Special aspects of intergenerational intra-family conflicts during the pandemic

The article deals with intergenerational conflicts within the family during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author reveals the topic of small groups isolation in the professional sphere: sailors, cosmonauts, polar explorers, members of long research expeditions. The topic of isolation is not new to psychology, since scientists in the middle of the last century faced this problem when they began to send expeditions to the poles, astronauts into space, etc. It analyses articles on the subject of isolation during the pandemic and reveals a mixed view of how families behave during this difficult time for society.

Personal identity

What is it to be the same person today as one was in the past, or will be in the future? How are we to describe cases in which (as we might put it) one person becomes two? What, if anything, do the answers to such questions show about the rationality of the importance we attach to personal identity? Is identity really the justifier of the special concern which we have for ourselves in the future? These are the concerns of this entry. In order to answer the question about the persistence-conditions of persons we must indulge in some thought experiments. Only thus can we tease apart the strands that compose our concept of personal identity, and thereby come to appreciate the relative importance of each strand. There are plausible arguments against attempts to see the relation of personal identity as constitutively determined by the physical relations of same body, or same brain. I can survive with a new body, and a new brain. But it does not follow; nor is it true, that a person’s identity over time can be analysed exclusively in terms of psychological relations (relations of memory, belief, character, and so on). To the contrary, the most plausible view appears to be a mixed view, according to which personal identity has to be understood in terms of both physical and psychological relations. This is the view which can be extracted from our core (that is, minimally controversial) set of common-sense beliefs about personal identity. The possibility of the fission of persons– the possibility that, for example, a person’s brain hemispheres might be divided and transplanted into two new bodies – shows that the mixed view has to incorporate a non-branching or uniqueness clause in its analysis. The concept of personal identity, contrary to what we might first be inclined to believe, is an extrinsic concept (that is, whether a given person exists can depend upon the existence of another, causally unrelated, person). Some philosophers have recently tried to forge an important connection between theories of personal identity and value theory (ethics and rationality). The possibility of such a connection had not previously been investigated in any detail. It has been argued that, on the correct theory of personal identity, it is not identity that matters but the preservation of psychological relations such as memory and character. These relations can hold between one earlier person and two or more later persons. They can also hold to varying degrees (for example, I can acquire a more or less different character over a period of years). This view of what matters has implications for certain theories of punishment. A now reformed criminal may deserve less or no punishment for the crimes of their earlier criminal self. Discussions of personal identity have also provided a new perspective on the debate between utilitarianism and its critics.

On being wronged and being wrong

If D commits a wrong against V, D typically incurs a corrective duty to V. But how should we respond if V has false beliefs about whether she is harmed by D’s wrong? There are two types of cases we must consider: (1) those in which V is not harmed but she mistakenly believes that she is (2) those in which V is harmed but she mistakenly believes that she is not. I canvass three views: The Objective View, The Subjective View and The Mixed View. The Objective View holds that V’s claim depends on the correct account of harm, rather than her false beliefs, and so D has a duty to offer damages to V in (2) but not in (1) in order to compensate her. The Subjective View holds that, for broadly anti-perfectionist reasons, V’s claim depends on her sincere beliefs, even if they are mistaken, and so D has a duty to compensate V in (1) but not in (2). The Mixed View holds that we should defer to her beliefs in (1) but not in (2), so D has a duty to compensate her in both cases. In this article, I argue that we should accept The Mixed View.

The Value of the Virtues

I argue that debates about virtue are best settled by clearly distinguishing two questions: (a)What sort of character trait is there reason to cultivate?(b)What sort of character trait is there reason (morally) to admire? With this distinction in mind, I focus on recent accounts of what consequentialists ought to say about virtue, arguing that: (1)The instrumentalist view of virtue accepted by many prominent consequentialists should not be accepted as the default view for consequentialists to hold.(2)The main rival view, the appropriate response account, not only avoids the major objection facing the instrumental view, but gives the correct diagnosis of where it goes wrong.(3)Two objections that seem to face the appropriate response account can in fact be convincingly met in ways which leave it looking stronger.(4)The appropriate response account is also to be preferred to a disjunctive view or a mixed view.