Neurolaw: Neuroscience,Ethics, and Law. Review Essay

Neurolaw is a new, rapidly developing area of interdisciplinary research on the meaning and implications of neuroscience for the law and legal practices. In this article three recently published volumes in this field will be reviewed.     

Moral Responses and Moral Theory: Socially-based Externalist Ethics

The paper outlines a view called social (or two-level) response-dependency as an addition to standard alternatives in metaethics that allows for a position intermediate between standard versions of internalism and externalism on the question of motivational force. Instead of taking psychological responses as either directly supplying the content of ethics (as on emotivist or sentimentalist accounts) or as irrelevant to its content (as in classical versions of Kantian or utilitarian ethics), the view allows them an indirect role, as motivational props to moral teaching and thus to the general institution of moral discourse. However, they are not implied by any particular moral judgment (or speaker), so that amoralism comes out as possible. The response that defines the distinctively moral notion of wrong on this account is the second-level (social) response of forbidding some behavior; but this is ultimately to be understood in terms of (variable) individual reactions. Natural human emotion tendencies thereby constrain the content of ethics, while allowing for some degree of social variation in moral codes.     

Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics: A Review Essay

Though others have surveyed the different methods in comparative religious ethics, relatively little attention has been given to different approaches to pedagogy (exceptions include Lovin and Reynolds; Juergensmeyer; Twiss). The field of comparative religious ethics has now reached a level of maturity so that there are a variety of ways such courses can be taught. In this review I consider the approaches to comparative religious ethics found in four recent texts by Jacob Neusner, Darrell Fasching and Dell deChant, Regina Wolfe and Christine Gudorf, and Sumner Twiss and Bruce Grelle. In the essay I note the strengths and weaknesses of each text, with special attention given to how the texts might work in the classroom. I then argue that the different texts reflect different understandings of the goal of teaching comparative religious ethics, and I make these goals explicit in order to help teachers decide how they might approach the teaching in this growing field.     

Introduction: Ethnography,Moral Theory,and Comparative Religious Ethics

Representing a spectrum of intellectual concerns and methodological commitments in religious ethics, the contributors to this focus issue consider and assess the advantages and disadvantages of the shift in recent comparative religious ethics away from a rootedness in moral theory toward a model that privileges the ethnography of moral worlds. In their own way, all of the contributors think through and emphasize the meaning, importance, and place of normativity in recent comparative religious ethics.     

Ethics Beyond Moral Theory

I develop an anti‐theory view of ethics. Moral theory (Kantian, utilitarian, virtue ethical, etc.) is the dominant approach to ethics among academic philosophers. But moral theory's hunt for a single Master Factor (utility, universalisability, virtue . . .) is implausibly systematising and reductionist. Perhaps scientism drives the approach? But good science always insists on respect for the data, even messy data: I criticise Singer's remarks on infanticide as a clear instance of moral theory failing to respect the data of moral perceptions and moral intuitions. Moral theory also fails to provide a coherent basis for real‐world motivation, justification, explanation, and prediction of good and bad, right and wrong. Consider for instance the marginal place of love in moral theory, compared with its central place in people's actual ethical outlooks and decision making. Hence, moral theory typically fails to ground any adequate ethical outlook. I propose that it is the notion of an ethical outlook that philosophical ethicists should pursue, not the unfruitful and distorting notion of a moral theory.     

Punctuated Equilibrium,Moral Panics and the Ethics Review Process

A review of the literature and ethnographic data from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom on the research ethics review process suggest that moral panics can become triggers for punctuated equilibrium in the review process at both the macro and microlevel, albeit with significantly different levels of magnitude and impact. These data suggest that neither the development of the ethics review process nor the process itself proceeds gradually, but both are characterized by periodic major shifts evoked by particular events or situations that result in varying levels of moral panic. One way to deal with this moral panic is to increase the regulation of research and the depth or intensity of the scrutiny of applications under ethics review. Moral panics at the macrolevel influence those at the microlevel and, if the moral panic evoked at the local or microlevel is not satisfactorily resolved, it will evoke action at a higher level. Understanding the evolution of research ethics review processes from this perspective might help make actions by ethics committees and policy makers more understandable and help explain why attention to research ethics are heightened at particular points in time. It may also provide a basis for developing recommendations for adaptations to the ethics review process and policy at both the local and macrolevel.     

