Justice and desert-based emotions

A number of contemporary philosophers have pointed out that justice is not primarily an intellectual virtue, grounded in abstract, detached beliefs, but rather an emotional virtue, grounded in certain beliefs and desires that are compelling and deeply embedded in human nature. As a complex emotional virtue, justice seems to encompass, amongst other things, certain desert-based emotions that are developmentally and morally important for an understanding of justice. This article explores the philosophical reasons for the rising interest in desert-based emotions and offers a conceptual overview of some common emotions of this sort having to do with the fortunes of others and of oneself, respectively. The article does not give a definitive answer to the question of whether those emotions really are virtuous, but aims at enriching our understanding of what kind of virtue they might possibly represent.     

The duplication of love's reasons

If X loves Y does it follow that X has reasons to love a physiologically exact replacement for Y? Can love's reasons be duplicated? One response to the problem is to suggest that X lacks reasons for loving such a duplicate because the reason-conferring properties of Y cannot be fully duplicated. But a concern, played upon by Derek Parfit, is that this response may result from a failure to take account of the psychological pressures of an actual duplication scenario. In the face of the actual loss of a loved one and the subsequent appearance of a duplicate, how could we resist the inclination to love? Drawing upon duplication scenarios from Parfit and from Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, this paper will argue that there could be reasons for X to come to love a duplicate of Y but that these would not be identical with the reasons that X had (and may still have) to love Y. Nor (in the case of an agent with a normal causal history) could they be reasons for a love that violates the requirement that love is a response to a relationship and therefore takes time to emerge.     

防御性医疗动因及干预策略

本文重点阐述了防御性医疗的概念及特点,分析了防御性医疗之动因,最后提出防御性医疗的干预策略,包括加强医务人员职业道德教育,提高人文服务水平;加强社会宣传,提升医务人员形象;加强沟通,重建医患信任关系;强化内部管理,建立风险应对机制;完善医疗法律法规,积极构建法制环境下的现代医学模式。     

Reasons,rational requirements,and the putative pseudo-question “Why be moral?”

In this paper, I challenge a well-known argument for the view that “Why be moral?” is a pseudo-question. I do so by refuting a component of that argument, a component that is not only crucial to the argument but important in its own right. That component concerns the status of moral reasons in replies to “Why be moral?”; consequently, this paper concerns reasons and rationality no less than it concerns morality. The work I devote to those topics shows not only that the argument I address is unsound, but that the conclusion of that argument is false. “Why be moral?” is no pseudo-question.     

Michael Smith and the rationality of immoral action

Although it goes against a widespread significant misunderstanding of his view, Michael Smith is one of the very few moral philosophers who explicitly wants to allow for the commonsense claim that, while morally required action is always favored by some reason, selfish and immoral action can also be rationally permissible. One point of this paper is to make it clear that this is indeed Smith’s view. It is a further point to show that his way of accommodating this claim is inconsistent with his well-known “practicality requirement” on moral judgments: the thesis that any rational person will always have at least some motivation to do what she judges to be right. The general conclusion is that no view that, like Smith’s, associates the normative strength of a reason with the motivational strength of an ideal desire will allow for the wide range of rational permissibility that Smith wants to capture. Many thanks to Michael Smith for his friendly and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and for permission to make a very strong and explicit claim on his behalf.     

IN DEFENCE OF THE AGENT-CENTRED PERSPECTIVE

Abstract: This article explores certain issues that arise at the borderline between conceptual analysis and metaphysics, where answers to questions of a conceptual nature compete with answers to questions of an ontological or metaphysical nature. I focus on the way in which three philosophers, Kant, Collingwood and Davidson, articulate the relationship between the conceptual question “What are actions?” and the metaphysical question “How is agency possible?” I argue that the way in which one handles the relationship between the conceptual and the ontological question has important implications for one's conception of the nature of philosophy, and that thinking hard about what it takes to defend the autonomy of the mental and of the agent‐centred perspective should force us to think about our underlying conception of philosophy and to choose between one that understands it as first science and one that understands it as the under‐labourer of science.     

Go Figure? Body-Shape Motives are Associated with Decreased Physical Activity Participation Among Midlife Women

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between midlife women's physical activity motives and their participation in physical activity. Cross-sectional qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 59 midlife women, most of whom were well-educated European-Americans (mean age = 45.6 years). Body-shape physical activity motives (i.e., motives related to toning, shaping, and weight loss) were compared with all other types of physical activity motives combined. Participants with body-shape motives were significantly less physically active than those with non-body-shape motives (p<.01). Negative affect toward physical activity was negatively associated with participation, but did not mediate the effect of physical activity motives on participation. Body Mass Index (BMI) was not related to physical activity motives or participation. Results suggest that body-shape motives might be associated with less physical activity participation than non-body-shape motives among midlife women.     

Factor Structure of the Reasons for Attempting Suicide Questionnaire (RASQ) with Suicide Attempters

A sample of 134 suicide attempters completed the Reasons for Attempting Suicide Questionnaire (RASQ). Maximum likelihood factor and principal components analyses confirmed the multidimensionality of the RASQ, with two-component and three-factor models each receiving support. Scales from these competing multidimensional RASQ models demonstrated adequate internal consistency reliability. For the two-component model, two previously developed scales demonstrated differential validity with suicide indices. It is concluded that the RASQ has at least two dimensions, and it is recommended that the RASQ be scored for two scales: Internal Perturbation-Based Reasons and Extrapunitive/Manipulative Motivations.     

Particularism and the Point of Moral Principles

According to radical moral particularists such as Jonathan Dancy, there are no substantive moral principles. And yet, few particularists wish to deny that something very like moral principles do indeed play a significant role in our everyday moral practice. Loathe at dismissing this as mere error on the part of everyday moral agents, particularists have proposed a number of alternative accounts of the practice. The aim of all of these accounts is to make sense of our appeal to general moral truths in both reaching and justifying our particular moral judgments without thereby violating the particularists' stricture against substantive moral principles. In this paper, I argue that the most prominent non-substantive accounts of moral generalities appealed to by radical particularists – the heuristic account and default reasons accounts – fail in this aim.