My beliefs about your beliefs: a case study in theory of mind and epistemic logic

We model three examples of beliefs that agents may have about other agents’ beliefs, and provide motivation for this conceptualization from the theory of mind literature. We assume a modal logical framework for modelling degrees of belief by partially ordered preference relations. In this setting, we describe that agents believe that other agents do not distinguish among their beliefs (‘no preferences’), that agents believe that the beliefs of other agents are in part as their own (‘my preferences’), and the special case that agents believe that the beliefs of other agents are exactly as their own (‘preference refinement’). This multi-agent belief interaction is frame characterizable. We provide examples for introspective agents. We investigate which of these forms of belief interaction are preserved under three common forms of belief revision.     

Persistent pursuit of need-satisfying goals leads to increased happiness: A 6-month experimental longitudinal study

University-based community members (N = 181) participated in a four-wave, 6-month longitudinal experiment designed to increase treatment participants’ happiness levels. Participants were randomly assigned to set goals either to improve their life circumstances (comparison condition) or to increase their feelings of autonomy, competence, or relatedness in life (treatment conditions). We hypothesized that sustained gains in happiness would be observed only in the three treatment conditions, and that even these gains would last only when there was continuing goal engagement. Results supported these predictions and the sustainable happiness model on which they were based (Lyubomirsky et al. in Rev Gen Psychol 9:111–131, 2005). Furthermore, participants with initial positive attitudes regarding happiness change obtained larger benefits. We conclude that maintained happiness gains are possible, but that they require both “a will and a proper way” (Lyubomirsky et al. in Becoming happier takes both a will and a proper way: two experimental longitudinal interventions to boost well-being, 2009).     

Control,responsibility, and moral assessment

Recently, a number of philosophers have begun to question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility. According to these philosophers, what really matters in determining a person’s responsibility for some thing is whether that thing can be seen as indicative or expressive of her judgments, values, or normative commitments. Such accounts might therefore be understood as updated versions of what Susan Wolf has called “real self views,” insofar as they attempt to ground an agent’s responsibility for her actions and attitudes in the fact (when it is a fact) that they express who she is as a moral agent. As such, they seem to be open to some of the same objections Wolf originally raised to such accounts, and in particular to the objection that they cannot license the sorts of robust moral assessments involved in our current practices of moral responsibility. My aim in this paper is to try to respond to this challenge, by clarifying the kind of robust moral assessments I take to be licensed by (at least some) non-volitional accounts of responsibility and by explaining why these assessments do not in general require the agent to have voluntary control over everything for which she is held responsible. I also argue that the limited applicability of the distinction between “bad agents” and “blameworthy agents” on these accounts is in fact a mark in their favor.

Internal organs,integral selves,and good communities: opt-out organ procurement policies and the ‘separateness of persons’

Most people accept that if they can save someone from death at very little cost to themselves, they must do so; call this the ‘duty of easy rescue.’ At least for many such people, an instance of this duty is to allow their vital organs to be used for transplantation. Accordingly, ‘opt-out’ organ procurement policies, based on a powerfully motivated responsibility to render costless or very low-cost lifesaving aid, would seem presumptively permissible. Counterarguments abound. Here I consider, in particular, objections that assign a moral distinctiveness to the physical boundaries of our bodies and that concern autonomy and trust. These objections are singled out as they seem particularly pertinent to the stress I place on a distinctive benefit of the particular policy I defend. An opt-out system, resting not on the authority of ‘presumed consent’ but on the recognition of a duty to one another, has the prospect of prompting people to understand more richly the ways in which they are both physically embodied and communally embedded.     

Liberal arts graduates: They would do it again

Despite the trend toward increasing specialization in our society, men who graduated 15, 10, and 5 years before this study with college majors in liberal arts report a high degree of satisfaction with their careers and their lives. If they had it to do all over again, 80 percent would major in a liberal arts subject. Three-fourths felt that liberal education had prepared them well for vocational life. Most graduates selected their career goal after graduation from college. The greatest help in career planning came from faculty members and family—not from guidance or placement counselors.     

