Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

The Quest For Ethical Truth: Wang Yangming On The Unity Of Knowing And Acting, Weimin Shi

Comparative Philosophy

Drawing an analogy between Wang Yangming’s endeavor to know ethical truth and Descartes’ quest for epistemic certainty, this paper proposes a reading of Wang's doctrine of the unity of knowing and acting to the effect that the doctrine does not express an ethical teaching about how the knowledge that is already acquired is to be related to acting, but an epistemological claim as to how we know ethical truths. A detailed analysis of Wang’s relevant texts is offered to support the claim.

Reflective Knowledge: Confucius And Virtue Epistemology, Chienkuo Mi

Comparative Philosophy

Most of sScholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This paper seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought of the Analects is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of the Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The third goal is to show that the Confucian thought is not only of epistemological significance, but that it can make a contribution to progressing contemporary …

Vol 8 No 2 Editor's Words, Bo Mou

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 2 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 2 Information Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 2 Cover Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Leadership In Information Technology: Leadership Theories, Perspectives And Ethical Dilemmas, Douglas B. Malcolm

The Siegel Institute Journal of Applied Ethics

This paper will describe various leadership theories and how they were formed, current leadership perspectives for information technology (IT) and the impact they can have on an IT workforce due to negative impressions and conditions. It will then relate current ethical issues faced by Information Technology to the key driving forces behind IT today along with detailing the current ethical issues faced by IT Leadership. Finally it will recommend some future research to help IT Leadership navigate the ethical and leadership issues faced today and to prepare for the future issues that will appear as technology advances.

Fish Sentience And The Precautionary Principle, Robert C. Jones

Robert C. Jones, PhD

Key (2016) argues that fish do not feel pain based on neuroanatomical evidence. I argue that Key makes a number of conceptual, philosophical, and empirical errors that undermine his claim.

Science, Sentience, And Animal Welfare, Robert C. Jones

Robert C. Jones, PhD

I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on …

A Phenomenological Approach To Clinical Empathy: Rethinking Empathy Within Its Intersubjective And Affective Contexts, Carter Hardy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the philosophy of empathy and biomedical ethics by drawing on phenomenological approaches to empathy, intersubjectivity, and affectivity in order to contest the primacy of the intersubjective aspect of empathy at the cost of its affective aspect. Both aspects need to be explained in order for empathy to be accurately understood in philosophical works, as well as practically useful for patient care in biomedical ethics.

In the first chapter, I examine the current state of clinical empathy in medicine including professional opinions about empathy, the dominant definition being employed, and the problems that arise from this definition. …

Chasing Secretariat's Consent: The Impossibility Of Permissible Animal Sports, James Rocha

Between the Species

Tom Regan argued that animal sports cannot be morally permissible because they are cruel and the animals do not voluntarily participate. While Regan is correct about actual animal sports, we should ask whether substantially revised animal sports could be permissible. We can imagine significant changes to certain animal sports, such as horse racing, that would avoid cruelty and even allow the animals to make their own choices. Where alternative options are freely available, we can consider the horses to have preference autonomy in that they make their own decisions, and we could thereby claim that we have their hypothetical consent. …

Liberal-Democratic States Should Privilege Parental Efforts To Instill Identities And Values, Andrew M. Robinson

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberal-democratic states’ commitments to equality and personal autonomy have always proven problematic with respect to state regulation of relations between parents and children. In the parental authority literature positions have varied from invoking children’s interests to argue for limitations on parental efforts to instill identities and values to invoking parental rights to justify state privileging of such efforts.

This article argues that liberal-democratic states should privilege parental efforts to raise their children to share their identities and values. Its approach is distinctive in two ways: i) it engages in interdisciplinary reflection upon selected findings in psychological literature on immigrant youth, …

Reviewing The Position Lee Minghuei, Max Fong

Max Fong

At What Cost? The Ethics Of Student Debt, Kevin D. Gecowets

The Siegel Institute Journal of Applied Ethics

This paper summarizes recent research into the cost of higher education, and specifically the effects of growing student debt loads. It explores the utility of debt related to access to degree programs, entry into the job market, and economic impact in later life. It is not an economic analysis of higher education financing, but a consideration of the costs and benefits of education financing today. The central ethical consideration of “who benefits” applied to the current state of play in higher education financing leads to the questions: With constantly rising debt loads for individual students and the general population, is …

