Certain Types Of Action Research Articles

Gut estimates: Pregnant women adapt to changing possibilities for squeezing through doorways

Possibilities for action depend on the fit between the body and the environment. Perceiving what actions are possible is challenging, because the body and the environment are always changing. How do people adapt to changes in body size and compression? In Experiment 1, we tested pregnant women monthly over the course of pregnancy to determine whether they adapted to changing possibilities for squeezing through doorways. As women gained belly girth and weight, previously passable doorways were no longer passable, but women's decisions to attempt passage tracked their changing abilities. Moreover, their accuracy was equivalent to that of nonpregnant adults. In Experiment 2, nonpregnant adults wore a "pregnancy pack" that instantly increased the size of their bellies, and they judged whether doorways were passable. Accuracy in the "pregnant" participants was only marginally worse than that of actual pregnant women, suggesting that participants adapted to the prosthesis during the test session. In Experiment 3, participants wore the pregnancy pack and gauged passability before and after attempting passage. The judgments were grossly inaccurate prior to receiving feedback. These findings indicate that experience facilitates perceptual-motor recalibration for certain types of actions.

Duty, Kant, and Deontology

Kant, like Bentham, was an Enlightenment man. Morals must come not from authority or tradition, not from religious commands, but from reason. Kant also thought he had it sorted. The funny thing is that his answers were almost the opposite of Bentham’s. Kant started not with pain and pleasure but rather with the fact that mankind’s distinguishing feature is our possession of reason. Therefore, it follows that all humans have universal rational duties to one another, centring on their duty to respect the other’s humanity. To Kant, all humans must be seen as inherently worthy of respect and dignity. He argued that all morality must stem from such duties: a duty based on a deontological ethic. Consequences such as pain or pleasure are irrelevant. (Well, he was German). To Kant some duties are absolute. These are the obligations to do certain types of actions. Kant calls this general type of obligation a categorical imperative, that …

Global environmental change III

There are increasing calls from the global environmental change research community for new strategies for translating knowledge into action. Such calls are not new, yet they are often based on the assumption that more solutions-oriented knowledge about environmental problems will lead to desired outcomes. In this progress report, I argue that it is time to shift attention to the issue of change itself, and to question some of the assumptions that reproduce certain types of knowledge and certain types of action over alternatives. I discuss an approach for challenging big assumptions, which draws greater attention to a broad body of social science research that renders many of the paradigmatic assumptions ambiguous or problematic. Finally, I consider the implications for human geography, including whether some of our own disciplinary assumptions are complicit in perpetuating paradigms that contribute to continued global environmental change.

Can a Parent Do Too Much for Their Child? An Examination By Parenting Professionals of the Concept of Overparenting

Is there a point where parental effort can be too much? While the link between parenting effort and the wellbeing of children has been firmly established, contemporary discussion has proposed that extreme levels of parental protection of and responsiveness to children could be counterproductive. Research has not yet addressed this phenomenon to ascertain if overparenting is a genuinely different type of parenting approach. The purpose of the present study was to gain insight into the parenting actions considered by parenting professionals (psychologists and school guidance counsellors) to be overparenting. One hundred and twenty-eight professionals responded to an online survey about their observations of overparenting, with eighty-six respondents providing lists of the types of actions they believed were behavioural examples of the term. The survey data revealed that certain types of actions were considered to be indicative of overparenting, and that particular beliefs and outcomes may be involved in this parenting approach. Implications for parenting advice and education programs, and further research are discussed.

Agent-neutral deontology

According to the “Textbook View,” there is an extensional dispute between consequentialists and deontologists, in virtue of the fact that only the latter defend “agent-relative” principles—principles that require an agent to have a special concern with making sure that she does not perform certain types of action. I argue that, contra the Textbook View, there are agent-neutral versions of deontology. I also argue that there need be no extensional disagreement between the deontologist and consequentialist, as characterized by the Textbook View.

