Cultural Neuroscience and the Collective Good

AbstractThis article explores the movement of children between households in Zambia as a site of ‘moral navigation’. Moral navigation extends Henrik Vigh's concept of social navigation from contexts of conflict and migration to more socially stable contexts in which well-being depends critically on people's ability to manage relationships. The live, dynamic and mobile character of these relationships means that they require active, real-time cultivation and response. While having practical objectives, these negotiations are also moral, articulated with ideas of what ought to be, and seeking to fulfil sometimes competing ethical projects. Life history interviews present three main perspectives: recollections of times in childhood spent away from birth parents; birth parents’ reflections on having a child living with others; and adults’ accounts of taking in other people's children. Strong norms of kinship unity and solidarity notwithstanding, in practice terms of engagement are differentiated through gender, marital, social and economic status, plus relational and geographical proximity. The pursuit of personal benefit contains the seeds of both contradiction and convergence with the collective good, as a relational understanding of moral selves sees one's own gain as proper, rightful and virtuous when it is realized in and through providing for others.

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Mandevillian Virtues

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice ◽

10.1007/s10677-020-10141-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Mandi Astola

Keyword(s):

Recent Literature ◽

Collective Intelligence ◽

Cognitive Task ◽

Virtue Theory ◽

Collective Good ◽

Distinctive Features ◽

The Core ◽

Cognitive Traits ◽

Collaborative Activities ◽

Do So

AbstractStudies in collective intelligence have shown that suboptimal cognitive traits of individuals can lead a group to succeed in a collective cognitive task, in recent literature this is called mandevillian intelligence. Analogically, as Mandeville has suggested, the moral vices of individuals can sometimes also lead to collective good. I suggest that this mandevillian morality can happen in many ways in collaborative activities. Mandevillian morality presents a challenge for normative virtue theories in ethics. The core of the problem is that mandevillian morality implies that individual vice is, in some cases, valuable. However, normative virtue theories generally see vice as disvaluable. A consequence of this is that virtue theories struggle to account for the good that can emerge in a collective. I argue that normative virtue theories can in fact accommodate for mandevillian emergent good. I put forward three distinctive features that allow a virtue theory to do so: a distinction between individual and group virtues, a distinction between motivational and teleological virtues, and an acknowledgement of the normativity of “vicious” roles in groups.

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Does workplace social capital protect against long-term sickness absence? Linking workplace aggregated social capital to sickness absence registry data

Scandinavian Journal of Public Health ◽

10.1177/1403494817721672 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 46 (3) ◽

pp. 290-296 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Anne-Sophie K. Hansen ◽

Ida E. H. Madsen ◽

Sannie Vester Thorsen ◽

Ole Melkevik ◽

Jakob Bue Bjørner ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Capital ◽

Private Sector ◽

Sickness Absence ◽

Collective Good ◽

Standard Deviation Increase ◽

Individual Level ◽

The Individual ◽

Adjusted Model ◽

Workplace Social Capital

Aims: Most previous prospective studies have examined workplace social capital as a resource of the individual. However, literature suggests that social capital is a collective good. In the present study we examined whether a high level of workplace aggregated social capital (WASC) predicts a decreased risk of individual-level long-term sickness absence (LTSA) in Danish private sector employees. Methods: A sample of 2043 employees (aged 18–64 years, 38.5% women) from 260 Danish private-sector companies filled in a questionnaire on workplace social capital and covariates. WASC was calculated by assigning the company-averaged social capital score to all employees of each company. We derived LTSA, defined as sickness absence of more than three weeks, from a national register. We examined if WASC predicted employee LTSA using multilevel survival analyses, while excluding participants with LTSA in the three months preceding baseline. Results: We found no statistically significant association in any of the analyses. The hazard ratio for LTSA in the fully adjusted model was 0.93 (95% CI 0.77–1.13) per one standard deviation increase in WASC. When using WASC as a categorical exposure we found a statistically non-significant tendency towards a decreased risk of LTSA in employees with medium WASC (fully adjusted model: HR 0.78 (95% CI 0.48–1.27)). Post hoc analyses with workplace social capital as a resource of the individual showed similar results. Conclusions: WASC did not predict LTSA in this sample of Danish private-sector employees.

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Cultural neuroscience of emotion: Toward a developmental framework.

