Moral Conviction

We often praise people who stand by their convictions in the face of adversity and practice what they preach. However, strong moral convictions can also motivate atrocious acts. Two significant questions here are (1) whether conviction itself — taken as a mode of belief — has any distinctive value, or whether all the value of conviction derives from its substantive content, and (2) how conviction can be made responsible in a way that mitigates the risks of falling into dogmatism, fanaticism, and other vices. In response to the first question, I suggest that conviction has instrumental value that derives from its relationship to integrity and courage. On the second question, I articulate the roles that reflection, discourse (engagement with others), and humility must play in the dialectical process of maintaining responsible convictions.     

Issues in the Pharmacological Induction of Emotions

abstract   In this paper, we examine issues raised by the possibility of regulating emotions through pharmacological means. We argue that emotions induced through these means can be authentic phenomenologically, and that the manner of inducing them need not make them any less our own than emotions arising 'naturally'. We recognize that in taking drugs to induce emotions, one may lose opportunities for self-knowledge; act narcissistically; or treat oneself as a mere means. But we propose that there are circumstances in which none of these concerns arise. Finally, we consider how the possibility of drug-regulation might affect duties to feel emotions.     

PARTICIPATION AND EXEGESIS: RESPONSE TO CATHERINE PICKSTOCK

This essay pursues Catherine Pickstock's "metaphysical-epistemological" insights but in a "metaphysical-hermeneutical" direction. In particular, Pickstock's case for a fourteenth-century break from the metaphysics/epistemology of "participated-in perfections" receives further plausibility by looking at the movement away from patristic-medieval biblical interpretation. Drawing upon the work of Matthew L. Lamb in particular, the essay argues that nominalist metaphysical rejection of participation led to time and history being understood no longer primarily as a participatory and teleological conversatio Dei but instead now as a strictly linear (autonomous) continuum of distinct moments. "History" thus understood proved difficult to square with patristic-medieval biblical interpretation, which gradually became unintelligible to many as a "mystical" zone cut off from the "conceptual" realm of facts. As an example of the resources available in such patristic-medieval biblical interpretation, the essay treats Aquinas's exegesis of John 3:27–36.     

Agency and Human Rights

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a human right? James Griffin has persuasively argued that the notion of agency should determine the content of human rights. However, Griffin's agency account faces the question of why agency should be the sole ground for human rights. For example, can Griffin's notion of agency by itself adequately explain such human rights as that against torture? Or, has Griffin offered a plausible explanation as to why one should not broaden the ground for human rights to include other elements of a good life such as freedom from great pain, understanding, deep personal relations, and so on? These concerns have been raised regarding Griffin's agency account, but in his new book, On Human Rights, Griffin has offered new arguments in support of his view that agency is the sole ground for human rights. In this paper, I examine these new arguments, and I argue that Griffin's arguments are ultimately unsuccessful.     

INTUITIVE NON-NATURALISM MEETS COSMIC COINCIDENCE

Having no recourse to ways of knowing about the natural world, ethical non-naturalists are in need of an epistemology that might apply to a normative breed of facts or properties, and intuitionism seems well suited to fill that bill. Here I argue that the metaphysical inspiration for ethical intuitionism undermines that very epistemology, for this pair of views generates what I call the defeater from cosmic coincidence. Unfortunately, we face not a happy union, but a difficult choice: either ethical intuitionism or ethical non-naturalism, but not both.     

GOD AND NATURAL LAW: REFLECTIONS ON GENESIS 22

This essay first explores Immanuel Kant's reading of Genesis 22, which Kant identifies as a preeminent case of the irrationality of biblical religion. After comparing Kant's assurance about the norms of rationality with the postmodern work of John Thiel, which finds the world of disorder and death to be outside God's ordering and therefore unintelligible, the essay argues that one finds in Thomas Aquinas's and Duns Scotus's contrasting accounts of Genesis 22 the beginnings of the breakdown of the theocentric understanding of the natural law as a participation in God's wise ordering of created realities to their fulfillment. Modern and postmodern thinkers operate within the context of this anthropocentric shift.