An Interview with Rocío Muñoz Flores

An Interview with Rocío Muñoz Flores* Charles Henry Rowell, Marcus D. Jones, and Mónica Carrillo Rowell: Would you describe the work that you do and how you came gradually toward that work? Muñoz Flores: I think that a lot of things happened by chance. I was very young, about eighteen, nineteen years old, and I approached, in a very timely manner, a group to offer some sort of support. It was an organization that was already working on the issue of the Afro-descendant population. My first impression was that how was it that people rallied to work on behalf of blacks. It seemed a very strange thing that didn't make a lot of sense. Nevertheless, curiosity got the better of me and I kept observing what was happening, what it was about, and by the time I realized it I was already involved in an organization taking on the issue of rights, taking on activities, making a commitment, trying to understand myself again as an Afro-descendant woman who had a whole cultural inheritance, a whole historical experience that was necessary to recover and strengthen. I still don't understand completely how is it that life placed me in this situation, because maybe if I hadn't been asked by someone to support the organization, I never would have been in this world. But life placed me in this opportunity, and it was from there on that I integrated myself quite quickly. This process didn't even take a month. Within days I was already inside this organization working, supporting, facilitating, and I started to understand that, in effect, there was a personal commitment that I had to assume, a necessity to recover the history, to recover the identity, to strengthen ourselves. So from there I began my activism in Afro-descendant causes. My battle flag was always the recovery of identity, the fight against racism, the fight against all forms of discrimination. But along the way I was gathering other types of demands and necessities, and my efforts and my activities were also oriented toward the subject of Afro-descendant women. I started to include in fights, in speeches, the subject of gender, of racism and sexism as key axes on which to begin work. From that point on I've been on a path that has taken me on various routes that in particular moments forced me to adhere to a black feminism that questions feminism and that also allows for the tools for a new political structure for the demands of Afro-descendant women. That has been more or less the beginning, and obviously with that process there have been many battles. We have gone through many things that have led me to have certain types of representations, take certain types of actions. These things [End Page 365] in life put you in a leadership role in front of other Afro-descendant women. I'm one of the few Afro-feminists in this country who reclaim the subject of gender, who reclaim the fight against racism and sexism in a more political and public manner. My first experiences in this environment were that I had to accompany some girls who were already active so they could do a workshop. We went to do the workshop, and out of sheer mischief, at a certain point they grabbed me and said, "Well, it's your turn to do the workshop." And they left. They left me alone with forty Afro-descendant men and women and I didn't have a clue what to tell them. I thought, "Dear God, now what?" We began to work with them, and when I thought about it I realized it had been very easy to relate to the people. I believe from that point forward I began to discover that I could have the ability to communicate with people without meeting much resistance. One of the elements that I incorporated as part of my activism was to gain training. That is to say, I believed I could have good tools in order to approach another group of black men and women who had never gone through the...

The Ladder and the Cage

A contribution to the sixth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” this article compares the worldview of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) and the quietism that it presumably entails to the early Wittgenstein's worldview and his quietism. The first section of the article treats a relevant paradox in the worldview of the early Wittgenstein: his positive exhortations for certain types of speech and silence, for certain types of action and inaction, seem in conflict with his statement that, in the world, “there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.” The second section examines an internal paradox in the worldview of Qoheleth, who commends the enjoyment of a world that he considers meaningless and vain. The third and final section of the article compares these paradoxes as constitutive of the texts in which they appear. Conveying no univocal message, while both writers exhibit quietism, they also gesture toward kinds of speech and action.

Legal Moralism and the Harm Principle: A Rejoinder

In "Harm Versus Sovereignty: A Reply to Ripstein," Colin Bird criticizes several arguments of my article "Beyond the Harm Principle." In my earlier article I raised two objections to the Harm Principle, before going on to develop my alternative. The first is that it is underinclusive, because it is unable to identify a significant class of wrongs that a liberal state would want to prohibit: harmless trespasses against person and property. The second is that it requires independent grounds to explain which harms merit prohibition. Bird seeks to answer the first challenge by denying that the harm principle has any difficulty at all in accommodating those harmless trespasses that merit prohibition, and to answer the second by proposing that harms be balanced against each other to determine where prohibition is justified. In this brief response, I show that Bird's conceptualization of the harm principle enables it to account for my examples only by making it so elastic as to provide no real constraint on prohibition. Bird defends the harm principle as an alternative to what he calls "legal moralism," the legal prohibition of acts based on their nature rather than their effects on others. I shall show, however, that his interpretation of the harm principle generates an indirect form of legal moralism.

