I here respond to my interlocutors in the symposium on my book, Love Divine: A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity. Addressing each of them in the order in which their essays appear within this symposium, I reply to the comments by R. T. Mullins, Keith Hess, and Ty Kieser.

The push by some bioethicists to excise religion from the clinical ethics consultative process has received institutional support from the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities. Their certification program, Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified, is intended to identify and assess “a national standard for the professional practice of clinical healthcare ethics consulting” devoid of religious content. As Christian ethicists who wish to preserve the morally evaluative nature of healthcare ethics, we must pause and theologically reflect on the meaning of such a (...) program. The five articles in this issue offer rich theological responses to the religion-free standardized methodology endorsed by the ASBH and reified in the HEC-C certification program. They offer a depth of theological reflection we see previously lacking in the literature, attending to the real possibilities of a “terraformed bioethics” effecting metaphysical harm, severing of clinical ethics from its sources, eliminating possibilities for conversion, and confusing the meaning of moral expertise. (shrink)

How does character information inform judgments of blame? Some argue that character information is indirectly relevant to blame because it enriches judgments about the mental states of a wrongdoer. Others argue that character information is directly relevant to blame, even when character traits are causally irrelevant to the wrongdoing. We propose an empirical synthesis of these views: a Two Channel Model of blame. The model predicts that character information directly affects blame when this information is relevant to the wrongdoing that (...) elicits blame. Further, the effect of character information on blame depends on judgments about the true self that are independent of judgments of intentionality. Across three pre-registered studies (N = 662), we found support for all three predictions of the Two Channel Model. We propose that this reflects two distinct functions of blame: a social regulatory function that encourages norm compliance and a pedagogical function that encourages personal improvement. (shrink)

Merrill, Booker and Fivush examine the social functions associated with transmitting intergenerational narratives to adolescents and emerging adults and how these family stories affect identity formation in early adulthood. Merrill et al. observed that the intergenerational stories of parents’ transgression and proud moments told by adolescents and emerging adults operate as a way to transmit life lessons, strengthen relationships with the parent and give insights into their parents and their self.

Background: This study tested the core tenets of how facial scars are perceived by characterizing layperson response to faces with scars. The authors predicted that scars closer to highly viewed structures of the face (i.e., upper lip and lower lid), scars aligned against resting facial tension lines, and scars in the middle of anatomical subunits of the face would be rated less favorably. Methods: -/- Volunteers aged 18 years and older from the United States were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (...) to complete a face rating survey. Scars were digitally added in different locations and orientations for a total of 14 unique scars added to each face. Each participant rated 50 different faces on confidence, friendliness, and attractiveness. Data were analyzed using linear mixed effects models. Results: -/- A total of 88,850 ratings [82,990 scarred (93.4 percent)] for attractiveness, friendliness, and confidence were analyzed. In univariate linear mixed effects models, the presence of a facial scar did not significantly impact attractiveness (β = 0.016, SE = 0.014, z = 1.089, p = 0.276). A second set of linear mixed effects models identified interactions between location, subunit placement, and orientation to facial tension lines. Scars located on the lower lid mid subunit perpendicular to facial tension lines were rated less attractive (β = −0.065, SE = 0.028, z = −2.293, p = 0.022). Conclusions: -/- On average, a single well-healed facial scar does not negatively affect first impressions of attractiveness, confidence, or friendliness. Specific scar location and orientation combinations, however, such as a perpendicular scar at the mid-lower eyelid, may result in lower perceived attractiveness, confidence, and friendliness. (shrink)

With the increasing professionalization of clinical ethics, some hospitals and health systems utilize both ethics committees and professional clinical ethicists to address their ethics needs. Drawing upon historical critiques of ethics committees and their own experiences, the authors argue that, in ethics programs with one or more professional clinical ethicists, ethics committees should be dissolved when they fail to meet minimum standards of effectiveness. The authors outline several criteria for assessing effectiveness, describe the benefits of a model that places primary (...) responsibility for ethics work with professional clinical ethicists—the PCE-primary model, and offer suggestions for alternative ethics program structures that empower healthcare professionals to contribute to ethics work in ways more tailored to their strengths and skills while minimizing the shortcomings of ethics committees. (shrink)

