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Articles 61 - 90 of 96

Full-Text Articles in Ethics and Political Philosophy

On Moral Arguments Against A Legal Right To Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention, David Lefkowitz Apr 2006

On Moral Arguments Against A Legal Right To Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As the international response to recent events in Darfur demonstrates, the restriction of authority to intervene to the United Nations poses the greater legal barrier to intervention. From a practical perspective, then, the more pressing question may be whether international law ought to be modified to permit states, or multi-state organizations, to carry out unilateral humanitarian interventions; that is, interventions that are not authorized by the United Nations. The issue here is essentially a moral one: would the incorporation of a right to unilateral humanitarian intervention entail a moral improvement to international law – for example, a decrease in the …

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Introduction: Comparative Ethics And The Crucible Of War, G. Scott Davis Jan 2006

Introduction: Comparative Ethics And The Crucible Of War, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Michael Howard takes the title of his recent essay, The Invention of Peace, from the nineteenth-century jurist and historian of comparative law Henry Maine, who wrote that "war appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modem invention."' We moderns tend to assume that the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were aberrant eruptions marring the peaceful status quo, but the opposite better describes the long view. Outside the Garden of Eden, human communities have always been involved in political conflict and that conflict has regularly escalated to the use of lethal force, both …

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Freedom And Rights, Richard Dagger Jan 2006

Freedom And Rights, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberalism, of course, is quite a capacious theory, with room for liberals to debate quite vigorously among themselves, as well as with others, the meaning and significance of freedom, rights and other concepts. It is also capacious enough to allow for a rethinking of these concepts at a time of pressing environmental problems. Such a rethmking, I shall argue, should lead us to conceive of freedom and rights less as barriers or shields that protect individuals against interference - as forms of independence - and more as matters of organic growth and connection, or interdependence. Indeed, we must conceive …

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Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics: The Principles Course, Jonathan B. Wight Jan 2006

Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics: The Principles Course, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

When we analyze the source of humor, one ingredient is surely incongruity, the juxtaposition of opposites. So when Tom Lehrer, the consummate Harvard mathematician, openly calls for plagiarism, this is funny because it is exactly the opposite of what we expect - it is absurd. And yet, from the viewpoint of modern economics, is plagiarism really so absurd? We teach our students to maximize short-term profits (in a moral vacuum). We drill them that producers minimize private costs of production (without reference to ethical codes of conduct). We expect economic agents to operate with atomistic selfishness, assuring them that this …

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Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis Jan 2005

Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, which first appeared in three installments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861, was intended as a defense of the notorious doctrine identified with the liberal reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and with the author's father, James Mill (1773-1836). The defense was successful. While "the principle of utility, or as Bentham has latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle," may have scandalized Victorian England, Mill's Utilitarianism became one of the defining documents of modern British and American liberalism. It is impossible to appreciate contemporary social and political life without coming to grips with utilitarianism.

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Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis Jan 2005

Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

When Principia Ethica appeared, in 1903, it became something of a sacred text for the Cambridge-educated elites-Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes-who, along with Virginia Woolf, would form the core of the Bloomsbury Group. In a letter of October 11, 1903, Strachey confesses to Moore that he is "carried away" by Principia, which inaugurates, for him, "the beginning of the Age of Reason." Moore's critique of convention, his caustic dismissal of his philosophical predecessors, and the relentless rigor of his method promised a revolution in morality commensurate with the modernist transformation of art and literature. Principia Ethica shifted …

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Autonomy, Domination, And The Republican Challenge To Liberalism, Richard Dagger Jan 2005

Autonomy, Domination, And The Republican Challenge To Liberalism, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Like Sunstein and other advocates of 'republican' or 'civic' liberalism, I believe that it is historically unsound and politically unwise to insist on a sharp distinction between liberalism and republicanism. Others disagree, however, and there is much to be learned from their position even if, ultimately, we should not adopt it. Those who take this more radical neo-republican view advance two main lines of argument: first, that the liberal emphasis on neutrality and procedural fairness is fundamentally at odds with the republican commitment to promoting civic virtue; and, second, that republicans and liberals conceive of liberty or freedom in incompatible …

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Politics, Rights, And The Refugee Problem, Richard Dagger Jan 2005

