Narrative Capacity

Toomey, James, (August 31, 2021).

100 N.C. L. Rev. 1073

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3914839

Abstract

The doctrine of capacity is a fundamental threshold to the protections of private law. The law only recognizes private decision-making—from exercising the right to transfer or bequeath property and entering into a contract to getting married or divorced—made with the level of cognitive functioning that the capacity doctrine demands. When the doctrine goes wrong, it denies individuals, particularly older adults, access to basic private-law rights on the one hand and ratifies decision-making that may tear apart families and tarnish legacies on the other.

The capacity doctrine in private law is built on a fundamental philosophical mismatch. It is grounded in a cognitive theory of personhood, and determines whether to recognize private decisions based on the cognitive abilities thought by philosophers to entitle persons in general to unique moral status. But to align with the purposes of the substantive doctrines of property and contract, private-law capacity should instead be grounded in a narrative theory of personal identity. Rather than asking whether a decision-maker is a person by measuring their cognitive abilities, the doctrine should ask whether they are the same person by looking to the story of their life.

This Article argues for a new doctrine of capacity under which the law would recognize personal decision-making if and only if it is linked by a coherent narrative structure to the story of the decision-maker’s life. Moreover, the Article offers a test for determining which decisions meet this criterion and explains how the doctrine would work in practice.

Conclusion

Scholars and courts have long recognized that the threshold doctrine of capacity in private law requires reform to meet the needs of our aging society.  What they have not clearly seen is the doctrine’s fundamental error—a philosophical misalignment between the legal test, based on the construct of personhood, and its purposes, which are concerned with personal identity. This Article has excavated this distinction. And it has articulated and evaluated an alternative.

We think of ourselves as stories and we make meaning of our lives through our stories. That is what is at stake in the doctrine of capacity—whether an individual may continue to write their story by making decisions and choices.  Concern for the stories of our lives should be a paramount guiding principle of the capacity doctrine. In short, courts should only intervene in our decision-making where the story we would tell with our choices ceases to be our story at all.

A pdf is here.

Free Ethics CE

I will support Beth Rom-Rymer's voting kickoff for APA President-Elect with a continuing education program!!

I will be presenting a free CE on September 15, 2022 on the first day of voting for APA President-Elect.  I will be encouraging participants to vote in the APA election, and put Beth in the #1 space.

This will be the first in a series of three free workshops to promote Beth's candidacy.

Here is the link to the CE event to register.

Here is the long link.

https://events.eventzilla.net/e/integrating-moral-values-with-ethical-decisionmaking-2138578426

Here is a link for Dr. Rom-Rymer's campaign web site.

Violence against women at work

Adams-Prassl, A., Huttunen, K., Nix, E., 

& Zhang, N. (2022). University of Oxford.

Working Paper

Abstract

Between-colleague conflicts are common. We link every police report in Finland to administrative data to identify assaults between colleagues, and economic outcomes for victims, perpetrators, and firms. We document large, persistent labor market impacts of between colleague violence on victims and perpetrators. Male perpetrators experience substantially weaker consequences after attacking women compared to men. Perpetrators’ economic power in male-female violence partly explains this asymmetry. Male-female violence causes a decline in women at the firm. There is no change in within-network hiring, ruling out supplyside explanations via "whisper networks". Only male-managed firms lose women. Female managers do one important thing differently: fire perpetrators.

Discussion

Our results have a number of implications. First, female victims of workplace violence have few economic incentives to report violence at work. Even in the relatively severe cases reported to the police in our data, the male perpetrator experiences relatively small labor market costs for his actions. This is consistent with the vast under-reporting of workplace harassment and abuse suggested by survey data. A major, known problem in preventing harassment at work is that victims rarely report the problem to their employer (Magley, 2002). Women under-reporting harassment and violence at the hands of a colleague (and in particular one’s manager) is easily reconciled with the comparative lack of career consequences for perpetrators of male-female violence we have documented.

Second, given that under-reporting is common, we are likely only observing a small fraction of all cases of workplace violence. As described in Section 2, just 10% of physical assaults are reported to the police in Finland, with lower reporting rates for crimes considered less serious by the victim (EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2015; European Institute for Crime Prevention & Control, 2009). Conservatively, this implies that the incidence of workplace violence is at least 10 times larger than can be documented by police reports. At the same time, under-reporting and selective reporting is relevant for the external validity of our results. While we provide the first evidence of the causal impacts of workplace violence on perpetrators, victims, and the broader firm we can only do so for the (likely) more severe cases reported to police. We might not expect to see quite as large of impacts on victims, perpetrators, and the firm from less severe abuse by colleagues.

