The voice of the counselee

Conclusion Unfortunately, case excerpts and histories in which the voice of counselee is largely ignored appear very frequently in the pastoral care and counseling literature. More unfortunately, these excerpts are often lifted up, as is the one discussed in this article, as examples of very good counseling. The plea from the counselees, which can be heard very clearly through these excerpts and histories, is quite simply that their voices be heard and their experiences of their own suffering validated.     

Rights, Liability, and the Moral Equality of Combatants

According to the dominant position in the just war tradition from Augustine to Anscombe and beyond, there is no ??moral equality of combatants.?? That is, on the traditional view the combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war??but not vice versa (barring certain qualifications). I shall argue here, however, that in the large number of wars (and in practically all modern wars) where the combatants on the justified side violate the rights of innocent people (??collateral damage??), these combatants are in fact liable to attack by the combatants on the unjustified side. I will support this view with a rights-based account of liability to attack and then defend it against a number of objections raised in particular by Jeff McMahan. The result is that the thesis of the moral equality of combatants holds good for a large range of armed conflicts while the opposing thesis is of very limited practical relevance.     

Yet Another Revised DDE? A Note on David K. Chan's DDEd

David K. Chan wants to save the DDE from the considerable criticism levelled against it, by making the moral distinction it refers to rest on a difference in desire instead of in intention. I argue that the revised version, too, is counter-intuitive and confuses the blameworthiness of an actor with the wrongness of the act. It also invites abuse instead of preventing it. Besides, Chan's DDE omits three of the four criteria of the traditional DDE, and it is couched in terms of lesser objectionability, while the traditional DDE is couched in terms of permission. Therefore, Chan's DDE has so little in common with the traditional DDE that it should not even count as a revised version of it.     

Can't suppress this feeling: automatic negative evaluations of somatosensory stimuli are related to the experience of somatic symptom distress

Cognitive theories of medically unexplained ("somatoform") symptoms stress the importance of alterations in attention and memory processes. Accordingly, specific schemata are hypothesized to (mis-)guide the processing of somatosensory stimuli leading to the formation of symptom-like perceptions. The current study tested a possible association between altered automatic somatosensory evaluation processes and the tendency to experience somatoform symptoms in a nonclinical sample. In a first pilot study, a modified version of the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) by Payne, Cheng, Govorun, and Stewart (2005) with aversive and nonaversive tactile stimuli (nonpainful electric vs. vibration stimulus) was successfully tested in 40 college students. In a second study (n = 50), automatic evaluations following aversive tactile stimuli were found to be positively associated (r = .35) with somatic symptom distress (PHQ). Moreover, negative affectivity significantly moderated this association (i.e., people high on negative affectivity revealed the strongest associations between somatic symptom distress and negative automatic evaluations in the tactile AMP). The findings support cognitive theories of somatoform symptom formation. The tactile AMP is suggested as a promising paradigm to study automatic evaluations of body sensations in people with somatoform disorders and related clinical conditions.     

Prophetic ministry in the nuclear world

This essay opens with a summary of a modern psychoanalytic theory of large groups. This theory is used to analyze the character, first, of the American church; second, prophetic ministry; and finally, what the nuclear threat means to the American church. The essay concludes with a discussion of what this analysis says about how to do effective prophetic ministry in the American church in the nuclear age.He is an ordained minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and an experienced psychotherapist. He is active in the anti-nuclear movement, most recently serving on the committee which successfully organized to make Chicago a Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone.     

Against a “Combined Liability-Lesser-Evil Justification”

Philosophia - Jeff McMahan has recently proposed what he calls a “combined liability-lesser-evil justification.” Its core idea is that the fact that someone has no right against the...