Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Green New Deal: Promise And Limitations, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This review essay discusses three recent books on the Green New Deal (GND), written, respectively, by Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, and Kate Aronoff and a few other democratic socialists. It argues that the New Deal offers a better model of how to envision the change required for deep carbonization than the vision of war mobilization after Pearl Harbor since it emphasizes not only the need for massive introduction of green technology but also the importance of broad social change constituting a just transition. The essay argues that the GND should be placed in a global context so that the adoption …

Technology And Responsibility: A Discussion Of Underexamined Risks And Concerns In Precision Livestock Farming, Ian Werkheiser

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Implications

Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) promises to replicate at scale, the care usually provided by farmers who know their animals.

This suite of current and developing technologies has the potential to address many problems facing modern farms.

Many underexamined concerns still exist around PLF, some of which are common to many new technologies, and others of which are more specific to these technologies being implemented on farms with humans and nonhuman animals.

Though these concerns are not a sufficient reason to abandon PLF, they ought to be considered more carefully by everyone working on developing, implementing, or legislating these technologies.

Place And Digital Space, Suraj Chaudhary

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The intersection of philosophies of space and technology is a fecund area of inquiry that has received surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature. While the major accounts of space and place have not considered complexities introduced by recent technological developments, scholarship on the human-technology relationship has virtually ignored the spatial dimensions of this interaction. Place and Digital Space takes a step in addressing this gap in literature by offering an original, phenomenological account of place and using this framework to analyze digitally mediated spaces. I argue that places are continually evolving, internally heterogenous, and spatially distinct meaningful wholes with …

Reconsidering Moral Perception: The Dialectical Emergence Of Moral Perceptual Contents During Experience Via Cognitive Penetration And Oppressive Socialization’S Suppression Of Our Ability To ‘See’ Moral Reasons For Humanization And Liberation, James William Lincoln

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Moral perceptions occur when a subject makes an immediate discernment about the moral features of an occurrent experience. This project taxonomizes theories of moral perception into the following two camps: experientialism and judgementalism. I defend a version of experientialism, Moral Perceptual Orientation, by arguing that we, in addition to making moral judgments, have genuine perceptions with moral content during occurrent experience. I then go on to advance a framework for understanding how these perceptions are curated by our background beliefs by developing a view of dialectical consciousness. I do this by synthesizing Herbert Marcuse’s perspective on the epistemic subject with …

Reflections On Psychological And Psychiatric Consequences Of Covid-19 Pandemic, Donatella Marazziti

Animal Sentience

Although far from reaching a clear conclusion, some evidence increasingly highlights the possible connections among climate change, environmental pollution and the current COVID-19 pandemic, as well as their intertwined detrimental effects on both physical and mental health. Such a catastrophic event calls for a novel awareness of the interdependence of all biotic and nonbiotic factors in our environment and planet.

Protecting Nature, Freeing Beings, Eileen Crist

Animal Sentience

Large-scale protection of nature is needed to address the ecological crisis. Big animals are connected with this mandate: They are threatened worldwide; they play important ecological roles; and the vast areas they require support a host of lifeforms. But visionary conservation is not only a pragmatic necessity. It is an ethical imperative, for comprehensive nature protection and restoration that supports the good life for all. The story of Asian elephants is part of this bigger story. We must find compassionate ways to free captive elephants and restore a world in which they, and countless others, may live free and flourish.

Invertebrates Should Be Given Ethical Consideration, Marie-Claire Cammaerts

Animal Sentience

Invertebrates are far more numerous than vertebrates. Most of them are essential to the survival of humanity. Their physiology, behavior, know-how, and cognitive abilities are often as complex as those of vertebrates. Invertebrates should be considered and studied as are vertebrates, i.e., ethically, and cautiously.

