scholarly journals Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure

Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (516) ◽  
pp. 1033-1070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Fogal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Standard View ◽  
Rational Requirements ◽  
Substantive Rationality ◽  
Structural Relations ◽  
Distinct Kind ◽  
The Right ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Rational Evaluation

Abstract There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one's attitudinal mental states, independently of whether those states are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associated with a distinctive set of requirements that mandate or prohibit certain combinations of attitudes, and it's in virtue of violating these requirements that incoherent agents are irrational. I think the standard view is mistaken. The goal of this paper is to explain why, and to motivate an alternative account: rather than corresponding to a set of law-like requirements, structural rationality should be seen as corresponding to a distinctive kind of pro tanto rational pressure—that is, something that comes in degrees, having both magnitude and direction. Something similar is standardly assumed to be true of substantive rationality. On the resulting picture, each dimension of rational evaluation is associated with a distinct kind of rational pressure—substantive rationality with (what I call) justificatory pressure and structural rationality with attitudinal pressure. The former is generated by one's reasons while the latter is generated by one's attitudes. Requirements turn out to be at best a footnote in the theory of rationality.

Kantian Perspectives on Private Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-84
Author(s):  
Arthur Ripstein
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Naive Theory ◽  
Private Rights ◽  
Kantian View ◽  
Moral Structure ◽  
The Right ◽  
In Virtue Of

This chapter articulates the Kantian approach to private law. It begins by explaining the aims and ambitions of Kantian legal philosophy more generally and, in particular, introducing the Kantian idea that a particular form of thought is appropriate to a particular domain of inquiry or conduct. The chapter situates the Kantian view within a broad natural law tradition. For the part of that tradition that Immanuel Kant develops, the moral structure of natural law is animated by a conception of personal interaction that is so familiar as to be almost invisible. Despite its centrality to both morality and law, in the absence of legal institutions, this natural law is inadequate to its own principles. It requires legal institutions to render it fully determinate in its application consistent with everyone’s independence. It also requires public institutions of adjudication. The chapter further looks at Kant’s “division” of private rights, distinguishing first between the innate right that everyone has simply in virtue of being human and acquired rights that require an affirmative act to establish them. It then goes through the Kantian division of the titles of private right, situating them in relation to the distinction between persons and things. Finally, the chapter articulates the Kantian account of what might be called the naïve theory of remedies—that is, that the remedy is an imperfect continuation of the right that was violated.

scholarly journals Moral Appraisal for Everyone: Neurodiversity, Epistemic Limitations, and Responding to the Right Reasons

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Field
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
De Re ◽  
Moral Appraisal ◽  
De Dicto ◽  
The Right

AbstractDe Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the reasons an agent is responsive to (de re or de dicto), but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases.

scholarly journals The Interaction Between Caudate Nucleus and Regions Within the Theory of Mind Network as a Neural Basis for Social Intelligence

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Votinov ◽  
Artem Myznikov ◽  
Maya Zheltyakova ◽  
Ruslan Masharipov ◽  
Alexander Korotkov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Caudate Nucleus ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Functional Integration ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Caudate Nuclei ◽  
Structural Peculiarity ◽  
The Right

The organization of socio-cognitive processes is a multifaceted problem for which many sophisticated concepts have been proposed. One of these concepts is social intelligence (SI), i.e., the set of abilities that allow successful interaction with other people. The theory of mind (ToM) human brain network is a good candidate for the neural substrate underlying SI since it is involved in inferring the mental states of others and ourselves and predicting or explaining others’ actions. However, the relationship of ToM to SI remains poorly explored. Our recent research revealed an association between the gray matter volume of the caudate nucleus and the degree of SI as measured by the Guilford-Sullivan test. It led us to question whether this structural peculiarity is reflected in changes to the integration of the caudate with other areas of the brain associated with socio-cognitive processes, including the ToM system. We conducted seed-based functional connectivity (FC) analysis of resting-state fMRI data for 42 subjects with the caudate as a region of interest. We found that the scores of the Guilford-Sullivan test were positively correlated with the FC between seeds in the right caudate head and two clusters located within the right superior temporal gyrus and bilateral precuneus. Both regions are known to be nodes of the ToM network. Thus, the current study demonstrates that the SI level is associated with the degree of functional integration between the ToM network and the caudate nuclei.

scholarly journals Moral judgement by the disconnected left and right cerebral hemispheres: a split-brain investigation

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 170172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conor M. Steckler ◽  
J. Kiley Hamlin ◽  
Michael B. Miller ◽  
Danielle King ◽  
Alan Kingstone
Keyword(s):  
Brain Research ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Moral Judgement ◽  
Temporoparietal Junction ◽  
Split Brain ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
The Right ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

