In this essay I will discuss the therapeutic application of philosophy in treating what I term “the moral casualties of war.” In doing so, I will develop an etiology of moral injury and focus upon the philosophical reasoning and insights that may be applied in an individual or group setting to foster an understanding of the warexperience as the first treatment step in a long and complex journey to healing.

In this essay I will discuss the therapeutic application of philosophy in treating what I term “the moral casualties of war.” In doing so, I will develop an etiology of moral injury and focus upon the philosophical reasoning and insights that may be applied in an individual or group setting to foster an understanding of the warexperience as the first treatment step in a long and complex journey to healing.

Moral emotions (i.e. guilt, shame) and interpersonal processes such as fairness have been theorised to facilitate cooperation within society. However, empirical tests to support this association have yielded inconsistent results. The present research investigated whether guilt and shame have an impact on fairness-related decision-making and reciprocity-driven cooperation. College students (N = 94) were assigned to one of three experimental conditions (Guilt vs. Shame vs. Control) and instructed to complete an iterated Ultimatum Game against two anonymous partners. We manipulated social context (...) so that one partner would appear as predominantly fair, and the other as predominantly unfair. For guilt, we found that participants (assigned as proposers) reciprocated fair partners with significantly larger amounts of money (i.e. positive reciprocity). For shame, we found that participants had higher rejection rates of unfair splits, and subsequently offered less money to unfair partners (i.e. negative reciprocity). We argue that both guilt and shame benefit fairness-related judgments, guilt by endorsing fairness, and shame by punishing unfairness. Our results also show that guilt and shame benefit reciprocity-driven cooperation, although they do so via different pathways. Our findings suggest that guilt promotes cooperation via positive reciprocity, whereas shame stabilises cooperation via negative reciprocity. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Camillo “Mac” Bica, Ph.D., a former Marine Corps Officer, Vietnam Veteran, and philosopher, provides a cogent analysis of why a veteran may not want to be thanked for his “service” in war. Mac’s experiential and theoretical perspective is both gut wrenching and concise. “The Philosopher speaks from the mind,” Mac writes, “the warrior from where it hurts.” With simplicity, poignancy, and power, this book, together with future installments of the War Legacy Series, works to dispel (...) the mythology of nobility and heroism by providing a window into the reality of war and its devastating effects upon all who experience its horrors. (shrink)

In this review article, I situate Michela Massimi’s 2022 Perspectival Realism book in the broader state of the art of the contemporary philosophy of science by examining critically its contribution to the perspectival realism debate. Setting up a new agenda of philosophical problems for the perspectival realist, Massimi’s book is the most comprehensive assessment of perspectival realism since the publication of Giere’s 2006 Giere, Ronald. Ed. 2006. Scientific Perspectivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar] Scientific Perspectivism (the starting (...) point of the debate). The author carries out a scrupulous analysis of the historical, epistemological, and metaphysical foundations of perspectival realism—while she engages critically with the existing literature, she does so by giving a generous homage to the previous contributions to the state of the art (the works of Giere, Morrison, van Fraassen and others). However, I raise a batterie of questions about Massimi’s (perspectival) commitments, to bring into question the reach and the ambitions of her global project, specifically the rising tension between her modest epistemological beliefs in a plurality of culturally and historically situated perspectives and her ambitious metaphysical commitments towards a primitivist view about laws of nature. (shrink)