The End(s) of Mercy

In philosophy and in religious ethics, accounts of mercy are typically developed in relation to justice. The essays in this focus issue each insist on an integral connection between mercy and justice, yet each reconfigures that relationship by arguing that mercy is best understood as a normative response to others in their need. Defining mercy as our response to others’ need highlights the value of mercy as an effective public virtue, grounded in realism about the human condition and focused on reparative and restorative action.     

Formant transition duration and amplitude rise time as cues to the stop/glide distinction.

There is some disagreement in the literature about the relative contribution of formant transition duration and amplitude rise time in signalling the contrast between stops and glides. In this study, listeners identified sets of /ba/ and /wa/ stimuli in which transition duration and rise time varied orthogonally. Both variables affected labelling performance in the expected direction (i.e. the proportion of /b/ responses increased with shorter transition durations and shorter rise times). However, transition duration served as the primary cue to the stop/glide distinction, whereas rise time played a secondary, contrast-enhancing role. A qualitatively similar pattern of results was obtained when listeners made abrupt-onset/gradual-onset judgements of single sine-wave stimuli that modelled the rise times, frequency trajectories, and durations of the first formant in the /ba/-/wa/ stimuli. The similarities between the speech and non-speech conditions suggest that significant auditory commonalities underlie performance in the two cases.     

The Development of Price Formation Theory and Subjectivism about Ultimate Values

abstract One sometimes finds leading economic thinkers expounding the metaphysical thesis that the ultimate ethical value of an object reflects nothing about the properties of the object in itself and instead reflects the subjective tastes of the valuer. Could anything in economics qua economics provide a warrant for such ethical subjectivism? And what might tempt economists to speak on such broadly meta‐ethical issues? In this paper we argue that a partial explanation for the subjectivist cast‐of‐mind of much economic theory is to be found in the recent history of price formation theory. (We focus in particular on the so‐called ‘Marginalist’ and ‘Ordinalist’ Revolutions in price theory.) We argue that although such price formation theory provides no warrant for drawing ethical subjectivist conclusions, it does provide an explanation as to why such conclusions might be drawn. Thus we explore how the particular history of the development of what is called ‘value theory’ might well lead one (albeit unwarrantedly) towards ethical subjectivism.