Experimental implementations of the Ultimatum Game are some of the most well studied economic experiments of the last twenty years. There are two popular explanations for why Proposers offer substantially more than the smallest positive amount of the pie. One is that the Proposers have other-regarding preferences and the other explanation is that Proposers are selfish, but fear rejection by Responders who will reject low offers. Most experiments that attempt to discriminate between these two explanations contrast behavior in the Ultimatum Game to behavior in the Dictator Game. The Dictator Game removes strategic concerns from the Ultimatum Game without substantially changing the predicted behavior of a selfish Proposer. Researchers thus believe that subtracting Dictator Game offers from Ultimatum Game offers isolates the fraction of average offers in the Ultimatum Game motivated by other-regarding preferences. In most Dictator Game experiments, Proposers offer less than they do in Ultimatum Games, but they still offer non-trivial positive amounts. This result has led analysts to posit that Proposer behavior in the Ultimatum Game is motivated in part by other-regarding preferences. There are, however, potential problems in drawing inferences about Proposer behavior in the Ultimatum Game from observations of Proposer behavior in the Dictator Game. First, it is well known that objectively irrelevant contextual details in experiments can affect subject behavior in systematic ways. Second, altruistic motivations are less costly to satisfy per monetary unit in the Ultimatum Game because each monetary unit offered to the Responder reduces the probability of rejection. Thus strategic motivations may be sufficient to explain behavior in the Ultimatum Game. In other words, a Proposer with altruistic preferences may offer the same amount of money as an identical Proposer who differs only in his lack of such preferences. In contrast to previous approaches that remove the strategic incentives in the Ultimatum Game, we remove the incentives for expressing other-regarding preferences. We do so through a treatment in which humans are paired with robots that, for each choice in the Proposer’s decision space, reject with the same frequency as humans in previous experiments. Proposers are aware they are playing with automata that are programmed to reject and accept as humans have done in previous implementations of the experiment. Under the mild assumption that humans do not express other-regarding preferences for fictional automata, this treatment presents an Ultimatum Game with only strategic motives operative. Note also that unlike previous attempts that use a different game to make inferences about behavior in the Ultimatum Game, we are able to measure the effects of strategic and other-regarding motives without changing the fundamental structure of the Ultimatum Game. Moreover, previous analyses do not formally include decision error as an important motivation for non-SPNE offers. To test for misunderstanding of the strategic environment, we develop a second treatment in which subjects play the Ultimatum Game with a robot Responder that rejects or accepts every offer with equal probability. If Proposers are truly thinking about Responder rejection rates in formulating their offers, they should offer $0 in this treatment.

If we want to take the agency of the oppressed seriously, we need to think about their normative situation. We need to understand what oppression does to victims, and what victims ought to do as a result. The first half of my dissertation develops a new account of oppression, one that identifies cases not by the wrongs that oppressors embody but by the burdens that victims suffer. The second half questions what kinds of moral and political actors victims can and should be. According to the prevailing "group relationship" of model of oppression, the members of a social group are oppressed when they're subordinated, marginalized, constrained, or displaced in a way that benefits the members of a different social group. In place of this prevailing view, I propose a new, effects-centered model: a person is oppressed when their autonomy or their life prospects are systematically and wrongfully burdened. I then use this account to understand the moral and political agency of the oppressed. I argue that victims have a self-regarding moral obligation to resist their oppression, grounded in considerations of objective well-being. And I develop Aristotle's account of political virtue to apply across ideal and oppressive circumstances alike, adapting it as a defense of nonviolent civil disobedience. This dissertation is the beginning of a larger research project concerned with the nature of victimhood, how injustice affects agency, and how obligations can be grounded in the absence of just institutions.

