Iraq: A Morally Justified Resort to War

abstract   This paper begins by accepting, for argument's sake, a number of the central criticisms raised regarding the US led war in Iraq. In the remainder of the paper, it is argued that even if these criticisms are assumed to be true, the resort to war was still morally justified, both prospectively and retrospectively. The argument is made within the context of the just war tradition. It is argued that the resort to war met the conditions of sufficient just cause, last resort and proportionality, and that any failings in regards to legitimate authority and right intention do not undermine the morality of that resort. More specifically, the case is made that: humanitarian considerations provided a sufficient just cause, questions of international law do not undermine the moral legitimacy of the US led coalition, and that concerns about the intentions of the US, even if valid, would not impact on moral judgements about the act of resorting to war. In arguing for the last point, it is determined that the right intention condition should not be included among the set of conditions that form the basis of the just war tradition.     

Effects of Interspersing Additional Brief Math Problems on Student Performance and Perception of Math Assignments: Getting Students to Prefer to Do More Work

Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of the interspersing procedure on students' mathematics performance, perceptions of mathematics assignments, and preference for mathematics assignments when more work was added. In Experiment I, college students worked computation problems from two assignments. The control assignment contained 15 three-digit by two-digit problems (3 × 2) and the experimental assignments contained 18 3 × 2 problems and 6 additional interspersed one-digit by one-digit problems (1 × 1). Students then rated the assignments and chose one for homework. Results showed significantly more students preferred (i.e., chose it for homework) the experimental assignment with the additional target (i.e., 3 × 2) and interspersed problems. Furthermore, significantly more students rated this experiment as requiring less effort and being less difficult. Moreover, students' mathematics performance was not affected by the procedure. Experiment II strengthened the internal validity by showing that students did not prefer the experimental assignment because it contained more target problems. Experiment III showed that the interspersing procedure was not powerful enough to extend findings beyond the 20% level (i.e., 40 and 60% more conditions). Results showed how the interspersing procedure could be used to encourage students to choose to do more target computation tasks. Discussion focuses on the applied value of the interspersing procedure and plausible causal mechanisms that may account for current and past findings related to student choice and interspersing brief tasks.     

RATS,We Should Have Used Clinton: Subliminal Priming in Political Campaigns

Political strategists decide daily how to market their candidates. Growing recognition of the importance of implicit processes (processes occurring outside of awareness) suggests limitations to focus groups and polling, which rely on conscious self‐report. Two experiments, inspired by national political campaigns, employed Internet‐presented subliminal primes to study evaluations of politicians. In Experiment 1, the subliminal word “RATS” increased negative ratings of an unknown politician. In Experiment 2, conducted during former California Governor Gray Davis's recall referendum, a subliminal photo of Clinton affected ratings of Davis, primarily among Independents. Results showed that subliminal stimuli can affect ratings of well‐known as well as unknown politicians. Further, subliminal studies can be conducted in a mass media outlet (the Internet) in real time and supplement voter self‐report, supporting the potential utility of implicit measures for campaign decision making.     

Ideology and the Harms of Self-Deception: Why We Should Act to End Poverty

In thinking about global poverty, the question of moral motivation is of central importance: Why should the average person in the West feel morally compelled to do anything to help the poor? Various answers to this question have been constructed—and yet poverty persists. In this paper I will argue that, among other difficulties, the current approaches to the problem of poverty (from Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge) overlook a critical element: that poverty not only harms the poor, it harms every human being. Its existence forces us to live in a world where we are compelled by a pervasive ideology to eviscerate our own humanity and neglect our human impulses. Drawing on Karl Marx’s Aristotelian-influenced notion of our human essence as “species-being,” I will construct an account of moral motivation in the face of poverty that stems from a selfish desire to avoid these harms. Thus our moral impetus for acting to help the poor comes not from feelings of guilt about how poverty harms them, but rather from recognizing that poverty is harming all of us. By fighting against global poverty, we seek to make the world a better place for ourselves and the poor alike.     

We Agree: Fat IS a Feminist Issue! Response to Commentators

In our review of the literature on women and weight bias (Fikkan and Rothblum 2011), we attempted to cull findings from multiple disciplines that demonstrate the impact (social, educational, and financial) of the stigma of women’s weight. We undertook this for two purposes: the first was to address a gap in the weight bias literature, which tends to make only a side note mention that fat women suffer worse penalties than do fat men; the second, to raise the point that feminist scholars, though highly attuned to pressures on women to be thin, have spent less time discussing the disparate impact for women of being fat, despite the mounting evidence of how much weight bias impacts women. We offered some of our own thoughts on the persisting neglect of this topic among feminist writers, despite previous calls to action (Rothblum 1992, 1994). Given the dearth of attention to what has become one of the most frequent types of discrimination against women (Puhl et al. 2008), we asked: “is fat a feminist issue?” We were delighted with the response from the commentators and the thoughtful exploration they devoted to our question and to this issue within feminist scholarship. Here, we briefly summarize some of the main themes identified by these writers, offer our own thoughts on these themes and repeat their call to action for further study of this important area of women’s lives.     

