Applied Ethics Commons^™

Little Gods And Little Heroes: Hyperreal Ethics In God Games And Online Gaming, G. Christopher Williams

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Media critics, notably Jean Baudrillard, have suggested that the environment of simulations are to be defined as something more real than the real, or, in his terms, hyperreal. If hyperrealities are indeed the way that we can define the environment of multimedia technologies like video games, what sorts of ethical considerations should exist in a place that gamers conceive as more real than the real? This essay considers what ethical considerations are worth contemplating as gamers begin to take on the roles of gods and heroes in multiplayer video games. The little gods and heroes whose identities gamers have begun …

Burn The Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics, Simone Roberts

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Prologue]

The following essay has a purpose more than a thesis. This essay explains the central tenets of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference through an understanding her work as that of a symbolist philosopher. Symbolist poetry and French Feminist philosophy like Irigaray's have several qualities in common. One is that the literal level of language is not where the action is. A reader must think associatively on many levels at once in order to gather and interpret the several indirect messages sent by a particular image or metaphor. Another is an acquired comfort with paradox. Paradoxes lie …

Toward A Posthuman Ethics, Dongshin Yi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editor's Introduction]

Setting a posthuman ethics as a goal toward which the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics must move, Yi in his essay, Toward a Posthuman Ethics, points out that the collaboration is detained because current debates on the cyborg harbor on the question of representations and consider how political, social and cultural problems of the human are reconfigured, and possibly resolved, by the cyborg. Thus, the debates are bound to be retrospective in approach and circular in direction, as they fail to recognize new possibilities that the cyborg may present. Arguing that the failure indicates the cyborg is being …

Hegel, Nietzsche, And The Postmodern Teleological Impasse, Michael P. Tarpey

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Our postmodern intellectual climate is characterized by two apparently contradictory impulses. One seeks to undermine, unmask, and deflate the pretenses of philosophy as traditionally conceived. The result is a focus on difference, surfaces, and fragmentation. The competing impulse seeks to reconcile, integrate, and synthesize. The result is a holistic focus on deeper similarities behind surface differences. I argue that these competing impulses can be traced back to Hegel and Nietzsche. Thus, an understanding of the relationship between these two thinkers can illuminate our current postmodern condition. I argue that Nietzsche and Hegel are remarkably similar in their approach to many …

Searching For Zarathustra: A Nietzschean Critique Of Post-Traditional Ethical Theory, Joshua Knutsen

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Following Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of ethics, twentieth century philosophical investigations into ethics have attempted to abandon the universalist principles which guided the endeavors of Christianity, Kant and Bentham. The purpose of this work was to examine exactly how successful that endeavor has been. In order to represent the field of ethics as a whole given the limited space of the work I chose three distinct ethics, which in their formulations are representative of the current ethical clime. Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism serves as a model for radical individualism and solipsism. Alasdair MacIntyre' s virtue based ethic demonstrates communitarian trends. And the …