Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

The Intricacy Of Death And Destiny, Christopher Rogers

Undergraduate Publications

It is our eternal shadow and our ultimate judge. It is our shared destiny and greatest fear; death. The conceptualization of death has always been a fascination of man; we have forever explored it, pondered it, dissected it, but never conquered it. We know how to live, but yet very few of us know how to die.

Two of the most brilliant explorations of this dynamic are vastly different yet inherently important works. The genius of both George Orwell’s political satire 1984, and Albert Camus’ The Plague is their accessibility to the imagination regarding dying, the authors ability to ...

Structural Racism, Institutional Agency, And Disrespect, Andrew Pierce

Andrew J. Pierce

In recent work, Joshua Glasgow has offered a definition of racism that is supposed to put to rest the debates between cognitive, behavioral, attitudinal, and institutionalist definitions. The key to such a definition, he argues, is the idea of disrespect. He claims: “X is racist if and only if Xis disrespectful toward members of racialized group R as Rs.” While this definition may capture an important commonality among cognitive, behavioral, and attitudinal accounts of racism, I argue that his attempt to expand the definition to cover institutional or “structural” racism is less persuasive. Alternatively, I argue that structural racism must ...

Hunting The Dark Knight: Books On The Batman, Ian N. Fox

Book Collecting Contest Essays

My essay and annotate bibliography explores the many facets of Batman as both a cultural icon and as a morally and politically complicated character. I explore the merits of comics and superheroes as a modern mythology that deserves serious academic study. Ultimately this is the expression of my personal growth by learning about the Batman and hope that others will pursue their respective passions.

Intersections In Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri, Abigail Lowe

Dissertations & Theses, Department of English

The connection between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Italian political theorist Antonio Negri has drawn attention in academic publications over the last decade. For both thinkers, the philosophical concept of immanence is central to how both respectively conceptualize the world. However, in order to consider their work with regard to a metaphysical grounding, one may benefit from turning to each thinker’s engagement with Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose immanent ontology, or monism, was indeed his Ethics. This essay concentrates on drawing out an ontological distinction between the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Negri by way of a close ...

The State Of Nature X: Why Leave? A Preface On The State Of Nature Theory, Zachary S. Stirparo

Senior Honors Papers

Great minds have addressed the issue of forming a polity, dating back to Plato. Yet, most of these great minds, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argue for the need to escape the state of nature into a civil form of government. However, after taking the three essential elements of man that these philosophers all comment on, self-preservation, reason, and will, a new state of nature model is created that is stronger. It is stronger because of its definition of man and the analytic inferences that flow from that definition. Therefore, the state of nature theory does ...

Under The Watchful Eye: The Highly Intrusive Nature Of Facial Recognition Technology, Rocco Carzo

Undergraduate Review: a Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

In lieu of an abstract, below is the first paragraph of the paper.

Facial recognition technology, or FRT, has the potential to provide numerous benefits, both to individual persons and to society as a whole. Among these benefits, convenience for everyday tasks and increased safety/security are possible. However, the likely benefits that FRT can provide are overshadowed by one major weakness of the technology: the invasion of one's privacy. FRT intrudes on the lives of all people. This can potentially lead to false accusations and/or people altering their lifestyles. Because people never know when or where they ...

An Examination Of Artificial Reproduction Versus Adoption: Taking On The Test-Tube, Marie Heberger

Undergraduate Review: a Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

In lieu of an abstract, below is the first paragraph of the paper.

Human self-knowledge continues to increase monumentally, as well as the accompanying consequences. One aspect of human life that is being conquered is reproduction. While it doesn't take a genius to procreate naturally, technologies to make artificial reproduction possible are becoming more popular. Men and women who cannot conceive children naturally are getting help, and this help is leading to many ethical dilemmas and scientific questions and dilemmas. By being swept away with the abilities to make children in a lab, there are forgotten children born into ...

Managing The Polarities Of Democracy: A Theoretical Framework For Positive Social Change, William J. Benet

The Journal of Social Change

People around the globe have embraced democracy to bring about positive social change to address our environmental, economic, and militaristic challenges. Yet, there is no agreement on a definition of democracy that can guide social change efforts. The Polarities of Democracy model is a unifying theory of democracy to guide healthy, sustainable, and just social change efforts. The Polarities of Democracy model consists of ten elements, organized as five polarity pairs: freedom & authority, justice & due process, diversity & equality, human-rights & communal-obligations, and participation & representation. In this model each element has positive aspects and negative aspects and the objective is to successfully ...

Gandhi And Copyright Pragmatism, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Scholarship at Penn Law

Mahatma Gandhi is revered the world over for his views on freedom and non-violence, ideas that he deployed with great success during India’s freedom struggle. As a thinker, he is commonly believed to have been a moral perfectionist: anti-utilitarian in mindset and deeply skeptical of market mechanisms. Yet, when he engaged with the institution of copyright law during his lifetime — as a writer, editor, and publisher — his approach routinely abjured the idealism of his abstract thinking in favor of a lawyerly pragmatism. Characterized by a nuanced, internal understanding of the institution and its conflicting normative goals, Gandhi’s thinking ...

Harmful Beneficence, Lisa Rivera

Philosophy Faculty Publication Series

Beneficence can be significant to moral action but criteria for good beneficence is rarely discussed. Much work has focused on how extensive the demands are on agents to be beneficent and on agents’ motivations for beneficence.

