The Social Foundations of Normative Judgment

<p>Norms suffuse our lives and are a major part of the way that we understand and structure the social world. This thesis provides an account of normative judgment that illuminates the nature of this uniquely human competence. The main argument pursued is that understanding normative judgment requires a direct and sustained understanding of its social functions. Within philosophy, discussion of normativity has often been confined to the moral domain. One major theme of this thesis is the broadening of this focus to include other domains that are rightfully considered normative. Another philosophical shibboleth is the tendency to explain features of human psychology from a conceptual perspective. A second theme of the thesis will be the insistence that empirical research is a useful addition to the project of understanding normativity. I present these ideas in three stages. First, I show why it is plausible to believe in the unity of normative domains and defend a conceptual thesis of Normative Judgment Internalism that sees norms as fundamentally bound up with reasons. Secondly, I outline a puzzle that any theory of normative judgment must answer and then critique orthodox Humean and anti-Humean theories that fail to provide such a solution. Thirdly, I explore empirical research about the nature of normative judgment and tentatively endorse a model of normative cognition that is informed by my earlier arguments.</p>

The Social Foundations of Normative Judgment

<p>Norms suffuse our lives and are a major part of the way that we understand and structure the social world. This thesis provides an account of normative judgment that illuminates the nature of this uniquely human competence. The main argument pursued is that understanding normative judgment requires a direct and sustained understanding of its social functions. Within philosophy, discussion of normativity has often been confined to the moral domain. One major theme of this thesis is the broadening of this focus to include other domains that are rightfully considered normative. Another philosophical shibboleth is the tendency to explain features of human psychology from a conceptual perspective. A second theme of the thesis will be the insistence that empirical research is a useful addition to the project of understanding normativity. I present these ideas in three stages. First, I show why it is plausible to believe in the unity of normative domains and defend a conceptual thesis of Normative Judgment Internalism that sees norms as fundamentally bound up with reasons. Secondly, I outline a puzzle that any theory of normative judgment must answer and then critique orthodox Humean and anti-Humean theories that fail to provide such a solution. Thirdly, I explore empirical research about the nature of normative judgment and tentatively endorse a model of normative cognition that is informed by my earlier arguments.</p>

Artificial intelligence applications in social media for depression screening: A systematic review protocol for content validity processes

Background The popularization of social media has led to the coalescing of user groups around mental health conditions; in particular, depression. Social media offers a rich environment for contextualizing and predicting users’ self-reported burden of depression. Modern artificial intelligence (AI) methods are commonly employed in analyzing user-generated sentiment on social media. In the forthcoming systematic review, we will examine the content validity of these computer-based health surveillance models with respect to standard diagnostic frameworks. Drawing from a clinical perspective, we will attempt to establish a normative judgment about the strengths of these modern AI applications in the detection of depression. Methods We will perform a systematic review of English and German language publications from 2010 to 2020 in PubMed, APA PsychInfo, Science Direct, EMBASE Psych, Google Scholar, and Web of Science. The inclusion criteria span cohort, case-control, cross-sectional studies, randomized controlled studies, in addition to reports on conference proceedings. The systematic review will exclude some gray source materials, specifically editorials, newspaper articles, and blog posts. Our primary outcome is self-reported depression, as expressed on social media. Secondary outcomes will be the types of AI methods used for social media depression screen, and the clinical validation procedures accompanying these methods. In a second step, we will utilize the evidence-strengthening Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, Study type (PICOS) tool to refine our inclusion and exclusion criteria. Following the independent assessment of the evidence sources by two authors for the risk of bias, the data extraction process will culminate in a thematic synthesis of reviewed studies. Discussion We present the protocol for a systematic review which will consider all existing literature from peer reviewed publication sources relevant to the primary and secondary outcomes. The completed review will discuss depression as a self-reported health outcome in social media material. We will examine the computational methods, including AI and machine learning techniques which are commonly used for online depression surveillance. Furthermore, we will focus on standard clinical assessments, as indicating content validity, in the design of the algorithms. The methodological quality of the clinical construct of the algorithms will be evaluated with the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health status Measurement Instruments (COSMIN) framework. We conclude the study with a normative judgment about the current application of AI to screen for depression on social media. Systematic review registration International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews PROSPERO (registration number CRD42020187874).

Normative Judgment, Realism, and International Law

A strand of thought within international relations realism claims that international law, understood as the dense network of multilateral and bilateral treaties, customary law, and institutions tasked with interpreting and applying them, cannot have meaningfully legal authority. This chapter traces the genealogy of the realist take on international law to a problematic use of the rational choice model for state behavior. Namely, realists derive skeptical positions about the authority and value of international law by using the rational choice model applied to states prescriptively rather than merely descriptively. With parsimonious assumptions about instrumental rationality, preferences, and choice situations, realists have put the model to good use to explain state action in the context of international politics. But they go much further, by taking the rational actor model to articulate an implicit moral ideal for states.

¿Cabe una educación sexual que sea expresión de una inteligencia cultivada?

This article aims to show how sex education today responds to the dominance that philosophies of suspicion have achieved over intellectual life, a dominance that hinders a normative judgment of human sexuality. Any attempt at regulation is suspected of concealing some kind of domination by some over others. The lack of regulations makes meaningful education about sexuality impossible and only allows for education that is superficial, instrumental, and limits itself to managing unwanted consequences such as teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. This work shows that there is another way of understanding intellectual life that is linked to moral life, open to the truth, and not just dedicated to denunciation. Thinking well involves living within a tradition and on the path of a good life. A concept of a good life supposes a teleological understanding of the human condition and the necessary cultivation of virtues in order to remain within it. In this dimension, sexuality has a meaning that is not merely biological but also relational, generative, and communicative, and it is subject to rules that derive from our personal character and sexuality’s relationship with intimacy.

The Liar’s Mark: Character and Forfeiture in Federal Rule of Evidence 609(a)(2)

Rule 609(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Evidence is an outlier. The Rule mandates admission of impeaching evidence of a witness’s past convictions for crimes of dishonesty. It is the only place in the Rules where judges are denied their usual discretion to exclude evidence on the grounds that its admission would be more prejudicial than probative. This Note analyzes three assumptions underlying this unusual Rule: (1) that there is a coherently definable category of crimes of dishonesty, (2) that convictions for crimes of dishonesty are uniquely probative of a person’s character, and (3) that an assessment of moral character based on past convictions will be suitably predictive of a person’s reliability as a witness. These assumptions are false and so do not justify the mandatory admission of convictions under the Rule. The final Part of this Note argues that Rule 609(a)(2) is better understood as operating on an implicit principle of forfeiture. Recognizing this and modifying the structure of the Rule accordingly cures some of its current defects. But these revisions still leave something deeply concerning about Rule 609(a)(2). The logic of forfeiture substitutes a normative judgment about a particular class of people in place of an evidentiary judgment about the probative value of a certain kind of information. This Note concludes that this substitution is unprincipled and unjust, and that therefore Rule 609(a)(2) should be eliminated.

X-Phi and Impartiality Thought Experiments: Investigating the Veil of Ignorance

This paper discusses “impartiality thought experiments”, i.e., thought experiments that attempt to generate intuitions which are unaffected by personal characteristics such as age, gender or race. We focus on the most prominent impartiality thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance (VOI), and show that both in its original Rawlsian version and in a more generic version, empirical investigations can be normatively relevant in two ways: First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor a certain normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board.