Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

The Incoherence Of Denying My Death, Lajos L. Brons

Lajos Brons

The most common way of dealing with the fear of death is denying death. Such denial can take two and only two forms: strategy 1 denies the finality of death; strategy 2 denies the reality of the dying subject. Most religions opt for strategy 1, but Buddhism seems to be an example of the 2nd. All variants of strategy 1 fail, however, and a closer look at the main Buddhist argument reveals that Buddhism in fact does not follow strategy 2. Moreover, there is no other theory that does, and neither can there be. This means that there is no …

Ron Arkin's 2013 Argument For A Moratorium On Deployment, But No Ban Of Lethal Autonomous Robots (Argument Map), Michael H.G. Hoffmann

Michael H.G. Hoffmann

This argument map represents the argumentation of Arkin, R. (2013). Lethal Autonomous Systems and the Plight of the Non-combatant. AISB Quarterly, 137(July ). Retrieved from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/online-publications/aisbq-137.pdf. The argument map is open for debate in AGORA-net, search for map ID 9199.

安靖如教授之回應, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle

How To Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects For A New Methodology, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder

Attila Tanyi

Examining folk intuitions about philosophical questions lies at the core of experimental philosophy. This requires both a good account of what intuitions are and methods allowing to assess them. We propose to combine philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of intuitions by focusing on three of their features: immediacy, lack of inferential relations, and stability. Once this account of intuition is at hand, we move on to propose a methodology that can test all three characteristics without eliminating any of them. In the final part of the paper, we propose implementations of the new methodology as applied to the experimental investigation of …

Pure Cognitivism And Beyond, Attila Tanyi

Attila Tanyi

The article begins with Jonathan Dancy’s attempt to refute the Humean Theory of Motivation. It first spells out Dancy’s argument for his alternative position, the view he labels ‘Pure Cognitivism’, according to which what motivate are always beliefs, never desires. The article next argues that Dancy’s argument for his position is flawed. On the one hand, it is not true that desire always comes with motivation in the agent; on the other, even if this was the case, it would still not follow that desire is identical with the state of being motivated. When this negative work is done, the …

Overdemanding Consequentialism? An Experimental Approach, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder

Attila Tanyi

According to act-consequentialism the right action is the one that produces the best results as judged from an impersonal perspective. Some claim that this requirement is unreasonably demanding and therefore consequentialism is unacceptable as a moral theory. The article breaks with dominant trends in discussing this so-called Overdemandingness Objection. Instead of focusing on theoretical responses, it empirically investigates whether there exists a widely shared intuition that consequentialist demands are unreasonable. This discussion takes the form of examining what people think about the normative significance of consequentialist requirements. In two experiments, the article finds that although people are sensitive to consequentialist …

Az Út Az Értelem Felé (On The Road To Meaning’), Attila Tanyi

Attila Tanyi

The paper offers a philosophically infused analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The main idea is that McCarthy’s novel is primarily a statement on the meaning of life. Once this idea is argued for and endorsed, by using a parallel between The Road and a 19th century Hungarian dramatic poem, The Tragedy of Man, the paper goes on to argue that the most plausible – although admittedly not the only possible – interpretation of The Road is that it advocates a religious account of the meaning of life that uses what I call a practical conception of God (that borrows …

Elementi Per Una Teoria Critica Delle Regressioni, In "La Società Degli Individui", Xvii, N. 51 (2014), Pp. 141-152., Marco Solinas

Marco Solinas

The Big Casino, Karl Widerquist

Karl Widerquist

This paper uses an analogy to illustrate two things: (1) the economy is and will always be a casino, and (2) in existing societies and most libertarian, liberal, and socialist visions of society individuals are effectively forced to participate in the casino economy. It argues justice requires that individuals must be free from forced participation in such an economy and that the best way to free people from forced participation is the provision of a Basic Income Guarantee.

