Agency,human nature and character in Kantian theory

Conclusion In order for the duty of friendship to be practically possible, and for gratitude and beneficence to be unencumbered virtues, Kant need not have held that human beings are basically good. He need only have understood that they are social beings, with desires for both independence and connection, autonomy and affiliation, and purposes that are not always merely their own. I have argued that because he did not, his moral theory is flawed in three important respects.In Kant's theory, morality is only possible because humans are rational, and necessary because (absent morality) they are self-interested individuals, egoistically motivated, distrustful and isolated. When this view is applied to particular questions of friendship and the virtues, it becomes a distorting medium. It is my contention that a more adequate theory of character would result from the application of Kantian moral principles to a sounder, more social conception of human nature.In conclusion, I wish to make it clear that I am not arguing that human beings are basically good, only that they are essentially social. In his political writings Kant has emphasized the social dimension of reason itself, and I believe he would agree with Thomas Nagel's recent claim about human nature and morality: To say that altruism and morality are possible in virtue of something basic to human nature is not to say that men are basically good. Men are basically complicated; how good they are depends on whether certain conceptions and ways of thinking have achieved dominance, a dominance which is precarious in any case.

---

     

The Immorality of Having Children

This paper defends the Famine Relief Argument against Having Children, which goes as follows: conceiving and raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be far better spent on famine relief; therefore, conceiving and raising children is immoral. It is named after Peter Singer’s Famine Relief Argument because it might be a special case of Singer’s argument and because it exposes the main practical implication of Singer’s argument—namely, that we should not become parents. I answer five objections: that disaster would ensue if nobody had children; that having children cannot be wrong because it is so natural for human beings; that the argument demands too much of us; that my child might be a great benefactor to the world; and that we should raise our children frugally and give them the right values rather than not have them. Previous arguments against procreation have appealed either to a pessimism about human life, or to the environmental impact of overpopulation, or to the fact that we cannot obtain the consent of the non-existent. The argument proposed here appeals to the severe opportunity costs of parenting.     

Changing the Definition of Education. On Kant’s Educational Paradox Between Freedom and Restraint

Ever since Kant asked: “How am I to develop the sense of freedom in spite of the restraint?” in his lecture on education, the tension between necessary educational influence and unacceptable restriction of the child’s individual development and freedom has been considered an educational paradox. Many have suggested solutions to the paradox; however, this article endorses recent discussions in educational philosophy that pursue the need to fundamentally rethink our understanding of education and upbringing. In this article it is argued that it is incomprehensible to describe an intervention of an educator as a constraint on a child’s actions and that such an intervention would be in need of justification; as Kant and many others after him have done. Educational intervention should not be understood as a restriction of a child’s endeavour to learn, because any educational intervention is educational. Furthermore, it is argued that the notion of restraint is based on the concept of human beings as radically separated which lead to the assumption that education is restrictive per se. In contrast, this article argues that indoctrination, manipulation, and coercion are rather phenomena within our educational forms of life. Recognizing the interrelations between human beings should play a constitutive part in the conceptualisation of individual freedom. A bond with others is the foundation upon which a child develops its own identity and an understanding of itself as an agent who can express its own will and takes responsibility for its words and actions.     

Human enhancement and supra-personal moral status

Several authors have speculated that (1) the pharmaceutical, genetic or other technological enhancement of human mental capacities could result in the creation of beings with greater moral status than persons, and (2) the creation of such beings would harm ordinary, unenhanced humans, perhaps by reducing their immunity to permissible harm. These claims have been taken to ground moral objections to the unrestrained pursuit of human enhancement. In recent work, Allen Buchanan responds to these objections by questioning both (1) and (2). I argue that Buchanan’s response fails. However, I then outline an alternative response. This response starts from the thought that, though moral status-increasing human enhancements might render ordinary, unenhanced humans less immune to permissible harm, they need not worsen the overall distribution of this immunity across beings. In the course of the argument I explore the relation between mental capacity and moral status and between moral status and immunity to permissible harm.     

