Philosophy Commons^™

A Defense Of Hume's Dictum, Cameron Gibbs

Doctoral Dissertations

Is the world internally connected by a web of necessary connections or is everything loose and independent? Followers of David Hume accept the latter by upholding Hume’s Dictum, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. Roughly put, anything can coexist with anything else, and anything can fail to coexist with anything else. Hume put it like this: “There is no object which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves.” Since Hume’s day, Hume’s Dictum has played a major role in philosophy, especially in contemporary metaphysics. In ruling out necessary connections, …

The Morality Of Chinese Legalism: Han Fei’S Advanced Philosophy, Yuan Ke

Masters Theses

Legalism, as one of the most useful philosophies of government, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The work of Han Fei—one of the most influential proponents of Legalism—has been scrutinized and critiqued for centuries as immoral. I intend to show Legalism, especially the Han Feizi, is moral through focusing on four aspects of Han Fei’s work. First, his understanding of human nature. Han Fei states people are born with a hatred of harm and a love of profit. This understanding of human nature can never lead to a cognitive distortions in governing. So it is a moral basic …

The Epistemic Dimensions Of Moral Responsibility And Respect, John Robison

Doctoral Dissertations

What epistemic conditions must one satisfy to be morally responsible for an action or attitude? A common worry is that robust epistemic requirements would have disastrous implications for our responsibility attributing practices: we would be unable to make epistemically justified responsibility attributions, or we would be licensed to disrespectfully excuse agents for their sincerely held beliefs. Those more optimistic about robust epistemic requirements inadvertently make them too demanding to explain the moral successes of ordinary agents. The present project shows how both the pessimists and optimists rely on instructively mistaken assumptions in epistemology, ethics, and action theory, and it culminates …

Self-Knowledge, Choice Blindness, And Confabulation, Hayley F. Webster

Doctoral Dissertations

There are two kinds of epistemic theories about self-knowledge: the traditional account, and the inferentialist account. According to the traditional view of self-knowledge, we have privileged access to our propositional attitudes. “Privileged access” means that one can gain knowledge of one’s own propositional attitudes directly via an exclusive, first-personal method called introspection. On the other hand, the inferentialist view of self-knowledge postulates that we don’t have privileged access to our propositional attitudes and must infer or self-attribute them instead. In this thesis I argue that the traditional view of self-knowledge, which postulates that we have privileged access to our propositional …

Tourism Operators On Trial: Pushing The Animal Justice Agenda Forward In Tourism In Spite Of Theory, David Fennell, Val Sheppard

TTRA Canada 2019 Conference

Abstract:

Justice tourism is emerging to be a topic of considerable interest as scholars strive to emphasise several important themes around the fair distribution of resources and benefits between and within societies (Mihalic & Fennell, 2014; Smith & Duffy, 2003). There is the belief that tourism must be ethical, share equity, underscore solidarity between hosts and guests, and place emphasis on respect, self-determination, as well as benefits on many different social, economic, and cultural levels (Scheyvens, 2002). An example of this type of research comes from Jamal and Camargo (2014), who discuss how limited distributive justice can be within destinations …