Virtue Ethics And The Likelihood Of Invertebrate Suffering, Jeffrey A. Lockwood

Animal Sentience

Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) review evidence that invertebrates have the capacity to suffer. If they do, then, according to utilitarians (those advocating “the greatest good for the greatest number”) and deontologists (those advocating rights and corresponding duties), research practices and funding policies should be required to protect invertebrates. But if the evidence is mistaken, then, according to utilitarians and deontologists, our constraints would be unjustified and even morally suspect. Virtue ethicists, in contrast, endorse acting rationally in an effort to cultivate the virtues — even if the basis for our action is mistaken. Virtue ethics seems more compelling than the …

On The Possibility Of Invertebrate Sentience, David Degrazia

Animal Sentience

Mikhalevich & Powell (M&P) set up the basic criteria for according moral status equitably, including the capacity for affect. They argue persuasively against assuming that all invertebrates are insentient and hence ineligible for moral consideration. In addition to the relatively clear case of cephalopods, various arthropods may prove to be sentient. We should be aware of various sources of prejudice that M&P discuss and not assume that it would be absurd to attribute sentience and moral status to certain invertebrates.

Key Ethical Leadership Characteristics Of State Police Promotional Candidates In The South, David Patrick Hay

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Public officials, researchers, and practitioners agree police organizations need the proper tools to foster a stronger sense of ethical leadership to more effectively conduct police operations and work with communities. However, few researchers have investigated ethical leadership characteristics for police supervisors, and no research has been conducted to identify desired ethical leadership characteristics for state police supervisors in the southern United States. The purpose of this qualitative Delphi study was to determine the degrees of consensus and support of identified key ethical leadership characteristics for state police promotional candidates in the southern United States, using the theoretical framework of transformational …

Problems With Basing Insect Ethics On Individuals’ Welfare, Susana Monsó, Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró

Animal Sentience

In their target article, Mikhalevich & Powell (M&P) argue that we should extend moral protection to arthropods. In this commentary, we show that there are some unforeseen obstacles to applying the sort of individualistic welfare-based ethics that M&P have in mind to certain arthropods, namely, insects. These obstacles have to do with the fact that there are often many more individuals involved in our dealings with insects than our ethical theories anticipate, and also with the fact that, in some sense, some insects count as more than an individual and, in another sense, they sometimes count as less than an …

Lessons From Miniature Brains: Cognition Cheap, Memory Expensive (Sentience Linked To Active Movement?), Giorgio Vallortigara

Animal Sentience

Studies on invertebrate minds suggest that the neural machinery for basic cognition is cheap, and that bigger brains are probably associated with greater memory storage rather than more advanced cognition. Sentience may be linked to feedforward mechanisms (Reafferenzprinzip) that allow organisms with active movement to distinguish active and passive sensing. Invertebrates may offer special opportunities for testing these hypotheses.

Diminishing Powers Of Traditional Leaders: The Case For Dinka Bor Social Revival, Daniel Leek Geu

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The impact of diminishing powers of Dinka Bor traditional leaders is affecting how the community is recovering from the protracted civil war in South Sudan. Many people are traumatized and most of the population are young of whom many are orphaned children of war growing up in poverty and violence. The problem is that Dinka Bor traditional leaders have lost governing powers over their people in the villages across Jonglei State. Thus, as civilians return to rebuild their lives no stable system of governance is present in the remote villages to guide and protect the people. The research question addressed …

Correlations To Financial Performance In The Pharmaceutical Industry, Fred Mcclellan

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

There exist conflicting priorities for leaders when considering ethical leadership behaviors and organizational financial performance. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine correlations between top manager ethical leadership levels and organizational financial performance, within the pharmaceutical industry. The Ethical leadership theory was used to frame the study. Relationships between top managers’ perceived ethics levels and organizational financial performance were studied, as well as, whether top managers’ practices, purposes, and virtues acted as mediators. A goal of 184 participants were recruited from 338 pharmaceutical companies. Five top managers and 17 of their direct report team members took part in …

A Qualitative Study Of Peer Reporting Of Attorney Ethical Misconduct, Jason Alan Helm

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Attorney misconduct affects the victims, the justice system, and the reputation of the entire legal profession. The legal profession suffers from a negative public perception because of a perceived lapse of ethical conduct. This study was designed as a general qualitative study and its purpose was to understand the processes attorneys experience regarding peer reporting of attorney ethical misconduct. The questions examined in this study was whether attorneys were willing to report their peer's ethical misconduct and why those attorneys decided to report or not report their peer's ethical misconduct. Twenty open-ended questionnaires were collected from a sampling of active, …

