MORALITY THROUGH INQUIRY,MOTIVE THROUGH RHETORIC: THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE EPOCH OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

In an epoch marked by the threat of global warming, the conflicts between science and religion are no longer simply matters that concern only intellectual elites and armchair philosophers; they are in many ways matters that will determine the degree to which we can meet the challenges of our times. John H. Evans's Morals Not Knowledge represents an important provocation for those committed not only to using scientific method as a resource for making moral judgments but also to creating political alliances with religious constituencies. In this important work, Evans argues that most conflicts between science and religion do not concern a clash between two contradictory ways of knowing, but rather a clash over our moral responsibilities and ultimate values. In my response to his work, I suggest that integrating both John Dewey's pragmatic understanding of the moral situation and Kenneth Burke's rhetorical interpretation of motives helps bolster Evans's cause and provides support for a political movement that aims to bridge the divide between science and religion in the epoch of the Anthropocene.     

Ethics and the generous ontology

According to a view attractive to both metaphysicians and ethicists, every period in a person’s life is the life of a being just like that person except that it exists only during that period. These “subpeople” appear to have moral status, and their interests seem to clash with ours: though it may be in some person’s interests to sacrifice for tomorrow, it is not in the interests of a subperson coinciding with him only today, who will never benefit from it. Or perhaps there is no clash, and a subperson’s interests derive from those of the person it coincides with. But this makes it likely that our own interests derive from those of other beings coinciding with us.     

Envy: the canker in the bud

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of moral masochism as a response to early trauma and the implications of this for psychotherapy.

Consideration is given to early conceptualisations of moral masochism within the psychoanalytic literature, in particular, the move from drive theory to object relations. More recent developments in relation to trauma and defences, such as disassociation, are explored. It is suggested that a more complex and fuller understanding requires thinking about the subtle and shifting interaction of both these levels. This allows the possibility of building a more nuanced understanding which can look at both behaviour, as described in the trauma literature, and meaning which is the core of a more classical psychoanalytic approach.

Case histories are used to illustrate the linkages between moral masochism and trauma and the transference and countertransference dynamics and challenges involved. Progress varied in these cases, with both positive and negative outcomes. This theoretical background is used to suggest why this may be so.     

Theological Pragmatism: A Critical Evaluation

Theological pragmatists like Daly, Kaufman, McFague and Reuther claim that the God we should believe in and the kind of images we should use to express our religious faith should be evaluated primarily on the basis of the consequences they have for the maintenance of certain political or moral values. These views are presented and critically evaluated. One difficulty is that their pragmatism seems to clash with our intuition and experience that there is no automatic fit between our moral aspirations and political visions, on the one hand, and how the world is actually structured, on the other. Their strong emphasis on political and moral considerations is, therefore, questionable and only plausible under certain specific circumstances.     

Social Psychology,Moral Character,and Moral Fallibility*

In recent years, there has been considerable debate in the literature concerning the existence of moral character. One lesson we should take away from these debates is that the concept of character, and the role it plays in guiding our actions, is far more complex than most of us initially took it to be. Just as Gilbert Harman, for example, makes a serious mistake in insisting, plain and simply, that there is no such thing as character, defenders of character also make a mistake to the extent that they imply there is no problem raised by the psychological literature for either the concept of character or the nature of character‐based ethics. My hope for this paper is to avoid both of these mistakes by first, exploring exactly what is the concept of character that is so firmly rooted in our philosophical and everyday thinking; and second, exploring the implications of the psychological literature for this appropriately understood concept of character. In so doing, I will come to a resolution that vindicates the existence of character, while at the same time calls attention to the real and serious problem suggested by the psychological evidence. This, we will see, is a problem of moral motivation.     

Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

Abstract

Explaining genuine moral disagreement is a challenge for metaethical theories. For expressivists, this challenge comes from the plausibility of agents making seemingly univocal claims while expressing incongruent conative attitudes. I argue that metaethical inferentialism – a deflationary cousin to expressivism, which locates meaning in the inferential import of our moral assertions rather than the attitudes they express – offers a unique solution to this problem. Because inferentialism doesn’t locate the source of moral disagreements in a clash between attitudes, but instead in conflicts between the inferential import of ethical assertions, the traditional problem for expressivism can be avoided. After considering two forms of inferentialism that lead to revenge versions of the problem, I conclude by recommending that we understand the semantics of moral disagreements pragmatically: the source of univocity does not come from moral or semantic facts waiting to be described, but instead from the needs that ethical and semantic discourses answer – a solution to the problems of what we are to do and how we are to talk about it.     

Moral Arguments in the Debate over Nanotechnologies: Are We Talking Past Each Other?

How are we to understand the fact that the philosophical debate over nanotechnologies has been reduced to a clash of seemingly preprogrammed arguments and counterarguments that paralyzes all rational discussion of the ultimate ethical question of social acceptability in matters of nanotechnological development? With this issue as its starting point, the study reported on here, intended to further comprehension of the issues rather than provide a cause-and-effect explanation, seeks to achieve a rational grasp of what is being said through the appeals made to this or that principle in the range of arguments put forward in publications on the subject. We present the results of the study’s analyses in two parts. In the first, we lay out the seven categories of argument that emerged from an analysis of the literature: the arguments based on nature, dignity, the good life, utility, equity, autonomy, and rights. In the second part, we present the background moral stances that support each category of argument. Identifying the different categories of argument and the moral stance that underlies each category will enable a better grasp of the reasons for the multiplicity of the arguments that figure in discussions of the acceptability of nanotechnologies and will ultimately contribute to overcoming the tendency towards talking past each other that all too often disfigures the exchange. Clarifying the implications of the moral arguments deployed in the debate over nanotechnologies may make it possible to reduce the confusion observable in these exchanges and contribute to a better grasp of the reasons for their current unproductiveness.     

Jealousy Revisited: Recent Philosophical Work on a Maligned Emotion

Taking as its starting point a previous work by the author which reviewed early philosophical sources on jealousy and proposed both a conceptual and moral account of this much-maligned emotion, the present article reviews the relevant philosophical literature from the last decade or so. Most noticeable is how scarce those sources still are. Special attention is given, however, to a new conceptual model proposed by Purshouse and Fredericks which rejects the standard architectonic of jealousy as a three-party compound emotion. While the essential contours of the new model are rejected, Fredericks is shown to offer some powerful misgivings about putative instrumentalist defences of jealousy. In addition to this new model, a number of other recent writings about jealousy – historical, conceptual and moral – are subjected to critical scrutiny in this overview article.     

Extended mind and cognitive enhancement: moral aspects of cognitive artifacts

This article connects philosophical debates about cognitive enhancement and situated cognition. It does so by focusing on moral aspects of enhancing our cognitive abilities with the aid of external artifacts. Such artifacts have important moral dimensions that are addressed neither by the cognitive enhancement debate nor situated cognition theory. In order to fill this gap in the literature, three moral aspects of cognitive artifacts are singled out: their consequences for brains, cognition, and culture; their moral status; and their relation to personal identity.     

Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency

Psychopaths have long been of interest to moral philosophers, since a careful examination of their peculiar deficiencies may reveal what features are normally critical to the development of moral agency. What underlies the psychopath's amoralism? A common and plausible answer to this question is that the psychopath lacks empathy. Lack of empathy is also claimed to be a critical impairment in autism, yet it is not at all clear that autistic individuals share the psychopath's amoralism. How is empathy characterized in the literature, and how crucial is empathy, so described, to moral understanding and agency? I argue that an examination of moral thinking in high-functioning autistic people supports a Kantian rather than a Humean account of moral agency.     

