Most people believe some moral propositions are true. Most people would say that they know that rape is wrong, torturing people is wrong, and so on. But despite decades of intense epistemological study, philosophers cannot even provide a rudimentary sketch of moral knowledge. In my view, the fact that we have very strong epistemic confidence in some fundamental moral propositions and the fact that it is extremely difficult for us to provide even the basics of an account of moral knowledge (...) gives us an important clue. Both of these facts stem from the very nature of moral knowledge. In this paper I provide an intuitionist account of moral knowledge. I try to remove misunderstanding and add to our understanding of the contemporary account of self-evident moral propositions. For a theory of moral knowledge to be acceptable it must explain both the moral knowledge we have and why it is so very difficult for us to explain. My theory meets both requirements. (shrink)

A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault’s ‘agentless position’ for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault’s writings, which allows space for ‘human agency’, including individuals’ pursuit of tactics, attempts at solving problems, reactions to unexpected events and their reflexive work on their own subjectivities. (...) The revised analytical framework, ‘dispositional analytics’, integrates the study of self-techniques with the analysis of dispositifs. Recognizing that Foucault’s work eschewed an adequate consideration of individuals’ capacity to affect the forces that bear upon them, the article discusses the sociopolitical conditions for self-formation. Finally, a case study of ‘voice-hearers’ who use self-techniques to reconstitute themselves in opposition to institutional psychiatry is reinterpreted through the framework of dispositional analysis. (shrink)

Despite a wealth of findings that psychotherapy is an effective psychological intervention the principal mechanisms of psychotherapy change are still in debate. It has been suggested that all forms of psychotherapy provide a context which enables clients to transform the meaning of their experiences and symptoms in such a way as to help clients to feel better, and function more adaptively. However, psychotherapy is not the only healthcare intervention that has been associated with ‘meaning’: the reason why placebo have effects (...) has also been proposed to be a ‘meaning response’. Thus, it has been argued that the meaning of treatments has a central impact on beneficial (and by extension, negative) health-related responses. In light of the strong empirical support of a contextual understanding of psychotherapy and its effects, the aim of this conceptual analysis is to examine the role of meaning and its transformation in psychotherapy – in general – and within three different, commonly-used psychotherapy modalities. (shrink)

Normative ethics asks: What makes right acts right? W. D. Ross attempted to answer this question inThe Right and the Good(1930). Most theorists have agreed that Ross provided no systematic explanatory answers. Ross's intuitionism lacks any decision procedure, and, as McNaughton (2002: 91) states, it ‘turns out after all to have nothing general to say about the relative stringency of our basic duties’. Here I will show that my own Rossian intuitionism does have a systematic way of explaining what makes (...) right acts right. Deontological theories have struggled to say what internal to acts could make them right. From Price to Ross, the striking but uninformative answer has beenthe natureof the act. In this paper I will provide a Rossian theory of the moral natures of acts. It contains a set of self-evident principles of moral stringency and other considerations that can assist agents in deciding what prima facie duty overrides what. (shrink)

Thinking about morality -- Story of contemporary intuitionism -- Moral knowledge -- New challenges to intuitionism -- Grounds of morality -- Right and the good reconsidered -- Intuitionism's rivals -- Being moral: how and why.

The first phase of the recent intuitionist revival left untouched Ross’s claim that fundamental moral truths are self-evident. In a recent article, Robert Cowan attempts to explain, in a plausible way, how we know moral truths. The result is that, while the broad framework of Ross’s theory appears to remain in place, the self-evidence of moral truths is thrown into doubt. In this paper, I examine Cowan’s Conceptual Intuitionism. I use his own proposal to show how he arrives at a (...) skeptical position on self-evidence. First, he completely ignores the kind of epistemic appraisal intuitionism has always rested on; second, he is committed to the Reasons View of prima facie duty, rather than to Ross’s Properties View; third, he holds that a commitment to self-evidence often comes with a commitment to metaphysically extravagant entities, which he calls Perceptualism; fourth, he scrutinizes only a part of the contemporary theory of self-evidence, overlooking the strengths of the theory when considered as a whole. Revealing these several points supports the conclusion that Cowan has not provided a viable variety of Rossian Intuitionism. (shrink)

