Racial Attitudes and the Death Penalty1

This study investigated the relationship between overt and subtle forms of racism with Whites' recommendations for capital sentencing of Black and White offenders convicted of murder. White participants (n= 104) viewed 5 other “jurors” (all Whites or 4 Whites and 1 Black) on videotape individually presenting their decisions to vote for the death penalty in the case. It was hypothesized that the bias of high prejudice-scoring participants would be overt, but that the pattern for low prejudice-scoring participants would be more complex. As predicted, among high prejudice-scoring participants, Black defendants received stronger recommendations for the death penalty than did White defendants. Among low prejudice-scoring White participants, Black offenders received stronger recommendations for the death penalty only when a Black juror advocated the death penalty.     

Support for the Death Penalty: A Gender-Specific Model

Research on the public's level of death penalty support (DPS) has neglected gender-specific models. While most previous work has shown that women have lower DPS than men, it is not clear whether traditional models of DPS will work for a sample restricted to women. The greater intolerance of the death penalty among women may overshadow or reduce the impact of traditional predictors of DPS among women. The present paper performs the first systematic gender-specific analysis of DPS. It uses national data from the 1990 General Social Survey. Measures of three variable sets were employed: symbolic orientations (e.g., political conservatism, authoritarianism); crime salience (e.g., victimization, fear); and demographic controls. The results of a stepwise logistic regression analysis showed that political conservatism has a direct effect on the DPS of both men and women. For women only, authoritarianism also had a direct effect on DPS. Further analysis showed that for women, six variables exert an indirect effect on DPS through political conservatism and five through authoritarianism. Only three indirect effects were found for men. However, none of the 16 variables analyzed had a significant gendered effect. Indicators of traditional models of DPS were found to work as well for women as they did for men.     

Christianity and Opposition to the Death Penalty: Late Modern Shifts

This article sketches the shifts in Christian thought and denominations on capital punishment from the early church to today in the United States, and then examines the ethical issues in the administration of capital punishment both before and since the Supreme Count stopped executions in 1972. The conclusion of the article is that overwhelming evidence of the injustice of death sentences could not sway popular support for capital punishment, but evidence that switching to life sentences could save states millions of dollars is swaying many pro‐death penalty voters and legislators.     

上帝与死囚:基督教视野中的美国死刑问题

死刑与宗教的互动从未停歇。作为大多数美国人信仰的基督教虽然面临着包括价值日趋多元、教义与当代科技日趋脱节、信众流失等诸多挑战,但其仍然在美国社会的各个方面扮演着十分重要的作用。而作为西方所谓民主国家当中唯一没有废除死刑的国家,美国国内目前围绕死刑存废以及死刑的具体执行过程中产生相关问题的争论需要在宗教,特别是在基督教的视野中加以解读。而这种基督教语境中的死刑问题研究将会从文化层面剥离与解析美国死刑的发展脉络、主要问题与未来的发展趋势。     

Children's Beliefs About Violating Gender Norms: Boys Shouldn't Look Like Girls,and Girls Shouldn't Act Like Boys

This research examined 3- to 11-year-old children's knowledge of and beliefs about violating several gender norms (e.g., toys, play styles, occupations, parental roles, hairstyles, and clothing) as compared to social and moral norms. Knowledge of the norms and understanding that norm violations were possible increased with age. The children's evaluations of violations of gender norms varied from item to item. Violations concerning becoming a parent of the other gender were devalued in both boys and girls, whereas most toy and occupation violations were not especially devalued in either. Boys with feminine hairstyles or clothing were evaluated more negatively than girls with masculine hairstyles or clothing. On the other hand, girls who played in masculine play styles were devalued relative to boys who played in feminine styles. Evaluations of norm violations were not consistently related to age.     

The Internal Suicide Debate Hypothesis: Exploring the Life versus Death Struggle

Researchers and theorists (e.g., Shneidman, Stengel, Kovacs, and Beck) hyothesized that suicidal people engage in an internal debate, or struggle, over whether to live or die, but few studies have tested its tenability. This study introduces direct assessment of a suicidal debate, revealing new aspects of suicidal ideation. Results, from an online survey (N = 1,016), showed nearly all suicide‐risk respondents engaged in the debate. In addition, debate frequency accounted for 54% of the variance in suicidality scores, and showed significant associations with other indicators of suicide risk. Likely factors of the debate, reasons for living and dying, showed significant differences by suicidality, and most suicide‐risk participants reported going online for such purposes, demonstrating a behavioral component of the debate.     

