Browsing by Subject "Ethics"

Prudential hedonism is a school of thought in the philosophy of welfare that says that only pleasure is good for us in itself and only pain is bad for us in itself. This dissertation concerns an especially austere form of prudential hedonism: basic prudential hedonism (BPH). BPH claims that all pleasure is good for us in itself, and all pain is bad for us in itself, without exception; that all pleasures feel fundamentally alike, as do all pains; and that the amount of welfare in a person’s life can (in principle) be calculated just by adding up the amount of pleasure it contains and subtracting the amount of pain. The dissertation presents a positive argument for the claim that pleasures and pains are defined by common phenomenal properties, defends BPH against a battery of objections, and outlines an argument for accepting BPH on the grounds that it is simpler than competing views.

This is a philosophical work on the subject of play. Organized around a handful of questions, the thesis approaches inquiry by first integrating empirical lines of research and then applying the methods of philosophy. The first chapter is an introductory one that serves to motivate the project and outline its central features. Chapter 2 concerns the question of why humans play from an evolutionary and psychological perspective. The conclusions reached in this chapter form the basis of chapter 3's ethical discussion of why and how we ought to play. Chapter 4 uses an interpretation of Jean Piaget's The Moral Judgment of the Child as a stepping stone to an investigation of how play and moral development are related. Chapter 5 addresses the metaphysics of play by critiquing extant philosophical and biological accounts of what play is before advancing a novel theory based on active engagement and frivolousness. To conclude the dissertation, chapter 6 ties together themes from various chapters.

The theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder are, if at all treated together, typically contrasted. This negative juxtaposition is in so small part due to the very different reputations of each theologian on the question of violence. This dissertation demonstrates that the standard contrast between the theopolitical visions of Yoder and Augustine is mistaken. An introduction portrays the cumulative work of the chapters as the unfolding of a question about the contemporary reception of Augustine and Yoder: Might John Howard Yoder's "pacifism of the messianic community" be received as a radical form of Augustinianism? The dissertation consists of four chapters, each dealing with some aspect of Yoder's or Augustine's thought which, under closer examination, reveals an interesting line of convergence with the thought of the other. The politics of historical interpretation, the challenge of interiority, the aims of historicism, and the nature of "the political" are taken up in succession. An affirmative answer to the overarching question is suggested, but the more important task is to render the question salient for contemporary theologians and ethicists.

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Nearly 60% of the US population experiencing posttraumatic stress disorder have not received a meaningful clinical response from traditional interventions (Akiki & Abdallah, 2018). Early research using psychedelics in tandem with psychotherapy may offer a more effective option (Feduccia et al., 2019) and has been shown to provide or contribute to long-term relief or remission from PTSD symptoms (in small samples). Funding for psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) clinical-trials has increased to nearly billions (Phelps et al., 2022) and while the research is propitious, it is far from complete. Concerns about safety and generalizability have begun to surface (Love, 2022), including recent allegations of abuse. Though abuse is an issue within all clinical practice, risk is amplified by the non-ordinary state of consciousness experienced in high-dose PAT trials. In the US, treatment models using mind-altering substances are shaped by FDA-approved clinical research trials, which in turn define ethical practices and standards of care. By examining how existing regulations recommend governance for the informed consent process and reviewing publicly available documents from PAT trials, I aim to: 1) illuminate how risk and accountability are currently communicated to PAT participants; and 2) suggest how existing research policy might be updated to make working with trauma patients under non-ordinary states of consciousness safer and more ethically robust.

This thesis project explores Thomas Aquinas’ writings about eudaimonia (human flourishing, happiness) and its compatibility with Christian discipleship. Eudaimonia and Christian discipleship are not mutually exclusive ideas but can be synthesized in a meaningful manner. Moreover, I explore rational and theological ideas that challenge Thomistic understandings of bodily perfection in the attainment of happiness in this mortal life. In the second part of his imminent work The Summa Theologica, Aquinas seeks to integrate Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. The cornerstone of his theoretical system is eudaimonia, human flourishing, well-being, or happiness. Aquinas ultimately concludes that perfect happiness (beatitude) cannot be achieved in this life. However, imperfect happiness is possible. Interestingly, this situates Aquinas between Aristotle, who believed in the attainability of eudaimonia in this life, and Augustine who taught that happiness was unattainable in this life. Rather, Augustine’s hope for happiness stemmed from his eschatological vision of the afterlife. The first part of my dissertation is exploratory by design, carefully examining Aquinas’ views on the essence and requirements for happiness, the dynamics of the will, the nature of intelligent substances, and the cultivation of the virtues. Through examining part II of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and Book 3 of his Summa Contra for the Gentiles, I critically explore the unity and sometimes disunity of Aristotle's ethical paradigm with Christian discipleship. The second part of my research project consists of a four-week Bible study entitled The Quest for Happiness: A Four-Week Journey With Thomas Aquinas. In addition to teaching the bible study, I will provide reflections on my experience with the class for my growth and development as a leader. Aquinas provides his readers with a unique ontological lens for discerning the dynamics of human behavior. His perspectives are neither antithetical or hostile toward Christian discipleship but provide unique perspectives on the will, human proclivities, and morality. Aquinas’ Aristotelian analysis of the will provides hope that in achieving a deeper understanding of moral behavior, we can better achieve our ultimate telos, eudaimonia, in this life and the life beyond.

