The Destiny of Creation: Theological Ethical Reflections on Laudato Si'

In this essay, I ask what the precise relation is between Laudato si's theology and its claims about our individual and corporate responsibility for the environment and the plight of the poor. To do so, I first clarify the relationship between the theological claims and its account of moral norms, situating the text within the history of western ethical theory. I then turn to reconstruct the submerged theology of the encyclical, focusing on Pope Francis's accounts of the techno‐economic paradigm and the possibility of an “integral ecology” paradigm. I end by assessing the text in terms of the coherence and plausibility of its argument as an ethical and theological statement.     

Authoritarianism and Economic Threat: Implications for Political Behavior

This study examined whether authoritarians experiencing economic threat are more likely than other authoritarians to support social policy and political agendas that restrict benefits or curtail rights for disadvantaged groups. A sample of 131 college students completed questionnaires that measured authoritarianism, degree of economic and societal insecurity, and attitudes toward eight political issues. Economic and social insecurity were indexed to perceptions of whether one's standard of livingg had declined, whether incom inequality had grown among social classes, and whether crime, race relations, environmental quality, and governmental services had worsened. The political scales reflected issues currently debated in public forums; they included funding mechanisms for social security and health care, the state's role in regulating abortion, government services for illegal immigrants, terminating welfare for unemployed women with children, and regulation of sexual conduct. A logistic model found that, relative to non-threatened authoritarians or nonauthoritarians, threatened authoritarians were six times as likely to favor restricting benefits to powerless groups and eight times as likely to support the state's preventing women from securing anabortion. These results are discussed in terms of systemic changes in the economy that have resulted in declines in real income and increasing income inequality.     

Living in a Non‐Communist Versus in a Post‐Communist European Country Moderates the Relation Between Conservative Values and Political Orientation: A Multilevel Study

We performed a multilevel, multinational analysis using the 2012 European Social Survey dataset (N = 41 080, nested in 20 countries) to study how living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country moderates the link between individual conservative values (drawn on Schwartz's theory of basic human values) and political orientation (assessed as self‐placement on the left–right axis and attitude towards economic redistribution). The results supported the moderating role of living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country in the case both of political self‐placement and of attitude towards economic redistribution, even controlling for the countries' degree of individualism, power distance and democracy. Specifically, conservative values were positively related to a rightist political self‐placement among participants living in countries without a communist past, and to a favourable attitude towards economic redistribution in countries with a communist past. The limitations, implications and future directions of this study are discussed. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Leaping to Conclusions: Why Premise Relevance Affects Argument Strength

Everyday reasoning requires more evidence than raw data alone can provide. We explore the idea that people can go beyond this data by reasoning about how the data was sampled. This idea is investigated through an examination of premise non‐monotonicity, in which adding premises to a category‐based argument weakens rather than strengthens it. Relevance theories explain this phenomenon in terms of people's sensitivity to the relationships among premise items. We show that a Bayesian model of category‐based induction taking premise sampling assumptions and category similarity into account complements such theories and yields two important predictions: First, that sensitivity to premise relationships can be violated by inducing a weak sampling assumption; and second, that premise monotonicity should be restored as a result. We test these predictions with an experiment that manipulates people's assumptions in this regard, showing that people draw qualitatively different conclusions in each case.     

The impact of the crisis on the Orthodox Church of Greece: a moment of challenge and opportunity?

This article explores the impact of the economic crisis on the Orthodox Church of Greece (OCG). The first three parts of the article set the current stage by offering a short overview of the crisis and the response of the OCG through its charitable social welfare activities. The fourth part looks at church–state relations in Greece, covering more particularly its financial aspects. The fifth and final part discusses how the economic crisis has affected the OCG itself, including its own finances and governance, and sustainability and mission in the long term. Although the OCG provides social assistance to the Greek population during the economic crisis, it also finds itself very much affected by the same crisis. The economic crisis has forced the OCG to reduce its operating costs while at the same time continue its extensive social work. The crisis has also prompted public debates and questions about the finances of the OCG. This situation may gradually force either the Greek state or the OCG, or perhaps both, to rethink their relationship in the future.     