Truth,Ramsification, and the Pluralist's Revenge

Functionalists about truth employ Ramsification to produce an implicit definition of the theoretical term true, but doing so requires determining that the theory introducing that term is itself true. A variety of putative dissolutions to this problem of epistemic circularity are shown to be unsatisfactory. One solution is offered on functionalists' behalf, though it has the upshot that they must tread on their anti-pluralist commitments.     

Between Retribution and Restoration: Justice and the TRC

Abstract

Having been struck by the Levinasian aspects of J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, this article tries to ‘reveal’ Coetzee’s novel as a Levinasian narration of how the other ruptures a specific subject’s self-regarding egoism, leading the subject to take up its responsibility for the other. Throughout, the concreteness and realism of the novel is considered supplementary to the abstraction of Levinas’s philosophical thought. It is demonstrated how the main character in Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren, is confronted by the other as a face, has her right to be put into question by the other, experiences guilt for her usurpation of the place of the other, which becomes positive in her assuming responsibility for the other. In awakening to the other, Curren moves from a Heideggerean concern with her own death (she is dying of cancer) towards a Levinasian prioritising of the other’s life over her own. Her coming into contact with the political violence and oppression of late 1980s South Africa adds to and focuses her expiation for the other.     

The Expressivist Account of Punishment, Retribution, and the Emotions

This paper provides a discussion of the role that emotions may play in the justification of punishment. On the expressivist account of punishment, punishment has the purpose of expressing appropriate emotional reactions to wrongdoing, such as indignation, resentment or guilt. I will argue that this expressivist approach fails as these emotions can be expressed other than through the infliction of punishment. Another argument for hard treatment put forward by expressivists states that punitive sanctions are necessary in order for the law to be valid. But this justification of punishment, too, is unconvincing. There are no good reasons to assume that we have to resort to punitive measures in order to vindicate the law. I will then raise the more general worry whether there is any intelligible link at all between moral emotions such as indignation, resentment or guilt and retributive behaviour. I will finally conclude with some sceptical remarks on the moral worth of retribution.     

Moral Injury,Betrayal and Retribution: Australian Veterans and the Role of Chaplains

Journal of Religion and Health - This paper presents additional qualitative results from Phase 1 of a larger study examining potentially morally injurious events/experiences (PMIE) and/or moral...     

Pannenberg,Particularity and Eschatology: Shifting the Debate

Wolfhart Pannenberg's account of the eschatological transition in his Systematic Theology describes how human beings are transformed by passing through a purifying fire that destroys whatever in them is incompatible with the life of God. I argue that this representation of human transformation renders individual existence too discontinuous between life as it now is and the life to come, makes redeemed interhuman sociality unimportant, and transforms access to salvation for non‐Christians into a matter of works. As a result, Pannenberg cannot preserve the kind of particularity he needs for his own theological aims: ensuring the significance of history, affirming finitude and developing a non‐oppositional understanding of the relation between the finite and the infinite.     

The Repeated Name Penalty,the Overt Pronoun Penalty,and Topic in Japanese

When reading sentences with an anaphoric reference to a subject antecedent, repeated-name anaphors result in slower reading times relative to pronouns (the Repeated Name Penalty: RNP), and overt pronouns are read slower than null pronouns (the Overt Pronoun Penalty: OPP). Because in most languages previously tested, the grammatical subject is typically also the discourse topic it remains unclear whether these effects reflect anaphors’ subject-hood or their topic-hood. To address this question we conducted a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese, a language which morphologically marks both subjects and topics overtly. Our results show that both repeated-name topic-subject anaphors and repeated-name non-topic-subject anaphors exhibit the RNP and that both overt-pronoun topic-subject and overt-pronoun non-topic-subject anaphors show the OPP. However, a detailed examination of performance revealed an interaction between the anaphor topic marking, reference form, and the antecedent’s grammatical status, indicating that the effect of the antecedent’s grammatical status is strongest for null pronoun and repeated name subject anaphors and that the overt form most similar to null pronouns is the repeated name topic anaphor. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of anaphor processing.