Originally published in 1988, this landmark study develops its own positive account of the nature and foundations of moral judgement, while at the same time serving as a guide to the range of views on the matter which have been given in modern western philosophy. The book addresses itself to two main questions: Can moral judgements be true or false in that fundamental sense in which a true proposition is one which describes things as they really are? Are rational methods (...) available in ethics which can be expected to produce convergence on shared moral views on the part of those who use them intelligently? (shrink)

This book argues that ethical business behavior can be enhanced by taking fuller account of human nature, particularly with respect to the need for creating relatively small communities within the corporation. Timothy Fort discusses this premise in relation to the three predominant theories of business ethics--stakeholder, virtue, and contract. Drawing heavily from philosophy, he analyzes traditional business ethics and legal theory. Overall, his work provides a good example of how to integrate normative and empirical studies in business ethics, a (...) task that often receives substantial discussion in academic journals. (shrink)

The disciplined investigation of consciousness is of three main types: eidetic, anthropological , and psychophysical. The first concerns the essence of consciousness in general and of its main modes. Its method involves introspection, empathy, and insight into necessities present in what these reveal. As the study of the essence of that which is the locus of all value it is of unique importance, and it is also essential as a foundation of the other inquiries. Such inquiry has been the main (...) task set for itself by phenomenology as a philosophical school, but engagement in it need not imply acceptance of distinctive doctrines of this school. English language?philosophy has developed in ways which discourage the eidetic investigation of consciousness, especially through insistence that modes of consciousness, conceived as a private possession, cannot be the referent of socially shared meanings. Its great mistake has been to expect ?consciousness? to refer to some elusive phenomenon to be looked for in the world and able to be studied as a distinctive reality only if conceptually isolable from what it reveals. Study of consciousness, however, is not primarily study of a phenomenon to be found within the world, but of the variety of ways in which the world can be present to us. (shrink)

The Relevance of Higher Education: Exploring a Contested Notion, edited by Timothy L. Simpson, examines the relevance of higher education from diverse disciplinary perspectives to grasp its historical and philosophical assumptions, and its implications for the relationship bet...

This paper argues that business can be helpfully conceived of as a mediating institution. Drawing upon neo-conservative theology, the author argues that mediating institutions serve a vital function in a free society to provide social justice out of an expanded civil society and provide a framework for a flourishing free market. Such institutions also nourish the attitudinal orientation of solidarity in applying the principle of subsidiarity by which self-interest becomes fulfilled through concern for others.The author further argues that businesses also (...) be conceived of as mediating institutions and thereby be held to criteria of meeting associationalneeds. In addition to normative reasons for revising the social contract so that businesses do serve the role of mediating institutions, contemporary management theories demonstrate that businesses can also meet their social obligations of creating wealth while meeting associational needs. (shrink)

This book, written by a top scholar in the business law area, is written to create a skill in ethical decision-making and building ethical culture. It is complete summary of the leading theories of business ethics today. The book draws students into the material by providing experiences that allow them to tell their own stories and to define their own business ethics. It provides student examples of how to apply the frameworks and decision-making models so that the "how-to" is clear. (...) The book synthesizes a very strong legal foundation with both philosophical ethics and cognitive psychology to create an integrated textbook drawing on not one, but all the major traditions found in business schools worldwide today. (shrink)

Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by independently manipulating the costs associated with both word rotation and array frame rotation. Surprisingly, we found that individuals’ patterns of spontaneous physical rotations did not follow patterns of performance (...) costs or benefits associated with being physically rotated, findings difficult to reconcile with existing theories of strategy selection involving external resources. Individuals’ subjective ratings of perceived benefits, rather, provided an excellent match to the patterns of physical rotations, suggesting that the critical variable when deciding on-the-fly whether to incorporate an external resource is the participant's metacognitive beliefs regarding expected performance or the effort required for each approach. Implications for metacognition's future in theories of cognitive offloading are discussed. (shrink)

