Bayesian modeling is pervasive in economics and cognitive science. I formalize a general notion of a Bayes model and illustrate it using a variety of examples.

In this chapter, Ezrahi analyzes the influence of philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Vico, and Rousseau, as well as the Federalists, on the shift from a medieval monistic cosmology based on God to a modern dualistic cosmology, emphasizing dynamic Nature and human agency. These thinkers played a pivotal role in shaping a political order and obedience independent of divine authority, turning to Nature as the source of laws and a check on human actions. This transformation led to the emergence of new concepts, such as the state, freedom, and equality, despite their being imaginative. Hobbes pioneered the use of metaphors and empirical sciences in civic affairs. Spinoza adopted a detached scientific perspective, viewing human emotions and drives as natural phenomena. Locke presented empiricism and probability to inform political decisions through an understanding of human judgment. Vico proclaimed that political systems are based on collective political imagination, facilitating the construction of institutions and political processes rooted in commonsense. Rousseau further developed the dichotomy of Nature/Culture, highlighting its impact on politics, education, and ethics. The American Revolution marked the merging of objective Nature and human agency, giving rise to the idea of employing science to manipulate Nature.

In Chapter 4, we conduct an in-depth exploration of norms at both the individual and group levels. We discuss how they develop, how they are classified, and the factors that encourage their acceptance by group members. We also discuss the collusive behavior and deviancy that can occur in groups and their connection to group norms.

Hierarchical situations are a complex example for determining individual responsibility, as typically a superior communicates a plan, and a subordinate executes it. Thus, the superior bears responsibility for the decision but is distanced from the outcomes, while the subordinate experiences authorship over the action but may not experience responsibility for its outcomes. This chapter focuses on how authority is wielded and how decisions are made by commanders in order to understanding the dynamics of obedience. By reviewing the claims made by some leaders of genocide, this chapters show that despite their high position in the hierarchical chain, they are frequently trying to reduce their responsibility for the atrocities conducted. Neuroscience research further showed that giving orders leads to a reduction of the sense of agency and moral emotions towards the pain of victims. These results show how hierarchical situations can allow people to commit actions that could transgress moral conducts, as agency and moral emotions are split across two individuals.

The “just following orders” argument has been used across many documented wars and genocides around the world. It suggests that the justifications given by perpetrators perhaps reflect, at least in part, a reality in their brains that would be shared across all the members of our species. The brain is a complex structure composed of trillions of neurons that controls our thoughts, our feelings, our decisions, our memory, our senses, and that regulates our body. Even though a wide range of environmental and social factors can modulate how our brains process information and computes decisions, the brain is nevertheless the central processing agent. By providing a novel perspective on what is happening in the brains of those obeying orders, I seek to reveal the mechanisms leading to immoral behaviors under obedience at a deep and individual level – that is, at the neural level. This knowledge can be used to develop personalized interventions that take into account unique neurobiological profiles.

This chapter shows how human obedience is captured in an experimental setup, and how such research methodology can help us understand how people can comply with orders to hurt another person on a neurological level. By reviewing past experimental research, such as the rat decapitation study of Landis, the studies of Stanley Milgram on destructive obedience, and the Utrecht studies on obedience to non-ethical requests, this chapter shows that under certain circumstances, a majority of individuals could be coerced into inflicting physical or psychological harm on others at levels generally deemed unacceptable, even without any tangible social pressures such as military court or job loss. The chapter also describes a novel method where people can administer real painful electric shocks to someone else in exchange for a small monetary reward, and describes how such a method allows neuroscience investigations that would focus on the neural mechanisms associated with obedience.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) was one of the most important German philosophers in the middle of the eighteenth century. His series of four German textbooks offered a systematic and sophisticated alternative to Wolffianism. Kant was at the beginning of his academic career when Crusius’ philosophical works were first published, so it is not surprising that Kant would come to be influenced by Crusius’ philosophy. This chapter contains a translation of selections from books 1 and 2 of Crusius’ Guide to Living Rationally (1744), capturing his theory of the will and desire, his theory of freedom, his voluntarist theory of ethics, his theory of the end of human life, and his moral proof of the immortality of the soul. The selections will help readers better understand Kant’s reference to Crusius’ moral philosophy as one based on the “will of God” (5:40), among many other things.

This chapter investigates monastic experience, which has been a deliberate pursuit of religious life for most of Christian history and also appears in other religious traditions. It argues that monasticism is especially characterized by structures of stability that are achieved through communally shared rules and vows of stability. The tasks of prayer and labor – often accomplished in silence – mark monastic life and often interpenetrate each other, as prayer becomes labor and work is infused with prayer. The monastic self is shaped through obedience to the rule, shared communal practices, and mutual love. It is a profoundly communal religious way of life to the point that the individual is entirely absorbed into the monastic community. In this regard, it carries human plural experience – usually pursued in a more temporally limited fashion – to its height.