Methodological Challenges in the Study of Emotions in Politics and How to Deal With Them

This introductory article to the special issue zooms in on the literature on political emotions with a specific focus on methodological questions of “how to study” political emotions. To the extent that methodological matters are addressed in the extant literature, the associated challenges are often portrayed as a clash between social science and natural science disciplines, a clash frequently illustrated by the meeting between political science and neuroscience. Rather than being a clash between academic disciplines, this article argues that many of the methodological challenges facing emotional research have their origin in scholars' diverse views on the relationship between themselves as researchers and political emotions as a research object. In the light of this acknowledgment, the article encircles and discusses the methodological challenges associated with three key conceptual distinctions between: (1) individual and collective emotions, (2) emotions and reason, and between (3) involuntary political emotions and the strategic usage of political emotions. Using the contributions to this special issue as illustrations, the article argues in favor of moving beyond mutually exclusive dichotomies regarding these conceptual distinctions and offers pathways for dealing with current methodological challenges to emotional research. It points to methodological pluralism, transparency, and context‐sensitive research strategies.     

Re‐embedding Moral Agency

The connection between ethics and theological vision has become increasingly important for ethics as we better appreciate how the moral agent is embedded in a framework that affectively and intellectually shapes her moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is always reasoning within (that is, within a moral framework, a religious worldview, and/or a set of ideological commitments). A similar framing occurs in literature, which I refer to as its “horizon.” A literary text's horizon comprises the theological and metaphysical commitments that are implied by the text and that the reader relies on to make sense of it. I suggest that there is a parallel between how moral frameworks and literary horizons operate in that both shape moral judgment. I argue that in using literature as a resource for ethics, the same contemporary currents that have led us to appreciate the embeddedness of moral reasoning should also encourage us to give more careful attention to the theological or metaphysical vision implied by a text. Such a “theo‐ethical” reading of literature provides a richer understanding of particular moral goods and the interplay between those goods and ethical themes like agency, hope, and redemption. I substantiate this claim with a reading of William Blake's Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.     

Domains of deontic reasoning: Resolving the discrepancy between the cognitive and moral reasoning literatures

Deontic reasoning has been studied in two subfields of psychology: the cognitive and moral reasoning literatures. These literatures have drawn different conclusions about the nature of deontic reasoning. The consensus within the cognitive reasoning literature is that deontic reasoning is a unitary phenomenon, whereas the consensus within the moral reasoning literature is that there are different subdomains of deontic reasoning. We present evidence from a series of experiments employing the methods of both literatures suggesting that people make a systematic distinction between two types of deontic rule: social contracts and precautions. The results call into question the prevailing opinion in the cognitive reasoning literature and provide further support for both an evolutionary view of deontic reasoning and the more domain-specific perspective found in the moral reasoning literature.     

Converging Theory and Practice: example selection in moral philosophy

ABSTRACT There is a growing trend in moral philosophy that reflects a return to a more ancient perspective of the subject matter wherein moral theory and moral practice are thought to converge. Like their Greek and Hellenistic predecessors, contemporary moral philosophers are again analysing virtues and character traits, drawing normative conclusions at the end of arguments, and testing their theories against examples from common life. Unfortunately, this literature is still cluttered with abstract, general, unlikely, and cleverly-constructed examples that are more apt to draw both reader and author away from the various moral issues under consideration. This paper argues that the selection of examples drawn from literature, history and common-life experiences offers the following advantages: (1) such examples better serve the purpose of illustration; (2) they function as projects for moral inquiry; (3) they better connect both reader and author to the moral issues being discussed; (4) they help prevent the dichotomisation of moral philosophy into meta-ethics and applied ethics; and (5) they help make it possible again for moral philosophy to have the relevance and importance it once enjoyed in previous periods of history. Selection criteria are outlined, and examples are provided that satisfy them.     

Confidentiality issues in psychological research

There has been increased attention in recent years to the importance of individual privacy and professional confidentiality both in Australia and overseas. At the same time, psychologists' growing research interests in areas such as AIDS, child sexual abuse, and domestic violence have led to new ethical dilemmas over the contract of confidentiality between researchers and their research participants. The present paper discusses a number of issues regarding the ethics of confidentiality in psychological research. Following Bok (1989), the issues are highlighted within the context of four ethical principles that underlie researchers' obligations to preserve confidentiality. These principles are derived from considerations of privacy, loyalty, the pledge of silence, and professional codes of ethical standards. Each of these principles is illustrated with examples taken from recent research. We devote special attention to instances that appear to provide a clash between moral principles.     

