Philosophy Commons^™

How Can Law Enforcement Use Technology To Protect Citizens Justly?, Zach Kantenwein

Emerging Writers

This paper explores the danger of emerging artificial intelligence technology perpetuating racial injustice in law enforcement and how police can ensure the protection of citizens amid this information age. We dissect a real-world case in which AI predictive policing technology resulted in alarming racial discrimination against American minority citizens. We discuss the possible explanations for this result and explore the limitations of artificial intelligence technology. Furthermore, we brainstorm methods for ensuring American citizens' just and constitutional protection as new technology is developed and tested. We propose implementing transparency laws that make the details about any policing technology and surveillance available …

Lighting The Way Of The Learner: Towards A Social Virtue Epistemology In Aḥmad Al-Ṣaghīr’S The Faqīh’S Lantern, Amani Khelifa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis offers an original translation and analysis of a West African didactic poem in Islamic ethics and law, by the Mālikī-Ashʿarī Mauritanian scholar Aḥmad al-Ṣaghīr (d. 1272 AH/1856 CE) called The Faqīh’s Lantern (Miṣbāḥ al-Faqīh). In addition to the critical translation, I examine the poem thematically through the lens of social virtue epistemology. Chapter 1 sketches the background of the text and author, positioning the author historically as a product of a rich scholarly and pedagogical tradition while noting Mauritania’s contemporary place in the North American Muslim imagination. Chapter 2 is the translation of the text, making …

The Role Of Recognition In Kelsen's Account Of Legal Obligation And Political Duty, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Kelsen’s critique of absolute sovereignty famously appeals to a basic norm of international recognition. However, in his discussion of legal obligation, generally speaking, he notoriously rejects mutual recognition as having any normative consequence. I argue that this apparent contradiction in Kelsen's estimate regarding the normative force of recognition is resolved in his dynamic account of the democratic generation of law. Democracy is embedded within a modern political ethos that obligates legal subjects to recognize each other along four dimensions: as contractors whose mutually beneficial cooperation measures esteem by fair standards of contribution; as autonomous agents endowed with equal rights; as …

The Politics Of The Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, And Subjectivity In The Anthropocene, Joshua Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how psychedelic substances become drawn into particular sociohistorical and political arrangements, and how psychedelic experiences with psilocybin ‘magic mushrooms’ are used as tools of subjectivation. Guided by literatures in philosophy, critical theory, and the social sciences that focus on subjectivity, assemblage theory, and critical posthumanism, I argue that psychedelics are drawn into variegated assemblages, each of which conceptualizes the nature of psychedelics in highly specific ways that reflect implicit conceptions of the world and the self. In developing the concept of psychedelic assemblages, this research provides a window onto the politics of the self in the Anthropocene. …

Against The Death Penalty, Charles Jessup

Student Research Submissions

My thesis is an argument against the death penalty. Given that public support for the death penalty in America is at a half-century low (according to the Pew Research Center), the timing could not be more appropriate to examine the death penalty. This research project had a two-step approach: first, ethical theory-based arguments for and against the death penalty were examined. Following that ethical theory-based examination, real-world statistics were applied to these theories to test where they stand in modern society. The findings contained in this research project point to a clear reality that the death penalty in America is …

How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

The most fundamental question in general jurisprudence concerns what makes it the case that the law has the content that it does. This article offers a novel answer. According to the theory it christens “principled positivism,” legal practices ground legal principles, and legal principles determine legal rules. This two-level account of the determination of legal content differs from Hart’s celebrated theory in two essential respects: in relaxing Hart’s requirement that fundamental legal notions depend for their existence on judicial consensus; and in assigning weighted contributory legal norms—“principles”—an essential role in the determination of legal rights, duties, powers, and permissions. Drawing …

The Criminogenic Effects Of Damaging Criminal Law’S Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb

All Faculty Scholarship

The criminal justice system’s reputation with the community can have a significant effect on the extent to which people are willing to comply with its demands and internalize its norms. In the context of criminal law, the empirical studies suggest that ordinary people expect the criminal justice system to do justice and avoid injustice, as they perceive it – what has been called “empirical desert” to distinguish it from the “deontological desert” of moral philosophers. The empirical studies and many real-world natural experiments suggest that a criminal justice system that regularly deviates from empirical desert loses moral credibility and thereby …

