Rem B. Edwards

In this article I clarify the concepts of ‘pain’, ‘suffering’. ‘pains of body’, ‘pains of soul’. I explore the relevance of an ethic to the clinical setting which gives patients a strong prima facie right to freedom from unnecessary and unwanted pain and which places upon medical professionals two concomitant moral obligations to patients. First, there is the duty not to inflict pain and suffering beyond what is necessary for effective diagnosis. treatment and research. Next, there is the duty to do all that can be done to relieve all the pain and suffering which can be alleviated. I develop in some detail that individuality of pain sensitivity must be taken into account in fulfihing these obligations. I explore the issue of the relevance of informed consent and the right to refuse treatment to the matter of pain relief. And I raise the question of what conditions, if anv, should override the right to refuse treatment where pain relief is of paramount concern.

The Metaphysics of Experience: Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality by Elizabeth M. Kraus develops very classical, Boethian, atemporal understanding of Whitehead’s God. Kraus contends that Whitehead intended “to infer that the divine actual world includes all actual worlds in unison of becoming” (p. 164). Her position is that even in his consequent nature, God coexists simultaneously and changelessly with the entire past, present, and future of every occasion in every world or cosmic epoch. Her rationale for this rests upon 1. a highly questionable interpretation of one text in Process and Reality and the claims that 2. only such a view is compatible with human freedom, and 3. only such a view is compatible with human faith. This article argues that she is mistaken on all three counts.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with criticisms of Robert S. Hartman’s theory of formal axiology. During his lifetime, Hartman wrote responses to many of his critics. Some of these were previously published but many are published here for the first time. In particular, published here are Hartman’s replies to such critics as Hector Neri Castañeda, Charles Hartshorne, Rem B. Edwards, Robert E. Carter, G. R. Grice, Nicholas Rescher, Robert W. Mueller, Gordon Welty, Pete Gunter, George Kimball Plochmann, William Eckhardt, and Robert S. Brumbaugh. Crticial essays and responses to them developed by Rem B. Edwards, Frank G. Forrest, and Mark A. Moore after Hartman’s untimely death in 1973 are also included.

In this promising and well written book, the author struggles with the question of how basic religious beliefs can be groundless without being irrational. He notes that the axiomatic beliefs--philosophical, scientific, or religious--which ground all areas of human knowledge, are groundless in the sense of being unsupported by more primitive evidential considerations. He wishes to avoid purely non-cognitivist accounts of religious belief as purely subjective expressions of tastes, preferences, values, or arbitrary decisions, insisting that it makes sense to speak of fundamental religious beliefs as being informative, true, and reasonable even though unsupported. They are not "hypotheses" whose truth value can be ascertained by identifying logically independent truth conditions. Rather, they closely resemble Wittgenstein's "certainties" in being unprovable beliefs that are so fundamental to our ways of thinking that even doubts about them would be groundless if doubts about them were well founded. Yet, basic religious beliefs are not quite certainties since they can be doubted intelligently "from outside" a given religious outlook, and since secular and religious alternatives to them are readily available. They are best classified as "principles," the author maintains, noting that contemporary philosophers seldom use this term any more even though it was part of our traditional stock-in-trade. Principles resemble certainties in being not grounded in other beliefs more basic than themselves and in sustaining, regulating, and informing other judgments and beliefs. The uniformity of nature, nothing vanishes without a trace, every event has a cause, the principle of sufficient reason, etc., are offered as examples of non-religious principles. Like these, religious principles "help believers to organize, to interpret, or to make sense out of their experience," and "their reasonableness depends on their power of illumination". Various religious principles are discussed which "vouch for a worthwhile ground or end in all that is, thereby enabling believers to pursue a meaningful existence". Belief in divine creation, and belief in predestination are discussed in some detail as examples of religious principles. It is reasonable to adopt principles if they are capacitating and to reject them if they are not, the author insists; so we are not irrational if we do not adopt every principle which comes our way. Basic religious beliefs such as belief in a Creator God, etc., are capacitating, we are told, in the sense that "they are discoveries of purpose and intimations of life's redeeming worth. If they are genuine, they show themselves in 'spiritual', inward capacities, such as the ability to consolidate one's selfhood, to resist despair, and to extend one's concern to others".