Many psychologists and philosophers hold that anger is a completely normal and often healthy human emotion. This position perhaps traces back to Aristotle, who argued that anger is morally good when it is moderated, such as towards the right people, to the right degree, and for the right reasons. Even though Aristotle’s position has widespread acceptance, this view of anger is challenged by the philosophical traditions of Stoicism and Buddhism. Despite starting from disparate premises, both conclude that anger is impermissible and ought to be eliminated, a position called anger eliminativism. Even so, there has been little critical engagement with their respective arguments as bona fide philosophical positions, worthy of consideration in their own right. This dissertation hopes to help remedy that lack. To do so, it offers a philosophical exploration of Stoic and Buddhist arguments. It contrasts and critically evaluates the views of Stoicism and Buddhism, evaluates the Buddhist metaphysical reasoning about anger, responds to existing interpretations of Stoic anger eliminativism, and presents Stoic objections to arguments from the Confucian tradition that anger is at least sometimes the morally virtuous response to perceived wrongdoing.

Since Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation, sentience has been the dominant justification for increasing non-human animal (hereafter ‘animal’) welfare. This dissertation is an attempt to discover a different reason to treat animals better: their moral agency. If animals are moral agents, then they deserve additional moral rights, rights that arise independently from their sentience.

To find out whether animals are moral agents, I focus on whether animals are ever morally responsible for their actions. More specifically, I examine whether animals punish each other. I focus on a special type of punishment: third-party retributive punishment. This is punishment issued by an unaffected bystander for a moral wrongdoing.

Humans do not treat animals as moral agents, but this does not mean that animals are never morally responsible. I evaluate animal behavior from the contexts of their own communities. Rather than focus on the ways in which humans treat animals, I focus on the ways in which animals treat one another.

This dissertation is highly interdisciplinary, utilizing principles of philosophy alongside empirical evidence from psychology, evolutionary anthropology, animal behavior, and ecology. Both the theoretical and empirical evidence support my main conclusion: animals are moral agents.

Children who appear as the main characters or primary consumers of YouTube content have been the focus of emerging academic literature and public debate (Feller & Burroughs, 2022; Ferguson, 2018; Kumar, 2021). Sharenting, or posting information, photos, or videos about one's children on social media, has also been a discussion and concern among researchers, legal scholars, and parents (Kumar, 2021). Sharenting has online and offline consequences. It exposes personal information, such as a child’s name and whereabouts, which may lead to unwanted attention or safety risks (Brosch, 2016; Blum-Ross, 2015). However, there is a significant subsection of YouTube media where children appear as integral supporting characters of an adult’s content that has yet to be meaningfully researched.The normalization of sharenting has coincided with an upsurge of influencers and influencer marketing (Abidin, 2018). The influencer marketing industry was estimated to be worth 16 billion dollars in 2022, projected to increase to 21 billion dollars in 2023 (Geyser, 2023). Influencers who involve their children in content position them, at times, as unintentional microcelebrities or brand assets (Abidin, 2015). When this happens, their appearance in user-generated content contributes to the premise and profitability of their parent’s brand. However, children who consistently contribute to their parent’s brand have no rights to the money their names, images, and likenesses generate. They have no working hours to abide by and no access to representation by a third party acting without a personal stake in their profitability (Geider, 2021). Children are unaware of the long-term consequences of exposure to a digital audience, including potential privacy violations, online harassment, or reputational harm. They may also not fully understand the implications of having a digital identity established for them before they can make decisions for themselves. While existing literature demonstrates that social media platforms, laws, and policies do not adequately regulate or protect the children of influencers, there has been no effort first to define the child of an influencer and, second, to identify at what point that regulation becomes necessary. In other words, when do influencer parents go beyond mere sharenting? This research project examines the complex interplay between the potential long-term impacts of children's involvement in influencer content and the gaps in regulations related to children’s work on social media. I aim to analyze the regulatory gray area children of influencers inhabit on YouTube and to identify salient features of influencer content which place children at disproportionate risk of undesirable exposure online. The present study scopes the value children provide to user-generated monetized content. It constructs a typology to describe the unique privacy and psychological risks they are exposed to when their parents' income involves their presence. It outlines common arguments influencer parents use to justify their children's use in content production and discusses the impossibility of informed consent for children in this context.

