Everyday Morality

This essay explores the nexus between Buddhist discourse, moral reasoning, and aspects of indigenous ethnopsychology in a Shan community in northern Thailand. I suggest that these three strands of thought are routinely braided together in intricate ways and, furthermore, that some version of this conceptual arrangement is necessary in order for any moral thinking to take place. That is, all moral thought entails some conception of the way the world is structured (a conception that may or may not be based on religion) and some ethnotheory of human nature, both of which are culturally mediated. Finally, I discuss the implications of this view for our understanding of human agency and autonomy.     

CICERO, AMBROSE, AND AQUINAS "ON DUTIES"OR THE LIMITS OF GENRE IN MORALS

To compose a Christian book on exemplary Christian living, Ambrose appropriates and criticizes Cicero's book on “duties,”De officiis. In many passages within the moral part of his Summa of Theology, Thomas Aquinas incorporates quotations from both Cicero and Ambrose. Comparison of the three texts raises issues about the relation of genres to terms, arguments, rules, and ideals in religious teaching. Genre becomes a useful category for analyzing religious rhetoric only when it is conceived as a set of persuasive or pedagogical relations below a text's surface disposition.     

虚假医疗信息的道德缺失与伦理重建

伴随着经济和信息技术的发展,医疗信息环境的污染和失衡已严重影响到了医疗卫生事业的健康发展。从虚假医疗信息的表现入手,剖析了虚假医疗信息产生的根源,着重分析了虚假医疗信息的道德缺失,从实际出发提出了具有可操作性的伦理道德重建。     

Reasons,rational requirements,and the putative pseudo-question “Why be moral?”

In this paper, I challenge a well-known argument for the view that “Why be moral?” is a pseudo-question. I do so by refuting a component of that argument, a component that is not only crucial to the argument but important in its own right. That component concerns the status of moral reasons in replies to “Why be moral?”; consequently, this paper concerns reasons and rationality no less than it concerns morality. The work I devote to those topics shows not only that the argument I address is unsound, but that the conclusion of that argument is false. “Why be moral?” is no pseudo-question.     

Spiritual practices children understand: an analysis of Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy,A Wind in the Door

The following essay is a close reading of Madeleine L’Engle’s science fantasy novel, A Wind in the Door, in which young Meg Murry travels first to outer space and then into her younger brother’s ailing cells. The novel is a fine example of high fantasy (also known as heroic fantasy) wherein a humble protagonist is called to a quest to fight a cosmic battle between good and evil. The essay analyzes specific expressions of evil in the novel: impersonality, narcissism, despair and blind empiricism. Meg’s quest demonstrates particular spiritual practices that promote spiritual maturation and the ability to overcome evil: ‘kything’, Naming, deepening and holding. L’Engle portrays these practices in a fresh way that can help both children and adults incorporate them into their day‐to‐day lives. Moreover, there are links between kything and holding and the metta and tonglen, two types of Buddhist meditation. L’Engle affirms children’s innate relational consciousness and presents spiritual practices that are relational, non‐sectarian, practical, and eminently hopeful.     

Heidegger in Mexico: Emilio Uranga’s ontological hermeneutics

“Exiled” Spanish philosopher José Gaos was the first to translate, in its entirety, Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Emilio Uranga, a student of Gaos in Mexico City (exiled since 1938), appropriates Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics in an effort to expose the historico-existential structures making up “lo mexicano,” or Mexicanness. Uranga’s Análisis del ser del mexicano (1952) freely and creatively employs the methods of existential analysis, suggesting that the being-there of the Mexican being is ontologically “insufficient” and “accidental”—modes of being reflected in existential expressions of sentimentality, indifference, and angst particular to this form of life. As a work indebted to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, Analysis of the Being of the Mexican fails to be faithful to this method. This, however, is the source of its value. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: one, to introduce the Anglo–American philosophical readership to Uranga’s existential phenomenology; and, two, to disentangle the lines of thought that make up Uranga’s Análisis and in the process defend Uranga from the possible charge that he ignorantly misappropriates Heidegger’s method.

Is moral phenomenology unified?

In this short paper, I argue that the phenomenology of moral judgment is not unified across different areas of morality (involving harm, hierarchy, reciprocity, and impurity) or even across different relations to harm. Common responses, such as that moral obligations are experienced as felt demands based on a sense of what is fitting, are either too narrow to cover all moral obligations or too broad to capture anything important and peculiar to morality. The disunity of moral phenomenology is, nonetheless, compatible with some uses of moral phenomenology for moral epistemology and with the objectivity and justifiability of parts of morality.     

攻击行为社会信息加工模型与道德领域理论的整合

儿童攻击行为研究中Dodge等人提出的社会信息加工模型,强调社会交互作用情境下个体的信息加工过程与后来的社会行为之间的联系,对于信息加工所依据的数据库则缺乏系统的阐述。领域理论源于对道德认知的思考,将个体的社会知识分为道德、常规和个人三个领域,强调个体在领域认同标准和领域混合事件推理上的差异。Arsenio和Lemerise在情绪与社会信息加工模型整合的基础上,提出借鉴领域理论来说明数据库的内部结构以及其中的社会知识对于信息加工的影响。这些整合体现了认知和情绪在社会行为加工和决策过程中的交互作用,有利于说明存储在长时记忆中的社会知识之间的联系及作用,引发了对各种形式的内部心理成分的理论思考和多个实证研究方向,也为心理研究其他方面的整合工作提供了值得借鉴的研究思路     

论自省

自省具有双重源头:道德感情--或道德志向--和道德智慧.因此,一个人要做到经常且深刻的自省,一方面,必须提高自己的道德认识和道德智慧,树立诸如"美德乃是每个人获得幸福的必要条件"的道德信念;另一方面,必须扩充和强大"做一个有美德的人"的道德欲望、道德感情和道德志向,立志做一个君子、仁人乃至圣人.