Browsing by Department "Philosophy"

Prudential hedonism is a school of thought in the philosophy of welfare that says that only pleasure is good for us in itself and only pain is bad for us in itself. This dissertation concerns an especially austere form of prudential hedonism: basic prudential hedonism (BPH). BPH claims that all pleasure is good for us in itself, and all pain is bad for us in itself, without exception; that all pleasures feel fundamentally alike, as do all pains; and that the amount of welfare in a person’s life can (in principle) be calculated just by adding up the amount of pleasure it contains and subtracting the amount of pain. The dissertation presents a positive argument for the claim that pleasures and pains are defined by common phenomenal properties, defends BPH against a battery of objections, and outlines an argument for accepting BPH on the grounds that it is simpler than competing views.

In this study I address the moral and cultural disagreement and conflict regarding the interpretation of human rights norms that threatens the legitimacy of the human rights enterprise. Such disagreements present an opportunity to probe, question and dissect beliefs to uncover inconsistencies and false assumptions and attain a deeper insight into human rights norms that are presently left in a rather abstract form in international human rights documents and conventions.

I describe and defend an institutionally-driven dialogical approach that promises to systematically address these moral and cultural disagreements. My approach rests on two claims. First, clearer content for human rights norms will emerge from within particular cultures if critical cultural and moral investigation through dialogue is encouraged. By engaging in dialogical processes, we not only discharge our obligation to aid in a process that leads to a fair specification of human rights norms, but we also come to understand how human rights norms are, at their very core, participative.

Second, one way that international human rights institutions (IHRIs) can legitimately fulfill their function of supporting human rights is by encouraging critical moral investigation through dialogue. I make this proposal more concrete by discussing the case law on the issue of transsexuals that has come before the European Court of Human Rights.

This is a philosophical work on the subject of play. Organized around a handful of questions, the thesis approaches inquiry by first integrating empirical lines of research and then applying the methods of philosophy. The first chapter is an introductory one that serves to motivate the project and outline its central features. Chapter 2 concerns the question of why humans play from an evolutionary and psychological perspective. The conclusions reached in this chapter form the basis of chapter 3's ethical discussion of why and how we ought to play. Chapter 4 uses an interpretation of Jean Piaget's The Moral Judgment of the Child as a stepping stone to an investigation of how play and moral development are related. Chapter 5 addresses the metaphysics of play by critiquing extant philosophical and biological accounts of what play is before advancing a novel theory based on active engagement and frivolousness. To conclude the dissertation, chapter 6 ties together themes from various chapters.

My dissertation aims to show that sympathy, when well-cultivated, is adequate to motivate and produce altruistic behavior in a consistent and reliable manner. I do so by creating a dialogue between the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. I define sympathy as a four-dimensional emotion—including perceptive, visceral, motivational and cognitive aspects. I argue that sympathy in its mature stage is capable of motivating people in a consistent manner, and its role in morality cannot be replaced by other emotions. In addition, I argue that the leap from an unstable reaction to a mature, consistent and reliable emotion is made through proper cultivation. Cultivational methods such as ritual practice, rational persuasion, self-cultivation, etc. are discussed and evaluated. I also discuss the limitations of sympathy and its cultivation towards the end of the dissertation.

Working memory—the mental capacity to “hold on to” information after it ceases to be perceptually available—is one of the most discussed topics in psychology and neuroscience. Despite the importance of working memory in the sciences, however, there is only a small amount of philosophical research on the topic. The aim of my dissertation is to provide a philosophically-informed account of working memory, and to assess its relationship to other mental phenomena, including attention and consciousness.

In chapter one, I provide a broad historical overview of working memory. I begin by outlining William James’ original distinction between “primary” and “secondary” memory, and work my way up to present-day neuroscientific investigations of working memory. One of the main conclusions of this chapter is that there is no single working memory “module” in the brain. Instead, working memory is best conceptualized as a functionally-defined process that is potentially realized by multiple neural mechanisms.

