MYSTICISM AS MORALITY

Sufism—spiritual practice, intellectual discipline, literary tradition, and social institution—has played an integral role in the moral formation of Muslim society. Its aspiration toward a universal kindness to all creatures beyond the requirements of Islamic law has added a distinctly hypernomian dimension to the moral vision of Islam, as evidenced in a wide range of Sufi literature. The universal perspective of Sufism, fully rooted in Islamic revelation, yields a lived (and not just studied) ethics with the potential to view and embrace all creatures through a single ethical vision, regardless of religious or other affiliation. This side of Islam, both acknowledging and surpassing the outlook of the legal heritage, offers important insight into understanding the nature of Muslim society as both Islamic and meta‐Islamic in religious orientation. Sufism, still significant in today's Islamic world, thus offers important material for locating Islam as part of an international order with principles and standards that resonate deeply with the moral vision of Islam itself.     

Overshadowing of a stimulus-reinforcer association by an instrumental response

In two experiments, rats were first exposed to pairings of a clicker and food; they were subsequently, in order to measure the effectiveness of the clicker as a conditioned reinforcer, given the opportunity to press a lever which turned the clicker on. For one group of animals the food originally delivered in the presence of the clicker had been contingent on their performance of an instrumental response (running in a running wheel); for a second the contingency between clicker and food had been purely classical. Although the actual correlation between clicker and food was identical for the two groups, the clicker was a less effective conditioned reinforcer for the first group than for the second. In a third experiment, all animals were initially required to run to obtain food in the presence of the clicker, but one group received additional trials on which food was delivered contingent on running in the absence of the clicker. This group showed less tendency to lever press for the clicker than a second group that had received free food on trials when the clicker was not presented. The results of all three experiments suggest that conditioning to the clicker could be overshadowed if the occurrence of food was more reliably predicted by the execution of an instrumental running response; they thus support the view that instrumental conditioning depends on the establishment of an association between response and reinforcer similar to the association between stimulus and reinforcer underlying classical conditioning.