“Caring‐about” and the Problem of Overwhelming Obligations

Care theorists often think of care as involving (at least) “caring‐about”—concern or attentiveness—and “caring‐for”—acting to nurture, look after, or meet needs. One problem for any theory of care is the scope of our obligations to care in both of those senses; in particular, our capacities for “caring‐about” often outrun our capacities for “caring‐for.” Accounts of care as potentially global in scope may ascribe overwhelming obligations to moral agents; however, we are often tempted to avoid or ignore situations that may call for a caring response. I suggest that some Kantian ideas may help to strike a reasonable balance.     

That “Ought” Does Not Imply “Right”: Why It Matters for Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethicists sometimes say that a right action is what a virtuous person would do, characteristically, in the circumstances. But some have objected recently that right action cannot be defined as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances because there are circumstances in which a right action is possible but in which no virtuous person would be found. This objection moves from the premise that a given person ought to do an action that no virtuous person would do, to the conclusion that the action is a right action. I demon‐strate that virtue ethicists distinguish “ought” from “right” and reject the assumption that “ought” implies “right.” I then show how their rejection of that assumption blocks this “right but not virtuous” objection. I conclude by showing how the thesis that “ought” does not imply “right” can clarify a further dispute in virtue ethics regarding whether “ought” implies “can.”     

对友谊关系社会认知发展的跨文化比较研究

该研究以友谊许诺为主题的故事分别对冰岛（雷克雅未克市）和中国（北京市）的７岁和９岁小学儿童作个别随访,探查儿童在友谊矛盾冲突情景中是如何作出行动决定选择及道德评价的。研究结果揭示了文化及年龄变量对儿童有关社会认知发展的影响。     

Cognition in moral space: A minimal model

We describe moral cognition as a process occurring in a distinctive cognitive space, wherein moral relationships are defined along several morally relevant dimensions. After identifying candidate dimensions, we show how moral judgments can emerge in this space directly from object perception, without any appeal to moral rules or abstract values. Our reductive “minimal model” (Batterman & Rice, 2014) elaborates Beal’s (2020) claim that moral cognition is determined, at the most basic level, by “ontological frames” defining subjects, objects, and the proper relation between them. We expand this claim into a set of formal hypotheses that predict moral judgments based on how objects are “framed” in the relevant dimensions of “moral space.”     

Effet d'un scénario d'interaction dans la résolution d'un problème chez des enfants de 5–6 ans

Children aged 5–6 years performed a problem-solving task designed to investigate the source of cognitive gain observed after peer social interaction. In a joint problem-solving context, pairs of subjects had to work by using a tool whose function was to facilitate and regulate their solving activity. The role of each partner in the dyads was established by the experimenter in the “socio-regulated interaction” group but not in the “free interaction” group. A control group of single children was also included in the present study. The assumption was that role allocation would facilitate semiotic mediation and lead to differentiation in the solving activities. The “free interaction group” obtained the highest performance in the joint problem solving context, whereas a delayed post-test revealed that “socio-regulated interaction” leads to the highest improvements in individual performance. These findings are discussed with reference to the activity-regulation systems and the appropriation mechanisms of regulation.     

Compunction,Second-Personal Morality,and Moral Reasons

In The Second-Person Standpoint and subsequent essays, Stephen Darwall develops an account of morality that is “second-personal” in virtue of holding that what we are morally obligated to do is what others can legitimately demand that we do, i.e., what they can hold us accountable for doing through moral reactive attitudes like blame. Similarly, what it would be wrong for us to do is what others can legitimately demand that we abstain from doing. As part of this account, Darwall argues for the proposition that we have a distinctive “second-personal reason” to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong-actions, an “authority-regarding” reason that derives from the legitimate demands the “moral community” makes of us. I show that Darwall offers an insufficient case for this proposition. My criticism of this aspect of Darwall’s account turns in part on the fact that we have compunction-based or “compunctive” reasons to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong actions, a type of reason that Darwall seemingly overlooks.     

Moral principles as moral dispositions

What are moral principles? In particular, what are moral principles of the sort that (if they exist) ground moral obligations or—at the very least—particular moral truths? I argue that we can fruitfully conceive of such principles as real, irreducibly dispositional properties of individual persons (agents and patients) that are responsible for and thereby explain the moral properties of (e.g.) agents and actions. Such moral dispositions (or moral powers) are apt to be the metaphysical grounds of moral obligations and of particular truths about what is morally permissible, impermissible, etc. Moreover, they can do other things that moral principles are supposed to do: explain the phenomena “falling within their scope,” support counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary connections” between obligating reasons and obligations. And they are apt to be the truthmakers for moral laws, or “lawlike” moral generalizations.     

