Cycling: Utilitarian and symbolic dimensions

[The symbolic and utilitarian facets of pacifiers according to mothers].

OBJECTIVE Despite governmental initiatives that control, discourage and even prohibit the divulgation of the usage of dummies and pacifiers in maternity wards, the frequency of pacifier use by Brazilian children is still high. In light of this phenomenon, the aim of the present study was to investigate the social representations of the pacifier constructed by mothers whose children used pacifie...

Water and People: Challenges at the Interface of Symbolic and Utilitarian Values

McCool, Stephen, F.; Clark, Roger N.; Stankey, George H., eds. 2008. Water and people: challenges at the interface of symbolic and utilitarian values. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-729. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 246 p. The demand for water is rapidly increasing, but the uses to which that water is put and the values society place...

Utilitarian Harm 1 Running Head: UTILITARIAN HARM Authority Dependence and Judgments of Utilitarian Harm

Three studies tested the conditions under which people judge utilitarian harm to be authority dependent (i.e., whether its right or wrongness depends on the ruling of an authority). In Study 1, participants judged the right or wrongness of physical abuse when used as an interrogation method anticipated to yield useful information for preventing future terrorist attacks. The ruling of the milita...

Utilitarian epistemology

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promi...

Harsanyi’s ‘Utilitarian Theorem’ and Utilitarianism