Why arguments against infanticide remain convincing: A reply to Räsänen

Infanticide: a reply to Giubilini and Minerva

Alberto Giubilini and Francesco Minerva's recent infanticide proposal is predicated on their personism and actualism. According to these related ideas, human beings achieve their moral status in virtue of the degree to which they are capable of laying value upon their lives or exhibiting certain qualities or being desirable to third-party family members. This article challenges these criteria, ...

DiaLaw: Levels, Dialog Trees, Convincing Arguments

DiaLaw is a dialogical model of legal justification. An important characteristic of the formal and implemented model DiaLaw is that both logic-based arguments and mere convincing statements can be modelled. The support of both structural (logic-based) arguments and procedural arguments (mere convincing statements) is expressed by different levels in the dialog. In this paper so-called dialog tr...

Reply to Dixson: Infanticide triggers primate monogamy.

We thank Alan Dixson (1) for his interest in our paper (2). Unfortunately, he seems to have misread it. First, contrary to Dixson’s claim, we did not conflate callitrichid “monogamy” with obligate monogamy in other primates, like gibbons and the small cebids. We note that these were conflated in Lukas and Clutton-Brock’s (3) recent report on the evolution of monogamy but not in our paper. Dixso...

Social values as arguments: similar is convincing

Politicians, philosophers, and rhetors engage in co-value argumentation: appealing to one value in order to support another value (e.g., "equality leads to freedom"). Across four experiments in the United Kingdom and India, we found that the psychological relatedness of values affects the persuasiveness of the arguments that bind them. Experiment 1 found that participants were more persuaded by...

Why we want to remain a nonprofit health care organization.