scholarly journals On the use of evolutionary mismatch theories in debating human prosociality

Author(s):  
Andrés Segovia-Cuéllar ◽  
Lorenzo Del Savio

AbstractAccording to some evolutionary theorists human prosocial dispositions emerged in a context of inter-group competition and violence that made our psychology parochially prosocial, ie. cooperative towards in-groups and competitive towards strangers. This evolutionary hypothesis is sometimes employed in bioethical debates to argue that human nature and contemporary environments, and especially large-scale societies, are mismatched. In this article we caution against the use of mismatch theories in moral philosophy in general and discuss empirical evidence that puts into question mismatch theories based on parochial prosociality. Evolutionary mismatch theories play at best a rhetorical role in these moral debates and may misrepresent the status of relevant evolutionary research. We finally recommend that moral philosophers interested in the evolutionary literature also engage with dispositions such as xenophilia and social tolerance to counterbalance the focus on psychological mismatches adopted so far.

Author(s):  
G. A. Cohen

This chapter examines Friedrich Nietzsche's moral philosophy, first by explaining what makes him different from most of the other moral philosophers such as David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, the Greeks, and Baruch Spinoza. It then considers Nietzsche's notion of good and evil by addressing three questions: How do we find out what sort of creatures men are? How do we decide what sort of creature man ought to be? Is it possible for man to transform himself into that sort of creature. It also discusses the problem faced by Nietzsche in his attempts to assess human nature, namely: what is to count as health in the spiritual dimension, when is a soul diseased, what is mens sana. Finally, it analyzes the main arguments put forward by Nietzsche in his two books Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.


Author(s):  
Christopher McCarroll

This chapter sets out some key issues related to a philosophical analysis of point of view in memory. It does so by looking at examples of psychological, philosophical, and literary accounts of the phenomenon, as well as examples of the author’s own observer perspective memories. The chapter provides an overview of some of the empirical evidence related to visual perspective in memory. Despite these consistent empirical findings, however, a number of doubts and misconceptions about remembering from-the-outside still linger, especially concerning the status of observer perspectives in memory. This chapter outlines some of the skepticism to the possibility of remembering from-the-outside and points to a possible diagnosis of why such skepticism arises. This chapter points to a way of thinking about memory—to be developed through the course of the book—which eases the worries about remembering from-the-outside.


Author(s):  
Ralph C.S. Walker

Kant is committed to the reality of a subject self, outside time but active in forming experience. Timeless activity is problematic, but that can be dealt with. But he holds that the subject of experience is not an object of experience, so nothing can be known about it; this raises a problem about the status of his own theory. But he ought to allow that we can know of its existence and activity, as preconditions of experience: the Critique allows that synthetic a priori truths can be known in this way. However, its identity conditions remain unknowable. Kant’s unity of apperception shares much with Locke’s continuity of consciousness, but does not determine the identity of a thing. Personal identity is bodily identity. Only Kant’s moral philosophy justifies recognizing other selves; it could warrant ascribing a similar status to animals.


2013 ◽  
Vol 440 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yannick J. L. Michaux ◽  
Anthony F. J. Moffat ◽  
André-Nicolas Chené ◽  
Nicole St-Louis

Abstract Examination of the temporal variability properties of several strong optical recombination lines in a large sample of Galactic Wolf–Rayet (WR) stars reveals possible trends, especially in the more homogeneous WC than the diverse WN subtypes, of increasing wind variability with cooler subtypes. This could imply that a serious contender for the driver of the variations is stochastic, magnetic subsurface convection associated with the 170 kK partial-ionization zone of iron, which should occupy a deeper and larger zone of greater mass in cooler WR subtypes. This empirical evidence suggests that the heretofore proposed ubiquitous driver of wind variability, radiative instabilities, may not be the only mechanism playing a role in the stochastic multiple small-scaled structures seen in the winds of hot luminous stars. In addition to small-scale stochastic behaviour, subsurface convection guided by a global magnetic field with localized emerging loops may also be at the origin of the large-scale corotating interaction regions as seen frequently in O stars and occasionally in the winds of their descendant WR stars.


