临床医生应具有很高的哲学修养

人体的复杂性和人命关天的特殊性决定了临床工作具有持久的挑战性.无论是病因的诊断,治疗方案的选择,还是治疗效果的判断都给临床医生的哲学思维提出很高的要求.因此,临床医生不仅要注重积累自己的专业知识和临床经验,而且要努力提高自己的哲学修养.     

How to Be Helpful to Multiple People at Once

When someone hosts a party, when governments choose an aid program, or when assistive robots decide what meal to serve to a family, decision-makers must determine how to help even when their recipients have very different preferences. Which combination of people’s desires should a decision-maker serve? To provide a potential answer, we turned to psychology: What do people think is best when multiple people have different utilities over options? We developed a quantitative model of what people consider desirable behavior, characterizing participants’ preferences by inferring which combination of “metrics” (maximax, maxsum, maximin, or inequality aversion [IA]) best explained participants’ decisions in a drink-choosing task. We found that participants’ behavior was best described by the maximin metric, describing the desire to maximize the happiness of the worst-off person, though participant behavior was also consistent with maximizing group utility (the maxsum metric) and the IA metric to a lesser extent. Participant behavior was consistent across variation in the agents involved and  tended to become more maxsum-oriented when participants were told they were players in the task (Experiment 1). In later experiments, participants maintained maximin behavior across multi-step tasks rather than shortsightedly focusing on the individual steps therein (Experiment 2, Experiment 3). By repeatedly asking participants what choices they would hope for in an optimal, just decision-maker, and carefully disambiguating which quantitative metrics describe these nuanced choices, we help constrain the space of what behavior we desire in leaders, artificial intelligence systems helping decision-makers, and the assistive robots and decision-makers of the future.     

How to Be an Ethical Expressivist

Expressivism promises an illuminating account of the nature of normative judgment. But worries about the details of expressivist semantics have led many to doubt whether expressivism's putative advantages can be secured. Drawing on insights from linguistic semantics and decision theory, I develop a novel framework for implementing an expressivist semantics that I call ordering expressivism. I argue that by systematically interpreting the orderings that figure in analyses of normative terms in terms of the basic practical attitude of conditional weak preference, the expressivist can explain the semantic properties of normative sentences in terms of the logical properties of that attitude. Expressivism's problems with capturing the logical relations among normative sentences can be reduced to the familiar, more tractable problem of explaining certain coherence constraints on preferences. Particular attention is given to the interpretation of wide‐scope negation. The proposed solution is also extended to other types of embedded contexts—most notably, disjunctions.     

How to Be a Bayesian Dogmatist

Rational agents have (more or less) consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, and so in the remainder of the essay I offer an alternative account of how perceptual justification, as the Dogmatist understands it, can be incorporated into the Bayesian formalism.     

How to Be a Humean Interventionist

This paper aims to provide Humean metaphysics for the interventionist theory of causation. This is done by appealing to the hierarchical picture of causal relations as being realized by mechanisms, which in turn are identified with lower‐level causal structures. The modal content of invariances at the lowest level of this hierarchy, at which mechanisms are reduced to strict natural laws, is then explained in terms of projectivism based on the best‐system view of laws.     

How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist

Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that naturalism is self-defeating. Plantinga's argument is, at its heart, an argument from analogy. Plantinga presents various epistemic situations and claims of each that (i) a person in such a situation has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs, and (ii) a reflective naturalist is in a relevantly similar situation. I present various epistemic situations and claim of each that a person in such a situation does not have an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs. I further claim that at least some of these situations are more relevantly like the situation faced by the reflective naturalist than any of the situations Plantinga describes. Therefore, Plantinga's argument fails to establish that the reflective naturalist has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs and hence fails to establish that naturalism is self-defeating.     

生物库管理:如何避免失败

近年来,生物库成为了人们关注的焦点,因为生物库已经成为了生物制药和药学研究领域新的必备基础和来源。生物库所承载的历史使命是极具挑战性的,甚至有些令人望而却步:它既要将现有生物样本库转化成基因学研究的新的研究工具,又要建立大规模人群生物库。建立或维护生物库不仅仅是一项简单的收集工作,而是要通过生物库管理来赋予其特定的知识价值,这种知识价值可以产生相应的医疗健康意义或某种经济价值。生物库的成败与否,生物库创造价值的能力,取决于管理体系的确立和有序模式的建立,其建立可以为分类提供策略,并最终建立一个互动的网络体系,这个互动网络体系呈现在一系列不同的领域中:科学/技术领域,医药/卫生领域,产业化经济领域,法律道德和社会政治领域。     

生物库管理:如何避免失败

近年来,生物库成为了人们关注的焦点,因为生物库已经成为了生物制药和药学研究领域新的必备基础和来源.生物库所承载的历史使命是极具挑战性的,甚至有些令人望而却步:它既要将现有生物样本库转化成基因学研究的新的研究工具,又要建立大规模人群生物库.建立或维护生物库不仅仅是一项简单的收集工作,而是要通过生物库管理来赋予其特定的知识价值,这种知识价值可以产生相应的医疗健康意义或某种经济价值.生物库的成败与否,生物库创造价值的能力,取决于管理体系的确立和有序模式的建立,其建立可以为分类提供策略,并最终建立一个互动的网络体系,这个互动网络体系呈现在一系列不同的领域中:科学/技术领域,医药/卫生领域,产业化经济领域,法律道德和社会政治领域.     

如何才能成为一个真正的马克思主义者?——汤普森“致列泽克·科拉克夫斯基的公开信”解读

在1973年的"致列泽克·科拉克夫斯基的公开信"中,汤普森通过给科拉克夫斯基这个受到第二代英国新左派热捧、然而在他看来已经出现背叛迹象的东欧马克思主义者写公开信,向第二代英国新左派阐发了他对在英国如何才能成为一个真正的马克思主义者这个重大问题的基本理解.     

How to Be a Friend of Absolute Goodness

This paper critically examines Richard Kraut’s attack on the notion of absolute value, and lays out some of the conceptual work required to defend such a notion. The view under attack claims that absolute goodness is a property that provides a reason to value what has it. Kraut’s overall challenge is that absolute goodness cannot play this role. Kraut’s own view is that goodness-for, instead, plays the reason-providing role. My targets are Kraut’s double-counting objection, and his ethical objection against absolute value. After explaining the double-counting objection, and discussing the idea of non-additive reasons, I examine and reject Kraut’s reasons for holding that nonadditivity can rescue relative value but not absolute value. I proceed then to explore a different reply to the double-counting objection by introducing a distinction between normative reasons for action and reasons that explain why a certain consideration is a reason for action. Such a distinction (hinted at by Kraut) would either help both Kraut and the friend of absolute value, or neither of them. I defend the distinction from the objection that it would make absolute value just a ‘shadow’. Finally, I reply to Kraut’s ethical objection that being motivated by absolute value is depersonalizing, on two grounds: 1) if thinking in terms of absolute value depersonalizes relationships, then we have absolute-value-given reasons not to think in those terms; 2) the distinction between normative and explanatory reasons explains why even a motivation centred on absolute value need not be depersonalizing.     

Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad

Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. We review research on this moral self-licensing effect in the domains of political correctness, prosocial behavior, and consumer choice. We also discuss remaining theoretical tensions in the literature: Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people? Finally, we propose avenues for future research that could begin to address these unanswered questions.