In chapter two, I explore the link between working memory and attention. Recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience indicates that attention is (to some extent) involved in the process of working memory maintenance. However, it remains unclear whether the contents of working memory are always attended, or if working memory representations can be dynamically shifted in and out of the focus of attention. Drawing on empirical and phenomenological data, I argue that the second view is correct. Although attention plays an important role in working memory maintenance, working memory representations can persist—at least temporarily—outside the focus of attention.

Chapter three addresses a related question: namely, how working memory relates to consciousness. I distinguish three possible positions on this score: (i) working memory representations are always conscious; (ii) working memory representations can be either conscious or unconscious, but they are all accessible to consciousness; and (iii) working memory representations can be either conscious or unconscious, and some are inaccessible to consciousness. Based on the available empirical data, I argue in favor of position (ii). Evidence suggests that working memory representations can be unconscious, but such unconscious representations still appear to be consciously accessible, in the sense that they can be brought to consciousness at will.

Finally, in chapter four, I provide a critique of Peter Carruthers’ recent sensory-based account of working memory. According to Carruthers, attention only targets “mid-level” sensory areas, and thus the representations held in working memory will necessarily be sensory based in nature. I disagree. I point out that there is some evidence for attentional modulation outside of modality-specific sensory areas. I also highlight several empirical studies which provide preliminary support for the existence of non-sensory (i.e., amodal) working memory representations.

This dissertation identifies 5 mayor demands regarding the role of the emotions in Aristotelian virtue theories and examines how well some contemporary psychological views of the emotions deal with these issues. The discussion of the role of emotion in Aristotelian virtue theory draws on Aristotle's texts and the works of Terence Irwin, Nancy Sherman, Martha Nussbaum, John Cooper, Rosalind Hursthouse and Arash Abizadeh. The discussion of the contemporary psychological views of the emotions is based on the work of Paul Griffiths in What Emotions Really Are, and focuses on his division of the study of emotion into affect programs and higher cognitive emotions.

The dissertation is divided in three chapters. The first chapter discusses Aristotelian definitions of emotion and outlines the following demands that psychological theories of emotion should be able to explain: (1) plausibility, (2) psychological harmony, (3) motivational support, (4) perception of moral salience and (5) training. The second chapter explains the psychological views that Griffiths focuses on, the affect program theory and the higher cognitive view, and highlights the areas relevant to the Aristotelian demands. The third chapter compares the contemporary theories of emotion discussed with Aristotelian views of emotion by taking the Aristotelian demands outlined in the first chapter and examining how the contemporary theories handle these issues. I conclude that the contemporary views do not adequately meet the Aristotelian demands and need to pay more attention to the Aristotelian view of emotion to achieve a more complete view. I argue that how a theory distinguishes between basic and higher cognitive emotions impacts the compatibility with Aristotelian notions of emotion and how it can meet its demands.

According to everyday folk psychology, our deliberate goals and intentions, together with our character traits, explain much of our overt behavior. These ways of explaining behavior are pervasive. According to many social psychologists, they are also typically false. Instead, much human behavior is controlled by psychological processes prompted through external triggers that we do not recognize and over which we have little control. Once triggered, these processes shape our behavior in profound ways. Experiments demonstrating these effects are legion, suggesting that any number of elements can have determining sway on our behavior, whether it's a simple smile (which can make cooperation among players in strategic games more likely), or the chance finding of a dime in a payphone (which can temporarily increase the probability of the finder acting altruistically), or the presence of unappealing, half-eaten foodstuffs in an experimenter's room (which makes subjects behave moralistically when responding to unrelated experimental questions). Minor details can have major impact on our behavior, and our ignorance of this phenomenon should be of moral concern. This is the focus of my dissertation.

