Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Human cognitive performance has crucial significance for legal process, often creating the difference between fair and unfair imprisonment. Lawyers, judges, and jurors need to follow long and complex arguments. They need to understand technical language. Jurors need to remember what happens during a long trial. The demands imposed on jurors in particular are sizeable and the cognitive challenges are discussed in this chapter. Jurors are often subjected to both tremendous decision complexity and tremendous evidence complexity. Some of these problems could be ameliorated if we can somehow enhance the cognitive capacities, including attention and memory, of various players in trials. There are multiple ways in which cognition can be improved either by external tools or by an increasing number of biomedical interventions that act directly on the brain. The article surveys a range of beneficial and detrimental effects that substances can have on cognition.

In a recent paper,1 we proposed a Personalised Patient Preference Predictor (P4), building on earlier work by Rid and Wendler.2 The P4 is a hypothetical computer program that would, in the context of surrogate decision-making (eg, following a substituted judgement standard), use generative artificial intelligence (AI) models to infer a patient’s underlying values and preferences and, on that basis, predict which treatment option they would choose in the current situation. Such AI models, we suggested, could be ‘fine-tuned’ on various pre-existing data or materials produced by, or otherwise pertaining to (eg, including information about), the patient considered as a unique individual.1 3 Annoni has offered a thoughtful critique of this proposal, challenging what he (implicitly) characterises as assumptions underlying our work.4 In his critique, in addition to advancing the negative claim that the P4 would not, as we had suggested,1 allow surrogate decision-makers to more effectively show respect for formerly competent patients, Annoni makes the positive claim that the P4 could help surrogates better honour the patient’s unique identity. We appreciate Annoni’s contribution to this important ethical conversation and welcome the opportunity to clarify our position. We agree with Annoni that the P4 serves ethical purposes beyond showing respect for autonomy, and that this may include honouring their identity.5 We also agree, contrary to what Annoni implies about our position, that respect for autonomy is not simply reducible to mere preference satisfaction. However, we do not agree with Annoni’s claim that the P4 does not, or could not, promote the value of autonomy at all. We argue that Annoni’s view of respect for autonomy is too narrow, insofar as it seems to require occurrent explicit consent, which is impossible for incapacitated patients. We advocate for a spectrum approach to autonomy: When direct choice or …

Analytic particularism claims that judgments of moral wrongness are about particular acts rather than general principles. Metaphysical particularism claims that what makes true moral judgments true is not general principles but nonmoral properties of particular acts. Epistemological particularism claims that studying particular acts apart from general principles can justify beliefs in moral judgments. Methodological particularism claims that we will do better morally in everyday life if we look carefully at each particular decision as it arises and give up the search for a complete moral theory. This paper raises problems for each of these versions of particularism.

ABSTRACT In “What is terrorism?” Igor Primoratz defines ‘terrorism’ as “the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them, or other people, into a course of action they otherwise would not take.” I argue that this definition needs to be modified (1) by requiring that the harm or threat be to persons other than those intimidated, (2) by including aims which do not concern action, and (3) by distinguishing terrorists who know they are terrorists from those who do not.

In his admirable review, Ballantyne characterizes intellectual humility (IH) as a personal way ‘to manage evidence … in seeking truth.’ However, not every way of managing truth is virtuous. Since IH is supposed to be an intellectual virtue, we propose that IH should be understood as a ‘golden mean’ or ‘middle path’ between extremes of intellectual arrogance and lack of self-confidence (or between dogmatism and gullibility). The golden mean should not be characterized descriptively by the statistical mean of a population but instead either epistemically by accuracy in intellectual assessments of oneself and others or pragmatically by the kinds of such assessments that enable or lead to successful inquiry. This comment explains and considers advantages and disadvantages of these two ways of locating the golden mean.

