Terrorism,War, and The Killing of the Innocent

Commonsense moral thought holds that what makes terrorism particularly abhorrent is the fact that it tends to be directed toward innocent victims. Yet contemporary philosophers tend to doubt that the concept of innocence plays any significant role here, and to deny that prohibitions against targeting noncombatants can be justified through appeal to their moral innocence. I argue, however, that the arguments used to support these doubts are ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, the philosophical positions in question tend to misunderstand the justification of both the prohibition against targeting noncombatants, and that of the permission to attack combatants, for which the paper offers a new account. Such misunderstandings make it all too easy to justify both terrorist actions and morally objectionable actions on the part of nations at war. Taking proper account of the role of innocence in the context of armed conflict will alter our ordinary ways of thinking about the ethics of war, with respect to both jus in bello and jus ad bellum.

QUANTUM REALITY AND ETHOS: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT REGARDING THE FOUNDATION OF ETHICS IN COSMIC ORDER

The authors undertake a thought experiment the purpose of which is to explore possibilities for understanding moral principles in analogy with cosmic order. The experiment is based on three proposals, which are described in detail: an ontological, a neurological, and a moral proposal. The ontological proposal accepts from the phenomena of quantum physics that there is a nonempirical domain of physical reality that consists not of material things but of what is philosophically conceptualized as a realm of nonmaterial forms. This realm of forms is the realm of potentiality in physical reality that quantum physics posits as an indivisible Wholeness—the One. It is the ultimate reality because everything empirical is the actualization of its forms. The neurological proposal is the hypothesis that the brain is sensitive to the potentiality waves in the cosmic field, as ordinary measuring instruments in physics are sensitive to potentiality waves at the quantum level, so that the cosmic field can communicate with the human brain. The third proposal assumes that the communication with the cosmic field can translate into moral ideas and actions. Even though the three proposals underlying the thought experiment are highly speculative, they lead to definite implications that make sense in their own right and can be applied in a useful way. From the order of reality some simple rules of conduct follow that are identical with traditional moral rules but have the character of rules of well‐ness, leading to new aspects of Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia and Kant's concept of the highest good. In analogy with the structure of physical reality, where all empirical phenomena are actualizations of nonempirical forms, it is suggested that the structure of morality, too, is that of a tacit, nonempirical form that actualizes in explicit principles and moral acts through our consciousness. The tacit form is thought to exist in the realm of cosmic potentiality, together with all the other forms that the empirical world actualizes. It can appear spontaneously in our consciousness when needed, offering its guidance to our judgment and free will. Because it does not appear in the form of commandments accompanied by threats, the actions of the tacit moral form define a higher level of morality, similar to that offered by some aspects of the Christian teaching, where one acts not out of fear but on the desire to do things right.     

Beliefs About Psychological Services (BAPS): development and psychometric properties

A scale to measure attitudes towards seeking psychological help was developed (Beliefs About Psychological Services [BAPS]) and evaluated. This scale was based on items gathered from students, colleagues, and the authors when asked about common positive and negative attitudes toward psychologists and their services. Items were also based on the Fischer and Turner (1970 Fischer, EH and Turner, JLeB. 1970. Orientations to seeking professional help: Development and research utility of an attitude scale. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 35: 79–90. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]) Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Services (ATSPPH) measure. Three studies are reported describing the construction and evaluation of the psychometric properties of the BAPS. The BAPS is an 18-item measure consisting of three subscales: Intent, Stigma Tolerance, and Expertness. Support was found for the reliability and validity of the measure.     

Identifying and changing the normative beliefs about aggression which lead young Muslim adults to join extremist anti‐Semitic groups in Pakistan

Two studies investigated the role of beliefs about the acceptability of aggression (“normative beliefs”) against Jews in determining who would join an extremist group. In Study 1, students in a university in Pakistan (N=144) completed self‐report attitude measures, and were subsequently approached by a confederate who asked whether they wanted to join an extremist anti‐Semitic organization. Normative beliefs about aggression against Jews were very strong predictors of whether participants agreed to join. In Study 2, participants (N=92) were experimentally assigned to either a brief educational intervention, designed to improve inter‐group relations, or to a control group. They also filled in self‐report attitude measures pre and post intervention. Participants in the intervention group were much less likely to agree to join the extremist group, and this effect of the intervention on joining was mediated by changes in normative beliefs about aggression against Jews. The results have implications for theories of inter‐group aggression and interventions to prevent people from being recruited into extremist groups. Aggr. Behav. 35:514–519, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Superstitious,magical, and paranormal beliefs: An integrative model