The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken Problem

Nanotechnologies that have been linked to the possibility of enhancing cognitive capabilities of human beings might also be deployed to reduce or eliminate such capabilities in non-human vertebrate animals. A surprisingly large literature on the ethics of such disenhancement has been developed in response to the suggestion that it would be an ethically defensible response to animal suffering both in medical experimentation and in industrial livestock production. However, review of this literature illustrates the difficulty of formulating a coherent ethical debate. Well structured arguments for disenhancement can be made on the basis of mainstream views on the basis of ethical obligations to animals, but these arguments have not been persuasive against the moral intuition that disenhancements are unethical. At the same time, attempts to ground these intuitions in a coherent philosophical doctrine have been plagued by logical fallacies and question begging assertions. As such, the debate over animal disenhancement forecasts an enduring conundrum with respect to the core question of transforming the nature of sentient beings, and this conundrum is logically independent of claims that relate either to the distinctive of human beings or to issues deriving from the emphasis on enhancement.     

Natural Rights to Welfare

Abstract: Many people have lamented the proliferation of human rights claims. The cure for this problem, it may be thought, would be to develop a theory that can distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights. I argue, however, that the proliferation of human rights mirrors a deep problem in human rights theory itself. Contemporary theories of natural rights to welfare are historical descendants from a theory of rights to subsistence which was developed in twelfth‐century Europe. According to this theory, each human being has a special role to fulfil in God's plan and therefore has inalienable rights to subsist. Later theories have secularized this idea by claiming that human beings are purposive agents. Secularization, however, comes at a price. In the case of these theories, the price is a failure to provide satisfactory answers to the most basic questions we would expect of a theory of natural rights to answer. They have failed to provide a basis for ascribing these rights to all and only to human beings. They have not been able to generate a clear and viable criterion for ascribing duties correlative to these rights. And they cannot limit rights‐claims in a non‐arbitrary way. Hence we should abandon these theories.     

Children's essentialist reasoning about language and race

Across four studies, we directly compared children's essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual's lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each target child would grow up to be - one who was a 'match' to the target child in race but not language, and the other a 'match' in language but not race. Nine- to 10-year-old European American children chose the race-match, rather than the language-match. In contrast, 5-6-year-old European American children in both urban, racially diverse, and rural, racially homogeneous environments chose the language-match, even though this necessarily meant that the target child would transform racial categories. Although surprising in light of adult reasoning, these young children demonstrated an intuition about the relative stability of an individual's language compared to her racial group membership. Yet, 5-6-year-old African American children, similar to the older European American children, chose the race-match, suggesting that membership in a racial minority group may highlight children's reasoning about race as a stable category. Theoretical implications for our understanding of children's categorization of human kinds are discussed.     

No man is an island: the need to belong and dismissing avoidant attachment style

The need to belong theory proposes that all human beings need social connections. However, dismissive avoidant individuals claim to be comfortable without close relationships and appear to be indifferent to how other people think of them. The current studies examined the association between dismissing avoidant attachment and the desire to feel accepted by others. In Study 1, high-dismissive participants reported experiencing higher than average levels of positive affect and state self-esteem after learning that other participants accepted them. In Study 2, high-dismissive participants felt better about themselves and experienced higher levels of positive affect after learning that in the future they would be successful in interpersonal relative to independent domains or controls. The results of these studies suggest that dismissive avoidants do not represent a counterexample to the hypothesis that all human beings have a fundamental need and desire to belong.     

Historical shifts and underlying themes in ideas about rearing young children in the United States: Where have we been? Where are we going?

Common themes in ideas about rearing infants and young children in the United States can be traced from the nation's beginnings to the present day. These themes include a strong concern about child rearing; a belief that human beings are perfectible through better child rearing; an eagerness by parents to listen to the advice of ‘experts’; a belief that infants and young children should be educated in schools or day-care centers by experts, competing with the belief that infants belong at home with their mothers; a commitment to social reform, competing with the conviction that families should be autonomous. These themes provide a background for contemporary research, political controversy, and future discussion concerning how children should be reared. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Zen Buddhism and the intrinsic value of nature

Part IIt is a perennial theme in the literature on environmental ethics that the exploitation of the environment is the result of a blindness to (or perhaps a refusal to recognize) the intrinsic value of natural beings. The general story here is that Western traditions of thought have tended to accord natural beings value only to the extent that they prove useful to humans, that they have tended to see nature as only instrumentally valuable. By contrast, it is said that a new, environmentally friendly understanding of the world would value nature ‘for its own sake’, would conceive natural beings as having intrinsic value. In the light of such an understanding, the oak tree, for instance, would be seen not merely as a source of timber or shade or as a decoration for the front lawn, but as valuable ‘in itself’, as having an intrinsic value that ought to be respected (see further, O'Neill 1993, chapter 2).     

