In Defense of Individualism

This paper offers a programmatic philosophical articulation of moral and political individualism. This individualism consists of two main components: value individualism and rights individualism. The former is the view that, for each individual, the end which is of ultimate value is his own well-being. Each individual's well-being has ultimate agent-relative value and the only ultimate values are these agent-relative values. The latter view is that individuals possess moral jurisdiction over themselves, i.e., rights of self-ownership. These rights (along with other rights individuals may come to possess) constrain the manner in which agents may pursue value. For this reason, the articulated individualism is an constrained individualism. Sketches of arguments are offered for both value and rights individualism. And it is argued that the sole legitimate function of legal/political institutions is to further delineate and protect the rights of individuals. However, the paper is also concerned to indicate why this radical moral and political individualism does not have many of the features or implications that are commonly ascribed to it. In this connection, I seek to show how this social doctrine accords with individuals' having concern for the well-being of others, with the emergence of relationships among individuals that have both instrumental and non-instrumental value, with a degree of responsibility for self and others that is often thought to be antithetical to individualism and, in general, with a flourishing of civil order.     

Letters, Notes, and Comments

Letter: Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religions
Commenting on Leaping into the Boundless: A Daoist Reading of Comparative Religious Ethics by Francisca Cho, Moral Reason, Risk, and Comparative Inquiry by Robin W. Lovin, Heuristic Power as the Test of Theory by Ronald M. Green, and The Author Replies by Francisca Cho     

Animal Rights and Animal Experiments: An Interest-Based Approach

This paper examines whether non-human animals have a moral right not to be experimented upon. It adopts a Razian conception of rights, whereby an individual possesses a right if an interest of that individual is sufficient to impose a duty on another. To ascertain whether animals have a right not to be experimented on, three interests are examined which might found such a right: the interest in not suffering, the interest in staying alive, and the interest in being free. It is argued that while the first two of these interests are sufficient to ground animal rights against being killed and made to suffer by experiments, the interest in freedom does not ground a general animal right not to be used in experimentation. Winner of the second annual Res Publica Postgraduate Essay Prize, 2006.     

Career transitions in times of social change. His and her story

Drawing on data collected from two longitudinal Cohort Studies following the lives of over 20,000 individuals born in the United Kingdom 12 years apart in 1958 and 1970, respectively, this paper examines antecedents and outcomes of educational and occupational aspirations of young men and women, covering the transition from dependent childhood into independent adulthood. Two analytical models, a Social Reproduction Model and a Developmental-Contextual Model are tested to assess the processes by which family background and the wider socio-historical context influence work and family related careers. The findings demonstrate the persistent role of gender, social origin and individual agency processes as well as the influence of a changing socio-historical context on career development. Results are interpreted with regard to biographical agency processes linking individual lives with social contexts across the life course.     

Individual differences in information order effects: The importance of right-hemisphere access in belief updating

The order in which information is received alters the evaluation of causal hypotheses. Specifically, research suggests that the last piece of information oftentimes has the greatest impact on the evaluation and that the difference in subjective value between two pieces of information is an important factor influencing the magnitude of this recency effect. The present paper extends this line of work by exploring individual differences in this phenomenon via one's degree of handedness. Two hundred and five participants were given two hypothetical scenarios and related causal hypotheses accompanied by two pieces of additional information and asked to revise their belief in each hypothesis as information accumulated. Results confirmed predictions that 1) inconsistent/mixed-handers (those who use their non-dominant hand for at least some activities) show a larger effect with two pieces of inconsistent weak or strong information, and 2) neither mixed-handers nor consistent/strong-handers (those who use their dominant hand for almost all activities) show an effect with strong and weak pieces of consistent information. Mixed-handers' susceptibility to persuasive arguments and Ramachandran’s (1995; Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998) belief-updating theory centered around communication between the two halves of the brain and functional access to the right hemisphere are used to account for these data.     

Making peace in gestational conflicts

Mary Anne Warren's claim that there is room for only one person with full and equal rights inside a single human skin ([1], p. 63) calls attention to the vast range of moral conflict engendered by assigning full basic moral rights to fetuses. Thereby, it serves as a goad to thinking about conflicts between pregnant women and their fetuses in a way that emphasizes relationships rather than rights. I sketch out what a care orientation might suggest about resolving gestational conflicts. I also argue that the care orientation, with its commitment to the significance of the partial and the particular, cannot be absorbed within standard, impartialist moral theory.     

THE CAPABILITIES OF PEOPLE WITH COGNITIVE DISABILITIES

Abstract: People with cognitive disabilities are equal citizens, and law ought to show respect for them as full equals. To do so, law must provide such people with equal entitlements to medical care, housing, and other economic needs. But law must also go further, providing people with disabilities truly equal access to education, even when that is costly and involves considerable change in current methods of instruction. The central theme of this essay is what is required in order to give such people political and civil rights on a basis of genuine equality.     

Specialization effect and its influence on memory and problem solving in expert chess players

Expert chess players, specialized in different openings, recalled positions and solved problems within and outside their area of specialization. While their general expertise was at a similar level, players performed better with stimuli from their area of specialization. The effect of specialization on both recall and problem solving was strong enough to override general expertise—players remembering positions and solving problems from their area of specialization performed at around the level of players 1 standard deviation (SD) above them in general skill. Their problem-solving strategy also changed depending on whether the problem was within their area of specialization. When it was, they searched more in depth and less in breadth; with problems outside their area of specialization, the reverse. The knowledge that comes from familiarity with a problem area is more important than general purpose strategies in determining how an expert will tackle it. These results demonstrate the link in experts between problem solving and memory of specific experiences and indicate that the search for context-independent general purpose problem-solving strategies to teach to future experts is unlikely to be successful.     

Cognitive models of choice: comparing decision field theory to the proportional difference model

People often face preferential decisions under risk. To further our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying these preferential choices, two prominent cognitive models, decision field theory (DFT; Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993 ) and the proportional difference model (PD; González-Vallejo, 2002 ), were rigorously tested against each other. In two consecutive experiments, the participants repeatedly had to choose between monetary gambles. The first experiment provided the reference to estimate the models' free parameters. From these estimations, new gamble pairs were generated for the second experiment such that the two models made maximally divergent predictions. In the first experiment, both models explained the data equally well. However, in the second generalization experiment, the participants' choices were much closer to the predictions of DFT. The results indicate that the stochastic process assumed by DFT, in which evidence in favor of or against each option accumulates over time, described people's choice behavior better than the trade-offs between proportional differences assumed by PD.