In particular, I argue that individuals can often agree or disagree on moral issues not because of the content of their respective beliefs, but rather because of their unawareness of (and thus inattentiveness to) the subtle impact of their immediate environments--and their own mannerisms--on moral reasoning and conduct. The effects can be considerable: How long we are willing to engage in dialogue; the degree to which we find accommodation to others acceptable; the creativity we deploy in finding mutually agreeable outcomes to problems; the significance we attach to any problems we may have--each of these crucial factors in moral deliberation can be affected profoundly by minor variations in our conduct and our situations. Take any social encounter: Even before we share our opinions and engage in serious discussion, we are already signaling various attitudes and even content-rich information about ourselves through cues arising from our facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, forms of address, and other seemingly minor details of our comportment. These cues automatically bias how others interpret our subsequent behavior, and thereby influence how our interactions with others enfold. Attending to such minor details may seem antiquated--even priggish--from a modern perspective. Yet the influence they exert should caution us against discounting their importance.

So I throw my hat in with a philosopher who did not overlook the impact of these variables, and who viewed minding them as a vital source of moral power: Confucius (fl. ca. 6th century BCE). In the Analects, we find Confucius preoccupied by very minor details of one's mannerisms and their impact on others. This led Confucius to motivate norms of conduct aimed at structuring social exchanges in ways conducive to achieving interpersonal agreement or accommodation. I argue that, for our purposes today, we can reduce his various norms to just two. The first is to 'mind manners'--in other words, to be attentive to details of one's own behavior out of consideration of its impact on others; the second is to 'give the benefit of a doubt'--to discount the impact of negative first impressions in order to allow for healthy moral relationships to develop.

Abiding by these norms can foster a form of ethical bootstrapping--that is, lifting or prompting one another towards our joint moral ends. If the social psychological literature is true, then whether or not any individual will be able to meet her ethical aims on any particular occasion will hinge on the actions and manners of her immediate interlocutors, which in turn will hinge on her own. In being mindful of the interconnectedness of our behavior, we not only affect how others react to us, but we also thereby affect the kinds of reactions we face in turn. The bootstrapping is mutual.

The deep interconnectedness of our behavior as reflected in experimental social psychology should lead us away from thinking of individuals as trapped by aspects of their psychology and determined to act in fixed ways, come what may. Instead, individuals' behavior is highly malleable; with the right prompts, even the most recalcitrant individuals can be moved in new directions. After all, people can have flourishing or accommodating moral relationships in spite of real differences in their avowed moral commitments, and deleterious or rancorous moral relationships in spite of substantive agreement on big ticket moral items. In pluralistic societies where we expect clashes of norms to occur, it is vital to uncover the conditions propitious to agreement or accommodation not just at a theoretical level but a practical level as well. This begins with what we have most control over: our manners.

Many psychologists and philosophers hold that anger is a completely normal and often healthy human emotion. This position perhaps traces back to Aristotle, who argued that anger is morally good when it is moderated, such as towards the right people, to the right degree, and for the right reasons. Even though Aristotle’s position has widespread acceptance, this view of anger is challenged by the philosophical traditions of Stoicism and Buddhism. Despite starting from disparate premises, both conclude that anger is impermissible and ought to be eliminated, a position called anger eliminativism. Even so, there has been little critical engagement with their respective arguments as bona fide philosophical positions, worthy of consideration in their own right. This dissertation hopes to help remedy that lack. To do so, it offers a philosophical exploration of Stoic and Buddhist arguments. It contrasts and critically evaluates the views of Stoicism and Buddhism, evaluates the Buddhist metaphysical reasoning about anger, responds to existing interpretations of Stoic anger eliminativism, and presents Stoic objections to arguments from the Confucian tradition that anger is at least sometimes the morally virtuous response to perceived wrongdoing.

Since Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation, sentience has been the dominant justification for increasing non-human animal (hereafter ‘animal’) welfare. This dissertation is an attempt to discover a different reason to treat animals better: their moral agency. If animals are moral agents, then they deserve additional moral rights, rights that arise independently from their sentience.

To find out whether animals are moral agents, I focus on whether animals are ever morally responsible for their actions. More specifically, I examine whether animals punish each other. I focus on a special type of punishment: third-party retributive punishment. This is punishment issued by an unaffected bystander for a moral wrongdoing.

