Applied Ethics Commons^™

Abortion And The Right To Not Be Pregnant, James E. Mahon

Publications and Research

In this paper I defend Judith Jarvis Thomson's 'Good Samaritan Argument' (otherwise known as the 'feminist argument') for the permissibility of abortion, first advanced in her important, ground-breaking article 'A Defense of Abortion' (1971), against objections from Joseph Mahon (1979, 1984). I also highlight two problems with Thomson's argument as presented, and offer remedies for both of these problems. The article begins with a short history of the importance of the article to the development of practical ethics. Not alone did this article put the topic of the abortion on the philosophical map, but it made 'practical ethics' in the …

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

Sheila Lintott, “Friendship And Bias: Ethical And Epistemic Considerations,”, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Kierkegaard On Truth, Caroline Moore

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Many philosophers believe in three types of truth and all of them are considered objective: correspondence, coherence and pragmatist. Objective knowledge “can designate a knowledge-claim having, roughly, the status of being fully supported or proven.”i If asked, philosophers often say that they believe in a mixture of two or more of the objective truths because each of the truths has points of weakness. While the objective truths cover much of what is considered to be valid truth, they all leave something out, subjective truth. Subjective truth is “a judgment or belief’ “that is compelling for some rational beings (subjects) but …

The Role Of Memory In Forgiveness: A Post-Forgiveness Investigation, Zachariah Berry

Library Research Prize Student Works

There is a fundamental importance and value in maintaining a memory of wrongs done in the past. What do we do, however, when we think that we have forgiven someone, but aspects from the past wrong continue to manifest in our conscious awareness? Some may argue that the victim ought to suppress the memory of the wrong. Yet, as I maintain, doing so causes the victim to lose the moral value associated with the memory of the wrong. Maintaining the memory of a past wrong, however, may cause the victim to re-experience the negative emotions corresponding to a past wrong …

Can One Love The Distant Other? Empathy, Affiliation, And Cosmopolitanism, Gregory R. Peterson

School of American and Global Studies Faculty Publications with a Focus on History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion

An ongoing debate in political and moral philosophy concerns the nature of international obligations. While cosmopolitans argue that duties of justice are independent of national borders, statists argue otherwise, sometimes basing their account on the limitations of our empathic concern, a line of argument found much earlier in Adam Smith. Although critics argue that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality, and although statists imply that psychological limitations of the kind that would be based in empathy prevent the realization of commitments to distant others beyond humanitarian aid, I argue that both these views are incorrect. While the possession …

Validating Animal Models, Nina Atanasova

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

This paper responds to a recent challenge for the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge from laboratory animals to humans. According to this challenge, experimental neurobiology, and thus neuroscience, is in a state of crisis because the knowledge produced in different laboratories hardly generalizes from one laboratory to another. Presumably, this is so because neurobiological laboratories use simplified animal models of human conditions that differ across laboratories. By contrast, I argue that maintaining a multiplicity of experimental protocols and simple models is well justified. It fosters rather than precludes the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge. The discipline is thriving

Ethics In The U. S. Navy, Walter E. Carter Jr.

United States Navy: Publications

First paragraph:

The U. S. military is among the most trusted of American institutions. The trust accorded to the U. S. Navy by the American people derives from our status as members of the military profession. Only to the degree that the Navy is, and is perceived to be, trustworthy can we maintain our status as the naval profession in American society.

Last paragraph:

Our official Navy ethos charges that:

We are patriots, forged by the Navy's core values of Honor, Courage and Commitment. In times of war and peace, our actions reflect our proud heritage and tradition.

Our goal, …

Nursing Ethics And The 21st-Century Armed Conflict: The Example Of Ciudad Juárez, Kathleen A. O'Connor

Departmental Papers (S&A)

The purpose of this article is to call attention to the lack of caregiver safety in conflict settings; to bring awareness to nurses and health care professionals of new challenges, specifically the deliberate targeting of health care professionals, that they may encounter in local armed conflict situations; and to address a gap in knowledge about the social and cultural factors surrounding 21st-century armed conflict that directly affect the provision of health care. I argue that these are of interest to transcultural nursing in that violent actors belong to a dangerous subculture, the understanding of which is important to transcultural nursing …

Xuanzang’S Text Of Bodhisattva Precepts, Ronald S. Green, Chanju Mun

Philosophy and Religious Studies

A translation from the Chinese with annotations.

Can Culture Justify Infant Circumcision?, Eldar Sarajlic

Publications and Research

The paper addresses arguments in the recent philosophical and bioethical literature claiming that social and cultural benefits can justify non-therapeutic male infant circumcision. It rejects these claims by referring to the open future argument, according to which infant circumcision is morally unjustifiable because it violates the child’s right to an open future. The paper also addresses an important objection to the open future argument and examines the strength of the objection to refute the application of the argument to the circumcision case.

