Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Toward A Legal Harm Principle: Constructing And Applying A Legal Principle From John Stuart Mill's General Harm Principle, Kathryn Alice Zawisza

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My goal in this work is to outline a specifically legal harm principle that is derived from John Stuart Mill’s harm principle in On Liberty. I will do this by providing a close reading of On Liberty and comparing it to what he says in chapter V of Utilitarianism. I believe that these two works provide a foundation for a harm principle that defines the domain and limits of the law. While this goal is not new, I focus on Mill’s general harm principle and the two maxims that he believes make it up in order to construct a relatively …

Civic Tenderness: Love's Role In Achieving Justice, Justin Leonard Clardy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Martha Nussbaum’s work Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice identifies the role that compassion plays in motivating citizens in a just society. I expand on this discussion by considering how attitudes of indifference pose a challenge to the extension of compassion in our society. If we are indifferent to others who are in situations of need, we are not equipped to experience compassion for them. Building on Nussbaum’s account, I develop an analytic framework for the public emotion of Civic Tenderness to combat indifference.

Civic tenderness is an orientation of concern that is generated for people and groups that …

From Feminist Activist To Abortion Barbie: A Rhetorical History Of Abortion Discourse From 2013-2016, Skye De Saint Felix

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a rhetorical history of abortion discourse with an emphasis on the rhetorical moment from 2013-2016. To uncover the rhetorical strategies used to shape consensus on abortion, I highlight three major events—Senator Wendy Davis’s (D-Fort Worth) notorious 13-hour filibuster against Texas’s HB2, the conservative capture of Davis as Abortion Barbie, and the Supreme Court case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). Because of these key rhetorical moments, pro-choice and anti-choice publics cultivated a period of heightened tension that reinvigorated abortion debates. While pro-choice groups employed narrative to centralize women as rhetorical agents and open spaces to discuss abortion, …

Determinism And The Role Of Moral Responsibility, Justin Edward Edens

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order to solve the apparent incompatibility between moral responsibility and determinism, it is necessary to understand moral responsibility in terms of the function it plays within moral systems, which is highly similar to the role played by laws within judicial systems. By showing that a conception of moral responsibility based upon desert is metaphysically untenable, a function-based conception will be showed to be much more likely. Furthermore, by considering why the desert-based conception has proven so resilient, insight into the moral responsibility/determinism debate may be possible. Lastly, this paper considers whether the problems with this conception can be solved, …

Friedrich Schelling: Soteriological Redemption And Ontological Renewal In The Intellectual Intuition Of The Life Of Life, Thomas Christopher Seay

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Schelling calls for the restoration of originary revelation by the true philosopher and, for the successful anagogue, the creation of a philosophical-religion; in so summoning man back to his innermost beginnings in the Absolute prius, the life of life, this paper claims that Schelling revalorizes and retranslates the ancient Orphico-Pythagorean and Platonic traditions and Hellenic mystery teachings onto European soil. Accordingly, drawing on correspondences and concordances with and insights from traditionalist philosophy, the German Pietist reform movement and the antique contemplative tradition, this paper reads the Schellingian project as an initiatic mystagogy to intellectual intuition, in which the anagogic traveler …