Sieges, Shipwrecks, andSensible Knaves: Justice and Utility in Butler and Hume

By examining the theories of justice developed by Joseph Butler and David Hume, the author discloses the conceptual limits of their moral naturalism. Butler was unable to accommodate the possibility that justice is, at least to some extent, a social convention. Hume, who more presciently tried to spell out the conventional character of justice, was unable to carry through that project within the framework of his moral naturalism. These limits have gone unnoticed,largely because Butler and Hume have been misinterpreted, their relation misconstrued. Exegetes have persistently misunderstood the differences that divide them, have misconceived the notion of "public utility" in Hume's account of justice, have wrongly interpreted Butler as a forerunner of Immanuel Kant, and have altogether missed the degree to which Hume stands in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas.     

Implementing Trauma-Informed Care in Correctional Treatment and Supervision

ABSTRACT

This article provides a rationale for trauma-informed care (TIC) in correctional services, and challenges readers to think about offending behavior through the lens of trauma. Based on interdisciplinary research and cross-theoretical literature, TIC can help in our quest to develop relevant and successful programs, practices, and policies, and the best methods for delivering them. Using Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s core principles of TIC, this article will make suggestions for the implementation of trauma-informed service delivery and practices across correctional settings. The authors translate trauma-informed concepts into practice behaviors through the acronym SHARE (safety, hope, autonomy, respect, empathy), which honors the principles of TIC recommended by SAMHSA and the principles of effective correctional rehabilitation. TIC in corrections may help improve the desired outcomes of successful re-entry and reduced recidivism.     

ON HELPING ONE'S NEIGHBOR

Few people doubt that severe poverty is a pressing moral issue. But what sorts of obligations, if any, do affluent people have toward the severely poor? If one accepts the idea that one has some obligations to the severely poor there still remains disagreement about the magnitude of this obligation and when it obtains. I consider Peter Singer's influential “shallow pond” argument, which holds that affluent people have greater obligations toward the severely poor than ordinary moral judgments suggest. Critics hold that Singer's view is excessively demanding and therefore untenable. I thus turn to the parable of the Good Samaritan and Christian accounts of neighbor‐love to help attenuate this criticism. Drawing from Christian conversations on neighbor‐love, I attempt to demonstrate that accepting an obligation to assist does not necessarily result in one abandoning one's special relations, abnegating self‐regard, or no longer pursuing other non‐moral strivings.     

METANOIA AND HEALING: TOWARD A GREAT PLAINS LAND ETHIC

A Great Plains land ethic is shaped by an intimate knowledge of and appreciation for the evolution, ecology, and aesthetics of the plains landscape. The landscape evokes a sense of wonder and mystery suggested by the word "sacrament." The biblical concept of "covenant" points to God as a community-forming power, a creative process that has evolved into the earth community to which we humans belong. In contrast to an anthropocentric ethic which emphasizes human dominion over nature, a Theo-centric land ethic seeks a balance, reflected in Genesis 1–3, between humans who are members of the earth community and moral agents accountable to God for the earth. A land ethic identifies concrete practices of metanoia and healing: agricultural practices to address the loss and degradation of soil; conservation and protection of water sources; utilization of wind and solar energy; and prescribed burning to restore processes vital to the prairie ecosystem. The concept of subsidiarity suggests that practices of metanoia and healing are a combination of wise public policy balanced by personal, family, church, business, and community responsibility.     

Can Norman Daniels Help You Get a Wheelchair? A Commentary on Durocher et al.

Durocher and colleagues (2019) argue that Norman Daniels’s notion of just health could provide a useful framework for decreasing inequities in access to assistive technology. I argue that it would provide limited help for two reasons. First, Daniels’s reliance on normal species functioning as the goal of health care and his assumptions regarding the impact of normal species functioning on reasonable life projects create substantial difficulties for application to assistive technology. Second, although Daniels’s requirements for distributive justice provide a critical starting point for any discussion of health equity, these requirements appear already met within current assistive technology funding schemes.     

