What Makes a Manipulated Agent Unfree?

Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much hangs on this issue because manipulation‐based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will.     

What Makes for a Merry Christmas?

Despite the importance of Christmas within many cultures, researchhas not examined the types of experiences and activities that are associated withholiday well-being. Thus, we asked 117 individuals, ranging in age from 18 to 80,to answer questions about their satisfaction, stress, and emotional state during theChristmas season, as well as questions about their experiences, use of money, andconsumption behaviors. More happiness was reported when family and religiousexperiences were especially salient, and lower well-being occurred when spendingmoney and receiving gifts predominated. Engaging in environmentally consciousconsumption practices also predicted a happier holiday, as did being older and male.In sum, the materialistic aspects of modern Christmas celebrations may underminewell-being, while family and spiritual activities may help people to feel more satisfied.     

What Makes a Basic Structure Just?

In his multi-faceted attack on Rawls’s account of justice, G.A. Cohen has argued that the notion of basic structure is necessarily insensitive to the importance of informal social norms to social justice. The paper argues that the most plausible account of the basic structure is not blind to informal social norms in any meaningful sense. Whereas informal, non-legally coercive institutions are not part of the basic structure as such, their careful consideration is necessary for the assessment of whether the basic structure itself is indeed just. This claim is based on an account of what it means for normative principle to apply to institutions, which I expound in detail throughout the paper. Principles apply to institutions, I argue, not in that they restrain their conduct, but in that they indicate which social conditions they should bring about.

What Makes Care Pastoral?

This essay argues for including two principal foci in both research and practice within pastoral theology. These foci include the care of souls (soul care) and care offered against the backdrop of “the Christian story.” The distinctiveness of pastoral care, as compared with other types of care, is also discussed.     

What Makes for a Good Life? A Four-Nation Study

How do we assess the value of our lives? What makes the life we live a good or worthy one in our own eyes? What are its aims? The answers to these questions are implicit in the often unarticulated commitments by which people define their selves, purposes, and actions. These commitments structure the moral framework that guides our everyday qualitative distinctions and positions us within a unified narrative of continuity and change. The substantive conception of a good life, we argue, presupposes but is not reducible to a set of basic values. As an initial exploration of cultural variation, Canadian, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese university students were compared on what they held to be most important for assessing the worth of their lives. The results revealed considerable commonality of content with notable differences consistent with the cultural ethos of each group.     

What Makes an Intuition a Compatibilist Intuition? A Response to Sripada

So-called “manipulation arguments” have played a significant role in recent debates between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Incompatibilists take such arguments to show that agents who lack ultimate control over their characters or actions are not free. Most compatibilists agree that manipulated agents are not free but think this is because certain of the agent’s psychological capacities have been compromised. Chandra Sekhar Sripada has conducted an interesting study in which he applies an array of statistical tools to subjects’ intuitive responses to a manipulation case, and he insists that the results of his study provide compelling evidence that people favor compatibilist views of freedom. I argue that because the case that forms the centerpiece of his study is relevantly different from the sort of cases incompatibilists have developed and because he fails to build deterministic conditions into this case, Sripada’s data cannot help settle the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists.     

What Makes Good Ministry Good? Women in Ministry

Abstract

What are the special ethical issues faced by women in ministry? In this article conventional assumptions about ethics in ministry, taken from the work of Gaylord Noyce, are compared with the experiences, attitudes and expectations of ordered and lay members of the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada in two Canadian regions. The similarities and differences are then explored in conjunction with more contemporary theories. Conventional approaches to pastoral ethics and women in ministry limit concern to issues of discrimination in wages, employment and advancement. This article concludes that while such discrimination exists, it is not nearly as great a concern for women as the fear of sexual harassment. This fear is not only great but well founded. The research supports the claim that for a woman to be engaged in good ministry, she is required to do it differently from men.     

Dual Role Relationships: What Makes Them So Problematic?

The author argues that all dual role relationships, not only those involving sexual contact, may be ethically problematic. Three guidelines are offered to differentiate between relationships that have a high probability of leading to harm and those that do not. First, as the incompatibility of expectations increases between roles, so will the potential for harm. Second, as the obligations associated with different roles diverge, the potential for loss of objectivity and divided loyalties increases. Third, as the power and prestige between the professional's and consumer's roles increase, so does the potential for exploitation. Last, it is argued that, as the risks of harm increase, so should the ethical prohibitions about engaging in the relationship.     