意图信息在物权判断和道德判断中的作用

意图会影响人们的道德判断，但尚不清楚意图在物权判断中的作用。本研究以156名非法学专业的大学生为被试，通过包含不同意图（恶意/善意/无意）的故事情景，考察了在损失求偿和获益分享情境中人们的物权判断和道德判断。结果发现，在损失求偿情境中，不管是出于善意、恶意还是无意，被试均判断行为者应当赔偿他人损失，但不认为善意和无意的行为者应受谴责。在获益分享情境中，被试仅认为善意的行为者应当分享给他人带来的收益且应当受赞扬，但不认为恶意和无意的行为者应当受到赞扬。综合来看，意图对常人物权判断和道德判断的影响不一致，物权判断比道德判断较少受意图信息的影响，涉及更多的理性思维，反映其具有领域特异性。     

Ability,Responsibility, and Global Justice

Many have argued that we have a moral obligation to assist others in need, but given the scope of global suffering, how far does this obligation extend? According to one traditional philosophical view, the obligation to help others is limited by our ability to help them, or by the principle that “ought implies can.” This view is primarily defended on the grounds that it is a core principle of commonsense moral psychology. This paper reviews findings from experimental philosophy in cognitive science demonstrating that “ought implies can” is rejected by moral psychology. Researchers find that moral obligations are ascribed to agents who cannot fulfill them, suggesting that moral requirements do sometimes extend beyond what we are able to do. This research furthers our understanding of moral obligation, identifies an important need for further cross-cultural work in moral psychology, and demonstrates a way in which scientific experimentation can be applied to improve upon the conceptual analysis of important philosophical concepts in normative ethics.

     

Development of comprehension of “or”: Evidence for a sequence of competencies

Comprehension of various usages of “or” was investigated in children 5–6, 7–8, and 9–10 years old, and in college students. One task used imperatives containing “or.” and investigated the set union interpretation. In a second task, one puppet asserted a statement and another puppet contradicted it: subjects were asked whether both could be right, and whether one had to be right. A third task investigated the truth conditions for disjunctions. The fourth task presented reasoning problems that tested principles of inference involving “or.” It was found that all age groups, even the youngest, could make the logical inferences involving “or.” All age groups could also perceive contradictions, but subjects were less than unanimous that one of the puppets contradicting each other had to be right. Sensible truth judgments for disjunctions began to develop around 7–8 years. Set union was elicited in only a few adults. In general, except when it indicates set union, “or” is understood substantially earlier than the current literature suggests. Logical inference is one of the first uses in which children become competent, suggesting that the basic meaning of “or” is given by inference forms for reasoning with alternatives, not by truth conditions.     

The effects of sex-role ideology,self-esteem,and expected future interactions with an audience on male help seeking

Male subjects, purportedly being observed by an audience, received failure feedback while working on a task (rating dialogues for neuroticism). Help was readily available, from a male or female assistant, and the primary dependent variable was whether or not subjects requested help. Embarrassment was postulated as the major inhibitor of help seeking in this situation. Self-report measures of embarrassment and perceived accuracy were taken throughout the session. The independent variables were: task centrality (sex-role appropriateness), sex of assistant, expectation of future interaction with the audience, self-esteem, and sex-role ideology (“traditional” vs “feminist” beliefs). The principal results for help seeking were: high esteem traditional subjects sought help less frequently on the central (male) task and more frequently sought help on the peripheral (female) task; feminists did not differ in help seeking according to sex of task. Increased embarrassment was not generally associated with inhibition of help seeking. In fact, there was a trend for high embarrassment to be reported immediately before help was sought. To explain these results, two forms of embarrassment are distinguished — the embarrassment due to continued failure, which should result in seeking help to bring about success, and anticipated embarrassment involved in the act of seeking help, which should inhibit help-seeking behavior.     

A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame

Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: 1. One's blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent's wrongdoing. 3. One is warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the wrongdoing. 4. The target's wrongdoing is some of “one's business”. These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing”. Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone's standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer's action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non‐hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our “moral fragility”, the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the “equality of persons”.     

“Ought Implies Can,” Framing Effects,and “Empirical Refutations”

This paper aims to contribute to the current debate about the status of the “Ought Implies Can” (OIC) principle and the growing body of empirical evidence that undermines it. We report the results of an experimental study which show that people judge that agents ought to perform an action even when they also judge that those agents cannot do it and that such “ought” judgments exhibit an actor-observer effect. Because of this actor-observer effect on “ought” judgments and the Duhem-Quine thesis, talk of an “empirical refutation” of OIC is empirically and methodologically unwarranted. What the empirical fact that people attribute moral obligations to unable agents shows is that OIC is not intuitive, not that OIC has been refuted.     

Routes to Actions and their Efficacy for Remembering

Four experiments focused on the influence that different controls of actions have on memory for these actions. A verbal-to-action task in which subjects had to perform actions on verbal command was distinguished from a movement-to-action task in which subjects had to perform the same action that a model had shown (imitation). We expected free recall to be worse for the imitation condition than for the enactment-on-command condition. The following rank order of recall performances was observed: verbal learning << perceiving the model = imitating the watched model < performing on command = performing on command in addition to perceiving the model. The less pronounced effect of imitation on memory is explained by the fact that subjects in this condition could directly use the information provided by perception for enactment without selection and detailed planning of motor actions. In contrast, subjects in the command-to-action condition had to look up the “motor program”. The inefficiency of using two modalities, i.e. perception and action, as compared to using only one is explained by the redundancy of encoded information in the visual and “motor” modality.     