INTEGRATING EVOLUTION: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF CREATION

Abstract. Science has demonstrated that the universe creates itself through its own history. This history is the result of a probabilistic process, not a deterministic execution of a plan. Science has also documented that human beings are a result of this universal, probabilistic process of general evolution. At first sight, these results seem to contradict Christian teaching. According to the Bible, history is essentially the history of salvation. Human beings therefore are not an "accident of nature" but special creations to be saved. With deeper theological probing, it becomes clearer, however, that creation must create itself. The Christian God is the loving God who enters into a loving relationship with human beings if they desire to reciprocate. If creation could not create itself, human beings could not be free. Without freedom to ignore or reject God's love, the central act of the Christian God, the drama of salvation, would become a parody played by marionettes in the hands of a supernatural manipulator. Christians should welcome the fundamental insight brought forth by science that the universe, including human beings, created itself through its own history. This article will try to show that this scientific insistence is required and confirmed by the intrinsic character of the orthodox, Judeo-Christian concept of God. That nature has to create itself, including human beings, secures human freedom and with it, the responsibility for human actions. From this perspective one might better understand the Bible in the light of God's revelation through the book of nature.     

Human Bonds

ABSTRACT There are three kinds of bonds between human beings: biological and natural; legal and artificial; social and voluntary. Marriage can be seen as an artificial and legal means of shifting the loose bonding of the third category of relationship into the deep and inescapable bonding of the first. The desire to create bonds of this type is widespread, but non-bonding, too, has been recommended either as good in itself—a way of achieving peace of mind or personal emancipation through wider relationships—or as necessary self-denial for some higher cause. In the latter case, the bonds of family are seen as a positive good, a view shared, though for different reasons, by religious and political conservatives and by revisionist feminists.
In contrast to this, three philosophical conceptions which would favour unbonding, or detachment from emotional ties, are categorised here as (a) the Stoic, (b) the Existentialist and (c) the Feminist. Within the Feminist ideal, it is radical, rather than liberal or socialist feminism that has most in common with Stoic or Existentialist ideals. These ideals are considered, together with various alternatives to marriage, and are judged not to override the need for deep personal bonds between human beings. These personal bonds of love and commitment are compared with the alternative bonds of religion and politics and it is concluded that, whatever forms they take, personal bonds have fundamental moral priority in the lives of human beings.     

Drawing Limits: contemporary views on biotechnology

Biotechnology deals with the stuff of life; living things can be changed and barriers between species broken down. Through biotechnology human beings are ‘playing god’ in ways that have not been possible before. This article discusses some findings of the Biocult project, which investigated the views of 956 young people on risk and safety in relation to biotechnology [1]. The article focuses on the responses of young people aged 11 to 18 to the statement ‘human beings can use science and technology to do what they want’ set in the context of answers to other questions on specific applications. Despite the emphasis on individual freedom of choice found in surveys of personal morality, most young people spontaneously brought in notions of limits and barriers to human action in the field of biotechnology. The ways these limits are justified are of interest as they uncover ethical thinking which may or may not be religious or spiritual.     

On the metaphysical presuppositions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Conclusion In what precedes, I have argued that Aristotle does not, in his ethics, commit three metaphysical errors sometimes imputed to him: he does not define the good as a fact; he does not claim that human beings move by nature towards their telos; he does not claim, in the ergon argument, that human beings are fixed rather than versatile. Instead, I have shown, he does the opposite in each case: he argues that the good cannot be defined as a fact; he claims that human beings move towards their telos only if they have virtue and virtue is not by nature; he locates, in the human ergon, that which is responsible for human versatility. Finally, I have shown by example that the metaphysical commitments of Aristotle's account of human happiness are not as controversial as they seem.If all of this is true, then perhaps the disorder that has existed in ethics since the enlightenment has been misdiagnosed. Perhaps it is not due to an unhappy choice between end-neutral emotivism on the one hand and Aristotle's bad metaphysics on the other. Perhaps instead it is due, at least in part, to a too hasty rejection of Aristotle's ethics on the grounds of a rejection of his biology.     