Victim Impact: The Manson Murders And The Rise Of The Victims’ Rights Movement, Merrill W. Steeg

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Road To Human Emancipation - The Moral And Political Foundations Of Markets, William Shi

CMC Senior Theses

The thesis aims to provide both a real public ideology and the legal and socioeconomic structures to realize Karl Marx’s ideal of human emancipation. Marx argues that in capitalist society, the legal and political superstructure forces the ruling class to represent its interest as the public interest, which legitimizes the massive inequality in resources and social power. To demonstrate how to realize the substantive public interest, the two parts of the thesis have two goals. The first part aims to formulate a rightful candidate to the public ideology of human emancipation, which represents the substantive public interest rather than the …

Eternal Recurrence In A Neo-Kantian Context, Michael S. Green

Michael S. Green

In this essay, I argue that someone who adopted a falsificationism of the sort that I have attributed to Nietzsche would be attracted to the doctrine of eternal recurrence. For Nietzsche, to think the becoming revealed through the senses means falsifying it through being. But the eternal recurrence offers the possibility of thinking becoming without falsification. I then argue that someone who held Nietzsche’s falsificationism would see in human agency a conflict between being and becoming similar to that in empirical judgment. In the light of this conflict only the eternal recurrence would offer the possibility of truly affirming life. …

Pagans, Christians, And Student Protesters, Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish’s contribution to the 2019 Editors’ Symposium: Pagans and Christians in the City.

Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

Professor Gideon Yaffe’s recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break not because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults, but because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about …

Jews, Not Pagans, Richard Schragger, Micah Schwartzman

San Diego Law Review

Richard Schragger & Micah Schwartzman’s contribution to the 2019 Editors’ Symposium: Pagans and Christians in the City.

Pagans, Christians, And Student Protesters, Stanley Fish

San Diego Law Review

Stanley Fish’s contribution to the 2019 Editors’ Symposium: Pagans and Christians in the City.

Christians And Pagans In The Sacred Nation, Christopher J. Eberle

San Diego Law Review

Christopher J. Eberle’s contribution to the 2019 Editors’ Symposium: Pagans and Christians in the City.

Rethinking Copyright And Personhood, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the primary theoretical justifications for copyright is the role that creative works play in helping develop an individual’s sense of personhood and self-actualization. Typically ascribed to the writings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, personhood-based theories of copyright serve as the foundation for the moral rights prominent in European copyright law and mandated by the leading intellectual property treaty, which give authors inalienable control over aspects of their works after they have been created. The conventional wisdom about the relationship between personhood and copyright suffers from two fatal flaws that have gone largely unappreciated. First, in …

Findlay Stark, Culpable Carelessness: Recklessness And Negligence In The Criminal Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

Culpable Carelessness by Findlay Stark is a careful and considered contribution to the 'punishment for negligence' debate. As well as providing a comprehensive overview of the doctrinal and theoretical aspects of recklessness and negligence in the criminal law, it also offers novel insights for scholars already steeped in these debates. An additional methodological strength is that Stark takes seriously the connection between theory and law, offering useful potential jury instructions on recklessness and negligence.

Arguing With Friends, William Baude, Ryan D. Doerfler

All Faculty Scholarship

It is a fact of life that judges sometimes disagree about the best outcome in appealed cases. The question is what they should make of this. The two purest possibilities are to shut out all other views, or else to let them all in, leading one to concede ambiguity and uncertainty in most if not all contested cases.

