DOES HE PULL IT OFF? A THEISTIC GROUNDING OF NATURAL INHERENT HUMAN RIGHTS?

This paper focuses on two key issues in Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs . It argues that Wolterstorff's theistic grounding of inherent rights is not successful. It also argues that Wolterstorff does not provide adequate criteria for determining what exactly these natural inherent rights are or criteria that can help us to evaluate competing and contradictory claims about these rights. However, most of Wolterstorff's book is not concerned with the theistic grounding of inherent rights. Instead, it is devoted to a detailed and rigorous articulation of the meaning and defense of a theory of justice as consisting of inherent rights and with showing why this theory of justice is superior to the alternative right order theories that Wolterstorff criticizes. The paper concludes that these accomplishments are not diminished even if Wolterstorff has failed to provide us with a satisfactory theistic grounding of his theory.     

Altering traumatic memory

Can you experimentally contaminate memory for truly traumatic events? We investigated this question in a study in which 80 Russian participants reported on their memories for one of two terrorist bombings. Half the participants recalled the 1999 attacks on Moscow apartment buildings while the others recalled the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Participants recalled the events on two separate occasions over a six month period. Just prior to the second recall, we strongly suggested to all participants that they had seen a wounded animal in the attacks and had mentioned it in their original memory reports. While none of the WTC group were convinced by the suggestion, 12.5% of the Moscow group did so, and even elaborated with sensory detail (e.g., a bleeding cat lying in the dust). This group was more susceptible to contamination despite the greater emotion that they experienced about the Moscow terrorist attacks. These findings support the notion that even traumatic memories are experimentally malleable.