Normative Account Research Articles

Social modeling of eating mediated by mirror neuron activity: A causal model moderated by frontal asymmetry and BMI

The social modeling of eating effect refers to the consistently demonstrated phenomenon that individuals tend to match their quantity of food intake to their eating companion. The current study sought to explore whether activity within the mirror neuron system (MNS) mediates the social modeling of eating effect as a function of EEG frontal asymmetry and body mass index (BMI). Under the guise of rating empathy, 93 female undergraduates viewed a female video confederate “incidentally” consume either a low or high intake of chips while electroencephalogram (EEG) activity was recorded. Subsequent ad libitum chip consumption was quantified. A first- and second-stage dual moderation model revealed that frontal asymmetry and BMI moderated an indirect effect of model consumption on participants’ food consumption as mediated by MNS activity at electrode site C3, a3b3=−0.718, SE=0.365, 95% CI [−1.632, −0.161]. Left frontal asymmetry was associated with greater mu activity and a positive association between model and participant chip consumption, while right frontal asymmetry was associated with less mu activity and a negative association between model and participant consumption. Across all levels of frontal asymmetry, the effect was only significant among those with a BMI at the 50th percentile or lower. Thus, among leaner individuals, the MNS was demonstrated to mediate social modeling of eating, as moderated by frontal asymmetry. These findings are integrated within the normative account of social modeling of eating. It is proposed that the normative framework may benefit from consideration of both conscious and unconscious operation of intake norms.

The Normative Value of Partisanship: When and Why Partisanship Matters

Recent work on partisanship has highlighted the role of political parties in rendering democracy and justice widely accessible to citizens. In these recent works, a distinction is drawn between a contemporary conception of partisanship that focuses on fidelity to political parties and a classic conception that emphasises the importance of a civic ethos of active political engagement. I argue that these two conceptions of partisanship are not so disparate if we focus on the role of political parties in promoting civic commitment and contestation. More specifically, I show how a normative account of partisanship can contribute to a defence of a civic ethos of political commitment. I then argue that commitment leads to contestation among both partisans and non-partisans, and that polities lacking active contestation of political commitments are in one significant respect less well off than those societies where there is such contestation.

Why Sustainability Principles should integrate Global Justice Concerns

Curren and Metzger develop a normative account of sustainability without prejudging the relationships between sustainability and global justice. This commentary propounds an alternative methodology whereby sustainability principles are determined in conjunction with principles of global justice. I suggest this methodology is better equipped to address two issues Living well raises. First, the authors’ sufficiency view involves an inescapable tension between permitting a generation to consume more than the threshold of opportunities to live well and securing an equivalent threshold for other generations. Addressing this tension requires an account of how much is owed to the current generation. Second, their third principle of sustainability ethics establishes a duty to ‘seek fair terms of cooperation conducive to sustainability’. Fleshing out this principle requires an account of the fair distribution of the burdens of transitioning to a sustainable world and of the extent to which the existing distribution of goods falls short of justice.

Conceptual Analysis for Genealogical Philosophy: How to Study the History of Practices after Foucault and Wittgenstein

AbstractInquiry into the history of practices in the manner of Foucault's philosophical genealogy requires that we distinguish between practical action, on the one hand, and mere behavior, on the other. The need for this distinction may help explicate an aspect of Foucault's philosophical genealogy that might otherwise appear misplaced, namely his attention to rationalities and its attendant conceptual material. This article shows how a genealogical attention to practice goes hand in hand with an attention to the role of the conceptual within our practices. This is done by first drawing on considerations furnished by a Wittgensteinean branch in analytic philosophy recently developed by Robert Brandom. With an account of conceptual normativity and reflexivity in hand, the article turns second to a crucial site of conceptual self‐transformation by drawing on work from a particular Foucauldian lineage developed in the work of Arnold Davidson. Davidson's work helps us understand the crucial status of concepts of persons (akin to what Foucault called “modes of subjectivation”) for any historical inquiry into practices.

