Several hypotheses on the form and function of sex differences in social behaviors were tested. The results suggest that friendship preferences in both sexes can be understood in terms of perceived reciprocity potential—capacity and willingness to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. Divergent social styles may in turn reflect trade-offs between behaviors selected to maintain large, functional coalitions in men and intimate, secure relationships in women. The findings are interpreted from a broad socio-relational framework of the types of behaviors that (...) facilitate selective advertisement and investment of reciprocity potential across individuals and within groups of men and women. (shrink)

Embodied simulation and the epistemic motivation to search for the of other people's behaviors are not necessary for specific and functional responding to, and hence processing of, human facial expressions. Rather, facial expression processing can be achieved through lower-cognitive, heuristical perceptual processing and expression of prototypical morphological musculature movement patterns that communicate discrete trustworthiness and capacity cues to conspecifics.

A sample of 460 low-income women completed a mate preference questionnaire and surveys that assessed family background, life history, conscientiousness, sexual motives, self-ratings (e.g., looks), and current circumstances (e.g., income). A cluster analysis revealed two groups of women: women who reported a strong preference for looks and money in a short-term mate and commitment in a long-term mate, and women who reported smaller differences across mating context. Group differences were found in reported educational levels, family background, sexual development, number of (...) children, and motives for having sex. Implications for understanding individual differences in women’s mate-preference trade-offs are discussed. (shrink)

Las revistas ilustradas jugaron un papel fundamental en el proceso comunicativo durante el primer tercio del siglo XX. Las portadas cobraron relevancia al procurar el impacto en los receptores. Se presenta un análisis de los contenidos culturales en las portadas de las revistas ilustradas de información general publicadas durante la Segunda República española, con dos objetivos: averiguar si se produjo un cambio significativo en el modelo comunicativo y conocer la tipología de los contenidos. Las revistas analizadas han sido cinco: Blanco (...) y Negro, Nuevo Mundo, Mundo Gráfico, Estampa y Crónica. (shrink)

According to socio-relational theory, men and women encountered different ecologies in their evolutionary past, and, as a result of different ancestral selection pressures, they developed different patterns of emotional expressivity that have persisted across cultures and large human evolutionary time scales. We question these assumptions, and propose that social-cognitive models of individual differences more parsimoniously account for sex differences in emotional expressivity.

The free association method is often employed in marketing research to investigate perceptions of a particular product or brand in different socio-cultural groups of customers. In our research, international and domestic students produced free associations in response to photographs of outdoor billboards from two different locations in one city (city centre and outskirts). The results indicate that free associations can depict qualitative aspects of outdoor billboards like poor quality (relating to the categories of amateurish and fake), problematic content (relating to (...) female stereotypes, gender stereotypes and cultural differences), and that they have the potential to capture the general atmosphere of the neighbourhood (categories of decay, depression, danger and past). (shrink)

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the (...) social sciences. (shrink)

The adoption of the French Duty of Vigilance law has been celebrated as a milestone for advancing the transnational business and human rights regime. The law can contribute to harden corporate accountability by challenging the “separation principle” of transnational companies and by obligating companies to report on their duty of vigilance. However, the question of whether the law actually contributes to human rights and environmental protection along global supply chains requires empirically grounded research that connects processes (...) in home and host state countries. This paper contributes to such a new research agenda by linking political ecology literature and empirical insights from the Global South to research on due diligence regulations. With reference to field research data on contestations between the oil and gas company Total E&P and indigenous communities in Bolivia, I argue that the burden of proof and contestations over valid knowledge represent major obstacles when trying to establish legal liability. (shrink)

Both science and religion are human endeavours that recruit and modify pre-existing human capacity to engage in epistemic vigilance. However, while science relies upon a focus on content vigilance, religion focusses on source vigilance. This difference is due, in turn, to the function of religious claims not being connected to their accuracy – unlike the function of scientific claims. Understanding this difference helps to understand many aspects of scientific and religious institutions.

The question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult and more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that his rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. Human, All Too Human considers how we might radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism? Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animate and (...) inanimate, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border identities: animals, things or children. Human, All Too Human examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by "things" and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them. The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challenging some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditions subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires. Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Cora Kaplan, James Kincaid, Harriet Ritvo, David Willis. (shrink)

Neil Levy argues that the importance of acquiring cultural knowledge in our evolutionary past selected for conformist and deferential social learning, and that contemporary bad beliefs – roughly, popular beliefs at odds with expert consensus – result primarily from the rational deployment of such conformity and deference in epistemically polluted modern environments. I raise several objections to this perspective. First, against the cultural evolutionary theory from which Levy draws, I argue that humans evolved to be highly sophisticated and vigilant social (...) learners. Given this, the ubiquity of bad beliefs in the modern world is puzzling: if humans are so smart and suspicious, why do these characteristics seem so rare in domains such as politics? I argue that the answer rests on the incentives that underlie bad beliefs, and I favorably contrast this explanation with Levy’s appeal to epistemic pollution. (shrink)

The theory of epistemic vigilance posits that -- to quote the eponymous paper that introduced the theory -- “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others." Despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of epistemic vigilance, however, I argue that the theory is a poor fit with the evidence: while there is good reason to accept that people ARE vigilant, there is also good reason to believe (...) that their vigilance is NOT epistemic. Rather, the evidence actually supports an alternative theory, one that I dub the theory of "Machiavellian vigilance": humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for Machiavellian vigilance, targeted at tracking others' relative social status and maintaining or enhancing one's own status. The evidence against epistemic vigilance stems from three sources: (a) data demonstrating that people are terrible at detecting honesty or competence, (b) data demonstrating that our vigilance is phylogenetically prior to the development of homo sapiens, and therefore was not designed to be sensitive to linguistic communication, and (c) data demonstrating that people's sources of information are distributed, and not detectable through individual vigilance. The evidence in favor of Machiavellian vigilance is the mirror image of the evidence against epistemic vigilance: (a) data demonstrating that people are very accurate at detecting status, (b) data demonstrating that social species, including bonobos and chimps, track the social status of their conspecifics, and (c) data demonstrating that people can quickly track status even in new social groups. (shrink)

It is currently assumed that exposure to an artificial blue-enriched light enhances human alertness and task performance, but recent research has suggested that behavioural effects are influenced by the basal state of arousal. Here we tested whether the effect of blue-enriched lighting on vigilance performance depends on participants’ arousal level. Twenty-four participants completed four sessions (blue-enriched vs. dim light x low vs. high arousal) at 10 pm on four consecutive days, following a repeated-measures design. Participants’ arousal was manipulated (...) parametrically through the execution of a cycling task at two intensities (low vs. moderate), and was checked by monitoring their heart rate. On each session, distal and proximal skin temperatures were recorded as a neuroergonomic index of vigilance, while participants performed a 20-min psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) under either blue-enriched light or dim light conditions. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS) and Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion Scale (RPE) were used to measure subjective psychological state. The results showed that the exercise-induced manipulation of arousal produced robust alerting effects in most measures, while the lighting manipulation only attenuated subjective sleepiness and enhanced positive affect, but it did not influence behaviour or physiology. Acute exposure to a blue-enriched light was practically ineffective when the arousal level was over baseline. The present research favoured the use of acute physical exercise over acute exposure to blue-enriched lighting in order to boost humans’ alertness when necessary, as in work settings where maintaining optimal levels of attention is difficult (shift work, night-work, vigilance tasks) and necessary to prevent human error and accidents. (shrink)