Becoming The Real Deal: Building A Life Of Integrity, Howard R. Macy

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

The Beane Lecture, given at William Penn University in Oskaloosa, Iowa April 1, 2014.

From the conclusion: "As we choose to persist in the habits of truth-telling, transparency, and trustworthiness, we can build lives of integrity. We can be “the real deal.” I could make a strong case for doing this based on biblical teaching. But frankly, I think that almost universally we want integrity in our life together, in our relationships, in our business and agreements with one another, in our leadership, and in our courts. We like people who tell the truth, who are genuine, and who we …

Ethical And Legal Knowledge, Cognitive Complexity, And Moral Reasoning In Counseling Students, Matthew W. Bonner

Counseling & Human Services Theses & Dissertations

Accrediting, credentialing, and counseling association bodies require counselors to possess ethical and legal knowledge and an understanding of applying ethical and legal standards to effectively serve clients. Prior to the creation of an ethical and legal knowledge instrument, scholars had theorized a relationship among ethical and legal knowledge, cognitive development, and ethical decision-making in counseling. With the creation of a new instrument for ethical and legal knowledge, ethical and legal knowledge could be assessed with extensively used constructs such as moral reasoning for ethical decision-making and cognitive complexity for cognitive development. This study investigated ethical and legal knowledge and cognitive …

Free Education, Matthew J. Magliacane

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

This honors thesis examines the apparent tension between the demands of individual rights as articulated by Ayn Rand and the human need for education. First, the implications of a right to education are identified and explicated. An argument is then set forth from Rand's principles that the human right to education, insofar as it imposes a duty on individuals to provide an education for others through taxation is without moral justification. Likely objections are articulated and answered throughout the paper.

Compensation Ethics And Organizational Commitment, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

If an employee is committed to his firm – if he is “attached” or “bound” to it – then his firm may be able to obtain a discount on his labor. This paper asks: Is it wrong for firms to do so? If we understand just or fair pay solely in terms of voluntary agreements between employers and employees, the answer seems to be ‘no’. Against this, I argue that, in some cases, it is ‘yes’. In particular, it is wrong for firms to try to obtain discounts on their committed employees’ labor when their employees reasonably expect that they …

Corporations, The Democratic Deficit, And Voting, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Many writers argue that a “democratic deficit” is created when private actors such as corporations take on state functions. The problem, it is said, is that the course of public life is being shaped by agents who are not accountable to the public. We evaluate this claim and consider what should be done about it. We focus in particular on a recent attempt, put forward principally by Palazzo and Scherer, to address the democracy deficit by “democratizing” corporations. We argue that their proposal, while promising, has a significant defect. We then propose a remedy for this defect. In sum, our …

Case Study: The Ibar Bridge Attack, Walter E. "Ted" Carter Jr.

United States Navy: Publications

In 1999, I was the commanding officer of the VF-14 ‘Tophatters’, an F-14 squadron assigned to Carrier Air Wing Eight embarked in USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71). We were flying F- 14A Tomcats, the oldest Tomcats in the fleet, modified for the air-to-ground mission with the Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infra-Red for Night (LANTIRN) system. Departing in late March 1999 for a planned six-month deployment, we made a quick transit across the Atlantic Ocean with orders to be prepared for action in the Balkans. On 6 April, our squadron conducted combat operations in support of Operation Allied Force (North …

Xuanzang’S Manual For Conferring The Bodhisattva Precepts, Ronald S. Green, Chanju Mun

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This is a translation of the Manual on the Procedures for Conferring the Bodhisattva Precepts (T.24.1499.1104c19- 1106b27) by Xuanzang (602-664) and the preface to it written by the monk Jingmai (T.24.1499.1106c3-29). Xuanzang was a Chinese monk and a translator of Buddhist scriptures. Although it is recorded that Xuanzang translated this manual in 649, he may have written it himself based on the Yoga-ca-- s rabhu-mi-s´astra in 100 fascicles. After travel through Central Asia and India from 629 (or 627?) to 645, he translated 75 Buddhist scriptures in 1,335 fascicles into Chinese, including a number of major Yoga-ca-ra Buddhist texts. He …

Lying For The Sake Of The Truth: The Ethics Of Deceptive Journalism, James E. Mahon

Publications and Research

Should journalists go undercover and misrepresent who they are in order to write exposé stories? This chapter examines the case of Ken Silverstein, the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine. Silverstein lied to lobbying firms about being a prospective client so he could expose firms' strategies to help tyrannical regimes and dictators. Although a utilitarian ethical approach would dictate that Silverstein should have gone undercover and lied to obtain the truth, an approach based on virtue ethics would discourage such actions.