Hobbes condemns liberty of conscience by stressing its incendiary repercussions on social stability and political sovereignty. Religious dissenters fashion themselves as sovereigns, emboldening them to do whatever they want rather than obey the state. For Hobbes, invocations to conscience are mere assertions of opinion – deeply held and felt, such that individuals insist on acting in accordance with them, but opinions nonetheless. While Hobbes anticipates the danger of liberty of conscience, he also offers a potential solution to this very problem – civic education – and invites us to reflect on how we might cultivate consensus through attempts to shape the conscience of dissenters. The possibility of peaceful co-existence becomes, at some point, about the project of persuasion, for Hobbes, such that invocations of conscience will abate over time and the threat of liberty of conscience to political authority may be tamed.

Societies are transformed by total wars, which mobilize entire populations, penetrate society as a whole, and involve both civilian and military populations as direct targets of aggression, as well as resources for inflicting harm and destroying the enemy. Total wars bring about enormous (forced) movement of populations, as well as changes in gender roles and social class relations. Because most men are directly involved on the front lines of the war effort, new opportunities are created for women to become active in areas from which they were previously excluded. Also, because of the enormous sacrifices made by the general population and the real possibility of national defeat at the hands of the enemy, the rich also become more ready to make some sacrifices. During total wars, the rich–poor divide becomes smaller, as the rich make larger contributions toward the war effort. However, as discussed in this chapter, evidence suggests that this increase in political plasticity is only temporary. The rich–poor divide has increased enormously since World War II.

A prominent theme in the mirror literature is the exceptionalism of the king’s position, a point often presented as the result of divine selection or favour. Many mirror-writers evoke, in various articulations, the notion of the divine mandate – the proposition that the king ruled by virtue of divine choice and with divine support. But the authors bring very different perspectives to this idea; even when they invoke a common repertoire of formulae and metaphors, they employ them to create different meanings. Several authors insist that the singular bounties that the king enjoys are counterbalanced by unparalleled, and burdensome, responsibilities. The texts in this chapter are drawn from Pseudo-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

“Passivity: The Passion of Oroonoko and the Ethics of Narration” recovers a historical meaning of “passive obedience,” a precursor to modern theories of civil disobedience, and it uses this concept to read both the protagonist, an African prince enslaved in a new world colony, and the narrator, a colonial woman writer, of Oroonoko. It argues that the narrator of Oroonoko, and by inference novelistic narration in general, is based on assumptions about the ethics of individual detachment (or ironic distance) from political action. In recovering the idea of passive obedience and the figure of Christ’s passion as a model for novelistic narration and a conservative ethics of citizenship under liberalism, this chapter offers a critique of liberal theories of political action as well as an argument against the novel’s foundation in liberal theories of individualization and agency. It also takes up the problems of racism and slavery as central to understanding both the liberal/conservative dynamic and the development of the novel form.

This chapter argues that Aquinas’ conception of eternal law implies a particular way of understanding human freedom, reflected in his treatment of natural rights. To make this argument plausible, it is necessary to show that Aquinas does endorse some notion of subjective natural rights. While he does not have a theory of natural rights, he does have a working knowledge of the legal norms of his time, including practices of claiming and vindicating natural rights. He accepts, seemingly without question, that individuals can, under certain circumstances, claim something or resist the claim of another on the basis of a natural or divine jus, or right, including most notably a right to material necessities of life, and a right to make decisions for one’s young children. Importantly, these are not just asserted as objective duties; he defends the power of individuals to assert these rights without fear of punishment or coercion, even in cases in which one asserts a right to do something wrong. These aspects of Aquinas’ thought raise illuminating connections between the theological conception of eternal law and an account of natural rights, taking Aquinas’ remarks as a starting point.

As Lobban explains, Austin thought of jurisprudence as the study of concepts, principles and distinctions that are common to various, possibly only mature, legal systems. He considers Austin’s command theory and concept of a sovereign and Austin’s thoughts on the relation between law and morality and on legal reasoning and judge-made law. On Austin’s analysis, laws properly so-called, as distinguished from rules of positive morality, are commands issued by the sovereign to the subjects, and that something is a command only if there is a sanction behind it. Lobban considers the objection that the idea of a habit of obedience cannot account for the legal authority of the lawmaker, for the idea of a succession of lawmakers or for the idea of a legally limited lawmaker. Austin argued that there is no necessary connection between law and morality, defended a version of rule-utilitarianism and held that the principle of utility is a good index to divine law. He advocated a textual approach to the interpretation of statutes, holding that the law in a precedent is to be found in its ratio decidendi and that customary rules do not become legal rules until they are recognised by courts.