The failure of theories of personhood

The belief persists in philosophy, religion, science, and popular culture that some special cognitive property of persons like self-consciousness confers a unique moral standing. However, no set of cognitive properties confers moral standing, and metaphysical personhood is not sufficient for either moral personhood or moral standing. Cognitive theories all fail to capture the depth of commitments embedded in using the language of "person." It is more assumed than demonstrated in these theories that nonhuman animals lack a relevant form of self-consciousness or its functional equivalent. Although nonhuman animals are not plausible candidates for moral personhood, humans too fail to qualify as moral persons if they lack one or more of the conditions of moral personhood. If moral personhood were the sole basis of moral rights, then these humans would lack rights -- and precisely for the reasons that nonhuman animals would.     

New insight into Mencius’ theory of the original goodness in human nature

In Mencius’ theory of the original goodness in human nature, fate is the original source of xing (nature). Heart is the appearance of nature. There are two aspects to nature and heart: ti (form) and yong (function). From the perspective of form, nature is liangzhi (the goodness in conscience) and liangneng (the inborn ability to be good) in human beings and heart is human’s conscience and original heart. From the perspective of function, nature is the four things of benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom, and heart consists in compassion, shame, respect, right and wrong. As the foundation for the theory of the original goodness in human nature, conscience and heart are a combination of human moral instinct, moral rationality and moral volition, whereas moral instinct gradually rises to moral volition and passes through moral rationality. Mencius’ theory of the original goodness in human nature is not a theory of future goodness, but a theory of original goodness.     

The knower and the known

This paper is a presentation and discussion of Spinoza's view on the knower, or the mind, as an agent. The knower is on his view to be regarded as an active or generative complex cognitive experience. Imagination, reason and intuition are the cognitive principles. On account of their intrinsic relation to the first law of nature, that of selfpreservation, together with the thesis of the mind as constituted by ideas or knowledge, these principles function at the same time as moral principles. Consequently, it makes sense to speak of an individual's moral attitude toward everything be knows. A discussion of imagination, reason and intuition mainly as cognitive principles is followed by some concluding remarks on the cognitive and moral relation between human beings: To know another human being is to know his knowledge. The moral attitude of individuals to each other is a function of their mutual knowledge of knowledge.     

The knower and the known

This paper is a presentation and discussion of Spinoza's view on the knower, or the mind, as an agent. The knower is on his view to be regarded as an active or generative complex cognitive experience. Imagination, reason and intuition are the cognitive principles. On account of their intrinsic relation to “the first law of nature”, that of selfpreservation, together with the thesis of the mind as constituted by ideas or knowledge, these principles function at the same time as moral principles. Consequently, it makes sense to speak of an individual's moral attitude toward everything be knows. A discussion of imagination, reason and intuition mainly as cognitive principles is followed by some concluding remarks on the cognitive and moral relation between human beings: To know another human being is to know his knowledge. The moral attitude of individuals to each other is a function of their mutual knowledge of knowledge.     

Basic emotions, relations among emotions, and emotion-cognition relations.

From the cognitive theory perspective that emotions are cognition dependent and contain cognitive components, Ortony and Turner (1990) questioned the validity of the concept of basic emotions. They argued that the so-called basic emotions were neither psychologically or biologically "primitive" nor "irreducible building blocks" for generating the "great variety of emotional experiences." In the biosocial theory tradition, researchers have identified multiple noncognitive activators of emotion and demonstrated the usefulness of defining the essential components of emotion as phenomena that do not require cognitive mediators or constituents. In this framework, emotions are seen as basic because their biological and social functions are essential in evolution and adaptation. Particular emotions are called basic because they are assumed to have innate neural substrates, innate and universal expressions, and unique feeling-motivational states. The great variety of emotional experiences is explained as a function of emotion-cognition interactions that result in affective-cognitive structures.     

