Bu çalışmada, Fahreddin er-Râzî (ö. 606/1210) tarafından mütekaddimîn dönem kelâmında kullanılan istidlâl yöntemlerine yöneltilen kapsamlı eleştiriler karşısında, geç dönem Zeydî-Mu‘tezilî geleneğin önde gelen temsilcilerinden İbnü’l-Murtazâ’nın (ö. 840/1437) ortaya koyduğu yöntemsel müdafaa ve istidlâl ilkelerini tahkim etmeye yönelik yaklaşımı analiz edilecektir. Erken dönem kelâmcılarının benimsedikleri istidlâl biçimlerine dair ilk eleştiriler, İmamü’l-Haremeyn el-Cüveynî’nin (ö. 478/1085) el-Burhân fî uṣûli’l-fıḳh adlı eserinde yer almıştır. Cüveynî, kelâmcıların bilgi üretiminde başvurduğu aklî çıkarım biçimlerini tanıtmakla kalmamış, aynı zamanda bu yöntemlerin metafizik alana ilişkin bilgiye ulaştırma yeterliliklerini sorgulayarak yöntem temelli eleştirel düşüncenin önünü açmıştır. Bu düşünsel yönelim, Fahreddin er-Râzî’nin Nihâyetü’l-ʿuḳūl fî dirâyeti’l-uṣûl adlı eserinde sistematik ve teorik bir çerçeveye kavuşmuştur. Râzî, klasik kelâm geleneğinde yerleşik hâle gelen, “hakkında delil bulunmayanın nefyedilmesi”, “kıyas”, “ilzam” ve “kelâmcılar arasında meşhur iki öncül” gibi akıl yürütme türlerini ayrıntılı biçimde tahlil ederek, bu yöntemlerin tutarlılığı ve geçerliliği hususunda ciddi eleştiriler dile getirmiştir. Râzî’nin bu eleştirilerine ise Mu‘tezilî düşüncenin epistemolojik ilkelerini ve istidlâl sistematiğini koruma ve tahkim hedefiyle İbnü’l-Murtazâ, Râzî’nin Nihâyetü’l-ʿuḳūl’ü üzerine yazdığı el-Hidâye ilâ ḥalli şübehi’n-Nihâye isimli reddiyesinde cevap vermiştir. Ona göre Râzî, aklî ve naklî yönlerden her bir konuyu detaylı biçimde incelemiş ve özellikle Mu‘tezile’nin görüşlerinin dayandığı teorik zemine yönelik, çözümü oldukça zor itirazlar yöneltmiştir. İbnü’l-Murtazâ, bu tenkitleri esasen Mu‘tezilî metodolojinin temel ilkelerine dönük bir meydan okuma olarak değerlendirmiş ve bu çerçevede hem kullanılan yöntemleri temellendirmeye çalışmış hem de Râzî’nin itirazlarını kavramsal olarak çürütmeye gayret etmiştir. Onun bu tutumu, bir yandan geç dönem Zeydî-Mu‘tezilî âlimlerin klasik kelâm yöntemlerini ne şekilde savunduklarını ve bu savunuların hangi teorik esaslara yaslandığını ortaya koymakta, diğer yandan ise mütekaddimîn döneme ait istidlâl türlerinin nasıl işlediğini anlamaya katkı sunmaktadır. Çalışmada öncelikle Cüveynî’nin eş-Şâmil fî uṣûli’d-dîn adlı eseri merkez alınarak istidlâl yöntemleri bağlamında Mu‘tezile’ye yönelttiği eleştiriler kısaca tasvire ve değerlendirmeye tabi tutulacak; ardından metinler arası karşılaştırmalı çözümleme yöntemiyle, Râzî’nin eleştirileri ile İbnü’l-Murtazâ’nın bu eleştirilere karşı geliştirdiği epistemolojik savunu çabası kavramsal boyutlarıyla incelenecektir. Böylece iki düşünürün, ortak bir tartışma zemininde nasıl karşılaştıkları tespit edilmeye çalışılacaktır. Bu yönüyle çalışma, geç dönem Zeydî-Mu‘tezilî düşüncenin klasik kelâm mirasıyla kurduğu ilişkiyi ve erken dönem tartışmalarına sağladığı katkıları ortaya koymayı; aynı zamanda yönteme ilişkin süreklilikleri ve kopuşları kavramaya imkân veren bir perspektif sunmayı amaçlamaktadır.
