A Compatibilist Account of the Epistemic Conditions on Rational Deliberation

A traditional concern for determinists is that the epistemic conditions an agent must satisfy to deliberate about which of a number of distinct actions to perform threaten to conflict with a belief in determinism and its evident consequences. I develop an account of the sort that specifies two epistemic requirements, an epistemic openness condition and a belief in the efficacy of deliberation, whose upshot is that someone who believes in determinism and its evident consequences can deliberate without inconsistent beliefs. I argue that conditions of both types are indispensable, and that they can be formulated so as to withstand the relevant objections.     

临床合理用药中若干问题的思考

为临床合理用药提供参考依据.参考大量文献,用对立统一的思想分析临床合理用药存在的问题.结果临床合理用药目前存在许多问题,我们需要用对立统一的辩证思维和方法正确对待和处理目前临床用药存在的问题.     

Democracy,Deliberation and Disobedience

This paper develops a theory of civil disobedience informed by a deliberative conception of democracy. In particular, it explores the justification of illegal, public and political acts of protest in constitutional deliberative democracies. Civil disobedience becomes justifiable when processes of public deliberation fail to respect the principles of a deliberative democracy in the following three ways: when deliberation is insufficiently inclusive; when it is manipulated by powerful participants; and when it is insufficiently informed. As a contribution to ongoing processes of public deliberation, civil disobedience should be carried out in a way that respects the principles of deliberative democracy, which entails a commitment to persuasive, non-violent forms of protest.Civil disobedience is understood in this paper as public, illegal and political protest carried out against state laws or policies. Justification here is understood as a moral or political justification -- where civilly disobedient citizens claim that they are morally or politically entitled to disobey law. It does not imply legal justification.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (London: Harvard University Press, 1985).     

Deliberation,Reasons, and Alternatives

A plausible constraint on normative reasons to act is that it must make sense to use them as premises in deliberation. I argue that a central sort of deliberation – what Bratman calls partial planning – is question‐directed: it is over, and aims to resolve, deliberative questions. Whether it makes sense to use some consideration as a premise in deliberation in a case of partial planning can vary with the deliberative question at issue. I argue that the best explanation for this is that reasons are contrastive or relativized to deliberative questions.     

Mindful Deliberation About Exercise: Influence of Acute Positive and Negative Thinking1

The purpose was to examine if the acute thoughts that individuals have as a function of deciding whether to exercise influence subsequent motivated behavior. Two questions based on self‐efficacy theory were tested. Are immediate, retrospective, or anticipated thoughts predictive of self‐efficacy to adhere to regular exercise? Does self‐efficacy influence exercise intention and behavior? Participants were 82 healthy adults (M age = 24 years) enrolled in a 10‐week exercise program. Social cognitive measures were assessed after 1.5 months of experience, and 3 weeks of exercise were tracked. Multivariate analyses showed that participants who were more positive in their acute retrospective or anticipated thinking exhibited significantly higher self‐efficacy and attendance than did negative‐thinking counterparts. Multiple regression analyses revealed that acute retrospective and anticipated thoughts were predictors of self‐efficacy. In addition, self‐efficacy was predictive of future intention and exercise attendance.     

Integrity, Practical Deliberation and Utilitarianism

Ideas at work in Bernard Williams'integrity objection' threaten not only direct act-utilitarianism (act-utilitarianism considered as decision-procedure and as test of rightness) but also indirect act-utilitarianism (act-utilitarianism as test of rightness only). Calculation can decide whether an action is utilitarianly right only if it takes every evaluatively relevant feature of alternatives into account. I assume, following Williams, that utilitarianism is reductionist, i.e., represents every case of an agent's valuing something as a case of having a preference. But thanks to an internal relation between an agent's values and the shape of practical deliberation, they cannot always be so represented, so there are some things agents typically value whose value to them utilitarianism necessarily misrepresents. There are therefore some actions such that calculation cannot decide whether they are utilitarianly right, and utilitarianism is incoherent as a test of rightness.     

Capability and Deliberation

This paper explores the role of deliberation in the context of the capability approach to human well-being from the standpoint of the individual doing the reflecting. The concept of a ‘strong evaluator’ is used develop a concept of the agent of capability. The role of values is discussed in the process of deliberating, particularly the nature of and difference between prudential values and intrinsic values. Some consideration is given to the limits and constraints on deliberation and finally a brief example of deliberation is considered—that of occupational choice.     

Reason and Coercion: In defence of a Rational Control Account of Freedom

According to Pettit, an account of freedom in terms of rational control fails to suffice, for he argues that such an account lacks the resources to rule out coerced actions as unfree. The crucial feature of a coerced action is that it leaves the agent with a choice to make, an apparently rational choice to make. To the extent that it does this, it would seem to leave the agent as free as he would be in any other case where there is a choice to be made. However, we do not consider actions that are coerced to be on a par with actions that are not coerced, that are performed freely as we might say. We do not hold agents similarly responsible in the two sorts of cases. So it would seem that the rational control account fails, for it appears to fail to vindicate this differential practice. In this paper, I defend the rational control account. I outline two ways in which proponents of a rational control model, broadly understood, can respond to this criticism.     

Advisors and Deliberation

The paper has two goals. First, it defends one type of subjectivist account of reasons for actions—deliberative accounts—against the criticism that they commit the conditional fallacy. Second, it attempts to show that another type of subjectivist account of practical reasons that has been gaining popularity—ideal advisor accounts—are liable to commit a closely related error. Further, I argue that ideal advisor accounts can avoid the error only by accepting the fundamental theoretical motivation behind deliberative accounts. I conclude that ideal advisor accounts represent neither a substantial departure from, nor a substantial improvement upon, deliberative accounts.     

Temptation and Deliberation

There is a great deal of plausibility to the standard view that if one is rational and it is clear at the time of action that a certain move, say M₁, would serve one’s concerns better than any other available move, then one will, as a rational agent, opt for move M₁. Still, this view concerning rationality has been challenged at least in part because it seems to conflict with our considered judgments about what it is rational to do in cases of temptation that share the structure of Warren Quinn’s self-torturer case. I argue that there is a way to accomodate our considered judgments about the relevant cases of temptation without giving up the standard view or dismissing, as in some way rationally defective, the concerns of the agents in the relevant cases. My reasoning relies on the idea that, at least in some cases, whether an action serves one’s concerns well depends on what action(s) or course(s) of action it is part of. In the final section of the paper, I explain how this idea sheds light on an important source of frustration in collective decision-making.     

Mencius and Dewey on Moral Perception, Deliberation, and Imagination

I argue against interpretations of Mencius by Liu Xiusheng and Eric Hutton that attempt to make sense of a Mencian account of moral judgment and deliberation in light of the moral particularism of John McDowell. These interpretations read Mencius??s account as relying on a faculty of moral perception, which generates moral judgments by directly perceiving moral facts that are immediately intuited with the help of rudimentary and innate moral inclinations. However, I argue that it is a mistake to identify innate moral inclinations as the foundational source of moral judgments and knowledge. Instead, if we understand that for Mencius an individual??s natural dispositions (xing ??) have a relational element, then the normativity of moral judgments can be seen as stemming from the relationships that constitute the dispositions of each individual. Finally, this essay elaborates on John Dewey's account of moral deliberation as moral imagination, an account which also takes the relational quality of natural dispositions as its starting point, in order to suggest the vital role of imagination for Mencius??s own account of moral deliberation.