Aquinas on Hating Sin in Summa Theologiae II-II Q34 A3 and I-II Q23 A1

This essay explores the phenomenological features of the passional response to evil that Aquinas calls ‘hatred of sin’ in Summa Thelogiae II-II Q34 A3 and I-II Q23 A1, among other places. Social justice concerns and philosophical objections, however, challenge the notion that one can feel hatred toward an agent’s vice or sin without it being the agent who is hated. I argue that a careful, contextual reading of these texts shows that Aquinas cannot be read as commending ‘hate’ in any form. The texts under consideration offer no comfort to those who appeal to hatred of sin or vice to legitimate sentiments or actions that can be reasonably taken to express hatred of persons.     

Effects of age and ability on components of cognitive change

Prior experience with a cognitive task is often associated with higher performance on a second assessment, and these experience effects can complicate the interpretation of cognitive change. The current study was designed to investigate experience effects by obtaining measures of cognitive performance separated by days and by years. The analyses were based on data from 2017 adults with two longitudinal occasions, of whom 948 had also completed a third occasion, with each occasion consisting of three parallel versions of the tests on separate sessions. Change across short intervals was typically positive, and greater among older adults and adults with low levels of cognitive ability, whereas change over intervals of approximately three years was often negative, particularly at older ages. In contrast to the expectation that change over short intervals might be informative about change over longer intervals, relations between short-term change and long-term change were negative, as the individuals who gained the most with assessments separated by days tended to experience the greatest losses across assessments separated by years.     

Police Use of Discretion: A Participant Observation Study of Game Wardens

This study extends inquiry on police discretion by examining the situational and organizational factors influencing game wardens' arrest/summons decisions. Data were collected by participant observation and interviews. Situational and organizational factors seldom, if at all, evident from previous studies were discovered to influence wardens discretion, example, officers' demeanor, professional courtesy, judges, plea bargains, regional directives, and department policy. Danger, authority, and efficiency are important elements of an occupational ideology that may be shared by police and wardens. Theoretically, “police culture” writ large, may be an important source of the patterns of discretion across police organizations.     

Perceptual Learning in the Rat: Stimulus Differentiation or Latent Inhibition of Common Elements?

Preexposure to an unreinforced stimulus facilitates learning (perceptual learning) under some conditions, but it can have the opposite effect (latent inhibition) under other conditions. Researchers have suggested that perceptual learning depends on a change of context, whereas latent inhibition is usually context specific. The associative theory explains both phenomena within a single framework. The authors report 4 experiments that show that perceptual learning does not depend on a context change. The experiments suggest that latent inhibition, unlike perceptual learning, depends on passive exposure. Thus the results do not support the associative theory. They are more consistent with Gibson's stimulus-differentiation theory.     

Fading perceptual resemblance: A path for rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to conceptual matching?

Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been intrigued by humans’ and animals’ capacity to respond to abstract relations like sameness and difference, because this capacity may underlie crucial aspects of cognition like analogical reasoning. Recently, this capacity has been explored in higher-order, relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which humans and animals try to complete analogies of sameness and difference between disparate groups of items. The authors introduced a new paradigm to this area, by yoking the relational-matching cue to a perceptual-matching cue. Then, using established algorithms for shape distortion, the perceptual cue was weakened and eliminated. Humans’ RMTS performance easily transcended the elimination of perceptual support. In contrast, RMTS performance by six macaques faltered as they were weaned from perceptual support. No macaque showed evidence of mature RMTS performance, even given more than 260,000 training trials during which we tried to coax a relational-matching performance from them. It is an important species difference that macaques show so hesitant a response to conceptual relations when humans respond to them so effortlessly. It raises theoretical questions about the emergence of this crucial capacity during humans’ cognitive evolution and during humans’ cognitive development.     

Transhumanism and Roman Catholicism: Imagined and Real Tensions

Abstract

Transhumanists have asserted that religious people would both oppose life extension and allowing people with extended lives to die. In this paper, coming from a Roman Catholic perspective, I refute four myths associated with these claims: that the Church materially opposes life extension, that it conceptually opposes the very idea of life extension, that it opposes human genetic manipulation, and that it opposes letting people die in hospitals. I then propose that there are four real tensions that are much more significant: that material immortality is highly improbable, that injustice and inequality are major concerns, that transhuman omnipotence is impossible, and that utopianism is extremely dangerous.     

Antecedents and Civic Consequences of Choosing Real versus Ersatz Social Activities

Social capital (Coleman, 1990 Coleman, J. S. 1990. Foundations of social theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  [Google Scholar]), democracy's wellspring (Putnam, 1993 Putnam, R. D. 1993. Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  [Google Scholar]; Tocqueville, 1835 Tocqueville, A. 1835. Democracy in America, Edited by: Mansfield, H. C. and Winthrop, D. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.  [Google Scholar]/2000), must now accrue within a social fabric that has been changed by the ubiquitous adoption of technologies such as television and the Internet. Three studies (N = 313) of college students supported a theory of ersatz social behavior, which proposed that: a) the use of technological (replacement/ersatz) alternatives to real social interaction may be less conducive to the skill building and opinion formation that foster social capital; b) ersatz activities involve fewer costs (effort, risk of rejection) than real interactions; and c) ersatz alternatives are regularly chosen, even though real interaction is ostensibly preferred. The results provide increased understanding of when and how mediated interaction can be detrimental to social capital formation.