bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Simulating Minds
Authors: Goldman Alvin I.
Published: September 2006

How people assign mental states to others and how they represent or conceptualize such states in the first place are topics of interest to philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Three competing answers to the question of how people impute mental states to others have been offered: by rationalizing, by theorizing, or by simulating. Simulation theory says that mindreaders produce mental states in their own minds that resemble, or aim to resemble, those of their targets; these states are then imputed to, or projected onto, the targets. In low-level mindreading, such as reading emotions from faces, simulation is mediated by automatic mirror systems. More controlled processes of simulation, here called “enactment imagination”, are used in high-level mindreading. Just as visual and motor imagery are attempts to replicate acts of seeing and doing, mindreading is characteristically an attempt to replicate the mental processes of a target, followed by projection of the imagination-generated state onto the target. Projection errors are symptomatic of simulation, because one’s own genuine states readily intrude into the simulational process. A nuanced form of introspection is introduced to explain self-attribution and also to address the question of how mental concepts are represented. A distinctive cognitive code involving introspective representations figures prominently in our concepts of mental states. The book concludes with an overview of the pervasive effects on social life of simulation, imitation, and empathy, and charts their possible roles in moral experience and the fictive arts.
The Rationality Theory
Authors: Goldman Alvin I.
Published: September 2006

Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” theory is a leading specimen of the rationality theory, though Dennett vacillates in offering stronger and weaker variants. In the strong formulations, the theory is quite implausible; in its weak formulations, its content is too thin to have predictive implications. It also suffers from an inability to handle attributions over the entire range of mental states, including sensations like thirst, hunger, or itchiness. Finally, it offers no satisfactory story of how mental concepts are understood. An ostensibly related theory, the “teleological stance” theory, doesn’t really claim to explain mental state attribution.
The Modularity Theory
Authors: Goldman Alvin I.
Published: September 2006

Modularists claim that folk psychology is mediated by an innate modularized database, the structures of which support inferences concerning representational relations like belief, desire, and pretense. It is doubtful, however, that mindreading really qualifies as modular, specifically, that it satisfies Fodor’s chief criteria of modularity: domain specificity and informational encapsulation. Alan Leslie postulates a core module called the “theory of mind mechanism”, but most of the work in assigning mental states is done by the “selection processor”, which is a non-modular mechanism. Finally, no real evidence is provided that propositional attitudes are ascribed via theoretical inference rather than simulation.
Ontogeny, Autism, Empathy, and Evolution
Authors: Goldman Alvin I.
Published: September 2006

A wide variety of well-studied phenomena associated with mindreading are surveyed to probe the consistency of what is known about them with our version of simulation theory. These phenomena include key ontogenetic stages such as gaze following, early intention tracking, and role play, as well as the psychopathology of autism. A link between mirror-neuron dysfunction and autism provides suggestive support for the simulation approach. Our distinction between low-level and high-level simulation fits comfortably with dual-process theories in cognitive science that draw a fundamental distinction between automatic and controlled processes. A tentative conjecture is offered about the evolution of simulation and mindreading, at least for more primitive kinds of simulation.
Self‐Attribution
Authors: Goldman Alvin I.
Published: September 2006

Most cognitive scientists and many philosophers of mind resist the traditional notion that the mind has a special method of monitoring or accessing its own current mental states. We review the critiques of both philosophers (Wittgenstein, Burge, Shoemaker) and cognitive scientists (Gazzaniga, Nisbett and Wilson, Gopnik), based on confabulation or self/other parallelism, and find all to be wanting. We then examine the more congenial monitoring account of Nichols and Stich, but find it incapable of handling the problem of attitude-type identification. A nuanced special-method approach is presented that combines introspection (inner recognition) for self-attributing state-types and redeployment for self-attributing attitude contents. The question of what the input-properties are for introspection is addressed at length.
Concepts of Mental States
Authors: Goldman Alvin I.
Published: September 2006

A concept in the psychological sense is the mental representation of a category, and a mental concept is the mental representation of a mental category or type, such as belief, desire, fear, or hunger. What are the vehicles of mental concepts and what are their contents? There is a proprietary internal code, the introspective code, which employs introspection-derived mental vehicles to represent mental categories. Introspection-based concepts bear some similarity to the notion of self-directed recognitional concepts, articulated by Loar. This approach contrasts with the functional-role approach to mental concepts that is naturally associated with theory theory.
Bioethics
Authors: Gert Bernard , Culver Charles M. , Clouser K. Danner
Published: September 2006

