WEAPONS ARE NOTHING BUT OMINOUS INSTRUMENTS: The Daodejing's View on War and Peace

The Daodejing (DDJ) is an ancient Chinese text traditionally taken as a representative Daoist classic expressing a distinctive philosophy from the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE). This essay explicates the ethical dimensions of the DDJ paying attention to issues related to war and peace. The discussion consists of four parts: (1) “naturalness” as an onto‐cosmological argument for a philosophy of harmony, balance, and peace; (2) war as a sign of the disruption of the natural pattern of things initiated by the proliferation of desire; (3) defensive war and appropriate war conduct required when one has to be involved in warfare; and (4) the natural and spontaneous way of living that would prevent war from happening in the first place. This essay attempts to show that what makes the DDJ different from other military texts, or what is called the “art of war corpus” in China is that the discourse of war and warfare in the DDJ is presented via its unique understanding of peace at the personal and social levels. The DDJ is meant to be an inquiry into an effective method to prevent war from happening amid a world full of selfish interests and excessive desires. It proposes that peace is not only a condition in which there is freedom from war and overt violence, but a state of harmony that marks human life and its betterment.     

Finding Creativity in an Artificial Artist

Creativity is an important component of human intelligence, and imbuing artificially intelligent systems with creativity is an interesting challenge. In particular, it is difficult to quantify (or even qualify) creativity. Recently, it has been suggested that conditions for attributing creativity to a system include: appreciation, imagination, and skill. We demonstrate and describe an original computer system (called DARCI) that is designed to produce images through creative means. We present methods for evaluating DARCI and other artificially creative systems with respect to appreciation, imagination, and skill, and use these methods to show that DARCI is arguably a creative system.     

Social inferences concerning male and female homeowners who use a gun to shoot an intruder

Two experiments were performed to test the hypothesis that gender stereotypes influence social inferences about homeowners who use a gun to shoot an intruder. It was predicted that homeowners who violate stereotypical norms would be perceived more negatively, and would be perceived as more responsible for the consequences of their weapon use than would homeowners of both genders who represent stereotype-consistency. The data from the first experiment provided some support for this notion. Male homeowners who shot incompetently were perceived more negatively than were men who shot the intruder with competence. The opposite trend was observed for female homeowners. The second experiment tested a refinement of this hypothesis and revealed how attitudes toward guns, specifically degree of acceptance of the notion that guns provide their owners with protection, moderates the social judgments formed about homeowners who use weapons as a means of defending their property during a burglary, Persons for whom the event is inconsistent with their attitude-based expectancies blamed the stereotype-inconsistent homeowners more than the gender stereotype-consistent homeowners, particularly the skillful female shooters. Individuals with relatively negative attitudes toward guns, in contrast, tended to perceive the skillful female shooters more positively than the other homeowners. Perceptions of weapons users who find themselves and their actions scrutinized by the media and the court system may depend upon perceivers' pre-existing category expectations and attitudes. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Remote Weaponry: The Ethical Implications

The nature of warfare is changing. Increasingly, developments in military technology are removing soldiers from the battlefield, enabling war to be waged from afar. Bombs can be dropped from unmanned drones flying above the range of retaliation. Missiles can be launched, at minimal cost, from ships 200 miles to sea. Micro Air Vehicles, or ‘WASPS’, will soon be able to lethally attack enemy soldiers. Though still in the developmental stage, progress is rapidly being made towards autonomous weaponry capable of selecting, pursuing, and destroying targets without the necessity for human instruction. These developments have a profound — and as yet under‐analysed — impact on just war theory. I argue that a state under attack from remote weaponry is unable to respond in the traditional, just war sanctioned, method of targeting combatants on the battlefield. This restriction of options potentially creates a situation whereby a state is either coerced into surrender, or it must transgress civilian immunity. Just war theory in conditions of remote warfare therefore either serves the interests of the technologically advanced by demanding the surrender of targeted states, or else it becomes redundant.     

Can driving condition prompt systems improve passenger comfort of intelligent vehicles? A driving simulator study

The main trend in the development of intelligent vehicles has been on ensuring comfort, safety, efficiency, and environmental sustainability. However, current research focuses primarily on the safety and energy saving of intelligent vehicles, and a comfortable driving experience through a human–machine interaction system has not been sufficiently investigated. This study used a high-fidelity 6-degree-of-freedom driving simulator to evaluate the impact of an independently-designed vehicle driving condition prompt (DCP) systems on subjective passenger comfort and motion sickness. The experiment showed that when future driving information is obtained through the vehicle DCP systems, the passengers' subjective comfort is improved, motion sickness is alleviated, and the degree of passenger posture instability is reduced. These conclusions contribute toward improving the comfort of autonomous vehicles and providing a reference for the future design of human–machine interaction systems for intelligent vehicles.     