The Analogy Argument for Doxastic Voluntarism

An influential version of doxastic voluntarism claims that doxastic events such as belief-formations at least sometimes qualify as actions. William Alston has made a simple response to this claim by arguing on empirical grounds that in normal human agents intentions to form specific beliefs are simply powerless. However, despite Alston’s observation, various authors have insisted that belief-formations may qualify as voluntary in perfect analogy to certain types of actions or even to actions in general. I examine three analogy arguments of this type and argue that they all fail.

Individuation of Self and Stereotyping of others

This study investigated whether people who present themselves as individuated tend not to see others in stereotyped ways. 106 undergraduates completed a measure of self-individuation and a measure of stereotyping others. The measure of self-individuation, the Individuation scale, has 12 items on which respondents rate their willingness to engage in individuating behavior such as self-disclosure and attention-getting. The measure of stereotyping has 40 items on which respondents rate the likelihood that certain types of people would engage in certain types of actions. Analysis showed scores on the measures of individuation and stereotyping were internally reliable (83 and 85 respectively), and significantly negatively correlated (−.33) with each other Respondents who scored high on the Individuation scale tended to rate the likelihood of others' actions in a manner different from common stereotypes.

Precis of Human Morality

In Human Morality, I attempt to do two things. The first is to distinguish carefully among questions concerning morality's scope, content, authority, and deliberative role, and to emphasize the importance of addressing all four of these topics if we are to understand the relation between morality and the point of view of the individual agent. The second is to explore each of these topics myself, and, in so doing, to sketch one interpretation of the place of moral concerns in human life. With respect to the question of scope, I argue that morality should be seen as pervasive, in the sense that no voluntary human action is immune to moral assessment. Although some philosophers have suggested that certain types of action may be beyond the scope of morality, I argue against this position, and try to show that some of the concerns that underlie it can be better accommodated in other ways. With respect to the issue of content, I argue that morality should be seen as moderate rather than stringent. This means that although morality and selfinterest can conflict, and although morality sometimes demands great sacrifices, moral requirements are less systematically demanding than some philosophers have believed, and than some moral theories imply. Thus, the idea that morality is moderate represents an intermediate position, which stands midway between the view that morality is stringent and the view that morality and self-interest coincide. My position on the authority of morality is less straightforward. The focal point for my discussion is the traditional claim that morality is overriding, which means that it can never be rational knowingly to do what morality forbids. I do not argue against this claim and, indeed, I criticize certain arguments against it that others have offered. Nevertheless, I express doubts about the claim of overridingness, and the bulk of my discussion is devoted to arguing that morality's authority is less dependent on the truth of this claim than has often been supposed. For, even if the claim were true, morality would still have less authority than some people would like; and, even if the claim

