Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Kamyab Ghorbanpour, Michał Klincewicz, Paris Mavromoustakos Blom and Pieter Spronck who recently published a paper entitled: " The Blind Gamer: Examining Ethical Agency Through Choice Blindness in Game Design " in Entertainment Computing . Kamyab Ghorbanpour When you ask someone why they chose to read a particular book, they will usually give you a story. It might be about how they came across it in a bookstore, how it was highly recommended by their friends, or how it resembled a book they had previously enjoyed. Regardless, they will provide a story, a story believed both by you and by themselves. But what if that story is untrue? What if they weren’t actually aware of why they chose that book? What if they were confabulating without even realizing it? Choice blindness shows that this is not an unlikely scenario. Research has demonstrated that people can make decisions without being fully aware of them—or, for lack of a better term, they think they know why ...

Garrett Cullity  is Hughes Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, where he teaches and writes on topics in practical, theoretical and meta-ethics. He taught previously at the Universities of Oxford and St Andrews.  He is a co-editor (with Berys Gaut) of Ethics and Practical Reason (Clarendon Press, 1997) and the author of The Moral Demands of Affluence (Clarendon Press, 2004). In this blog post he talks about his new book Concern, Respect, and Cooperation . Three things often recognized as central to morality are concern for others’ welfare, respect for their self-expression, and cooperation in worthwhile collective activity. When philosophers have proposed theories of the substance of morality, they have typically looked to one of these three sources to provide a single, fundamental principle of morality – or they have tried to formulate a master-principle for morality that combines these three ideas in some way. In this book, I make the case for tr...