Keeping score: the consequential critique of religion

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - This essay attempts to specify just what one would need to show in order to draw any substantive conclusion about religion’s consequential...     

Anthropomorphism and the Apophatic God

This paper is a warning-shot across more sloppy contemporary invocations of an apophatic God. Such apophatic approaches are thought to avoid anthropomorphic projections onto God of parochial and problematic notions of the human subject. Developing an analysis of two views of the human subject given by Charles Taylor, I suggest that modern constructions of the apophatic God look very much like a projection of an intellectually-compromised and culturally-pervasive notion of the subject. I call this subject the romantic monad, suggesting Ally McBeal as an example.     

Defensive Responding on the MMPI-2 in Pre-Surgical Candidates

The MMPI-2 is frequently used for a variety of pre-surgical evaluations that can have life changing consequences for the patient being examined. While it intuitively makes sense that a proportion of examinees will attempt to downplay distress in order to avoid any perceived questions about their surgical candidacy, this hypothesis has received scant research attention. This study cluster analyzed the MMPI-2 L, F, & K validity scales for 890 pre-surgical candidates. Depending on the standard utilized, between one-third and two-thirds of our sample displayed some degree of defensive responding. These results suggest that traditional markers of test validity may need to be adjusted in populations with high base rates for defensiveness. The difficulty in ascribing personality characteristics based on validity scale scores and directions for further research are also discussed.     

Is A Purely First Person Account Of Human Action Defensible?

There are two perspectives available from which to understand an agent's intention in acting. The first is the perspective of the acting agent: what did she take to be her end, and the means necessary to achieve that end? The other is a third person perspective that is attentive to causal or conceptual relations: was some causal outcome of the agent's action sufficiently close, or so conceptually related, to what the agent did that it should be considered part of her intention? Recent goods based views in ethics are divided as to whether only the first person perspective, or a mix of both perspectives, are necessary to understand intention and action. But resolution of the issue is necessary if goods based views are to be able to deploy to principle of double effect; for that principle requires an account of how to distinguish what is genuinely a matter of intention in human action from what is not. I argue that the pure first person account is better than the mixed account.     

A team-taught interdisciplinary approach to engineering ethics

This paper outlines the development and implementation of a new course in Engineering Ethics at the University of Tennessee. This is a three-semester-hour course and is jointly taught by an engineering professor and a philosophy professor. While traditional pedagogical techniques such as case studies, position papers, and classroom discussions are used, additional activities such as developing a code of ethics and student-developed scenarios are employed to encourage critical thinking. Among the topics addressed in the course are engineering as a profession and its role in society; ethical successes and failures; risk, safety, and the environment; professional responsibilities; credit and intellectual property; and international concerns. The most significant aspect of the course is that it brings both engineering and non-engineering points of view to the topics at hand. This is accomplished in two ways. First, as mentioned previously, it is team-taught by engineering faculty with an interest in ethical and societal issues, and by philosophy faculty with expertise in the field of professional ethics and an interest in science and technology. Second, the course is offered to both engineers and non-engineers. This mix of students requires that all students must be able to explain their technical and ethical decisions in a non-technical manner. Work teams are structured to maximize interdisciplinary interaction and to foster insights by each student into the professional commitments and attitudes of others. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 conference, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology, Linking Workplace Ethics and Education, co-hosted by Gonzaga University and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 9–10 June 2005.