In Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action, Iain Morrisson offers a new view on Kant’s theory of moral action.

Canonical economic agents act so as to maximize a single, representative, utility function. However, there is accumulating evidence that heterogeneity in thought processes may be an important determinant of individual behavior. This paper investigates the implications of a vector-valued generalization of the Expected Utility paradigm, which permits agents either to deliberate as per Homo economics, or to act impulsively. This generalized decision theory is applied to explain the crowding-out effect, irrational educational investment decisions, persistent social inequalities, the pervasive influence of (...) non-cognitive ability on socio-economic outcomes, and the dynamic relationships between non-cognitive ability, cognitive ability, and behavioral biases. These results suggest that the generalized decision theory warrants further investigation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Though the ideas of health and sickness are very much at the heart of Nietzsche’s mature thought, scholars have offered little on what exactly he means by sickness. This is particularly true when Nietzsche presents his conception of sickness in more narrowly physiological terms, as he does explicitly in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality. In this paper, I present an account of what Nietzsche means by physiological sickliness and sickness, and how these notions are related (...) to asceticism. In particular, I argue that for Nietzsche human beings have been subject through all of history to epidemics of nervous inhibition and exhaustion. In explaining these physiological conditions, I detail the basic understanding of the nervous system in the nineteenth century and show how Nietzsche’s diagnosis of sickness in this system explains many of the mysterious elements of the Third Essay. In my final section, I sketch out the meaning of the ascetic ideal against the backdrop of this nervous sickness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I reconstruct Nietzsche's largely implicit understanding of how value systems are created. At the heart of this process are affects, which Nietzsche sees as drive-based evaluative feelings. Affects create value systems when they form rational patterns of feeling around the aims of their underlying drives. But Nietzsche sets this process of value creation in a functionalist context in which values work to promote underlying drives through the direct privileging of their aims over the aims of other (...) drives, through encouraging the pursuit of objects and conditions that facilitate the drive's discharge, and through the justification of the affects that create the values in the first place. I show how Nietzsche's functionalism can be reconciled with his commitment to the idea that affects create values. And I test my claims against Nietzsche's analysis of slave morality to show that his interpretations of the morality of custom, asceticism, and noble morality follow the same pattern. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most Nietzsche scholars read the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals as an account of the development of Christian asceticism after the slave revolution in morals. In this article, I argue that that is a misreading of Nietzsche's argument, the consequence of which is a failure to understand Nietzsche's treatment of the transition from noble morality to slave morality. I contend that we can track this transition only once we understand the role of the ascetic priest in (...) the slave revolution. The third essay's account of asceticism, then, is indispensable in understanding how slave morality grows out of priestly values. With this argument in place I begin to trace the deep lines of asceticism in the slave revolt as described in the first essay. (shrink)

Commentators have argued about whether Nietzsche is an aristocratic radical, a postmodern democrat or an anti‐political philosopher. Each of these views is correct in that there is some evidence from Nietzsche's texts that speaks in its favor. However, this fact points to a deeper truth, which is that Nietzsche's politics are confused. Nietzsche argues in favor of certain political ideals throughout his works, but these ideals do not hang together to form a coherent political system. The bulk of the evidence (...) in Nietzsche's corpus supports the view that he is an aristocratic radical, and so, in this paper, I argue my point by targeting this view and showing that Nietzsche does not have a complete or coherent aristocratic system. (shrink)

A philosophical biography challenges its author to do justice to both the philosophical and the biographical. In this book, Julian Young's level of detail and investigative rigor in exploring Nietzsche's life is such that from very early on one begins to have doubts about how he is going to connect these details with Nietzsche's philosophical positions. Would Young use the biographical reductively to explain Nietzsche's philosophy, or would he simply allow the two dimensions of his book to coexist without effectively (...) interacting? The primary success of this book is that at its high points it transcends the division between biography and philosophy, and thus avoids both of these clumsy alternatives.Young accomplishes this feat by tracking a single, dominant line of argument through Nietzsche's thought that also allows us to see his life as a whole. The unifying philosophical claim is that Nietzsche's final stance is "the fundamental position of The Birth of Tragedy, minus metaphysics" . For Young, The Birth of Tragedy explores the need for a creative and socially vibrant culture to respond to the fundamental question of how human beings can live meaningful and happy lives in spite of the inevitability of suffering and death. Young contends. (shrink)

