脑死亡立法的伦理辩护

"脑死亡"立法是必要的并可以得到充分的伦理辩护:尊重人,特别是尊重人的自主性是"脑死亡"立法的伦理基础."脑死亡"立法符合有利和公平的伦理原则,符合功利主义伦理学追求社会利益最大化的目的.但我们在立法时,应尽量贯彻不伤害原则,注意保护患者及其亲属的利益.     

A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo

Most theories in social and political psychology stress self-interest, intergroup conflict, ethnocentrism, homophily, ingroup bias, outgroup antipathy, dominance, and resistance. System justification theory is influenced by these perspectives—including social identity and social dominance theories—but it departs from them in several respects. Advocates of system justification theory argue that (a) there is a general ideological motive to justify the existing social order, (b) this motive is at least partially responsible for the internalization of inferiority among members of disadvantaged groups, (c) it is observed most readily at an implicit, nonconscious level of awareness and (d) paradoxically, it is sometimes strongest among those who are most harmed by the status quo. This article reviews and integrates 10 years of research on 20 hypotheses derived from a system justification perspective, focusing on the phenomenon of implicit outgroup favoritism among members of disadvantaged groups (including African Americans, the elderly, and gays/lesbians) and its relation to political ideology (especially liberalism-conservatism).     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
James Campbell, Recovering Benjamin Franklin
Elliot L. Jurist, Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture, and Agency     

A Coherentist Theory of Normative Authority

What makes an ``ought'' claim authoritative? What makes aparticular norm genuinely reason-giving for an agent? This paper arguesthat normative authority can best be accounted for in terms of thejustification of norms. The main obstacle to such a theory, however, isa regress problem. The worry is that every attempt to offer ajustification for an ``ought'' claim must appeal to another ``ought''claim, ad infinitum. The paper argues that vicious regress canbe avoided in practical reasoning in the same way coherentists avoid theproblem in epistemology. Norms are justified by their coherence withother norms.     

Verisimilitude and the Dynamicsof Scientific Research Programmes

Some peculiarities of the evaluation of theories within scientific research programmes (SRPs) and of the assessing of rival SRPs are described assuming that scientists try to maximise an ‘epistemic utility function’ under economic and institutional constraints. Special attention is given to Lakatos' concepts of ‘empirical progress’ and ‘theoretical progress’. A notion of ‘empirical verisimilitude’ is defended as an appropriate utility function. The neologism ‘methodonomics’ is applied to this kind of studies. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Regret in Decision Making

Decision research has only recently started to take seriously the role of emotions in choices and decisions. Regret is the emotion that has received the most attention. In this article, we sample a number of the initial regret studies from psychology and economics, and trace some of the complexities and contradictions to which they led. We then sketch a new theory, decision justification theory (DJT), which synthesizes several apparently conflicting findings. DJT postulates two core components of decision–related regret, one associated with the (comparative) evaluation of the outcome, the other with the feeling of self–blame for having made a poor choice. We reinterpret several existing studies in DJT terms. We then report some new studies that directly tested (and support) DJT, and propose a number of research issues that follow from this new approach to regret.     

Reconciliation and Forgiveness in an Unjust Society

Justification by faith necessarily leads to justice in society. IN post–apartheid South Africa, reconciliation has required truth telling plus confession and, most importantly, land redistribution. Failure at land redistribution in Zimbabwe has reduced the effectiveness of the post–colonial reconciliation program and perpetuated previous injustice.     

Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through the Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens

ABSTRACT— We propose that people protect the belief in a controlled, nonrandom world by imbuing their social, physical, and metaphysical environments with order and structure when their sense of personal control is threatened. We demonstrate that when personal control is threatened, people can preserve a sense of order by (a) perceiving patterns in noise or adhering to superstitions and conspiracies, (b) defending the legitimacy of the sociopolitical institutions that offer control, or (c) believing in an interventionist God. We also present evidence that these processes of compensatory control help people cope with the anxiety and discomfort that lacking personal control fuels, that it is lack of personal control specifically and not general threat or negativity that drives these processes, and that these various forms of compensatory control are ultimately substitutable for one another. Our model of compensatory control offers insight into a wide variety of phenomena, from prejudice to the idiosyncratic rituals of professional athletes to societal rituals around weddings, graduations, and funerals.     

Effects of status and outcome on attributions and just-world beliefs: How the social distribution of success and failure may be rationalized

The distribution of success and failure to social groups is supported by lay theories about the characteristics of social groups and the causes of their outcomes, as well as by beliefs about entitlement of groups to succeed or fail. This paper presents a study where a target individual’s socio-economic status (high vs. low) and outcome in a major academic achievement task (success vs. failure) were manipulated in a 2 × 2 experimental design. It was found that high-status success and low-status failure, i.e. the system-consistent outcomes, were attributed relatively more to stable internal causes (ability), whereas high-status failure and low-status success, i.e. the system-inconsistent outcomes, were attributed relatively more to unstable causes (effort). Second, participants’ belief in a just world was higher in high-status success and low-status failure than in high-status failure and low-status success.     

Inference and update

We look at two fundamental logical processes, often intertwined in planning and problem solving: inference and update. Inference is an internal process with which we uncover what is implicit in the information we already have. Update, on the other hand, is produced by external communication, usually in the form of announcements and in general in the form of observations, giving us information that might not have been available (even implicitly) before. Both processes have received attention from the logic community, usually separately. In this work, we develop a logical language that allows us to describe them together. We present syntax, semantics and a complete axiom system; we discuss similarities and differences with other approaches and mention how the work can be extended.