BIOETHICS: A Systematic Approach is an extensive revision of Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals. The subtitle has changed in order to emphasize that what distinguishes the authors’ approach to bioethics from almost all others is that it is systematic. It applies the account of morality and rationality presented in COMMON MORALITY: Deciding What To Do (2004) and MORALITY: Its Nature and Justification, Revised Edition (2005) to the moral problems that arise in the practice of medicine. The concept of rationality used to justify morality is the same concept that is used to define the concept of malady or disease. The book offers an account of the concept of death, and provides an account of euthanasia that fits within the systematic account of morality and rationality that have been provided. It also shows that this systematic account explains the controversy about the morality of abortion. There are new chapters on moral disagreements, abortion, and on “what doctors must know”, and significant improvements have been made in the treatment of the concepts of consent and malady. An entire chapter is devoted to the concept of mental maladies. Arguments are also developed against principlism and shows how principlism’s authors’ misunderstanding of this view undermines their criticisms.
Particular Moral Rules and Special Duties
Authors: Gert Bernard , Culver Charles M. , Clouser K. Danner
Published: September 2006

This chapter shows how different societies and professions generate particular moral rules and special duties from the general moral rules and moral ideals. The role that particular moral rules and special duties play in professional ethics is explained, and it is shown that there cannot be any incompatibility between common morality and professional ethics.
Paternalism and Its Justification
Authors: Gert Bernard , Culver Charles M. , Clouser K. Danner
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the four features of paternalism: (1) benefits the patient, (2) needs moral justification, (3) does not have patient’s consent, and (4) the patient believes he can make his own decision, showing why accounts that leave out any of these features is inadequate. It then contrasts the accounts of the justification of paternalism offered by act consequentialism and strict deontology with the justification procedure offered by common morality, and discusses several cases of paternalism.
Death
Authors: Gert Bernard , Culver Charles M. , Clouser K. Danner
Published: September 2006

This chapter provides a definition of “death” that accurately describes the way “death” and “dead” are used in both medicine and in everyday conversation. It discusses the characteristics of optimum criteria and tests, and shows how acceptance of the definition provided supports the use of the whole brain criterion for determining death and for using the tests that show that this criterion has been satisfied. A legal definition of death that is believed to be superior to the UDDA statute is provided.
Euthanasia
Authors: Gert Bernard , Culver Charles M. , Clouser K. Danner
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses why euthanasia presents a moral dilemma for physicians. It shows that trying to distinguish between active and passive euthanasia in any of the following four ways: (1) acts versus omissions, (2) withholding versus withdrawing, (3) ordinary care versus extraordinary care, or (4) whether death is due to natural causes, does not work. It then shows that using the distinction between patient requests and patient refusals does provide an adequate way to make this distinction. It provides an analysis of killing and discusses the Supreme Court decision concerning assisted suicide.
RATIONAL IMAGINING, RESPONSIBLE KNOWING
Authors: Code Lorraine
Published: September 2006

Although knowing other people often seems to offer better exemplars of the complexity of knowing than does knowing medium-sized physical objects, the scope and limits of such knowledge need to be examined. It is unclear how well anyone can imagine/claim to know another person’s experiences, circumstances, situation, feelings; and expressions of empathy are often imperialistic, insensitive, coercive, intrusive. Considering Mark Johnson’s The Moral Imagination, and Marguerite La Caze’s work on the arrogance of the analytic imaginary according to which anyone can, with a little effort, imagine being in someone else’s shoes, this chapter addresses the difficulties of knowing well enough to think responsibly, beyond one’s “own” situation. How might such thinking be possible, and who, specifically, is in a position to claim such knowledge? Issues of vulnerability, both as exposed in the Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992, and in Susan Brison’s accounts of the aftermath of a brutal rape inform the analysis.
On Female Body Experience
Authors: Young Iris Marion
Published: September 2006

These essays describe diverse aspects of women’s lived body experience in modern Western societies. They combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of “gender” for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residencies. Aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory are analyzed, such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman’s life story. The phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing are also considered.
Lived Body vs. Gender
Authors: Young Iris Marion
Published: September 2006

This essay evaluates Toril Moi’s arguments for abandoning the concept of gender for feminist theory and replacing it with the concept of lived body derived from existential phenomenology. It agrees with Moi that lived body is a better concept than gender as a category theorizing subjectivity. However, it argues that we need to retain and reposition a concept of gender for theorizing social structure. This essay serves as a theoretical introduction to some of the concepts applied in the succeeding essays.
Pregnant Embodiment
Authors: Young Iris Marion
Published: September 2006