Response To Svoboda And Irvine (Ethical And Technical Challenges In Compensating For Harm Due To Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering), Jesse Reynolds

Jesse Reynolds

Consequentialism And Its Demands: A Representative Study, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder

Attila Tanyi

An influential objection to act-consequentialism holds that the theory is unduly demanding. This paper is an attempt to approach this critique of act-consequentialism – the Overdemandingness Objection – from a different, so far undiscussed, angle. First, the paper argues that the most convincing form of the Objection claims that consequentialism is overdemanding because it requires us, with decisive force, to do things that, intuitively, we do not have decisive reason to perform. Second, in order to investigate the existence of the intuition, the paper reports empirical evidence of how people see the normative significance of consequentialist requirements.. In a scenario …

Mou Zongsan And His Nineteen Lectures On Chinese Philosophy, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle

Languages Of The Unheard: Why Militant Protest Is Good For Democracy, Stephen D'Arcy

Stephen D'Arcy

A normative democratic theory of sound militancy is proposed, drawing on the ideas of Martin Luther King, but rejecting his non-violence standard in favour of a democratic standard. This normative standard is then applied to civil disobedience, disruptive direct action, sabotage, black blocs, rioting and armed struggle.

Imposing Duties And Original Appropriation, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

"To justify property rights, two things must be shown. First, the kind of exclusive rights over goods or land that property rights involve must be justified. Second, it must be possible for such property rights to come into being. These are two separate issues. It is one thing to say that it is a good idea for there to be such rights, quite another to say that some person or procedure can bring them about."

Review Of D. Chatterjee (Ed.), The Ethics Of Preventive War, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

A review of The Ethics of Preventive War, edited by Deen K. Chatterjee.

Searching For Consensus: Shared Decision Making And Clinical Ethics, Meghan Estell Bungo

Doctoral Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is the search for consensus in the context of clinical ethics—physician-patient interactions, ethics consultations, and ethics committee meetings focused on a particular patient’s care. I argue that consensus, when achieved through a process of shared deliberation that I outline, is the hallmark of the morally correct decision.

While philosophers have generally denigrated consensus as a guide to morally correct decisions, hospital ethics committees and President’s Councils charged with making recommendations about how to resolve moral conflicts in the clinical setting have clearly valued and aimed at the achievement of consensus. Assuming this search for consensus …

The Ethics Glass Ceiling: A Historical Analysis Of Actions By The U.S. House Of Representatives Committee On Ethics, Michael James Gordon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The breaking of moral and ethical codes has been with humankind since history was first recorded. As such, the public wants to know that their elected officials are held accountable and cannot disregard enshrined legal rights without incurring broader personal and societal consequences. Within the hallowed halls of government, the "unrequested" House Committee on Ethics (HCE) provides the forum of accountability.

In this qualitative, historical case study, HCE documents are analyzed and both the internal and external motivating factors behind the actions of the HCE members are examined. Computer assisted qualitative data analysis software, namely ATLAS.ti, was used to look …

Rawls, Religion And The Ethics Of Citizenship: Toward A Liberal Reconciliation, Jeffrey Michael Cervantez

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the conflict between religion and Rawls’s liberalism. Often Rawls’s critics contend that the idea of public reason is hostile to religion or unfriendly to citizens of faith. I argue that this concern is misguided. A careful analysis of Rawls’s work demonstrates that he is far more welcoming to religion than is sometimes claimed. To defend this thesis I put forward what I take to be the best interpretation of Rawls’s idea of public reason, one that I think is immune to most of the standard objections.

Nevertheless, there are some lingering challenges to public reason that need …

Amazon Book Review Of Dwayne Tunstall's Doing Philosophy Personally (2013), Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

An Amazon.com customer book review of Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism (Fordham University, 2013) by Dwayne A. Tunstall

Here Come The Nones! Pluralism And Evangelization After Denominationalism And Americanism, William L. Portier

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This essay begins with a four-part overview of American Catholic history focused on the building and dissolution of an immigrant Catholic subculture. The final period, “Catholics and the Dynamics of Pluralism (1968-present)” leads naturally into a discussion of the demography of Catholics in the United States. Particular attention is given to the trend to disaffiliation among millennials and how best to interpret it. Pastoral and theological reflections on the demography of disaffiliation emphasize the need for the church in the United States to take on an evangelical form more suited to a pluralism that is post-denominational and post-Americanist, and how …