Psychology & Neuroscience ◽

10.1037/pne0000078 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 11-40 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Amina Khan ◽

Louis A. Schmidt ◽

Xinyin Chen

Keyword(s):

Cultural Neuroscience ◽

Developmental Framework ◽

Neuroscience Of Emotion

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Persistent Tensions? International Legal Perspectives on ‘Other’ Foreign Fighters

Volume 61 · 2018 - German Yearbook of International Law ◽

10.3790/gyil.60.1.539 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 60 (1) ◽

pp. 539-573

Author(s):

Marnie Lloydd

Keyword(s):

Armed Conflict ◽

Global Justice ◽

Collective Good ◽

Due Diligence ◽

Strong Basis ◽

Slowing Down ◽

Sovereign Equality ◽

Starting Point ◽

History Of ◽

Foreign Fighters

This paper takes as its starting point the question of whether and to what extent States may have an international legal obligation towards other States to seek to prevent those within their jurisdiction from travelling abroad to fight with a non-State armed group in a foreign armed conflict. While there is a strong basis for such due diligence obligations regarding the prevention of terrorist activity, including Security Council Resolution 2178 (2014) on ‘foreign terrorist fighters’, the scope of responsibility is less clear regarding broader categories of foreigners participating in civil war, despite a long history of foreign volunteers in armed conflict. In this paper, I present a reading of two possible resolutions in international law to the question posed by this ‘other’ foreign fighting and explore the tensions between them. The first is based on State responsibility, sovereign equality, and diligent prevention of harm; the second on a more contextual reading of human rights considerations and global justice. The tensions surrounding ‘other’ foreign fighters provide a practical example of the oscillation between a reliance on the consent of States and a notion of the collective good in international legal argument. Acknowledging the practical reliance of States on these interlacing perspectives in different times and contexts, I suggest the importance of stepping back and slowing down to look beyond today’s predominant but narrower and rushed, focus on counter-terrorism approaches to take account of the key themes that have shaped the legal discourse and practice regarding a broader historical range of foreign volunteering in armed conflict.

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Cultural Neuroscience and Neurophilosophy

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199357376.013.4 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

George Northoff

Keyword(s):

Cultural Neuroscience

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East European military expenditures in the 1970s: collective good or bargaining offer?

International Organization ◽

10.1017/s0020818300004239 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

pp. 143-155 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

William M. Reisinger

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Gross National Product ◽

Defense Spending ◽

Collective Good ◽

East European ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Military Expenditures ◽

Domestic Support ◽

Nicolae Ceausescu ◽

General Secretary

In late November 1978, Nicolae Ceausescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, returned to Bucharest from a Moscow meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). In a series of speeches from 25 November through 1 December, he began to denounce efforts by the Soviet Union to integrate more fully the armies of the WTO members and to get the East European members to increase their defense expenditures. Ceausescu was making a dramatic (and apparently successful) appeal for domestic support for his resistance to Soviet pressure. Other WTO member-states, although less publicly, have also resisted this Soviet pressure. Romania is not the only East European state ignoring Soviet calls for higher defense spending. Poland, for example, has also shown a significant decline during the 1970s in the amount of its gross national product (GNP) spent on defense (D/GNP). East Germany, on the other hand, increased its expenditures dramatically over the same decade.

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The Rule of Numbers

For-Profit Democracy ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300215359.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 76-108

Author(s):

Loka Ashwood

Keyword(s):

Collective Good ◽

American Democracy ◽

Short Answer ◽

Personal Rights ◽

Standing Up ◽

State Of Affairs

This chapter suggests that there is something uncomfortable about democracy as we live in it today, where the majority is considered as the righteous ruler. Thus, if the majority wants electricity, and if providing that service requires a few people to give up their land or health, then the few should sacrifice for the whole. How did American democracy get to the point where standing up for one's personal rights became understood as an affront to the broader collective good? The short answer is that the democratic state's rendering of most things and people into numbers has created such a state of affairs, which is referred to the “rule of numbers.” People, ecology, or really anything can be added or subtracted, and all that matters in the end is what comes out of the equation.

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Knowledge Management in Modern Democracies and the Issue of Truth

Filosofiya osvity Philosophy of Education ◽

10.31874/2309-1606-2016-19-2-6-14 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 6-14

Author(s):

Panos Eliopoulos

Keyword(s):

Knowledge Management ◽

Political Life ◽

Collective Good ◽

Moral Qualities ◽

Concept Of Truth ◽

Practical Level

This paper explores the issue of knowledge management in modern Democracies, along with the demands posed by the truth problem. While a singular concept of truth can neither be epistemically safe, thus becoming flexible for partial or subjective demonstrations of its authentic or ideal value, nor applicable for every society, it can still take the form of a critical consensus, based on two new principles that are introduced here. The continuity of such a consensus that lies beyond the manipulation of an un-ethical rhetoric or demagogy can safeguard the existence of the Polis, without having to cease espousing typical logic syllogisms as well as the moral qualities that are essential for a meaningful way of social and political life. If not conducive to the collective good, the search for truth remains futile in the practical level of making people’s lives better and of enhancing their common bonds.

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