Reexamining Russia: Institutions and Incentives

Reexamining RussiaInstitutions and Incentives Peter C. Ordeshook (bio) Can Russia become a stable liberal democracy? Are there ways to end the conflicts that seem a permanent feature of Russian politics? Will the new constitution adopted in December 1993 bring order to relations between the executive and legislative branches and to the making and enforcement of law? Does the bloody strife in Chechnya, where Soviet flags once again fly from tanks and armored personnel carriers, presage a repeat of Russia’s historical experience with political reform, with democrats once again driven into authoritarianism’s iron embrace? At present, pessimistic answers to these questions seem better grounded than optimistic ones. Democratic reformers, stunned by their poor showing in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, seem unable to coalesce, while nationalists and fascists marshal their forces to seize power through Russia’s infant democratic institutions. Political maneuvering proceeds in a manner barely contained by law; even some of those once counted among democracy’s staunchest defenders have resorted to undemocratic tactics when it suited their purpose. No longer are people concerned with lofty democratic ideals: instead they focus on mere survival, with those able to do so grabbing all the wealth they can. The anarchy of day-to-day business dealings is tempered only by the mafiya, whose contract-enforcement capability, though based on criminal violence, goes unchallenged by the state. With plummeting production fueling demands for subsidies to inefficient industry, comparisons with Weimar Germany are not entirely far-fetched. [End Page 46] Indeed, the marvel of the December 1993 elections is not that democratic reformers did so badly while Vladimir Zhirinovsky did so well, but that the fascists, ultranationalists, and hard-core antireformists somehow failed to secure outright control of the new legislature. 1 Is Russia trapped in some terrible equilibrium that can only be escaped by a passage through more dangerous turmoil or a retreat from liberal democracy? Even the possibility should be enough to impel democrats in Russia and abroad to start looking for another way out. Although most of those concerned with ex-Soviet states pay lip service to the proposition that economic reform and political reform are tightly interdependent and must proceed together or not at all, the two are in fact often dealt with as though different principles guide each. This is a grave mistake, for the same basic principle must guide both. The economic reformer formulates strategy in terms of laws regarding private property, banking, and contracts, as well as government policies regarding tariffs, taxes, privatization, borrowing, and subsidies. Economic reformers of every stripe understand that changes in law and policy must be guided by a common principle—namely, that socially desirable outcomes cannot be wished into existence, but depend on the ways in which governmental actions and the structure of economic institutions channel individual self-interest. Decrees and exhortations cannot make people work, save, invest, or invent. Instead, they need incentives (Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”) to do these things in natural and self-sustaining ways. Intelligently designed public policies and economic institutions are needed if reform is to give people an immediate self-interest in working, saving, investing, and inventing. The Significance of Self-Interest Although the methods for best applying the principle of self-interest in economics may be imperfectly understood, they seem pellucidly clear when compared to knowledge of political reform. Like the transition to markets, the transition to democracy depends on the design and handling of institutions—in this instance, rules of legislative representation, electoral laws, and constitutional allocations of power—that give people an immediate self-interest in pursuing certain types of actions and outcomes. For a democracy to be stable, moreover, its institutions must be crafted to give those who might destroy them an incentive not to do so. The Framers of the United States Constitution had a keen sense of the political (to say nothing of the economic) significance of self-interest that contemporary Russian leaders would do well to emulate. James Madison displayed this famously in Federalist 51 when he wrote that “the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each [End Page...

The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics by Romanus Cessario, O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics. By RoMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. x +204. $24.95. What we learn from Holy Scripture about the kind of life which God commands us to lead depends in key part upon our prior natural and rational understanding of many of the key expressions used in Scripture . So it is with those expressions which name and characterize the virtues. We are commanded not only to do certain types of action and to refrain from others, but also to become a certain type of person, one whose qualities of character are such that our actions spring from and give expression to those qualities. We are required not only to do what is just and courageous and temperate, but to do it because we ourselves have become just, courageous, and temperate, injunctions that we could not adequately understand, let alone obey, were it not for a prior knowledge of what these virtues are and what it is that makes them virtues. Moreover we also learn from Scripture about how we fail and about how we are called to account for our failures in the virtues. So we need also to know what it is to develop the virtues and what it is to fail or to be frustrated in that development. Few Christians are or can be theorists of the virtues; but every Christian by her or his actions presupposes the truth of some kind of theory of the virtues and of their development, a theory which, even when not explicitly articulated, enables her or him to find application for the Scriptures in the actions and transactions of everyday life. And every pastor and preacher has to draw upon the resources of some such theory. No theory of this kind can be adequate unless it satisfies two standards: that of fidelity to Scripture and that of conformity to the best understanding which philosophy and the human sciences afford of how human beings are constituted by appetites, passions, will, and reason. What would the content and structure of such a theory, satisfying these two standards, have to be? This is the question posed and answered by Romanus Cessario in his unusually important, stimulating, and incisive book. The content and structure of the theory which he presents are essentially Thomistic, but his theory is only incidentally and in part a historical exposition of St. Thomas's account. It is Thomistic rather in that it uses resources drawn from that account in order to address issues in contemporary moral theology, resources which enable him to identify and to formulate crucial but sometimes neglected 339 340 BOOK REVIEWS questions, as well as to propose answers to them. And in so doing, as we shall see, he presses inquiry to a point such that he needs to go he· yond what St. Thomas provides. Cessario's claim throughout is that the teaching of Scripture can become adequately intelligible to us only in the light afforded by a systematic understanding of the virtues, moral, intellectual, and theological. The only plausible alternatives to the type of theory which he proposes do not include some type of atheoretical reliance on scripture. Plausible alternative standpoints always involve open or covert appeal to some other rival type of moral theory. And Cessario from time to time provides acute and telling criticisms of some of the alternatives more influential at present. But he is careful to avoid :more than a bare minimum of such polemic, sometimes even too careful . In his first chapter, for example, Cessario recognizes that what he has to say about the radical nature of the transformation of character required by the Christian life and of the distinctive qualities of that life puts him at odds with certain theses of Karl Rahner. He notes almost in passing that it is his allegiance to metaphysical realism (with its claims about the teleological ordering of human nature) which gen· erates this conflict with Rahner's positions-positions which of course depend heavily on Heideggerian borrowings. But he never pursues the philosophical issues which divide Thomistic metaphysics from Rahner's blending of Heidegger with a theology aptly...