As of September 2005, the co-founders of Waste Concern, an organisation dedicated to improving waste recycling in Bangladesh, are considering making a change to their model in order to get approval from the municipal government for a large-scale composting site. Since its inception in 1995, Waste Concern has followed a decentralised composting model whereby each composting site is a small-scale operation processing 3 tons of organic waste per day. In this model, they have relied on land and waste supply from (...) the Dhaka City Council (DCC) municipal government. Now, they are working with Dutch-based World Wide Recycling BV (WWR) to set up a 700-ton per day composting plant, which will enable them to earn tradable certificates for US$11 per ton of reduced methane gas, making it the first in the world to garner credits through composting waste under the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). To launch the composting site, they face the hurdle of getting DCC’s approval. They have three alternatives: (1) follow through with the original plan whereby the municipality would supply both the land and waste, which entails waiting for DCC’s approval; (2) purchase the land for the composting site and rely on the municipality for a waste supply; or, (3) purchase the land and take on the responsibility of waste collection themselves. In their considerations, they need to weigh the financial and social aspects and determine an appropriate structure for their organisation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 559-572.

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency of women (...) and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state. (shrink)

When our nearest and dearest experience medical crises, we may need to step into caregiving roles. But in doing so, we may find that our new caregiving relationship is actually in tension with the loving relationship that motivated us towards care. What we owe and are entitled to as friends, spouses, and family members, can be different from what we owe and are entitled to as caregivers. For this reason, caregiving carries with it the risk of a type of moral (...) distress that I call “role conflict distress.” Rather than view role conflict distress as a sign that we are falling short, I suggest that it actually speaks to the commitment that we have to the loving relationship that grounds our duty of care. (shrink)

Philip Reed argues that laws that grant people access to euthanasia on the basis of terminal illness are discriminatory. In support of this claim, he offers an argument by analogy: it would be discriminatory to offer a person access to euthanasia because they are women or because they are disabled, as such restricted access would send the message ‘that life as a woman or as a disabled person is (very often) not worth living’.1 And so it must also be discriminatory (...) to offer people access to euthanasia because they are terminally ill. Arguments by analogies are only as good as the analogies on which they are built. Having a terminal illness, I’m going to suggest, is not relevantly similar enough to either being disabled or being a member of an oppressed social group to make Reed’s claim compelling. Let’s explore each branch of the analogy in turn. Why think that terminal illness is relevantly unlike disability, in a way that makes offering access to euthanasia in the latter case discriminatory, but not the former? For one thing, terminal illness is necessarily time-limited. When my father was dying, he found himself in constant …. (shrink)

We discuss four interconnected issues that we believe have hindered investigations into how language may affect thinking. These have had a tendency to reappear in the debate concerning linguistic relativity over the past decades, despite numerous empirical findings. The first is the claim that it is impossible to disentangle language from thought, making the question concerning “influence” pointless. The second is the argument that it is impossible to disentangle language from culture in general, and from social interaction in particular, so (...) it is impossible to attribute any differences in the thought patterns of the members of different cultures to language per se. The third issue is the objection that methodological and empirical problems defeat all but the most trivial version of the thesis of linguistic influence: that language gives new factual information. The fourth is the assumption that since language can potentially influence thought from “not at all” to “completely,” the possible forms of linguistic influence can be placed on a cline, and competing theories can be seen as debating the actual position on this cline. We analyze these claims and show that the first three do not constitute in-principle objections against the validity of the project of investigating linguistic influence on thought, and that the last one is not the best way to frame the empirical challenges at hand. While we do not argue for any specific theory or mechanism for linguistic influence on thought, our discussion and the reviewed literature show that such influence is clearly possible, and hence in need of further investigations. (shrink)

Thinkers from the Chinese and Greco-Roman traditions posit that disparate objects throughout the cosmos have mutual affinities. In the Stoic tradition, such affinities are explained through “sympathy.” In the Chinese tradition, the explanatory principle is often called ganying 感應 (resonance). In addition, both traditions use similar philosophical strategies when discussing these concepts. Thinkers cite natural correspondences, placing them in parallel lists as evidence for philosophical truths. On the surface, the analogous concepts and strategies hint that these thinkers share similar philosophical (...) goals. However, analysis of the role natural correspondences play in argumentation discovers fundamental differences between the two traditions. The focus on particular arguments instead of broader cosmological trends offers a different perspective for comparative research, and the conclusions raise questions concerning how scholarship should analyze philosophical trends in early China. (shrink)

