Broad, subjective, relative: the surprising folk concept of basic needs.

Some normative theorists appeal to the concept of basic needs. They argue that when it comes to issues such as global justice, intergenerational justice, human rights or sustainable development our first priority should be that everybody is able to meet these needs. But what are basic needs? We attempt to inform discussions about this question by gathering evidence of ordinary English speakers' intuitions on the concept of basic needs. First, we defend our empirical approach to analyzing this concept and identify a number of its potential features. Then we present three preregistered empirical studies that were conducted to investigate the extent to which ordinary speakers endorse these features. The studies yield convergent evidence for the following three claims: (1) ordinary speakers sometimes apply the concept of basic needs to necessities for a flourishing (not just a minimally decent) life, (2) most ordinary speakers attribute at least some degree of subjectivity to the concept, and (3) most ordinary speakers attribute at least some degree of relativity to the concept. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical analyses of basic needs.

Implicit Metaethical Intuitions: Validating and Employing a New IAT Procedure.

Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons' attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism implicitly. Since the studies conducted so far almost exclusively assessed subjects' metaethical attitudes via explicit cognitions, the strength of this rebuttal remains unclear. The current study attempts to test the folk's implicit metaethical commitments. We present results of a newly developed Implicit Association Test (IAT) for metaethical attitudes which indicate that the folk generally tend towards moral non-objectivism on the implicit level as well. We discuss implications of this finding for the philosophical debate.

The typicality effect in basic needs.

According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this 'typicality effect' holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a strong effect of this kind: (1) Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. (2) They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. (3) The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. (4) These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. (5) Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical (e.g., exemplar or prototype) structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11229-022-03859-9.

The Relativistic Car: Applying Metaethics to the Debate about Self-Driving Vehicles.

Almost all participants in the debate about the ethics of accidents with self-driving cars have so far assumed moral universalism. However, universalism may be philosophically more controversial than is commonly thought, and may lead to undesirable results in terms of non-moral consequences and feasibility. There thus seems to be a need to also start considering what I refer to as the "relativistic car" - a car that is programmed under the assumption that what is morally right, wrong, good, bad, etc. is determined by the moral beliefs of one's society or culture. My investigation of this idea involves six steps. First, I explain why and how the moral universalism/relativism debate is relevant to the issue of self-driving cars. Second, I argue that there are good reasons to consider accident algorithms that assume relativism. Third, I outline how a relativistic car would be programmed to behave. Fourth, I address what advantages such a car would have, both in terms of its non-moral consequences and feasibility. Fifth, I address the relativistic car's disadvantages. Finally, I qualify and conclude my considerations.

Basic needs in normative contexts.

In answering normative questions, researchers sometimes appeal to the concept of basic needs. Their guiding idea is that our first priority should be to ensure that everybody is able to meet these needs-to have enough in terms of food, water, shelter, and so on. This article provides an opinionated overview of basic needs in normative contexts. Any basic needs theory must answer three questions: (1) What are basic needs? (2) To what extent do basic needs generate reasons for action and how are these reasons to be understood? (3) How are basic needs and their satisfaction to be measured? I address these questions in turn. Then I also briefly discuss the theoretical potential of appealing to basic needs in normative contexts. It turns out that future research in this area could benefit from a higher degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological reflection, and that, generally speaking, basic needs theories are more promising than they have often been claimed to be.

Anti-Realist Pluralism: a New Approach to Folk Metaethics.

Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument's empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for future studies. Then we report and discuss the results of a survey that was based on this design. In our study, most of our participants denied the existence of objective truths about most or all moral issues. In particular, many of them had the intuition that whether moral sentences are true depends both on their own moral beliefs and on the dominant moral beliefs within their culture ("anti-realist pluralism"). This finding suggests that the realist presumptive argument may have to be rejected and that instead anti-realism may have a presumption in its favor.

Empirical research on folk moral objectivism.

Lay persons may have intuitions about morality's objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical implications. First, we introduce the methods of empirical research on folk moral objectivism. Second, we provide an overview of the findings that have so far been made. Third, we raise a number of methodological worries that cast doubt upon these findings. And fourth, we discuss ways in which lay persons' intuitions about moral objectivity may bear on philosophical claims.

How to Measure Moral Realism.

In recent years an increasing number of psychologists have begun to explore the prevalence, causes and effects of ordinary people's intuitions about moral realism. Many of these studies have lacked in construct validity, i.e., they have failed to (fully or exclusively) measure moral realism. My aim in this paper accordingly is to motivate and guide methodological improvements. In analysis of prominent existing measures, I develop general recommendations for overcoming ten prima facie serious worries about research on folk moral realism. G1 and G2 require studies' answer choices to be as metaethically comprehensive as methodologically feasible. G3 and G4 prevent fallacious inferences from intuitions about related debates. G5 and G6 limit first-order moral and epistemic influences. G7 address studies' instructions. And G8 and G9 suggest tests of important psychological presuppositions.

