Applied Ethics Commons^™

Moral Issues In Business, Andre Dobronic Parola

Open Educational Resources

In this course students will initially be introduced to different ethical theories as well as two different theories of justice. Subsequently—following an introduction to basic economical ideas concerning the place of businesses and corporations in modern capitalistic society—various questions specific to business ethics will be taken up. Topics will include: arguments for and against the stakeholder theory of business ethics; corporate social responsibility; the problem of sex-based discrimination in the workplace-setting; business and the environment; globalisation; and lying in business negotiations.

War Photography & The Limits Of Empathy, Andrea Shi

Student Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of photography, particularly war and poverty photography, has had massive implications for the level of vividness with which Americans are able to picture suffering beyond their doors. The mass atrocities that have occurred since the advent of photography – that is to say, the last 200 years – are so relentlessly circulated that they feel, sometimes, as an inevitable byproduct of human nature. It’s not surprising, then, that a lot of media theory and analysis reduce the dilemma of atrocity photographs to a psychological level. Do they numb us, or do they incite empathy? Are they a call …

Free Speech On The Web And Its Limits, Moris Stern

Open Educational Resources

This assignment uses ChatGPT as a learning tool to examine the democratic justification and limits of free speech on the web. Students analyze arguments for and against online free expression through Kantian respect for persons and Utilitarian maximization of overall well-being. Using AI-generated historical and controversial cases, students evaluate whether specific instances of free speech are morally justifiable, challenge their own conclusions with AI-constructed counterarguments, and critically assess AI-generated summaries. The assignment emphasizes philosophical reasoning, ethical analysis, and reflective engagement with AI as an academic tool.

Liberalism And Lockdowns, D. Robert Macdougall

Publications and Research

Some authors have argued that liberalism cannot support lockdowns because it cannot engage in collective welfare-type reasoning. Others have thought that liberalism can justify lockdown measures, but that legitimate lockdown measures must be based on pre-legal moral principles that set acceptable limits to the imposition of risk or forbid contributing to collective harm. In this essay, I assess the overall relationship between liberalism and lockdowns. Against the first interpretation of liberalism, I argue in favor of the idea that lockdowns can be justified by liberalism. Liberalism protects the liberty of each and so can presumably protect persons from some kinds …

Living Heritage, Resilience And Ethically Informed Infrastructures In Malawi, Martha B. Lerski, Frank Puluputu Mwale

Publications and Research

Rooted in a rural community’s needs, this paper explores how historically, and ethically informed infrastructures can support community engagement towards identification, documentation, and dissemination of local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge relating to climate change. The paper examines climate adaptation and sustainability issues through the lenses of community organizing and Library & Information Science best practices. It draws on a growing body of literature identifying a role for expanded epistemological and subject discipline perspectives. While the impacts of climate on material culture are increasingly recognized, intangible, and biocultural heritage have not received as much attention. Living heritage traditions and knowledge systems …

Arts-Based Sustainability: From New York To Malawi, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Recognizing that libraries serve multiple constituencies and subject areas, this chapter documents and advocates for development of transdisciplinary arts-based research (ABR) and culture-related projects linked to environmental challenges. Libraries contribute collections and spaces, as well as the research of library and information scientists. Libraries are currently among invisible contributors to sustainability planning and services. The chapter will link this invisibility to the value of what visual arts refer to as negative space elements in subjects ranging from traditional ecological knowledge to environmental science. Library collections, projects, and research contribute to education for sustainable development (ESD) as required to achieve the …

Not Meant To Be Read: The Stories They Silence, The Resistance That Speaks, Cristina Onea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I trace the evolution of surveillance from overt state violence to the more insidious forms of ideological policing embedded in everyday life. Through lived experience, oral history, and critical autoethnography, I explore how surveillance moves through bodies, families, institutions, and memory—not simply as external control, but as internalized rhythms of fear, vigilance, and self-surveillance. I move between my father's life under Romanian dictatorship, my own embodied inheritance, and the contemporary struggles of librarians facing ideological suppression to reveal surveillance as a structure that persists through generations, mutates across contexts, and demands new forms of resistance.

I argue …

What's The Art In Artificial Intelligence?, Emily Verla Bovino

Open Educational Resources

This workbook learns from Black and Indigenous artists working with Artificial Intelligence to confront issues of ethics and aesthetics in its technologies. It features guided learning activities with links to publicly available video lectures and online articles, and includes options for experiential learning through both a tutorial in Midjourney and a visit to the public art collection at York College in Jamaica, Queens. Featured artists include: American Artist, Rizvana Bradley, Beth Coleman, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Kite, Sondra Perry, Mimi Onuoha and Alisha B. Wormsley. Works by Martin Puryear and Maren Hassinger are explored in the Midjourney exercise.

