Hybrid Views Research Articles

Moral worth

AbstractThe concept of moral worth, of being creditworthy for doing the right thing, is often seen as essential feature of a moral theory. It forces us to provide a clear account of the relationship between moral motivation and moral action, raising important questions about the demands that morality makes of us. Work on moral worth has a long lineage, especially in Kantian scholarship. Recent years, however, have seen a more focused interest in the nature of moral worth outside of the Kantian tradition. Indeed, part of this interest stems from a rejection of an orthodox Kantian understanding of what moral worth is. In this article, I chart prominent reasons for rejecting the orthodoxy, and distinguish between two rival camps that have emerged: Right Reasons Accounts and Rightness Accounts. I delineate some of the demands that these accounts must meet, and end by discussing a potential way forward that has emerged via hybrid views and goal‐based views that attempt to utilise the most promising features of each.

Can we compare health states when our standards change?

AbstractAmong health economists, who think that preferences are the correct standard of the value of health states, it is common to assume, at least implicitly, that the correct criterion of this value takes the following schematic form: H1 is a better health state than H2 iff the members of group S prefer (on average) being in H1 to being in H2. Various candidates for members of S have been proposed, including medical experts, the general public, H1-patients, H2-patients, former H1-patients, former H2-patients, or combinations of these groups. I shall argue that criteria of this form run into serious problems, if we consider cases where people’s fundamental preferences change from one health state to another. I shall also show that these problems afflict hybrid views, according to which preferences are only one determinant of the value of health, the objective value of health states being another. Finally, I shall argue that a better subjectivist criterion would be something like this: H1 is a better health state than H2 iff the H1-patients would want to be in H1 more than the H2-patients would want to be in H2. According to this criterion, the value of a health state is determined by the absolute attitudes (favouring, disfavouring, neutrality) people would have towards a health state were they to be in it. Along the way, I will also present and make use of an attitude matrix framework that enables us to represent in a simple way complex information about attitudes. With this framework at hand, we can easily see the advantages and disadvantages of different subjectivist accounts of the value of health.

The Best Confucian Hybrid Meritocracy-Democracy for Liberal Democracies

Several contemporary Confucian philosophers have posited differing hybrid views fusing meritocracy to democracy. There is a good deal of interest in a meritocracy in contemporary Confucian thought, and such a view perhaps should receive more serious consideration in liberal democratic thought since it may make for a stronger form of government when appended to democracy. In this paper, four contemporary hybrid theorists who combine elements of a meritocracy with a democracy are critically analyzed concerning an ability for their views to be instantiated in liberal democracies for the legislative branch only. Finally, I provide a modified hybrid view for the legislature that I believe is the best fit for current liberal democracies.

Considering the Scope, History, and Sophistication of Skilled Action in Expertise

In his paper “Getting Sophisticated: In Favor of Hybrid Views of Skilled Action in Expertise,” Spencer Ivy (2023) argues effectively for what he calls a “sophisticated hybrid” view of expertise, driven by empirical considerations and argument from contemporary phenomenology and cognitive architecture. Here I raise three unfair objections which I think lead to some fair questions that may be productive for discussion and future work.

Getting Sophisticated: In Favor of Hybrid Views of Skilled Action in Expertise

The long history of research and debate surrounding expertise has emphasized the importance of both automaticity and intelligent deliberation in the control of skilled, expert action – and often, their mutual exclusion of one another. To the contrary, recent developments in the cognitive science of skill implicate the likelihood of a third, hybrid line of interpretation and a new path forward. This paper surveys these recent developments, arguing that hybrid models of expertise and skill are the most fruitful way forward in interpreting and conducting research on experts. I categorize a new set of interpretations of skill as ‘sophisticated hybrid models’ owing to the fact that they deny the mutual exclusion of automaticity from intelligent action control. I then argue that this interpretive strategy is the most fruitful way forward to making clear much of the complexity of skilled action and expertise.

Are the folk utilitarian about animals?

