Normative Ethics after Pragmatic Naturalism

Philip Kitcher presents an ambitious account of pragmatic naturalism that incorporates an explanatory story of the emergence and development of ethics, a metaethical perspective on progress, and a normative stance for moral theorizing. This article contends that Kitcher's normative stance is incompatible with the explanatory and metaethical components of his project. Instead, pragmatic naturalists should endorse a normative ethics that is experimental, grounded in practice, and acutely aware of cognitive and informational limitations. In particular, the ethical project would benefit from endorsing empirical work on participatory democracy for the identification of mechanisms to guide us on deep moral conflicts.     

The Effects of Prior Learned Strategies on Updating an Opponent's Strategy in the Rock,Paper, Scissors Game

To explore how model building adapts to changing environments, we had participants play “rock‐paper‐scissors” against a computer that played a frequency bias or a player‐dependent bias and then switched. Participants demonstrated their use of prior experience in how quickly they recognized and exploited changes in the computer's play strategy; in general, the more similar the strategies, the more efficient the updating. These findings inform our understanding of previously reported updating impairments in right‐brain damaged patients.     

Can Pragmatists Be Moderate?

In discussions of whether and how pragmatic considerations can make a difference to what one ought to believe, two sets of cases feature. The first set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief, is exemplified by cases of being financially bribed to believe (or withhold from believing) something. The second set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic encroachment on epistemic justification, is exemplified by cases where acting on a belief rashly risks some disastrous outcome if the belief turns out to be false. Call those who think that pragmatic considerations make a difference to what one ought to believe in the second kind of case, but not in the first, ‘moderate pragmatists’. Many philosophers – in particular, most advocates of pragmatic and moral encroachment – are moderate pragmatists. But moderate pragmatists owe us an explanation of exactly why the second kind of pragmatic consideration makes a difference, but the first kind doesn’t. I argue that the most promising of these explanations all fail: they are either theoretically undermotivated, or get key cases wrong, or both. Moderate pragmatism may be an unstable stopping point between a more extreme pragmatism, on one hand, and an uncompromising anti-pragmatism on the other.     

Understanding Implicit Bias: Putting the Criticism into Perspective

What is the status of research on implicit bias? In light of meta-analyses revealing ostensibly low average correlations between implicit measures and behavior, as well as various other psychometric concerns, criticism has become ubiquitous. We argue that while there are significant challenges and ample room for improvement, research on the causes, psychological properties, and behavioral effects of implicit bias continues to deserve a role in the sciences of the mind as well as in efforts to understand, and ultimately combat, discrimination and inequality.     

‘Pissed Off and Confused’/‘Grateful and (Re)Moved’: Affect,Privilege and National Commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article explores affect, colonial privilege, and the cultural politics of national commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on focus-group interviews around two major national days, we examine means through which feelings and emotions are deployed in ways that enable the reproduction of social advantage. Situating affect within patterns of relationship, four interrelated affective-discursive practices are explored. In relation to Waitangi Day, agents tend to work under the rubric of anger and confusion. For Anzac Day, being grateful and moved shapes the interaction, although participants often indicate preferences towards “having a day off.” Given the colonial context in which these practices circulate, analysis observes the associated freedom and ease by which affective-discursive privilege is (re)produced. Often incongruent and rarely challenged, privilege allows associated actors to do what they want, when they want, however they want. This affective climate authorizes the ongoing reproduction of, and justification for, membership to a higher-status ethnic group of which unearned opportunities and entitlements remain its everyday, expected currency.