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Title: Contestation and discursive practice : issues for participatory democracy
Creator: Wallace, John Richard
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The dissertation discusses two different views of democratic politics from the standpoint of the problem of increasing democratic participation in a context of conflict, inequality, and domination. The two philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Ernesto Laclau draw on different conceptions of language. Their concern with language includes the recognition that power is always mediated through language. We focus on deliberative democracy developed by Jürgen Habermas and hegemonic democracy developed...
Show more"The dissertation discusses two different views of democratic politics from the standpoint of the problem of increasing democratic participation in a context of conflict, inequality, and domination. The two philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Ernesto Laclau draw on different conceptions of language. Their concern with language includes the recognition that power is always mediated through language. We focus on deliberative democracy developed by Jürgen Habermas and hegemonic democracy developed by Ernesto Laclau. We contrast these perspectives and assess them primarily in how they serve the political contestation essential to democratic politics in specific. The four terms of analysis are power, participation, performativity (symmetry/asymmetry) and grounds for criticism (conception of the good society and democratic norms). Both philosophers respond to the historical context of unresolved theoretical questions within Marxism and in terms of historical conditions which Marx did not anticipate. The second chapter deals with the historical milieu of Marx's engagement with democracy and the issues that arise in its application. It is in response to this context that they bring in language to account for how democratic movements can coalesce and people can be involved in the democratic process. Habermas addresses this with communicative action and Laclau does so through hegemony. The third and fourth chapters deal with each philosopher. The deliberative democracy of Habermas builds on the simple recognition that the goal of language, seen in the agreements we reach daily, is to reach an understanding. This offers the true possibility of participatory democracy. People bring a variety of interests into a dialogue from which emerge interests that are generalized and help shape the process of democratic will-formation. The hegemonic democracy of Laclau builds on poststructural language theory organized around difference that does not privilege reason. For Laclau, the democratic power struggle follows the linguistic pattern of forming 'empty signifiers' out of social demands and appropriating 'floating signifiers' in contestation between hegemonic projects. This is an unstable process that seeks to dislocate power. Laclau's hegemonic democracy offers a challenge to Habermas' deliberative democracy which attempts to privilege reason in order to contain the mix of forces such that the best argument prevails in an unforced agreement. In the end, hegemonic democracy does not offer sufficient direction toward participatory democracy. The contestation in the deliberative democracy of Habermas through the reciprocity of offering validity claims to one another is the reciprocity that makes democracy possible. It promotes space for the democratic contestation among diverse visions of the good society, such that it affirms contextual location of specific viewpoints along with the context-transcending possibility of agreement to democratic norms on the way to a good society for all. This is the ongoing conversation of democratic contestation."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: The question of radical generosity : ethics and politics of cosmopolitanism
Creator: Kashani, Ali
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTTHE QUESTION OF RADICAL GENEROSITY: ETHICS AND POLITICS OF COSMOPOLITANISMByAli KashaniThis inquiry is about the following question: what conditions give rise to the possibility of cosmopolitanism. This study examines ethical and political conditions concerning cosmopolitanism, and argues that radical generosity is a key condition for the possibility of cosmopolitanism. Generosity involves benevolence that expects nothing in return. It does not depend on reciprocity, duty, calculation...
Show moreABSTRACTTHE QUESTION OF RADICAL GENEROSITY: ETHICS AND POLITICS OF COSMOPOLITANISMByAli KashaniThis inquiry is about the following question: what conditions give rise to the possibility of cosmopolitanism. This study examines ethical and political conditions concerning cosmopolitanism, and argues that radical generosity is a key condition for the possibility of cosmopolitanism. Generosity involves benevolence that expects nothing in return. It does not depend on reciprocity, duty, calculation, or following a rule. It is an unconditional practice. Radical generosity differs from random acts of generosity that may happen from time to time, but do not have profound social and political impact. Radical generosity is a social practice, which has the potential to transform ethical and political practices. The practice of radical generosity has a transformative aspect, that is to say, it is a practice as a “way of life.” A “way of life” means practicing radical generosity as an everyday activity, which can become the ethos of society. In other words, radical generosity has the potential to challenge and transform existing values and norms. This study examines three distinct philosophical approaches to the possibility of cosmopolitanism. It examines cosmopolitanism as a “way of life” developed by Stoics thinkers in diverse ways, but lacking a political or institutional conception of cosmopolitanism. Then, examines two other approaches to cosmopolitanism, the “juridical-political”(Kant and Habermas) in the framework of political institutions, and the “beyond-normative”(Derrida and Levinas) in the realm of unconditional ethical responsibility. It acknowledges the importance and necessity of these approaches to cosmopolitanism and extracts certain ideas from these thinkers. It also problematizes and shows their limitations in certain respects in order to advance its argument. Finally, it attempts to develop a conception of radical generosity as a social practice in concrete terms, and underscore the idea of practice (praxis). The idea of practice (praxis) refers to human activities that transform material, social, and political conditions in historical terms. It attempts to show the relevance and importance of radical generosity as a key condition for the possibility of cosmopolitanism.
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Title: Plato's confrontation with Parmenides
Creator: Mask, Jason Patrick
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Parmenides is sometimes thought of as the father of metaphysics. He is the first philosopher of the abstract notion of being, and as such even many contemporary issues in metaphysics go back to some basic concepts in his poem, written nearly 2600 years ago, and of which we only have several fragments. The currently hot topic of metaphysical monism is just one which traces back to Parmenides. Others include the problems of nonexistent things and attendant notions of not-being, the nature of...