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of (...) interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual and multimodal. Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional profiles of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario. (shrink)

I argue that an evolutionary adaptation for bodily mimesis, the volitional use of the body as a representational devise, is the “small difference” that gave rise to unique and yet pre-linguistic features of humanity such as imitation, pedagogy, intentional communication and the possibility of a cumulative, representational culture. Furthermore, it is this that made the evolution of language possible. In support for the thesis that speech evolved atop bodily mimesis and a transitional multimodal protolanguage, I review evidence for the extensive (...) presence of sound-symbolism in modern languages, for its psychological reality in adults, and for its contribution to language acquisition in children. On a meta-level, the argument is that dividing human cognitive-semiotic evolution into a sequence of stages is crucial for resolving classical dichotomies concerning human nature and language, which are both natural and cultural, both continuous with and discontinuous from those of animals. (shrink)

Community resilience, a system’s ability to maintain its essential functions despite disturbance, is a cornerstone of public health preparedness. However, as currently practiced, community resilience generally focuses on defined neighborhood characteristics to describe factors such as vulnerability or social capital. This ignores the way that residents of some neighborhoods (as ‘essential workers’’) were required during the COVID-19 pandemic to sacrifice their wellbeing for the sake of others staying at home in more affluent neighborhoods. Using the global care chain theory, we (...) analyze the way that the resilience of affluent neighborhoods depends on siphoning off the labor of other, less affluent neighborhoods, creating what we call the parasitic nature of resilience. We argue that understanding this neighborhood interdependence—and accounting for its parasitic nature— should be prioritized by public health authorities to prevent unintentional harm in future pandemics. Otherwise, any public health emergency response that relies on this labor (as did the COVID-19 pandemic response) depends on exploitative practices that produce the very disparities the response is trying to address. We explore the theoretical grounding and practical effects of this idea to provide the preparedness enterprise with an initial set of theoretical tools to move from a model of community resilience to one of community renewal. The community renewal model is based on an underlying ethics of care, in which systems are redesigned to become more prosocial during a public health response. We believe this model can more successfully address the tragic inequities in labor and health outcomes that we see during public health emergencies. (shrink)

1. Sexual Brains and Body Politics 2. Hormones and Hardwiring 3. Making Sense of Brain Organization Studies 4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Brain Organization 5. Working Backward from “Distinct‘ Groups 6. Masculine and Feminine Sexuality 7. Sexual Orienteering 8. Sex-Typed Interests 9. Taking Context Seriously 10. Trading Essence for Potential.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 193-195.

Some Christian theorists define love in terms of benevolence, or benevolence plus some minor addition. Here I rely on a thought experiment involving a fully benevolent human, dubbed “Benevolent Billy,” to show that benevolence accounts of this kind are insufficient as a distinctly Christian account of love. This is because those who exemplify ideal Christian love for another must be intrinsically motivated to form or maintain caring, reciprocal relationships with those loved ; yet there is nothing about Billy’s perfect benevolence (...) that so motivates. (shrink)

Chemical kinds (e.g. gold) are generally treated as having timelessly fixed identities. Biological kinds (e.g. goldfinches) are generally treated as evolved and/or evolving entities. So what kind of kind is a biochemical kind? This paper defends the thesis that biochemical molecules are clustered chemical kinds, some of which–namely, evolutionarily conserved units–are also biological kinds.On this thesis, a number of difficulties that have recently occupied philosophers concerned with proteins and kinds are shown to be resolved or dissolved.

Gregory the Great depicts himself as a contemplative who, as bishop of Rome, was compelled to become an administrator and pastor. His theological response to this existential tension illuminates the vexed questions of his relationships to predecessors and of his legacy. Gregory develops Augustine’s thought in such a way as to satisfy John Cassian’s position that contemplative vision is grounded in the soul’s likeness to the unity of Father and Son. For Augustine, “mercy” lovingly lifts the neighbor toward life in (...) God. Imitating God’s own love for humankind, this mercy likens the Christian to God’s essential goodness and, by this likeness, prepares him or her for the vision of God, which Augustine expects not now but only in the next life. For Augustine, the exercise of mercy can—when useful—involve a shared affection or understanding. Gregory makes this shared affection essential to the neighborly love that he calls “compassion.” In this affective fellowship, Gregory finds a human translation of the passionless unity of Father and Son—so that, for Gregory, compassion becomes the immediate basis for and consequence of seeing God—even in this life. Compassion does not degrade; rather, it retrenches the perfection of contemplation. Reconciling compassionate activity and contemplative vision, this creative renegotiation of Augustine and Cassian both answered Gregory’s own aspirations and gave to the tumultuous post-Imperial West a needed account of worldly affairs as spiritual affairs. (shrink)