It has been suggested that reward processing and related neural substrates are disrupted in some common mental disorders such as depression, addiction, and anxiety. An increasing number of psychiatric studies have been applying reinforcement learning (RL) models to examine these disruptions in self-regarding learning (learning about rewards delivered to the learners themselves). A review of RL alterations associated with mental disorders in extant studies will be beneficial for uncovering the mechanisms of these health problems. Although impaired social reward processing is common in some mental disorders [e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety and autism], RL has not been widely used to detect the potentially disrupted social reward learning, especially for other-regarding learning (learning about rewards delivered to others). Meanwhile, it has not been clear whether some drugs, e.g., oxytocin (OT), can alter other-regarding learning, so they may serve as a therapeutic intervention when related deficits occur. In the present set of studies, we summarized common and distinct features in terms of self-regarding RL disturbances among depression, addiction and anxiety disorders based on previous findings (Paper I), tested whether behavioral and neural self- and other-regarding RL were impaired in PTSD with and without comorbid depression (Paper II), and investigated OT's behavioral and neural effects on self- and other-regarding RL in healthy males (Paper III). The results of our literature review showed that the commonalities in all three mental disorders were inflexibility and inconsistent choices, and the differences included decreased learning rates in depression, a higher weight to rewards versus punishments in addiction, and hypersensitivity to punishments in anxiety. The results of the PTSD study demonstrated impaired behavioral other-regarding learning in PTSD patients with and without depression, supposedly due to their hypervigilance to unexpected outcomes for others, as evidenced by the heightened responses in their inferior parietal lobule. The OT study detected OT's effects of attenuating behavioral other-regarding learning, as well as the neural coding of unexpected outcomes for others in the anterior cingulate cortex. These findings provide new evidence of self- and other-regarding RL alterations in mental disorders, reveal potential targets for their treatments, and bring caution for using OT as a therapeutic intervention. / Doctor of Philosophy / People learn to make choices to gain rewards and to avoid punishments delivered to themselves. As social animals, people also take account of outcomes delivered to others when learning. With the help of computational modeling, previous studies have found abnormal reward learning for oneself in people with mental health problems. To better understand mental illnesses, we summarized the similarities and differences of the learning abnormalities reported in previous studies about depression, addiction, and anxiety. We have found that people with these mental illnesses all tend to be inflexible and make more random choices when learning. As for the differences, people with depression tend to learn slower; people with addiction tend to see gaining rewards as more important than avoiding punishments; and people with anxiety tend to be oversensitive to punishments. Using computational modeling and imaging of brain function, we also tested whether learning for other was abnormal in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and found that, compared to healthy people, PTSD patients had slower learning for others' rewards, and the inferior parietal lobule, a brain region for processing social information, showed higher responses to unexpected outcomes for others. In another study, we examined whether oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide that has been reported to change people's social functions, could influence reward learning for others in healthy males. The results showed that OT slowed down people's learning for others, and also decreased the neural learning signals in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in processing other's outcomes. Our findings provide new information about how reward learning for oneself and others are changed in mental illnesses, reveal potential targets for their treatments, and bring caution for using OT as a therapeutic intervention.

This is a thesis about anti-paternalism – the liberal doctrine that we may not interfere with a person’s liberty for her own good. Empirical circumstances and moral values may certainly give us reason to avoid benevolent interference. Anti-paternalism as a normative doctrine should, however, be rejected. Essay I concerns the definitions of paternalism and anti-paternalism. It is argued that only a definition of paternalism in terms of compound reason-actions can accommodate its special moral properties. Definitions in terms of actions, common in the literature, cannot. It is argued, furthermore, that in specifying the reason-actions in further detail, the notion of what is self-regarding, as opposed to other-regarding, is irrelevant, contrary to received opinion. Essay II starts out with the definition of paternalism defended in essay I and claims that however this very general definition is specified, anti-paternalism is unreasonable and should be rejected. Anti-paternalism is the position that certain reasons – referring one way or the other to the good of a person, give no valid normative support to certain actions – some kind of interferences with the same person. Since the reasons in question are normally quite legitimate and important reasons for action, a convincing argument for anti-paternalism must explain why they are invalid in cases of interference. A closer look at the reasons and actions in question provides no basis for such an explanation. Essay III considers a concrete case of benevolent interference – the withholding of information concerning uncertain threats to public health in the public’s best interest. Such a policy has been suggested in relation to the European Commission’s proposed new system for the Registration, Evaluation, and Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH). Information about uncertain threats to health from chemicals would allegedly spread anxiety and depression and thus do more harm than good. The avoidance of negative health effects is accepted as a legitimate and good reason for withholding of information, thus respecting the conclusion of essay II, that anti-paternalism should be rejected. Other reasons, however, tip the balance in favour of making the information available. These reasons include the net effects on knowledge, psychological effects, effects on private decisions and effects on political decisions. / QC 20101115