Show moreParmenides is sometimes thought of as the father of metaphysics. He is the first philosopher of the abstract notion of being, and as such even many contemporary issues in metaphysics go back to some basic concepts in his poem, written nearly 2600 years ago, and of which we only have several fragments. The currently hot topic of metaphysical monism is just one which traces back to Parmenides. Others include the problems of nonexistent things and attendant notions of not-being, the nature of false statement, the nature of identity, the issue of appearances and reality, and the very concept of being anything at all. His concern is the fundamental nature of reality, and in terms of metaphysics and epistemology, logic and the nature of language, he is indeed what Plato called him explicitly: both Father and the One. But Parmenides—perhaps by virtue of being the first, a watershed in Western thought—stumbles out of the gate. It is not by virtue of espousing or employing faulty concepts, such as the notions of generation and perishing, wholeness, oneness, and completeness, that Parmenides stumbles. It is by virtue of a strict adherence to a bivalent logic, which pits absolute being and absolute not-being against one another. Parmenides’ adherence to this bivalence effectually disallows a main part of his philosophy: the admonishment of mortal opinions by way of eradicating the very things—sensibles—those opinions are of. When Plato confronts Father Parmenides, he does so from the perspective of one who sees that in order to admonish opinion, one must also take into account the sensible world; explication, not eradication, is the foundation of Plato’s confrontation with Parmenides. In so doing, however, Plato never fully abandons his Eleatic roots. He agrees that the reality must be a singular and whole; but he moves beyond Parmenides in arguing that such a single reality must be really divisible, if sensibles are to make sense.
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Title: The evolution of morality : toward an interdisciplinary explanation
Creator: Berling, Eric William
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Evolutionary insights have radically improved our ability to understand (explain) the natural world around us, including how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the rest of the natural world. For the past century and half, evolutionary arguments have been advanced that have looked to explain human morality as a feature of our biological origins, as a capacity or propensity endowed to us by our evolutionary history. Recent research programs within psychology, ethology, and game...
Show more"Evolutionary insights have radically improved our ability to understand (explain) the natural world around us, including how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the rest of the natural world. For the past century and half, evolutionary arguments have been advanced that have looked to explain human morality as a feature of our biological origins, as a capacity or propensity endowed to us by our evolutionary history. Recent research programs within psychology, ethology, and game theory have purported to explain morality. The prolific efforts of these researchers, concentrated especially over the past two decades, has resulted in an impressive literature about the evolution of morality. It is unclear how, if at all, these research programs fit together into a coherent explanation of morality, though there is a tendency in the literature to presume such a moral synthesis that could connect these research endeavors in a meaningful way. This is the central task I seek to accomplish. First, I look for a reportive account of morality-as-explanandum, to see if there is reason to think that the explanations being proposed by these different research programs are ostensibly aiming to explain the same phenomenon. I find sufficient overlap in how the evolutionary approaches conceive of morality, namely that it is a phenomenon that includes social interactions involving behaviors often relevant to helping and hurting others, and the perception and response to these interactions involves the stimulation of an affective moral sense that is combined with rational cognitive processing and consideration of cultural elements such as values, norms, or expectations of approval or disapproval during moral judgment. While the research programs of evolutionary psychology, ethology, and evolutionary game theory are attempting to explain the same phenomenon when they talk about morality, work remains to demonstrate how the different methodological kinds of explanations could fit together. For those who adopt a unity of science view, there is a tendency to prefer explanatory reductionism or explanatory eliminativism that identifies a preferred mode of explanation and removes others. Rejecting such a tendency, I endorse a pluralistic approach that allows for multiple modes of explanation to contribute to our understanding of the same phenomenon. I detail the kinds of explanation that each of the three evolutionary approaches offers, and then argue that Pennock's CaSE pragmatic model of causation could be used to demonstrate that, in principle, the explanations of each approach can be integrated. Pluralistically weaving the explanations of each approach together yields a more robust and complete account of the causal web that has produced our biological capacities for morality. Furthermore, beyond just giving a more complete account of the causal web, integrating the approaches also helps to insulate the explanatory claims of each from some its more pressing objections. For instance, while evolutionary psychology is susceptible to critiques of adaptationism, by demonstrating that the behavioral building blocks of the proposed innate psychological intuition can be found in our phylogenetic neighbors gives reason to think that the trait has an adaptive function and has been preserved by selective pressures. Similarly, game theoretic approaches can demonstrate via models that the behavioral tendency is, in fact, adaptive and causally advantageous to reproductive success."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: Social-ecological systems, values, and the science of "people management"
Creator: Piso, Zachary Amedeo
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field embraces the social sciences...
