Facts,Ends, and Normative Reasons

This paper is about the relationship between two widely accepted and apparently conflicting claims about how we should understand the notion of ‘reason giving’ invoked in theorising about reasons for action. According to the first claim, reasons are given by facts about the situation of agents. According to the second claim, reasons are given by ends. I argue that the apparent conflict between these two claims is less deep than is generally recognised.     

Self-Transcendence: Integrating Ends and Means in Value Counseling

Pastoral counseling is distinguished from secular counseling by “limit experiences.” These are experiences that disclose the fullness of self-transcendence—for Christians, a personal relationship with God. But the radical drive of the human spirit for self-transcendence unifies every dimension of the developing person. This drive thus forms the basis of a fundamental continuity between pastoral and secular counseling in their directions and methods, despite clear differences in boundaries, categories, and languages.     

Treatment of Missing Data: Beyond Ends and Means

The ethical decision making process behind the treatment of missing data has yet to be examined in the research literature in any discipline. The purpose of the current paper is to begin to discuss this decision-making process in view of a Foucauldian framework. The paper suggests how the ethical treatment of missing data should be considered from the adoption of this theoretical framework.     

Daily Goals, Life Goals, and Worst Fears: Means, Ends, and Subjective Well-Being

This study addressed the relations among personal strivings (daily goals) and future life goals and worst fears. Eighty undergraduate participants (62 women, 18 men) listed their daily goals, their ultimate life goals, and their worst fears, and completed questionnaire measures of subjective well-being. Daily goals were content-analyzed for relevance to attaining life goals or avoiding worst fears. Daily goals that were instrumental to life goals or that avoided worst fears were rated as more important but also more difficult by participants. Working on daily goals avoiding one's worst fears was negatively related to measures of subjective well-being, controlling for daily goal progress, difficulty, ambivalence, and importance. Working on daily goals that were instrumental to one's life goals only weakly predicted well-being. The avoidance of worst fears interacted with daily goal appraisals such that individuals who experienced little progress at daily goals that served to avoid their "worst case scenario" experienced the lowest levels of subjective well-being. In addition, progress at daily goals that were relevant to accomplishing one's life goals was significantly more strongly related to subjective well-being than progress at daily goals that were unrelated to one's life goals. Results indicate that daily goals are used to enact life goals and avoid worst fears and that these means–end relations have implications for well-being.     

Epistemic Means and Ends: In Defense of Some Sartwellian Insights

The question of what means-and-ends structure our epistemic endeavors have is an important issue in recent epistemology, and is fundamental for understanding epistemic matters in principle. Crispin Sartwell has proposed arguments for the view that knowledge is our only ultimate goal, and justification is no part of it. An important argument is his instrumentality argument which is concerned with the conditions under which something could belong to our ultimate epistemic goal. Recently, this argument has been reconstructed and criticized by Pierre Le Morvan in a clear and helpful way. It will be shown, however, that Le Morvan’s criticism is not adequate, since it misconstrues the real instrumentality argument that can be found in Sartwell’s writings.     

When Respect Means to Obey: Immigrant Mexican Mothers' Values for Their Children

We describe Mexican immigrant mothers' values for their children and their understanding of how children acquire those values. Fifteen mothers were given a Q-Sort task of parental values and interviewed at length using a semi-structured format. Analysis of the mothers' transcribed narratives revealed salient features of a cultural model of child development that constrasts sharply with current professional models. The emergent portrait of children was one of inactive learners whose ability to understand dictated social behavior, developed very slowly over the years, and was dependent on parental direction and instruction.     

Function, Intuition and Ends in Aristotle's Ethics

This essay attempts to show why deliberation is not of ends for Aristotle, not only because deliberation is concerned with means, but because ends are grasped by wish. Such wishing, I argue, is a form of rational intuition that is non-discursive and analogous to seeing and therefore not at all like the discursive thought involved in deliberation. Such a reading also helps shed light on the nature of contemplation and therefore on happiness in Aristotle.     

