How should utilitarians think about the future?

Abstract

Utilitarians must think collectively about the future because many contemporary moral issues require collective responses to avoid possible future harms. But current rule utilitarianism does not accommodate the distant future. Drawing on my recent books Future People and Ethics for a Broken World, I defend a new utilitarianism whose central ethical question is: What moral code should we teach the next generation? This new theory honours utilitarianism’s past and provides the flexibility to adapt to the full range of credible futures – from futures broken by climate change to the digital, virtual and predictable futures produced by various possible technologies.     

How do location and control over the music influence listeners’ responses?

This study uses Mehrabian and Russell's ( 1974 ) Pleasure‐Arousal‐Dominance (PAD) model to consider how responses to both the music heard and overall in‐situ listening experience are influenced by the listener's degree of control over music selected for a particular listening episode and the location in which the listening takes place. Following recruitment via campus advertisements and a university research participation program, 216 individuals completed a background questionnaire and music listening task in a 3 (location) × 2 (experimenter‐ or participant‐selected music) design. After the listening task, participants completed a short questionnaire concerning the music they heard and the overall in‐situ listening experience. Results demonstrated that there was a positive relationship between control and liking for the music and episode, whether the former was considered in terms of: (1) whether the music was self‐selected or experimenter‐selected or (2) overt ratings of perceived control. Furthermore, the location and liking for the music were related to people's judgments of their enjoyment of the overall experience. This research indicates that the PAD model is a useful framework for understanding everyday music listening and supports the contention that, in a musical context, dominance may be operationalized as control over the music.     

How good is good luck? The role of counterfactual thinking in the perception of lucky and unlucky events

Spontaneous references to ‘luck’ (e.g. in the mass media) frequently occur in connection with narrow escapes from accidents. The hypothesis that lucky events are not always positive, to the same degree as unlucky events are negative, was tested by asking Norwegian and Polish students to describe incidents of good and bad luck from their own lives, These stories were subsequently evaluated by the narrators and by a group of judges. Ratings showed unlucky events to be uniformly negative whereas lucky events varied widely in attractiveness. Both were characterized by the idea that the outcome could easily have been a dramatically different one. In a parallel set of studies, pleasant and unpleasant experiences from students' everyday life were collected (without specific reference to luck) and evaluated along the same dimensions. The results confirm that unlucky and unpleasant events have more in common than lucky and pleasant ones. Pleasant and unpleasant events can be imagined to have opposite alternative outcomes, but these are felt with less immediacy than in the case of luck. It is concluded that luck attributions typically occur in situations that could easily have taken a worse turn. How lucky depends upon how easily and how much worse.     

How does context affect assessments of facial emotion? The role of culture and age

People from Asian cultures are more influenced by context in their visual processing than people from Western cultures. In this study, we examined how these cultural differences in context processing affect how people interpret facial emotions. We found that younger Koreans were more influenced than younger Americans by emotional background pictures when rating the emotion of a central face, especially those younger Koreans with low self-rated stress. In contrast, among older adults, neither Koreans nor Americans showed significant influences of context in their face emotion ratings. These findings suggest that cultural differences in reliance on context to interpret others' emotions depend on perceptual integration processes that decline with age, leading to fewer cultural differences in perception among older adults than among younger adults. Furthermore, when asked to recall the background pictures, younger participants recalled more negative pictures than positive pictures, whereas older participants recalled similar numbers of positive and negative pictures. These age differences in the valence of memory were consistent across culture.     

A critical discussion of Prior’s philosophical and tense-logical analysis of the ideas of indeterminism and human freedom

This paper is a critical discussion of A.N. Prior’s contribution to the modern understanding of indeterminism and human freedom of choice. Prior suggested that these ideas should be conceived in terms of his tense logic. It can be demonstrated that his approach provides an attractive formalization that makes it possible to discuss indeterminism and human freedom of choice in a very precise manner and in a broader metaphysical context. It is also argued that Prior’s development of this approach was closely linked to his very personal struggles with fundamental religious and metaphysical questions. In his opinion, holding the doctrine of divine foreknowledge together with the doctrine of human freewill gives rise to difficult logical and philosophical problems. It appears that Prior, rather early on, decided to support what was later known as the Peircean solution, although he also analysed what he considered to be the most important alternative solution—the Ockhamist solution. This paper offers a discussion of some of Prior’s published books and papers as well as some of the papers in his Nachlass.

