文化冲突与价值碰撞:安乐死问题根源探究——兼及反思国内安乐死问题之讨论

20世纪80年代国内学术界及公众对安乐死问题的关注与讨论日渐升温,但总体上对安乐死作为问题的理解和把握仍显不足。安乐死作为一种临终生命处置方式而被争论不止,其缘起于西方文化系统中内在的冲突与价值碰撞,集中表现在:宗教文化、医学职业文化和政治文化领域。这三种文化各自内在的价值冲突与不同文化之间的相互碰撞造就了安乐死问题。     

Response rate correlates with indifference points in a delay‐discounting procedure

To study how effort affects reward value, we replicated Fortes, Vasconcelos and Machado's (2015) study using an adjusting‐delay task. Nine pigeons chose between a standard alternative that gave access to 4 s of food, after a 10 s delay, and an adjusting‐delay alternative that gave access to 12 s of food after a delay that changed dynamically with the pigeons' choices, decreasing when they preferred the standard alternative, and increasing when they preferred the adjusting alternative. The delay value at which preference stabilized defined the indifference point, a measure of reward value. To manipulate effort across phases, we varied the response rate required during the delay of the standard alternative. Results showed that a) the indifference point increased in the higher‐response‐rate phases, suggesting that reward value decreased with effort, and b) in the higher‐response‐rate phases, response rate in the standard alternative was linearly related to the indifference point. We advance several conceptions of how effort may change perceived delay or amount and thereby affect reward value.     

Right- and left-wing prejudice toward dissimilar groups in cultural and economic domains

According to recent studies, people on both the political right and left show prejudice toward groups whose beliefs are in conflict with their own. This prediction applies to both cultural and economic dimensions of political beliefs. In three studies (N = 499) we demonstrate that people on both the cultural and economic right and left show negative attitudes toward groups on the other side of the given spectrum and that underlying this effect is the perception of value violation. In two out of three studies, we manipulated the extremity of target worldviews to further explore the causal chain between political beliefs, the perception of value violation, and prejudice. Our results showed a high degree of symmetry between the political left and right in their attitudes toward groups with dissimilar beliefs. However, although people on both sides of the political spectrum show prejudice toward each other, people on the cultural and economic right seem to be more sensitive to value violations than people on the left.     

Effects of social and affective content on exogenous attention as revealed by event-related potentials

The social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli. For this purpose, we recorded event-related potentials in a sample of 24 participants engaged in a digit categorisation task. Distracters were affective pictures varying in social content, in addition to affective valence and arousal, which appeared in the background during the task. Our data revealed that pictures depicting high social content captured greater automatic attention than other pictures, as reflected by the greater amplitude and shorter latency of anterior P2, and anterior and posterior N2 components of the ERPs. In addition, social content also provoked greater allocation of processing resources as manifested by P3 amplitude, likely related to the high arousal they elicited. These results extend data from previous research by showing the relevance of the social value of the affective stimuli on automatic attentional processing.     

Counterexamples to Recovery and the Filtering Condition

David Makinson has argued that the compelling character of counterexamples to the Recovery Condition on contraction is due to an appeal to justificational structure. In “naked theories” where such structure is ignored or is not present, Recovery does apply. This note attempts to show that Makinson is mistaken on both counts. Recovery fails when no appeal is made to justificational structure. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good

Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this "the value problem." I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is that not all instances of true belief seem to be good on balance, so even if a given instance of knowing p is better than merely truly believing p , not all instances of knowing will be good enough to explain why knowledge has received so much attention in the history of philosophy. The article aims to answer two questions: (1) What makes knowing p better than merely truly believing p ? The answer involves an exploration of the connection between believing and the agency of the knower. Knowing is an act in which the knower gets credit for achieving truth. (2) What makes some instances of knowing good enough to make the investigation of knowledge worthy of so much attention? The answer involves the connection between the good of believing truths of certain kinds and a good life. In the best kinds of knowing, the knower not only gets credit for getting the truth but also gets credit for getting a desirable truth. The kind of value that makes knowledge a fitting object of extensive philosophical inquiry is not independent of moral value and the wider values of a good life.     

心理账户的非替代性及其运算规则

心理账户理论(Mental accounting Theory)由萨勒(Thaler)教授提出,他认为：小到个体、家庭,大到企业集团,都有或明确或潜在的心理账户系统。心理账户有两个最本质的特征：一是非替代性;二是具有不同于经济学的特定运算规则。本文分析了心理帐户非替代性的三种表现,从值函数,得与失的编码规则和参照点效应探讨了心理帐户的特定运算规则。这对解释人的非理性经济行为有重要价值。     

从传统伦理向现代伦理的转型和跨越——孙中山伦理思想研究

孙中山以自由、平等、博爱等人道主义现代伦理理念为指导 ,从道德本体、道德规范的内容、人格模式、道德价值定位等视角将传统伦理转化为现代伦理 ,实现了传统伦理向现代伦理的跨越。孙中山伦理思想在中国近现代伦理思想史上具有重要的历史地位。     

体育运动中“兴奋剂使用”的伦理思考

兴奋剂使用已经成为现代体育运动 ,特别是高水平体育运动与竞赛中最大的问题。由于兴奋剂使用的历史时期长 ,使用背景复杂 ,使用药物和技术日益高科技化 ,国际反兴奋剂使用的斗争面临许多的困难。虽然“反”和“堵”是世界体坛的主旋律 ,但也不乏建议“堵”与“疏”并举的声音。然而 ,它们都面临着伦理学的追问和反思。从兴奋剂何以进入伦理学思考的源头开始 ,寻找现代及未来体育的价值根据和行为准则 ,正视体育运动的层次性和领域分化与拓展的事实 ,人类或许在不久的将来能够运用科技和伦理的双层智慧 ,超越或化解兴奋剂使用和反使用的矛盾。