Philosophy
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Item Disadvantage in Context: From Microaggressions to Healthcare Policy(2019) Perez Gomez, Javiera Maximiliana; Kerstein, Samuel J; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many dimensions of applied ethics appeal to consequentialist moral theories to evaluate the moral permissibility of an action, practice, or policy. But such an approach risks obscuring other, non-consequentialist concerns. In line with this worry, this dissertation seeks to clarify and morally examine three phenomena that may compound the disadvantages that members of historically and currently disadvantaged groups face: microaggressions, the promotion of prenatal testing for selective abortion, and the allocation of scarce medical resources. Chapter 1, “Disadvantage in Context,” describes the notion of disadvantage that is relevant to this dissertation and explains the relation between Chapters 2-4. Chapter 2, “Microaggressions: What’s the Big Deal?” argues that the standard view of microaggressions, which holds that microaggressions are harmful because they express devaluing messages about members of disadvantaged groups, is too underdeveloped both for identifying microaggressions and for explaining why they are morally objectionable. I then offer an improved account of microaggressions according to which it is the content of what is expressed that determines when microaggressions are morally objectionable. Chapter 3, “When Is the Promotion of Prenatal Testing for Selective Abortion Wrong?” addresses the imprecisions of the expressivist objection to prenatal testing, which maintains that when medical professionals promote the use of prenatal testing for abortion on grounds of disability, they express a harmful, devaluing message to and about extant disabled people. I then offer an improved formulation of this objection according to which the promotion of prenatal testing for selective abortion is sometimes wrong. Chapter 4, “Indirect Benefits and Double Jeopardy in the Allocation of Scarce, Lifesaving Resources,” examines the question of whether or not benefits to third parties, e.g., saving their lives or improving socioeconomic conditions, should count when resources are scarce and not all can be saved. By recruiting the notion of ‘double jeopardy,’ which, as I argue, can be understood in two distinct ways, I aim to give a stronger foundation for the idea that counting indirect benefits such as social contribution would be wrong—at least given certain social conditions.Item Environmental Human Rights, Natural Law Theory, and Nature's Aesthetic Value(2011) Stevens, Christopher William; Levinson, Jerrold; Morris, Christopher; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I argue that nature ought to be preserved because its existence is required for a particularly significant constituent of human well-being, a constituent so significant that the means to it -- provision of and ready access to indigenous and ecologically sound nature -- are worthy of being secured by legal right. The constituent is a complex cognitively-grounded and perceptually-induced emotive experience best characterized as an aesthetic one. In the current policy and social climate this characterization will to most policymakers and concerned citizens hardly convey its significance for either well-being or the preservationist cause. Hence the need for its presentation and defense. This view of the justification of environmental preservation is different from those common in the environmental ethics literature and in environmental policy. It includes neither an appeal to nature's purported intrinsic value nor an appeal to provisioning, regulating, or supporting ecosystem services such as clean air and water, climate control, and biomass production, though these are secured secondarily if indigenous and ecologically sound nature is primarily secured as a means to the experience. The dissertation consists of eight self-contained but interrelated chapters in which I argue for the following: interest/instrumental theory of rights; neo-sentimentalist buck-passing account of nature's value; merging of the scientific-cognitivist conception of the appropriate aesthetic experience of nature with a wonder-based account; the consistency of J. S. Mill's harm principle with the principle of utility in the context of Mill's qualitative hedonism; expansion of the philosophical aesthetician's self-understanding of his task to include the public policy-relevant aspects of his discipline in terms of the contribution that appropriate, merited aesthetic experience can make to well-being; neo-sentimentalist buck-passing account of aesthetic experience and aesthetic value.Item The Disunity of Moral Judgment: An Essay in Moral Psychology(2011) Saunders, Leland; Dwyer, Susan J; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recently there has been great deal of interest in uncovering the psychological processes of moral judgment. Over the past 10 years, psychologists and neuroscientists have studied the psychology and neurology of moral judgment, and there are now several empirical models of the psychology of moral judgment that attempt to explain these empirical findings. I argue that current empirical models of moral judgment, however, are inadequate, because the psychological processes that they posit cannot explain some important characteristics of other features of our moral psychology. On the other hand, contemporary philosophical accounts of moral judgment do not fare any better, because they are not consistent with recent empirical findings. My diagnosis for these inadequacies is that contemporary philosophical and empirical models of moral judgment are implicitly committed to what I call the Unity of Process Thesis, which is the claim that all moral judgments are the products of a single psychological process. I argue that the Unity of Process Thesis must be abandoned, because it makes it impossible to account for some important features of our moral psychology. What is needed is a dual-process model of moral judgment, and by drawing on an empirically well-supported dual-process architecture of human judgment, I develop a framework for moral judgment that posits two distinct kinds of moral judgments, intuitive and deliberative, that have very different underlying psychologies that operate in different ways, using different cognitive resources, that are tied to motivation in different ways, and play different roles in our moral psychology. I call this framework the Two Kinds Hypothesis. The distinction between intuitive and deliberative moral judging and judgments is quite valuable in developing an overall psychological picture of moral judgment