This thesis investigates two episodic television shows, Arrested Development and Scrubs, and attempts to establish why one succeeded with audiences and the other failed. Following the work of genre theory, it is asserted that the two shows resonate with opposing narratives framing lived experience. The former presents the institutional (or restrictive) force of language to guide one's thoughts, mark disassociations between the self and others, and determine action. The latter appeals to the creative (or liberating) use of dialogue and narrative to inspire agency. In privileging the concrete situations in which interactions with others enable growth without restricting the will, and in which others are engaged in the same self-investigation, Scrubs calls for an acknowledgement of others. Arrested Development points to the metaphysical language and power systems that make such acknowledgements impossible. It is argued thereafter that both world-pictures have their place. The opposition between Arrested Development and Scrubs develops into a dual affirmation of how ordinary uses of language have the potential to create arbitrary limits between the self and others, but also how ordinary language in a state of emergence from the particular lives of a multiplicity of speakers enables us to meaningfully communicate in the first place and antagonizes the metaphysical pictures that hold us captive. This thesis concludes by exploring the way that fiction, as a series of propositions, occupies the middle space between an epistemological opening up and closing off of the self to others, allowing it to be used for either purpose, or for both at once.

For over a century, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers have debated the coherence and moral validity of Augustine’s account of self-love. What to make of statements like “Love the Lord, and in so doing learn how to love yourselves” (s. 90.6) and humanity’s ruin “was caused by love of self” (s. 96.2)? Does Augustine’s account of self-love contain an inner contradiction? And does loving oneself by loving God turn God into an instrument in the quest for self-love and happiness?

In this dissertation, I analyze Augustine’s account of self-love and its relevance for pastoral care and redefine the more than a century-old debate in three ways. First, employing Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, enriched by Augustine’s insights, I analyze the prejudgments scholars brought to this debate. I demonstrate that scholars who fault Augustine’s understanding of enjoyment (frui) with instrumentalization read Augustine with wrong assumptions. Aware of how modern utilitarianism’s emphasis on happiness could lead to the instrumentalization of people, critics like Hannah Arendt, Anders Nygren, and Oliver O’Donovan think Augustine’s usage of utilitas (“usefulness”) and uti (“use”) instrumentalizes God and neighbor. Through a detailed analysis of how uti and utilitas appear in ordinary Latin, ancient philosophy, Scripture, and Augustine’s writings, I show that Augustine uses forms of uti to describe the divine order. For Augustine, to use something is not to instrumentalize it but to love it as it should be loved: as an end in itself, situated within the higher end of loving God above all, from which every end receives its order, meaning, and purpose.

Second, situating Augustine’s account of self-love in its historical context—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the debate between Stoicism and the Old Academy about the good life, and Scripture—I refute that his interpretation of self-love is incoherent. Augustine’s understanding of self-love is grounded in the ancient ideal of therapy. In antiquity, therapy is about a new way of seeing and being in the world. Through his writings and preaching, Augustine seeks to move his readers from a competitive self-love that favors the self over others to a connective self-love that flourishes in loving relationships with God and neighbor.

Third, having established the nature and coherence of Augustine’s account of self-love, I go one step further by making explicit the implicit motivation for the entire debate: the relevance of Augustine’s interpretation of self-love for living a good life. I argue that Augustine’s nuanced understanding of self-love offers a good starting point for integrating self-care and self-denial for the common good. And in dialogue with feminist critiques of Augustine and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, I also analyze where Augustine’s account of self-love needs to be corrected and expanded.

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.

In this dissertation, I argue that the conceptual grammar of Augustine's thought provides a way of re-thinking the public/private distinction as it has been developed in modernity. The dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is a conceptual analysis and a genealogy of the distinction through focus on specific private characters produced in both antiquity and modernity. I focus on the characters of the "woman" and the "refugee." Conceptually, I argue that the public/private distinction can be seen both as an anthropological distinction and as a socio-political distinction: claims about the structure, nature, and history of selves have implications for how society ought to be organized, and claims about how society ought to be organized have implications about the structure, nature, and history of selves. I show how Christianity changed society by creating new character scripts and with them, new socio-political possibilities. The second part of the dissertation provides one Augustinian conceptual "grammar" that makes sense of the revolution Christianity effected possible, and it responds to problems raised by the genealogy in the first half by providing a close reading of Augustine's texts relating to God and creation, interiority, salvation and beatitude, and the Virgin Mary. I display the logic in Augustine's thought by which, in God, domestic and public come together, how God's relation to creation changes how to think about interiority, what that means for how Augustine understands salvation as a restoration of proper inwardness, and how the character of the Virgin Mary condenses the grammar as a sacrament of human salvation. I draw out the ways that Mary shows how Augustinian thought provides resources to think "beyond" the public/private distinction both as it was given to her in antiquity and how it has been received in modernity.

This dissertation explores the formational power of healthcare as revealed in the modern hospital, offering a constructive theological and moral response to two interrelated questions. First, how should the work of healthcare be described? Answering this question requires careful attention to distinct formations of patients and practitioners undergirded by tacit theological assumptions. Second, what moral responses are fitting for these descriptions of the work of healthcare? In contrast to the standard prescriptive approach in modern bioethics, the moral concerns and sources present in contexts of action must be articulated in order to enable prudential moral guidance. Through engaging the relationship between moral description and prescription in the modern hospital, this dissertation argues that the practice of healthcare should be ordered within an overarching moral and theological vision of hospitable bodily care.

In dialogue with writings in phenomenology, ethnography, and history, the dissertation excavates the theological, philosophical, and political assumptions that undergird different accounts of the work of healthcare in the hospital. Within this institution, bodily disruption is imagined and engaged in distinct ways, which form how patients and practitioners speak, perceive, and act. This formation is examined in three paradigmatic medical sites within the modern hospital: the surgical ward, the Intensive Care Unit, and the labor and delivery ward. Within them, the patient’s body is imagined and engaged as enemy, object, and friend. These medical imaginaries are made possible by the development within the modern hospital of distinct arrangements of discourses, practices, and practitioners, each undergirded by particular normative schema.

By articulating the moral sources and conflicts within the modern hospital, the project illuminates the moral theories of three prominent Christian bioethicists: James Childress, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and Stanley Hauerwas. I argue that Childress offers a just-war inspired bioethics fitting for conflictual encounters, and that Engelhardt’s position, as developed by Jeffrey Bishop, ultimately counsels separation in light of the objectification of the body that occurs in the modern hospital. In his writings, Hauerwas offers an account of care befitting the institution’s roots in practices of hospitality. By developing this moral vision through the work of Luke Bretherton, the dissertation articulates a postsecular approach to bioethics, one that seeks to work within and across robust moral communities to foster the conditions and possibilities of hospitable bodily care.

The project argues that the dominant modes of imagining and engaging the patient’s body in the modern hospital—as enemy and object—do not have to be fundamental. Instead, a constructive normative vision of hospitable bodily care can order the practice of healthcare within the modern hospital. The theological underpinnings of this overarching moral framework are provided through understanding the encounter between patient and practitioner as a Christologically charged event, as depicted in Matthew 25 and the work of St. Basil. This is developed further through a pneumatological account of healthcare. The project concludes by arguing for a theological construal of the practice of healthcare as a means of participating in the Spirit’s work of befriending flesh. Through acts of hospitable bodily care, patients and practitioners are formed into the image of Christ through the power of the Spirit.

In a democratic society, does the electorate approve of truth and disapprove of deception, do opinion patterns exclusively mimic partisan elite views, or do opinion patterns react exclusively to successful or failed outcomes? Do citizens hold leaders accountable for the perceived truthfulness of foreign policy claims or do they only evaluate whether or not the policies were successful? The existing literature on public opinion and foreign policy calls the accountability role for the public "audience costs," and specifies that concerns about audience costs constrain leaders. However, the literature is not clear on what role normative issues may play in generating audience costs. This gap in the literature is notable because so much of the debate surrounding significant policy issues, especially war-making and military action, is couched in retrospective, normative, moralizing language. These debates make no sense if the pragmatic, forward-looking dimensions of audience costs - reliability and success - are all that exist. Through a survey experiment and four historical case studies developed with primary and secondary historical sources, news articles, and polling data, I find that there is a complex dynamic at work between the public's desire for successful outcomes and the high value placed upon truth-telling and transparency within a democracy. Studying justifications for military action and war, I find that the public will be motivated to punish leaders perceived as deceptive, but that imposition of audience costs will be moderated by factors including partisanship, degree of elite unity, and the leader's damage control strategy in response to disapproval.