The Ethical Import Of Entheogens, Joshua Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term entheogen refers to drugs—including the artificial substances and active principles drawn from them—which are known to produce ecstasy and have been used traditionally in certain religious and shamanic contexts. The entheogenic experiences provoked by entheogens are described by users in myriad ways, including in spiritual, religious, philosophical, and secular contexts. Entheogenic experiences have shown that they can create opportunities for individuals to generate meaning, including novel philosophical insights, which users claim to gain by way of experience. As such, entheogenic experiences exhibit the ability to influence a change in a user’s fundamental philosophical commitments, or live options, including …

An Ethical Evaluation Of The Modern Pharmaceutical Industry, Kaitlyn Drennan

Dialogue & Nexus

Lack of transparency, wrongdoings, and unlawful promotion characterize the healthcare industry; these are especially prevalent within the pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, an investigation into the evidence of the corruption and the ethical infringement is needed. In this paper, I will evaluate the pharmaceutical industry’s adherence to the three major branches of ethics. The ever-increasing prices of pharmaceutical products, especially medications used for the combating of anaphylaxis and cancer, coupled with the compensatory-based medication promotion and research points to a major crisis in the realm of social justice. These examples, among many other current issues, lead to difficulties in individuals receiving the …

Introduction To The Ethics Of Clothing And Clothing Production, Linda M. Johnston

Siegel Institute Ethics Research Scholars

Introduction to the Ethics of Clothing and Clothing Production

Critical Ethics: Witnessing Otherness In La Última Niebla, Christine Garst-Santos

Dissidences

La última niebla [The Final Mist] (1935) by María Luisa Bombal presents a female protagonist traumatized by the restrictive gender norms of 1930s Argentina. One would expect that the protagonist’s increasing alienation throughout the novel and her ultimate surrender to an identity that she loathes would generate a compassionate response from readers. However, the text has generated a significant body of notably unsympathetic—and even censorious—criticism from scholars. In an effort to analyze why Bombal’s novel and the protagonist’s performance have been problematic for critics, I turn from literary theory to philosophy. By combining Richard Rorty’s vision of a …

Spectral Bodies: Women's Resistance Across Time In North America, Whitney C. Evanson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contrasts the lived experiences of feminists within the EZLN in Mexico with the historical persecution of community outsiders during the Salem witch trials. I want to explore the differences between a radical political and social movement (the EZLN), and the radical shift in history in which women were accused of witchcraft based on hysteria and rumors. There are parallels between the witch trials and the causes of the Zapatista movement in the ways that women's bodies were treated--their political usefulness to create fear and obedience from citizens by murdering them for their defiance, burying them in shallow graves. …

A Defense Of The Unrestricted Kantian Moral Saint, Richard Szabo

The Hilltop Review

In this article I provide a defense for the worthiness of the moral paradigm of unrestricted Kantian Moral Sainthood from criticisms raised by Susan Wolf. She claims that actually achieving the ideal would result in undesirable moral fanatics with underdeveloped nonmoral characters that none of us would want to be like and so we should not aspire to this ideal of Moral Sainthood. My defense’s main thrust appeals to the impossibility of human beings achieving the demands of the ideal in the actual world in order to avoid Wolf’s objections. Because we can never become unrestricted Kantian Moral Saints (i.e. …

Whose Traditions? Which Practices?, Sor-Hoon Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

My response to Tully’s article, “Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond,” suggests that before introducing students in Asia to comparative political thought, including texts from Asian traditions in Political Theory or Philosophy courses, their education needs to first engage in the critical practice of questioning their own “background horizon of disclosure.” The background horizon of disclosure that needs questioning certainly is not simply constituted by Asian traditions; despite westernized education, it is also not entirely western, insofar as the society they live in continues to be Asian in various ways, and the adopted western institutions and modes of thought have been …

The Dumb Prof Considers Intersectionality In The Age Of Trump, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Among decent, intelligent, and respectable human beings in the United States and around the world, the occupation of Donald Trump of the American presidency is the shock that never ends. Much of this has to do with how vulgar the man is. The activist-academic terms intersectionality and identity politics have in turn entered into our popular vocabulary as words that might describe how all of these aggrieved groups might resist the Trump Administration. This resistance, it is claimed, is necessary because these various groups have not only been insulted by Trump’s rhetoric, but have also been oppressed by draconian policies …

[Not] Buying It: Prostitution As Unwanted Sex, Rebecca Whisnant

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Noting the relative invisibility of prostitution buyers, or Johns, in discussions of the morality of prostitution, this article criticizes Johns’ behavior on the grounds that they are culpably involved in causing the typical harms of prostitution in the lives of the women whom they pay for sex. Those harms are, at bottom, the result of being habitually subjected to unwanted sex, and they are exacerbated rather than mitigated by such sex being bought and paid for. Efforts to normalize and legalize sex-buying should therefore be resisted.

Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism And The 'Religious Secular', James Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

The secularization thesis, rooted in the idea that “modernity” brings with it the destruction—or, at least, the ruthless privatization—of religion, is clearly grounded in specific, often oversimplified, interpretations of Western historical developments since the eighteenth century. In this article, I use the case of the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会) of the Meiji period (1868–1911) to query the category of the secular in the context of Japanese modernity. I argue that the New Buddhists, drawing on elements of classical and East Asian Buddhism as well as modern Western thought, promoted a resolutely social and this-worldly Buddhism that …

Toward Just Hospitality, Ron Bruner

Discernment: Theology and the Practice of Ministry

The ministry of Jesus moved through times of seeking justice, sharing hospitality, and withdrawing for prayer. Though inescapably “other” because of his divine identity, he sought solidarity with humans by becoming human and interacting with humanity through hospitable practices. The Ancient Mediterranean customs of hospitality were well-defined, but Jesus took this powerful cultural framework and changed its practice so that it produced reconciliation and justice.

This work briefly reviews the practice of hospitality in the time of Jesus. It also presents the work of scholars identifying linguistic markers that would have cued readers in the Ancient Mediterranean to recognize a …

Theory For A Starving Obese, Ishai Shapira Kalter

Theses and Dissertations

Theory for a Starving Obese (2017) is both a book and an installation. During the years 2015-2017 I began writing Theory for a Starving Obese; a collection of essays and art criticism about exhibitions that took place in white cubes in New York. I was following my dissatisfaction, and hoped to delve deeper into the question “What is Contemporary Art?” At the end of a process, I sent seventeen envelopes to artists who exhibited solo shows in New York and whose works I have criticized. Each envelope consists of one digital drawing (שרבוט, pronounced Shirbut), DVD with the …

Fighting Domestic Terrorism: Art's Role In Social Activism, Jonathan Cornell

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

Through a study into the complex web of Church and State, I describe how the American condition falters under a Capitalist regime. Throughout this thesis, I identify incongruences within pervading socio-political tropes. By dissections of religion and culture, I identify how the American people are subjugated by their own ideologies, thereby perpetuating a cycle of class struggle and social injustice. I assert that the American hero has failed in the face of material desire and blind faith to a ruling plutocracy, and that organized religion has been ultimately subsumed by politics as a tool of control. Using the visual …

Initiating Research On Igniting Fires In The Blue Ridge Mountains During The Autumn 2016 Conflagration, Cynthia Twyford Fowler, Cynthia Fowler

Faculty Scholarship

An unprecedented moment in the fire ecology of the Blue Ridge Mountains occurred in Autumn 2016 when severe drought, frequent anthropogenic ignitions, and seasonality in disturbed deciduous forests fueled widespread burning. As the wildfires burned, wildland firefighters from around the U.S. temporarily moved into the region to assist local land managers. As wildfire risks increased and air quality decreased, local residents became increasingly interested in fire ecology. The community shifted continuously as wildfires were extinguished, wildland firefighters returned home, and local residents disengaged. In conducting research during the conflagration, obtaining consent from community members varied depending on whether or not …

The Practical Potential Of Living Authentically, Aaron Minnick

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

To paraphrase George Orwell, the best books are those that tell us what we already know. Perhaps, then, this thesis will ring most strikingly in the minds of those who have realized a deep dissatisfaction with the universal ethics of the day. Consequently, it is not the final word on the matter, but an exploration of a more practical ethic of living authentically. The paper deals with what I take to be the central question of philosophy: How should I live? It shows, I believe, that the proper vantage point to begin that inquiry can be at all times none …

Controlled Authenticity: A Hybrid Account Of Personal Autonomy, Eric Fox

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This thesis explores the concept of authenticity as a mode of self-identity, and how an added layer of control through the application of personal autonomy enables an agent to more readily achieve authentic states of being and satisfaction. Comparing the work of Diana Meyers and Marina Oshana, two prominent, contemporary writers in the field of personal autonomy, this paper attempts to establish the ground works for what components are necessary to a personal autonomy account as well as highlighting the contrasting aspects of both views. The paper engages in a synthesis of these two views, combining the social-relational theory of …