Practicing Hope, Rebecca Konyndyk Deyoung

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

In this essay, I consider how the theological virtue of hope might be practiced. I will first explain Thomas Aquinas's account of this virtue, including its structural relation to the passion of hope, its opposing vices, and its relationship to the friendship of charity. Then, using narrative and character analysis from the film The Shawshank Redemption, I examine a range of hopeful and proto-hopeful practices concerning both the goods one hopes for and the power one relies on to attain those goods. In particular, I show how the film's picture of the role friends and friendship play in catalyzing …

Knowing The Standard American Diet By Its Fruits: Is Unrestrained Omnivorism Spiritually Beneficial?, Matthew C. Halteman

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This essay aims to challenge the standard [North] American diet's (SAD) default status in church and among North American Christians generally. It attempts to allay some common concerns about the suitability of food ethics as a topic for serious Christian discernment, and argues that SAD is not spiritually beneficial, drawing support from five traditional sources for Christian moral deliberation, including and especially general revelation and discernment of the fruits of the spirit.

Machines And The Moral Community, Erica L. Neely

Philosophy and Religion Faculty Scholarship

A key distinction in ethics is between members and nonmembers of the moral community. Over time, our notion of this community has expanded as we have moved from a rationality criterion to a sentience criterion for membership. I argue that a sentience criterion is insufficient to accommodate all members of the moral community; the true underlying criterion can be understood in terms of whether a being has interests. This may be extended to conscious, self-aware machines, as well as to any autonomous intelligent machines. Such machines exhibit an ability to formulate desires for the course of their own existence; this …

Angels, The Space Of Time, And Apocalyptic Blindness: On Günther Anders’ Endzeit — Endtime, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Anders was a preeminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb as he saw this hermeneutico-phenomenologically in the visceral sense of being and time: the sheer that of its having been used (where the Nietzschean dialectic of the ‘having been’ reflects the essence of modern technology) as well as the bland politics of nuclear proliferation functions as programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defense and deterrence. The tactic of sheerly technological, automatic, mechanical, aggression is carried out in good conscience. The preemptive strike is, as Baudrillard observed, the opponent’s fault: such are the wages of evil. Violence …

Smilansky, Arneson, And The Asymmetry Of Desert, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Desert plays an important role in most contemporary theories of retributive justice, but an unimportant role in most contemporary theories of distributive justice. Saul Smilansky has recently put forward a defense of this asymmetry. In this study, I argue that it fails. Then, drawing on an argument of Richard Arneson’s, I suggest an alternative consequentialist rationale for the asymmetry. But while this shows that desert cannot be expected to play the same role in distributive justice that it can play in retributive justice, it does not fully vindicate the asymmetry, since desert can still play an important role in the …

Between Law And Markets: Is There A Role For Culture And Ethics In Financial Regulation?, Dan Awrey, William Blair, David Kershaw

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The limits of markets as mechanisms for constraining socially suboptimal behavior are well documented. Simultaneously, conventional approaches toward the law and regulation are often crude and ineffective mechanisms for containing the social costs of market failure. So where do we turn when both law and markets fail to live up to their social promise? Two possible answers are culture and ethics. In theory, both can help constrain socially undesirable behavior in the vacuum between law and markets. In practice, however, both exhibit manifest shortcomings.

To many, this analysis may portend the end of the story. From our perspective, however, it …

Salutary Slander, Rebecca Konyndyk Deyoung

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Review of The Virtues of our Vices, by Emrys Westacott

Review Of The Psychology And Character Of Virtue, Ed. Craig Steven Titus, Rebecca Konyndyk Deyoung

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Justice In Compensation: A Defense, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Business ethicists have written much about ethical issues in employment. Except for a handful of articles on the very high pay of chief executive officers and the very low pay of workers in overseas sweatshops, however, little has been written about the ethics of compensation. This is prima facie strange. Workers care about their pay, and they think about it in normative terms. This article's purpose is to consider whether business ethicists' neglect of the normative aspects of compensation is justified. I examine several possible justifications for neglecting compensation and show that they fail. What remains is a case for …

Martin Heidegger On Günther Anders And Technology: On Ray Kurzweil, Fritz Lang, And Transhumanism, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Between God And Man: Community's Place In Virtue, Practical Reason, And Transcendent Good, Jordan Herz Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Talbot Brewer's Retrieval of Ethics and Robert Adams's Finite and Infinite Goods present distinct theories in ethics and metaethics. Brewer begins with the fundamental ethical perspective of the practical deliberator who experiences his practical deliberations as a continuous, unified, and constantly revised activity which begins with inchoate intimations of goodness and proceeds better or worse to understand and pursue the goodness which pervades his evaluative outlook. From this Brewer aims to account for how we achieve excellence in practical deliberation and arrive at a more tenable and self-consistent evaluative outlook which informs our ethical deliberations. Alternately, Adams begins in the …