Good Samaritans, Good Humanitarians

abstract   Duties of beneficence are not well understood. Peter Singer has argued that the scope of beneficence should not be restricted to those who are, in some sense, near us. According to Singer, refusing to contribute to humanitarian relief efforts is just as wrong as refusing to rescue a child drowning before you. Most people do not seem convinced by Singer's arguments, yet no one has offered a plausible justification for restricting the scope of beneficence that doesn't produce counterintuitive results elsewhere. I offer a defence of this restricted scope by introducing the notion of unique dependence, a notion that is both intuitively attractive and theoretically grounded. It explains why your reason to rescue the drowning child is more stringent than your reason to contribute to humanitarian relief, while blocking the conclusion that we have no reason at all to aid distant sufferers.     

Good Soldiers, A Traditional Approach

This article contends that in crucial respects effective soldiers are ethical soldiers, that good soldiers in the military sense are good soldiers in the moral sense, and that this is so for quite traditional reasons. The thesis is defended by identifying and then resolving basic paradoxes regarding what soldiers must be trained to do or be, e.g.: be trained to kill but also not to be brutal; be trained to react in combat situations almost automatically but also to deliberate and decide if a command is unlawful; as peacekeepers, be trained to be impartial but also to know right from wrong and be firmly committed to upholding the former and opposing the latter. It is shown that contradictory things are not really thus being called for. With the aid of a blend of deontology and virtue theory, it is argued that certain standard qualities of effective soldiers have an associated moral dimension. For example, true military courage implies an unwillingness to engage in cruelty; the self-control on which success of missions depends implies eschewing motives of personal vengeance; and the capacity for comprehending complex equipment and data implies a mentality for assessing the validity of orders.     

Good Societies,Financial Inequality and Secrecy,and a Good Life: from Aristotle to Piketty

In this paper we show that for a dataset of 105 countries, four candidate objective indexes (Human Development Index (HDI), Weighted Index of Social Progress (WISP), Social Progress Index (SPI) and Sustainable Society Index (SSI)) and one subjective index (World Happiness Survey (WHS)) of at least aspects of the quality of life or human well-being have good convergent validity among themselves and expected statistically significant negative correlations with Gini measures of wealth and income, and a measure of political jurisdictions’ institutionalized financial secrecy (Financial Secrecy Scores (FSS)). A measure of offshore wealth as a fraction of GDP (FOW) showed only a couple significant correlations with one overall quality of life index (SSI). When we combined the four objective indexes to the subjective index to create overall measures of the quality of life (including Happy Life Years (HLY)), the correlations among the indexes increased. Most of the correlations increased again when we used Gini indexes to create wealth-equality overall quality of life indexes and these correlations were higher on average than those among income-equality overall quality of life indexes. Combining results using 21 quality of life/well-being indexes, we rank ordered 105 countries from best to worst. The top 10 in order were Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Australia, Finland, Netherlands, Slovakia, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark. This is the first time anyone has built the array of index options presented here based on a handful of originals. We offer them as another potential starting point for the next generation of researchers.

     

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The impact of the activation of positive and negative components of an ethnic stereotype on judgments of responsibility for both positive and negative stereotypic behaviors was considered. Overall, stereotype activation biased judgments in a stereotype-consistent manner, across both positive and negative scenarios. Generalization of these judgments to more global trait perceptions of the target was limited to the negative scenario. Results are discussed in terms of both the use of stereotypes as inferential shortcuts and in-group favoritism mechanisms.     

Happiness,Rationality, Autonomy and the Good Life

The paper starts with a general discussion of the concepts of happiness and the good life. I argue that there is a conceptual core of happiness which has to do with one’s life as a whole. I discuss affective and attitude or life satisfaction views of happiness and indicate problems faced by those views. I introduce my own view, the life plan view, which sees happiness as the ongoing realizing of global desires of the person. I argue that on such a view one’s life could be happy without a high level of rationality or a high level of autonomy; such rationality and autonomy are not built into the concept of happiness. So while happiness is a final value, and good for the person, it is not the only final value. Rationality and autonomy are also final values and, where they exist, are good as ends for the person, part of the good life.     

Good conversations: Grounding,convergence, and richness

We apply three communication theories (the collaborative theory of language use, communication accommodation theory, and media richness theory) to aspects of conversational structure (openings, closings) and communicative setting (audiovisual, written) in order to make predictions about how people will feel about conversational interactions. We distinguish between two sources of information that interlocutors use to evaluate conversations: conversational outcomes and subjective conversational experience. We propose that positive subjective conversational experience comes about when interlocutors reach common ground with one another and do so with the least required effort possible (collaborative theory of language use), converge on their language use and communicative behaviors (communication accommodation theory), and select the appropriate medium for their conversation to take place (media richness theory). This positive subjective conversational experience is an important component of good conversations.     

Good Partners,Good Parents: Parent Relationship Satisfaction Predicts Parenting Efficacy for Young Children

Both maternal and paternal parental involvement are critical for child development. What is unclear, nonetheless, is how parents’ own relationships contribute to the growth of children. Addressing the question, we predicted marital satisfaction strengthens parenting efficacy, making parental involvement more effective in increasing children’s functioning. To test the hypothesis, we analyzed a nationally representative large-sample survey of 3-year-olds (N = 2164), wherein their language, cognitive, social, and emotional development, maternal and paternal parental involvement, as well as the marital satisfaction of the parents were assessed. The results supported the predictions by showing the critical role of fathers—the mother parents through the father in a satisfying marriage, more than she does in a dissatisfying marriage, and their young children subsequently grow better when their parents are satisfying partners. Together, the findings reveal potential mechanisms through which well-being may be passed down from one generation to the next.