Philosophy Commons^™

A Kantian View Of Transgenderism, Michael S. Mendoza

Eleutheria: John W. Rawlings School of Divinity Academic Journal

• The recent popularity of sex reassignment surgery is logically untenable and immoral when understood in the light of Kantian philosophy. From a Kantian perspective of synthetic a priori judgments, I argue that a biological male cannot rationally claim to “feel like a woman inside.” As a male, any female is part of the noumenal world and cannot be known apart from perception. The statement “I feel like a woman inside” assumes all women feel the same on the inside. Kant’s explanation of the noumenal and phenomenal excludes the possibility of knowing that all women or men feel the same inside …

Empathy And Fairness In Nonhuman Primates: Evolutionary Bases Of Human Morality, Colt Halter

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

Darwin offered an evolutionary perspective on the origins of human morality, suggesting that humans share a biological foundation with nonhuman primates. This paper reviews the current literature on moral and prosocial behaviors of nonhuman primates, specifically examining whether nonhuman primates exhibit behaviors that are typical of empathy and fairness. The literature documents that nonhuman primates exhibit empathetic behaviors regarding emotional contagion and sympathetic concern. There is also evidence that nonhuman primates have a sense of fairness, seen in their reciprocal behaviors and aversion to inequity. Taken together, this suggests that there are evolutionary roots of morality, lending empirical support to …