A pdf is here.

Debiasing System 1: Training favours logical over stereotypical intuiting

Boissin, E, Caparos, S., Voudouri, A, & DeNeys, W.

Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 17, No. 4, 

July 2022, pp. 646–690

Abstract

Whereas people’s reasoning is often biased by intuitive stereotypical associations, recent debiasing studies suggest that performance can be boosted by short training interventions that stress the underlying problem logic. The nature of this training effect remains unclear. Does training help participants correct erroneous stereotypical intuitions through deliberation? Or does it help them develop correct intuitions? We addressed this issue in four studies with base-rate neglect and conjunction fallacy problems. We used a two-response paradigm in which participants first gave an initial intuitive response, under time pressure and cognitive load, and then gave a final response after deliberation. Studies 1A and 2A showed that training boosted performance and did so as early as the intuitive stage. After training, most participants

solved the problems correctly from the outset and no longer needed to correct an initial incorrect answer through deliberation. Studies 1B and 2B indicated that this sound intuiting persisted over at least two months. The findings confirm that a short training can debias reasoning at an intuitive “System 1” stage and get reasoners to favour logical over stereotypical intuitions.

From the General Discussion

Traditionally, it is assumed in the literature that debiasing interventions work by boosting deliberation and get people to better correct erroneous intuitions (Lilienfeld et al., 2009; Milkman et al., 2009). However, in many daily life situations reasoners will simply not have the time (or resources) to engage in costly deliberation. Hence, if our interventionsonly taught participants to deliberate more, they would be less than optimal (Boissin et al., 2021). As with most educational settings, we ultimately do not only want people to correct erroneous intuitions but to avoid biased intuitions altogether (Evans, 2019; Milkman et al., 2009; Reyna et al., 2015; Stanovich, 2018). The present study indicates that debiasing interventions in which the problem logic is briefly explained have such potential.

To avoid misinterpretation, it is important to highlight that our training did not lead to transfer effects. The training should thus not be conceived as a panacea that magically tunes the whole System 1 in one single stop. The training results generalized to base-rate and conjunction tasks, with overall similar effects across the two types of tasks, showing that participants can be trained to intuit correctly with different types of reasoning problems.  However, training base-rates did not help to solve the conjunction fallacy or other unrelated problems, and vice versa. The training effects were task specific. Reasoners did not learn to intuit (or deliberate) better in general. They got better at the very specific problem they were trained at. This fits with the finding that existing debiasing or cognitive training programs are often task or domain specific (Lilienfeld et al., 2009; Sala & Gobet, 2019; but also see Morewedge et al., 2015; Trouche et al., 2014). Our key finding is that this task specific training can play at the intuitive level and is persistent. When we talk about “System 1 debiasing” it should be conceived at this task specific level.

The research is here.

Dr. Oz Shouldn’t Be a Senator—or a Doctor

Timothy Caulfield

Scientific American

Originally posted 15 DEC 21

While holding a medical license, Mehmet Oz, widely known as Dr. Oz, has long pushed misleading, science-free and unproven alternative therapies such as homeopathy, as well as fad diets, detoxes and cleanses. Some of these things have been potentially harmful, including hydroxychloroquine, which he once touted would be beneficial in the treatment or prevention of COVID. This assertion has been thoroughly debunked.

He’s built a tremendous following around his lucrative but evidence-free advice. So, are we surprised that Oz is running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania? No, we are not. Misinformation-spouting celebrities seem to be a GOP favorite. This move is very on brand for both Oz and the Republican Party.

His candidacy is a reminder that tolerating and/or enabling celebrity pseudoscience (I’m thinking of you, Oprah Winfrey!) can have serious and enduring consequences. Much of Oz’s advice was bunk before the pandemic, it is bunk now, and there is no reason to assume it won’t be bunk after—even if he becomes Senator Oz. Indeed, as Senator Oz, it’s all but guaranteed he would bring pseudoscience to the table when crafting and voting on legislation that affects the health and welfare of Americans.