that captures important features of our moral psychology and that is consistent with current accounts of the general architecture of human judgment. This analysis also has upshots in illuminating some debates in metaethics as well, specifically the debate between moral particularists and generalists, and the debate between moral judgment internalists and externalists.Item Moral Intuitions and their Role in Justification(2011) Fanselow, Ryan Taylor; Kerstein, Samuel J; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Moral intuitions play a vital role, not only in ordinary moral thought, but also in how philosophers choose between competing normative theories. The standard view about how intuitions ought to be used in moral theory is John Rawls' method of reflective equilibrium, according to which an agent ought to work back and forth between her intuitions, the principles that systematize them, and other background beliefs, revising each until all of her judgments are consistent. My dissertation addresses two problems with the standard view. First, the method makes use of moral intuitions but offers no account of why these judgments have the epistemic credibility to play a role in choosing between normative theories. Second, when we find an inconsistency between an intuition and a moral principle, the method tells us to revise either the principle or the theory. However, this leaves the interesting question unaddressed. Simple norms of consistency tell us that we ought to revise either the principle or the theory; the interesting question is which should we revise. I argue that both of these problems can be solved simultaneously by conjoining the method of reflective equilibrium with an account of belief revision. Accordingly, I formulate and defend what I call a contributionist account of belief revision, according to which, when faced with a conflict between beliefs, one revises so as to preserve the belief that makes the greatest overall contribution to the coherence one's set of beliefs. This account, I argue, not only solves the second challenge by making the method of reflective equilibrium more determinate. It also explains why those intuitions that survive the reflective equilibrium process have the requisite epistemic credibility. These intuitions have this credibility in virtue of the contribution they make to the coherence of one's overall set of beliefs.Item Action, Perception, and the Living Body: Aristotle on the Physiological Foundations of Moral Psychology(2009) Russo, Michael P.; Singpurwalla, Rachel G. K.; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I show that Aristotle's moral psychology is grounded in his natural philosophy of the living body. Moral psychology studies the ways in which agency and moral responsibility are rooted in the functional structure of the psyche. For Aristotle, the psyche - that is, the soul (psychê) - is unified with the living body, and its functional structure is integrated with the dispositional propensities of the body's material constituents. On account of this, "the soul neither does anything nor has anything done to it without the body..." (DA I.1, 403a 5) Accordingly, Aristotle considers it an "absurdity" of the accounts of his predecessors that "they attach the soul to the body and set it into it, determining no further what the cause of this is or what the condition of the body is..." (DA I.3, 407b 14) However, most contemporary interpretations of Aristotle's moral psychology suffer from essentially this same problem: they interpret Aristotle's explanation of, say, voluntary action or lack of self-restraint (akrasia) in entirely psychological terms, and say nothing about the physiological processes that Aristotle takes to partially constitute, and to critically influence, these phenomena. Here I address this imbalance by exploring Aristotle's view of the somatic dimension of moral psychology. More specifically, I examine Aristotle's so-called "hylomorphism" - the view that a living thing's body and soul are its material and its form (respectively) - and his account of the physiological functions underlying "incidental perception" (roughly, "seeing as" or perceiving particulars under a description), voluntary action, practical reasoning and its role in moving us to act, lack of self-restraint, and moral development.Item Rwanda and the Moral Obligation of Humanitarian Intervention(2007-04-25) Kassner, Joshua James; Morris, Christopher W; Morris, Christopher W; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1994, nearly one million Men, women, and children were slaughtered because of their ethnicity. The tragedy of the Rwandan genocide has caused many to question the international community's choice not to intervene. I use the Rwandan genocide as a means of discussing international morality and the role of morality in international relations. The first half of my project focuses on humanitarian intervention as an issue of global ethics. I argue that the international community, as a collection of duty-bearing states, had a moral obligation to intervene in Rwanda. To defend this proposition I must first establish the conceptual possibility of global ethics. In that vein, I begin by arguing against various skeptical arguments made by communitarians, relativists, and political realists. Having made the conceptual room for global ethics, I then develop a weak moral principle in support of the moral obligation of humanitarian intervention by identifying the set of conditions under which no one could reasonably deny that such an obligation exists. I next explain how states can and why they on occasion do bear that obligation. Lastly, I argue that the Rwandan genocide fulfilled such conditions; as a consequence, not only was intervention permissible, it was obligatory. The second half of my project is concerned with the role moral demands should play in the practical deliberations of states. Many international relations scholars contend that questions of intervention are largely determined by the right of nonintervention which precludes other states from considering reasons for action that would require intervention. Against such scholars I argue that the role the right of nonintervention played in the practical deliberations of states during the Rwandan genocide was, and remains, unjustified. In the alternative, I argue that we ought to adopt a rebuttable presumption in favor of nonintervention. Such a rule would serve the same goals as the right of nonintervention, but without the unjustified preclusion of moral reasons for action. I conclude that the presumption of nonintervention would have been rebutted during the Rwandan genocide, and that the international community ought to have intervened.