Some Varieties of Particularism

Analytic particularism claims that judgments of moral wrongness are about particular acts rather than general principles. Metaphysical particularism claims that what makes true moral judgments true is not general principles but nonmoral properties of particular acts. Epistemological particularism claims that studying particular acts apart from general principles can justify beliefs in moral judgments. Methodological particularism claims that we will do better morally in everyday life if we look carefully at each particular decision as it arises and give up the search for a complete moral theory. This paper raises problems for each of these versions of particularism.     

Swedish and English secondary school pupils' attitudes towards, and conceptions of, bullying: concurrent links with bully/victim involvement

Thirteen and fifteen year old Swedish and English secondary school pupils (n = 210) completed a questionnaire designed to measure attitudes towards, and conceptions of, bullying. The older participants also provided peer nominations of classmates thought to be bullies and victims. Significant differences between pupils from the two countries, between younger and older pupils, and between girls and boys emerged on a number of these variables. For example, a significantly larger percentage of English pupils than Swedish pupils indicated that name calling is bullying, whereas the reverse was true for leaving somebody out. These results suggest that findings concerning incidence of, and beliefs about, bullying may not generalise from one group of pupils to another. Overall, participants tended to express anti-bullying attitudes. The present results also add to the small but growing set of findings which suggest that pupils' attitudes concerning bullying and their actual involvement in bullying are associated concurrently. Attitudes were found to significantly predict involvement in bullying even after the variance shared with participants' sex had been controlled. Specifically, those pupils that expressed the weakest anti-bullying attitudes were found to be most often nominated by peers as a bully. The implications of these results for anti-bullying interventions were discussed.     

Cultural Expectations of One's Own and Other Nations' Foreign Policy Action Templates

One useful conceptualization of culture is that of a preestablished set of behavioral competencies, which in turn form behavioral dispositions. According to this variant of culture theory, decision-makers faced with new situations will rely on established behavioral competencies in forming an initial policy response. This assumption can also be applied at the nation-state level, where established behavioral predispositions may lessen uncertainty and stress in ambiguous yet salient foreign policy situations. Likewise, observers in one nation-state may be able to identify such behavioral dispositions in other nation-states, lending greater transparency and predictability to international interactions. Do such culturally based action templates exist? Are they recognizable even to ordinary citizens? Citizens in Russia, Japan, and the United States were asked to posit the most likely and least likely behavioral responses to a variety of foreign policy situations by their own nation and by the other two nations in the sample. The results indicate that recognition of such templates takes place, and that recognition of one nation's template content by citizens of the other nations typically matches recognition of template content by the nation's own citizens. The research also shows that such action templates can be eroded and become unrecognizable over time, both to insiders and to outsiders.     

Argument Quality and Cultural Difference

Central to argumentation theory is a concern with normativity. Argumentation theorists are concerned, among other things, with explaining why some arguments are good (or at least better than others) in the sense that a given argument provides reasons for embracing its conclusion which are such that a fair- minded appraisal of the argument yields the judgment that the conclusion ought to be accepted -- is worthy of acceptance -- by all who so appraise it.This conception of argument quality presupposes that the goodness of arguments is characterizable in terms of features of the argument itself. It makes no reference either to the attributes of the persons appraising the argument and judging its normative force, or to the context in which that appraisal is carried out. But recent work by a wide range of philosophers, argumentation theorists, and social theorists rejects such an abstract, impersonal notion of argument goodness. Instead, these theorists insist upon taking seriously, in the evaluation of arguments, the features of the evaluators themselves. In particular, such theorists emphasize the importance of cultural difference in argument appraisal. Often locating themselves under the banner of multiculturalism, they argue that the quality of an argument depends upon culturally-specific beliefs, values, and presuppositions; that an argument may be of high quality in one cultural context but of low quality in another. Consequently, they contend, no abstract, impersonal characterization of argument quality can succeed.In this paper I consider this multiculturalist approach to argument quality. I argue that while there is much merit in the general multiculturalist perspective, the multiculturalist argument against impersonal conceptions of argument quality fails. It fails for several reasons detailed below; most fundamentally, it fails because it itself presupposes just the kind of impersonal account of argument quality it seeks to reject. I call this presupposition that of transcultural normative reach. I identify this presupposition in the multiculturalist argument, and show how it undercuts the multiculturalist challenge to abstract, impersonal, transcultural conceptions of argument quality. I conclude with an evaluation of the strengths, and weaknesses, of the multiculturalist challenge to such conceptions of argument quality.     

Ethics in Long-Term Care: Are the Principles Different?

It has become common in medical ethics to discuss difficult cases in terms of the principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. These moral concepts or principles serve as maxims that are suggestive of appropriate clinical behavior. Because this language evolved primarily in the acute care setting, I consider whether it is in need of supplementation in order to be useful in the long-term care setting. Through analysis of two typical cases involving residents of long-term care facilities, I argue for the additional principles of candor and responsibility for narrative integrity.     

Plato's Analogy of Soul and State

In Part I of this paper, I argue that the arguments Plato offers for the tripartition of the soul are founded upon an equivocation, and that each of the valid options by which Plato might remove the equivocation will not produce a tripartite soul. In Part II, I argue that Plato is not wholly committed to an analogy of soul and state that would require either a tripartite state or a tripartite soul for the analogy to hold. It follows that the heart of the analogy is not to be found in the comparison of the Kallipolis and its three parts to the soul conceived as tripartite, but rather must be supposed to reside in some other connection between the ways in which justice characterizes states and souls, and I will suggest what this other connection consists in.     

Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility: The Flicker of Freedom

Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a flicker of freedom -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-one's-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her.     

Responses

This essay consists in my replies to Professors John Martin Fischer, Patricia Greenspan, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen and Gary Watson regarding various aspects of my analysis of moral responsibility.     

A NATURALISTIC THEORY OF ARCHAIC MORAL ORDERS

Abstract. Cultural evolution, producing group-level adaptations, is more problematic than the cultural evolution of individually confirmable skills, but it probably has occurred. The "conformist transmission," described by Boyd and Richerson (1985), leads local social units to become homogeneous in anadaptive, as well as adaptive, beliefs. The resulting intragroup homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity makes possible a cultural selection of adaptive group ideologies.
All archaic urban, division-of-labor social organizations had to overcome aspects of human nature produced by biological evolution, due to the predicament of genetic competition among the cooperators. The universal norms found in archaic moral systems are seen as curbs to this human nature, reinforced by beliefs in invisible sanction systems and rewarding and punishing afterlives (as in heaven or reincarnation). Perhaps the ubiquity of lavishly wasteful royal funerals is to be explained as contributing to this function.