In the film Dark City, mysterious pale-skinned creatures rearrange a city and alter the inhabitants’ identities and memories each night. Every morning, residents awaken in a different city with new identities, unaware of what changed while they slept. Though fictional, this scenario seems to mirror an intriguing aspect of our lives—not when we wake up, but when we go to sleep. Each night, as we dream, we often find ourselves in strange environments, experiencing unrealistic or implausible events, intense negative emotions, and even transformations that make us feel like different people. The dream world appears to rupture waking reality, making anything possible. Some researchers argue that this suggests our dreaming life is discontinuous with our waking life. But is this really so? Are dreams a complete break from wakefulness, implying that we lead two separate lives: one grounded in consistency and stability by day, and another filled with fleeting, bizarre experiences at night? This chapter explores whether the relationship between our dreaming mind and our waking mind is best understood as one of continuity or discontinuity. Since continuity and discontinuity can be interpreted in different ways, we examine various dimensions through which this debate can be framed. The first section focuses on the content of experiences, while the second addresses their affective dimension. The third section explores the continuity and discontinuity of the self in wakefulness and dreaming, and the fourth discusses brain activity and other physiological markers. The last section presents some concluding thoughts on this debate.

Ideal for undergraduate courses in philosophy of law, this comprehensive anthology examines such topics as the concept of law, the dispute between natural law theorists and legal positivists, the relations between law and morality, criminal responsibility and legal punishment, the rights of the individual against the state, justice and equality, and legal evidence as compared with scientific evidence. The readings have been selected from both philosophy and law journals and include classic texts, contemporary theoretical developments, and well-known recent court cases. The text features extensive introductions that make even the most profound writings accessible to undergraduates.

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency.

Kolber’s magnificent book argues that “pure consequentialism is superior to standard retributivism when applied to incarceration in the here and now.” I admire his focus on actual contexts and particular cases of incarceration, and I accept his main criticisms of standard retributivism. However, I reply that pure consequentialism faces several profound problems similar to those he presses against standard retributivism. In particular, I argue that pure consequentialism is not as simple, practical, or fruitful as Kolber claims, and that it has trouble dealing with uncertainty and aligning with intuition and conventional morality. In the end, Kolber fails to show that pure consequentialism is any good in the here and now or superior to standard retributivism in any important sense.

Wage theft—the underpayment or nonpayment of workers’ wages and benefits by employers—is pervasive in the US and abroad, adversely affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people annually. Although academics, advocacy groups, and investigative journalists have made advances in documenting the pervasiveness and severity of wage theft practices across states, nations, and industries, research has yet to identify and characterize the processes that make the public see such practices as legitimate. Across four well-powered studies (total N = 2291), we leverage theory and research on moral identity and on evolutionary approaches to moral values to investigate a possible underlying psychological antecedent of the judged legitimacy of wage theft. We propose that the value placed on a widely shared and moralized principle—loyalty—may (ironically) underlie the legitimization of wage theft practices. Although people often consider loyalty to be a positive moral principle or virtue that ought to be valued and exemplified in social and business relations, we find consistent evidence that placing more value on loyalty closely tracks stronger beliefs that wage theft practices are legitimate. Ultimately, differences in the valuation of loyalty may help to explain and predict judgments about the legitimacy of wage theft practices across individuals, groups, organizations, and cultures.

In Morality by Degrees, Alastair Norcross presents contextualist accounts of good and right acts as well as harm and free will. All of his analyses compare what is assessed with “the appropriate alternative,” which is supposed to vary with context. This paper clarifies Norcross's approach, distinguishes it from previous versions of moral contextualism and contrastivism, and reveals difficulties in adequately specifying the context and the appropriate alternative. It also shows how these difficulties can be avoided by moving from contextualism to a kind of contrastivism that does not claim that any alternative is or is not appropriate or relevant.

The DSM–5 characterizes mental disorders as significant disturbances in cognition, emotion, or behavior. But what might unite the disturbances on this list? We hypothesize that mental disorders can all be meaningfully characterized as failures of attention. We understand these as failures to distribute attention in the way one has most reason to, and we include both failures of tendency and of ability. We discuss six examples of mental disorders and offer a preliminary gloss of how to recast each as centrally involving a failure of attention. We close by highlighting theoretical and practical upshots of our proposal.