Bernard Prusak

As the sociologist Viviana Zelizer has observed, the twentieth century saw a “profound cultural transformation in children’s economic and sentimental value”: in brief, “the priceless child displaced the useful child.” Yet, the great value that we place on children of our own has gone hand-in-hand, again in Zelizer’s words, with a “collective indifference to other people’s children.” This paper focuses on the question of public responsibility for children: that is, on who should pay for the priceless child. I claim that, within the framework of a liberal state, public responsibility for children is not inconsiderable, despite and even because of the great value that we place on our own children. To make this case, the paper examines a not so modest proposal: namely, that the family be abolished. I argue that there is good reason to reject this proposal, but that this rejection comes with costs that call for compensation.

This paper reconsiders whether Aquinas is rightly read as a double-effect thinker and whether it is right to understand him as concurring with Paul’s dictum that evil is not to be done that good may come. I focus on what to make of Aquinas’s position that, though the private citizen may not intend to kill a man in self-defense, those holding public authority, like soldiers, may rightly do so. On my interpretation, we cannot attribute to Aquinas the position that aiming to kill in self-defense is prohibited where so aiming is the only way to stay alive. Instead, for the private citizen though not for the public authority, it is aiming to kill as an end in itself, over and above the aim of saving one’s life, that is prohibited. Accordingly, we also cannot attribute to Aquinas the third condition of the principle of double effect in its textbook formulation.

Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory takes as its foundation “exemplars of goodness identified directly by the emotion of admiration.” This paper’s basic question is whether Zagzebski’s trust in the emotion of admiration is well-founded. In other words, do we have good reason to trust that those we admire on conscientious reflection warrant our admiration, such that we will not be led astray? The paper’s thesis is that Zagzebski’s theory would be stronger with a more fully developed account of conscience. The paper outlines and discusses Zagzebski’s theory, articulates the epistemic challenge that the theory confronts, and proposes a sketch of an account of conscience that supplements Zagzebski’s account of conscientiousness.

The thesis of this paper is that the new natural law has reason to try to integrate Kant’s ethics, not reject it. My argument breaks into two parts. First I provide a critical account of the new natural law, taking as my exemplar of this theory Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis’s 1987 article “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends.” My criticism in the end is that the new natural law is vulnerable to much the same criticism that Boyle has made of Alan Donagan’s Kantian ethics. For the new natural law, the trouble will be specifying the basic goods. Here “compromise, intuition, or decision” appears inescapable. The second part of the paper briefly outlines what “Kant reconstructed” has to bring. The Kant that I advocate is not exactly Donagan’s; but my Kant shares with Donagan’s a patience for more than one reasonable position on disputed moral questions.

I make two arguments in this paper. First, I argue briefly that the ticking time bomb case is unrealistic and as such is liable to mislead us badly on the ground. Second, after conceding that the conditions of the ticking time bomb case might someday be realized, I argue that it may in fact be morally permissible to torture a terrorist in this case on the grounds of self-defense. My reason for making this argument is that rejecting torture in even the ticking time bomb case risks discrediting objections to torture in other, more realistic cases. Yet the principle established by the ticking time bomb case is of extremely limited application. Given the extreme improbability that the conditions of this case could ever be realized, public authorities who sanction torturing someone should have to bear a heavy burden of proof that this decision was justified on the grounds of self-defense.

At least some (perhaps the most serious) moral problems, public as well as private, concern the ways in which we should construe and specify the problems we face. The present paper, as the subtitle indicates, reexamines the conscience of Huckleberry Finn, which means both that I provide a close reading of key chapters of Mark Twain’s great novel and that I engage Jonathan Bennett’s well-known and oft-cited paper, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.” Bennett tells us, early in his paper, that an episode in chapter 16 of the novel “brilliantly illustrates how fiction can be instructive about real life.”1 I agree that fiction can teach us about life—though of course living beings must judge fiction’s ..

This paper takes up the question, “What is the responsibility of the philosopher, specifically the Catholic philosopher, in teaching ethics at a Catholic university?” Examination of the constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae reveals that answering this question requires examining in turn the relationship between theology and philosophy. Accordingly, the paper proceeds to an analysis of the late Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio. Th is analysis shows, however, that the very distinction between theology and philosophy seems to become problematic on the encyclical’s terms. The paper thus goes on to indicate a different means of distinguishing these disciplines, and concludes by considering the significance of this distinction for the question of the responsibility of the Catholic philosopher.