Show moreThis dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field embraces the social sciences broadly, with contributions from sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, and so on. That said, social science is fairly narrowly conceived; leaders in the field stress that they are studying social mechanisms in order to predict and manage social behavior. In a popular textbook on the subject, Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke stress that "resource management is people management" and call for a social science of this management.Social-ecological systems scientists have generally neglected the ethics of people management-for the most part they subscribe to a fairly typical fact/value dichotomy according to which scientists describe social-ecological systems while managers and policymakers prescribe actions in light of these descriptions. Following several philosophical traditions (in particular pragmatist philosophy of science), I call attention to the ways that social-ecological systems science is value-laden. I take environmental pragmatism to provide a roadmap for conducting social-ecological systems science ethically. Environmental pragmatists stress that science is always embedded in practical problem-solving activities that presuppose particular goals for, and side constraints to, inquiry. Many traditions in the philosophy of environmental science embrace social science for the specific role of facilitating this deliberation, but these traditions do not seem to anticipate the explanatory ambitions of social sciences. This leaves unaddressed several pertinent questions about how social explanations work (i.e. how functional distinction structure inquiry), which have very practical implications for which social science disciplines should be included in a collaboration and how social and ecological knowledge should be integrated. For example, most social situations are characterized by property rights institutions, cultural traditions, political alliances, and other social institutions within the purview of particular social science disciplines, but researchers are not reflexive about whether to explain environmental change according to one set of practices or another.The dissertation traverses the following terrain: the first chapter more carefully motivates the questions above regarding the need for ethics and the promise, but present inadequacy, of environmental pragmatism to meet this need. Chapter two attends to Dewey's theory of inquiry, in particular the dialogical dimension of inquiry that authorizes warranted assertions. Through reflection on Daniel Bromley's volitional pragmatism and a debate between Richard Rorty and hermeneutic social scientists, chapter three attends to the way that social science structures inquiry in order to intervene in the normative practices of a community. Chapter four analyzes social-ecological explanations in order to locate normative and evaluative assumptions that should be accountable to democratic deliberation. Finally, chapter five redescribes interdisciplinary integration as an ethical project where decisions about the centering and decentering of different sciences is as much ethical as epistemological.
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Title: Bioethics and moral expertise as a collective enterprise
Creator: McLeskey, Chet
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Moral expertise is not a fantasy contrived by those who would wish to wield it. Moral expertise is something that is achieved through training and experience, just as any other form of expertise. While it shares many features with other forms of expertise, it carries with it a form of authority that is different and distinctive due largely to its inherently normative nature. I examine moral expertise by first examining expertise itself. Given what we understand about expertise, how it is...
Show moreMoral expertise is not a fantasy contrived by those who would wish to wield it. Moral expertise is something that is achieved through training and experience, just as any other form of expertise. While it shares many features with other forms of expertise, it carries with it a form of authority that is different and distinctive due largely to its inherently normative nature. I examine moral expertise by first examining expertise itself. Given what we understand about expertise, how it is achieved, and the impacts it has on the cognition of those who achieve it, I claim that moral expertise in bioethics is best seen as something achieved by groups rather than individuals.
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Title: The Frankfurt School and religion : determinate negation, translation, and the rescue of critical religious potentials
Creator: Byrd, Dustin
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the "Frankfurt School," was born between the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. Rooted in Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and other philosophers, the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and others, is generally understood to be solely secular. The core thesis of this dissertation refutes that claim. I argue that not only did the Frankfurt School draw...
Show moreThe Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the "Frankfurt School," was born between the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. Rooted in Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and other philosophers, the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and others, is generally understood to be solely secular. The core thesis of this dissertation refutes that claim. I argue that not only did the Frankfurt School draw upon their secular sources for their critical analyses, but also the religions of Judaism and Christianity. Unlike their immediate predecessors, especially the 19th century materialists, who argued for the abstract negation of religion, the first generation of critical theorists argued for a determinate negation of religion, wherein the liberational, emancipatory, and prophetic semantic and semiotic materials of religion would be rescued by way of translation into critical political philosophy. In other words, if religion was to survive secular modernity, it would need to do so via its migration into an alternative form, i.e. critical philosophy. Additionally, I argue that a similar process of determinate negation can be found in Jürgen Habermas' call for members of the Islamic faith to translate the moral-practical elements of their religion in post-metaphysical reasoing, wherein it can escape from its closed semantic universe and enter into democratic deliberations. Yet, I argue against Habermas' temperate call for the Muslim community to translate only the moral-practical elements or their religion. Rather, I argue for a return akin to the first generation of the Frankfurt School's radicality; Muslims should translate the monotheistic concept of tawhīd (divine oneness) into post-metaphysical reasoning, just as the first generation of critical theorists translated the Jewish theological concept of bilderverbot, the "image ban" of the Second Commandment of the Decalogue, into critical philosophy.
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Title: Community epistemic capacities for epistemic self-determination in environmental justice and food sovereignty
Creator: Werkheiser, Ian Russell Wolohan
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation seeks to address an important but underexamined part of communities' survival and flourishing in the face of marginalization and oppression: community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination. I distinguish community epistemic capacities as a subset of community capacities, to mean the abilities of a community to gain, maintain, adapt, and continue the knowledge needed to solve problems and flourish. I have argued previously that community epistemic...
Show moreThis dissertation seeks to address an important but underexamined part of communities' survival and flourishing in the face of marginalization and oppression: community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination. I distinguish community epistemic capacities as a subset of community capacities, to mean the abilities of a community to gain, maintain, adapt, and continue the knowledge needed to solve problems and flourish. I have argued previously that community epistemic capacities are necessary for a community to meaningfully participate within the larger society in just, deliberative processes. This dissertation argues in part that community epistemic capacities are also necessary for a community to effectively engage in their own, independent projects (often in cooperation with other communities) which are important to the communities' members, particularly ones which promote the survival and flourishing of the community. I take this other application of community epistemic capacities to be a form of self-determination for communities. I focus in this dissertation on epistemic self-determination as an important sub-set of self-determination. By epistemic self-determination I mean the ability of community members to jointly engage in epistemic projects and determine the epistemic practices of their community, which can include methodologies for knowledge production and evaluative assumptions. To understand community epistemic capacities and self-determination, I contrast them with the Capabilities Approach, including the growing literature on collective capabilities. I also look at the environmental justice and food sovereignty paradigms – two activist discourses which take seriously the importance of both justice within larger institutions, as well as justice claims for communities to be able to build their own alternative projects outside of those institutions. The latter justice claim, which I call self-determination justice, has been insufficiently examined in political philosophy, but as I argue it is vital for community survival and flourishing. The justice conversations in these discourses help explicate the community epistemic capacities and self-determination framework, and these concepts likewise help deepen our understanding of these social justice movements. With this understanding in place, I apply the concepts of community epistemic capacities and community epistemic self-determination to a number of topics to show how they can inform our understanding of policy, activism, and transdisciplinary research. I explore the concept of trust as an epistemic capacity, and look at ways in which external experts can ameliorate a lack of community epistemic capacities through structured decision-making. I also look at how policies in food systems and the environment can be evaluated based on the degree to which they promote epistemic self-determination or undermine it. In the final chapter, I discuss a transdisciplinary project I have been conducting with partners in La Via Campesina and KRRS to look at women's barriers to participation in the food sovereignty movement in India. This work not only provides illustrations of the concepts discussed in this dissertation in its findings, but the study itself stands as a useful model of how incorporating a concern for community epistemic capacities and self-determination can inform external experts' work with communities.
