Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

Ahistoricism And Oppresssion, Kenton Machina

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

Many theories of moral accountability, whether libertarian or compatibilist, may be characterized as time-slice theories in that they do not allow the agent’s personal history to be relevant to moral accountability, instead making accountability rest solely on the state of things during one slice out of the agent’s life story. The point of this paper is to draw attention to the personal background irrelevance embedded in such theories, and to argue that any theory of accountability embracing such irrelevance supports injustice. My argument rests on an analysis of some generally accepted epistemic conditions on accountability, claiming that whether these conditions …

Argument, Political Friendship And Rhetorical Knowledge: A Review Of Garver's "For The Sake Of Argument", Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Gene Garver's recent book, "For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character and the Ethics of Belief" (U. Chicago Press, 2004), responds to the dilemma at the core of contemporary legal theory. Garver incisively describes why legal reasoning is viewed either as impotent or dangerous. Reason appears impotent in the legal context to the extent that we maintain its rigor by limiting its scope to dialectical demonstration; it appears dangerous to the extent that we free reason from having to provide definitive answers. Garver looks to Aristotle for a solution. To deal with the inadequacies of the accounts of practical …

Reading, Writing & Religion: Teaching The Bible In Texas Public Schools, Mark A. Chancey

Occasional Papers

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Best-Fit Bioethics: The Formation Of Ethical And Political Positions On Stem Cell Research, Emily Zehnder

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Few issues in bioethics inspire controversy and garner headlines like human embryonic stem cell research. This cutting-edge research can be at once confusing, exciting, and disturbing. Scientists eagerly tout the potentially life-saving therapies this research could produce, giving hope to the millions who suffer from debilitating diseases and to their loved ones. However, to obtain these longed-for miracles of modern science, human embryos must be destroyed. And many people object to this aspect of the research. Despite being sympathetic to those who suffer, these people do not believe that any benefits merit the large-scale destruction of what they consider to …

Natural Justice, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Justice is a natural virtue. Well-functioning humans are just, as are well-ordered human societies. Roughly, this means that in a well-ordered society, just humans internalize the laws and social norms (the nomoi)--they internalize lawfulness as a disposition that guides the way they relate to other humans. In societies that are mostly well-ordered, with isolated zones of substantial dysfunction, the nomoi are limited to those norms that are not clearly inconsistent with the function of law--to create the conditions for human flourishing. In a radically dysfunctional society, humans are thrown back on their own resources--doing the best they can in …

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 …

Hayek And Liberalism, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

F. A. Hayek occupies a peculiar place in the history of twentiethcentury liberalism. His influence has, in many respects, been enormous. The Road to Serfdom, his first political work, not onlyattracted popular attention in the west but also circulated widely(in samizdat form) in the intellectual underground of Eastern Europeduring the years between the end of the war and the revolutions of1989. His critique of central planning has been thoroughly vindicated, if not by the demise of communist economic systems, thenat least by the recognition by socialists of many stripes of theimportance of market processes.1 Books and articles on his thoughtcontinue …

The Responsibility To Protect, Romeo Dallaire

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the EPIIC Symposium, Sovereignty & Intervention, at Tufts University in February 2003: Focuses on the responsibility to protect humanity. Experiences during the Rwandan catastrophe; Resolvability of humanitarian catastrophes with security problems; Several ways on how to intervene in the problem.

Center For Professional Ethics, Winter 2005, Case Western Reserve University

Center for Professional Ethics

Incomplete draft of issue:

Table of Contents:

• The Race at Case: One Leg of a Long Marathon
• Truth and Trust in a Time of Continuing Change: A Talk by Caroline Whitbeck
• Religious Lawyering: Professor Russell Pearce Keeps His Faith
• News and Notes

Great Anger, Anthony Cunningham

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Anger has had a major hand in a history of inhumanity. In this light, some schools of thought have suggested that we do best to jettison anger entirely. However, anger, like grief, is tied to caring deeply, and as such, both emotions can speak to what is best and most beautiful about human life and character.

School Desegregation 50 Years After Brown: Misconceptions, Lessons Learned, And Hopes For The Future, Gary Orfield

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Papers presented for the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University.

