Public discourse is often caustic and conflict-filled. This trend seems to be particularly evident when the content of such discourse is around moral issues (broadly defined) and when the discourse occurs on social media. Several explanatory mechanisms for such conflict have been explored in recent psychological and social-science literatures. The present work sought to examine a potentially novel explanatory mechanism defined in philosophical literature: Moral Grandstanding. According to philosophical accounts, Moral Grandstanding is the use of moral talk to seek social (...) status. For the present work, we conducted six studies, using two undergraduate samples (Study 1, N = 361; Study 2, N = 356); a sample matched to U.S. norms for age, gender, race, income, Census region (Study 3, N = 1,063); a YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Study 4, N = 2,000); and a brief, one-month longitudinal study of Mechanical Turk workers in the U.S. (Study 5, Baseline N = 499, follow-up n = 296), and a large, one-week YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Baseline N = 2,519, follow-up n = 1,776). Across studies, we found initial support for the validity of Moral Grandstanding as a construct. Specifically, moral grandstanding motivation was associated with status-seeking personality traits, as well as greater political and moral conflict in daily life. (shrink)

Surveying the field of the economics of the household, the second edition of this text reviews the theory of the consumer at the intermediate undergraduate level. It then applies and extends it to consumer demand and expenditures, consumption and saving, time allocation among market work, home work, and leisure, human capital emphasizing investment in education, children and health, fertility, marriage, and divorce. Influenced by Gary Becker and his associates, the models developed are used to help explain modern U.S. trends in (...) family behavior. Topics are discussed with the aid of geometry and a little algebra. For those with calculus, mathematical endnotes provide the models on which the text discussions are based and interesting applications beyond the scope of the text. (shrink)

Shors & Matzel's conclusion that LTP is not related to learning is similar to one we reached several years ago. We discuss some methodological advances that have relevance to the issue and applaud the authors for challenging existing dogma.

Democratic countries, such as Australia, face the dilemma of preserving public and national security without sacrificing fundamental freedoms. In the context where the rule of law is an underlying assumption of the constitutional framework, Emergency Powers in Australia provides a succinct analysis of the sorts of emergency which have been experienced in Australia and an evaluation of the legal weapons available to the authorities to cope with these emergencies. It analyses the scope of the defence power to determine the constitutionality (...) of federal legislation to deal with wartime crises and the 'war' on terrorism, the extent of the executive power and its relationship to the prerogative, the deployment of the defence forces in aid of the civil power, the statutory frameworks regulating the responses to civil unrest, and natural disasters. The role of the courts when faced with challenges to the invocation of emergency powers is explained and analysed. (shrink)

"I'll furnish the war" : the making of a media myth -- Fright beyond measure? : the myth of the war of the worlds -- Murrow vs. McCarthy : timing makes the myth -- TV viewers, radio listeners, and the myth of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate -- The Bay of Pigs-New York Times suppression myth -- Debunking the "Cronkite moment" -- The nuanced myth : bra burning at Atlantic City -- Picture power? : confronting the myths of the "napalm girl" (...) photograph -- It's all about the media : Watergate's heroic-journalist myth -- The "fantasy panic" : the news media and the "crack-baby" myth -- "She was fighting to the death" : mythmaking in Iraq -- Hurricane Katrina and the myth of superlative reporting -- Counterfeit quotations : swelling with a digital tide. (shrink)

This paper identifies moore's use of a carefully selected group of propositions from common sense as a touchstone for philosophical credibility, As belonging to a tradition in metaphysics which is neither ambitiously constructive nor sceptically negative, But rather acts as a "whistle-Blowing" restraint. It traces the later disappearance of any common-Sensical touchstones, Then argues that two aspects of fodor's "modularity of mind" provide a basis for the return of a modest reliance on common-Sense knowledge as a point of reference. The (...) two aspects are the partial isolation of perception from the rest of our belief, And the existence of a naturally salient vocabulary of natural kinds. (shrink)

For the Stoic hero, the man or woman of virtue, the conduct of life presents no serious problems. The life of the sage comprises a consistent and effortless flow of actions, all conforming to virtue and all undertaken for the sake of their place in a virtuous life. The Stoic sage has advanced to a point where a life of courage and wisdom, justice and temperance comes easily and naturally, without struggle and without repinings.

