Naturalizing Moral Regression

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Group Threat ◽  
Epistemic Practices ◽  
Harsh Conditions ◽  
Development And Evolution

This chapter proposes a theory of moral regression, arguing that inclusivist gains can be eroded not only if certain harsh biological and social conditions indicative of out-group threat actually reappear but also if significant numbers of people come to believe that such harsh conditions exist even when they do not. It argues that normal cognitive biases in conjunction with defective social-epistemic practices can cause people wrongly to believe that such harsh conditions exist, thus triggering the development and evolution of exclusivist moralities and the dismantling of inclusivist ones. Armed with detailed knowledge of the biological and social environments in which progressive moralities emerge and are sustained, as well as the conditions under which they are likely to be dismantled, human beings can take significant steps toward transforming the classic liberal faith in moral progress into a practical, empirically grounded hope.

scholarly journals MEMBANGUN PENDIDIKAN KARAKTER DALAM MASYARAKAT

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Sri Suyanta
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Character Education ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Elderly Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
At Home

Character education is a necessity across the area, time and age. Character education is absolutely necessary not only in school, but also at home and in other social environments. It was prioritized since the past, present and future. Even today the students in character education is no longer for an early childhood but also adult and even the elderly age. Therefore character education should be designed and implemented systematically and simultaneously to help the students understand the human behavioral values which are associated with someoneself, fellow human beings, the environment and his or her Lord. Character education can be reached through three stages, namely socialization of the introduction, internalization, application in life.

Suffering Games: De Quincean Transgression and Self-Production in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Igrok (The Gambler)

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-72
Author(s):  
Lonny Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Self ◽  
Production Functions ◽  
First Person ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
Self Production

This paper compares Dostoevsky’s The Gambler (1866) to certain features of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) to show that the two texts demonstrate the emergence of a simulacral culture of the modern self. The De Quincean model of subjectivity is presented as a prototype of the modern self before The Gambler is investigated in its light. Insofar as the self is constructed in the context of social environments, modernity is characterized by a mimetic mode we might call intensity, where the modern self finds and creates its identity through repetitive patterns of mediated experience. In particular, it is argued that the first-person narrators of Confessions and The Gambler exemplify the obsessive cycle of self-production—a characteristically modern addiction to the decentring and multiplication of the self, rooted in the need for the intoxicating effect of strong sensations and imaginary experience. Self-production functions in a cycle of passion, transgression, and suffering, followed by anticipation of change and renewal, on a par, psychologically, with rebirth or resurrection. The major difference between the works is that, while Confessions emphasizes the causality of social conditions, The Gambler is predicated on the uniquely Russian sense of destiny (sud’ba).

Drones and Robots

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Statman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
Defensive Action

The recent development of unmanned technology—drones and robots of various types—is transforming the nature of warfare. Instead of fighting against other human beings, combatants will soon be fighting against machines. At present, these machines are operated by human beings, but they are becoming increasingly autonomous. Some people believe that, from a moral point of view, this development is worrisome, especially insofar as fully autonomous offensive systems (‘killer robots’) are concerned. I claim that the arguments that support this belief are pretty weak. Compared with the grand battles of the past, with their shockingly high toll of casualties, drone-centered campaigns seem much more humane. They also enable a better fit between moral responsibility and vulnerability to defensive action. Drones and robots may well be recorded in the annals of warfare as offering real promise for moral progress.

scholarly journals Reconsidering Relational Autonomy. Personal Autonomy for Socially Embedded and Temporally Extended Selves

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Baumann
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Relational Autonomy ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time

AbstractMost recent accounts of personal autonomy acknowledge that the social environment a person lives in, and the personal relationships she entertains, have some impact on her autonomy. Two kinds of conceptualizing social conditions are traditionally distinguished in this regard: Causally relational accounts hold that certain relationships and social environments play a causal role for the development and on-going exercise of autonomy. Constitutively relational accounts, by contrast, claim that autonomy is at least partly constituted by a person’s social environment or standing. The central aim of this paper is to raise the question how causally and constitutively relational approaches relate to the fact that we exercise our autonomy over time. I argue that once the temporal scope of autonomy is opened up, we need not only to think differently about the social dimension of autonomy. We also need to reconsider the very distinction between causally and constitutively relational accounts, because it is itself a synchronic (and not a diachronic) distinction.

scholarly journals CONCEPTUAL STUDY OF GUDUCHI IN THE MANAGEMENT OF JWARA

2020 ◽  
Vol p5 (01) ◽  
pp. 2612-2616
Author(s):  
Sahare Priyanka ◽  
Sasmal Gitanjali ◽  
Kumar Ashok
Keyword(s):  
Medicinal Plants ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Tinospora Cordifolia ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Conceptual Study

Ayurveda is the science which ensures health and longevity of individuals. It contains detailed knowledge of etiopathogenesis, symptoms, treatment of various diseases. Jwara is first among all the disorders which occur individually or with manifestation of any disorder. Jwara is manifested in the form of Tamas at the time of birth and death. It is an important and crucial among all the diseases as it affects not only human beings but also all living creatures. Jwara has been destroying humans since ancient times. Ayurveda also contains details of various medicinal plants with all its benefits which is used to treat various medical con-ditions. Guduchi [Tinospora Cordifolia (Willd.)Miers] of family Menispermaceae is a climbing shrub found throughout tropical India. It is useful in removing Ama (toxins) and other microbes that are responsible for causing Jwara (fever) and other infections. As now Ayurveda has come so close to humans that it seems difficult to separate it from human life. Through this paper an effort is made to know more about Guduchi and how Jwara can be treated by using Guduchi.

