Interpreting Hume in these terms not only goes a long way to filling what looks to be a large gap in his naturalistic program, it also avoids distorting his own wider ethical commitments by imposing a narrower, rationalistic conception of moral capacity into his naturalistic framework.
As our understanding of the human brain advances, our conception of its capacities becomes ever more complex, and the ability to complete a mathematical pattern or unscramble an anagram becomes less the measurement of an important ability and more a curious predilection, like a fascination with stamps or a passion for the oboe.
Bunce feels Chelsea Court can do much to improve dementia services and aims to produce a case study charting its course "from conception to capacity" to be used as an industry model of best practice for dementia care.
In these and other essays, Photios engages in a critical discussion of some of the most central theses in ancient philosophy, such as Plato's conception of forms, whose capacity to function as predicates he rejects, and Aristotle's distinction between primary and secondary substances, which he thinks entails that 'substance' is an ambiguous term.
Even Immanuel Kant, who had a staunchly rational conception of human moral capacities, acknowledged a (limited) role for mechanical, noncognitive means of moral improvement, for example, via carrot and stick incentives.
Rawls also restricted participation in the Original Position to those with two "moral powers": the capacity to form and revise one's own conception of the good; and the capacity for a sense of justice, the capacity to act on and apply fair terms of cooperation (ibid).
According to the "commonsense view," a virtue of the threshold conception of the Sophisticated Cognitive Capacity account is that it distinguishes and elevates the moral status of cognitively unimpaired adult humans compared to other animals.
Our capacity to form, pursue and revise a conception of the good, like our capacity for a sense of justice, can lead us to mistaken conclusions.
Such a view contrasts sharply with Broadbent's conception of attentional selectivity as capacity-bottleneck management.
According to the threshold conception of a Sophisticated Cognitive Capacities view, any being that meets the threshold has full moral status.
