In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self-conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical (...) issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics. (shrink)

This essay uses empirical studies to engage Richard Miller’s advocacy of a “cultural turn” in the study of religious ethics found in Friends and Other Strangers. The particular kind of empirical research I highlight here, cultural cognition, emphasizes the ways that belonging to a cultural group influences one’s reasoning when faced with controversial issues involving disputed facts. This approach underscores the significance of the cultural turn, but it also raises some important challenges for Miller’s accounts of moral psychology and public (...) reason. I work to elucidate what those challenges are and point to some ways that taking cultural cognition seriously might open up fresh avenues for addressing perennial ethical issues. (shrink)

This essay responds to four critics of Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics and Culture: Diana Fritz Cates, Eric Gregory, Ross Moret, and Atalia Omer. Focusing on the book’s organizing concepts of intimacy and alterity, engagement with empirical sources, discussion of Augustine’s thought, and attention to moral psychology and political morality, these interlocutors take up various strands in the book’s argument and extend them into metaethical, normative, and metadisciplinary domains. The author organizes his response under three (...) rubrics: Metaethics and Personal Relationships; Political Morality; and Multidisciplinary Horizons. (shrink)

In this study, Don Ross explores the relationship of economics to other branches of behavioral science, asking, in the course of his analysis, under what interpretation economics is a sound empirical science. The book explores the relationships between economic theory and the theoretical foundations of related disciplines that are relevant to the day-to-day work of economics -- the cognitive and behavioral sciences. It asks whether the increasingly sophisticated techniques of microeconomic analysis have revealed any deep empirical regularities -- whether (...) technical improvement represents improvement in any other sense. Casting Daniel Dennett and Kenneth Binmore as its intellectual heroes, the book proposes a comprehensive model of economic theory that, Ross argues, does not supplant, but recovers the core neoclassical insights, and counters the caricaturish conception of neoclassicism so derided by advocates of behavioral or evolutionary economics. Because he approaches his topic from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science, Ross devotes one chapter to the philosophical theory and terminology on which his argument depends and another to related philosophical issues. Two chapters provide the theoretical background in economics, one covering developments in neoclassical microeconomics and the other treating behavioral and experimental economics and evolutionary game theory. The three chapters at the heart of the argument then apply theses from the philosophy of cognitive science to foundational problems for economic theory. In these chapters, economists will find a genuinely new way of thinking about the implications of cognitive science for economics, and cognitive scientists will find in economic behavior, a new testing site for the explanations of cognitive science. (shrink)

Expanding the Palace of Torah offers a broad philosophical overview of the challenges the women’s revolution poses to Orthodox Judaism, as well as Orthodox Judaism’s response to those challenges. Writing as an insider—herself an Orthodox Jew—Tamar Ross confronts the radical feminist critique of Judaism as a religion deeply entrenched in patriarchy. Surprisingly, very little work has been done in this area, beyond exploring the leeway for ad hoc solutions to practical problems as they arise on the halakhic plane. In (...) exposing the largely male-focused thrust of the rabbinic tradition and its biblical grounding, she sees this critique as posing a potential threat to the theological heart of traditional Judaism—the belief in divine revelation. This new edition brings this acclaimed and classic text back into print with a new essay by Tamar Ross which examines new developments in feminist thought since the book was first published in 2004. (shrink)

Ross, Alf Loar, Brian, Editor.Directives and Norms. New York: Humanities Press, [1967]. ix, 188 pp. Reprint available April 2009 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1-58477-961-2. ISBN-10: 1-58477-961-6. Cloth with dust jacket. $65.00 * Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (...) (1958) are his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes. (shrink)

In this article, I critically respond to Herbert Gintis's criticisms of the behavioral-economic foundations of Ken Binmore 's game-theoretic theory of justice. Gintis, I argue, fails to take full account of the normative requirements Binmore sets for his account, and also ignores what I call the ‘scale-relativity’ considerations built into Binmore 's approach to modeling human evolution. Paul Seabright's criticism of Binmore, I note, repeats these oversights. In the course of answering Gintis's and Seabright's objections, I clarify and extend Binmore (...) 's theory in a number of respects, integrating it with Kim Sterelny's and Don Ross's recent work on the evolution of people as cultural entities. The account also yields a novel basis for choosing between socialism and what Binmore calls ‘whiggery’ as normative political programs. Key Words: theory of justice • bargaining theory • evolutionary game theory • human evolution • Ken Binmore • Herbert Gintis • Kim Sterelny. (shrink)

Pregnant people are often listed among groups that have been excluded from research on the basis of perceived vulnerability, to the detriment of the entire class. Lack of research among pregnant pe...

