Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

American Populism Shouldn’T Have To Embrace Ignorance, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Public ignorance is an inherent threat to democracy. It breeds superstition, prejudice, and error; and it prevents both a clear-eyed understanding of the world and the formulation of wise policies to adapt to that world.

Plato believed it was more than a threat: He thought it characterized democracies, and would lead them inevitably into anarchy and ultimately tyranny. But the liberal democracies of the modern era, grudgingly extending suffrage, have extended public education in parallel, in the hope of cultivating an informed citizenry. Yet today, given the persistence and severity of public ignorance, the ideal of an enlightened electorate seems …

Debating Humanitarian Intervention: Should We Try To Save Strangers?, Fernando R. Tesón, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"When violence breaks out in a country, foreign governments face a difficult dilemma: should they intervene on behalf of the victims, or should they remain spectators? Each choice offers its own perils, and philosophers Fernando R. Tesón and Bas van der Vossen offer contrasting views of intervention by employing modern analytic philosophy, particularly just war theory. Tesón and van der Vossen refer to and weigh the consequences of past, present, and future interventions in Syria, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Lybia, Egypt, and more."

Will War's Nature Change In The Seventh Military Revolution?, F. G. Hoffman

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

This article examines the potential implications of the combinations of robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep learning systems on the character and nature of war. The author employs Carl von Clausewitz’s trinity concept to discuss how autonomous weapons will impact the essential elements of war. The essay argues war’s essence, as politically directed violence fraught with friction, will remain its most enduring aspect, even if more intelligent machines are involved at every level.

The Glocal Hiv/Aids Epidemic And The Need For An Extended Theory Of Power In International Relations, Annika Hughes

International Dialogue

This paper argues for an extended theory of power in International Relations (IR), using the example of the glocal HIV/AIDS epidemic. It will argue that world power relations depend not only on military, economic, social and cultural power, but also on the power of the human body itself. This argument builds on the author’s own theory of glocalised world power, which combines a Foucaultian with a structurationist approach to argue for the existence of four-faced power relationships across the following twelve interdependent sites of power: 1) time; 2) space; 3) knowledge and aesthetics; 4) morality and emotion; 5) identities; 6) …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 7

Agamben’S Comic Messianism: Giorgio Agamben: Beyond The Threshold Of Deconstruction; Agamben And Politics: A Critical Introduction, Anthony Curtis Adler

International Dialogue

The publication of Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies in 2014, followed the next year by Adam Kotsko’s English translation, marked a momentous event in the history of more recent continental thought, bringing to a close one of the most far reaching and ambitious scholarly and philosophical labors of the twentieth century. Initiated in 1995 with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben’s project, named after the first volume, would come to comprise nine separate books, published at fairly regular intervals over the course of twenty years. While neither Kevin Attell’s Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (BTD) …

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 7.

Bosnia’S Paralyzed Peace, Oliver P. Richmond

International Dialogue

This study offers a powerful blow by blow analysis of the attempts to create peace in BiH since the Dayton Agreement. According to Christopher Bennett, Dayton provided a “balance of terror,” was full of unrealistic deadlines, and aimed at providing internationals with an exit strategy (81) and international involvement constantly suffered from an “enforcement gap” (110) derived from the contradiction between trusteeship and democracy as well as limited resources (114). It has even reinforced existing power structures (the ethnos rather than the demos (116, 182), connected to para-states, and undermined democracy. A “new ethno-national reality now exists” even extending to …

War And Individual Rights: The Foundation Of Just War Theory, Nathan Wood

International Dialogue

Rights are a cornerstone of much contemporary moral and political philosophy. They tell us what we are owed by others, what protections we enjoy against both private citizens and against the state, and they inform us of the restrictions on our freedom that morality and law demand.

Adam Smith: His Life, Thought And Legacy, Sarah Otten

International Dialogue

Since the publication of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith by Oxford University Press in the 1970s and 80s, there has been increasing interest in the philosophical aspects of Smith’s writings. While in the public mind, he is associated with economics through his second book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (Wealth of Nations) Adam Smith was a professional philosopher, holding the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University for eleven years. It was a period he regarded as “the most useful, and, therefore, as by far the happiest” …

The Legacy Of Iraq: From The 2003 War To The “Islamic State”, Kieran Mcconaghy

International Dialogue

Benjamin Isakhan’s The Legacy of Iraq attempts to take a holistic look at the totality of political developments and relationships in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The book has contributions from more than a dozen experts in aspects of Iraq’s history and politics.