The neuroanatomical substrates controlling and regulating sleeping and waking, and thus consciousness, are located in the brain stem. Most crucial for bringing the brain into a state conducive for consciousness and information processing is the mesencephalic part of the brain stem. This part controls the state of waking, which is generally associated with a high degree of consciousness. Wakefulness is accompanied by a low-amplitude, high-frequency electroencephalogram, due to the fact that thalamocortical neurons fire in a state of tonic depolarization. Information (...) can easily pass the low-level threshold of these neurons, leading to a high transfer ratio. The complexity of the electroencephalogram during conscious waking is high, as expressed in a high correlation dimension. Accordingly, the level of information processing is high. Spindles, and alpha waves in humans, mark the transition from wakefulness to sleep. These phenomena are related to drowsiness, associated with a reduction in consciousness. Drowsiness occurs when cells undergo moderate hyperpolarizations. Increased inhibitions result in a reduction of afferent information, with a lowered transfer ratio. Information processing subsides, which is also expressed in a diminished correlation dimension. Consciousness is further decreased at the onset of slow wave sleep. This sleep is controlled by the medullar reticular formation and is characterized by a high-voltage, low-frequency electroencephalogram. Slow wave sleep becomes manifest when neurons undergo a further hyperpolarization. Inhibitory activities are so strong that the transfer ratio further drops, as does the correlation dimension. Thus, sensory information is largely blocked and information processing is on a low level. Finally, rapid eye movement sleep is regulated by the pontine reticular formation and is associated with a ''wake-like'' electroencephalographic pattern. Just as during wakefulness, this is the expression of a depolarization of thalamocortical neurons. The transfer ratio of rapid eye movement sleep has not yet been determined, but seems to vary. Evidence exists that this type of sleep, associated with dreaming, with some kind of perception and consciousness, is involved in processing of ''internal'' information. In line with this, rapid eye movement sleep has higher correlation dimensions than slow-wave sleep and sometimes even higher than wakefulness. It is assumed that the ''near-the-threshold'' depolarized state of neurons in the thalamus and cerebral cortex is a necessary condition for perceptual processes and consciousness, such as occurs during waking and in an altered form during rapid eye movement sleep. (shrink)

Drawing on both empirical evidence and evolutionary considerations, Sperber et al. argue that humans have a suite of evolved mechanisms for . On their view, vigilance plays a crucial role in ensuring the reliability and hence the evolutionary stability of communication. This article responds to their argument for vigilance, drawing on additional empirical evidence (from deception detection research) and evolutionary considerations (from animal signalling research) to defend a more optimistic, quasi-Reidian view of communication. On this alternative view, the (...) lion's share of the responsibility for explaining the reliability of testimony falls not to the vigilance of receivers but rather to the honesty of communicators, implying that vigilance does not play a major role in explaining the evolutionary stability of communication. (shrink)

Although the brain enables us to perceive the external world and our body, it remains unknown whether brain processes themselves can be perceived. Brain tissue does not have receptors for its own activity. However, the ability of humans to acquire self-control of brain processes indicates that the perception of these processes may also be achieved by learning. In this study patients learned to control low-frequency components of their EEG: the so-called slow cortical potentials (SCPs). In particular ''probe'' sessions, the patients (...) estimated the quality of the SCP shift they had produced in the preceding trial. The correspondence between the recorded SCP amplitudes and the subjective estimates increased with training. The ability to perceive the SCPs was related to the ability to control them; this perception was not mediated by peripheral variables such as changes in muscle tonus and cannot be reduced to simple vigilance monitoring. These data provide evidence that humans can learn to perceive the neural activity of their brain. Alternative interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

Animal activists sometimes engage in vigils and acts of witnessing as forms of political protest. For example, the Animal Save Movement, a global activist network, regards witnessing the suffering of non-human animals as a moral duty of veganism. The act of witnessing is intended to non-violently communicate both attitudes and principles. These forms of activism are unlike other forms of protest, relying for much of their force upon passive, non-confrontational actions. This article explores the ethical character of vigils and (...) witnessing in order to evaluate their role in animal rights activism. It argues that the love-based ethic behind the Animal Save Movement's form of witnessing is overly demanding, overly expansive and overly deferential towards wrongdoers. In its place, this article offers a narrower account of witnessing, detached from controversial spiritual elements. Vigils and conscious acts of witnessing, it is claimed, are political acts aimed at fulfilling duties to seek justice for non-human animals. (shrink)

Many have bowed before the recently acquired powers of ‘new technologies’. However, in the shift from tekhnē to tekhnologia, it seems we have lost human values. These values are communicative in nature as technological progress has placed barriers like distance, web pages and ‘miscellaneous extras’ between individuals. Certain values, like the interpersonal pleasures of rendering service, have been lost as their domain of predilection has for many become fully commercially oriented, dominated by the cadence of profitability. Though the popular (...) cultures of the artificial have surged forth to deliver us from the twentieth century, they have enabled some very superfluous dreaming—Man has succumbed to the Godly role of simulating himself and creating other beings. Communication is replaced by machines, services are rendered via many automated devices, procreation has entered the public sphere, robots and entertainment agents educate our youth and mesmerising screen-integrating ‘forms of intelligence’ even think for us. As such, this so-called culture threatens the very values Man constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to guide himself into the future. But what if the phenomena mentioned just reflect our new values? The author presents an investigation into this cultural shift, its impact on human practices with regards the mind and the body and evokes some pros and cons of generally accepting the ‘Culture of the Artificial’. (shrink)