This essay considers some of the experiences of pregnancy from the pregnant woman’s viewpoint. Drawing on diaries and literature as well as phenomenological reflection on the pregnant experience, it seeks to let women speak in their own voices. Section I describes some aspects of bodily existence unique to pregnancy. The pregnant subject is shown as decentered, split, or doubled in several ways. Section II reflects on the encounter of the pregnant subject with the institutions and practices of medicine. It argues that within the present organization of these institutions and practices, women usually find such an encounter alienating in several respects.
Menstrual Meditations
Authors: Young Iris Marion
Published: September 2006

This essay examines the social oppression of women as menstruators in two major forms: the shame associated with menstruation that compels girls and women to conceal their menstrual events, and the misfit between women and public places such as schools and workplaces, which often refuse to accommodate women’s social and physical needs. Imagining away these injustices reveals not a glorious experience but a personal bodily process that causes many women some discomfort or annoyance some of the time. The process nevertheless carries emotional meaning for many women. The unfairness associated with the social response to menstruation is analyzed based on the accounts of women’s experience of menstruation derived from Simone de Beauvoir and contemporary feminist research. Mood and memory as menstrual events that mark a woman’s self-narrative are explored.
Teaching in the Contact Zone
Authors: Jones Carolyn M.
Published: September 2006

In a course like African American religion, the classroom is a “contact zone”, a term used by Mary Louise Pratt. To illustrate the difficulties in dealing with the contact zone, this chapter describes an African American Religion course recently taught by the author of this book. It then looks at the issues involved when a classroom becomes a contact zone. The chapter then discusses the use of David Remnick's biography of Muhammed Ali, King of the World, and America in the Civil Rights era for understanding the significance of the Nation of Islam. Finally, building on the spiritual journey of Muhammed Ali, the central issue in teaching religion, transformation, whether it is African American Religion or not, is considered.
On the Plantation
Authors: Hardesty Nancy A.
Published: September 2006

This chapter describes the teaching of a basic-level course called “African American Religion”. The course, taught by the author of the book, is open to anybody with an interest in the subject. In 1999, there were only seven students who completed the course: five black, two white. In 2001, there were twenty-eight: twenty-three black and five white. The course will continue to be offered.
Incorporating the African American Religious Experience into the Community College Curriculum and Classroom
Authors: Horton Mary Jane
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses teaching religion and in particular, teaching the African American religious experience. Topics covered include how to create a community of learners by establishing class norms, using classroom activities, and introducing womanist thought in class.
“Testifying” and “Testimony”
Authors: Moore, Jr. Moses N.
Published: September 2006

Autobiographical narratives and related materials such as journals and diaries have proved to be valuable, but often problematic, resources for the studying and teaching of African American religious experiences. This chapter identifies a number of these resources and illustrates some of the historiographical and pedagogical issues related to their use. In this chapter, “testifying” alludes to the confessional tradition within the black religious experience and is used in reference to the “subjective” self-representations, interpretations, and experiences found in autobiographical narratives and related materials. “Testimony”, meanwhile, has more “factual” connotations and refers to resources and interpretations that are ostensibly more “objective” and hence subject to critical historical assessment. Both types of material are presented as valid, valuable, and complementary resources for studying the African American religious experience. This chapter also includes pedagogical reflections on varied classroom experiences that incorporate both types of resources in courses situated in two university departments of religious studies.
“Making a Way Out of No Way”
Authors: Wiggins Daphne C.
Published: September 2006

African American Christianity can be used to engage the questions of social practice and theology. From a variety of sources, the Black Church has constructed practices that counter and subdue oppressive forces felt by African Americans while simultaneously establishing a context for a more abundant life. This chapter presents a model for teaching those contexts. It presents the rationale and several of the strategies used in the course, “The Social Contexts of the Black Church”. The course requires students to ground their ministerial vision in a dialectical understanding of the Black Church. Moving between the contemporary interdisciplinary interpretation of the sociocultural contexts of African Americans and the history and established theological teachings of the Black Church, an approach is presented that equips theological students to construct a ministerial direction and praxis.
Tribal Talk:
Authors: Coleman Will “Esuyemi”
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the text, Tribal Talk. Topics covered include Black theology, the use of broken English in the narrative, hermeneutics, African-derived religions in the Americas, and African-American religious history.
Afterword
Authors: Townes Emilie M.
Published: September 2006

