Life-Prolonging Killings and their Relevance to Ethics

What makes killing morally wrong? And what makes killing morally worse than letting die? Standard answers to these two questions presuppose that killing someone involves shortening that person's life. Yet, as I argue in the first two sections of this article, this presupposition is false: Life-prolonging killings are conceivable. In the last two sections of the article, I explore the significance of the conceivability of such killings for various discussions of the two questions just mentioned. In particular, I show why the conceivability of life-prolonging killings renders Frances M. Kamm's attempt to provide an answer to the second question problematic.     

Moral Responsibility, Determinism, and the Ability to do Otherwise

In his classic paper, The Principle of Alternate Possibilities, Harry Frankfurt presented counterexamples to the principle named in his title: A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. He went on to argue that the falsity of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) implied that the debate between the compatibilists and the incompatibilists (as regards determinism and the ability to do otherwise) did not have the significance that both parties had attributed to it -- since moral responsibility could exist even if no one was able to do otherwise. I have argued that even if PAP is false, there are other principles that imply that moral responsibility entails the ability to do otherwise, and that these principles are immune to Frankfurt-style counterexamples. Frankfurt has attempted to show that my arguments for this conclusion fail. This paper is a rejoinder to that reply; I argue that he has failed to show this.     

大五人格理论与人事测评中的人格结构分析

本研究以工商企业人事选拔工作中参与实际测评的成人被试为研究对象,采用因素分析方法对中国成人人格的内隐结构进行了分析,并对所获取得主要特质因素与大五人格理论模型的关系和差别进行了探讨。     

Comorbidity in schizophrenia: A prognostic study of personality disorders in recovered and non-recovered schizophrenia patients

Symptoms and outcome in schizophrenia are heterogeneous. Part of the variation in outcome might be due to the coexistence of other forms of psychopathology. In the present study the prevalence of personality disorders in a group of recovered and non-recovered schizophrenia patients was focused to examine the prognostic implications of comorbidity for the outcome of the disorder. The results showed no significant differences in prevalence of personality disorders in the two groups at first admission to the hospital, but the difference at the time of interview was close to significance. Emotional and conduct difficulties in adolescence were significantly more prevalent in the non-recovered group. Schizoid features and emotional and conduct disorders in childhood were also more often reported among the non-recovered subjects. The results confirm that comorbidity contributes to the variation in outcome for schizophrenia patients, but does not confirm its prognostic significance.     

Debate,Prophecy, and Revolution: Notes on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt

In Prophecy without Contempt, Cathleen Kaveny argues that prevailing scholarly approaches to religious and public discourse misunderstand the actual complexity of moral rhetoric in America. She endeavors to provide a better account through study of the role the Puritan jeremiad has played. Kaveny then offers a normative case for deliberative public moral discourse and the limited exercise of prophetic denunciation. I argue that Kaveny's distinction between deliberation and prophetic denunciation is overdrawn. They are ideal types that elide other rhetorical forms. Moreover, both deliberative discourse and prophetic denunciation assume a social contract or shared tradition. Healthy moral discourse requires revolutionary rhetoric to interrogate and break traditions that are themselves morally compromised.     

Are Conservatives Less Likely to be Prosocial Than Liberals? From Games to Ideology,Political Preferences and Voting

Do political preferences reflect individual differences in interpersonal orientations? Are conservatives less other‐regarding than liberals? On the basis of past theorising, we hypothesised that, relative to individuals with prosocial orientations, those with individualistic and competitive orientations should be more likely to endorse conservative political preferences and vote for conservative parties. This hypothesis was supported in three independent studies conducted in Italy (Studies 1 and 2) and the Netherlands (Study 3). Consistent with hypotheses, a cross‐sectional study revealed that individualists and competitors endorsed stronger conservative political preferences than did prosocials; moreover, this effect was independent of the association between need for structure and conservative political preferences (Study 1). The predicted association of social value orientation and voting was observed in both a four‐week (Study 2) and an eight‐month (Study 3) longitudinal study. Taken together, the findings provide novel support for the claim that interpersonal orientations, as measured with experimental games rooted in game theory, are important to understanding differences in ideology at the societal level. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Capturing the Structure of Distinct Types of Individual Differences in the Situation‐specific Experience of Emotions: The Case of Anger

The aim of this paper was to understand why some people experience certain emotions in a specific situation, whereas others do not. We postulate that these individual differences arise from individual differences in two underlying processes of emotion elicitation: (i) individual differences in the emotion components (appraisals and action tendencies) that situations activate in a person and (ii) individual differences in how these emotion components are related to subjective emotional experience. In this paper, we re‐analysed data from two studies on anger to capture the structure of these two types of individual differences by using clustering modelling techniques. Consistent results across the two studies demonstrated that individuals differ in anger because they (i) differ in how easy they experience anger‐relevant appraisals (Studies 1 and 2) and action tendencies (Study 2) in increasingly negative situations and (ii) differ in which of these components are necessary to experience anger. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retribution and Restoration as General Orientations Towards Justice

We proposed two distinct understandings of what justice means to victims and what its restoration entails that are reflected in individual‐level justice orientations. Individuals with a retributive orientation conceptualize justice as the unilateral imposition of just deserts against the offender. In contrast, individuals with a restorative orientation conceptualize justice as achieving a renewed consensus about the shared values violated by the offence. Three studies showed differential relations between these two justice orientations and various individual‐level values/ideologies and predicted unique variance in preferences for concrete justice‐restoring interventions, judicial processes and abstract justice restoration goals. The pattern of results lends validity to the understanding of justice as two distinct conceptualizations, a distinction that provides much needed explanation for divergent preferences for injustice responses. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.