Evidence for the Phase Transition from Rule I to Rule II on the Balance Scale Task

A central and recurrent theme in developmental psychology is the question whether development proceeds continuously or discontinuously. This question is difficult to answer because the two types of development may be hard to distinguish. To investigate whether change is discontinuous, one requires a formal model for discontinuous development. Such a model should provide operational, empirical criteria to investigate the nature of development. The cusp model, which is derived from catastrophe theory, is a formal model of discontinuity that provides such criteria. Eight criteria, so-called catastrophe flags, can be derived from the model. Some of these flags are predicted in other models of discontinuity, but others, notably hysteresis, are unique to catastrophe theory. In the present research, it is tested whether the transition from Rule I to Rule II on the balance scale task proceeds discontinuously. The present research centers around five catastrophe flags: bimodality, inaccessible region, sudden jump, divergence, and hysteresis. Two experiments are reported. In Experiment 1, a paper-and-pencil version of the balance scale task was administered to 314 children who were 6 to 10 years old. In Experiment 2, an adapted version of the test was administered to 302 children who were 6 to 10 years old. Bimodality, inaccessible region, hysteresis, and sudden jump were clearly observed. Divergence was not observed. The presence of four of the five flags strongly supports the hypothesis that the transition from Rule I to Rule II is discontinuous.     

Science,Social Scientisation and Hybridisation of Knowledges

ABSTRACT

The contestation between mainstream science and counter-science is a longstanding phenomenon. The current issue of Science as Culture addresses the need for scientists to consciously engage in a broad-spectrum science that simultaneously focuses its lens on the social and natural dimensions of the universe. The question of how this objective can be achieved by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars is, therefore, the main thrust of this special issue.     

READING HAUERWAS IN THE CORNBELT: The Demise of the American Dream and the Return of Liturgical Politics

In this paper I examine criticism of Hauerwas's critique of American democracy and liberalism, and of American violence and war, as sectarian and politically irrelevant. This twin account has the merit of engaging his critics from left and right. I show that his critique of American Christians, and their support of America's ways of promoting justice and freedom at home and in the world, has analogies with Foucault's genealogical project in France, and represents a more powerful critique of American imperialism and militarism, and of a compliant church, than efforts to sustain the purchase of rights talk or liberal justice in contemporary theological ethics.     

Four Faces of Fair Subject Selection

Abstract

Although the principle of fair subject selection is a widely recognized requirement of ethical clinical research, it often yields conflicting imperatives, thus raising major ethical dilemmas regarding participant selection. In this paper, we diagnose the source of this problem, arguing that the principle of fair subject selection is best understood as a bundle of four distinct sub-principles, each with normative force and each yielding distinct imperatives: (1) fair inclusion; (2) fair burden sharing; (3) fair opportunity; and (4) fair distribution of third-party risks. We first map out these distinct sub-principles, and then identify the ways in which they yield conflicting imperatives for the design of inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the recruitment of participants. We then offer guidance for how decision makers should navigate these conflicting imperatives to ensure that participants are selected fairly.     

Knowledge and Justice: A Comment

ABSTRACT

Epistemic justice projects are now one of the most important sites of science studies scholarship and engagement. The papers in this collection make clear that we divorce science and technology from questions of power at our peril, if we are to understand what generates and remediates the inequalities that past and extant knowledge creation and distribution systems have wrought. Expertise and experts are the conceptual anchors for these articles, and they offer quite different perspectives on whether expertise and counter-expertise are the terrain on which epistemic justice struggles ought to be fought. Some challenge older conceptualizations of expertise as narrow and specific, providing new evidence and frameworks for treating epistemes that are heterogeneous and boundary-crossing as means to justice; others demonstrate that acting on concerns as purely technical matters can provide strategic advantages; and others make clear that formally trained experts are neither welcome nor visible in technopolitical justice struggles. Reflected in the innovative approaches that the papers take, a second major contribution of the collection is to show why inclusion is itself a just goal, and a means to uncovering stories of injustice, technical innovations, and visions of the future that can offer new pathways to justice. The collection inspires new directions in sts, including which stories, and by whom, matter and why, and how attention to innovation can be balanced with attention to the extant, and to history.