Owing to the hemispheric isolation resulting from a severed corpus callosum, research on split-brain patients can help elucidate the brain regions necessary and sufficient for moral judgement. Notably, typically developing adults heavily weight the intentions underlying others' moral actions, placing greater importance on valenced intentions versus outcomes when assigning praise and blame. Prioritization of intent in moral judgements may depend on neural activity in the right hemisphere's temporoparietal junction, an area implicated in reasoning about mental states. To date, split-brain research has found that the right hemisphere is necessary for intent-based moral judgement. When testing the left hemisphere using linguistically based moral vignettes, split-brain patients evaluate actions based on outcomes, not intentions. Because the right hemisphere has limited language ability relative to the left, and morality paradigms to date have involved significant linguistic demands, it is currently unknown whether the right hemisphere alone generates intent-based judgements. Here we use nonlinguistic morality plays with split-brain patient J.W. to examine the moral judgements of the disconnected right hemisphere, demonstrating a clear focus on intent. This finding indicates that the right hemisphere is not only necessary but also sufficient for intent-based moral judgement, advancing research into the neural systems supporting the moral sense.

Belief

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Internal State ◽  
Propositional Attitude ◽  
Special Theory ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Vice Chancellor ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the Vice-Chancellor; and some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case – believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus belief is said to be a propositional attitude or intentional state: to believe is to take the attitude of belief to some proposition. It is about what its propositional object is about (God, coffee, or whatever). We can think of the propositional object of a belief as the way the belief represents things as being – its content, as it is often called. We state what we believe with indicative sentences in ‘that’-clauses, as in ‘Mary believes that the Democrats will win the next election’. But belief in the absence of language is possible. A dog may believe that there is food in the bowl in front of it. Accordingly philosophers have sought accounts of belief that allow a central role to sentences – it cannot be an accident that finding the right sentence is the way to capture what someone believes – while allowing that creatures without a language can have beliefs. One way of doing this is to construe beliefs as relations to inner sentences somehow inscribed in the brain. On this view although dogs do not have a public language, to the extent that they have beliefs they have something sentence-like in their heads. An alternative tradition focuses on the way belief when combined with desire leads to behaviour, and analyses belief in terms of behavioural dispositions or more recently as the internal state that is, in combination with other mental states, responsible for the appropriate behavioural dispositions. An earlier tradition associated with the British Empiricists views belief as a kind of pale imitation of perceptual experience. But recent work on belief largely takes for granted a sharp distinction between belief and the various mental images that may or may not accompany it.

Why Means MatterLegally Relevant Differences Between Direct and Indirect Interventions into Other Minds

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-88
Author(s):  
Jan Christoph Bublitz
Keyword(s):  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Causal Pathways ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
And Control ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
The Brain

Whether there are intrinsic differences between different means to intervene into brains and minds is a key question of neuroethics, which any future legal regulation of mind-interventions has to face. This chapter affirms such differences by a twofold argument:. First, it present differences between direct (biological, physiological) and indirect (psychological) interventions that are not based on crude mind–brain dualisms or dubious properties such as naturalness of interventions. Second, it shows why these differences (should) matter for the law. In a nutshell, this chapter suggests that indirect interventions should be understood as stimuli that persons perceive through their external senses whereas direct interventions reach brains and minds on different, nonperceptual routes. Interventions primarily differ in virtue of their causal pathways. Because of them, persons have different kinds and amounts of control over interventions; direct interventions regularly bypass resistance and control of recipients. Direct interventions also differ from indirect ones because they misappropriate mechanisms of the brain. These differences bear normative relevance in light of the right to mental self-determination, which should be the guiding normative principle with respect to mind-interventions. As a consequence, the law should adopt by and large a normative—not ontological—dualism between interventions into other minds: nonconsensual direct interventions into other minds should be prohibited by law, with few exceptions. By contrast, indirect interventions should be prima facie permissible, primarily those that qualify as exercises of free speech. The chapter also addresses a range of recent objections, especially by Levy (in the previous chapter).

scholarly journals Freedom of thought in Europe: do advances in ‘brain-reading’ technology call for revision?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sjors Ligthart
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Rights Protection ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Reading Technology ◽  
Freedom Of Thought ◽  
The Right