The transcendental argument in Kant's

Conclusions From this summary account of the deduction we can draw a number of conclusions: In the first place, the guiding thesis used to make sense of the argument was that the argument needed to ground not just the moral law but a cognitive framework within which the moral law is the highest law. This distinction is important since it allows us to distinguish in the practical philosophy (as in the theoretical) a level of transcendental argumentation from a level of metaphysical argumentation: The concern of transcendental philosophy would be to establish the conditions of the possibility of a cognitive framework, whereas the concern of metaphysics (in Kant's sense) is to develop the principles of a given cognitive framework and to derive from them knowledge of objects (see KU, Introduction, Section V). (This distinction turns out to be invaluable in dealing with the problem of the application of the moral law.)In the second place, this interpretation allows us to avoid reducing the practical viewpoint to the status of a poor imitation of real knowledge, one whose inadequacies must be passed over in embarrassed silence for the sake of rescuing morality. If the argument is correct, practical knowledge is in one sense more firmly grounded than (and even subsumes) theoretical knowledge, even though its grounds do not allow of complete insight.And, finally, we can make at least some cautious generalizations about Kant's understanding of a transcendental argument. Two things in particular seem to characterize the deduction: (1) It is essential that the argument is concerned with a cognitive framework rather than with any specific knowledge within that framework; it is the possibility of knowledge at all that is in question, and it is that fact that requires a special kind of argument. (2) Kant's assumptions about the distinct roots of human knowledge are indispensable to the argument. The distinction between mere speculation (mere thinking, which requires only our rational faculties) and knowledge (which also requires sensibility) is essential: Without that distinction we cannot understand why the argument is necessary in the first place (since, as I argued above, we cannot see how the moral law is synthetic), nor can we understand what it means to ground a cognitive framework: Grounding a cognitive framework for Kant has turned out to involve showing how two irreducibly distinct faculties can cooperate in acts of cognition - here it is the faculty of desire and the pure will which are conceptually irreducible and for which grounds of a possible a priori unity must nevertheless be given. The fact that these two features are so central to the argument would indicate that they should be taken into consideration in any discussion of transcendental arguments framed along Kantian lines.     

论传统义利观和诚信观的现代转换——从“以诚实守信为荣,以见利忘义为耻”谈起

重义轻利是传统社会的基本价值取向,国人的义利观经历了一个从长期的“羞于言利”到逐渐面对市场逐利,再到一部分人重利轻义、见利忘义的历史转化过程;今天,应改变传统义利观中义与利相互对立的状态,倡导一种义利并重、道义与功利协调发展的新型义利观。诚实信用既是我国传统道德的基本规范,又是市场经济、法制经济的必然要求,从而具有道德建设和法制建设的二重性;法律原则要以其本身所包含的道德合理性为价值基础,而良法的实施又离不开相应的社会道德环境的配合。在市场化和法制化背景下,应该既依托传统,又立足现实,实现传统义利观和诚信观的现代转换。     

Orientalism andAntivoluntarism in the History of Ethics: On Christian Wolff's Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica

Christian Wolff's 1721 Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese is generally read as championing the autonomy of ethics from religion. This is too simple: Wolff's ethics was an antivoluntarist religious ethics. The example of the Chinese confirmed for Wolff that revelation is not necessary for knowledge or practice of genuine virtue, though he held that the Chinese achieve only the first of three "degrees of virtue." (Most Christians, including the Pietists who drove Wolff from Halle shortly after he delivered the Discourse , did not, in his judgment, achieve even that.) China's being perceived as outside of Western (and sacred) history made it a congenial example for the ethics and moral anthropology that, in Wolff's time, were struggling against the voluntarism of a Christian ethics premised on original sin.     

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.     

