Sherman, Nancy. The Look and Feel of Virtue
2005, In Christopher Gill (ed.), Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics. Clarendon Press
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Added by: John Baldari
Abstract: For much of the twentieth century it was common to contrast the characteristic forms and preoccupations of modern ethical theory with those of the ancient world. However, the last few decades have seen a growing recognition that contemporary moral philosophy now has much in common with its ancient incarnation, in areas as diverse as virtue ethics and ethical epistemology. Christopher Gill has assembled an international team to conduct a fascinating exploration of the relationship between the two fields, exploring key issues in ancient ethics in a way that highlights their conceptual significance for the study of ethics more generally. Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity will be as interesting and relevant to modern moral philosophers, therefore, as it will be to specialists in ancient thought.Sherman, Nancy. Torturers and the Tortured2006, South African Journal of Philosophy 25(1): 77-88.-
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Added by: John Baldari
Abstract: Patrick Lenta and Jessica Wolfendale have written two very thoughtful discussions on torture. A central question that arises in responding to these essays in terms of my recent book, Stoic Warriors, is whether ancient Stoicism affords any insights into both the propensity to inflict torture as well as the capacity to endure it. Wolfendale suggests that the learned capacity to endure torture, and in particular, becoming desensitised to pain, may be part of the psychological background that informs a willingness to inflict torture. Training in resisting torture, such as that which special operations troops typically go through, involves not only learning techniques, which can then be reverse engineered in applying torture (what some argue has happened in Guantanamo Bay), but also learning the kind of stress inoculation that makes one willing to use those techniques. In short, military training that involves torture resistance hardens one’s soul and makes one indifferent to the suffering that torture involves. This indifference, Wolfendale claims, is not unlike Stoic apathy. I want to argue, on the contrary, that Stoic apathy is substantively different. However, before making the case, I take up a number of other preliminary points raised in both papers. I conclude with some remarks about interrogation in general.Comment: This article is useful for post ad bellum discussions in philosophy of war, in addition to being recommended additional reading for political philosophy and ethics.
Sherman, Nancy. Virtue and a Warrior’s Anger2007, In Rebecca L. Walker & P. J. Ivanhoe (eds.), Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems. Oxford University Press.-
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Added by: John BaldariAbstract:
Comment: This text is best used as additional reading in ethics and virtue. This chapter is specifically useful in philosophy of war for discussion of effects of war on combatants.
Sherman, Nancy. From Nuremberg to Guantánamo: Medical Ethics Then and Now2007, Washington University Global Studies Law Review 6(3): 609-619.-
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Added by: John Baldari
Abstract: On October 25, 1946, three weeks after the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg entered its verdicts, the United States established Military Tribunal I for the trial of twenty-three Nazi physicians. The charges, delivered by Brigadier General Telford Taylor on December 9, 1946, form a seminal chapter in the history of medical ethics and, specifically, medical ethics in war. The list of noxious experiments conducted on civilians and prisons of war, and condemned by the Tribunal as war crimes and as crimes against humanity, is by now more or less familiar. That list included: high-altitude experiments; freezing experiments; malaria experiments; sulfanilamide experiments; bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments; sea water experiments; jaundice and spotted fever experiments; sterilization experiments; experiments with poison and with incendiary bombs. What remains less familiar is the moral mindset of doctors and health care workers who plied their medical skill for morally questionable uses in war. In his 1981 work, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton took up that question, interviewing doctors, many of whom for forty years continued to distance themselves psychologically from their deeds. The questions about moral distancing Lifton raised (though not the questions about criminal experiments) have immediate urgency for us now. Military medical doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists serve in U.S. military prisons in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Kandahar, and, until very recently, in undisclosed CIA operated facilities around the world where medical ethics are again at issue. Moreover, they serve in top positions in the Pentagon, as civilian and military heads of command, who pass orders and regulations to military doctors in the field, and who are in charge of the health of enemy combatants, as well as U.S. soldiers. Because we recently marked the sixtieth anniversary of the judgment at Nuremberg, I want to awaken our collective memory to the ways in which doctors in war, even in a war very different from the one the Nazis fought, can insulate themselves from their moral and professional consciences.Comment: This text is best used as an additional reading in bioethics, or in just war theory (post ad bellum).
Sherman, Nancy. Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of our Soldiers2015, New York: Oxford University Press.-
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Added by: John Baldari
Abstract: Movies like American Sniper and The Hurt Locker hint at the inner scars our soldiers incur during service in a war zone. The moral dimensions of their psychological injuries--guilt, shame, feeling responsible for doing wrong or being wronged-elude conventional treatment. Georgetown philosophy professor Nancy Sherman turns her focus to these moral injuries in Afterwar. She argues that psychology and medicine alone are inadequate to help with many of the most painful questions veterans are bringing home from war. Trained in both ancient ethics and psychoanalysis, and with twenty years of experience working with the military, Sherman draws on in-depth interviews with servicemen and women to paint a richly textured and compassionate picture of the moral and psychological aftermath of America's longest wars. She explores how veterans can go about reawakening their feelings without becoming re-traumatized; how they can replace resentment with trust; and the changes that need to be made in order for this to happen-by military courts, VA hospitals, and the civilians who have been shielded from the heaviest burdens of war. 2.6 million soldiers are currently returning home from war, the greatest number since Vietnam. Facing an increase in suicides and post-traumatic stress, the military has embraced measures such as resilience training and positive psychology to heal mind as well as body. Sherman argues that some psychological wounds of war need a kind of healing through moral understanding that is the special province of philosophical engagement and listening.Comment: Use this text as an easy-reader alongside more rigorous texts to shore up arguments from case studies and example.