Kant's account of moral weakness

On the one hand, Kant seems to suggest that moral weakness is merely expressed at the level of following maxims. On the other hand, he addresses moral weakness as the first grade of our propensity to evil, which implies that moral weakness is also expressed at the level of adopting maxims. There is still a lack of clarity in the literature concerning how the relationship between these two aspects is to be understood, and a proper account of the nature of the maxims of the morally weak has yet to be offered. Drawing on my earlier interpretation of moral strength, I shall propose a reading of Kant's account of moral weakness that consistently unifies both aspects. On my interpretation, the morally weak agent lacks the moral strength that he ought to acquire through the continuous exercise of his power of self‐control; he therefore fails both to set himself particular moral ends in adopting his maxims and to follow his maxims by realizing such ends. His intention to do what the moral law demands is overly general: It does not set a particular moral end, which is what virtue requires.     

Evil and moral detachment: further reflections on The Mirror Thesis

A commonly accepted claim by philosophers investigating the nature of evil is that the evil person is, in some way, the mirror image of the moral saint. In this paper I will defend a new version of this thesis. I will argue that both the moral saint and the morally evil person are characterized by a lack of conflict between moral and non-moral concerns. However, while the saint achieves this unity through a reconciliation of the two, the evil person does so by eliminating moral concerns from her character.     

Morality

ABSTRACT— Moral psychology is a rapidly growing field with two principle lineages. The main line began with Jean Piaget and includes developmental psychologists who have studied the acquisition of moral concepts and reasoning. The alternative line began in the 1990s with a new synthesis of evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research in which the central phenomena are moral emotions and intuitions. In this essay, I show how both of these lines have been shaped by an older debate between two 19th century narratives about modernity: one celebrating the liberation of individuals, the other mourning the loss of community and moral authority. I suggest that both lines of moral psychology have limited themselves to the moral domain prescribed by the liberation narrative, and so one future step for moral psychology should be to study alternative moral perspectives, particularly religious and politically conservative ones in which morality is, in part, about protecting groups, institutions, and souls.     

Suppose Freud had chosen Orestes instead

Abstract :  The paper argues that the story of Oedipus, however understood, conveys psychic truth of no greater or more central importance to human development than do the stories of many other myths. A distinction is made between sophisticated theories developed out of Freud's original concept of the Oedipus complex, and the adherence by some clinicians to his original sexual theory. The meaning of Sophocles' play Oedipus the King is found to lie in the clash between Oedipus' omnipotent narcissism ( hubris) and the power of the unconscious psyche, rather than in cross-generational sex. Emphasis is placed on the clinical usefulness of understanding all myths symbolically. The Oresteia by Aeschylus is offered as a story about pre-Oedipal (in the Freudian sense) psychic states. This trilogy shows symbolically the developing of an ego, the establishment of moral judgement and the integration of our shadow (the Furies). It also shows the parallel development of structures of law in society to replace instinctive blood feuds. It is suggested that had Freud chosen Orestes instead of Oedipus, the course of both psychoanalysis and of Western society would have had a different emphasis.     

There’s Nothing Quasi About Quasi-Realism: Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine

This paper seeks to clarify and defend the proposition that moral realism is best elaborated as a moral doctrine. I begin by upholding Ronald Dworkin’s anti-Archimedean critique of the error theory against some strictures by Michael Smith, and I then briefly suggest how a proponent of moral realism as a moral doctrine would respond to Smith’s defense of the Archimedeanism of expressivism. Thereafter, this paper moves to its chief endeavor. By differentiating clearly between expressivism and quasi-realism (or moral realism as a moral doctrine), the paper highlights both their distinctness and their compatibility. In so doing, it underscores the affinities between Blackburnian quasi-realism and moral realism as a moral doctrine. Finally, this paper contends—in line with my earlier work on these matters—that moral realism as a moral doctrine points to the need for some reorienting of meta-ethical enquiries rather than for the abandoning of them.