Blaise Pascal is highly regarded as a religious moralist, but he has rarely been given his due as an ethical theorist. The goal of this article is to assemble Pascal's scattered thoughts on moral judgment and moral wrongdoing into an explicit, coherent account that can serve as the basis for further scholarly reflection on his ethics. On my reading, Pascal affirms an axiological, social-intuitionist account of moral judgment and moral wrongdoing. He argues that a moral judgment is an immediate, intuitive (...) perception of moral value that we willfully disregard in favor of the attractive, though self-deceptive, deliverances of our socially constructed imaginations. We can deceive ourselves so easily because our capacity to evaluate goods is broken, a dark legacy of the fall. In the article's concluding section, I briefly compare Pascal to contemporary ethicists and suggest directions for future research. (shrink)

This paper explores the importance of hope as a determining factor for patients to participate in first-in-human trials for synthetic biology therapies. This paper focuses on different aspects of hope in the context of human health and well-being and explores the varieties of hope expressed by patients. The research findings are based on interview data collected from stable gout and diabetes patients. Three concepts of hope have emerged from the interviews: hope as certainty ; hope as reflective uncertainty ; hope (...) as self-therapy. The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it aims to underline the significance of hope in patients’ medical decision-making, as well as the beneficence of hope for patients’ well-being, and for progress in research. Second, it shows how philosophical investigations—in particular Descartes—explore the phenomenon of hope and provide medical empirical research with profitable insights and tools. (shrink)

The history and philosophy of affective terms and concepts contains important challenges for contemporary scientific accounts of emotion regulation. First, there is the problem of moral undertow. This arises because stipulating the ends of emotion regulation requires normative assumptions that ultimately derive from values and morals. Some historical precedents are considered to help explain and address this problem. Second, there is the problem of organization. This arises because multiple emotions are often organized and oriented in very particular ways over the (...) life of the individual in a manner that cannot be adequately explained using the concept of “emotion.” A modern variant of the traditional concept of passion is invoked to help address this problem. (shrink)

This paper seeks to show that Bernard Mandeville's primary purpose in The Fable of the Bees was to historicize the concept of self?love (amour?propre) articulated by seventeenth?century French Jansenists and moralistes; that in doing so Mandeville constructed a theory designed to explain the inter?subjective constraints and forces of social discipline which characterize commercial societies; and that a full understanding of Mandeville's achievement depends upon an appreciation of the way in which pride in his theory becomes socialized into hypocrisy at a (...) decisive moment in the civilizing process, a moment after which, Mandeville argues, cultural institutions themselves can contain that unfettered self?interest which his contemporaries fearfully associated with the triumph of commerce. (shrink)