Global ethics: increasing our positive impact

Global ethics is no ordinary subject. It includes some of the most urgent and momentous issues the world faces, such as extreme poverty and climate change. Given this, any adequate review of that subject should, I suggest, ask some questions about the relation between what those working in that subject do and the real-world phenomena that are the object of their study. The main question I focus on in this essay is this: should academics and others working in the field of global ethics take new measures aimed at having more real-world positive impact on the phenomena they study? Should they take new measures, that is, aimed at bringing about more improvements in those phenomena, improvements such as reductions in extreme poverty and in emissions of greenhouse gases? I defend a positive answer to this question against some objections, and also discuss some of the kinds of measure we might take in an attempt to have more positive impact.     

How should “acceptance of responsibility” be addressed in sexual offending treatment programs?

Sexual offenders in treatment programs are usually expected to take responsibility for their offending—which we define, on the basis of a literature review, as giving a detailed and precise disclosure of events which avoids external attributions of cause and matches the official/victim's account of the offense. However, research has not established that a failure to take responsibility for offending is a risk factor for future recidivism. In this paper, we critically review and evaluate the literature on taking responsibility for offending, to determine the rationale for the popularity of this treatment target. We consider the reasons why sex offenders fail to take responsibility for their offending and examine some potential problems with focusing on this goal in treatment programs. We also describe alternative treatment strategies for taking responsibility and conclude that there is less need for offenders to take responsibility for their past offending than there is for them to take responsibility for their future actions.     

APTNESS OF EMOTIONS FOR FICTIONS AND IMAGININGS

Many philosophical accounts of the emotions conceive of them as susceptible to assessments of rationality, fittingness, or some other notion of aptness. Analogous assumptions apply in cases of emotions directed at what are taken to be only fictional or only imagined. My question is whether the criteria governing the aptness of emotions we have toward what we take to be real things apply invariantly to those emotions we have toward what we take to be only fictional or imagined. I argue that what counts as a reason justifying an emotion can differ across real, fictional, and imagined domains.     

什么是临时内在性问题？

Lewis的临时内在性问题出名地难以理解,也许是因为它质疑了某些我们认为理所当然的基本概念。本文通过简明地陈述问题和对若干可能解法的分析试图使之易于理解。此外,本文给出了一个产生Bradley倒退的简明易懂的方法。     

The Moral Grounds of Reasonably Mistaken Self-Defense

Some, but not all, of the mistakes a person makes when acting in apparently necessary self-defense are reasonable: we take them not to violate the rights of the apparent aggressor. I argue that this is explained by duties grounded in agents’ entitlements to a fair distribution of the risk of suffering unjust harm. I suggest that the content of these duties is filled in by a social signaling norm, and offer some moral constraints on the form such a norm can take.     

The story of some: everyday pragmatic inference by children and adults.

The statement, some elephants have trunks, is logically true but pragmatically infelicitous. Whilst some is logically consistent with all, it is often pragmatically interpreted as precluding all. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that with pragmatically impoverished materials, sensitivity to the pragmatic implicature associated with some is apparent earlier in development than has previously been found. Amongst 8-year-old children, we observed much greater sensitivity to the implicature in pragmatically enriched contexts. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that amongst adults, logical responses to infelicitous some statements take longer to produce than do logical responses to felicitous some statements, and that working memory capacity predicts the tendency to give logical responses to the former kind of statement. These results suggest that some adults develop the ability to inhibit a pragmatic response in favour of a logical answer. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of pragmatic inference.     

Existential choices: to what degree is who we are a matter of choice?

On the one hand, it is commonly agreed that we make choices in which we are guided by a core of personal commitments, wishes, feelings, etc. that we take to express who we are. On the other, it is commonly agreed that some of these ‘existential’ choices constitute who we are. When confronting these two matters, the question of agency inevitably arises: Whether and in what sense can we choose ourselves? The paper will argue for a new perspective on existential choice.     

Communitarianism 'Social Constitution,' and Autonomy

Communitarians defend what we may call the 'social constitution thesis,' that participation in society makes us what we are. This claim, however, is ambiguous. In an attempt to shed some light on it and to better understand the impact its truth would have on our beliefs regarding autonomy, I offer four possible ways it could be understood and four corresponding senses of individual independence and autonomy. I also indicate what senses liberals can accept that we are socially constituted and in what sense I take communitarians to argue we are socially constituted.     

What is wrong with the indeterminacy of language-attribution?

One might take the significance of Davidson’s indeterminacy thesis to be that the question as to which language we can take another to be speaking can only be settled relative to our choice of an acceptable theory for interpreting the speaker. This, in turn, could be taken to show that none of us is ever speaking a determinate language. I argue that this result is self-defeating and cannot avoid collapse into a troubling skepticism about meaning. I then offer a way of trying to make sense of the idea that some utterances do belong to determinate languages even though there is no determinate language one can take another to be speaking. This, however, results in an uninviting picture of communication in which no speaker is really in a position to say what another’s words mean.     

A response to commentaries on positivity

In our response, we aim to further contribute to the ongoing discussion of the construct of positivity and of the related research. We believe that each of the three commentaries has something unique to offer to the literature. By this response we take the opportunity to discuss the ideas that they present, and to illustrate some additional thoughts about positivity and its relationships with germane psychological constructs.     

Taking responsibility for health in an epistemically polluted environment

Proposals for regulating or nudging healthy choices are controversial. Opponents often argue that individuals should take responsibility for their own health, rather than be paternalistically manipulated for their own good. In this paper, I argue that people can take responsibility for their own health only if they satisfy certain epistemic conditions, but we live in an epistemic environment in which these conditions are not satisfied. Satisfying the epistemic conditions for taking responsibility, I argue, requires regulation of this environment. I describe some proposals for such regulation and show that we cannot reject all regulation in the name of individual responsibility. We must either regulate individuals’ healthy choices or regulate the epistemic environment.     