To what extent is individual conscience social in character? Anti-individualist critics have taken issue with the individualistic account of conscience that they find prominent in liberalism. I consider Rawls’s accounts of conscience and the liberty of conscience with a view to understanding the role that sociality might play in the formation and significance of conscience. I defend Rawls against these anti-individualist critics. However, I demonstrate that Rawls’s account of conscience remains bound to a specific metaphysics of the person that is (...) at odds with the anti-foundationalist aims of political liberalism. I argue that, in place of this metaphysics, liberals should adopt a social ontology of the self. (shrink)

This paper is a response to a recent colloquy among Professors David Messick, Donna Wold, and Edwin Harman. I defend Messick’s naturalist methodology, which suggests that people inherently categorize others and act altruistically toward certain people in a given person’s in-group. This paper suggests that an anthropological reason for this grouping tendency is a limited human neural ability to process large numbers of relationships. But because human beings also have the ability to modify, to some extent, their nature, corporate law (...) can organize small mediating institutions within large corporations in order to take ethical advantage of this groupingtendency. Within a corporate law taking seriously a mediating institution’s formulation of business communities, a virtue ethicsapproach can be integrated with a naturalist approach in a way that fosters ethical business behavior while mitigating the dangers of ingrouping tendencies. (shrink)

In illusory line motion, presentation of a cue is followed by presentation of a nearby stationary line, and the line is perceived to “unfold,” “expand,” or “extend” away from the cue. Effects of the allocation of attention regarding where the cue or the line would be presented were measured in three experiments, and ratings of relative velocity and relative strength of illusory motion were collected. Findings included (a) relative velocity and relative strength decreased with increases in SOA from 50 to (...) 450 ms, (b) relative velocity and relative strength were not influenced by whether illusory motion moved from one end of the line to the other or from both ends toward the middle of the line, (c) increased uncertainty regarding where the line would appear did not influence relative velocity or relative strength, and (d) valid pre-cues regarding the location of a cue resulted in faster relative velocity than did invalid pre-cues, but pre-cue validity did not influence relative strength. Implications of these findings for the relationship of such illusory motion and attention (e.g., divided attention, shifts in attended location) are considered. (shrink)

This article considers the contribution that Hegel’s concept of “alienation” (Entfremdung) makes to his theory of reciprocal intersubjective recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I show that Hegel presents a powerful criticism of what I call the “automatic” model of recognition—I treat Stephen Darwall’s conception of reciprocal recognition as exemplary—where individuals merit recognition from others in virtue of some generic self-standing trait, and recognition requires responding appropriately to that feature. This model of recognition is alienating since it entails understanding the (...) self in a way that excludes the individual’s particularity. Overcoming alienation requires rejecting this automatic model in favor of an “achievement” model of recognition, where the individual’s particularity is understood to be essential to the achievement of self-imposed and socially-realized ends. (shrink)