Ethics Of Mobility, Globalization, Political Economy, And Culture: Refugees, Terror And Other Troubles With The Neighbors: Against The Double Blackmail, Edward Sandowski, Betty J. Harris

International Dialogue

Slavoj Žižek’s Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors-Against the Double Blackmail is yet another book demonstrating Žižek’s ability to seize on major contemporary social phenomena and to bring to bear on a topic, with provocative results, his unusual combination of traits. He is very much a European educated by study and travel into an especially vivid awareness of the connections of Western Europe (and the UK), with Central and Eastern Europe (including his native Slovenia), and much of North America. He has an expansive sense of being European that includes a sense of special kinship with historical and …

Human Rights And Cultural Diversity. Core Issues And Cases, Stener Ekern

International Dialogue

As clearly explained on the very first page, this book is about “the troubled relationship between the promotion of human rights and the promotion of cultural diversity.” Its purpose is to discuss (and overcome, I presume) some of the “core areas of anxiety” that this trouble speaks of. Anyone working with human rights, academically or in more applied ways, will be familiar with the anxieties that arise from trying to reconcile individual and collective rights in a consistent and convincing manner. A book holding the promise of taking you one step further towards simultaneously handling the issues of individual moral …

The Empty Place: Democracy And Public Space, Asma Mehan

International Dialogue

The relationship of public space to democracy is dominated by two competing, yet intertwined, theoretical bases: political philosophy and spatial theory. But how does the architect make political space? Can architectural practice create political space through design? In this book, Teresa Hoskyns theorizes that the converging point between theoretical foundations and democratic practices is “participation” within “social production of space.” Therefore, “participation” from joint perspectives of architecture and political philosophy has been studied in two different frameworks: the theoretical and the practical. Unlike most previous works on the relationship between architecture and democracy, Hoskyn’s book transcends the spatial and political …

Hitler’S American Model: The United States And The Making Of Nazi Race Law, Michael J. Kelly

International Dialogue

Yale’s James Whitman jumps straight into academic controversy with his new book outlining how the lawyers of the Third Reich modeled their anti-Jewish race laws on older Jim Crow era laws in the United States. Prior American and German scholars had previously tackled this hypothesis with mixed results—some dismissing the idea or playing it down, others acknowledging some limited influence. After plumbing primary sources from the Nazi government, however, Whitman goes much further and plants his flag squarely in the influence camp. The sources, read soberly, paint a different picture. Awful it may be to contemplate, but the reality is …

The Making Of Salafism: Islamic Reform In The Twentieth Century, Matthew Vondrasek

International Dialogue

Henri Lauzière takes the reader on a multi-dimensional counterintuitive journey with The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century. The book might be more aptly titled The Conceptual Construction of Salafism as its most illuminating and insightful features focus more on linguistics and heuristic devices rather than history or political developments. Through detailed analysis of language, religion, history, and politics, Lauzière shows how Salafism, as it is understood today, represents a misunderstood construction that is often portrayed back into history onto primary sources. Perhaps the most important parts of the text help the reader “unlearn.”

The Good Crisis: How Population Stabilization Can Foster A Healthy U.S. Economy, Owen G. Mordaunt

International Dialogue

Even though there is a notion of a birth dearth, this text aims at debunking the common belief that a population that is not growing due to declining fertility spells disaster for our world. The population has declined over time, but in reality the world continues to add 83 million people each year. Some birth dearthers, citing low fertility in affluent nations, express concern about “moral decay” (vi). For example, “smaller and unconventional families” will harm the United States because there will be fewer children and there will not be enough people to care for the elderly (vii). The authors …

Civic Tenderness: Love's Role In Achieving Justice, Justin Leonard Clardy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Martha Nussbaum’s work Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice identifies the role that compassion plays in motivating citizens in a just society. I expand on this discussion by considering how attitudes of indifference pose a challenge to the extension of compassion in our society. If we are indifferent to others who are in situations of need, we are not equipped to experience compassion for them. Building on Nussbaum’s account, I develop an analytic framework for the public emotion of Civic Tenderness to combat indifference.

Civic tenderness is an orientation of concern that is generated for people and groups that …

Liberal-Democratic States Should Privilege Parental Efforts To Instill Identities And Values, Andrew M. Robinson

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberal-democratic states’ commitments to equality and personal autonomy have always proven problematic with respect to state regulation of relations between parents and children. In the parental authority literature positions have varied from invoking children’s interests to argue for limitations on parental efforts to instill identities and values to invoking parental rights to justify state privileging of such efforts.

This article argues that liberal-democratic states should privilege parental efforts to raise their children to share their identities and values. Its approach is distinctive in two ways: i) it engages in interdisciplinary reflection upon selected findings in psychological literature on immigrant youth, …

The Dumb Prof Considers Intersectionality In The Age Of Trump, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Among decent, intelligent, and respectable human beings in the United States and around the world, the occupation of Donald Trump of the American presidency is the shock that never ends. Much of this has to do with how vulgar the man is. The activist-academic terms intersectionality and identity politics have in turn entered into our popular vocabulary as words that might describe how all of these aggrieved groups might resist the Trump Administration. This resistance, it is claimed, is necessary because these various groups have not only been insulted by Trump’s rhetoric, but have also been oppressed by draconian policies …

Humanization Of The Enemy: The Pacifist Soldier And France In World War One, Daniel E. Stockman

