Previous findings demonstrate that people often do not feel how they want to feel, supporting the distinction between “actual affect” and “ideal affect.” But are there certain activities that reduce the discrepancy between actual and ideal affect? Based on flow theory and socioemotional selectivity theory, we examined whether the discrepancy between people’s actual and ideal positive affect would be smaller during activities that were more conducive to flow (a state of intense absorption and concentration), pleasant, and familiar. In Study 1, (...) U.S. participants aged 17–79 (N = 393) reported their ideal affect and how they felt during activities with varying degrees of challenges and skills. For both low-arousal positive affect (LAP) and high-arousal positive affect (HAP), participants reported smaller actual-ideal affect discrepancies during flow-conducive activities (when skills matched challenges). Study 2 was a 14-day experience sampling study, in which Hong Kong participants aged 18–83 (Nindividual = 109) reported their momentary actual and ideal affect, and how pleasant and familiar their activities were (Nexperience = 3,815). Greater activity familiarity was associated with smaller discrepancies in actual-ideal LAP, while greater activity pleasantness was associated with smaller discrepancies in actual-ideal HAP. These findings provide insights on the activities that help people achieve their ideal affect more easily. (shrink)

One dark and rainy night, Yuso sexually assaults and tortures Zelan. In escaping from the scene of his crime, he falls heavily and becomes an impotent paraplegic. Instead of treating his fate as divine retribution for his wicked acts, Yuso sees it as sheer bad luck. He shows no remorse for what he has done, and vainly hopes that he will recover his powers, which he now treats as involuntarily hoarded resources to be used on less rainy days. In the (...) presence of others, he pretends that he has turned over a new leaf. He asks for religious and educational books, hoping to make up for his poor education and deprived social background. But he immediately discards them when he is alone in favor of the pornographic magazines which he has bribed a nurse to smuggle in for him. His deception and various obscene acts committed in the hospital are exposed; by the time he comes up for trial, everyone knows that he is still a lustful, sadistic, and unrepentant man. Most retributivists have a sufficient justification for punishing Yuso independently of the social consequences of his punishment. Two features of the case might cause some difficulties. First, Yuso has already experienced considerable suffering and deprivation both before and after his crime, and retributivists might disagree about the relevance of the suffering to his punishment. Secondly, Yuso is unrepentant, and it is unlikely that punishment will change him. This might, as we shall see, create a problem for those who think that the justifying aim of punishment is the moral reform of the offender. (shrink)

What ecological advantages do animals gain by being able to detect, extract and exploit wavelength information? What are the advantages of representing that information as hue qualities? The benefits of adding chromatic to achromatic vision, marginal in object detection, become apparent in object recognition and receiving biological signals. It is argued that this improved performance is a direct consequence of the fact that many animals' visual systems reduce wavelength information to combinations of four basic hues. This engenders a simple categorical (...) scheme that permits a rich amount of sensory information to be rapidly and efficiently employed by cognitive machinery of limited capacity. (shrink)

At 8 a.m. I get in my car and set off for work. At 7:59 a.m., before I started it, my car was at rest; at 8:01 a.m. it is in motion. When a thing is not in motion, it is at rest, and when it is not at rest, it is in motion. But what was the state of the car at 8:00 a.m., as I was starting it? It would be inaccurate to say that it was in motion (...) but it would be inaccurate, also, to say that it was at rest: it was “just starting.” But, if whenever a thing is not in motion it is at rest, the state of “just starting”—or, of course, the comparable state of “just stopping”—must be either a state of motion or a state of rest. Which? (shrink)

In Defense of Utilitarianism, C.L. Sheng provides a more intensive study of the Unified Utilitarian Theory , which he proposed in his previous work A New Approach to Utilitarianism . Sheng defends utilitarianism, particularly UUT, against the objections and attacks raised by nonutilitarians, showing it to be a viable ethical theory.

The purpose of this essay is to study the problem of inherent obscurity of the criterion for maximal utility in utilitarianism. For the sake of convenience of analysis, situations of moral actions are classified into four categories. It is shown that morality is flexible, especially in the positive sense, in that a virtuous action can be taken in various ways and/or to various degrees. For some situations it is inherently unclear what the moral requirement is, and whether it is a (...) maximum or a minimum. It is concluded that the schism of the principle of utility between the principle of the good and the principle of the right seems to be inevitable, and the interpretation of the ultimate criterion for maximal utility should be relaxed or interpreted separately and differently according to the situation of action. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature of liberty from the point of view of value. Liberty is the highest value for liberals. The root of this liberal view is their particular conception of self. Rawls says 'the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it.' This is also the Kantian view of the self: the self is prior to its socially given roles and relationships. Therefore, no end is exempt from possible revision by the self. There is nothing (...) wrong with this basic idea. In fact, all theories agree on free choice of life plan or self-determination. But they disagree about what package of rights and resources best enables people to pursue their own conceptions of the good. However, the liberal view of liberty is based on a metaphysically reasoned idealism. This results in a conception of liberty that is absolute, supreme, and has infinite value compared with other things. Communitarians have several arguments against the liberal view. I consider the following two points to be of utmost import: The liberal view of the self is empty; The liberal view ignores our embeddedness in communal practices. My reasoning is not exactly that of the communitarians. I view 'emptiness' as freedom associated with the substance of an action, which has a value that does not lie in itself. (shrink)

“Career value” is the name of a kind of value I used (or perhaps I coined) in my classification of value according to good things in life based on the law of nonreplaceability. I classify value into seven classes: (1) health value, (2) sentimental value, (3) economic value1, (4) belief value, (5) environmental value, (6) social value, and (7) career value. Career value refers to the extra value of the most important work, which one wants to do and actually does (...) in one’s life time, for oneself. In Section 2, I explain the nature of career value, which is different from the natures of all other values. In Section 3, I discuss various career values themselves. Career value has several different forms, depending on the nature and size of career. Finally, I conclude that, except for economic value3, which isunsuitable and unreasonable to be a career value, the pursuit of any kind of a nonmaterial career value is a good thing and conforms to the maximization of social utility in utilitarianism. (shrink)

At Moore’s time, the main-stream ethical theory is the doctrine that pleasure alone is good as an end as held by the hedonistic utilitarianism. Moore, however, asserts that good, not composed of any parts, is a simple notion and indefinable, and naturalistic ethical theories, in particular hedonistic utilitarianism, interpret intrinsic good as a property of a single natural object---pleasure, which is also the sole end of life, thus violates naturalistic fallacy. Moore seems to believe that there exist things other than (...) pleasure that are also intrinsically good and has searched for them. But Moore has not clearly stated what these things are, nor has he given any justification for why they are intrinsically good. This paper discusses Moore’s arguments and difficulties of utilitarianism. With the subjectivistic utilitarian theory of value, Unified Utilitarian Theory (UTT) discards the classification of value into intrinsic and instrumental and proves to be exempt of all theexisting difficulties with utilitarianism related to pleasure, including naturalistic fallacy, vagueness of pleasure and sole end of life, double counting, etc. (shrink)

This detailed and sympathetic, but not uncritical, study of On Liberty' argues for the general consistency and coherence of Mill's defence of individual liberty, but maintains that there are significant non-utilitarian elements in his arguments.