Asymmetric population axiology: deliberative neutrality delivered

Two related asymmetries have been discussed in relation to the ethics of creating new lives: First, we seem to have strong moral reason to avoid creating lives that are not worth living, but no moral reason to create lives that are worth living. Second, we seem to have strong moral reason to improve the wellbeing of existing lives, but, again, no moral reason to create lives that are worth living. Both asymmetries have proven very difficult to account for in any coherent moral framework. I propose an impersonal population axiology to underpin the asymmetries, which sidesteps the problematic issue of whether or not people can be harmed or benefited by creation or non-creation. This axiology yields perfect asymmetry from a deliberative perspective, in terms of expected value. The axiology also yields substantial asymmetry for large and realistic populations in terms of their actual value, beyond deliberative relevance.     

Meta-perception for pathological personality traits: do we know when others think that we are difficult?

The self allows us to reflect on our own behavior and to imagine what others think of us. Clinical experience suggests that these abilities may be impaired in people with personality disorders. They do not recognize the impact that their behavior has on others, and they have difficulty understanding how they are seen by others. We collected information regarding pathological personality traits--using both self and peer report measures--from groups of people who knew each other well (at the end of basic military training). In previous papers, we have reported that agreement between self-report and peer-report is only modest. In this paper, we address the question: Do people know that others disagree with their own perceptions of themselves? We found that expected peer scores predicted variability in peer report over and above self-report for all 10 diagnostic traits. People do have some incremental knowledge of how they are viewed by others, but they do not tell you about it unless you ask them to do so; the knowledge is not reflected in ordinary self-report data. Among participants who expect their peers to describe them as narcissistic, those who agree with this assessment are viewed as being less narcissistic by their peers than those who deny being narcissistic. It therefore appears that insight into how one is viewed by others can moderate negative impressions fostered by PD traits.     

AN EVOLUTIONARY CRITIQUE OF THE CREATED CO-CREATOR CONCEPT

Abstract The created co‐creator theology states that human beings have the purpose of creating the most wholesome future possible for our species and the global ecosystem. I evaluate the human aspect of this theology by asking whether it is possible for human beings to do this. Do we have sufficient knowledge? Can we be motivated to do what is necessary to create a wholesome future for ourselves and our planet? We do not at present have sufficient knowledge, but there is reason to believe that with further scientific research we will be able to acquire it. The more difficult question is whether we can be motivated to cooperate on the scale necessary to fulfill this purpose. Evolutionary theories of human sociality, altruism, and cooperation are reviewed. I conclude that it is possible for human beings to fulfill the purpose defined for us by the created cocreator concept, but doing this will not be easy.     

Life Extension versus Replacement

abstract   It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better than creating new happy lives although the total welfare is the same in both cases, and that it may be better even when the total welfare is lower in the outcome with extended lives. I shall discuss two interesting suggestions that seem to support this idea, or so it has been argued. Firstly, the idea there is a positive level of well-being above which a life has to reach to have positive contributive value to a population, so-called Critical Level Utilitarianism. Secondly, the view that it makes an outcome worse if people are worse off than they otherwise could have been, a view I call Comparativism. I shall show that although these theories do capture some of our intuitions about the value of longevity, they contradict others, and they have a number of counterintuitive implications in other cases that we ultimately have to reject them.     

Pluralistic folk psychology and varieties of self-knowledge: an exploration

Turning the techniques we use to understand other people onto ourselves can provide an insight into the types of self-knowledge that may be possible for us. Adopting Pluralistic Folk Psychology, according to which we understand others not primarily by thinking about invisible beliefs and desires that cause behavior, but instead by modeling others as people - with rich characters, relationships, past histories, cultural embeddedness, personality traits, and so forth. A preliminary investigation shows that we understand ourselves at least in terms of our phenomenal states, informational states, perceptual states, traits, desires, and beliefs. I then appeal to empirical research to examine the accuracy of our sense of self-understanding in these ways, and argue that these are often non-veridical. Moreover, in our folk practices, we do not take our statements of self-understanding as infallible, but we allow others to help us see ourselves. While there is room for some improvement in our acurarcy, I conclude that our sense of self is largely a joint construct of self and others, and that looping effects play a significant role in what one’s self turns out to be. The self is a fluid thing that we are constantly creating through our actions and self-constituting thoughts, but it is a creation we do not make alone. Others help to create us, as we help to create them.     

