Normative Ethics after Pragmatic Naturalism

Philip Kitcher presents an ambitious account of pragmatic naturalism that incorporates an explanatory story of the emergence and development of ethics, a metaethical perspective on progress, and a normative stance for moral theorizing. This article contends that Kitcher's normative stance is incompatible with the explanatory and metaethical components of his project. Instead, pragmatic naturalists should endorse a normative ethics that is experimental, grounded in practice, and acutely aware of cognitive and informational limitations. In particular, the ethical project would benefit from endorsing empirical work on participatory democracy for the identification of mechanisms to guide us on deep moral conflicts.     

Anxiety,Immigration, and the Search for Information

In this article, we use the issue of immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to previous literature, anxiety motivates citizens to learn and pay more attention to news coverage. Literature in psychology demonstrates that anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will seek out and be attracted to threatening information. In an experiment, we induce anxiety about immigration and then subjects have the opportunity to search for additional information in a website designed to mimic online news sources. The website has both immigration and nonimmigration stories, and the immigration stories are split between threatening coverage and nonthreatening coverage. We find that anxious subjects exhibit biased information processing; they read, remember, and agree with threatening information.     

THE IMAGO DEI AS A WORK IN PROGRESS: A PERSPECTIVE FROM PALEOANTHROPOLOGY

This article considers the imago Dei from the perspective of paleoanthropology. We identify structural, functional, and relational elements of the imago Dei that emerged mosaically during human evolution. Humans are unique in their ability to relate to each other and to God, and in their membership of cultural communities where shared attention, the transmission of moral norms, and symbolic behavior are important elements. We discuss similarities between our approach and the concept of theosis adopted in the Eastern Orthodox Church.     

Personalization in Mother–Child Emotion Talk Across Three Contexts

An unexplored aspect of contextual variation in emotion talk is the extent to which the emotions mothers and children discuss relate to the child, mother, or another self. To establish the extent to which mothers and children personalize the emotions they discuss, we examined the emotion talk of 40 American mother–child dyads in three conversational contexts: reminiscing, book reading, and play. We found that both mothers and children talked about emotions directly relevant to the child mostly in the reminiscing context and about emotions relating to another self mostly in the book context. Interestingly, the discussion of personalized emotions did not significantly differ between the book and play contexts, but did for the independent emotions. The discussion of mothers' own emotions occurred with almost the same frequency in all three contexts. In addition, within‐context analyses revealed that while mothers discussed the child's and their own emotions in the book and play contexts at about the same rate, children focused on their own emotions significantly more than on mothers' emotions in all three contexts. We contextualize the significance of the results in light of intervention programmes and future research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

青少年的学校适应问题：家庭亲密度、家庭道德情绪和责任感的作用

随机选取某市三所普通中小学四、六、八、十年级的755名青少年为被试,使用自评和他评问卷探讨家庭亲密度、家庭道德情绪和责任感与青少年学校适应之间的关系。结果显示：（1）青少年家庭亲密度、责任感与学校适应问题存在性别差异,女生家庭亲密度和责任感高于男生,外化和学业问题少于男生;家庭亲密度、道德情绪和责任感随年龄增长呈下降趋势;（2）家庭亲密度正向预测道德情绪和责任感,直接和间接负向预测青少年学校适应问题。（3）责任感负向预测学校适应问题,并在家庭亲密度和学校适应问题之间起部分中介作用;结构方程模型各指标的拟合效果较好。家庭亲密度、责任感是学校适应问题的良好预测指标。     

Blended courage: Moral and psychological courage elements in mental health treatment seeking by active duty military personnel

We propose that seeking mental health care in an environment with heightened stigma may combine elements of both psychological and moral courage. Interviews of 32 active duty US Army personnel about their process of seeking current mental health care were analyzed for themes of voluntary action, personal risk, and noble or worthwhile goals (benefits). Risks and benefits were divided into internal risks and benefits, characteristic of psychological courage; and external risks and benefits, characteristic of moral courage. Concerns about external risks were themes in all narratives, while concerns about internal risks were themes in only about half of narratives. Both internal and external benefits of treatment were themes in approximately three-quarters of the narratives, whereas doubts about internal (but not external) benefits were also expressed at a similar rate. Thus, participants described an act of blended courage, with social risks of moral courage taken for wellness goals of psychological courage.     

Toward a cosmopolitan ethos

There has been a rising trend in cosmopolitan moral theory to seriously take into consideration the human's rootedness in, and partiality toward, particular cultures, places, peoples and traditions. This essay suggests that reframing our theorizing on cosmopolitanism from one that primarily addresses an ethico-political set of questions to one that addresses questions related to moral psychology, personal and collective identity formation and the ways in which civilizations and cultural communities cultivate an ethos may assist in the task of generating a rooted form of cosmopolitanism. Conceptualizing cosmopolitanism as an ethos entails a shift from considering our moral obligations to distant others toward a focus on the types of dispositions and character traits necessary to forge a sense of intercultural solidarity. Through an analysis of the ideas of ‘diaspora’, ‘proximity’, ‘partiality' and the ‘foreign’, it will be suggested that through our rootedness in particularity, and our ability to be partial to particular persons and identify with particular cultures, we are capable of fostering a sense of world citizenship that can serve as a foundation upon which we can secure a tenable global ethic for our pluralistic society.