Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education presents what the late Lawrence Kohlberg regarded as the definitive statement of his educational theory. Addressing the sociology and social psychology of schooling, the authors propose that school culture become the center of moral education and research. They discuss how schools can develop as just and cohesive communities by involving students in democracy, and they focus on the moral decisions teachers and students face as they democratically resolve problems. As the authors put it: "...we (...) propose an educational renewal of our democratic society.... We have attempted to establish schools that do more than just teach about democratic citizenship, that are themselves democratic societies.". (shrink)

Confessional rigidity between Roman Catholics and Protestants is not adequately explained by doctrinal disagreement alone. This study argues that the persistence and intensity of confessional antagonism arise from a deeper convergence of psychological needs, anthropological patterns, sociological pressures, and theological commitments that shape how individuals and communities hold their beliefs. Fear, insecurity, and unresolved trauma, both individual and collective, often transform doctrinal claims into mechanisms of identity protection rather than instruments of discernment. Through the TAPS framework, together with original analytical (...) constructs such as R.I.G.I.D., S.A.F.E., and the developmental sequence of Fear to Fixation to Ferocity, the analysis demonstrates how ritual, symbol, communal memory, attachment disruptions, and group threat responses interact to produce defensive and inflexible confessional postures. Catholic and Protestant traditions each contain healthy orientations that can become distorted under conditions of perceived threat, particularly when trauma constricts cognitive and emotional flexibility. The study concludes that spiritual maturity, characterized by grounded identity, humility, interpretive charity, and ecumenical openness, provides a constructive path toward healing and enables believers to move from defensive identity fortressing toward a more integrated, compassionate, and dialogical form of Christian engagement. (shrink)

This anthology contains essays by a distinguished group of British and American scholars prominent in the field of medieval philosophy. Setting high standards of clarity and exactness, the papers reflect current analytic, formalistic, and traditional methods of philosophy applied to topics such as logic, linguistics, and the philosophy of the mind.

For many, the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill has become a symbol of unethical corporate behavior. Had Exxon’s managers not callously pursued their own interests at the expense of the environment and other parties, the accident would not have happened. In this paper, we (1) present a short case study of the Valdez incident; (2) argue that many analyses of the case either ignore or fail to give sufficient weight to the uncertainties managers often face when they make (...) decisions; and (3) propose a framework for moral management grounded in principles of communicative ethics, moral dialogue, and in the non-traditional ideas of many current management and behavioral decision theorists. From this view, the moral manager is not expected to know the “correct” answer to every ethical issue, but rather to participate responsibly in an open dialogue with other interested parties. (shrink)

The pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 has led to unprecedented changes to society, causing unique problems that call for extraordinary solutions. We consider one such extraordinary proposal: ‘safer infection sites’ that would offer individuals the opportunity to be intentionally infected with SARS-CoV-2, isolate, and receive medical care until they are no longer infectious. Safer infection could have value for various groups of workers and students. Health professionals place themselves at risk of infection daily and extend this risk to their family members and (...) community. Similarly, other essential workers who face workplace exposure must continue their work, even if have high-risk household members and live in fear of infecting. When schools are kept closed because of the fear that they will be sites of significant transmission, children and their families are harmed in multiple ways and college students who are living on campus, whether or not they are attending classes in person, are contributing to high rates of transmission and experiencing high rates of exposure. We consider whether offering safer infection sites to these groups could be ethically defensible and identify the empirical unknowns that would need to resolve before reaching definitive conclusions. This article is not an endorsement of intentional infection with the coronavirus, but rather is meant to spark conversation on the ethics of out-of-the-box proposals. Perhaps most meaningfully, our paper explores the value of control and peace of mind for those among us most impacted by the pandemic: those essential workers risking the most to keep us safe. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the macroscopic quantum behavior of simple superconducting circuits. Starting from a Lagrangian for electromagnetic field with broken gauge symmetry, we construct a quantum circuit model for a superconducting weak link (SQUID) ring, together with the appropriate canonical commutation relations. We demonstrate that this model can be used to describe macroscopic excitations of the superconducting condensate and the localized charge states found in some ultrasmall-capacitance weak-link devices.

The statistical properties of a single quantum object and an ensemble of independent such objects are considered in detail for two-level systems. Computer simulations of dynamic zero-point quantum fluctuations for a single quantum object are reported and compared with analytic solutions for the ensemble case.

The Los Angeles riots illustrate how a pluralistic society can come apart once its members lose faith in its moral character. The cynicism and despair so evident in our cities challenge moral educators to nurture in the coming generation a belief and hope in the transformative power of democratic institutions. Effective democratic moral education requires that teachers provide experience in democratic problem‐solving. In this article we use examples from two Just Community programmes in urban settings, the recently established YES program (...) and the Cluster School, to illustrate how democratic participation can enkindle democratic faith and foster integration across racial and social class divisions. (shrink)

740 page life in letters, including all Hegel's available letters at time of publication by Indiana University Press in 1984 tied together by a running commentary by Clark Butler. The volume is in a searchable PDF format. Publication was supported by a Major Grant by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH).

