Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

Liberation Chronicles: Reformulating Black Liberation In The Face Of Persistent Oppression, Nia P. Gadson

Honors College Theses

Liberation movements for Black people have been prominent throughout American history. Chattel slavery and Jim Crow laws caused centuries of anti-black oppression. They continuously evolved into other anti-black structures – mass incarceration, predatory loan companies, and healthcare inequalities, to name a few – that require us to address these issues still today. The most recent Black liberation movement, Black Lives Matter, experienced a brief uptick in support after George Floyd’s murder but, overall, failed to address these issues. This thesis outlines three approaches to Black liberation in the U.S. to determine the most effective. First, drawing on Frederick Douglass’ autobiographies, …

For Richer Or Poorer: The Warren Court's Relationship To Socioeconomic Class, Nicole Jonassen

CMC Senior Theses

The U.S. Constitution does not enshrine socioeconomic rights. Why does this matter? Many argue that socioeconomic rights have value in and of themselves because they secure certain minimum conditions of human dignity, but socioeconomic rights also have instrumental value because abject material deprivation often makes traditional political and civil rights meaningless. In this thesis, I explore the relationship between U.S. constitutional law and socioeconomic rights through an analysis of the Warren Court’s decisions regarding socioeconomic class. In Chapter 1, I present existing literature on socioeconomic rights, socioeconomic rights in the American context, and what many scholars see as the Warren …

Is There Really Anything Wrong With That? An Aristotelian Analysis Of Duty, Luke J. Mcgrath

Honors College Theses

In the iconic Seinfeld series finale, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer find themselves in a peculiar legal predicament when they mock a crime rather than intervene to help the victim. The show’s commitment to portraying reality, even in its finale, vividly demonstrates the potential consequences of a society lacking the legal obligation to aid others. This comical incident raises a thought-provoking question about the legitimacy of duty-to-act laws in the United States. This thesis examines the application of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to the concept of duty-to-act laws and argues for the necessity and benefits of such laws in promoting a …

Abort The Court? How Abortion Jurisprudence Has Highlighted Questions Surrounding The Legitimacy Of The Supreme Court, Junia E. Paulus

Honors Projects

The Supreme Court is often viewed with awe and the justices treated with reverence. It is the highest court in the United States, tasked with interpreting the law. But is the Supreme Court the neutral arbiter of justice it purports to be? Most recently, the 2022 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the fifty-year precedent of Roe v. Wade, causing the Court to face increasing scrutiny and questions of its legitimacy. I conduct a philosophical analysis of the arguments made by the justices in the opinions on Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and …

The Juris Master: A Proposal For Reducing Excessive Public Defender Caseloads, Blake Comeaux

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

The US public defense system is underfunded, understaffed, and underdelivering on the Constitutional promises of the 6^th Amendment, the right to a fair and speedy trial. This state of our public defense system results in monstrous impacts for indigent defendants nationwide. Through indefinite delays in litigation, being abandoned in jail while sitting on waiting lists for public defenders, and being outright denied representation, indigent defendants are deprived of their rights. Beyond just defendant neglect, our current system puts immense strain on public defenders, prosecutors, and state budgets. In an attempt to combat this current state of affairs, this paper …

Combating Systemic Racism With Truth Commissions, Katherine E. Miles

Theses

The main form of justice practiced in the United States when it comes to criminal proceedings and individual wrongdoings is a form of justice called Retributive Justice. Retributive justice is committed to following these three principles, 1: that those who commit certain kinds of wrongful acts, morally deserve to suffer an equivalent punishment; 2: that it is intrinsically morally good—good without reference to any other goods if some legitimate punisher gives them the punishment they deserve; and 3: that it is morally impermissible to punish the innocent intentionally or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on offenders. From the three principles …

Natural Lights & Natural Rights: The Problem Of The New Classical Natural Law Theory, Charles Neville Cacciatore

LSU Master's Theses

The present work examines the natural law jurisprudence of John Finnis. It argues that Finnis’s teaching is a genuinely new natural law theory. Finnis’s jurisprudence is not a re- presentation of the jurisprudence of St. Thomas Aquinas because its central element—a doctrine of natural rights—is a departure from Aquinas’s natural law teaching. In support of these claims, the present work relies upon the scholarship of Ernest L. Fortin, A.A. Following Fr. Fortin, it presents an understanding of the natural law that endorses a clear distinction between natural right and natural rights—between premodern political philosophy and modern political philosophy.

