Challenges to Biocentrism

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-61
Author(s):  
John Basl
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Satisfactory Account ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Objective List

Chapter 2 takes up two distinct sets of challenges to biocentrism. The first concerns the relationship between moral status and normative theory. The challenge is that there is no defending the claim that nonsentient organisms have moral status without defending a particular normative theory. This chapter defends the view that questions about the bearers of moral status can be settled independently of issues of normative theory. The second challenge, the subjectivist challenge, rests on the claim that there is no satisfactory account of welfare that does not depend in some way on the bearer of welfare having cognitive capacities, that attributions of welfare to nonsentient things are illusory, derivative, etc. Here the chapter makes space for the welfare of nonsentient organisms by defending an objective-list view of welfare and using the subjectivist challenge to set conditions of adequacy for a theory of welfare for nonsentient organisms.

Reconsidering the Relationship among Voluntary Acts, Strict Liability, and Negligence in Criminal Law

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Strict Liability ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Economic Class ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Satisfactory Account ◽  
The Relationship

This essay, as will become obvious, owes a huge debt to Mark Kelman, particularly to his article “Interpretative Construction in the Substantive Criminal Law.” That debt is one of both concept and content. There is rich irony in my aping Kelman's deconstructionist enterprise, for I do not share his enthusiasm for either the “insights” or the political agenda of the Critical Legal Studies movement. I do not believe that either the law in general or the criminal law in particular is radically indeterminate, rife with internal contradictions, or an expression of the interests of a dominant economic class. And although, like Kelman, I believe that the freedom/determinism, act/character, and rule/principle dichotomies must ultimately be dealt with in order to have a completely satisfactory account of criminal law, I also believe that these dichotomies loom just as large in other areas of law and in normative theory generally. They are problems for Crits as well as for liberal-legalists.In any event, my intentions in undertaking this deconstructionist enterprise are modestly reformist, not revolutionary. I do not intend to shift any paradigms, but to work with well-established ones. I will assume that criminal law seeks to accomplish some blend of retributive response to and deterrence of culpable choices, choices to defy moral norms that are also legal norms. (I omit consideration of criminal laws premised on immoral norms.) I will also assume that a culpable choice is one that reflects negatively on the values held by the chooser. Beyond these quite modest assumptions, I need not and will not venture in this paper, realizing, of course, that much has and can be written about the proper aims of punishment and the proper account of culpability.

Dehumanization and Mentalizing Animals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.J. Kasperbauer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Phenomenal States

This chapter applies the psychological account from chapter 3 on how we rank human beings above other animals, to the particular case of using mental states to assign animals moral status. Experiments on the psychology of mental state attribution are discussed, focusing on their implications for human moral psychology. The chapter argues that attributions of phenomenal states, like emotions, drive our assignments of moral status. It also describes how this is significantly impacted by the process of dehumanization. Psychological research on anthropocentrism and using animals as food and as companions is discussed in order to illuminate the relationship between dehumanization and mental state attribution.

scholarly journals Argumentation, rationality, and psychology of reasoning

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 135 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Godden
Keyword(s):  
Dual Process ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Psychology Of Reasoning ◽  
Process Theories ◽  
System 2 ◽  
The Common ◽  
Dual Process Theories ◽  
The Relationship

This paper explicates an account of argumentative rationality by articulating the common, basic idea of its nature, and then identifying a collection of assumptions inherent in it. Argumentative rationality is then contrasted with dual-process theories of reasoning and rationality prevalent in the psychology of reasoning. It is argued that argumentative rationality properly corresponds only with system-2 reasoning in dual-process theories. This result challenges the prescriptive force of argumentative norms derives if they derive at all from their descriptive accuracy of our cognitive capacities. In response, I propose an activity-based account of reasoning which retains the assumptions of argumentative rationality while recontextualizing the relationship between reasoning as a justificatory activity and the psychological states and processes underlying that activity.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
D. Justin Coates ◽  
Neal A. Tognazzini
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Current Account ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Michael Smith ◽  
Gary Watson ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Susan Wolf ◽  
Antony Duff

In this brief introduction, the editors summarize the motivation for the coming together of these chapters—which is to celebrate the work and philosophical legacy of Gary Watson—as well as the content of each contribution. Michael McKenna builds on and systematizes several key elements of Watson’s views on agency and responsibility. Susan Wolf extends elements of Watson’s oeuvre, notably the relationship between the way agents are responsible for their actions and the kind of response licensed by those actions. Pamela Hieronymi goes on from Watson’s work to offer her own account of what blame’s about. R. Jay Wallace is also concerned with Watson’s overall conception of moral responsibility, understanding blame to be an incipient form of moral address. Michael Smith continues the theme, offering a possible theory of moral responsibility similarly grounded in the reactive emotions. T. M. Scanlon continues a debate that Scanlon and Watson have been having over the moral status of psychopaths. Jeanette Kennett argues that psychopaths are not accountable for their actions in the sense required for moral blameworthiness; and that psychopaths’ actions are not attributable to them so as to make them plausibly criminal. Antony Duff extends Watson’s work on moral responsibility to the domain of criminal responsibility. Gideon Yaffe seeks to better understand the prospects of Watson’s account of addiction. Gary Watson himself offers his current account of the distinction between the two faces of responsibility and thoughts on weakness of will and negligence. Finally, a 2016 interview of Watson by Sarah Buss is a wide-ranging and significant discussion of Gary’s personal history and philosophical development.

