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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Moral Pathology, Katie Rapier
Moral Pathology, Katie Rapier
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation explores the relationship between morality and mental illness. Mental illness is often thought to impair moral functioning but careful examination reveals that mental illness offers its own insight into moral functioning. While we learn a great deal about moral responsibility and exempting conditions (psychopathy and addiction), we also discover that there a multiple ways to be moral and that many individuals act morally despite ongoing conditions (high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and recovered borderline personality disorder). I conclude that these insights ought to shape our ethical theories.
Who Needs Blame?: Answerability Without Expressed Blame, Sarah Gokhale
Who Needs Blame?: Answerability Without Expressed Blame, Sarah Gokhale
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation argues that we can hold other agents morally responsible without expressing blame and, more strongly, that doing so is preferable. I first argue that blame is fundamentally retributive, and that blame’s retributive foundation is incipiently present even in civilized guises. As such, even though some forms of expressed blame are quite civilized, expressed blame always involves a risk of emotional damage, entrenchment, and escalation. To make things worse, I argue that anger is an exacerbating feature of blame’s retributive foundation. I then argue that, generally speaking, cases of public blame involve higher stakes than cases of private judgments …