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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
The Morality Of Corporate Persons, Ladelle Mcwhorter
The Morality Of Corporate Persons, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications
This essay provides a genealogy of corporate personhood as it exists currently in US law and places moral personhood in a similar genealogical context. This treatment demonstrates that the two are inextricably intertwined in both conception and institutionalized practices. We would do well to dismantle both; meanwhile, however, corporate personhood's implicit illiberal notion of collective mentality and responsibility may suggest possibilities for establishing collective counterforces to oppose activities of transnational for-profit corporations and mitigate their devastating political, economic, and environmental effects upon actual people and the ecosystems upon which we depend.
What Makes A Social Order Primitive? In Defense Of Hart’S Take On International Law, David Lefkowitz
What Makes A Social Order Primitive? In Defense Of Hart’S Take On International Law, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
The widespread antipathy to Hart's description of international law as a simple or primitive social order, one that lacks a rule of recognition and therefore does not qualify as a legal system, rests on two misunderstandings. First, the absence of a division of labor in identifying, altering, applying, and enforcing law is as much, if not more, central to Hart's understanding of what makes a society primitive as is the absence of any secondary rules at all. Second, it is primarily in terms of the presence of such a division of labor and the implications it has for the ontology …
Political Obligation, Richard Dagger, David Lefkowitz
Political Obligation, Richard Dagger, David Lefkowitz
Political Science Faculty Publications
This essay begins, therefore, with a brief history of the problem of political obligation. It then turns, in Part II, to the conceptual questions raised by political obligation, such as what it means for an obligation to be political. In Part III the focus is on the skeptics, with particular attention to the self-proclaimed philosophical anarchists, who deny that political obligations exist yet do not want to abolish the state. Part IV surveys the leading contenders among the various theories of political obligation now on offer, and Part V concludes the essay with a brief consideration of recent proposals for …
Social Contracts, Fair Play, And The Justification Of Punishment, Richard Dagger
Social Contracts, Fair Play, And The Justification Of Punishment, Richard Dagger
Political Science Faculty Publications
In recent years, the counterintuitive claim that criminals consent to their own punishment has been revived by philosophers who attempt to ground the justification of punishment in some version of the social contract. In this paper, I examine three such attempts—“contractarian” essays by Christopher Morris and Claire Finkelstein and an essay by Corey Brettschneider from the rival “contractualist” camp—and I find all three unconvincing. Each attempt is plausible, I argue, but its plausibility derives not from the appeal to a social contract but from considerations of fair play. Rather than look to the social contract for a justification of punishment, …
Legitimate Authority, Following Orders, And Wars Of Questionable Justice, David Lefkowitz
Legitimate Authority, Following Orders, And Wars Of Questionable Justice, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In this article, the author discusses philosophy teacher David Estlund's belief that subjects of a state with a morally justified claim to political authority have a duty to obey its legal commands to wage a particular war, even if they believe that the state has made a mistake in its reasons for waging the war. The author argues that Estlund's theory also allows for individuals to assess the justice of the wars they fight. He also argues that Estlund's view also holds that individual combatants should not be held accountable for any injustice of a war that the state believes …
Republicanism And Crime, Richard Dagger
Republicanism And Crime, Richard Dagger
Political Science Faculty Publications
These are but two of the difficult questions that arise when one examines the claim that crime is a public wrong. I take it, though, that their difficulty is an indication of the importance of thinking through the presuppositions and implications of this conception of crime, not a reason to abandon it. A thorough 'thinking through' is too large and complex a task for this chapter, but it is possible to make a case here for the right way to proceed with such an undertaking. That right way, in my view, is to look to the republican tradition of political …
Toward A Genealogy Of Aryan Morality: Nietzsche And Jacolloit, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
Toward A Genealogy Of Aryan Morality: Nietzsche And Jacolloit, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications
While Nietzsche’s writings of the late 1880s reveal waxing interests in Hinduism, Sanskrit philology, Aryan culture, and the related Indo-European hypothesis, these interests have been remarkably understudied by Nietzsche scholarship, with the exception of a scant few articles that have recently appeared. The presence of the aforementioned topics was crucial for the configuration of the works written in 1887 and 1888: On the Genealogy of Morality, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist, as well as for some of the notions at hand in Nietzsche’s correspondence with Heinrich Köselitz, but the provenance of the ideas that …
Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis
Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, which first appeared in three installments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861, was intended as a defense of the notorious doctrine identified with the liberal reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and with the author's father, James Mill (1773-1836). The defense was successful. While "the principle of utility, or as Bentham has latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle," may have scandalized Victorian England, Mill's Utilitarianism became one of the defining documents of modern British and American liberalism. It is impossible to appreciate contemporary social and political life without coming to grips with utilitarianism.
Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis
Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
When Principia Ethica appeared, in 1903, it became something of a sacred text for the Cambridge-educated elites-Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes-who, along with Virginia Woolf, would form the core of the Bloomsbury Group. In a letter of October 11, 1903, Strachey confesses to Moore that he is "carried away" by Principia, which inaugurates, for him, "the beginning of the Age of Reason." Moore's critique of convention, his caustic dismissal of his philosophical predecessors, and the relentless rigor of his method promised a revolution in morality commensurate with the modernist transformation of art and literature. Principia Ethica shifted …
Wittgenstein And The Recovery Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis
Wittgenstein And The Recovery Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Modern, scientific, man doesn't see miracles, only odd phenomena that call out for more thorough study. Ethics, like the miraculous, doesn't defy scientific explanation; it just doesn't exist. In what follows I hope to do two things., On the one hand, I want to embrace Wittgenstein's rejection of ethics as theory, in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge about the world. On the other, I hope to suggest that this rejection opens up conceptual space for understanding ethics as a critical human enterprise.
Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro
Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Two cautions or warnings (at least) must be heeded in the attempt to do justice to Nietzsche's project of a genealogy of morals in the text that bears that name. While the Genealogy is often regarded as the most straightforward and continuous of Nietzsche's books, he tells us in Ecce Homo that its three essays are "perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far in regard to expression, intention, and the art of surprise.” If we should think ourselves successful in penetrating to these uncanny secrets and saying what Nietzsche's text means, once and for all, we would then have …