The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of ‘non-authoritarian’ health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a ‘well-balanced subject’ straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregrounding a strategy of subjectivation that integrates desire, pleasure and enjoyment into health promotion. The point of departure is the (...) overwhelming emphasis in the governmentality literature on ‘prudence’, ‘self-responsibility’ or ‘risk calculation’, such that pleasure and desire remain largely absent from the framework. Some insights from Žižek’s work are introduced to help us obtain a firmer grasp on the problematic of ‘the well-balanced subject’. The article argues that, in order to analyse the transformation of interpellation in recent health promotion, we must recognize the mechanism of self-distance or dis-identification as an integral part of the procedure of subjectification. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s essay ‘The Subject and Power’ has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault’s shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault’s research in the 1970s: his genealogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser’s thesis on the ideological state apparatuses, demonstrating affinities between Althusser’s thesis and Foucault’s diagnosis of the welfare (...) state as a ‘matrix’ of individualising and totalising power. The article suggests that Foucault’s essay straddles between two different concepts of subjectivation. First, one encounters the citizen ‘internally subjugated’ by disciplinary and pastoral power, whereas, at the end, we find a ‘flat’ subject of governance; a form of power which intervenes only in the environment in which individuals make their rational, self-fashioning choices. The implication of Foucault’s newfound concept of governance is a weakening of the link between subjectivation and the formation of the state, which also meant that the state’s role in reproducing capitalism receded into the background of Foucauldian scholarship. Finally, the article suggests extending Foucault’s analytical ‘matrix’ to current techniques of subjectivation associated with the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, which buttress the expansive technique of predictive profiling. (shrink)

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth-century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights the physico-theology of the second half (...) of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

This paper argues that morality depends on prudence, or more specifically, that one cannot be a moral person without being prudent. Ethicists are unaware of this, ignore it, or imply it is wrong. Although this thesis is not obvious from the current perspective of ethics, I believe that its several implications for ethics make it worth examining. In this paper I argue for the prudence dependency thesis by isolating moral practice from all reliance on prudence. The result is that in (...) the actual world in which we live one cannot be moral unless one is prudent. In order to show that morality depends on prudence for the entire range of moral situations, we put prudence to the test against the most extraordinary of moral situations: moral dilemmas. Doing so shows that for all practical purposes moral dilemmas are prudential problems for agents, giving further support to the prudence dependency thesis. (shrink)

One of the fundamental problems inherent in the research of biological relationships is the question, whether the system of organisms corresponds to their natural order or not. This question is a crucial topic in the discussion concerning Numerical Taxonomy vs. Phylogenetic Morphology. In the work submitted, this criticism of morphology by the American School, i.e., that of Sokal and Sneath as well as that of B. Hassenstein is dealt with. The typus-problem forms the central theme, as it obviously represents the (...) key to solving the issue. In addition to the discussion of the thesis, that the morphological typus could correspond to a Platonic Form, the justification of the morphological method will be given as well. This justification is based on the realization, that the typus possesses an actual correspondence to the epigenetic correlation system, through which it can be shown, that the so called natural system. is indeed a natural one. The faculty of perception of the so called Ratiomorpher Apparat is a product of evolution — exactly as the typus-concept itself. And the fact that morphology, at least in part, makes use of this perceiving apparatus, gives an essential support of this interpretation of the typus. (shrink)

Explorations in Ethics is a collection of essays with a speculative bent. Its twelve contributors attempt to take ethics thinking in new directions. Ethics is fundamentally a speculative discipline. We sometimes lose sight of that because of our current scholarly practices, which include reliance on a set of traditional works in ethics, deferring to the scholarly literature, drawing from the evidential sources afforded us. This volume breaks the mold. It is committed, first and foremost, to exploring new ground in a (...) methodologically sound way whilst respecting and building on the literature where needed. The contributors range from world renowned ethicists to early-career scholars. The ethical standpoints represented are various and the overall aim of this collection is to stimulate fresh thinking. (shrink)