The Murder Of George Floyd: A Case Study Examining How The Policing Of Black Men And Grassroots Activism Influence The Will Of Black Women To Lead, Ella Gates-Mahmoud

Doctorate in Education

This study's objective investigates the viewpoints held by Black women in two urban areas of Minnesota about the social upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for using a counterfeit $20 bill. In the last decade, police killings of innocent Black people in the United States have received more attention, and Floyd's death is only one example of this phenomenon. In the U.S., the likelihood of a police officer taking the life of a Black man is higher than that of a White man. Between 2013-2019 there have been 1,641 fatal shootings of defenseless Black men by …

A Theory Of (In)Justice: The Failure Of Tort Law To Secure Equal Respect For Women And A Feminist Contractarian Framework For Reform, Eva Augst

CMC Senior Theses

Traditional approaches to philosophical theories of tort law have systematically undermined the individual worth and security interests of women. However, torts also provide a particularly powerful avenue for reform, in that they embody the public power of private law and offer individuals the opportunity to seek recourse and accountability for wrongs. In this paper, I offer a framework for such reformist approaches to tort philosophy, predominantly inspired by Jean Hampton’s “Feminist Contractarianism,” which requires that women be recognized as individuals with intrinsic worth who are deserving of respect. To accomplish this, I first note the particular relevance of social contract …

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words: Factors Influencing Disability Accommodations, Alicia E. Martin

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Because not all disabilities look the same it is difficult to label a person with disabilities just by looking at them. Given that our knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions impact how we interpret our world and our willingness to act, people, including professors, may be biased toward providing accommodations for those with easily recognizable disabilities and biased against those with non-recognizable disabilities, and this may impact the disabled person’s ability to learn. This thesis aims to address whether professors’ disability-related attitudes, perceptions of accommodation reasonableness, and willingness to provide accommodations differ when the disability is recognizable (student is pictured in a …

Juvenile Life Without Parole: Exposing The Parallels Between Juvenile Offenders And Those Who Sentence Them, Autumn Fortenberry

Honors Theses

This thesis will discuss Juvenile Life Without Parole sentencing (JLWOP) from three perspectives: (1) the evolving standard of decency as developed through relevant U.S. Supreme Court cases; (2) the cognitive and psychosocial development of adolescents that creates reduced culpability in juvenile offenders; and (3) the justifications and implications of punishment as-applied to juvenile offenders. In my fourth chapter, I argue that JLWOP sentencing disregards the humanity and transformable nature of juvenile offenders. I will then draw a parallel between the implications of a juvenile offender's underdeveloped cognitive functions on their decision-making processes and the implications of a trial judge's underdeveloped …

The Dream Of The Common Good: Not A Nightmare, Jackson Gregory Dellinger

Honors Theses

This paper examines an emerging position in the philosophy of law, common-good constitutionalism. In the first two parts of the paper, I explain the position and constitutionalism more generally, examining how common-good constitutionalism fits within the definition of constitutionalism providing by a neutral scholar. In the next five parts, I attempt to show that common-good constitutionalism’s preference for explicit adherence to the common good does not violate constitutionalism. In doing so, I provide an examination of common-good constitutionalism’s relationship with three important constitutional principles and the separability of common-good constitutionalism as a whole and the infamous views of its most …

Free Speech And Its Limits: An Exploration Of Tolerance In The Digital Age, Jamie Forte

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Humans have made remarkable strides in protecting and preserving free speech despite an overwhelming historical legacy of censorship and suppression of dissent. Given that history makes clear how easy it is to slide into authoritarianism and sacrifice our rights in the name of security, and given that we find ourselves frequently facing the temptation to do so, this is not an unreasonable position. If the United States is one of the few bastions of free speech in an otherwise unfree world, then we must defend this freedom vehemently, or so the argument goes. While this position is not an unreasonable …

Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves

All Dissertations

Poetic Justice: Connecting the Modern American Prosecutor to her Rhetorical Roots explores the gap between rhetoric and the American prosecutor, to eventually advocate for a more creative, inventive trial practice for prosecutors that embraces the spirit and methods of narrative, poetics, and Ulmeric mystories, with the prosecutor’s unique ethical obligations forming the basis of a new prosecutor’s rhetoric. This research opens with an autoethnographic account of the author’s own path to criminal prosecution, to give the reader a sense of the author’s ethos, to identify the shortcomings of rhetorical training in law school pedagogy, and to outline the rhetorical …

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 …

On The Elimination Of Cash Bail, Lucas Baudry

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Facultas Marginem: Assessing Disability Data And Public Aau Universities’ Affirmative Action Plans For Systemic Barriers Facing Faculty With Disabilities, Joseph Carlton Barry

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

This dissertation contributes to education equity scholarship produced by academics seeking to develop understandings of disability, Persons with Disabilities (PWD), and how both are situated amongst faculty in institutions of higher education. As such, this dissertation centers on a study of public US universities belonging to the Association of American Universities (AAU). This study looks for institutional level associations between respective rates by which college and university faculty with disabilities (FWD) are employed, certain aspects of disability policy drawn from each institution’s 2020 Affirmative Action Plans (AAP), and various other instances of empirical disability data (EDD).

While this study contributes …

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.

Welcoming The Game Changer Of Human Society: A Defense Of The Moral Permissibility And Obligations Of Human Genetic Engineering, Yongkang Li

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In 2018, a Chinese scientist, Jiankun He, announced the birth of two HIV-resistant babies through his experiment of human genetic engineering. This incidence has soon shocked the entire scientific community and invoked public outrage towards He’s corrupt moral integrity.

