Bioeconomy solutions potentially reduce the utilization demand of natural resources, and therefore, represent steps towards circular economy, but are not per se equivalent to sustainability. Thus, production may remain to be achieved against losses in natural resources or at other environmental costs, and materials produced by bioeconomy are not necessarily biodegradable. As a consequence, the assumption that emerging bioeconomy by itself provides an environmentally sustainable economy is not justified, as technologies do not necessarily become sustainable merely through their conversion to (...) using renewable resources for their production. A source of the above assumption is that the utility of bioeconomy is mostly assessed in interaction between technology developers and economists, resulting in biased assessment with private commercial technology benefits being included, but environmental costs, especially longer term ones, not being sufficiently considered in the economic models. A possible solution to this conceptual contradiction may come from bioethics, as a strong concept in environmental ethics is that no technological intervention can be imposed on nature beyond its receptive capacity. To achieve a better balanced analysis of bioeconomy, environmental and ecological, as well as non-economic social aspects, need to be included in the overall assessment. (shrink)

This paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will (...) combine with those of others. In some cases they are morally responsible for this failure, in others they are not. Moreover, the argument for collective epistemic agency is incoherent because reasons-for-groups are ipso facto reasons-for-individual. Instead of talking about reasons-for-groups, we should therefore distinguish between self-regarding reasons and group-regarding reasons. Both kinds of reasons are reasons-for-individuals. These conceptual considerations in favour of moderate individualism are strengthened by an analysis of our moral practice of responding to collective shortfalls of rationality and by the unpalatable moral implications of collectivism about epistemic agency. There is no need to change the subject. Groups can be rational or irrational, but they do not reason. (shrink)

Sugar relationships can be considered contemporary forms of transactional sex, that is, offering sexual services for material resources or other benefits. Considering the common age differences in these relationships, sugar relationships might be of relevance for older adults as well on the mating market. As a sequel to Birkás et al., in the present study, an attitude scale was developed to assess older women’s and men’s acceptance of sugar relationships. We also explored whether the acceptance of sugar relationships was associated (...) with love styles, sociosexual orientation, sexual motivation, and certain socially aversive personality traits. In two online studies with a total number of 836 participants, the results showed that the Acceptance of Sugar Relationships in Older Men and Women Scale proved to be a reliable and conceptually valid measure of older individuals’ attitude toward sugar relationships. A more accepting attitude toward sugar relationships was found to be associated with more unrestricted sociosexuality, preference to engage in playful love relationships and more self-focused sexual motivation, and with more pronounced Dark Triad and borderline traits. Our findings are discussed in an evolutionary framework. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that certain hard moral choices constitute tragic moral dilemmas in which no available course of action is justifiable, and so the agent is blameworthy whatever she chooses. This paper criticizes a certain approach to the debate about moral dilemmas and considers the metaethical implications of the criticisms. The approach in question has been taken by many advocates as well as opponents of moral dilemmas who believe that analysing the emotional response of the agent is the key (...) to the debate about moral dilemmas. The metaethical position this approach is most naturally associated with is sentimentalism. Sentimentalists claim that evaluation, and in particular moral evaluation, crucially depends on human sentiment. This paper is not concerned with the question whether moral dilemmas exist, but rather with emotion-based arguments used on both sides of the debate. The first aim of the paper is to show that emotion-based arguments by friends or foes of moral dilemmas cannot garner support from sentimentalism. The second aim is to show that this constitutes a serious problem for sentimentalism. (shrink)

IntroductionIt is clear that forgiveness is closely related to emotions. Bishop Butler’s “forswearing of resentment” is still the definition most philosophical works on the subject take as their point of departure. Some others disagree but usually only insofar as they focus on another reactive emotion – e.g., moral hatred, disappointment, anger – which we overcome when we forgive.More specifically, according to Roberts the emotion we overcome in forgiveness is anger, see Robert C. Roberts, “Forgivingness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995): 289–306. (...) According to Richards, forgiveness involves overcoming a whole range of negative emotions including sadness, disappointment, frustration as well as resentment; see Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics 99 (1988): 77–97. According to Sher, forgiveness involves overcoming blame; see George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).There is something striking about the negativity of this approach. Forgiveness i. (shrink)

A simple inductive argument shows natural languages to have infinitly many sentences, but workers in the field have uncovered clear evidence of a diverse group of ‘exceptional’ languages from Proto-Uralic to Dyirbal and most recently, Pirahã, that appear to lack recursive devices entirely. We argue that in an information-theoretic setting non-recursive natural languages appear neither exceptional nor functionally inferior to the recursive majority.

Digital parenting tools, such as child-tracking technologies, play an ever-increasing role in contemporary child rearing. To explore opinions and experiences related to the use of such tracking devices, we conducted Q methodology and a semi-structured individual interview-study with Estonian parents and their 8- to 13-year-old pre-teens. Our aim was to study how such caring dataveillance was rationalized within the families, and to explore the dominant parenting values associated with the practice. Relying upon communication privacy management theory, the issues of privacy (...) related to such intimate surveillance were also studied. Three factors relating to the use of tracking technologies were extracted from both parents and pre-teens. Tracking technologies were viewed as parental aids that made it possible to ease anxieties and provide assurance to parents and children alike. Although children did not associate the use of tracking technologies with intrusion on privacy, they expected to have a chance to coordinate their privacy boundaries. (shrink)

