Deliberate Judgments Research Articles

How Much is that Ecosystem in the Window? The One with the Bio-diverse Trail

Ecosystems are increasingly characterised as goods and services to allow their valuation in monetary terms. This follows an orthodox economic approach to environmental values, but is also being undertaken by ecologists and conservation biologists. There then appears a lack of clarity and debate as to the model of human behaviour, specific values and decision process being adopted. Arguments for ecosystems service valuation are critically appraised and the case for a model leading to value pluralism is presented. The outcome is to identify the need for value articulating processes which involve open deliberative judgment rather than instantaneously stated preferences, concealed expert opinion and global cost-benefit analysis.

Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching

Student evaluations of teaching are a common fixture at American law schools, but they harbor surprising biases. Extensive psychology research demonstrates that these assessments respond overwhelmingly to a professor's appearance and nonverbal behavior; ratings based on just thirty seconds of silent videotape correlate strongly with end-of-semester evaluations. The nonverbal behaviors that influence teaching evaluations are rooted in physiology, culture, and habit, allowing characteristics like race and gender to affect evaluations. The current process of gathering evaluations, moreover, allows social stereotypes to filter students' perceptions, increasing risks of bias. These distortions are inevitable products of the intuitive, one cognitive processes that the present process taps. The cure for these biases requires schools to design new student evaluation systems, such as ones based on facilitated group discussion, that enable more reflective, deliberative judgments. This article, which will appear in the Winter 2007 issue of the St. John's Law Review, draws upon research in cognitive decision making, both to present the compelling case for reforming the current system of evaluating classroom performance and to illuminate the cognitive processes that underlie many facets of the legal system.

Intuition and autism: a possible role for Von Economo neurons

Von Economo neurons (VENs) are a recently evolved cell type which may be involved in the fast intuitive assessment of complex situations. As such, they could be part of the circuitry supporting human social networks. We propose that the VENs relay an output of fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortex to the parts of frontal and temporal cortex associated with theory-of-mind, where fast intuitions are melded with slower, deliberative judgments. The VENs emerge mainly after birth and increase in number until age 4 yrs. We propose that in autism spectrum disorders the VENs fail to develop normally, and that this failure might be partially responsible for the associated social disabilities that result from faulty intuition.

After-affects: How automatic evaluations influence the interpretation of subsequent, unrelated stimuli

Findings from three experiments suggest that participants’ automatic evaluations of subliminally presented objects influenced how they interpreted subsequent, unrelated objects. Participants defined homographs (Experiment 1), categorized objects and people (Experiment 2), and made person judgments (Experiment 3) that all could be disambiguated in either a positive or negative way. Participants’ responses to the ambiguous targets were evaluatively consistent with their automatic evaluations of preceding, semantically unrelated objects. The findings suggest that one’s automatic evaluations can influence deliberate judgments of subsequent stimuli, even when the only shared dimension between the initially evaluated objects and the judged objects is an evaluative one. The implications of these findings are discussed with regard to possible mechanisms of evaluative priming as well as previous research concerning evaluative priming effects on social judgment.

On Punishing Emotions

This paper challenges recent influential arguments which would encourage legislators and courts to give weight to an assessment of the “evaluative judgements” expressed by the emotions which motivate crimes. While accepting the claim of Kahan and Nussbaum and others that emotions, other than moods, have intentional objects (“the cognitive conception”), and are not mere impulses which bypass cognition (“the mechanistic conception”), it suggests the following criticisms of their analysis. First, the concept of an emotional “evaluative judgement” tends to elide the distinction between (misleadingly named) “judgements” that are merely the sense of an emotion, and do not have the character of acts, and deliberative emotional judgements that do resemble acts and so properly fall within the corrective scope of the law. Second, intentional emotions are empowered by pre–intentional psychological resources which are less amenable than intentional states to the agent's conscious supervision: The traditional recognition of “infirmity” in mitigation of crimes uncharacteristic of the criminal's overall conduct towards others is justified by the unpredictable action of these pre–intentional elements and can survive the abandonment of the mechanistic conception of emotion.

