Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Kant And The Fact Of Reason, Kenneth Kh Chung

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It is often thought that Kant abandoned his argument for the justification of morality in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals for a radically different argument in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the Groundwork, Kant appears to try to justify our commitment to the moral law on the basis of our freedom, but in the Critique, he tries to justify that commitment on the basis of what he calls the fact of reason. I assess and reject influential interpretations of both arguments as being philosophically unsound, and I propose, what I take to be, a …

Legitimate Authority, Following Orders, And Wars Of Questionable Justice, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this article, the author discusses philosophy teacher David Estlund's belief that subjects of a state with a morally justified claim to political authority have a duty to obey its legal commands to wage a particular war, even if they believe that the state has made a mistake in its reasons for waging the war. The author argues that Estlund's theory also allows for individuals to assess the justice of the wars they fight. He also argues that Estlund's view also holds that individual combatants should not be held accountable for any injustice of a war that the state believes …

You And Me Baby Ain't Nothing But Mammals: Disgust, Evolution, And The Transcendence Of An Immaterial Soul, Sara G. Gottlieb

Psychology Honors Projects

Materialist theories of mind are disturbing for those who endorse the idea that an immortal soul is distinct from the material body. Many argue for a uniqueness of the human spirit that transcends bodily qualities. The present research focuses on the rejection of human evolution from the perspective of disgust, which has both a physical (body) and moral (soul) component and is elicited by objects that remind us of both death and animals. Study 1 asked whether those primed to feel disgusted would show an implicit preference for creationism over evolution on an Implicit Associations Test but failed to find …

Worthy Lives, Lisa Rivera

Philosophy Faculty Publication Series

Susan Wolf's paper "Meaning and Morality" draws our attention to the fact that Williams's objection to Kantian morality is primarily a concern about a possible conflict between morality and that which gives our lives meaning. I argue that the force of Williams's objection requires a more precise understanding of meaning as dependent on our intention to make our lives themselves worthwhile. It is not meaning simpliciter that makes Williams's objective persuasive but rather meaning as arising out of our positive evaluation of the value of our lives as a whole. This type of meaning has a normative element: it involves …

Moral Limits Of Dworkin's Theory Of Law And Legal Interpretation, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

At the foundation of Justice for Hedgehogs is a commitment to moral objectivity – the doctrine that there are right answers to moral questions. This nicely complements Dworkin’s legal theory, which holds that right answers to legal questions depend on right answers to moral questions. Without the doctrine of moral objectivity, Dworkin could not reasonably maintain, as he does, that law provides determinate answers to legal questions.

Marx And Morality: An Impossible Synthesis?, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

A discussion of Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982); Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon, eds., Marx. Justice. and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Kai Nielsen and Steven C. Patten, eds., Marx and Morality, Supplementary Volume VII of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Guelph: Canadian Association for Publishing in Philosophy, 1981).

Morally Justifying Oncofertility Research, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

Is research aimed at preserving the fertility of cancer patients morally justified? A satisfying answer to this question is missing from the literature on oncofertility. Rather than providing an answer, which is impossible to do in a short space, this chapter explains what it would take to provide such justification.

Killing, Letting Die, And The Case For Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism, Ken M. Levy

Journal Articles

For over a century now, American scholars (among others) have been debating the merits of “bad-samaritan” laws – laws punishing people for failing to attempt “easy rescues.” Unfortunately, the opponents of bad-samaritan laws have mostly prevailed. In the United States, the “no-duty-to-rescue” rule dominates. Only four states even have bad-samaritan laws, and these laws impose only the most minimal punishment – either sub-$500 fines or short-term imprisonment.

This Article argues that this situation needs to be remedied. Every state should criminalize bad samaritanism. For, first, criminalization is required by the supreme value that we place on protecting human life, a …

Moral Foundation Theory And The Law, Colin Prince

Seattle University Law Review

Moral foundation theory argues that there are five basic moral foundations: (1) harm/care, (2) fairness/reciprocity, (3) ingroup/loyalty, (4) authority/respect, and (5) purity/sanctity. These five foundations comprise the building blocks of morality, regardless of the culture. In other words, while every society constructs its own morality, it is the varying weights that each society allots to these five universal foundations that create the variety. Haidt likens moral foundation theory to an “audio equalizer,” with each culture adjusting the sliders differently. The researchers, however, were not content to simply categorize moral foundations—they have tied the foundations to political leanings. And it is …

A Moral Investigation Of Torture In The Post 9.11 World, Joe Moloney

Undergraduate Review

The field of philosophy is unique, as it allows one to logically examine issues in all disciplines, from science to politics to art. One further important discipline that philosophy examines is criminal justice. In this respect, one approach philosophy can take when examining criminal justice is to assess each issue by questioning its morality—that is, whether an action within the issue is right or wrong based upon a system of ethics. This approach concerns the subfield of philosophy known as ethics, a subfield that includes questions concerning what is morally good and morally bad. When one is faced with an …

Das Subjekt Als Moralische Person. Zu Husserls Späten Reflexionen Bezüglich Des Personenbegriffs, Sebastian Luft

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

In this essay, I will attempt a systematic reconstruction of the general shape of Husserl's late philosophy, insofar as it centers on the concept of personhood. The systematic concatenation of this and other themes in Husserl's late work - the method of epoché and reduction, ethics, personhood, and teleology - has only recently begun to be explored in Husserl scholarship, and this article is a modest contribution to the further e1ucidation of their mutual relationship. One of the most striking results of this reconstructive analysis is Husserl's final concept of "person", which goes beyond the traditional distinctions, such as "heart" …