Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Toward A Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article re-examines racial and ethnic identity within the context of pedagogical attempts to instill a positive white identity in white students who are conscious of the history of white racism and white privilege. The paper draws heavily from whiteness studies and developmental cognitive science in arguing (against Henry Giroux and Stuart Hall) that a positive notion of white identity, however postmodern its construction, is an oxymoron, since whiteness designates less a cultural/ethnic ethos and meaningful way of life than a pathological structure of privilege and narrowminded cognitive habitus.

School Desegregation 50 Years After Brown: Misconceptions, Lessons Learned, And Hopes For The Future, Gary Orfield

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Papers presented for the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University.

Great Anger, Anthony Cunningham

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Anger has had a major hand in a history of inhumanity. In this light, some schools of thought have suggested that we do best to jettison anger entirely. However, anger, like grief, is tied to caring deeply, and as such, both emotions can speak to what is best and most beautiful about human life and character.

Imputed Conflicts Of Interest In International Law Practice, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

We Need To Talk....About Institutional Integrity, Daniel E. Wueste

Publications

It seems a reasonable hypothesis that institutional health depends upon institutional integrity and institutional integrity depends upon individual integrity. If that’s right, “disease” may be manifest at two levels—at the level of institutional or individual integrity.

I begin with the first part of the hypothesis above, that institutional integrity is a condition of institutional health. The legal theorist Lon Fuller articulated this idea in a less generalized form when he spoke of a morality internal to law that makes law possible. I will explain and illustrate this idea and indicate how it applies to institutions of various sorts, including professions …

Reasonable Partiality And Animal Ethics, Bernard E. Rollin

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship -philia in Aristotle's term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emerging in society, its full expression is severely limited by our exploitative uses of animals. At this historical moment, only the animals with whom we enjoy philia - companion animals - can be treated with unrestricted moral …

Critical Theory At A Crossroad: Adorno, Marcuse, And The Radical Sixties, Jacob Skinner

Inquiry Journal 2005

No abstract provided.

Questioning Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Review of: "Michael Walzer, Arguing About War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 208. Cloth, $25.00. ISBN: 0-300-10365-4."

Integrating Leadership With Ethics: Is Good Leadership Contrary To Human Nature?, Joanne B. Ciulla

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

What is it about human nature that makes ethical leadership in any context or culture difficult? This chapter examines leadership in terms of the basic philosophic question concerning human nature. To what extent does free will shape our lives and to what extent are our lives determined by our genes and by fate?

Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic and communicative, and concludes by addressing Foucault's understanding of parrhesia as a non-discursive form of truth-telling.

Continental Philosophy In Britain And America, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Continental, or as it is sometimes called, contemporary European philosophy represents a range of approaches to academic philosophy distinguished from the analytic modality dominating professional or institutional philosophy in the United Kingdom and in the United States, as in Australia, Canada, and Ireland. Where the analytic tradition itself may be said to trace its own roots to Europe, e.g., positivism may be traced to France and its originator August Comte, and logical empiricism to Germany and to Austria and the writings of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle, continental philosophy expresses an ideological tradition …

Frederick Douglass's Longing For The End Of Race, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) argued that newly emancipated black Americans should assimilate into Anglo-American society and culture. Social assimilation would then lead to the entire physical amalgamation of the two groups, and the emergence of a new intermediate group that would be fully American. He, like those who were to follow, was driven by a vision of universal human fraternity in the light of which the varieties of human difference were incidental and far less important than the ethical, religious, and political idea of personhood. Douglass’s version of this vision was formed by natural law theories, and a Protestant Christian conception …

Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, which first appeared in three installments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861, was intended as a defense of the notorious doctrine identified with the liberal reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and with the author's father, James Mill (1773-1836). The defense was successful. While "the principle of utility, or as Bentham has latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle," may have scandalized Victorian England, Mill's Utilitarianism became one of the defining documents of modern British and American liberalism. It is impossible to appreciate contemporary social and political life without coming to grips with utilitarianism.

Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

When Principia Ethica appeared, in 1903, it became something of a sacred text for the Cambridge-educated elites-Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes-who, along with Virginia Woolf, would form the core of the Bloomsbury Group. In a letter of October 11, 1903, Strachey confesses to Moore that he is "carried away" by Principia, which inaugurates, for him, "the beginning of the Age of Reason." Moore's critique of convention, his caustic dismissal of his philosophical predecessors, and the relentless rigor of his method promised a revolution in morality commensurate with the modernist transformation of art and literature. Principia Ethica shifted …

Adam Smith And Greed, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

The virtues of greed have been widely promoted by some economists in the 20th century. Allegedly it is Adam Smith who provides this new dignity to greed (Lerner, 1937, ix). Kenneth Arrow and Frank Hahn in the General Equilibrium Analysis (1971), for example, implicitly assume that Adam Smith's self-interest is the greed that promotes economic efficiency (quoted in Evensky, 1993, 203). Walter Williams (1999), a devoted follower of Smith, writes in his column that, "Free markets, private property rights, voluntary exchange, and greed produce preferable outcomes most times and under most conditions." These pronouncements have become part of the cultural …