This article addresses a classical question: Can a machine use language meaningfully and if so, how can this be achieved? The first part of the paper is mainly philosophical. Since meaning implies intentionality on the part of the language user, artificial systems which obviously lack intentionality will be `meaningless'. There is, however, no good reason to assume that intentionality is an exclusively biological property and thus a robot with bodily structures, interaction patterns and development similar to those of human beings (...) would constitute a system possibly capable of meaning – a conjecture supported through a Wittgenstein-inspired thought experiment. The second part of the paper focuses on the empirical and constructive questions. Departing from the principle of epigenesis stating that during every state of development new structure arises on the basis of existing structure plus various sorts of interaction, a model of human cognitive and linguistic development is proposed according to which physical, social and linguistic interactions between the individual and the environment have their respective peaks in three consecutive stages of development: episodic, mimetic and symbolic. The transitions between these stages are qualitative, and bear a similarity to the stages in phylogenesis proposed by Donald and Deacon. Following the principle of epigenetic development, robotogenesis could possibly recapitulate ontogenesis, leading to the emergence of intentionality, consciousness and meaning. (shrink)

What do we gain from the scientific study of religion? One possibility is that religious contexts are unique, and cognition within these contexts is worth understanding. Another possibility is that religion can be viewed as a laboratory for understanding psychology and culture more broadly. Rather than limiting the study of religion to a single context, I argue that the study of religion is useful precisely because it illuminates secular psychological and cultural processes. I first outline my practical approach to psychology (...) and religion, focusing on how people use religion to advance mundane goals. I then discuss several domains in which studying religion has led to important insights, including culture, prejudice, and cognition. This article is an extended version of an Early Career Award address given at the International Association for the Psychology of Religion meeting in 2023 in Groningen, Netherlands. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 7, July 2019, Page 43-45.

Transhumanism’s ideology is marked by a commitment to the “progress” or “perfection” of the human species through technological means. What transhumanists are after is not just therapeutic intervention or optimization of current human capabilities, but an ontological change from human to posthuman. In this article, I critique transhumanist ideology on the grounds that it fundamentally misunderstands human moral perfection as resulting from forces acting upon us (i.e., technological interventions), rather than an internal change of character. This misunderstanding reflects an impoverished (...) view of the concept of motion brought about by the rise of modern science, which entails certain ontological commitments that are not Christian in nature. I conclude transhumanism is untenable because it rests on a shaky foundation of Newtonian physics, and reduces the world to mere matter and forces. Furthermore, Christian transhumanism is especially flawed, because it is complicit in this severing of creation from its sacramental ontology, from the Being of God. (shrink)

The ‘black box problem’ is a long-standing talking point in debates about artificial intelligence. This is a significant point of tension between ethicists, programmers, clinicians and anyone else working on developing AI for healthcare applications. However, the precise definition of these systems are often left undefined, vague, unclear or are assumed to be standardised within AI circles. This leads to situations where individuals working on AI talk over each other and has been invoked in numerous debates between opaque and explainable (...) systems. This paper proposes a coherent and clear definition for the black box problem to assist in future discussions about AI in healthcare. This is accomplished by synthesising various definitions in the literature and examining several criteria that can be extrapolated from these definitions. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Many Christian theorists notice that love should contain, in additional to benevolence, some kind of interpersonal or unitive component. The difficulty comes in trying to provide an account of this unitive component that is sufficiently interpersonal in other-love and yet is also compatible with self-love. Eleonore Stump is one of the few Christian theorists who directly addresses this issue. Building upon the work of Thomas Aquinas, Stump argues that love is constituted by two desires: the desire for an individual’s good (...) and the desire to be united to that individual. Stump further develops the desire for union within this Thomistic understanding of love, and she maintains that her developed account not only captures the robustly interpersonal nature of one’s love of another but is also compatible with the love of oneself. Unfortunately, Stump’s way of making sense of this latter claim introduces a significant inconsistency in her analyses of the desire for union in self-love and other-love. Nevertheless, the most important features of Stump’s Neo-Thomistic account are salvageable. For there is a way of understanding love’s desire for union that emerges out of Thomas’s views on love and is compatible with the desiderata suggested by Stump, only does not have the same difficulties that beset Stump’s account. What is offered, then, is a modification of Stump’s account that might better serve her purposes. The resulting view of love, however, is one not only relevant to Stump. Rather, the view that emerges is a broadly Thomistic conception of love that is plausible in its own right and captures a certain biblical emphasis on the relational or interpersonal nature of love. (shrink)