Robert Nozick famously raised the possibility that there is a sense in which both deontology and utilitarianism are true: deontology applies to humans while utilitarianism applies to animals. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in such a hybrid views of ethics. Discussions of this Nozickian Hybrid View, and similar approaches to animal ethics, often assume that such an approach reflects the commonsense view, and best captures common moral intuitions. However, recent psychological work challenges this empirical assumption. We review evidence suggesting that the folk is deontological all the way down—it is just that the moral side constraints that protect animals from harm are much weaker than those that protect humans. In fact, it appears that people even attribute some deontological protections, albeit extremely weak ones, to inanimate objects. We call this view Multi-level Weighted Deontology. While such empirical findings cannot show that the Nozickian Hybrid View is false, or that it is unjustified, they do remove its core intuitive support. That support belongs to Multi-level Weighted Deontology, a view that is also in line with the view that Nozick himself seemed to favour. To complicate things, however, we also review evidence that our intuitions about the moral status of humans are, at least in significant part, shaped by factors relating to mere species membership that seem morally irrelevant. We end by considering the potential debunking upshot of such findings about the sources of common moral intuitions about the moral status of animals.

Two deductions of right in early post-Kantianism

ABSTRACT This paper uses a distinction drawn from the Kantian legal theorist Paul Johann Anselm Feuerbach to categorize two approaches to analysing the concept of right, each of which is represented by various figures in early post-Kantianism. Feuerbach’s distinction holds that there were two main strategies for conceiving of the relation between right and morality and the structure of rights. He refers to these two conceptions as ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ deductions from the moral law. One key contribution of my paper consists of the reconstruction of historical examples of each kind of argument, along with some ‘hybrid’ accounts. Figures discussed include Feuerbach, Heydenreich, Reinhold, Fichte, Hufeland, and Erhard. In light of this historical reconstructive work, I argue that Fichte’s 1796 arguments against absolute deductions face a previously unnoticed dilemma: either the arguments assume a premise I will call the mere permissions principle, which causes tension with a central commitment of Fichte’s theory of property in FNR; or the arguments do not assume the mere permissions principle, in which case they are not sufficient to rule out the possibility of hybrid views that give a more limited role to absolute moral rights.

마티나 마이옥의 『생계비』에 나타난 인간적 유대의 간절함과 내면화

The Cost of Living by Martyna Majok sheds light on the hybrid subjects' views of immigrant experiences, noble lies of the American dream, disabilities, and the working class, which reflect today's problematic social conditions. The play demonstrates that the theater is a platform for transitions and transformations of life with dramatic actions of affective labors such as attending to neighbors, not feeling lonely, not suffering from poverty, caring for one another, and going with them. The two disabled characters, their caretakes, and those suffering from desperate humanitarian crises such as loneliness and poverty practice the action of going with them to make supplication of human relations and new forms of life. The characters reach the internalization of human bondage. After recognizing who is actually caring for whom, they overcome their own loneliness regardless of the gulfs that disability and wealth place between them. All the characters including Eddie, who is the loneliest person in the world, become knowing subjects, and finally recognize that they are interconnected and interdependent. The vision of interconnection and interdependence makes their neighborhood a collaborative platform and presents a new epistemic virtue.

‘Utilitarianism for animals: deontology for people’ and the doing/allowing distinction

It is tempting to think that zebras, goats, lions, and similar animals matter morally, but not in quite the same way people do. This might lead us to adopt a hybrid view of animal ethics such as ‘Utilitarianism for Animals; Deontology for People’. One of the core commitments of deontology is the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm. I explore how this core tenant of deontology applies to non-person, non-human animals and whether hybrid views of animal ethics can accept it. In doing so, I aim to do three things. First, to show that my defence of the DDA can solve a problem surrounding our duties to wild animals, while making only minimal claims about animal moral status. Second, to offer an argument that for many non-person, non-human animals, we should recognise deontological constraints on their treatment, but also see those constraints as importantly different from the constraints against doing harm to persons. Third, to get clearer on how we should understand Utilitarianism for Animals and Nozickian hybrid approaches to animal ethics.

A Theoretical Framework for a Hybrid View of the N400.

In this study, we present a novel theoretical account of the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component. Hybrid views interpret this ERP component in terms of two cognitive operations: (i) access of information, which is related to predictions (predictability component), and (ii) integration of information, which is related to plausibility (plausibility component). Though there is an empirical evidence for this view, what has been left open so far is how these two operations can be defined. In our approach, both components are related to categorization. The critical word and the argument position it is related to are associated with categories that have a graded structure. This graded structure is defined in terms of weights both on attributes and values of features belonging to a category. The weights, in turn, are defined using probability distributions. The predictability component is defined in terms of the information gain with respect to non mismatched features between the two categories. The plausibility component is defined as the difference in the degree of typicality between the two categories. Finally, the N400 amplitude is defined as a function of both components.

