SPECIESISM AND MORAL STATUS

Abstract: Many people believe that all human life is of equal value. Most of them also believe that all human beings have a moral status superior to that of nonhuman animals. But how are these beliefs to be defended? The mere difference of species cannot in itself determine moral status. The most obvious candidate for regarding human beings as having a higher moral status than animals is the superior cognitive capacity of humans. People with profound mental retardation pose a problem for this set of beliefs, because their cognitive capacities are not superior to those of many animals. I argue that we should drop the belief in the equal value of human life, replacing it with a graduated view that applies to animals as well as to humans.     

Rethinking Moral Agency in Markets: A Book Discussion on Behavioral Economics

Recent work in behavioral economics and psychology provides valuable resources for religious ethicists. This book discussion examines contributions by Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton, Uri Gneezy and John A. List, and Douglas Hough. This literature raises important questions about ethical decision‐making, moral agency and responsibility, and the ethics of life in global capitalism. It also opens up promising areas for interdisciplinary dialogue between economics and religious studies. This book discussion concludes that religious ethicists have much to contribute to the conversations about moral anthropology that are now being held in behavioral economic research, and to the broader political economic debates in which this research participates.     

Of Mice and Men: Equality and Animals

Can material Egalitarianism (requiring, for example, the significant promotion of fortune) include animals in the domain of the equality requirement? The problem can be illustrated as follows: If equality of wellbeing is what matters, and normal mice are included in this egalitarian requirement, then normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any human. This is because normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any human. This is because their wellbeing is much lower than that of normal humans. Thus, equality of wellbeing requires a massive shift of resources away from most humans to mice. This view, however, seems crazy. I explore this problem and propose a solution.     

Re‐embedding Moral Agency

The connection between ethics and theological vision has become increasingly important for ethics as we better appreciate how the moral agent is embedded in a framework that affectively and intellectually shapes her moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is always reasoning within (that is, within a moral framework, a religious worldview, and/or a set of ideological commitments). A similar framing occurs in literature, which I refer to as its “horizon.” A literary text's horizon comprises the theological and metaphysical commitments that are implied by the text and that the reader relies on to make sense of it. I suggest that there is a parallel between how moral frameworks and literary horizons operate in that both shape moral judgment. I argue that in using literature as a resource for ethics, the same contemporary currents that have led us to appreciate the embeddedness of moral reasoning should also encourage us to give more careful attention to the theological or metaphysical vision implied by a text. Such a “theo‐ethical” reading of literature provides a richer understanding of particular moral goods and the interplay between those goods and ethical themes like agency, hope, and redemption. I substantiate this claim with a reading of William Blake's Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.     

Naturalizing Ethics: the Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency

Moral agency is a central feature of both religious and secular conceptions of human beings. In this paper I outline a scientific naturalistic model of moral agency making use of current findings and theories in sociobiology,developmental psychology, and social cognitive theory. The model provides answers to four central questions about moral agency: (1) what it is, (2) how it is acquired, (3) how it is put to work, and (4) how it is justified. I suggest that this model can provide religious and secular moral theories with a basis for a common understanding of moral agency.     

Aesthetics of Surrender: Levinas and the Disruption of Agency in Moral Education

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education.     

A Compassionate Autonomy Alternative to Speciesism

Many people in the animal welfare communityhave argued that the use of nonhuman animals inmedical research is necessarily based onspeciesism, an unjustified prejudice based onspecies membership. As such it is morally akinto racism and sexism. This is misguided. Thecombined capacities for autonomy and sentiencewith the obligations derived from relationssupport a morally justifiable rationale forusing some nonhuman animals in order to limitthe risk of harm to humans. There may be a fewcases where it is morally better to use a neversentient human than a sentient animal, butthese cases are few and would not fulfill thecurrent need for research subjects. The use ofnonautonomous animals instead of humans inrisky research can be based on solid moralground. It is not necessarily speciesism.     

