Under conditions of physiological stress, officers are sometimes required to make split-second life-or-death decisions, where deficits in performance can have tragic outcomes, including serious injury or death and strained police–community relations. The current study assessed the performance of 122 active-duty police officers during a realistic lethal force scenario to examine whether performance was affected by the officer’s level of operational skills training, years of police service, and stress reactivity. Results demonstrated that the scenario produced elevated heart rates, as well as (...) perceptual and cognitive distortions, such as tunnel vision, commensurate with those observed in naturalistic use of force encounters. The average performance rating from the scenario was 59%, with 27% of participants making at least one lethal force error. Elevated stress reactivity was a predictor of poorer performance and increased lethal force errors. Level of training and years of police service had differential and complex effects on both performance and lethal force errors. Our results illustrate the need to critically reflect on police training practices and continue to make evidence-based improvements to training. The findings also highlight that while training may significantly improve outcomes, flawless performance is likely not probable, given the limits of human performance under stress. Implications for the objective reasonableness standard, which is used to assess the appropriateness of force in courts of law, are discussed. (shrink)

The question of whether donors should be able to set conditions on who can receive their tissue has been discussed by bioethicists, but so far there has been little consideration of whether the answer to this question should be different depending on the type of tissue under discussion. In this article, we compare the donation of organs with the donation of reproductive material such as sperm, eggs, and embryos, exploring possible arguments for allowing donors to set conditions in one case (...) but not the other. After considering arguments from procreative liberty, special parental obligations, and donors meeting their genetic offspring, we find that there is no ethically defensible reason to have different policies between these two cases. As a consequence, we conclude that jurisdictions operating with this inconsistency should consider moving their policies into better alignment. We also make some recommendations for the standardisation of the terminology around conditional donation. (shrink)

This paper argues that the convention of allocating donated gametes on a ‘first come, first served’ basis should be replaced with an allocation system that takes into account more morally relevant criteria than waiting time. This conclusion was developed using an empirical bioethics methodology, which involved a study of the views of 18 staff members from seven U.K. fertility clinics, and 20 academics, policy-makers, representatives of patient groups, and other relevant professionals, on the allocation of donated sperm and eggs. Against (...) these views, we consider some nuanced ways of including criteria in a points allocation system. We argue that such a system is more ethically robust than ‘first come, first served’, but we acknowledge that our results suggest that a points system will meet with resistance from those working in the field. We conclude that criteria such as a patient's age, potentially damaging substance use, and parental status should be used to allocate points and determine which patients receive treatment and in what order. These and other factors should be applied according to how they bear on considerations like child welfare, patient welfare, and the effectiveness of the proposed treatment. (shrink)

Background As part of its response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa, the United Kingdom government established an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone, staffed by military personnel. Little is known about the ethical challenges experienced by military medical staff on humanitarian deployment. We designed a qualitative study to explore this further with those who worked in the treatment unit. Method Semi-structured, face-to-face and telephone interviews were conducted with 20 UK military personnel deployed between October 2014 and April (...) 2015 in one of three roles in the Ebola treatment unit: clinician; nursing and nursing assistant; and other medical support work, including infection control and laboratory and mortuary services. Results Many participants reported feeling ethically motivated to volunteer for deployment, but for some personal interests were also a consideration. A small minority had negative feelings towards the deployment, others felt that this deployment like any other was part of military service. Almost all had initial concerns about personal safety but were reassured by their pre-deployment 'drills and skills', and personal protective equipment. Risk perceptions were related to perceptions about military service. Efforts to minimise infection risk were perceived to have made good patient care more difficult. Significantly, some thought the humanitarian nature of the mission justified tolerating greater risks to staff. Trust in the military institution and colleagues was expressed; many participants referred to the ethical obligation within the chain of command to protect those under their command. Participants expected resources to be overwhelmed and ‘empty beds’ presented a significant and pervasive ethical challenge. Most thought more patients could and should have been treated. Points of reference for participants’ ethical values were: previous deployment experience; previous UK/National Health Service experience; professional ethics; and, distinctly military values. Conclusion We report the first systematic exploration of the ethical challenges face by a Western medical military in the international response to the first major Ebola outbreak. We offer unique insights into the military healthcare workers’ experiences of humanitarian deployment. Many participants expressed motivations that gave them common purpose with civilian volunteers. (shrink)

This discussion of Infinitely Demanding explores the terms of the paradox with which Critchley is centrally concerned: how an ethico-politics can at once begin in disappointment and yet allow for engagement, the infinite renewal of commitment and optimism. Placing this in critical relation to the paradox Rorty meets with his account of the "private ironist and public liberal" in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I argue that Critchley's ethico-politics invokes the possibility of a non-ironical categorical imperative, at the meeting point of finitude (...) and the infinite and at the heart of what is also a political space of intersubjectivity. I examine the logic of humour and of commitment within the Kantian frame thus suggested, arguing for their relevance to certain aspects of anarcho-activism, but also for their limitations in desperate circumstances, posing the risk that Critchley's preferred politics falls back into liberal complacency. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences are not immediately responsive to reasons. You see a stick submerged in a glass of water as bent no matter how much you know about light refraction. Due to this isolation from reasons, perception is traditionally considered outside the scope of epistemic evaluability as justified or unjustified. Is perception really as independent from reasons as visual illusions make it out to be? I argue no, drawing on psychological evidence from perceptual learning. The flexibility of perceptual learning is a (...) way of responding to new epistemic reasons. The resulting perceptual experiences are epistemically evaluable as justified or unjustified. (shrink)

According to a traditional picture, perception and belief have starkly different epistemic roles. Beliefs have epistemic statuses as justified or unjustified, depending on how they are formed and maintained. In contrast, perceptions are “unjustified justifiers.” Core cognition is a set of mental systems that stand at the border of perception and belief, and has been extensively studied in developmental psychology. Core cognition's borderline states do not fit neatly into the traditional epistemic picture. What is the epistemic role of these states? (...) Focusing on the core object system, the author argues that core object representations have epistemic statuses like beliefs do, despite their many prototypically perceptual features. First, the author argues that it is a sufficient condition on a mental state's having an epistemic status as justified or unjustified that the state is based on reasons. Then the author argues that core object representations are based on reasons, through an examination of both experimental results and key markers of the basing relation. The scope of mental states that are subject to epistemic evaluation as justified or unjustified is not restricted to beliefs. (shrink)

Perception provides us with access to the external world, but that access is shaped by our own experiential histories. Through perceptual learning, we can enhance our capacities for perceptual discrimination, categorization, and attention to salient properties. We can also encode harmful biases and stereotypes. This article reviews interdisciplinary research on perceptual learning, with an emphasis on the implications for our rational and normative theorizing. Perceptual learning raises the possibility that our inquiries into topics such as epistemic justification, aesthetic criticism, and (...) moral knowledge should include not only an examination of cognition but also of perception. (shrink)

What kinds of mental states can be based on epistemic reasons? The standard answer is only beliefs. I argue that perceptual states can also be based on reasons, as the result of crossmodal interactions. A perceptual state from one modality can provide a reason on which an experience in another modality is based. My argument identifies key markers of the basing relation and locates them in the crossmodal Marimba Illusion (Schutz & Kubovy 2009). The subject’s auditory experience of musical tone (...) duration is based on the reason provided by her visual representation of the length of the musician’s gesture and other stored perceptual principles. (shrink)

Do epistemic and aesthetic values ever conflict? The answer might appear to be no, given that background knowledge generally enhances aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience in turn generates new knowledge. As Keats writes, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats, 1996). Contra this line of thought, I argue that epistemic and aesthetic values can conflict when we over-rely on aesthetically enhancing background beliefs. The true and the beautiful can pull in different directions, forcing us to choose between flavours of normativity.

Introduction to Special Issue of Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Overview of the central issues in cognitive architecture, epistemology, and ethics surrounding cognitive penetrability. Special issue includes papers by philosophers and psychologists: Gary Lupyan, Fiona Macpherson, Reginald Adams, Anya Farennikova, Jona Vance, Francisco Marchi, Robert Cowan.

New computer systems of discovery create a research program for logic and philosophy of science. These systems consist of inference rules and control knowledge that guide the discovery process. Their paths of discovery are influenced by the available data and the discovery steps coincide with the justification of results. The discovery process can be described in terms of fundamental concepts of artificial intelligence such as heuristic search, and can also be interpreted in terms of logic. The traditional distinction that places (...) studies of scientific discovery outside the philosophy of science, in psychology, sociology, or history, is no longer valid in view of the existence of computer systems of discovery. It becomes both reasonable and attractive to study the schemes of discovery in the same way as the criteria of justification were studied: empirically as facts, and logically as norms. (shrink)

We argue that the core social being system is unlike other core systems in that it participates in frequent, widespread learning. As a result, the social being system is less constant throughout the lifespan and less informationally encapsulated than other core systems. This learning supports the development of the precursors of bias, but also provides avenues for preempting it.