From Bibles to Biomarkers: The Future of the DSM and Forensic Psychiatric Diagnosis

There is great anticipation for the RDoC’s neurobiological approach to mental illness to replace the DSM and make everything from research funding to insurance coverage more fair. Whether or not the legal applications of this new system will indeed be an improvement on the DSM depends greatly on how it is used, and what the normative commitments are in that particular legal domain. While the DSM provides one important and useful perspective on what counts as mentally disordered, ultimately for the law this is not a question that science or data can answer. Societies, comprised of people, must grapple with a normative account of when to treat, when to pardon, and when to punish. The DSM cannot decide these questions for us, tempting as it may be to defer to its diagnostic criteria. That we expect it to reveals a deep insecurity about the legal system’s ability to defend its methods and theories of punishment.

Norm-expressivism and regress

This paper aims to investigate Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivist account of normativity. In particular, the aim is to see whether Gibbard’s theory is able to account for the normativity of reason-claims. For this purpose, I first describe how I come to targeting Gibbard’s theory by setting out the main tenets of quasi-realism cum expressivism. After this, I provide a detailed interpretation of the relevant parts of Gibbard’s theory. I argue that the best reading of his account is the one that takes normativity to be carried by a controlled, coherent, comprehensive set of norms. Finally, I present a potential obstacle to Gibbard’s approach: the regress problem. The idea is to examine the structure of the non-cognitive state expressed and find it inadequate due to the possibility of an infinite regress in the justification of the norms whose acceptance it contains. I then end the paper with some concluding remarks.

The function of “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative account of personhood: a response to Bernard Matolino

This article is a response to Bernard Matolino’s criticisms against Ifeanyi Menkiti’s elucidations on the normative notion of personhood in African philosophy. This article argues that Menkiti’s article is best understood to be ultimately focused on articulating the normative notion of personhood; so understood, Menkiti’s analysis eschews many of the objections made against it by Matolino. We show that the confusion lies in a general failure in African philosophy to distinguish three distinct senses of the notion of a person. We further show how the referent ‘it’ as used to pick out infants by Menkiti, contrary to Matolino’s analysis that suggests that it is an instance of ‘mal-function’ may be charitably construed to be capturing the idea that infants have moral status and/or that they are morally neutral. A defense of Menkiti’s idea of personhood is crucial in a search for a robust African perfectionist ethics.Keywords: ‘It’, Moral agency, Moral Perfectionism, Moral status, Personhood

Sensory noise predicts divisive reshaping of receptive fields.

In order to respond reliably to specific features of their environment, sensory neurons need to integrate multiple incoming noisy signals. Crucially, they also need to compete for the interpretation of those signals with other neurons representing similar features. The form that this competition should take depends critically on the noise corrupting these signals. In this study we show that for the type of noise commonly observed in sensory systems, whose variance scales with the mean signal, sensory neurons should selectively divide their input signals by their predictions, suppressing ambiguous cues while amplifying others. Any change in the stimulus context alters which inputs are suppressed, leading to a deep dynamic reshaping of neural receptive fields going far beyond simple surround suppression. Paradoxically, these highly variable receptive fields go alongside and are in fact required for an invariant representation of external sensory features. In addition to offering a normative account of context-dependent changes in sensory responses, perceptual inference in the presence of signal-dependent noise accounts for ubiquitous features of sensory neurons such as divisive normalization, gain control and contrast dependent temporal dynamics.

Hume's Internalism Reconsidered

A standard reading of Hume on the nature of practical reasons holds that he is a normative internalist; that, for Hume, legitimate practical reasons must be linked to an agent’s set of desires or motivating passions. Though the internalist reading of Hume is popular, it gives rise to serious puzzles of interpretation. To pick one nearly at random, it appears that, on an internalist reading, Hume has serious difficulties in establishing that the so-called “artificial" virtues of justice and promise-keeping are reason-giving, especially when it comes to characters like the sensible knave. Some, skeptical of the internalist reading, have argued that Hume is in fact a nihilist about practical reasons, and admits no reasons for action at all. Against the internalist and skeptical readings, I argue that there is substantial reason to believe that Hume’s corpus is compatible with a far more robust account of normativity than even internalism allows. If so, I argue, Hume has a genuine response to the sensible knave that establishes the knave’s obligation to justice. As it turns out, Hume’s considered view is unique, underexplored, and merits further philosophical investigation.