This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of the chapters presented in this volume. It also discusses the subject of African American religious studies.
Transforming the 20th Century
Authors: Smil Vaclav
Published: September 2006

Technical progress in the 20th century was based on the unprecedented technical advances that took place during the two pre-WWI generations (1867-1914). All of these fundamental and lasting inventions — most notably electricity generation, internal combustion engines, new materials, and new means of communication — had undergone major technical transformations that improved their performance, reliability, durability, and ease of use while lowering their cost. In addition, the century saw its share of new inventions and innovations, ranging from plastics to solid state electronics.
Care of the Elderly and End‐of‐Life Care
Authors: Mahowald Mary Briody
Published: September 2006

Cases illustrating variables that arise in the health care of elderly women and their caregivers, and care of the dying are presented. These include questions about ageism, competence to perform ordinary functions such as driving, possible loss of capacity for moral agency, advance directives, and decisions about forgoing or terminating life-support. For each topic, empirical and theoretical factors are discussed from an “egalitarian perspective” that imputes privileged status to the standpoint of women.
Introduction: The Historical Context
Authors: Bulman Raymond F.
Published: September 2006

This introductory chapter presents a brief historical background of Trent. It is argued that Trent offered a doctrinal response to the challenges of the Protestant Reformation, as well as a reform council, marking the zenith of a long and often frustrating process of inner Church reform dating back at least two centuries. The Catholic reform movement is described, and Trent and the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) are compared. An overview of the chapters in this volume is presented.
The Latin of the Roman Rite: Before Trent and After Vatican II
Authors: Sloyan Gerard S.
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the Catholic mother tongue — its history, its role in the official life of the Church, and its apparent demise. It spans a period from the first century of the Christian era, to the Council of Trent, to the Second Vatican Council.
Responding to Religious Difference: Conciliar Perspectives
Authors: Fletcher Jeannine Hill
Published: September 2006

This chapter explores the shift in the Catholic response to religious difference. The Council of Tent Trent declared that that the Catholic response to religious difference was simply “extra ecclesiam nulla salus”. Outside the Church, there is no salvation. The Second Vatican Council voiced the matter differently. In the lines of their dogmatic constitutions they declared: “There are those who without any fault do not know anything about Christ or his church...these too can obtain eternal salvation”.
“Beset on Every Side”: Reimagining the Ideology of the Roman Catechism (1566)
Authors: Brancatelli Robert J.
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines the Roman Catechism. First, it reviews the historical development of the catechism and critique portions of its text according to Ricoeur's understanding of ideology and distanciation. Second, it shows how the catechism conveys an ideology in which the Church's primary role is to defend itself against threats to its survival and internal structure. Finally, it suggests possibilities for appropriating or reimagining the catechism's defensive posture of Tridentinism in the context of the contemporary Church.
Conclusion: A Clash of Ecclesiologies
Authors: Parrella Frederick J.
Published: September 2006

This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of the chapters included in this volume. It is argued that the chapters in this book help us grasp and understand the Church not as an eternal community with unchangeable teachings and rituals, but as a historical and dynamic reality with a rich and vibrant theological tradition.
Economic Reforms and Investment Under Japan
Authors: Chung Young‐Iob
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines the economic reforms for capital formation and economic transformation, as well as the estimation of aggregate investment in Korea under Japanese rule between 1905 and 1945. The reform measures examined are those that removed economic and political obstacles, and those that established a new infrastructure to accommodate the workings of a government-controlled but market-oriented economy aimed at promoting capital formation and economic development. The estimation of investment considered not only the aggregate sum, but also the different nationalities (namely, Japanese, foreigners, and Koreans). The chapter also evaluates the impact of foreign investment, especially that of the Japanese, on Korean investment in terms of catalytic, linkage, oppression effects, as well as the benefits derived from external economies. Investment in human capital is assessed in terms of the overall expansion of the school system, student enrollments, and educational opportunities for Japanese and Koreans. The analysis includes private education, particularly that of the Christian missionaries, which played an important role in educating future Korean leaders.
Sectoral Investment
Authors: Chung Young‐Iob
Published: September 2006

