Browsing by Author "Sreenivasan, Gopal"

A moral dilemma confronts criminal justice in unjust states. If the state punishes marginalized citizens whose crimes are connected to conditions of systemic injustice the state has failed to alleviate, it perpetuates a further injustice to those citizens. If the state does not punish, it perpetuates an injustice to victims of crime whose protection is the duty of the criminal justice system. Thus, no reaction to crime by the unjust state appears to avoid perpetuating further injustice. Tommie Shelby proposes a new solution to this old dilemma, suggesting that certain theoretical and practical qualifications can save the unjust state from perpetuating injustice. He argues that punishment can be just even as society remains unjust if it is: (a) administered through a fair criminal justice apparatus; (b) only directed at mala in se crimes; and (c) not expressive of moral judgment. In the first part of this thesis, I explore Shelby’s solution to show that certain aspects of his framework are superior to alternative ones, but that it nonetheless fails to resolve the dilemma. In Part 2, I use a novel technological reform that promises to make criminal justice fairer, the AI risk assessment, as a case study to show why even punishment that meets Shelby’s criteria will continue to perpetuate injustice as long as it operates under systemic social injustice. Punishment can only be just if society is.

Recent accounts of authenticity have defined the concept in terms of self-creation, self-discovery, or some combination of the two. While these accounts get something right about the concept, I argue that they fail to capture all the elements of authenticity that an adequate account ought to capture. In this dissertation, I develop and defend a novel account of authenticity that preserves some features of previous accounts while also introducing new ones. My account is two-pronged (recognizing what I term the ‘target’ and ‘response’ dimensions of authenticity), and through it I come to the conclusion that authenticity is best characterized as the practice of living in accordance with one’s values. After outlining and defending this account, I consider how it might impact or inform current debates regarding how the use of psychoactive drugs for so-called ‘enhancement’ purposes affect users’ authentic selves.

This dissertation focuses on conceptions of victimhood across legal, political, and psychological domains. Conceptions of victimhood, as they currently stand, delegitimize the claims of legitimate victims and impose undue burdens upon victims to respond in a socially correct way. My research can be divided into three subsections: 1) legal and political conceptions of victimhood and the delegitimization of legitimate claims to victim status, 2) societal burdens placed on victims unduly because of their victim status, and 3) psychological conceptions internal to victims that make self-identification of blamelessness and victim-status more difficult than current scholarship suggests.

I build an expanded definition of victimhood that recognizes victims of structural harms and a parallel conception of survivorhood that legitimizes the suffering of victims even if they are seen as complicit actors in the harm they suffer. After building up a more robust conception of who counts as a legitimate victim, I investigate the internal self-conception that victims construct in light of the societal conceptions that surround them. In particular, I show that many victims have psychological reactions to being harmed that are at odds with the social expectations for how a victim ought to feel and act in relation to themselves and their offenders. The trajectory of my project first deals with others’ conceptions of victims, then addresses the ethical obligations imposed on victims as a condition of their legitimacy, and finally examines the psychological reactions of victims and internalization folk legal and psychological conceptions.

What does justice require of us in the personal realm of intimate association? Many seemingly innocent choices at the heart of private life, such as our tendency to sort ourselves into groups of friends, partners, and neighbors who share our social identities, play a significant role in perpetuating social segregation and its concomitant inequalities. And oftentimes, we rely on structures such as informal social norms, selective rules of club membership, or local land-use policies to protect these associational choices. I call this the problem of sorting. Because these choices are in the private realm, there is significant tension between personal liberty, especially the freedom of association, and the demands of justice. I begin this dissertation by using empirical social science to outline the problem of sorting. Individuals have reasons to take political action in favor of shaping their search environments according to these criteria, and they also have reasons to offer social opportunities to the excluded. The state should take positive steps to create diverse search environments. However, the state ought not interfere in our actual associations, and individuals have no duties to form substantive associations with the excluded. I conclude that this understanding of freedom of association and its concomitant duties reduces the tension that we began with, though it does not eliminate it.

My dissertation aims to shed light on the importance and distinctive nature of intimate relationships such as parent-child relationship and friendship by developing my own version of a virtue-ethical approach.

In Chapter 1, I critically examine important contemporary Western theories of filial piety and argue that they do not adequately capture the nature of a desirable parent-child relationship and filial piety.

In Chapter 2, I show why the duty-centered approach to filial piety is inadequate focusing on why it fails to make sense of filial love and argue that filial piety is better understood as a virtue by showing how it can do justice to the normative significance of filial love.

In Chapter 3, I introduce what I call ‘gratitude for being’ to capture the distinctive type of gratitude we owe to people who have consistent and particularized care for us, especially our parents. I argue that the idea of gratitude for being can best make sense of deep gratitude typically found among intimates who care for each other.

In Chapter 4, I introduce what I call ‘relational virtues,’ which are virtues required for the participants of a given type of personal relationship and argue that it offers a valuable resource for answering questions concerning the value of intimate personal relationships. Next, I propose my own relational virtue theory of filial piety.

In Chapter 5, I discuss several aspects of the Confucian conception of filial piety—early filial piety, the close connection between self-cultivation and filial piety, and postmortem filial piety—and show how my relational virtue theory can defend and make sense of them. Lastly, I show how my view of filial piety is different from the Confucian view, or at least a version of it.

In Chapter 6, I discuss the virtue of friendship as a relational virtue and show how it can make sense of the nature and value of friendship. In particular, I show why the virtue of friendship is distinct from general virtues such as benevolence or generosity and why it is morally important to have this virtue.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I propose what I call ‘relational activity view’ on partiality. After critically examining existing views on partiality, I suggest a picture of how special values are transformed, delivered, and created within intimate relationships.