Pavlov's methodological behaviorism as a pre-Socratic contribution of the melding of the differential and experimental psychology

The differential/experimental distinction that Cronbach specified is important because any adequate account of psychological phenomena requires the recognition of the validity of both approaches, and a meaningful melding of the two. This paper suggests that Pavlov's work in psychology, based on earlier traditions of inquiry that can be traced back to the pre-Socratics, provides a potential way of achieving this melding, although such features as systematic rather than anecdotal methods of observation need to be added. Pavlov's methodological behaviorist approach is contrasted with metaphysical behaviorism (as exemplified explicitly in Watson and Skinner, and implicitly in the computer-metaphorical, information-processing explanations employed by current "cognitive" psychology). A common feature of the metaphysical approach is that individual-differences variables like sex are essentially ignored, or relegated to ideological categories such as the treatment of sex as merely a "social construction." Examples of research both before and after the "cognitive revolution" are presented where experimental and differential methods are melded, and individual differences are treated as phenomena worthy of investigation rather than as nuisance factors that merely add to experimental error.     

Mencius's Vertical Faculties and Moral Nativism

This paper compares and contrasts Mencius's moral philosophy with recent development in cognitive science regarding mental capacity to understand moral rules and principles. Several cognitive scientists argue that the human mind has innate cognitive and emotive foundations of morality. In this paper, Mencius's moral theory is interpreted from the perspective of faculty psychology and cognitive modularity, a theoretical hypothesis in cognitive science in which the mind is understood as a system of specialized mental components. Specifically, Mencius's Four Beginnings (the basic human emotions that serve as the foundations of morality) are interpreted as vertical faculties, comparable to Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid's moral faculties.     

Finding God in the Classics: The Theistic Confucianism of Dasan Jeong Yagyong

Dasan Jeong Yagyong (1762–1836) is regarded in South Korea today as one of pre-modern Korea’s best philosophers. This article examines one of the reasons he is so respected. He modified traditional Korean Confucian moral philosophy to include notions of human nature as desires rather than innate virtue, the importance of free will rather than mere determination, and the existence of a Lord Above as a necessary incentive to proper behavior. Though he supported these changes to traditional Korean Confucian philosophy with references to the Classics and his own personal moral experience, observers have noticed the possibility of Western influence on his thinking. He is thus hailed by Koreans as a cross-cultural philosopher, an example of how Koreans can borrow from the West while nonetheless remaining authentically Korean.     

The Bridge of Benevolence: Hutcheson and Mencius

The Scottish sentimentalist Francis Hutcheson and the Chinese Confucianist Mencius give benevolence (ren) a key place in their respective moral theories, as the first and foundational virtue. Leaving aside differences in style and method, my purpose in this essay is to underline this similarity by focusing on four common features: first, benevolence springs from compassion, an innate and universal feeling shared by all human beings; second, its objects are not only human beings but also animals; third, it is sensitive to proximity; and finally, it has to be constantly cultivated in order to become a character trait. I will conclude with some brief remarks as to how this understanding of benevolence as rooted in feeling rather than reason, and in personal rather than impersonal relationships, helps to illuminate part of the discussion in moral philosophy today.     

Concepts and Epistemic Individuation

Christopher Peacocke has presented an original version of the perennial philosophical thesis that we can gain substantive metaphysical and epistemological insight from an analysis of our concepts. Peacocke's innovation is to look at how concepts are individuated by their possession conditions, which he believes can be specified in terms of conditions in which certain propositions containing those concepts are accepted. The ability to provide such insight is one of Peacocke's major arguments for his theory of concepts. I will critically examine this "fruitfulness" argument by looking at one philosophical problem Peacocke uses his theory to solve and treats in depth.
Peacocke (1999, 2001) defines what he calls the "Integration Challenge." The challenge is to integrate our metaphysics with our epistemology by showing that they are mutually acceptable. Peacocke's key conclusion is that the Integration Challenge can be met for "epistemically individuated concepts."A good theory of content, he believes, will close the apparent gap between an account of truth for any given subject matter and an overall account of knowledge. I shall argue that there are no epistemically individuated concepts, and shall critically analyze Peacocke's arguments for their existence. I will suggest more generally that the possession conditions of concepts and their principles of individuation shed little light on the epistemology or metaphysics of things other than concepts. My broader goal is to shed light on what concepts are by showing that they are more fundamental than the sorts of cognitive and epistemic factors a leading theory uses to define them.¹     