     

Towards the knowledge democracy? Knowledge production and the civic role of the university

In this paper I ask whether the University has a special role to play in democratic societies. I argue that the modern University can no longer lay claim to a research monopoly since nowadays research is conducted in many places outside of the University. The University can, however, still lay claim to a kind of knowledge monopoly which has to with the central role Universities play in the definition of what counts as scientific knowledge. The problem is, however, that the University’s knowledge monopoly is predominantly understood in epistemological terms. This leaves only one role for the University in a democratic society, viz., that of the expert. Based on ideas from John Dewey and Bruno Latour I suggest a different way to understand the distinction between ‘scientific’ and ‘everyday’ knowledge. Against this background I argue that the University can contribute towards the democratisation of knowledge if it articulates the difference between scientific and everyday knowledge in non-epistemological terms.

How should the History of Education be Written? Some Reflections about the Nature of the Discipline from the Perspective of the Reception of our Work

How should history of education be written? To put the question is far more easier than to provide a concrete answer. In contemporary research, there continue to be pedagogistic complaints about finding answers to present-day educational problems via history. In our view, such an ahistorical utilitarianism as well as the legitimizing and/or mythologizing belief in a particular pedagogical system, in which the history of this field is so rich since the institutionalization of the discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, should be avoided at all costs. But the danger of presentism lurks around the corner as a sine qua non condition in any form of historical research. As can be found out via the comments on our own work, much of the criticism goes back to old conceptions of the discipline, conceived as historical pedagogy rather than as history of education. Apparently, in the field of pedagogy people are still convinced that the history of education, even if it does not provide edifying examples and useful lessons, must in any case have a training value for professionals – which in the light of modern, advanced research is rather a difficult idea to defend.     

What is the role of the cerebellum in motor learning and cognition?

The exact role of the cerebellum in motor learning and cognition is controversial. Nonetheless, recent ideas and facts have prompted an attempt at building and testing a more unified and coherent conceptualization. This article will suggest that the cerebellum might indeed participate in both motor control and cognition, and in motor adaptation, motor learning, and procedural learning. The proposed process would entail stimulus-response linkage through trial and error learning, and would consist of groupings of single-response elements-motor and cognitive-into large combinations. After practice, the occurrence of a sensory or experiential `context' would automatically trigger the combined response. The parallel fiber is the proposed agent of stimulus-response linkage and of combining the response elements. The attempt here is to focus on the role of the parallel fiber as a possible combiner of downstream motor and cognitive elements.     

How does perfectionism affect academic achievement? Examining the mediating role of accurate self-assessment

Perfectionism, a multidimensional disposition encompassing both positive and negative attributes, has been widely examined in a number of different fields, one of which is academics. However, results of research on the precise connection between perfectionism and academic success remain largely inconclusive. The present study, therefore, attempted to identify this underlying mechanism by examining the mediating role of accurate self-assessment in the relationship between perfectionism and academic achievement of college students. The results revealed that while perfectionistic concerns and strivings did not directly affect academic achievement, their indirect effects were statistically significant. Perfectionistic concerns negatively predicted academic achievement through inaccurate self-assessment, whereas perfectionistic strivings positively predicted academic achievement through accurate self-assessment. These findings are expected to promote a practical and balanced understanding of academic perfectionism by explaining the relationship between the sub-dimensions of perfectionism and academic achievement.     

Information on the Internet: How selective should we be?

Vast amounts of information are available on the Internet, and programs such as Mosaic provide users with easy access to text and multimedia files. Once a user has set up a host system, consideration must be given to what information will be made available. In addition to legal restrictions, the interests of potential users (those accessing the host system) should be considered when determining the kinds of information to be made available. If those maintaining these host systems are somewhat selective when making information availability decisions, the potential information “glut” may be attenuated.     

Who should own the definition of personality?

The averaged judgment of knowledgeable others provides the best available point of reference both for the definition of personality structure in general and for assessing someone's personality in particular. Self-judgments, as in personality questionnaires, are intrinsically deficient because judgment errors cannot be averaged out. The recommended procedure for assessing someone's personality is to give a personality questionnaire, phrased in the third person singular, to those who know the target best. This set may or may not include the target person as a judge.     

Development of working memory: should the Pascual-Leone and the Baddeley and Hitch models be merged?

