Philosophy Commons^™

Wild-But-Not-Too-Wild Animals: Challenging Goldilocks Standards In Rewilding, Erica Von Essen, Michael P. Allen

Between the Species

Rewilding is positioned as ‘post’-conservation through its emphasis on unleashing the autonomy of natural processes. In this paper, we argue that the autonomy of nature rhetoric in rewilding is challenged by human interventions. Instead of joining critique toward the ‘managed wilderness’ approach of rewilding, however, we examine the injustices this entails for keystone species. Reintroduction case studies demonstrate how arbitrary standards for wildness are imposed on these animals as they do their assigned duty to rehabilitate ecosystems. These ‘Goldilocks’ standards are predicated on aesthetic values that sanction interventions inconsistent with the premise of animal sovereignty. These include culling, relocations and …

The Exclusion Problem And Counterfactual Theories Of Causation, Yee Hang Sze

Lingnan Theses

Jaegwon Kim famously challenged non-reductive materialism/physicalism (NRM), a popular stance in the philosophy of mind, with the so-called exclusion argument. The argument is alleged to show that if NRM is true, then mental properties cannot be causes. In recent years, there have been many reactions to the exclusion problem based on counterfactual accounts of causation. In particular, List and Menzies gave an interesting response based on a Lewis-style counterfactual theory of causation, with some modifications made to Lewis’s semantics of counterfactuals. In this thesis, I first argue that their central thesis regarding the issue of exclusion can actually be established …

理性思維與行動的統一性 : 兩個模型, I Xuan Chong

Lingnan Theses

本文從對索引性（如「這個」、「那個」、「我」）的研究開始，企圖借兩種迴異的對索引性在與心靈及行動相關之意義上的解釋為支點，來突顯兩個理解「心靈」與「行動」及「理由」甚至「理性」之間內在關係的模型。以一個「整體論式」的研究進路出發，在建立兩個模型時，我企圖找出一個平衝各種考慮的分析途徑，從而避免過於簡陋的化約論。在這樣分析的過程中，諸如「自知」、「真之條件之於解釋心靈的地位」等重要議題亦會在處理心靈與行動之間關係的脈絡中得到討論。最後，如果本文的分析是大致準確的話，那麼，對於如何理解和回應驅動本文之研究的核心問題──即我們應該如何理解這個世界才能讓「規範性」處身其中的這個所謂「規範性之定位問題」──我們便會得出兩個完全不同的思考方式。一方面，是以「命題」為核心來理解的、把規範性定位在認知－行動者就其當下處境作出整體論式的反思後依其理性機能之發揮而作出的判斷上，依此理解「理性」是「製造性」的，即不論是認知抑或行動，有關的規範性理由都是認知－行動者之理性機能運作的結果；另一方面，是以行動者所處身之「心靈狀態」為核心來理解的、把規範性定位在從行動者之思想與行動中皆有所展現出的整全人格上，依此理解「理性」是「調節性」的，即有關認知或行動的理由皆是行動者因應處境權衡而作出的。然而，本文的分析並不以能最終回答規範性之定位問題自居；相反，如果能夠得出兩個自成一系的模型，本文就算已達成其目的。

Book Review: Issa And The Meaning Of Animals: A Buddhist Poet’S Perspective By David G. Lanoue, Lisa Kemmerer

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Aesthetics, Philosophical Discussion Group, Armstrong State University

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.

Animal Experimentation As A Form Of Rescue, Alexander Zambrano Mr.

Between the Species

In this paper I explore a new approach to the ethics of animal experimentation by conceiving of it as a form of rescue. The notion of rescue, I suggest, involves some moral agent(s) performing an action or series of actions, whose end is to prevent or alleviate serious harm to another party, harm that otherwise would have occurred or would have continued to occur, had that moral agent not intervened. Animal experiments that are utilized as a means to alleviate human illnesses mirror the structure of rescue cases and this means that we can and should apply principles of rescue …

Enhancing Academic Integrity And Facing Academic Dishonesty Afternoon Plenary Session & Wrap-Up, Abbylynn Helgevold, Jennifer Waldron, Disa Lubker Cornish, Brittany Flokstra, Craig Vansandt

Ethics Conference

A core classroom value for many college and university instructors is academic integrity and honesty. Instructors often employ a range of strategies to strengthen academic integrity and limit academic dishonesty in their individual courses. By bringing together panelists from a variety of disciplines and professional experiences, who teach a range of courses in diverse formats, levels, and sizes, this panel aims to generate a discussion about how to support a culture of academic integrity. We will address these issues based on how we think about academic integrity and dishonesty, our discipline or course specific concerns, our physical and institutional environments, …

Vulnerability And Children With Disabilities: Ethical Spheres Of Concern In Research And Practice, Chris Kliewer, Susan Etscheidt

Ethics Conference

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services requires that research involving children, including highly vulnerable social categories of children, detail adequate provisions to solicit the assent of children (in addition to receiving parental permission). The purpose appears to recognize the autonomy of children.

In this presentation, we raise questions about the autonomy and rights of children in both research projects and educational/therapeutic practices (often the focus of research projects). Commonly, justification for research and/or practices proceeds from two seemingly complementary orientations: (1) a deficit/deficiency model of disability and (2) a utilitarian ethical consideration focused on a rather narrow analysis …

Stem Education, Ethics & Communication, Laura Terlip, Jeffrey Brand

Ethics Conference

This session will focus on the need for integrating ethics education in general and communication ethics specifically into K-12 STEM education. The authors will discuss their previous work on science communication and ethics and present the results of a survey conducted to ascertain K-12 educator perceptions about the need to incorporate ethics into K-12 STEM programs.

Factors Contributing To Faculty Research Misconduct, Anita Gordon, Helen Harton

Ethics Conference

This session shares selected results from a national survey, funded by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, to investigate the perceptions of research misconduct by faculty researchers from four disciplinary areas (biology, social work, sociology, and psychology). About 4,500 faculty from 107 randomly selected research-intensive and master’s comprehensive universities were invited to participate, leading to a response rate of approximately 40%. Respondents assessed scenarios depicting researcher misbehavior and reported how likely they would be to take those actions under the same circumstances. They also rated their perceptions of how wrong the actions were, how likely the actions were to become …

An Interprofessional Approach To Plagiarism Prevention, Jacqueline Meyer, Lisa Brodersen, Seth Vickers, Dana Wedeking

Ethics Conference

The Graduate Nursing program employs a comprehensive, interprofessional approach to facilitate academic integrity for Master’s of Science in Nursing and Doctor of Nursing Practice students. This panel presentation will address the various facets of this approach, focusing specifically on plagiarism prevention.

An Academic Integrity Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) addresses expectations for students in regard to all aspects of academic integrity, including plagiarism. In addition, this SOP establishes a mechanism for dealing with instances of plagiarism when they occur. As a condition of the SOP, students sign the plagiarism policy at program orientation and annually thereafter. During their “Academic Success and …

Student Perspectives On Academic Ethics, Laura Terlip, Parker Bennett, Samantha Johannsen, Toril Eintman, Lanie M. Crouse

Ethics Conference

This panel will consist of undergraduate and graduate students who will answer specific questions regarding academic ethics and discuss their positions with the audience. Case study examples will be posed for student/audience discussion and interaction.

The Ethics Of Words In An Ethical (Academic) World, Bill Koch

Ethics Conference

The topic of my presentation was prompted by a question I’ve asked students in my writing class: why is it that colleges almost uniformly require students take courses on writing and speaking in their first year of college? Why do programs like Cornerstone usually consist of courses on writing and speech and not, say, biology and business? Why are words in spoken and written form so important? My presentation will answer these questions and show that the ethical issues related to integrity and cheating can be greatly clarified when students and faculty engage more deeply, radically with their words.

