Esta investigación se emprende motivada por la necesidad de desentrañar la progresión delos modelos de aprendizaje, los cuales se han ido adaptando para responder a las demandas de lasociedad en su dinámica constante de fluctuación y transformaciones. El objetivo de este trabajo es examinar de forma sistemática la evolución de los modelos de aprendizaje, destacando los cambios paradigmáticos que han favorecido la transición de enfoques de aprendizaje tradicionales hacia propuestas más innovadoras y transdisciplinarias. Para lograrlo, se lleva a cabo un (...) análisis bibliográfico apoyado en el método hermenéutico para la interpretación contextual de la literatura y los discursos, a fin de desentrañar las complejidades inherentes en la evolución de los modelos de aprendizaje. Los resultados resaltan la influencia limitante del paradigma de la simplicidad en laformación educativa tradicional y la necesidad de un giro hacia la dialogicidad y la colaboración eintegración disciplinaria para avanzar hacia la complejidad. Se concluye argumentando a favor de la adopción del paradigma de la complejidad, abogando por una epistemología transdisciplinariay un enfoque de aprendizaje interestructurante, que permitan el desarrollo humano integral.El reconocimiento de la complejidad humana en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje exige una transformación radical de la educación hacia prácticas más holísticas y transformadoras, esenciales para construir una sociedad equitativa y justa. (shrink)

Esta obra colectiva expone diversas concepciones teóricas, ontológicas, epistemológicas, axiológicas y prácticas sobre el origen, sentido, problemáticas, ventajas, detrimentos, alternativas y desafías de la filosofía de la innovación y su incidencia en la educación; reflexiona sobre las contribuciones de la tecnología y responde a interrogantes como: ¿Cuáles son los aporte de la tradición filosófica, del pensamiento ilustrado, de la postmodernidad y de la teoría crítica para la filosofía de la innovación educativa?; ¿Cuál es la función de la filosofía para la (...) comprensión de la innovación?; ¿Cómo se explica el progreso tecno-científico desde la epistemología contemporánea?; ¿Cuál es el componente pedagógico de la innovación?; ¿Cuáles son las aportaciones del Laudato Si para la innovación educativa?. Además, plantea la necesidad de repensar algunos aspectos relacionados con la educación, el Estado y la identidad latinoamericana para determinar las posibilidades, las limitaciones y los retos de la innovación, entendida como un fenómeno en permanente construcción. Este tomo se encuentra conformado por ocho capítulos en los que los autores formulan un conjunto de contribuciones para la generación de nuevas investigaciones. Además, evidencia a la innovación como un procesos que exige reformulaciones. La innovación sigue siendo una de las tareas pendientes de la filosofía. (shrink)

La formación docente es indispensable para responder a los requerimientos de la compleja sociedad actual. De su conocimiento, iniciativa, praxis y creatividad depende el éxito o el fracaso del sujeto que aprende. Al modificar el rol del docente se transforma la actitud de los estudiantes. ¿Cómo entender la formación filosófica transdisciplinar? Este texto responde a este y otros cuestionamientos: ¿cuáles son los planteamientos pedagógicos afines a la era digital? ¿en qué medida las TIC se encuentran al servicio de una filosofía (...) educativa transdisciplinar?, ¿cómo se explica ese enfoque en la formación del docente?, ¿cuál es la función de la formación en la innovación educativa?, ¿cómo formar para la ciudadanía mundial?, ¿cuáles son las contribuciones de las nuevas ciencias para la formación educativa? El crecimiento exponencial de la ciencia y de la tecnología nos obliga a pensar en procesos formativos innovadores. En tal sentido, resulta imprescindible el estudio de estas problemáticas. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo, plantear el concepto de la tecnología como mito, y por lo tanto como un espacio mítico, lugar de enunciación desde donde el ser humano establece la comprensión que tiene de la realidad que le corresponde vivir, y así, plantea su actuar sobre ella. Para ello se presenta brevemente y a manera de barrunto una introducción de un análisis de la coyuntura vivida con la pandemia del Covid-19, que servirá para contextualizar la urgencia de reflexionar sobre (...) el tema central, y que además permitirá bosquejar la conclusión de este escrito. Luego se abordará el problema planteado desde la propuesta económico-teológica del pensador crítico Franz Hinkelammert, quien a lo largo de su obra ha presentado, de manera implícita, un análisis sobre el tema de la tecnología, y quien desarrolla radicalmente la concepción de la tecnología como un mito de la modernidad. Hacer este acercamiento nos obligará a recorrer las reflexiones que este mismo pensador tiene sobre la racionalidad económica perfecta, así mismo que sobre la concepción de la economía que emergió con la revolución industrial y que se radicaliza tras las subsiguientes revoluciones que se plantean en esa línea. A lo largo de este desarrollo argumental nos veremos en la obligación de pasar por otros conceptos clave de la propuesta de Hinkelammert, como el de ideología liberal y su concepción de concepto límite. El de mala infinitud que viene desde la lectura que nuestro autor hace de Hegel. Y por supuesto el concepto de mito y espacio mítico, así como el de tecnología y su vínculo con el imaginario social de progreso que es impuesto dentro de la racionalidad económica y social del sistema-mundo imperante. (shrink)

