Moral responsibility and manipulation: on a novel argument against historicism

Philosophical Studies - Taylor Cyr offers a novel argument against, as he puts it, “all versions of historicism” about direct moral responsibility (Philos Stud....     

FREE WILL AND LUCK

I present an account of how agents can know what they are doing when they intentionally execute object-oriented actions. When an agent executes an object-oriented intentional action, she uses perception in such a way that it can fulfil a justificatory role for her knowledge of her own action and it can fulfil this justificatory role without being inferentially linked to the cognitive states that it justifies. I argue for this proposal by meeting two challenges: in an agent's knowledge of her action perception can only play an enabling role (and no justificatory role) for the agent's knowledge and if perception has a justificatory role, then the agent's knowledge must be inferential.     

Usability evaluation with screen reader users: a video presentation of the PCTA’s experimental setting and rules

In the study entitled “Web usability evaluation with screen reader users: Implementation of the Partial Concurrent Thinking Aloud technique” (Federici et al. 2010), we have proposed a modified protocol of usability evaluation technique for blind users, which integrates the features of the concurrent and the retrospective techniques. This new technique, called partial concurrent thinking aloud (PCTA), while respecting the properties of classic verbal protocols, overcomes the structural interference and the limits of concurrent and retrospective protocols when used with screen reader users. In order to facilitate understanding and acquisition of the PCTA’s technique for practitioners and researchers, we have video recorded three different verbal protocols by visualizing five experimental sections. In the first two videos, we have compared a concurrent with a retrospective’s verbal protocol of a sighted user, showing the difference of the verbalizations provided by the user in these two conditions. The third video shows the structural interference of the screen reader, during a blind user concurrent thinking aloud. In the last two videos, we show the difference of a blind user behaviour when PCTA or retrospective protocol is adopted. The videos clearly visualize the advantage of the PCTA use in respect of the two other protocols. In conclusion, the visualization of the PCTA technique confirms that this new verbal protocol promotes and guarantees a more user-driven usability assessment with disabled people, by better involving screen reader users, overcoming the structural interference and the limits of the concurrent and retrospective protocols.     

Moral responsibility and the continuation problem

Typical incompatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism contend that being basically morally responsible for a decision one makes requires that, if that decision has proximal causes, it is not deterministically caused by them. This article develops a problem for this contention that resembles what is sometimes called the problem of present (or cross-world) luck. However, the problem makes no reference to luck nor to contrastive explanation. This article also develops a solution.     

DENNETT ON FREEDOM

Abstract: In his Freedom Evolves (2003) Daniel Dennett criticizes a view I defend in Autonomous Agents (1995) about the importance of agents' histories for autonomy, freedom, and moral responsibility and defends a competing view. Our disagreement on this issue is the major focus of this article. Additional topics are manipulation, avoidance, and avoidability.