The data presented by Kemps, De Rammelaere, and Desmet (2000, this issue) appear to have some aspects that fit most readily into our own model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), while others appear to support that of Pascual-Leone (1970). We accept that our initial model said little about development and was better able to account for relatively simple memory-based tasks than more complex cognitive activities. More recent elaborations of the model are, however, able to throw new light on the processes underlying cognitive development, offering a better account than that provided by existing neo-Piagetian interpretations. Meanwhile, the addition of a fourth component to the model, namely the episodic buffer, offers a way of dealing with more complex cognitive activities. Given the major differences between our own model and that of Pascual-Leone in basic assumptions, and in theoretical style, we suggest that any attempt to combine the two would be premature.     

Still servants of work? Exploring the role of the critic in work and organizational psychology

This paper situates the burgeoning movement of critical work and organizational psychology (CWOP) within a broader and ongoing effort to rehabilitate work in a broken society. Drawing upon Loren Baritz's seminal critique of the field, The Servants of Power, the argument is made that while CWOP scholars clearly militate against pandering to the “power elite,” they nonetheless risk becoming servants of work, defined as the propensity to perpetuate work's outsized psychological significance. To support such an argument, a core yet neglected theme in Baritz's book is revisited, that of the role of the critic, to demonstrate how CWOP scholars might navigate their own entanglements with servitude while at the same time contest work's symbolic power. The paper also addresses the charge of intellectual elitism that can result from holding such a position of “critical distance” not just from mainstream scholarship, but from work itself. Implications for the future of CWOP are discussed.     

How can ‘we’ help? Exploring the role of shared social identity in the experiences and benefits of volunteering

Previous research on volunteering has largely focused on the individual characteristics and experiences of volunteers, or on their relationship with a volunteering organisation, neglecting the group dynamics of volunteering. To address this gap, we apply a social identity and “Social Cure” perspective in a thematic analysis of interviews with 40 volunteers from across the South of England. This analysis highlights that group identities are fundamental to volunteers' motivations and experiences of volunteering. Sharing an identity with other volunteers promoted feelings of belonging, which in turn impacted upon the participants' wellbeing. Identity processes also underpinned interactions with the beneficiaries of help and how volunteers managed the challenges of helping. Finally, shared identity facilitated collective support between volunteers, which was necessary to deal with the challenges of the volunteering role, and this could be facilitated or hindered by the volunteering organisation. We discuss the implications for how volunteering organisations can enhance identity‐mediated helping, as well as for understanding the impact of volunteering on health and wellbeing.     

Do you remember where sounds,pictures and words came from? The role of the stimulus format in object location memory

Contrasting results in visual and auditory spatial memory stimulate the debate over the role of sensory modality and attention in identity-to-location binding. We investigated the role of sensory modality in the incidental/deliberate encoding of the location of a sequence of items. In 4 separated blocks, 88 participants memorised sequences of environmental sounds, spoken words, pictures and written words, respectively. After memorisation, participants were asked to recognise old from new items in a new sequence of stimuli. They were also asked to indicate from which side of the screen (visual stimuli) or headphone channel (sounds) the old stimuli were presented in encoding. In the first block, participants were not aware of the spatial requirement while, in blocks 2, 3 and 4 they knew that their memory for item location was going to be tested. Results show significantly lower accuracy of object location memory for the auditory stimuli (environmental sounds and spoken words) than for images (pictures and written words). Awareness of spatial requirement did not influence localisation accuracy. We conclude that: (a) object location memory is more effective for visual objects; (b) object location is implicitly associated with item identity during encoding and (c) visual supremacy in spatial memory does not depend on the automaticity of object location binding.     

Conspirituality Reconsidered: How Surprising and How New is the Confluence of Spirituality and Conspiracy Theory?

Those who have followed the development of online new religiosity over the past decade will not have failed to notice that conspiracy theories and ‘New Age’ ideas are thriving together. But how new and how surprising is the phenomenon of ‘conspirituality’? In the present article, we challenge the thesis put forward by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in their article of 2011, published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, that a confluence of spirituality and conspiracism has emerged in the past two decades as a form of New Age theodicy. Instead, we argue, on theoretical grounds, that conspirituality can be viewed as a predictable result of structural elements in the cultic milieu and, on historical grounds, that its roots stretch deep into the history of Western esotericism. Together, these two considerations allow us not only to suggest that conspirituality is old and predictable, but also to identify a large potential for further research which will contribute to the study of conspiracy culture and enable a new line of comparative research in religious studies.