The present work includes a discussion about the Kantian ideal of progress and its repercussions in the construction of a cosmopolitan education, by virtue of weighing its validity and the challenges it faces in contemporary times. The manuscript analyzes the Kantian postulates about progress to clarify the guidelines of a cosmopolitan education. The document is structured thanks to the bibliographic study and the consequent systematic review of an exploratory type and the help of the hermeneutical method. The approach to the (...) subject begins with the analysis of the enlightened ideals of a cosmopolitan, universal, humanizing education project aimed at fulfilling the ultimate purposes of reason, as the preferred path for human improvement and social progress. At the end of this work, the incompatibility between that ideal of Kantian cosmopolitan education, which promised freedom and self-control, and the current system that promotes an idea of ​​progress far from these principles is made evident. (shrink)

El presente trabajo surge de la reflexión acerca del fracaso de modelos educativos exteriores aplicados en contextos emergentes sin considerar la realidad de cada pueblo. A juicio de Carnoy (1974) en los países subdesarrollados existe una fuerte tradición en copiar las formas culturales y modelos de sociedades de primer mundo, sin analizar las condiciones objetivas y subjetivas que determinarán el éxito o el fracaso. El objetivo de este documento es analizar los fundamentos ontológicos presentes en el sistema educativo finlandés con (...) la finalidad de identificar los principales referentes que servirán de base para superar problemáticas de la realidad educativa en sociedades emergentes. El documento presenta una revisión de tipo exploratoria, descriptiva y comparativa que por la naturaleza del estudio es de carácter bibliográfico y cualitativo apoyado en el uso de los métodos lógico-científicos (deductivo-inductivo) con sus respectivos procedimientos, y fortalecido con la aplicación de los métodos filosóficos fenomenológico-hermenéutico. La tendencia a la imitación y a la copia de modelos educativos ajenos a nuestra realidad ha dado como resultado sistemas educativos deficientes y que no responden a las necesidades concretas propias de la realidad educativa de las sociedades emergentes. Es preciso determinar el ser, el sentido y el significado del sistema educativo finlandés con miras a la localización de aspectos esenciales que podrían convertirse en pautas para repensar otros modelos educativos. (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

"One of the outstanding authorities on the early days of the Republic, Saul K. Padover offers in this volume a generous sampling of the letters, essays, speeches, discourses, and personal documents--many of them previously unpublished--of the men who made America. Included are extensive selections from the papers and speeches of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. There are also copious extracts from the private and public utterances of secondary, but important, figures (...) of the founding days--Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, William Paterson, Benjamin Rush, George Wythe, and many others. A number of the speeches made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 are given in full, and several of the important debates are reproduced. John Dickinson's Letters from an American Farmer in Pennsylvania appear in these pages as well as many of Alexander Hamilton's famous and brief opinions. Also included are John Hancock's speech on the Boston Massacre; Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia; James Madison's Memorial against Religious Assessments; two of the most important of John Marshall's Supreme Court decisions (Marbury vs. Madison and McCulloch vs. Maryland); Robert Morris' Letters on Finance; John Taylor's paper On Aristocracy, and William Paterson's Plan for a Constitution. Taken together, these writings offer in one volume a complete picture of the thinking, the debate, the legal maneuvers, the compromises, the manners, and the morals of the American nation's earliest days. The book provides a sound basic appreciation of the atmosphere in which the Founding Fathers worked and planned and debated with one another. All the many counter-currents that contributed to the building of the Constitution, the stresses to which the young nation was subjected, the rebellion that continued to seethe, the moral climate of the days--these are all recreated in the speeches and writings of America's first patriots. Dr. Padover has bound the selections together with enlightening commentary that enables the reader to understand the exact circumstances of each utterance and brings the particular work into historical perspective."--Jacket. (shrink)

