Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment
Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment

Author: Randolph Nesse

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2001-11-29

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1610444256

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Commitment is at the core of social life. The social fabric is woven from promises and threats that are not always immediately advantageous to the parties involved. Many commitments, such as signing a contract, are fairly straightforward deals, in which both parties agree to give up certain options. Other commitments, such as the promise of life-long love or a threat of murder, are based on more intangible factors such as human emotions. In Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, distinguished researchers from the fields of economics, psychology, ethology, anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and law offer a rich variety of perspectives on the nature of commitment and question whether the capacity for making, assessing, and keeping commitments has been shaped by natural selection. Game theorists have shown that players who use commitment strategies—by learning to convey subjective offers and to gauge commitments others are willing to make—achieve greater success than those who rationally calculate every move for immediate reward. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment includes contributions from some of the pioneering students of commitment. Their elegant analyses highlight the critical role of reputation-building, and show the importance of investigating how people can believe that others would carry out promises or threats that go against their own self-interest. Other contributors provide real-world examples of commitment across cultures and suggest the evolutionary origins of the capacity for commitment. Perhaps nowhere is the importance of commitment and reputation more evident than in the institutions of law, medicine, and religion. Essays by professionals in each field explore why many practitioners remain largely ethical in spite of manifest opportunities for client exploitation. Finally, Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment turns to leading animal behavior experts to explore whether non-humans also use commitment strategies, most notably through the transmission of threats or signs of non-aggression. Such examples illustrate how such tendencies in humans may have evolved. Viewed as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, commitment offers enormous potential for explaining complex and irrational emotional behaviors within a biological framework. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment presents compelling evidence for this view, and offers a potential bridge across the current rift between biology and the social sciences. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment
Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment

Author: Randolph M. Nesse

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2001-11-29

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780871546227

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Commitment is at the core of social life. The social fabric is woven from promises and threats that are not always immediately advantageous to the parties involved. Many commitments, such as signing a contract, are fairly straightforward deals, in which both parties agree to give up certain options. Other commitments, such as the promise of life-long love or a threat of murder, are based on more intangible factors such as human emotions. In Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, distinguished researchers from the fields of economics, psychology, ethology, anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and law offer a rich variety of perspectives on the nature of commitment and question whether the capacity for making, assessing, and keeping commitments has been shaped by natural selection. Game theorists have shown that players who use commitment strategies—by learning to convey subjective offers and to gauge commitments others are willing to make—achieve greater success than those who rationally calculate every move for immediate reward. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment includes contributions from some of the pioneering students of commitment. Their elegant analyses highlight the critical role of reputation-building, and show the importance of investigating how people can believe that others would carry out promises or threats that go against their own self-interest. Other contributors provide real-world examples of commitment across cultures and suggest the evolutionary origins of the capacity for commitment. Perhaps nowhere is the importance of commitment and reputation more evident than in the institutions of law, medicine, and religion. Essays by professionals in each field explore why many practitioners remain largely ethical in spite of manifest opportunities for client exploitation. Finally, Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment turns to leading animal behavior experts to explore whether non-humans also use commitment strategies, most notably through the transmission of threats or signs of non-aggression. Such examples illustrate how such tendencies in humans may have evolved. Viewed as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, commitment offers enormous potential for explaining complex and irrational emotional behaviors within a biological framework. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment presents compelling evidence for this view, and offers a potential bridge across the current rift between biology and the social sciences. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