The paper begins by providing a game-theoretic reconstruction of Gilbert’s (1989) philosophical critique of Lewis (1969) on the role of salience in selecting conventions. Gilbert’s insight is reformulated thus: Nash equilibrium is insufficiently powerful as a solution concept to rationalize conventions for unboundedly rational agents if conventions are solutions to the kinds of games Lewis supposes. Both refinements to NE and appeals to bounded rationality can plug this gap, but lack generality. As Binmore (this issue) argues, evolutive game theory readily (...) explains the origin of conventional behavior, but that is not Lewis’s project. Gilbert’s critique is generalized by reference to Bacharach’s (2006) work on team reasoning in games. The paper then argues that although Lewis’s account of the rationalization of conventions is shown by the reconstruction of Gilbert’s critique to be incomplete, Gilbert is wrong to conclude that classical (‘eductive’) game theory lacks the resources to explain conformity to conventions among people. A game-theoretic account of the dynamics of socialization, based on Ross’s (2005, 2006) idea of ‘game determination’, rationalizes choices of conventional strategies in overlapping generations contexts, provided agents are products of evolutionary selection and know that other players are also such products. (shrink)

The idea that religious belief is ‘almost inevitable’ is so forcefully argued by Justin Barrett that it can warrant justifiable concern – especially since he claims atheism is an unnatural handicap. In this article, I argue that religious belief in Homo sapiens isn’t inevitable – and that Barrett does agree when pushed. I describe the role played by a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device in the generation of belief in God as necessary but insufficient in explaining religious culture – I distance (...) myself from some common conceptions of HADD and the view I take of it is unorthodox. I point out that the conclusion to Barrett’s book, ‘Why Would Anyone Believe in God?’ is a fine example of the very hyperactive agency detection Barrett himself describes, and is therefore highly suspect. (shrink)

This paper proposes an explanation in terms of three kinds of freedom, first for the special efficacy of science in general and then for why such efficacy has been more impressive in the natural than the social sciences. This explanation thus complements "post-positivist" interpretations of science which argue that science's effectiveness cannot be accounted for by fundamental epistemic differences from other kinds of discourse. My explanation tries to say what is responsible for science's effectiveness, in purely nonepistemic, sociological terms. All (...) of the three kinds of freedom have so far been denied to most other forums, including in particular nations' populations taken overall. And one of these freedoms, while now allowed to the natural sciences, is still denied to the social sciences. (shrink)

This letter responds to letters by Garson Leder and by Harrison Lee in the same issue, September‐October 2024, of the Hastings Center Report.

BackgroundSchool based running programmes, such as The Daily Mile™, positively impact pupils’ physical health, however, there is limited evidence on psychological health. Additionally, current evidence is mostly limited to examining the acute impact. The present study examined the longer term impact of running programmes on pupil cognition, wellbeing, and fitness.MethodData from 6,908 school pupils, who were participating in a citizen science project, was examined. Class teachers provided information about participation in school based running programmes. Participants completed computer-based tasks of inhibition, (...) verbal and visual-spatial working memory, as well as the Children’s Feeling scale and Felt arousal scale to determine subjective wellbeing. A multistage 20-m shuttle run test was used to estimate fitness.ResultsFrom our total sample of 6,908 school pupils, 474 participants had been taking part in a running programme for 3 months); and 5,430 did not take part in a running programme. The Longer Term participation group had higher fitness levels than both other groups and this remained significant when adjusted for age, sex and SES. Moderated regression analysis found that for the Shorter Term participation group, higher shuttle distance was associated with better visual-spatial working memory. Effect sizes were small though.ConclusionWe identified small and selective positive impact of participation in school based running programmes on fitness and cognition. While no long term benefit was identified for cognition or wellbeing, the impact on fitness and short term benefit suggest schools should consider participation. (shrink)

Our response to Sara Fry's paper focuses on the difficulty of understanding her insistence on the fundamental character of caring in a theory of nursing ethics. We discuss a number of problems her text throws in the way of making sense of this idea, and outline our own proposal for how caring's role may be reasonably understood: not as an alternative object of value, competing with autonomy or patient good, but rather as an alternative way of responding toward that which (...) is of value. (shrink)

Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David'Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

Ross (philosophy, SUNY Binghamton) attempts to rethink metaphysical traditions in terms of continental and pragmatist critiques, viewing the major work in the tradition as heretical. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Ladyman and Ross argue that analytic metaphysics is a misguided enterprise that should give way to a naturalized metaphysics that aims to reconcile everyday and special-scientific ontologies with fundamental physics as the authoritative source of knowledge on the general structure of the universe. Le Bihan and Barton (argue, as against this, that analytic metaphysics remains useful as a basis for the body of work in AI known as “applied ontology.” They stop short of claiming, however, that analytic metaphysics is (...) useful as metaphysics. I consider a basis for making the stronger claim: Smith's project for building what he claims to be metaphysical foundations for applied ontology (and for AI generally). Ultimately, the stronger claim is rejected; but in the course of this dialectic new aspects of the naturalistic metaphysical project come to light, including relationships between it and the traditional metaphysical project of providing foundations for philosophical semantics of truth and reference. (shrink)

Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

ABSTRACTThis special issue of Social Epistemology has its origin in two symposia organised by the Contemporary Philosophy of Technology Research Group at the University of Birmingham. These we...

Authors from the social sciences and humanities discuss the neoliberal re-structuring of higher education and the possibilities for progressive change to the social production of knowledge in universities.

U.S. immigration law has excluded noncitizens likely to become a “public charge” since 1882. When the Trump administration proposed a new Rule expanding the interpretation of that exclusion in 2018, over 55,000 people wrote public comments. These comments, overwhelmingly opposed to the change, are the subject of Rachel Fabi and Lauren Zahn’s insightful article in this issue of The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. The themes they identify resonate with the history of the public charge exclusion, which has always (...) reflected a tension between two aims of American governance — to provide for those in need of assistance, and to shape the nation’s citizenry according to ideals of self-sufficiency. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 31-32.

This chapter contains sections titled: Descartes Malebranche.

This chapter contains sections titled: Spinoza Leibniz.