Toward A Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article re-examines racial and ethnic identity within the context of pedagogical attempts to instill a positive white identity in white students who are conscious of the history of white racism and white privilege. The paper draws heavily from whiteness studies and developmental cognitive science in arguing (against Henry Giroux and Stuart Hall) that a positive notion of white identity, however postmodern its construction, is an oxymoron, since whiteness designates less a cultural/ethnic ethos and meaningful way of life than a pathological structure of privilege and narrowminded cognitive habitus.

Book Review, David Dolinko

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

[Book Review Of] Moral Acquaintances: Methodology In Bioethics, By Kevin Wm. Wildes, Janet Smith

The Linacre Quarterly

No abstract provided.

We Need To Talk....About Institutional Integrity, Daniel E. Wueste

Publications

It seems a reasonable hypothesis that institutional health depends upon institutional integrity and institutional integrity depends upon individual integrity. If that’s right, “disease” may be manifest at two levels—at the level of institutional or individual integrity.

I begin with the first part of the hypothesis above, that institutional integrity is a condition of institutional health. The legal theorist Lon Fuller articulated this idea in a less generalized form when he spoke of a morality internal to law that makes law possible. I will explain and illustrate this idea and indicate how it applies to institutions of various sorts, including professions …

Habitar El Límite: Una Aproximación A La Ética De Eugenio Trías [Reseña Del Libro], Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

Reseña del libro: Trías, Eugenio, Ética y condición humana, Barcelona, Ediciones Península, 2000, 154 pp.

Freeing Freedom From Illusion, B. Kamran Swanson

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Reasonable Partiality And Animal Ethics, Bernard E. Rollin

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship -philia in Aristotle's term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emerging in society, its full expression is severely limited by our exploitative uses of animals. At this historical moment, only the animals with whom we enjoy philia - companion animals - can be treated with unrestricted moral …

Critical Theory At A Crossroad: Adorno, Marcuse, And The Radical Sixties, Jacob Skinner

Inquiry Journal 2005

No abstract provided.

Psychological And Sociopolitical Factors Contributing To The Creation Of The Iraqi Torturers: A Human Rights Issue, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article was written by Dr. Mika Haritos-Fatouros, Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessalonica, Greece.

She discusses the human rights context of torture in Abu Ghraib from a political psychological perspective.

Festschrift For Dr. John Mullooly, Eugene F. Diamond

The Linacre Quarterly

No abstract provided.

[Book Review Of] The Virus And The Vaccine, By Debbie Bookchin And Jim Schumacher, Eugene F. Diamond

The Linacre Quarterly

No abstract provided.

[Book Review Of] George Pell, By Tess Livingstone, Catholic Medical Association

The Linacre Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Frederick Douglass's Longing For The End Of Race, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) argued that newly emancipated black Americans should assimilate into Anglo-American society and culture. Social assimilation would then lead to the entire physical amalgamation of the two groups, and the emergence of a new intermediate group that would be fully American. He, like those who were to follow, was driven by a vision of universal human fraternity in the light of which the varieties of human difference were incidental and far less important than the ethical, religious, and political idea of personhood. Douglass’s version of this vision was formed by natural law theories, and a Protestant Christian conception …

The Epistemological Argument Against Desert, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Most contemporary political philosophers deny that justice requires giving people what they deserve. According to a familiar anti-desert argument, the influence of genes and environment on people's actions and traits undermines all desert-claims. According to a less familiar – but more plausible – argument, the influence of genes and environment on people's actions and traits undermines some desert-claims (or all desert-claims to an extent). But, it says, we do not know which ones (or to what extent). This article examines this ‘epistemological’ argument against desert. It gives reason to believe that it fails, emphasizing the importance of justice relative to …

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 …

Continental Philosophy In Britain And America, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Continental, or as it is sometimes called, contemporary European philosophy represents a range of approaches to academic philosophy distinguished from the analytic modality dominating professional or institutional philosophy in the United Kingdom and in the United States, as in Australia, Canada, and Ireland. Where the analytic tradition itself may be said to trace its own roots to Europe, e.g., positivism may be traced to France and its originator August Comte, and logical empiricism to Germany and to Austria and the writings of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle, continental philosophy expresses an ideological tradition …