In this article, I explore Nietzsche’s account of the origins of the ascetic ideal in his Genealogy of Morality. I offer a reading of his claim that this ideal springs from an instinctive response to the sicknesses he describes as “physiological inhibition and exhaustion”, arguing that these sicknesses are primarily nervous conditions found among the priestly class who come up with the ascetic ideal, and periodically among “large masses of people”. The historical frequency of the latter outbreaks accounts for the (...) popularity of the ideal. But the origin story is very much about the ascetic priest, and it is a story Nietzsche tells in bits and pieces over the course of the Genealogy. This article integrates these bits and pieces into one cohesive account. Finally, I consider how the priest’s more innocent ascetic lifestyle suggestions respond to the twin conditions of inhibition and exhaustion. (shrink)

In this paper I present an interpretation of the role of pleasure in Kant’s theory of desire formation. On my reading Kant’s account of how desires are formed does—in spite of what some commentators say—commit him to hedonism. On the face of it, Kant writes of the determination of the faculty of desire in three distinct ways, but I argue that these accounts can be reconciled in a single, more comprehensive (and thoroughly hedonistic) theory. This comprehensive theory has the virtue (...) of complementing and elucidating some of the lesser-known things that Kant has to say on the nature of pleasure in the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. (shrink)

Many scholars, in view of the close link that he draws between morality and freedom, argue that Kant does not think that there are free choices between nonmoral ends. On this view, Kant only posits a freedom to resist our desires and act morally. We are still responsible for immoral choices because we always have the power to act morally. Henry Allison has opposed this reading by arguing that Kant grounds a notion of nonmoral freedom in the Incorporation Thesis. In (...) this paper, I criticize Allison’s argument and then try to replace it with an alternative that grounds nonmoral freedom in morality. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new way of reading Nietzsche's second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality. At the heart of my account is the claim that Nietzsche is primarily interested in a persistent or existential form of guilt in this essay and only concerned with locally reactive cases of guilt as a function of this deeper phenomenon. I argue that, for Nietzsche, this persistent form of guilt develops out of a deep feeling of indebtedness or owing that (...) accompanies a fearful sense of dependency on the gods. When this sense of dependent indebtedness mixes with bad conscience, which arises through the shift from prehistoric tribes to state‐like communities, it becomes a moral problem; vast numbers of “slaves and serfs” (GM II.20) start to feel like they are not sufficiently honoring their dependent relationship with the gods. It is this feeling of persistent guilt that Nietzsche thinks metastasizes into Christian guilt. (shrink)

The glucocorticoid receptor belongs to an important class of transcription factors that alter the expression of target genes in response to a specific hormone signal. The glucocorticoid receptor can function at least at three levels: (1) recruitment of the general transcription machinery; (2) modulation of transcription factor action, independent of DNA binding, through direct protein‐protein interactions; and (3) modulation of chromatin structure to allow the assembly of other gene regulatory proteins and/or the general transcription machinery on the DNA. This review (...) will focus on the multifaceted nature of protein‐protein interactions involving the glucocorticoid receptor and basal transcription factors, coactivators and other transcription factors, occurring at these different levels of regulation. (shrink)

This Handbook provides an intellectually rigorous and accessible overview of the relationship between natural law and human rights. It fills a crucial gap in the literature with leading scholarship on the importance of natural law as a philosophical foundation for human rights and its significance for contemporary debates. The themes covered include: the role of natural law thought in the history of human rights; human rights scepticism; the different notions of 'subjective right'; the various foundations for human rights within natural (...) law ethics; the relationship between natural law and human rights in religious traditions; the idea of human dignity; the relation between human rights, political community and law; human rights interpretation; and tensions between human rights law and natural law ethics. This Handbook is an ideal introduction to natural law perspectives on human rights, while also offering a concise summary of scholarly developments in the field. (shrink)