The Oxford Handbook of Secularism
The Oxford Handbook of Secularism

Author: Phil Zuckerman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 793

ISBN-13: 0199988455

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As recent headlines reveal, conflicts and debates around the world increasingly involve secularism. National borders and traditional religions cannot keep people in tidy boxes as political struggles, doctrinal divergences, and demographic trends are sweeping across regions and entire continents. And secularity is increasing in society, with a growing number of people in many regions having no religious affiliation or lacking interest in religion. Simultaneously, there is a resurgence of religious participation in the politics of many countries. How might these diverse phenomena be better understood? Long-reigning theories about the pace of secularization and ideal church-state relations are under invigorated scrutiny by scholars studying secularism with new questions, better data, and fresh perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Secularism offers a wide-ranging and in-depth examination of this global conversation, bringing together the views of an international collection of prominent experts in their respective fields. This is the essential volume for comprehending the core issues and methodological approaches to the demographics and sociology of secularity; the history and variety of political secularisms; the comparison of constitutional secularisms across many countries from America to Asia; the key problems now convulsing church-state relations; the intersections of liberalism, multiculturalism, and religion; the latest psychological research into secular lives and lifestyles; and the naturalistic and humanistic worldviews available to nonreligious people.

Moving Beyond Self-Interest
Moving Beyond Self-Interest

Author: Stephanie L. Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-10-26

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0195388100

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Moving Beyond Self-Interest is an interdisciplinary volume that discusses cutting-edge developments in the science of caring for and helping others. In Part I, contributors raise foundational issues related to human caregiving. They present new theories and data to show how natural selection might have shaped a genuinely altruistic drive to benefit others, how this drive intersects with the attachment and caregiving systems, and how it emerges from a broader social engagement system made possible by symbiotic regulation of autonomic physiological states. In Part II, contributors propose a new neurophysiological model of the human caregiving system and present arguments and evidence to show how mammalian neural circuitry that supports parenting might be recruited to direct human cooperation and competition, human empathy, and parental and romantic love. Part III is devoted to the psychology of human caregiving. Some contributors in this section show how an evolutionary perspective helps us better understand parental investment in and empathic concern for children at risk for, or suffering from, various health, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Other contributors identify circumstances that differentially predict caregiver benefits and costs, and raise the question of whether extreme levels of compassion are actually pathological. The section concludes with a discussion of semantic and conceptual obstacles to the scientific investigation of caregiving. Part IV focuses on possible interfaces between new models of caregiving motivation and economics, political science, and social policy development. In this section, contributors show how the new theory and research discussed in this volume can inform our understanding of economic utility, policies for delivering social services (such as health care and education), and hypotheses concerning the origins and development of human society, including some of its more problematic features of nationalism, conflict, and war. The chapters in this volume help readers appreciate the human capacity for engaging in altruistic acts, on both a small and large scale.

Programming Machine Ethics
Programming Machine Ethics

Author: Luís Moniz Pereira

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-02-10

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 3319293540

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This book addresses the fundamentals of machine ethics. It discusses abilities required for ethical machine reasoning and the programming features that enable them. It connects ethics, psychological ethical processes, and machine implemented procedures. From a technical point of view, the book uses logic programming and evolutionary game theory to model and link the individual and collective moral realms. It also reports on the results of experiments performed using several model implementations. Opening specific and promising inroads into the terra incognita of machine ethics, the authors define here new tools and describe a variety of program-tested moral applications and implemented systems. In addition, they provide alternative readings paths, allowing readers to best focus on their specific interests and to explore the concepts at different levels of detail. Mainly written for researchers in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics, philosophy of technology and engineering of ethics, the book will also be of general interest to other academics, undergraduates in search of research topics, science journalists as well as science and society forums, legislators and military organizations concerned with machine ethics.

Moral Infringement and Repair in Antiquity
Moral Infringement and Repair in Antiquity

Author: Thomas Kazen

Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand

Published: 2022-06-29

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9188906183

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Moral Infringement and Repair in Antiquity, is a series of publications related to a project on Dynamics of Moral Repair in Antiquity, run by Thomas Kazen and Rikard Roitto between 2017 and 2021, and funded by the Swedish Research Council. The volumes contain stand-alone articles and serve as supplements to the main outcome of the project, the volume Interpersonal Infringement and Moral Repair: Revenge, Compensation and Forgiveness in the Ancient World, forthcoming on Mohr Siebeck in 2023. Supplement 1: Emotions and Hierarchies, contains four articles and chapters by Thomas Kazen. Three of them are republished in accordance with the publishers' general conditions for author reuse. The fourth has not been published before. 1. Emotional Ethics in Biblical Texts: Cultural Construction and Biological Bases of Morality. 2. Viewing Oneself through Others' Eyes: Shame between Biology and Culture in Biblical Texts. 3. Law and Emotion in Moral Repair: Circumscribing Infringement. 4. Retribution and Repair in Voluntary Associations: Comparing Rule Texts from Qumran, Collegia, and Christ Groups.