Overlapping Pain and Psychiatric Syndromes

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Comorbid Condition ◽  
Health Practitioner ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hospital Administrators ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Chronic Pain Conditions

When a health practitioner is at the bedside of a patient suffering from chronic pain and a psychiatric comorbid condition, he is facing a true clinical conundrum. The comorbidity is frequent yet poorly understood, the diagnosis is difficult and the treatment that follows is less than appropriate. Pain conditions and psychiatric disorders have customarily been understood and treated as different and separate clinical entities, to the detriment of patients’ wellbeing. Fathoming the overlapping pain and psychiatric disorders is in the interest of everyone involved in healthcare, including doctors, nurses, pain specialists, psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, hospital administrators, and health policymakers. There is a wide overlap of chronic pain conditions and psychiatric disorders. Pain and psychiatric comorbidity is frequent in the population, yet it is poorly understood. The societal burden of mental illness and pain is enormous; it could approach one trillion dollars annually in the USA. Compounding to the economic burden, are the liability related to stigma, shame, bias, discrimination, health disparities, inequities in care, and health injustice. Recent scientific and technological developments in digital medicine, artificial intelligence, pharmacogenetics, genetics, epigenetics, and neuroscience promise beneficial quality changes to medical care and education. The pain medicine and psychiatry of the future will consider patients as human beings embedded in their physical and social environments. This book provides a glimpse in that direction.

Moral Progress for Evolved Rational Creatures

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-238
Author(s):  
William J. FitzPatrick
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Belief ◽  
Adaptive Plasticity ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Naturalistic Account ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Way

Abstract Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have developed a rich ‘biocultural theory’ of the nature and causes of moral progress (and regress) for human beings conceived as evolved rational creatures with a nature characterized by ‘adaptive plasticity’. They characterize their theory as a thoroughly naturalistic account of moral progress, while bracketing various questions in moral theory and metaethics in favor of focusing on a certain range of more scientifically tractable questions under some stipulated moral and metaethical assumptions. While I am very much in agreement with the substance of their project, I wish to query and raise some difficulties for the way it is framed, particularly in connection with the claim of naturalism. While their project is clearly naturalistic in certain senses, it is far from clear that it is so in others that are of particular interest in moral philosophy, and these issues need to be more carefully sorted out. For everything that has been argued in the book, the theory on offer may be only a naturalistic component of a larger theory that must ultimately be non-naturalistic in order to deliver the robust sort of account that is desired. Indeed, there are significant metaethical reasons for believing this to be the case. Moreover, if it turns out that some of the assumptions upon which their theory relies require a non-naturalist metaethics (positing irreducibly evaluative or normative properties and facts) then even the part of the theory that might have seemed most obviously naturalistic, i.e., the explanation of how changes in moral belief and behavior have come about, may actually require some appeal to non-naturalistic elements in the end.

Bias

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Antony
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Norm ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Helen Longino ◽  
Social Prejudice ◽  
Underdetermination Of Theory

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical reflections on bias and objectivity. Some feminists have argued that objectivity is an unachievable and thus inappropriate epistemic norm for human beings. But at the same time, these feminists have criticized philosophy for displaying masculinist bias. This complex critique faces a problem I’ve called the “Bias Paradox” and that Helen Longino calls an “Essential Tension:” how we can criticize partiality at the same time we acknowledge its ubiquity. I explain Longino’s proposed “social empiricist” solution, and contrast it with my own. I argue for a re-conception of “bias” as a normatively neutral epistemic inclination. Biases, in this sense, play a crucial constructive role in the development of human knowledge by solving the problem of underdetermination of theory by evidence. The biases we (correctly) regard as morally bad, such as social prejudice, involve the operation of neutral biases in unpropitious natural or social environments.

How the Moral Community Evolves

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-249
Author(s):  
Rachell Powell ◽  
Irina Mikhalevich ◽  
Allen Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Moral Community ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Animal Minds ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
Adaptive Mechanisms ◽  
Moral Attitudes

Moral reasoning is modulated by emotions and other cognitive biases. How do these covert biasing mechanisms shape perceptions of more fundamental moral categories, such as moral standing and moral status (together, “MSS”), out of which specific moral attitudes and behaviors flow? This chapter explains the centrality of MSS to human evolution, and examines several evolved biases that distort MSS ascription. These include tendencies to deny moral standing, or to attribute lower moral status, to beings that elicit feelings of disgust or fear, as well as to those that are perceived as less similar, less attractive, less individualized, and less disposed toward reciprocal cooperation. These adaptive mechanisms may have served human groups well in the evolutionary past, but in the modern world they pose an obstacle to moral progress and play a key role in moral regression. The chapter argues that these biases have also influenced philosophical and scientific research on animal minds. The aim is to develop a richer, biocultural understanding of how conceptions of the moral community evolve.

Social Environments of Pervasive Incarceration: Lessons from Australia’s Top End

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-221
Author(s):  
Bruce Western ◽  
Catherine Sirois
Keyword(s):  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Criminal Justice Policy ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Material Hardship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Penal Institutions

U.S. mass incarceration is characterized by pervasive imprisonment among black men with little schooling that is often viewed as the product of punitive criminal justice policy. This chapter argues that pervasive incarceration also arises under a specific set of social conditions that make police contact and detention overwhelmingly likely. This work explores the social conditions of pervasive incarceration in a significantly less punitive policy context, in Australia’s Northern Territory where social inequality is acute and incarceration is woven into everyday life. Interviews and field observation in this region show that pervasive indigenous incarceration emerges in a historical context of racial inequality marked by extreme material hardship, violent family conflict and alcohol abuse. Where violence is coupled to poverty, penal institutions respond expansively to myriad social problems — including serious violence.

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