There has been little direct attention to the relationship between benefactor and beneficiary. The argument here is that serious deficiencies exist in the view that benefactors should focus primarily on satisfying another’s self-chosen ends. A narrow focus on the attempt to help someone satisfy her ends misses the harmful effects that benefactors can have on a dependent beneficiary's ability to choose freely ...

Honest Intentions, Problematic Results: Sexual Identity Therapy, Jamie R. Moon

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Afterword: The Libertarian Middle Way, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Libertarianism is sometimes portrayed as radical and even extreme. In this Afterword to a symposium on "Libertarianism and the Law" in the Chapman Law Review, I explain why, though it may be radical, libertarianism is far from extreme in comparison with its principal alternatives: the social justice of the Left or legal moralism of the Right. Social justice posits that everyone should get a certain amount of stuff; legal moralism posits that everyone should act in a certain way. But because there is no consensus about how much stuff each person should have or how exactly everyone should act, both ...

Cv, H Theixos

H Theixos

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetic Unconscious, Roland K. Végső

Faculty Publications -- Department of English

Within the context of recent European history, examines the phrase "aesthetic ideology" and attendant conceptual considerations. Discusses Jacques Rancière’s work and his unequivocal rejection of what he calls “this great anti-aesthetic consensus,” and the central category of the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible). Rancière calls some level of political engagement “primary aesthetics” and opposes it to actual “aesthetic practices.”

Further, considers Alain Badiou’s critique of Rancière’s Disagreement. Badiou summarizes Rancière’s argument by calling it “a democratic anti-philosophy that identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of the collective ...

Liberalism, Hermeneutics, And The Other, Qiang Hao

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

For hermeneutics, liberal universality—the belief that rights for being humans as such are universally true—is a sort of subjective universality. Subjectivity is just another way of saying that universality is historically situated, and whoever claims universality cannot objectify herself from her own history; accordingly, universality is not universality-as-the-thing-is (a sort of “objective” universality), but universality-for-person P -in-her-historical-situation, even if the claimer is totally unaware of the restrictions imposed by her own tradition and historicity.

Subjective universality reveals the fact that the content of universality is affected by the personal dimension of its claimer. That is, the claimer’s ...

Hannah Arendt And Feminist Agency, Katherine N. Fulfer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My goal in this dissertation is to articulate an Arendtian conception of feminist agency, that is, agency that aims at resistance from within oppressive situations. There is a tendency in feminist literature to depict women in the global south as if they are passive victims of their oppression, with no opportunities to resist. This tendency is replicated in feminist responses to transnational contract pregnancy, the practice in which people travel across national borders to hire a woman to gestate an embryo.

I argue that the feminist literature on contract pregnancy is polarized and unable to resolve the problematic trend of ...

Approaching Christianity: Exploring The Tragic Impact Of Greek Philosophical Thought On Christian Thought, Tammy Galvan-Barnett

M.A. in Political Theory Theses

This study explores the impact of Greek philosophical thought on Christian thought. I argue that Greek dualism is the fundamental contradiction in Christian thought creating problems for the doctrines of Christianity and ultimately thwarting a biblical approach to Christianity. From the early days of Christianity, Greek philosophy became absorbed into Christian thinking. Christian theology is often incorrectly interpreted through Platonic metaphysics. Platonic Christianity distinguishes between sacred and secular realms of the cosmos and devalues physical things. Furthermore, the tragedy is not only that Greek philosophy has had such a profound impact on Christianity, but also that its influence is still ...

The Human Right To Water And Water Security, Zuzanna N. Chociej

Open Access Dissertations and Theses

In this thesis I argue that the utility of employing the human right to water within discussions of water security is intimately related to the population under consideration, such that its use can be more or less effective depending on whose water security one is considering. This is owed to the fact that employing the human right to water in discussions of water security is useful only in the case of states that are able to satisfy the conditions necessary for the successful implementation of the human right to water as a positive legal right: i) being possessed of adequate ...

Minding Nature: A Defense Of A Sentiocentric Approach To Environmental Ethics, Joel P. Macclellan

Doctoral Dissertations

Environmental philosophers allege that philosophical views supporting the animal liberation movement are theoretically and practically inconsistent with environmentalism. While it is true that some animal ethicists argue that we ought to intervene extensively in nature such as the prevention of predation, these views take controversial positions in value theory and normative theory: (i) hedonism as a value theory, and (ii) a view of normativity which places the good before the right, e.g. maximizing utilitarianism, or a rights theory that includes strong positive rights, i.e. animals are entitled to a certain level of welfare or protection from harm. Importantly ...

Deronda And The Tigress: Judaism, Buddhism, And Universal Compassion In George Eliot’S Daniel Deronda, Joshua Frank Moats

Masters Theses

Many scholars have discussed Judaism and the ethics of George Eliot in Daniel Deronda, but few have explored the impact of Buddhism upon the novel. This thesis is the first study to demonstrate the influence of Buddhism upon George Eliot's fiction. By tracing Eliot's interest in the emerging field of comparative religion, I argue that Buddhism offered Eliot a unique religion that was compatible with her secular humanism. Although Buddhism appears explicitly in Deronda in only a few instances, I contend that Eliot uses the tradition of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalism as the predominant theology in Deronda ...