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Title: Global development and its discontents : rethinking the theory and practice
Creator: Malavisi, Anna
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACT GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS: RETHINKING THE THEORY AND PRACTICEByAnna Malavisi Global development is comprised of a system of ideas, policies, institutions and individuals all concerned with the amelioration of the living conditions of those populations living in disadvantaged conditions. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 25, Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,...
Show moreABSTRACT GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS: RETHINKING THE THEORY AND PRACTICEByAnna Malavisi Global development is comprised of a system of ideas, policies, institutions and individuals all concerned with the amelioration of the living conditions of those populations living in disadvantaged conditions. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 25, Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and Article 22, Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. So, in a way the system of global development has been set up as a way to respond to these two human rights, first to provide all children, women and men with the fulfillment of basic necessities and second to ensure that the social and international order responds appropriately. However, in the reality this is not so. I argue that if we are really serious about the impact of global development, then this requires a rethinking of the theory and practice. Despite efforts made to contribute to the amelioration of people's lives in the name of development, human development indicators continue to be alarming: more than a billion people are malnourished, 884 million people do not have access to clean water, basic sanitation is denied to 2.5 billion people and 774 million people cannot read and write. Although the causes of these evident deprivations are not entirely due to development, it could be argued that due to the ineffectiveness of development these situations are not adequately addressed. Some of the problems particular to development include the implementation of inappropriate projects and programs; the dynamics of relationships between the multiple actors who play a role in development often entrenched in power and domination; and poor mechanisms of accountability. This has resulted in trillions of dollars invested in the name of development, but I would argue with poor results. In my dissertation I offer a more in-depth analysis and understanding of the current development paradigm, its theory and practice. There are two fundamental problems in development. First, there is a rather token and weak presence of an ethical dimension and second, the suppression of knowledge or what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls, "a form of epistemicide." There is another dimension to the way the global north has imposed a capitalist and imperial order on the global south that is often missed or blatantly ignored. This is epistemological. Therefore, I argue that implementing a strong ethical approach to development and understanding epistemic injustice in development will help to respond to severe global problems such as poverty and hunger in a different way. I particularly focus on neglected tropical diseases (NTD), a group of tropical diseases that occur all over the world but are markedly absent from the affluent countries. Using the example of NTD, I analyze how current development paradigms and approaches fail to address gross injustices such as the health disparities in the treatment and cure of these diseases. My ultimate aim is to offer an analysis of the problem of NTD from a development ethics perspective which intersects with feminist epistemology. From my own analysis which also draws on my experience, I venture to argue that one of the fundamental problems of development theory and practice is grounded in theoretical discussions of knowledge, and how this knowledge is then applied in the practice. First, I introduce an interpretation of global development from a theoretical standpoint as well as its practice. Second, I analyse the situation of NTD, and particularly Chagas Disease as a consequence of the failings of development. Third, I argue for a strong ethical approach in development and propose what a strong ethical approach should entail. Fourth, I discuss the notion of epistemic injustice in global development. Lastly, I offer some recommendations for the practice of development based on a strong ethical approach and epistemic justice.
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Title: Ecological reconciliation : bridging humanity and nature for justice
Creator: Murdock, Esme Greene
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The disciplines of political philosophy and environmental ethics are both concerned with the articulation and analysis of harms as well as the creation of normative and sustainable remedies. However, these disciplines rarely overlap in either the scope of their analysis of harm or their remedies. For they largely articulate harm as either “political” or “environmental,” and not importantly, both. “Ecological Reconciliation: Bridging Humanity and Nature for Justice” explores this separation...