The Human Agenda is the first Special Edition of The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art (CJLPA), an interdisciplinary journal founded at the University of Cambridge. Focused on the unique intersections of law, politics and art in the context of human rights, contributors to the Special Edition include David Baragwanath, Luis Moreno Ocampo, Nadia Murad, Nancy Hollander, Andrew Clapham, Vladimir Osechkin, Mansour al-Omari, and many others. A full table of contents is available through the publication's own page.

Alexander James Dallas' An Exposition of the Causes and Character of the War was written as part of an effort by the then US government to explain and justify its declaration of war in 1812. However publication coincided with the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War. The Exposition is especially interesting for the insight it provides into the self-constraint of American foreign policy and of the conduct of a war. The focus is on the foreign (...) policy of the early republic and the related philosophy of law and war. A central idea is that international law should chiefly benefit those remaining at peace. -/- Dallas was a Philadelphian who settled there in 1783, the year of the Peace of Paris which ended the War of Independence, arriving from Jamaica after a British education. He wrote much on law, becoming the first recorder of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He later served as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and federal district attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, appointed by President Jefferson. He was appointed Secretary of Treasury by President Madison. -/- In this edition the original text is presented with annotations to help identify persons and events of interest. The editor has also added an Introduction, a Bibliography, a short Chronology of Dallas' life and the events of the War, and an analytical Index. As such this annotated edition presents a key primary source in a manner helpful to research for students of the early Republic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay aims at reconsidering the impact of Physiocratic ideas on the United States context during and after the American Revolution, which represented the first turning point concerning the democratic implications of political economy. In the confrontation in the 1790s between Jefferson’s Republicans and Hamilton’s Federalists the early scientific analysis of economics, grounded in the central role of agriculture formulated by Physiocracy, gave strong theoretical validation of the agrarian democracy ideology as an alternative to the British model and (...) contributed to shaping the American identity. The article will investigate this opposition and the economic culture that provides theoretical foundations to two opposed political projects. The reasons and the forms of this impact will be explored through the confrontation between Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures and George Logan’s series of pamphlets conceived as an orchestrated campaign against the Secretary of the Treasury. The study of Physiocracy beyond Europe and the Old Regime can offer new and divergent outlooks compared to recent studies aiming at questioning the relevance of Physiocratic theory in the Old Regime social and political context and its impact during the French Revolution. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson is among the most important and controversial of American political thinkers: his influence (libertarian, democratic, participatory, and agrarian-republican) is still felt today. A prolific writer, Jefferson left 18,000 letters, Notes on the State of Virginia, an Autobiography, and numerous other papers. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball have selected the most important of these for presentation in the Cambridge Texts series: Jefferson's views on topics such as revolution, self-government, the role of women and African-American and Native (...) Americans emerge to give a fascinating insight into a man who owned slaves, yet advocated the abolition of slavery. The texts are supported by a concise introduction, suggestions for further reading and short biographies of key figures, all providing invaluable assistance to the student encountering the breadth and richness of Jefferson's thought for the first time. (shrink)

Volume Eight of the project documenting Thomas Jefferson's last years presents 591 documents dated from 1 October 1814 to 31 August 1815. Jefferson is overjoyed by American victories late in the War of 1812 and highly interested in the treaty negotiations that ultimately end the conflict. Following Congress's decision to purchase his library, he oversees the counting, packing, and transportation of his books to Washington. Jefferson uses most of the funds from the sale to pay old debts (...) but spends some of the proceeds on new titles. He resigns from the presidency of the American Philosophical Society, revises draft chapters of Louis H. Girardin's history of Virginia, and advises William Wirt on revolutionary-era Stamp Act resolutions. Jefferson criticizes those who discuss politics from the pulpit, and he drafts a bill to transform the Albemarle Academy into Central College. Monticello visitors Francis W. Gilmer, Francis C. Gray, and George Ticknor describe the mountaintop and its inhabitants, and Gray's visit leads to an exchange with Jefferson about how many generations of white interbreeding it takes to clear Negro blood. Finally, although death takes his nephew Peter Carr and brother Randolph Jefferson, the marriage of his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph is a continuing source of great happiness. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

