Coherence and disagreement

I wish to thank Lars Bergström, Carl Ginet, Joseph Moore, Christian Munthe, Torbjörn Tännsjö, and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The remaining errors are of course my own.     

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Depression: A Preliminary Randomized Clinical Trial for Unemployed on Long-Term Sick Leave

This preliminary study investigated the feasibility of a brief Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in a Swedish sample of unemployed individuals on long-term sick leave due to depression. Participants were randomized to a nonstandardized control condition (N = 16) or to the ACT condition (N = 18) consisting of 1 individual and 5 group sessions. From pretreatment to 18-month follow-up the ACT participants improved significantly on measures of depression, general health, and quality of life compared to participants in the control condition. The conditions did not differ regarding sick leave and employment status at any time point. The results indicate that ACT is a promising treatment for depression. The need for further refinements of future ACT protocols for this population is discussed.     

Crispin Wright on Moral Disagreement

Wright argues that if there are moral disagreements that cannot be attributed to inferential error, ignorance of relevant data or some similar form of deficiency (i.e., what I call 'radical' disagreements), then moral realists are committed to the view that moral truths are evidence-transcendent. Moreover, since he thinks that this view is implausible and that moral disagreements can indeed be radical, he has suggested that we should reject realism here. I indicate how a realist can respond to this challenge, by offering two arguments to the effect that a realist might plausibly hold that moral disagreements can never be found to be radical. However, this is not so much intended to be a defence of moral realism as a critique of Wright's basic strategy, since a similar defence may be provided in support of realism about any (minimally truth-apt) discourse.     

The Dynamic Interaction of Personal Norms and Environment‐Friendly Buying Behavior: A Panel Study1

A deeper understanding of the attitude–norm–behavior relationship in the environmental field can be obtained by analyzing the dynamic interaction over time between relevant attitudinal variables and specific behaviors of interest. This article is based on a panel survey with a random sample of about 1,500 Danes interviewed up to 3 times in 1998 to 2000, regarding their purchase of organic food products. The panel analysis reveals that the stronger are consumers' personal norms about buying organic food products and the less they perceive organic products as expensive, the greater the likelihood that they change their purchase patterns in favor of organic products. Furthermore, one can observe significant cross‐lagged paths from past behavior to belief and norm variables.     

The reliability of moral intuitions: A challenge from neuroscience

A recent study of moral intuitions, performed by Joshua Greene and a group of researchers at Princeton University, has recently received a lot of attention. Greene and his collaborators designed a set of experiments in which subjects were undergoing brain scanning as they were asked to respond to various practical dilemmas. They found that contemplation of some of these cases (cases where the subjects had to imagine that they must use some direct form of violence) elicited greater activity in certain areas of the brain associated with emotions compared with the other cases. It has been argued (e.g., by Peter Singer) that these results undermine the reliability of our moral intuitions, and therefore provide an objection to methods of moral reasoning that presuppose that they carry an evidential weight (such as the idea of reflective equilibrium). I distinguish between two ways in which Greene's findings lend support for a sceptical attitude towards intuitions. I argue that, given the first version of the challenge, the method of reflective equilibrium can easily accommodate the findings. As for the second version of the challenge, I argue that it does not so much pose a threat specifically to the method of reflective equilibrium but to the idea that moral claims can be justified through rational argumentation in general.