Actual and Counterfactual Attitudes: Reply to Brueckner and Fischer

In a recent article, I criticized Anthony L. Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s influential argument—appealing to the rationality of our asymmetric attitudes towards past and future pleasures—against the Lucretian claim that death and prenatal non-existence are relevantly similar. Brueckner and Fischer have replied, however, that my critique involves an unjustified shift in temporal perspectives. In this paper, I respond to this charge and also argue that even if it were correct, it would fail to defend Brueckner and Fischer’s proposal against my critique.     

Belief through Thick and Thin

We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief). We also suggest that the distinction can be applied to debates in the philosophy of mind and metaethics.     

Through Thick and Thin: Validity and Reflective Judgment

The application of “thick” ethical concepts is best understood as a process of reflective rather than deductive judgment. Taking the form “B is as X as A,” where X is a thick ethical concept and A and B are narrative wholes unified through X (for example, “Those who hid Jews from the Nazis were as brave as Achilles”), reflective judgment opens thick ethical concepts to transformation. Though interpretive, such reflective judgment may still be able to provide validity without recourse to “thin,” purportedly context‐neutral terms.     

Overlapping Consensus Thin and Thick: John Rawls and Simone Weil

John Rawls and Simone Weil presented two distinct conceptions of political justice, aimed at articulating a common ethos in an inherently heterogeneous society. The terms of the former, chiefly concerned with the distribution of primary goods, underwrite much of today's Western democracies political liberalism. The terms of the latter, chiefly concerned with the way interaction is organised in social activities in view of the body and soul's balancing pairs of needs, are less well known. We explain the sense in which the overlapping consensus in Weil's notion of political justice is “thicker”, and may thus deserve more attention – alongside that of Rawls – for substantiating a democratic ethos within political liberalism.     

Thick,Thin, and Becoming a Virtuous Arguer

A virtue account is focused on the character of those who argue. It is frequently assumed, however, that virtues are not action guiding, since they describe how to be and so fail to give us specific actions to take in a sticky situation. In terms of argumentation, we might say that being a charitable arguer is virtuous, but knowing so provides no details about how to argue successfully. To close this gap, I develop a parallel with the thick-thin distinction from ethics and use Hursthouse’s notion of “v-rules”. I also draw heavily from the work in argumentation by Daniel Cohen to develop Wayne Brockriede’s notion of arguing lovingly. But “argue lovingly” has a delicious ambiguity. For Brockriede it describes how we engage with others arguers. It can also mean, however, a loving attachment to knowledge, understanding, and truth. Applying the thick-thin distinction to argumentation in general and loving argumentation in particular shows that a virtue theoretic approach to argumentation is valuable for two reasons: it can provide one articulation of what it means to be a virtuous arguer and provide some insights into how to become one.     

Trusting Our Selves to Technology

Trust is a central dimension in the relation between human beings and technologies. In many discourses about technology, the relation between human beings and technologies is conceptualized as an external relation: a relation between pre-given entities that can have an impact on each other but that do not mutually constitute each other. From this perspective, relations of trust can vary between reliance, as is present for instance in technological extensionism, and suspicion, as in various precautionary approaches in ethics that focus on technological risks. Against these two interpretations of trust, this article develops a third one. Based on a more internal account of the relations between human beings and technologies, it becomes possible to see that every technological development puts at stake what it means to be a human being. Using technologies, then, implies trusting ourselves to technologies. We argue that this does not imply an uncritical subjection to technology. Rather, recognizing that technologies help to constitute human subjectivity implies that human beings can get actively involved in processes of technological mediation. Trust then has the character of confidence: deliberately trusting oneself to technology.     

Entitled to Speak: Talk in the Classroom

For young children, learning begins in conversation contexts such as schools. The author of this paper contends that talk activities are fundamental to future knowledge and understanding. Implicit is critique of a current British model that values the practice of speaking through effective talk. This view is contrasted to one centered on expressive speech and authentic listening.     

Selves and Moral Units

Derek Parfit claims that, at certain times and places, the metaphysical units he labels selves may be thought of as the morally significant units (i.e., the objects of moral concern) for such things as resource distribution, moral responsibility, commitments, etc. But his concept of the self is problematic in important respects, and it remains unclear just why and how this entity should count as a moral unit in the first place. In developing a view I call Moderate Reductionism, I attempt to resolve these worries, first by offering a clearer, more consistent account of what the concept of self should involve, and second by arguing for why selves should indeed be viewed as moral (and prudential) units. I then defend this view in detail from both conservative and extreme objections.     

Upward Self-Revision: Constructing Possible Selves

This research examined how and when people engage in upward self-revision to embrace new possible selves in response to social validation. First, the present study (n = 67) predicted and found that upward self-revision was more likely to occur when validations fully specify the meaning of the positive discrepancy between the desired self and the alternative self into the explicit prospect of the desired self as more likely to occur. Second, initial elevations in self-confidence mediated the effect of social validations on possible selves. The discussion focuses on implications and future directions of the present work.     

Adolescents' Possible Selves and Their Relationship to Global Self-Esteem

Recent research indicates that adolescent girls'self-esteem is lower than that of boys, and adolescence has been identified as a particularly problematic period for female self-esteem. However, many studies use global self-esteem measures that mask important differences within the domains of self-concept that contribute to self-esteem. Further, some self-esteem measures assess components of male self-esteem but overlook aspects of female self-esteem. The possible selves approach was used to identify categories of adolescent male and female self-concept that correlate with self-esteem. Subjects were 212 high-school students. The sample was primarily (96%)Caucasian. Results indicate that female self-esteem is related to perceived likelihood of hoped-for and feared possible selves in multiple domains, whereas male self-esteem is related only to the likelihood of one domain of hoped-for possible selves.     

Religion, Thick and Thin: On the Development of 'Religious Studies' in the American University

Book reviewed in this article:
Johns Hopkins, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education