MUST ETHICS BE THEOLOGICAL? A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW PRAGMATISTS

In the last decade there has been a pragmatic turn in the work of those doing Christian ethics, especially as represented by the work of Jeffrey Stout and Franklin Gamwell. The pragmatic turn represents a critique of the highly influential work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, which argues for a strongly intra-church ethics. The pragmatists are correct in arguing that Christian ethics must engage the public sphere. However, I argue that they are deeply mistaken in their claim that this engagement must rest on a weak or non-existent theology. I show that the claim that robust theology adds nothing to ethics, and that we can get along without it, is unsustainable.     

Normative goals and the regulation of social behavior: The case of respect

The rational actor model has a long and successful history of explaining human motivation across several disciplinary fields, but its focus on material self-interest fails to explain the many courtesies that people extend to each other and the frequent sacrifices they make on a day-to-day basis. What promotes this pro-social behavior—in particular trust in other people? I argue that interpersonal trust is supported by normative goals, in that people trust others, even complete strangers, because of a sense of what they ought to do, by social rules and obligations they feel they must follow. In particular, people feel they must respect the character of the other person, constrained to act as though the other individual is an honorable human being, irrespective of what they may privately believe. I describe how respect underlies trust in economic games as well as pro-social behavior in other social settings. This focus on normative goals, such as respect, suggests that people do not always act in alignment with their expectations, regulate themselves in terms their actions rather than possible outcomes of those actions, and choose pro-social action not out of desire to benefit others as much as a simple acquiescence to situational demands.     

Butler Interprets Aquinas

This essay examines whether the Catholic magisterium's use of Aquinas to condemn homosexual acts is actually Thomistic. Rather than being aligned with the magisterium, Aquinas advances a moral epistemology better illuminated by the work of philosopher Judith Butler. Deploying Butler as a means of immanent critique, I show how magisterial attempts to argue against lesbian and gay sex fail on their own terms. Reading Aquinas alongside Butler shows us why we need not choose between fidelity to Thomistic natural law and affirmation of lesbians and gays.     

Evaluating Elizabeth Grosz's Biological Turn

Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ground a feminist ontology of biology has been particularly controversial. Most critics have understood Grosz as supporting her theory with empirical evidence, and they criticize her for being either inaccurate or uncritical of and overly dependent on science. I argue that Grosz reads Darwin as a philosopher in a Deleuzian and Irigarayan sense, and that Grosz's project is therefore better understood in terms of its ethical and political goals rather than in terms of empirical adequacy. Employing this evaluative framework leads to a novel route for critique of Grosz's ontology in terms of its reliance on the Darwinian distinction between organism and environment. I conclude that Grosz's work is valuable for the way it maintains ethical and political considerations in feminist ontological debates, and that introducing a more sensitive understanding of the organism–environment relation will lead us closer to a truly feminist ontology of biology.     

On the Limits of Rights and Representation

This essay explores the degree to which public reason can sustain political liberalism's commitment to justice and pluralism without attending to the role of what Jeffrey Stout calls “cultural inheritance” in shaping and justifying political commitments. At issue is whether public reason is the best resource for guiding conversations on political matters that are enmeshed in religious commitments and moral beliefs. Unless public reason can account for cultural inheritance, and foster a deliberative context in which political actors might grapple with the relationship between overlapping political claims and comprehensive doctrines, public reason will remain narrow and inadequate in a contemporary world where epistemic diversity is increasingly at odds with political liberalism's normative model of social cooperation and public deliberation.     

Mary Wollstonecraft's Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle

The scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is divided concerning her views on women's role in public life, property rights, and distribution of wealth. Her critique of inequality of wealth is undisputed, but is it a complaint only of inequality or does it strike more forcefully at the institution of property? The argument in this article is that Wollstonecraft's feminism is partly defined by a radical critique of property, intertwined with her conception of rights. Dissociating herself from the conceptualization of rights in terms of self‐ownership, she casts economic independence—a necessary political criterion for personal freedom—in terms of fair reward for work, not ownership. Her critique of property moves beyond issues of redistribution to a feminist appraisal of a property structure that turns people into either owners or owned, rights‐holders or things acquired. The main characters in Wollstonecraft's last novel—Maria, who is rich but has nothing, and Jemima, who steals as a matter of principle—illustrate the commodification of women in a society where even rights are regarded as possessions.     