Politics, Rights, And The Refugee Problem, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed to the years between World War I and World War II as the time when the plight of refugees became a pressing political problem.' If Arendt were still alive (she died in 1975), she would no doubt agree that the problem is at least as pressing in the early twenty-first century as it was sixty or more years ago, when she herself was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Who would not agree? According to a report of the U.N. Population Division, 16 million people were refugees at the …

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Adam Smith And Greed, Jonathan B. Wight Jan 2005

Adam Smith And Greed, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

The virtues of greed have been widely promoted by some economists in the 20th century. Allegedly it is Adam Smith who provides this new dignity to greed (Lerner, 1937, ix). Kenneth Arrow and Frank Hahn in the General Equilibrium Analysis (1971), for example, implicitly assume that Adam Smith's self-interest is the greed that promotes economic efficiency (quoted in Evensky, 1993, 203). Walter Williams (1999), a devoted follower of Smith, writes in his column that, "Free markets, private property rights, voluntary exchange, and greed produce preferable outcomes most times and under most conditions." These pronouncements have become part of the cultural …

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Integrating Leadership With Ethics: Is Good Leadership Contrary To Human Nature?, Joanne B. Ciulla Jan 2005

Integrating Leadership With Ethics: Is Good Leadership Contrary To Human Nature?, Joanne B. Ciulla

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

What is it about human nature that makes ethical leadership in any context or culture difficult? This chapter examines leadership in terms of the basic philosophic question concerning human nature. To what extent does free will shape our lives and to what extent are our lives determined by our genes and by fate?

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[Introduction To] The Quest For Moral Leaders: Essays On Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Terry L. Price, Susan E. Murphy Jan 2005

[Introduction To] The Quest For Moral Leaders: Essays On Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Terry L. Price, Susan E. Murphy

Bookshelf

The quest for moral leaders is both a personal quest that takes place in the hearts and minds of leaders and a pursuit by individuals, groups, organizations, communities and societies for leaders who are both ethical and effective. The contributors to this volume, all top scholars in leadership studies and ethics, provide a nuanced discussion of the complex ethical relationships that lie at the core of leadership.

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The Perverse Paradox Of Privacy, Gary L. Mcdowell Jan 2005

The Perverse Paradox Of Privacy, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The most recent effort of the Supreme Court of the United States to define the judicially created constitutional right to privacy has demonstrated once again why that contrived right poses such a pronounced threat to constitutional self-government. In writing for the majority in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) to overrule a case of only seventeen years' standing that allowed the states to prohibit homosexual sodomy, Justice Anthony Kennedy insisted that the idea of liberty in the Constitution's due process clauses is not limited to protecting individuals form "unwarranted governmental intrusions into a dwelling or other private places" but has "transcendent dimensions" …

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Wittgenstein And The Recovery Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis Jan 2004

Wittgenstein And The Recovery Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Modern, scientific, man doesn't see miracles, only odd phenomena that call out for more thorough study. Ethics, like the miraculous, doesn't defy scientific explanation; it just doesn't exist. In what follows I hope to do two things., On the one hand, I want to embrace Wittgenstein's rejection of ethics as theory, in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge about the world. On the other, I hope to suggest that this rejection opens up conceptual space for understanding ethics as a critical human enterprise.

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[Introduction To] The International Library Of Leadership, J. Thomas Wren, Terry L. Price, Douglas A. Hicks Jan 2004

[Introduction To] The International Library Of Leadership, J. Thomas Wren, Terry L. Price, Douglas A. Hicks

Bookshelf

The International Library of Leadership brings together in one place the most significant writings on leadership, the process by which groups, organizations, and societies seek to satisfy their needs and achieve their objectives. Volume 1 focuses on classic discussions of perennial leadership issues including the moral purpose of leadership, the nature of legitimate authority, and the role of followers. Volume 2 turns to investigations of leadership in the modern era and makes available the seminal social scientific works that inaugurated the modern theories of leadership. Volume 3 builds upon the analyses of power, culture, and gender in the first two …

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Moral Imagination, Joanne B. Ciulla Jan 2004

Moral Imagination, Joanne B. Ciulla

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Moral imagination provides leaders with insight into others and the world and helps them make moral decisions and form visions. Leaders need imagination to determine the values they embrace and the feelings that these values engender in themselves and others. Leaders use imagination to animate values, apply moral principles to particular situations, and understand the moral aspects of situations. Imagination and moral values are the fundamental components of a vision.

