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An Empirical Theory of Practical Reasons and Its Use for Practical Philosophy
Abstract
In the first part of this chapter (sections 2-5) an empirical theory of practical reasons is sketched and defended. It consists of: hypotheses about what intentions are, namely optimality beliefs, (2), hypotheses about how intentions are formed on the basis of probabilistic beliefs and intrinsic desires (3), a pluralist theory about intrinsic desires (4) and a theory about motives for moral action (5). In the second part (sections 6-8) it is argued that normative practical philosophy must rely on empirical theories of practical reasons (6). Then it is shown that theories of prudential practical rationality and of morals that are not based on such empirical theories run into problems. And it is sketched how the empirical theory outlined in the first part can be used as a basis for a reconstructive approach to practical rationality and of an internalist approach to morals (7-8).
... 6-8). Accordingly, many parts of decision psychology are highly relevant for a (prudential) rational decision theory as well as for general ethics (Lumer 2007b). Even the debate between Kantians and Humeans, whether an apriori approach can make justifications of morals motivationally relevant and influential or whether reliance on the subject's desires is indispensable and will shape the content of morals, is mostly and essentially a debate about a decision psychological question. ...
The last three chapters of the book contain my systematic proposal as to how intentions can be reductively understood whilst accounting for the specificity of the intentional syndrome, in particular whilst allowing us to understand the force of the requirements of intention rationality. The proposal is disjunctive and genetic: I claim that intentions are optative attitudes on which a contextually unique practical status has been conferred, a status that can be conferred by one of two aetiological mechanisms.
Intentions are self-fulfilling beliefs, which make the future epistemically rather than metaphysically open.
Discusses the relationships between personal expressiveness and intrinsic motivation, flow, and self-actualization. The construct of personal expressiveness has roots in eudaimonistic philosophy. Living in a manner consistent with one's daimon, or "true self," gives rise to a cognitive-affective state labeled "eudaimonia" that is distinguishable from hedonic enjoyment. A personally expressive personality pattern is described, integrating concepts of personal identity, self-actualization, locus of control, and principled moral reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Proposed that a distinction be made between 2 emotional responses to seeing another person suffer—personal distress and empathy—and that these 2 emotions lead to 2 different kinds of motivation to help: Personal distress leads to egoistic motivation; empathy, to altruistic motivation. These distinctions were tested in 3 studies, each using 10 male and 10 female undergraduates. Across the 3 studies, factor analysis of Ss' self-reported emotional response indicated that feelings of personal distress and empathy, although positively correlated, were experienced as qualitatively distinct. The pattern of helping in Studies 1 and 2 indicated that a predominance of personal distress led to egoistic motivation, whereas a predominance of empathy led to altruistic motivation. In Study 3, the cost of helping was made especially high. Results suggest an important qualification on the link between empathic emotion and altruistic motivation: Ss reporting a predominance of empathy displayed an egoistic pattern of helping. Apparently, making helping costly evoked self-concern, which overrode any altruistic impulse produced by feeling empathy. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A review of the literature concerning the promotive influence of experimentally generated happiness and sadness on helping suggests that (a) increased helping among saddened Ss is an instrumental response designed to dispel the helper's negative mood state, and (b) increased helping among elated Ss is not an instrumental response to (maintain) the heightened effect but is a concomitant of elevated mood. A derivation from this hypothesis—that enhanced helping is a direct effect of induced sadness but a side effect of induced happiness—was tested in an experiment that placed 86 undergraduates in a happy, neutral, or sad mood. Through a placebo drug manipulation, half of the Ss in each group were led to believe that their induced moods were temporarily fixed, that is, temporarily resistant to change from normal events. The other Ss believed that their moods were labile and, therefore, manageable. As expected, saddened Ss showed enhanced helping only when they believed their moods to be changeable, whereas elated Ss showed comparable increases in helping whether they believed their moods to be labile or fixed. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Repeated attempts have been made in the past 35 years to obtain self-report measures of motives originally identified in associative thought. Measures of the same motive obtained in these two ways seldom correlate significantly with each other and relate to different classes of behavior. Recent evidence is summarized showing that implicit motives, derived from stories written to pictures, combine generally with activity incentives to affect behavior, whereas self-attributed motives, derived from self-reports, combine generally with social incentives to affect behavior. Hence, implicit motives generally sustain spontaneous behavioral trends over time because of the pleasure derived from the activity itself, whereas the self-attributed motives predict immediate responses to structured situations because of the social incentives present in structuring the situation. Implicit motives represent a more primitive motivational system derived from affective experiences, whereas self-attributed motives are based on more cognitively elaborated constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A substantial body of evidence collected by Batson and his associates has advanced the idea that pure (i.e., selfless) altruism occurs under conditions of empathy for a needy other. An egoistic alternative account of this evidence was proposed and tested in our work. We hypothesized that an observer's heightened empathy for a sufferer brings with it increased personal sadness in the observer and that it is the egoistic desire to relieve the sadness, rather than the selfless desire to relieve the sufferer, that motivates helping. Two experiments contrasted predictions from the selfless and egoistic alternatives in the paradigm typically used by Batson and his associates. In the first, an emphatic orientation to a victim increased personal sadness, as expected. Furthermore, when sadness and empathic emotion were separated experimentally, helping was predicted by the levels of sadness subjects were experiencing but not by their empathy scores. In the second experiment, enhanced sadness was again associated with empathy for a victim. However, subjects who were led to perceive that their moods could not be altered through helping (because of the temporary action of a "mood-fixing" placebo drug) were not helpful, despite high levels of empathic emotion. The results were interpreted as providing support for an egoistically based interpretation of helping under conditions of high empathy.