This chapter investigates the magnitude, features, and attributes of investment in various segments of the economy based on (i) ownership (e.g., public or private sectors); (ii) the nature of industries (e.g., industry, agriculture, trade, and service); (iii) the type of industry (e.g., social overhead capital and manufacturing); (iv) the capital-, technology-, and labor-intensities of industry; (v) the scale of investment; and (vi) the goals of investment by various economic entities, e.g., organizations and nationals. The analysis of investments in social overhead capital is further broken down according to transportation, communications, and electric power industries, while manufacturing is examined based on the types of goods produced, namely, light and heavy, and chemical industries. These not only reflected the transformation of Korean economy, but also showed the goals of investment. The volume, investors, and the nature of investment underscored the contributions made by different economic entities, such as the government, and different nationalities, namely, the Japanese, non-Japanese “foreigners”, and Koreans, in forging the country's capital formation, which reveal the underlying forces for the structural changes in the economy over time.
Sources and Policies for Investment
Authors: Chung Young‐Iob
Published: September 2006

This chapter investigates how the colonial government promoted capital formation through fiscal and financial policies, by providing financial incentives and creating a favorable economic environment to invest in newly-produced capital assets. The fiscal policies examined are the taxation and subsidy measures that enhanced business opportunities for profit, especially in the targeted industries. The financial policies examined are those that established various financial institutions to mobilize savings — both from domestic and foreign sources — and allocate loans with subsidized interest for investment in the targeted industries through public financial institutions. The means through which savings were mobilized are examined, including deposits in financial institutions, which were loaned out for investment; Japanese government grants, foreign borrowings, and “forced savings” through currency issues to supplement inadequate owners equity. Since the government's excessive intervention through preferential schemes, such as directed credits, subsidies, and tax exemptions carried a considerable economic burden, its negative impact is also evaluated.
Living with the End
Authors: Thompson Damian
Published: September 2006

This chapter explores the different strategies used by leaders and members of Kensington Temple with regard to the subject of the End Times. It examines the “official” treatment of apocalyptic doctrines in sermons and Bible classes, and the “unofficial” material sold in the church bookshop. At both levels, there is evidence that the transmission of millenarian ideas is affected by the personal dispositions of pastors and church employees, many of whom find this a difficult area to manage. Drawing on interviews with ordinary church members and survey data, the different strategies employed by worshippers in dealing with potentially troublesome apocalyptic ideas are examined. These include a policy of ignoring them, a focus on explanatory rather than predictive motifs, and the use of language that reduces millenarianism to the unthreatening proportions of a professional discourse.
The NBAC Report on Cloning
Authors: Kaveny M. Cathleen
Published: September 2006

The report produced by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission at the request of President Bill Clinton, titled Cloning Human Beings, provides a good example of the two-pronged approach to religion in bioethics. The report merits careful scrutiny precisely because of the deftness with which it appears to negotiate the thorny questions surrounding the role of religion in public policy. Analysis of the structure, arguments, and rhetoric of the report reveals the theoretical and practical inadequacy of the currently reigning two-pronged approach to the role of religious perspectives in the field of bioethics.
The Delivery of Controversial Services
Authors: Ryan Maura A.
Published: September 2006

Cochran has argued that Catholic health care occupies a “unique place on the border of public and private life”. Catholic health care is accountable to both its religious and sacramental traditions and its public responsibilities. It is inevitable that “border skirmishes” will arise. Yet there is no single formula for suggesting what public-private collaboration should comprise or how conflicts between values ought to be resolved. It may be, as Cochran suggests, that increasingly bitter conflicts over widely valued services such as sterilization, combined with market pressures to conform to for-profit trends in health care, will make divestiture of faith-based hospitals in favor of other types of church-community partnerships the best course for the future.
True to Oneself
Authors: Solomon Robert C.
Published: September 2006

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is one of the great books in philosophy of the 20th century. One of the most excerpted and most discussed sections of that book is the chapter on “Bad Faith”. Sartre’s analysis centers on the twin concepts of facticity and transcendence and the complex relationship of the two. He also suggests that bad faith may be inescapable, a thesis seriously challenged here. This chapter also examines Sartre’s famous examples of bad faith in considerable detail.
What Blame Is Not
Authors: Sher George
Published: September 2006

This chapter asks what blaming someone adds to believing that he has acted badly. It examines three of the most popular accounts of the additional element: roughly, those which construe it as a public expression of one’s disapproval, as a belief that the agent’s misdeeds have marred his moral record, and as a negative emotional reaction. Of these familiar accounts, each is shown to be inadequate.
In Praise of Blame
Authors: Sher George
Published: September 2006