Humans do not treat animals as moral agents, but this does not mean that animals are never morally responsible. I evaluate animal behavior from the contexts of their own communities. Rather than focus on the ways in which humans treat animals, I focus on the ways in which animals treat one another.

This dissertation is highly interdisciplinary, utilizing principles of philosophy alongside empirical evidence from psychology, evolutionary anthropology, animal behavior, and ecology. Both the theoretical and empirical evidence support my main conclusion: animals are moral agents.

This thesis comprises an investigation into a very well known and perennial philosophical debate over the interpretive status of our most well confirmed scientific theories, known as "scientific realism." I do not defend scientific realism; rather, I set out to determine what scientific realism is in the first place. My contention is that the thesis is not a single, unified view, but rather a conglomeration of loosely associated propositions that are highly conceptually interwoven, but rarely distinguished. These consist of several different metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic doctrines, which I examine in great detail. I then argue that the indeterminate nature of scientific realism muddles the issue (if there is any) and renders debates fruitless. I attempt to define a thesis with relatively more precise content, which I call the "Core Realist Commitment," CRC. I argue that the CRC prioritizes epistemology - with the thesis that we can and do have (some) theoretical knowledge. I then demonstrate the relatively minimal commitments of the CRC, namely, a minimalist and very undemanding metaphysics, and almost none of the semantic theses that have been traditionally associated with realism. I conclude that the CRC is a step forward in thinking about the debate, not just for its relative precision but also because it is consistent with, and even tolerant of, a wide array of disagreement over concerns that are, I argue, external to the debate and need to be decided on independent grounds.

Recent accounts of authenticity have defined the concept in terms of self-creation, self-discovery, or some combination of the two. While these accounts get something right about the concept, I argue that they fail to capture all the elements of authenticity that an adequate account ought to capture. In this dissertation, I develop and defend a novel account of authenticity that preserves some features of previous accounts while also introducing new ones. My account is two-pronged (recognizing what I term the ‘target’ and ‘response’ dimensions of authenticity), and through it I come to the conclusion that authenticity is best characterized as the practice of living in accordance with one’s values. After outlining and defending this account, I consider how it might impact or inform current debates regarding how the use of psychoactive drugs for so-called ‘enhancement’ purposes affect users’ authentic selves.

People buy many goods produced in ways that appear to call for a remedy or a reaction from actors in developed countries: these are goods which appear to have “grave flaws” in the upstream supply chain. For example, one can buy products produced by firms which routinely clear-cut forests, employ child or forced labor, defy domestic health-and-safety laws, intimidate labor organizers, and so on. On the other hand, many of the global poor rely on the employment opportunities that global production networks create, and developing countries tend to see their low production costs as their comparative advantage to attract foreign investment and upgrade to higher stages of development. In this dissertation, I explore different aspects of the moral, political and social philosophy surrounding grave flaws, particularly what they entail for consumers in affluent countries. Chapters 1-3 concern the appropriate role of consumers and those who would mobilize them to remedy grave flaws. In Chapter 1, I survey the kinds of moral relationship that consumers might have to the grave flaws. I then ask under what conditions an individual consumer has strong moral reasons to react to grave flaws by practicing selective purchasing. I conclude that the deep epistemic difficulties surrounding recognising each good’s connection with a grave flaw, and the effects of switching to apparently better products, mean consumers do not typically have strong moral reasons to practice conscientious consumption. Chapters 2 and 3 turn to consider what I call political consumerism, practiced by consumers as an aggregate group, mobilized by those who aim to remedy some of the grave flaws. In Chapter 2 I raise concerns about the necessity, effectiveness, and risks of political consumerism, and argue that it might be an effective and appropriate means to remedy grave flaws in global supply chains only in rather specific circumstances. Furthermore, in Chapter 3, I argue that because political consumerism threatens several liberal-democratic values, the mobilizers of political consumerism should attempt to apply more deliberative and democratic elements to their campaigns. Finally, in Chapter 4, I turn to the question of which flaws in supply chains are actually grave. I use the apparel industry as an example, and argue that, apart from outright fraud and coercion, cases of firms trying to undermine or ignore attempts to collectively overcome systemic market failures in the supply chain are the grave flaws we in affluent countries should be most concerned about.