Sherman, Nancy. Taking Responsibility for our Emotions1999, Social Philosophy and Policy 16(2): 294.-
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Added by: John Baldari
Abstract: We often hold people morally responsible for their emotions. We praise individuals for their compassion, think less of them for their ingratitude or hatred, reproach self-righteousness and unjust anger. In the cases I have in mind, the ascriptions of responsibility are not simply for offensive behaviors or actions which may accompany the emotions, but for the emotions themselves as motives or states of mind. We praise and blame people for what they feel and not just for how they act. In cases where people may subtly mask their hatred or ingratitude through more kindly actions, we still may find fault with the attitude we see leaking through the disguise.Comment: Use this text as a recommended reading to compliment the earlier work on The Fabric of Character.
Sherwin, Susan. No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care1992, Temple University Press.-
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon Fokt
Introduction: This book attempts to deepen common understandings of what considerations are relevant in discussions of bioethics. It is meant to offer a clearer picture of what morally acceptable health care might look like. I argue that a feminist understanding of the social realities of our world is necessary if we are to recognize and develop an adequate analysis of the ethical issues that arise in the context of health care.Comment:
Shiffrin, Seana. Promising, Intimate Relationships, and Conventionalism2008, Philosophical review. 117(4): 481-524.-
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Abstract: The power to promise is morally fundamental and does not, at its foundation, derive from moral principles that govern our use of conventions. Of course, many features of promising have conventional components—including which words, gestures, or conditions of silence create commitments. What is really at issue between conventionalists and nonconventionalists is whether the basic moral relation of promissory commitment derives from the moral principles that govern our use of social conventions. Other nonconventionalist accounts make problematic concessions to the conventionalist's core instincts, including embracing: the view that binding promises must involve the promisee's belief that performance will occur; the view that through the promise, the promisee and promisor create a shared end; and the tendency to take promises between strangers, rather than intimates, as the prototypes to which a satisfactory account must answer. I argue against these positions and then pursue an account that finds its motivation in their rejection. My main claim is: the power to make promises, and other related forms of commitment, is an integral part of the ability to engage in special relationships in a morally good way. The argument proceeds by examining what would be missing, morally, from intimate relationships if we lacked this power.Comment:
Shogenji, Tomoji. The Degree of Epistemic Justification and the Conjunction Fallacy2012, Synthese 184 (1): 29-48.-
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Added by: Jie Gao
Abstract: This paper describes a formal measure of epistemic justification motivated by the dual goal of cognition, which is to increase true beliefs and reduce false beliefs. From this perspective the degree of epistemic justification should not be the conditional probability of the proposition given the evidence, as it is commonly thought. It should be determined instead by the combination of the conditional probability and the prior probability. This is also true of the degree of incremental confirmation, and I argue that any measure of epistemic justification is also a measure of incremental confirmation. However, the degree of epistemic justification must meet an additional condition, and all known measures of incremental confirmation fail to meet it. I describe this additional condition as well as a measure that meets it. The paper then applies the measure to the conjunction fallacy and proposes an explanation of the fallacy.Comment: This interesting paper on epistemic justification requires prerequisite knowledge on formal epistemology. It is hence suitable for an advanced undergraduate course or graduate course on epistemology or formal epistemology.
Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. Reductionist Philosophy of Technology: Stones Thrown from Inside a Glass House1994, Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 5(1): 21-28.-
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Added by: Laura Jimenez
Introduction: Mark Twain said that, for people whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In Thinking about Technology, Joe Pitt's main tools appear to be those of the philosopher of science, so it is not surprising that he claims most problems of philosophy of technology are epistemic problems. As he puts it: 'The strategy here is straightforward. Philosophers of science have examined in detail a number of concepts integral to our understanding of what makes science what it is. The bottom line is this: philosophical questions about technology are first and foremost questions about what we can know about a specific technology and its effects and in what that knowledge consists' . Although Pitt points out important disanalogies between scientific and technological knowledge, nevertheless he emphasizes that philosophy of technology is primarily epistemology. Pitt has stipulatively defined ethical and political analyses of technology as not part of philosophy and philosophy of technology. While claiming to assess the foundations of philosophy of technology, he has adopted a reductionist approach to his subject matter, one that ignores or denigrates the majority of work in philosophy of technology. Does Pitt's bold, reductionist move succeed?Comment: Good as further reading for philosophy of science courses or as introductory reading for courses specialized in philosophy of technology. It is an easy paper but the topic is very specific, so in this last sense it is more suitable for postgraduates.
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Comment: This chapter is recommended additional reading for in-depth studies on Virtue Theory specifically.