Gratitude and Good Government

I attempt to show that it is notphilosophically incompetent to ground politicalobligation in feelings of gratitude. But theargument needs to be stated carefully.Gratitude must be distinguished fromreciprocity. It applies only to good governmentwhich provides benefits to citizens for whichthey ought to feel grateful. It applies only tocitizens who accept that their feelings ofgratitude are properly demonstrated by anacceptance on their part of the duties ofcitizenship. It does not apply to citizenswhose benefits are purchased at the expense ofthe unjust treatment of fellow citizens.     

Is Political Cognition Like Riding a Bicycle? How Cognitive Neuroscience Can Inform Research on Political Thinking

Our understanding of political phenomena, including political attitudes and sophistication, can be enriched by incorporating the theories and tools of cognitive neuroscience—in particular, the cognitive neuroscience of nonconscious habitual cognition (akin to bicycle riding). From this perspective, different types of informational "building blocks" can be construed from which different types of political attitudes may arise. A reflection-reflexion model is presented that describes how these blocks combine to produce a given political attitude as a function of goals, primes, expertise, and inherent conflict in considerations relevant to the attitude. The ways in which neuroimaging methods can be used to test hypotheses of political cognition are reviewed.     

Mars and Venus at Twilight: A Critical Investigation of Moralism, Age Effects, and Sex Differences

Analysts have long sought to understand whether women and men have different ethical orientations. Some researchers have argued that women and men consistently make fundamentally different ethical judgments, especially of corruption; others have found no such disparities. This study considered whether an individual's age may also play a role in determining his or her moral judgment. A statistical investigation of interactive effects between gender and age in a nationally representative data set from Japan shows that this interaction functions better as a predictor of moralism than do education or gender alone. Older individuals of both sexes were found to have similar strict moral perceptions; as women and men age, their ethical judgments converge.     

Democratic Moral Education and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit

How far is Thomas Aquinas available for current discussions in political philosophy? While there are certainly things to be learned from him about our political preoccupations, the pedagogy of his moral teaching typically resists our familiar questions. This holds even when the question is put in terms that Thomas should recognize—say, as a question about the virtues appropriate for a democracy. Thomas not only gives different meanings to these terms, he moves political topics away from the center of theological attention and so organizes them very differently. A reader can notice these differences at many points but perhaps especially in the attention that Thomas gives in the Summa to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. His account of these gifts qualifies significantly what he says of virtue and suggests large limits on human agency, whether in ethics or in politics.     

Adam Smith,Ethicist

This essay argues that Adam Smith's political economy is premised upon a moral anthropology, and that greater attention to Smith from religious ethicists may both improve Smith scholarship and deepen dialogue on economic themes within the field of religious ethics. It does so first by surveying common readings of Smith and noting that engagement of his work within religious ethics and theology tends to rely on misconceptions prevalent in these readings. It then outlines the moral psychology that links Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations and explains the importance of this moral psychology for Smith's ambivalent analysis of commercial society. Reflecting on the case of Smith's work, it concludes by arguing that attention from religious ethicists may also improve contemporary political economic debates, given that they are often premised upon latent assumptions about moral anthropology.     

IS A MESSIANIC POLITICAL ETHIC POSSIBLE? Recent Work by and about John Howard Yoder

In his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially Preface to Theology, in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and The Jewish‐Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder's proposal for a renewed Jewish–Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics.     

BEFORE THE ORIGINAL POSITION: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls

This paper examines a remarkable document that has escaped critical attention within the vast literature on John Rawls, religion, and liberalism: Rawls's undergraduate thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community” (1942). The thesis shows the extent to which a once regnant version of Protestant theology has retreated into seminaries and divinity schools where it now also meets resistance. Ironically, the young Rawls rejected social contract liberalism for reasons that anticipate many of the claims later made against him by secular and religious critics. The thesis and Rawls's late unpublished remarks on religion and World War II offer a new dimension to his intellectual biography. They show the significance of his humanist response to the moral impossibility of political theology. Moreover, they also reveal a kind of Rawlsian piety marginalized by contemporary debates over religion and liberalism.     

How does anybody live in this strange place? A reply to Samantha Vice

Abstract

Samantha Vice has argued that ‘white’ South Africans are so tainted by the history of racial oppression in their country that they are incapable of attaining a great degree of moral virtue. She recommends that they should live in humility and political silence. There are a number of flaws in her argument. First, none of the characteristics of ‘white’ South Africans that she says provides the basis for these conclusions can distinguish (almost) all ‘white’ South Africans from (almost) all ‘black’ South Africans. Second, because it is not only ‘white’ South Africans but everybody in the world who either perpetrates serious injustice or is tainted by others’ perpetration of it, her argument, if sound, would imply that nobody is capable of great virtue and that everybody ought to be politically silent. Finally, her recommendation that ‘white’ South Africans should be politically silent is a very dangerous one.     

"Moralism" and the Gender Gap: Judgments of Political Ethics in Japan

This article investigates whether women are, as many claim, "moralists"—that is, moral and ethical standard-setters who seek clean politics and have strict standards for public officials. An analysis of data from the 1996 Japanese Elections and Democracy Study survey and from 18 focus groups conducted in 1996 indicates that women in Japan are not moralists. As elsewhere, there is a gender gap in Japan on "issue preference sets," with women favoring a "care" agenda, but women assign political ethics less importance than do men, even though women are more likely to see adverse effects from political corruption. Studying people's judgments of four ethics scenarios reveals minimal gender gaps; controlling for education and age, women's judgments overall are less, not more, strict than men's. Among women, age is a better predictor of moralism than education; older women are stricter than younger women on political ethics. This is attributed to gender-based differences in moral reasoning: Japanese women and men both rely heavily on a "relation-based" frame (which is situation-specific and requires extensive social information), but gender stratification patterns create information inequalities. Younger women lack social information necessary for judging political misconduct, whereas older women overcome the information deficit through life experience.