Thresholds for movement direction: Two directions are less detectable than one

Thresholds for detecting movement direction were measured for two different types of dynamic dot display; first, one in which all dots moved upwards, and secondly, one in which half the dots moved upwards and half moved downwards. Direction sensitivity was found to be worse for the stimulus containing two simultaneous directions of motion than for the stimulus in one direction. These data are taken as evidence of some form of competition, or AND-NOT gating, between the outputs of direction-specific analysers during threshold determination.     

Incentive learning following reinforcer devaluation is not conditional upon the motivational state during re-exposure

Three experiments analysed the effect of re-exposure to the reinforcer following aversion conditioning on instrumental performance. In the first experiment, groups of hungry and thirsty rats were trained to press a lever for sucrose, which was then followed by a single injection of lithium chloride (LiCl). On the following day, half the animals in each motivational condition received re-exposure to the sucrose solution; the remaining animals were not re-exposed. In a subsequent extinction test animals that had received re-exposure to the sucrose pressed less than animals that were not re-exposed. Moreover, the effect of re-exposure to the sucrose solution was similar following training under hunger and thirst. In the remaining studies, animals were trained to lever-press for sucrose while either hungry or thirsty. They were then injected with LiCl and re-exposed to the sucrose while either hungry or thirsty, i.e. in the same or different motivational state employed during training, or they were not re-exposed. Lever pressing was then tested in extinction in the training motivational state. As in the first experiment, re-exposure to the reinforcer after aversion conditioning enhanced the magnitude of the reinforcer devaluation effect. More importantly, re-exposure to the sucrose produced a comparable effect on instrumental performance, whether re-exposure was given under the same or different motivational state to that employed during training. These results suggest that the instrumental reinforcer devaluation effect depends upon a process of incentive learning, but that this process is not conditional upon the current motivational state of the animal.     

Antibiotic Use and the Demise of Husbandry

Numerous ethical issues have emerged from the industrialization of animal agriculture. Those issues ultimately rest in large measure upon overuse of antibiotics. How this has occurred is discussed in detail in this paper.     

Lefort as a reader of Machiavelli and Marx

This essay begins with the contention that phenomenology has taken a “hermeneutic turn,” “the things themselves” are always already interpreted. Philosophers often elaborate their own positions through a “reading” of the works of other philosophers. This is the case for Claude Lefort. Through his interpretive reading of the works of Machiavelli one sees the origin of Lefort’s idea of the autonomy and the anonymity of the political and thus his notion of political modernity. In tracing the evolution of Lefort’s relationship to Marx, we witness the process by which he disengages himself from his early “enchantment” with the works of Marx and the idea of the proletariat as a class bearing universal interest. Ultimately he criticizes Marx for his attempt to derive the political from the dimension of the social. This issues in his theory of totalitarianism as the attempt of a regime to close in on itself, thus denying any gesture to the dimension of the other.     

Japanese preschoolers’ evaluation of circular and non-circular arguments

Observational and experimental data have revealed that preschoolers possess some argumentation skills, both in the production and the evaluation of arguments. However, these skills might have been fostered by the particular cultural context of Western middle- and upper-classes families, to which most children studied belong. Some data suggests that children in other cultures possess at least some of these skills, but no experimental data had been gathered in Eastern cultures. These cultures are supposed to frown on argumentation, and might thus be less conducive to the early development of argumentation skills. We test the emergence of argument evaluation skills in Japanese 5-year-olds by presenting them with a choice between endorsing a strong, perceptual argument, and a weak, circular argument. A first experiment revealed a trend in the direction of the strong argument. A second experiment that addresses some methodological concerns of the first demonstrates a significant tendency to follow the strong argument. These results are similar to those previously gathered in two other cultures (Swiss and Maya), and suggest that some basic argumentation skills are early developing across cultures.     

Double effect,all over again: The case of Sister Margaret McBride

As media reports have made widely known, in November 2009, the ethics committee of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, permitted the abortion of an eleven-week-old fetus in order to save the life of its mother. This woman was suffering from acute pulmonary hypertension, which her doctors judged would prove fatal for both her and her previable child. The ethics committee believed abortion to be permitted in this case under the so-called principle of double effect, but Thomas J. Olmsted, the bishop of Phoenix, disagreed with the committee and pronounced its chair, Sister Margaret McBride, excommunicated latae sententiae, “by the very commission of the act.” In this article, I take the much discussed Phoenix case as an occasion to subject the principle of double effect to another round of philosophical scrutiny. In particular, I examine the third condition of the principle in its textbook formulation, namely, that the evil effect in question may not be the means to the good effect. My argument, in brief, is that the textbook formulation of the principle does not withstand philosophical scrutiny. Nevertheless, in the end, I do not claim that we should then “do away” with the principle altogether. Instead, we do well to understand it within the context of casuistry, the tradition of moral reasoning from which it issued.     

Animal Pain: What It is and Why It Matters

The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by “pangs of pleasure” that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, “mattering” would be positive, not negative, but would still be based in sentience and awareness. In our world, however, the “mattering” necessary to survival is negative—injuries and unfulfilled needs ramify in pain. But physical pain is by no means the only morally relevant mattering—fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief, certainly do not equate to varieties of physical pain, but are surely forms of “mattering.” An adequate morality towards animals would include a full range of possible matterings unique to each kind of animal, what I, following Aristotle, call “telos”. Sometimes not meeting other aspects of animal nature matter more to the animal than does physical pain. “Negative mattering” means all actions or events that harm animals—from frightening an animal to removing its young unnaturally early, to keeping it so it is unable to move or socialize. Physical pain is perhaps the paradigmatic case of “negative mattering”, but only constitutes a small part of what the concept covers. “Positive mattering” would of course encompass all states that are positive for the animal. An adequate ethic for animals takes cognizance of both kinds. The question arises as to how animals value death as compared with pain. Human cognition is such that it can value long-term future goals and endure short-run negative experiences for the sake of achieving them. In the case of animals, however, there is no evidence, either empirical or conceptual, that they have the capability to weigh future benefits or possibilities against current misery. We have no reason to believe that an animal can grasp the notion of extended life, let alone choose to trade current suffering for it. Pain may well be worse for animals than for humans, as they cannot rationalize its acceptance by appeal to future life without pain. How can we know that animals experience all or any of the negative or positive states we have enumerated above? The notion that we needed to be agnostic or downright atheistic about animal mentation, including pain, because we could not verify it through experience, became a mainstay of what I have called “scientific ideology”, the uncriticized dogma taught to young scientists through most of the 20th century despite its patent ignoring of Darwinian phylogenetic continuity. Together with the equally pernicious notion that science is “value-free”, and thus has no truck with ethics, this provided the complete justification for hurting animals in science without providing any pain control. This ideology could only be overthrown by federal law. Ordinary common sense throughout history, in contradistinction to scientific ideology, never denied that animals felt pain. Where, then, does the denial of pain and other forms of mattering come from if it is inimical to common sense? It came from the creation of philosophical systems hostile to common sense and salubrious to a scientific, non-commonsensical world view. Reasons for rejecting this philosophical position are detailed. In the end, then, there are no sound reasons for rejecting knowledge of animal pain and other forms of both negative and positive mattering in animals. Once that hurdle is cleared, science must work assiduously to classify, understand, and mitigate all instances of negative mattering occasioned in animals by human use, as well as to understand and maximize all modes of positive mattering.