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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Sovereign Authority And Rule Of Law: The Effect Of U.S. Use Of Torture On Political Legitimacy, Sydney Bradley
Sovereign Authority And Rule Of Law: The Effect Of U.S. Use Of Torture On Political Legitimacy, Sydney Bradley
Undergraduate Honors Theses
Governmental sovereignty is created and maintained by mutual respect for the rule of law by the government and citizens. To maintain legitimacy, a government must act within the bounds of the contract that created it. Otherwise, the relationship founded by said contract would be nullified, as would the duties and obligations that flow from that relationship. Torture exemplifies an ultra vires act used by the United States to show the consequences of over-extended authority on political legitimacy and the rule of law. Founded on the philosophies of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Christine Korsgaard, this research investigates the nature of …
Scanlon's Contractualism And Its Critics, Kenneth R. Weisshaar
Scanlon's Contractualism And Its Critics, Kenneth R. Weisshaar
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines whether Thomas Scanlon’s contractualism satisfactorily explains its intended domain of morality which he terms “what we owe to each other.” Scanlon proposes that such interpersonal morality is based on justifying one’s actions to others by behaving according to principles that could not be reasonably rejected. This idea accounts for two key functions of a moral theory: explaining how moral judgments are made and why agents generally act according to these judgments. After reviewing the nature of constructivist moral theories to show why I chose to focus on Scanlon’s theory, I assess how effectively it fulfills these two …
Grounding Deliberative Contractualism, Michael Hogan
Grounding Deliberative Contractualism, Michael Hogan
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Contractualism is often seen as a kind of self-interested bargaining in which individuals engage to preserve their own desired outcome. If individuals are only out for themselves, then no one achieves his or her desired end. Yet, if individuals constrain some of their desires and are assured that others will do the same, then, the contractors can avoid mutual destruction. It is not hard to see why Contractualism is often viewed as a way to explain the origins of morality within civil society. In this paper, I take up a version of Contractualism espoused by Nicholas Southwood called Deliberative Contractualism. …
Virtue, Knowledge, And Goodness, Marlin Ray Sommers
Virtue, Knowledge, And Goodness, Marlin Ray Sommers
Masters Theses
This thesis consists of three parts. Part one responds to an argument by Jason Baehr that virtues of intellectual character which make their possessor good qua person can also figure as virtues in reliabilist accounts of knowledge. I analyze his argument with special attention to the cases he uses to motivate his claims, and argue that the role which intellectual character virtues play in the acquisition of knowledge is not the role which is relevant to reliabilists accounts of knowledge. More generally, I argue that character intellectual virtues are not good candidates for reliabilist virtues because their telos is not …
Effort And Ethics, Edward J. Lee
Effort And Ethics, Edward J. Lee
Philosophy Honors Papers
In this paper, I start by describing two categories into which effort can be divided. The first category I call objective effort, which refers to the external factors associated with an action; the second I call subjective effort, which deals with the internal psychological or mental effort required to bring oneself to perform an action. I then track my intuitions about how objective effort and subjective effort are relevant to the moral evaluations of actions and agents, and further develop this descriptive account by explaining these intuitions normatively through the lenses of contractualism and virtue ethics. Having given my account …
The Calculus Of Consent, John Thrasher, Gerald Gaus
The Calculus Of Consent, John Thrasher, Gerald Gaus
Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters
The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is a groundbreaking work in democratic theory. This chapter argues that it is of continued relevance today, due both to its methodological innovations and its use of those innovative techniques to solve the fundamental problem of democratic justification. In Calculus, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock fuse economic methods, political theory, and the normative project of showing how democratic institutions of a particular sort can be justified contractually, creating a unique form of democratic contractualism that came to be known as “Constitutional Political Economy” and the more general research program of “Public …
On The Concept Of A Morally Relevant Harm, David Lefkowitz
On The Concept Of A Morally Relevant Harm, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In this paper I explicate and defend the concept of a morally relevant harm. This concept figures prominently in common-sense and contractualist moral reasoning concerning cases where an agent can prevent harm to members of a large group or a small one, but not both. When the two harms to which members of these groups are exposed are morally relevant to one another, an agent is permitted (or perhaps required) to take into account the number of people he can save. When the harms are irrelevant, an agent should not even consider preventing the lesser harm, regardless of how many …