As viewed by someone who researches the spread of health misinformation, Oz’s candidacy remains deeply grating in that “of course he is” kind of way. But it is also an opportunity to highlight several realities about pseudoscience, celebrity physicians and the current regulatory environment that allows people like him to continue to call themselves doctor.

Before the pandemic I often heard people argue that the wellness woo coming from celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Brady and Oz was mostly harmless noise. If people want to waste their money on ridiculous vagina eggs, bogus diets or unproven alternative remedies, why should we care? Buyer beware, a fool and their money, a sucker is born every minute, etc., etc.

But we know, now more than ever, that pop culture can—for better or worse—have a significant impact on health beliefs and behaviors. Indeed, one need only consider the degree to which Jenny McCarthy gave life to the vile claim that autism is linked to vaccination. Celebrity figures like podcast host Joe Rogan and football player Aaron Rodgers have greatly added to the chaotic information regarding COVID-19 by magnifying unsupported claims.

The info is here.

Counterfactuals and the logic of causal selection

Quillien, T., & Lucas, C. G. (2022, June 13)

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ts76y

Abstract

Everything that happens has a multitude of causes, but people make causal judgments effortlessly. How do people select one particular cause (e.g. the lightning bolt that set the forest ablaze) out of the set of factors that contributed to the event (the oxygen in the air, the dry weather. . . )? Cognitive scientists have suggested that people make causal judgments about an event by simulating alternative ways things could have happened. We argue that this counterfactual theory explains many features of human causal intuitions, given two simple assumptions. First, people tend to imagine counterfactual possibilities that are both a priori likely and similar to what actually happened. Second, people judge that a factor C caused effect E if C and E are highly correlated across these counterfactual possibilities. In a reanalysis of existing empirical data, and a set of new experiments, we find that this theory uniquely accounts for people’s causal intuitions.

From the General Discussion

Judgments of causation are closely related to assignments of blame, praise, and moral responsibility.  For instance, when two cars crash at an intersection, we say that the accident was caused by the driver who went through a red light (not by the driver who went through a green light; Knobe and Fraser, 2008; Icard et al., 2017; Hitchcock and Knobe, 2009; Roxborough and Cumby, 2009; Alicke, 1992; Willemsen and Kirfel, 2019); and we also blame that driver for the accident. According to some theorists, the fact that we judge the norm-violator to be blameworthy or morally responsible explains why we judge that he was the cause of the accident. This might be because our motivation to blame distorts our causal judgment (Alicke et al., 2011), because our intuitive concept of causation is inherently normative (Sytsma, 2021), or because of pragmatics confounds in the experimental tasks that probe the effect of moral violations on causal judgment (Samland & Waldmann, 2016).

Under these accounts, the explanation for why moral considerations affect causal judgment should be completely different than the explanation for why other factors (e.g.,prior probabilities, what happened in the actual world, the causal structure of the situation) affect causal judgment. We favor a more parsimonious account: the counterfactual approach to causal judgment (of which our theory is one instantiation) provides a unifying explanation for the influence of both moral and non-moral considerations on causal judgment (Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009)16.

Finally, many formal theories of causal reasoning aim to model how people make causal inferences (e.g. Cheng, 1997; Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2005; Lucas & Griffiths, 2010; Bramley et al., 2017; Jenkins & Ward, 1965). These theories are not concerned with the problem of causal selection, the focus of the present paper. It is in principle possible that people use the same algorithms they use for causal inference when they engage in causal selection, but in practice models of causal inference have not been able to predict how people select causes (see Quillien and Barlev, 2022; Morris et al., 2019).

The research is here.

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning

Trouche, E., Johansson, P., Hall, L., & Mercier, H. 

(2016). Cognitive science, 40(8), 2122–2136.

https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12303

Abstract

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this "selective laziness," we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other people's arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials, they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else's. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else's argument, more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people's arguments than of their own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when the arguments are someone else's rather than their own.

From the Discussion

These experiments provide a very clear demonstration of the selective laziness of reasoning. When reasoning produces arguments, it mostly produces post-hoc justifications for intuitive answers, and it is not particularly critical of one’s arguments for invalid answers. By contrast, when reasoning evaluates the very same arguments as if they were someone else’s, it proves both critical and discriminating.