This article critically examines the several definitions of, or elements of a single definition of, Robert S. Hartman's understanding of “intrinsic values,” “intrinsic evaluations,” “extrinsic values,” and “extrinsic valuations”. [I have since changed my mind about what is said in the last few sentences. I now think, with Hartman, that only unique, non-repeatable, conscious individuals have intrinsic worth. Repeatable qualities like pleasure and knowledge are “good for us” properties, but not “good in, to, and for themselves” or “for their own sakes” properties.]

These two remarkable books, both published in 2010, share many themes but differ in significant ways, and each is very much worth reading and pondering. Oord’s The Nature of Love concentrates primarily on conceptual and theological themes relating to the very nature of love itself and what influential theologians have had to say about love. His Defining Love focuses on how the social and physical sciences impact our understanding of human and divine love. Both books presuppose and express many themes that are prominent in process theology such as: freedom is universally present (by degrees) in all creatures, especially us; predestination is abhorrent and untenable; God exists necessarily and everlastingly but not ..

This article tries to show that commonplace economic, ethico-religious, anti-racist,and logical-consistency objections to public funding of abortions and abortion counseling for poor women are quite weak. By contrast, arguments appealing to basic human rights to freedom of speech, informed consent, protection from great harm, justice and equal protection under the law, strongly support public funding. Thus, refusing to provide abortions at public expense for women who cannot afford them is morally unacceptable and rationally unjustifiable, despite the opinions of former Presidents Reagan and Bush, the more conservative members of the Supreme Court of the United States, the current Congress, and the majority of the American people.

The process claim that matter is mentally infused and that mind or consciousness is spatially and temporally extended is explored. The views of Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb, Ford and Griffin on the following questions are examined: If spacy, where are the occasions of human consciousness, how are they related to the brain, how large are they, and can they be externally perceived directly or with instruments? It is proposed that what is internally experienced as human consciousness is objectively identical with the synthetic unity of those brain waves known to be correlated with wakeful awareness. If so, modern scanning technology can literally find us in our brains. Possible objections are discussed.

Rather than eliminate the terms "mental health and illness" because of the grave moral consequences of psychiatric labeling, conservative definitions are proposed and defended. Mental health is rational autonomy, and mental illness is the sustained loss of such. Key terms are explained, advantages are explored, and alternative concepts are criticized. The value and descriptive components of all such definitions are consciously acknowledged. Where rational autonomy is intact, mental hospitals and psychotherapists should not think of themselves as treating an illness. Instead, they are functioning as applied axiologists, moral educators, spiritual mentors, etc. They deal with what Szasz has called "personal, social, and ethical problems in living." But mental illness is real.

The theses of this paper are that: 1. the attempt to found absolute norms on rationality presupposes the availability of a single universal absolute conception of rationality, but no such conception is available; and 2. any conception of rationality which might be available for justifying one's ultimate normative commitments is itself evaluative. “Rationality” itself is a value-laden concept, as are all its philosophical sub-divisions—logic, ethics, aesthetics, axiology, etc. Choosing ultimate value principles under conditions of freedom, enlightenment, and impartiality presupposes that one positively values such things. Rationality is an inescapably evaluative concept, not a value neutral concept.

This article explores a form of ethics and spirituality based on the nearly universal but often undeveloped human capacity for identifying self with others and with non-personal values. It begins with commonplace non-moral identification experiences, then describes identification with others in ethical and spiritual unions. Freud’s psychological emphasis on identification is linked with ethics and spirituality, though Freud would have objected. Robert S. Hartman’s three kinds of goodness—systemic, extrinsic, and intrinsic—are applied to abundant ethical and spiritual living through identification. Intrinsic identification with intrinsic values is the highest moral ideal; intrinsic identification with ultimate reality and with goodness in all its forms is the highest spiritual ideal.

This article introduces Formal Axiology, first developed by Robert S. Hartman, and explains its essential features—a formal definition of “good” (the “Form of the Good”), three basic kinds of value and evaluation—systemic, extrinsic, and intrinsic, and the hierarchy of value according to which good things having the richest quantity and quality of good-making properties are better than those having less. Formal Axiology is extended into moral philosophy by applying the Form of the Good to persons and showing how this culminates in an Axiological Virtue Ethics. This involves the systemic, extrinsic, and intrinsic goodness of persons, the intrinsic-good-making properties of persons, and the moral virtues that respect the intrinsic worth of persons in thoughts, feelings, and actions. A few obstacles to being and becoming morally good persons are also identified and explained.