About …

Navigating Climate Action: The River As Teacher For Eco-Literacy, Educational Regeneration And Creative Participation, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cultures' engagements with land and its more-than-human elements reveal their attitudes toward these dimensions, spanning a spectrum from reciprocal to transactional practices. In time, these engagements form a body of knowledges that nurtures the culture and its land, or arrests their vital and diverse qualities. This research project aims to bring to light how the different ways of engaging with and relating to land are embedded in knowledge production, distribution and communication—in short, in general educational endeavors and their philosophies—to promote a better understanding of the principles of eco-literacy. Additionally, a purpose of this project is to provide insights into …

Engaging Ethics In Technology And Artificial Intelligence, Elizabeth Edenberg

Open Educational Resources

This project seeks to help students apply philosophical questions about the ethics of technology and artificial intelligence to contemporary debates about AI’s impact on society and students’ own lives. It includes a set of in-class active learning exercises and reflection assignments, along with instructions for moderating class discussion of these topics. This is designed to pair with three units in a course on the ethics of technology: privacy, consent, and algorithmic fairness. Each exercise aims to help students connect the philosophical theories studied in class to their own lived experiences with technology.

Is Sexyy Red Minstrelsy, Or Are We Overreacting?, Malik Brizan-Reed

Capstones

This criticism piece explores the controversial female rapper Sexyy Red. It challenges negative perspectives about her persona, primarily based on respectability politics. It highlights Sexyy Red's ability to capitalize on a moment and business savviness. The article has themes of racial double standards and classism. Sexyy Red is more than the "ghetto Black girl," aesthetic. She's a mother and entrepreneur who is authentic to herself.

Complicity, Eliana Luxemburg-Peck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What does it mean to be complicit in diffuse collective wrongs like structural racism, gender-based oppression, or environmental damage, and what responsibilities are entailed by complicity? Moral philosophers have often understood complicity to consist in some degree of inherited culpability, arising from knowing or intentional contributions to the bad acts of a primary wrongdoer. But these theories fail to explain complicity in the foregoing contexts, and cannot justify needed efforts to hold individuals accountable for unwitting contributions to systemic wrongs and injustices. In response to this gap, my dissertation defends a novel reconceptualization of complicity as participation in collectively perpetrated …

Veggie Meat Alternatives: A Virtue-Ethical View, Carlo Alvaro

Publications and Research

This chapter discusses practical and ethical aspects concerning veggie meat alternatives. Upon consideration, it is argued that while the production, sale, and consumption of veggie meat alternatives seemingly contribute to a solution to environmental problems, we ought to consider veggie meat alternatives from a virtue-ethical perspective concerning human excellence and flourishing. Doing so reveals previously unexplored ethical reasons for not promoting the production, sale, and consumption of veggie meat alternatives. One reason in particular is that veggie meat alternatives stem from the lack of the virtue of temperance.

Organizational Good Epistemic Practices, Lisa Warenski

Publications and Research

Epistemic practices are an important but underappreciated component of business ethics; good conduct requires making epistemically sound as well as morally principled judgments. Well-founded judgments are promoted by epistemic virtues, and for organizations, epistemic virtues are arguably achieved through organizational good epistemic practices. But how are such practices to be developed? This paper addresses this normative and practical challenge. The first half of the paper explains what organizational good epistemic practices are and outlines a means for their construction. The second half of the paper demonstrates how specific good epistemic practices could be developed by considering a case of corporate …

Survivor-Shaped Specters And Gaps, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

...survivors are disappearing from academia. Our schools, our syllabi, our classrooms, our bibliographies, our campuses, our research labs, our thesis committees, our libraries, our conference panels, our departments, our programs, and our monographs are riddled through and through with survivor-shaped gaps. Each gap is a place in academia where someone has gone missing due to bullying, harassment, retaliation, predation, sexual assault, mobbing, and/or other abuses of power. Some of these gaps are shaped like allies who have left academia due to moral injury. Not every gap, moreover, is shaped like a survivor. Not every victim survives.

Green Is The New Black: Exploring How A Philosophical Approach To The Fashion Industry Will Reduce Its Environmental Impact, Darion A. Gibbs

Student Theses and Dissertations

The fashion industry is the third largest contributor to pollution globally, behind only oil and agriculture. It also accounts for one-fifth of the plastic produced annually. Despite its impact, it is hard to trace accountability. For example, mega-retailers often outsource production to developing countries, without strong structures of accountability for their environmental impact. In addition, companies often claim to be environmentally sustainable, but it is easy to inflate the truth, and entities designed to protect consumers have limited enforcement. In this context, who should be held responsible for the fashion industry’s contribution to climate change?

In response, this thesis delves …

Ethical Subjectivism: A Lost Cause, Carlo Alvaro

Publications and Research

Individual relativism, also known as ethical subjectivism, is an attractive theory about morality. It argues that morality is a matter relative to the individual in a way akin to personal taste. For example, subjectivists regard the ethical judgment ‘Stealing is wrong’ as comparable with the judgment of taste ‘I dislike Brussels sprouts’. Yet, subjectivism is not nihilism. While nihilism denies the existence of moral value, duties, principles and truths, subjectivism claims that they exist, but they are subjective like taste. In this paper, I argue that ethical subjectivism ought to be rejected as it is an incoherent, undefendable, and a …

Balanced Blended Space: Foundational Human–Ai Dialogues In A Symmetry-Based Mediation Framework, David Smith

Publications and Research

This working paper documents the early development of the Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework through a series of iterative interactions between a cognitive agent (human researcher) and a computational agent (AI system) conducted in 2023. The work is motivated by the need for a universal theoretical model capable of describing the integration of physical, virtual, and conceptual spaces, particularly in response to increasing fragmentation across contemporary communication systems.