The Arms Trade and the Slave Trade

We have abandoned the slave trade, and come to abhor it. Could the same happen with the arms trade? Even if we are not pacifists, and allow some use of force in self-defence, we must have serious ethical questions to ask about the trade in weaponry on which our economies are now so dependent. I distinguish the various forms these questions take for governments and individuals, and argue for some answers.     

The Philosophical Personality Argument

Perhaps personality traits substantially influence one??s philosophically relevant intuitions. This suggestion is not only possible, it is consistent with a growing body of empirical research: Personality traits have been shown to be systematically related to diverse intuitions concerning some fundamental philosophical debates. We argue that this fact, in conjunction with the plausible principle that almost all adequate philosophical views should take into account all available and relevant evidence, calls into question some prominent approaches to traditional philosophical projects. To this end, we present the Philosophical Personality Argument (PPA). We explain how it supports the growing body of evidence challenging some of the uses of intuitions in philosophy, and we defend it from some criticisms of empirically based worries about intuitions in philosophy. We conclude that the current evidence indicates that the PPA is sound, and thus many traditional philosophical projects that use intuitions must become substantially more empirically oriented.     

The holy grail of cognitivism: a response to Adams and Aizawa

In their papers for this issue, Sterelny and Sutton provide a dimensional analysis of some of the ways in which mental and cognitive activities take place in the world. I add two further dimensions, a dimension of manipulation and of transformation. I also discuss the explanatory dimensions that we might use to explain these cases.     

Dimensions of mind

In their papers for this issue, Sterelny and Sutton provide a dimensional analysis of some of the ways in which mental and cognitive activities take place in the world. I add two further dimensions, a dimension of manipulation and of transformation. I also discuss the explanatory dimensions that we might use to explain these cases.     

Remembering and Remembering to Forget

To navigate our lives we all need to find ways both to remember and sometimes to forget aspects of our experiences that threaten us or cause us anxiety. Often patients need help in developing a capacity to hold in some dialectical tension, both remembering and forgetting. Some people are so frightened by the harsher realities of their lives that they turn to us to take on the remembering side of this dialectic, and, sometimes, to take on the forgetting side. Part of the work of their therapy is to help them develop the capacity to do more of both for themselves. Other patients come better prepared to take on this challenge and use us to witness and support their own efforts. This paper considers how patients use their hours with us to remember and to forget and ways in which psychoanalysts might participate in this undertaking.     

Imitating Christ's Cross: Lonergan and Girard on How and Why

The article begins with the gospels’ admonition to take up one's cross and asks how Christians might understand Christ's work on the cross so that we might better imitate or participate in it. Using tools from recent advances in literary analysis and systematic theology, the article attempts to provide some answer to this question. It considers contemporary feminist and liberation theologians’ criticism of the common but problematic interpretation of Christ's cross, what is often called ‘substitutionary penal atonement.’ It compares this with Anselm's atonement theory of satisfaction and Bernard Lonergan's and René Girard's analysis of the cross as a communication of love that invites others into loving relationship. With these interpretations of Christ's work, it concludes with some thoughts on how Christians might take up their own daily crosses.     

Sex in the Head

Abstract Recent philosophical writing on sexual desire divides broadly into two camps. Reductionists take sexual desire to aim at an essentially physical bodily pleasure, whereas intentionalist accounts take a focus upon the reciprocal interaction of the mental states of the partners to be crucial for understanding the phenomenon. I argue that the apparent plausibility of reductionism rests upon the flawed assumption that sexual pleasure has the same uniform bodily character in all sexual encounters, which rests in turn upon flawed assumptions in the philosophy of mind. Drawing on an Aristotelian understanding of persons as essentially embodied minds, I outline an alternative account of sexual desire, showing how the nature of the sexual pleasure we take in the body of another can be transformed by the significance the person or situation has for us. I proceed to show that my account of sexual desire is able to accommodate the entire range of sexual phenomena, including those that seem to undermine standard intentionalist accounts as well as those that reductionists have difficulty in fully explaining. Finally I make some brief remarks about the implications of my account of sexual desire for sexual morality, suggesting some reasons why it casts doubt on the view that universal participant consent is sufficient for a sexual act to be morally unproblematic.     

Physicalism and the Via Negativa

Some philosophers have suggested that, instead of attempting to arrive at a satisfactory definition of the physical, we should adopt the ‘via negativa.’ That is, we should take the notion of the mental as fundamental, and define the physical in contrast, as the non-mental. I defend a variant of this approach, based on some information about how children form concepts. I suggest we are hard-wired to form a concept of intentional agency from a very young age, and so there’s some reason to believe that our concept of the physical does include, as part of its content, a contrast with the mental.     

Can Emotions Have Abstract Objects? The Example of Awe

Can we feel emotions about abstract objects, assuming that abstract objects exist? I argue that at least some emotions can have abstract objects as their intentional objects and discuss why this conclusion is not just trivially true. Through critical engagement with the work of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, I devote special attention to awe, an emotion that is particularly well suited to show that some emotions can be about either concrete or abstract objects. In responding to a possible objection, according to which we can only feel emotions about things that we take to matter to our flourishing, and thus cannot feel emotions about causally inefficacious abstract objects, I explore how abstract objects can be relevant to human flourishing and discuss some emotions other than awe that can be about abstract objects. I finish by explaining some reasons why my conclusion matters, including the fact that it presents a challenge to perceptual theories of emotion and causal theories of intentionality.