ABSTRACT This cross-sectional study compared the moral reasoning of first-year and third-year doctoral students in clinical psychology. Nineteen first-year and 20 third-year students were recruited from 17 doctoral training programs in the UK. Most adopted a sophisticated approach to moral judgments, as assessed by the Defining Issues Test, although, surprisingly, more experienced students had significantly less sophisticated schemata. In their moral judgments, less experienced students relied more heavily on their personal, and more experienced students on their professional, constructs, as assessed (...) by repertory grid technique. Integration between personal and professional constructs was higher in more experienced students. (shrink)

Much of the history of Western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes a good life, and claims that a good life is achievable only by certain human beings. In Feminist Philosophies of Life, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, and ecofeminist philosophers challenge this tendency, approaching the question of life from alternative perspectives. Signalling the importance of distinctively feminist reflections on matters of shared concern, Feminist Philosophies of Life not only exposes the propensity of discourses to normalize and exclude (...) differently abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, it also asks questions about how life is constituted and understood without limiting itself to the human. A collection of articles that focuses on life as an organizing principle for ontology, ethics, and politics, chapters of this study respond to feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Søren Kierkegaard. Divided into three parts, the book debates the question of life in and against the emerging school of new feminist materialism, provides feminist phenomenological and existentialist accounts of life, and focuses on lives marked by a particular precarity such as disability or incarceration, as well as life in the face of a changing climate. Calling for a broader account of lived experience, Feminist Philosophies of Life contains persuasive, original, and diverse analyses that address some of the most crucial feminist issues. Contributors include Christine Daigle, Shannon Dea, Lindsay Eales, Elizabeth Grosz, Lisa Guenther, Lynne Huffer, Ada Jaarsma, Stephanie Jenkins, Ladelle McWhorter, Jane Barter Moulaison, Astrida Neimanis, Danielle Peers, Stephen Seely, Hasana Sharp, Chloë Taylor, Florentien Verhage, Rachel Loewen Walker, and Cynthia Willett. (shrink)

I argue that alternative-denoting expressions interact with their semantic context by taking scope. With an empirical focus on indefinites in English, I show how this approach improves on standard alternative-semantic architectures that use point-wise composition to subvert islands, as well as on in situ approaches to indefinites more generally. Unlike grammars based on point-wise composition, scope-based alternative management is thoroughly categorematic, doesn’t under-generate readings when multiple sources of alternatives occur on an island, and is compatible with standard treatments of binding. (...) Unlike all in situ treatments of indefinites, relying on a true scope mechanism prevents over-generation when an operator binds into an indefinite. My account relies only on function application, some mechanism for scope-taking, and two freely-applying type-shifters: the first is Karttunen’s :3–44, 1977. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00351935) proto-question operator, aka Partee’s Studies in discourse representation theory and the theory of generalized quantifiers, Foris, Dordrecht, 1986) IDENT, and the second can be factored out of extant approaches to the semantics of questions in the tradition of Karttunen. These type-shifters form a decomposition of LIFT, the familiar function mapping values into scope-takers. Exceptional scope of alternative-generating expressions arises via scopal pied-piping: indefinites take scope over their island, which then itself takes scope. (shrink)

It has been suggested that iconic graphical signs evolve into symbolic graphical signs through repeated usage. This article reports a series of interactive graphical communication experiments using a ‘pictionary’ task to establish the conditions under which the evolution might occur. Experiment 1 rules out a simple repetition based account in favor of an account that requires feedback and interaction between communicators. Experiment 2 shows how the degree of interaction affects the evolution of signs according to a process of grounding. Experiment (...) 3 confirms the prediction that those not involved directly in the interaction have trouble interpreting the graphical signs produced in Experiment 1. On the basis of these results, this article argues that icons evolve into symbols as a consequence of the systematic shift in the locus of information from the sign to the users' memory of the sign's usage supported by an interactive grounding process. (shrink)

This book includes sections on brightness and light, eye movements and perception, and perception of orientation and self-motion.