Ethics and the Science of Animal Minds

Ethicists have commonly appealed to science to bolster their arguments for elevating the moral status of nonhuman animals. I describe a framework within which I take many ethicists to be making such appeals. I focus on an apparent gap in this framework between those properties of animals that are part of the scientific consensus, and those to which ethicists typically appeal in their arguments. I will describe two different ways of diminishing the appearance of the gap, and argue that both of them present challenges to ethicists seeking a firm scientific basis for their claims about the moral status of animals. I argue that more clarity about the role of appeals to science by applied ethicists leads to questions about the effectiveness of such appeals, and that these questions might best be pursued empirically.     

Moral Utilitarianism and Attitudes Toward Animals

The majority of studies investigating attitudes toward animals have underscored the role of demographic and personality factors. The study of the role of general moral worldviews on attitudes toward animals represents an important complementary perspective. In the current study, we analyzed the relationship between moral utilitarianism toward humans and attitudes toward animals. In psychological and neuroscientific studies, moral utilitarianism has been shown to be related to empathy deficits. We expected that utilitarian decision making would be related to the endorsement of an instrumental representation of animals. We measured utilitarianism with the trolley problem, a hypothetical moral dilemma widely used in the psychological study of moral reasoning. A sample of 20,474 French adults answered an online survey measuring attitudes toward animals and moral decision making involving human beings. Results showed that irrespective of participants’ age and gender, there was a slight relationship between utilitarianism measured by the trolley dilemma and the endorsement of an instrumental representation of animal. Limitations and implications for future research are considered.     

Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars

This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel resolutions of the ‘Kantian paradox’: the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars’s understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s moral philosophy.     

道德情绪：道德行为的中介调节

道德情绪是心理学的一个重要研究主题。道德情绪是个体根据一定的道德标准评价自己或他人的行为和思想时所产生的一种情绪体验。它是一种复合情绪, 主要包括厌恶、移情、内疚, 羞耻等。道德情绪影响下人类会产生某些典型行为, 这主要包括道德洁净行为和道德补偿行为。心理学研究道德情绪的实验范式很多, 主要有行为回忆范式、实物或图片刺激范式、情境设置范式等。有关道德情绪的未来研究主要应注重于探讨正性道德情绪在道德发展中的作用, 探讨道德情绪对群体行为的影响, 以及探讨道德情绪在不同文化背景下的价值意义。     

An Exploration of Moral Rebelliousness with Adolescents and Young Adults

The present pair of studies investigated the assessment, correlates, and evaluation of “moral rebels” who follow their own moral convictions despite social pressure to comply. In Study 1, self, peer, and teacher ratings of adolescents' tendencies to be a moral rebel were positively intercorrelated. In Study 2, young adults' tendencies to be a moral rebel were associated with relatively high self-esteem scores and relatively low willingness to engage in minor moral violations and need to belong scores. Both adolescents and young adults reported relatively favorable attitudes toward a morally rebellious peer, especially when they themselves had heightened ratings on this characteristic.     

Recent Work in Moral Anthropology

This special focus issue brings to the Journal of Religious Ethics fresh considerations of moral anthropology as practiced by four emergent voices within the field. Each of these essays, in varying ways, seeks not only to advance an understanding of ethics in a particular time, place, and context, but to draw our attention to shared aspects of the human condition: its discontinuities and fractures, its practices of perception and attention, its interplays of emotion, intuition, and reason, and its thoroughly intersubjective nature. To learn something of Thai Buddhist life‐worlds, contemporary Russian modes of being, or the experience of immorality in today's China, each essay argues in turn, is to gain new insight into ourselves.     

Human and Animal Subjects of Research: The Moral Significance of Respect versus Welfare

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals’ lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons—and related duties—that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences␣between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as␣found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference.     

