麦金太尔论社会关系、共同利益与个人利益

我们从出生到死亡都处在一种接受与给予的关系中 ,我们从谁那里接受和给予谁往往是不对称的。这是我们参与到这个网络中不得不懂得的。在这个接受与给予的关系中 ,有我们的共同利益和我们个人的利益。同时 ,处在这样一种关系中 ,也需要我们遵守相应的德性规则。     

Individual and Collective Intentionality: Elaborating the Fundamentality-Question

This is a contribution to the controversy which of individual or collective intentionality is more fundamental. I call it the fundamentality-question. In a first step, I argue that it is really two questions. One is about sense and one about reference. The first is: Can one grasp or understand the concept individual intentionality and, correspondingly, individuality, on the one hand, without grasping or understanding the concept collective intentionality and, correspondingly, collectivity, on the other? The second is: Can the concept individual intentionality and corresponding concept of individuality, on the one hand, refer to something without the concept of collective intentionality and corresponding concept of collectivity referring to something, on the other? Simplifying somewhat, this elaborated fundamentality-question admits of nine answers. In a second step, I pursue a tentative answer to the elaborated fundamentality-question. Given a disambiguation of individuality and, correspondingly, individual intentionality, the answer is the combination of claims that individuality and individual intentionality in one sense is fundamental in reference-dependence but that collectivity and collective intentionality is fundamental in reference-dependence in the other sense of individuality, while collectivity and collective intentionality is in both cases fundamental in sense-dependence.

     

Collective and Individual Duties to Protect the Environment

ABSTRACT Many environmental harms are produced by the consequences of too many people doing acts which taken together have collective bad consequences, e.g. overuse of an underground aquifer or acid rain ‘killing’ a lake. If such acts are wrong, what should a conscientious moral agent do in such circumstances? Examples of such harms have the general feature that they are produced by individual acts, which taken by themselves may be innocent and morally permissible, but which have disastrous consequences when too many people perform them. Philosophers once thought that the generalisation argument (GA), “If the consequences of everyone's doing acts of kind a are undesirable, then no one ought to do a,” was the appropriate principle to guide a conscientious moral agent in such circumstances. However, there has been considerable literature discussing the shortcomings of this principle. Nevertheless, a proper understanding of the GA suggests that whole groups of people have collective duties to prevent such harms, which duties then provide clues to individual duties to protect the environment. In this paper I consider some major deficiencies of the generalisation argument, the collective duty which follows from the salvageable part of the argument, and the distribution of individual duties a conscientious moral agent has with regard to such environmental harms as a consequence. These duties turn out to be peculiarly political in nature with the result that conscientious moral agents may have a number of political duties to protect the environment heretofore unrealised.     

Individual Complicity in Collective Wrongdoing

Some instances of right and wrongdoing appear to be of a distinctly collective kind. When, for example, one group commits genocide against another, the genocide is collective in the sense that the wrongness of genocide seems morally distinct from the aggregation of individual murders that make up the genocide. The problem, which I refer to as the problem of collective wrongs, is that it is unclear how to assign blame for distinctly collective wrongdoing to individual contributors when none of those individual contributors is guilty of the wrongdoing in question. I offer Christopher Kutz’s Complicity Principle as an attractive starting point for solving the problem, and then argue that the principle ought to be expanded to include a broader and more appropriate range of cases. The view I ultimately defend is that individuals are blameworthy for collective harms insofar as they knowingly participate in those harms, and that said individuals remain blameworthy regardless of whether they succeed in making a causal contribution to those harms.     

Collective Action as Individual Choice

We argue that conceptual analyses of collective action should be informed by game-theoretic analyses of collective action. In particular, we argue that Ariel Rubenstein’s so-called ‘Electronic Mail Game’ provides a useful model of collective action, and of the formation of collective intentions.     

The development and validation of the Relational, Individual, and Collective self-aspects (RIC) Scale

A new scale measuring Relational, Individual, and Collective self-aspects (RIC) was developed. The RIC Scale consists of ten questions each followed by three options reflecting the three self-aspects. Respondents rate each option in terms of its applicability to the self, yielding three subscale scores and revealing the relative prominence of each self-aspect. Two samples of university students (N1 = 170, N2 = 214) were used to develop and refine the scale. Analyses supported the reliability and validity of the three RIC subscales. Each self-aspect correlated in predicted ways with several existing scales. The RIC Scale also proved useful in assessing gender differences in self-aspect prominence. Validity of the three-part model of the self and implications for future research are discussed.     

