In the past, human violence was associated with food shortage, but recently it has increased even in relatively well-fed societies. The reason appears from studies of monkeys under relaxed, spacious conditions and under crowding stress. Uncrowded monkeys have unaggressive leaders, rarely quarrel, and protect females and young. Crowded monkeys (even well-fed) have brutal bosses, often quarrel, and wound and kill each other, including females and young. Crowding has similar behaviour effects on other mammals, with physiological disturbances including greater susceptibility to (...) infections. All this appears to be a regular response to overpopulation, reducing the population before it has depleted its natural resources. Human beings, like monkeys and other mammals, need ample space, and become more violent when crowded. Human history is marked by population cycles: population outgrows resources, the resulting violence, stress and disease mortality cuts down the population, leading to a relief period of social and cultural progress, till renewed population growth produces the next crisis. The modern population crisis is world-wide, and explains the increase of violence even in well-fed societies. The solution to the problem of violence is to substitute voluntary birth control for involuntary death control, and bring about relaxed conditions for a reduced world population. (shrink)

Izard (2010) did not seek a descriptive definition of emotion—one that describes the concept as it is used by ordinary folk. Instead, he surveyed scientists’ prescriptive definitions—ones that prescribe how the concept should be used in theories of emotion. That survey showed a lack of agreement today and thus raised doubts about emotion as a useful scientific concept.

In the academic world, a researcher's number of publications can carry huge professional and financial rewards. This truth has led to many unethical authorship assignments throughout the world of publishing, including within faculty-student collaborations. Although the American Psychological Association passed a revised code of ethics in 1992 with special rules pertaining to such collaborative efforts, it is widely acknowledged that unethical assignments of authorship credit continue to occur regularly. This study found that of the 604 APA-member respondents, 165 felt they (...) had been involved in an unethical or unfair authorship assignment. Furthermore, nontenured faculty members and women were statistically more likely to be involved in an unethical or unfair assignment of authorship credit than tenured faculty members or men. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

This book introduces and showcases contributions from leading international scholars on the topic of "divine action" in the world, with special attention on the ...

In the past few decades, awareness around gender-based violence has expanded on a global scale with increased attention in global treaties, organizations, and conferences. Previously a taboo topic, it is now viewed as a human rights violation in the broader world culture. Drawing on a quantitative analysis of 568 textbooks from 76 countries from across the world, we examine the extent to which this growing global attention to GBV has filtered down into national educational curricula. We find that textbook discussions (...) of GBV are more prevalent in the post-1993 period and are linked to discussions of women’s rights. In addition, discussions of GBV are more common in countries with more linkages to the global women’s movement. Findings from our study underscore the influence of the women’s rights movement and the radical feminist perspective on the reframing of GBV as a human rights issue. (shrink)

The theory of evolution sparked a series of questions about the origins of moral judgments and the underpinning principles. In particular, it reinforced the debate about moral nativism. In this paper we scrutinize two research programs that advocate respectively the existence of an innate ability to judge morally and a predisposition to moralize behaviors with certain contents. The best-known version of moral nativism argues for the existence of a moral grammar, by analogy with the Chomskyan model of principles and parameters (...) in linguistics. The second program argues for the existence of a moral domain, i.e., of a small set of moral intuitions found in all societies. We critically evaluate the arguments commonly used to ground both theories: ease of learning even in face of poverty of stimulus; the principle of double effect; the pre-established order of moral development in individuals; universality and antiquity of the moral phenomenon. We are concerned with how they fare at relevant contemporary research in Cognitive Science and meet constructivist arguments proposed by Jesse Prinz and Kim Sterelny, among others. We found out that there is little evidence that our moral judgments follow the model of principles and parameters, although it can be useful as a heuristic device for guiding future research. At the same time, ease of learning suggests that the human brain is somehow prepared to learn moral rules and that the types of rule we adopt are constrained by our biology. Furthermore, the fact that the capacity to make moral judgments develops according to a similar schedule in different cultures indicates that it is an endogenous one. Although it depends, for sure, on the existence of culture, it is not reducible to cultural phenomena. Based on a distinction made by Darwin between social instincts and intellectual powers we argue that thinking in a normative way requires being aware of the grounds of our beliefs and actions, and this implies self-consciousness. It is difficult to discern if morality is an adaptation or just a spandrel. Even if it might have emerged as a side effect in our evolutionary history, it might have undergone subsequent adaptive structural changes, possibly because of interactions with cultural dynamics. (shrink)