This paper examines the case of Lawrence v. Texas to bring out the philosophical commitments of Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. It is proposed that Justices Kennedy and Scalia, while both Catholics, represent fundamentally different visions of the “ends and reasons” of democratic law. A close reading of the Justices’ opinions in Lawrence indicates that Justice Scalia belongs to the tradition of the “ancients” and Justice Kennedy to the tradition of the “moderns.” The paper focuses in particular on the Justices’ interpretations of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It is claimed that the interpretation of this clause turns on a philosophical commitment regarding the ends and reasons that the Constitution should be understood to serve, and thus that justices cannot help acting as “philosopher kings” here. Which of the two Justices is more consistent with the Catholic tradition is proposed as a question for another day.

This dissertation critically examines Helmuth Plessner's philosophically ambitious explanation of laughter presented in his Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Plessner's philosophical anthropology makes a distinctive contribution to our knowledge of the human capacity to laugh and, in the process, to our knowledge of human nature. This dissertation is accordingly addressed not only to philosophers interested in the question of human nature, but to physiologists, psychologists, sociologists, and all other scientists interested in explaining laughter. ;Plessner, who lived from 1892 to 1985, was one of the founders and foremost representatives of the twentieth-century movement of thought known as philosophical anthropology, which he characterizes as "the systematic discussion of questions of the structure of human nature." Against Cartesian dualism, Plessner undertakes to investigate "how the psychological is clasped together with the physical." The project of Laughing and Crying , first published in German in 1940 and translated into English in 1970, is to investigate the conditions of possibility of these two forms of expression "in the basic figure of human existence under the spell of the body." ;Plessner's thesis in Laughing and Crying is that these two forms of expression outstandingly disclose "the secret composition of human nature," which in turn "constitutes the basis of laughing and crying." This dissertation is restricted to laughter in order to facilitate the exposition of this "secret composition," which Plessner names our "eccentric positionality." Chapter 1 establishes a role for philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of laughter in the light of physiological, psychological, and sociological findings. Chapter 2 discusses some of Plessner's earlier writings insofar as they form the background of and thus illuminate his approach to laughter. Chapter 3 examines and elaborates upon the development and details of Plessner's argument in Laughing and Crying. Chapter 4 assesses a criticism of Plessner's argument as "behaviorist." After locating Laughing and Crying within Plessner's corpus and Plessner's corpus within the movement of philosophical anthropology in his day, the conclusion addresses the question of the ongoing significance of this discipline of thought

In his reply to my paper “The Problem with the Problem of the Embryo,” which appeared in the Summer 2008 (82:3) issue of ACPQ, Christopher Tollefsen claims that (1) I muddle matters by failing to keep distinct questions of biology from questions having to do with personhood; (2) I have the science wrong in my account of the debate over the fact that the embryo depends on “maternal donation” for its development; and (3) my so-called “counsel of pragmatism” is unlikely to lead to any progress, since, “[i]f we refuse to accept and be guided by truth when it lies before us, we are unlikely to even seek it in other, more difficult domains.” I reply to each criticism in turn, both by clarifying the argument in my paper—which Tollefsen misrepresents at one point—and by taking up, and considering in the light of my argument, his substantive claims about what biological inquiry can here reveal.

Bioethicists often use the “nonidentity problem”—the idea that a child born with a disability would actually be a different child if she were born without the disability—to defend parents' rights to have whatever children they want. After all, a child is not harmed by being brought into the world with a disability; without the disability, she would not be brought into the world at all. But what happens if we turn the moral question around and ask, not about the benefits and harms to the child, but just about parental obligations? Will that lead to a different view of reproductive decisions?

Since Kant, the standard response to the commandment to love has been that our affections are not ours to command, and so an obligation to feel lovefor another cannot reasonably be demanded. On this account, we must say that a parent who fails to love his or her child, in the sense of feeling affection for himor her, has not violated any obligation toward that child. Maybe we could say still that the parent is deficient somehow, but we could not characterize this deficiency as a moral failing. Here, then, is the subject of this paper: In the specific context of the parent-child relationship, is the commandment to love reasonable? Are we warranted in saying that the “offices of nature” include an officium caritatis, in a sense exceeding benevolence? My answer is yes, but it is necessary then to come to terms with Kant’s reasons for answering no.