Lack of conceptual clarity has hampered theory formation and research on superstitious, magical, and paranormal beliefs. This study offers a conceptual framework where these concepts are differentiated from other unfounded beliefs and defined identically as a confusion of core knowledge about physical, psychological, and biological phenomena. When testing this definition with questionnaire items (N = 239), the results showed that superstitious individuals accepted more violations of core ontological distinctions than skeptics did and that ontological confusions discriminated believers from skeptics better than intuitive thinking, analytical thinking, or emotional instability. The findings justify the present conceptualization of superstitious, magical, and paranormal beliefs, and offer new theoretical propositions for the familiar everyday beliefs that are yet scientifically so poorly understood.     

The Minority-Majority Conundrum in Northern Ireland: An Orange Order Perspective

Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with macroexplanations. In this paper the rhetoric of relative group position is analysed in political speeches delivered by leading members of an influential Protestant institution in Northern Ireland. It is apparent that minority and majority claims are not fixed but are flexibly used to achieve local rhetorical goals. Furthermore, the speeches differ before and after the Good Friday Agreement, with a reactionary "hegemonic" Unionist position giving way to a "majority-rights power sharing" argument and a "pseudo-minority" status giving way to a "disempowered minority" argument. These results suggest a view of the Northern Ireland conflict as a struggle for "symbolic power," i.e., the ability to flexibly define the intergroup situation to the ingroup's advantage.     

Personal Political Salience: The Role of Personality in Collective Identity and Action

Personal political salience (PPS) is proposed as a personality characteristic that assesses individuals' linkage of political events with their personal identities. Its role in facilitating the development of politicized collective identity and action is examined. In four samples of midlife and activist women, we show that PPS was consistently related both to politicized gender identity and political participation. Further analyses show similar results for PPS, politicized racial identity, and political participation. Politicized gender identity mediated the relationship between PPS and women's rights activism, and politicized racial identity mediated the relationship between PPS and civil rights activism. PPS is demonstrated to independently predict political action and also to provide a personality link between group memberships, politicized collective identity, and political participation.     

Global Distributive Justice

The paper discusses the problem of global distributive justice. It proposes to distinguish between principles for the domestic and for the global or intersocietal distribution of wealth. It is argued that there may be a plurality of partly diverging domestic conceptions of distributive justice, not all of which need to be liberal egalitarian conceptions. It is maintained, however, that principles regulating the intersocietal distribution of wealth have to be egalitarian principles. This claim is defended against Rawls's argument in The Law of Peoples that egalitarian principles of distributive justice should not be applied globally. Moreover, it is explained in detail, why Rawls's "duty of assistance to burdened societies" cannot be an appropriate substitute for a global principle of distributive justice.     

The Common Beliefs Survey-III and the Situational Self-Statement and Affective State Inventory: Test-Retest Reliability, Internal Consistency, and Further Psychometric Considerations

The Common Beliefs Survey-III (CBS-III), a factored measure of general irrational beliefs, has satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity. The Situational Self-Statement and Affective State Inventory (SSSASI), also with acceptable basic psychometric properties, assesses specific thoughts and feelings in response to vignettes describing frustrating events. Both inventories are potentially useful in assessing dimensions important to REBT, but information on test-retest reliability is needed. The CBS-III and the SSSASI were administered to 101 undergraduate students on two occasions, two or three weeks apart. Satisfactory test-retest reliability coefficients were obtained on all subscales of both inventories, but in the case of the SSSASI reliabilities were generally stronger when the same form of the test was used on both occasions (Form 1 presented the thoughts before the feelings, whereas Form 2 presented the feelings before the thoughts). Further exploration showed that responding to the thoughts before the feelings significantly attenuated scores on the feelings, but responding to the feelings before the thoughts had no effect on scores on the thoughts. This unexpected finding also held true in a previously unexamined data set obtained with a different sample of students several years earlier. Taking careful stock of one's emotional reactions before embarking on cognitive modification interventions seems essential to REBT, and it follows that asking questionnaire respondents to rate their affective states before they rate their self-statements could be desirable conceptually. These results provide empirical support for that strategy.