The number of legal and nonlegal ethical regulations in the biomedical field has increased tremendously, leaving present-day practitioners and researchers in a virtual crossfire of legislations and guidelines. Judging by the production and by the way these regulations are motivated and presented, they are held to be of great importance to ethical practice. This view is shared by many commentators. For instance, Commons and Baldwin write that, within the nursing profession, patient care can be performed unethically or ethically depending on (...) the professional standards the nurses have set for themselves. They also hold that such standards are set when nurses become aware of the ethical codes available. As nurses are often not familiar with the codes, they do not all conform to them. Commons and Baldwin argue that nurses' ability to deal with ethical dilemmas is effectively secured with education on guidelines, creating a “barrier” between personal and professional values. (shrink)

Probabilism is committed to two theses: 1) Opinion comes in degrees—call them degrees of belief, or credences. 2) The degrees of belief of a rational agent obey the probability calculus. Correspondingly, a natural way to argue for probabilism is: i) to give an account of what degrees of belief are, and then ii) to show that those things should be probabilities, on pain of irrationality. Most of the action in the literature concerns stage ii). Assuming that stage i) has been (...) adequately discharged, various authors move on to stage ii) with varied and ingenious arguments. But an unsatisfactory response at stage i) clearly undermines any gains that might be accrued at stage ii) as far as probabilism is concerned: if those things are not degrees of belief, then it is irrelevant to probabilism whether they should be probabilities or not. In this paper we scrutinize the state of play regarding stage i). We critically examine several of the leading accounts of degrees of belief: reducing them to corresponding betting behavior (de Finetti); measuring them by that behavior (Jeffrey); and analyzing them in terms of preferences and their role in decision-making more generally (Ramsey, Lewis, Maher). We argue that the accounts fail, and so they are unfit to subserve arguments for probabilism. We conclude more positively: ‘degree of belief’ should be taken as a primitive concept that forms the basis of our best theory of rational belief and decision: probabilism. (shrink)

In one conception of cultural evolution, the evolutionary success of cultural units that are transmitted from individual to individual is determined by forces of cultural selection. Here we argue that it is helpful to distinguish between several distinct phases of the transmission process in which cultural selection can operate, such as a choose-to-receive phase, an encode-and-retrieve phase, and a choose-to-transmit phase. Here we focus on emotional selection in cultural transmission of urban legends, which has previously been shown to operate in (...) the choose-to-transmit phase. In a series of experiments we studied serial transmission of stories based on urban legends manipulated to be either high or low on disgusting content. Results supported emotional selection operating in all three phases of cultural transmission. Thus, the prevalence of disgusting urban legends in North America may be explained by emotional selection through a multitude of pathways. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently challenged cognitivism, i.e., the view that moral judgments are beliefs, by arguing that moral judgments are evidence non-responsive in a way that beliefs are not. If you believe that P, but acquire (sufficiently strong) evidence against P, you will give up your belief that P. This does not seem true for moral judgments. Some subjects maintain their moral judgments despite believing that there is (sufficiently strong) evidence against the moral judgments. This suggests that there is a (...) mismatch between moral judgments and beliefs. This is an interesting argument. In particular, it forces the cognitivist to be more explicit about the nature of belief and the sense in which moral judgments are responsive to evidence. This paper has two aims. First, it aims to systematically examine different versions of the argument from evidence non-responsiveness. Second, it aims to outline a more nuanced understanding of the sense in which beliefs are evidence responsive that explains why the extant versions of the argument do not constitute a challenge to cognitivism. (shrink)

Cultural variants may spread by being more appealing, more memorable, or less offensive than other cultural variants. Empirical studies suggest that such “emotional selection” is a force to be reckoned with in cultural evolution. We present a research paradigm that is suitable for the study of emotional selection. It guides empirical research by directing attention to the circumstances under which emotions influence the likelihood that an individual will influence another individual to acquire a cultural variant. We present a modeling framework (...) to translate such knowledge into specific and testable predictions of population-level change. A set of already analyzed basic cases can serve as a toolbox. (shrink)

