Chapter 6 presents a discussion of how one might go about changing the minds of others (and even one’s own). This broad discussion reiterates messages from Chapter 4 in the context of engaging misinformation and reconstructing knowledge. The topic of ‘debunking’ is introduced and how using it to change people’s minds is perhaps more difficult than simply advising others of their ‘mistakes’ (e.g. with respect to the backfire effect), depending on the nature of the belief and the individual’s attachment to it. Persuasion techniques are also discussed, as is how people can ‘change their own minds’ and how we often rationalise poor thinking.

Natural rights can justify legal rights to control and dispose of those resources exclusively – that is, rights of ownership. Ownership is justified on moral grounds when it seems likely in practice to help people acquire and use resources more effectively than alternate regimes would – especially, a system in which resources were open for everyone’s access and use and people enjoyed them with usufructs. This chapter studies four core or paradigm cases in which ownership facilitates use enough to be legitimate. One (associated with Aristotle) stresses ownership’s tendency to reduce disputes over property; another (associated with St. Thomas Aquinas) focuses on how ownership encourages careful management of resources; a third (Locke) focuses on how ownership incentivizes people labor and productivity; and the last (James Madison and other American founders) focuses on ownership’s securing privacy and autonomy for owners’ own preferred uses. This chapter considers egalitarian critiques of ownership, especially by Jeremy Waldron, Joseph Singer, G.A. Cohen, Liam Murphy, and Thomas Nagel. To define ownership, this chapter relies on conceptual work by A.M. Honore and J.E. Penner.

This chapter critiques past attempts at developing models of Islamic nonviolence which rely on key concepts and scriptural loci classici. Instead, it identifies structural commonalities flowing from a classically Islamic approach to ethical evaluation which regards the actor’s dispositional intention [niyyah] as coequal with the criteria of means and ends more commonly discussed in secular writing on nonviolence. The consequences of this are then examined in relation both to their praxis and to their commensurability with dominant secular models.

This chapter defines care in the context of cultural heritage, drawing on the work of Joan Tronto, who treats care as both a disposition and a process. Central to this is the notion that care represents how people care about cultural heritage, but also the action of caring for it. Given the multitude of communities that care about, and care for, cultural heritage, it is clear that care is relational in nature. Building on the work of other academics who have analysed the nature of care, this chapter applies these to the context of cultural heritage and identifies the central elements of care as (a) developing and sustaining relationships; (b) acknowledging and assuming responsibilities; and (c) identifying and maintaining the appropriate care in the circumstances and revisiting this regularly. The need for caution with the concept of care is addressed, in particular to ensure that care is not paternalistic. Any system of care needs to build in space for revisiting the current allocation of care to determine whether it remains appropriate.

This chapter discusses known motives of female serial killers (FSKs). FSKs’ most common motive for murder was financial gain. An evolutionary psychology model of serial murder is presented. The author discusses how killing children, the antithesis of genesmanship, may be understood from an evolutionary angle. The author reminds the reader that evolved psychology is not an absolute determinant of behavior and that multiple perspectives (e.g., clinical, neural, traumagenic) should be considered to understand a given behavior or mental process. This chapter also presents the outcome (disposition) of serial murder cases in that about 80% were sent to prison, with some receiving the death penalty. This chapter further presents a composite of the “typical” female serial killer (FSK) as described in Harrison et al. (2015) in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology. The author revisits the case of Kristen Gilbert, a FSK whose motives did not neatly fall into a lone typology category. The cases of Judy Buenoano, Rhonda Belle Martin, Lydia Sherman, and Kimberly Clark Saenz illustrate chapter concepts.

“Kindness” is gentleness, consideration, care for others. It is related to “kinship”—the genetic and affective bonds among parents, children, brothers, and sisters. By way of “kind,” meaning “species” or “breed,” it expands the reach of those bonds to what Montaigne (in Florio’s translation) calls “the general throng.” The word “kindness” incites us to think about how human virtues, which usually stand apart from the natural world, might be rooted in our kinship with all the other animals. The Tempest is a key text for thinking about the history and the great utility of kindness as a transspecies virtue in the twenty-first century. This chapter makes its case for animal virtue by telling the story of the key arc of action in the play itself and by recounting a story about how the author of the chapter, at a workshop with actors and scholars, was terribly unkind toward Caliban and what he learned from his own lack of animal virtue.

Some people think wisdom is a stable and invariable individual disposition. Others view wisdom as deeply embedded in culture, experiences, and situations, and treat these features as mutually making up wisdom. What are the implications of each view for measurement, training, and the fundamental nature of wisdom itself? This chapter reviews evidence concerning the dispositional versus situational approaches to study wisdom. Even though main features of wisdom show some stability, there is also a profound and systematic variability in response to situational demands. By conceptualizing dispositions as a distribution of situation-specific responses, one can integrate dispositional and situational approaches to wisdom. Building on these insights, it is recommended to pay attention to contextual factors in measurement. Insight about contextual factors can also shed light on how to develop interventions for training wisdom.