Precursors To Human Trafficking, Aleta J. Eldridge

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractThe problem addressed in this phenomenological study was the lack of documentation of the supported lived experiences of the precursors that children exhibit prior to being groomed by a sex trafficker into human sex trafficking. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of adults, whom as a child, were groomed into sex trafficking due to being bullied, experienced familial abuse and had used illegal drugs, concurrent. Using Ostrom's institutional analysis theory (IAT) and Shaw and McKay's social disorganization theory (SDT), this study examined the three precursors of human trafficking that occurred, concurrently, prior and during the …

Reconsidering The Rule Of Consideration: Probabilistic Knowledge And Legal Proof, Timothy Smartt

IES Papers and Journal Articles

In this paper, I provide an argument for rejecting Sarah Moss's recent account of legal proof. Moss's account is attractive in a number of ways. It provides a new version of a knowledge-based theory of legal proof that elegantly resolves a number of puzzles about mere statistical evidence in the law. Moreover, the account promises to have attractive implications for social and moral philosophy, in particular about the impermissibility of racial profiling and other harmful kinds of statistical generalisation. In this paper, I show that Moss's account of legal proof crucially depends on a moral norm called the rule of …

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …

Love’S Extension: Confucian Familial Love And The Challenge Of Impartiality, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

The question of possible moral conflict between commitment to family and to impartiality is particularly relevant to traditional Confucian thought, given the importance of familial bonds in that tradition. Classical Confucian ethics also appears to lack any developed theoretical commitment to impartiality as a regulative ideal and a standpoint for ethical judgment, or to universal equality. The Confucian prioritizing of family has prompted criticism of Confucian ethics, and doubts about its continuing relevance in China and beyond. This chapter assesses how those sympathetic to the Confucian vision of the good life might respond. It first explores Confucian conceptions of love …

Li Zehou: Synthesizing Kongzi, Marx, And Kant, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

To understand the details of Li Zehou’s work, it is helpful to first locate it within the social and historical contexts to which Li was responding. Specifically, his work can be understood as a contribution to the struggle to establish the intellectual foundations of a Chinese modernity. As China transitioned away from the long-lived dynastic system that had ended early in the twentieth century, there was intense debate in China about what forms of social and political order should take its place. Marxism emerged as the governing ideology after the Communist revolution, but this did not settle the outstanding social …

Confucian Thought And Contemporary Western Philosophy, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

This chapter explores the encounter between the traditional Confucian thought and contemporary Anglophone philosophy. It explores the evolution in philosophical methods and heuristics employed by Anglophone thinkers in the past fifty or so years, often with the aim of extracting Confucian thought from its specific social and historical roots. Unlike the disciplines of intellectual or literary history, these philosophers have articulated dimensions of Confucian philosophy not explicit in traditional texts, developed critiques of Western modernity, derived solutions to problems in Western philosophy, and sought to reimagine Confucian thought for an East Asian modernity. Analyzing how contemporary philosophers have engaged the …

Ang Patolohiya Ng Espektakulo Sa Panahon Ng Covid-19, Alvin B. Yapan

Filipino Faculty Publications

Itatanghal ng papel ang teorya ng espektakulo ni Guy Debord sa pagbasa ng kasalukuyang kalakaran ng pampublikong diskurso bilang diskurso ng mga imahen. Ipaliliwanag kung paano isang metodong patolohiko ang ganitong pagbasa o pagbibigay interpretasyon sa mga imahen bilang sintomas ng higit na malalalim na sakit na panlipunan. Isa itong patolohiya na maiuugat sa mga panulat nina Jose Rizal, Emilio Jacinto, at mga propagandista. Nagpapakita ito ng kolonyal na ugat ng metodong patolohiko na napatitingkad lamang ng kontradiksiyon nito sa karanasan ng pandemya na dulot ng COVID-19 na isang sakit na tumatanggi sa diagnosis. Sa huli, patutunayan ng papel na …