Happiness,Rationality, Autonomy and the Good Life

The paper starts with a general discussion of the concepts of happiness and the good life. I argue that there is a conceptual core of happiness which has to do with one’s life as a whole. I discuss affective and attitude or life satisfaction views of happiness and indicate problems faced by those views. I introduce my own view, the life plan view, which sees happiness as the ongoing realizing of global desires of the person. I argue that on such a view one’s life could be happy without a high level of rationality or a high level of autonomy; such rationality and autonomy are not built into the concept of happiness. So while happiness is a final value, and good for the person, it is not the only final value. Rationality and autonomy are also final values and, where they exist, are good as ends for the person, part of the good life.     

In Defense of Paternalism

This paper argues that we have wrongly and not for the patient’s benefit made a form of stark autonomy our highest value which allows physicians to slip out from under their basic duty which has always been to pursue a particular patient’s good. In general – I shall argue – it is the patient’s right to select his or her own goals and the physician’s duty to inform the patient of the feasibility of that goal and of the means needed to attain it. If the goal is not one that is possible, the patient, with the physician and family, must select a feasible goal and then discuss the costs/benefits of various approaches. The physician should take a leading role in helping the patient select the goal. I argue that to simply present a laundry list of means and insist that patients choose for themselves is not only abandoning patients to their autonomy but is, in fact, a crass form of violating the patient’s autonomy. Freely choosing not to choose is a choice a patient with decisional capacity is entitled to make and one that needs to be respected.     

Autonomy,Experience, and Reflection. On a Neglected Aspect of Personal Autonomy

The aim of this paper is to suggest that a necessary condition of autonomy has not been sufficiently recognized in the literature: the capacity to critically reflect on one’s practical attitudes (desires, preferences, values, etc.) in the light of new experiences. It will be argued that most prominent accounts of autonomy—ahistorical as well as history-sensitive—have either altogether failed to recognize this condition or at least failed to give an explicit account of it.     

Internalization and moral demands

How should we assess the burden of moral demands? A predominant assessment is provided by what Murphy calls the baseline of factual status-quo (FSQ): A moral theory is demanding if the level of agents’ well-being is reduced from the time they begin to comply perfectly with the theory. The aims of my paper are threefold. I will first discuss the limits of the FSQ baseline. Second, I suggest a different assessment, which examines moral demands from a whole-life perspective. My view is that even if agents’ compliance with a moral theory will not cause a substantial reduction to their existing level of well-being, the total quality of life that they may obtain from complying with this theory may still be lower than what they could have obtained by following some other moral theories. The third aim of this paper is that, through this investigation, I hope to explicate the relation between agents’ acceptance of a moral theory and the burden of demands that is created by it. I believe that we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of moral demands by paying attention to the psychological development of agents as they accept and internalize a moral theory.     

Spirituality,Religiousness, and Happiness in Children Aged 8–12 Years

The relation between spirituality and happiness was assessed in 320 children aged 8–12 from public and private (i.e., faith-based) schools. Children rated their own spirituality using the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire and 11 items selected and modified from the Brief Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality which reflected the children’s practices and beliefs. Children’s happiness was assessed using self-reports based on the Oxford Happiness Scale short form, the Subjective Happiness Scale, and a single-item measure. Parents also rated their children’s happiness. Children and parents rated the children’s temperament using the emotionality, activity, and sociability temperament survey. Children’s spirituality, but not their religious practices (e.g., attending church, praying, and meditating), was strongly linked to their happiness. Children who were more spiritual were happier. Spirituality accounted for between 3 and 26% of the unique variance in children’s happiness depending on the measures. Temperament was also a predictor of happiness, but spirituality remained a significant predictor of happiness even after removing the variance associated with temperament. The personal (i.e., meaning and value in one’s own life) and communal (quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) domains of spirituality were particularly good predictors of children’s happiness. These results parallel studies of adult happiness and suggest strategies to enhance happiness in children.     

Temperament and Happiness in Children

The relation between temperament and happiness was assessed in 311 children aged 9–12. Parents rated their children’s temperament using the Emotionality, Activity, and Sociability Temperament Survey (EAS) and rated their children’s happiness. Children rated their own temperament using the EAS and the Piers–Harris Self Concept Scale for Children Second Edition, and they rated their own happiness using a single-item measure, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire Short Form, and the Subjective Happiness Scale. Parents’ and children’s temperament ratings conformed to the four factor structure proposed by Buss and Plomin(Temperament: Early developing personality traits, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, 1984) supporting the use of children’s self-reports as an additional measure of temperament. Temperament accounted for between 9 and 29% of the variance in children’s happiness depending on the measures. Children who were more social and active, and less shy, emotional, and anxious were happier. These results parallel the well-established relation between happiness and personality in adults; temperament traits akin to extraversion (Sociability) were positively associated with happiness whereas traits akin to neuroticism (Emotionality) were negatively associated with happiness. Additionally, children who were rated higher in the temperament trait Activity were happier.     

