In the wake of the chimpanzee genome publication, Pascal Gagneux, James J. Moore and Ajit Varki consider the ethical and scientific challenges for scientists who work on captive great apes.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.Are the smartest people also the wisest? Not necessarily. While traditional intellectual reasoning and procedural knowledge have helped build the communities we live in, there is a growing scientific understanding that we need emotionally balanced and better-fitting prosocial frameworks for coping with the uncertainties and complexities of life and addressing new challenges of the modern world. We are now poised on the edge of a new science of wisdom.The concept of wisdom, long (...) considered the “pinnacle of insight into the human condition”, has been that of an intangible, subjective, culturally specific entity—an unscientific... (shrink)

Marx says of alienated labor that it does not “belong” to the worker, that it issues in a product that does not belong to her, and that it is unfulfilling, unfree, egoistically motivated, and inhuman. He seems to think, moreover, that the first of these features grounds all the others. All of these features seem quite independent, however: they can come apart; they share no obvious common cause or explanation; and if they often occur together, this seems accidental. It is (...) not clear, then, how Marx’s concept of alienated labor could possess the strong unity that he takes it to have. This article defends a reinterpretation of the concept that explains this unity. The various features of alienated labor, the article argues, all follow from a single, hitherto underappreciated feature of its formal motivational structure: the fact that such labor is motivated not by its product but by an incentive. (shrink)

Normative accounts of the correctness of belief have often been misconstrued. The norm of truth for belief is a constitutive norm which regulates our beliefs through ideals of reason. I try to show that this kind of account can meet some of the main objections which have been raised against normativism about belief: that epistemic reasons enjoy no exclusivity, that the norm of truth does not guide, and that normativism cannot account for suspension of judgement.

Previous research on reactivity—defined as changing organizational behaviour to better conform to the criteria of measurement in response to being measured—has found significant variation in company responses toward sustainability metrics. We propose that reactivity is driven by dialogue, motivation, and capacity in a configurational way. Empirically, we use fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to analyze company responses to the sustainability index FTSE4Good. We find evidence of complementary and substitute effects between motivation and capacity. Based on these effects, we develop a (...) typology of reactivity to sustainability metrics, which also theorizes the use of metrics as tools for performance feedback and the building of calculative capacity. We show that when reactivity is studied configurationally, we can identify previously underacknowledged types of responses. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for studying and using sustainability metrics as governance tools for responsible behaviour. (shrink)

The domain of “folk-economics” consists in explicit beliefs about the economy held by laypeople, untrained in economics, about such topics as, for example, the causes of the wealth of nations, the benefits or drawbacks of markets and international trade, the effects of regulation, the origins of inequality, the connection between work and wages, the economic consequences of immigration, or the possible causes of unemployment. These beliefs are crucial in forming people's political beliefs and in shaping their reception of different policies. (...) Yet, they often conflict with elementary principles of economic theory and are often described as the consequences of ignorance, irrationality, or specific biases. As we will argue, these past perspectives fail to predict the particular contents of popular folk-economic beliefs and, as a result, there is no systematic study of the cognitive factors involved in their emergence and cultural success. Here we propose that the cultural success of particular beliefs about the economy is predictable if we consider the influence of specialized, largely automatic inference systems that evolved as adaptations to ancestral human small-scale sociality. These systems, for which there is independent evidence, include free-rider detection, fairness-based partner choice, ownership intuitions, coalitional psychology, and more. Information about modern mass-market conditions activates these specific inference systems, resulting in particular intuitions, for example, that impersonal transactions are dangerous or that international trade is a zero-sum game. These intuitions in turn make specific policy proposals more likely than others to become intuitively compelling, and, as a consequence, exert a crucial influence on political choices. (shrink)

Milgram’s experiments have had a considerable influence on the historical study of genocidal behavior, which originated with Christopher Browning’s groundbreaking book Ordinary Men. The purpose of my article is to examine and critically assess the following theory which is often taken somewhat for granted: “Relevance thesis: findings in social psychology, most notably Milgram’s findings about obedience behavior, are causally relevant to explaining perpetrators’ behaviors.” The relevance theory presupposes that certain paradigmatic studies in social psychology have both internal and external validity. (...) In the context of the replication crisis which has affected many recent findings in social psychology, it seems crucial to discuss this presupposition. I shall argue that the evidence is mixed. (shrink)