Moral Theory and Theorizing in Healthcare Ethics

This paper takes up the question of the role of philosophical moral theory in our attempts to resolve the ethical problems that arise in health care, with particular reference to the contention that we need theory to be determinative of our choice of actions. Moral theorizing is distinguished from moral theories and the prospects for determinacy from the latter are examined through a consideration of the most promising candidates: utilitarianism, deontology and the procedures involved in reflective equilibrium. It is argued that the current lack of any generally accepted method of solving moral problems, together with the extreme improbability of philosophy achieving a plausibly determinate theory, should encourage us to approach the problems in a spirit of agnosticism regarding the way in which theoretical material might be of relevance. The practical test for both moral theorizing and moral theories is thus not determinacy but the degree to which they increase our understanding of moral problems by serving, as they do in philosophy, as a means of inquiry into their nature.     

Chinese Cosmology and Recent Studies in Confucian Ethics: A Review Essay

Scholars of early Chinese philosophy frequently point to the non transcendent, organismic conception of the cosmos in early China as the source of China's unique perspective and distinctive values. One would expect recent works in Confucian ethics to capitalize on this idea. Reviewing recent works in Confucian ethics by P. J. Ivanhoe, David Nivison, R. P. Peerenboom, Henry Rosemont, and Tu Wei-Ming, the author analyzes these new studies in termsof the extent to which their representation of Confucian ethics reflects and is consistent with the view that in early China the cosmos was conceived to be organismic, nontranscendent, and nondualistic.     

Ethics, Law and Legislation: The Institutionalisation of Moral Reflection

This paper describes the different dimensions of the relation between moral reflection and legislative processes. It discusses some examples of the institutionalisation of moral reflection. It is argued that the relation between ethics and law is still an actual and relevant question. Ethics also has to reflect on its own role in political life. The paper defends the relevance of a theological perspective on the relation between law and ethics. In the last part it is argued that the modality of relation between ethics and law depends on the specific character of social domain.     

Just War Theory In Comparative Perspective: A Review Essay

The late twentieth century has provided both reasons and occasions for reassessing just war theory as an organizing framework for the moral analysis of war. Books by G. Scott Davis, James T. Johnson, and John Kelsay, together with essays by Jeffrey Stout, Charles Butterworth, David Little, Bruce Lawrence, Courtney Campbell, and Tamara Sonn, signal a remarkable shift in war studies as they enlarge the cultural lens through which the interests and forces at play inpolitical violence are identified and evaluated. In his review of the contribution made by these texts, the author focuses on the cohesion of just war theory, the asymmetry between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward holy war, and the need to develop just war theory into a tool adequate to assist in the moral evaluation of violent conflicts within, not just between, nation-states.     

Review Essay: Constructivism,Dialectic, and Mortality

My approach in this review of Irwin Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process is historical and explicative. I discuss the book's reprinted works in their original publication sequence in order to highlight the emergence of themes over time. I then discuss the chapters written expressly for this volume in light of these themes.     

Foundations for Ethical Standards and Codes: The Role of Moral Philosophy and Theory in Ethics

Ethical practice is a concern for all who practice in the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences. A central problem is discerning what action is ethically correct in a particular situation. It has been said that there is nothing so practical as good theory, because theory can help counselors organize and integrate knowledge. It seems, therefore, that a sound means to facilitate ethical competence in counseling would be through a knowledge and understanding of foundations and theories of ethics. Much of this pragmatic foundation is found in moral philosophy and related ethical theory.     

Review Essay: The Ethical and the Epistemological

In this review of Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process, I suggest that Irwin Hoffman's claim that his proposed paradigm of constructivism is revolutionary becomes more comprehensible and substantial if we realize that constructivism not only is an epistemological stance but is a profoundly ethical and even theological position that sees construction as construction in the face of death. The pronounced dialectical approach Hoffman is espousing and developing enables us to see the underside of uncertainty not only as epistemological complexity but as the ever present potential for moral fallibility and guilt.