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Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight Aug 2003

Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

Some economists consider their discipline a science, and thereby divorced from messy ethical details, the normative passions of right and wrong. They teach in a moral vacuum, perhaps even advocating economic agents' operating independently and avariciously, asserting that this magically produces the greatest good for society.

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[Introduction To] The Ethics Of Leadership, Joanne B. Ciulla Jan 2003

[Introduction To] The Ethics Of Leadership, Joanne B. Ciulla

Bookshelf

The focus of The Ethics of Leadership is the ethical challenges that are distinctive to leaders and leadership. Organized around themes such as power and the public and private morality of leaders, the book explores the ethical issues of leadership in a variety of contexts including, business, NGOs, and government. It integrates material on ethics and leadership from the great Eastern and Western philosophers with leadership literature and case studies. This multi-disciplinary approach helps philosophers and leadership scholars present a fully integrated view of the subject.

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La Repubblica Di Sandel E L'Lo Incarnato, Richard Dagger Jan 2002

La Repubblica Di Sandel E L'Lo Incarnato, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Quelli che vogliono conoscere cio per cui Sandel parteggia e cio contro cui combatte, quindi, hanno una buona ragione per dare il benvenuto a Democracy's Discontent. Se credono che la politica americana trarrebbe profitto da una corroborante (per non dire generosa) dose di repubblicanesimo, troveranno anche molte cose salutari nel libro. Come uno che si considera dentro entrambi questi gruppi, io credo che Sandel sia stato saggio a prendere una qualche distanza dal comunitarismo, e ancora piu saggio a sottoscrivere l'enfasi repubblicana sulla formazione dei cittadini e la coltivazione delle virtU civiche. Ma sbaglia nel continuare a opporsi al …

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Comment On Benhabib's "Dismantling The Leviathan": A Republican-Liberai Perspective, Richard Dagger Jul 2001

Comment On Benhabib's "Dismantling The Leviathan": A Republican-Liberai Perspective, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Those who think of themselves as republican or civic liberals, as I do, will surely be of two minds about Seyla Benhabib's "Dismantling the Leviathan: Citizen and State in a Global World" [Spring 2001 ]. In some respects, Professor Benhabib' s thoughtful essay is quite congenial to republican liberalism. She insists on the importance of human rights, for instance, and she looks for ways to expand political participation. Her indictment of "civic republicanism," however, requires a republican-liberal response.

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The Sandelian Republic And The Encumbered Self, Richard Dagger Apr 1999

The Sandelian Republic And The Encumbered Self, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In Democracy's Discontent, Michael Sandel argues for a revival of the republican tradition in order to counteract the pernicious effects of contemporary liberalism. As in his earlier work, Sandel charges that liberals who embrace the ideals of political neutrality and the unencumbered self are engaged in a selfsubverting enterprise, for no society that lives by these ideals can sustain itself. Sandel is right to endorse the republican emphasis on forming citizens and cultivating civic virtues. By opposing liberalism as vigorously as he does, however, he engages in a self-subverting enterprise of his own. That is, Sandel is in danger …

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Humanist Ethics And Political Justice: Soto, Sepúlveda, And The "Affair Of The Indies", G. Scott Davis Jan 1999

Humanist Ethics And Political Justice: Soto, Sepúlveda, And The "Affair Of The Indies", G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In the debate over Spanish treatment of the natives of the New World, both sides regularly invoked Aristotle on natural slaves. This paper argues that the interpretation of the Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto displays a greater understanding of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition of justice than that of Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, the Spanish Humanist. The paper goes on to argue that it is the humanist tradition itself that disposes Sepúlveda to misconstrue Aristotle and the tradition of political justice.