Re‐framing systemic paradigms for the art of learning

Thoughtful people are increasingly concerned that the current paradigms for social, corporate, and educational activities are in disgraceful disarray. The “problem‐solving” or analytical model, the competitive or game model, the commercial or consumer model, the bureaucratic or institutional model, and the disease or illness model which prevail in public discourse are proving to be especially unwholesome. We cannot, however, educate ourselves without paradigms. A credible educational paradigm must be generally accessible without being simplistic, informative without being monothematic, and accommodating as well as discriminating. Given our disquiet with the current cognitive situation, a renewing paradigm must be somehow novel; given the character of human nature, a sustaining paradigm must be somehow familiar.

For a very long time now, professional Sciences have committed themselves to paradigms about “reality out there,” while professional Arts have devoted themselves to expressing “imagination from within here.” The more these two worldviews polarize in opposition to one another, the more room there is—and the more human heed there becomes—for mediation by an applied philosophy which accommodates the “real” as well as the “imaginary” in a complementary way. Such a philosophy would address not only “what do you know?” and “how do you do?” but also “how do you know?” and “why do you do?” In earlier times, people would have been considered neither educated nor wise unless they appreciated the Sciences and the Arts whole. In our time, we may not survive unless we can re‐integrate our fractured perceptions. How might we proceed to do so? There may be a systemological way.     

共情对广义互惠的影响：自我-他人重叠的中介作用

与“我帮你,你帮我”的直接互惠相比,“我帮你,你帮他”的积极广义互惠,促使受助者转变为助人者帮助更多的人。与之相反,“我伤你,你伤他”的消极广义互惠,易导致受害者转变为伤害者波及无辜他人。以往研究未探寻到既能促进积极广义互惠,又能抑制消极广义互惠的因素。采用两阶段独裁者博弈任务范式,通过两项实验发现,共情是一个能够起到扩大积极广义互惠传递效应并削弱消极广义互惠传递效应双重作用的特殊变量,其机制在于自我-他人重叠,支持了自我扩张模型。这一研究为营造良好社会道德氛围,加强公民道德建设,保障公正和谐的社会环境提供了思路。     

Reflections on the use of patient records: Privacy,ethics, and reparations in the history of psychiatry

One of the most common questions we get asked as historians of psychiatry is “do you have access to patient records?” Why are people so fascinated with the psychiatric patient record? Do people assume they are or should be available? Does access to the patient record actually tell us anything new about the history of psychiatry? And if we did have them, what can, or should we do with them? In the push to both decolonize and personalize the history of psychiatry, as well as make some kind of account or reparation for past mistakes, how can we proceed in an ethical manner that respects the privacy of people in the past who never imagined their intensely personal psychiatric encounter as subject for future historians? In this paper, we want to think through some of the issues that we deal with as white historians of psychiatry especially at the intersection of privacy, ethics, and racism. We present our thoughts as a conversation, structured around questions we have posed for ourselves, and building on discussions we have had together over the past few years. We hope that they act as a catalyst for further discussion in the field.     

The criminalization of money laundering and terrorism in global contexts: a hybrid solution

What obligations do global actors have to prevent terrorism? Is consent required to create an international obligation, or does the correctness of its goals ground its legitimacy? In this paper, I consider these questions with respect to a subset of international law often overlooked: anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT). AML/CFT comprises peaceful response to violence and terrorism, making it a significant component of international justice and diplomacy. First, I present the current legal framework for AML/CFT institutions and identify two conflicting sources of justification: objective value and consent. The fix for this problem, I argue, does not come from either component alone. Objective value cannot provide the sole source of justification because it cannot settle the choice between multiple competing norms that would achieve the same objective goods were we to follow them (‘the choice problem’). Consent cannot provide the sole source of justification (‘the constraint problem’) for two reasons: some contracts that people agree to are morally abhorrent and others are morally required but people do not agree to them. But objective value and consent can be combined consistently, and I articulate this hybrid as a sound basis for evaluating and reforming AML/CFT laws and institutions.     

Engaging the consumer: The opposing forces of regulatory nonfit versus fit

Higgins and Scholer (Higgins, E. T., and Scholer, A. A. (2009). Engaging the consumer: The science and art of the value creation process. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(2), 100-114) propose that while opposing forces do not create value, value is created when people engage in the act of countering these forces. To the extent that feeling wrong from regulatory nonfit may be perceived as an opposing force, their hypothesis can be extended to understanding regulatory nonfit effects. More specifically, while regulatory nonfit does not create value, the experience of regulatory nonfit may signal that something “feels wrong”. Consumers may be prompted to counter this feeling wrong experience when they are involved in the decision making process, and this intervention in turn leads to value creation.     

