Weekly churchgoing amongst Roman Catholics in Britain: long-term trends and contemporary analysis

Declining communal religious practice in the form of regular churchgoing is a key area in the measurement and study of religious change and secularisation. The general trends in attendance in Britain have been well-researched. However, there has been less consideration of change and continuity in religious practice within different religious traditions. This article provides a detailed assessment of the trends in weekly churchgoing amongst Roman Catholics and then examines the socio-demographic factors associated with regular churchgoing. In long-term perspective, there has been a clear decline in weekly churchgoing amongst Catholics, corroborated by data across several recurrent social surveys. In terms of contemporary churchgoing, weekly attenders are more likely to be older, have higher socio-economic status and have children in the household. But, contrary to the well-established association between women and religiosity, there were no significant differences in weekly attendance between men and women, nor on the basis of ethnic background.     

Hard Determinism,Humeanism, and Virtue Ethics

Hard determinists hold that we never have alternative possibilities of action—that we only can do what we actually do. This means that if hard determinists accept the “ought implies can” principle, they must accept that it is never the case that we ought to do anything we do not do. In other words, they must reject the view that there can be “ought”‐based moral reasons to do things we do not do. Hard determinists who wish to accommodate moral reasons to do things we do not do can instead appeal to Humean moral reasons that are based on desires to be virtuous. Moral reasons grounded on desires to be virtuous do not depend on our being able to act on those reasons in the way that “ought”‐based moral reasons do.     

From Environmental to Ecological Ethics: Toward a Practical Ethics for Ecologists and Conservationists

Ecological research and conservation practice frequently raise difficult and varied ethical questions for scientific investigators and managers, including duties to public welfare, nonhuman individuals (i.e., animals and plants), populations, and ecosystems. The field of environmental ethics has contributed much to the understanding of general duties and values to nature, but it has not developed the resources to address the diverse and often unique practical concerns of ecological researchers and managers in the field, lab, and conservation facility. The emerging field of “ecological ethics” is a practical or scientific ethics that offers a superior approach to the ethical dilemmas of the ecologist and conservation manager. Even though ecological ethics necessarily draws from the principles and commitments of mainstream environmental ethics, it is normatively pluralistic, including as well the frameworks of animal, research, and professional ethics. It is also methodologically pragmatic, focused on the practical problems of researchers and managers and informed by these problems in turn. The ecological ethics model offers environmental scientists and practitioners a useful analytical tool for identifying, clarifying, and harmonizing values and positions in challenging ecological research and management situations. Just as bioethics provides a critical intellectual and problem-solving service to the biomedical community, ecological ethics can help inform and improve ethical decision making in the ecology and conservation communities.

On the binary quality of recognition and the inconsequentiality of further knowledge: two critical tests of the recognition heuristic

The recognition heuristic is claimed to be distinguished from notions of availability and fluency through its categorical or “binary” treatment of information and the “inconsequentiality” of further knowledge to inferences based on recognition. Using the city‐size task of Goldstein and Gigerenzer ( 2002 ) we demonstrate that: (1) increasing the validity of other information in the environment decreases the reliance on recognition; (2) cities that are both recognized and have other information known about them (e.g. they have a soccer team) are chosen more often than those which are simply recognized; and (3) there is a negative correlation between the time taken to identify a city and the proportion of times it is selected as the larger of a pair. None of these results is predicted by the process model of the recognition heuristic. The implication of the results for the distinction between the recognition, availability and fluency heuristics is discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

哲学与现实生活

作为时代精神之精华的哲学必定懂得现实生活。哲学与现实生活的关系可以通过哲学与民众、哲学与社会实践、真理与价值、知识与信仰、理性与非理性、哲学家的使命感等问题展开出来。人民大众的实践活动,是哲学智慧的源泉。哲学是人类特有的智慧,其特色就在于它的批判性。对现存事物不合理、不公平因素的否定和批判,唤起人民的觉悟,是哲学的革命性、批判性锋芒的光辉体现。哲学不能故步自封,不应固守单纯知识的领地。应该突破哲学就是认识论的唯科学主义的眼界,向价值的领域、信仰的领域、非理性的领域挺进,开拓思想的自由。哲学家是哲学智慧的人格化,促进文化发展和人的全面发展是哲学家的光荣职责和使命。