Abstract Since advances in brain-reading technology are changing traditional epistemic boundaries of the mind, yielding information from the brain that enables to draw inferences about particular mental states of individuals, the sustainability of the present framework of European human rights has been called into question. More specifically, it has been argued that in order to provide adequate human rights protection from non-consensual brain-reading, the right to freedom of thought should be revised, making it ‘fit for the future’ again. From the perspective of criminal justice, the present paper examines whether such a revision is necessary within the European legal context. It argues that under its current understanding, the right to freedom of thought would probably not cover the employment of most brain-reading applications in criminal justice. By contrast, the right to freedom of (non-)expression will provide legal protection in this regard and, at the same time, will also allow for certain exceptions. Hence, instead of revising the absolute right to freedom of thought, a legal approach tailored to non-consensual brain-reading could be developed under the already existing right not to convey information, ideas, and opinions as guaranteed under the freedom of (non-)expression. This might need to re-interpret the right to freedom of expression, rather than the right to freedom of thought.

scholarly journals Brain Connectivity Analysis Under Semantic Vigilance and Enhanced Mental States

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fares Al-Shargie ◽  
Usman Tariq ◽  
Omnia Hassanin ◽  
Hasan Mir ◽  
Fabio Babiloni ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Brain Connectivity ◽  
Vigilance Task ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Processing Efficiency ◽  
Vigilance State ◽  
The Right

In this paper, we present a method to quantify the coupling between brain regions under vigilance and enhanced mental states by utilizing partial directed coherence (PDC) and graph theory analysis (GTA). The vigilance state is induced using a modified version of stroop color-word task (SCWT) while the enhancement state is based on audio stimulation with a pure tone of 250 Hz. The audio stimulation was presented to the right and left ears simultaneously for one-hour while participants perform the SCWT. The quantification of mental states was performed by means of statistical analysis of indexes based on GTA, behavioral responses of time-on-task (TOT), and Brunel Mood Scale (BRMUS). The results show that PDC is very sensitive to vigilance decrement and shows that the brain connectivity network is significantly reduced with increasing TOT, p < 0.05. Meanwhile, during the enhanced state, the connectivity network maintains high connectivity as time passes and shows significant improvements compared to vigilance state. The audio stimulation enhances the connectivity network over the frontal and parietal regions and the right hemisphere. The increase in the connectivity network correlates with individual differences in the magnitude of the vigilance enhancement assessed by response time to stimuli. Our results provide evidence for enhancement of cognitive processing efficiency with audio stimulation. The BRMUS was used to evaluate the emotional states of vigilance task before and after using the audio stimulation. BRMUS factors, such as fatigue, depression, and anger, significantly decrease in the enhancement group compared to vigilance group. On the other hand, happy and calmness factors increased with audio stimulation, p < 0.05.

Neural Correlates of Mental State Decoding in Human Adults: An Event-related Potential Study

2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Sabbagh ◽  
Margaret C. Moulson ◽  
Kate L. Harkness
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Neural Systems ◽  
Core Theory ◽  
Human Adults ◽  
The Right

Successful negotiation of human social interactions rests on having a theory of mind—an understanding of how others' behaviors can be understood in terms of internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions. A core theory-of-mind skill is the ability to decode others' mental states on the basis of observable information, such as facial expressions. Although several recent studies have focused on the neural correlates of reasoning about mental states, no research has addressed the question of what neural systems underlie mental state decoding. We used dense-array eventrelated potentials (ERP) to show that decoding mental states from pictures of eyes is associated with an N270–400 component over inferior frontal and anterior temporal regions of the right hemisphere. Source estimation procedures suggest that orbitofrontal and medial temporal regions may underlie this ERP effect. These findings suggest that different components of everyday theory-of-mind skills may rely on dissociable neural mechanisms.

Mensrea

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Penal Code ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Mens Rea ◽  
Model Penal Code ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Criminal Conviction ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

Accusing, condemning, and avenging are part of our daily life. However, a review of many years of literature attempting to analyze our blaming practices suggests that we do not understand very well what we are doing when we judge people culpable for a wrong they have committed. Of course, everyone agrees that, for example, someone deserves censure and punishment when she is guilty of a wrong, and the law has traditionally looked for a mens rea, or “guilty mind,” in order to convict someone of a criminal wrongdoing. But philosophers and legal theorists have found it interestingly difficult to say what mens rea is. For example, noting the way in which we intuitively think people aren't culpable for a crime if they disobey the law by mistake, or under duress, or while insane, theorists such as H.L.A. Hart have tried to define mens rea negatively, as that which an agent has if he is not in what we consider to be an excusing state. But such an approach only circumscribes and does not unravel the central mystery; it also fails to explain why the law recognizes any excusing states as mitigating or absolving one of guilt, much less why all and only the excusing states that are recognized by the law are the right ones. Moreover, the Model Penal Code, which gives a very detailed account of the kinds of mental states which justify criminal conviction, does not tell us (nor was it designed to tell us) why these states of mind (e.g., knowledge, purposiveness, intention, assumption of risk of harm, negligence) are relevant to an assessment of legal guilt.

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