The knowledge account of assertion (KAA) is the view that assertion is governed by the norm that the speaker should know what s/he asserts. It is not the purpose of this article to examine all the criticisms nor to try to give a full defence of KAA, but only to defend it against the charge of being normatively incorrect. It has been objected that assertion is governed by other norms than knowledge, or by no norm at all. It seems to (...) me, however, that a number of these criticisms are based on a number of misunderstandings of the notion of a norm and of the way it can regulated a given practice. Once we spell out in what sense knowledge can play a normative role in this context, the KAA appears much more plausible. (shrink)

BackgroundCurrent preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) technologies enable embryo genotyping across the whole genome. This has led to the development of polygenic risk scoring of human embryos (PGT-P). Recent implementation of PGT-P, including screening for intelligence, has been extensively covered by media reports, raising major controversy. Considering the increasing demand for assisted reproduction, we evaluated how information about PGT-P is communicated in press media and explored the diversity of ethical themes present in the public debate.MethodsLexisNexis Academic database and Google News were (...) searched to identify articles about polygenic embryo screening. This led to 535 news articles. 59 original articles met the inclusion criteria. Inductive content analysis was used to analyse these articles.Results8.8% of articles gave embryo polygenic scoring a positive portrayal, while 36.8% expressed a negative attitude. 54.4% were neutral, mostly highlighting limited practical value of the technology in in vitro fertilization settings. We identified five main ethical themes that are also present in academic literature and the broader debate on reproductive technologies: a slippery slope towards designer babies, well-being of the child and parents, impact on society, deliberate choice and societal readiness.ConclusionsImplementation of embryo polygenic profiling engenders a need for specific recommendations. Current media analysis discloses important ethical themes to consider when creating future guidelines for PGT-P. (shrink)

This field study investigated the relationship between strategic human resource management, internal environmental concern, organizational citizenship behavior for the environment, and environmental performance. The originality of the present research was to link human resource management and environmental management in the Chinese context. Data consisted of 151 matched questionnaires from top management team members, chief executive officers, and frontline workers. The main results indicate that organizational citizenship behavior for the environment fully mediates the relationship between strategic human resource management and environmental (...) performance, and that internal environmental concern moderates the effect of strategic human resource management on organizational citizenship behavior for the environment. (shrink)

In reply to commentary on our target article, we supply further evidence and hypotheses in the description of ritualized behaviors in humans. Reactions to indirect fitness threats probably activate specialized precaution systems rather than a unified form of danger-avoidance or causal reasoning. Impairment of precaution systems may be present in pathologies other than obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), autism in particular. Ritualized behavior is attention-grabbing enough to be culturally transmitted whether or not it is associated with group identity, cohesion, or with any (...) other social aspect of collective ceremonies. (Published Online February 8 2007). (shrink)

I defend a necessary condition of local autonomy inspired by Aristotle and Marx. One does something autonomously, I argue, only if one does it for its own sake and not for the sake of further ends alone. I show that this idea steers an attractive middle path between the subjectivism of Dworkin- and Frankfurt-style theories of autonomy on the one hand and the objectivism of Raz-style theories on the other. By doing so, it vindicates and explains two important pieces of (...) common sense of which those theories struggle to make sense. First, it explains how external sources of compulsion, such as coercion by other people and duress by unfavorable circumstances, can compromise the autonomy of an activity. Second, it explains this by articulating the sense in which to act autonomously is to do what one really or truly wants to do, and the correlative sense in which to do something unfreely is instead to be forced or necessitated to do it. At the same time, my proposal brings into view distinctive species of external unfreedom beyond the traditional paradigm cases of coercion and duress. Most importantly, it implies that toil—labor which is not valued intrinsically but is done purely on account of its instrumental necessity—is essentially unfree. (shrink)

A growing body of research indicates that attentional biases toward emotional stimuli are not automatic, but may depend on the relevance of emotion to the top-down search goals of the observer. To...

