Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

Teaching Engineering Ethics By Conceptual Design: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In 1998, a lead researcher at a Midwestern university submitted as his own a document that had 64 instances of strings of 10 or more words that were identical to a consultant's masters thesis and replicated a data chart, all of whose 16 entries were identical to three and four significant figures. He was fired because his actions were wrong. Curiously, he was completely unable to see that his actions were wrong. This phenomenon is discussed in light of recent advances in neuroscience and used to argue for a change in the standard way engineering ethics is taught. I argue …

Peace Is Not Perpetual, Autonomous, Or Rational, Danielle Poe

Philosophy Faculty Publications

When I write about and teach Immanuel Kant, I am always impressed and seduced by the beauty and neatness of his work. After all, Kant makes morality a science; answers are clear and distinct, black and white. Individuals make ethical decisions by using reason according to universally accessible principles. People should do the right thing, not because it is easy, not because it makes them feel good, and not because they have been raised to do so. People should do the right thing because it is their duty, and they determine their duty by asking, "Can I universalize my action?" …

Modernism And Postmodernism, Brad Kallenberg, Ethan Smith

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The Global Dictionary of Theology is inspired by the shift of the center of Christianity from the West to the Global South. But it also reflects the increase in two-way traffic between these two sectors as well as the global awareness that has permeated popular culture to an unprecedented degree.

The editorial perspective of the Global Dictionary of Theology is an ecumenical evangelicalism that is receptive to discovering new facets of truth through listening and conversation on a global scale. Thus a distinctive feature of the Global Dictionary of Theology is its conversational approach. Contributors have been called on to …

A Pragmatist Cosmopolitan Moment: Reconfiguring Nussbaum's Cosmopolitan Concentric Circles, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Robert Fine and Robin Cohen conclude their essay “Four Cosmopolitan Moments” by stating that developing cosmopolitanism “has become an urgent moral necessity” (2002, 162). As resources for this task they offer the Stoics, Kant, Arendt, and Nussbaum as particularly important “moments” in the history of cosmopolitanism. David Held (2002, 57) shares their sense of urgency but worries that a Kantian understanding of political communities gives an inadequate basis for this task. David Hollinger identifies as “new cosmopolitans” an array of scholars who articulate alternatives to Nussbaum's universalism and Kymlicka's pluralism, in attempting “to connect the notion of a species-wide community …

The Descriptive Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Language is like the cane in the hand of the blind person. The better one becomes at getting around with the cane, the more he or she is apt to forget the cane but through the cane perceive the objects scraped and tapped by the other end. A defective cane may distort the world perceived by the blind person. So too, defective use of language threatens to muddy our understanding of the things we talk about. When discussing something as difficult as natural evils, a frequently undetected defect in our language use is “overly attenuated description.” In this piece, I …

Addams's Internationalist Pacifism And The Rhetoric Of Maternalism, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Addams's pacifism grew out of her experiences working for social justice in Chicago's multi-national immigrant community. It rested on her well-tested conviction that justice and international comity could only be achieved through nonviolent means. While Addams at times used maternalist rhetoric, her pacifism was not based on a belief in woman's essential, pacifist nature. Instead, it was grounded on her understanding of democracy, social justice, and international peace as mutually defining concepts. For Addams, progress toward democracy, social justice, and peace involved both institutional reform and changes in moral, intellectual, and affective sensibilities.

A person's sensibilities grow out of his …

Some Things Are Worth Dying For, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In April of 1992, Kristen French, a 15 year-old girl was kidnapped and held as a sex slave in suburban Ontario. For two days she was raped and threatened with death. Surprisingly, on the third day she grew defiant, refusing to perform a particular sexual act even after she was shown pre-recorded videotape of her predecessor, Leslie, being strangled by her captors with an electrical cord. (Leslie's corpse was sawn into 10 pieces before disposal.) A record of Kristen's suffering was preserved on video tape too. Of interest is Kristen's dying claim: "Some things are worth dying for."

