Cosmopolitanism and Global Justice

Philosophical attention to problems about global justice is flourishing in a way it has not in any time in memory. This paper considers some reasons for the rise of interest in the subject and reflects on some dilemmas about the meaning of the idea of the cosmopolitan in reasoning about social institutions, concentrating on the two principal dimensions of global justice, the economic and the political.Opening address of the Mini-Conference on Global Justice, American Philosophical Association Pacific Division, 2004 Annual Meeting, Pasadena, California, March 27, 2004. I am grateful for comments to Darrel Moellendorf and to my copanelists Michael Blake, Kristen Hessler, Jon Mandle, Mathias Risse and Leif Wenar.     

论廉政的伦理内涵

廉政属于伦理范畴和道德规范。文中从“廉”“政”的语义入手,阐述了“廉政”的伦理内涵,探讨了“廉政”伦理内涵的层次。     

Mokken Scale Analysis for Dichotomous Items Using Marginal Models

Scalability coefficients play an important role in Mokken scale analysis. For a set of items, scalability coefficients have been defined for each pair of items, for each individual item, and for the entire scale. Hypothesis testing with respect to these scalability coefficients has not been fully developed. This study introduces marginal modelling as a framework to derive the standard errors for the scaling coefficients and test hypotheses about these coefficients. Several examples demonstrate the possibilities of marginal modelling in Mokken scale analysis. These possibilities include testing whether Mokken’s criteria for a scale are satisfied, testing whether scalability coefficients of different items are equal, and testing whether scalability coefficients are equal across different groups.     

Moral mires and the grip of the group: Morality as internalized group norms

I argue that morality is a set of internalized group norms. It is a reliable guide in a complex social world where group status and membership are not guaranteed by birth, but have to be asserted and maintained continuously. Morality is acquired through the process of socialization when children learn in their experience with peers, from observation of adults, and by instructional stories, such as fairy tales. Failure to internalize group norms results in a clinical condition of Psychopathy, or Antisocial Personality Disorder. Research into Antisocial Personality Disorder suggests that likely pathways of group norm internalization are states of arousal associated with social situations.     

论医生的“道德心”

“心”是中国古代哲学的基本概念,“道心”是儒家修养论的起点和归宿,演绎了完整的修养论。然而,这一传统思路目前在很多研究领域被遗忘,包括医德研究领域。强调尊重传统,用“道德心”来重新衡量医生内在的精神世界,并从祖国传统医学文献的角度,对医德这一常规命题做全新的解读。     

Is choice a reliable predictor of choice? A comment on Sagarin and Skowronski

In a recent working paper, Chen (2008) argues that a methodology central to the cognitive dissonance literature (the free-choice paradigm) has suffered from an inability to separately measure how much choices affect people’s preferences, and how much they simply reflect those preferences, by failing to fully control for the fact that subjects tend to choose goods they prefer. Although Sagarin and Skowronski concede this, they discount Chen’s argument, claiming that for revealed preferences to completely account for observed choice-effects the relationship between choice and preference would have to be unrealistically high. In this comment, we argue that their critique both misses the crux of Chen’s analysis, and is incorrect. Specifically, to properly test whether choices affect preferences, it is essential that researchers experimentally control for revealed preferences rather than speculate how much of a role they may play. Moreover, Sagarin and Skowronski’s critique rests on two fundamental errors—a misunderstanding of the function of the null-hypothesis and a misunderstanding of preference-measurement psychometrics. These errors leads Sagarin and Skowronski to suggest alternative experimental designs which while a good first step, do not address the problems identified in Chen (2008).     

Some reflections on potential abuses of psychology’s knowledge and practices

This article identifies ten implicit and explicit assumptions of Western psychology that are rooted within its cultural history, traditions, and values. Unfortunately, these assumptions have informed and dominated the knowledge and practice of psychology across the world because of historic, cultural, political, and economic reasons. It is now clear, however, that the indiscriminate acceptance and application of Western psychological knowledge and practices constitutes a serious abuse for non-Western people and for ethnic/racial minorities in Western nations. This abuse is often transmitted and exacerbated via the training of international and ethnic minority students who learn to accept Western psychology as universal. In a global community in which all our lives have become interdependent, it is essential Western psychology be re-considered as a “cultural construction” with all the ethnocentric limitations this implies. As a counter, efforts must be made to acknowledge, develop, and transmit the diverse indigenous/national psychologies from across the world.     

Why Euclid’s geometry brooked no doubt: J. H. Lambert on certainty and the existence of models

J. H. Lambert proved important results of what we now think of as non-Euclidean geometries, and gave examples of surfaces satisfying their theorems. I use his philosophical views to explain why he did not think the certainty of Euclidean geometry was threatened by the development of what we regard as alternatives to it. Lambert holds that theories other than Euclid’s fall prey to skeptical doubt. So despite their satisfiability, for him these theories are not equal to Euclid’s in justification. Contrary to recent interpretations, then, Lambert does not conceive of mathematical justification as semantic. According to Lambert, Euclid overcomes doubt by means of postulates. Euclid’s theory thus owes its justification not to the existence of the surfaces that satisfy it, but to the postulates according to which these “models” are constructed. To understand Lambert’s view of postulates and the doubt they answer, I examine his criticism of Christian Wolff’s views. I argue that Lambert’s view reflects insight into traditional mathematical practice and has value as a foil for contemporary, model-theoretic, views of justification.     

THE BROTHERS BONHOEFFER ON SCIENCE, MORALITY, AND THEOLOGY

On one level this is a case study in science, religion, and morality, with special attention to the consequences for morality of science's embeddedness in society. On another level this is the science-and-theology dialogue between the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother Karl-Friedrich, a physicist. The influence of Karl-Friedrich and the brothers' exchanges on Dietrich's prison theology receives special attention. Because this study is set in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, and Karl-Friedrich's work intersected Germany's efforts to develop a nuclear weapon, the discussion leads to Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. The attention there is to the interplay of science, religion, and morality at the time the bomb was detonated at the Trinity site.     

道德与自然:"形上之道"与"形而上学"的本质区别

Both thinkings on Dao in Chinese philosophy and metaphysics in Western philosophy investigate things on a spiritual level that transcends experience, but there are incommensurable differences between them. The objective of “metaphysics” is ontological knowledge about nature from the perspective of epistemological “truth-pursuing”. Western metaphysics is thus a “metaphysics of nature”. Dao in Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, more often manifests itself in “good-pursuing” by means of the internal, experiential pursuit of moral stature and spiritual security. Philosophy of Dao is thus a “metaphysics of ethics”. The cause of this difference can be traced back to the differences between the rational tradition of the West, characterized by the dualism of the subject and the object, and the moral tradition of China, characterized by the integration of man and nature. __________ Translated by Zhang Lin from Lunlixue yanjiu 伦理学研究 (Studies in Ethics), 2007, (4): 62–65