Among philosophers of religion and theologians, debates over Hegel's interpretation of religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit have become the stuff of scholarly legend. Was Hegel a humanistic atheist? Or was he a serious Christian thinker? Both positions have been defended with vigilance in recent years. Now into this fray steps Professor Jamros to offer fresh insights and to argue that neither of these received views captures the thoughts of the philosophical theist who wrote the Phenomenology. Expounding Hegel's philosophical (...) theism through a close and careful study of the texts dealing with religion, Jamros demonstrates that for Hegel divine essence is "universal-essence" and that the self-development of this essence into human existence describes God. In consequence, argues Jamros, the traditional "left-wing" interpretation of Hegel must be rejected, since the autonomy of divine essence in determining this self-development compels us to affirm God's existence. What's more, we realize that since God is the essence of earthly human existence, Hegel's vision of Christianity excludes divine personality and eschatology; we must reject the traditional "right-wing" interpretation as well. Jamros concludes that in the Phenomenology we discover a thinker who spurns Christian other-worldliness and who works assiduously to describe the nexus between God's being and human existence. This nexus ultimately is to be found not in revelation - for the idea of revelation suggests that God's being is something naturally inaccessible to the human intellect yearning for its discovery. Rather, we meet God in the very exercise of reason commended by our desire for assurance of God's being - for God is the logical ground of all that can be thought. (shrink)

The majority of research on human rights focuses on the consequences of regime-type for human rights violations, and overwhelming evidence suggests that democracies are less likely to violate human rights of their citizens as compared to non-democracies. However, a regime-type perspective is unable to account for disparities in human rights violations within democratic and non-democratic regimes. This paper disaggregates regime-type and analyzes the relationship between citizens’ participation and human rights violations. I argue that a participative (...) citizenry, as captured by high voter turnout, is indicative of an active and vigilant populace who are more likely to hold governments accountable and ensure better human rights protections. The paper tests the relationship between human rights and voter turnout among 89 democratic countries from 1976 to 2008. The findings demonstrate that a participative citizenry enhances governmental respect for human rights. (shrink)

Machiavelli's 500-year-old treatise The Prince outlined the central features of the realist tradition in international relations. His premises led him to question the likelihood of efficacious and stable international law and international courts, a skepticism that has present-day proponents. Machiavelli's reluctance was due to a combination of features of human nature and a focus on anarchic features of the relations among states. This article challenges these assumptions and implications: Other interpretations of human nature are closer to Machiavelli's text, (...) and current relations among states are significantly different. The revised assumptions should make Machiavelli's followers more optimistic about international law and international courts. (shrink)

Stimulant drugs, transcranial magnetic stimulation, brain-computer interfaces, and even genetic modifications are all discussed as forms of potential cognitive enhancement. Cognitive enhancement can be conceived as a benefit-seeking strategy used by healthy individuals to enhance cognitive abilities such as learning, memory, attention, or vigilance. This phenomenon is hotly debated in the public, professional, and scientific literature. Many of the statements favoring cognitive enhancement (e.g., related to greater productivity and autonomy) or opposing it (e.g., related to health-risks and social expectations) (...) rely on claims about human welfare and human flourishing. But with real-world evidence from the social and psychological sciences often missing to support (or invalidate) these claims, the debate about cognitive enhancement is stalled. In this paper, we describe a set of crucial debated questions about psychological and social aspects of cognitive enhancement (e.g., intrinsic motivation, well-being) and explain why they are of fundamental importance to address in the cognitive enhancement debate and in future research. We propose studies targeting social and psychological outcomes associated with cognitive enhancers (e.g., stigmatization, burnout, mental well-being, work motivation). We also voice a call for scientific evidence, inclusive of but not limited to biological health outcomes, to thoroughly assess the impact of enhancement. This evidence is needed to engage in empirically informed policymaking, as well as to promote the mental and physical health of users and non-users of enhancement. (shrink)