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these (...) result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations. (shrink)

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. (...) In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments—and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore (...) the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority. (shrink)

Medicine is faced with a number of intractable modern challenges that can be understood in terms of hyper-intellectualization; a compassion crisis, burnout, dehumanization, and lost meaning. These challenges have roots in medical philosophy and indeed general Western philosophy by way of the historic exclusion of human emotion from human reason. The resolution of these medical challenges first requires a novel philosophic schema of human knowledge and reason that incorporates the balanced interaction of human intellect and human emotion. This schema of (...) necessity requires a novel extension of dual-process theory into epistemology in terms of both intellect and emotion each generating a distinct natural kind of knowledge independent of the other as well as how these two forms of mental process together construct human reason. Such a novel philosophic schema is here proposed. This scheme is then applied to the practice of medicine with examples of practical applications with the goal of reformulating medical practice in a more knowledgable, balanced, and healthy way. This schema’s expanded epistemology becomes the philosophic foundation for more fully incorporating the humanities in medicine. (shrink)

The ICD-11 personality disorder model is the first fully dimensional assessment of personality pathology. It consists of a personality disorder dysfunction-severity dimension, which encompasses both self- and interpersonal dysfunction, and six optional qualifiers for five prominent personality traits—Negative Affectivity, Detachment, Dissociality, Disinhibition, and Anankastia —plus a borderline pattern that is defined by the criteria of DSM-IV borderline PD. This article reports on the development of a new self-report measure to assess self- and interpersonal dysfunction and the five trait qualifiers. It (...) is the first comprehensive measure of the ICD-11 PD model in that it is the only one to include both PD dysfunction-severity as well as trait scales and because it is based on the Clinical Description and Diagnostic Guidelines, which are more detailed than the “statistical” model description that is currently on the ICD-11 website. The authors wrote 992 items and then reduced the pool to 300 items by eliminating redundancy and selecting the consensus best few items for each subconstruct. Data were collected using an online sample of 383 Prolific workers. Using exploratory factor analysis, seven domain scales were developed, each of which contained two to four scales assessing components of the domain. These preliminary scales’ psychometrics were excellent, as were the domains’ and their components’ convergent and discriminant validity, with a few generally minor exceptions. Structural analyses at the component level revealed a three-factor structure consisting of two moderately correlated Internalizing factors, one centered on Self Dysfunction with two NA components and a DSN component and the other on Interpersonal Dysfunction with DET and ANK components; as well as an Externalizing factor with DSL and a DSN component that was uncorrelated with the other two factors. Two aspects of the results in particular are striking: ANK was not the opposite end of a DSN dimension, but rather contributed to an Internalizing Interpersonal Dysfunction dimension and DSN had both an Internalizing and an Externalizing component. Implications of the findings and study limitations are discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents a cognitive account of the process of evaluating scientific data. Our account assumes that when individuals evaluate data, they construct a mental model of a data-interpretation package, in which the data and theoretical interpretations of the data are integrated. We propose that individuals attempt to discount data by seeking alternative explanations for events within the mental model; data-interpretation packages are accepted when the individual cannot find alternative accounts for these events. Our analysis indicates that there are many (...) levels at which data-interpretation packages can be accepted or denied. (shrink)

To characterize human emotions, researchers have increasingly utilized Automatic Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), which automates the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and translates the facial muscular positioning into the basic universal emotions. There is broad interest in the application of FACS for assessing consumer expressions as an indication of emotions to consumer product-stimuli. However, the translation of FACS to characterization of emotions is elusive in the literature. The aim of this systematic review is to give an overview of how FACS (...) has been used to investigate human emotional behavior to consumer product-based stimuli. The search was limited to studies published in English after 1978, conducted on humans, using FACS or its action units to investigate affect, where emotional response is elicited by consumer product-based stimuli evoking at least one of the five senses. The search resulted in an initial total of 1,935 records, of which 55 studies were extracted and categorized based on the outcomes of interest including (i) method of FACS implementation; (ii) purpose of study; (iii) consumer product-based stimuli used; and (iv) measures of affect validation. Most studies implemented FACS manually (73%) to develop products and/or software (20%) and used consumer product-based stimuli that had known and/or defined capacity to evoke a particular affective response, such as films and/or movie clips (20%); minimal attention was paid to consumer products with low levels of emotional competence or with unknown affective impact. The vast majority of studies (53%) did not validate FACS-determined affect and, of the validation measures that were used, most tended to be discontinuous in nature and only captured affect as it holistically related to an experience. This review illuminated some inconsistencies in how FACS is carried out as well as how emotional response is inferred from facial muscle activation. This may prompt researchers to consider measuring the total consumer experience by employing a variety of methodologies in addition to FACS and its emotion-based interpretation guide. Such strategies may better conceptualize consumers' experience with products of low, unknown, and/or undefined capacity to evoke an affective response such as product prototypes, line extensions, etc. (shrink)

In 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote a short story based upon the life of Eleanor Ormerod. A wealthy spinster, Ormerod achieved notoriety in late nineteenth-century Britain as an economic entomologist. In 1904, Nature compared her to Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville. In terms of recent scholarship devoted to the history of women in science, Ormerod's career differed markedly from that of her two predecessors. The emotional or intellectual support of a brother, husband, father, or male family relation made no considerable contribution (...) to her commitment to the study of entomology. Furthermore, her life as an independent spinster offered no positive proof for Francis Power Cobbe's dictum: as she aged, Eleanor Ormerod showed no tendency to become a ‘women's rights woman’. She publicly accepted or internalized the dominant, masculine ideology of science; and by contemporary standards, she achieved success. (shrink)