The significance of Machiavelli's political thinking for the development of modern republicanism is a matter of great controversy. This reassessment examines the character of Machiavelli's own republicanism by charting his influence on Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, David Hume, the baron de Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Concluding that although Machiavelli himself was not liberal, Paul Rahe argues that he did, nonetheless, set (...) the stage for the emergence of liberal republicanism in England. (shrink)

Western society today is less unified by a set of core values than ever before. Undoubtedly, the concept of moral consensus is a difficult one in a liberal, democratic and pluralistic society. But it is imperative to avoid a rigid majoritarianism where sensitive personal values are at stake, as in bioethics. Bioethics has become an influential part of public and professional discussions of health care. It has helped frame issues of moral values and medicine as part of a more general (...) effort to find consensus about some of the most perplexing questions of our time. But why is it thought that a moral consensus is important or that it deserves respect? How does moral consensus acquire legitimacy in a society that includes diverse value systems? How is moral consensus possible and how do small groups help create or distort consensus processes? Written by a medical school professor trained in philosophy, this timely work tackles these questions from philosophical, historical, and social scientific standpoints. It begins by describing the traditional ambivalence about consensus in Western culture as well as the uncertain relationship in modernity between consensus and expertise. After outlining the current bioethical consensus, the book gives philosophical and political analyses of the idea of consensus, then assesses the role of consensus in national ethics commissions and in the ethics committee movement. Moreno constructs an original, naturalistic philosophy of moral consensus, referred to as "bioethical naturalism", and then applies sociology and social psychology to actual consensus processes. The book concludes with an account of bioethics as a consensus-oriented social reform movement. This insightful volume will be essential reading for bioethicists, philosophers, physicians, members of ethics committees, and all those concerned with ethical and social issues in health care. (shrink)

I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible. I show that the instrumentalism I propose can avoid some problems more crude forms of instrumentalism encounter by adopting aspects of Strawsonian accounts. I then show the implications (...) for our understanding of responsibility: my account requires us to adopt a graded notion of responsibility and accept the claim that certain individuals may not be responsible because they are not susceptible to being influenced by our moral responsibility practices. Finally, I discuss whether the account is committed to allowing the instrumentalization of non-responsible individuals in cases where blaming them may benefit others’ moral agency. (shrink)

African-American political thought finds its premises in European philosophical traditions. But these traditions often challenge African-American humanity which African-American political thought defends. African-American political thought is therefore an extended commentary on the consistency of European philosophical traditions.

Since Darwin, Biology has been framed on the idea of evolution by natural selection, which has profoundly influenced the scientific and philosophical comprehension of biological phenomena and of our place in Nature. This book argues that contemporary biology should progress towards and revolve around an even more fundamental idea, that of autonomy. Biological autonomy describes living organisms as organised systems, which are able to self-produce and self-maintain as integrated entities, to establish their own goals and norms, and to promote the (...) conditions of their existence through their interactions with the environment. Topics covered in this book include organisation and biological emergence, organisms, agency, levels of autonomy, cognition, and a look at the historical dimension of autonomy. The current development of scientific investigations on autonomous organisation calls for a theoretical and philosophical analysis. This can contribute to the elaboration of an original understanding of life - including human life - on Earth, opening new perspectives and enabling fecund interactions with other existing theories and approaches. This book takes up the challenge. (shrink)

Ecological accounts of responsible agency claim that moral feedback is essential to the reasons-responsiveness of agents. In this paper, we discuss McGeer’s scaffolded reasons-responsiveness account in the light of two concerns. The first is that some agents may be less attuned to feedback from their social environment but are nevertheless morally responsible agents – for example, autistic people. The second is that moral audiences can actually work to undermine reasons-responsiveness if they espouse the wrong values. We argue that McGeer’s account (...) can be modified to handle both problems. Once we understand the specific roles that moral feedback plays for recognizing and acting on moral reasons, we can see that autistics frequently do rely on such feedback, although it often needs to be more explicit. Furthermore, although McGeer is correct to highlight the importance of moral feedback, audience sensitivity is not all that matters to reasons-responsiveness; it needs to be tempered by a consistent application of moral rules. Agents also need to make sure that they choose their moral audiences carefully, paying special attention to receiving feedback from audiences which may be adversely affected by their actions. (shrink)

The question of whether psychopaths are criminally and morally responsible has generated significant controversy in the literature. In this paper, we discuss what relevance a psychopathy diagnosis has for criminal responsibility. It has been argued that figuring out whether psychopathy is a mental illness is of fundamental importance, because it is a precondition for psychopaths’ eligibility to be excused via the legal insanity defense. But even if psychopathy counts as a mental illness, this alone is not sufficient to show the (...) insanity defense is applicable; it must also be shown that, as a result of the illness, specific deficits in moral understanding or control are present. In this paper, we show that a diagnosis of psychopathy will generally not indicate that a defendant is eligible for an insanity defense. This is because the group of individuals subsumed under the diagnosis is so heterogeneous that while some psychopaths do show significant impairments in affect and control which may impact on their responsibility, many psychopaths are not incapacitated in a way relevant to responsibility. (shrink)

Slippery slope arguments are frequently dismissed as fallacious or weak arguments but are nevertheless commonly used in political and bioethical debates. This paper gives an overview of different variants of the argument commonly found in the literature and addresses their argumentative strength and the interrelations between them. The most common variant, the empirical slippery slope argument, predicts that if we do A, at some point the highly undesirable B will follow. I discuss both the question which factors affect likelihood of (...) slippage and the relation between the strength of the prediction and the justificatory power of the argument. (shrink)

People hold wildly opposing and very strong views on the question whether mental disorders are brain disorders, and the disagreement is primarily a conceptual one, not one about whether there are,...

The challenges facing us today require practical wisdom to allow us to react appropriately. In this paper, we argue that at a group level, we will make better decisions if we respect and take into account the moral judgment of agents with diverse styles of cognition and moral reasoning. We show this by focusing on the example of autism, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of moral reasoning found in autistic and non-autistic persons respectively.

In this paper, I address the question whether mental disorders should be understood to be brain disorders and what conditions need to be met for a disorder to be rightly described as a brain disorder. I defend the view that mental disorders are autonomous and that a condition can be a mental disorder without at the same time being a brain disorder. I then show the consequences of this view. The most important of these is that brain differences underlying mental (...) disorders derive their status as disordered from the fact that they realize mental dysfunction and are therefore non-autonomous or dependent on the level of the mental. I defend this view of brain disorders against the objection that only conditions whose pathological character can be identified independently of the mental level of description count as brain disorders. The understanding of brain disorders I propose requires a certain amount of conceptual revision and is at odds with approaches which take the notion of brain disorder to be fundamental or look to neuroscience to provide us with a purely physiological understanding of mental illness. It also entails a pluralistic understanding of psychiatric illness, according to which a condition can be both a mental disorder and a brain disorder. (shrink)

The question of whether mental disorders are disorders of the brain has led to a long- running and controversial dispute within psychiatry, psychology and philosophy of mind and psychology. While recent work in neuroscience frequently tries to identify underlying brain dysfunction in mental disorders, detractors argue that labelling mental disorders as brain disorders is reductive and can result in harmful social effects. This book brings a much- needed philosophical perspective to bear on this important question.

Recent work on ecological accounts of moral responsibility and agency have argued for the importance of social environments for moral reasons responsiveness. Moral audiences can scaffold individual agents’ sensitivity to moral reasons and their motivation to act on them, but they can also undermine it. In this paper, we look at two case studies of ‘scaffolding bad’, where moral agency is undermined by social environments: street gangs and online incel communities. In discussing these case studies, we draw both on recent (...) situated cognition literature and on scaffolded responsibility theory. We show that the way individuals are embedded into a specific social environment changes the moral considerations they are sensitive to in systematic ways because of the way these environments scaffold affective and cognitive processes, specifically those that concern the perception and treatment of ingroups and outgroups. We argue that gangs undermine reasons responsiveness to a greater extent than incel communities because gang members are more thoroughly immersed in the gang environment. (shrink)

Opponents of biomedical enhancement frequently adopt what Allen Buchanan has called the “Personal Goods Assumption.” On this assumption, the benefits of biomedical enhancement will accrue primarily to those individuals who undergo enhancements, not to wider society. Buchanan has argued that biomedical enhancements might in fact have substantial social benefits by increasing productivity. We outline another way in which enhancements might benefit wider society: by augmenting civic virtue and thus improving the functioning of our political communities. We thus directly confront critics (...) of biomedical enhancement who argue that it will lead to a loss of social cohesion and a breakdown in political life. (shrink)

Should moral blame stop at the grave? We often blame the dead for the bad things they did while alive. But blaming the dead poses a prima facie challenge to accounts which take our blaming practices to aim at communicating moral disapproval to wrongdoers or at improving their moral agency. If these kinds of aims are made definitional for blame, blaming the dead becomes impossible. But even on accounts which say that paradigmatically, blame is a form of moral engagement which (...) aims to effect changes in the wrongdoer, blaming the dead may seem unjustified, pointless or even irrational. In this paper, I explain how blaming the dead can be made sense of and justified. However, not all cases of blaming the dead fit this explanation, because blaming the dead is not a homogenous practice. (shrink)

Whether anorexic patients should be able to refuse treatment when this potentially has a fatal outcome is a vexed topic. A recent proposal for a new category of ‘terminal anorexia’ suggests criteria when a move to palliative care or even physician assisted suicide might be justified. I argue that this proposed diagnosis presents a false sense of certainty of the illness trajectory by conceptualizing anorexia in analogy with physical disorders and stressing the effects of starvation. Furthermore, this conceptualization is in (...) conflict with the claim that individuals who meet the diagnostic criteria for terminal anorexia have decision making capacity. It should therefore be rejected. (shrink)

Introduction to a special issue on unrealistic optimism.

Does a diagnosis of brain dysfunction matter for ascriptions of moral responsibility? This chapter argues that, while knowledge of brain pathology can inform judgments of moral responsibility, its evidential value is currently limited for a number of practical and theoretical reasons. These include the problem of establishing causation from correlational data, drawing inferences about individuals from group data, and the reliance of the interpretation of brain findings on well-established psychological findings. Brain disorders sometimes matter for moral responsibility, however, because they (...) change an individual’s moral psychology in a way that is beyond their control. While control over psychological changes is not an excusing factor, brain disorders can mitigate moral responsibility because they confront individuals with new psychological deficits or urges for which their previous moral education and existing external and internal moral resources have not prepared them. (shrink)

In everyday confabulation and rationalisation of behaviour, agents provide sincerely believed explanations of behaviour which are ill-grounded and normally inaccurate. In this paper, I look at the commonalities and differences between confabulations and rationalisations and investigate their moral costs and benefits. Following Summers and Velleman, I argue that both can be beneficial because they constrain future behaviour through self-consistency motivations. However, I then show that the same features that make confabulations and rationalisations beneficial in some cases can also make them (...) morally costly, when behaviour is explained and justified through the endorsement of bad moral principles. I show that these effects are most likely to occur where the central element of confabulation, self-explanation, and the central element of rationalisation, self-justification, coincide. (shrink)

Thesis summary BATISTA, Jefferson Pinto.The social doctrine of the Catholic Church and the foundations of social work: the graduation course of Social Work at PUC Minas.

Why do Americans, and so often, American writers, profess moral sentiments and yet write so little in the traditionally "moralistic" genres of maxim and fable? What is the relation between "moral" concerns and literary theory? Can any sort of morality survive the supposed nihilism of deconstruction? Jefferson Humphries undertakes a discussion of questions like these through a comparative reading of the ways in which moral issues surface in French and American literature. Humphries takes issue with the "amoral" view of (...) deconstruction espoused by many of its detractors, arguing that the debate between the theory's advocates and opponents comes down to two opposing literary and moral traditions. While the American tradition views morality as a rigid system capable of being enforced by injunctions along the lines of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not," the French tradition conceives of morality as a function of a relentless and unsentimental pursuit of truth, and finally, an admission that "truth" is not a static thing, but rather an ongoing process of rigorous thought. (shrink)