Beyond Words: Inarticulable Reasons and Reasonable Commitments

We often come to value someone or something through experience of that person or thing. Call such an experience direct appreciation. When you appreciate something directly you may come to embrace a value that you did not previously grasp. Moreover, in a large and important subset of cases it seems you could not have fully appreciated that value, absent some such experience, merely by considering a report of the reasons or arguments that purport to justify your attitude. It follows that you will remain incapable of fully communicating the reasons for your valuing attitude to someone who lacks any such experience. Despite its ubiquity, this phenomenon goes missing in a great deal of contemporary work in ethics and political philosophy. To make sense of it we need an account of the standards governing our normative commitments that explains how we can have reasons for them without requiring articulacy about these reasons.     

Moral Machines?

Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen??s Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press, 2009) explores efforts to develop machines that, not only can be employed for good or bad ends, but which themselves can be held morally accountable for what they do??artificial moral agents (AMAs). This essay is a critical response to Wallach and Allen??s conjectures. Although Wallach and Allen do not suggest that we are close to being able to create full-fledged AMAs, they do talk seriously about making incremental progress in the direction of creating them (even if we never fully succeed). However, there are important questions about the moral development of AMAs that Moral Machines does not address. Given the responsibilities entrusted to human moral agents, we take questions about their moral development very seriously. In the case of children, the hope is that eventually they will develop into full-fledged moral agents. How might we expect this to go with less than fully formed AMAs? Will there be a comparable story of moral development and moral education that we can tell?     

"Proud of violence". Psychoanalytic remarks on adolescence and right extremism]

Young people with extremist right-wing leanings who join together to form gangs frequently come from a social background which has had a traumatic influence on their biographies from an early stage. The right-wing radical group functions as a substitute for caring parents and other figures that these youngsters can look up to. Within these constellations they then act out the violence that they themselves have been the victims of. The author points out that, both on an individual and social plane, these young people stand for facets of our own selves that we have severed off or negated and conflicts which we have yet to come to terms with.     

Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm or benefit someone by bringing her into existence.     

In Defence of Backyard Chickens

Suppose that animals have rights. If so, may you go down to your local farm store, buy some chicks, raise them in your backyard, and eat their eggs? You wouldn't think so. But we argue, to the contrary, that you may. Just as there are circumstances in which it's permissible to liberate a slave, even if that means paying into a corrupt system, so there are circumstances in which it's permissible to liberate chickens by buying them. Moreover, we contend that restrictions on freedom of movement can be appropriate for chickens, but not humans, because of the obvious differences between the interests of healthy, adult humans versus those of chickens who have been bred for human use. We also argue that egg consumption is permissible based on the plausible assumption that no one's rights are violated in their consumption, and so while there may sometimes be morally preferable uses for eggs, you do nothing unjust in eating them. If we're right, then the rights view doesn't imply that veganism is obligatory; rather, it implies that the constraints on how we source animal products, though highly demanding, are not so demanding that they can't be met.     

Harming future people

Hanser examines Derek Parfit's contention in his treatise on rationalism, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press; 1984) that acts that are not reproductive in nature can nonetheless predictably affect the identities of future people, and that this fact has unexpected and important consequences for ethical theory. Hanser argues tht this fact is not as significant as Parfit believes it to be. The arguments of both scholars concern the morality of choices that, while causing future persons to be badly off, do not make them worse off than they would have been if the choices had not been made. Hanser concludes his essay with a discussion of responsibility for acts that will affect the health of future offspring.     

Using Foucault's theory of disciplinary power to critically examine the construction of gender in secondary schools

Schools are typically thought of as important places for young people to learn specific academic skills. This review synthesises research from “western” English‐speaking countries to argue that young people learn more than just academic skills at school. Specifically, the review explores how aspects of classroom teaching and culture contribute to how young people understand gender. Drawing on Foucault's theory of disciplinary power, practices within schools are deconstructed to show how they create certain gendered ways of being. The discourses of gender within schools are critiqued by highlighting how they limit diverse expressions of gender. Section 3 of the review draws on literature to highlight how dominant discourses and the practices that create them can be resisted creating the opportunity for other discourses of gender.