Family Therapy for an Adult Child Experiencing Bullying and Game Addiction: An Application of Bowenian and MRI Theories

Bowenian theory and MRI family therapy model were chosen to treat a Korean male adult client whose symptomatic problems were bullying and game addiction. To test its validity of therapeutic effectiveness, the following case analysis methods were used: narrative analysis of interview contents, categorization of the nine sessions of verbatim, videotaping, and notes according to classified concepts (i.e., triangulation), and explanation using matrix and network. Results showed that low level of differentiation, patterns of emotional cutoff, and dynamics of triangulation were clearly present in this client. After MRI family therapy, changes were evident in perceptive references, communication patterns, stress-coping mechanism, symptomatic behaviors, and intra-family relationships.     

Expectations About Couple Therapy Over Time

One common factor of therapy, expectations, has been demonstrated to be a significant contributor to outcome in individual therapy. Despite this, little is known about expectations about couple therapy. This paper presents the qualitative results of a study exploring clients’ expectations before beginning couple therapy and after six sessions. Results indicate that clients form pre-therapy expectations about their therapist, the process of therapy, and their partner. Results also showed that after six sessions, clients’ expectations about therapy were often met or modified in ways that were positive. Implications for therapists and researchers are included.     

Equality in Education – Why We Must Go All the Way

In this paper I present and defend a highly demanding principle of justice in education that has not been seriously discussed thus far. According to the suggested approach, “all the way equality”, justice in education requires nothing short of equal educational outcome between all individual students. This means not merely between equally able children, or between children from different groups and classes, but rather between all children, regardless of social background, race, sex and ability. This approach may seem implausible at first, due to the far-reaching implications it entails, primarily its requirement to deny better-off children their advantage for the sake of equality. However the paper argues that all-the-way-equality, in fact, does a better job realizing the goals of justice in education than alternative conceptions of justice. It is further argued that at least some of the principle’s most radical consequences, those that make it seem counterintuitive, can be mitigated by balancing all-the-way-equality with competing interests.     

The Ladder of Rationality

This paper is a review and critical discussion of John Broome’s Rationality Through Reasoning. In particular, it engages critically with (i) Broome’s view on the independence of normative reasons and rationality, (ii) his construal of the capacity, property, and requirement senses of “rationality”, and (iii) his account of reasoning as a conscious, rule-following operation on mental contents.     

Should the Changing Character of War Affect Our Theories of War?

War has changed so much that it barely resembles the paradigmatic cases of armed conflict that just war theories and international humanitarian law seemed to have had in mind even a few decades ago. The changing character of war includes not only the use of new technology such as drones, but probably more problematically the changing temporal and spatial scope of war and the changing character of actors in war. These changes give rise to worries about what counts as war and thus what norms to use in evaluating a particular conflict. In this paper, I develop an argument that the changing character of war gives us reasons to take reductionist revisions of just war theory seriously. By reductionist theories of war I mean those revisions within the just war tradition that suggest that we can use ordinary peacetime interpersonal analyses of moral responsibility and liability to harm to decide what justice requires in times of war.     

Multi-Dimensional Consequentialism and Risk

In his new book, The Dimensions of Consequentialism, Martin Peterson proposes a version of multi-dimensional consequentialism according to which risk is one among several dimensions. We argue that Peterson’s treatment of risk is unsatisfactory. More precisely, we discuss a number of major problems of one-dimensional (objective or subjective) consequentialism, and show that none of them disappears with Peterson’s proposal. In ending our paper, we address the objection that our discussion overlooks the fact that Peterson’s proposal is not the best version of multi-dimensional consequentialism. Our reply is that the possibilities of improving multi-dimensional consequentialism are very limited as far as risk is concerned.     

Revisionist Responses to the Amoralism Objection: A Reply to Julia Markovits

Some subjectivist views of practical reasons entail that some people, in some cases, lack sufficient reasons to act as morality requires of them. This is often thought to form the basis of an objection to these subjectivist views: ‘the amoralism objection’. This objection has been developed at length by Julia Markovits in her recent book Moral Reason. But Markovits—alongside many other proponents of this objection—does not explicitly consider that her objection is premised on a claim that her opponents deny on first-order grounds, often as part of a socially and politically motivated revisionism about the assessment of agents and their actions. As such, the amoralism objection as she presents it misses its dialectical mark. This has interesting consequences for subjectivism—and the methodology behind it—more generally.