The Deferential Wife Revisited: Agency and Moral Responsibility

This paper rejects two main arguments for absolving the deferential wife and victims of deprived circumstances from responsibility or blame for their servility: for Susan Wolf, circumstances can determine their reasons and acts, and for Sarah Buss, circumstances can give them excusing reasons for their acts. The paper argues that circumstances can give them justifying reasons to act in ways defending their intrinsic worth when their acts can be legitimately interpreted as a protest against an attempt to degrade their intrinsic value.     

老子顺应的自我观探究

从心理学视角探究老子的自我观,指出老子的自我观本质上是一种顺应的自我;其中,顺应的前提是"明",顺应的基点是贵身,顺应的方式是无知、无为、无欲,顺应的工夫实践是致虚守静,顺应的环中则是保持自我之真、不失自身的主宰.最后,指出老子顺应的自我的理想形象,以及老子顺应的自我观对塑造健康自我的意义.     

Research Concerning Wife Abuse

SUMMARY

Violence toward women has been declared a public health epidemic. To date, research on battered women in medical settings has focused primarily on incidence and prevalence and on identification of risk markers. Such research also has elucidated low rates of battered women identified in medical settings, as well as barriers to such identification. Methods of training physicians to identify and help battered women are described in the present article. The unique role of psychologists and other mental health professionals in designing and evaluating such programs is discussed.     

Wife abuse and battering in the sociocultural context of Arab society

Despite increasing public, professional, and scientific interest in the problem of wife abuse and battering, little has been written about the importance of sociocultural sensitivity in intervention with abused and battered women in Arab society. In this article, I describe central family values in that society and discuss their relevance to wife abuse and battering. Specifically, the discussion focuses on values such as mutual family support and interdependence, family reputation, women's inferiority and male supremacy, and family cohesion and the relevance of those values to wife abuse and battering. In addition, I present Arab women's perspectives on this problem, as revealed in their responses to open-ended questions that were part of larger studies conducted by me. In this regard, five dimensions of their perspectives are considered: (1) Women's definitions of violence against women; (2) their awareness of the problem; (3) their justification or condemnation of violence against women; (4) their awareness of the risk encountered by battered women; and (5) their approach toward coping with the problem. The results are discussed from the perspective of the sociocultural context of Arab society. The article concludes with recommendations for socioculturally sensitive intervention with battered women in this society.     

亲子鉴定和夫妻道德

本文在简要回顾亲子鉴定产生历史的基础上 ,揭示了亲子鉴定的家庭道德功能 ,指出了其存在的问题 ,提出了进行亲子鉴定的道德对策     

Self-Help,Moral Philosophy,and the Moral Present

In this paper I argue that the lack of interest, among analytic moral philosophers, in the contingencies of our moral present, produces an impoverished moral philosophy, unable to address the moral problems and quandaries of ordinary people. What is needed to remedy this is a broadening of the scope of the moral philosopher’s thought to include a rich attention to moral phenomena of the present. One such phenomenon, attended to by sociologists and critical journalists over the past few decades, is the contemporary proliferating genre of psychologically oriented self-help literature. I display a range of sociological responses to self-help in order to point out aspects of morality that are made visible in these discussions, whereas they often remain invisible in standard moral philosophy. The aim is not to suggest a specific methodology for including such material into philosophical discussions, but rather to urge philosophers to reconsider the range of materials they attend to in their work, in order to produce a more lively engagement with and understanding of contemporary morality.     

道德的市场与企业道德行为的合理性

古典政治经济学的经济人命题和社会达尔文主义的生物学竞争理论为道德和市场的二元分裂提供了理论支持,从而在经济领域形成了一个企业活动非道德性的神话。经济实践活动面临的各种伦理道德问题,彰显企业非道德神话的谬误。鲍曼认为当代市场经济社会是一个"道德的市场",企业作为道德人士比作为自利的"经济人"更能理想地实现自己的效用;从博弈论的观点来看,企业的道德性行为也是合乎理性的。当代市场活动对伦理道德的需求,宣告了企业非道德性神话的破灭。     

Moral Accountancy and Moral Worth

People do good or bad things, and get or do not get good or bad credit for their actions, depending (in part) on knowledge of their actions. I attempt to unfold some of the interconnections between these matters, and between them and the achievement of moral worth. The main conclusion is that the heights of moral worth seem to appear in the oddest places.     

Moral Judgement and Moral Motivation

I criticize an important argument of Michael Smith, from his recent book The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Smith's argument, if sound, would undermine one form of moral externalism – that which insists that moral judgements only contingently motivate their authors. Smith claims that externalists must view good agents as always prompted by the motive of duty, and that possession of such a motive impugns the goodness of the agent. I argue (i) that externalists do not (ordinarily) need to assign moral agents such as a motive, and (ii) that possession of this motive, when properly understood, is morally admirable.     

Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics

When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences (“X is wrong”/“X is not wrong”), it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences (i.e., that it has to be the case that at least one of them is incorrect). This inference then plays a key role in a now‐standard argument against certain theories in moral semantics. In this paper, we introduce new evidence that bears on this debate. We show that there are moral conflict cases in which people are inclined to say both (a) that the two speakers disagree and (b) that it is not the case at least one of them must be saying something incorrect. We then explore how we might understand such disagreements. As a proof of concept, we sketch an account of the concept of disagreement and an independently motivated theory of moral semantics which, together, explain the possibility of such cases.