Politics, Rights, And The Refugee Problem, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed to the years between World War I and World War II as the time when the plight of refugees became a pressing political problem.' If Arendt were still alive (she died in 1975), she would no doubt agree that the problem is at least as pressing in the early twenty-first century as it was sixty or more years ago, when she herself was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Who would not agree? According to a report of the U.N. Population Division, 16 million people were refugees at the …

Autonomy, Domination, And The Republican Challenge To Liberalism, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Like Sunstein and other advocates of 'republican' or 'civic' liberalism, I believe that it is historically unsound and politically unwise to insist on a sharp distinction between liberalism and republicanism. Others disagree, however, and there is much to be learned from their position even if, ultimately, we should not adopt it. Those who take this more radical neo-republican view advance two main lines of argument: first, that the liberal emphasis on neutrality and procedural fairness is fundamentally at odds with the republican commitment to promoting civic virtue; and, second, that republicans and liberals conceive of liberty or freedom in incompatible …

The Bible And Public Schools: Report On The National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools (Ncbcps), Mark A. Chancey

Occasional Papers

No abstract provided.

Kant On Duties To Animals, Nelson T. Potter Jr.

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

According to Kant we human beings are finite rational beings, who also have an animal nature. Kant occasionally speculates that perhaps on other planets there may be quite different sorts of finite rational animals. But of course we have no specific knowledge of any such. Given that fact, all of our duties are duties to other human beings. We can have no duties to God because he is not an object of possible experience. There are no human beings such that they have only duties and no rights--they would be slaves or serfs. And the apparent duties that we have …

Public And Relational Communication Ethics In Political Communication: Integrity, Secrecy, And Dialogue In ‘The Contender’, Jon A. Hess, Joy Piazza

Communication Faculty Publications

There is no denying the omnipresence of media in the twenty-first century. One form of media that is particularly influential is film. Unlike print forms of entertainment, in which age and reading ability dictate accessibility, movies are accessible to virtually everyone. And, regardless of the producer's purpose for making the film, all movies provide an insight into our culture and the individuals who reside within it. Some movies are produced solely for entertainment value, but others seek to convey some type of message or to stimulate thought on the part of the viewer (Good & Dillon 2002; Kupfer 1999; Lipkin …

The Perverse Paradox Of Privacy, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The most recent effort of the Supreme Court of the United States to define the judicially created constitutional right to privacy has demonstrated once again why that contrived right poses such a pronounced threat to constitutional self-government. In writing for the majority in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) to overrule a case of only seventeen years' standing that allowed the states to prohibit homosexual sodomy, Justice Anthony Kennedy insisted that the idea of liberty in the Constitution's due process clauses is not limited to protecting individuals form "unwarranted governmental intrusions into a dwelling or other private places" but has "transcendent dimensions" …

Trust (And Social Capital) In Cultural Theory, Marco Verweij

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Pierre Bayle's Philosophical Commentary On The Words Of Jesus Christ: Compel Them To Come In, John Kilcullen, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this defence of religious toleration, Bayle discusses the words attributed to Jesus Christ in Luke 14:23, “And the Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be full.” Bayle contends that the word compel cannot mean “force.” From this perspective, he constructs his doctrine of toleration based on the singular importance of conscience. Bayle argues that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God …

The Conservative's Dilemma: Traditional Institutions, Social Change, And Same-Sex Marriage, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judicial Accountability To The Past, Present, And Future: Precedent, Politics And Power, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Advertising And Intermediaries In Provision Of Legal Services: Bates In Retrospect And Prospect, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Justification Defenses In Situations Of Unavoidable Uncertainty: A Reply To Professor Ferzan, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

The objective (or "deeds") theory of justification has been attacked on the ground that one can never know for sure whether the circumstances for justification actually exist. One can only speculate as to whether the conditions exist. This is true not only for the actor at the time of the conduct for which a justification is sought but can also be true for the adjudicator after all available evidence has been gathered. The attack contains a useful insight about the nature of justifying circumstances: they necessarily contain some degree of unavoidable uncertainty. But it does not follow from this insight …

The Challenge Of Ethical Political Leadership, Brian Stiltner

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Without a solid ethical foundation to state governance, the process of developing and implementing sound public policy is weakened. In addition to the crisis of public confidence, which may turn voters away from politics in disgust, political scandals undermine the quality of the policymaking process.

Connecticut needs watertight laws, vigorous oversight, independent voices, and an electoral process that does not pervert the information voters receive. The responsibility of citizens includes not only voting their consciences but pressing their representatives to put the electoral process and policymaking on a cleaner, more transparent foundation.

Economic Migration And Justice, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Our main thesis is that the U.S. has a duty of justice to adopt an open border policy with regard to economic migrants because it is significantly responsible for the unjust social and economic conditions that bring such migrants to its borders. From this perspective, President Bush’s recent “guest worker” proposal is morally objectionable because it is designed more to serve U.S. business interests than the interests of the migrants. We address three objections to opening borders: it will worsen the economic condition especially of low-skilled native workers; it will harm developing countries by increasing the so-called “brain drain”; and …

Law, Ethics And Mystery, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.