What do people do with porn? Qualitative research into the comsumption,use, and experience of pornography and other sexually explicit media

This article reviews qualitative research into the consumption of pornography and other sexually explicit media emerging from a range of subject areas. Taking a critique of quantitative methods and a focus on measuring sexual effects and attitudes as a starting point, it considers the proposition that qualitative work is more suited to an examination of the complex social, cultural, and political constructions of sexuality. Examining studies into the way men, women, and young people see, experience, and use explicit media texts, the article identifies the key findings that have emerged. Qualitative work shows that sexually explicit media texts are experienced and understood in a variety of ways and evoke strong and often contradictory reactions, not all of which are represented in public debates about pornography. These texts function in a range of different ways, depending on context; as a source of knowledge, a resource for intimate practices, a site for identity construction, and an occasion for performing gender and sexuality. The article reviews these studies and their findings, identifying what they suggest about directions for future research, both in terms of developing methodology and refining approaches to sexuality and media consumption.     

Power on the margins: A new place for intellectuals to be

This paper is concerned with rethinking the nature of social life in terms of how it appears — not to us academics at the centre of it, as consisting in a system, or a plurality of systems -but how it might appear from a position more in on the margins, at those moments when ordinary people must relate themselves to each other, unsystematically and practically. To do this, we must also rethink the nature of language and thought as possessing within these moments, a formative or creative character — for it must have the ability to create practical connections between aspects of people's lives, as required, on the spot. This is to privilege the role of rhetoric in these regions over that of logic. This also leads to a rethinking of ideology and power: as being to do with, not ideas, but the practical shaping (or not) — in moments when in practical communication with others — of collective, sharable forms of life. Where it is in such moments, in which different people meet each other in socially constructing their lives together, that political struggles are their most intense, and where ideology can be detected at work.     

Multiple roles and successes in public bioethics: a response to the public forum critique of bioethics commissions

National bioethics commissions have been critiqued for a variety of structural, procedural, and political aspects of their work. A more recent critique published by Dzur and Levin uses political philosophy to constructively critique the work of national bioethics commissions as public deliberative forums. However, this public forum critique of bioethics commissions ignores empirical research in political science and normative claims that suggest that advisory commissions can and should have diverse of functions beyond that of being public forums. The present paper argues that the public forum critique too narrowly considers the roles that bioethics commissions can play in public bioethics and ignores the moral obligation of commissions to fulfill their mandates. Evaluations of commissions must consider that these institutions can serve in capacities other than those of a public deliberative forum and use additional measures to evaluate the multiple roles and successes of bioethics commissions in public policy.     

Social loafing: Allocating effort or taking it easy?

When asked to work both alone and in groups, people exert less effort in groups, a phenomenon we call “social loafing.” Either of two possible strategies could explain this outcome: an allocational strategy where people work as hard as they can overall but conserve their strength for individual trials where work is personally beneficial and a minimizing strategy where the primary motive is to “get by” with the least effort possible. However, an allocational strategy would lead participants who always work in groups to put out as much effort as participants who always work alone, since there is no need to husband strength. Two studies using a sound production task found social loafing even under these conditions, suggesting that allocational strategies are not prevalent. Social loafing seems to occur when people perform together in groups, regardless of whether or not they must also perform alone.     

Marx's genealogy of the idea of equality

Contrary to egalitarian readings of both Marx's critique of capitalist society and its replacement by communist society, his lack of commitment to the idea of equality has been emphasized. I argue that Marx's statements concerning the idea of equality, and especially how it would represent an inappropriate norm for genuine communist society, are ultimately to be explained in terms of its relation to the exchange value that governs acts of commodity exchange. Marx wants to show how general recognition of the idea of equality and the legal and political forms that it assumes have their origin in the way in which exchange value has come to dominate social relations, leading human beings to develop an abstract conception of themselves, others and how the world ought to be that is incompatible with the goals of communist society.     

Disability,Respect and Justice

Recent political philosophers have argued that criteria of social justice that defend distributing resources to individuals on the basis of the disadvantages of their natural endowments are disrespectful and disparaging. Clearly influenced by the social model of disability, Elizabeth Anderson and Thomas Pogge have recently defended criteria of social justice that distribute resources to people with disabilities on the basis of eliminating discrimination, not making up for so‐called natural disadvantage. I argue that it is implausible to suggest that just entitlements for people with disability can be secured solely by eliminating discrimination. Resources for people with disabilities must sometimes be justified on the grounds that some natural endowments pose disadvantages even in societies that do not discriminate. I argue further that there need be nothing at all disrespectful about this way of explaining disadvantage; nor have proponents of the social model of disability or political philosophers provided any compelling reasons for supposing that it is disrespectful. There is thus no motivation for Anderson's and Pogge's attempts to secure justice for people with disabilities by appealing solely to the imperative to eliminate discrimination.     

The Body Politic: Theorising Disability and Impairment

abstract  In her critique of the social model of disability, Lorella Terzi argues that it over-socialises disability, and that some kind of connection must be made between disability and bodily impairment. In this paper I argue that, far from over-socialising disability, the social model does not go far enough. The important contribution of the social model is that it politicises disability. I argue that bodily impairment must itself be politicised, and the insights of the social model should be extended to the body itself.     

