Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

The Role Of Organizational Socialization On The Ethical Orientation Of Male Police Officers, Megan Marie Bessey

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A gap in literature exists surrounding years of service, training, and ethical attitudes within the law enforcement industry. The proposed hypothesis was that years of service in law enforcement and hours of in-service training were interactively related to an officer's ethical attitudes as related to ethical orientation. The purpose of this study was to examine organizational socialization within the law enforcement profession, specifically as demonstrated through the interaction effects of factors relating to ethical orientation and scores measured by the Ethics Position Questionnaire of male Northern Kentucky and Southern Oregon police officers. The major theoretical propositions for this study came …

Crisis Mitigation And Ethical Decision-Making In A Nonurban Community A Social Work Perspective, Lisa Marie Woolston

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

While social workers respond to human and natural disasters daily, they also respond to other crises equally important. The 2019-2020 global health pandemic has required social workers to prepare for the unknown. Social workers must prepare for those events by planning, training, and knowing agency policies, and procedures (formal rules). This capstone study's objective was explored through a qualitative action research methodology discovering ways social workers use ethics for decision-making during crisis mitigation in a nonurban community. A biomedical ethical decision-making model, along with the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics was utilized to understand what guides social …

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 …

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.

African Environmental Ethics: Keys To Sustainable Development Through Agroecological Villages, Charles Verharen, Flordeliz Bugarin, John Tharakan, Enrico Wensing, Bekele Gutema, Joseph Fortunak, George Middendorf

Center for Global Health Publications

This essay proposes African-based ethical solutions to profound human problems and a working African model to address those problems. The model promotes sustainability through advanced agroecological and information communication technologies. The essay's first section reviews the ethical ground of that model in the work of the Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop. The essay's second section examines an applied African model for translating African ethical speculation into practice. Deeply immersed in European and African ethics, Godfrey Nzamujo developed the Songhaï Centers to solve the problem of rural poverty in seventeen African countries. Harnessing advanced technologies within a holistic agroecological ecosystem, Nzamujo's …

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, …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, And The Post-Sovereign State [Toc], Gareth Williams

Literature

This book proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It does this in in order to make a case for “infrapolitics” as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. In Infrapolitical Passages the politics of contemporary global capital is a race to the bottom of reason itself, extended in the wake of the subordination of all forms of living to the economized relation between means and ends. It is this relation which, thanks …

Roland Breeur, Lies – Imposture – Stupidity. Vilinius: Jonas Ir Jokūbas 2019, Andrew D. Spear

Articles, Book Chapters, Essays

As the title suggests, Breeur’s project is to discuss three key ideas: lies, stupidity, and imposture. The book is organized into two parts (I. Lies and Stupidity; II. Imposture) of two chapters each, followed by an appendix. The individual chapters and sub-sections are well-written and philosophically sophisticated. However, the reader will be disappointed if they expect a sustained analysis of the relations among the book’s titular ideas or a unified account of their role in the breakdown of respect for truth more broadly. Breeur’s approach is more episodic, laying out valuable considerations and enticing formulations, but often breaking off before …

Deontic Constraints Are Maximizing Rules, Matthew Hammerton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Deontic constraints prohibit an agent performing acts of a certain type even when doing so will prevent more instances of that act being performed by others. In this article I show how deontic constraints can be interpreted as either maximizing or non-maximizing rules. I then argue that they should be interpreted as maximizing rules because interpreting them as non-maximizing rules results in a problem with moral advice. Given this conclusion, a strong case can be made that consequentialism provides the best account of deontic constraints.

Agent-Relative Consequentialism And Collective Self-Defeat, Matthew Hammerton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Andrew Forcehimes and Luke Semrau argue that agent-relative consequentialism is implausible because in some circumstances it classes an act as impermissible yet holds that the outcome of all agents performing that impermissible act is preferable. I argue that their problem is closely related to Derek Parfit's problem of ‘direct collective self-defeat’ and show how Parfit's plausible solution to his problem can be adapted to solve their problem.

Concerning Mostly Nonacademic Aspects Of My July 2006 Visit To Salzburg, Austria For The 6th International Whitehead Conference At Salzburg University, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Here are travel notes concerning mostly nonacademic aspects of my July 2006 visit to Salzburg, Austria for the 6th International Whitehead Conference at Salzburg University. These travel notes supplement the book Whiteheadian Ethics: Abstracts and Papers from the Ethics Section of the Philosophy Group at the 6th International Whitehead Conference at the University of Salzburg, July 2006 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) edited by Theodore Walker Jr. and Mihály Toth.

“How Could You Even Ask That?”: Moral Considerability, Uncertainty And Vulnerability In Social Robotics, Alexis Elder

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

When it comes to social robotics (robots that engage human social responses via “eyes” and other facial features, voice-based natural-language interactions, and even evocative movements), ethicists, particularly in European and North American traditions, are divided over whether and why they might be morally considerable. Some argue that moral considerability is based on internal psychological states like consciousness and sentience, and debate about thresholds of such features sufficient for ethical consideration, a move sometimes criticized for being overly dualistic in its framing of mind versus body. Others, meanwhile, focus on the effects of these robots on human beings, arguing that psychological …