Roles for scientific societies in promoting integrity in publication ethics

Scientific societies can have a powerful influence on the professional lives of scientists. Using this influence, they have a responsibility to make long-term commitments and investments in promoting integrity in publication, just as in other areas of research ethics. Concepts that can inform the thinking and activities of scientific societies with regard to publication ethics are: the “hidden curriculum” (the message of actions rather than formal statements), a fresh look at the components of acting with integrity, deviancy as a normally occurring phenomenon in human society, and the scientific community as an actual community. A society’s first step is to decide what values it will promote, within the framework of present-day standards of good conduct of science and given the society’s history and traditions. The society then must create educational programs that serve members across their careers. Scientific societies must take seriously the implications of the problem; set policies and standards for publication ethics for their members; educate about and enforce the standards; bring the issues before the members early and often; and maintain continuing dialogue with editors. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAAS-Office of Research Integrity (ORI) meeting in Washington DC on the theme: “The Role and Activities of Scientific Societies in Promoting Research Integrity” held on April 10–11, 2000.     

Moral Responsibility and History Revisited

Compatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility disagree with one another about the bearing of agents’ histories on whether or not they are morally responsible for some of their actions. Some stories about manipulated agents prompt such disagreements. In this article, I call attention to some of the main features of my own “history-sensitive” compatibilist proposal about moral responsibility, and I argue that arguments advanced by Michael McKenna and Manuel Vargas leave that proposal unscathed.     

The Determinants of Happiness of China’s Elderly Population

“Three generations under one roof” is an old Chinese saying used to describe a desired living arrangement. The traditional concept of happiness for a Chinese elderly person is being able to “play with grandchildren with candy in mouth, enjoy life with no cares.” In a fast-changing economy like China, how does society, especially the elderly themselves, view these traditional values? Using the 2005 Chinese General Social Survey, we study the determinants of happiness of the Chinese elderly. We are particularly interested in whether living with their child and whether living with their grandchild affect the happiness of the elderly. An important empirical concern is that unobserved permanent income may affect both the living arrangements of the elderly and their level of happiness. We include property ownership variables as proxies and also adopt an instrument variable approach to identify the causal relationship between the elderly’s happiness and their living arrangements. We find that, conditional on living with a grandchild, living with one’s child has a negative effect on the elderly’s happiness. Furthermore, elderly Chinese who live with grandchildren are associated with a much higher degree of happiness than their counterparts.     

Temperament and Happiness in Children in India

The relation between temperament and happiness was assessed in a sample of 441 children aged 7–14 years drawn from a population in Northern India. Parents assessed their children’s happiness and rated their children’s temperament using the Emotionality, Activity, and Sociability Temperament Survey (EAS). Children self-reported their own happiness using a single-item measure, the Oxford Happiness Scale Short Form, and the Subjective Happiness Scale. Parents’ temperament ratings conformed to the four factor structure proposed by Buss and Plomin (Temperament: early developing personality traits. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, 1984): Emotionality, Activity, Sociability, and Shyness. Temperament accounted for between 4 and 11% of the variance in children’s happiness depending on the measures. Children who were more social and active, and less shy, were happier. This result parallels the well-established relation between happiness and personality in adults and is similar to recent research on happiness and temperament in children; temperament traits akin to extraversion were positively associated with happiness. However, despite that neuroticism and its temperament counterpart are strongly and consistently linked to happiness in adults, the relation between happiness and the temperament trait associated with neuroticism (i.e., Emotionality) was weak. This suggests that the relations between temperament and happiness in children may not completely generalize across cultures.     