2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (04) ◽  
pp. 681-706 ◽  
Author(s):  
PASQUALE BLASI ◽  
STEFANO GABICI ◽  
GIANFRANCO BRUNETTI

Clusters of galaxies and the large scale filaments that connect neighboring clusters are expected to be sites of acceleration of charged particles and sources of non-thermal radiation from radio frequencies to gamma rays. Gamma rays are particularly interesting targets of investigation, since they may provide precious information on the nature and efficiency of the processes of acceleration and magnetic confinement of hadrons within clusters of galaxies. Here we review the status of viable scenarios that lead to the production of gamma rays from large scale structures and are compatible with the multifrequency observations that are already available. We also discuss the possibility of detection of gamma rays with space-borne telescopes such as GLAST and ground based Cherenkov telescopes, and the physical information that may be gathered from such observations.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Adam Kelly

Powers, Burstein, Chodorow, Fowles, and Kukich (2002) suggested that automated essay scoring (AES) may benefit from the use of “general” scoring models designed to score essays irrespective of the prompt for which an essay was written. They reasoned that such models may enhance score credibility by signifying that an AES system measures the same writing characteristics across all essays. They reported empirical evidence that general scoring models performed nearly as well in agreeing with human readers as did prompt-specific models, the “status quo” for most AES systems. In this study, general and prompt-specific models were again compared, but this time, general models performed as well as or better than prompt-specific models. Moreover, general models measured the same writing characteristics across all essays, while prompt-specific models measured writing characteristics idiosyncratic to the prompt. Further comparison of model performance across two different writing tasks and writing assessment programs bolstered the case for general models.


2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (5) ◽  
pp. 823-842 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Stewart

Despite a fair amount of conjecture regarding the circumstances that lead to the generation of status orders, most of the previous literature in this area typically has studied the effects of social cues within a laboratory setting. This article analyzes the evolution of the status hierarchy within a large-scale, natural setting. The results of empirical analyses assessing a large online community of software developers show that in the process of status attainment, community members tend to evaluate a focal actor's reputation according to publicly available social references. Ironically, these same social references also work to constrain an actor's status mobility.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 75-82
Author(s):  
P. V. Troshchinskiy ◽  

The article is devoted to the study of the process of introducing digital technologies into the work of the People’s Courts of China and the issues of its legal regulation. The judicial system of the modern Chinese state is based on courts of three levels and two courts. Judicial bodies include the Supreme People’s Court, local people's courts, military courts and other special courts. For several years, various digital technologies have been used in all Chinese courts. In addition, since August 2017, special Internet courts have appeared in the PRC (three such courts have now been created in Hangzhou, Beijing and Guangzhou), which consider civil, administrative and criminal cases online without the personal presence of participants. The use of digital technologies in the judicial system of the PRC contributes to its transparency, reducing corruption, combating the spread of coronavirus, increasing the general level of legal literacy of the people. So, the creation of a unified platform for online broadcasting of court hearings online, the public disclosure of court sentences (decisions, rulings) in various categories of cases allows society to control the activities of the people's courts of the country. Considering the case online during the confrontation of the coronavirus epidemic prevents the spread of infection among participants in the process. The experience of China in the large-scale implementation of digital technologies in judicial activity is not only of scientific interest, but also important from a practical point of view for the Russian expert community. The Russian Federation has also embarked on the path of using digital technologies in litigation, but China is following it ahead of the schedule, which is important in terms of studying the results it has achieved and the mistakes made so that the Russian legislator can take them into account in their law-making activities. It is also important that China, in the process of digitalizing its national system, uses exclusively national platforms and databases. Access to information by foreign intelligence services is not possible. The main providers of digital services for the judicial system are also national corporations, which legally have the status of private companies, but in fact they are completely controlled by the СРС.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastiano A. Piccolo ◽  
Anja M. Maier ◽  
Sune Lehmann ◽  
Chris A. McMahon

Author(s):  
Taha Yasseri ◽  
Jannie Reher

AbstractThrough a large-scale online field experiment, we provide new empirical evidence for the presence of the anchoring bias in people’s judgement due to irrational reliance on a piece of information that they are initially given. The comparison of the anchoring stimuli and respective responses across different tasks reveals a positive, yet complex relationship between the anchors and the bias in participants’ predictions of the outcomes of events in the future. Participants in the treatment group were equally susceptible to the anchors regardless of their level of engagement, previous performance, or gender. Given the strong and ubiquitous influence of anchors quantified here, we should take great care to closely monitor and regulate the distribution of information online to facilitate less biased decision making.


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