This final chapter develops an account of blameworthiness that dovetails with the previous chapter’s account of blame. Because the core constituents of blame consist of a desire and a belief, the norms that determine when blame is called for are the ones that correspond to these elements. On the resulting account, blame is called for when (a) the blamer’s belief that the blamee has acted badly is true, and (b) the blamer’s desire that the blamee not have violated a moral principle to which the blamer is committed is justified by the very considerations that justify his commitment itself. By thus making explicit the link between the justification of blame and the justification of the moral principle that the blamee has flouted, we come to see that a commitment to blame is inseparable from a commitment to morality itself.
Foundations for a Feminist Sublime
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

This chapter takes up the notion of vulnerability in the face of alterity that is the foundation for Freeman's “feminine sublime.” It traces similar notions in Butler's book of post-9/11 essays, Precarious Life, and in Eva Kittay's ground-breaking book in feminist care ethics, Love's Labor. It is argued that the dependence these authors find at the very heart of our intersubjective relationships is also at the heart of our relationship to the natural world — and that these relations of dependence are the irrevocable aspect of the human condition that both lends itself to and is disclosed in sublime experience. The ethical and political implications of this vulnerability to others can be temporarily denied or thwarted by the subject who flees dependence, but they must ultimately be affirmed if we are to live these relations in aesthetically, ethically, and politically sustainable ways.
The Natural Sublime
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

This chapter describes one type of sublime experience that often tears open the sealed worlds that tend to mark our contemporary life, called the “the natural sublime”. Natural sublime shows us that while the two realms of necessity and freedom are distinct, they are not separate. Either eliding the distinction between them or treating them as quite separate results in the misunderstanding of both realms.
Conclusion
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It argues that a feminist account of the sublime is important today because the dominant framework for encountering the sublime is one that leads precisely to the fated efforts toward sovereignty and invulnerability we see all around us. But other responses are possible. The sublime might also be an occasion for the affirmation of relations that are both inevitable and ethically binding. These other sublimes will require a different kind of courage, one that is able to linger with grief when it swells to unmanageable proportions, when it overtakes and overthrows pretensions to a power so grand that it borders on omnipotence. They will require the courage to face the pain that we must live in our encounters with beautiful nature, and with powerful nature, in spite of the fact that this pain takes the punch out of the spectacles of invulnerability we create with ourselves at the center.
Casting Kings
Authors: Snodgrass Jeffrey G.
Published: September 2006