Show moreThe disciplines of political philosophy and environmental ethics are both concerned with the articulation and analysis of harms as well as the creation of normative and sustainable remedies. However, these disciplines rarely overlap in either the scope of their analysis of harm or their remedies. For they largely articulate harm as either “political” or “environmental,” and not importantly, both. “Ecological Reconciliation: Bridging Humanity and Nature for Justice” explores this separation between political philosophy and environmental ethics as exemplified in the separation of the literatures of political reconciliation and ecological restoration. This dissertation argues that both political reconciliation and ecological restoration attempt to articulate processes of reconciliation as remedies to harms—where reconciliation is defined as the instantiation of right relations out of harmful ones. However, both the analysis of political and environmental harm and the proposed processes of reconciliation regarding these harms can be improved through the incorporation of more inclusive ecological relations within political reconciliation and through the incorporation of more inclusive political relations within ecological restoration. Ecological relations, roughly, track the physical processes and functionalities of ecosystems, while political relations track the human perspectives, lived experiences, and values that construct human relationships to power. Political reconciliation can come closer to its aspirations toward social justice from understandings of how environmental injustices both aggravate and contribute to social and political marginality; ecological restoration can come closer to its aspirations to create greater environmental responsibility from analysis of how social and political injustices infuse and color restoration plans and projects. This dissertation argues that the integration of ecological relations and political relations is key to better analyzing harm, as well as to the construction of sustainable, practical remedies. For example, the disproportionate siting of commercial toxic waste facilities in poor, communities of color in the United States is an instance of both social/political injustice and environmental injustice. Both levels of harms must be analyzed and addressed through reconciliatory frameworks that are expanded to account for them both. As solutions, this dissertation explores the literatures of environmental justice and Indigenous environmental ethics as areas of inquiry that center the relatedness of political and environmental harms/remedies. Both environmental justice and Indigenous environmental ethics prioritize the wedding of inclusive ecological relations and political relations to the instantiation of right relations and, thus, produce integrated, better models of reconciliation, which overcome limitations of both political reconciliation and ecological restoration models explored in the first part of the dissertation. Environmental justice tracks the ways in which environmental, social, and political ills disproportionately affect already vulnerable and marginalized communities, which illustrates the inextricable links between political and environmental injustice. Similarly, Indigenous environmental ethics examines how the rampant injustices (especially to the environment and ecosystems) of settler colonialism engender networks of harm that are deeply political and ecological, which call for reconciliatory processes that result in the ability of Indigenous communities to live in and experience the world in just, authentic, and culturally appropriate ways.
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Title: Disabling bioethics : the case for a disability moral psychology and epistemology for bioethics
Creator: Stramondo, Joseph Anthony
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: While it may be surprising to some, there is a history of persistent, sometimes heated conflict between the profession of bioethics and the disability movement. Namely, the disability movement has engaged mainstream bioethics in an adversarial way because of radically divergent positions on topics such as: prenatal diagnosis, health care rationing, growth attenuation interventions, physician assisted suicide, and euthanasia. In my dissertation, I argue that this tension between the analyses...
Show moreWhile it may be surprising to some, there is a history of persistent, sometimes heated conflict between the profession of bioethics and the disability movement. Namely, the disability movement has engaged mainstream bioethics in an adversarial way because of radically divergent positions on topics such as: prenatal diagnosis, health care rationing, growth attenuation interventions, physician assisted suicide, and euthanasia. In my dissertation, I argue that this tension between the analyses of the disability movement and mainstream bioethics is not merely a conflict between two insular communities of “disability activists” and “bioethicists” but between those who have experienced disability and those who have not. That is, I maintain that it is a mistake to think of this conflict as arising just from a difference in ideology or political commitments, because it represents a much deeper difference—one rooted in moral psychology and epistemology. Analyzing the causes and effects of nuanced differences between the disability movement and field of bioethics’ respective moral psychologies and epistemologies--and then suggesting both theoretical and practical changes that might dissolve the conflict produced by these unacknowledged differences--is the key task of my dissertation.
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Title: Power, ethics and the possibility of nonviolence
Creator: Balawender, Mark Stanislaus
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this project I focus on the question, What makes nonviolence an ethical form of political action? The shift to an instrumental understanding of nonviolence in the civil resistance literature has made it difficult to conceptualize nonviolence using a moral framework. Nonviolence is currently theorized and presented to potential activists as an instrumental form of politics. I draw on a number of different literatures to address this question. First, I look at classical explanations for the...
Show moreIn this project I focus on the question, What makes nonviolence an ethical form of political action? The shift to an instrumental understanding of nonviolence in the civil resistance literature has made it difficult to conceptualize nonviolence using a moral framework. Nonviolence is currently theorized and presented to potential activists as an instrumental form of politics. I draw on a number of different literatures to address this question. First, I look at classical explanations for the moral character of nonviolence that come from Gandhi, Clarence Case and Richard Gregg. Then, I dig into the strategic conceptualization of nonviolence that gets developed by Gene Sharp and is being further developed today by authors in the civil resistance literature like Erica Chenoweth and Kurt Schock. In discussing Sharp’s theory of power, I rely on the philosophical literature on power, specifically, Foucault and Steven Lukes. In developing my own conception of nonviolence I draw heavily on Arendt and Habermas. I also carry out a historical analysis of Poland’s nonviolent Solidarity movement (1980-89), which informs my conceptualization of nonviolence. My method has been to investigate what is incomplete about what I call the moral and the strategic paradigms of nonviolence in order to highlight what a more complete theory of nonviolence must do. In my analysis I argue that the moral paradigm, which understands nonviolence through the idea of conversion, lacks a conceptualization of the power inherent to nonviolent acts and is, itself, inconsistent about whether nonviolence operates coercively (Ch 2). Gene Sharp’s strategic reconceptualization argues that nonviolence is a more effective technique for political change than violence and that it actually forces the opposition to change. His theory of nonviolent power, however, relies on a voluntarist notion of consent that is inadequate in the face of contemporary social theory. The civil resistance literature in general focuses on the disruptive acts like strikes and boycotts, but does not have a category for nonviolent action that is not disruptive (Ch 3). Thus, the dissertation argues that nonviolence involves both disruptive acts (between the movement and its opposition) and communicative action (within the movement itself). In order to generate the disruptive capability that is recognized as nonviolent power by the civil resistance literature, I argue that participants within a movement must take a communicative stance toward each other, develop a public sphere, and must participate in developing shared political understandings. The voluntary, collective nature of nonviolent disruptive acts, like strikes, requires public will formation. My analysis of Solidarity shows that disruptive acts both originate in communicative action and are used to protect or expand the space for communicative action against attempts at suppression. For this reason I argue that disruptive acts and communicative action have what I call, a co-generative relationship in nonviolence. (Ch 4) I use Arendt and Habermas’s political theory to argue that nonviolence is a form of communicative power that gets developed outside of constitutionally democratic frameworks. It is ethical because it involves the effective and rational exercise of agency, through discourse alternating with action. Nonviolence makes private and public autonomy possible for movement participants in contexts of irresolvable conflict because it is powerful and can disrupt or replace existing institutions and legislation. (Ch 5) My ethical conception of nonviolence attempts to address the issues that arise from conceptualizing nonviolence in a universalistic moral framework (which fails to incorporate power) and in a purely instrumentalist framework (which fails to distinguish violence from nonviolence).