“Did you have fun?”: American and Chinese mother–child conversations about shared emotional experiences

Twenty-two American and 25 Chinese mothers and their 3-year-old children participated in this study. Mothers were instructed to discuss with their children at home four specific one-point-in-time events in which they both participated and during which the child experienced happiness, sadness, fear, or anger. American mother–child conversations showed an “emotion-explaining style” in which mothers and children provided rich causal explanations for antecedents of emotions. Chinese mother–child conversations employed an “emotion-criticizing style” that focused on installing proper behavior in the child and gave few explanations for the emotion itself. American mother–child conversations were also more likely to center on personal themes, were more elaborative, and were more focused on the child's roles and predilections than the conversations of Chinese. Findings are discussed in light of the impact of early family narrative practices on children's acquisition of emotion situation knowledge, which may in turn affect the development of autobiographical memory.     

Variation in the anthropomorphization of supernatural beings and its implications for cognitive theories of religion

The cognitive study of religion has been highly influenced by P. Boyer's (2001, 2003) claim that supernatural beings are conceptualized as persons with counterintuitive properties. The present study tests the generality of this claim by exploring how different supernatural beings are conceptualized by the same individual and how different individuals conceptualize the same supernatural beings. In Experiment 1, college undergraduates decided whether three types of human properties (psychological, biological, physical) could or could not be attributed to two types of supernatural beings (religious, fictional). On average, participants attributed more human properties to fictional beings, like fairies and vampires, than to religious beings, like God and Satan, and they attributed more psychological properties than nonpsychological properties to both. In Experiment 2, 5-year-old children and their parents made both open-ended and closed-ended property attributions. Although both groups of participants attributed a majority of human properties to the fictional beings, children attributed a majority of human properties to the religious beings as well. Taken together, these findings suggest that anthropomorphic theories of supernatural-being concepts, though fully predictive of children's concepts, are only partially predictive of adults' concepts.     

Reconsidering Psychoanalytic Notions of Paternal and Maternal Roles in Situations of Father-Absence

Traditional psychoanalytic literature describes the father as occupying a critical role in child development. The father’s loss or absence is seen as hindering development from early infancy throughout childhood and even into adulthood. Father absence is defined as any situation where the father is psychologically disconnected from his children, whether or not he is currently living in the same home. Dramatic shifts have occurred in the American family over the past several decades, which have resulted in changes for both the father and mother’s role in child development. With the increasing divorce rate and rise in single parenthood, father-absence has become common, and a multiplicity of family forms has emerged. However, psychoanalytic ideas regarding maternal and paternal roles have not been modified to encompass these changing family forms. Research is beginning to show that children can develop in families that are not the traditional mother-father unit. Two case examples are provided to examine various factors related to unresolved separation-individuation issues, and how psychoanalytic ideas regarding the paternal and maternal functions can be used in either a modified or unmodified manner in organizing the clinical material.     

What is so Good about Moral Freedom?

Many Christian philosophers believe that it is a great good that human beings are free to choose between good and evil, so good indeed that God is justified in putting up with a great many evil choices for the sake of it. But many of the same Christian philosophers also believe that God is essentially good – good in every possible world. Unlike his sinful human creatures, God cannot choose between good and evil. In that sense, he is not 'morallyFree'. It is not easy to see how to fit these two theses into a single coherent package. If moral freedom is such a great good in human beings, why is it not a grave defect in God that he lacks it? And if the lack of moral freedom does not detract in any way from God's greatness, would it not have been better for us not to have it? I develop, but ultimately reject, what I take to be the most initially promising strategy for resolving this dilemma.     

Intimacy and the face of the other: A philosophical study of infant institutionalization and deprivation

The orphans of Romania were participants in what is sometimes called “the forbidden experiment”: depriving human infants of intimacy, affection, and human contact is an inhuman practice. It is an experiment which no ethical researcher would set out to do. This paper examines historical data, case histories, and research findings which deal with early deprivation and performs a phenomenological analysis of deprivation phenomena as they impact emotional and physical development. A key element of deprivation is the absence of intimate relationships with other human beings. However, the absence of intimacy impacts not only the social/emotional abilities of infants, but their very ability to perceive the world. Philosophically and from a radically Merleau-Pontean perspective, the intimate face of the other appears to be a world opening event for the child. Its absence has a profound impact on the child's experience of embodiment, coexistence, spatiality, temporality, and language. When seen through early deprivation, intimacy appears as a necessary foundation for establishing the transcendence of the world beyond perceptual presence, and it provides the possibility for language, culture, and history.