Postwar Recovery to Stress Symptoms Ratio as a Measure of Resilience,Individual Characteristics,Sense of Danger,and Age

This study maintains that postwar resilience should be defined by the proportion of recovery from war adversity and level of postwar symptoms. We hypothesize first that four resilience-promoting factors will predict this measure of resilience. Second, these associations will be mediated by sense of postwar danger. Third, war-afflicted older people will be comparable to younger people on these variables. The sample included 829 Israeli adults who experienced the 2006 second Lebanon war. Results that have generally supported these hypotheses have been discussed in terms of the definition of resilience, the role of sense of danger in postwar adjustment, and the resilience of older people to war.     

Microcosm–Macrocosm

Much has been learned in the 20th century about the impact of covert group dynamics on the individual, the family and small group on the micro level and about institutions, communities, national and international process on a macro level. However, as we enter the new millennium this knowledge seems dwarfed by the burgeoning of knowledge about the brain and biological approaches to disturbed human behavior, casting a worrisome shadow on the future of dynamic group therapies. This article explores the impact of socio-economic-political forces on mental health delivery systems from the vantage point of group process and therapy, and raises questions about possible interventions to restore a balance between social dynamics and biology.     

中国传统经济伦理思想的近代演变初论

中国传统经济伦理核心内容是对营利和私有产权的价值合理性的否定,中国传统经济伦理思想的近代(演变)可界定为鸦片战争前后至五四新文化运动时期资本主义性质的反传统衍变;其现代(演变)则是“五四”之后,资本主义和社会主义经济伦理思想相互交锋、消长、排斥与“融合”的历史进程。传统经济伦理思想近代演变的实质是为资本活动方式或资本的利益寻求工具价值和伦理合理性的过程,中国传统经济伦理的近代演变最终否定了资本主义经济制度的伦理价值合理性、确立了社会主义经济制度的伦理价值合理性。     

Animalizing the disadvantaged,mechanizing the wealthy: The convergence of socio‐economic status and attribution of humanity

Differences between groups in socio‐economic status (SES) are becoming more salient nowadays. In this context, we examined the animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization that both low and high‐SES groups may experience respectively by conducting three studies. In study 1, we manipulated the SES of two fictitious groups (low vs. high‐SES) and measured the humanity ascribed to them. Results showed that the low‐SES group was animalized in comparison with the high‐SES group, which was mechanized. In study 2, we manipulated the humanity of two fictitious groups by describing them as animals or machines and measured the perceived SES of the groups. Participants tended to attribute lower SES to the group described as animals and higher SES to the group described as machines. Finally, in study 3, we used an Implicit Association Test to replicate the results of studies 1 and 2. Taken together, these studies show that low‐SES groups are considered as animal‐like whereas high‐SES groups are seen as robot‐like. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the justification of income inequality within our society.     

The relationship between attitudes toward suicide and willingness to pay for suicide prevention: a cross-sectional study in Japan

There are gaps in our knowledge of the role attitudes toward suicide play in determining people’s willingness to participate (WTP) for suicide prevention. We conducted a large nationwide cross-sectional study with the aim of clarifying the relationship between WTP for reducing suicide risk and attitudes toward suicide. Ordinal logistic regression analyses (n = 1771) showed that there were significant associations of WTP for suicide prevention with ‘Suicide as a right’ (β = ?.15, 95% CI: ?.25 to ?.04, p = .006), ‘Preventability/readiness to help’ (β = .81, 95% CI: .69–.94, p < .001) and ‘Common occurrence’ (β = .32, 95% CI: .19–.46, p < .001). ‘Incomprehensibility/unpredictability’ did not show an association with WTP. Taxpayer acceptance for suicide prevention is more likely to be achieved through provision of information that increases endorsement of ‘preventability/readiness to help’ and ‘common occurrence’ factors, and decreases ‘suicide as a right’ scores.