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Title: A moral framework for the practice of companion canine veterinary medicine
Creator: Merow, Craig Banks
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this dissertation I construct and defend a moral framework for the care and medical treatment of companion canines that recognizes and accommodates the moral implications of the relationships among companion canines, their owners, the communities in which they live, and the veterinary clinicians who care for them. The goal is to bring into equilibrium our considered moral judgments concerning particular canine care practices, the moral principles we use to guide our judgments, the...
Show moreIn this dissertation I construct and defend a moral framework for the care and medical treatment of companion canines that recognizes and accommodates the moral implications of the relationships among companion canines, their owners, the communities in which they live, and the veterinary clinicians who care for them. The goal is to bring into equilibrium our considered moral judgments concerning particular canine care practices, the moral principles we use to guide our judgments, the professional ethical standards for veterinary medicine, and the legal protections needed to ensure that obligations are met. I argue that humans have moral obligations to companion canines beyond those due to all sentient animals, because of the relationship they have with them. The specification of these obligations is explored using a modified capabilities approach. The result is a list of wellbeing-promoting interests of companion canines that delineates the scope of human responsibilities of care for these animals. Next, I discuss the professional ethical standards and legal protections necessary to ensure that human obligations to companion canines are met. An argument is offered for the establishment of a new category of property, custodial property, to include living things that have the morally significant feature of being created and owned in order to form strong, emotional bonds with their owners. Finally, several ethical problems are explored to show that the recognition of obligations generated by relationships, the list of wellbeing-promoting companion canine interests, and the new category of property combine to form a moral framework that can help dog owners, veterinary clinicians, and legislators in mixed-species communities make difficult decisions concerning the care and medical treatment of some of their most vulnerable members-companion canines.
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Title: A critical analysis of Habermas's qualified defense of strong judicial review
Creator: Sprague-Rice, Aidan Michael
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The question of how best to resolve constitutional indeterminacy has recently returned to prominence in American political philosophy. Jurgen Habermas's contribution to this debate, which takes the form of a qualified defense of strong judicial review, is interesting, but it has not been the subject of much scholarly attention. In this dissertation I provide a recapitulation of Habermas's account, locating it within the context of both Habermas's ambitious communication theory of society and...
Show more"The question of how best to resolve constitutional indeterminacy has recently returned to prominence in American political philosophy. Jurgen Habermas's contribution to this debate, which takes the form of a qualified defense of strong judicial review, is interesting, but it has not been the subject of much scholarly attention. In this dissertation I provide a recapitulation of Habermas's account, locating it within the context of both Habermas's ambitious communication theory of society and the ongoing American debate. This accomplished, I next subject Habermas's defense of strong judicial review to critical scrutiny. Through this process I demonstrate that Habermas's defense of strong judicial review does not sit comfortably with certain main premises of his social theory. Most importantly, I show that Habermas's attempt to legitimate strong judicial review runs afoul of his contention that members of rationalized societies should be expected, on reflection, to endorse a communicative criterion for analysis of the legitimacy of legal institutions. Because history teaches that there are alternative practically realizable forms of constitutional interpretation which come closer to realizing a situation in which communicatively processed public opinion influences constitutional interpretation, Habermas's qualified defense of strong judicial review must ultimately be understood as in significant tension with his overall social theory. I conclude my account by engaging in some speculation about both why Habermas might not have noticed this and what further lines of research are suggested by this analysis."--Page ii.
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Title: A unified account of motivated ignorance
Creator: Woomer, Lauren Michelle
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Motivated ignorance is a state of not-knowing that is cultivated or maintained by a person in order to serve their motives (i.e. their desires, interests, needs, or goals). While there has been a fair amount of work done by some feminist philosophers and critical philosophers of race on cultivated forms of ignorance in general, a detailed account of motivated ignorance in particular has not been given. In my dissertation, I offer just such an account—examining both what it means for a person...