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze repeatedly referred to a wide range of sports and games throughout his career. This article assembles a comprehensive view of the philosophy of sport seen from Deleuze’s perspective. By studying the development of how he discussed different sports and games, and by pinpointing the concepts he constructed with reference to them, the article attests to the merits of a Deleuzian philosophy of sports. His term athleticism is utilised as a node to overview his allusions to (...) sports and games in general. Special attention is paid to sport as a companion to the creative domains of science, philosophy, and art. Thus, it is concluded that what athletes create are moves, which amounts to inventing new styles which may alter the sport and attest to new ways of thinking through bodies in motion. (shrink)

Norms are a pervasive yet mysterious feature of social life. In Explaining Norms, four philosophers and social scientists team up to grapple with some of the many mysteries, offering a comprehensive account of norms: what they are; how and why they emerge, persist and change; and how they work.

In The Moral Problem, Smith defended an analysis of moral judgments based on a number of platitudes about morality. The platitudes are supposed to constitute conceptual constraints which an analysis of moral terms must capture “on pain of not being an analysis of moral terms at all”. This paper discusses this philosophical methodology in light of the fact that the propositions identified as platitudes are not obvious truths – they are propositions we can be uncertain about. This, we argue, is (...) a kind of fundamental philosophical uncertainty, and we develop an account of fundamental uncertainty (for both philosophical and other issues). The key to understand such uncertainty, on our view, is conceptual opacity – i.e., that the content and reference of concepts is not necessarily transparent to competent concept users. We argue that Smith’s own view of conceptual analysis in TMP provides one plausible explanation of fundamental uncertainty. However, we also argue that another potential explanation is conceptual indeterminacy. If some fundamental philosophical uncertainties are best explained in this way, the implication is that there is no determinately correct analysis of the target terms and concepts. (shrink)

The paper’s target is the historically influential betting interpretation of subjective probabilities due to Ramsey and de Finetti. While there are several classical and well-known objections to this interpretation, the paper focuses on just one fundamental problem: There is a sense in which degrees of belief cannot be interpreted as betting rates. The reasons differ in different cases, but there’s one crucial feature that all these cases have in common: The agent’s degree of belief in a proposition A does not (...) coincide with her degree of belief in a conditional that A would be the case if she were to bet on A, where the belief in this conditional itself is conditioned on the supposition that the agent will have an opportunity to make such a bet. Even though the two degrees of belief sometimes can coincide (they will coincide in those cases when the bet has no expected causal bearings on the proposition A and the opportunity to bet have no evidential bearings on that proposition), it is the latter belief rather than the former that guides the agent’s rational betting behaviour. The reason is that this latter belief takes into consideration potential interferences that bet opportunities and betting itself might create with regard to the proposition to be betted on. It is because of this interference problem that the agent’s degree of belief in A cannot be interpreted as her betting rate for A. (shrink)

In some cases of disagreement it seems that neither party is at fault or making a mistake. This phenomenon, so-called faultless disagreement, has recently been invoked as a key motivation for relativist treatments of domains prone to such disagreements. The conceivability of faultless disagreement therefore appears incompatible with traditional realists semantics. This paper examines recent attempts to accommodate faultless disagreement without giving up on realism. We argue that the accommodation is unsatisfactory. However, the examination highlights that “faultless” is multiply ambiguous. (...) The more overarching purpose is to examine the consequences of this—more generally, how to think about faultless disagreement. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt has been objected to moral non-cognitivism that it cannot account for fundamental moral uncertainty. A person is derivatively uncertain about whether an act is, say, morally wrong, when her certainty is at bottom due to uncertainty about whether the act has certain non-moral, descriptive, properties, which she takes to be wrong-making. She is fundamentally morally uncertain when her uncertainty directly concerns whether the properties of the act are wrong-making. In this paper we advance a new reply to the objection (...) to non-cognitivism, immune to the problems afflicting earlier replies. First, we argue that fundamental moral uncertainty is best understood as classificatory uncertainty, since the psychological factors behind fundamental moral uncertainty are analogous to the factors behind fundamental uncertainty regarding descriptive, non-moral, matters, and fundamental descriptive uncertainty is naturally understood as classificatory uncertainty. We call this the classification account... (shrink)

