THE JUSTICE IN MERCY

It is natural to wonder how mercy is related to justice. I focus in this essay on a more limited question: how should we relate mercy and retributive justice? My suggestion is that attending to our situation as moral agents can help us solve this conundrum. I offer a pessimistic reading of our situation. Because of original sin and related forms of bad moral luck, we have limited control over our attitudes and actions. This has a surprisingly hopeful upshot, since our unfortunate condition makes it appropriate to respond to one another mercifully. I suggest that this response can take two forms. Without collapsing justice into mercy, it is right to make our approach to justice and punishment more merciful and to recognize the fittingness of “erring” on the side of mercy when we are uncertain how to apportion blame.     

The Duality of Content

Philosophical Studies -     

Hopelessness as a Predictor of Suicide Ideation in Depressed Male and Female Adolescent Youth

We examined hopelessness as a predictor of suicide ideation in depressed youth after acute medication treatment. A total of 158 depressed adolescents were administered the Children's Depression Rating Scale‐Revised (CDRS‐R) and Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C‐SSRS) as part of a larger battery at baseline and at weekly visits across 6 weeks of acute fluoxetine treatment. The Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS) was administered at baseline and week 6. A negative binomial regression model via a generalized estimating equation analysis of repeated measures was used to estimate suicide ideation over the 6 weeks of acute treatment from baseline measure of hopelessness. Depression severity and gender were included as covariates in the model. The negative binomial analysis was also conducted separately for the sample of males and females (in a gender‐stratified analysis). Mean CDRS‐R total scores were 60.30 ± 8.93 at baseline and 34.65 ± 10.41 at week 6. Mean baseline and week 6 BHS scores were 9.57 ± 5.51 and 5.59 ± 5.38, respectively. Per the C‐SSRS, 43.04% and 83.54% reported having no suicide ideation at baseline and at week 6, respectively. The analyses revealed that baseline hopelessness was positively related to suicide ideation over treatment (p = .0027), independent of changes in depression severity. This significant finding persisted only for females (p = .0024). These results indicate the importance of early identification of hopelessness.     

Eudaimonism,Virtue, and Self‐Sacrifice

This essay introduces some of the key topics at stake in the ongoing controversies about the place of eudaimonism in Christian ethics and theology. Whether and in what way a person should seek her or his own happiness and flourishing has been a central question in ethics for centuries. Here I summarize the contributions the essays in this focus issue make to that conversation, and conclude by briefly sketching a Neoplatonist approach to eudaimonism that may offer a way to build on the insights and concerns articulated in the focus essays.     

Effects of fornix transection upon associative memory in monkeys: Role of the hippocampus in learned action

Thirty-three monkeys took part in seven experiments designed to elucidate further the effect of fornix transection on learning and memory. In the first experiment the monkeys had to remember whether stimulus objects had previously been paired with reward or no reward, and they had to use this memory to guide choice between stimulus objects at retention tests according to an arbitrary rule which they had learned: to choose objects previously paired with no reward in preference to objects previously paired with reward. Fornix transection produced a severe and permanent impairment in this task. In the second experiment the monkeys also had to remember object-reward associations but the performance rule was more natural: to choose objects previously paired with reward. Here fornix transection had no effect. The third experiment required the monkeys to remember, given a stimulus object, which of two events of equal valence had previously been the outcome of displacing that object. The two events were either a peanut and a sultana or a black penny and a white penny of equal secondary reinforcing value. Performance was unimpaired by fornix transection. The fourth experiment also demonstrated, in a different paradigm, unimpaired recall of sensory events. The fifth experiment demonstrated an impairment following fornix transection in acquisition of simultaneous spatial-visual conditional discriminations; the sixth demonstrated normal learning by fornix-transected monkeys of a successive spatial-visual conditional discrimination and the seventh demonstrated unimpaired acquisition of a simultaneous auditory-visual conditional discrimination. These results, when considered in detail and together, are incompatible with existing hypotheses of hippocampal function. A new hypothesis is discussed.