Agency and pain: An exploration

The notion of agency has become particularly prominent in social‐science writing. This article identifies some of the weaknesses in the ways it has been employed in contemporary anthropology. It criticises the assumptions of self‐empowerment, responsibility, and constructivism that are held to be essential to moral agency in much of that usage. Present‐day conceptions of agency in this literature introduce—whether intentionally or not—a triumphalist vision of history. Drawing on recent neuro‐physiological research, religious history and ethnography, it focuses on pain in order to think about agency in other than triumphalist terms. Triumphalist versions of agency, the article argues, are not only inherently questionable, they also distract our attention away from the need to understand how different traditions articulate the idea of living sanely in a world that is inevitably painful.     

道德推脱对大学生攻击行为的影响:道德认同的调节作用

采用问卷法以440名大学生为研究对象,探讨了道德认同在道德推脱影响攻击行为中的作用机制。采用潜变量调节效应模型的无约束估计方法研究发现:(1)道德推脱会对大学生的攻击行为产生显著的正向影响,道德认同会对大学生的攻击行为产生显著的负向影响,并且道德认同会对道德推脱与攻击行为之间的关系产生显著的调节作用;(2)与低道德认同者相比,高道德认同者的攻击行为会随着道德推脱水平的降低而明显减少。     

道德推理与道德行为关系的元分析

目前道德心理学中存在对道德推理作用的质疑, 这一质疑源自哲学领域的著名争论。从经典道德心理学理论来说, 道德推理应该是道德行为的重要决定因素, 但新近的观点则否定这一重要作用。本研究采用元分析技术探讨道德推理与道德行为的关系。通过文献搜索与检查, 获得了50项研究和83个独立效应量, 共包含16738名被试。检验表明发表偏差不会影响元分析的结果, 选择随机效应模型是准确的。通过随机效应模型的元分析表明, 道德推理与道德的行为有显著的正相关, 与不道德的行为有显著的负相关。调节效应分析表明, 道德推理测量工具的类型会影响道德推理与道德行为的关系, 被试年龄阶段会影响道德推理与不道德行为的关系。这些结果肯定了道德推理的作用, 也强调了研究过程中要关注测量工具的类型, 指出了需要开发更全面的道德推理测量工具。     

目标取向、道德认同、道德推脱与大学生运动员的反社会行为的关系

研究从道德失调的观点出发探讨了目标取向、道德认同、道德推脱与大学生运动员在比赛中的反社会行为的关系.198名大学生运动员参加了本研究并完成了任务取向和自我取向问卷、道德推脱问卷、道德认同问卷和运动中的反社会行为问卷.分析发现,任务取向减少了大学生运动员的反社会行为,但是自我取向增加了他们的反社会行为;道德推脱在自我取向与反社会行为的关系中发挥着中介作用,且这一中介作用受到道德认同的调节,较低的道德认同增加了自我取向的运动员的道德推脱,并由此提高其反社会行为倾向.     

Student Agency in Literacy: Validation of the Student Agency Profile (StAP)

Abstract

There have been recent calls to support student agency in the field of literacy. Agency, which we define in the context of schooling, is a multidimensional construct where individuals exert influence and create opportunities in the learning context through intentions, decisions, and actions. We propose highlighting agency as an interconnected construct, which includes self-perception as readers and writers, intentionality, choice-making, persistence, and interactiveness. Elementary students (n?=?1,726) completed surveys of their agency along with standardized literacy assessments. Statistical analyses largely aligned with the hypothesized dimensions of agency. Relationships to student literacy achievement were stronger in grades 3^rd–5^th than in 1^st–2^nd grades. Discussion highlights how elementary students have a voice in their agency as it pertains to literacy. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

集体效能：一种团体研究的主体性视角

班杜拉于20世纪80年代中期将个体效能研究拓展到集体效能研究,吸引了相当数量研究者的注意。研究发现,集体效能信念在集体活动的因果结构中起着关键的作用,它不但能直接影响集体行为,而且还能作用于其它决定集体行为的因素,如目标设定、抱负水平、结果预期、情感倾向、对社会机遇和社会阻力的知觉等等。该文对近年来的集体效能研究进行梳理,考察不同领域的集体效能研究状况,并初步总结出相应的理论共识,指出该研究的贡献和局限。