Owen Flanagan

The Shame of Addiction

Addiction is a person-level phenomenon that involves twin normative failures. A failure of normal rational effective agency or self-control with respect to the substance; and shame at both this failure, and the failure to live up to the standards for a good life that the addict himself acknowledges and aspires to. Feeling shame for addiction is not a mistake. It is part of the shape of addiction, part of the normal phenomenology of addiction, and often a source of motivation for the addict to heal. Like other recent attempts in the addiction literature to return normative concepts such as “choice” and “responsibility” to their rightful place in understanding and treating addiction, the twin normative failure model is fully compatible with investigation of genetic and neuroscientific causes of addiction. Furthermore, the model does not re-moralize addiction. There can be shame without blame.

Dreaming is not an adaptation

The five papers in this issue all deal with the proper evolutionary function of sleep and dreams, these being different. To establish that some trait of character is an adaptation in the strict biological sense requires a story about the fitness enhancing function it served when it evolved and possibly a story of how the maintenance of this function is fitness enhancing now. My aim is to evaluate the proposals put forward in these papers. My conclusion is that although sleep is almost certainly an adaptation, dreaming is not. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; revonsuo; Solms; Vertes & Eastman]

Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue

1. Introduction: naturalized virtue epistemology? Abrol Fairweather and Owen Flanagan 2. Functions, epistemic warrant and natural norms Peter Graham 3. The epistemic ought Ram Neta 4. Naturalism and the norms of inference Carrie Ichikawa-Jenkins 5. Indirect epistemic teleology explained and defended David Copp 6. Moral virtues, epistemic virtues, and the big five Christian Miller 7. Epistemic dexterity: a Ramseyian account of agent-based knowledge Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor 8. Re-evaluating the situationist challenge to virtue epistemology Duncan Pritchard 9. Stereotype threat and intellectual virtue Mark Alfano 10. Acquiring epistemic virtue Heather Batally 11. Virtue and the fitting culturing of the human critter David Henderson and Terence Horgan 12. Expressivism and convention-relativism about epistemic discourse Alan Hazlett.

Empiricism and normative ethics: What do the biology and the psychology of morality have to do with ethics?

What do the biology and psychology of morality have to do with normative ethics? Our answer is, a great deal. We argue that normative ethics is an ongoing, ever-evolving research program in what is best conceived as human ecology.

“Can do” attitudes: Some positive illusions are not misbeliefs

McKay & Dennett (MD 2007) that the class of alleged positive illusions is a hodge-podge, and that some of its members are best understood as positive attitudes, hopes, and the like, not as beliefs at all.

Against the Drug Cure Model: Addiction, Identity, and Pharmaceuticals

Recent advances in brain imaging methods as well as increased sophistication in neuroscientific modeling of the brain’s reward systems have facilitated the study of neural mechanisms associated with addiction such as processes associated with motivation, decision-making, pleasure seeking, and inhibitory control. These scientific activities have increased optimism that the neurological underpinnings of addiction will be delineated, and that pharmaceuticals that target and change these mechanisms will by themselves facilitate early intervention and even full recovery. In this paper, we argue that it is misguided to construe addiction as just or primarily a brain chemistry problem, which can be adequately treated by pharmaceutical interventions alone.

A Decade of Teleofunctionalism: Lycan's Consciousness and Consciousness and Experience