This book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or "phronesis"--an excellence of deliberating and making choices--which ...

Virtue ethicists sometimes say that a right action is what a virtuous person would do, characteristically, in the circumstances. But some have objected recently that right action cannot be defined as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances because there are circumstances in which a right action is possible but in which no virtuous person would be found. This objection moves from the premise that a given person ought to do an action that no virtuous person would do, (...) to the conclusion that the action is a right action. I demon‐strate that virtue ethicists distinguish “ought” from “right” and reject the assumption that “ought” implies “right.” I then show how their rejection of that assumption blocks this “right but not virtuous” objection. I conclude by showing how the thesis that “ought” does not imply “right” can clarify a further dispute in virtue ethics regarding whether “ought” implies “can.”. (shrink)

Many libertarians believe that self-ownership is a separate matter from ownership of extra-personal property. “No-proviso” libertarians hold that property ownership should be free of any “fair share” constraints, on the grounds that the inability of the very poor to control property leaves their self-ownership intact. By contrast, left-libertarians hold that while no one need compensate others for owning himself, still property owners must compensate others for owning extra-personal property. What would a “self” have to be for these claims to be (...) true? I argue that both of these camps must conceive of the boundaries of the self as including one's body but no part of the extra-personal world. However, other libertarians draw those boundaries differently, so that self-ownership cannot be separated from the right to control extra-personal property after all. In that case, property ownership must be subject to a fair share constraint, but that constraint does not require appropriators to pay compensation. This view, which I call “right libertarianism,” differs importantly from the other types primarily in its conception of the self, which I argue is independently more plausible. (shrink)

The programme of physicians and surgeons during the ‘late’ phase of the Paris Hospital incorporated efforts to codify the most efficient ways of defining disease. Those efforts involved reckoning the probability, the specificity, and most consistently, the localization of disease entities. One of the most frequently encountered of such entities was pleuritis. Pleuritis is therefore used here as a ‘marker’ through which to investigate how Auguste Chomel and others carried forward the programme of codification. A conspicuous feature of that programme (...) was a highly ritualized system of pedagogical organization in the clinique médicale. (shrink)

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

Daniel Russell develops a fresh and original view of pleasure and its pivotal role in Plato's treatment of value, happiness, and human psychology. This is the first full-length discussion of the topic for fifty years, and Russell shows its relevance to contemporary debates in moral philosophy and philosophical psychology. Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life will make fascinating reading for ancient specialists and for a wide range of philosophers.

The boundaries of psychology have never been very distinctly defined and, as a consequence, science has witnessed frequent border incidents. But it obviously is not psychology alone which suffers from such lack of delineation, but its neighbors, the biological and social sciences, do as well. Cooperation between sciences becomes difficult under these conditions. All agree that psychology is the science of mind, but few agree to what “mind” is. At least within our century “mind” has been taken to be “behavior”, (...) for the present day outlook is that mind is behavior rather than that which is responsible for behavior. The metaphysical dynamism of a prime mover has been replaced by an experimental concept, i.e., one that is susceptible to scientific investigation. There is no need to review the complex history of behavioristic psychology in its many ramifications, ranging from Watson's mechanism to the various vitalistic teleologies. We turn instead to a fundamental problem on which there is little agreement: “What kind of behavior should be called mind?”. (shrink)

We begin by accepting that introspective evidence is important to cognitive science. However, as its history shows, introspection is risky, so methods should be used that minimize those risks. We argue that there are 13 ways that a beeper can reduce those risks, dividing those ways into three categories: time sampling per se, minimizing the reactive disturbance of evanescent phenomena, and aiding phenomenological fidelity. We turn aside six criticisms of beeper-based research, and describe five characteristics of a good beep.