我军心理战理论研究热点问题概要

我军心理战研究兴起于20世纪80年代,虽然历时短,但发展迅速。特别是在心理战理论与实践中的一些热点问题上,已经形成了一些较为成熟的理论框架和思想观点。对心理战内涵和外延的界定上虽然有一定的争议,但已形成了较普遍地被认可的观点;对心理战效应和心理战运行机理,也已经形成比较明确的认识;对心理战地位作用普遍持肯定态度;对外军心理战理论与实践研究的剖析和学习借鉴,成为我军心理战发展的基础     

Defensive Wars and the Reprisal Dilemma

I address a foundational problem with accounts of the morality of war that are derived from the Just War Tradition (JWT). Such accounts problematically focus on ‘the moment of crisis’: i.e. when a state is considering a resort to war. This is problematic because sometimes the state considering the resort to war is partly responsible for wrongly creating the conditions in which the resort to war becomes necessary. By ignoring this possibility, JWT effectively ignores, in its moral evaluation of wars, certain types of past wrongdoing. I argue that we can address this problem by incorporating an account of compensatory liability into an account of the morality of war. Doing so yields the view that, if we have culpably failed to compensate victims for past wrongs, we might be morally required to weigh the well-being of those victims more heavily in our calculation of proportionality when determining the permissibility of a defensive act that harms the victim as a side-effect. This, in turn, makes satisfying the proportionality constraint more difficult. The upshot is that sometimes, in order to wage a defensive war permissibly, we first have to discharge compensatory duties. This has implications for how we evaluate ‘cycles of reprisals’ that plague warfare.     

Thomas Aquinas on Virtuous Warfare

Thomas Aquinas, one of the "founding fathers" of just war theory, offers an account of virtuous warfare in practice. The author argues that Aquinas's approach to warfare, with its emphasis on justice and charity, is helpful in providing a coherent moral account of war to which Christians can subscribe. Particular attention is given to the role of charity, since this virtue is the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian soldier. Charity compels him to soldier justly, and by fighting justly, he is elevated by God to friendship with God. Notable features of this approach are its emphasis on the criteria for judging whether a war is just and its relativizing of the criteria for proper combat behavior.     

REVEREND ROBOT: AUTOMATION AND CLERGY

Digital technology, including artificial intelligence, is having a dramatic impact on the professions of medicine, law, journalism, finance, and others. Some suggest that clergy will also be affected. We describe recent progress in designing artificially intelligent systems, suggesting that this is possible, perhaps even likely. We investigate ways in which technology currently is affecting ministry and outline some plausible scenarios in which digital systems could supplement or supplant clergy in some areas, specifically preaching and pastoral care. We also raise some theological issues raised by the use of digital systems in ministry.     

Autonomous buses: Intentions to use,passenger experiences,and suggestions for improvement

Research on the use of autonomous vehicles as a mode of public transport in a city context is lacking. This paper focuses on the use of recently established autonomous buses (self-driving electric shuttle buses) running along a regular public transport line in a residential area of Oslo, Norway. We use a mixed-methods approach based on survey and interview data from two independent studies. The paper examines intentions to use autonomous buses before and after these were introduced in the case area as well as how passengers experience traveling by autonomous bus. Results show that the intention to use the autonomous buses was mostly positive both before and after using them. Most users felt safe while traveling by autonomous bus. Two suggestions for improvement made by the users were to: increase the speed and reduce the abrupt breaking of the autonomous buses. Overall, outcomes from this paper suggest that residents would be willing to use autonomous buses if these offer more frequent bus departures than the existing ones. However, as full automation has not been achieved yet and there is a host on board who can control the vehicle if necessary, passenger experiences and intentions to use should be reassessed with fully automated buses in future studies.     