This study analyses the sensitivity of public goods contributions through the lens of psychological motives. We report the results of a public goods experiment in which subjects were induced with the motives of care and anger through autobiographical recall. Subjects’ preferences, beliefs, and perceptions under each motive are compared with those of subjects experiencing a neutral autobiographical recall control condition. We find, but only for those subjects with the highest comprehension of the game, that care elicits significantly higher contributions than (...) anger, with the control treatment in between. This positive influence of the care motive on unconditional giving is accounted for partly by preferences for giving and partly by beliefs concerning greater contributions by others. Anger also affects attention to own and other’s payoffs and perceptions of the game’s incentive structure. (shrink)

We present some applications of Popa’s Superrigidity Theorem to the theory of countable Borel equivalence relations. In particular, we show that the universal countable Borel equivalence relation E∞ is not essentially free.

This paper contrasts two ways of understanding the function of human thought and language. According to representationalism, the function of thought and language is to refer to entities in the world and assert truths about them. By contrast, pragmatism seeks to understand the function of thought and language without any such appeal, at the most fundamental level, to the concepts of truth or reference.

This article places Hannah Arendt’s fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate the importance for each of a notion of ‘mere life’ or ‘life itself’ to an understanding of the agency of violence in modernity. Arendt’s critique of vitalism is most fully developed in The Human Condition, where she describes an entanglement of the instrumental activity of homo faber with life and labour in the work of Bergson, Nietzsche (...) and Marx. I suggest that Bergson’s treatment of life as creative evolution unexpectedly yields an accurate description of politics as spontaneous, unpredictable motion that Arendt takes as typical of modernity. Since Arendt also credits Bergson with a decisive influence on what she takes to be a growing commitment to the life-enhancing, creative potential of violence in the oppositional movements of the 1960s, which she explores in her late essay, On Violence, I trace out the continuity between Arendt’s earlier account of homo faber and her later critique of postmodern oppositional violence. (shrink)

Dreier’s sympathy with expressivism is welcome, and yet he comes upon an ‘uncomfortable surprise’, in a circularity or regress that he detects in my attempt to place ethical commitments in a natural world. The circularity is that the expressivist analysis of what is going on, when we invoke norms, identifies particular states of mind: valuings, or acceptance of norms, or complexes of attitude. But states of mind are themselves normatively tainted. Hence: ‘the kernel of expressivist analysis invokes normative concepts’.

This is an excerpt from a report on the workshop on multisensory integration at the University of Toronto, on May 9th and 10th, 2014, written by Kevin Connolly, Aaron Henry, Zoe Jenkin, and Andrew MacGregor, and available at: http://networksensoryresearch.utoronto.ca/Events_%26_Discussion.html This excerpt explores the question: What can multisensory processing tell us about multisensory awareness?

According to the Everett interpretation, branching structure and ratios of norms of branch amplitudes are the objective correlates of chance events and chances; that is, 'chance' and 'chancing', like 'red' and 'colour', pick out objective features of reality, albeit not what they seemed. Once properly identified, questions about how and in what sense chances can be observed can be treated as straightforward dynamical questions. On that basis, given the unitary dynamics of quantum theory, it follows that relative and never absolute (...) chances can be observed; that only on repetition of a large numbers of similar trials can relative probabilities be measured; and so on. The epistemology of objective chances can in this way be worked out from the dynamics. its curious features are thus explained. But one aspect of chance set-ups seems to resist this subsuming of chancing to branching: how is it that chance involves uncertainty? And if that is not possible, on Everettian lines, then the whole project is doomed. I argue that in fact there is no difficulty in making sense of uncertainty in the face of branching. Contrary to initial impressions, the unitary formalism is consistent with a well-defined notion of self-locating uncertainty. It is also consistent without: the mathematics under-determines the metaphysics in these respects. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

Wide-ranging essays making up the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. This volume collects a wide-ranging set of essays examining Friedrich Nietzsche's engagement with antiquity in all its aspects. It investigates Nietzsche's reaction and response to the concept of "classicism," with particular reference to his work on Greek culture as a philologist in Basel and later as a philosopher of modernity, and to his reception of German classicism in all his texts. (...) The book should be of interest to students of ancient history and classics, philosophy, comparative literature, and Germanistik. Taken together, these papers suggest that classicism is both a more significant, and a more contested, concept for Nietzsche than is often realized, and it demonstratesthe need for a return to a close attention to the intellectual-historical context in terms of which Nietzsche saw himself operating. An awareness of the rich variety of academic backgrounds, methodologies, and techniques of reading evinced in these chapters is perhaps the only way for the contemporary scholar to come to grips with what classicism meant for Nietzsche, and hence what Nietzsche means for us today. The book is divided into five sections -- The Classical Greeks; Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics and Stoics; Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition; Contestations; and German Classicism -- and constitutes the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. Contributors: Jessica N. Berry, Benjamin Biebuyck, Danny Praet and Isabelle Vanden Poel, Paul Bishop, R. Bracht Branham, Thomas Brobjer, David Campbell, Alan Cardew, Roy Elveton, Christian Emden, Simon Gillham, John Hamilton, Mark Hammond, Albert Henrichs, Dirk t.D. Held, David F. Horkott, Dylan Jaggard, Fiona Jenkins, Anthony K. Jensen, Laurence Lampert, Nicholas Martin, Thomas A. Meyer, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, John S. Moore, Neville Morley, David N. McNeill, James I. Porter, Martin A. Ruehl, Herman Siemens, Barry Stocker, Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, and Peter Yates. Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. (shrink)

