How Bad Can Good People Be?

Can a virtuous person act contrary to the virtue she possesses? Can virtues have “holes”—or blindspots—and nonetheless count as virtues? Gopal Sreenivasan defends a notion of a blindspot that is, in my view, an unstable moral category. I will argue that no trait possessing such a “hole” can qualify as a virtue. My strategy for showing this appeals to the importance of motivation to virtue, a feature of virtue to which Sreenivasan does not adequately attend. Sreenivasan’s account allows performance alone to be a reliable indicator of the possession of virtue. I argue that, at least with respect to a classical, Aristotelian conception of virtue, this assumption is mistaken: a person is said to possess a virtue only when she is properly motivated. In my view, the nature of motivation required for the possession of Aristotelian virtue does not admit of blindspots. I am not primarily interested in details about the situationist critique of virtue theory but rather the implications that blindspots have for our conception of virtue. I argue that because the practical reasoning of the virtuous requires both cognitive and motivational coherence, the motivational structure of the virtuous agent cannot accommodate blindspots. My conclusion is neither a defense of motivational internalism nor of an idealized conception of Aristotelian virtue. My aim is to show that because blindspotted virtue does not cohere well with Aristotle’s conception of virtuous agency, friends of virtue theory must choose one or the other; they cannot have both.     

Can Sadness Be Good for You?

The subtle relationship between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition has fascinated philosophers and writers since time immemorial, yet, empirical research on this topic was relatively neglected by psychologists until recently. There have been many claims emphasising the beneficial cognitive and behavioural consequences of positive affect. Many recent works suggest that negative affect may also facilitate optimal performance in many situations, consistent with evolutionary theories suggesting the adaptive signalling function of various affective states. This paper reviews traditional and current psychological theories linking affect to social thinking and behaviour. A variety of empirical studies from our laboratory will also be presented, demonstrating that in many situations, negative affect promotes optimal performance in cognitive and social tasks, including tasks such as memory, social judgements, motivation, and strategic interpersonal behaviours. These results will be interpreted in terms of a dual‐process theory that predicts that negative affect promotes a more accommodative, vigilant, and externally focused thinking strategy. The relevance of these findings for recent affect–cognition theories will be discussed, and the practical implications of negative affect promoting improved social thinking and performance in a number of applied fields will be considered.     

Can Explanatory Reasons Be Good Reasons for Action?

What kind of thing is a reason for action? Are reasons for action subjective states of the agent, such as desires and/or beliefs? Or are they, rather, objective features of situations that favor certain actions? The suggestion offered in this article is that neither strategy satisfies. What is needed is a third category for classifying reasons which makes them out to be neither purely subjective nor purely objective. In brief: a reason for action is a feature of the situation that matters to the agent. On this proposal, subjective states of the agent are indeed indispensable in characterizing reasons for action. Precisely which set of situational features matter to an agent—precisely what shape the agent experiences the situation as having—depends on the agent's psychological makeup. Those features themselves are not psychological states, however, and it is precisely those features that constitute the agent's reasons for action.     

Can Illness Be Edifying?

Havi Carel has recently argued that one can be ill and happy. An ill person can “positively respond” to illness by cultivating “adaptability” and “creativity”. I propose that Carel's claim can be augmented by connecting it with virtue ethics. The positive responses which Carel describes are best understood as the cultivation of virtues, and this adds a significant moral aspect to coping with illness. I then defend this claim against two sets of objections and conclude that interpreting Carel's phenomenology of illness within a virtue-ethical framework enriches our understanding of how illness can be edifying.     

Can Internalism Be Saved?

Abstract: Richard Feldman argues that a good deal more of Chisholm's approach can be saved than I allow in “Roderick Chisholm and the Shaping of American Epistemology.” More than this, Feldman argues that there are other, and still more defensible, forms of internalism. I argue here that the problems I presented for Chisholm's view are not so easily sidestepped either within Chisholm's system or by other forms of internalism.     