An established ethical principle of biomedical research involving human subjects stipulates that risk to subjects should be proportionate to an experiment’s potential benefits. Sometimes this principle is imprecisely stated as a requirement that ‘risks and benefits’ be balanced. First, it is noted why this language is imprecise. Second, the persistence of such language is attributed to how it functions as a rhetorical trope. Finally, an argument is made that such a trope is infelicitous because it may not achieve its (...) intended persuasive purposes. More importantly, it should be avoided because it masks the important role that chance plays in clinical research. Risk is the possibility of harm. As a precondition of harm it is unintended and undesirable in projects of biomedical research. It requires ethical vigilance. As a vehicle of chance, however, it is both intended and desirable. It requires methodological appreciation. (shrink)

In 2023, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued its ruling in the case of Sanchez v France. The case revolved around the conviction of the applicant, a politician, for inciting hatred or violence against people due to their religious affiliation. What makes this case unique among hate speech cases before the Strasbourg Court was that the applicant’s conviction did not stem from his own words but rather from his alleged failure to promptly remove commends (...) made by others under one of his (non-offensive) Facebook posts. This case has prompted a myriad of significant questions, the main one being, how an earth did we reach a point where imposing a criminal penalty on an internet user for someone else’s speech and how does such a penalty align with the principles of necessity and proportionality outlined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression)? This paper aims to address this question by examining the Court’s approach to hate speech, particularly in the realm of politics, how to the Court situates politicians within the scope of Article 10 and how the gradual expansion of ‘duties and responsibilities’ incorporated in Article 10 to engulf those who are not the actual speakers (namely internet intermediaries and, with Sanchez individual politicians). It concludes that Sanchez constitutes a worrying term for the very worst of hate speech and free speech jurisprudence as individuals (at the moment just politicians) have a duty to be vigilant of what others say on the former’s social media pages. If they are not, criminal penalties are deemed to be justified and legitimate by Strasbourg. (shrink)

The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it (...) acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework. (shrink)

We use screams to explore ideas presented in the target article. Evolving first in animals as a response to predation, screams reveal more complex social use in nonhuman primates and, in humans, uniquely, are associated with a much greater variety of emotional contexts including fear, anger, surprise, and happiness. This expansion, and the potential for manipulation, promotes listener social vigilance.

This paper addresses two methodological paths in Artificial Intelligence: the paths of Babbage and anti-Cartesianism. While those researchers who have followed the latter have attempted to reverse the Cartesian dictum according to which machines cannot think in principle, Babbage’s path, which has been partially neglected, implies that the replacement of humans—and not the creation of minds—should provide the foundation of AI. In view of the examined paths, the claim that we support here is this: in line with Babbage, AI researchers (...) have recently concentrated upon the replacement of human labour, and thus upon the creation of Machine Learning systems. After presenting and analysing the paths, we characterise Machine Learning via its developments and an illustrative example. Then, we put forward an argument that shows that total replacement of human labour will not be feasible for practical and conceptual reasons despite the successful developments in recent AI systems. Our discussion finally leads to optimism and awareness: AI’s advances allow humans to dedicate themselves to higher level tasks, but these advances also require that we be vigilant about the responsibilities granted to ML-based systems. (shrink)

It is one sign of the lack of understanding of the value of the humanities, to educational research and inquiry as well as to our world more widely, that such justifications of them as are offered frequently take a crudely instrumental form. The humanities are welcomed insofar as they are beneficial to the economy, for example, or play a therapeutic role in people's physical or mental well-being. In higher education in the UK, they are marginalized for similar reasons, on the (...) grounds that they neither appeal to the lucrative overseas student market nor constitute a significant source of grant income from research councils, industry, or other funding sources. While their place in educational research is still defended in many quarters, the increasing demand that research should have “impact” can leave the humanities appearing ineffectual. Furthermore, the very idea of research is widely taken to mandate empiricist and “scientific” approaches. Although there are no easy solutions to this state of things, Richard Smith argues in this essay that those of us who value the humanities in and for themselves might adopt two approaches in particular: to pursue vigilant criticism of the rampant instrumentalism and scientism of our time, and to emphasize the importance of that distinctive feature of humane inquiry: interpretation. (shrink)

"The vigilant worm" about G.S. A frying pan, having deeply become entrenched in human nature, having come to an understanding of the anthropological crisis, as a result of surviving, is now very technogenic in civilization. For the vigilance of the “vigilant worm”, the culturologist beat the humanistic instrument with the visionary philosophies, religion, morality, mystery, art, praise to the faithful, holy, kind, good-natured. For the sake of meticulous law є zernennya of today’s suspension thoughts to the historical access (...) to their predecessors, who should take revenge on their spacious human potential potential. Yogi osmislennya zalysha naysuttvіshe zavdannya, scho stand in front of the philosophical attainment. At this zv'yazku vivchennya creative creativity Spadshchiny G.S. The frying pans look like they are more relevant than those of the philosopher, but they are also wider - the most humanistic. (shrink)