Kristen's story …

Public And Relational Communication Ethics In Political Communication: Integrity, Secrecy, And Dialogue In ‘The Contender’, Jon A. Hess, Joy Piazza

Communication Faculty Publications

There is no denying the omnipresence of media in the twenty-first century. One form of media that is particularly influential is film. Unlike print forms of entertainment, in which age and reading ability dictate accessibility, movies are accessible to virtually everyone. And, regardless of the producer's purpose for making the film, all movies provide an insight into our culture and the individuals who reside within it. Some movies are produced solely for entertainment value, but others seek to convey some type of message or to stimulate thought on the part of the viewer (Good & Dillon 2002; Kupfer 1999; Lipkin …

On Locating Disaster, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Imagine a man, unknown to you, standing in your backyard calmly clasping and unclasping his hands three times each hour. If we ask "What is he doing?" we would not likely be satisfied with these words: "He's clasping his hands three times per hour." There is something unnerving about the whole scene, not only because we cannot comprehend the point of clasping one's hands three times per hour; we want to know, "What's he doing in my back yard?"

There is a similarly unnerving quality about the description of the Columbia disaster as posed by the case study. By it …

The Strange New World In The Church: A Review Essay Of 'With The Grain Of The Universe' By Stanley Hauerwas, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in With the Grain of the Universe (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that "anyone" can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show at least this much: With the Grain of the Universe transforms natural theology into "witness." In the end, my …

Praying For Understanding: Reading Anselm Through Wittgenstein, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

If Wittgenstein is correct to assert that practice gives words their sense, then it is logically possible that an understanding of the ontological "argument" Anselm presents in Proslogion requires some level of practical participation in prayer. A close inspection of Anselm's historical context shows that the conceptual distance we stand from him may be too great to be overcome by mere spectatorship. Rather, participation in this case likely requires of the modern reader a reproduction of Anselm's conduct in prayer. If so, Anselm's case falsifies, and thus warrants our resistance of, the commonly presumed disconnect between knowledge and practice.

Fresh …

Professional Or Practitioner? What’S Missing From The Codes?, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Imagine a code of ethics that advocated shady business practices and that the organization proposing the code came under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Imagine further, that the investigation came to trial and the stance taken by the organization was found to be illegal by the highest court of the land. Such a scenario, if true, would raise a host of questions about codes of professional ethics, not the least of which would be “What value, if any, do codes of ethics have for the teaching of ethics?”

Sadly, the above scenario is factual. However, I’m not referring …

Live To Tell, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In recent years, countless Christians have found evangelism a difficult and even baffling scriptural mandate. Those we encounter, particularly young people, are often entirely unfamiliar with the basics of the Gospel. Traditional means of communicating the faith, from cold-calling to mass-mailings, simply no longer speak the language of the culture.

Brad Kallenberg recognizes that evangelism, even in our own backyard, has become a cross-cultural task. Like missionaries serving in foreign countries, we must become "students of the host culture." Much more than a "sinner's prayer," conversion requires a change of social identity.

Indeed, becoming a follower of Christ involves gaining …

Feminist Ethics, Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ethics As Grammar: Changing The Postmodern Subject, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Wittgenstein, one of the most influential, and yet widely misunderstood, philosophers of our age, confronted his readers with aporias—linguistic puzzles—as a means of countering modern philosophical confusions over the nature of language without replicating the same confusions in his own writings. In Ethics as Grammar, Brad Kallenberg uses the writings of theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas as a foil for demonstrating how Wittgenstein’s method can become concrete within the Christian tradition. Kallenberg shows that the aesthetic, political, and grammatical strands epitomizing Hauerwas’s thought are the result of his learning to do Christian ethics by thinking through Wittgenstein.

Kallenberg argues that …

Jane Addams On Autonomy And Responsibility, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Addams understands autonomy and responsibility from the perspective of American pragmatism. Like her collaborator and friend, John Dewey, Addams believes one ascertains an idea's meaning and truth by applying it in practice. Hull House was founded explicitly as a pragmatist test for her ideas on ethics and social change (Lagemann 1994, 77).

Verifying philosophical ideas rests on two methodological prerequisites: concrete experience and sympathetic understanding. Addams repeatedly stresses how emotions serve as the starting point for ethical change, although they need to be cultivated and guided by experience and reason. In addressing social problems, Hull House residents first gathered statistics …

'Wait — Something’S Missing!': The Status Of Ethics In Basic Public Speaking Texts, Jon A. Hess

Communication Faculty Publications

The basic course is important to the welfare of the speech communication discipline. According to Seiler and McGukin (1989), the basic course is the mainstay of the discipline. Gibson, Hanna, and Leichty (1990) surveyed 423 institutions of higher education nationwide and found that at 92% of the schools’ enrollment in the basic course was increasing or holding steady (this is up from the figure of 88% reported in 1985). In a survey of college graduates, Pearson, Nelson, and Sorenson (1981) found that 93% believed that the basic speech course should be required for all students. Because of its popularity and …