According to expressivism, moral judgments are desire-like states of mind. It is often argued that this view is made implausible because it isn’t consistent with the conceivability of amoralists, i.e., agents who make moral judgments yet lack motivation. In response, expressivists can invoke the distinction between dispositional and occurrent desires. Strandberg (Am Philos Quart 49:81–91, 2012) has recently argued that this distinction does not save expressivism. Indeed, it can be used to argue that expressivism is false. In this paper I (...) argue that expressivism is a much more complex thesis than Strandberg assumes. Once these complexities are acknowledged, Strandberg’s arguments are rendered ineffective and expressivism rendered more plausible. (shrink)

Research on cultural transmission among Americans has established a bias for transmitting stories that have disgusting elements. Conceived of as a cultural evolutionary force, this phenomenon is one type of emotional selection. In a series of online studies with Americans and Indians we investigate whether there are cultural differences in emotional selection, such that the transmission process favours different kinds of content in different countries. The first study found a bias for disgusting content among Americans but not among Indians. Four (...) subsequent studies focused on how country interacts with kind of emotional content in reactions to transmission of stories or information. Whereas Indian participants, compared to Americans, tended to be less interested in, and excited by, transmission of stories and news involving common disgust-elicitors, the opposite pattern held for transmission of happy surprises and good news. We discuss various possible explanations and implications. (shrink)

What is it for a speech act to be sincere? The most common answer amongst philosophers is that a speech act is sincere if and only if the speaker is in the state of mind that the speech act functions to express. However, a number of philosophers have advanced counterexamples purporting to demonstrate that having the expressed state of mind is neither necessary nor sufficient for speaking sincerely. One may nevertheless doubt whether these considerations refute the orthodox conception. Instead, it (...) may be argued, they expose other ways of elucidating sincerity in speech. “Sincerity in speech” is ambivalent between a number of different conceptions. Against this background this paper presents two alternative conceptions, viz., Sincerity as Spontaneity and Sincerity as Presenting Oneself as one takes Oneself to be and develops a third conception which we may call Sincerity as a Communicative Virtue. This conception emphasizes the speaker’s intention in communicating her attitudes and the need to be properly justified in saying what one does. (shrink)

It is part of our everyday experience that there is a reliable connection between moral opinions and motivation. Thinking that an act is right (wrong) tends to be accompanied by motivation to (avoid to) perform the act in question. This is mirrored in moral talk. We tend to think that someone who says that he thinks that it is right (wrong) to act in a certain way without being motivated, to some extent, will most likely be speaking insincerely. Moveover, moral (...) utterances have a dynamic function to exhort and guide conduct. This suggests that moral utterances involve a kind of attitudinal expressiveness that makes them very different from prosaically factual utterances. These commonsensical features of our moral practice represent the practicality of moral thought and talk. The main purpose of this essay is to investigate how the practicality of moral thought and talk is best represented and whether it supports either a cognitivist or noncognitivist analysis of moral judgments. I argue that sophisticated versions of internalism and externalism, the main competing explanations of the connection between moral judgments and motivation, represent the reliable connection equally good and that the relevant kind of attitudinal expression can be accomodated by both cognitivists and noncognitivists. The upshot is that considerations based on the practicality of moral thought and talk does not cut much philosophical ice. Hence, the rivalry between cognitivists and noncognitivists analyses must be settled beyond considerations based on practicality. Maybe the belief-like features of moral thought and talk can tilt things in favor of cognitivism. However, noncognitivists have different ways of accommodating the belief-like features. In fact, in the wake of different accommodation projects one wonders what remains of the traditional debate between cognitivist and noncognitivist analyses, a debate that shaped metaethics as we know it. (shrink)

It is argued that utilitarianism should be reformulated as a scalar theory admitting of degrees of wrongdoing. It is also argued that the degree of wrongness of an action should be sensitive both to the relative valueloss the action results in and to the difficulty of having acted better. A version of utilitarianism meeting these specifications is forumalted.