Michel Foucault has been presented as a unequivocal defender of civil society. He was particularly sensitive to diversity and marginality, aligned with local activism and bottom-up politics. This article re-assesses this view by demonstrating that despite his political militancy, Foucault never viewed civil society as an inherently progressive force. It traces Foucault’s struggle against his own enthusiasm for anti-institutional and anti-rationalist political movements. Inventing the notion of ‘transactional reality’, Foucault escaped the choice between naturalism and ideology critique, presenting civil society (...) as a ‘reality that does not exist’ but still has real effects. This new reality holds contradictory potentials. When articulated by political eschatology, civil society supports prophecies of the end of politics in a final accord where contradictions dissolve and the community absorbs the state. Neoliberal notions of civil society promise, on Foucault’s account, a more open-ended milieu of subject formation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWith the recent revival of moral intuitionism, the work of W. D. Ross has grown in stature. But if we look at some recent well-regarded histories, anthologies and companions of analytic philosophy, Ross is noticeably absent. This discrepancy of assessments raises the question of Ross’s place in the history of analytic philosophy. Hans-Johann Glock has recently claimed that Ross is not an analytic philosopher at all, but is instead a ‘traditional philosopher’. In this article, I will identify several undeniable features (...) of analytic philosophy that Ross’s work bears: a focus on linguistic analysis, great respect for pre-theoretical thoughts, the conviction that philosophy is a collaborative, piecemeal enterprise and so on. Such an investigation, I claim, reveals two historically significant results: Ross was the first ethicist to fully draw from commonsense beliefs about morality in light of characteristic analytic considerations to secure his theory. Two, concerning the matter of whether the notion... (shrink)

Intuitionism and nihilism, according to nihilists, have key features in common: the same semantics and the same phenomenology. Intuitionism is the object of nihilism’s attack. The central charge nihilism lodges against intuitionism is that its nonnatural moral properties are queer. Here I’ll examine what ‘queer’ might mean in relation to the doctrines nihilism uses to support this charge. My investigation reveals that nihilism’s queerness charge lacks substance and resembles a tautology served with a frown. There’s really nothing to it. After (...) I show that, I’ll offer an explanation for why nihilism has gotten intuitionism wrong. It makes a central mistaken methodological assumption and doesn’t target any identifiable intuitionism in the last hundred or so years. (shrink)

The present research was guided by the important need for a diversion from an economistic to a humanistic management perspective of sustainability. It concentrates on the current importance of digital strategic communication, particularly regarding the concept of corporate sustainability in the context of the conflict arena of the oil industry. The focus is on the comparison of the persuasive effectiveness of the framings of corporate versus activist NGO website communications and their impacts on the perception of the triple pillars of (...) sustainability and, corporate greenwashing with respect to a proposed bituminous oil pipeline in Canada. The results of these pro and con messages were analyzed within the Elaboration Likelihood Model demonstrating a “non expert” peripheral route to a positive persuasion from exposure to the corporate communication versus an “expert” central route to a negative persuasion from the activist NGO communication. Subsequent exposure to the opposite website communication further emphasized the predominance of a negative persuasion based on both groups now being motivated as “expert” viewers of these strategic communications, leading to an important perception of greenwashing by participants resulting from vague claims, visual and linguistic contents of the corporate communication versus the mainly verifiable factual ones in that of the activist NGO. (shrink)

The role normative ethics has in guiding action is unclear. Once moral theorists hoped that they could devise a decision procedure that would enable agents to solve difficult moral problems. Repeated attacks by anti-theorists seemingly dashed this hope. Although the dispute between moral theorists and anti-theorists rages no longer, no decisive victor has emerged. To determine how we ought to make moral decisions, I argue, we must first examine how we do decide in moral situations. Intuitionism correctly captures the essence (...) of the moral element in such situations, finding itself located somewhere between moral theory and anti-theory. In order that intuitionism may constitute an improvement over predecessors in normative ethics we must proceed with awareness of the limits imposed by the still dominant framework of modern moral theory. I argue that the deliberatively open system of intuitionism, interlocked in practice with prudential considerations, allows us to constructively move normative ethics beyond those limits. (shrink)

