Philosophy Commons^™

Minding Nature: A Defense Of A Sentiocentric Approach To Environmental Ethics, Joel P. Macclellan

Doctoral Dissertations

Environmental philosophers allege that philosophical views supporting the animal liberation movement are theoretically and practically inconsistent with environmentalism. While it is true that some animal ethicists argue that we ought to intervene extensively in nature such as the prevention of predation, these views take controversial positions in value theory and normative theory: (i) hedonism as a value theory, and (ii) a view of normativity which places the good before the right, e.g. maximizing utilitarianism, or a rights theory that includes strong positive rights, i.e. animals are entitled to a certain level of welfare or protection from harm. Importantly, environmental philosophers’ …

Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins

Doctoral Dissertations

In the lyric tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets and James Wright’s odes to the Midwest, the poems in Collateral interrogate the complexities of faith and doubt in middle-class America and present a witness compelled to translate suburbia’s landscapes and evangelical banalities into a testimony of hard truths. These poems explore the emotional exhaustion that accompanies language’s broken connection to ideal meaning and how both are unable to fully correspond to our lives. The manuscript is also an exploration of my own corresponding lyric struggle to reconcile what is and what should be, the personal and the political …

When One Should Forgive: Eirenistic Responses To Wrongdoing, David Court Lewis

Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation I use Nicholas Wolterstorff’s conception of the good life (eirenéism), which serves as the foundation for his theory of rights, to argue for a new ethics of forgiveness that incorporates the necessary relational features of forgiveness, while at the same time providing substantive normative guidance in regards to when one should forgive. I, then, show that eirenistic forgiveness implies there is an obligation to forgive: a repentant wrongdoer has a right to be forgiven that creates certain obligations for victims to forgive.

I, like Wolterstorff, find such an implication repugnant, and so I spend the majority of …