PERCEIVED COSTS AND BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATION IN UNION ACTION

Conflicts in organizations are often initiated by unions. The outcome of a conflict depends on the opportunities of the parties to use the power they have. Parties seldom use all of their resources, either because they are not willing to risk them or because they are not able to muster them. Resources have to be mobilized before they can be used. In this study the conditions under which union members were willing to support their union in a conflict were examined. It was hypothesized that readiness to support union action is a function of the individual's estimates of costs and benefits. One hundred and eight union members in a company where conflict was imminent were asked at two different points in time whether they would support union action. Various types of action were mentioned. The union attempted to mobilize support between the two measurements. Anticipated costs and benefits of a collective, social, and material nature accounted for the variance in willingness to give support, changes in this willingness, and preferences for certain types of action. These findings confirm the contention that a value‐expectancy approach to the willingness to participate in union action can be useful. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The cellular mechanisms of cardiac antiarrhythmic drug action.

In the preceding pages we have considered a number of mechanisms whereby drugs may modify arrhythmias and we also have demonstrated that certain types of action are specific to individual drugs. In addition, through the description of the use-dependence of drug effects, we have shown that the specificity of a drug's action often is attributable to its interactions with specific channels. As we learn more about the specificity of individual drug effects we should be better able not only to understand the actions of presently available drugs, but also to discover compounds that promise to be of use in the future.

The Force of Hypothetical Commitment

In recent years a number of philosophers have propounded theories which in one way or another ground moral obligation in rational motivations, attitudes, or commitments. Some of these theories are normative, some are metaethical. Rawls and Brandt, for example, derive substantive moral principles from the commitments people would be willing to make in contract situations embodying certain constraints of rationality. Firth's ideal-observer theory, on the other hand, analyzes moral concepts in terms of the impartial attitudes of an epistemically rational observer. Other metaethical theories of this type reduce moral obligations to rational attitudes. Let us call this general class rational motivation theories.' Though different rational motivation theories have somewhat different aims and build different rational constraints into their derivation mechanisms, they have a common counterfactual structure: they all ground moral obligation in the claim that if an agent were to be placed under certain rational constraints then he would respond in a positive way to a certain type of action or to the prospect of living under a certain principle. Thus most defenders of rational motivation theories stress that the relevant motivations, attitudes, or commitments need only be hypothetical: to have a moral obligation it is not necessary that a person actually be rational, and it is not necessary that he actually exhibit the relevant response. But the counterfactual structure of these theories invites the obvious challenge: should I do what I would want to do if all my desires were rational? Why should I not simply act on my present and actual desires just as they are? Why should I act as though