This thesis is an attempt to constructively interpret and critically evaluate the liberal doctrine that we may not limit a person’s liberty for her own good, and to discuss its implications and alternatives in some concrete areas of public health policy. The thesis starts theoretical and goes ever more practical. The first paper is devoted to positive interpretation of anti-paternalism with special focus on the reason component – personal good. A novel generic definition of paternalism is proposed, intended to capture, in a generous fashion, the object of traditional liberal resistance to paternalism – the invocation of personal good reasons for limiting of or interfering with a person’s liberty. In the second paper, the normative aspect of this resistance is given a somewhat technical interpretation in terms of invalidation of reasons – the blocking of reasons from influencing the moral status of actions according to their strength. It is then argued that normative anti-paternalism so understood is unreasonable, on three grounds: 1) Since the doctrine only applies to sufficiently voluntary action, voluntariness determines validity of reasons, which is unwarranted and leads to wrong answers to moral questions. 2) Since voluntariness comes in degrees, a threshold must be set where personal good reasons are invalidated, leading to peculiar jumps in the justifiability of actions. 3) Anti-paternalism imposes an untenable and unhelpful distinction between the value of respecting choices that are sufficiently voluntary and choices that are not. The third paper adds to this critique the fourth argument that none of the action types typically proposed to specify the action component of paternalism is such that performing an action of that type out of benevolence is essentially morally problematic. The fourth paper ignores the critique in the second and third papers and proposes, in an anti-paternalistic spirit, a series of rules for the justification of option-restricting policies aimed at groups where some members consent to the policy and some do not. Such policies present the liberal with a dilemma where the value of not restricting people’s options without their consent conflicts with the value of allowing people to shape their lives according to their own wishes. The fifth paper applies the understanding of anti-paternalism developed in the earlier papers to product safety regulation, as an example of a public health policy area. The sixth paper explores in more detail a specific public health policy, namely that of mandatory alcohol interlocks in all cars, proposed by the former Swedish government and supported by the Swedish National Road Administration. The policy is evaluated for cost-effectiveness, for possible diffusion of individual responsibility, and for paternalistic treatment of drivers. The seventh paper argues for a liberal policy in the area of dissemination of information about uncertain threats to public health. The argument against paternalism is based on common sense consequentialist considerations, avoiding any appeal to the normative anti-paternalism rejected earlier in the thesis. / QC 20100714

<p>This is a thesis about anti-paternalism – the liberal doctrine that we may not interfere with a person’s liberty for her own good. Empirical circumstances and moral values may certainly give us reason to avoid benevolent interference. Anti-paternalism as a normative doctrine should, however, be rejected.</p><p><em>Essay I</em> concerns the definitions of paternalism and anti-paternalism. It is argued that only a definition of paternalism in terms of compound reason-actions can accommodate its special moral properties. Definitions in terms of actions, common in the literature, cannot. It is argued, furthermore, that in specifying the reason-actions in further detail, the notion of what is self-regarding, as opposed to other-regarding, is irrelevant, contrary to received opinion.</p><p><em>Essay II </em>starts out with the definition of paternalism defended in essay I and claims that however this very general definition is specified, anti-paternalism is unreasonable and should be rejected. Anti-paternalism is the position that certain reasons – referring one way or the other to the good of a person, give no valid normative support to certain actions – some kind of interferences with the same person. Since the reasons in question are normally quite legitimate and important reasons for action, a convincing argument for anti-paternalism must explain why they are invalid in cases of interference. A closer look at the reasons and actions in question provides no basis for such an explanation.</p><p><em>Essay III</em> considers a concrete case of benevolent interference – the withholding of information concerning uncertain threats to public health in the public’s best interest. Such a policy has been suggested in relation to the European Commission’s proposed new system for the<em> R</em>egistration, <em>E</em>valuation, and <em>A</em>uthorisation of <em>Ch</em>emicals (REACH). Information about uncertain threats to health from chemicals would allegedly spread anxiety and depression and thus do more harm than good. The avoidance of negative health effects is accepted as a legitimate and good reason for withholding of information, thus respecting the conclusion of essay II, that anti-paternalism should be rejected. Other reasons, however, tip the balance in favour of making the information available. These reasons include the net effects on knowledge, psychological effects, effects on private decisions and effects on political decisions.</p>