Jeanette Kennett

Autism, empathy and moral agency

Psychopaths have long been of interest to moral philosophers, since a careful examination of their peculiar deficiencies may reveal what features are normally critical to the development of moral agency. What underlies the psychopath’s amoralism? A common and plausible answer to this question is that the psychopath lacks empathy. Lack of empathy is also claimed to be a critical impairment in autism, yet it is not at all clear that autistic individuals share the psychopath’s amoralism. How is empathy characterized in the literature, and how crucial is empathy, so described, to moral understanding and agency? I argue that an examination of moral thinking in high-functioning autistic people supports a Kantian rather than a Humean account of moral agency.

Do psychopaths really threaten moral rationalism

It is often claimed that the existence of psychopaths undermines moral rationalism. I examine a recent empirically based argument for this claim and conclude that rationalist accounts of moral judgement and moral reasoning are perfectly compatible with the evidence cited.

Pleasure and Addiction

What is the role and value of pleasure in addiction? Foddy and Savulescu (1) have claimed that substance use is just pleasure-oriented behavior. They describe addiction as “strong appetites toward pleasure” and argue that addicts suffer in significant part because of strong social and moral disapproval of lives dominated by pleasure seeking. But such lives, they claim, can be autonomous and rational. The view they offer is largely in line with the choice model and opposed to a disease model of addiction. Foddy and Savulescu are sceptical of self-reports that emphasize the ill effects of addiction such as loss of family and possessions, or that claim an absence of pleasure after tolerance sets in. Such reports they think are shaped by social stigma which makes available a limited set of socially approved addiction narratives. We will not question the claim that a life devoted to pleasure can be autonomously chosen. Nor do we question the claim that the social stigma attached to the use of certain drugs increases the harm suffered by the user. However our interviews with addicts (as philosophers rather than health professionals or peers) reveal a genuinely ambivalent and complex relationship between addiction, value, and pleasure. Our subjects did not shy away from discussing pleasure and its role in use. But though they usually valued the pleasurable properties of substances, and this played that did not mean that they valued an addictive life. Our interviews distinguished changing attitudes towards drug related pleasures across the course of substance use, including diminishing pleasure from use over time and increasing resentment at the effects of substance use on other valued activities. In this paper we consider the implications of what drug users say about pleasure and value over the course of addiction for models of addiction.

The Unity and Disunity of Agency

Effective agency, according to contemporary Kantians, requires a unity of purpose both at a time, in order that we may eliminate conflict among our motives, and over time, because many of the things we do form part of longer-term projects and make sense only in the light of these projects and life plans. Call this the unity of agency thesis. This thesis can be regarded as a normative constraint on accounts of personal identity and indeed on accounts of what it is to have the life of a person in the broad, rather than narrowly biological sense. It is also a fundamental condition of social life that persons within society fulfill a range of longitudinal roles: parenthood is one such obvious example, as are teachers, health professionals, engineers, artists, and many others. The fulfillment of these and other valuable social roles requires that agents have the capacity to rationally conceive of themselves as engaged in these roles and subject to the demands of them. To be unable to fulfill any such longitudinal social roles is to have a life deficient in value. The unity of agency is thus, we argue, something we rationally strive for, and something to be morally promoted. Psychiatric states that undermine the unity of agency are morally and rationally disvaluable. Using the example of dissociation, we explain how one such state may have this undermining or disruptive effect on the unity of agency. The therapeutic ends for psychiatry in conditions involving such states are thus seen more globally as the restoration of effective agency, that is, unified agency.

Philosophy and commonsense: The case of weakness of will

Here is a little story. As he has done a hundred times before, John heads off to the local shop to buy some chocolate bars. He knows that eating so much chocolate isn’t good for him. Being over forty and doing no exercise a passion for chocolate simply adds to an already significant weight problem. But thoughts like this do not move him. Each day, fully cognizant of the effects of eating chocolate upon his health, John heads off to the local shop, arrives, buys several chocolate bars, unwraps one, and then proceeds to eat it, unwraps another, and then proceeds to it, and so on and so on and so on.