Drawing on the philosophical concepts of “peer disagreement” and “epistemic peerhood,” we argue that there is a better way. Judges ought to give significant weight to the views of others, but only when those others share the judge’s basic methodology or interpretive …

“First, Do No Harm”: Old And New Paradigms In Prehospital Resuscitation In The Aquatic Domain, John H. Pearn, Richard Charles Franklin

International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education

The balance between benefit and risk is central to the work of all those involved in aquatic services. The Hippocratic exhortation of Primum non nocere, “First, do no harm,” has a history of over 2000 years. Superficially, all would support this dictum, but harm can result from inaction. The balance between no or little intervention on the one hand and proactive intervention with iatrogenic risk on the other is complex and enduring. Risk implies that one does not have all the information available to know the exact likelihood of an outcome, a common situation involving rescue, first aid, and …

Hermeneutic Philosophies Of Social Science: Introduction, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

The Inevitability And Ubiquity Of Cycling In All Feasible Legal Regimes: A Formal Proof, Leo Katz, Alvaro Sandroni

All Faculty Scholarship

Intransitive choices, or cycling, are generally held to be the mark of irrationality. When a set of rules engenders such choices, it is usually held to be irrational and in need of reform. In this article, we prove a series of theorems, demonstrating that all feasible legal regimes are going to be rife with cycling. Our first result, the legal cycling theorem, shows that unless a legal system meets some extremely restrictive conditions, it will lead to cycling. The discussion that follows, along with our second result, the combination theorem, shows exactly why these conditions are almost impossible to meet. …

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 …

Social Justice In Social-Ecological Systems: Resilience Through Stakeholder Engagement, Frederick I. Lauer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Successful management of social-ecological systems (SES) is predicated on quality collaborative exchanges between project stakeholders and management. The Southwest Crown of the Continent Collaborative (SWCC) Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) provided an opportunity to explore landscape scale collaborative management and SES outcomes. Global change and future uncertainty of landscapes prompted the SWCC to employ restoration treatment alternatives throughout 1.4 million acres of forests, most of which are publicly held. The SWCC currently monitors environmental and economic variables, with plans to monitor social variables. This thesis formalizes a proposed framework to investigate SES resilience, and explores public engagement as an …

Modest Retributivism, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Liberal As An Enemy Of Queer Justice, Craig Schamel

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

Abstract

Liberalism as a historical mode of the political is the context in which the movement and ensuing struggle for queer justice emerged in most Western countries. The terminology, practices, tendencies, beliefs, ethics, laws, and patterns of political and social life which have been determined by this mode of the political, it is argued, are inimical to queer justice and render its achievement impossible. Liberalism as a mode of the political is approached from below, from knowledge gained in practical experience in queer groups which considered themselves revolutionary at least to some degree, and from the effects on such groups …

The Intelligibility Of Extralegal State Action: A General Lesson For Debates On Public Emergencies And Legality, François Tanguay-Renaud

François Tanguay-Renaud

Some legal theorists deny that states can conceivably act extralegally in the sense of acting contrary to domestic law. This position finds its most robust articulation in the writings of Hans Kelsen and has more recently been taken up by David Dyzenhaus in the context of his work on emergencies and legality. This paper seeks to demystify their arguments and ultimately contend that we can intelligibly speak of the state as a legal wrongdoer or a legally unauthorized actor.

Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, to resolve real-world disputes sensibly, judges must be astute students of the world’s complexity. The problem, he says, is that, thanks to disposition, training, and professional incentives, they aren’t. Worse than that, the legal system generates its own complexity precisely to enable judges “to avoid rather than meet and overcome the challenge of complexity” that the world delivers. Reflections concerns how judges needlessly complexify inherently simple law, and how this complexification can be corrected.

Posner’s diagnoses and prescriptions range widely—from the Bluebook …

Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation offers a new framework through which to theorize contemporary democratic practices by attending to the political agency of unauthorized immigrants. I argue that unauthorized immigrants themselves, by claiming their own ambiguous legal condition as a legitimate basis for public speech, are able to open up the boundaries of political membership and to render the foundations of democracy contingent, that is to say, they are able to reopen the question about who counts as a member of the demos. I develop this argument by way of a close reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone[1], which allows me to …

Abuse Of Property Right Without Political Foundations: A Response To Katz, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

In an article recently published in the Yale Law Journal, Larissa Katz defends a heterodox principle of abuse of property right pursuant to which an owner abuses her rights with respect to a thing she owns if she makes an otherwise permitted decision about how to use that thing just in order to harm others, either out of spite, or for leverage. Katz grounds that principle in a novel theory of the political foundations of the institution of property ownership. This essay argues that Katz’s political theory is implausible, but that this should not doom her preferred principle of …