Pictorial meaning involves not just resemblance, but also pictorial skills, pictorial acts, practices, and performance. Especially in the classroom setting, at all levels of education, it is essential to realize that teaching with pictures and learning through pictures is a practical enterprise where thinking is embedded in doing. Promoting visual learning means to be a visionary, and to take on an enormous educational challenge. But while adaptation and innovation are inevitable in a world where technological changes are rapidly and radically (...) altering the learning environment, educational science and the everyday practice of education clearly need to retain a measure of conservatism. And any conservatism worth the name has to take account of visuality, visual thinking, and visual learning. (shrink)

An aesthetic sense—a taste for the creation and/or appreciation of that which strikes one as, e.g., attractive or awesome—is often assumed to be a distinctively H. sapiens phenomenon. However, recent paleoanthropological research is revealing its archaeologically visible, deeper roots. The sensorimotor/perceptual and cognitive capacities underpinning aesthetic activities are a major focus of evolutionary aesthetics. Here we take a diachronic, evolutionary perspective and assess ongoing scepticism regarding whether, and to what extent, aesthetic capacity extends to our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. The (...) goal of this article is twofold. First, it serves as a defence of the attribution of Neanderthal aesthetic capacity by marshalling archaeological data best explained by positing a Neanderthal aesthetic sense. Second, it offers an opportunity to make progress on understanding some epistemically relevant features of the wider debate in evolutionary aesthetics. First, we outline and analyse a range of distinct ‘sceptical arguments’ derived from attitudes and claims found in the literature and broader debate that aim to dial down the case for Neanderthal aesthetic capacity. We show that these arguments not only miss their target, they divert the debate away from more compelling questions. We then consider the case for protoaesthetic capacities and sensitivities in the Acheulean stone tool industry and argue that Neanderthals likely inherited the protoaesthetic package from ancient ancestors that they shared with H. sapiens. Finally, we sketch and defend a research agenda for framing Neanderthal aesthetic niche(s) beyond H. sapiens-derived standards, which we see as a priority for future archaeological, cognitive, and philosophical research. While we resist sceptical arguments and the often-implied inferiority of Neanderthals to humans, we also deny that Neanderthals and ancient humans were indistinguishable. Understanding the differences is an important goal of interpretation, and we apply this line of reasoning to the case of aesthetics. (shrink)

Many believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. This paper focuses on epistemic aspects of the putative link between emotions and value by asking two related questions. First, how exactly are emotions supposed to latch onto or track values? And second, how well suited are emotions to detecting or learning about values? To answer the first question, the paper develops the heuristics-model of emotions. This approach models emotions as sui generis heuristics of value. The empirical plausibility of the heuristics-model (...) is demonstrated using evidence from experimental psychology, evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience. The model is used then to answer the second question. If emotions are indeed heuristics of value, then it follows that emotions can be an important and useful source of information about value. However, emotions will not be epistemically superior in the sense of being the highest court of appeal for the justification of axiological beliefs (the latter view is referred to as the Epistemic Dependence Thesis, or EDT for short). The paper applies the heuristics-model to celebrated cases from the philosophy of emotions literature arguing that while the heuristics-model offers a good explanation of typical patterns of emotional reactions in such cases, advocates of EDT will have a hard time accounting for these patterns. The paper also shows that the conclusions drawn from special cases generalize. The paper ends by arguing that skepticism about the metaethical significance of emotions is compatible with a commitment to the importance of emotions in first-order normative ethics. (shrink)

This paper argues that emotions can play an epistemic role as justifiers of evaluative beliefs. It also presents the heuristics theory of emotion as an empirically informed explanation of how emotions can play such a role and why they in practice usefully complement non-affective evaluative judgments. As such, the heuristics theory represents a form of moderate rationalism: it acknowledges that emotions can be epistemically valuable, even privileged in some sense, but denies that they would be uniquely privileged. I argue that (...) judgments and emotional responses pick out different but correlated kinds of evaluative properties and therefore emotional responses and non-affective evaluative judgments play mutually complementary rather than mutually exclusive roles. It follows that emotional responses can be legitimately drawn upon to support evaluative beliefs, but they lack supreme epistemic authority. (shrink)

The thirty year long friendship between Imre Lakatos and the classic scholar and historian of mathematics Árpád Szabó had a considerable influence on the ideas, scholarly career and personal life of both scholars. After recalling some relevant facts from their lives, this paper will investigate Szabó's works about the history of pre-Euclidean mathematics and its philosophy. We can find many similarities with Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics and science, both in the self-interpretation of early axiomatic Greek mathematics as Szabó reconstructs it, (...) and in the general overview Szabó provides us about the turn from the intuitive methods of Greek mathematicians to the strict axiomatic method of Euclid's Elements. As a conclusion, I will argue that the correct explanation of these similarities is that in their main works they developed ideas they had in common from the period of intimate intellectual contact in Hungarian academic life in the mid-twentieth century. In closing, I will recall some relevant features of this background that deserve further research. (shrink)

Individualists hold that moral responsibility can be ascribed to single human beings only. An important collectivist objection is that individualism is morally deficient because it leaves a normative residue. Without attributing responsibility to collectives there remains a “deficit in the accounting books” (Pettit). This collectivist strategy often uses judgment aggregation paradoxes to show that the collective can be responsible when no individual is. I argue that we do not need collectivism to handle such cases because the individualist analysis leaves no (...) responsibility-deficit. Harm suffered in such situations can have only two sources. Harm is either due to culpable wrongdoing by individuals. Harm is then redressed by holding these individuals responsible. Or harm does not result from culpable wrongdoing. Such harm may have to be redressed too, but not because anyone is responsible for it. Therefore, the charge of moral insensitivity against individualist accounts can be rejected. Furthermore, in the last section of the chapter I will show that collectivist talk about moral responsibility can be used for ethically questionable purposes as well. Collectivists cannot claim the moral high ground. (shrink)