Abstract. This paper was aimed to explore the meaning of pleasing God as a form of transcendental motivation through an integrative approach combining Christian theology, transpersonal psychology, and biopsychology. This study used a library research method. Findings showed that this motivation is linked to spiritual direction, the heart as the center of moral discernment, and surrender as a response to grace. In transpersonal psychology, it aligns with self-transcendence and meaning-centered motivation. Biopsychologically, the prefrontal cortex supports moral decision-making, the dopaminergic system enhances spiritual joy, and the limbic system stores spiritual memory. These insights affirm that spirituality is not only an inner experience but also a biological process, showing that pleasing God involves a holistic formation of the person—spiritually, psychologically, and biologically.
Abstrak. Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk mengeksplorasi makna menyenangkan Tuhan sebagai motivasi transendental melalui pendekatan integratif antara teologi Kristen, psikologi transpersonal, dan biopsikologi. Penelitian dilakukan dengan metode studi pustaka. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahwa motivasi ini terkait dengan arah hidup spiritual, pembentukan hati sebagai pusat pertimbangan moral, dan penyerahan diri sebagai respons terhadap anugerah. Dalam psikologi transpersonal, motivasi ini mencerminkan self-transcendence dan meaning-centered motivation. Dari sudut biopsikologi, prefrontal cortex berperan dalam pengambilan keputusan moral, sistem dopaminergik memperkuat sukacita rohani, dan sistem limbik menyimpan memori spiritual. Temuan ini menegaskan bahwa spiritualitas melibatkan pengalaman batin sekaligus proses biologis yang mendukung pertumbuhan iman secara utuh.
Scottish mathematician Colin MacLaurin (1698-1746) is best known for his A Treatise of Fluxions (1742), An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1748), and the appellation for a type of power series. However, it is hardly known that in 1714 at the age of sixteen MacLaurin penned a short manuscript wherein he tried to apply Newtonian principles to morality, in an approach to mathematization that suggests strong continuities with earlier centuries. De viribus mentium bonipetis (On the good-seeking forces of minds) remained unpublished and hidden in the papers of the Colin Campbell Collection at the University of Edinburgh for over 250 years; it was only uncovered at the end of the twentieth century. De viribus provides a remarkable glimpse into how the young MacLaurin dealt with early Newtonianism, the tenets of the Church of Scotland, and the nascent interface between science and religion just prior to the dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of De viribus is the personal snippets related to Scottish Presbyterian morality that MacLaurin interjects throughout his mathematical discussion. These are often vague and oblique, and one must look to his mathematics, his contemporaries, and the social fabric of his surroundings to understand them. In the process, one gains insight not only into MacLaurin's family background and personal religious thought, but also into the culture and nature of teaching in Scottish universities at the time. De Viribus not only demonstrates that ideas of mathematising morality were being canvassed in Scotland much earlier than the better known, but less sophisticated, later attempts by the likes of Frances Hutcheson, David Hume and George Turnbull, but suggests continuities with approaches to mathematization in earlier centuries, providing a strong bridge into the Enlightenment era.
We consider the standard moral hazard problem with limited liability. The first-order approach (FOA) is the main tool for its solution, but existing sufficient conditions for its validity are restrictive. Our main result shows that the FOA is broadly valid, as long as the agent's reservation utility is sufficiently high. In basic examples, the FOA is valid for almost any positive reservation wage. We establish existence and uniqueness of the optimal contract. We derive closed-form solutions with various functional forms. We show that optimal contracts are either linear or piecewise linear option contracts with log utility and output distributions in an exponential family with linear sufficient statistic (including Gaussian, exponential, binomial, geometric, and Gamma). We provide an algorithm for finding the optimal contracts both in the case where the FOA is valid and in the case where it is not at trivial computational cost.