Enlargement, association, accession – a normative account of membership in a union of states

This paper deals with the legitimacy of the EU’s external borders and the decision-making rules for changing them. First, while the EU should not indefinitely expand, we can identify no normative grounds for precluding in advance any liberal democratic nation-states from participation in the European project. Second, for those countries having more or less thick legal ties with the EU, or who are otherwise substantially affected by European decision-making, we argue for the institutionalisation of flexible deliberative communities. For closely associated countries, we argue that the EU has special duties in opening the door to membership. Third, we address the legitimacy of the EU’s decision-making procedures for deciding on accession candidates and creating association agreements with non-member states. Here we defend the EU’s current unanimity requirement for the former and its supermajoritarian decision rules for the latter. Finally, we suggest that nationalism is the primary obstacle to the achievement of just inclusion outcomes for non-member states.

Strong popular sovereignty and constitutional legitimacy

Recent critiques of attempts to ground constitutional legitimacy in the constituent power of a strong popular sovereign have tended to focus upon the tension between strong popular sovereignty and central assumptions of liberal constitutionalism. Foremost among these assumptions are the need to reconcile disagreement regarding controversial matters of common concern and the value of the rule of law. The weakness of such critiques, however, is that they presuppose a commitment to liberal principles and values that an advocate of strong popular sovereignty need not share. In this paper, I argue that recourse to liberal assumptions is unnecessary in order to demonstrate the inability of a theory of strong popular sovereignty to issue in a viable account of constitutional legitimacy. Theories of constitutional legitimacy grounded in strong popular sovereignty and constituent power, I contend, simply lack the basic resources for an adequate theory of constitutional legitimacy because they do not offer normative grounds for an assessment of whether any particular constitution is or is not legitimate. The paper is structured in three sections. Section 1 demonstrates that Carl Schmitt’s theory of constitutional legitimacy – which remains the primary source of contemporary appeals to strong popular sovereignty and constituent power – sustains a normative interpretation. Section 2 then develops a minimal constraint on an adequate normative theory of constitutional legitimacy. Finally, in Section 3, I demonstrate why a normative account of constitutional legitimacy based on strong popular sovereignty and constituent power is, at least without supplementation from normative concepts derived from a weaker conception of popular sovereignty, unable to meet this constraint.

Replies: on norms of belief and knowledge

These replies to commentators on my work focus on the nature of epistemic norms, on the nature of truth and on the nature and value of knowledge. A normative account of belief and knowledge is committed to substantial and objective epistemic norms. But not everyone agrees on their form. I try here to reply to some doubts raised by my critics.

Biological function and epistemic normativity

I give a biological account of epistemic normativity. My account explains the sense in which it is true that belief is subject to a standard of correctness, and reduces epistemic norms to there being doxastic strategies which guide how best to meet that standard. Additionally, I give an explanation of the mistakes we make in our epistemic discourse, understood as either taking epistemic properties and norms to be sui generis and irreducible, and/or as failing to recognise the reductive base of epistemic normativity. This explanation will appeal to the claim that the beliefs which constitute our epistemic discourse are false but adaptive, and are the outcome of a non-truth-tracking process. The opponents of my position are philosophers who take epistemic normativity not to be reducible in this way, and to involve sui generis properties and norms governing belief. The aim of the paper is to show that epistemic normativity can be explained by appeal to the biological functions of our mechanisms of belief-production.

Patriotic Philanthropy? Financing the State with Gifts to Government

Federal and state law prohibit government officials from accepting gifts or “emoluments” from outside sources. The purpose of gift bans, like restrictions on more explicit forms of bribery, is to protect the integrity of political processes and to ensure that decisions about public policy are made in the public interest — not to advance a private agenda. Similar considerations animate regulations on campaign funding and lobbying. Yet private entities remain free to offer gifts to government itself, to foot the bill for particular public projects they would like to see government pursue. Such gifts — dubbed “patriotic philanthropy” by one prominent donor — raise fundamental questions about the private role in public policymaking, questions that are central to debates over campaign finance, private philanthropy, and the privatization of government functions. Nevertheless, they have received virtually no attention in the legal literature. This Article offers a positive and normative account of gifts to government. Although we do not question the enormous good that patriotic philanthropy can do, we argue that gifts raise significant concerns about democratic process, equality, and state capacity.