What Makes a Quality Therapy? A Consideration of Parsimony,Ease, and Efficiency

Evaluations of psychotherapy have traditionally focused on symptom reduction as the primary standard by which their value is determined. This has contributed to the appearance of equivalence between many therapies that may differ considerably in complexity, feasibility, amount of homework and therapist contact required, expected cost, speed of symptom decline, and transdiagnostic utility. In the current paper, I make the case that these are fundamental features related to quality that should be considered in psychotherapy development, randomized controlled trials, and dissemination efforts. Empirically supported treatments for different disorders are evaluated based on these criteria, and special consideration is given to cognitive-behavioral treatments for anxiety disorders. Specific recommendations for a quality-oriented clinical research agenda are also provided.     

What Makes People Happy? Some Evidence from Northern Ireland

Using data on over 3000 individuals in Northern Ireland, this paper conducts an econometric investigation into what makes people happy. It draws a distinction between “objective” (income, marital status) and “subjective” (satisfaction with one’s standard of living (SoL); money worries; experience of poverty) factors determining happiness. In so doing, it takes a broader view of “economic status” than one defined solely by income: occupational class, mortgage status, financial worries, rural/urban residence, poverty experience, and, of course, income coalesce to form this, more complex, concept of economic status. Juxtaposed against this, is the concept of “context-free” and “context-specific” well-being. A particular example of the latter is the degree of satisfaction with one’s SoL and an important point of focus of the paper is the relationship between SoL satisfaction and happiness. A complementary point of focus is an analysis of the determinants of context-free and context-specific well-being. The paper also examines the effects of non-economic factors on happiness in particular on specific aspects of the ill-health of respondents and upon the quality of the areas in which they live. Having analysed these effects, it places a money value on each of the diversity of effects that act upon a person’s level of happiness.The analysis in this paper is based on the Poverty and Social Exclusion in Northern Ireland (PSENI) Project’s data and I am grateful to the Project leaders – Paddy Hillyard, Eithne McLaughlin and Mike Tomlinson – for permission to use these data. Thanks are due to Andrew Oswald, to one of the Editors of JOHS, and to two anonymous referees for their valuable comments. Needless to say, the usual disclaimer applies.     

What Makes Susie Cry? A Symptom-Context Study of Family Therapy

The aim of this investigation was to examine the context of recurrent crying episodes during family therapy sessions. We tested the relative contribution of social versus individual intrapsychic variables within a 10-session, videotaped, structural family therapy. Segments of therapy before crying episodes when compared with control (non-crying) segments were found to have higher levels of the following variables: involvement with others in the room, rejection, and concern about supplies. Two family variables were also higher before crying episodes: family discussion about patient, and patient receives hostility. A stepwise discriminant function analysis using these variables indicated that family discussion about the patient was most important in signaling onset of crying. The results are discussed in terms of individual and family theories of symptom formation as illuminated through this case study.     

What Makes a Satisfied Immigrant? Host-Country Characteristics and Immigrants’ Life Satisfaction in Eighteen European Countries

Based on the data from six waves of the European Social Survey collected from 18 European countries between 2002 and 2012, we aimed at explaining the variation in immigrants’ life satisfaction across countries, by focusing on host countries’ characteristics. By adopting the multi-level analysis, we examined the national-level traits from three aspects: namely, the climate of immigrant reception, the extent of public goods provision and the level of economic inequality. Our findings suggest that immigrants are likely to be more satisfied in countries that offer more welcoming social settings. However, this association is significant only when the social setting is measured by attitudes of the native-born towards immigrants, rather than by legal immigration regulations and policies. When taking into account the extent to which host country is able to provide public goods, country’s wealth levels seems not to matter for immigrants’ life satisfaction, whereas countries’ levels of human development is associated with an increase in immigrants’ life satisfaction albeit only at the 10% significance level. The role of economic inequality varies with immigrants’ own socio-economic statuses. On average, immigrants are less satisfied with their lives in host countries with higher levels of economic inequality. However, highly educated immigrants tend not to perceive economic inequality of the country as an obstacle of their satisfaction.     

What is a City?

Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole.