Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

Relational Power, Music, And Identity: The Emotional Efficacy Of Congregational Song, Nathan Myrick

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Relational Power, Music, and Identity: The Emotional Efficacy of Congregational Song

The power of congregational song to unify (or divide) people along various lines is well documented. Yet, how this process of uniting or dividing is accomplished has proven necessarily difficult to document. This paper examines the complex and polyvalent factors that contribute to the meaningfulness of congregational music making, seeking to offer a synthetic, conceptual framework with which to engage this often murky milieu.

Employing interdisciplinary research techniques drawn from sociology, ritual studies, and ethnomusicology, I construct a conceptual framework with which to understand the profoundly formative power of …

The Unifying Power Of Education, Keagan Potts, Jenji Learn

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

• Without Expertise or Experience: Philosophizing When Your Students Know You Know Nothing
• Segregated Students — Segregated Society: The Primacy of Education in Ending Hate
• Combatting Emerging Resegregation: Teaching Those in Power to Empower

Defining Biometrics: Toward A Transnational Ethic Of Personal Information, Nicola Morrow

International Studies Honors Projects

Innovations in biotechnology, computer science, and engineering throughout the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries dramatically expanded possible modes of data-based surveillance and personal identification. More specifically, new technologies facilitated enormous growth in the biometrics sector. The response to the explosion of biometric technologies was two-fold. While intelligence agencies, militaries, and multinational corporations embraced new opportunities to fortify and expand security measures, many individuals objected to what they perceived as serious threats to privacy and bodily autonomy. These reactions spurred both further technological innovation, and a simultaneous proliferation of hastily drafted policies, laws, and regulations governing the collection, …

Virtue Theory As A Feminist Ethical Framework, Alejandro Navas

Critical Reflections

In recent decades, feminists have pointed out how prominent ethical theories are primarily concerned with establishing rules of conduct between strangers who share (or are theorized as if they share) the same social status. As Claudia Card points out, such theories outline explicit expectations and rewards of formal relationships; these relationships characterize formal institutions, such as law and business, and the considerations of upper-class men who predominate in such institutions. An ethics which focuses on the impersonal application of rules risks overlooking attentiveness to personal needs, a crucial quality in caring relationships which women and poorer classes have had primary …

Eudemonic Care: A Future Path For Occupational Therapy?, Charlotte L. Royeen, Franklin Stein, Alivia Murtha, Julie Stambaugh

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

The core tenets of occupational therapy date to ancient Greece. Philosophers and physicians alike promulgated that quality of life, or “eudemonia,” is at the center of both ethical and medical concern and can be attained through healthful engagement in meaningful occupation. In more recent times, there has been a strong call to return to the powerful implementation of the eudemonic moral philosophy in health care practice, especially in occupational therapy. Searches of recent occupational therapy research show that integration of wellness initiatives into rehabilitative treatment sessions can have a profound impact on the physical and emotional healthfulness of people with …

Moral Leadership And The Chairperson, David S. Owen

Academic Chairpersons Conference Proceedings

What does it mean for chairpersons to exercise moral leadership? This discussion will focus on clarifying what moral leadership means to chairpersons, what sorts of moral challenges are faced, and how chairpersons can exercise moral leadership.

Teaching About The Politics Of Religion And Social Change, Dean Johnson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pretrial Detention And Bail, Megan Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

Our current pretrial system imposes high costs on both the people who are detained pretrial and the taxpayers who foot the bill. These costs have prompted a surge of bail reform around the country. Reformers seek to reduce pretrial detention rates, as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities in the pretrial system, while simultaneously improving appearance rates and reducing pretrial crime. The current state of pretrial practice suggests that there is ample room for improvement. Bail hearings are often cursory, with no defense counsel present. Money-bail practices lead to high rates of detention even among misdemeanor defendants and those who …

The Scope And Limits Of Secular Buddhism: Watanabe Kaikyoku (1868–1912) And The Japanese New Buddhist 'Discovery Of Society', James Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

Although New Buddhism is a term sometimes employed to refer to the broad sweep of reform and modernization movements in Japanese Buddhist thought and practice beginning in the 1870s, the term shin bukkyō refers more specifically to a broadly influential movement of some two dozen young scholars and lay Buddhists active in the last decade of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Founded in February 1899 as Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai (Buddhist Pure Believers Fellowship or Buddhist Puritan Association), the group changed its name to Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai (New Buddhist Fellowship) in 1903. Notto Thelle refers to the NBF as “the most consistent …

Virtue Ethics For Relational Beings, Mathieu Roy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In On Virtue Ethics, Rosalind Husthouse outlines an account of virtue ethics and human flourishing grounded in an understanding of human beings as emotionally complex, social, and rational animals. These attributes give rise to a set of ends against which the goodness of our behavioural, affective, and intellectual dispositions are measured, namely, 1) survival of the individual, 2) continuance of the species, 3) characteristic enjoyment of pleasures (and avoidance of pain), and 4) the good functioning of the social group.

