Middle Theory, Inner Freedom, and Moral Health

In her influential book, The Practice of Moral Judgment, Barbara Herman argues that Kantian ethics requires a “middle theory” applying formal rational constraints on willing to the particular circumstances and nature of human existence. I claim that a promising beginning to such a theory can be found in Kant’s discussion of duties of virtue in The Metaphysics of Morals. I argue that Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties of virtue should be understood as a distinction between duties concerned with respect for necessary conditions of moral health and moral prosperity in sensibly affected human agents who realize their moral nature only through the development and continuing exercise of inner freedom. Thus understood, perfect duties prohibiting self-deception, miserly avarice, and humility are oriented around concerns with the conditions of rational self-constraint in human agents and are contrasted with imperfect duties requiring the development of our talents and the perfection of our moral disposition concerned with the effective exercise of this kind of inner freedom in choice and action. Generalizing this account, I claim that it allows us to accommodate the range of duties that Kant discusses here including perfect duties owed to others prohibiting arrogance, defamation, and ridicule and imperfect duties enjoining gratitude and beneficence and suggests a much more subtle and promising account of moral duty than those typically associated with Kant’s view

A Metacognitive Approach to Trust and a Case Study: Artificial Agency

Trust is defined as a belief of a human H (‘the trustor’) about the ability of an agent A (the ‘trustee’) to perform future action(s). We adopt here dispositionalism and internalism about trust: H trusts A iff A has some internal dispositions as competences. The dispositional competences of A are high-level metacognitive requirements, in the line of a naturalized virtue epistemology. (Sosa, Carter) We advance a Bayesian model of two (i) confidence in the decision and (ii) model uncertainty. To trust A, H demands A to be self-assertive about confidence and able to self-correct its own models. In the Bayesian approach trust can be applied not only to humans, but to artificial agents (e.g. Machine Learning algorithms). We explain the advantage the metacognitive trust when compared to mainstream approaches and how it relates to virtue epistemology. The metacognitive ethics of trust is swiftly discussed

To boldly go:an occam-π mission to engineer emergence

Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time

An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

The issue of design in managerial decision making

It is argued that the design of decisions is a process that in many ways is shaped by social factors such as identities, values, and influences. To be able to understand how these factors impact organizational decisions, the focus must be set on the management level. It is the management that shoulders the chief responsibility for designing collective actions, such as decisions. Our propositions indicate that the following measures must be taken in order to improve the quality of organizational decisions: 1. The identity of the people, involved in organizational decision making, affects the quality of decisions and should be taken into account in the design of decisions. 2. The decision maker or designer of decisions should engage the members of an organization to create a shared vision. 3. Getting the members of an organization to express and share common values should improve the decision making process. 4. Being able to socially influence the members of an organization, or other stakeholders involved, as well as letting them participate in the process, should improve the quality of decisions

The false promise of the better argument

Effective argumentation in international politics is widely conceived as a matter of persuasion. In particular, the ‘logic of arguing’ ascribes explanatory power to the ‘better argument’ and promises to illuminate the conditions of legitimate normative change. This article exposes the self-defeating implications of the Habermasian symbiosis between the normative and the empirical force of arguments. Since genuine persuasion is neither observable nor knowable, its analysis critically depends on what scholars consider to be the better argument. Seemingly, objective criteria such as universality only camouflage such moral reification. The paradoxical consequence of an explanatory concept of arguing is that moral discourse is no longer conceptualized as an open-ended process of contestation and normative change, but has recently been recast as a governance mechanism ensuring the compliance of international actors with pre-defined norms. This dilemma can be avoided through a positivist reification of valid norms, as in socialization research, or by adopting a critical and emancipatory focus on the obstacles to true persuasion. Still, both solutions remain dependent on the ‘persuasion vs. coercion’ problem that forestalls an insight into successful justificatory practices other than rational communication. The conclusion therefore pleas for a pragmatic abstention from better arguments and points to the insights to be gained from pragmatist norms research in sociology

Groups with Minds of Their Own Making

According Philip Pettit, suitably organised groups not only possess ‘minds of their own’ but can also ‘make up their minds’ and 'speak for themselves'--where these two capacities enable them to perform as conversable subjects or 'persons'. In this paper I critically examine Pettit's case for group personhood. My first step is to reconstruct his account, explaining first how he understands the two capacities he considers central to personhood – the capacity to ‘make up one’s mind’, and the capacity to ‘speak for oneself’ – before showing how he thinks these can be manifested in groups. With Pettit’s account duly reconstructed, I then turn to criticism, arguing that Pettit’s construal of making up one’s mind does not do proper justice to our first-personal self-understanding, nor to our characteristic interpersonal forms of engagement. This leads me, finally, to consider an alternative construal of ‘making up one’s mind’ and ‘speaking for oneself’ that is associated with the work of Richard Moran and whichargue, could usefully be exteextended to groups