In this comparative analysis of the UK and Sweden, we consider, if inherited wealth is most deserving of redistributive taxation, then what lessons, if any, may be learned from the difficult paths faced by this tax in these countries. We conclude that the political momentum behind the Swedish family business was distinct, and, possibly, capable of travel to the UK. The research for this article is part of the FairTax EU project, which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (...) research and innovation programme 2014-2018, grant agreement No. FairTax 649439. (shrink)

This article employs the concept of respectability and the discursive representation of gender equality policies to discuss how surrogacy is represented in Nordic parliamentary debates and policy documents. The article’s objective is to study how respectability, problems and equality are represented and discursively and rhetorically produced through a comparative study of Finnish and Norwegian political discourses on domestic unpaid surrogacy and cross-border commercial surrogacy. The article uses rhetorical and discursive analysis to analyse the Finnish and Norwegian Parliaments’ bills, members’ initiatives (...) and proceedings from 2002 to 2018. Finland’s policy on surrogacy has evolved from an unregulated and permissive approach towards a more restrictive one, with discourses focusing on medicalisation, equality, altruism and safety concerning domestic surrogacy and problems and risks concerning cross-border surrogacy. Norway’s policy on surrogacy has been restrictive consistently, with discourses focusing on surrogacy as a transnational social problem involving exploitation of women and children, and biocentrism. Analysing surrogacy regulation in Nordic welfare states, the author concludes that policies and parliamentary debates in both countries have expressed expectations for inclusive health policies and social security for families. Cross-border surrogacy is characterised as an unwanted consequence of globalisation and marketisation of reproduction. Surrogate mothers’ respectability is constructed through rhetoric on differences in terms of nationality, class and binary representations of female caring and instrumentalism. (shrink)

The Frege‐Geach problem is probably the most serious worry for the prospects of any kind of metaethical expressivism. In a recent article, Ridge suggests that a new version of expressivism, a view he calls ecumenical expressivism, can avoid the Frege‐Geach problem.1 In contrast to pure expressivism, ecumenical expressivism is the view that moral utterances function to express not only desire‐like states of mind but also beliefs with propositional content. Whereas pure expressivists’ solutions to the Frege‐Geach problem usually have rested on (...) some kind of “logic of attitudes,” Ridge argues that it is the expressed belief in the ecumenical machinery that holds the key. Although Ridge’s ecumenical expressivism is promising, this essay argues that his solution is flawed. However, this does not mean that every form of ecumenical expressivism is a failure. Ridge briefly contrasts his view with the kind of view Hare advanced but argues that Hare cannot make use of the ecumenical machinery.2 I argue that this is incorrect. Not only is an ecumenical reading of Hare very plausible and something that establishes him as an important forerunner of today’s ecumenical trend in metaethics, but, more important, it offers guidance where Ridge goes wrong. It solves the Frege‐Geach problem in a way that meets the criticism of more standard solutions head‐on, and it seems to be able to handle the most pressing problems for ecumenical theories. The ecumenical theory that emerges is therefore powerful enough to establish itself as one of the most (if not the most) plausible form of ecumenism on the market. The first part of this article is largely concerned with advancing an ecumenical reading of Hare’s The Language of Morals and the kind of solution it offers in response to the Frege‐Geach problem. Some of the problems such a reading encounters will be addressed as we outline the theory. The most serious worries, however, are addressed in the final part of the essay. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to apply expressivism outside the moral domain, e.g., to truth and epistemic justification. This paper examines the prospects of generalizing expressivism to taste. This application has much initial plausibility. Many of the standard arguments used in favor of moral expressivism seem to apply to taste. For example, it seems conceivable that you and I disagree about whether chocolate is delicious although we don’t disagree about the facts, which suggests that taste judgments are noncognitive attitudes rather (...) than beliefs. However, there is also a striking difference between moral disagreements and disagreements about taste. Faced with a moral disagreement, we intuit that either party is at fault. Disagreements about taste, by contrast, are occurrences where neither party intuitively is at fault. This leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, if a disagreement in attitude is not intuited as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to taste. If, on the other hand, a disagreement in attitude is a disagreement that we intuit as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to the moral domain. The aim of this paper is to examine how an expressivist can avoid this dilemma. (shrink)