Cultural consensus and definition of mental illness

Contained in both Parsons' [1, 2] formulation of illness role theory and Scheffs [3, 4] labeling perspective is the assumption that cultural definitions of mental illness are uniform throughout the community. Furthermore, both theorists assert that individuals identified as mentally ill internalize community definitions of their impairment whether positive or negative. Analysis of data of a sample of mental patients and the public lends some support to illness role theory while refuting Scheffs labeling perspective. There is community wide consensus in the moral (wrongness) evaluation of behaviors and feelings which are indicative of mental illness. Public and patient alike judge their own actions as less wrong than the actions of others. Contrary to Scheff [3, 4] the general public judges the actions, feelings and behaviors of the mentally ill as neither wrong nor right. With several exceptions, subgroups of the general public held similar definitions of the implications of traits of mental illness for the impairment of role performance. The highly educated, and patients with high symptom levels indicated their role performance was significantly impaired by mental illness. The results of this research call for labeling theorists to distinguish status as a cause from status as a cue for labeling certain types of actions and feelings as indications of mental illness.

Morality and Value

In his essay 'Morality and Egoism' (Mind lxxxv, January 1976), C. H. Whiteley defines the morality of a society as 'the practice of requiring or banning certain types of action and praising or blaming certain dispositions of character'.' He says that unlike rules imposed upon a society 'by a minority of powerful persons, [m]oral rules and ideals are those which have the general support of the members, in that most of them are in favour of these rules being obeyed and these ideals pursued'. Having thus defined morality 'as being concerned with standards of conduct which are to be supported by a common consensus', Whiteley goes on to infer from his definition, among other things, something about the content of morality, namely that it 'need favour the satisfaction of interests, or ... cannot expect general support'. He writes:

Classification of suicidal behaviors. II. Dimensions of suicidal intent.

A factor analysis of a scale to assess suicidal intent showed four major dimensions: expectancies and attitudes, premeditation, precautions against intervention, and oral communication. Certain types of actions associated with attempted suicide such as seeking help or social isolation appear to be revealing of particular behavioral patterns or motives. Dealing with intent only as a global concept is an oversimplification. Suicidal ideation and suicidal acts are seen as complex patterns of behavior requiring increasingly thorough analyses for better understanding, prediction, and prevention.

Morality and Egoism

In every society there are certain rules which its members are expected to observe, certain ways of behaving and attitudes of mind which are commonly and officially praised or blamed, and classified as virtues or vices. This practice of requiring or banning certain types of action and praising or blaming certain dispositions of character I shall call the morality of the society. Morality in this sense imposes some restraints upon the operation of self-interest, requiring the members of the society sometimes to behave to their own disadvantage in order to carry out a rule or exercise a virtue. Obedience to the demands of morality will be enforced by penalties of various kinds. But I do not count a rule as belonging to the morality of a society if obedience to it depends mainly on the fear of penalties imposed by a minority of powerful persons. Moral rules and ideals are those which have the general support of the members, in that most of them are in favour of these rules being obeyed and these ideals pursued. Since morality depends on common consent, and is derived from the opinions and attitudes of the members in general, every member is entitled and expected to contribute towards defining and eliciting moral conduct by forming and expressing opinions about right and wrong. Such opinions I will call moral judgements: that is, I shall mean by a moral judgement a judgement about the rules and standards which the members of the society should be required and encouraged to live by. I think this is one admissible way of using the words 'morality' and 'moral judgement'; I am not suggesting that it is the only one. A moral judgement in this sense-a judgement about the modes of acting, feeling and thinking to be recommended and enforced in the community-must conform to certain conditions of both form and content. Formally, such a judgement must either be general, taking the form 'If anybody is in circumstances of the kind X, he must behave in the manner Y, or it must be an application of some such generalisation to a particular case. For moral judgements are concerned with public standards, which can be formulated, promulgated, enforced, taught, learned, followed on principle or from habit without reflection. For a morality has the essential purpose of enabling men to trust one another by assuring one man of the way another man will behave. So of this sort of moral judgement we can say that whoever affirms it must be ready to agree that either the judgement itself or the principle of which it is an application should be a universal law-universal, that is to say, in the society in question. Of course, many philosophers have held that this universalisability is essential to moral judgements. My point is that this claim is not to be justified by reference to some a priori Idea of Reason, but by regarding moral judgements as concerned with standards that must be public, teachable and enforceable, and provide reliable expectations of the behaviour of others. There is of course no formal