The present results are analogous to those observed in the belief bias literature (e.g., Evans et al., 1983). When participants evaluate an argument whose conclusion they agree with, they tend to be neither critical (they accept most arguments) nor discriminating(they are not much more likely to reject invalid than valid arguments). By contrast, when they evaluate argument whose conclusion they disagree with, they tend to be more critical (they reject more arguments) and more discriminating (they are much more likely to reject invalid than valid arguments). The similarity is easily explained by the fact that when reasoning produces arguments for one’s position, it is automatically in a situation in which it agrees with the argument’s conclusion.

Selective laziness can be interpreted in light of the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier & Sperber, 2011). This theory hypothesizes that reasoning is best employed in a dialogical context. In such contexts, opening a discussion with a relatively weak argument is often sensible: It saves the trouble of computing the best way to convince a specific audience, and if the argument proves unconvincing, its flaws can be addressed in the back and forth of argumentation. Indeed, the interlocutor typically provides counter-arguments that help the speaker refine her arguments inappropriate ways (for an extended argument, see Mercier, Bonnier, & Trouche, unpublished data). As a result, the laziness of argument production might not be a flaw but an adaptive feature of reasoning. By contrast, people should properly evaluate other people’s arguments, so as not to accept misleading information—hence the selectivity of reasoning’s laziness.

The research is here.

In short: We make better judges for others, and better defense attorneys for ourselves (paraphrasing an old saying).

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have "engaged in misconduct," ethics board says

CBS News

Originally posted 23 AUG 22

A South Dakota ethics board on Monday said it found sufficient information that Gov. Kristi Noem may have "engaged in misconduct" when she intervened in her daughter's application for a real estate appraiser license, and it referred a separate complaint over her state airplane use to the state's attorney general for investigation.

The three retired judges on the Government Accountability Board determined that "appropriate action" could be taken against Noem for her role in her daughter's appraiser licensure, though it didn't specify the action.

The board's moves potentially escalate the ramifications of investigations into Noem. The Republican governor faces reelection this year and has also positioned herself as an aspirant to the White House in 2024. She is under scrutiny from the board after Jason Ravnsborg, the state's former Republican attorney general, filed complaints that stemmed from media reports on Noem's actions in office. She has denied any wrongdoing.

After meeting in a closed-door session for one hour Monday, the board voted unanimously to invoke procedures that allow for a contested case hearing to give Noem a chance to publicly defend herself against allegations of "misconduct" related to "conflicts of interest" and "malfeasance." The board also dismissed Ravnsborg's allegations that Noem misused state funds in the episode.

However, the retired judges left it unclear how they will proceed. Lori Wilbur, the board chair, said the complaint was "partially dismissed and partially closed," but added that the complaint could be reopened. She declined to discuss what would cause the board to reopen the complaint.

The info is here.

Dual use of artifcial-intelligence-powered drug discovery

Urbina, F., Lentzos, F., Invernizzi, C. et al. 

Nat Mach Intell 4, 189–191 (2022). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9

The Swiss Federal Institute for NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) Protection —Spiez Laboratory— convenes the ‘convergence’ conference series set up by the Swiss government to identify developments in chemistry, biology and enabling technologies that may have implications for the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions. Meeting every two years, the conferences bring together an international group of scientific and disarmament experts to explore the current state of the art in the chemical and biological fields and their trajectories, to think through potential security implications and to consider how these implications can most effectively be managed internationally.  The meeting convenes for three days of discussion on the possibilities of harm, should the intent be there, from cutting-edge chemical and biological technologies.  Our drug discovery company received an invitation to contribute a presentation on how AI technologies for drug discovery could potentially be misused.

Risk of misuse

The thought had never previously struck us. We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting.  Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery. We have spent decades using computers and AI to improve human health—not to degrade it. We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade, as our aim had always been to avoid molecular features that could interfere with the many different classes of proteins essential to human life. Even our projects on Ebola and neurotoxins, which could have sparked thoughts about the potential negative implications of our machine learning models, had not set our alarm bells ringing.

(cut)

Broader effects on society

There is a need for discussions across traditional boundaries and multiple disciplines to allow for a fresh look at AI for de novo design and related technologies from different perspectives and with a wide variety of mindsets. Here, we give some recommendations that we believe will reduce potential dual-use concerns for AI in drug discovery. Scientific conferences, such as the Society of Toxicology and American Chemical Society, should actively foster a dialogue among experts from industry, academia and policy making on the implications of our computational tools.

A pdf is here.