Why We Should Not Pay for Human Organs

The right to buy and sell human organs is challenged by the authors within the framework of a broad Christian perspective. Opposition to organ sales is argued in the light of the developing underclass of poor organ donors throughout the world who sell their organs to the rich. Very often neither the donors nor the recipients are fully informed about the medical risks involved in the procedure of organ transplantation.     

Why We Should Create Artificial Offspring: Meaning and the Collective Afterlife

This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful (i.e. satisfy more meaning-relevant conditions of value). By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is likely to be an important source and sustainer of meaning in our present lives (Scheffler in Death and the afterlife, OUP, Oxford, 2013). The second is that the creation of artificial offspring provides a plausible and potentially better pathway to a collective afterlife than the traditional biological pathway (i.e. there are reasons to favour this pathway and there are no good defeaters to trying it out). Both of these arguments are defended from a variety of objections and misunderstandings.     

Yes,We Earthlings Should Colonize Mars if Martian Rights Can Be Upheld

I argue that programmes of Mars colonization might usefully be guided by a consideration of “Martian Rights”. I outline four categories of possible rights which would need to be guaranteed, depending on the precise nature of the colonization: those directly transferable from existing human rights, new rights, rights in need of modification, and the rights of Mars itself. Debates over Martian Rights should not be deferred until the technological challenges of supporting human life on Mars have been resolved. Rather, they have the potential to usefully inform the development of relevant space technologies.     

Testing of Collegiate Athletes for Sickle Cell Trait: What We,as Genetic Counselors Should Know

In August 2010, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) mandated that all of its incoming Division I student-athletes be tested for sickle cell trait. Student-athletes have the additional options to provide proof of a previous sickle cell test result or decline testing, by signing a waiver releasing their institution of liability. This article addresses the origins of the NCAA recommendations, and stresses the importance of proceeding with care. In doing so, it seeks to start a discussion in the genetic counseling community as to what, if any, should our role be?     

Myopic regret avoidance: Feedback avoidance and learning in repeated decision making

Decision makers can become trapped by myopic regret avoidance in which rejecting feedback to avoid short-term outcome regret (regret associated with counterfactual outcome comparisons) leads to reduced learning and greater long-term regret over continuing poor decisions. In a series of laboratory experiments involving repeated choices among uncertain monetary prospects, participants primed with outcome regret tended to decline feedback, learned the task slowly or not at all, and performed poorly. This pattern was reversed when decision makers were primed with self-blame regret (regret over an unjustified decision). Further, in a final experiment in which task learning was unnecessary, feedback was more often rejected in the self-blame regret condition than in the outcome regret condition. We discuss the findings in terms of a distinction between two regret components, one associated with outcome evaluation, the other with the justifiability of the decision process used in making the choice.     

Rightness,Parsimony, and Consequentialism: A Response to Peterson

This paper argues against Martin Peterson in favour of the ‘standard view’ of rightness, according to which rightness does not come in degrees. It begins (section 1) with a defence of the standard view against the charge that it is committed to ‘deontic leaps’. It goes on (section 2) to claim that greater conceptual parsimony would allow Peterson to avoid certain problems involving equality and related matters that arise out of his conception of moral value, and that Peterson should take the same instrumentalist attitude towards the norms of practical rationality as he does towards the norms of common-sense morality. The paper closes (section 3) with some doubts about Peterson’s programme of consequentialization and its alleged advantages.     

Long Working Hours and Well-being: What We Know,What We Do Not Know,and What We Need to Know

Despite a widespread belief in both the academic and public policy literatures that working long hours is deleterious to health and well-being, our critical review of this large and complex literature fails to support a robust direct causal effect of work hours on either physical or mental well-being outcomes. Large-scale epidemiological studies, many of which are prospective and include objective health outcome measures, support a statistically significant association between long work hours and coronary heart disease and depression, but the effect sizes are very small. Moreover, there is an absence of true longitudinal studies that assess the consistency of working long hours over time and its relationship to well-being. Our review suggests that the effects of working long hours are nuanced in that they may vary considerably for different working populations based on gender, age, working conditions, and other factors. Primary and meta-analytic studies suggest that such moderator effects are plausible, yet rigorous testing of these remains to be done. We conclude with suggestions for specific moderator effects that seem worth investigating in future research.     

Reasons, Relevance and Salience: A Response to Hookway

This paper responds to Christopher Hookway’s article, “Reasons for Belief, Reasoning, Virtue.”     

Philosophy, Criticism and Community: A Response to Duff

abstract   A critical discussion of R. A. Duff's account of 'internal' and 'external' criticism using two examples drawn from recent work on international justice — Pogge on global poverty and Duff on international criminal jurisdiction .     

Sociosexual Orientation,Commitment, and Infidelity: A Mediation Analysis

ABSTRACT

Individuals with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation (SO) are less committed to their romantic relationships and more likely to engage in infidelity. Furthermore, commitment is negatively associated with tendencies to cheat. However, no previous research has examined the possible mediating role of commitment in the relationship between SO and infidelity. The current study examined whether commitment mediated the relationship between SO and willingness to engage in three types of cheating behaviors (Ambiguous, Deceptive, and Explicit). Results suggested that commitment partially mediated the relationship between SO and infidelity, such that unrestricted individuals had lower commitment, which in turn led to a greater likelihood of cheating. Implications of this association and directions for future research are discussed.