Threats to Democratic Rationality

This article examines trends that are impacting democratic rationality. It is found that the trends are almost uniformly negative. Viewed from within the legislative branch, trends are negatively impacting legislators’ time, complexifying problems, constraining options, and limiting the evaluation of options. Trends external to the legislative branch are reducing citizen participation and knowledge about public affairs, skewing the balance of power among the branches and states, and decreasing accountability of public officials. In combination, democratic rationality, the process of making good, efficient, and timely decisions to promote higher quality of life and the public good, is seriously threatened. Recommendations include public financing of campaigns, more structured legislative decision-making processes, simplification tests for all new legislation and regulations, and a major new initiative to foster public involvement in public decision making.     

Creating and Redirecting Threats

In the third volume of On What Matters, Derek Parfit argued that the distinction between imposing a newly created threat on someone and making what threatens some people instead threaten someone else has no genuine moral significance. This article's central thesis is that although there is much to learn from Parfit's arguments, they are ultimately unsuccessful at establishing that the redirected versus newly created threats distinction is morally irrelevant. In particular, I show that my Causal Sequences Principle specifies this distinction in such a way that it is immune to Parfit's objections against the Redirection Principle. It follows that any moral theory that can provide a sound rationale for the Causal Sequences Principle can solve the trolley problem.     

Two Threats To Representation

I consider two threats to the idea that on-line intelligent behaviour (the production offluid and adaptable responses to ongoing sensory input) must or should be explainedby appeal to neurally located representations. The first of these threats occurs whenextra-neural factors account for the kind of behavioural richness and flexibility normallyassociated with representation-based control. I show how this anti-representationalchallenge can be met, if we apply the thought that, to be a representational system,an action-oriented neural system must not only be the source of at least some of theobserved behavioural richness and flexibility, it must also feature two architecturaltraits, namely arbitrariness and homuncularity. Unfortunately, however, this solutionopens the door to our second threat to representation. The homuncularity conditionwill not be met by any system in which the causal contribution of each component ismassively context-sensitive and variable over time. I end by discussing the empiricalbet that biological nervous systems will not exhibit this style of causation.     

Equating Innocent Threats and Bystanders

abstract Michael Otsuka claims that it is impermissible to kill innocent threats because doing so is morally equivalent to killing bystanders. I show that Otsuka's argument conflates killing as a means with treating a person herself as a means. The killing of a person can be a means only if that person is instrumental in the threat to Victim's life. A permission to kill a person as a means will not permit killing bystanders. I also defend a permission to kill innocent threats against Otsuka's Trolley Cases. Otsuka depicts a person tied to an oncoming trolley as a bystander. I argue that such characters are threats whom Victim can permissibly kill.     

微生物威胁与人类安全

传染病伴随人类而存在,是人类的天敌.科学的进步、时代的发展、全球政治经济一体化的进程,并未停止传染病行进的脚步,许多旧的和新发的传染病不断涌现,日益成为人类的疾病负担,人为的微生物恐怖主义危险日益增大,直接威胁人类的健康、安全和可持续性发展.     

The epidemiology of suicide and attempted suicide

Since more than one century suicides have been registered in national statistics of death causes. They thus furnish one of the few parameters of psychiatrically relevant behaviour by means of which trends, cohort, age-group and period effects can be studied over longer periods. Since the second half of last century, the suicide rates for Swiss males--similar to those found in England and Wales--show a decrease in consecutive birth cohorts up to males born in the decade 1930-1940, and a continued decline in the total trend until about World War II. From then on the suicide rates of males in consecutive birth cohorts have been slowly increasing in the majority of European and North American countries--but not so in Sweden. Opposite to this, the predominantly low rates for females display little change. Further to the considerable differences between nations and the predominance of suicides committed by females in some Asian countries and Cuba, the changes indicate the significance of cultural and economic environmental factors. Typical period effects are mainly the result of changes in conception and conditions of life. In attempted suicide they proceed in a more sensitive and more rapid way and are about ten times higher. Such a period effect showing increases by about 300% in younger age-groups followed by a decline, attaining its peak about 1976, was ascertained in large cities of the Federal Republic of Germany. By the example of the effects of a television serial, the study of causal processes turning collective environmental factors into individual suicidal behaviour, proved that regularities are effective in learning by a process of modelling. Besides, the epidemiological data give essential hints how to treat suicidal behaviour.     

Threats of violence in group-oriented day treatment

Threats of violence in a group-oriented day treatment program are examined regarding the patient's motivation to make threats, and what occurs among patients and staff that fosters threats. Effects of threats on other patients, the program, and therapists are considered. Management of the threatening patient, the group, and staff reactions are described. Safety of group members is a sine qua non for the groups to function effectively.     

