In conclusion I would like to forestall one potential misunderstanding. As I have described it the pacifist ideal may seem so difficult to attain that it may seem closed off from the aspirations of ordinary human beings; and there is no doubt that few people are likely to attain this ideal to any great degree. This accords with our intuition that “true,” by which I think we mean “paradigm” pacifists, are rare indeed. But ideals can be sought, as well as (...) attained, to greater or lesser degrees. So there are many ordinary people who regard themselves as pacifists because they avoid violence more scrupulously than most. On my analysis their claim might well be true. (shrink)

This article seeks to make a contribution toward the eventual construction of an adequate formulation of rule-utilitarianism by explaining some of the difficulties the notion of supererogation poses for such an enterprise, and by describing a rule-utilitarian theory of supererogation which would resolve those difficulties. I begin in Section I by considering how best to define 'supererogation'. I propose a reforming definition at the end of that section. In Section II I claim that rule-utilitarians must recognize a distinction between two (...) types of rules if they hope to avoid the difficulties mentioned above. In Section III I attempt to explain and to resolve the difficulties supererogation poses for rule-utilitarianism. (edited). (shrink)

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

This is an original and stimulating collection of articles by scholars trained in classics, moral philosophy, political science, literature, and intellectual history. Its principal objective is to convey to the modern reader a sophisticated understanding of Homeric and Classical Greek morality and how it differs from our own. Some of the articles focus primarily on Greek value concepts, especially the concept of arete. Others compare those concepts to modern notions of virtue and tolerance, as well as to the work of (...) contemporary literary figures and philosophers, including T.S. Eliot, Alasdair Macintyre, John Wallace, and Philippa Foot. Throughout, the juxtaposition of ancient and modern ideas and the worldviews they presuppose makes these readings both intellectually exciting and revealing. (shrink)

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...) we should blame, rather than as cases giving us ready insight into the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

In deciding whether to forgive, we often focus on the wrongdoer, looking for an apology or a change of ways. However, to fully consider whether to forgive, we need to expand our focus from the wrongdoer and their wrongdoing, and we need to consider who we are, what we care about, and what we want to care about. The difference between blame and forgiveness is, at bottom, a difference in priorities. When we blame, we prioritize the wrong, and when we (...) forgive, we shift our priorities away from the wrong. Recognizing this essential role for priorities in forgiveness allows us to address a thorny puzzle in thinking about forgiveness: how is it that forgiveness can be both principled and elective? If there is sufficient reason to forgive, as will sometimes be the case because forgiveness is principled, how can it be reasonable to withhold forgiveness? Recognizing that forgiveness is a shift in our priorities dissolves this apparent tension between forgiveness being principled and forgiveness being elective. (shrink)

We can enrich the explanation of how we should treat kid wrongdoers by recognizing that it matters who does the blaming and punishing. That we should think about who does the blaming and punishing is perhaps unsurprising, but it is nonetheless often underappreciated. Here, I offer two lessons about blame and punishment by thinking about who judges kids. First, the right account of moral and legal responsibility should allow that kids may rightly blame each other, and I argue that we (...) can best accommodate this by relativizing the threshold of competence needed for responsibility. Second, although each kid is an individual and, as a result, the implications of immaturity vary signifi- cantly from kid to kid, we should give kids a break as kids, that is, based on our categorizing them as kids. That we should and do categorize in that way reflects the nature of the criminal justice system as an institution and the nature of us as social beings. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states, as when people say "Admittedly I did X, but I wasn't conscious of it." It is argued that "unconscious" varieties of mental states, processes, or events---even perception---can be analyzed entirely in terms of the possession, exercise, acquiring, or loss, of dispositions, whereas conscious mental states involve the same dispositional items, temporally conjoined with at least one of a variety of appropriate experiences. The "temporal conjunction" (...) relationship between behavior and "appropriate" experiences turns out to be much looser than recent causal or functional theories of mental concepts have allowed; the views of e.g., David Armstrong and Daniel Dennett are critically discussed. (shrink)

