Science,politics, and moral activism: Sorokin's integralism reconsidered

This paper uses previously untranslated excerpts from P. A. Sorokin's revolutionary journalism to reexamine the relationship between his scientific and nonscientific activities. Columns written in 1917 for the political daily Volya Naroda (The People's Will) provide insight into Sorokin's early Russian period and also prefigure the later synthesis that he called Integralism. This article explains Sorokin's competing commitments to science and reformism in terms of the Russian intelligentsia's social role and concludes that Sorokin in America remained a more Russian figure than has been generally recognized. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Quantification of Conflicts of Interest in an Online Point-of-Care Clinical Support Website

Science and Engineering Ethics - Online medical reference websites are utilized by health care providers to enhance their education and decision making. However, these resources may not adequately...     

Teleological Essentialism: Generalized

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we find support for the view that a broad range of categories—living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds, and artifactual kinds—are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments.     

Moral dilemmas and moral rules

Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants show a parallel asymmetry about versions of the dilemmas that have minimized emotional force. In a third experiment, we find that people distinguish between whether an action violates a moral rule and whether it is, all things considered, wrong. We propose that judgments of whether an action is wrong, all things considered, implicate a complex set of psychological processes, including representations of rules, emotional responses, and assessments of costs and benefits.