On Living in an Unjust Society

ABSTRACT Can it be wrong to simply live in an unjust society? Four moral principles: group responsibility, unjust enrichment, a general duty to prevent injustice and the need to preserve one's moral integrity indicate that it might be. I explore the implications of each of these principles and conclude that while the possibility of doing good might counterbalance the threat to moral integrity, a person who continues to live in an unjust society should repudiate the injustice to avoid being held responsible for it and has a duty to compensate those deprived if he is unjustly enriched. Moreover, the general duty to prevent injustice bears more heavily on those who are closest to it.     

Climate Change is Unjust War: Geoengineering and the Rising Tides of War

Climate change is undeniably a global problem, but the situation is especially dire for countries whose territory is comprised entirely or primarily of low‐lying land. While geoengineering might offer an opportunity to protect these states, international consensus on the particulars of any geoengineering proposal seems unlikely. To consider the moral complexities created by unilateral deployment of geoengineering technologies, we turn to a moral convention with a rich history of assessing interference in the sovereign affairs of foreign states: the just war tradition. We argue that the just war framework demonstrates that, for these nations, geoengineering offers a justified form of self‐defense from an unwarranted, albeit unintentional, aggression. This startling result places our own carbon‐emitting activities in a stark new light: in perpetrating climate change, we are, in fact, waging war on the most vulnerable.     

Reconciliation and Forgiveness in an Unjust Society

Justification by faith necessarily leads to justice in society. IN post–apartheid South Africa, reconciliation has required truth telling plus confession and, most importantly, land redistribution. Failure at land redistribution in Zimbabwe has reduced the effectiveness of the post–colonial reconciliation program and perpetuated previous injustice.     

War and Suicide*

ABSTRACT: The suicide rate generally appears to decline during the time of war. The traditional psychodynamic explanation that this decrease results from the legitimization of outward aggression is questioned. World War II evidence from both occupied and neutral countries, together with fluctuations of the suicide rates among the Scandinavian countries, are better understood as reflecting the social conditions of wartime, rather than the presence of actual fighting. These data, and others, point to the hypothesis that the decreased suicide rate during wartime is tied to the greater social integration–increased patriotism, ease of promotions, greater sense of purpose, and so forth–resulting from a state of war.     

Belief in an Unjust World: When Beliefs in a Just World Fail

Past research has attempted to delineate personality differences between insomniacs and good sleepers but has failed to control for type of insomnia or severity of the disorder. The purpose of this study was to compare MMPI scores of mild and severe sleep onset insomniacs with a control group of noninsomniacs. Results demonstrated that sleep onset insomniacs, regardless of degree of severity, differed significantly from noninsomniacs; and that mild and severe insomniacs differed from each other on only one MMPI scale.     

Rule‐Following and Externalism*

John McDowell has suggested recently that there is a route from his favoured solution to Kripke's Wittgenstein's “sceptical paradox” about rule‐following to a particular form of cognitive externalism. In this paper, 1 argue that this is not the case: even granting McDowell his solution to the rule‐following paradox, his preferred version of cognitive externalism does not follow.     

论宗教与战争

宗教与战争都是一定社会历史阶段的产物。在一定社会历史条件下,一方面宗教可以影响战争的爆发和战争的领导者、参与者乃至进程与结果;另一方面,战争有时也能影响宗教的传播和兴衰。由于世界宗教的多样性、世界各国民族历史上社会政治制度发展的差异性以及战争背景的复杂性,使宗教与战争的关系变得更加错综复杂。本文透过大量的宗教与战争的历史现象,尝试对二者的复杂关系作出一种探索和阐释。     

On the Concept of Following Logically

We provide for the first time an exact translation into English of the Polish version of Alfred Tarski's classic 1936 paper, whose title we translate as ‘On the Concept of Following Logically’. We also provide in footnotes an exact translation of all respects in which the German version, used as the basis of the previously published and rather inexact English translation, differs from the Polish. Although the two versions are basically identical, to an extent that is even uncanny, we note more than 400 differences. Several dozen of these are substantive differences due to revisions by Tarski to the Polish version which he did not incorporate in the German version. With respect to these revisions the Polish version should be regarded as more authoritative than the German. Hence scholars limited to an English translation should use ours.     

On the So-Called War on Terrorism

Abstract: Since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, the country has embarked on a so‐called war on terrorism. This essay argues that so‐called war on terrorism has used the pretext of responding to terrorist attacks in the U.S. in September 2001 to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have objectives other than stamping out terrorism. It further argues that war requires a moral justification that cannot be provided for either the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq.     

Neuropsychological Sequelae of PTSD and TBI Following War Deployment among OEF/OIF Veterans

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) are highly prevalent among Veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. These conditions are associated with common and unique neuropsychological and neuroanatomical changes. This review synthesizes neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies for both of these disorders and studies examining their co-occurrence. Recommendations for future research, including use of combined neuropsychological and advanced neuroimaging techniques to study these disorders alone and in concert, are presented. It is clear from the dearth of literature that addiitonal studies are required to examine and understand the impact of specific factors on neurocognitive outcome. Of particular relevance are temporal relationships between PTSD and mTBI, risk and resilience factors associated with both disorders and their co-occurrence, and mTBI-specific factors such as time since injury and severity of injury, utilizing comprehensive, yet targeted cognitive tasks.