Development and use of behavior and social interaction software installed on Palm handheld for observation of a child’s social interactions with the environment

In settings in developing countries, children often socialize with multiple socializing agents (peers, siblings, neighbors) apart from their parents, and thus, a measurement of a child’s social interactions should be expanded beyond parental interactions. Since the environment plays a role in shaping a child’s development, the measurement of child-socializing agents’ interactions is important. We developed and used a computerized observational softwareBehavior and Social Interaction Software (BASIS) with a preloaded coding scheme installed on a handheld Palm device to record complex observations of interactions between children and socializing agents. Using BASIS, social interaction assessments were conducted on 573 preschool children for 1 h in their natural settings. Multiple screens with a set of choices in each screen were designed that included the child’s location, broad activity, state, and interactions with child-socializing agents. Data were downloaded onto a computer and systematically analyzed. BASIS, installed on Palm OS (M-125), enabled the recording of the complex interactions of child-socializing agents that could not be recorded with manual forms. Thus, this tool provides an innovative and relatively accurate method for the systematic recording of social interactions in an unrestricted environment.     

Exploring the Role of Religiosity and Spirituality in Amniocentesis Decision-Making Among Latinas

Given the complex array of emotional and medical issues that may arise when making a decision about amniocentesis, women may find that their spiritual and/or religious beliefs can comfort and assist their decision-making process. Prior research has suggested that Latinas’ spiritual and/or religious beliefs directly influence their amniocentesis decision. A more intimate look into whether Latinas utilize their beliefs during amniocentesis decision-making may provide an opportunity to better understand their experience. The overall goal of this study was to describe the role structured religion and spirituality plays in Latinas’ daily lives and to evaluate how religiosity and spirituality influences health care decisions, specifically in prenatal diagnosis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven women who were invited to describe their religious beliefs and thoughts while considering the option of amniocentesis. All participants acknowledged the influence of religious and/or spiritual beliefs in their everyday lives. Although the women sought comfort and found validation in their beliefs and in their faith in God’s will during their amniocentesis decision-making process, results suggest the risk of procedure-related complications played more of a concrete role than their beliefs.     

Training in Mindful Caregiving Transfers to Parent–Child Interactions

In an earlier study, we provided mindfulness training to three caregivers of individuals with profound multiple disabilities. We measured levels of happiness displayed by the individuals during the 8 weeks of mindfulness training of the caregivers, as well as during the 16 weeks following the termination of training. We found that happiness increased markedly when an individual interacted with a caregiver who had received training in mindfulness as opposed to a control caregiver who did not receive such training. In this study, we investigated whether the increased mindfulness of the three caregivers would transfer to interactions with their own children. The children’s non-compliance with their mother’s requests was used as an indirect index of the effects of training their mothers received in mindfulness. Although the ages of the children and their baseline levels of non-compliance were variable, the data showed a decrease in non-compliance during mindfulness training of the caregivers and further decreases following the completion of training. Our data provide preliminary evidence of transfer of mindfulness training from caregiving to parent–child interactions. We speculate as to why this may occur in mindfulness training.     

Effort and Moral Worth

One of the factors that contributes to an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness — his or her moral worth — is effort. On the one hand, agents who act effortlessly seem to have high moral worth. On the other hand, agents who act effortfully seem to have high moral worth as well. I explore and explain this pair of intuitions and the contour of our views about associated cases.     

Professional Ambivalence: Accounts of Ethical Practice in Childhood Genetic Testing

Childhood genetic testing raises complex ethical and moral dilemmas for both families and professionals. In the family sphere, the role of communication is a key aspect in the transmission of ‘genetic responsibility’ between adults and children. In the professional sphere, genetic responsibility is an interactional accomplishment emerging from the sometimes competing views over what constitutes the ‘best interests’ of the child in relation to parental preferences on the one hand, and professional judgements on the other. In the present paper we extend our previous research into parental accounts of childhood genetic testing and explore the ethical accounts of professionals in research interviews. Interviews (n = 20) were conducted with professional practitioners involved in the genetic diagnosis and management of children and their families. We first identify four inter-related themes—juxtaposition of parental rights vis-à-vis child’s autonomy, elicitation of the child’s autonomy, avoidance of parental responsibility and recognition of professional uncertainty. Then, using Rhetorical Discourse Analysis, we examine the range of discourse devices through which ethical accounts are situationally illustrated: contrast, reported speech, constructed dialogue, character and event work. An overarching device in these ethical accounts is the use of extreme case scenarios, which reconstruct dilemmas as justifications of professional conduct. While acknowledging ambivalence, our analysis suggests that professional judgement is not a simple matter of implementing ethical principles but rather of managing the practical conditions and consequences of interactions with parents and children. We conclude that more attention is needed to understand the way professional practitioners formulate judgements about ethical practice.