If God’s being is a relational being, then it is not possible to speak of God without the concept of communion, a concept that challenges us to read reality in a Trinitarian key and understand that the world created according to the divine model is a web of relationships and that everything is connected—everything is related and communicated with everything. Consequently, the awareness of this interdependence obliges us to think of a single world, of a common project in which moral theology must also take charge of the conflicts that affect the whole world. This scenario and theological framework show us where, and give us the reasons why we should undertake this challenging task of building an intercultural moral theology, which, when based on a relational theology, underlines how important it is to become aware of our interdependence and that we are obliged to think of a single world and to build a common project, bearing in mind that it will ultimately be a matter of entering into a relationship of communion because we are all one. Communion can only be built in the difference and richness of diversity
This brief introduction presents the contributions of Catherine Yanko and Stephanie Edwards as part of a roundtable on Jessica Coblentz’s Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression , to which the author offers a response in the form of six lessons to learn when engaging in theological reflection on psychological distress. Yanko and Edwards utilize Coblentz as foundational to their own research and theological “next steps.” When read together, the authors intend to inspire scholars to rethink their own work through Coblentz’s lens, recognizing the tendrils of issues such as mental health, disability, and embodiment that entwine themselves in every facet of theology. The trio of papers is intended to represent one iteration of an ongoing conversation in theology regarding anthropology, mental health, and ethics.
The phenomenon of sexual abuse by Catholic leaders has led to many responses by clergy, dioceses, and the global Catholic Church. One underexplored aspect of preventing sexual abuse by Catholic leaders is the educational practice of abuse prevention and the moral implications therein. Here we examine best practices for abuse prevention by turning to the interdisciplinary study of intimate partner violence and prevention education as tools for deeper theological exploration of safeguarding initiatives. Using these interdisciplinary insights, we offer theological grounding for power and relationship education in abuse prevention, identifying children’s moral agency, right relationship, a theology of power literacy, and structures of vice as key components in the phenomenon of pervasive abuse. We explain the analysis of safeguarding materials conducted as part of Fordham University’s _Taking Responsibility_ grant initiative, and our concerns regarding the lack of best practices and theological gaps noted in our review—gaps related to social ethics, power, and the structural or communal effects of abuse. We conclude with recommendations for developing future safeguarding training, rooted in a relationship-based, systemic understanding of abuse, used to create our own safeguarding workshop for adolescents.
Yuwei Chuai, Anastasia Sergeeva, Gabriele Lenzini
et al.
Displaying community fact-checks is a promising approach to reduce engagement with misinformation on social media. However, how users respond to misleading content emotionally after community fact-checks are displayed on posts is unclear. Here, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally analyze changes in sentiments and (moral) emotions in replies to misleading posts following the display of community fact-checks. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale panel dataset comprising N=2,225,260 replies across 1841 source posts from X's Community Notes platform. We find that informing users about falsehoods through community fact-checks significantly increases negativity (by 7.3%), anger (by 13.2%), disgust (by 4.7%), and moral outrage (by 16.0%) in the corresponding replies. These results indicate that users perceive spreading misinformation as a violation of social norms and that those who spread misinformation should expect negative reactions once their content is debunked. We derive important implications for the design of community-based fact-checking systems.
When we design and deploy an Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, reward functions motivates agents to achieve an objective. An incorrect or incomplete specification of the objective can result in behavior that does not align with human values - failing to adhere with social and moral norms that are ambiguous and context dependent, and cause undesired outcomes such as negative side effects and exploration that is unsafe. Previous work have manually defined reward functions to avoid negative side effects, use human oversight for safe exploration, or use foundation models as planning tools. This work studies the ability of leveraging Large Language Models (LLM)' understanding of morality and social norms on safe exploration augmented RL methods. This work evaluates language model's result against human feedbacks and demonstrates language model's capability as direct reward signals.