Awareness and decision making in Professional ethics : The New Code of the Psychological Society of Ireland

The paper describes the development of the 1998 revision of the Psychological Society of Ireland's Code of Professional Ethics. The Code incorporates the European Meta-Code of Ethics and an ethical decision-making procedure borrowed from the Canadian Psychological Association. An example using the procedure is presented. To aid decision making, a classification of different kinds of stakeholder (i. e., interested party) affected by ethical decisions is offered. The author contends (1) that psychologists should assert the right, which is an important aspect of professional autonomy, to make discretionary judgments, (2) that to be justified in doing so they need to educate themselves in sound and deliberative judgment, and (3) that the process is facilitated by a code such as the Irish one, which emphasizes ethical awareness and decision making. The need for awareness and judgment is underlined by the variability in the ethical codes of different organizations and different European states: in such a context, codes should be used as broad yardsticks, rather than precise templates.

Awareness and Decision Making in Professional Ethics

The paper describes the development of the 1998 revision of the Psychological Society of Ireland's Code of Professional Ethics. The Code incorporates the European Meta-Code of Ethics and an ethical decision-making procedure borrowed from the Canadian Psychological Association. An example using the procedure is presented. To aid decision making, a classification of different kinds of stakeholder (i.e., interested party) affected by ethical decisions is offered. The author contends (1) that psychologists should assert the right, which is an important aspect of professional autonomy, to make discretionary judgments, (2) that to be justified in doing so they need to educate themselves in sound and deliberative judgment, and (3) that the process is facilitated by a code such as the Irish one, which emphasizes ethical awareness and decision making. The need for awareness and judgment is underlined by the variability in the ethical codes of different organizations and different European states: in such a context, codes should be used as broad yardsticks, rather than precise templates.

Meanings of Merit

What does discussion of higher education issues tell us about fundamental societal questions? Merit appears to underpin the major issues in higher education at the moment. Yet an inspection of these issues suggests that this is really about larger tensions that we may wish to avoid, such as the role of experts in a democracy, specifically their degree of professional autonomy in setting content and performance standards. A new unifying purpose for higher education—articulate judgement—may allow us to address these societal issues more clearly and the role of higher education more publicly and directly. Fundamentally, we must decide what role we want for the academic professions and how we place articulate judgement in their endeavor. Do we have the moral confidence in our enterprise to assert a capacity and a responsibility for independent, informed, deliberative, and humane judgment and for the capacity to elicit the same in our students?

Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War

A soldier obeys illegal orders, thinking them lawful. When should we excuse his misconduct as based in reasonable error? How can courts convincingly convict the soldier's superior officer when, after Nuremberg, criminal orders are expressed through winks and nods, hints and insinuations? Can our notions of the soldier's due obedience, designed for the Roman legionnaire, be brought into closer harmony with current understandings of military conflict in the contemporary world? Mark J. Osiel answers these questions in light of new learning about atrocity and combat cohesion, as well as changes in warfare and the nature of military conflict. Sources of atrocity are far more varied than current law assumes, and such variations display consistent patterns. The law now generally requires that soldiers resolve all doubts about the legality of a superior's order in favor of obedience. It excuses compliance with an illegal order unless the illegality - as with flagrant atrocities - would be immediately obvious to anyone. But these criteria are often in conflict and at odds with the law's underlying principles and policies. Combat and peace operations now depend more on tactical imagination, self-discipline, and loyalty to immediate comrades than on immediate, unreflective adherence to the letter of superiors' orders, backed by threat of formal punishment. The objective of military law is to encourage deliberative judgment. This can be done, Osiel suggests, in ways that enhance the accountability of our military forces, in both peace operations and more traditional conflicts, while maintaining their effectiveness. Osiel seeks to civilianize military law while building on soldiers' own internal ideals of professional virtuousness. He returns to the ancient ideal of martial honor, reinterpreting it in light of new conditions, arguing that it should be implemented through realistic training in which legal counsel plays an enlarged role rather than by threat of legal prosecution. Obeying Orders thus offers a compelling answer to the question that has most haunted the moral imagination of the late twentieth century: the roots - and restraint - of mass atrocity in war.