Last paragraphe: Finally, we need to take on board the strange and disturbing fact that the modern destruction of environments has occurred not as if nature counted for nothing but, on the contrary, has occurred in a world of longstanding climatic theories that have earmarked environmental objects as the very things that produce humankind. Modern man, oblivious of the impact of his actions and blinded by his faith in progress and polarized vision of the world? Our postmodernity also has its (...) own mythologies. (shrink)

The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent (...) interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed. (shrink)

Physical environmental factors – or ‘artifacts’ – are linked to healthcare outcomes in the field of social psychology. However, the role of artifacts remains rarely examined in the burgeoning discipline of placebo studies. In this paper, we argue that a careful consideration of artifacts – such as provider clothing and office décor – may carry significant potential in eliciting placebo effects in clinical settings. We discuss three potential mechanisms by which artifacts may enhance or diminish placebo (or nocebo) effects: classical (...) conditioning, response expectancy, and mindsets. We propose testable hypotheses and conclude by providing innovative research designs that might help to better advance this novel research agendum. (shrink)

Nunn's critique of the placebo concept is a radical and refreshing contribution to the debate. While there is much that can be contested in his analysis, his use of empirical and theoretical arguments to defend his conclusion - that the time has come to abandon the placebo construct altogether - presents an important challenge.

A growing body of cross-cultural survey research shows high percentages of clinicians report using placebos in clinical settings. One motivation for clinicians using placebos is to help patients by capitalising on the placebo effect’s reported health benefits. This is not surprising, given that placebo studies are burgeoning, with increasing calls by researchers to ethically harness placebo effects among patients. These calls propose placebos/placebo effects offer clinically significant benefits to patients. In this paper, we argue many findings in this highly cited (...) and ‘hot’ field have not been independently replicated. Evaluating the ethicality of placebo use in clinical practice involves first understanding whether placebos are efficacious clinically. Therefore, it is crucial to consider placebo research in the context of the replication crisis and what can be learnt to advance evidence-based knowledge of placebos/placebo effects and their clinical relevance (or lack thereof). In doing so, our goal in this paper is to motivate both increased awareness of replication issues and to help pave the way for advances in scientific research in the field of placebo studies to better inform ethical evidence-based practice. We argue that, only by developing a rigorous evidence base can we better understand how, if at all, placebos/placebo effects can be harnessed ethically in clinical settings. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic forced German universities to adjust their established operations quickly during the first nationwide lockdown in spring 2020. Lecturers and students were confronted with a sudden transition to remote teaching and learning. The present study examined students’ preparedness for and perspective on this new situation. In March and April 2020, we surveyed n = 584 students about the status quo of their perceived digital literacy and corresponding formal learning opportunities they had experienced in the past. Additionally, the students (...) reported the direction of changes in key study characteristics they expected from this new situation. Moreover, they reported the extent to which they believe they will be able to master this new study situation successfully. Two categories of independent variables were considered: context-related variables and person-related variables. Our results show that students did not have many learning opportunities to promote their digital literacy, suggesting that they were not appropriately prepared for this new situation. Results for digital literacy vary by competence area. However, there is a positive correlation between past formal learning opportunities and corresponding digital competences. Master students reported more learning opportunities and higher digital literacy only in one competence area compared to bachelor students. Regarding the expected change of key study characteristics, some characteristics were expected to worsen and fewer to improve. A multiple regression analysis explained 54% of the estimated probability of successful remote learning. Students’ age, state anxiety, positive state affect, general self-efficacy, the availability of an own workplace, past learning opportunities in digital content creation, and the estimated preparedness of lecturers for remote teaching were significant explaining factors. Our results provide valuable insights into the perspective of students on studying during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. We discuss important factors that should be addressed by educational measures in the future. (shrink)

This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.

I argue that the GANE model basically explains an arousal-based amplification of emotional stimuli, whereas effects on neutral stimuli indicate a contextualization process aiming to reduce stimulus ambiguity. To extend the model's validity, I suggest distinguishing between internal and external emotional sources, as well considering the stimulus valence and addressing age-related differences in attention and memory preferences.