Do we know what we're doing, and why? Psychological research seems to suggest not: reflection and self-awareness are surprisingly uncommon and inaccurate. John M. Doris presents a new account of agency and responsibility, which reconciles our understanding of ourselves as moral agents with empirical work on the unconscious mind.

In this chapter, we recount some of the most pressing objections to character scepticism, pointing out their limitations and, when appropriate, incorporating their suggestions. From here, we consider what empirically informed moral improvement might look like by turning to the skill analogy. While the skill analogy provides a realistic rubric for becoming a better person, many of the questions concerning the details of how moral improvement might take place remain unanswered. When developing expertise in domains like chess and morality, a (...) wide range of factors will likely be important and it is unlikely than any one individual factor will be especially important. Given this, for any account of moral improvement, our optimism should be bounded: the effect of any particular intervention is likely to be limited, in both magnitude and domain. Lastly, we consider how character scepticism has reshaped the way we think about moral responsibility, whether this is cashed out in reasons-responsiveness or self-expression accounts. While both views face challenges, by distinguishing the possession of the responsibility-making feature from failures to manifest that property in behaviour, we gain a certain degree of wiggle room that allows us to accommodate empirical findings while holding on to notions of responsibility. This chapter highlights that the ‘person-situationism debate’ has expanded far beyond its beginnings, giving way to new accounts of moral improvement and moral responsibility. (shrink)

We describe an experiment that investigated levels-of-processing effects in recognition memory for famous faces. The degree of conscious control over the recognition decisions was manipulated by using a response deadline procedure, and memory awareness associated with those decisions was assessed using a standard remember-know paradigm. Levels-of-processing effects were found at both short and long response deadlines, and at both deadlines those effects occurred only in remembering. Moreover, knowing, as well as remembering, increased with the greater opportunity for conscious control over (...) recognition decisions at the long deadline. These results have implications for dual-process theories that distinguish between a slower, more controlled recollection process, reflected in remembering, and a faster, more automatic familiarity process, reflected in knowing. (shrink)

The HIPAA Rules continue to support and bolster the importance of protecting the privacy and security of patients' protected health information. The HIPAA training requirements are at the cornerstone of meaningful implementation and provide a ripe opportunity for critical education.

This article reports the results of marketing research that was undertaken as part of an information technology prototype development project. The project was devoted to the creation of a multimedia-based prototype system to provide timely and accurate information from government geographic information databases to government decision makers and the general public in an easy-to-use interactive visual format. The general public (i.e., private citizens, schools, and businesses—society in general) had to be able to access the product via broadband-to-the-home (-business/-school) technology. Because (...) of significant time and budget constraints, a satisficing approach to the marketing research was adopted. This approach led to the definition of several social categories of the general public whose opinions were thought to be critical to the commercial development of the prototype: (a) elementary and secondary education leaders (both technophiles and technophobes), (b) adults with a record as early adopters of information technologies, (c) adults with no previous interest in (or limited experience with) information technologies, and (d) high school students. Six focus groups were defined based on these social categories. The results of the marketing research devoted to information needs of the focus group participants are reported, and implications related to their expectations regarding emerging technologies are discussed. The research suggests that expectations in the portion of the market on which the success of the technologies depend are often inconsistent with the types of technologies that are being developed for that market. (shrink)

Aristotle's Politics is widely recognized as one of the classics of the history of political philosophy, and like every other such masterpiece, it is a work about which there is deep division.

Education, Religion and Society celebrates the career of Professor John Hull of the University of Birmingham, UK, the internationally renowned religious educationist who has also achieved worldwide fame for his brilliant writings on his experience, mid-career, of total blindness. In his outstanding career he has been a leading figure in the transformation of religious education in English and Welsh state schools from Christian instruction to multi-faith religious education and was the co-founder of the International Seminar on Religious Education and (...) values. John Hull has also made major contributions to the theology of disability and the theological critique of the "money culture." This volume brings together leading international scholars to honour John Hull's contribution, with a focus on furthering scholarship in the areas where he has been active as a thinker. The book offers a critical appreciation of his contribution to religious education and practical theology, and goes on to explore the continuing debate about the role of religious education in promoting international understanding, intercultural education and human rights education. A possible basis for integrating Islamic education into Western education is suggested and the contribution of the philosophy of religion to pluralistic religious education is outlined. The contributors also deal with issues relating to indoctrination, racism and relationship in Christian religious aspects, and examines aspects of the the theology of social exclusion and disability. (shrink)

The essays in this book offer an in-depth exploration of value theory. Portions examine the theoretical foundations of values and valuation exploring the rational groundwork for judgments. Other aspects, appealing to value distinctions of inherent, intrinsic, and instrumental, bring to light matters of aesthetic, social political, ethical, and ontological issues.

The primary aim of the edition is to present fully collated texts of those works which exist in a number of versions, both printed and manuscript, and to provide accurate texts of those works previously unpublished or which have become relatively inaccessible. The series is complete.

While improving the theoretical account of base-rate neglect, Barbey & Sloman's (B&S's) target article suffers from affect neglect by failing to consider the fundamental role of emotional processes in decisions. We illustrate how affective influences are fundamental to decision making, and discuss how the dual process model can be a useful framework for understanding hot and cold cognition in reasoning.