Law, Mind and Brain
Law, Mind and Brain

Author: Michael Freeman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1317107438

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Over the past 20 years, cognitive neuroscience has revolutionized our ability to understand the nature of human thought. Working with the understandings of traditional psychology, the new brain science is transforming many disciplines, from economics to literary theory. These developments are now affecting the law and there is an upsurge of interest in the potential of neuroscience to contribute to our understanding of criminal and civil law and our system of justice in general. The international and interdisciplinary chapters in this volume are written by experts in criminal behaviour, civil law and jurisprudence. They concentrate on the potential of neuroscience to increase our understanding of blame and responsibility in such areas as juveniles and the death penalty, evidence and procedure, neurological enhancement and treatment, property, end-of-life choices, contracting and the effects of words and pictures in law. This collection suggests that legal scholarship and practice will be increasingly enriched by an interdisciplinary study of law, mind and brain and is a valuable addition to the emerging field of neurolaw.

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology
The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology

Author: Manuel Vargas

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-03-24

Total Pages: 1121

ISBN-13: 019264551X

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Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state-of-the-art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology's fifty chapters, authored by leading figures in the field, cover foundational topics, such as character, virtue, emotion, moral responsibility, the neuroscience of morality, weakness of will, and the nature of moral judgments and reasons. The volume also canvases emerging work in applied moral psychology, including adaptive preferences, animals, mental illness, poverty, marriage, race, bias, and victim blaming. Collectively, the essays form the definitive survey of contemporary moral psychology.

Science and the World's Religions
Science and the World's Religions

Author: Patrick McNamara Ph.D.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-07-19

Total Pages: 1048

ISBN-13: 0313387338

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This trio of volumes contains essays that explore vital existential, moral, or metaphysical issues surrounding the relationship between the sciences and the world's religions. In Science and the World's Religions, experts with scientific and religious backgrounds explore vital existential or practical issues, drawing on whatever sciences are relevant and engaging at least two religious traditions. The multidisciplinary essays exhibit rigorous intellectual, scholarly thinking but are written to clearly communicate to educated adult lay readers. The first volume addresses questions about the origins and purpose of the cosmos and the human project. The second volume investigates the roles of religion and spirituality in human existence, considering issues ranging from the brain and religious experience to the human life cycle. The third volume tackles controversies in which both religion and science are stakeholders, showing how both can deepen understanding and enrich human experience. Together, these three books present readers with powerful tools that enable them to think through the challenge of integrating science with their religious beliefs and spiritual practices.

Rethinking Machine Ethics in the Age of Ubiquitous Technology
Rethinking Machine Ethics in the Age of Ubiquitous Technology

Author: White, Jeffrey

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2015-05-31

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 146668593X

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As the utilization of intelligent machines spreads to numerous realms, the discourse of machine ethics has also developed and expanded. Concerns over machine intelligence and the role of automata in everyday life must be addressed before artificial intelligence and robotic technologies may be fully integrated into human society. Rethinking Machine Ethics in the Age of Ubiquitous Technology blends forward-looking, constructive, and interdisciplinary visions of ethical ideals, aims, and applications of machine technology. This visionary reference work incorporates ethical conversations in the fields of technology, computer science, robotics, and the medical industry, creating a vibrant dialogue between philosophical ideals and the applied sciences. With its broad scope of relevant topics, this book serves as an excellent tool for policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, technology developers, and government officials. This timely publication features thoroughly researched articles on the topics of artificial moral agency, cyber-warfare, transhumanism, organic neural nets, human worker replacement, automaticity and global governance, security and surveillance, military drones, and more.