This chapter continues the analysis begun in Chapter 2 regarding the theory of civil dispute resolution (CDR). Chapter 2 focused on the many conflicts which must be balanced by governments, courts, ADR practitioners and parties engaging with CDR, and how those conflicts define and explain CDR. This chapter will consider two key principles: access to justice and open justice, which underlie our dispute resolution system and how these principles play out through policy, legal reform and practice. These principles interact in sometimes complex ways with the balancing acts discussed in Chapter 2. The ability of every member of society to access justice and the openness of the justice system are two of the most important requirements of the civil justice system but they are simultaneously complex and impossible to achieve.

According to Aristotle there is an important distinction between human beings and the rest of nature: while all other creatures develop as they do ‘necessarily or for the most part’, the development of human beings depends on their own efforts. This applies not only to their acquisition of technical and intellectual accomplishments, but to their character as well. Emotions or affections (pathē) play an important role in that development; they have an interesting ‘passive-cum-active’ character. Although their experience is not determined by choice, it is due to understanding and evaluating the particular situation. Reasoning is therefore in a way involved in the formation of human affections by habituation. The process of habituation determines not only how human beings act, but also how they feel. The affective part of the soul, though it is non-rational, is capable of ‘listening’ to reason more or less well and thereby the person acquires good or bad dispositions to act. Thus, in a human being, affections can be reasonable or unreasonable: The distinctive reason-responsiveness of the affections helps to explain why, despite certain natural predispositions, successful human development cannot simply be attributed to nature.

This chapter argues that while Shakespeare has no single or overarching theory or view of love, specific patterns or tendencies are evident in both the plays and the poems. It focuses on three characteristics of such a disposition: the singularity of the beloved (‘you are you’) that admits of no substitute; the essentially projective rather than reactive vision of love (‘love sees not with the eyes but with the mind’); and the perhaps counterintuitive fact that love is not an emotion as such, but rather a disposition or form of behaviour that involves different, sometimes contradictory, emotions. This puts Shakespeare at odds with contemporary, Galenic theories of love as one of the most volatile of the passions. The Sonnets, for example, are virtually devoid of references to contemporary psychology, and the chapter focusses on these poems to explore the rich varieties of emotion they express in their complex and fraught negotiations of love and desire. Classifying and arranging the sonnets in accordance with the emotions expressed in them furthermore does not accord with the usual narrative attributed to them.

Chapter 2 argues that Thomas’s mature view of the formal cause of original justice created an unresolved problem for his doctrine of original sin. Though his early writings sharply distinguished the rectitude of the human will in the state of original justice from supernatural sanctifying grace, by the mid-1260s (e.g., STh I, q. 95, a. 1) he implied that the formal cause of original justice is sanctifying grace. The problem is that Thomas also held (1) that Adam should have been the principal cause of original justice in his posterity and (2) that no creature can be the principal cause of sanctifying grace. Thomas’s mature view implies that the disposition to original justice never could have been sexually transmitted. This implies that his account of original sin as a whole needed to be modified. Adam’s failure to transmit the disposition to original justice rendered the lack of original justice sinful in his posterity: if Adam couldn’t have done this in the first place, how could his descendants have original sin?

This chapter continues the exploration of the development of the doctrine of justification during the Middle Ages, focussing on the question of how sinners are able to appropriate justification. The chapter opens by considering the nature of the human free will (liberum arbitrium), a question discussed by Augustine, but which was found to require further conceptual development in the light of ambiguities and lack of precision at certain points. One of the questions regularly raised for discussion in the early medieval period concerned whether some form of predisposition for justification was required, and how this was to be correlated with the compromised capacities of fallen humanity. This chapter considers the debates within medieval theology over the the necessity and nature of the proper disposition for justification, which often centred on the question of the relation of human and divine contributions to the process of justification. Finally, the chapter considers the origins and application of the medieval theological axiom facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam (‘God does not deny grace to anyone who does their best’).

Certain key themes, subjects and texts were considered to constitute a crucial educational foundation for an individual aspiring to achieve success in the court societies of the Persian Cosmopolis. This chapter argues that the character of this general education was deliberately ‘cosmopolitan’: based on a widely agreed canon of texts, both literary and scientific, whose importance was recognised across the Persian Cosmopolis. Rather than mere knowledge acquisition, the aim of this education was the formation of a specific type of disposition: a particular orientation towards the court society and towards the self. Underlying the external traits of this courtly disposition was a widely shared medico-philosophical understanding of the connections between mind, body and soul and the way in which the perfection of one, presupposed the engagement of the others. The implication of the body in the acquisition of knowledge and the perfection of the soul provides the rationale for directing attention to bodily practices and the influences of objects on bodies, a theme that recurs throughout this book.

Certain key themes, subjects and texts were considered to constitute a crucial educational foundation for an individual aspiring to achieve success in the court societies of the Persian Cosmopolis. This chapter argues that the character of this general education was deliberately ‘cosmopolitan’: based on a widely agreed canon of texts, both literary and scientific, whose importance was recognised across the Persian Cosmopolis. Rather than mere knowledge acquisition, the aim of this education was the formation of a specific type of disposition: a particular orientation towards the court society and towards the self. Underlying the external traits of this courtly disposition was a widely shared medico-philosophical understanding of the connections between mind, body and soul and the way in which the perfection of one, presupposed the engagement of the others. The implication of the body in the acquisition of knowledge and the perfection of the soul provides the rationale for directing attention to bodily practices and the influences of objects on bodies, a theme that recurs throughout this book.