Imperfect Cognitions

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...

This post is by Francesco Guala (pictured above), Professor of Economics at the University of Milan. In this post, he presents a paper  he wrote with Luigi Mittone , Professor of Economics at the University of Trento, and which was published in the journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology. A reply to their article by Cass Sunstein is also available in the same journal. ‘Behavioural economics’ is a research programme that aims at making economic models psychologically more realistic. After many years ‘in the wild’, behavioural economists are now part of the mainstream and have succeeded at bringing microeconomics in line with the developments of cognitive psychology. Up until recently, however, behavioural economists had been rather shy regarding the normative (i.e. policy) implications of their research. All of this has changed in 2008 with the publication of Nudge, the best-selling book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Nudge is not only an impressive showcase fo...