用“你”表述物体的功能会抑制成因对归类的影响

已有研究显示物体的成因等变量会影响人造物概念的分类;但这种影响的中介变量为何,基于设计和基于用途的理论有不同的假设。实验采用物体自由命名任务,在陈述物体的功能时,操纵角色词的类型（旁观者“有人”和使用者“你”）,比较被试对物体的命名在领域水平的分类倾向。结果发现,呈现“旁观者”角色词时,呈现或不呈现物体自然形成的成因故事会造成不同的分类倾向;但是在呈现“使用者”角色词时,成因故事对分类倾向的影响消失了。提示物体的功能是成因和分类的中介变量,支持基于用途的人造物分类模型     

Facilitation effect of observed motor deviants in a cooperative motor task: Evidence for direct perception of social intention in action

Spatiotemporal parameters of voluntary motor action may help optimize human social interactions. Yet it is unknown whether individuals performing a cooperative task spontaneously perceive subtly informative social cues emerging through voluntary actions. In the present study, an auditory cue was provided through headphones to an actor and a partner who faced each other. Depending on the pitch of the auditory cue, either the actor or the partner were required to grasp and move a wooden dowel under time constraints from a central to a lateral position. Before this main action, the actor performed a preparatory action under no time constraint, consisting in placing the wooden dowel on the central location when receiving either a neutral (“prêt”–ready) or an informative auditory cue relative to who will be asked to perform the main action (the actor: “moi”–me, or the partner: “lui”–him). Although the task focused on the main action, analysis of motor performances revealed that actors performed the preparatory action with longer reaction times and higher trajectories when informed that the partner would be performing the main action. In this same condition, partners executed the main actions with shorter reaction times and lower velocities, despite having received no previous informative cues. These results demonstrate that the mere observation of socially driven motor actions spontaneously influences the low-level kinematics of voluntary motor actions performed by the observer during a cooperative motor task. These findings indicate that social intention can be anticipated from the mere observation of action patterns.     

Contingencies of Exogenous Reward and Task Performance: On the “Minimax” Strategy in instrumental Behavior1

Subjects performed a task in return for monetary payment. In one experimental condition, the subject's pay was contingent on his working at the task for at least the time specified, in another condition, the pay was contingent on the subject's completion of at least the specified output standard; in a third condition, the amount of pay was contingent on the quantity of output. It was found that subjects in the time-contingent condition adhered most closely to the task's time specification, subjects in the standard-contingent condition adhered most closely to the standard specification, and subjects in the output-contingent condition produced the highest quantities of output. The results are discussed in reference to the idea that extrinsically motivated workers act in accordance with a “minimax” strategy: They attempt to perform the bare minimum of work sufficient for the achievement of maximal rewards.     

Doing Ethics or Changing for the Better?

In this paper, classical pragmatism is used as a method, not as a substantial ethical theory, to develop “moral pragmatics.” Moral pragmatics offers a constructive approach for making progress where traditional ethical theories converge, and it innovates ethical deliberation. Assuming widespread agreement that real moral problems need practical solutions, the paper addresses two related problems: the missing link between ethical theories and moral practice, and the question of who is in charge of finding such solutions. It argues that “conscience” can create a link between ethical knowledge and moral practice, and that this partly discharges “the ethicist” from the task of solving problems that are not really, or not only, hers. Two specific methodological innovations are suggested that go beyond admonitions to render ethics sensitive to context. Instead, a reevaluation of “casuistry” and a sensitivity for “finding the right words” give an idea of how to achieve this goal.     

道德判断中的框架效应:一个新的视角

道德领域亦存在框架效应,但有关这类偏差的研究仍然存在不足。研究以600名大学生为对象,以亚洲疾病和工厂风波两类经典情境为实验情境,设置正面和负面两类属性框架,以研究道德判断的框架效应。结果发现,在面临道德判断情境时,在正面框架下被试倾向于选择确定性方案,而在负面框架下被试倾向于选择风险性方案; 在正面框架下被试倾向于评价风险性方案更违背道德,在负面框架下则认为确定性方案更违背道德; 被试对情境中人物选择确定性或风险性方案道德之可谴责性评价与确定性或风险性方案本身之道德违背性评价的判断并不一致:在正面框架下,若情境中人物选择风险性方案,被试认为其行为更应受到谴责; 但在负面框架下,被试对情境中人物选择确定性方案和风险性方案在道德上应受谴责性的评价并无显著差异。研究还发现道德判断框架效应存在性别差异,负面框架下女生更为风险寻求。