I contend, however, that this picture is incomplete. More specifically, I outline the psychological effects of prolonged solitary confinement to …

What’S The Harm In Climate Change?, Eric S. Godoy

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

A popular argument against direct duties for individuals to address climate change holds that only states and other powerful collective agents must act. It excuses individual actions as harmless since they (1) are neither necessary nor sufficient to cause harm, (2) arise through normal activity, and (3) have no clear victims. Philosophers have challenged one or more of these assumptions; however, I show that this definition of harm also excuses states and other collective agents. I cite two examples of this in public discourse and suggest we reconsider the notion of harmful action in our discussions about climate change.

Colb And Dorf On Abortion And Animal Rights, Mylan Engel Jr.

Between the Species

In their recent book, Sherry Colb and Michael Dorf defend the following ethical theses: (1) sentience is sufficient for possessing the right not to be harmed and the right not to be killed; (2) killing sentient animals for food is almost always seriously wrong; (3) aborting pre-sentient fetuses raises no moral concerns at all; and (4) aborting sentient fetuses is wrong absent a reason weighty enough to justify killing the fetus. They also discuss strategies and tactics for activists: They oppose the use of graphic images by activists on tactical grounds, and they categorically oppose the use of violence by …

Unparadoxical Liberalism, Andrew Koppelman

San Diego Law Review

Larry Alexander argues that liberalism is internally incoherent because it contains a paradox: it is committed to toleration, but if it tolerates illiberal ideas and practices it betrays itself. The paradox does not exist. Liberalism aims to tolerate as much diversity as it can consistent with the preservation of the liberal project. It has distinctive reasons to tolerate illiberal ideas, since it aims to be adopted by the citizenry consciously and with a full understanding of the alternatives. How much diversity can, in practice, be tolerated is a contingent question dependent on the facts of any particular time and place. …

Legal Moralism Revisited, Michael S. Moore

San Diego Law Review

I shall use this occasion mostly to clarify what the legal moralist theory of criminal legislation proclaims to be the proper limits on the reach of criminalization of behavior. But preliminarily, here in this Introduction, I want to remind readers of how the principle is motivated. First, recall what a principle of criminal legislation is. It consists of two closely related items. First of all, it is a principle that sets forth the proper aims of a legislature when that legislature drafts the prohibitions and requirements that constitute the “special part” of the substantive criminal law. It is, second, a …

The Harm Principle, Legal Moralism, And The "Disintegration Thesis": On Lord Devlin Being Unable To Keep Playing The Smuggling Game, Miguel Nogueira De Brito

San Diego Law Review

The topic of the legal enforcement of morals, understood as the “question of the legitimacy of ‘vice crimes’ or ‘victimless crimes,’” is a special facet of the more general issue of the limits of the law. It is the subject of the long-standing debate as to whether law—all law—can be used as a support for moral conceptions as such, or, more generally, whether there are limits on the use of law to enforce morality, as when it is claimed that the law must remain neutral as between different views of the good, be they religious or otherwise. Whether understood in …

The Porn Myth: Exposing The Myth Behind The Fantasy Of Pornography By Matt Fradd, Donald L. Hilton Jr.

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Why Liberal Tolerance, Rightly Understood, Is Coherent And Defensible, William A. Galston

San Diego Law Review

One of the most familiar criticisms of liberal democracy is that it cannot defend itself against its enemies while remaining true to its principles. This criticism is odd as well as unjust because theorists regarded as arch-liberals offer compelling reasons to reject it. . .

An Unjust Dogma: Why A Special Right To Religion Wrongly Discriminates Against Non-Religious Worldviews, Kenneth Einar Himma

San Diego Law Review

In this Article, I will argue that a special right to religious freedom is not morally warranted, and that hence such a right illicitly discriminates against non-religious worldviews. The principal argument here is that there is no adequate reason to think that religious worldviews implicate any interests distinct from those implicated by non-religious worldviews. While it is certainly true that religious worldviews warrant, as a matter of political morality, all the protections that non-religious worldviews receive, there is good reason to question what seems to have become a dogma among Western nations—namely, that religious worldviews deserve special protection....

A Transcendental Argument For Liberalism, Samuel C. Rickless

San Diego Law Review

Liberalism is the view that the state should not, except on mutually justifiable grounds, coerce a society’s citizens to adopt, support, or follow some particular comprehensive conception of the good. So understood, a liberal state, by definition, permits each citizen a zone of freedom delimited by her own understanding of the ingredients of a happy life. Liberalism, as a normative theory governing state–citizen (and, indirectly, citizen–citizen) relations, is opposed by various forms of totalitarianism, including theocracy and communism. A theocratic state is one that imposes a particular religious form of life on its citizens, and thereby restricts their freedom to …

Liberalism And Tolerance, William Voegeli

San Diego Law Review

I began by raising the possibility that tolerance is minor issue, having no bearing on whether liberalism works out or makes sense. I conclude by noting that it is a central question, for liberalism and politics in general. Tolerance is important because intolerance is important. “Anything Goes” is one of Cole Porter’s best songs, but is unlikely to become any country’s national anthem. The questions of what doesn’t go, and why, and how to prevent it from going any further, explain a great deal about the political ideologies of our era, as well as the premises on which social orders …