In 1941, Jacques Maritain mused about writing a variation on the Federalist papers, this time keyed not only to approval of the United States constitution but for the “entire world.” We could use such a document now, as democracies falter. Maritain, more than any other thinker, laid the groundwork for the Catholic Church’s endorsement of democracy. The task today, therefore, is to remember and also improve upon what Maritain once taught us.
This paper investigates the historical origin and ancestors of typicality, which is now a central concept in Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics and Bohmian Mechanics. Although Ludwig Boltzmann did not use the word typicality, its main idea, namely, that something happens almost always or is valid for almost all cases, plays a crucial role for his explanation of how thermodynamic systems approach equilibrium. At the beginning of the 20th century, the focus on almost always or almost everywhere was fruitful for developing measure theory and probability theory. It was apparently Hugh Everett III who first mentioned typicality in physics in 1957 while searching for a justification of the Born rule in his interpretation of quantum mechanics. The historically closest concept before these developments is moral certainty, which was invented by the medieval French theologian Jean Gerson, and it became a standard concept at least until the Age of Enlightenment, when Jakob Bernoulli proved the Law of Large numbers.
We study an optimal reinsurance problem under a diffusion risk model for an insurer who aims to minimize the probability of lifetime ruin. To rule out moral hazard issues, we only consider moral-hazard-free reinsurance contracts by imposing the incentive compatibility constraint on indemnity functions. The reinsurance premium is calculated under an extended distortion premium principle, in which the distortion function is not necessarily concave. We first show that an optimal reinsurance contract always exists and then derive two sufficient and necessary conditions to characterize it. Due to the presence of the incentive compatibility constraint and the nonconcavity of the distortion, the optimal contract is obtained as a solution to a double obstacle problem. At last, we apply the general result to study three examples and obtain the optimal contract in (semi)closed form.
Through a historical perusal of Church teaching this essay explores the question of the ethical permissibility of xenotransplantation in light of Laudato Si’. This timely encyclical acknowledges the dignity of human beings and other animal creatures and deserves formal church articulation before the technocratic paradigm of scientific possibility replaces the integrity of creation. Grounded in the Catholic tradition and building upon Sacred Scripture and Catholic social teaching, Laudato Si’ constitutes the most mature and promising, albeit incomplete articulation of human and non-animal relationships within the integral wholeness of all creation. The ethical permissibility of xenotransplantation in the Catholic community requires further discussion and reconsideration in light of Laudato Si’ to meet the ethical obligations of safety, respect, and dignity owed to humans and living creatures.
How to attribute responsibility for autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) systems' actions has been widely debated across the humanities and social science disciplines. This work presents two experiments ($N$=200 each) that measure people's perceptions of eight different notions of moral responsibility concerning AI and human agents in the context of bail decision-making. Using real-life adapted vignettes, our experiments show that AI agents are held causally responsible and blamed similarly to human agents for an identical task. However, there was a meaningful difference in how people perceived these agents' moral responsibility; human agents were ascribed to a higher degree of present-looking and forward-looking notions of responsibility than AI agents. We also found that people expect both AI and human decision-makers and advisors to justify their decisions regardless of their nature. We discuss policy and HCI implications of these findings, such as the need for explainable AI in high-stakes scenarios.
This paper investigates a Pareto optimal insurance problem, where the insured maximizes her rank-dependent utility preference and the insurer is risk neutral and employs the mean-variance premium principle. To eliminate potential moral hazard issues, we only consider the so-called moral-hazard-free insurance contracts that obey the incentive compatibility constraint. The insurance problem is first formulated as a non-concave maximization problem involving Choquet expectation, then turned into a concave quantile optimization problem and finally solved by the calculus of variations method. The optimal contract is expressed by a second-order ordinary integro-differential equation with nonlocal operator. An effective numerical method is proposed to compute the optimal contract assuming the probability weighting function has a density. Also, we provide an example which is analytically solved.
Maxwell Forbes, Jena D. Hwang, Vered Shwartz
et al.
