Machiavellian flexibility in negative mate retention

Among the Dark Triad traits (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism), Machiavellianism is uniquely associated with flexibility. This flexibility should result in the use of aggressive short‐term tactics only when they do not interfere with long‐term goals. Study 1 found that individuals high in Machiavellianism differed from those high in psychopathy with respect to retrospective accounts of negative mate retention tactics. Study 2 found an interaction between Machiavellianism and relationship type such that individuals high in Machiavellianism tempered the use of negative tactics for long‐term (but not short‐term) relationships. The findings highlight the flexibility of the Machiavellianism construct and its relevance to mating strategies among the Dark Triad.     

Academic Performance of High School Students as a Function of Mental Capacity,Cognitive Style,Mobility‐Fixity Dimension,and Creativity

The purpose of this study is to explore how creativity and the cognitive variables (mental capacity, cognitive style & mobility‐fixity dimension) can explain academic performance of high school students. Students at a high school in Maturin (Venezuela) were tested to determine creativity (Torrance Tests), cognitive variables and academic performance. Results based on multiple regression analyses showed that the mobility‐fixity dimension was the most consistent predictor of academic performance, by explaining a significant amount of the variance in Spanish, English, Geography, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Mathematics, Physics and the Mean score. Creativity scores explained a significant amount of the variance in Spanish, Geography, Earth Science and the Mean score. It appears that the mobility‐fixity dimension and creativity although related, perhaps represent different aspects of academic performance.     

“A GREATEST MIRACLE”: STANLEY CAVELL,MORAL PERFECTIONISM,AND THE ASCENT INTO THE ORDINARY

What to make of “the ordinary,”“the everyday,” and their common “eventfulness”? What to think of what Veena Das, in her recent book Life and Words, prefaced by Stanley Cavell, has called our need to “descent into the ordinary”? Is there a parallel figure of “ascent,” again, into the same “ordinary,” that we might we want to juxtapose with it and that resembles the motif of “change,” even “conversion,” that Cavell analyzes at some length in The Claim of Reason and throughout his oeuvre as a whole? And what could be our reasons for doing so? This essay will draw on Cavell's reading of Ibsen's work in the volume Cities of Words to spell out what such an “ascent” might mean.     

Ethics and Marginal Cases: the rights of the mentally handicapped

ABSTRACT  Some beings, including children, animals and the mentally handicapped, seem to deserve moral consideration, despite the fact that they are not rational or moral agents. These so-called marginal cases create a problem for theories that heavily stress the role of moral and/or rational agency in ethics: the latter seem unable to account for the former's moral status. This paper discusses the recent and original attempt of Loren Lomasky to solve this problem. It is argued that Lomasky's arguments are self-defeating because they can only succeed by relying on common-sense morality and, thus, by giving up the heavy stress on the role of rational agency in ethics.