Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Redefining Paternalistic Practices In Women’S Health: How Dysfunctional Trust Relationships Impact Medical Autonomy Of Female Patients In The Contemporary Clinical Setting, Lauren K. O'Dell

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Utilizing Trudy Govier’s (1997) conception of social trust, this dissertation will provide a framework for understanding trust in healthcare relationships and highlight some of the ways that unequal power distribution and dependency, poorly defined roles, and institutions complicate trust between women and their providers. This framework will also explain how distrust, especially prejudicial distrust, leads to paternalistic attitudes on the part of providers. Paternalism limits patient autonomy because medical autonomy is constitutively relational. This means that insofar as distrust causes paternalism, it also damages autonomy. Through negative outcomes, this lack of autonomy can cause patients to distrust healthcare, which can …

The Moral Imperative To Include More Women In Leadership Within Institutions Of Higher Education, Kathryn Mattingly Flynn

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

In higher education, women’s trajectory into leadership positions is not equitable to men’s. The concerns with the scarcity of women in leadership positions, specifically deans, provosts, presidents, and board members, involve varying levels of gender biases, norms, and stereotypes, as well as expectations of representation. Gender biases and stereotypes remain ingrained in American societal structures and result in immoral consequences, injustice for colleges and universities, and diminished happiness of the participants within them. I will use philosophical inquiry to argue that greater representation of women in the leadership of higher education would lead to morally better outcomes for institutions and …

Facultas Marginem: Assessing Disability Data And Public Aau Universities’ Affirmative Action Plans For Systemic Barriers Facing Faculty With Disabilities, Joseph Carlton Barry

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

This dissertation contributes to education equity scholarship produced by academics seeking to develop understandings of disability, Persons with Disabilities (PWD), and how both are situated amongst faculty in institutions of higher education. As such, this dissertation centers on a study of public US universities belonging to the Association of American Universities (AAU). This study looks for institutional level associations between respective rates by which college and university faculty with disabilities (FWD) are employed, certain aspects of disability policy drawn from each institution’s 2020 Affirmative Action Plans (AAP), and various other instances of empirical disability data (EDD).

While this study contributes …

The Ideal Religious Community: Articulating The Possibility Of Collaborative Community Within Religious Contexts, Kayla Bohannon

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation seeks to explain a certain instability that characterizes many contemporary religious communities. Why are people abandoning organized religion at an unprecedented rate? And why do so many religious people behave in vicious ways, even as they claim to preach a message of love? These phenomena are related, and they are both usually explained on epistemological grounds. According to many of religion’s recent critics, religious belief requires the suspension of rational thought, and those who abandon it have simply seen the light of reason. Meanwhile, those who remain religious do so despite the testimony of their reason, and the …

Metaphor And The Struggle Between Populism And Liberal Democracy, Daniel Cole

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Populist movements have emerged the world over, appearing even in countries in which it had long been assumed that liberal democracy was unassailable. Scholars have been grappling with the concept of populism for decades, but as populists have won victories close to home, the research has taken on a heightened sense of urgency. Two of the common theses that have appeared in the recent literature are, (a) populism is opposed to liberal democracy, and (b) populism is linked to a democratic tradition of thought that originates with Rousseau. While I am willing to grant (a), I argue in this dissertation …

Care Working Conditions: The Ethics And Politics Of Social Reproductive Labor From Aristotle To Marxist Feminism, Andrew R. Van't Land

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The spectre of an inescapably divided working class has haunted every generation of marxist theorists, including the latest wave of marxist feminists engaged in the research programme known as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). In this dissertation, I will explain how Marx’s clear theoretical debt to Aristotle extends into the marxist feminist analysis of social reproductive labor and of the exploitation, class interests, and normative demands which condition such care workers. I will demonstrate how SRT can follow Marx’s own example in reading Aristotle, critically yet charitably, in order to resolve three problems. First, Aristotle’s original concept of use value (built …

Reconsidering Moral Perception: The Dialectical Emergence Of Moral Perceptual Contents During Experience Via Cognitive Penetration And Oppressive Socialization’S Suppression Of Our Ability To ‘See’ Moral Reasons For Humanization And Liberation, James William Lincoln

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Moral perceptions occur when a subject makes an immediate discernment about the moral features of an occurrent experience. This project taxonomizes theories of moral perception into the following two camps: experientialism and judgementalism. I defend a version of experientialism, Moral Perceptual Orientation, by arguing that we, in addition to making moral judgments, have genuine perceptions with moral content during occurrent experience. I then go on to advance a framework for understanding how these perceptions are curated by our background beliefs by developing a view of dialectical consciousness. I do this by synthesizing Herbert Marcuse’s perspective on the epistemic subject with …

The Idea Of Absolute Ethical Life: Hegel’S Account Of Freedom And Natural Law In His Early Philosophical Works, Tim Fitzjohn

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation project focuses on G.W.F. Hegel’s early philosophical writings, though primarily on the Natural Law essay (1802/3), and how, through those writings, Hegel positions himself in relation to other thinkers, such as Fichte. Broadly, the modern period saw with it the rise of accounts of what is called natural law. Philosophers prior to Hegel argued that the proper account of natural law must be rooted in some kind of universal framework: either the basis of law must be the shared empirical facts of human nature (empiricism), or the basis of law must be found in the universal demands on …

Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney

Theses and Dissertations--English

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …

The Free Exercise Clause, Minority Faiths, And The Possibility Of Religious Independence After Rawlsian Liberalism, David Charles Scott