The Influence of Relational,Individual and Collective Self-Aspects on Stress,Uplifts and Health

The theoretical framework of the tripartite self was used to explore the links between relational (R), individual (I) and collective (C) self-aspects, corresponding sources of stress and uplifts, and health outcomes in a sample of 355 Australians (147 men, 208 women). Results supported a self-uplift congruence model of well-being, whereby the strength of a self-aspect guided the experience of recent uplifts in a corresponding R, I or C domain, which, in turn, contributed to well-being. There was partial support for a self-stress incongruence model of ill-being, whereby a strong self-aspect combined with recent stress in a mismatched domain contributed to ill-being. These findings, which highlight the role of the self and the importance of identifying relational, individual and collective sources of stress and uplifts, provide a promising new approach to understanding psychosocial influences on health and illness.     

Individual Self,Relational Self,Collective Self: Hierarchical Ordering of the Tripartite Self

The individual self comprise unique attributes, the relational self comprises partner-shared attributes, and the collective self comprises ingroup-shared attributes. All selves are fundamental components of the self-concept, with each being important and meaningful to human experience and with each being associated with health benefits. Are the selves, however, equally important and meaningful? We review a program of research that tested four competing theoretical views suggesting that the motivational hub of human experience is (a) the individual self, (b) the relational self, (b) the collective self, or (c) determined by contextual or cultural factors. The research furnished support to the view that the individual self is the primary form of self-definition. We discuss alternative explanations and implications. We end with the introduction of a theoretical model, the boomerang model, that has the potential to integrate the diverse literature on the topic.     

Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual

This paper develops a neglected area in psychoanalytic theorizing: namely the collective aspects of individual subjectivity in the one-to-many object relationship. Using group theory allows us to describe this point of articulation between the individual and the group, allowing a more nuanced theoretical development of the social link in psychoanalysis. Subjectivity is inter-subjectivity in a radical way that extends beyond a singular one and singular other to pluralities of differences. We are both particles and waves; our subjectivity has a double provenance. This makes subjectivity inherently dynamic, inherently unstable, inherently dependent on groups of others, just as groups of others depend on the individuals that comprise them.     

Social Representations,Individual and Collective Mind: A Study of Wundt,Cattaneo and Moscovici

The paper presents a discussion on the role of Social Representations in the articulation between individual and collective dimensions of mental activity. An analysis of some concepts in the works of Wundt and Cattaneo is the starting point for a discussion of the relationship between individual processes, practices, artifacts, symbolic systems and functions of Social Representations in the development of culture and individuals. In this perspective, Social Representations could be considered a space of negotiation of the meaning. The relationship between Social Representations, symbolic systems, practices and sense making involves the elaboration of the tension between continuity and innovation, which is developed through communication and practice along time in the interaction between individual and collective minds.     

Development and validation of the brief Relational, Individual and Collective (brief RIC) Self-Aspects scale

A brief nine-item context-free version of the 30-item Relational, Individual and Collective (RIC) Self-Aspects scale was developed for use in short surveys and time-constrained telephone interviews. Two monocultural studies were conducted using Australian samples. In Study 1 ( N  = 175 university students) the Brief RIC demonstrated internal reliability, factorial validity and convergent construct validity with the original RIC. In Study 2 ( N  = 1000 adults) the three-factor structure was replicated and demographic correlates of self-aspects revealed new directions for future exploration. The Brief RIC will benefit from further validation, particularly in cross-cultural samples, but appears to be suitable for research purposes which require brevity.     

Individual Social Capital and Subjective Wellbeing: The Relational Goods

In this paper we analyze the non-instrumental dimension of social capital and its effects on subjective well-being. In the first part, we define the characteristics of production and consumption of relational goods. The second section analyses the influence of the different expressions of relational goods and social capital on individual subjective well-being. In the third, we test the explanatory power of this variable on the Easterlin’s paradox using the results of a survey on individual social capital in Spain. The main findings from the empirical analysis for Spanish society allow us to strengthen the hypothesis. We found a weak explanatory capacity of income or educational level or instrumental dimensions of social capital (expert mobilization) while a strong link between expressions of relational goods (domestic mobilization, household stability, partnership, trust and security in the environment) was found.