Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of willand compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control are possible is of great practical significance.Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sensedistinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, andthe varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) - and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moralresponsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil.
The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts? "Mind, Morality and Magic" draws on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind - including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship - such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics - as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.
This book examines philosophical and scientific implications of Neodarwinism relative to recent empirical data. It develops explanations of social behavior and cognition through analysis of mental capabilities and consideration of ethical issues. It includes debate within cognitive science among explanations of social and moral phenomena from philosophy, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, neurobiology, linguistics, and computer science. The series Cognitive Science provides an original corpus of scholarly work that makes explicit the import of cognitive-science research for philosophical analysis. Topics include the nature, structure, and justification of knowledge, cognitive architectures and development, brain-mind theories, and consciousness.
Evolutionary Intuitionism presents a new evolutionary theory of human morality. Zamulinski explains the evolution of foundational attitudes, whose relationships to acts constitute moral facts. With foundational attitudes and the resulting moral facts in place, he shows how they ground a plausible normative morality, give answers to meta-ethical questions, and provide an account of moral motivation. He explains the nature of moral intuitions and, thus, of our access to the moral facts. He shows that the theory makes confirmed empirical predictions, including the observable variation in moral views. The combination of intuitionism and evolutionary ethics enables Zamulinski to overcome the standard objections to both.
Empathy plays a central role in the history and contemporary study of ethics, interpersonal understanding, and the emotions, yet until now has been relatively underexplored. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts: Core issues History of empathy Empathy and understanding Empathy and morals Empathy in art and aesthetics Empathy and individual differences. Within these sections central topics and problems are examined, including: empathy and imagination; neuroscience; David Hume and Adam Smith; understanding; evolution; altruism; moral responsibility; art, aesthetics, and literature; gender; empathy and related disciplines such as anthropology. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, particularly ethics and philosophy of mind and psychology, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as anthropology and social psychology.
Although integrative conceptions of development have been gaining increasing interest, there have been few attempts to bring together the various threads of this emerging trend. The Handbook of Integrative Developmental Science seeks ways to bring together classic and contemporary theory and research in developmental psychology with an eye toward building increasingly integrated theoretical and empirical frameworks. It does so in the form of a festschrift for Kurt Fischer, whose life and work have both inspired and exemplified integrative approaches to development. Building upon and inspired by the comprehensive scope of Fischer’s Dynamic Skill Theory, this book examines what an integrated theory of psychological development might look like. Bringing together the work of prominent integrative thinkers, the volume begins with an examination of philosophical presuppositions of integrative approaches to development. It then shows how Dynamic Skill Theory provides an example of an integrative model of development. After examining the question of the nature of integrative developmental methodology, the volume examines the nature of developmental change processes as well as pathways and processes in the development of psychological structures both within and between psychological domains. The team of expert contributors cover a range of psychological domains, including the macro- and micro-development of thought, feeling, motivation, self, intersubjectivity, social relations, personality, and other integrative processes. It ends with a set of prescriptions for the further elaboration of integrative developmental theory, and a tribute to Kurt Fischer and his influence on developmental psychology. This book will be essential reading for graduate students and researchers of developmental psychology and human development, specifically developmental science.
The pre-eminent 19th century British ethicist, Henry Sidgwick once said: "All important ethical notions are also psychological, except perhaps the fundamental antitheses of 'good' and 'bad' and 'wrong', with which psychology, as it treats of what is and not of what ought to be, is not directly concerned" (quoted in T.N. Tice and T.P. Slavens, 1983). Sidgwick's statement can be interpreted to mean that psychology is relevant for ethics or that psychological knowledge contributes to the construction of an ethical reality. This interpretation serves as the basic impetus to this book, but Sidgwick's statement is also analyzed in detail to demonstrate why a current exposition on the relevance of psychology for ethical reality is necessary and germane.
Might human morality be a product of evolution? An increasing number of philosophers and scientists believe that moral judgment and behaviour emerged because it enhanced the fitness of our distant ancestors. This volume collects some recent explorations of the evidence for this claim, as well as papers examining its implications. Is an evolved morality a genuine morality? Does an evolutionary origin deflate the pretensions of morality, or strip it of its force in guiding behaviour? Is an evolutionary approach compatible with realism about morality? All sides of these debates are represented in this volume.
The conflict between the natural sciences and Christian theology has been going on for centuries. Recent advances in the fields of evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, and neuroscience have intensified this conflict, particularly in relation to origins, the fall, and sin. These debates are crucial to our understanding of human sinfulness and necessarily involve the doctrine of salvation. Theistic evolutionists have labored hard to resolve these tensions between science and faith, but Hans Madueme argues that the majority of their proposals do injustice both to biblical teaching and to long-standing doctrines held by the mainstream Christian tradition. In this major contribution to the field of science and religion, Madueme demonstrates that the classical notion of sin reflected in Scripture, the creeds, and tradition offers the most compelling and theologically coherent account of the human condition. He answers pressing challenges from the physical sciences on both methodological and substantive levels. Scholars, pastors, students, and interested lay readers will profit from interacting with the arguments presented here.