Based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the Indian state of Rajasthan, this book explores the manner that semi-nomadic performers known as Bhats understand and also subvert caste hierarchies. A number of scholars have recently contended that caste is invented and thus a fiction of a kind. Focus in these studies, however, is typically placed on the way that caste is imagined according to the agendas and desires of elite Westerners such as colonial officials. By contrast, this book argues that Bhats themselves understand the imaginative dimensions of caste relations. It focuses on the way that Bhats (literally, “Bards”) now entertain a variety of contemporary sponsors — village patrons, foreign and domestic tourists, urban elites, government officials, development experts, and Hindu nationalists — with ballads, epics, and puppet plays detailing the exploits of Rajasthan’s long-dead kings and heroes. As the book delves deeper into the complexities and contradictions of Bhat art, identity, and political resistance, the complexities and contradictions of modern India are likewise revealed.
Moral Sickness
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on the ways moral values are embedded in conceptions of mental disorders and positive health, focusing on when mental health is defined negatively, as in the absence of mental disorders. In the Republic, Plato proposes that the health of the mind consists in exercising the cardinal virtues: practical wisdom in making judgments, courage in confronting dangers, temperance in satisfying appetites, and justice in manifesting inner harmony in desirable conduct. Immorality is the absence of healthy self-governance, whether due to ignorance, cowardice, lack of self-control, or inner chaos. For Plato, “moral health” and “moral sickness” are not mere metaphors. They refer to mental health and pathology as defined by concepts of virtue and vice. Critics of the therapeutic trend denounce Plato's proposal as a dangerous confusion — dangerous, because equating morality with mental health gives health professionals alarming power in moral matters; confusion, because mental health and virtue are entirely different. The chapter affirms Plato's core insight: mental health and moral virtue are significantly interwoven in their meaning and reference. This is true when mental health is defined negatively, as the absence of mental disorders.
Moral Health
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter continues the discussion began in Chapter 1 on the ways moral values are embedded in conceptions of mental disorders and positive health, focusing on when mental health is defined positively, as psychological well-being. Positive conceptions of health invariably embody or presuppose moral values. Marie Jahoda identified six (overlapping) criteria for positive health, which today, is the starting point for many contemporary discussions. These are: (1) self-esteem, (2) psychological integration, (3) personal autonomy, (4) self-actualization, (5) social coping, and (6) realistic cognition. It is argued that these criteria are closely linked, respectively, to self-respect, integrity, moral autonomy, authenticity, responsibility, and truthfulness. They are not synonymous with these virtues, however, and each feature can be unfolded in subjective or objective directions, thereby reflecting ambiguities in the therapeutic trend.
Responsibility in Therapy
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses responsibility for health in the context of client-therapist relationships. It begins by considering Samuel Butler's Erewhon, a novel that adumbrates the current uncertainty about responsibilities for health and provokes us to clarify the meaning and foundation of those responsibilities. It then critiques two ideologies about therapy that distort our understanding of responsibilities for health. One ideology concerns the sick role: to be sick is to be an innocent victim, and nonjudgmental therapy implies not holding patients responsible for their sickness. The other concerns science and causation: sick people (as well as healthy ones) are completely determined by biological and environmental forces in ways that remove moral responsibility. It is argued that these ideologies are as inimical to effective therapy as to sound morality.
Blaming Victims
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter addresses the question of whether victims of mental disorders or physical diseases should be blamed for their problems. It explores how an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective encourages acceptance of responsibility for health without unfair and destructive forms of blame. The discussion is structured around four health-related contexts: (1) preventing sickness, (2) assigning financial liabilities for health care costs, (3) giving meaning to suffering, and (4) interacting with health care professionals. What we say about blame in one of these contexts is relevant to but does not dictate what we say in other contexts.
Are Bigots Sick?
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter presents an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective on bigotry. A case is made for viewing visceral bigotry as both a sickness and a wrongdoing. It is argued that (visceral) bigotry can be understood as pathological without altering our conviction that it is immoral. Doing so allows us to appreciate how overcoming bigotry can be both a moral and a therapeutic process. At the same time, pathologizing prejudice (as with crime) carries risks in the current social climate where sickness is often assumed to be an automatic excuse. We need to ensure that justice remains a key component in an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective.
Epilogue
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This epilogue presents some concluding thoughts. It argues that America's therapeutic trend in ethics — the tendency to approach moral matters in terms of mental health — was politicized by America's culture wars during the second half of the 20th century. It comments on the political resonance of three themes: healthy morality, responsibility for health, and mental health as moral-laden.
Understanding Prosperity and Poverty: Geography, Institutions, and the Reversal of Fortune
Authors: Acemoglu Daron , Johnson Simon , Robinson James
Published: September 2006

Geography and institutions are the two main contenders to explain the fundamental causes of cross-country differences in prosperity. The geography hypothesis — which has a large following both in the popular imagination and in academia — maintains that the geography, climate, and ecology of a society’s location shape both its technology and the incentives of its inhabitants. This essay argues that differences in institutions are more important than geography for understanding the divergent economic and social conditions of nations. While the geography hypothesis emphasizes forces of nature as a primary factor in the poverty of nations, the institutions hypothesis is about man-made influences. A case is developed for the importance of institutions which draws on the history of European colonization.
The Role of Agriculture in Development
Authors: Eswaran Mukesh , Kotwal Ashok
Published: September 2006

As countries develop, their labor force shifts from agriculture to industry and services, and in the process, the well-being of the people improves. This essay sheds some light on the economic logic that drives the process and on the important role that agricultural productivity plays in it. It argues that agricultural productivity growth is the key to poverty alleviation, and then discusses the policy implications for developing countries. The first section shows how the process of secular decline in poverty is inevitably associated with a movement of labor from agriculture to other sectors, and how agricultural productivity growth facilitates such a movement. The second section discusses the importance of international trade in this process. Both agricultural and trade policies tend to generate political battles because they redistribute incomes from one group to another. This political economy question is addressed in the third section, which also discusses the causes (and consequences) of the observed policy bias against agriculture. The fourth section discusses the two main determinants of agricultural growth-technology and crop diversification, and reflects on the policy options available to poor countries to induce agricultural growth without causing domestic upheavals.
Corruption and Development
Authors: Laffont Jean-Jacques
Published: September 2006

