COVID-19 and Religious Ethics

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID-19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.     

Using PsyScope for demonstrations and student-designed experiments in cognitive psychology courses

We describe a plan for integrating an experimental control language, PsyScope, into under-graduate laboratory exercises of perceptual and cognitive experiments on Macintosh computers. PsyScope is a powerful and versatile system with which students can modify standard research paradigms and execute experiments of their own design, thus facilitating student-initiated independent research. Data are summarized with a general-purpose program, PsySquash, for import into Statview or SuperAnova for further analysis. This system provides an effective means of implementing student projects.     

Counting experiments

Philosophical Studies - In this paper, I show how one might resist two influential arguments for the Likelihood Principle by appealing to the ontological significance of creative intentions. The...     

The Impact of Cognitive Diversity on Crisis Negotiations

This paper reports on a series of experiments designed to assess the impact of grouping decision makers by level of cognitive complexity on the outcomes they attain in crisis negotiations. The participants—University of Maryland undergraduates who took roles in a simulated international hostage crisis—used a computer decision support system and a controlled network environment for communications. The goal of the experiments was to better understand the dynamics that lead certain types of groupings to have greater success in negotiations, and that lead certain groups of adversaries to achieve more mutually beneficial outcomes such as compromise and agreement. The findings point to a positive relationship between the level of homogeneity in cognitive complexity among decision makers and the achievement of positive outcomes in crisis negotiations.     

Creativity training: An assessment of a novel approach

The right hand hemisphere of the brain is purported to be the seat of the perceptual, intuitive, synthetic, visual and non-rational activities. In it is believed to reside the creative ability. Evidence is presented which suggests that, by exercising specifically the right hand hemisphere using a series of carefully structured tasks, some aspects of creative behaviour can be enhanced. It follows that users of creativity training courses should not expect every aspect of creative behaviour to be enhanced by any given course.     

Theism, Blame And Perfection

Blame and also punishment do not reach many agents in the sense that many agents are not motivated to ethically self-correct, and in fact, may be worsened by these practices. The main reasons agents may not be reached by them are that (on the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethical theory) (a) the agent's second nature may make inaccessible to him a sound appreciation of ethical considerations, and (b) the fixity of mature character may make ethical self-correction practically impossible. Still, when they are ethically rationalized, blame and punishment seem to be requirements. Even the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethics involves an important kind of incompleteness and unclarity concerning this issue. The Jewish and Christian traditions involve conceptions of the accessibility of ethical considerations and also the possibility of character change (both ultimately grounded in grace) in ways that enable us to overcome the perplexity about blame and punishment. They are not 'good for nothing' even when they fail to improve agents. The religious traditions' conceptions of moral agency and the possibility of perfection enable us to see why there are reasons not to ethically 'write off' even persistently vicious agents. Moreover, we can see that the fulfilling of ethical requirements is an enabling condition for perfection that is not merely ethical. To highlight the contrast between the naturalistic view and the theistic view, Aristotle's moral psychology and moral epistemology are contrasted with those of Maimonides and Aquinas, both of whom borrow heavily from Aristotle, but fundamentally transform what they borrow.     

Technical expertise and the construction of the rural Yishuv, 1882–1948

In fin de sièecle Europe, political economy viewed science as an indispensable tool of state power. Accordingly, in the early 1900s exponents of Zionist political economy saw the World Zionist Organization (WZO) as a government with the responsibility to direct the nation-building enterprise in Palestine. The principle beneficiaries of assistance from the WZO, youthful pioneer laborers from eastern Europe,shared the WZO's reverence for technical knowledge, but distrusted technicians, whom they associated with authoritarianism. In the eyes of the pioneer laborers, a technican should not lead, but rather make vital resources available to the workers to use as they saw fit. Key figures in the WZO's settlement institutions accepted this subordinate status for the technician and employed technical experts to guide,rather than direct, the labor movement in the construction of publicly-funded, co-operative agricultural settlements. From its beginning, however, the Zionist movement featured an alternative conception of technical expertise, drawn more from business economics than political economy, and tending to favor as its model the corporation rather than the state. One characteristic of this approach was the conviction that apolitical experts should direct settlement activity.For a brief period during the 1920s, champions of this approach wielded influence over the WZO's settlement institutions. But as a result of the tumultuous events of the years 1929–1939, the Zionist settlement enterprise fused politics and economics tightly together. From the mid-1930s on to the founding of the state of Israel, technical expertise was mobilized to serve the political and military leadership of the Yishuv. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.