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Tradition And Truth In Christian Ethics: John Yoder And The Bases Of Biblical Realism, G. Scott Davis Jan 1999

Tradition And Truth In Christian Ethics: John Yoder And The Bases Of Biblical Realism, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Reflecting on the state of theological ethics in 1981, James Gustafson wrote that "the radical Christian ethics of Yoder mark a substantive position for which there are many sound defenses; to opt against it is to opt against some fundamental claims of traditional Christianity." This, however, comes fast on the heels of Gustafson's remark that, despite its historical, biblical, sociological, and moral warrants, "I note Yoder's option here because it is the one most dramatically different from the option I shall pursue.'' The attentive outsider, unaccustomed to the ways of Christian ethics, is likely to wonder what, with all those …

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The State, Civil Society, And Citizenship, Richard Dagger Jul 1993

The State, Civil Society, And Citizenship, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In large, modern societies, then, we should make the most of "partial societies" by encouraging the development of a vital civil society--a sphere of life that promotes freedom through private activity and the voluntary associations that serve as a buffer between individuals and the state. Indeed, the question is not whether civil society is a prerequisite for a good society, but what form it should take. With this in mind, I want to offer three observations about the proper form of civil society.

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Play Fair With Punishment, Richard Dagger Apr 1993

Play Fair With Punishment, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

If we want to provide a justification for legal punishment, then, we must answer two distinct questions: (1) What justifies punishment as a social practice? and (2) What justifies punishing particular persons? The principle of fair play is an especially attractive theory of punishment, I shall agree, because it offers plausible and compelling answers to both these questions. I shall also suggest that there is a third question - How should we punish those who commit crimes? - that fair play cannot answer without help from other sources.

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Asceticism/Askēsis: Foucault's Thinking Historical Subjectivity, Ladelle Mcwhorter Jan 1992

Asceticism/Askēsis: Foucault's Thinking Historical Subjectivity, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure Foucault calls his work an askēsis, "an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought." The "living substance of philosophy," Foucault writes, is the essay, "which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication." Foucault's work, then, does not simply report to us his conclusions or theories. Foucault is not primarily interested in imparting information. What he offers instead is a kind of exercise book.

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The "L-Word": A Short History Of Liberalism, Terence Ball, Richard Dagger Jan 1990

The "L-Word": A Short History Of Liberalism, Terence Ball, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Hence the question: Are these good or bad times for liberalism? To answer, we shall need a broader perspective than a survey of contemporary developments can provide. We shall need to look back, that is, to see what liberalism was in order to understand what it has become. Only then can we assess its current condition and prospects-and appreciate how politics in the United States is largely an intramural debate between different wings of liberalism.

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Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro Jan 1990

Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Two cautions or warnings (at least) must be heeded in the attempt to do justice to Nietzsche's project of a genealogy of morals in the text that bears that name. While the Genealogy is often regarded as the most straightforward and continuous of Nietzsche's books, he tells us in Ecce Homo that its three essays are "perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far in regard to expression, intention, and the art of surprise.” If we should think ourselves successful in penetrating to these uncanny secrets and saying what Nietzsche's text means, once and for all, we would then have …

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Rights, Richard Dagger Jan 1989

Rights, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In English, 'right' is used in a number of ways to mean a number of things. We may turn to the right, for instance, even when that is not the right way to turn; the Pythagorean theorem deals with right angled triangles; governments sometimes shift to the right; straightforward people come right to the point when they seek to right matters; and we occasionally find that what someone is doing is not right, morally speaking, even though she has the right to do it. 'Right' in this last sense - 'right' as a kind of property we …

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Warcraft And The Fragility Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis Oct 1987

Warcraft And The Fragility Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

There is much talk currently about virtue and virtues, and this, I suppose, is all to the good. But if the current debate aspires to be more than an academic exercise, it needs to show how discussion of the virtues makes a difference in moral philosophy. Any serious alternative to the status quo should satisfy the following three conditions: It should involve a shift in the fundamental vocabulary of ethics; it should reorder, if not reject, some of the emphases and priorities found in the status quo; and finally, it should issue in a reevaluation of specific acts and policies …

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From The Sublime To The Political: Some Historical Notes, Gary Shapiro Jan 1985

From The Sublime To The Political: Some Historical Notes, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Let me document my suggestion that modernist poetics tends to give a privileged position to what has traditionally been known as the sublime by adducing two examples from rather disparate traditions. Martin Heidegger's ontological poetics can reasonably be viewed as a renewal of the aesthetics of the sublime -- although Heidegger never uses the term sublime, so far as I know -- and is explicitly hostile to the limitations of aesthetics, conceived as an autonomous study of a certain kind of experience. Harold Bloom does recur to the Romantic terminology of sublimity in his attempt to construct a poetics which …

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