However, this event should also act as a harbinger to the human society that the technique of human genetic engineering is rapidly approaching maturity. In that case, how should we respond?

This thesis focuses on the moral issues surrounding human genetic engineering and advertises an accepting moral attitude to this booming technology. This thesis will first discuss the types of human …

Skorupskian Allyship: Human Rights Reconstructed Through Efficacious Enforcement And Social Relativism, Chase Opperman

Philosophy Honors Papers

This project aims to take the subject of Human Rights and attempt to wrestle with its clarity. The concept has been, since its more modern manifestation, as represented by the United Nations’ Uniform Declaration of Human Rights, heavily criticized for its being indeterminate, unclear, ambiguous, or somehow not fully understood. Despite the concept’s incredible moral potential, the extent to which this potential can be realized is determined by the concept’s intelligibility and defensibility—both of which are affected by the concept’s being understood to a sufficient point. Given Human Rights’ moral potential to challenge the forces of evil in the world, …

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 …

Legal Purgatory: Why Some Animals Are Neither Persons Nor Property, Sharisse Kanet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All animals with non-borderline sentience are deserving of certain legal considerations independent of their use and relationship to human beings. That is, all sentient beings should have some rights. Given the current organization of the U.S. legal system, which divides all entities into property or persons, it is not surprising that animals are relegated to property status. I put forth a proposal to fix this whose central suggestion is that we create a third legal designation, legal patient, into which all non-person sentient animals (those which do not properly belong on either current category) would fit. These animals would receive …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

Social Contract Theory And Transitional Justice: A Philosophical Approach To A Problem Of Global Importance, Brendan Moriarty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I seek to bring together two areas of scholarly work to see how each can inform the other: social contract theory and transitional justice. The social contract, as it exists and as it was theorized about by Rousseau, was born from the world-historic forces that spread capitalism across the globe, stirring up nationalism everywhere it went. In its wake, there was vast inequality and new legal regimes which protected the hoarded wealth of the capitalist class by enshrining the right of private property along with life and liberty. To examine the intricacies of transitional justice and its …

Production, Not Dependence: The Metaphysics Of Causation And Its Role In Explanation, Responsibility, And The Law, Yuval Abrams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Causation is production, not dependence. It is not merely a matter of how two facts or events covary, but about what underlies that covariation. Furthermore, causation is unified (not fragmented or plural) and is a natural relation (in the world). To cause is to make something happen, to generate. The causal nexus (the web of causal influence) consists entirely of productive positive causes. With these fixed, the (causal) dependence relations are determined.

Dependence belongs to the theory of explanation. Causal dependence is an explanatory notion: A causally explains B, in virtue of a causal relation between cause C and effect …

A Qualitative Study Of Peer Reporting Of Attorney Ethical Misconduct, Jason Alan Helm

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Attorney misconduct affects the victims, the justice system, and the reputation of the entire legal profession. The legal profession suffers from a negative public perception because of a perceived lapse of ethical conduct. This study was designed as a general qualitative study and its purpose was to understand the processes attorneys experience regarding peer reporting of attorney ethical misconduct. The questions examined in this study was whether attorneys were willing to report their peer's ethical misconduct and why those attorneys decided to report or not report their peer's ethical misconduct. Twenty open-ended questionnaires were collected from a sampling of active, …

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 …

Legal Interpretation, Mykaila Ashlynn Berry

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The purpose of this project is to provide a fresh and in-depth analysis of legal jurisprudence through the use of two of the most important legal theorists of our time, H. L. A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin. This project focuses on how Dworkin’s position in his famous paper “Hard Cases”, helps us understand an important Supreme Court case, Cohen v. California. Cohen will be the main focus of my project. The project will discuss the case and the possible ways of deciding the case. Then the project explains both Dworkin’s and Hart’s positions. Finally, the project will analyze how Dworkin’s …

@Usa Vs. @Realdonaldtrump: The Decline Of Democracy In 280 Characters Or Less, Bryn Edwards

CMC Senior Theses

From threats, to hate speech, to potential criminal statements, Donald Trump has made use of Twitter like no president or world leader before him. His presidency and communication strategy have been defined by his “tweetstorms” and a consequent slew of legal issues. The prolific rate of his tweeting has made large-scale analyses difficult as they quickly become dated.

Nevertheless, this thesis has aimed for a more holistic analysis by uniquely linking trends in his tweeting to its perceived social consequences, situating this work in a long line of analyses of presidential rhetoric and media strategies. Moreover, it assesses Trump’s use …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Opening Statements In Trial: Reconsidering The Classical Canon Of Invention, Andrew Chandler

Undergraduate Theses

This analysis of 21 opening statements probes at current persuasive practices employed by trial attorneys through the lens of mainstream legal advice and an expanded definition of rhetorical invention – one which includes both discovery and creation. An evaluation of such practice reveals the utility, and furthermore the duty of the advocate, to draw upon an expanded realm of available arguments.