Four Epistemological Challenges to Ethical Naturalism: Naturalized Epistemology and the First-Person Perspective

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 30-74
Author(s):  
David Copp
Keyword(s):  
A Posteriori ◽  
Natural Property ◽  
Naturalized Epistemology ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Moral Goodness ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Psychological Property ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Moral Properties

Ethical naturalism is the doctrine that moral properties, such as moral goodness, justice, rightness, wrongness, and the like, are among the “natural” properties that things can have. It is the doctrine that moral properties are “natural” and that morality is in this sense an aspect of “nature.” Accordingly, it is a view about the semantics and metaphysics of moral discourse. For example, a utilitarian naturalist might propose that wrongness is the property an action could have of being such as to undermine overall happiness, where happiness is taken to be a psychological property. Unfortunately, it is unclear what the naturalist means by a “natural” property. For my purposes in this paper, I shall assume that natural properties are such that our knowledge of them is fundamentally empirical, grounded in observation. More precisely, a property is “natural” just in case any synthetic proposition about its instantiation can be known only a posteriori, or with the aid of experience.

Assimilative Moral Realism and Supervenience

Dialogue ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Yasenchuk
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Important Respect ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Macrophysical Properties ◽  
David Brink ◽  
The Way

David Brink has recently argued for the “parity” of ethics and the sciences. While the parity claim alone might be metaphysically neutral, Brink favours a form of ethical naturalism on which moral properties “are” natural properties, just as non-moral macrophysical properties “are” the microphysical states that compose them. Brink supports this claim by showing that both types of properties share certain important features: specifically, that both may be (and typically are) constituted, supervening and synthetically necessitated. I shall argue that notwithstanding these common features, there remain significant modal differences in the way the two types of properties are assigned to the world. These differences represent an important respect in which moral properties are not on par with their scientific counterparts.

scholarly journals Differentiating Real-World Autobiographical Experiences without Recourse to Behaviour

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 521
Author(s):  
Jonathan Erez ◽  
Marie-Eve Gagnon ◽  
Adrian M. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Brain Injuries ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Extrastriate Cortex ◽  
First Person ◽  
Autobiographical Memories ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Machine Learning Model ◽  
First Person Perspective

Investigating human consciousness based on brain activity alone is a key challenge in cognitive neuroscience. One of its central facets, the ability to form autobiographical memories, has been investigated through several fMRI studies that have revealed a pattern of activity across a network of frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobe regions when participants view personal photographs, as opposed to when they view photographs from someone else’s life. Here, our goal was to attempt to decode when participants were re-experiencing an entire event, captured on video from a first-person perspective, relative to a very similar event experienced by someone else. Participants were asked to sit passively in a wheelchair while a researcher pushed them around a local mall. A small wearable camera was mounted on each participant, in order to capture autobiographical videos of the visit from a first-person perspective. One week later, participants were scanned while they passively viewed different categories of videos; some were autobiographical, while others were not. A machine-learning model was able to successfully classify the video categories above chance, both within and across participants, suggesting that there is a shared mechanism differentiating autobiographical experiences from non-autobiographical ones. Moreover, the classifier brain maps revealed that the fronto-parietal network, mid-temporal regions and extrastriate cortex were critical for differentiating between autobiographical and non-autobiographical memories. We argue that this novel paradigm captures the true nature of autobiographical memories, and is well suited to patients (e.g., with brain injuries) who may be unable to respond reliably to traditional experimental stimuli.

scholarly journals An immersive first-person navigation task for abstract knowledge acquisition

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doerte Kuhrt ◽  
Natalie R. St. John ◽  
Jacob L. S. Bellmund ◽  
Raphael Kaplan ◽  
Christian F. Doeller
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Navigation ◽  
First Person ◽  
Abstract Space ◽  
Motion Platform ◽  
Head Mounted Display ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
Spatial Domains ◽  
First Person Perspective

AbstractAdvances in virtual reality (VR) technology have greatly benefited spatial navigation research. By presenting space in a controlled manner, changing aspects of the environment one at a time or manipulating the gain from different sensory inputs, the mechanisms underlying spatial behaviour can be investigated. In parallel, a growing body of evidence suggests that the processes involved in spatial navigation extend to non-spatial domains. Here, we leverage VR technology advances to test whether participants can navigate abstract knowledge. We designed a two-dimensional quantity space—presented using a head-mounted display—to test if participants can navigate abstract knowledge using a first-person perspective navigation paradigm. To investigate the effect of physical movement, we divided participants into two groups: one walking and rotating on a motion platform, the other group using a gamepad to move through the abstract space. We found that both groups learned to navigate using a first-person perspective and formed accurate representations of the abstract space. Interestingly, navigation in the quantity space resembled behavioural patterns observed in navigation studies using environments with natural visuospatial cues. Notably, both groups demonstrated similar patterns of learning. Taken together, these results imply that both self-movement and remote exploration can be used to learn the relational mapping between abstract stimuli.

scholarly journals Human Enhancements and Voting: Towards a Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities of Beings

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
S. J. Blodgett-Ford
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Governance Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
To Come ◽  
Additional Option

The phenomenon and ethics of “voting” will be explored in the context of human enhancements. “Voting” will be examined for enhanced humans with moderate and extreme enhancements. Existing patterns of discrimination in voting around the globe could continue substantially “as is” for those with moderate enhancements. For extreme enhancements, voting rights could be challenged if the very humanity of the enhanced was in doubt. Humans who were not enhanced could also be disenfranchised if certain enhancements become prevalent. Voting will be examined using a theory of engagement articulated by Professor Sophie Loidolt that emphasizes the importance of legitimization and justification by “facing the appeal of the other” to determine what is “right” from a phenomenological first-person perspective. Seeking inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948, voting rights and responsibilities will be re-framed from a foundational working hypothesis that all enhanced and non-enhanced humans should have a right to vote directly. Representative voting will be considered as an admittedly imperfect alternative or additional option. The framework in which voting occurs, as well as the processes, temporal cadence, and role of voting, requires the participation from as diverse a group of humans as possible. Voting rights delivered by fiat to enhanced or non-enhanced humans who were excluded from participation in the design and ratification of the governance structure is not legitimate. Applying and extending Loidolt’s framework, we must recognize the urgency that demands the impossible, with openness to that universality in progress (or universality to come) that keeps being constituted from the outside.

Narrative, Cognition, and the Flow of Mirror’s Edge

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ciccoricco
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Main Stage ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective

Faith, the protagonist of Mirror’s Edge, marks an empowered female character that is not hypersexualized, and the decision to employ a first-person perspective (thereby subverting any gaze offered by a third-person view) supports this design objective through gameplay. But despite Faith’s welcome debut on the main stage of commercial gaming, the game raises more significant questions through its engagement with the multifarious concept of “fluidity” or “flow,” which is integral to both the gameplay of Mirror’s Edge and the themes in it. Is Faith’s flow—in line with radical critical moves in literary history and cultural theory of the late 20th century to gender this trope—essentially or inevitably feminine, or for that matter, feminist? Does the game ultimately avoid, perpetuate, or contest the gendered discourses that it evokes? What can its simulations of a fictional mind in action tell us about our own? This article draws on cognitive, feminist, and narrative theoretical frameworks to question what the concept of fluidity means for a video game that mobilizes it through both narrative design and gameplay.

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