Independent Threats and Self-Evaluation Maintenance Processes

Abstract

The present study investigated the independence of Self-Evaluation Maintenance (SEM) processes and the larger self-system. SEM processes are activated whenever another's performance is made salient relative to one's own. According to the SEM model, when one is outperformed by a close other on a task high in self-relevance, self-esteem is lowered and a negative affect state is generated. When one is outperformed by a close other on a task low in self-relevance, however, self-esteem and positive affect are actually enhanced, because one can take pride in the other's accomplishments. There are many sources of threat or enhancement to self-esteem, however, that are unrelated to one's performance relative to another's. The present study, using American undergraduates as subjects, examined the impact that these unrelated self-esteem threats or enhancements might have on SEM processes, that is, whether a prior unrelated ego-threatening or ego-enhancing experience modulates the effects of SEM processes. It was expected that a prior ego-threatening experience would augment the impact of SEM variables, whereas an ego-enhancing experience would attenuate the effect. Results, however, indicated little interaction between SEM processes and unrelated threats or enhancements to self-esteem.     

Threats and Challenges to Feminist Therapy

No abstract available for this article.     

A Three-Factor Experimental Analysis of Promises and Threats

A questionnaire study was conducted to examine the extent to which variations in the language of promises and threats differentially affect compliance as well as perceptions of the transmitters of these influence attempts. Subjects were asked to imagine that they had been assigned a partner for collaborative work on a project, for which the topic had not yet been decided. In an attempt to persuade them of the value of his topic, the partner (experimenter) sent subjects one of eight promises and threats, which varied along three dimensions: orientation to the consequences of compliance (reward or nonpunishment) vs. noncompliance (punishment or nonreward); transmitter versus recipient orientation of the statement's premise; and transmitter versus recipient orientation of the statement's conclusion. The results indicate that recipient-oriented premise statements and statements of contingent reward or nonpunishment are seen as both more attractive and more likely to gain compliance than those that have a transmitter-oriented premise or that express contingent punishment or nonreward. In addition, compliance was found to be strongly related to a transmitter's attractiveness, but to neither his perceived power nor his activity. The implications of these findings for future research and the resolution of a variety of conflicts were discussed.     

Self-Determination, Wellbeing, and Threats of Harm

David Rodin argues that the right of national‐defence as conceived in international law cannot be grounded in the end of defending the lives of individuals. Firstly, having this end is not necessary because there is a right of defence against an invasion that threatens no lives. However, in this context we are to understand that ‘defending lives’ includes defending against certain non‐lethal threats. I will argue that threats to national‐self determination and self‐government are significant non‐lethal threats to the wellbeing of individuals that can justify lethal defensive force. Therefore the end of defending individuals can ground a right of national‐defence against a ‘bloodless invasion’. Secondly, Rodin argues that defending lives is not a sufficient condition for military action to be national self‐defence, because humanitarian intervention is military action to defend individuals, and such action is in deep tension with national self‐defence. I will argue that a reductive account, grounded in claims of need and threats of harm, can justify principles of both intervention and non‐intervention on the same grounds; that is, protecting the wellbeing of individuals.     

Helpline: suicide prevention at a suicide site

In an effort to reduce the number of suicides from the Mid-Hutson Bridge in Poughkeepsie, New York, the Dutchess County Department of Mental Hygiene and the New York State Bridge Authority jointly established a suicide prevention phone on the bridge, which is directly connected to a 24-hour psychiatric emergency service. This program is the first known one in which a dedicated suicide prevention helpline has been installed at a site of known suicides and linked with a mental health service. After 2 years of operation, the phone has been used 30 times; the data suggest that most would-be jumpers are ambivalent enough about dying that they will reach out for help/contact if the opportunity exists, and, as a consequence, can be saved.     

Manipulated suicide

To accept a notion of rational suicide, as many contemporary bioethicists now urge, first makes possible certain kinds of manipulation into suicide which do not occur in suicide-impermissive societies. This paper describes the two principal mechanisms by which an individual can be manipulated into choosing to kill himself or herself, though that individual would not have done so otherwise, and identifies circumstantial and ideological changes in contemporary society which may be associated with such manipulation now and in the future. However, the author holds that this prospect is not grounds for rejecting the notion of rational suicide;it must be accepted on other moral grounds, but with a clear view of the risks it will bring.     

Youth suicide

The literature on youth suicide (ages 15-24) is surveyed for the period 1980-1985. Emphasis is placed on general determinants of suicide, predictors in the form of psychological tests, precipitating events (immediate causes), and signs--clues that may signify impending attempts at self-destruction. Suggestions for prevention, and limitations of research on suicide are offered.