Changing Perspectives: The Prose of Natal’ia Baranskaia

The issue of perspective, signaled in the above motto, is central to the title-story of Baranskaia' s second collection Zhenshchina s zontikom (The Woman with an Umbrella).1 Each of five vacationers persists in seeing in a stranger the woman with the umbrella of the title what the individual imagination of each wants to see. Despite the admonition by one of them: let's not invent anything. Fascination in life lies in enjoying its practical values (Zhsz, 178), they are either unable or unwilling to make careful and deliberate judgments. All their conjectures, as the author makes clear, are not only superficial (in a literal sense), but they in fact contradict Sofia L'vovna's actual life story, as recounted in distinctly separate sections of the work. The dichotomy of perspective is accentuated formally in several ways (including the use of Sofia L'vovna's name only in those sections devoted to her perspective, and through discrepancies between narrator and report2), while the issue itself of perception

An Internalist View of the Epistemic Regress Problem

Many contemporary epistemologists have perceived a need to choose between the foundationalist view that justification derives at least in part from a class of basic beliefs and the coherentist view that it derives entirely from coherence among beliefs. The reason most frequently given for the necessity of this choice is that foundationalism and coherentism represent the only possible solutions to what is commonly known as the epistemic problem, or simply the regress Briefly stated, this problem is as follows: An empirical belief is justified only if it is supported by other justified beliefs. Justification for the latter beliefs, however, depends on still other justified beliefs, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. Thus, how can any empirical belief possibly be justified?' Recently, several writers have noted that the problem has two principal versions and that the tasks of solving these may differ. One version deals with people's abilities to be justified in holding beliefs. Questions about the nature and extent of believers' awareness of their justification are not directly relevant to this version of the problem. A second version, by contrast, addresses people's abilities to identify their justification for beliefs, at least well enough to explain to others their grounds for beliefs and to make self-aware, deliberative judgments as to which beliefs they may justifiably hold. Accounts of justification responsive to the issues of being justified and being able to identify justification

What Wilson Sent and What House Received: Or Scholars Need to Check Carefully

My deliberate judgment is that our whole weight should be thrown for an armistice which will not permit a renewal of hostilities by Germany, but which will be as moderate and reasonable as possible within that condition, because lately I am certain that too much severity on the part of the Allies will make a genuine peace settlement exceedingly difficult if not impossible.... Foresight is better than immediate advantage.1

Trends and Policies in Arithmetic Curricula

During the past half dozen years events have been moving pretty fast in the field of arithmetic. I may be the victim of an illusion—an illusion arising from concentration of attention upon a matter of considerable personal interest, yet I have other personal interests, and to those interests I have often devoted more attention than I have ever given to arithmetic. It is my deliberate judgment, to be taken for what it is worth, that an unusually rapid change is taking place in the subject-matter of arithmetic and in the objectives entertained by students and teachers of the subject. To document this would perhaps be tedious. One may, however, point to one large general trend which includes within itself many subordinate trends and implies still others as a natural consequence.

THE EAR IN "STUNT" FLYING

Crashes that occur during stunt flying are usually the result of something having gone wrong with the pilot. Hence, it is a pertinent matter for medical investigation. Just what this something is, is not always clear. Poor judgment, a sense of bravado, carelessness, stunting at low altitudes, and sudden faintness are among the reasons generally offered in explanation of these accidents. Direct testimony of the pilot is not always available, since many of the crashes result fatally. Neither are pilots who have crashed and survived always able to give a clear and concise account or analysis of the causes of the accident. Underlying them all, however, there runs a story of momentary loss of faculties, resulting in a manipulation of controls without deliberate judgment. Most accounts of crashes read, pilot went into a tail spin and failed to come out. The story of Lieut. J. M. M. is quite