According to Kant, a certain kind of knowledge is essential to the achievement of moral autonomy. In order for an action to be obligatory, it must be possible for me to know not only what I have a...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Minds, Memes, and Multiples”Timothy Sprigge (bio)In his paper “Minds, Memes and Multiples” Stephen Clark discusses the problem of multiple personality, to some considerable extent in response to Stephen Braude’s recent book First Person Plural, with eloquence, subtlety and some apposite historical references. I am delighted to have been asked to make some comments on it, developing some points I made in discussion when Professor Clark read (...) his paper at a seminar in Edinburgh.Multiple personality is certainly a fascinating subject on which anyone with views about the nature of human persons does well to cast an eye. I am grateful to both Clark and Braude for having raised my awareness of it. Clearly, Clark has been persuaded by Braude of the reality of the phenomenon as something more than just a form of extreme role-playing or play acting, 1 but also agrees with him that there is an ultimate single self behind the genuine multiplicity (Clark 1969; Braude 1991). What this ultimate self is Clark seeks to explain by reference to a single “light” which illumines all the variety (extreme in the case of multiple personality), of ideas, thoughts, emotions etc. by which we are variously swayed.Let us for simplicity take the case where the putatively distinct “persons” associated with the one human organism are three. Prima facie, there are, in these cases, three distinct centers of consciousness associated with a single human organism each capable turn and turn about of being the dominant one (that which is using the first person pronoun out aloud to speak of itself and whose desires and wishes are what is most immediately expressed in behavior).There seem to be three main features of genuine and full blooded multiple personality (as described most famously—I shall assume correctly—in Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality and Thigpen and Cleckley’s The Three Faces of Eve). First, the different centers of consciousness exhibit very different personalities, so different that the individual seems in some ways even physically altered according as to which is dominant. By personality here I mean a system of character traits rather than the principle of personal identity, whatever we think that to be. The expression “multiple personality” tends rather to blur the distinction between personality in this sense and person. Someone can change quite radically in personality without ceasing to be the same person—or at least that is how we ordinarily look at it. Second, at least one of them does not “remember” the experiences and conscious behavior of at least one of the others, while one of them does. If they really are different persons, some would think that “memory” is the wrong word here. But I am using “memory” to refer to any cognitive relation sufficiently akin to that in which we stand to our own past experiences when we [End Page 31] remember them. Third, they co-exist in the sense that at least one other of the centers is often “looking on” at the contents and public manifestations of the then dominant one.Another important factor is that they have attitudes to one another, often of hostility, which seem much more like the attitudes one can have to another person than one normally does to oneself. However, important as this is, it should not be taken as part of the definition of multiple personality, since so many of these attitudes are ones many people direct at themselves, (e.g. self-hatred and self-pity). To say that these are distinct from the hatred and pity felt towards others just because they are self-directed seems rather to beg the question.It seems to me that unless the first three conditions are met, we do not have multiple personality in a full sense. I cannot consider all possible cases in which only one or two of the conditions are met but here are some examples. Suppose that the first condition is met but not the other two. Then we would have a person subjected to striking mood swings, each mood bringing with it a contrasting set of personal loves and hates, political opinions, aesthetic tastes, sporting enthusiasms, and... (shrink)

Experiences of qualia, subjective sensory-like aspects of stimuli, are central to imagistic representation. Following Raffman , qualia are considered to reflect experiential knowledge distinct from descriptive, abstract, and propositional knowledge; following Jackendoff , objective neural activity is distinguished from subjective experience. It is argued that descriptive physical knowledge does not provide an adequate accounting of qualia, and philosophical scenarios such as the Turing test and the Chinese Room are adapted to demonstrate inadequacies of accounts of cognition that ignore subjective experience. (...) Arguments by Dennett and others that qualia do not exist or that qualia do not provide additional explanatory power are addressed, and it is suggested that consideration of qualia is necessary in order to explain objective behavior. The hypotheses of functional equivalence, second-order isomorphism, and psychophysical complementarity between imagery and perception are discussed, and the ability of analog and schematic models of imagery to account for qualia is examined. (shrink)

Of the two main interpretations of Spinoza's theory of the identity of the attributes, in particular those of Thought and Extension, the objective interpretation is now almost universally preferred to the subjective. Rejection of the subjective interpretation, according to which the attributes are merely our ways of cognizing a reality whose real essence remains unknown, is certainly justified, but the objective theory comes too near to replacing the identity by a mere correlation of diff rents to be quite satisfactory. Is (...) it not better to say that Thought and Extension represent two complementary conceptions of reality which are both correct? Yes, but in saying so some commentators ascribe to mind, as Spinoza conceives it, an unplausibly abstract status. An alternative proposal is made as to a way in which Spinoza might be right in essentials, though it requires that a certain tension in Spinozism as to the nature of body be resolved in a particular direction. (shrink)

