从疫情控制看中庸行动我的应急灵活性

本文撰写的目的是,藉助分析COVID-19疫情控制的应急心理机制,提出一个思考中国人“自我”的新架构,希望未来它能成为研究这一热门研究领域的新进路。沿用中国传统流传下来、但却一直被沿用至今的中庸思维,以及其内涵的“阴阳思维”及“全息思维”作为立论基础,提出“中庸行动我”的构念。它是指个体在选择及执行解决问题之具体行动方案时,依现实“情境需求”,灵活地“协调”出一个最恰当的“行动我”,以配合集体战疫的需要及功效。“中庸行动我”这一构念的提出,不仅只是为了解释战疫的成效,更重要的是它欲反映出中国人思维“灵活性”的根源,从而可以作为研究“中国人自我”的另类进路,不再只是以跨文化研究进路所关注的“本质自我”为主要立论基础,从而丰富了该领域现有的知识内涵。     

Debate,Prophecy, and Revolution: Notes on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt

In Prophecy without Contempt, Cathleen Kaveny argues that prevailing scholarly approaches to religious and public discourse misunderstand the actual complexity of moral rhetoric in America. She endeavors to provide a better account through study of the role the Puritan jeremiad has played. Kaveny then offers a normative case for deliberative public moral discourse and the limited exercise of prophetic denunciation. I argue that Kaveny's distinction between deliberation and prophetic denunciation is overdrawn. They are ideal types that elide other rhetorical forms. Moreover, both deliberative discourse and prophetic denunciation assume a social contract or shared tradition. Healthy moral discourse requires revolutionary rhetoric to interrogate and break traditions that are themselves morally compromised.     

Deciding as Intentional Action: Control over Decisions

Common-sense folk psychology and mainstream philosophy of action agree about decisions: these are under an agent's direct control, and are thus intentional actions for which agents can be held responsible. I begin this paper by presenting a problem for this view. In short, since the content of the motivational attitudes that drive deliberation and decision remains open-ended until the moment of decision, it is unclear how agents can be thought to exercise control over what they decide at the moment of deciding. I note that this problem might motivate a non-actional view of deciding—a view that decisions are not actions, but are instead passive events of intention acquisition. For without an understanding of how an agent might exercise control over what is decided at the moment of deciding, we lack a good reason for maintaining commitment to an actional view of deciding. However, I then offer the required account of how agents exercise control over decisions at the moment of deciding. Crucial to this account is an understanding of the relation of practical deliberation to deciding, an understanding of skilled deliberative activity, and the role of attention in the mental action of deciding.     

Volatile Reasons

I argue for the existence of a category of practical reasons which I call ‘Deliberation-Volatile Reasons’ or ‘DVRs’. DVRs have the distinguishing feature that their status as reasons for action is diminished when they are weighed in deliberation by the agent. I argue that DVRs are evidence of ‘deliberative blind spots’. I submit that an agent manifests a peculiar kind of practical irrationality in so far as she endeavours to find a deliberative path to what she has reason to do, when the discovery of such a path renders the destination inaccessible.     

Heuristic Methods for Computer Ethics

The domain of "procedural ethics" is the set of reflective and deliberative methods that maximize the reliability of moral judgment. While no general algorithmic method exists that will guarantee the validity of ethical deliberation, non-algorithmic "heuristic" methods can guide and inform the process, making it significantly more robust and dependable. This essay examines various representative heuristic procedures commonly recommended for use in applied ethics, maps them into a uniform set of twelve stages, identifies common faults, then shows how the resulting stage-by-stage decision-making model could be adapted for general use and for use in computer ethics.     

Rousing the Partisan Combatant: Elite Incivility,Anger, and Antideliberative Attitudes

The claim that elite political incivility can rouse partisan, antideliberative attitudes has many adherents, but the empirical record demonstrating a relationship is surprisingly limited. Yet the extant research suggests that incivility can stimulate aversive feelings, of the sort that discrete and dimensional theories of emotion predict should induce a partisan, antideliberative mode of citizenship among those exposed. Leveraging two online experiments, I address the questions of whether elite incivility provokes anger, rather than enthusiasm and anxiety, and whether the affective reactions induced by incivility yield the changes in deliberative attitudes that theories of emotion predict. I find that elite incivility, when counterattitudinal, rouses anger, which in turn can provoke an active and combative form of partisan citizenship. Despite claims to the contrary, the link between proattitudinal incivility, anger, and antideliberative attitudes is less clear. The results provide insight into the dynamics of discourse in the digital age, when affective polarization is the norm and elites commonly employ uncivil rhetoric.     

Values, Framing, and Citizens' Thoughts about Policy Issues: Effects on Content and Quantity

This study examines how frames invoking a core value shape the content and quantity of citizens' thoughts about a policy issue. An experimental study showed that exposure to a pro-school voucher equality frame increased the probability that participants would invoke equality in their open-ended survey responses. Exposure to an anti-school voucher equality frame produced the same effect, as did exposure to both frames. At the same time, participants who received either frame or both frames provided fewer open-ended responses. Thus, the frames appeared to focus participants' thoughts on one value while reducing the overall extent to which they thought about the issue. In broader terms, value framing may have implications for the nature and quality of public deliberation about policy issues—a point that scholars should keep in mind when considering how to define and study framing effects.     

双系统逃生决策的顺序替代效应

探讨当信息以不同方式呈现时双系统逃生决策的顺序替代效应。采用单因素完全随机设计,将180名被试平均分配到直觉、分析和直觉后分析三种条件下考察其逃生决策。结果表明：(1)信息直接呈现时,直觉和分析决策、以及直觉和直觉后分析决策均差异显著且趋势相同;(2)信息隐含呈现时,直觉和分析决策差异显著,但直觉和直觉后分析决策差异不显著。结论：当信息直接呈现时个体的逃生决策存在顺序替代;而当信息隐含呈现时存在反顺序替代。     

Temptation and Deliberation

There is a great deal of plausibility to the standard view that if one is rational and it is clear at the time of action that a certain move, say M₁, would serve one’s concerns better than any other available move, then one will, as a rational agent, opt for move M₁. Still, this view concerning rationality has been challenged at least in part because it seems to conflict with our considered judgments about what it is rational to do in cases of temptation that share the structure of Warren Quinn’s self-torturer case. I argue that there is a way to accomodate our considered judgments about the relevant cases of temptation without giving up the standard view or dismissing, as in some way rationally defective, the concerns of the agents in the relevant cases. My reasoning relies on the idea that, at least in some cases, whether an action serves one’s concerns well depends on what action(s) or course(s) of action it is part of. In the final section of the paper, I explain how this idea sheds light on an important source of frustration in collective decision-making.     

Rethinking Accountability in the Context of Human Rights

Within liberal democratic theory, ‘democratic accountability’ denotes an aggregative method for linking political decisions to citizens’ preferences through representative institutions. Could such a notion be transferred to the global context of human rights? Various obstacles seem to block such a transfer: there are no ‘world citizens’ as such; many people in need of human rights are not citizens of constitutional democratic states; and the aggregative methods that are supposed to sustain the link are often used in favour of nation-state strategic action rather than human rights. So what could accountability mean in relation to human rights? This article argues that discourse theory offers resources for approaching these problems and for rethinking a normative notion of accountability in relation to human rights. It is suggested that accountability should link political decisions to universal agreements through global rights institutions and that the link should be sustained by deliberative rather than aggregative procedures.