This paper considers the role of reasons and arguments in the making of decisions. It is proposed that, when faced with the need to choose, decision makers often seek and construct reasons in order to resolve the conflict and justify their choice, to themselves and to others. Experiments that explore and manipulate the role of reasons are reviewed, and other decision studies are interpreted fro...

W e are two of the scientist members of the President's Council on Bioethics. In late 2001, we were invited by the President of the United States to serve on this Council. The Bioethics Council was appointed by the President to " monitor stem-cell research, to recommend appropriate guidelines and regulations, and to consider all of the medical and ethical ramifi cations of biomedical innovation...

We consider ourselves to be rational beings. We feel that our choices, decisions, and actions are selected from a flexible array of possibilities, based upon reasons. When we vote for a political candidate, it is because they share our views on certain critical issues. When we hire an individual for a job, it is because they are the best qualified. However, if this is true, why does an analysis...

1. Rawls puts forward a proposal of political philosophy suitable for a pluralistic society where members try to establish and make persistent a stable social cooperation. The proposal is very sophisticated and takes into consideration numerous elements of a complex society. First of all, it is worth pointing out that the model of society proposed by Rawls is a liberal society, based on the ide...

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by ...

My topic is the debate in moral psychology between the rationalist and the anti-rationalist over the proper relation between reason and desire. My aim is not to adjudicate this debate, but rather to clarify what is at stake, for, it seems to me, both parties are prone to misconceive the issues that divide them. Rationalists and anti-rationalists alike believe that there are norms of rationality...

Humans have used arguments for defending or refuting statements long before the creation of logic as a specialized discipline. This can be interpreted as the fact that an intuitive notion of “logical consequence” or a psychic disposition to articulate reasoning according to this pattern is present in common sense, and logic simply aims at describing and codifying the features of this spontaneou...

A reason-based choice correspondence rationalizes choice behaviour in terms of a two-stage choice procedure. Given a feasible set S, the individual eliminates from it all of the dominated alternatives according to her …xed (not necessarily complete) strict preference relation, in the …rst step. In the second step, …rst she constructs for each maximal alternative identi…ed in the …rst step its l...

In this paper I will approach the subject of intuition from a different angle from what has been usual in the philosophy of mathematics, by beginning with some descriptive remarks about Reason and observing that something that has been called intuition arises naturally in that context. These considerations are quite general, not specific to mathematics. The conception of intuition might be call...

On the face of things, it would seem that suffering can have significant value for creatures like us. It is overwhelmingly plausible from the point of view of both naı̈ve reflection and broadly empirical investigation that sensory/psychological suffering is a necessary condition on a certain kind of fitness-preserving causal motivation, and one that assists and supports rational activity. On suc...