Some low-income social housing neighborhoods are undergoing radical transformations in Denmark. Classified as “ghettos” and “parallel societies,” and marked by area-specific legislation, we identify a triple exposure in these neighborhoods. The residents are exposed to inequality, stigmatization, and discriminatory inter-ventions. Parallel to this, cultural policies and programs have ap-proached these same neighborhoods based on the assumption that they can be “elevated” through art. Drawing upon a broader re-search in art project in four social housing areas (Eriksson, Nielsen, Sørensen and (...) Yates, 2022), this article focuses on Gellerup Park in Aarhus and considers how two site-specific art platforms address the site and time-specific conditions of the area, offering alterna-tive relations and forms of engagement. (shrink)

We first deal with a few preliminary matters and discuss what-if any-distinct impact belief in moral error theory should have on our moral practice. Second, we describe what is involved in giving an answer to our leading question and take notice of some factors that are relevant to what an adequate answer might look like. We also argue that the specific details of adequate answers to our leading question will depend largely on context. Third, we consider three extant answers to (...) our leading question: fictionalism, conservationism, and abolitionism. Of these three, conservationism seems most promising. However, conservationism leaves pertinent questions unanswered. In order to provide answers to these questions, and ultimately to provide an answer to our leading question, conservationism needs to be supplemented, yielding an account we call “negotiationism.” This final proposal is not neat and tidy, but it might work reasonably well in the moral environment in which error theorists are likely to find themselves. (shrink)

To investigate the possible dichotomy between the neurophysiological bases of perceptual transitions versus sustaining a particular percept over time, an fMRI study was conducted with subjects viewing fragmented pictures. Unlike most other perceptually unstable stimuli, fragmented pictures give rise to only one perceptual transition and a continuous period of sustained perception. Earlier research is inconclusive on the subject of which anatomical regions should be attributed to what temporal aspect of perception, and the aim of the present study was to shed (...) more light on the subject. In this study occipitotemporal and fronto-parietal regions were found to be activated for both aspects. However, regions in the medial-temporal lobe were activated specifically for transitions, whereas medial and dorsolateral prefrontal regions were activated specifically for sustained perception. These results provide further support for the theory that the initial creation of perceptual awareness and upholding perceptual awareness over time are separate processes involving different brain regions. (shrink)

People taking part in research vary in the extent to which they understand information concerning their participation. Since they may choose to limit the time and effort spent on such information, lack of understanding is not necessarily an ethical problem. Researchers who notice a lack of understanding are in the quandary of not knowing whether this is due to flaws in the information process or to participants’ deliberate choices. We argue that the two explanations call for different responses.A tool for (...) identifying those research participants who want limited information is presented. This consists of a restricted number of questions about trust in and appraisal of research, priority of time and privacy, and perception of a duty to participate. It is argued that an important group of participants who purposely lack understanding of the study can be identified with this tool. Some limitations to this approach are also discussed. (shrink)

Discussions of political issues may influence people's opinions. Is there any systematic difference in opinions between those who discuss frequently and those who do not? We measured the association between self-reported discussion frequency and the probability of holding the more liberal opinion on moral issues, using data from the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies. This association looked different among liberals and among conservatives. Having more frequent discussions is associated with a higher probability of holding more liberal (...) opinions among liberals, while there is little association between discussion frequency and opinions among conservatives. These findings can be explained by the moral argument theory, which is an account of the long-term liberalization of public opinion on moral issues as an outcome of repeated discussions. The key assumption of this theory is that opinions that are justified by the kinds of arguments that only conservatives accept have a disadvantage compared to opinions that are justified by the kinds of arguments that everyone accepts. Consistent with this theory, we find that the effect of discussion frequency is stronger for moral opinions that have a bigger argument advantage. (shrink)

This paper approaches the old question of what, if anything, we should do with our moral practice if we believe that moral nihilism is true and that there are no objective moral facts. Four responses to nihilism are discussed: abolitionism, conservationism, fictionalism and propagandism. They are all found to have their respective problems. Most of these problems stem from the complexity and variability of our actual moral practices which are curiously overlooked in previous discussions of this issue. These problems, however, (...) point towards a solution. By combining some of the elements from the four discussed views, a fifth response to nihilism, that retains their virtues without their drawbacks, is proposed. This response I call ‘negotiationism’ and I defend it as the hitherto best answer to the question of how to deal with our moral practice in case we think nihilism is true. (shrink)