Moral Philosophers as Ethical Engineers: Limits of Moral Philosophy and a Pragmatist Alternative

Ever since Kant, moral philosophers have been more or less animated by the mission of discovering inescapable law‐like rules that would provide a binding justification for morality. Recently, however, many have started to question (a) whether this is possible and (b) what, after all, this project could achieve. An alternative vision of the task of moral philosophy starts from the pragmatist idea that philosophizing begins and ends in human experiencing. It leads to a view where morality is seen as a “social technology” that aims to make living together possible, and strengthens people's capability to live a good life within a society. The role of moral philosophy is, accordingly, to develop our moral tools further. Moral philosophers become ethical engineers who use their expertise in ethical topics to criticize existing “moral technology” and construct new concepts, tools, and theories that better answer the current challenges for living a good life.     

Meaningfulness as Contribution

This article aims to offer a refined way of understanding what we mean by the concepts of meaningfulness and meaning in life. The first step is to separate worthwhileness, as the broadest evaluation of life taking all types of values into account, from meaningfulness, which is seen as one type of intrinsic value along with, for example, well‐being, moral praiseworthiness, and authenticity, which I argue are also separate types of intrinsic value. After discussing why we should not settle with the currently popular fitting attitudes analysis of meaningfulness, I argue that the meaningfulness of a life should be seen to be about the positive contribution beyond itself that this particular life is able to make. I show how this analysis is different from previous similar accounts and how it is able to avoid a number of challenges that have troubled these previous accounts, such as the pleasure machine challenge, the results machine challenge, and the doing good unintentionally challenge. I also demonstrate how it is able to account for prototypical examples of meaningful and meaningless lives and how it is compatible with subjectivism, supernaturalism, and objective naturalism, which is seen as a merit. Finally, I conclude with some notes about what could make life meaningful, given the current analysis of meaningfulness itself.     

Fear and its vicissitudes

Abstract

The USA has been a changed society since 9/11: the Zeitgeist either has a background of low-level angst, or when an attack occurs or a threat is sounded, the fear peaks and comes to the foreground for a time. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the degree to which fear permeates contemporary culture more than the continual presence of the measures the USA takes to be safe: airport security, the Patriot Act, the mining of formerly private information by the government, to name but a few. Can we account for the pervasive nature of fear solely by the devastating and deadly attacks 15 years ago, unspeakably horrifying though they were? This paper will explore this omnipresent fear in contemporary American culture from a psychoanalytic perspective, and in so doing hopes to shed light on the nature of that fear, why it is so persistent despite 15 years without any sequels, and what the consequences of that fear are for the American way of life. The discussion will be rounded out by linking this pervasive fear to the violence that is endemic to our age.     

From the Couch to the Chair: Applying Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice in Counseling

In this article, the authors offer a contemporary perspective on psychoanalytic theory. The authors present a clinical vignette that illustrates how one analyst applied the principles of transference, countertransference, and resistance in a modern clinical setting. The authors describe how analysis is similar to and different from humanistic counseling and conclude by describing how analytic insights might be applied in the clinical practice of counselors.     

African-American students' early trust beliefs in work-based mentors

Using an experimental design with a sample of African-American high school students (n=94), this study examines the determinants of students' initial trust beliefs about adult mentors. Consistent with the model of initial trust formation, results indicate that both structural assurance beliefs and youth dispositions toward trust were positive, significant predictors of the belief in an adult mentor's benevolence, honesty, competence, and predictability. Mentor selection procedures were not related to any of the trust beliefs. Ethnic identity of the student was found to moderate the relation between two of these beliefs (competence and predictability) with racial similarity of the mentor and student. Contrary to expectations, African-American students with low ethnic identity believed that a White adult mentor would be more competent and predictable than students with high ethnic identity. Implications for work-based, adult-youth mentoring programs and future research are discussed.     

Simultaneous and sequential Feature Negative discriminations: Elemental learning and occasion setting in human Pavlovian conditioning

Using a conditioned suppression task, we investigated simultaneous (XA−/A+) vs. sequential (X → A−/A+) Feature Negative (FN) discrimination learning in humans. We expected the simultaneous discrimination to result in X (or alternatively the XA configuration) becoming an inhibitor acting directly on the US, and the sequential discrimination in X becoming a negative occasion setter acting indirectly on the A-US link. After simultaneous FN training, X+ training completely abolished discriminative XA/A responding (Experiment 1), and X transferred inhibition to new targets B regardless of their training history (B+ or YB−/B+) (Experiment 2), suggesting X became a simple inhibitor. After sequential FN training, X showed the predicted selective transfer to a target B that also had been modulated (Y → B−/B+), not to a simple excitor (B+) (Experiment 4), but turning X into an excitor (X+) likewise disrupted discriminative X → A/A responding (Experiment 3). This suggests that X acquired a combination of modulatory and direct inhibitory properties, and that the joint contribution of both components is necessary for the suppression of the target-induced US activation.     

Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -