Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

On The Wrongs Of Fake News, Samuel Fiske

CMC Senior Theses

While fake news has become a hot political issue in the past years, it presents novel and apolitical philosophical problems that are often neglected. This paper explores the epistemic and moral wrong of fake news, drawing on work from Immanuel Kant, Seana Shiffrin, and Miranda Fricker to explain exactly why fake news is so problematic. I argue that creating and sharing fake news violates Kant’s Categorical Imperative because it cannot be willed into a universal law and because it fails to respect rational agents as ends in themselves. I also argue that fake news presents distinct epistemic harms as it …

Arguments For The Abolition Of Gender, Antonio Pineda

CMC Senior Theses

Throughout the process of writing this thesis, I have struggled with whether or not to use the term “gender abolition.” In one sense, the term itself initially piqued my interest in the topic. I remember the first time I heard of gender abolition, I had an immediate intuitive resistance. I thought it was another manifestation of the disconnect that exists between academia and society at large. However, my feelings quickly changed when the concept was explained to me in my sophomore year philosophy seminar. My incredulousness transformed to excitement when I realized gender abolition was actually simply the full realization …

Didactic Democracy: Rethinking The Roles Of Individuality, Political Freedoms And “Cultural Values” In The Process Of Development, Sabrina Hartono

CMC Senior Theses

Working off of Amartya Sen’s “Development as Freedom,” this paper challenges the conception of political freedoms and their instrumental, constructive and intrinsic roles in the development of society. I explore how identity formation is not as individualistic as Sen implicitly assumes in his framework. Using Elizabeth Anderson’s work on the importance of community in developing an individual identity, as well as incorporating ideas from Marx and Somers, I argue that there is strong reason to believe that Sen’s emphasis on the instrumental and constructive roles of political freedoms is exaggerated. I challenged Sen’s conception of the intrinsic value of political …

Factory To Table: A Philosophic Analysis Of The Justice Or Lack Thereof Of Agricultural Markets, Will Carter

CMC Senior Theses

How food is produced has dramatic consequences on how we live, our world’s justice, and the future of our planet. In a world increasingly driven by neoliberalism, agricultural markets have been incentivized to industrialize, globalize, and consolidate. This has resulted in the global dominance of a new type of agriculture, industrial agriculture, driven by the market logic of lowering costs and raising profits. Industrial agriculture has undoubtedly generated the profound benefit of cheaper, more plentiful food in much of the world. These favorable innovations lead many scholars to argue that free markets produce the most just and efficient arrangements for …

The Economic And Philosophic Manuscripts Of Data, Sage D. Young

CMC Senior Theses

Society is filled with words and images that elucidate the positive force radiating from technology entities. I push back against this imprecise and inaccurate narrative by breaking down the illusions created by surveillance capitalism. I argue that there exists a unique relationship between an individual and their environment in creating value, especially in the form of data. This relationship tears down the smokescreens prompted up by the surveillance state because it demonstrates the costs of technology and surveillance capitalism. I found that how data is created and made monetarily valuable has significant, adverse repercussions on the capability to flourish as …

Sufficientarianism Revised: A Look At Past Theories Of Distributive Justice And Working Prospects For Future Theories, Georgia Dietz

CMC Senior Theses

In philosophy, distributive justice is the economic, political, and social structure that constitutes a larger debate on how resources should be divided in society. What is a ‘fair’ way of distributing resources? Many philosophers have created different frameworks that attempt to answer this question. This paper will focus on the attempts that have been made by sufficientarians, then look at problems with these theories that have been pointed out by critics, and finally attempt to revise sufficientarianism altogether.

The Effect Of Moral Development On Voters’ Trust In Politicians, Aquilus Ricks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The impact of voters’ moral development on trust in politicians is a rarely explored phenomenon among scholars studying why voters trust politicians. It is unknown whether voters’ moral development plays an influential role in their decisions to trust those they elect to public office, or if they simply respond to the best political show. The purpose of this study was to examine this phenomenon and determine whether voters’ moral development impacted their trust in politicians regardless of age, gender, education, income, and religion. The study surveyed 110 eligible voters in a midwestern city in the United States using two survey …

A Content Analysis Of Euthanasia Polls In Australia And New Zealand: Words Do Matter, Graham Grove, Ian Hughes, Melanie Lovell, Megan Best

IES Papers and Journal Articles

Aim: To explore whether public support for and opposition to Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide (EPAS) as measured in historic Australian and New Zealand polls has been influenced by the wording of survey questions.

Methods: Australian and New Zealand random-sample post-1995 EPAS poll questions asked of the general public were identified and subjected to content analysis. Individual phrases and words were considered in terms of their favourability towards or unfavourability against EPAS and each poll question was assigned a net favourability score. Variation of support for EPAS based on year, location and favourability of language was analysed by various statistical …

Humanist But Not Radical: The Educational Philosophy Of Thiruvalluvar Kural, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Humanist ideas in education have been promoted by both Western thinkers and classical wisdom texts of Asia. Exploring this connection, I examine the educational philosophy of an iconic ancient Tamil (Indian) text, the Thiruvalluvar Kural, by juxtaposing it with a contemporary humanist classic, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As this comparative study reveals, both texts offer humanist visions of relevance to education, politics, and society. Notably, however, the Kural takes what might be described as a more mainstream humanist stance vis-à-vis Freire’s radical humanist approach. Nevertheless, both educational philosophies share a common humanist bond representing important breakthroughs …

The Way Of Longevity: Blue Zones As Unselfconscious Models Of Daoist Living, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Demographic researchers have identified five geographic regions around the world with unusually high proportions of nonagenarians and centenarians. Studies of these longevity hotspots or “blue zones” are now trying to distill lessons for how people everywhere can live long and active lives with minimal impediments. In this study, I compare lifestyle observations and longevity prescriptions derived from studies of blue zone centenarians with long-standing recommendations for the practice of nourishing life (yangsheng) to achieve a long and healthy life in the Daoist tradition. Observing a high degree of similarity across the four lifestyle domains of diet, exercise, mindset, …

Strategies For Small Businesses To Enhance Ethical Financial Reporting, Mercy Nchangnwi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Unethical financial reporting can negatively impact the sustainability of a business organization. Small business owners who struggle to promote ethical financial reporting are at high risk of failure. Grounded in the fraud diamond theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies small business owners use to enhance ethical financial reporting. The participants comprised four small business owners in Massachusetts who effectively used strategies to enhance ethical financial reporting. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, company documents, and casual observation. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Five themes emerged: ethical behavior, internal control and communication, monitoring, …

Professional Values Of Corporate Nurses, Kasey Jeanne Sands

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Healthcare is comprised of providers, who offer patient services, and payors, who manage the financial reimbursement of providers. Not much is known about registered nurses (RNs) in the corporate payor industry due to a lack of research. Strong professional values (PVs) are expected of all RNs, but research has shown this to vary across the field, meaning that RNs may require support in this area. As little is known about RNs in the payor industry, how these nurses sustain their PVs within the industry has not been evaluated, recognized, or supported. Therefore, the aims of this quantitative, descriptive, and correlational …

Influencing Capitalist Attitudes To Drive More Capital Towards Social Good, Leah Michelle Burton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to better understand how to influence capitalist attitudes and drive more capital towards social good. This is why we must explore the prospect of emancipating the capitalists from capitalism. This study identifies capitalism as a form of oppression that is contributing to a newly developed ethics of capital, a term introduced in this study. Emancipatory action research and general systems theory were employed as the primary approaches to engaging a group of venture capitalists and finance professionals in activities and dialogues. Value2 is the theory of action I use to influence the attitudes of …

Retributive Justice, Capital Punishment, And Jurors In Northeast Florida, Joseph S. Hamrick

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Jacksonville is nationally recognized as being a city that disproportionately places defendants on death row. The author, who has been both a prosecutor and an appellate attorney representing inmates on death row in Jacksonville, believes that the high number of death sentences being issued in this city, at the recommendation of juries, is driven by a strong retributive intuition held by a significant part of Jacksonville’s society. This thesis evaluates the views of three philosophers who played influential roles in the resurgence of retributive theory in the latter half of the twentieth century in America, in seeking to identify and …

Why Do Chapman & Huffman Think Humans Are Not Different?, Nick Zangwill

Animal Sentience

This commentary discusses various shortcomings in Chapman & Huffman’s (2018) denial of differences between human beings and animals and the ethical consequences they think turn on this. Rationality is proposed as a candidate for such a difference, one that also has acceptable ethical consequences.

Extending Animal Welfare Science To Include Wild Animals, Walter Veit, Heather Browning

Animal Sentience

Ng’s (2016) target article built on his earlier work advocating a science of welfare biology (Ng 1995). Although there were problems with the models proposed in Ng’s original paper regarding the balance of pleasure and suffering for wild animals, his call for a science of wild animal welfare was a sound one. This does not require a new discipline but just an extension of the existing frameworks and methods of animal welfare science to include wild animals.

Data: The Good, The Bad And The Ethical, John D. Kelleher, Filipe Cabral Pinto, Luis M. Cortesao

Articles

It is often the case with new technologies that it is very hard to predict their long-term impacts and as a result, although new technology may be beneficial in the short term, it can still cause problems in the longer term. This is what happened with oil by-products in different areas: the use of plastic as a disposable material did not take into account the hundreds of years necessary for its decomposition and its related long-term environmental damage. Data is said to be the new oil. The message to be conveyed is associated with its intrinsic value. But as in …

The Long-Haul: Buddhist Educational Strategies To Strengthen Students’ Resilience For Lifelong Personal Transformation And Positive Community Change, Namdrol Miranda Adams, Kevin Kecskes

Public Administration Faculty Publications and Presentations

For decades, community engagement scholars have built a robust body of knowledge that explores multiple facets of the higher education community engagement domain. More recently, scholars and practitioners from mainly Christian affiliated faith-based institutions have begun to investigate the complex inner world of community-engaged students’ meaning-making and spiritual development. While most of this fascinating cross-domain effort has been primarily based on “Western” influenced Judeo-Christian traditions, this study explores service-learning/community engagement themes, approaches, rationale, and strategies from an “Eastern” perspective based on the rich tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. This case study research focuses on curricular approaches, influences, and impacts of Buddhist …

Politics For Angels, William Kanwischer

Honors Projects

How many idealizing assumptions may we make when doing political philosophy? May we assume our citizens more rational than they are, or our governments more efficient than in reality? These questions lie at the center of the debate between ideal and non-ideal theorists. Ideal theorists believe it permissible to engage in counterfactual assumptions about citizens and states when doing political philosophy, and non-ideal theorists think the opposite. In this paper, I will argue against a particular defense of ideal theory given by David Estlund, who argues that the low probability that a standard of justice will be met does not …

Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, And Artificial Intelligence, Os Keyes

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems shift to interact with new domains and populations, so does AI ethics: a relatively nascent subdiscipline that frequently concerns itself with questions of “fairness” and “accountability.” This fairness-centred approach has been criticized for (amongst other things) lacking the ability to address discursive, rather than distributional, injustices. In this paper I simultaneously validate these concerns, and work to correct the relative silence of both conventional and critical AI ethicists around disability, by exploring the narratives deployed by AI researchers in discussing and designing systems around autism. Demonstrating that these narratives frequently perpetuate a dangerously dehumanizing model …