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The conversation to which my dissertation belongs is that which preoccupied John Rawls in Political Liberalism, namely: (1) how it is possible that a religiously and morally pluralistic culture like ours lives cooperatively from one generation to the next, and (2) The extent to which religious or moral convictions are appropriate bases for political action. My three-essay dissertation is about aspects of this investigation that affect minority or non-mainstream religious and cultural groups, since legal institutions, and theoretical models of them (such as Rawls’s and Ronald Dworkin’s) are in many ways ill-suited to accommodate their ways of life. In the …

Interpreting The Republic As A Protreptic Dialogue, Peter Nielson Moore

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Protreptic is a form of rhetoric, textual and oral in form, which exhorts its recipients to reorient their lives both morally and intellectually. Plato frequently portrays Socrates' use of this rhetoric with interlocutors who are enticed by the moral and political views of figures from Athens' intellectual culture. During these conversations Socrates attempts to persuade his interlocutors to reorient their lives in a way that conforms more closely to his own moral and intellectual practice of philosophy. Plato's depiction of protreptic, however, also exerts a protreptic effect on readers of his dialogues. Plato's writing thus performs a dual function, simultaneously …

A Case For Empathy: Immigration In Spanish Contemporary Media, Music, Film, And Novels, Constantin C. Icleanu

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation analyzes the representations of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe in Spain. As engaged scholarship, it seeks to better the portrayal of immigrants in the mass media through the study of literature, film, and music about immigration spanning from the year 2000 to 2016. Because misconceptions continue to propagate in the media, this dissertation works to counteract anti-immigrant, xenophobic representations as well as balance out overly positive and orientalized portrayal of immigrants with a call to recognize immigrants as human beings who deserve the same respect, dignity, and rights as any other citizen.

Chapter 1 …

Transcendental Idealism’S Theory Of Selfhood: Fichte On The Relationship Between Knowing Oneself And Moral Deliberation, Caroline Ann Buchanan

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In this dissertation, I take on an exegetical project of understanding how Fichte’s theory of the self influences his account of moral deliberation, and specifically, his account of conscience. I argue that moral action can only be understood within Fichte’s system as possible on the basis of the individual’s own cognitive awareness that they are not only bound by the moral law, but that they are so in virtue of their essential nature as selves. In other words, the feeling of conscience in Fichte’s work, and the decision to abide it, requires that the acting individual recognize that the ought …

Becoming What We Are: Virtue And Practical Wisdom As Natural Ends, Keith Buhler

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation is about ethical naturalism. Philippa Foot and John McDowell both defend contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethics but each represents a rival expression of the same. They are united in the affirmation that virtue is ‘natural goodness’ for human beings. Nevertheless, they are divided in their rival conceptions of ‘nature.’ McDowell distinguishes second nature or the "space of reasons" from first nature or the “realm of law.” Foot rejects this division.

On Foot's naturalism, natural goodness is just as much a feature of first nature as health is, even though human practical reasoning is unique in the biological world. I defend …

Anthropocentrism As Environmental Ethic, Kyle L. Burchett

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Ever since the environment and nonhumanity became major ethical topics, human-centered worldviews have been blamed for all that is morally wrong about our dealings with nature. Those who consider themselves nonanthropocentrists typically assume that the West’s anthropocentric axiologies and ontologies underlie all of the environmental degradations associated with our species. On the other hand, a handful of environmental philosophers argue that anthropocentrism is perfectly acceptable as a foundation for environmental ethics. According to Bryan Norton’s convergence hypothesis, "If reasonably interpreted and translated into appropriate policies, a nonanthropocentric ethic will advocate the same [environmental] policies as a suitably broad and long-sighted …

The Normative Architecture Of Reality: Towards An Object-Oriented Ethics, Justin L. Harmon

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The fact-value distinction has structured and still structures ongoing debates in metaethics, and all of the major positions in the field (expressivism, cognitivist realism, and moral error theory) subscribe to it. In contrast, I claim that the fact-value distinction is a contingent product of our intellectual history and a prime object for questioning. The most forceful reason for rejecting the distinction is that it presupposes a problematic understanding of the subject-object divide whereby one tends to view humans as the sole source of normativity in the world. My dissertation aims to disclose the background against which human ethical praxis is …

Self-Respect And Objectivity: A Critique Of Rawls, Benjamin A. Logan

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls names two conditions as necessary and sufficient for an agent to have self-respect. I argue that Rawls’s two conditions constitute an inadequate understanding of self-respect. Contrary to Rawls, I argue that self-respect requires moral desert, and that self-respect is a distinct concept from self-esteem.

Critical-Reflective Thinking: A Phenomenology, Margot D. Wielgus

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation formulates and describes a type of thinking called critical-reflective thinking. Examples of critical-reflective thinking appear in the works of many major Western philosophical figures, including the main thinkers considered here, Plato, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Henry David Thoreau. Although this list of thinkers is eclectic, these philosophers come together in describing a common phenomenon, although they do not thematically designate or explain it. Their works illustrate a type of thinking in which people are invited by prompting events to consider their presuppositions—notions they have taken as true without prior consideration. I have deemed this phenomenon “critical-reflective thinking” …

Unconditional Forgivingness, Kimberly Goard

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In the last few decades, some scholars have questioned the moral value of forgiveness. They have argued that in order for a victim to preserve his self-respect, to not condone the wrongdoing, and to avoid unjustly pardoning the offender, he must consider forgiving only after the offender has satisfied specific conditions that have been demanded of him. Forgiveness, they claim, is morally permissible only when it is given conditionally. Unconditional forgiveness cannot be virtuous.

This dissertation addresses the issues surrounding this claim. I argue that Forgivingness, which is the virtue associated with forgiving, causes its possessor to reliably offer …