There is a well-known, superficially plausible argument which says that a game is defined by its rules, so that cheaters in that game can't possibly be winners, or even legitimate participants. The article critically examines this argument and provides counterexamples to its underlying assumptions. -/- ================= This article originally appeared in Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, VIII, 1981, pp. 41-46. It has since been reprinted in Morgan, William and Meier, Klaus, eds, Philosophic Inquiry in Sport, and Vanderwerken, David and (...) Wertz, Spencer, Sport Inside Out. 40 years later, I don't have an uploadable copy, but I don't understand why, if you have a new anthology that includes it, you can't simply generate an archive copy from it or one of the prior publications. Or, just cite the sources where it appears. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, “Big Tobacco” has spread its tentacles across the developing world with devastating results. The global incidence of smoking has increased exponentially in Africa, Asia and South America and it is leading to an equally rapid increase in the incidence of smoking-induced morbidity and mortality on these continents. The World Health Organization (WHO) has tried to respond to this crisis by devising a set of regulations to limit the spread of smoking, and many countries have bound (...) themselves to follow the WHO’s guidelines. This article provides an overview of these regulatory measures and the authors attempt to defend them from the perspective of liberty and autonomy. Their motivation is to countermand any attempt by the tobacco industry to attack the regulations on the grounds that they infringe the liberty rights of producers and consumers. It is also argued, however, that a blanket ban of the production, sale and consumption of tobacco cannot be justified on the grounds of autonomy alone. (shrink)

We use the case of red meat food safety to illustrate the need to problematize policy. Overtime, there have been numerous red meat scandals and scares. We show that the statutes and regulations that arose out of these events provided the industry with a means of demonstrating safety, facilitating large-scale trade, legitimizing conventional production, and limiting interference into its practices. They also created systemic fragility, as evidenced by many recent events, and hindered the development of an alternative, small-scale sector. Thus, (...) the accumulated rules help to structure the sector, create superficial resilience, and are used in place of an actual policy governing safety. We call for rigorous attention to not only food safety, but also the role and effect of agrifood statutes and regulations in general, and engagement in policy more broadly. (shrink)

The Internet is rapidly developing into an important medium of communication in modem society, and both psychological research and therapeutic interventions are being increasingly conducted using this new communication medium. As therapeutic interventions using the Internet are becoming more prevalent, it is becoming increasingly important to conduct research on psychotherapeutic Internet interventions to assist in the development of an appropriate standard of practice regarding interventions using this new medium. In this article, we examine the Internet and the current psychological uses (...) which are being initiated using this medium. Ethical concerns related to the psychological use of the Internet are discussed, and guidelines are proposed for the conduct of Internet intervention research. (shrink)

Andrews et al. attempt to clarify the standards for determining whether traits are adaptations. The authors argue that tests of adaptationist hypotheses best proceed by assessing the consistency of the traits with the proposed standards. Critical tests of such standards must assess inconsistency – hypotheses must be falsifiable. To fully understand trait evolution, we must consider both adaptive and nonadaptive hypotheses.

In this paper we examine many of the arguments contained in Milton Friedman’s classic essay, in the form of critiques linked with learning objectives forclassroom discussions.

In his landmark monograph, "The Politics of Jesus", John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially "Preface to Theology", in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and "The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited", Yoder's (...) proposal for a renewed Jewish-Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics. (shrink)

Many African American children make use of African American English in their everyday lives, and face academic barriers when introduced to Standard American English in the classroom. Research has shown that students who can adapt and use SAE for academic purposes demonstrate significantly better test scores than their less adaptable peers. Accordingly, AAE use and its confirmed inverse relationship to reading achievement have been implicated in the Black-White Test Score Gap, thus becoming the focus of intense research and practical interest. (...) This volume discusses dialectal code-switching from AAE to SAE and stresses the benefits and importance of African American students becoming bi-dialectal. It provides background theory and science supporting the most promising educational approach to date, Contrastive Analysis, a set of longstanding methods drawn from Second Language research and used effectively with students ranging from kindergarten through college. It offers a deeper knowledge of AAE use by students, the critical features of Contrastive Analysis, and detailed information about successful applications which teachers can apply in their own pedagogy. (shrink)