BBS is proposed as a symmetry-based mediation framework in which relationships between domains—such as physical and virtual space, cognition and computation, and multiple sensory modalities—are treated as structurally equivalent and mappable. Central …

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

Computer Ethics In Curriculum, Tiya Williams

Publications and Research

Ethics specifically in Computer Curriculum is a growing problem that has yet to be widely addressed. Although, start of computer ethics being taught has been traced back to the early 1940’s it has not been standardized or implemented in all computer curriculum. The objective of this research is to diagnose the reasons why ethics is so crucial in computer curriculum at all levels. I used surveys to investigate whether students were taught ethics in their computer curriculum. I also conducted surveys for professors at universities and colleges if they were taught ethics while obtaining their degree, as well as if …

A Virtue-Ethical Approach To Cultured Meat, Carlo Alvaro

Publications and Research

The proposed benefits of cultured meat fail to track our moral intuitions because they are focused on the practical aspect of cultured meat production and consumption. A virtue-oriented approach can show cultured meat in a different light.

Epistemic Priors, Social Justice, And The Ethics Of Humor, Paul Butterfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I set out a theory of humor ethics and, in particular, I establish what difference humorousness makes to an instance of speech’s moral value. I set out by making the case for this approach to the topic, demonstrating that focusing on how humorous speech differs, morally, from non-humorous speech allows us to avoid getting caught up in prior ethical debates that are not strictly about humor itself – a shortcoming that is common to many treatments of humor ethics in the existing literature. I show that, in cases of humorous speech, we typically do not assert the …

Meat May Never Die, Carlo Alvaro

Publications and Research

The goal of ethical veganism is a vegan world or, at least, a significantly vegan world. However, despite the hard work done by vegan activists, global meat consumption has been increasing. Vegan advocates have focused on ethics but have ignored the importance of tradition and identity. And the advent of veggie meat alternatives has promoted food that emulates animal products thereby perpetuating the meat paradigm. I suggest that, in order to make significant changes toward ending animal exploitation, ethical vegans give more attention to tradition and identity. Furthermore, I propose that raw veganism is the most ethical diet and can …

Phil 2103, Ethics, Syllabus, D. Robert Macdougall

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Righting Health Policy: Bioethics, Political Philosophy, And The Normative Justification Of Health Law And Policy, D. Robert Macdougall

Publications and Research

In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics’ tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. On this account the legitimacy of health laws does …

Must Consent Be Informed? Patient Rights, State Authority, And The Moral Basis Of The Physician's Duties Of Disclosure, D. Robert Macdougall

Publications and Research

Legal standards of disclosure in a variety of jurisdictions require physicians to inform patients about the likely consequences of treatment, as a condition for obtaining the patient’s consent. Such a duty to inform is special insofar as extensive disclosure of risks and potential benefits is not usually a condition for obtaining consent in non-medical transactions.

What could morally justify the physician’s special legal duty to inform? I argue that existing justifications have tried but failed to ground such special duties directly in basic and general rights, such as autonomy rights. As an alternative to such direct justifications, I develop an …

Informed Consent: Foundations And Applications, Joanna Smolenski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since its advent in the 20th century, informed consent has become a cornerstone of ethical healthcare, and obtaining it a core obligation in medical contexts. In my dissertation, I aim to examine the theoretical underpinnings of informed consent and identify what values it is taken to protect. I will suggest that the fundamental motivation behind informed consent rests in something I’ll call bodily self-sovereignty, which I argue involves a coupling of two groups of values: autonomy and non-domination on the one hand, and self-ownership and personal integrity on the other. I will then go on to consider two 'case …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Phil 302: Ethics In The Workplace, Cuny School Of Professional Studies

Open Educational Resources

Introduces the philosophical frameworks used to guide ethical practice in the workplace. Using a case study approach, the course provides an analysis and critique of significant moral issues existing throughout business and industry in both domestic and international markets. Topics covered include classical and contemporary ethical theories, codes of professional conduct, issues such as consent and privacy, and environmental and social responsibilities at the personal, managerial, and organizational level.

Legal Purgatory: Why Some Animals Are Neither Persons Nor Property, Sharisse Kanet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All animals with non-borderline sentience are deserving of certain legal considerations independent of their use and relationship to human beings. That is, all sentient beings should have some rights. Given the current organization of the U.S. legal system, which divides all entities into property or persons, it is not surprising that animals are relegated to property status. I put forth a proposal to fix this whose central suggestion is that we create a third legal designation, legal patient, into which all non-person sentient animals (those which do not properly belong on either current category) would fit. These animals would receive …