Recent experimental choice studies compare expected utility with competing theories of decision-making under risk. Formal tests used to judge the theories usually count the number of consistent responses, ignoring systematic variation in inconsistent responses. A maximum-likelihood estimation method is developed that extracts more information from the data and enables one to judge the predictive utility--fit and parsimony--of utility theories. Analyses of twenty-three data sets suggest a menu of theories that sacrifice the least parsimony for the biggest improvement in fit. The menu is mixed fanning, prospect theory, expected utility, and expected value. Copyright 1994 by The Econometric Society.
I: Background.- 1. An Introduction.- 2. Conceptualizations of Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination.- II: Self-Determination Theory.- 3. Cognitive Evaluation Theory: Perceived Causality and Perceived Competence.- 4. Cognitive Evaluation Theory: Interpersonal Communication and Intrapersonal Regulation.- 5. Toward an Organismic Integration Theory: Motivation and Development.- 6. Causality Orientations Theory: Personality Influences on Motivation.- III: Alternative Approaches.- 7. Operant and Attributional Theories.- 8. Information-Processing Theories.- IV: Applications and Implications.- 9. Education.- 10. Psychotherapy.- 11. Work.- 12. Sports.- References.- Author Index.
This paper tries to provide a complete list and classification of the motives for acting in accordance with morals, to explain the mechanisms underlying the less transparent among these motives, and to probe which of these motives are suited for justifying morals. (1) After giving reasons for the importance of an empirical theory of moral motives for ethics, and after specifying the exact question of the present study (2) a general model of moral action (3) and a main classification of the motives for acting morally is presented. (4) Self-transcendent motives, (5) motives close to morals, like sympathy and respect, (6) and moral motives in the narrow sense, which proceed from moral judgements, are scrutinized in detail. Only the motives near to morals and interest in cooperation but not the moral motives in the narrow sense are suited for justifying morals. (7) A concluding sketch of the development of moral judgements shows that only motives near to morals and interest in cooperation (but not e.g. pure reason) are also the sources of autonomously developed moral criteria.
In this book, Alfred Mele tackles some central problems in the philosophy of action. His purpose is to construct an explanatory model for intentional behaviour, locating the place and significance of such mental phenomena as beliefs, desires, reasons, and intentions in the etiology of intentional action. Part One comprises a comprehensive examination of the standard treatments of the relations between desires, beliefs, and actions. In Part Two, Mele develops a subtle and well defended view that the motivational role of intentions is of a different sort from that of beliefs and desires. In the final chapter, Mele offers a provocative explanation of how we come to have intentions and elaborates on his earlier work concerning akratic failures of will.