Any humane society needs a just and compassionate way to care for those who are sick, and should be vigilant in identifying and eliminating barriers that frustrate efforts to adequately care for the sick. Some current insurance underwriting practices constitute effective barriers to access to healthcare and serve to diminish the place of freedom and justice in our healthcare system.

Early Syriac Christianity presents two notable paradigms for understanding liturgy as a means for the ethical formation of the congregation. Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) in his hymns for the Nativity vigil, and Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) in his verse homilies, each addressed their congregations in ways that utilized ritual participation in the liturgy for ethical and moral cultivation. Ephrem sought to instill his congregation with a biblical and theological understanding of the Nativity that would yield ethical enactment in (...) the world. Jacob worked to use the experience of liturgical participation to mold the Christian’s moral disposition. For both, God’s salvation enabled the healing of the human condition in its various dimensions: physical, social, ecclesial. Liturgy as disciplined ritual activity provided the tools by which their congregations could learn, experience, and enact that healing. (shrink)

Coherence plays an important role in psychology. In this article, I suggest that coherence takes two main forms in humans’ cognitive system. The first belong to ‘system 1’. It relies on the degree of coherence between different representations to regulate them, without coherence being represented. By contrast other mechanisms, belonging to system 2, allow humans to represent the degree of coherence between different representations and to draw inferences from it. It is suggested that the mechanisms of explicit coherence evaluation have (...) social functions. They are used as means of epistemic vigilance—to evaluate what other people tell us. They can also be turned inwards to examine the coherence of our own beliefs. Their function is then to minimize the chances that we are perceived as being incoherent. Evidence from different domains of psychology is briefly reviewed in support of these hypotheses. (shrink)

Human ritual sacrifices are one of the cultural practices that are undertaken in Nigeria and in many West African countries. While such ritual sacrifices are utilized for different purposes, this paper, however, focuses on baby farming for the purpose of human child ritual sacrifice for community and individual utilizations. Recruiting women for the sole purpose of using them for procreation is exploitative as such young women are usually in dire economic situations. Baby farmers identify the economic vulnerabilities of (...) such women and make them offers they cannot refuse. In like manner, helpless children who are harvested from the farms and who suffer gruesome deaths must be considered as the greatest victims in baby farming and harvesting arrangements. The paper stresses the need for stricter government vigilance and community sensitization to the horror of killing babies for sacrifice. (shrink)

Our time is characterized by what seems like an unprecedented process of intense global homogenization. This reality provides the context for exploring the nature and value of toleration. Hence, this essay is meant primarily as a contribution to international ethics rather than political philosophy. It is argued that because of the non-eliminability of differences in the world we should not even hope that there can be only one global religion or ideology. Further exploration exposes conceptual affinity between the concepts of (...) intolerance, ideology, and doctrinal evil. The last concept is developed in contrast to pure evil and average evil, and under the assumption of the metaphysical necessity of free will. Doctrinal evil is found to represent the main source of intolerance as a result of a mechanism that tends to confuse doctrinal evil (or the competing conceptions of the good) with pure evil. This connection between doctrinal evil and pure evil provides ideologies with their forcefulness. Tolerance cannot be properly understood in terms of a simple opposition to intolerance, however. Tolerance emerges as a sort of vigilance, conscientiousness, and non-negligence based not on a supposedly correct interpretation of the good, but rather on the acceptance of the fallibility of any such attempted definition. Conversely, the principal evil in doctrinal evil is found in arrogance that accompanies the intolerance-inducing irresponsible thoughtlessness. With this conceptual topology in mind the paper also addresses questions regarding religious tolerance, the ideology of human rights and democracy, the right to self-defense, ways to face evil, the dialectics of using old names for novel evils, and related issues. (shrink)