This essay explores why corruption is so widespread in developing countries. It is organized into three sections. The first section argues that a theory of corruption is needed in order to answer this question. The second section presents a theory linking corruption and development. The third section empirically documents the correlation between development and corruption.
Child Labor
Authors: Udry Christopher
Published: September 2006

In order to construct effective policies to address the problem of child labor, it is necessary to understand the circumstances that lead parents to send their children to work. The essay is organized as follows. The second section briefly describes some of the main features of child labor in developing countries. The third section discusses the first of two features of child labor that give it a central place in a vicious cycle of poverty. This is the fact that the primary costs of child labor are realized so far in the future. When financial markets are poorly developed, the separation in time between the immediate benefits and long-delayed costs of sending children to work can result in too much child labor. The second feature is that the costs and benefits of child labor are not only separated in time; they are borne by different people: the child suffers the main consequences, while other household members benefit. This problem of agency is discussed in the fourth section. The fifth section concludes with a discussion of child labor policies.
Public Goods and Economic Development
Authors: Besley Timothy , Ghatak Maitreesh
Published: September 2006

Despite overwhelming evidence that a large fraction of government expenditure on the provision of public goods in developing countries does not reach the intended beneficiaries, public policy debates often continue to revolve around “how much?” (i.e., how much money is spent by the government on some particular public good). Clearly, the question to ask is “how?” (i.e., how to design effective mechanisms for the delivery of public goods). This is the main theme of this essay. It discusses different kinds of public goods that are vital to the poor and the evidence of their value; the spontaneous or voluntary private provision of public goods by the beneficiaries; and the formal provision of public goods where the government or some other organization is in charge of providing the public good, with special emphasis on institution design issues.
Credit, Intermediation, and Poverty Reduction
Authors: Townsend Robert M.
Published: September 2006

This essay shows how credit markets influence development, and argues that the impact of improvements in credit markets is quantitatively significant. It begins by establishing the fact that access to credit is limited, emphasizing the magnitudes. It then goes on to the potential importance of financial sector development, again quantifying the impact. The merits of different interventions are also discussed. The policy recommendations in this essay are based on estimated versions of the Thai reality, filtered through the lens of artificial environments, or what economists call models.
Pluralistic Relativism
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2006

It is argued that moral ambivalence is best explained through a naturalistic approach that construes morality as a social invention for promoting and regulating social cooperation. Morality accomplishes this function through the shaping not only of behavior but also of motivational structures in human beings. Biological and cultural evolutionary theories identify plausible bases for the emergence of such an invention (e.g., the strength of self-concern combined with capacities to develop other concern, reliance on cultural norms to regulate and direct behavior and motivation). Such bases, together with the common conditions of social cooperation constrain the variety of ways that the function of morality could be fulfilled (e.g., norms of reciprocity are required, and justifications for the subordination of the interests of some to that of others). Within these constraints a plurality of moralities can be true. It is explained how the conditions for what counts as a true morality can vary with the meaning of moral concepts.
Moral Reasons—Internal and External
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2006

This chapter addresses the question how deeply moral reasons relate to human motivation through discussing the debate over internalism and externalism in ethics. Internalists on moral reasons hold that an agent’s having a reason to act requires that it be based in some motive that she already has, while externalists deny the necessary relation. The position defended here is externalist about reasons, but it specifies an intelligible relation between external reasons and the possibility of agents acting on them. Recognition of a moral reason to help another, for example, can become embedded during moral learning in the intentional objects of prior motivational propensities to respond to the suffering of others. Because they become embedded in and function to channel pre-existing motivations, reasons are external to any particular individual’s pre-existing motivations, but they must be internal to the general motivational capabilities of human nature.
Beyond Toleration
Authors: Beneke Chris
Published: September 2006

Drawing on pamphlets and broadsides, newspaper exchanges, document collections, personal diaries, church records, and legislative journals, this book engages the question of how early Americans learned to live amid a great diversity of beliefs and modes of worship. It begins by explaining how the right of private judgment gained the status of an unquestioned assumption, and then recounts how the print trade expanded the meaning of this right, and a series of religious revivals transformed it. Beyond Toleration chronicles the subtle changes in public language and social behavior that occurred as official persecution ceased and social institutions became integrated. It shows how toleration first became law and then became irrelevant as religious establishments crumbled and an ambiguous concept called religious liberty triumphed. It demonstrates how the assumption that dissenting faiths were merely permissible gave way to the conviction that a variety of faiths deserved equal treatment. In the end, Beyond Toleration explains how Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them-and how they found a way to articulate these differences civilly.