Raffaele Rodogno

In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion

Preface Introduction A. Why shame? B. Emotions and their Dimensions C. Shame and the sense of shame D. Emotions and morality E. The structure of the book Part One: Two Dogmas About Shame Chapter I. The Social Emotion Chapter II. The Ugly Emotion Part Two: The Nature Of Shame Chapter III. Shame, values and the self Chapter IV. Shame revealed Part Three: Revisiting the Dogmas Chapter V. Socialism with Modesty Chapter VI. Shames Fragile Beauty Part Four: Shame in the Public Domain Chapter VII. Shame, Crime, and Punishment Chapter VIII. Shame, Legislation, and Subordination

‘Autism and the good life’: a new approach to the study of well-being

Medical, psychological, educational and social interventions to modify the behaviour of autistic people are only justified if they confer benefit on those people. However, it is not clear how ‘benefit’ should be understood. Most such interventions are justified by referring to the prospect that they will effect lasting improvements in the well-being and happiness of autistic people, so they can lead good lives. What does a good life for an autistic person consist in? Can we assume that his or her well-being is substantively the same as the well-being of non-autistic individuals? In this paper, we argue that, as it stands, the current approach to the study of well-being is for the most part unable to answer these questions. In particular, much effort is needed in order to improve the epistemology of well-being, especially so if we wish this epistemology to be ‘autism-sensitive’. Towards the end of the paper, we sketch a new, autism-sensitive approach and apply it in order to begin answering our initial questions.

Social robots, fiction, and sentimentality

I examine the nature of human-robot pet relations that appear to involve genuine affective responses on behalf of humans towards entities, such as robot pets, that, on the face of it, do not seem to be deserving of these responses. Such relations have often been thought to involve a certain degree of sentimentality, the morality of which has in turn been the object of critical attention (Sparrow in Ethics Inf Technol 78:346–359, 2002; Blackford in Ethics Inf Technol 14:41–51, 2012). In this paper, I dispel the claim that sentimentality is involved in this type of relations. My challenge draws on literature in the philosophy of art and in cognitive science that attempts to solve the so called paradox of fictional emotions, i.e., the seemingly paradoxical way in which we respond emotionally to fictional or imaginary characters and events. If sentimentality were not at issue, neither would its immorality. For the sake of argument, however, I assume in the remaining part of the paper that sentimentality is indeed at play and bring to the fore aspects of its badness or viciousness that have not yet been discussed in connection with robot pets. I conclude that not even these aspects of sentimentality are at issue here. Yet, I argue that there are other reasons to be worried about the wide-spread use of ersatz companionship technology that have to do with the potential loss of valuable, self-defining forms of life.

Well-Being, Science, and Philosophy

Academic research on well-being is pursued in multiple disciplines and currently exploding. Governments are also interested in the topic, as witnessed by their recent efforts to develop statistical measures of progress that include well-being indicators. Combined, this interest opens the door to the fruitful application of well-being research to society. Research on well-being, however, is not always well integrated across the disciplines that purport to study it. In particular, there is insufficient communication between the empirical study of well-being, and its normative/conceptual study as pursued in philosophy. This state of affairs is lamentable, as it robs science and public policy of the expertise of philosophers, a desirable tool when evaluating empirical claims about well-being promotion. In this article, I examine the reasons for this lack of communication. In particular, I reject the view according to which it originates in the idea that philosophers take well-being to be a single and general concept, and argue instead that it is likely to be the result of the different theoretical constraints under which philosophy and empirical science respectively operate. Finally, I show that communication can be strengthened by developing the empirical articulations of philosophical theories of well-being, and sketch how to do just that.

Happiness and well-being: shifting the focus of the current debate

The point of departure of this paper is the recently emphasised distinction between psychological theories of happiness, on the one hand, and normative theories of well-being, on the other. With this distinction in mind, I examine three possible kinds of relation that might exist between (psychological) happiness and (normative) well-being; to wit, happiness may be understood as playing a central part in (1) a formal theory of well-being, (2) a substantive theory of well-being or (3) as an indicator for well-being. I note that, in the relevant literature, happiness is mostly discussed in terms of either (1) or (2). In this paper, I attempt to motivate a shift of focus away from such accounts of happiness and towards (3), i.e. its epistemic role. When examined in connection to (normative) well-being, (psychological states of) happiness and unhappiness should be understood as psychological states that inform individuals about the contribution of various activities, pursuits, or situations to their well-being or ill-being.