John Muir can be interpreted to have employed a similar strategy in his earliest conservation advocacy writings as the strategy Ralph Waldo Emerson employed to overcome the public futility of his personal ideals. Like Emerson, Muir came to offset the despair he felt at the political impotence of his conscience with a positive outlook on his potential to embody his subjective ideals both in his personal character and in his contributions to concrete forms of social practice. Muir thus can be (...) shown to have standing in the environmental virtue ethics tradition by dint of his appreciation for the necessity of virtuous political participation in movements for social reform. (shrink)

This collection of research papers explores the implications of quantum cosmology and the status of the laws of nature for theological and philosophical issues regarding God's action in the world. The main goal is to contribute to constructive theology as it engages current research in the natural sciences, and to investigate the philosophical and theological elements in ongoing theoretical research in the natural sciences.

This article proposes a novel justification for privacy rights based on the relationship between privacy and the democratic devices of voting and deliberation. Through an epistemic conception of democracy, I show that privacy, defined as epistemic inaccessibility, justifies a reliance on the vote as the voluntary mechanism of revealing citizen preferences, even in the face of theoretically more responsive methods. Respecting the inaccessibility of citizens' views ensures that democratic governments remain reliant on, rather than merely responsive to, the wills of (...) their citizens. In addition, spaces of epistemic inaccessibility both motivate a basic form of deliberation between citizens and foster healthy deliberative practices by blunting the potentially corrosive effects of publicity. Privacy can thus be seen as a presupposition of core democratic institutions, and not just as an individual right possessed by members of a liberal‐democratic polity. This new conceptualization provides a powerful additional justification for privacy rights and suggests an alternative approach to enacting privacy‐protective measures. (shrink)

In this volume of newly commissioned essays, leading moral philosophers offer a comprehensive overview of virtue ethics.

Self-efficacy as applied to language learning encompasses the belief in one’s ability to obtain mastery in a sought-after domain of linguistic competence by committing to goals and maintaining acquired skills. Intercultural communication and effectiveness are of interest to the professional and personal language goals of learners as their progress depends upon a strong motivation to put practical language skills to use when the real-world requires it. Studying or working abroad and engaging in intercultural training are two such contexts that bind (...) research in learner characteristics between applied linguistics and positive psychology as they provide a substrate of concrete interactions through language brokering, transformative experiences characterized by opportunities for changes in self-concept, negotiations with values and authenticity, and forms of interpersonal development underwritten by intercultural communication as an ability. The Self-Efficacy in Intercultural Communication Scale (SEIC) was developed by Peterson et al. (2011) in a sample of educators with overseas sojourning work experience. However, the original study lacked confirmatory analyses of internal and external validity that would provide clarity toward model identification and applicability for research that deals with intercultural communication competence across populations with diverse sample characteristics. A total of 876 teachers (M age = 37.48, SD = 10.81) and 266 university students (M age = 19.48, SD = 0.74) in Japan responded to items from the SEIC instrument. Acceptable model fit was supported for the 8-item short-form as proposed by Peterson et al. (2011). Metric invariance was observed for individuals from a sample of sojourning English language teachers similar to the original validation and a nationwide survey of Japanese teachers of English, offering indications of cross-cultural validity. Degrees of equivalence were also found for the Japanese items as extending fitness for use to students from two universities in Japan. Concurrent validity was supported for self-efficacy in intercultural communication measured by the scale with intercultural effectiveness competencies and speaking and listening self-efficacy constructs used in classroom contexts. Together, this study offers a tool of valid indicators for researchers and practitioners who aim to observe this self-efficacy in positive education or programs that intersect with language learning and intercultural communication. (shrink)