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural substrates of moral cognition in health resource allocation decision problems. In particular, it investigated the cognitive and emotional processes that underpin utilitarian approaches to health care rationing such as Quality Adjusted Life Years. Participants viewed hypothetical medical and nonmedical resource allocation scenarios which described equal or unequal allocation of resources to different groups. In addition, participants were assigned to 1 of 2 treatments in which they either did or did not receive advanced (...) instructions about the principles of utilitarianism. In all cases, participants were asked to judged the proposed allocations as “fair” or “unfair.” More brain activity was observed within the superior parietal lobe, angular gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and bilateral caudate nucleus when participants viewed scenarios depicting equal divisions of resources. Conversely, unequal resource divisions were associated with more activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and insula cortex. Furthermore, instructions about the principles of utilitarianism led to significant activation differences within the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus. Significant differences in activity were also found within the inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula between medical and nonmedical scenarios. The implications for cognitive control mechanisms and the cognitive and neural bases of utilitarian ethical judgment are discussed. (shrink)

When I perceive a physical object I am directly aware of something. This something may be called a sense?datum, leaving the question open whether it is indeed the physical object itself. Still, this question must be asked. It seems impossible that the sense?datum can be identical with the physical object for we do not always say we have different physical objects when we say we have different sense?data. On the other hand, the plain man does not think of the physical (...) object as something other than the sense?datum. It is suggested that the plain man regards the sense?datum as in a sense identical with the physical object he is perceiving. But it is a peculiar sense of ?identity? which is in question, one which does not conform to the rules logicians lay down for this word. (shrink)

D. C. Dennett propounds a ?multiple drafts? conception of consciousness which is both materialist and anti?realist (in something like Dummett's sense). Thus there is no determinate truth as to what the components of someone's consciousness were over any particular period and the order in which they occurred. In opposition to this an anti?materialist form of psychical realism is defended here. There really is a precise something which it is like to be a conscious individual at each moment. The main difficulty (...) in accepting this view is that it seems to make it quite contingent what type of consciousness performs what function in the economy of the organism, e.g. that pleasure acts as a positive, pain as a negative, reinforcer of behaviour. There is a problem here which can only be avoided by abandoning the Humean doctrine that there cannot be necessary relations between distinct existences. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Reality as Experience Knowledge and Truth Intellectualism The Unity of Mind Metaphysical Pluralism.

The past seven centuries of scholarly attention to and debate over the Roman de la Rose bear strong witness to the fact that the allegorical figure Faus Semblant presents us with an interpretive crux—one of many such in the poem—that we are not likely to resolve in the coming centuries. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a character who so embodies paradox—a profane friar who is openly honest about his intent to deceive—should be so difficult to pin down; (...) it is his singular talent, after all, to dissemble and confuse. The last century has seen a significant increase in criticism centered upon Faus Semblant that seeks to understand what he signifies within the larger allegory of the poem and how he relates to Jean de Meun's purported satire and antifraternalism. But this struggle to understand and explain the character began centuries earlier and, like him, has taken many forms. As early as the thirteenth century, the passage of Jean's poem in which Faus Semblant explains his craft and guile had begun to attract a diverse group of revisers: scribes, who added or deleted passages in order to shape a reading of the poem or avoid offending readers; remanieurs, such as Gui de Mori, who substantially rewrote the passage in efforts to reshape the poem into a more cohesive form; readers, whose marginal inscriptions and notae often accompany the passage; and illustrators , as images of Faus Semblant are frequently included in illuminated copies of Rose manuscripts. Even Jean himself seemed to feel the need to gloss and contain Faus Semblant, offering an apology and clarification in lines 15213–30. (shrink)