Prevalence of most common human pathogenic Campylobacter spp. in dogs and cats in Styria, Austria.

The aim of this study was to determine the frequency of occurrence of most common human pathogenic Campylobacter species, Campylobacter jejuni (C. jejuni) and Campylobacter coli (C. coli), in dogs and cats in Styria, Austria. In the period from April 2010 to April 2012, 842 faecal samples from dogs and cats from Styria, Austria were examined for Campylobacter (C.) species (spp.). All samples were subjected to qualitative microbiological culture testing, and additionally, some of them have been studied using qualitative real-time PCR. In microbiological culture, 5.9% of all samples investigated were C. spp. positive. With 3.1% out of positive samples, C. jejuni was the most common type. Campylobacter upsaliensis (C. upsaliensis) was detected only in 0.5% of the samples. The remaining positive samples (2.4%) were classified as C. species (sp.). C. coli could not be found in any of the samples. A higher prevalence of C. jejuni was found in kittens with 14.3% and in diarrhoeic dogs (7.4%) and cats (23.8%). The real-time PCR revealed for dogs and cats together, 27% of C. jejuni-positive faecal and 8% positive faecal swap samples. The obtained C. jejuni strains underwent antibiotic resistance testing using three different tests (agar diffusion, MIC testing and E-test) with different numbers of antibiotics. From the antibiotics used in this study, several showed high test-dependent resistance rates (cephalexin, cefovecin, kanamycin, sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim, penicillin G, ciprofloxacin, enrofloxacin, marbofloxacin, nalidixic acid). Overall, the prevalence of C. spp. in this study was very low compared to others, with the exception of C. jejuni in kittens and diarrhoeic animals. The results of the real-time PCR suggest that the rate of colonization of C. jejuni was actually higher than the results of the culture showed. As the resistance rates of C. jejuni isolates partly were very high, possible transmission of (multi-) resistant C. jejuni strains to humans especially from kittens and diarrhoeic animals must be expected.

Revisiting Folk Moral Realism.

Moral realists believe that there are objective moral truths. According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is supported by psychological research on folk metaethics. While most recent research has been thought to contradict this claim, four prominent earlier studies (by Goodwin and Darley, Wainryb et al., Nichols, and Nichols and Folds-Bennett) indeed seem to suggest a tendency towards realism. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed internal critique of these four studies. I argue that, once interpreted properly, all of them turn out in line with recent research. They suggest that most ordinary people experience morality as "pluralist-" rather than realist-seeming, i.e., that ordinary people have the intuition that realism is true with regard to some moral issues, but variants of anti-realism are true with regard to others. This result means that moral realism may be less well justified than commonly assumed.

Estimating sensitivity and specificity of a PCR for boot socks to detect Campylobacter in broiler primary production using Bayesian latent class analysis.

The present study compares three different assays for sample collection and detection of Campylobacter spp. in broiler flocks, based on (i) the collection of faecal samples from intestinal organs (caecum), (ii) individual faecal droppings collected from the bedding and (iii) faecal material collected by socks placed on the outside of a pair of boots (boot socks) and used for walking around in the flock. The two first methods are examined for Campylobacter using a culture method (ISO-10272-2:2006), while the boot socks are tested using PCR. The PCR-assay is a genus specific multiplex PCR with primers targeting 16S rDNA in Campylobacter and primers targeting Yersinia ruckerii. Sixty-seven broiler flocks from Austria and 83 broiler flocks from Denmark were included in this prospective study and 89 of these were found to be positive in at least one method (AT: 49 samples, DK: 40 samples) whereas 61 of these were negative in all assays. In Austria samples for the three assays were collected simultaneously, which facilitates a direct comparison of the diagnostic test performance. In Denmark, however, boot socks and faecal droppings were collected three days before slaughter while caecum samples were collected at slaughter. The results were evaluated in the absence of a gold standard using a Bayesian latent class model. Austrian results showed higher sensitivity for PCR detection in sock samples (0.98; Bayesian credible interval (BCI) [0.93-1]) than for culture of faecal droppings (0.86; BCI [0.76-0.91]) or caecal samples (0.92; BCI [0.85-0.97]). The potential impact of Campylobacter introduction within the final three days before slaughter was observed in Denmark, where four flocks were tested negative three days before slaughter, but were detected positive at the slaughterhouse. Therefore the model results for the PCR sensitivity (0.88; BCI [0.83-0.97]) and cultural ISO-method in faecal samples (0.84; BCI [0.76-0.92]) are lower than for caecal samples (0.93; BCI [0.85-0.98]). In our study, PCR detection on boot sock samples is more sensitive than conventional culture. In view of the advantage of rapid results before slaughter and low costs for sampling, especially in combination with existing Salmonella surveillance systems (just another pair of boot socks needed), this method-matrix combination could be a valuable surveillance tool in the broiler primary production.