At the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce wrote that "chance begets order" - indeterministic or `chancy' processes can underlie orderly and seemingly deterministic processes. Indeed, Peirce argues that indeterminism is the seed of all order in the natural world. The dissertation explores this theme in three parts. The first chapter reconstructs and elaborates Peirce's objections against necessitarianism, the position that all natural laws are perfectly orderly, deterministic. The second chapter examines and elaborates Ronald Aylmer Fisher's sophisticated analogy between gas models from statistical mechanics and his own population genetics models. The final chapter treats a contemporary indeterministic account of biological fitness and examines several points on which intuitions from deterministic theories misinterpret this quintessentially indeterministic position. The dissertation motivates an indeterministic theory of natural law and reinvigorates its implications for hierarchical models of the natural world.

This dissertation focuses on conceptions of victimhood across legal, political, and psychological domains. Conceptions of victimhood, as they currently stand, delegitimize the claims of legitimate victims and impose undue burdens upon victims to respond in a socially correct way. My research can be divided into three subsections: 1) legal and political conceptions of victimhood and the delegitimization of legitimate claims to victim status, 2) societal burdens placed on victims unduly because of their victim status, and 3) psychological conceptions internal to victims that make self-identification of blamelessness and victim-status more difficult than current scholarship suggests.

I build an expanded definition of victimhood that recognizes victims of structural harms and a parallel conception of survivorhood that legitimizes the suffering of victims even if they are seen as complicit actors in the harm they suffer. After building up a more robust conception of who counts as a legitimate victim, I investigate the internal self-conception that victims construct in light of the societal conceptions that surround them. In particular, I show that many victims have psychological reactions to being harmed that are at odds with the social expectations for how a victim ought to feel and act in relation to themselves and their offenders. The trajectory of my project first deals with others’ conceptions of victims, then addresses the ethical obligations imposed on victims as a condition of their legitimacy, and finally examines the psychological reactions of victims and internalization folk legal and psychological conceptions.

Death can be terrible for the survivors of the deceased, but can it be bad for the deceased themselves? Epicurus argued that it could not be, apparently because there is no temporal overlap between death and the deceased person—no time at which both are present. This argument has received a great deal of philosophical attention in recent decades, but few philosophers of death find it convincing. Most believe that death can be bad for the deceased and some fear that grave moral implications would follow if it could not be. This dissertation argues otherwise. It begins by defending Epicurus’ argument against a host of the most promising contemporary objections to it. Finding that these objections fail, it concludes that the prevailing philosophical consensus is unjustified: although death may be a great misfortune for the survivors of the deceased, it cannot be bad for the deceased themselves. The dissertation then examines the implications of this conclusion for some other issues in ethics, arguing that these implications are not as unpleasant as is sometimes believed. In doing so, it hopes to establish a foothold for the larger project of showing that Epicureanism, deeply important though it is, does not wreak havoc upon the moral landscape.

Heightened awareness of the evolutionary, socio-cultural, and psychological origins of our moral judgments pushes many of us in the direction of moral skepticism, in the direction of doubting the objective truth of our moral judgments. But should awareness of the origins of our moral judgments shake our confidence in them? Are there good moral debunking challenges or debunking arguments from premises concerning the accessible origins of our moral judgments to skeptical conclusions regarding them? In vigorous pursuit of these questions, this dissertation sifts three promising moral debunking challenges to moral realism, namely Richard Joyce's (2001) evolutionary debunking argument from epistemic insensitivity, Sharon Street's (2006) "Darwinian Dilemma," and David Enoch's (2010) "Epistemological Challenge." It is argued that each challenge faces cogent objections that not only demonstrate the inadequacy of the best debunking challenges available but also instructively guide us to the development of new and more forceful debunking challenges to moral realism. This dissertation develops two new and forceful debunking challenges, both of which target the epistemic reliability and justification of our moral judgments on realist views of the moral facts. The first new debunking challenge starts from the premise that the best explanation of our moral judgments does not appeal to their truth and invokes a new species of epistemic insensitivity to secure the conclusion that our moral belief-forming processes are epistemically unreliable. The second new debunking challenge reasons that the best explanation of the fact that moral realists have no good explanation of the reliability of our moral belief-forming processes is that there is no such reliability.