Life support and euthanasia, a perspective on Shaw's new perspective

It has recently been suggested by Shaw (2007) that the distinction between voluntary active euthanasia, such as giving a patient a lethal overdose with the intention of ending that patients life, and voluntary passive euthanasia, such as removing a patient from a ventilator, is much less obvious than is commonly acknowledged in the literature. This is argued by suggesting a new perspective that more accurately reflects the moral features of end-of-life situations. The argument is simply that if we consider the body of a mentally competent patient who wants to die, a kind of ‘unwarranted’ life support, then the distinction collapses. We argue that all Shaw has provided is a perspective that makes the conclusion that there is little distinction between voluntary active euthanasia and voluntary passive euthanasia only seemingly more palatable. In doing so he has yet to convince us that this perspective is superior to other perspectives and thus more accurately reflects the moral features of the situations pertaining to this issue.

Selective patient and public involvement: The promise and perils of pharmaceutical intervention for autism.

Guidelines suggest the patient community should be consulted from the outset when designing and implementing basic biomedical research, but such patient communities may include conflicting views. We examined how engagement occurred in one such instance.

GUILT, ANGER, AND RETRIBUTION

This article focuses primarily on the emotion of guilt as providing a justification for retributive legal punishment. In particular, I challenge the claim according to which guilt can function as part of our epistemic justification of positive retributivism, that is, the view that wrongdoing is both necessary and sufficient to justify punishment. I show that the argument to this conclusion rests on two premises: (1) to feel guilty typically involves the judgment that one deserves punishment; and (2) those who feel guilty after wrongdoing are more virtuous (or less vicious) than those who do not. I shall argue that premise (1) is false on both empirical and conceptual grounds and that there are no particularly good grounds supporting this premise (2). Finally, I consider and reject the claim that anger, as opposed to guilt, can afford the type of epistemic justification needed by positive retributivism.

Ethics and social robotics

On the Western traditional model of subjectivity, with its roots in Descartes and Kant, self-consciousness, rationality, individuality, freedom, agency, responsibility, and moral dignity come as a package deal. This package is presupposed by any relation or interaction that deserves the label ‘social’. Moreover, on the Hegelian reworking of this model, the package of capacities called subjectivity in turn presupposes social relations. On this model only humans are the kind of entity that can stand in social relations, and standing in social relations confers these human capacities and the rights and statuses that adhere to them. While this model has been challenged from within by both the ‘analytical’ and the ‘continental’ philosophical traditions, social robotics challenges the traditional link between subjectivity and sociality from a new angle. It seems that robots have some of what it takes to be social agents, at least if we take at face value the way in which we (are willing to) interact with them, as if they were real pets, or confidants, or friends. What are we to make of that? Should we extend our concepts and adjust the definitional conditions for social agency? But how will this change propagate through the network of our foundational concepts? Or should we insist that talk about ‘social robotics’ is question-begging? But how to exclude robots from the community of thinkers, now, when we have accustomed ourselves to describe the human mind in terms evolutionary algorithms, neural nets, dynamic systems, complexity, Bayesian updating, mechanisms; have we not roboticized the human mind to an extent that we are now forced to consider robots our functional equals, in principle at least? These considerations and the questions to which they give rise form the background to the conferenceRobo-Philosophy 2014—Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations (August 20–23, Aarhus University, Denmark), of which this special issue is an offspring. The conference—and its theoretical background—was conceived by Johanna Seibt as the first of a series of five biannual conferences intended to find the right answers to the questions above. In practice, the conference functioned as a catalyst to the idea that philosophers should join the already existing efforts of roboticists in exploring artificial social agency. More in particular, the conference showed that philosophical reflection on social robotics pertains to all systematic areas of philosophy, not only to ethics, which had engaged this theme for some time, but also to philosophy of cognition, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology and aesthetics, philosophy of culture and intercultural philosophy, political philosophy, and even to philosophy of religion. In fact, since the 2014 conference, it has become clear that to understand the transformative potentials of human-robot interactions, the rapid development of social robotics calls for an integrated effort not just in philosophy but across the Humanities.

The Self-Justifying Desire for Happiness

Abstract In Happiness, Tabensky equates the notion of happiness to Aristotelian eudaimonia. I shall claim that doing so amounts to equating two concepts that moderns cannot conceptually equate, namely, the good for a person and the good person or good life. In §2 I examine the way in which Tabensky deals with this issue and claim that his idea of happiness is as problematic for us moderns as is any translation of the notion of eudaimonia in terms of happiness. Naturally, if happiness understood as eudaimonia is ambiguous, so will be the notion of a desire for happiness, which we find at the core of Tabensky’s whole project. In §3 I shall be concerned with another aspect of the desire for happiness; namely, its alleged self-justifying nature. I will attempt to undermine the idea that this desire is self-justifying by undermining the criterion on which Tabensky takes self-justifiability to rest, i.e. its basicness, but also by shedding doubt on the idea that there is such a thing as an ultimate basic principle and, even if there were, that it is what Tabensky calls the eudaimon principle.