Chapter 1: Beginning with the Metaphysics of Morals’ systematic portrayal of reason’s universally legislative role with respect to duties of right and duties of virtue, I explain why Kant requires the concept of an end that is also a duty if the distinction that he draws between juridical and ethical lawgiving is to ground the basic architectonic setup of his overall doctrine of morals, i.e., i...

I address questions about values in model-making in engineering, specifically: Might the role of values be attributable solely to interests involved in specifying and using the model? Selected examples illustrate the surprisingly wide variety of things one must take into account in the model-making itself. The notions of system (as used in engineering thermodynamics), and physically similar sys...

What are the possible functions of moral cognition? Addressing this question has proven difficult, leading to disagreement among moral psychologists. Researchers claiming that morality is composed of many distinct domains have posited multiple functions, whereas researchers focusing on the features that are unique to and common across all moral judgments have suggested a unified evolutionary fu...

A RECENT EDITORIAL in the New York Times makes disturbing reading. It says, in part:. .. the number of Americans without insurance. .. stood at 39 million even at the end of the booming 1990s. .. more than 2 million Americans lost their insurance last year. The soaring costs are driven, in part, by the biomedical revolution of the past decade, which has produced an array of expensive new treatm...

Th i s paper examines the r o l e of both ep isod ic memory and a b s t r a c t p lann ing knowledge in n a r r a t i v e comprehension. Many n a r r a t i v e s a re memorable f o r the a b s t r a c t p lann ing adv ice they c o n t a i n , u s u a l l y i n the form o f f a i l u r e s which n a r r a t i v e charac te rs exper ienced du r i ng e i t h e r p l a n n i n g , o r p l an execut...

One process to which ‘purpose’ can refer is that genes are self-replicating. Another process to which ‘purpose’ can apply is that genes set some of the goals for actions. These goals are fundamental to understanding emotion. Another process to which ‘purpose’ can apply is that syntactic multistep reasoning provides a route for goals to be set that are to the advantage of the individual, the phe...