Show moreMotivated ignorance is a state of not-knowing that is cultivated or maintained by a person in order to serve their motives (i.e. their desires, interests, needs, or goals). While there has been a fair amount of work done by some feminist philosophers and critical philosophers of race on cultivated forms of ignorance in general, a detailed account of motivated ignorance in particular has not been given. In my dissertation, I offer just such an account—examining both what it means for a person to not-know in the particular way that characterizes motivated ignorance and how this particular form of not-knowing is produced. I call my account a unified one because it asks both of these questions, while current accounts of ignorance generally only address either one or the other. The accounts of the feminist and critical race theorists mentioned above (who I call epistemologists of ignorance) usually focus on the latter practical question, while those of epistemologists who are neither feminist epistemologists nor epistemologists of ignorance (who I call mainstream epistemologists) only address the former conceptual question.In the first two chapters of my dissertation, I argue that it is not only possible to create a unified account of ignorance that combines the methodologies and insights of mainstream epistemologists and epistemologists of ignorance, but that it is beneficial for an account of motivated ignorance to be a unified one. I develop my two-part definition of motivated ignorance in the remaining chapters. In the third chapter, I argue that the state of not-knowing that characterizes motivated ignorance is best understood as one of agential insensitivity. This kind of insensitivity occurs when an agent's failure either to attend to relevant and available evidence, or to change their beliefs in response to this evidence, results in their beliefs not tracking truth or evidence. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I argue that in cases of motivated ignorance agential insensitivity is produced by an agent's motives exerting influence on their cognitive processes, especially when these motives are affective ones. Furthermore, since our motives are socially shaped, the production of motivated ignorance is a deeply social process even though it takes place largely at the level of individual cognition.
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Title: Politics of epistemic dependence : an epistemological approach to gender-based asylum
Creator: Sertler, Ezgi
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "My dissertation aims to build a bridge between analytic social epistemologies, feminist epistemologies, and refugee studies by bringing them into conversation on gender-based asylum cases, i.e. cases where gender-related persecution is the primary consideration for the determination of refugee status. It does so by using the concept of "epistemic dependence," which refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in the process of knowing, i.e. what we rely on and how we rely on it. In this...
Show more"My dissertation aims to build a bridge between analytic social epistemologies, feminist epistemologies, and refugee studies by bringing them into conversation on gender-based asylum cases, i.e. cases where gender-related persecution is the primary consideration for the determination of refugee status. It does so by using the concept of "epistemic dependence," which refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in the process of knowing, i.e. what we rely on and how we rely on it. In this dissertation, I argue that tracking problematic operations of epistemic dependence can provide an illuminating framework for understanding the epistemological impacts of the social and political structures that govern asylum claims." -- Abstract.
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Title: Naturalizing moral reasoning in bioethics
Creator: Beck, Daniel
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation is motivated by the hunch that current treatments of methodology in bioethics rest on inaccurate and one-sided pictures of the social practices of moral reasoning, in part because of their general avoidance of questions about the constitution of the we that reasons about moral issues. These approaches uncritically take the perspective of the doctor or administrator and unduly focus on one aspect of moral reasoning—its purported goal of producing definitive judgments. These...
Show moreThis dissertation is motivated by the hunch that current treatments of methodology in bioethics rest on inaccurate and one-sided pictures of the social practices of moral reasoning, in part because of their general avoidance of questions about the constitution of the we that reasons about moral issues. These approaches uncritically take the perspective of the doctor or administrator and unduly focus on one aspect of moral reasoning—its purported goal of producing definitive judgments. These limitations rarely produce considerations that are useful and usable by most people who face moral dilemmas concerning health care decisions, especially people who do not find medical institutions to be empowering places.In this dissertation I contribute to the painting of a different picture—one that provides more usable resources for dealing with the problems that confront people in a morally messy world. I by no means claim artistic originality here. This alternative picture has been painted in several different shades and variations by many others. Though each variation places a different gloss on the relationship between ethical theory and practice, all share a commitment to modeling ethics on the variety of actual social practices in which moral reasoning occurs. I focus on a naturalized and feminist variation on this theme. More specifically, this variation combines politically critical and socially reflexive analysis with a commitment to starting moral reflection from the actual moral experiences of human beings—most often from the experiences of people excluded from mainstream moral discourse on account of their social position (e.g., gender, race, class, or disability status). In this dissertation, I aim at the modest task of clarifying the details of the portion of this picture relevant to moral reasoning in bioethics.I begin with a critical examination of dominant methodologies in bioethics and outline their problems in terms of their inability to accommodate the significance for moral agents of three kinds of social positioning: the positioning of agents (1) in institutions, (2) along axes of social oppression, and (3) as temporally, culturally, and psychologically constrained human beings. I then introduce naturalized moral epistemology as a potential antidote to the idealizing assumptions remaining in dominant methodologies. In the second chapter, I develop the application of naturalized moral epistemology to bioethics by naturalizing the notion of the common morality. I develop three mutually reinforcing interpretations of a naturalized common morality: the common morality as (1) shared ecological predicament, as (2) shared evaluative space, and (3) as external coherence. The third chapter looks more deeply into theoretical issues for the naturalized approach, namely into the problem of locating normativity in a natural world. This chapter also provides a clear expression of the difference between the feminist naturalism developed in this dissertation and the scientific naturalism that is more well-known in the literature. In the fourth chapter, I confront a common objection to naturalized approaches—the charge of moral relativism—and show how naturalizing does not lead to relativism. This sets the dissertation up for the final chapter in which I show naturalizing in action by presenting a naturalized approach to the topic of medical cultural competence.
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Title: Imagination redux : a phenomenological investigation
Creator: Guajardo, Ivan
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTIMAGINATION REDUX: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONBYIvan Guajardo The imagination has been enjoying an increase in popularity in recent years. Research on it now ranges from empirical studies of mental imagery to philosophical attempts to classify it. Although this research has generated valuable insights, most of it fails to pay sufficient attention to our intentional experience of imagination. As a result, misconceptions of imagination abound, and dimensions of our lived experience...
