scholarly journals The Moral Landscape of War RR JESP Watkins & Brandt 2018

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne M Watkins ◽  
Mark John Brandt

Mental representations of possibility in everyday contexts incorporate descriptive and prescriptive norms. People intuitively think that Mr X cannot perform an immoral action; even when upon deliberation they realise that the immoral action is in fact possible (Phillips & Cushman, 2017). We replicate this “moral-possibility constraint”, providing further support for the notion that default representations of possibility are - at first pass - limited to moral alternatives. We also test how context affects representations of possibility by asking whether the same findings hold in a war context. This context has different prescriptive norms (e.g., it is permissible to kill combatants, but not non-combatants), and we use Phillips and Cushman’s (2017) reaction-time paradigm to test whether these prescriptive norms shape people’s representations of what is possible in war. We find that the moral-possibility constraint is sensitive to variation in degree of immorality (e.g., killing a person vs. torturing a child); however the war context did not influence the constraint in the way we expected. The results further advance our understanding of the relationship between morality and domain-general cognition, and provide insight into the moral landscape of war.

Author(s):  
Ian Lawson

This paper investigates the way in which Robert Hooke constructed his microscopical observations. His Micrographia is justifiably famous for its detailed engravings, which communicated Hooke's observations of tiny nature to his readers, but less attention has been paid to how he went about making the observations themselves. In this paper I explore the relationship between the materiality of his instrument and the epistemic images he produced. Behind the pictures lies an array of hidden materials, and the craft knowledge it took to manipulate them. By investigating the often counter-theoretical and conflicting practices of his ingenious microscope use, I demonstrate the way in which Hooke crafted the microworld for his readers, giving insight into how early modern microscopy was understood by its practitioners and audience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
Hartmut Walravens

Julien was one of the outstanding Sinologists while Schilling von Canstadt is known as an inventor, as an Orientalist, a printer, and a bibliophile. The latter assembled a great many rare books in Chinese, Manchu, Mongol and Tibetan which later enriched the collections of the Russian Academy of Sciences. As a printer he mastered the intricacies of handling Oriental scripts by means of lithography and paved the way for cost effective and aesthetically satisfactory Oriental printing in Europe. The following letters, so far unpublished, give an insight into the relationship of the two scholars.


2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Farrugia

This article explores the practices through which young people cultivate themselves as subjects of value to the post-Fordist labour force. In this, the article goes beyond an existing emphasis on young people’s ‘transitions’ through employment, to a focus on the practices through which young people are formed as labouring subjects, and therefore on the relationship between youth subjectivities and post-Fordist labour force formation. Theoretically, the article builds upon increasingly influential suggestions in studies of post-Fordism that the formation of post-Fordist workers now takes place through the conversion of the whole of a subject’s life into the capacity for labour, including affective styles, modes of relationality, and characteristics usually not considered as productive dimensions of the self. In this context, the article shows that whilst young people form themselves as workers through practices that are not specific to institutionalised definitions of education and labour, these practices – and the modes of selfhood they aim to cultivate – vary in ways that contribute to classed divisions within post-Fordist societies. In this, the study of the formation of young workers offers a critical insight into the way that the formation of subjectivities intertwines with the disciplinary requirements of post-Fordist labour in their classed manifestations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147612702110322
Author(s):  
Bart De Keyser ◽  
Alain Guiette ◽  
Koen Vandenbempt

While work on affect in strategy-making has been increasingly developing, relatively little research has been conducted on the emotional dynamics of strategy processes directed by strategy consultants. Drawing on a variety of qualitative data gathered during a one-year consulting case, this article looks into the way emotions unfold when managers solicit external strategic advice. Specifically, this article reveals the mechanisms underpinning managers’ emotions in guided strategy-making from pre- to post-strategizing, highlighting processes as they develop over time. In doing so, three fundamental emotional drivers are laid bare: interaction – or how practitioners engage with each other; temporality – or how practitioners engage with time; and impression – or how practitioners engage with mental representations of strategy-making and strategy consultancy. By revealing how emotions evolve when managers find themselves strategically directed, this article offers insight into how a guided strategy-making trajectory can be affectively managed – to make sense of emotions when they unfold, and to address them appropriately as they do.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ros Jennings

This article focuses on two female ensemble dramas Tenko (BBC/Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1981–5) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–) and uses an ageing studies lens to explore the way that the ensemble format provides a particularly rich insight into the relationship between women, ageing and understandings of women's identity over time. The two dramas provide complex and evocative links between the spaces and times of British politics, culture and society in different historical periods enabling a highly nuanced engagement with the ideological constructions of concepts of age and women's gendered identities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Davies

This article discusses some recent critical approaches to the translation of Holocaust testimony, looking in particular at the way in which genre expectations may affect the translator's decisions about how to make the text readable as testimony in the target culture. Engaging with theories of testimony as genre by Robert Eaglestone and Eva Lezzi, the essay explores translators’ prefaces to works by Stefan Szende, Lucie Adelsberger, Miklós Nyiszli, Anatoli Kuznetsov, and others, showing how these documents give us an insight into the tensions inherent in translating a testimony text into a new context in which views about the relationship of text to experience may be quite different.