The thesis that humanity progresses in a lawlike manner from inferior states (of wellbeing, cognitive skills, culture, etc.) to superior ones dominated eighteenth- and nineteenth- century thought, including authors otherwise as diverse as Kant and Ernst Haeckel. Positioning himself against this philosophically and scientifically popular view, Nietzsche suggests that humanity is in a prolonged state of decline. I argue that Nietzsche’s rejection of the thesis that progress is inevitable is a product of his acceptance of Lamarck’s use-and-disuse theory of evolution (...) and his belief that society selects for traits beneficial to society and negatively selects for traits that promote individual flourishing. This explains Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-development as cultivating traits that Nietzsche views as valuable and that would, by Lamarck’s theory of evolution, become heritable and so help steer our evolutionary trajectory, correcting our decline. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's account of marriage and its relevance to contemporary debates over same-sex marriage. Kant's defense of marriage is read against debates unfolding in Prussia in the 1790s, when the question of whether marriage was a "universal estate" was a central point of debate surrounding the Prussian Legal Code of 1794. By reading Kant's arguments in light of this historical context, and in comparison with those offered by his contemporaries, Fichte and von Hippel, this article shows both that (...) the debates about marriage in the 1790s mirror contemporary tensions, and that Kant took a "middle path" that innovatively defended marriage as a basic feature of the state. (shrink)

Rules are meant to apply equally to all within their jurisdiction. However, some rules are frequently broken without consequence for most. These rules are only occasionally enforced, often at the discretion of a third-party observer. We propose that these rules—whose violations are frequent, and enforcement is rare—constitute a unique subclass of explicitly codified rules, which we call ‘phantom rules’ (e.g., proscribing jaywalking). Their apparent punishability is ambiguous and particularly susceptible to third-party motives. Across six experiments, (N = 1440) we validated (...) the existence of phantom rules and found evidence for their motivated enforcement. First, people played a modified Dictator Game with a novel frequently broken and rarely enforced rule (i.e., a phantom rule). People enforced this rule more often when the “dictator” was selfish (vs. fair) even though the rule only proscribed fractional offers (not selfishness). Then we turned to third person judgments of the U.S. legal system. We found these violations are recognizable to participants as both illegal and commonplace (Experiment 2), differentiable from violations of prototypical laws (Experiments 3) and enforced in a motivated way (Experiments 4a and 4b). Phantom rule violations (but not prototypical legal violations) are seen as more justifiably punished when the rule violator has also violated a social norm (vs. rule violation alone)—unless the motivation to punish has been satiated (Experiment 5). Phantom rules are frequently broken, codified rules. Consequently, their apparent punishability is ambiguous, and their enforcement is particularly susceptible to third party motives. (shrink)

Agent-regret seems to give rise to a philosophical puzzle. If we grant that we are not morally responsible for consequences outside our control (the ‘Standard View’), then agent-regret—which involves self-reproach and a desire to make amends for consequences outside one’s control—appears rationally indefensible. But despite its apparent indefensibility, agent-regret still seems like a reasonable response to bad moral luck. I argue here that the puzzle can be resolved if we appreciate the role that agent-regret plays in a larger social practice (...) that helps us deal with bad moral luck. That agent-regret is a component in a social practice limits the questions that we can reasonably ask about it. While we can ask whether an experience of agent-regret is rational given the norms of this practice, we cannot ask the question that motivates the puzzle of agent-regret, viz. whether agent-regret is rationally defensible according to the Standard View. (shrink)