Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

Degrees Of Altruism As Dependent Upon Degrees Of Relations, Bobbi Jackson

Theses

In David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), he asserts that humans act most altruistically toward people in the closest relations to us, e.g., in family or friendship relations, and somewhat less so toward those who are merely in our own ethnic group, of our own nationality, etc., and least altruistically toward people in the most distant relations to us. But, current empirical data appears to indicate vast multitudes of exceptions to Hume's claim. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to determine the cause of this apparent conflict and suggest potential solutions that might allow Hume's theory …

Realist Nonideal Theory: The Intuition Critique, Reflective Equilibrium And The Role Of Morality In Politics, Danny R. Underwood Ii

Theses

In this paper, I explain political realist Raymond Geuss’ critique of John Rawls concerning his use of intuitions when developing a political philosophy. Rawls’ justice as fairness, due to its reliance on moral intuitions, fails to achieve the theory's purported aim and has the effect of affirming the status quo. I use Rawls’ idea of reflective equilibrium, where our theoretical principles are checked against our commitments until a satisfactory balance is reached, as an explanatory framework to discuss various forms of political philosophy. By adopting this framework, the disputes between various approaches to political philosophy are reducible to which initial …

Soldier, Officer, Citizen: Applying Just War Theory To Police Use Of Force, Benjamin N. Wisniewski

Theses

A police officer's badge is the emblem of a shield, meant to protect and serve citizens from violence and crime. Yet today, so many citizens feel their shield is absent, if not weaponized against them. This perception of malfeasance has become evident in the waves of outrage and protest that followed high profile applications of coercive and lethal force by the police in recent years. One need only look at the armor and munitions police deploy in the searches of citizens and on perimeters of protests as evidence that the tools of the police mission are converging with those of …

Framework For Ethical Decision Making: How Various Types Of Unethical Clothing Production Have Different Impacts On People, Ebru Pinar

Siegel Institute Ethics Research Scholars

The purpose of this study was to evaluate how various types of unethical clothing manufacturing impacts peoples’ shopping attitude in different ways. The study also focused on if there was an effect on how people decided what they find more important and if there was a change in their decision making after being informed. Using an online survey, Kennesaw State University college students, faculty, staff, and community members (n=78) were conducted randomly. As a result, Fair trade (p=0.032), Sweatshop or Child labor (p=0.007), and Sustainable Material (p=0.020) had statistically significant differences after being informed. …

Humanitarian Military Intervention: A Failed Paradigm, Faruk Rahmanovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the end of the Cold War, traditional justifications for war have diminished in relevance and importance, while the use of Humanitarian Military Interventions (HMI) has proliferated, to the point that formerly traditional wars – e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq invasions – have become retroactively redefined as HMIs. While HMI suffers from a number of problems, from international law to historical track record, its proponents have managed to turn aside all arguments by claiming they represent either statistical outliers, improper implementation, or at best indicate a need for a certain degree of fine-tuning. Crucially, the validity of the HMI practice is …

Relational Power, Music, And Identity: The Emotional Efficacy Of Congregational Song, Nathan Myrick

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Relational Power, Music, and Identity: The Emotional Efficacy of Congregational Song

The power of congregational song to unify (or divide) people along various lines is well documented. Yet, how this process of uniting or dividing is accomplished has proven necessarily difficult to document. This paper examines the complex and polyvalent factors that contribute to the meaningfulness of congregational music making, seeking to offer a synthetic, conceptual framework with which to engage this often murky milieu.

Employing interdisciplinary research techniques drawn from sociology, ritual studies, and ethnomusicology, I construct a conceptual framework with which to understand the profoundly formative power of …

Defining Biometrics: Toward A Transnational Ethic Of Personal Information, Nicola Morrow

International Studies Honors Projects

Innovations in biotechnology, computer science, and engineering throughout the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries dramatically expanded possible modes of data-based surveillance and personal identification. More specifically, new technologies facilitated enormous growth in the biometrics sector. The response to the explosion of biometric technologies was two-fold. While intelligence agencies, militaries, and multinational corporations embraced new opportunities to fortify and expand security measures, many individuals objected to what they perceived as serious threats to privacy and bodily autonomy. These reactions spurred both further technological innovation, and a simultaneous proliferation of hastily drafted policies, laws, and regulations governing the collection, …

The Unifying Power Of Education, Keagan Potts, Jenji Learn

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

• Without Expertise or Experience: Philosophizing When Your Students Know You Know Nothing
• Segregated Students — Segregated Society: The Primacy of Education in Ending Hate
• Combatting Emerging Resegregation: Teaching Those in Power to Empower

Eudemonic Care: A Future Path For Occupational Therapy?, Charlotte L. Royeen, Franklin Stein, Alivia Murtha, Julie Stambaugh

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

The core tenets of occupational therapy date to ancient Greece. Philosophers and physicians alike promulgated that quality of life, or “eudemonia,” is at the center of both ethical and medical concern and can be attained through healthful engagement in meaningful occupation. In more recent times, there has been a strong call to return to the powerful implementation of the eudemonic moral philosophy in health care practice, especially in occupational therapy. Searches of recent occupational therapy research show that integration of wellness initiatives into rehabilitative treatment sessions can have a profound impact on the physical and emotional healthfulness of people with …

Teaching About The Politics Of Religion And Social Change, Dean Johnson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Scope And Limits Of Secular Buddhism: Watanabe Kaikyoku (1868–1912) And The Japanese New Buddhist 'Discovery Of Society', James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

Although New Buddhism is a term sometimes employed to refer to the broad sweep of reform and modernization movements in Japanese Buddhist thought and practice beginning in the 1870s, the term shin bukkyō refers more specifically to a broadly influential movement of some two dozen young scholars and lay Buddhists active in the last decade of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Founded in February 1899 as Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai (Buddhist Pure Believers Fellowship or Buddhist Puritan Association), the group changed its name to Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai (New Buddhist Fellowship) in 1903. Notto Thelle refers to the NBF as “the most consistent …

What’S The Harm In Climate Change?, Eric S. Godoy

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

A popular argument against direct duties for individuals to address climate change holds that only states and other powerful collective agents must act. It excuses individual actions as harmless since they (1) are neither necessary nor sufficient to cause harm, (2) arise through normal activity, and (3) have no clear victims. Philosophers have challenged one or more of these assumptions; however, I show that this definition of harm also excuses states and other collective agents. I cite two examples of this in public discourse and suggest we reconsider the notion of harmful action in our discussions about climate change.

Colb And Dorf On Abortion And Animal Rights, Mylan Engel Jr.

Between the Species

In their recent book, Sherry Colb and Michael Dorf defend the following ethical theses: (1) sentience is sufficient for possessing the right not to be harmed and the right not to be killed; (2) killing sentient animals for food is almost always seriously wrong; (3) aborting pre-sentient fetuses raises no moral concerns at all; and (4) aborting sentient fetuses is wrong absent a reason weighty enough to justify killing the fetus. They also discuss strategies and tactics for activists: They oppose the use of graphic images by activists on tactical grounds, and they categorically oppose the use of violence by …

Why Liberal Tolerance, Rightly Understood, Is Coherent And Defensible, William A. Galston

San Diego Law Review

One of the most familiar criticisms of liberal democracy is that it cannot defend itself against its enemies while remaining true to its principles. This criticism is odd as well as unjust because theorists regarded as arch-liberals offer compelling reasons to reject it. . .

An Unjust Dogma: Why A Special Right To Religion Wrongly Discriminates Against Non-Religious Worldviews, Kenneth Einar Himma

San Diego Law Review

In this Article, I will argue that a special right to religious freedom is not morally warranted, and that hence such a right illicitly discriminates against non-religious worldviews. The principal argument here is that there is no adequate reason to think that religious worldviews implicate any interests distinct from those implicated by non-religious worldviews. While it is certainly true that religious worldviews warrant, as a matter of political morality, all the protections that non-religious worldviews receive, there is good reason to question what seems to have become a dogma among Western nations—namely, that religious worldviews deserve special protection....

A Transcendental Argument For Liberalism, Samuel C. Rickless

San Diego Law Review

Liberalism is the view that the state should not, except on mutually justifiable grounds, coerce a society’s citizens to adopt, support, or follow some particular comprehensive conception of the good. So understood, a liberal state, by definition, permits each citizen a zone of freedom delimited by her own understanding of the ingredients of a happy life. Liberalism, as a normative theory governing state–citizen (and, indirectly, citizen–citizen) relations, is opposed by various forms of totalitarianism, including theocracy and communism. A theocratic state is one that imposes a particular religious form of life on its citizens, and thereby restricts their freedom to …

Liberalism And Tolerance, William Voegeli

San Diego Law Review

I began by raising the possibility that tolerance is minor issue, having no bearing on whether liberalism works out or makes sense. I conclude by noting that it is a central question, for liberalism and politics in general. Tolerance is important because intolerance is important. “Anything Goes” is one of Cole Porter’s best songs, but is unlikely to become any country’s national anthem. The questions of what doesn’t go, and why, and how to prevent it from going any further, explain a great deal about the political ideologies of our era, as well as the premises on which social orders …

Alexander On Koppelman On Alexander, Larry Alexander

San Diego Law Review

In my book Is There a Right of Freedom of Expression?, I argued that liberalism, to the extent it is defined by a commitment to freedom of illiberal speech, illiberal religions, and illiberal associations, is at its core paradoxical. For, I argued, if liberalism is the correct political philosophy, it must regard illiberal thought and its manifestations in action and policy as fundamentally mistaken. And these mistaken illiberal views cannot be deemed by the liberal to have value as views, except perhaps for whatever instructive value they might have in getting people to see the truth of liberalism. When such …

The Machiavellian Case Against Legal Moralism, Luis Pereira Coutinho

San Diego Law Review

In this paper, “legal moralism” is to be understood in a wide sense as the promotion, outright coercive, or otherwise, of conceptions of the good by the state—assuming in a Kelsenian way that any state action means legal action. Under consideration is the possibility of excluding the good from the bounds of the law under a theory of political right of Machiavellian origin. Anticipating the conclusion, this paper will seek to verify whether the Machiavellian case is the only one excluding the good from the bounds of the law in a coherent manner, regardless of its merits and the inherent …

Revisiting The Hart-Devlin Debate: At The Periphery And By The Numbers, James Allan

San Diego Law Review

We are not yet at the stage when trying to say something new about the well-known Hart-Devlin debate is like attempting to give a novel take on the Old Testament, or on William Shakespeare’s plays—or life for that matter—or even on the music of The Beatles. But then again those analogies are not wholly misplaced, at least not within legal philosophical circles in the common law world. So I was tempted to try my hand at some other topic falling under the aegis of “legal moralism” and leave Professor Hart and Lord Justice Devlin well enough alone. However, for good …