Author(s):  
D. F. Blake ◽  
L. F. Allard ◽  
D. R. Peacor

Echinodermata is a phylum of marine invertebrates which has been extant since Cambrian time (c.a. 500 m.y. before the present). Modern examples of echinoderms include sea urchins, sea stars, and sea lilies (crinoids). The endoskeletons of echinoderms are composed of plates or ossicles (Fig. 1) which are with few exceptions, porous, single crystals of high-magnesian calcite. Despite their single crystal nature, fracture surfaces do not exhibit the near-perfect {10.4} cleavage characteristic of inorganic calcite. This paradoxical mix of biogenic and inorganic features has prompted much recent work on echinoderm skeletal crystallography. Furthermore, fossil echinoderm hard parts comprise a volumetrically significant portion of some marine limestones sequences. The ultrastructural and microchemical characterization of modern skeletal material should lend insight into: 1). The nature of the biogenic processes involved, for example, the relationship of Mg heterogeneity to morphological and structural features in modern echinoderm material, and 2). The nature of the diagenetic changes undergone by their ancient, fossilized counterparts. In this study, high resolution TEM (HRTEM), high voltage TEM (HVTEM), and STEM microanalysis are used to characterize tha ultrastructural and microchemical composition of skeletal elements of the modern crinoid Neocrinus blakei.


2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sybille Rockstroh ◽  
Karl Schweizer

Effects of four retest-practice sessions separated by 2 h intervals on the relationship between general intelligence and four reaction time tasks (two memory tests: Sternberg's memory scanning, Posner's letter comparison; and two attention tests: continuous attention, attention switching) were examined in a sample of 83 male participants. Reaction times on all tasks were shortened significantly. The effects were most pronounced with respect to the Posner paradigm and smallest with respect to the Sternberg paradigm. The relationship to general intelligence changed after practice for two reaction time tasks. It increased to significance for continuous attention and decreased for the Posner paradigm. These results indicate that the relationship between psychometric intelligence and elementary cognitive tasks depends on the ability of skill acquisition. In the search for the cognitive roots of intelligence the concept of learning seems to be of importance.


2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 227-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agata Wytykowska

In Strelau’s theory of temperament (RTT), there are four types of temperament, differentiated according to low vs. high stimulation processing capacity and to the level of their internal harmonization. The type of temperament is considered harmonized when the constellation of all temperamental traits is internally matched to the need for stimulation, which is related to effectiveness of stimulation processing. In nonharmonized temperamental structure, an internal mismatch is observed which is linked to ineffectiveness of stimulation processing. The three studies presented here investigated the relationship between temperamental structures and the strategies of categorization. Results revealed that subjects with harmonized structures efficiently control the level of stimulation stemming from the cognitive activity, independent of the affective value of situation. The pattern of results attained for subjects with nonharmonized structures was more ambiguous: They were as good as subjects with harmonized structures at adjusting the way of information processing to their stimulation processing capacities, but they also proved to be more responsive to the affective character of stimulation (positive or negative mood).


2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hagen C. Flehmig ◽  
Michael B. Steinborn ◽  
Karl Westhoff ◽  
Robert Langner

Previous research suggests a relationship between neuroticism (N) and the speed-accuracy tradeoff in speeded performance: High-N individuals were observed performing less efficiently than low-N individuals and compensatorily overemphasizing response speed at the expense of accuracy. This study examined N-related performance differences in the serial mental addition and comparison task (SMACT) in 99 individuals, comparing several performance measures (i.e., response speed, accuracy, and variability), retest reliability, and practice effects. N was negatively correlated with mean reaction time but positively correlated with error percentage, indicating that high-N individuals tended to be faster but less accurate in their performance than low-N individuals. The strengthening of the relationship after practice demonstrated the reliability of the findings. There was, however, no relationship between N and distractibility (assessed via measures of reaction time variability). Our main findings are in line with the processing efficiency theory, extending the relationship between N and working style to sustained self-paced speeded mental addition.


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