The Beaconite Controversy

70 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL SOCIETY THE BEACONITE CONTROVERSY.* Anna Braithwaite Thomas. The Beaconite Controversy took its name from a small book entitled " A Beacon to the Society of Friends," published in First month, 1835, by Isaac Crewdson, a minister belonging to Manchester Meeting, England. To quote from Joseph John Gurney's description, " This publication consisted of a running commentary on various passages in the sermons of the late Elias Hicks, of North America, who had been disowned by Friends in that country; and, with proofs, drawn from Scripture, of this preacher's perversions and delusions are mixed up many painful innuendoes, trenching, in various degrees, on our well-known views of the spirituality of the Gospel of Christ. Indeed," says J. J. Gurney, " it is my deliberate judgment that the work, professing as it does to defend sound Christianity, has an undeniable tendency to undermine the precious doctrine of the immediate teaching, guidance, and government of the Holy Spirit." Such was the Beacon itself in the eyes of one who sympathized fully with its author in his desire for pure evangelical teaching in the Society. The Controversy began in 1831, when a Tract Association in Manchester was broken up in consequence of doctrinal differences amongst the Friends interested, and culminated in the winter of 1836-37 in the resignation of Isaac Crewdson and of 48 other members of Manchester Meeting. This was followed in other parts of England by the resignation of about 250 Friends, many of them prominent members of the Society, making 300 in all who were lost to Friends through this lamentable schism.f Thus, roughly speaking, the Beacon Controversy was contemporary with the reign of William IV, i. e., 1830-1837, a period of such wonderful changes that it might truly be said that * Part of a paper read before the Haverford Round Table, Third month 15, 1909. t See J. S. Rowntree. " The Friend," London, vol. 40, p. 797. THE BEACONITE CONTROVERSY71 a new England was being born, not only politically and religiously but also in regard to material surroundings. The old methods of travel which had lasted unchanged for a thousand years were now giving way to the great revolutionary steam, with all the seething mass of changes in manufactures that were to follow. In politics the battle of parliamentary reform was being fought out and the anti-slavery struggle was at its height, and in the religious world the same spirit of unrest and change was at work. Barriers were giving way and the thoughts of outside minds were touching the Society as they had not done since the days of George Fox. The great separation of 1828 among Friends in America had not failed to have an important reflex action upon the Society in England, where the same sort of formal quietism had long prevailed and great stress had been laid on the discipline and upon the external peculiarities of dress and address. Throughout the eighteenth century meetings were very often silent, but, in such ministry as there was, great emphasis was laid upon immediate inspiration; ministers frequently declaring that they had come into the meeting with no idea as to what they might have to deliver. The notion prevailed that intellectual activity was inimical to this inspiration, hence much of the ministry was absolutely, as it professed to be, devoid of intellectual or even of rational thought. It consisted largely in exhortations to dwell deep, to turn away from all that was of human wisdom, to seek unto that light within, which, if followed, would lead to peace with God ; or in warnings against worldliness and denunciations of those who trusted in wealth and human learning. With the opening of the nineteenth century a new era had begun. The British and Foreign Bible Society was founded, and from the outset there were always one or two Friends upon its committee. Thus greater attention began to be directed to the Bible and more stress to be placed upon Scripture truth. Joseph John Gurney, Elizabeth Fry, Hannah Backhouse, Anna Braithwaite and others were gifted and eloquent ministers of this newer order whose clearer teaching was warmly welcomed and much appreciated by the...

Life and Her Children: Glimpses of Animal Life from the Amæba to the Insects

AFTER light came life, and with that life there came its two great functions—growth and development. With the simplest as with the most complex forms there is the same eager race to be run, to increase in size, to multiply, and thus replenishing this earth, to die. “Life and Her Children” is a praiseworthy and admirable attempt to tell us something of the Children that Life sends forth, and of their history. Its main object is to acquaint young people with the structure and habits of the lower forms of life; but in our deliberate judgment it will do a great deal more. None will read its introductory chapter without advantage, and few will read the volume through without enjoyment. Within its narrow limits of 300 small pages no candid reader would expect to find all the details that might be wished for, or all the illustrations that might be desired. What constitutes the book's chief charm is the marvellously simple yet quite scientific style which runs through it, the food for thought and future study which it affords, and the truly philosophic glow which lights up its every page. The volume gives a general account of Life's Simplest Children, the Protozoa. The word “slime” does not seem to us quite a happy term by which to designate the living protoplasm of these creatures; this word conveys the idea of a something adhesive or glutinous, or of a something thrown off a living organism—a something without a structure (sordies, eluvies)—and there seems somewhat of a “contempt for nature,” a thought certainly never present in the author's mind, in the use of such a word. Jelly would seem a more appropriate word, as conveying the idea of the consistency requisite for life, and would have the sanction of use. Thus the Noctiluca?, called in this volume “tiny bags of slime,” were described, if we mistake not, by their discoverer as “tiny spherical gelatinous bodies,” and Prof. Huxley says, “Noctiluca may be described as a gelatinous transparent body about the one-sixtieth of an inch in diameter.” Life and Her Children: Glimpses of Animal Life from the Amæba to the Insects. By Arabella B. Buckley. (London: Edward Stanford, 1880.)