Show moreABSTRACTIMAGINATION REDUX: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONBYIvan Guajardo The imagination has been enjoying an increase in popularity in recent years. Research on it now ranges from empirical studies of mental imagery to philosophical attempts to classify it. Although this research has generated valuable insights, most of it fails to pay sufficient attention to our intentional experience of imagination. As a result, misconceptions of imagination abound, and dimensions of our lived experience of it that are central to describe its nature adequately are often overlooked or treated very superficially. In what follows, I revisit the phenomenon of imagination and develop a better account of its intentional structure. On the basis of Husserl's writings, I will argue that imagination is a distinctive psychic act that differs from perception and memory in terms of its quasi-positional stance on objects, its freedom to alter pure possibilities at will, and in terms of how imagine objects relate to time. After developing a phenomenological description of these three essential differences, I describe three forms of imagination, and then use everything learned as the basis of an argument against pictorialism, an alternative theory that reduces imagination to a mere ability to form mental images. I will argue that, despite its influence, pictorialism misconceives what it is like to imagine something primarily by conflating the act of imagination with image-consciousness.
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Title: Uncooperative engagement : an active response to hate speech
Creator: Verrochi, Meredith
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In the following I take up and elaborate on the claim that we do things with words. That is, as speakers in a culture bound by convention and ritual, words are not merely an expressive tool but a form of action. More importantly still, words can – and often do – wound in the very uttering of them. As to the question of how words wound, J.L. Austin provides us with the working theory – speech act theory. Like the illocutionary force of warning or marrying or christening, there is an...
Show moreIn the following I take up and elaborate on the claim that we do things with words. That is, as speakers in a culture bound by convention and ritual, words are not merely an expressive tool but a form of action. More importantly still, words can – and often do – wound in the very uttering of them. As to the question of how words wound, J.L. Austin provides us with the working theory – speech act theory. Like the illocutionary force of warning or marrying or christening, there is an illocutionary force of subordinating. Drawing together Austin's speech act theory with the theory of meaning and conversation provided by H.P. Grice, we have a formula for actively addressing the peculiar harm that is done in hate speech. If harm is well enough established then prima facie something ought to be done about that harm. What remains is the question: what does intervention look like? To that end, the main objective of this project is to show that there are avenues for interrupting the illocutionary force of subordination beyond either enlisting the coercive power of the state or leaving recourse to the “open marketplace of ideas.” Somewhere between the Dworkin-MacKinnon anti-pornography ordinance and Judith Butler’s “resignification” is an alternate path. In the following I develop a concept that I call "uncooperative engagement" as a means of redress that is both tenable and ethical.
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Title: Resoluteness and the political : from Heidegger's "Being and Time" to early Marcuse and Arendt's "Vita Activa"
Creator: Ashman, Matthew
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Martin Heidegger's notion of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is the core of Being and Time (1927) and stands at the center of his political thought. Despite this significance, much of the literature on Heidegger either ignores the importance of resoluteness, understands it as an ethical concept, or rejects it as a harbinger of his later support for National Socialism. Resoluteness is vitally significant for social and political theory because it accounts for the meaning of political agency as...
Show moreMartin Heidegger's notion of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is the core of Being and Time (1927) and stands at the center of his political thought. Despite this significance, much of the literature on Heidegger either ignores the importance of resoluteness, understands it as an ethical concept, or rejects it as a harbinger of his later support for National Socialism. Resoluteness is vitally significant for social and political theory because it accounts for the meaning of political agency as action that aims to transform the world. Presenting resoluteness as a mode of disclosure reveals that resoluteness is not a phenomenon of the individual or will, but rather a condition for the possibility of being a political agent. Part One provides a close reading of Heidegger's notion of resoluteness to show how it can be read as a political concept. In Chapter One, I argue that the predominant conception of Heidegger's thought in Anglo-American philosophy (i.e., by pragmatists like Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty) overlooks the importance of resoluteness by viewing action solely as purposive activity. However, in Heidegger's conception of disclosure, purposive activity occurs within an already established world of significance and therefore, cannot be its own foundation. Resoluteness cannot have a purpose beyond itself, because it grounds the significance of the world within which purposive activity is meaningful. In Chapter Two, I substantiate my claim by developing resoluteness as a mode of world disclosure. In contrast to mainstream interpretations of Being and Time that read resoluteness as an ethical concept (i.e., self-individuation), I argue that for Heidegger, the counter-concept to publicness is not the individual, but community, which requires us to understand world disclosure as shared by a people. Part Two establishes that resoluteness has influenced both social and political thought through an examination of how two of Heidegger's students, Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt, appropriate the concept. Though both Marcuse and Arendt distance themselves from Heidegger's thought, as I show, resoluteness has an indelible influence on each of their theories of action. In Chapter Three, I argue that the early Marcuse's conception of radical social action, which became influential for the New Left movement in the 1960s, is based on his attempt to synthesize Heidegger's notion of resoluteness with a Marxist revolutionary conception of history. Marcuse argues that the possibility of radical action requires Heidegger's analysis to incorporate material factors such as gender and socio-economic status. Arendt counters that because power depends upon the ability of people to act in concert, it transcends the material factors with which Marcuse takes issue. As I show in Chapter Four, Arendt rejects the materialist conception of history Marcuse embraces, yet similarly bases her conception of political action on resoluteness, revealing the foundational significance of Heidegger's thought. However, I argue that Arendt's pluralist notion of political agency highlights a problem with Heidegger's understanding of community as a uniform whole, which fails to consider the communicative process between diverse political agents. Despite this criticism, in Chapter Five, I argue that Heidegger's notion of world disclosure makes a valuable contribution to social and political philosophy by establishing the notion of non-instrumental, world-constitutive action as the basis for political agency.
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