The 1990’s, we’ve been told, were the decade of the brain. But without anyone announcing or declaring, much less deciding that it should be so, the 90’s were also a breakthrough decade for the study of consciousness. (Of course we think the two are related, but that is another matter altogether.) William G. Lycan leads the charge with his 1987 book Consciousness (MIT Press), and he has weighed-in again withConsciousness and Experience (1996, MIT Press). Together these two books put forth Lycan’s formidable view of consciousness, extending the theory of mind that he calls ‘homuncular functionalism.’ Roughly, Lycan’s view is that conscious beings are hierarchically composed intentional systems, whose representational powers are to be understood in terms of their biological function. In this review we will call the view ‘teleological functionalism’ or ‘teleofunctionalism’ – the homuncular part, for which Lycan and Daniel Dennett argued convincingly, is now so widely accepted that it fails to distinguish Lycan’s view from other versions of functionalism. This, by itself, is a testament to the importance of Lycan’s work. Lycan’s no-nonsense style of philosophy and philosophical writing will be a welcome change for those who have been left unsatisfied or bewildered by other philosophers’ tendencies to substitute metaphor for explanation at crucial moments, or to base arguments on science fiction fantasies. On the other hand, it must be said that his furious pace and his famous passion for argument and counterargument do not always make for a linear narrative. The road is sometimes rough; but in most every instance, working through the plethora of arguments is worth the effort. Our approach in this double review is to summarize each book in turn, making only brief critical remarks as we go. Having painted the big picture, we then develop one line of criticism of each book.

The Self and Its Good Vary Cross-Culturally: A Dozen Self-variations and Chinese Familial Selves

In the first part, we present a taxonomy of a dozen self-variations that appear in the contemporary studies of cross-cultural anthropology, psychology and philosophy. The taxonomy is designed to serve as a general template to analyse cultural variation in views of self, which ranges from the metaphysical self (or no-self) to ideal emotional self. In the second part, we apply three aspects of the taxonomy to analyse a distinctive way that the self is conceived in the Chinese tradition, and its relation to the family and non-family members. In particular, we look at the Chinese notion of the ‘soul’ (hun-po), which informs a unique, family-oriented notion of self. This understanding helps explain the distinctive texture of the Chinese virtue of filial piety that emphasises not only respect and support of the elderly members of the family, but also reproducing children who can carry the family lineage. It also helps us understand certain family-oriented ways of decision-making in the Chinese society.

Quid pro quo: the ecology of the self.

Moderated by Steve Paulson, producer and interviewer for public radios To the Best of Our Knowledge, philosopher and neurobiologist Owen Flanagan (Duke University), and psychologists Paul Bloom (Yale University) and Roy Baumeister (Florida State University) examine current biological, psychological, and anthropological research on the complex interaction between the self and others, and consider the roots of empathy and morality. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred February 23, 2011, 7:00–8:15 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City.

Identity, Gender, and Strong Evaluation

There is a distinction between actual full identity and self-represented identity. Actual full identity is constituted by the dynamic integrated system of past and present identifications, desires, commitments, aspirations, beliefs, dispositions, temperament, roles, acts, and action patterns, as well as by whatever self-understandings (even incorrect ones) each person brings to his or her life. Self-represented identity is the narratively constructed picture a person has of who he or she is. Self-representation takes actual identity as its proper object. The distinction between the two kinds of identity is needed to explain the project of seeking self-understanding, the possibility of selfdeception, and it helps explain why narratively guided efforts at self change often fail. The distinction also provides the basis of a plausible conception of moral self-respect: moral self-respect is based on a veridical sense that ones actual identity is morally respectable. Some recent psychological work claiming that there are no moral psychological gender differences is helpfully illuminated with the distinction between actual and self-represented identity. The claim is that because no statistically significant differences show up in tests using canonical procedures (either Kohlbergs or Gilligans), there are no such differences. One tactic is to suggest that even if these results establish that there are no deep differences in male and female moral psychology, they do not cast doubt on the idea that men and women in our culture conceive of their moral lives in different terms. The results, in effect, have implications for what we can say about actual identity, but they have none for what we can say about selfrepresentation. In fact, the psychological findings are worth dismissing as claims about both kinds of identity. First, although the psychologists would like us to think that they have discovered procedures to get at the deep structure of moral psychology, current experimental procedures merely get people to say certain things. They ask people how they would respond to standard dilemmas and what sorts of problems they face in real life. It will not do to read the experiments as having consequences for what we can say about the deep-structure of moral psychology, but none or what we can say about self-expression and self-conception. The experiments in fact only test self-expression. Second, a close look at the experiements show that the no difference claim is made on the basis of the deeply problematic procedure of factoring out content. That is, although