Is cognitive penetrability the mark of the moral

The papers collected in this special issue all address the relationship between empirical research and philosophical accounts of the nature of moral judgement. In particular, the papers all make claims about the extent to which research in cognitive neuroscience concerning the nature of cognitive processes which underlie moral judgement can support a sentimentalist or rationalist account of meta-ethics. The papers include explicitly philosophical accounts (Joyce, Cullity, Jones) which discuss the conditions that would have to be met for one or other meta-ethical theory to be vindicated, revised or refuted. This suggests an artificially neat division of labour in which empirical research describes the cognitive processes involved in moral judgement and philosophers decide whether those processes count as moral, sentimental or rational. However, as the papers by cognitive neuroscientists (Blair, Fiddick, Stone) make clear, how one conceives of the nature of moral judgement influences both the construction of experiments designed to probe its structure (Fiddick, Blair) and the interpretation of results. For example, most cognitive neuroscientists and some philosophers (Prinz) working in the field have interpreted the results to support some version of sentimentalism in meta-ethics. Interestingly, however, two papers in the collection dispute that interpretation on a mixture of philosophical and empirical grounds (Kennett, Fine). Our aim in the rest of this introduction is to provide a framework for evaluating those debates and to situate the papers within it so that readers can evaluate arguments without being weighed down by the sometimes technical disciplinary vocabularies or the differences of emphasis in the different papers. We first describe the essential theses of sentimentalism and rationalism. These philosophical theses might seem too abstract or gravid with normativity to be evaluated against the data of cognitive neuroscience but we do not think this is the case. In fact we can reconfigure one essential aspect of the debate between sentimentalists and rationalists as a debate about the answer to the following question, which can be directly addressed by empirical research.

Delusion, dissociation and identity

Abstract The condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is metaphysically strange. Can there really be several distinct persons operating in a single body? Our view is that DID sufferers are single persons with a severe mental disorder. In this paper we compare the phenomenology of dissociation between personality states in DID with certain delusional disorders.We argue both that the burden of proof must lie with those who defend the metaphysically extravagant Multiple Persons view and that there is little theoretical motivation to yield to that view in light of the fact that the core symptoms of DID bear remarkable similarity to the symptoms of these other disorders where no such extravagance is ever seriously entertained.

Explaining Addiction: How Far Does the Reward Account of Motivation Take Us?

ABSTRACT Choice theorists such as George Ainslie and Gene Heyman argue that the drug-seeking behaviour of addicts is best understood in the same terms that explain everyday choices. Everyday choices, they claim, aim to maximise the reward from available incentives. Continuing drug-use is, therefore, what addicts most want given the incentives they are aware of but they will change their behaviour if and when better incentives become available. This model might explain many typical cases of addiction, but there are hard cases that pose a problem. In these hard cases the addicted individual does not cease using drugs in the face of consequences that are so adverse it is implausible that they are unaware of more rewarding paths of action. These cases force the choice theorist into a dilemma: either these addicts’ drug use does not count as action and so is best described by a neurobiological model, or reference to ‘reward’ in these cases means merely ‘motivated’ and so provides no explanatory power. We propose a different model of motivation that takes self-conception into account. We show how that can better explain the hard cases of addiction and also inform our understanding of recovery and self-control.

Fashion - Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style

Foreword ( Jennifer Baumgardner). Acknowledgments. Introduction (Jessica Wolfendale and Jeanette Kennett). PART 1 BEING FASHIONABLE AND BEING COOL. 1 What Makes Something Fashionable? (Anya Farennikova and Jesse Prinz). 2 Fashion, Illusion, and Alienation (Nick Zangwill). 3 Tryhards, Fashion Victims, and Effortless Cool (Luke Russell). PART 2 FASHION, STYLE, AND DESIGN. 4 The Aesthetics of Design (Andy Hamilton). 5 Share the Fantasy: Perfume Advertising, Fashion, and Desire (Cynthia A. Freeland). 6 Computational Couture: From Cyborgs to Supermodels (Ada Brunstein). PART 3 FASHION, IDENTITY, AND FREEDOM. 7 Wearing Your Values on Your Sleeve (Daniel Yim). 8 Fashion and Sexual Identity, or Why Recognition Matters (Samantha Brennan). 9 Slaves to Fashion? (Lauren Ashwell and Rae Langton). 10 Fashion Dolls and Feminism: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Barbie? (Louise Collins). PART 4 CAN WE BE ETHICAL AND FASHIONABLE? 11 Sweatshops and Cynicism (Matthew F. Pierlott). 12 Women Shopping and Women Sweatshopping: Individual Responsibility for Consumerism (Lisa Cassidy). 13 A Taste for Fashion (Marguerite La Caze). Notes on Contributors.

True and Proper Selves: Velleman on Love*

In my view, appreciation for someone’s value as a person is not incidental to loving him: it is the evaluative core of love. I do not mean that love is a value judgment to the effect that the beloved has final value as an end in himself. Love is rather an appreciative response to the perception of that value. And I mean “perception” literally: the people we love are the ones whom we succeed in perceiving as persons, within some of the human organisms milling about us. Only sometimes in this throng do we vividly see a face or hear a voice or feel a touch as animated by the inner presence of a self-aware, autonomous other—a person who is self to himself, like us. ( J. David Velleman, “Beyond Price,” 199)