Lying, a way of knowledge in Umberto Eco’s Numero zero

In Numero zero the main theme is lying. It is utilized as a sort of normative account of its epistemic implication foregrounding lying's problematization. Here Eco addresses the very duality of lying that is intertwined with the authenticity of language, and journalism is the ideal genre to tackle this problem. A lie is intrinsically linguistic and essentially semiotic because, at a material expression level and an immaterial content level, language violates the principle of non-contradiction since it is and it is not at the same time and in the same respect, due to the dualistic nature of signs that work toward the creation of meaning. It is because it is endowed with the ability to refer; it is not because it is never a true self, it lacks its own individuality. Thus, as a communicative/significative medium, language foresees and legitimizes the paradoxical duality between lie and truth insofar as it always requires the presence of the other; it requires the coexistence of the one (expression level) and the other (content level) to ultimately produce meaning. Numero zero sheds light on the hermeneutics of lies and fakes, and further gives a hint of the reverberations they produce in the world in which we live.

Third wave development expertise

In this paper I offer a normative account of development expertise. Although extending expertise beyond the traditional development experts to include local stakeholders, this normative account aims to delimit legitimate forms of expertise. I label this normative view third wave development expertise. Third wave expertise is distinguished from both the technocratic and the social constructivist views of development expertise. In particular, I discuss the notions of contributory and interactional expertise. Contributory expertise denotes the extent to which a group of agents possesses (tacit, embodied, or explicit) knowledge which can make a significant contribution to development decision-making, while interactional expertise denotes the extent to which they are able to communicate this knowledge meaningfully. While local stakeholders may possess contributory expertise in matters of their own development, they may lack interactional expertise to communicate this knowledge. Resolving this issue, I argue, requires a mediator who can interact with and between external experts and local stakeholders.

The ontological and epistemological superiority of hylomorphism

Materialism—the view that all of reality is wholly determined by the very, very small—and extreme nominalism—the view that properties, kinds, and qualities do not really exist—have been the dominant view in analytic philosophy for the last 100 years or so. Both views, however, have failed to provide adequate accounts for the possibility of intentionality and of knowledge. We must therefore look to alternatives. One well-tested alternative, the hylomorphism of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics, was rejected without being refuted and so deserves further examination. I will argue that Aristotelian hylomorphic provides a markedly superior account of knowledge, cognitive normativity, and intentionality.

Reforming Scottish Criminal Procedure: In Search of Process Values

Recent proposals to reform Scottish criminal procedure are motivated by considerations of efficiency and accurate fact-finding, and there is little attempt to offer a normative account. This paper describes these proposals and contends that their emphasis on finding ‘the truth’ is misplaced on two distinct bases: (1) it equates erroneous acquittals to wrongful convictions, thus fails to uphold a fundamental tenet of criminal procedure, namely the particular importance of protecting the innocent against wrongful conviction; and (2) it fails to recognise the importance of non-instrumental process values which are at the heart of the adversarial criminal trial. The paper suggests that it is only by adhering to these process values that the state maintains – and demonstrates that it maintains – its moral authority to condemn and punish offenders.Key notes: Return Directive, entry ban, illegal migrant, criminal law sanctions, crimmigration, expulsion.

The EU’s democratic deficit in a realist key: multilateral governance, popular sovereignty and critical responsiveness

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a realist analysis of the European Union’s (EU) legitimacy. We propose a modification of Bernard Williams’ theory of legitimacy, which we term critical responsiveness. For Williams, ‘Basic Legitimation Demand + Modernity = Liberalism’. Drawing on that model, we make three claims. (i) The right side of the equation is insufficiently sensitive to popular sovereignty; (ii) The left side of the equation is best thought of as a ‘legitimation story’: a non-moralised normative account of how to shore up belief in legitimacy while steering clear of both raw domination and ideological distortions. (iii) The EU’s current legitimation story draws on a tradition of popular sovereignty that sits badly with the supranational delegation and pooling of sovereign powers. We conclude by suggesting that the EU’s legitimation deficit may be best addressed demoicratically, by recovering the value of popular sovereignty at the expense of a degree of state sovereignty.

Hybrid politics for justice: the Silk Road of restorative justice II

ABSTRACTThis article argues three propositions. The first is that restorative justice should be a legal principle that can trump legal rules, such as sentencing rules. Second it argues for embedding restorative justice in a hybrid political philosophy that is republican-feminist-socialist-capitalist. Third, it goes beyond ‘Persia to China: the Silk Road of Restorative Justice I’, that identified incipient examples of this hybridity from Iran to China, to advance a normative account of hybridity. Travelling the Silk Road is a metaphor for the comparative method required of reformers who seek better governance through hybrid governance.