Taking the edge off of disagreement: linguistic abstractness and self‐presentation to a heterogeneous audience

The use of linguistic abstraction in self‐presentation was examined. Participants, whose goal it was to be liked by recipients, presented their political views to an audience of two people. Participants learned beforehand that the two recipients had the same political views as the participant, that both had different political views from the participant, or that one had similar views to and one had dissimilar views from the participant. Theorising that variations in the degree of linguistic abstractness used by participants when describing their political views were related to their social goals, it was hypothesised that participants would describe their political views at a higher level of linguistic abstractness when communicating with a similar agreeing audience than when communicating with a mixed audience. Results confirmed this hypothesis. The role of linguistic abstractness in achieving self‐presentational goals is discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Action Phases and Goal Setting: Being Optimistic After Decision Making Without Getting into Trouble

According to Gollwitzer's mindset theory, people in postdecisional action phases, who are about to implement a chosen action or goal, are supposed to be more optimistic than people in predecisional action phases, who are deliberating on different actions or goals (P. M. Gollwitzer, 1990). The present experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that postdecisional people are optimistic in a way that does not set them up for failure and disappointment. In three experiments it is shown that people who are in an implemental mindset neither set more demanding goals than do deliberative people nor do they inflate their performance predictions. Instead, they are more confident in reaching their goals and more cautious when predicting future performance. This behavior is interpreted in terms of a strategy that allows people to hold optimistic beliefs without facing the danger of exaggerated goal setting or a disconfirmation of their beliefs.     

Resisting,recognizing, and returning: A three‐component model and review of persistence in episodic goals

According to prior work, persistent goal pursuit is a continuous process where persisting is a matter of resisting the urge to give up. In everyday goals, however, persistence is often episodic, and its causes are more complex. People pause and resume pursuit many times. Whether people persist reflects more than will power and motivation, it also reflects the other goals they pursue, their resources, and the attentional demands of daily life. People can fail to persist not just because they gave up, but also because they failed to act. We propose a general model of persistence that accommodates the complexity of episodic goals. We argue that persistent goal pursuit is a function of three processes: resisting the urge to give up, recognizing opportunities for pursuit, and returning to pursuit. The broad factors that help and hurt persistence can be organized within these components. These components can also explain the mechanisms of four effective strategies for persistence: removing distractions, using reminders, using implementation intentions, and forming habits. The recognizing‐resisting‐returning model integrates and improves on extant theories of persistence and goal pursuit and is consistent with empirical work from laboratory and naturalistic settings.     

On the Emergence of Human Goal Pursuit: The Nonconscious Regulation and Motivation of Goals

Experimental research in social psychology has discovered that human goal pursuit can emerge in the absence of conscious awareness. Whereas these goal-priming effects are commonly explained in terms of habitual automatic processes, recent studies shed new light on the matter. Building on this recent work, this paper attempts to promote a more comprehensive understanding and examination of the potential mechanisms that enable people to pursue their goals in a nonconscious fashion. Specifically, it addresses (i) the human capacity to pursue goals without awareness of the activation and operation of the goal, even when habits are inadequate; and (ii) the fundamental role of positive affect in nonconsciously modulating the motivation of goals and their pursuit.     

Bearing the lightning of possible storms: Foucault’s experimental social criticism

This paper argues that Michel Foucault explicitly rejected the model of critique by which he is often understood—by both his defenders and detractors. Rather than justifying norms that could be said to represent “the people;” judging institutions, norms, and practices accordingly; and creating programs for others to enact, he theorized and practiced an experimental social criticism in which specific intellectuals help people work through “intolerable” situations by multiplying the ways they can think about and act upon them. As Foucault’s work with the prisons in France shows, one way intellectuals can be part of the experimental transformations social bodies carry out upon themselves is through genealogical work describing the ways problems have come to be identified—and can thus be transformed. This account of criticism undercuts the problem of justifying a standpoint of critique that has plagued philosophers and suggests a few concrete means of better aligning theory and practice.     

Interpersonal influences on goals: Current and future directions for goal contagion research

A growing body of research documents goal contagion, a phenomenon whereby people are likely to catch—to adopt and pursue for themselves—the goals they see others pursuing. Here, I situate goal contagion relative to other ideas about where goals come from and then review existing scholarship on the phenomenon itself and the processes that underlie it. I then point to four larger questions that goal contagion researchers must answer in the years to come. The first two of these questions (what levels of the self‐regulatory hierarchy are subject to contagion and what role goal contagion affords for consciousness and intention) delve deeper into the process of the phenomenon, while the second two (how goal contagion affects social relationships and how it plays into goal pursuit more broadly) highlight how researchers have largely ignored the question of how goal contagion might influence people's broader lives.