The neural basis of progress monitoring has received relatively little attention compared to other sub-processes that are involved in goal directed behavior such as motor control and response inhibition. Studies of error-monitoring have identified the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) as a structure that is sensitive to conflict detection, and triggers corrective action. However, monitoring goal progress involves monitoring correct as well as erroneous events over a period of time. In the present research, 20 healthy participants underwent fMRI while playing (...) a game that involved monitoring progress towards either a numerical or a visuo-spatial target. The findings confirmed the role of the dACC in detecting situations in which the current state may conflict with the desired state, but also revealed activations in the frontal and parietal regions, pointing to the involvement of processes such as attention and working memory in monitoring progress over time. In addition, activation of the cuneus was associated with monitoring progress towards a specific target presented in the visual modality. This is the first time that activation in this region has been linked to higher-order processing of goal-relevant information, rather than low-level anticipation of visual stimuli. Taken together, these findings identify the neural substrates involved in monitoring progress over time, and how these extend beyond activations observed in conflict and error monitoring. (shrink)

Heterogeneity in mitochondrial content has been previously suggested as a major contributor to cellular noise, with multiple studies indicating its direct involvement in biomedically important cellular phenomena. A recently published dataset explored the connection between mitochondrial functionality and cell physiology, where a non‐linearity between mitochondrial functionality and cell size was found. Using mathematical models, we suggest that a combination of metabolic scaling and a simple model of cell death may account for these observations. However, our findings also suggest the existence (...) of alternative competing hypotheses, such as a non‐linearity between cell death and cell size. While we find that the proposed non‐linear coupling between mitochondrial functionality and cell size provides a compelling alternative to previous attempts to link mitochondrial heterogeneity and cell physiology, we emphasise the need to account for alternative causal variables, including cell cycle, size, mitochondrial density and death, in future studies of mitochondrial physiology. (shrink)

We introduce a new logical operator CSTC and show that incorporating this operator into first-order logic enables as to capture the complexity class PSPACE. We also show that by varying how the operator is applied we can capture the complexity classes P, NP, the classes of the Polynomial Hierarchy PH, and PSPACE. As such, the operator CSTC can be regarded as a general purpose operator. We also give applications of these characterizations by showing that P and NP coincide with those (...) problems accepted by two new classes of program schemes , by producing some new complete problems for various complexity classes where the reductions are from first principles and do not use known complete problems , and by giving a simple proof that first-order logic incorporated with the least fixed point operator captures P. (shrink)

The place of the emotions among the passions -- The analytic of the emotions I -- The analytic of the emotions II -- The dialectic of the emotions -- Pride, arrogance, and humility -- Shame, embarrassment, and guilt -- Envy -- Jealousy -- Anger -- Love -- Friendship -- Sympathy and empathy.

This is a well-behaved concept in Newtonian physics. But a center of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. It is a fine example of what Hans Reichenbach would call an abstractum. It is a purely abstract object. It is, if you like , a theorist's fiction. It is not one of (...) the real things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it is a fiction that has nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics. (shrink)

Frankish's argument for illusionism -- the view that there are no real instances of phenomenal consciousness -- depends on the claim that phenomenal consciousness is an 'anomalous phenomenon', at odds with our scientific picture of the world. I distinguish two senses in which a phenomenon might be 'anomalous': its reality is inconsistent with what science gives us reason to believe, its reality adds to what science gives us reason to believe. I then argue that phenomenal consciousness is not anomalous in (...) the first sense, and the fact that phenomenal consciousness is plausibly anomalous in the second sense is only problematic if it can be shown that our introspectively-based reasons for believing in consciousness are epistemically problematic. I finish by suggesting that Frankish might be motivated to adopt radical naturalism because he takes doing so to be the appropriate response to the incredible success of natural science. I outline a way of thinking about the history of science which undermines this motivation. (shrink)