This study argues that Chaucer's poetry belongs to a far-reaching conversation about the forms of consolation (philosophical, theological, and poetic) that are available to human persons. Chaucer's entry point to this conversation was Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a sixth-century dialogue that tried to show how the Stoic ideals of autonomy and self-possession are not simply normative for human beings but remain within the grasp of every individual. Drawing on biblical commentary, consolation literature, and political theory, this study contends that Chaucer's interrogation of the moral and intellectual ideals of the Consolation took the form of philosophical disconsolations: scenes of profound poetic rupture in which a character, sometimes even Chaucer himself, turns to philosophy for solace and yet fails to be consoled. Indeed, philosophy itself becomes a source of despair. In staging these disconsolations, I contend that Chaucer asks his readers to consider the moral dimensions of the aspirations internal to ancient philosophy and the assumptions about the self that must be true if its insights are to console and instruct. For Chaucer, the self must be seen as a gift that flowers through reciprocity (both human and divine) and not as an object to be disciplined and regulated.

Chapter one focuses on the Consolation of Philosophy. I argue that recent attempts to characterize Chaucer's relationship to this text as skeptical fail to engage the Consolation on its own terms. The allegory of Lady Philosophy's revelation to a disconsolate Boethius enables philosophy to become both an agent and an object of inquiry. I argue that Boethius's initial skepticism about the pretentions of philosophy is in part what Philosophy's therapies are meant to respond to. The pressures that Chaucer's poetry exerts on the ideals of autonomy and self-possession sharpen one of the major absences of the Consolation: viz., the unanswered question of whether Philosophy's therapies have actually consoled Boethius. Chapter two considers one of the Consolation's fascinating and paradoxical afterlives: Robert Holcot's Postilla super librum sapientiae (1340-43). I argue that Holcot's Stoic conception of wisdom, a conception he explicitly links with Boethius's Consolation, relies on a model of agency that is strikingly similar to the powers of self-knowledge that Philosophy argues Boethius to posses. Chapter three examines Chaucer's fullest exploration of the Boethian model of selfhood and his ultimate rejection of it in Troilus and Criseyde. The poem, which Chaucer called his "tragedy," belonged to a genre of classical writing he knew of only from Philosophy's brief mention of it in the Consolation. Chaucer appropriates the genre to explore and recover mourning as a meaningful act. In Chapter four, I turn to Dante and the House of Fame to consider Chaucer's self-reflections about his ambitions as a poet and the demands of truth-telling.

This dissertation asks how the theological anthropologies of T. F. Torrance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Willie Jennings help Christians diagnose and subvert the idolatry of our current racial imagination. It concludes that an idol we can call “whiteness” competes with Christ to function as the mediator of social identity, our goal and ideal human, and the icon held between us. This idolatry interferes with our ability to become the people we are meant to be together in Christ by the power of the Spirit. This theological anthropology enables us to identify the idol of whiteness at work in popular media like blockbuster movies, and it equips us to undermine this idol through our engagement of the arts, popular or otherwise, so that we might together develop a new, healthier, and holier imagination.

My dissertation seeks to clarify the stakes of recent calls to increase civic friendship in our communities by initiating a conversation between contemporary and historical theoretical work about the requirements and consequences of using friendship as a model for social and political relationships between citizens. Friends’ lives are bound together by shared activity and by mutual concern and support; in what ways do relations between citizens, who often begin as strangers, take up these attitudes and behaviors? What kinds of civic friendship are possible in our contemporary democratic communities? How are they cultivated? And what are their political advantages and disadvantages? These questions guide the project as a whole.

I begin by canvassing some recent and popular work by Robert Bellah et al., Robert Putnam, and Danielle Allen in order to clarify the claims they make about different forms of civic friendship. The chapters that follow focus on the work of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith respectively in order to respond to various gaps I find in the contemporary accounts. I assess what each thinker, contemporary and canonical, can offer us today as we continue to think about the most sustainable and fair ways in which citizens can relate to one another in vast and diverse contemporary democracies. Along the way I address several important over-arching issues: the relationship between self-interest and care for others; the relationship between different sorts of equality and civic friendship; and the different roles that reason, emotions, habits, and institutions play in the cultivation of various kinds of civic friendship. I conclude that equality and justice ought to be both prerequisites and consequences of civic friendship, that self-interest is not a sufficient source for robust civic friendship and that instead some kind of imaginative and emotional motivation is needed, and that civic friendship must be understood as both a moral and a political phenomenon.