Divine retribution: A defence

The concept of divine justice has been the subject of considerable scrutiny in recent philosophical theology, as it bears upon the notion of punishment with respect to the doctrine of eternal damnation. In this essay, I set out a version of the traditional retributive view of divine punishment and defend it against one of the most important and influential contemporary detractors from this position, Thomas Talbott. I will show that, contrary to Talbott’s argument, punishment may satisfy divine justice, and that perfect justice is commensurate with retribution, rather than, as he suggests, reconciliation and restoration.     

The fine line between interrogation and retribution

The use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects is typically justified on utilitarian grounds. The present research suggests, however, that those who support such techniques are fuelled by retributive motives. An experimental study conducted with a broad national sample of US residents found that the desire for harsh interrogation is largely isomorphic with the desire to punish, and that both effects are mediated by the perceived moral status of the target, but not the perceived effectiveness of the interrogation. Results are discussed with regard to retributive justice and the national policy on interrogation and torture.     

The roles of retribution and utility in determining punishment

Three studies examined the motives underlying people’s desire to punish. In previous research, participants have read hypothetical criminal scenarios and assigned “fair” sentences to the perpetrators. Systematic manipulations within these scenarios revealed high sensitivity to factors associated with motives of retribution, but low sensitivity to utilitarian motives. This research identifies the types of information that people seek when punishing criminals, and explores how different types of information affect punishments and confidence ratings. Study 1 demonstrated that retribution information is more relevant to punishment than either deterrence or incapacitation information. Study 2 traced the information that people actually seek when punishing others and found a consistent preference for retribution information. Finally, Study 3 confirmed that retribution information increases participant confidence in assigned punishments. The results thus provide converging evidence that people punish primarily on the basis of retribution.     

Emotional responses to intergroup apology mediate intergroup forgiveness and retribution

According to intergroup emotion theory, the impact of many intergroup events on intergroup outcomes is mediated by group-directed emotions. We demonstrate that the ability of apology to reduce retribution against and increase forgiveness of a transgressing outgroup is contributed to by discrete intergroup emotions. We examined both negative (anger and fear) and positive (respect and satisfaction) emotions directed toward the transgressing outgroup. Apology reduced the desire for retribution whereas lack of apology increased it, and outgroup-directed anger uniquely mediated this effect. In contrast, apology increased and lack of apology decreased forgiveness, particularly when the ingroup responded to the transgression, and only outgroup-directed respect mediated this effect. These results provide the first evidence that intergroup emotions can mediate the impact of apology on intergroup relations outcomes.     

The roles of ingroup identification and outgroup entitativity in intergroup retribution

A new aspect of intergroup conflict was investigated- vicarious retribution-in which neither the agent of retribution nor the target of retribution are directly involved in the initial intergroup provocation. The underlying processes involved in vicarious intergroup retribution were tested correlationally (Study 1) and experimentally (Study 2). Both ingroup identification and outgroup entitativity predict the degree of vicarious retribution. In both studies, there was evidence of motivated cognition, specifically that highly identified individuals perceived the outgroup as higher in entitativity than individuals low in identification. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that part of the effect of identification on retribution against the outgroup was mediated through perceptions of entitativity.     

Interlevel Relations and Manipulative Causality

Summary  The topic of this article is the analysis of the relations between different levels of reality. The core argument is based on considerations of both an epistemology of action and manipulative causality as a criterion of object identity. The argumentation is extended towards the concepts of self-organization and self-regulation. Finally, several views on reduction and the problems of emergence and complexity are discussed.     

Reconsidering Relativistic Causality

I discuss the idea of relativistic causality, i.e., the requirement that causal processes or signals can propagate only within the light‐cone. After briefly locating this requirement in the philosophy of causation, my main aim is to draw philosophers’ attention to the fact that it is subtle, indeed problematic, in relativistic quantum physics: there are scenarios in which it seems to fail.

I set aside two such scenarios, which are familiar to philosophers of physics: the pilot‐wave approach, and the Newton–Wigner representation. I instead stress two unfamiliar scenarios: the Drummond–Hathrell and Scharnhorst effects. These effects also illustrate a general moral in the philosophy of geometry: that the mathematical structures, especially the metric tensor, that represent geometry get their geometric significance by dint of detailed physical arguments.     

Causality and things in themselves

In this paper I examine Kant's use of causal language to characterize things in themselves. Following Nicholas Rescher, I contend that Kant's use of such causal language can only be understood by first coming to grips with the relation of things in themselves to appearances. Unlike Rescher, however, I argue that things in themselves and appearances are not numerically distinct entities. Rather, I claim that it is things in themselves that we are intentionally related to in veridical experience, though of course we know them only as they appear to us via our subjective experiential faculties. In light of this account of the role of things in themselves in Kant's account of experience, I argue that his use of causal locutions to describe things in themselves is simply his attempt to capture the fact that as the objects that we are related to in experience, the existence of things in themselves is presupposed by any account of the nature of our experienceof them.Substantial work on this paper was done while I attended the National Endowment for the Humanities 1986 Summer Seminar given by Hector-Neri Castañeda at Indiana University. I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for their support, and Professor Castañeda and the other members of the seminar for their many invaluable comments, suggestions, and criticisms.     

Semantic Normativity and Semantic Causality

Semantic normativism, which is the view that semantic properties/concepts are some kind of normative properties/concepts, has become increasingly influential in contemporary meta‐semantics. In this paper, I aim to argue that semantic normativism has difficulty accommodating the causal efficacy of semantic properties. In specific, I raise an exclusion problem for semantic normativism, inspired by the exclusion problem in the philosophy of mind. Moreover, I attempt to show that the exclusion problem for semantic normativism is peculiarly troublesome: while we can solve (or dissolve) mental‐physical exclusion by adopting the so‐called ‘autonomy approach’, a similar autonomy solution to semantic exclusion is implausible if semantic properties are understood as normative properties.     

Causality and Becoming: Scotistic Reflections

Becoming is a process in which a thing moves from one state to another. In Section 1, the study will elaborate on the discussion of the Aristotelian causes taken broadly, primarily focusing on the relation between efficient and final causes. In Section 2, the study discusses the implications of Scotus’s conception of contingency and freedom, as they are reflected in the relation of the future to the past, for the efficient and final causalities. Similarly in Section 3 an examination of Scotus’s conception of matter is conducted. Based on the ideas established in these sections, the study attempts to present an initial Scotistic view of becoming.     

Causality assessment in epidemiology

Epidemiology relies upon a broad interpretation of determinism. This paper discusses analogies with the evolution of the concept of cause in physics, and analyzes the classical nine criteria proposed by Sir Austin Bradford Hill for causal assessment. Such criteria fall into the categories of enumerative induction, eliminative induction, deduction and analogy. All of these four categories are necessary for causal assessment and there is no natural hierarchy among them, although a deductive analysis of the study design is preliminary to any assessment.     

Normality as Background Causality

Husserl Studies - Normality, for Husserl, is said in many ways. While the most detailed treatments of this technical Husserlian concept are usually found in discussions concerning the constitutive...