D. M. Armstrong is an eminent Australian philosopher whose work over many years has dealt with such subjects as: the nature of possibility, concepts of the particular and the general, causes and laws of nature, and the nature of human consciousness. This collection of essays explores the many facets of Armstrong's work, concentrating on his more recent interests. There are four sections to the book: possibility and identity, universals, laws and causality, and philosophy of mind. The contributors comprise an international (...) group of philosophers from the United States, England and Australia. An interesting feature of the volume is that Armstrong himself has written responses to each of the essays. There is also a complete bibliography of Armstrong's writings. (shrink)

Stanford Encyclopedia article surveying the life and work of D.C. Williams, notably in defending realism in metaphysics in the mid-twentieth century and in justifying induction by the logic of statistical inference.

Keith Lehrer has been publishing on free will and compatiblism since 1960. Our concern here is to present an account of the development on his work on the subject.

ABSTRACT This paper identifies four areas of conflict which arise in contemporary workplaces, conflict between management and workforce over initiative, especially with respect to decisions over choice of product and methods of production, over productivity and the response to declining demand, over innovation and technological redundancy, and over division of the company's income. All four types of conflict are traced to the existence of the employer/employee relationship, which generates these conflicts by perpetuating both real conflicts of interest and conflictual attitudes. (...) The conflicts could be resolved if the employment relationship were abolished as the standard manner of participation in the economy. This paper argues for the abolition of the market for labour while retaining markets in goods, services, and capital, by the transformation of firms into production co‐operatives, in which partnership, not employment, is the normal relationship to the enterprise. The advantages of such a scheme are briefly touched on, and then some of the more obvious difficulties in implementing it are discussed. These include the Trade Union interest, problems of ownership and capital formation, recruitment questions, and capitalist resistance. (shrink)

In metaphysics, we seem to have in every generation an oscillation between realist positions and stances that are in one way or another idealist, instrumentalist, or constructivist. Realists in the philosophy of science are those philosophers who will not conclude, from the fact that scientific theories are undoubtedly constructs of human mentality and culture, that therefore the content of these theories is inevitably some function of the human mentality and culture that have produced them. Realists are unimpressed by response-dependence. Realism (...) is metaphysical optimism; it has not abandoned the notion that exercising our capacities does not disqualify us from discovery. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of when a researcher is justified in describing his or her artificial agent as demonstrating ethical decision-making. The paper is motivated by the amount of research being done that attempts to imbue artificial agents with expertise in ethical decision-making. It seems clear that computing systems make decisions, in that they make choices between different options; and there is scholarship in philosophy that addresses the distinction between ethical decision-making and general decision-making. Essentially, the qualitative (...) difference between ethical decisions and general decisions is that ethical decisions must be part of the process of developing ethical expertise within an agent. We use this distinction in examining publicity surrounding a particular experiment in which a simulated robot attempted to safeguard simulated humans from falling into a hole. We conclude that any suggestions that this simulated robot was making ethical decisions were misleading. (shrink)

This paper considers the impact which developments in neuroscience seem likely to have on our inherited, intuitive psychology ? the system of beliefs called ?folk psychology? by enthusiasts for its elimination. The paper argues that while closer relations between a developing genuinely scientific cognitive psychology and a burgeoning neurological understanding are to be welcomed, physiology will not reduce psychology, and the concepts belonging to intuitive psychology will be transformed and enriched, but not discredited or discarded, when psychology, in its cognitive (...) form, emerges as a science with genuine explanatory power. The analogy between belief and desire, on one hand, and witches and phlogiston, on the other, is rejected. So is the parallel between folk psychology and folk physics. We face the choice, on Churchland's principles, between the rejection of historical, literary, and moral culture, and accepting a dualism in human thought which despairs of a comprehensively naturalistic vision of ourselves. (shrink)

Epiphenomenalism is a theory concerning the relation between the mental and physical realms, regarded as radically different in nature. The theory holds that only physical states have causal power, and that mental states are completely dependent on them. The mental realm, for epiphenomenalists, is nothing more than a series of conscious states which signify the occurrence of states of the nervous system, but which play no causal role. For example, my feeling sleepy does not cause my yawning — rather, both (...) the feeling and the yawning are effects of an underlying neural state. (shrink)