Just as Michael Porter's five forces provided a practical analytical tool for describing the forces that shape competitive strategy, so business ethicists ought to provide business leaders with a workable framework for understanding the sources of ethical obligations. The forces that shape competitive strategy vary according to time and industry, but are anchored in an ultimate criteria of profitability. Similarily, ethics can use a set of analytical categories that identify the relevant forces to business ethics on the basis of relationality.This (...) paper first argues that relationality based on naturalism is the primary, plausible value for ethics. Second, it adapts a tripartite dialectic from scholars William Frederick and Michael Novak to describe the relational categories with which business must contend. Third, it uses these forces in a way similar to Porter's competitive forces to offer an analytical language familiar to managers in order to characterize business ethics. (shrink)

The empirical literature on phenomenal causality (the notion that causality can be perceived) is reviewed. Different potential types of phenomenal causality and variables that influence phenomenal causality were considered in Part I (Hubbard 2012b) of this two-part series. In Part II, broader questions regarding properties of phenomenal causality and connections of phenomenal causality to other perceptual or cognitive phenomena (different types of phenomenal causality, effects of spatial and temporal variance, phenomenal causality in infancy, effects of object properties, naïve physics, spatial (...) localization, other illusions, amodal completion, Gestalt principles of perceptual grouping, effects of context, differences between physical and social causality, effects of learning and experience, individual differences, effects of predictability, asymmetry in phenomenal causality, differences between perceived causality and perceived force, phenomenal causality in nonhuman animals) are considered. Potential mechanisms of phenomenal causality (inference from contiguity, a priori understanding, ampliation, perceptual learning, stimulus activity, beliefs regarding kinematics, haptic experience, beliefs regarding impetus, postdiction, innateness, modularity, specific neural structures) are also considered. (shrink)

The ArgumentHistorians of science naturally tend to express interest in other forms of intellectual activity only when these intersect with science. This tendncy has produced a number of enlightening studies of what happens when science and (for instance) law or theology come into contact, but little by way of how science enters into the calculations and social status of such forms of knowledge after the conjuction has passed. Recent work in the sociology of professions, in contrast, has focused attention precisely (...) on those moments when the expert knowledge produced by different group doesnotoverlap. This has been the contribution of Andrew Abbortt's theory of “jurisdictional boundaries” between competing professions. The case of Victorian actuaries who worked hard to maintain unique intellectual claims in the competitive life insurance industry while maintainiing strong social connections and overlaps in knowledge with organized science, challenges the way both historians of science and sociologists of professions view contending knowledge claims. By observing what motivated actuaries to forge an alliance with men of science in the 1820s, then tracing their gradual recognition of a need to distance themselves from certain of the “scientific” values that had earlier informed their collective identity, it is possible to make sense of connections as well as disconnections between science and other forms of knowledge. A history of quantification from the actuaries' perspective, in other words, allows us to view science bothasandincontext. (shrink)

Displacements in the remembered location of stimuli in displays based on Michotte’s (1946/1963) launching effect and entraining effect were examined. A moving object contacted an initially stationary target, and the target began moving. After contacting the target, the mover became stationary (launching trials) or continued moving in the same direction and remained adjacent to the target (entraining trials). In launching trials, forward displacement was smaller for targets than for movers; in entraining trials, forward displacement was smaller for movers than for (...) targets. Also, forward displacement was smaller for targets in launching trials than for targets in entraining trials. Data are consistent with a hypothesis that the launching effect involves an attribution that the mover imparted to the target a dissipating impetus that was responsible for target motion. Introspective experience of a perception of physical causality in the launching effect might result because behavior of movers and targets is consistent with that predicted by an impetus heuristic. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the contribution that Hegel’s discussion of ethicality makes to his account of recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit. While the famous relation of lord and bondsman might prompt us to think of all failures of recognition as failures of reciprocity, Hegel’s account of ethicality shows that it is possible for forms of social life to be structured so that no one is recognized. This failure of recognition is unique since its source does not lie in (...) a lack of reciprocity between individuals but in the absence of an explicit and shared conception of the “self.” In conclusion I point to the importance of the idea of the self to Hegel’s account of reciprocal intersubjective recognition in the text and contrast it with Pippin’s recent interpretation. (shrink)