This …

Cheating Resistant Pedagogies: Applying Insights From “Cheating Lessons” In The Classroom, Martha Reineke, Kim Baker, Lisa Brodersen, Timothy Adamson

Ethics Conference

Our panel discussion will focus on James Lang’s Cheating Lessons. Our goal is to capture the attention of any faculty members who suffer from plagiarism fatigue and think that everything that can be said about cheating in higher education has already been said. Our presentation will demonstrate that Lang breaks new ground. He draws on case studies of cheating, but not primarily to teach his readers about why students plagiarize or commit other academic ethics infractions. Rather, Lang invites his readers to treat each case as a distinct lesson in how students learn. Focusing on contextual rather than dispositional factors …

Applying The Model Of Human Occupation In The Development Of Consistent Ethical Behavior, Cindy Hahn, Margo Kreger

Ethics Conference

Health care education programs are struggling in preparing future graduates for ethical practice. Students need to not only develop a better understand ethics, but also value them and learn to self-evaluate their progress in becoming ethical practitioners. To this end, educators need to imbed ethics into all classes and allow for consistent skill practice. Incorporating “habitual” practice can support later consistent skill performance. According to the Model of Human Occupation (MOHO) developed by researcher and occupational therapist, Dr. Gary Kielhofner, “habituation is an internalized readiness to exhibit consistent patterns of behavior guided by our habits and roles and fitted to …

Crafting Research Writing Assignments That Emphasize Scholarly Integrity, Jessica Schreyer

Ethics Conference

This presentation will share pedagogical practices for a research writing assignment that emphasizes the development of an ethic of scholarly integrity. Geared for first-year students, the assignment is embedded in a unit on research writing that is designed to helping students understand the research and writing process. Many students are novice researchers, therefore guidance on appropriate citation and the reason for such citation is needed. In addition, students learn about how maintaining detailed records to ensure they can appropriately give credit to authors as they navigate the wide variety and type of sources available. Within this assignment, discussion and reflection …

Big Opportunities Or Big Problems?: Participants’ Views On Big Data, Helen Harton, Michael Mintz, Kristin Broussard

Ethics Conference

At the most recent convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, there were three symposia dedicated to using big data methodologies for social research. Despite this push for academic researchers to use social networking sites in experimental contexts, popular opinion often reflects negative attitudes towards researchers conducting big data experiments without acquiring fully informed consent from the users whose data is being used. Following a recent study published by Facebook (Kramer, Guillory & Hancock, 2014), concern was raised over how the researchers approached the consent process and managed the harm from perceived privacy violations (Ross, 2014). To more …

University Faculty Perceptions Of Research Practices And Misconduct, Anita Gordon, Helen Harton

Ethics Conference

This poster shares selected results from a national survey, funded by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, to investigate the perceptions of research misconduct by faculty researchers from four disciplinary areas (biology, social work, sociology, and psychology). About 4,500 faculty from 107 randomly selected research-intensive and master’s comprehensive universities were invited to participate, leading to a response rate of approximately 40%. Respondents assessed scenarios depicting researcher misbehavior and reported how likely they would be to take those actions under the same circumstances. They also rated their perceptions of how wrong the actions were, how likely the actions were to become …

The Structure Of Chinese Higher Education Corruption: A Case Statistical Analysis, Qingli Meng

Ethics Conference

Corruption in the Chinese higher educational sector is an increasing concern but it has not been systematically studied. This paper distinguishes three major intermingled structural typologies of corruption in the Chinese higher education sector: academic specific, non-academic specific and a combination of the two. Data supporting this conceptualization come from a case statistical analysis of a non-randomized sample of 215 court decisions on corruption cases detected in Chinese universities during 1994-2009, complemented with a perception-based survey in different Chinese universities. The result postulates taxonomy of the distribution of corruption among the three typologies. This study finds non-academic specific corruption cases …

The Poor Of 1984: The Roots Of George Orwell's Final Novel, James M. Lang

Ethics Conference

Most American readers know George Orwell as the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, and as such consider him a staunch critic of communism and prophet of the surveillance state. But Orwell spent much of his writing career focused on exploring the cause and nature of poverty, and remained a committed socialist until his death. This lecture will put 1984 within the full context of Orwell’s career, and especially his lifelong criticism of big business and laissez-faire capitalism.

Topic 1: Utilitarian Ethics, Lee Eysturlid

Considerations in Ethics

No abstract provided.