Conservation refugees and environmental dispossession in 21st century critical Geography

This study explores the relevance of the concepts of conservation refugees and environmental dispossession for steering a middle course between unjust bio-centric conservation and anti-environmentalism of extreme right “populism”. Historical geographers have recently taken up these concepts from contemporary Environmental History, and when with allied to the concepts of environmental ethics from Radical Ecology and Environmental Studies and nature enclosures from Political Ecology, a novel critique is produced of the role of full conservation units in debates surrounding global climate change. This kind of nature reserve is steeped in bio-centric environmental ethics which distill nature and dispossess native peoples and poor peasants. The latter are considered to be anthropic agents who are criminalized, removed and turned into conservation refugees in order to cleanse the landscape of (poor rural) human presence. Drawing on research undertaken on nature enclosures in three threatened biomes of Brazil, hybrid views of society-nature and actor-network assembly from Relational Geography are used to interpret specific cases involving successful resistance to environmental dispossession in which local people forced a change in mentality of nature reserve administrators, turned foe into ally and built socially inclusive conservation strategies.

Beauvoir’s ethics, meaning, and competition

Abstract This paper discusses Simone de Beauvoir’s views on the meaning of life as presented in The Ethics of Ambiguity. I argue that Beauvoir’s view matches contemporary hybrid views on the meaning of life, incorporating both subjective and objective elements, while connecting them in a distinct way—through the tension between self and other. I then analyze the meaning of excessively competitive projects through Beauvoir’s ethics and conclude that success that amounts to denying other people’s access to the things one values is absurd. I use the case of contemporary academia as an illustration of extreme competition, then employ Beauvoir’s views to suggest a shift towards more meaningful practices.

How bad is it to report a slur? An empirical investigation

In this paper, we present three studies on slurs and non-slurring insults presented (i) in isolation (Pilot study), (ii) in direct speech (Study 1) and (iii) in indirect reports (Study 2). The Pilot study showed that on average slurs are perceived as more offensive than non-slurring insults when presented in isolation. In Study 1, we found some surprising results: when they occur in atomic predications of the form ‘X is a P’, in average slurs are perceived as less offensive than when they occur in isolation, while insults are perceived as more offensive than when they occur in isolation. In order to explain these two findings, we have developed an information-based hypothesis that crucially illuminates the distinction between slurs and non-slurring insults in terms of the information they carry and the function that they fulfil. Such a perspective is more compatible with hybrid views (e.g. presuppositional) rather than with expressivist theories. Moreover, Study 2 showed that indirect report of the form ‘Z: Y said that X is a P’ decreases (without deleting) the offensiveness of utterances featuring slurs and insults. Such results speak against prohibitionist theories on slurs and pose challenges to the non-prohibitionist accounts.

A matrix completion-based multiview learning method for imputing missing values in buoy monitoring data

Buoy systems have been deployed to monitor coastal waters, and these systems generate massive amounts of data with high temporal resolution. In practice, however, many of these records are often lost, which adversely impacts further data analysis. Current imputation methods place more emphasis on spatial and temporal correlations but ignore the crucial interactions between different parameters. To fully employ these interactions and further improve the imputation performance, a matrix completion-based multiview learning (MC-MVL) method is proposed in this paper to fill in the missing values in buoy monitoring data. MC-MVL considers three hybrid views, i.e., the temporal-parameter view, the spatial-parameter view and the spatiotemporal view, and each view is formulated as a matrix. The fixed-point continuation with approximate singular value decomposition (FPCA), the non-convex (Non-Convex) and the inexact augmented Lagrange multipliers (IALM) algorithms are separately utilized to reconstruct these three matrices. Then, a ridge regression-based multiview learning algorithm is used to aggregate the estimates of the three views into the final results. We used a buoy monitoring dataset from the Zhejiang coastal area to verify the imputation ability of the proposed model. The results confirm that MC-MVL achieves better performance than do 8 baseline approaches.

Attitudinal and Phenomenological Theories of Pleasure

On phenomenological theories of pleasure, what makes an experience a pleasure is the way it feels. On attitudinal theories, what makes an experience a pleasure is its relationship to the favorable attitudes of the subject who is having it. I advance the debate between these theories in two ways. First, I argue that the main objection to phenomenological theories, the heterogeneity problem, is not compelling. While others have argued for this before, I identify an especially serious version of this problem that resists existing solutions, and I explain why even this version of the problem does not undermine phenomenological theories. Second, I argue that a grand reconciliation can be effected between the two types of theory: it can be true both that pleasures are pleasures in virtue of the way they feel and that they are pleasures in virtue of how they are related to their subjects' favorable attitudes, so long as the attitudes that are constitutively related to pleasures are ones that feel a certain way. Hybrid views of this sort have significant advantages over pure attitudinal or phenomenological views.