国内外关于心理战研究的现状和问题

心理战作为一种战争和社会的实践活动,有着悠久的历史,但作为一门独立学科,发端于上世纪初。该文概述了心理战作为一个独立研究领域以来国内外关于心理战研究的现状。在此基础上,提出了心理战研究存在的问题和不足,最后对我国心理战研究的发展方向提出了看法。     

Group morality and intergroup relations: cross-cultural and experimental evidence

An observational, cross-cultural study and an experimental study assessed behaviors indicative of a moral code that condones, and even values, hostility toward outgroups. The cross-cultural study, which used data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock & White, 1969), found that for preindustrial societies, as loyalty to the ingroup increased the tendency to value outgroup violence more than ingroup violence increased, as did the tendencies to engage in more external than internal warfare, and enjoy war. The experimental study found that relative to guilt-prone group members who were instructed to remain objective, guilt-prone group members who were instructed to be empathic with their ingroup were more competitive in an intergroup interaction. The findings from these studies suggest that group morality is associated with intergroup conflict.     

The Misguided Marriage of Responsibility and Autonomy

Much of the literature devoted to the topics of agent autonomy and agent responsibility suggests strong conceptual overlaps between the two, although few explore these overlaps explicitly. Beliefs of this sort are commonplace, but they mistakenly conflate the global state of being autonomous with the local condition of acting autonomously or exhibiting autonomy in respect to some act or decision. Because the latter, local phenomenon of autonomy seems closely tied to the condition of being responsible for an act, we tend to think of the former, global phenomenon as a condition of responsibility as well. But one can act autonomously, or manifest autonomy with respect to some occurrent state, without satisfying the conditions for autonomous agency. Autonomous agency and responsible agency are logically distinct in part due to the varient conceptions of rationality each calls for. Both agent responsibility and holding a person responsible imply a fairly ``thick' form of rationality, where rationality embodies a normative component and is a matter of satisfying criteria that are objective in the sense that they are independent of what a person happens to want or to value. But autonomous agency calls for a quite different, ``thin' conception of instrumental rationality.     

Ambivalence,Autonomy, and Organ Sales

Recent philosophical arguments in favor of legal markets in human organs such as kidneys claim that respect for autonomy justifies such markets. I argue that these arguments fail to establish the moral permissibility of commercialized organ sales because they do not show that those most likely to serve as vendors would choose to sell autonomously. Pro‐market views utilize hierarchical theories of autonomy to demonstrate that potential organ vendors may autonomously consent to selling their organs even in the absence of any practical alternative to doing so. But central to hierarchical accounts of autonomy is the idea that persons my experience volitional ambivalence, a condition in which the will is irreconcilably conflicted. Because commercialized organ sales would create volitional ambivalence in many of those who opt to sell an organ, the choice to sell an organ would not be an autonomous one.     

心理战信息损伤的概念与研究

信息是心理战进攻的主要武器,以造成心理杀伤为最终目标。为了更好地研究心理战防御,需要首先对信息损伤的特点进行研究。本文通过“非典”流行期间信息损伤的调查,界定了信息损伤的概念,总结了信息损伤的特点,分析了信息损伤的影响因素,提出了未来信息损伤的研究方向     

The face that launched a thousand ships: the mating-warring association in men

Questions about origins of human warfare continue to generate interesting theories with little empirical evidence. One of the proposed explanations is sexual selection theory. Within and supportive of this theoretical framework, the authors demonstrate a mating-warring association among young heterosexual men in four experiments. Male, but not female, participants exposed to attractive, as compared to unattractive, opposite-sex photographs were significantly more likely to endorse war-supporting statements on a questionnaire. The same mating effect was not found in answering trade conflict questions. Male participants primed by attractive faces or legs of young women were significantly faster in responding to images or words of war than those primed by unattractive faces or national flags. The same mating effect was not found in responding to farming concepts or general aggression expressions. Results underscore the link between mating and war, supporting the view that sexual selection provides an ultimate explanation for the origins of human warfare.     

Weapons and Eye Contact as Instigators or Inhibitors of Aggressive Arousal in Police-Citizen Interaction1

A field experiment was conducted with police officers during the normal course of their traffic patrol duties. The purpose was to determine whether the presence of holstered weapons and mirror sunglasses affected the degree of aggressiveness expressed nonverbally, and reported on a mood scale by citizens halted for an information check (neutral condition) or in order to be given a traffic ticket (negative condition). Results indicated that subjects in the negative condition both expressed and reported more aggressivity when the police officer wore a weapon than when no weapon was visible. The use of sunglasses had no effect on aggressivity but resulted in the officer's being perceived more negatively, though he was not perceived more negatively when he wore a weapon. No sex differences in expressed or reported aggressivity were obtained, although some sex differences on measures of secondary interest did occur. The implications of these findings for research on the “weapons effect” and on policy regarding the visibility of police weapons and the wearing of sunglasses by police officers are discussed.