Can Pragmatists Be Moderate?

In discussions of whether and how pragmatic considerations can make a difference to what one ought to believe, two sets of cases feature. The first set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief, is exemplified by cases of being financially bribed to believe (or withhold from believing) something. The second set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic encroachment on epistemic justification, is exemplified by cases where acting on a belief rashly risks some disastrous outcome if the belief turns out to be false. Call those who think that pragmatic considerations make a difference to what one ought to believe in the second kind of case, but not in the first, ‘moderate pragmatists’. Many philosophers – in particular, most advocates of pragmatic and moral encroachment – are moderate pragmatists. But moderate pragmatists owe us an explanation of exactly why the second kind of pragmatic consideration makes a difference, but the first kind doesn’t. I argue that the most promising of these explanations all fail: they are either theoretically undermotivated, or get key cases wrong, or both. Moderate pragmatism may be an unstable stopping point between a more extreme pragmatism, on one hand, and an uncompromising anti-pragmatism on the other.     

Can Narrative Christology Be Orthodox?

Abstract:  Questions raised about the coherence of narrative Christology in the work of James Wm McClendon, Jr, raise questions about the orthodoxy of narrative Christology on the whole. An exploration of these questions identifies at least two possible narrative formulations of the identity of Jesus Christ: in him we acknowledge two agents in one narrative and two narratives in one agent. This bending of concepts for bearing witness to the singularity of Jesus Christ follows the conciliar rules and establishes the orthodoxy of narrative Christology.     

Can Conscious Agency Be Saved?

This paper is concerned with the role of conscious agency in human action. On a folk-psychological view of the structure of agency, intentions, conceived as conscious mental states, are the causes of actions. In the last decades, the development of new psychological and neuroscientific methods has made conscious agency an object of empirical investigation and yielded results that challenge the received wisdom. Most famously, the results of Libet’s studies on the ‘readiness potential’ have been interpreted by many as evidence in favor of a skeptical attitude towards conscious agency. It is questionable, however, whether action initiation should be regarded as the touchstone of conscious agency. I shall argue that the traditional folk-psychological view, but also some of the objections leveled against it, rest in part on an over-simplified conception of the structure of agency, that neglects both the role of control processes after action initiation and the role of planning processes before action initiation. Taking these processes into account can lead to a reassessment of the relation between intentions and action and of the role of conscious agency in action production.     

Can Communication Deviance Be Measured in a Family Problem-Solving Interaction?

Communication deviance (CD) refers to confusing and fragmented communication that prevents family members from attaining a shared focus of attention and meaning. Levels of communication deviance based on individual parental projective test protocols--Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and Rorschach--have repeatedly been found to be higher in parents of schizophrenic offspring than in parents of normal or nonpsychotic offspring. CD has also been measured in family transactions in which parents and their offspring interact with one another around a projective test stimulus, the Consensus Rorschach. There have been relatively few attempts to measure specific CD codes in familial interaction that is not initiated around an ambiguous visual stimulus. The present article examines the reliability and construct validity of an interactional measure (ICD) obtained from family transactions in which parents and patients are working toward the solution of a salient family problem. ICD from this family problem-solving task was compared to more traditional measures of CD from parental TAT protocols in a sample of 59 parents of 37 recent-onset schizophrenic patients. Results indicated that CD could be reliably measured in an interactive setting not initiated around a projective test stimulus, and provided evidence for the construct validity of ICD.     

How Can That Be Me? Developmental Disruption in a Young Adult

A young adult who experiences a psychotic break is at high risk of feeling that his or her life and sense of Self before the de-compensation were fraudulent. This article describes a young man who suffered such a trauma and deeply felt this sense of fraudulence and covers how his treatment developed. We established a dual narrative: one that explicated the precursors to his break and one that showed how the life that he had previously held to be his personal story were both authentic. The capacity to integrate the two created a sense of wholeness that permitted him to re-establish himself in his everyday life.