Art, Attention, And Consciousness: An Experiment In Experiential Painting, Ben Drewry, Johannes Kohler

Kaleidoscope

A “transformation of perception” is investigated by looking both at the interrelationship among art, attention, and consciousness and by looking into their common origin. The role attention plays in consciousness is considered. A new model of consciousness is summarized that claims that attention is the primary factor in creating consciousness, and posits a prereflective self prior to all perceptual experience. This model is compared to states of pure consciousness described by Eastern sages, and the role attention plays in achieving those states is examined. Our experiment in experiential painting is described, and we then attempt to tie together the three …

Diversity Of Depoliticization?, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

An ideologically homogeneous discipline of political psychology is a serious problem. But undoing the field's homogeneity may not suffice to address this problem. Instead, we should consider undoing the politicization.

Deification, Friendship, And Self-Knowledge, Matthew Hale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How does human friendship contribute to the process of deification? In this thesis, I will argue that a kind of “spiritual friendship” contributes to the process of deification by placing the human agent in a better position for acquiring self-knowledge, and avoiding false beliefs or misunderstandings about the self. This acquisition of self-knowledge is an important part of the deification process, which involves not just a moral and ontological transformation, but an epistemological one as well.

Nietzsche Contra Wright: On Becoming What You Are, Jordan Rodgers

Kaleidoscope

Robert Wright’s recent book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, is concerned largely with the ethical implications of recent evolutionary science, and espouses a form of utilitarianism as the ethical theory that should naturally follow evolutionary insights into human psychology. This paper challenges that notion, with constant reference to the work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, on the basis that such an ethical theory places far too little emphasis on the individual as such, and is tantamount to a form of nihilism. This paper also argues that, while seeking for the happiness of other people is a good thing, our …

Pigs Feet, Jesse W. Standlea

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

My sculpture “Pigs Feet” has literal foundations upon casts of live pig’s feet. I locally sourced the pig’s feet before casting them. My sculpture makes use of a once cutting edge casting technology, alginate. Alginate molds were once the standard in dentistry. Alginate is an appealing casting material as it is refined from brown seaweeds, is both food and skin safe, it is suitable for educators, for artists and engineers alike.

What Difference Does It Make? An Essay Review Of Beyond Versus: The Struggle To Understand The Interaction Of Nature And Nurture; James Tabery; Mit Press: Cambridge, Ma, 2014, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

Beyond versus makes its contribution to the thriving industry of books that clarify or recast nature-nurture issues through seven conceptual moves. The first is to posit a divide between sociological and philosophical inquiry. As Tabery depicts them, commentators on the science invoked in nature-nurture debates often focus on the racist or other political views of disputants or on their flawed understanding of scientific concepts. Tabery, in contrast, as a philosopher of science, explains past and present disagreements as stemming from “a disagreement concerning how explanation works in science.” (The other moves include explanatory and terminological divides, connecting associations to mechanisms, …

Bedecke Deinen Himmel, Zeus! Goethe And The Quest For Individual Sovereignty, Anthony D. Magestro

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

This project examines Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) and his early poetry and their influence on the German literary movement of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress, 1770-1785). As a reaction to the rise of rationalism, Goethe’s texts embody the value of raw, subjective emotion versus logical, objective understanding of the preceding Enlightenment period. Through his literature, Goethe challenges the status quo of absolute rule of church and state as well as humanity’s relationship with God: are we bound to the laws of the Almighty’s design or are …

Autopoiesis: Self-Creation In Nietzsche, Andrew Crown-Weber

Kaleidoscope

A recurrent theme in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is his imperative that we must create ourselves. Though this theme of self-creation runs throughout the entirety of his published works, Nietzsche neither fully articulates in one place the processes and guidelines by which such self-creation could occur, nor does he fully resolve the paradoxes inherent in this concept. This paper attempts to distill from these fragments a coherent interpretation of both how we can and why we should, despite (or, paradoxically, because of) our many external and internal constraints, fashion ourselves the way an artist shapes a work of art.

Does Artwork Have To Be Beautiful?, Sister Mary Benedicta Maier Rsm

Aristos

Beauty’s relation to art work is a contentious problem for the philosophy of art. The problem is not new to the history of philosophy. Hume and Kant attempted to tackle the question in the modern era. Contemporary philosophers have broadened the definition of art to include works that stretch modern philosophers’ conceptions. With philosophers shifting their definition from the object to the subject, they have effectively marginalized beauty in place of another good or valued concept.

Considering the status quo, this paper argues that beauty is a necessary condition for art work. It argues that philosophers have a problem …