A developing neurobiological/psychological theory of positive motivation gives a key causal role to reward events in the brain which can be directly activated by electrical stimulation (ESB). In its strongest form, this Reward Event Theory (RET) claims that all positive motivation, primary and learned, is functionally dependent on these reward events. Some of the empirical evidence is reviewed which either supports or challenges RET. The paper examines the implications of RET for the concepts of ‘motivation’, ‘desire’ and ‘reward’ or ‘pleasure’. It is argued (1) that a ‘causal base’ as opposed to a functional’ concept of motivation has theoretical advantages; (2) that a causal distinction between the focus’ and the ‘anchor’ of desire suggests an ineliminable ‘opacity’ of desire; and (3) that some affective concept, such as ‘pleasure’, should play a key role in psychological explanation, distinct from that of motivational (or cognitive) concepts. A concept of ‘reward’ or ‘pleasure’ as intrinsically positive affect is defended, and contrasted with the more ‘operational’ definitions of ‘reward’ in some of the hypotheses of Roy Wise.
Written from the standpoint of the social behaviorist, this treatise contains the heart of Mead's position on social psychology. The analysis of language is of major interest, as it supplied for the first time an adequate treatment of the language mechanism in relation to scientific and philosophical issues. "If philosophical eminence be measured by the extent to which a man's writings anticipate the focal problems of a later day and contain a point of view which suggests persuasive solutions to many of them, then George Herbert Mead has justly earned the high praise bestowed upon him by Dewey and Whitehead as a 'seminal mind of the very first order.'" Sidney Hook, "The Nation""
We show how to calibrate a prospect model of decision making under risk for an individual. The prospect model is empirically compared to a utility model on two criteria, verification of the postulates of each model, and predictive accuracy. The empirical comparison is performed via three experiments. In Experiment 1, predictive accuracy of the models is compared in nonparadoxical situations, those which favor neither model. In contrast the predictions in Experiment 2 are for paradoxical choices, those which favor the prospect model. In Experiment 1, the prospect model is compared to a model comprising a utility function which permits separate risk attitudes for gain and losses, and hence is more flexible than a utility model as traditionally assessed. In contrast the utility model in Experiment 3 is assessed as is traditionally done assuming constant risk attitude across gains and losses. Several calibration procedures are contrasted across experiments.
Our results show a high degree of consistency with the postulates of both models. On predictive accuracy the prospect model outperforms the utility model for paradoxical choices. However, for nonparadoxical situations there is little difference in the predictive ability of both models.
I will review recent experimental studies of individual decision making, with their implications for economics in mind. Decision making is increasingly important for economics for at least two reasons.
Michael E. Bratman develops a planning theory of intention. Intentions are treated as elements of partial plans of action. These plans play basic roles in practical reasoning, roles that support the organization of our activities over time and socially. Bratman explores the impact of this approach on a wide range of issues, including the relation between intention and intentional action, and the distinction between intended and expected effects of what one intends.
This article starts with a description of decision research in the past as a development towards an understanding of decision making as a process in which a decision maker's decision rules and problem representations interact in the creation of a final choice. The Differentiation and Consolidation Theory (Svenson, 1992) is presented briefly to provide a framework for a discussion of process studies and regularities in human decision processes. Subsequently, recent findings about pre- and postdecision processes are presented followed by some methodological considerations for future decision research. For example, it is argued that within subjects designs should be used whenever possible and that interindividual differences concerning importance of attributes must be accommodated before aggregating group data. The paper ends with a section presenting a number of suggestions of areas and problems deserving more attention and research efforts in the future.
Analysis of decision making under risk has been dominated by expected utility theory, which generally accounts for people's actions. Presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and argues that common forms of utility theory are not adequate, and proposes an alternative theory of choice under risk called prospect theory. In expected utility theory, utilities of outcomes are weighted by their probabilities. Considers results of responses to various hypothetical decision situations under risk and shows results that violate the tenets of expected utility theory. People overweight outcomes considered certain, relative to outcomes that are merely probable, a situation called the "certainty effect." This effect contributes to risk aversion in choices involving sure gains, and to risk seeking in choices involving sure losses. In choices where gains are replaced by losses, the pattern is called the "reflection effect." People discard components shared by all prospects under consideration, a tendency called the "isolation effect." Also shows that in choice situations, preferences may be altered by different representations of probabilities. Develops an alternative theory of individual decision making under risk, called prospect theory, developed for simple prospects with monetary outcomes and stated probabilities, in which value is given to gains and losses (i.e., changes in wealth or welfare) rather than to final assets, and probabilities are replaced by decision weights. The theory has two phases. The editing phase organizes and reformulates the options to simplify later evaluation and choice. The edited prospects are evaluated and the highest value prospect chosen. Discusses and models this theory, and offers directions for extending prospect theory are offered. (TNM)
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