The sense of incredibility in ethics

It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it difficult to believe reductive theses in ethics. I argue that the distinctiveness of the normative concepts we use in thinking about reductive theses offers a more promising explanation of this psychological phenomenon than the falsity of Reductive Realism. To identify the distinctiveness of normative concepts, I use resources from familiar Hybrid views of normative language and thought to develop a Hybrid view of normative concepts. In addition to using this new Hybrid view to explain why reductive theses are difficult to believe, I show how to preserve several patterns of inference involving normative concepts that, intuitively, it is possible to make, and hence answer an important recent challenge to Hybrid views from Mark Schroeder.

Hybrid Views on Endogenous and Exogenous Influences in Economics: The Case of International Economic Development

Economists debate whether influences on their work are external (“exogenous”) to it or reflect dynamics internal (“endogenous”) to their discipline.This paper argues that a hybrid view that recognizes both types of influence most accurately describes the activity of economists engaged in practical sub-disciplines. To support the hybrid approach, we discuss three generations of the debate -- primarily sociological in approach -- on the relative roles of endogenous and exogenous influences, each generation improving on the previous. The post-WWII history of international economic development theory provides a case study.This debate has important implications for the practice of economics. Economists need awareness of the historical forces and philosophical assumptions that influence their work. This helps them avoid undue reliance on endogenously-developed theoretical and mathematical models.We conclude that an explicit turn from sociology to philosophy will enrich understanding of the debate, especially by showing the proper scope of economics compared to other disciplines.

Quality improvement strategies of highway bus service based on a fuzzy quality function deployment approach

In this study, fuzzy quality function deployment (FQFD) is used as a tool to improve service quality in the passenger transportation industry. QFD enables firms to hear the voice of the customer appropriately and integrate it with the technical language in design processes. However, the nature of uncertainty and subjectivity in service delivery processes makes it difficult to employ QFD consistently. This study provides an empirical example of how FQFD could be appropriately used. ‘Employee’ and ‘tangibility of buses’ are the items from the hybrid views of both customers and service provider managers who require the most attention when differentiating a passenger transportation service from a rival's. The vital technical requirements relate to ‘employees’, ‘the features of buses’, and ‘error-free services’.

Explaining Disagreement: A Problem for (Some) Hybrid Expressivists

Hybrid expressivists depart from pure expressivists by claiming that moral sentences express beliefs and desires. Daniel Boisvert and Michael Ridge, two prominent defenders of hybrid views, also depart from pure expressivists by claiming that moral sentences express general attitudes rather than an attitude towards the subject of the sentence. This article argues that even if the shift to general attitudes helps solve some of the traditional problems associated with pure expressivism, a view like Ridge's, according to which the descriptive meaning is speaker relative, turns out to have problems explaining moral disagreement.

Hybrid Views in Meta-ethics: Pragmatic Views

A common starting point for ‘going hybrid’ is the thought that moral discourse somehow combines belief and desire-like aspects, or is both descriptive and expressive. Hybrid meta-ethical theories aim to give an account of moral discourse that is sufficiently sensitive to both its cognitive and its affective, or descriptive and expressive, dimensions. They hold at least one of the following: (i) moral thought: moral judgements have belief and desire-like aspects or elements; (ii) moral language: moral utterances both ascribe properties and express desire-like attitudes. This entry concerns hybrid theories of moral language. The main division within such theories is between those treating the expression of desire-like attitudes (hereafter ‘attitudes’) as semantic and those treating it as pragmatic. This entry exclusively focuses on pragmatic forms of (ii) and examines the prospects for treating moral attitude expression as working via certain standard pragmatic mechanisms. I explain these mechanisms, outline the properties that standardly define them, and test to see whether moral attitude expression matches them. At the end, I briefly explain a more minimal pragmatic alternative. The main conclusions are that we should disregard presupposition and conventional implicature views and that the most plausible options for a pragmatic hybrid view are a generalised conversational implicature view and a more minimal pragmatic view.