Two Books for Teachers

Murphy, Nancey and Ellis, George F. R. On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics
Haught, John F. Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation     

Naturalistic observations of pathological behavior in hospitalized psychiatric patients

Naturalistic observations were conducted on 19 acutely ill psychiatric patients in the hospital ward milieu. The study was designed to determine relationships between selected social and environment variables and overt atypical behavior. Patients were observed on an individual basis with time-sampling techniques. In total, 16 pathological behaviors were coded and the most frequent (postural deviance, pace, agitation, hyperactivity, withdrawal, foot shake/body sway, leg swing) were selected in order to determine variation in frequency of these behaviors as a function of the following variables: area within hospital, week of hospitalization, distance between the focal subject and his/her nearest neighbor, number of people in an area, and time of day. Results showed differential changes in pathological behavior as a function of week of hospitalization, number of people in a given area, and distance from the focal subject's nearest neighbor. There was no significant change in the frequency of pathological behaviors as a function of area within hospital or time of day. In addition, most pathological behaviors decreased significantly when patients were engaged in the sending or receiving of verbal behavior. Cluster analyses revealed varying degrees of dissociation between pathological behaviors and social-interaction behaviors. These results support (a) a nonunitary concept of the general category pathological and (b) the view that there are inhibitory effects of social interaction on the enactment of atypical behaviors. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.R.H.P. completed this research during his tenure as a postdoctocal fellow in the Department of Psychiatry, Human Ethology Laboratory, UCLA (NIMH Fellowship 1 F32MHO7627-01). Support for this research also came from the Veterans Administration.     

Observing a client's grieving process: bringing logical positivism into qualitative grief counselling research

This positional paper originates from our need as researcher/practitioners to establish a meaningful epistemological framework for research into bereaved people's journey through loss and grief over time. We describe how the field of grief research has a long and established biological basis, in keeping with a positivist epistemology. However, there has been a diminution of the influence of logical positivism in twenty-first-century counselling research. We argue that in grief counselling research, naturalistic observation of the grieving process within a logical positivist paradigm, remains a valid and valuable construct. We posit an observational protocol for the grief counselling process which minimises the intrusion of research method into the therapeutic process. We offer this as a means of conducting qualitative research within a bereavement counselling service. Further, we suggest that the development of an observational protocol for a client's grieving process has potential implications for developing good practice in grief work.     

INCREASING OUR COMPASSION FOOTPRINT: THE ANIMALS' MANIFESTO

Our relationships with animals are wide‐ranging. When people tell me that they love animals and then harm or kill them I tell them I'm glad they don't love me. Many individuals, including scientists, ignore their responsibility when they interact with animals and fail to recognize that doing something in the name of science, which usually means in the name of humans, is not an adequate reason for intentionally causing suffering, pain, or death. “Good welfare” usually is not “good enough”. Existing regulations allow animals to be treated in regrettable ways that demean us as a species. Compassion is the key for bettering both animal and human lives. A good way to make the world a more compassionate place for animals is to increase our compassion footprint. We could begin by deciding that we will not intrude on animals' lives unless our actions are in the best interests of the animals irrespective of our desires. It is simple to make more compassionate choices about what we eat and wear and how we educate students, conduct research, and entertain ourselves at the expense of animals. The time to make these changes is long overdue.     

MORAL APES, HUMAN UNIQUENESS, AND THE IMAGE OF GOD

Recent advances in evolutionary biology and ethology suggest that humans are not the only species capable of empathy and possibly morality. These findings are of no little consequence for theology, given that a nonhuman animal as a free moral agent would beg the question if human beings are indeed uniquely created in God's image. I argue that apes and some other mammals have moral agency and that a traditional interpretation of the imago Dei is incorrectly equating specialness with exclusivity. By framing the problem in terms of metaphor, following the work of Paul Ricoeur and Sallie McFague, I propose that the concept of the imago Dei could be extended to accommodate moral species other than our own.     

Cognitive Science: What One Needs to Know

Cognitive science is a new paradigm that informs and involves several disciplines, including artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, cognitive ethology, and the philosophy of mind. Cognitive science studies the mind as an information processor, with the computer often operating as a metaphor for the operations of the mind. Developments in the cognitive sciences stand to affect tremendously how we think of the mind and, consequently, how we think of theological and religious claims that concern the human subject. The unity of self, claims of human uniqueness, the relation of mind and body, human nature, and the personal agency of God are all areas of religious import in which the cognitive sciences need to be taken into account.     

Ethics and the Science of Animal Minds

Ethicists have commonly appealed to science to bolster their arguments for elevating the moral status of nonhuman animals. I describe a framework within which I take many ethicists to be making such appeals. I focus on an apparent gap in this framework between those properties of animals that are part of the scientific consensus, and those to which ethicists typically appeal in their arguments. I will describe two different ways of diminishing the appearance of the gap, and argue that both of them present challenges to ethicists seeking a firm scientific basis for their claims about the moral status of animals. I argue that more clarity about the role of appeals to science by applied ethicists leads to questions about the effectiveness of such appeals, and that these questions might best be pursued empirically.     

评侵犯行为的习性学理论

习性学是对侵犯行为进行过系统阐释的社会心理学体系之一。本文在概要考察习性学背景的基础上,全面评述了习性学的侵犯行为理论,并分析了它的人文价值及其面临的挑战。     

ANIMALS,ANIMISTS, AND ACADEMICS

Abstract. Animism is the label given to worldviews in which the world is understood to be a community of living persons, only some of whom are human. (An older use of the term to label a putative “belief in spirits” is less useful.) Animists inculcate locally meaningful means of communicating with other‐than‐human persons, especially in order to express respect. Ethnographic accounts of particular animist ways of engaging with animal persons are noted. I argue that ethologists interested in engaging respectfully with animals while researching cognition, behavior, and other critical issues may find their research methods and results enhanced by learning from animists about tested methods of communicating with animals. The mediation of animists in this communicative engagement between animals and those who research among them is proposed not as a romantic gloss on modernist culture but in full recognition that the challenge offered by dialogue with marginalized and excluded “others” may result in a reconfiguration of academic protocols. Nonetheless, this entry into full relationality is seriously posed as an improved means of achieving established goals of understanding animals, humans, and the world we coinhabit.     

“GOING TO THE DOGS”: CANID ETHOLOGY AND THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION

Abstract. Theological reflection often treats animals in the very broadest terms and establishes a dramatic difference between humans and animals. Empirical observations, however, describe animals and their relationship to humans in more nuanced ways. Marc Bekoff's science, which integrates ethology and ecology, generates a view of the complex social behaviors of animals and entails observations about difference. Dialogue with Bekoff's sensitive awareness of animal behavior is the occasion to construct a theology of nature that is better informed about diversity among animals and differences within and among species.