Freedom as the Guarantor of the Possibility of the Highest Good

2020 ◽  
pp. 264-282
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Insole
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Highest Good ◽  
First Cause ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Free Actions

The chapter articulates the following problem: given all that Kant’s notion of freedom, and the intelligible realm can achieve, what precisely is the role of God? That is, what do we need God for? And then, even if we have identified a role which God is expected to fill, there is the further question of whether God can fulfil this role, consistently with Kant’s wider commitments. It is suggested that God either seems to be ‘too much’, or ‘not enough’: ‘too much’, in that God can seem redundant, given all that is achieved by the notion of freedom, and ‘not enough’, in that, were God needed to make up some sort of deficit in our moral status, this would seem to violate Kant’s restrictions on human freedom, which is always ‘all or nothing’, such that all our free actions must come as a first cause from ourselves, and ourselves alone. This is a problem that threatens the cogency of Kant’s ‘moral proof’, which is to say, his understanding of the relationship between the highest good, happiness, and the existence of God.

Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics

2020 ◽  
pp. 449-466
Author(s):  
Hans Blumenberg
Keyword(s):  
Relevant Information ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Speech Situation

This chapter looks at Hans Blumenberg's “Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics” (1966), which focuses on poetic language. The three basic ideas of the relationship between language and thought should help one gain a certain orientation to determine the function of poetic language. After all, an immanent poetics will by necessity depend on examining the function of a work's language. The explication of the immanent poetics of a work will therefore depend on asking the “right” questions with regard to this work's language. Of course, hints can be derived from the author's exogenous poetics, from his self-testimony and self-observation, if this is indeed what they are and not simply the “offshoot” of a normative theory of art. This methodical preliminary question deserves not to be passed over. Already the classification of a text by its author as “self-observation” during the process of aesthetic production expresses a certain aesthetic position. This position permits experience to provide relevant information about the process of a work's emergence.

Does Public Reason Liberalism Rest on a Mistake? Democracy’s Doxastic and Epistemic Problems

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Public Justification ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
Public Reason Liberalism ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes ◽  
Voter Knowledge

Public reason liberalism is a normative theory meant to adjudicate citizens’ conflicting beliefs about the right and the good. However, it rests upon controversial and likely mistaken empirical claims about voter psychology and voter knowledge. In political science, there are two major paradigms—populism and realism—about the relationship between voters’ beliefs and political outcomes. Realism holds that most citizens lack the kinds of beliefs and attitudes which public reason liberals believe are normatively significant. If so, then most citizens lack the kinds of ideological disputes which public reason liberalism is supposed to adjudicate. Worse, most citizens lack the kinds of normatively significantly beliefs upon which public justification must rest.

Does emotion mediate the relationship between an action's moral status and its intentional status? Neuropsychological evidence

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 291-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liane Young ◽  
Daniel Tranel ◽  
Fiery Cushman ◽  
Marc Hauser ◽  
Ralph Adolphs
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Neuropsychological Evidence ◽  
The Relationship

Carers and Services: Factors Mediating Service Provision

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Twigg ◽  
Karl Atkin
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Age Class ◽  
Social Structural ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThe article explores factors mediating the relationship between carers and service provision, exploring the judgements and expectations that lie behind the complex and sometimes seemingly inconsistent pattern of provision for carers. The article which is based on an empirical study teases out a series of factors that structure responses in this area covering: the attitude adopted by the carer to his or her caring role; the views of the cared-for person and other kin; the impact of different relationships, of what we term ‘moral status’, and of the existence or otherwise of a separate future for the cared-for person, as well as more social structural factors such as gender, age, class and race. The significance of these is explored through their impact on the assumptions of both service providers and carers.

scholarly journals La Relation Entre Le Bilinguisme Precoce Et Les Capacites Cognitives Chez Les Enfants Ages De 5 A 6 Ans

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (26) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Saliha Bouzid Baa
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Visual Memory ◽  
Field Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

The objective of this paper is to present results of a field work in which the aim was to examine the relationship between precocious bilingualism and certain cognitive capacities in 5 and 6 years old children. The cognitive capacities we took into account are attention, visual memory and intelligence. The obtained results permitted to conclude that bilingualism does not constitute an obstacle to the child’s cognitive development on the one hand, and that there is no difference between the bilingual and the monolingual at the advantage of monolinguals on the other hand that lead to the development of certain cognitive capacities namely memory.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document