Senior Theses

Not all French citizens were enthused by the prospect of war in 1914, nor were they all so willing to embrace a dehumanized view of the enemy. Some French citizens believed the “Great War” to be a patriotic endeavor. Propaganda encouraged this nationalism and the dehumanization of the enemy. “Political” pacifism existed within the French Third Republic psyche following France’s defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. However, these pacifistic undertones were systematically undermined as France began to militarize itself. Drawing from a series of notebooks, and established academic sources, this paper shows that some French soldiers endured a world at …

Politics, Technology, And Libertarianism, Thomas J. Perry

Honors Projects

In recent years, technology has started to play a major role in the U.S. political climate. Specifically, it has created a platform for outside groups, such as libertarians, to have their voices heard. This brought forward an important research question: How has technology helped or hindered the ability of individually focused libertarians to organize for collective action? Through the exploration of previous research, two major findings are discovered: 1) technology and the growth of individualism in politics are intertwined and 2) technology and individualism both have ties to libertarianism. The implications of libertarianism are analyzed further through the study of …

How Trump Won: Media And The Silent Majority In The 2016 Us Presidential Election, Joshua K. Miller

Senior Honors Theses

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign ended in victory because of two powerful forces: enormous media advantage gained through sensationalism and a strong coalition made up of evangelicals, pragmatic conservatives, and the silent majority. The work of Neil Postman sheds light on the underlying cultural foundation of Trump’s media advantage. Parallels from the video game industry explain how intentional sensationalism played into Trump’s success in the primary process. Evangelicals and pragmatic conservatives joined Trump’s coalition in spite of his scandals, and Eric Hoffer’s work helps explain his appeal to the silent majority. Ultimately, the patterns of Trump’s victory yield significant learning …

Humanitarian Military Intervention: A Failed Paradigm, Faruk Rahmanovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the end of the Cold War, traditional justifications for war have diminished in relevance and importance, while the use of Humanitarian Military Interventions (HMI) has proliferated, to the point that formerly traditional wars – e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq invasions – have become retroactively redefined as HMIs. While HMI suffers from a number of problems, from international law to historical track record, its proponents have managed to turn aside all arguments by claiming they represent either statistical outliers, improper implementation, or at best indicate a need for a certain degree of fine-tuning. Crucially, the validity of the HMI practice is …

Defining Biometrics: Toward A Transnational Ethic Of Personal Information, Nicola Morrow

International Studies Honors Projects

Innovations in biotechnology, computer science, and engineering throughout the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries dramatically expanded possible modes of data-based surveillance and personal identification. More specifically, new technologies facilitated enormous growth in the biometrics sector. The response to the explosion of biometric technologies was two-fold. While intelligence agencies, militaries, and multinational corporations embraced new opportunities to fortify and expand security measures, many individuals objected to what they perceived as serious threats to privacy and bodily autonomy. These reactions spurred both further technological innovation, and a simultaneous proliferation of hastily drafted policies, laws, and regulations governing the collection, …

The Scope And Limits Of Secular Buddhism: Watanabe Kaikyoku (1868–1912) And The Japanese New Buddhist 'Discovery Of Society', James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

Although New Buddhism is a term sometimes employed to refer to the broad sweep of reform and modernization movements in Japanese Buddhist thought and practice beginning in the 1870s, the term shin bukkyō refers more specifically to a broadly influential movement of some two dozen young scholars and lay Buddhists active in the last decade of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Founded in February 1899 as Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai (Buddhist Pure Believers Fellowship or Buddhist Puritan Association), the group changed its name to Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai (New Buddhist Fellowship) in 1903. Notto Thelle refers to the NBF as “the most consistent …

Thresholds Of Atrocity: Liberal Violence And The Politics Of Moral Vision, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All political communities set normative limits to the acceptable use of force. A threshold of atrocity indicates the point at which acceptable violence meets the boundaries of the unacceptable. In liberal democratic states such norms are ostensibly set higher. Hence, there is a theoretical threshold to the modern state’s ability to act in ways that violate norms it claims to uphold. Paradoxically, thresholds of atrocity are almost never breached and unconscionable violence occurs regularly. This study seeks to explain the persistence of extreme violence by developing a theory of atrocity grounded in moral vision. Liberal democratic nation-states are able to …

The Anti-Imperialism Of Ottobah Cugoano: Slavery, Abolition, And Colonialism In Thoughts And Sentiments On The Evil Of Slavery, Tacuma Peters

Publications and Research

This article argues that the work of Ottobah Cugoano provides readers with a robust anti-imperial analysis of European modernity. For Cugoano, slavery and colonialism are coeval and mutually constitutive processes. I argue that Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery which has been accepted as a tract of radical abolitionism should also be interpreted as an anti-imperial text. I contend that we must attend to the global scope of Cugoano’s anti-imperialism which includes critiques of European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as provides recommendations for radical changes in the relationship between Europe and …

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 6.

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 6