Revising Reasons Reactivity: Weakly and Strongly Sufficient Reasons for Acting

In Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza propose an account of moral responsibility according to which an agent is morally responsible for an action just when that action is the product of her own moderately reasons-responsive mechanism, where reasons-responsiveness is explained in terms of the mechanism’s regular reasons-receptivity and weak reasons-reactivity. In a review of Fischer and Ravizza’s book Mele contends that their weakly reasons-reactivity condition is inadequate, constructing a case in which, according to their theory, an extreme agoraphobic is morally responsible for his staying in his home. In this paper I modify Fischer and Ravizza’s account of moral responsibility in light of Mele’s problematic example, suggesting a refinement of their weakly reasons-reactivity requirement via a distinction between weakly sufficient reasons and strongly sufficient reasons.     

Reasons for Belief, Reasoning, Virtues

The paper offers an explanation of what reasons for belief are, following Paul Grice in focusing on the roles of reasons in the goal-directed activity of reasoning. Reasons are particularly salient considerations that we use as indicators of the truth of beliefs and candidates for belief. Reasons are distinguished from enabling conditions by being things that we should be able to attend to in the course of our reasoning, and in assessing how well our beliefs are supported. The final section argues that epistemic virtues have a role in enabling us to identify reasons and explores this by reference to the example of being observant.     

Dualisms,Dichotomies and Dead Ends: Limitations of Analytic Thinking about Sport

In this essay I attempt to show the limitations of analytic thinking and the kinds of dead ends into which such analyses may lead us in the philosophy of sport. As an alternative, I argue for a philosophy of complementation and compatibility in the face of what appear to be exclusive alternatives. This is a position that is sceptical of bifurcations and other simplified portrayals of reality but does not dismiss them entirely. A philosophy of complementation traffics in the realm of ambiguities, paradoxes, differences by degree, tendencies, mixtures, polarities, tensions, complexes, transitions and all other forms of messiness. I note that this position has been generated, in part, by work conducted in the empirical sciences and that complementation provides a paradigm that is useful across the academic disciplines.

To show the ways in which analytic thinking leads to dead ends, I analyse the epistemological debate over ‘broad internalism’ engaged in by Russell (1999 Russell, J. S. 1999. Are rules all an umpire has to work with?. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, XXVI: 27–49. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 2004 Russell, J. S. 2004. Moral realism in sport. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, XXXI: 142–160. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), Dixon (2003 Dixon, Nicholas. 2003. Canadian figure skaters, French judges, and realism in sport. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, XXX: 103–116. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), Simon (2000 Simon, Robert. 2000. Internalism and internal values in sport. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, XXVII: 1–16. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 2004 Simon, Robert. 2004. From ethnocentrism to realism: Can discourse ethics bridge the gap?. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, XXXI: 122–141. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) and Morgan (2004 Morgan, William. 2004. Moral antirealism, internalism, and sport. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, XXXI: 61–83.  [Google Scholar]). Evidence for the claim that they reached a mostly unhelpful stalemate is based on the fact that they did not provide any third option and moreover that the analytic tools and ground rules they employ prevent its discovery. I suggest that all four authors are comfortable with the analytic tendency to bifurcate reality and require choices among exclusionary alternatives. I also claim that they treat reason as if it were generated by a ‘mind from nowhere’. Philosophical anthropology, I suggest, provides much-needed somatic grounding that would reign in excessively optimistic views of reason (Dixon, Simon and Russell) or excessively plastic interpretations of mind (Morgan). It can also provide evidence that could help us understand why hominids (even modern ones) are so attracted to dichotomies and why we have so much trouble in reconciling apparent incompatibilities.     

The Financial Burden of Having Children and Fertility Differentials Across Development and Life Stages: Evidence from Satisfaction Data

Comparing the financial burden of having children across countries accompanies various types of measurement issues. The present study employs financial satisfaction to overcome the measurement issues and examines how the financial burden of having children differs across development stages. The challenge in this approach lies in detecting the impact of having children on financial satisfaction. To address this challenge, we focus our attention on the peculiar movement of satisfaction in the financial domain of life, which is measured by standardizing financial satisfaction by overall life satisfaction, and perform regression analyses using World and European Integrated Values Survey. The results show that the negative impact of having an additional child on satisfaction becomes particularly greater in the financial domain as income increases and total fertility rate (TFR) decreases. The results also indicate that having children offers a sense of financial security to the elderly in high TFR countries while this is not the case in lower TFR countries. These results support the general idea that the heavier financial burden of having children is a major cause of fertility decline and provide policy implications to find a way out of extremely low fertility.