me, therefore, state that I have been given conclusive proof that the tape is genuine. I cannot reveal more in this public forum. However, toward the end of the tape, the speaker throws some light on these matters. The tape seems to have been recorded at some kind of academic confer ence. On the original version, there is background noise and evidence of a live audience. This transcription presents only the words of the main speaker. The speaker is female. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Marcuse's Eros and Civilization from the perspective of Gayle Rubin's classic article “The Traffic in Women.” The primary goals of this comparison are to investigate the social and psychological mechanisms that perpetuate the archaic sex/gender system Rubin describes under current conditions of post-industrial capitalism; to open possible new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors’ applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations of Freud's writings; and to make clearer the role sexual repression continues to (...) play in all forms of oppression, even in a public world seemingly saturated with sex. (shrink)

Images of human violence to animals challenge us both psychologically and morally. Sometimes images are so graphic, the treatment they capture so degrading and cruel, that they approach the pornographic. How can we responsibly approach them? Is it more respectful to witness such suffering, or to look away? I explore the notion of bearing witness to animal suffering as a manifestation of respect. I begin by asking why it is important to bear witness to human atrocities such as the Holocaust. (...) Some rationales are forward-looking and consequentialist. We bear witness in the spirit of “never again”: to stir moral motivation and preventive action. But there are also backward-looking and expressive reasons: to show respect for the dead, to express our solidarity and grief, to affirm the moral value of both the lost and the saved. Some might argue that differences between human and nonhuman victims of violence make the latter rationales irrelevant when animal victims are in question. The animal dead did not value being remembered; animal survivors do not share a degrading collective memory of horror and do not care if we acknowledge it. Yet obligations of memory do find a foothold here. Bearing witness to human-animal violence affirms the moral status of animals; it expresses respect and is part of constitutive justice. Bearing witness, however, carries moral risks, so that it matters greatly how one does so. One problem is that witnesses’ “testimony” - usually visual documentation of animal abuse - does not find its way only to compassionate audiences, but also to others who will use it in pernicious ways and some who are simply voyeurs. In this way, the witness can unwillingly become “a pornographer of pain.” Given the motive of paying respect to the animal dead, this is the last outcome a moral witness desires. Yet showing atrocities done to animals in all their horrific detail is among the most powerful ways of gaining allies in the struggle to end animal abuse. In light of such dilemmas, I explore the importance of bearing witness in private and as communal activity, of who attends to animal suffering, and of how and through what media we do so. (shrink)

In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Anscombe characterises the virtue of justice by reference to two features of the just person: (a) that of having a standing intention not ‘to commit or participate in any unjust actions for fear of any consequences, or to obtain any advantage, for himself or anyone else’; and (b) that of being someone who ‘quite excludes’ certain types of action from consideration (viz. intrinsically unjust ones). I investigate what (a) and (b) together amount to and entail. The (...) investigation covers a number of issues, including the nature of moral dilemmas, the relevance or irrelevance of motive to the question whether an act manifests a given virtue (e. g. justice), backward-looking reasons and practical wisdom (phronesis), and the idea of moral bedrock, or moral ‘hinge propositions’. I conclude with a tentative endorsement of the view that there are intrinsically unjust kinds of acts, i. e. acts that are always and everywhere unjust. (shrink)

Collegiality among nurses is necessary for the accomplishment of the tasks of care, for safety and quality improvement and for professional self‐regulation. Nurses, especially in hospitals, are more likely to work in groups than other professionals, yet those relationships have not been well explored. Bullying, intimidation and fear are frequently identified, while respectful disagreements are rarely described. In this paper, a single story by a nurse about her conversational conflict with another nurse is given a close reading. I use the (...) ‘triadic line’ of William Carlos Williams to format an extended excerpt of interview text, in order to make visible the rhythms and organization of spoken language. Mills' concept of a ‘vocabulary of motives’ is used to examine the rhetorical strategies deployed by each nurse. Finally, I analyze the narrative structure of the story, highlighting the ways that moral certainty and uncertainty function to involve the reader in the story, and the complex role of virtue in nursing discourse. (shrink)