Intrinsic Value and the Last Last Man

Even if you were the last person on Earth, you should not cut down all the trees—or so goes the Last Man thought experiment, which has been taken to show that nature has intrinsic value. But ‘Last Man’ is caught on a dilemma. If Last Man is too far inside the anthropocentric circle, so to speak, his actions cannot be indicative of intrinsic value (a Local problem). If Last Man is cast too far outside the anthropocentric circle, though, then value terms lose their cogency (a Global problem). The experiment must satisfy conditions in a seemingly impossible ‘goldilocks’ zone. To this end I propose a new version, the Ultramodal Last Man, which appeals to Routley's work in metaphysics and non‐classical logic. With this ‘Last Last Man’, I argue that the Local /Global dilemma is resolved: impossible equations balance in ultramodal space. For defenders and critics alike, this helps to clarify the demands of intrinsic value, and renews a role for non‐standard logics in value theory.     

Why people resort to coercion: the role of utility and legitimacy

This study focuses on why people may resort to coercive tactics. We tested the proposition that considerations of utility and legitimacy mediate effects of a powerholder's competence and reward structure on the use of coercion. Results showed that in general coercive tactics are employed less often than softer tactics, that coercive tactics are used more by more competent individuals than by less competent individuals, and that coercive tactics are used more often when the revenues of task performance benefited the agent of power than when they benefited both agent and target or when they benefited the target solely. Results identified perceived utility and perceived legitimacy as mediators of the decision to coerce the other or not. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detecting deception: the scope and limits

With the increasing interest in the neuroimaging of deception and its commercial application, there is a need to pay more attention to methodology. The weakness of studying deception in an experimental setting has been discussed intensively for over half a century. However, even though much effort has been put into their development, paradigms are still inadequate. The problems that bedevilled the old technology have not been eliminated by the new. Advances will only be possible if experiments are designed that take account of the intentions of the subject and the context in which these occur.     

Last word: imagining the future

H.G. Wells warned, in 1895, not to allow economic injustices to become so acute that they ultimately transform human biology. Wells's warning is all the more pertinent today as society contemplates the use of biotechnologies to manipulate or "enhance" the human genome.     

Chunk limits and length limits in immediate recall: a reconciliation

Whereas some research on immediate recall of verbal lists has suggested that it is limited by the number of chunks that can be recalled (e.g., N. Cowan, Z. Chen, & J. N. Rouder, 2004; E. Tulving & J. E. Patkau, 1962), other research has suggested that it is limited by the length of the material to be recalled (e.g., A. D. Baddeley, N. Thomson, & M. Buchanan, 1975). The authors investigated this question by teaching new paired associations between words to create 2-word chunks. The results suggest that both chunk capacity limits and length limits come into play. For the free recall of 12-word lists, 6 pre-learned pairs could be recalled about as well as 6 pre-exposed singletons, suggesting a chunk limit. However, for the serially ordered recall of 8-word lists, 4 pre-learned pairs could be recalled about as well as 8 pre-exposed singletons, suggesting a length limit. Other conditions yielded intermediate results suggesting that sometimes both limits may operate together.     

Child abuse and the limits of confidentiality: forewarning practices

Confidentiality is widely considered to be of great importance in psychotherapy. With few exceptions, the breaching of confidentiality is an ethical violation and grounds for litigation. One such exception is the mandated reporting of known or suspected child abuse, representing a legally sanctioned limitation of confidentiality. Because clients generally expect unlimited confidentiality in therapeutic relationships, many therapists have begun to "forewarn" clients as a matter of informed consent. This research report: (a) briefly reviews issues surrounding mandatory reporting and confidentiality as they relate to forewarning, (b) defines and discusses forewarning as contrasted with "informing," (c) examines state statutes, case law and ethical guidelines relevant to forewarning, and (d) presents a survey of 428 mental health providers (MHPs) on their forewarning practices in which 36.9% forewarned all clients, 36.4% informed clients only upon suspicion of abuse, and 20.6% informed only after receiving a disclosure of abuse. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Shattering the subject: Georges Bataille and the limits of therapy

This article is an analysis of the work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and its implications for interrogating the limits of therapy. One of the central concepts of Bataille's thought is transgression and the destabilizing effects of transgression on any concept of the limit. I explore this thinking through an analysis of Bataille's personal and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis. Bataille's radicalization of psychoanalysis is then pursued through his use of mythic representations of the ‘shattered subject’. These models of the shattered subject offer an interrogation of some of the theoretical and practical limits of therapy, particularly when it is centred on the individual. Drawing on these models it is then argued that Bataille offers a new ethics of abjection, which proposes that we must interrogate the subject in terms of what our culture regards as ‘waste’. Comparison is made between Bataille's thought and that of Jacques Lacan, and it is argued that Bataille offers a potential radicalization of Lacan's concept of the Real and his ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’. The limits of Bataille's own writing are critically interrogated, drawing on the readings of his work by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.     

Fast and frugal heuristics: rationality and the limits of naturalism

Gerd Gigerenzer and Thomas Sturm have recently proposed a modest form of what they describe as a normative, ecological and limited naturalism. The basic move in their argument is to infer that certain heuristics we tend to use should be used in the right ecological setting. To address this argument, we first consider the case of a concrete heuristic called Take the Best (TTB). There are at least two variants of the heuristic which we study by making explicit the choice functions they induce, extending these variants of TTB beyond binary choice. We argue that the naturalistic argument can be applied to only one of the two variants of the heuristic; we also argue that the argument for the extension requires paying attention to other “rational” virtues of heuristics aside from efficacy, speed, and frugality. This notwithstanding, we show that there is a way of extending the right variant of TTB to obtain a very well behaved heuristic that could be used to offer a stronger case for the naturalistic argument (in the sense that if this heuristic is used, it is also a heuristic that we should use). The second part of the article considers attempts to extending the naturalistic argument from algorithms dealing with inference to heuristics dealing with choice. Our focus is the so-called Priority Heuristic, which we extend from risk to uncertainty. In this setting, the naturalist argument seems more difficult to formulate, if it remains feasible at all. Normativity seems in this case extrinsic to the heuristic, whose main virtue seems to be its ability to describe actual patterns of choice. But it seems that a new version of the naturalistic argument used with partial success in the case of inference is unavailable to solve the normative problem of whether we should exhibit the patterns of choice that we actually display.