In this dissertation, I defend the thesis that an epistemic judgment of probability must be interpreted against the background of the context of inquiry in which it is made: in the abductive context, judgments of probability are matters of decision, made strategically in service to the investigative goal of the inquirer; in deduction, probabilities are derived based on the premises chosen in abduction, in order to explicate the implied commitments the agent may incur from those decisions; during the inductive stage, the inquirer is expected to conduct her empirical investigation in a deliberate manner, in accordance with the assertions and decisions she made during abduction and deduction, collectively referred to as the deliberative context.

I set the stage by proposing a pragmatist reading of Bas van Fraassen's Reflection Principle and his voluntarist interpretation of assertions of degrees of beliefs as performative locutions to express the intention to undertake a proportional epistemic commitment. I argue for a refinement of this view that I call deliberativism, which introduces an abductive dimension to understand the normative force that regulates these epistemic judgments. I then argue that decisions made in the context of abduction have inferential repercussions on the validity of inductive inference. In particular, I situate deliberativism in the context of statistical inference by critically examining a problem in the literature called optional stopping, which occurs when the experimenter's intention to stop can manipulate the statistical significance of the data. The last chapter explores the Pericean idea of deductive reasoning as the strategic interrogation of a provisionally chosen hypothesis by focusing on J. M. Keynes' notion of the weight of evidence.

A classic question in moral philosophy asks "Why be moral?" In other words, what reason or motive do people have to act in accordance with the requirements of morality? In the tradition of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, this project defends the thesis that nearly all people have reason to be moral nearly all of the time, because moral conduct generally serves individuals' desires and needs. It's argued, first, that a reason for action must be capable of motivating an agent to act, and second, that reasons for action motivate through the desires of the agent. This view is defended against the objection that reasons for action are not contingent on any particular agent's desires. Turning to morality, the case is made that the desires of an individual can be consonant with the demands of morality in any of three possible ways: (1) moral action serves one's other-regarding desires to help others; (2) moral action serves one's moral desires, which are formed when one internalizes the moral norms of his or her community; and (3) moral action serves one's self-regarding desires to avoid punishments that one incurs by violating moral norms. In the final chapter, it is acknowledged that the moral norms which happen to prevail in a society sometimes conflict with the moral convictions of individuals. Under certain conditions, however, it can be rational for nearly all members of a society to collectively change existing moral norms. Furthermore, it is within the power of individuals to foment the conditions for collective transitions to alternative moral norms.

Although the notion of dispassion has played an important role in many different traditions, such as Stoicism, Buddhism, Daoism, and eastern Christianity, it does not seem to hold much appeal to people today. To the modern ear, dispassion is often associated with apathy, which refers to a lack of feeling, motivation, or concern. Because of this association, dispassion carries a negative connotation and is frowned upon by many. In this dissertation, I hope to do justice to the notion of dispassion and identify a version of it that can be attractive as an ethical ideal. To do so, I focus on Stoicism and Zhuangism, the traditions of dispassion with which I am most familiar. After discussing Stoic dispassion and Zhuangist dispassion respectively, I argue that dispassion as they conceive it bears little resemblance to apathy. That is, dispassion does not extirpate all emotions, but simply takes us away from emotional upheavals in search of emotional peace. I also argue that Zhuangist dispassion is more plausible than Stoic dispassion through a comparison of their notions of the self. In particular, the Stoics in identifying the self with the self-sufficient virtue or reason not only fails to do justice to our patiency but also renders the self formalized and empty. By contrast, the Zhuangists in identifying the self with the plurality of daos makes possible a kind of self-sufficiency that is more appropriate to our embodied and relational existence.