"This is a detailed commentary on two paradigmatic books of the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria."--Provided by publisher.

Several claims made by Wilkins & Wakefield require qualification. First, the proposed delineation of the parietal-occipital-temporal junction (POT) is overly restrictive. Second, focusing exclusively on the evolutionary importance of manual manipulation oversimplifies interacting evolutionary preconditions for language. Finally, Wilkins and Wakefield's perspective adheres to a homocentric, formal, linguistic definition of language instead of viewing language as a multimodal sensory enhancement system unique to each species.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2012v16n2p341 Current supervaluation models of opinion, notably van Fraassen’s (1984; 1989; 1990; 1998; 2005; 2006) use of intervals to characterize vague opinion, capture nuances of ordinary reflection which are overlooked by classic measure theoretic models of subjective probability. However, after briefly explaining van Fraassen’s approach, we present two limitations in his current framework which provide clear empirical reasons for seeking a refinement. Any empirically adequate account of our actual judgments must reckon with the fact that these are typically neither uniform (...) through the range of outcomes we take to be serious possibilities nor abrupt at the edges. (shrink)

It is argued that in beginning ``being and nothingness'' with the absolute ontological distinction between the for-itself (pure nothingness) and the in-itself (pure being), sartre makes it impossible to understand how the phenomenological account of experience which comes later in the work could be correct. attention is paid almost entirely to the critique of sartre implicit in the chapter of merleau-ponty's ``phenomenology of perception'' titled 'the cogito'. merleau-ponty's divergence from sartre is seen to center around his critique of sartre on (...) the nature of the in-itself, the world, and the pre-reflective 'cogito'. (shrink)

Matrix population models provide a natural tool to analyse state-dependent life-history strategies. Reproductive value and the intrinsic rate of natural increase under a strategy, and the optimal life-history strategy can all be easily characterised using projection matrices. The resultant formulae, however, are not directly comparable with the corresponding formulae for age structured populations such as Lotka's equations and Fisher's formula for reproductive value. This is because formulae involving projection matrices lose track of what happens to an individual over its lifetime (...) and are only concerned with expected numbers of descendants one time step in the future. In contrast the usual age-dependent formulae explicitly followed a single individual through from birth to death.In this paper I show how the state-dependent formulae can be rewritten to be directly comparable with the standard age-structured formulae. Although the formulae are intuitively obvious the decomposition into current and future reproductive success differs from that previously given and is, I suggest, a more natural definition. The derivation of appropriate equations for optimal life-histories relies on results from dynamic programming theory; and is much more general and easier than previous derivations. (shrink)

In this 1976 volume, Professor Ziman paints a broad picture of science, and of its relations to the world in general. He sets the scene by the historical development of scientific research as a profession, the growth of scientific technologies out of the useful arts, the sources of invention and technical innovation, and the advent of Big Science. He then discusses the economics of research and development, the connections between science and war, the nature of science policy and the moral (...) dilemmas of social responsibility in science. Each topic is introduced by reference to easily understandable particular examples, with a large number of illustrations chosen to bring out the concreteness and reality of science as a human activity. Professor Ziman gives a chapter-by-chapter list of suggested topics for oral and written discussion, intended to provoke critical, sceptical attitudes to simplified solutions to real issues, and comments briefly on relevant books and other sources. (shrink)

So, on 22 July 1865, under the title ‘Philosophy and Punch’, did England's premier comic weekly greet the election of J. S. Mill as MP for Westminster. Mill held his seat for only one term, until the general election of 1868, when his Whig-Liberal colleague Robert Wellesley Grosvenor was re-elected, but Mill was replaced by the loser in 1865, the Conservative W. H. Smith, Jr., who, though he never went to sea, became the ruler of the Queen's navy. The reasons (...) for that reversal have engaged the attention of many, including Mill himself; I should like to introduce into the discussion material from an ignored source, the comic weeklies, which took a continued and close look at Mill's behaviour during his parliamentary years. While this evidence generally does not disconfirm earlier judgments—including my own— it does more than merely add to the induction. First, it shows how different political stances led journals to focus on different aspects of Mill's parliamentary career, and to adopt different rhetorical strategies in portraying him in picture and word. Second, it demonstrates how the hardening of party allegiances during the parliament of 1865–68, which accelerated in the preparatory campaigns for the general election of 1868, affected Mill adversely. Third, it suggests strongly that it was not his ‘crotchets’ or ‘whims’, especially women's suffrage and proportional representation, that damaged his chances for re-election, but his advocacy of causes unpopular with the majority of Liberals as well as with Conservatives. (shrink)

This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for (...) a whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices. (shrink)

The Heirs of Plato is the first full study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years after his death in 347 BC - the period generally known as 'The Old Academy', unjustly neglected by historians of philosophy. Lucid and accessible, John Dillon's book provides an introductory chapter on the school itself, and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage, before looking at each of the school heads and other chief characters, exploring both (...) what holds them together and what sets them apart. (shrink)