A Pre-Structural Center: Deconstructing Classical Social Theory, Darius F. Irani

Honors Undergraduate Theses

For theory and literature to evolve parallel to the subject matter which it associates, it recurrently progresses through admittance of variably incremental, yet critical, entries. This is the nature of modernism. This thesis reflects on one important point in the life of modernism, the advent at which society is first formalized and assimilated into theory: the origin of social theory, a point indisputably influential to twentieth century philosophy, but just eclipsed by one of that century's most noticeable theoretical features. The past century saw the rise and fall of a universalizing framework called structuralism. Informing the disciplines, especially the social …

Rethinking Causality: Thomas Aquinas' Argument From Motion & The Kalām Cosmological Argument, Derwin Sánchez Jr.

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Ever since they were formulated in the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas' famous Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God have been frequently debated. During this process there have been several misconceptions of what Aquinas actually meant, especially when discussing his cosmological arguments. While previous researchers have managed to tease out why Aquinas accepts some infinite regresses and rejects others, I attempt to add on to this by demonstrating the centrality of his metaphysics in his argument from motion. Aquinas cannot be properly understood or debated with a contemporary view of causality, but rather must wrestle with the concepts …

Immunotherapy: Therapy Vs. Enhancement, Mariah Daly

Honors Program Theses

The battle against cancer is a long-standing struggle that has resulted in new information and the development of novel medical technologies. Current research aims to figure out a way to reprogram cells and bodily mechanisms to eliminate those cells that are cancerous without destroying healthy cells in the process. Methods which use the body’s own mechanisms, such as immunotherapy, have shown and continue to show potential for specifically targeting cancer cells. Adoptive T cell therapy is one form of immunotherapy that has gained significant attention and focus in the field. Therapies improve conditions up to the normal state of being, …

Free To Bleed Or Free To Buy? The Postfeminist Transformation Of Menstruation, Kenzie Helmick

Honors Program Theses

From innovative new products to cheeky advertisements to period politics, menstruation appears to be having its moment. This thesis serves to offer some skepticism towards the changing cultural attitudes towards periods, categorizing many of these recent developments as a consequence of a postfeminist cooptation. To support this process, this thesis first identifies menstruation as a political issue with implications for both gender politics and anti-capitalist efforts, identifying the stakes at play with this paradigm shift. Then, it deconstructs the consequences of the changing corporate narratives and advertisements and of the most recent mainstream political engagement with menstruation, the menstrual equity …

Political Philosophy As Love Of Wisdom, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

The traditional view holds that political philosophy should aim at the truth. By contrast, Avner de Shalit argues that political philosophers should do something different. According to him, they should work in direct consultation with “the people” in order to think through their theories about political institutions. This article defends the traditional aim of truth-seeking and shows the mistakes in De Shalit’s alternative approach

Iv. Gifts Of Taste: Discussing Wine With Heraclitus And Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles S. Taylor

Wine Journey: Tasting Dwelling Learning at The Kitchen Table

It happened on a weekday evening. Dinner was Pasta e Fagioli and I would have chosen a wine from Tuscany. But, in my cellar a thought arose to explore, and a 19-year-old 1999 Paitin di Pasquero-Elia Barbaresco Sorì Paitin ended up on the table. A new pairing 1 plus a wine from a new-to-me producer I had waited 15 years for it to mature provided opportunities. Pasta e Fagioli should be a fine accompanist to the wonderful softening taste of a maturing Barbaresco from the good 1999 vintage. The pairing worked well enough to repeat. That was merely the prelude.

The Prince -- Brief Synopsis -- Powerpoint, Zach Davidson

Open Educational Resources

This is a very brief PowerPoint covering some key ideas in Machiavelli's THE PRINCE.

How Do Children Deal With Shifted Indexicals?, Jill De Villiers, Ann Nordmeyer, Tom Roeper

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

The topic of indexical shift has, like so many other domains in linguistics, blossomed into a domain showing extensive and unusual variation across languages. One initial goal in this project was to bring an acquisition perspective to the evolving theories early in the process. Initially we began with views derived from Hollebrandse (2000) where the idea was advanced that there is an PoV operator that jointly controls several types of indexicals such as personal pronouns, demonstratives, time and space adverbials.