Le sceptique nous demande " Comment sais-tu que tu as deux mains? Peut-être rêves-tu, ou es-tu trompé par quelque Malin Génie? Peut-on même définir ce que c'est que la connaissance? Va savoir! " Lui rétorquer, comme le faisaient G.E. Moore et la tradition de la philosophie du sens commun : " Mais je sais bien que j'ai deux mains! " semble à la fois une pétition de principe et une bien mauvaise réponse. Le mieux, depuis que nous avons perdu le (...) souci de fonder nos croyance sur des raisons ultimes, serait, tout simplement, de ne pas se soucier des questions du sceptique. Ce que l'on sait dépend, nous dit-on, des circonstances, et toutes nos connaissances sont faillibles. N'y a-t-il pas plutôt des savoirs, dont l'histoire nous montre combien leurs modes de validations sont variés? Ce livre entend refuser ce type de réponse contextualiste et relativiste. Il propose de revenir à la réponse de sens commun de Moore, à partir des reformulations contemporaines des raisonnements sceptiques issues de la philosophie analytique de la connaissance. Personne ne peut nous envoyer savoir quelque chose que nous ne pourrions pas savoir. De fait, nous savons, mais notre savoir n'est pas transparent : nous n'avons pas besoin de savoir que nous savons. Pour parvenir à cette réponse, il faut replacer la notion de connaissance, plutôt que celle de croyance justifiée ou rationnelle, au centre de l'épistémologie, et reformuler des questions traditionnelles comme celles de la nature de la perception, du témoignage, et de la connaissance a priori. On peut aussi reprendre le vieux projet d'une enquête sur la nature de la connaissance en général. (shrink)

Decisions in security contexts, including armed conflict, law enforcement, and disaster relief, often need to be taken under circumstances of limited information, stress, and time pressure. Since AI systems are capable of providing a certain amount of relief in such contexts, such systems will become increasingly important, be it as decision-support or decision-making systems. However, given that human life may be at stake in such situations, moral responsibility for such decisions should remain with humans. Hence the idea of “meaningful human (...) control” of intelligent systems. In this opinion paper, we outline generic configurations of control of AI and we present an alternative to human control of AI, namely the inverse idea of having AI control humans, and we discuss the normative consequences of this alternative. (shrink)

Plutôt que de rouvrir l'éternel débat entre tenants d'une histoire analytique de la philosophie et tenants d'une approche « authentiquement historique », il vaut mieux se demander si les premiers sont réellement condamnés à la trahison historique, et les seconds à la myopie historique. La démarche consistant à aborder le passé de la philosophie d'aval en amont est compatible avec une fidélité historique dès lors qu'on est prêt à reconnaître que ce ne sont pas seulement des textes qui se transmettent (...) à l'intérieur d'une tradition, mais des arguments, et que ceux-ci peuvent passer d'une tradition à l'autre. Instead of reopening the eternal debate between the partisans of an « analytical » approach to the history of philosophy and the partisans of an « genuinely historical » approach, let us rather ask ourselves whether the former are necessarily condemned to betray history and the latter condemned to historical myopia. Approaching the past of philosophy from downstream to upstream is compatible with a fidelity to history once we acknowledge the fact that not only texts, but also arguments are passed on within a tradition and outside it. (shrink)

It has been recently argued that by Leifer and Pusey, and Price, that time-symmetric quantum mechanics must entail retrocausality. Adlam responds that such theories might also entail ‘spooky action at a distance’. This paper proposes a third alternative: time-symmetric quantum mechanics might entail temporal global correlations. Unlike the traditional analysis of time symmetries in quantum mechanics, which consider linear and unitary interpretations, this paper considers the time-symmetric collapse models advanced by Bedingham and Maroney. These models are specially interesting since it (...) has been widely believed that collapse theories cannot be time-reversal invariant. (shrink)

Elaboramos una versión del disposicionalismo experimental que esclarece la relación entre capacidades y leyes fenomenológicas. Tras algunas consideraciones introductorias, presentamos el disposicionalismo experimental en vistas de las nociones de modalidad física y ambiente de estímulo. Trazamos las líneas generales para una epistemología experimentalista de las capacidades y esclarecemos la modalidad física e invariancia de las leyes fenomenológicas. Luego examinamos las generalizaciones físicas y extrapolaciones de las leyes fenomenológicas y exponemos el caso de la ley de Fresnel, que ilustra aspectos de (...) nuestro argumento. Concluimos con algunas consideraciones sobre los límites del disposicionalismo experimental. (shrink)

La figure de l'individu, qui a dominé la philosophie et les sciences sociales au cours des trois dernières décennies, semble à bout de souffle. Partout, singuliers et collectifs cherchent à dépasser la simple adaptation au monde fluide imposé par le capitalisme mondialisé et à redevenir les agents de leur propre vie. Au nord comme au sud, un immense désir de subjectivation est en train de gagner nos sociétés. Pourtant, la figure du sujet reste confuse. Longtemps identifiée à une entité naturelle, (...) hors de l'histoire, elle pâtit aujourd'hui également des représentations, tout aussi néfastes, qui concluent de l'historicité radicale du sujet à sa relativité éthique et politique, voire à son inexistence. Ce livre reprend, à la racine, la réflexion sur les relations entre sujet et histoire, en y réintroduisant une tradition oubliée, sinon refoulée par la philosophie : celle qui commence avec Humboldt, se poursuit chez Saussure, Benveniste et Meschonnic. En définissant le langage comme activité et comme mise en circulation de puissances poétiques, cette tradition fournit les bases d'une nouvelle anthropologie historique du sujet. (shrink)