On How to Build a Moral Machine

Herein we make a plea to machine ethicists for the inclusion of constraints on their theories consistent with empirical data on human moral cognition. As philosophers, we clearly lack widely accepted solutions to issues regarding the existence of free will, the nature of persons and firm conditions on moral agency/patienthood; all of which are indispensable concepts to be deployed by any machine able to make moral judgments. No agreement seems forthcoming on these matters, and we don’t hold out hope for machines that can both always do the right thing (on some general ethic) and produce explanations for its behavior that would be understandable to a human confederate. Our tentative solution involves understanding the folk concepts associated with our moral intuitions regarding these matters, and how they might be dependent upon the nature of human cognitive architecture. It is in this spirit that we begin to explore the complexities inherent in human moral judgment via computational theories of the human cognitive architecture, rather than under the extreme constraints imposed by rational-actor models assumed throughout much of the literature on philosophical ethics. After discussing the various advantages and challenges of taking this particular perspective on the development of artificial moral agents, we computationally explore a case study of human intuitions about the self and causal responsibility. We hypothesize that a significant portion of the variance in reported intuitions for this case might be explained by appeal to an interplay between the human ability to mindread and to the way that knowledge is organized conceptually in the cognitive system. In the present paper, we build on a pre-existing computational model of mindreading (Bello et al. 2007) by adding constraints related to psychological distance (Trope and Liberman 2010), a well-established psychological theory of conceptual organization. Our initial results suggest that studies of folk concepts involved in moral intuitions lead us to an enriched understanding of cognitive architecture and a more systematic method for interpreting the data generated by such studies.     

Is equal moral consideration really compatible with unequal moral status?

The issue of moral considerability, or how much moral importance a being's interests deserve, is one of the most important in animal ethics. Some leading theorists--most notably David DeGrazia--have argued that a principle of "equal moral consideration" is compatible with "unequal moral status." Such a position would reconcile the egalitarian force of equal consideration with more stringent obligations to humans than animals. The article presents arguments that equal consideration is not compatible with unequal moral status, thereby forcing those who would justify significantly different moral protections for humans and animals to argue for unequal consideration.     

Psychopathy and Responsibility

Some philosophers have argued that the psychopath serves as the ultimate test of the limits of moral responsibility. They hold that the psychopath lacks a deep knowledge of right and wrong, and that Kant's ethics arguably offers the most plausible account of this moral knowledge. On this view, the psychopath's lack of moral understanding is due to a cognitive failure involving practical reason. I argue that the deep knowledge of right and wrong consists of emotional and volitional components in addition to a cognitive one. Hence it is mistaken to claim that the psychopath's moral deficiency is due solely to a cognitive failure, or that his lack of the deep knowledge of right and wrong can be explained entirely in terms of a defect of practical reason. I refer to empirical research to show that the Kantian model of practical reason does not provide a satisfactory account of responsibility of the psychopath in particular or of moral agents in general. On the basis of both philosophical and empirical considerations, I argue that the psychopath is at least partly responsible for his behaviour.     

Cognitive style and moral judgement in mentally handicapped and non-handicapped children of equal mental age*

Forty-seven mentally handicapped and 47 non-handicapped children matched on mental age were assessed with Kagan's Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT) and a Piagetian measure designed to elicit moral judgements. No significant differences were observed in the error and latency scores between the two groups nor in the proportion of reflective, impulsive, fast/accurate or slow/inaccurate individuals. The results also indicated that the subjects did not differ in their level of moral judgement; although reflectives made moral judgements on the basis of intention rather than consequence. Moral judgement was not significantly correlated with performance on the MFFT. The findings were interpreted as being consistent with Zigler's developmental concept of cultural-familial retardation and suggesting that the ability to solve moral dilemmas appears to involve cognitive capacities.