Social norms -- the unspoken commonsense rules about acceptable social behavior -- are crucial in understanding the underlying causes and intents of people's actions in narratives. For example, underlying an action such as "wanting to call cops on my neighbors" are social norms that inform our conduct, such as "It is expected that you report crimes." We present Social Chemistry, a new conceptual formalism to study people's everyday social norms and moral judgments over a rich spectrum of real life situations described in natural language. We introduce Social-Chem-101, a large-scale corpus that catalogs 292k rules-of-thumb such as "it is rude to run a blender at 5am" as the basic conceptual units. Each rule-of-thumb is further broken down with 12 different dimensions of people's judgments, including social judgments of good and bad, moral foundations, expected cultural pressure, and assumed legality, which together amount to over 4.5 million annotations of categorical labels and free-text descriptions. Comprehensive empirical results based on state-of-the-art neural models demonstrate that computational modeling of social norms is a promising research direction. Our model framework, Neural Norm Transformer, learns and generalizes Social-Chem-101 to successfully reason about previously unseen situations, generating relevant (and potentially novel) attribute-aware social rules-of-thumb.
The diversity of religious beliefs in today's society has the potential to cause conflict, that is if each group insists on the truth it believes. Theology of pluralism is presently offering a new religion based on all the truths that are recognized. But is theology pluralism really the answer, or does it have a greater negative impact? At first glance, the emergence of a theology of pluralism is similar to the emergence of liberation theology as an attempt to answer theological problems. So in this study, the relationship between pluralism theology and liberation theology is discussed, as well as the impact of plural theology. Researchers conduct literature studies to examine the theology of pluralism, make comparisons, and ultimately draw conclusions. From this research, it can be concluded that there is a relationship between plural theology and liberation theology and that pluralism theology impacts relativism in standards, so there is no absolute moral standard. Abstrak: Keberagaman keyakinan agama di kalangan masyarakat masa kini berpotensi menimbulkan konflik, yaitu apabila masing-masing kelompok bersikukuh pada kebenaran yang diyakininya. Teologi pluralisme hadir menawarkan sebuah agama baru yang bertolak dari semua kebenaran yang diakui. Namun apakah teologi pluralisme sungguh-sungguh menjadi jawaban, ataukah justru memiliki dampak negatif yang lebih besar? Sekilas, kemunculan teologi pluralisme mirip dengan kemunculan teologi pembebasan sebagai sebuah upaya menjawab masalah teologis. Maka dalam penelitian ini dibahas hubungan antara teologi pluralisme dan teologi pembebasan, serta dampak dari teologi pluralisme. Peneliti melakukan studi pustaka untuk mencermati teologi pluralisme, melakukan komparasi, dan pada akhirnya menarik kesimpulan. Dari penelitian ini disimpulkan bahwa ada hubungan antara teologi pluralisme dan teologi pembebasan, dan bahwa teologi pluralisme berdampak pada relativisme dalam standar, sehingga tidak ada standar moral yang absolut.
This chapter presents a more detailed examination of Thomas Kuhn’s structure than that provided in the Introduction. The chapter explains how and why Kuhn’s book permanently rejected the idea of scientific “progress.” The author notes that although most Catholics experienced the widespread critique of Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical as a sudden (if welcome) rejection of the kind of theological argument that the Church had utilized in its moral teaching for several centuries, the cracks in the foundations of that older approach to natural law had appeared considerably before 1968. The emergence of a historicist approach to moral theology in the decades before the promulgation of the encyclical contextualized the rocky reception accorded it within a much larger historical framework. Further, even the guild of moral theologians had come to a much more nuanced understanding of what could be (and what could not be) “unchangeable” in Christian ethics.
“The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” in Luke 16 illuminates some important features of Asian American life. Like the parable’s central character, Asian Americans live under a set of cultural expectations where success is achieved by accepting terms set by others. In America, those terms are often defined racially, where access gets indexed to one’s ethnicity, or to perceptions of one’s ethnicity. The terms can be of great benefit and can come at great cost, as was the case for managers in Jesus’ day. Understanding Asian American life requires the recognition of both sides of this dynamic. This article first examines the parable and then draws out its relevance for Asian American and Asian American Christian life, concluding with some thoughts on the relative status of normative judgment in the context of racialization.