Narratives of supply chains and raw materials are a poor fit for early modern Europeans’ “thrifty” habit of reusing and reworking goods into new forms. This essay stresses the importance of such habits for early modern work using the example of paper, as a medium, instrument, and epistemic resource in various domestic and scientific spheres. Thrifty perspectives challenge not only linear supply narratives but also enduring accounts of the identities of materials themselves.

The article proposes a novel approach to the much discussed question of which symmetries have ‘direct empirical significance’ and which do not. The approach is based on a development of a recently proposed framework by Hilary Greaves and David Wallace, who claim that, contrary to the standard folklore among philosophers of physics, ‘local’ symmetries may have direct empirical significance no less than ‘global’ ones. Partly vindicating the standard folklore, a result is derived here from a number of plausible assumptions, that (...) states that local symmetries can indeed have no direct empirical significance. Ways to interpret the result are considered and possible morals are outlined. 1 Introduction2 Greaves and Wallace on Interior versus Non-interior Symmetries3 Elaborating on the Greaves/Wallace Framework4 The Result5 Problems with ’t Hooft’s Beam Splitter6 Summary and Conclusion. (shrink)

This paper defends a regularly paid basic income as being better equipped to tackle unfair inequalities of outcome. It is argued that the timing of "option-luck" failures – in particular, whether they occur early in a lifetime of calculated gambles, and whether they are clustered together – may lead to a form of "brute bad luck," referred to as "cumulative misfortune." A basic income that is paid on a regular basis provides a way to prevent the emergence of cumulative misfortune, (...) because the basic income at least partially replenishes the individual's ability to take the next calculated gamble. The upshot of this is a nonpaternalistic justification for an unconditional basic income that is paid regularly and is nonmortgageable. This has an important bearing on the debate between those who advocate a one-off endowment at the start of adult life and those who advocate a basic income paid regularly throughout one's life. The paper contends that a regular basic income represents a superior social policy because it prevents the emergence of cumulative misfortune, rather than belatedly attempting to compensate for its effects during our senior years. (shrink)

One line of argument in defense of an unconditional basic income is that it reduces the dependence of less advantaged citizens on others. However, its claim to help ensure individual self-government is undermined by the fact that it is consistent with social and economic inequality. For those who are more wealthy and talented are better placed to influence the democratic decision-making process according to their interests and contrary to the interests of those who are less advantaged. In sum, a basic (...) income does not provide the sufficient conditions for equal citizenship. One solution to that problem, defended by Rousseau, is that in addition to a social minimum, material inequality should be moderated. In this paper I argue that such a measure is unnecessary provided that we can insulate the political decision-making process from the background inequalities. It is argued, following a recent innovative proposal by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, that to ensure the effective right to self-government the basic income should be complemented by a voucher of equal value to be used by each and every citizen as a campaign contribution to a candidate of their choice. (shrink)

Due to their consolidated nature, corporate sustainability reports often mask the evolution of organizations’ sustainability initiatives. Thus, to more fully understand the environmental performance of an organization, it is essential to examine the experiences of specific projects and how they relate to corporate sustainability. Based on case studies of green projects in four different organizations, we find that it is difficult to determine the environmental impact of a project a priori, even in cases where environmental considerations are included as part (...) of the initial project scope. Instead, the decision to integrate environmentally favorable elements into projects is a dynamically occurring interaction between competing institutional logics and organizational identities, which create windows of opportunity for individual agency. During these windows, individuals may engage in reinforcing microprocesses that support traditional practices, or invoke enabling microprocesses to facilitate green decision-making, consistent with ecosystem logics. The process model developed in this paper provides a new perspective on the temporal and contextual dimensions of environmental championship behaviors, and sheds light on otherwise puzzling results such as why organizations with strong environmental orientations continue to struggle with delivering projects with strong positive environmental impacts. (shrink)