How might good work – skilled, autonomous work which affords workers opportunities for meaningful social cooperation in decent conditions – be made available to all? I evaluate five commonly advanced strategies: an unregulated labor market, egalitarian redistribution of resources, state regulation, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy. Each, I argue, has significant limitations. An unregulated labor market ignores workers' unduly weak bargaining power vis-à-vis employers. Egalitarian redistribution alone fails to solve this problem due to distinctive and endemic imperfections of labor markets. (...) Direct state regulation is insufficiently context-sensitive and insufficiently dynamic in the face of technological and other developments. Collective bargaining gives workers only indirect and sometimes costly influence over their working conditions. And workplace democracy leaves workers vulnerable to collective action problems induced by competition between firms. I argue, however, that these strategies can be complemented in a promising way by ‘syndicalist economic democracy’: direct worker participation in the government of the economy, largely specific to particular occupations or economic sectors but above the level of the individual workplace. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes stupidity as a problem for epistemology. Its proper home belongs to virtue epistemology, as a specific epistemic vice, which has to be studied along the lines of both reliabilist virtue epistemology and of responsibilist virtue epistemology. The author distinguishes between two kinds of stupidity: stupidity proper and foolishness. The former is a defect in the competence of an agent, as well as in the performance of judgment, and it is generally studied as a failure of rationality along (...) intellectualist lines. The second is a failure to evaluate properly the nature of the epistemic goal, and is a form of epistemic indifference, which involves an insensitivity to epistemic values and norms. This chapter analyzes their varieties, and suggest that the boundaries between stupidity and foolishness are often less clear than it is suggested by the author’s taxonomy. (shrink)

The diversity of interpretations of Aristotle’s treatment of chance and luck springs from an apparent contradiction between the claims that “chance events are for the sake of something” and that “chance events are not for the sake of their outcome.” Chance seems to entail the denial of an end. Yet Aristotle systematically refers it to what is for the sake of an end. This paper suggests that, in order to give an account of chance, a reference to “per accidens causes” (...) is not sufficient. Chance occurs as a parody of teleology; it is a“for-no-purpose” that looks like a purpose. The notion of “irony” is suggested as a way of accounting for a situation that keeps an ambiguity open. The fact that chance is thought of in relation to teleology does not mean that it is “reappropriated” by teleology. Rather,chance reveals a hiatus that betrays the limitation of a language concerned with substances to account for events. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCompared to expertise in other domains, moral expertise remains a controversial topic. The current research employs a folk-psychological approach to explore which characteristics laypeople...

The conditions for an investigation of Achard of Saint Victor (who died in 1171) have only recently become available. Now the discovery of a very significant turn in the history of twelfth-century thought is open to examination. The author focuses on Achard’s claim concerning an ontologically primary plurality. In the very title of Achard’s main treatise, De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum, it is the word ‘et’ that joins together unity and plurality, expressing the core of Achard’s ontological insight, whereby (...) a plurality is said to be true if it is grounded in absolute unity. That is to say, this plurality is not derived from unity (as would be assumed in an emanative account of plurality) but rather “coheres” with unity. Unity, likeness, and equality are the three terms that dialectically constitute the primary plurality. In this sense, true plurality is plurality without difference, without alterity and is thus convertible with identity. The essay examines (a) Achard’s doctrine of true plurality as multiple unity, (b) its application to the question of the Trinity and (c) its application to the question of the plurality of creatures and the nature of individuation. (shrink)

Le vitalisme est la part obscure de la pensée biologique. Bien plus que le créationnisme, qui se compose d'un ensemble d'affirmations dogmatiques, le vitalisme interroge l'état du savoir sur le vivant pour lui demander des comptes sur ce qu'il ne saisit pas ou pas encore. Il trace ainsi les frontières de la connaissance claire sur ces étranges entités que sont les êtres vivants. Frontières mouvantes : le vitalisme se recompose à chaque progrès des sciences biologiques. Il doit donc constamment être (...) " repensé ". (shrink)