Social behavior in most human societies is characterized by the following of moral rules explicitly justified by religious belief systems. These systems constitute the diverse domain of human sacred values. Supernatural entities as founders or warranty of moral principles may be seen as a form of “conversation stoppers,” considerations that can be dropped into a moral decision process in order to prevent endlessly reconsidering and endlessly asking for further justification. In this article we offer a general naturalistic framework (...) toward answering the question of why supernatural entities are so attractive in moral argumentation. We present an explanatory model based on the phenomena of multiple channels of moral reasoning, the suspension of epistemic vigilance, and relevance assumptions through the attractiveness of the sacred, moral dumbfounding, and the expression of social coalitionary commitment. Thus, in light of much of current cognitive theory, sacred values make sense as basins in the evolutionary landscape of human morality. (shrink)

In order to formulate hypotheses about the evolutionary underpinnings that preceded the first glimmerings of language, mother-infant gestural and vocal interactions are compared in chimpanzees and humans and used to model those of early hominins. These data, along with paleoanthropological evidence, suggest that prelinguistic vocal substrates for protolanguage that had prosodic features similar to contemporary motherese evolved as the trend for enlarging brains in late australopithecines/early Homo progressively increased the difficulty of parturition, thus causing a selective shift toward females that (...) gave birth to relatively undeveloped neonates. It is hypothesized that hominin mothers adopted new foraging strategies that entailed maternal silencing, reassuring, and controlling of the behaviors of physically removed infants (i.e., that shared human babies' inability to cling to their mothers' bodies). As mothers increasingly used prosodic and gestural markings to encourage juveniles to behave and to follow, the meanings of certain utterances (words) became conventionalized. This hypothesis is based on the premises that hominin mothers that attended vigilantly to infants were strongly selected for, and that such mothers had genetically based potentials for consciously modifying vocalizations and gestures to control infants, both of which receive support from the literature. Key Words: bipedalism; brain size; chimpanzees; foraging; gestures; hominins; infant riding; motherese; prosody; protolanguage. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. His analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives "after Auschwitz," of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly-conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human (...) suffering, all speak to central concerns of our time. The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from Adorno's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a "language without soil." Adorno' s finely chiseled sentences perform a ceaseless gesture of thoughtful vigilance, a vigilance understood not in the sense of moralizing or ethical normativity but of a rigorous attention to the presuppositions of thinking itself. The volume's fresh readings conspire to yield a refractory and unorthodox Adorno, a suggestive and at times infuriating thinker of the first order, whose intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil. Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview Adorno gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges. (shrink)

At present, there is an enormous gulf between the visibility of evil and the paucity of our intellectual resources for coming to grips with it. We have been flooded with images of death camps, terrorist attacks and horrendous human suffering. Yet when we ask what we mean by radical evil and how we are to account for it, we seem to be at a loss for proper responses. Bernstein seeks to discover what we can learn about the meaning of (...) evil and human responsibility. He turns to philosophers such as Kant, who coined the expression 'radical evil', as well as to Hegel and Schelling. He also examines more recent explorations of evil, namely the thinking of Freud and Nietzsche on the moral psychology of evil. Finally, he looks at the way in which three post-Holocaust thinkers - Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt - have sought to come to grips with evil "after Auschwitz." Bernstein's primary concern throughout this challenging book is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it. Radical Evil will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social and political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

This paper is an ethical exegesis of the biblical story of Gibeah, which concludes the Book of Judges (19–21), to show the catastrophic failure of the anti-political politics of the “community of virtue”, i.e., the rejection of power for the sake of moral society, such as proposed by libertarians, neo-liberals, anarchists and utopians. I consider Kant’s statement of the political problem: given humanity’s unsocial sociality, where each person is tempted to act as an exception to universal law, humans need rulers, (...) but how to obtain rulers who are not themselves ruled by power, and become tyrannical, rather than being ruled by justice? The solution proposed by “the community of virtue” would reject power altogether and replace it with society regulated exclusively according to the moral virtue of its members. The Bible’s story of Gibeah shows graphically and conclusively the failure of any such attempt. Instead, as with normative political philosophy, the Bible endorses the rule of a king, i.e., the rule of the state, and a politics whereby power is disciplined to serve justice because it is rooted in Torah, i.e., a fundamental covenant, charter or constitution, aware and vigilant regarding the ambiguities and temptations of sovereignty, and therefore, ideally, always open to critique. As exemplified by biblical prophets, political protest against injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the least—widow, orphan, stranger—is at once religious obligation and true patriotism. (shrink)