Environmental Sustainability, Economic Growth and Distributive Justice
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Sibyl Schwarzenbach
Abstract
A CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY NONNATURALIST MORAL REALISM
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation defends the claim that nonnaturalist moral realism cannot be successfully formulated in terms of a constitution model similar to that proposed by non-reductive materialists for mental properties. Constitution metaphysics of moral properties fails to be non-reductive in any relevant sense; it is incompatible with the claim that moral properties are non-natural and it fails to provide any substance to the claim that there are objective values. Nonnatural moral properties are still in search of a believable metaphysics. The centerpiece of the dissertation is a detailed discussion of Shafer-Landau's metaphysics of moral properties as expressed in Moral Realism, since it is the most philosophically sophisticated proposal of a constitution model for moral properties. It will also be argued that nonnaturalist realism defended without a commitment to mind-independent moral properties fails to respond to common realist intuitions. In fact, the strongest intuitions about objectivity are not likely to find a comprehensible metaphysics. It is unlikely that this result will have any important social consequences.
Proper Names: Reference and Attribution
Year of Dissertation:
2012
In the wake of Saul Kripke's landmark Naming and Necessity, the claim that proper names are directly referential expressions devoid of descriptive content has come to verge on philosophical commonplace. Nevertheless, the return to a purely referential semantics for proper names has coincided with the resurgence of the very puzzles which motivated so-called description theories of proper names in the first place - to wit, the failure of substitutivity for co-referential names in propositional attitude ascriptions, the informativeness of true identity statements involving co-referential names, and the meaningfulness of negative existential discourse. In the following I argue in favor of what I dub Metalinguistic Description Theory, which holds that the meaning of typical uses of the name type `NN' to be given by the definite description `the phi bearer of `NN'' (where phi is a contextually determined sortal which speakers use to disambiguate the reference of names with multiple bearers). This analysis, I contend, provides an ultimately novel solution to the principal puzzles for the Direct Reference theory of proper names which, nevertheless, avoids the devastating arguments which felled the classical description theories of Frege and Russell.
Philanthropy, Charting the Moral Terrain
Year of Dissertation:
2012
I begin with three simple questions. Should a wealthy person give to philanthropy? How much should they give? And, where should donations be made? I turn to Peter Singer's life-saving pond example to make an argument that philanthropy to aid agencies, which I call life-saving philanthropy, is in some cases obligatory and not merely supererogatory. Given a reasonable, or "modest" interpretation of Singer's argument, and the obligations that follow, I argue that for the very wealthy giving all (or nearly all) their wealth at death turns out to be the type of minimal sacrifice that is morally required.
What Is Scientific Progress?
Year of Dissertation:
2010
As Philip Kitcher observes, it seems that almost everybody agrees that science constitutes the richest and most extensive body of human knowledge. Among philosophers of science, however, there is curiously very little explicit discussion of scientific knowledge. As a result, the question "What is scientific progress?" almost never gets an answer in terms of the accumulation of scientific knowledge, even though this answer seems to be the most natural one. Indeed, this is how scientists themselves--from Early Modern natural philosophers to contemporary practitioners--conceive of scientific progress. For scientists, scientific progress occurs when there is an accumulation of scientific knowledge. A scientific episode is progressive when, by the end of such a period of scientific change, we know more than we did at the beginning.
Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances: An Essay in Moral Epistemology
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Recreational killing strikes most of us as wrong. Such "moral appearances," in which the world appears to us to be a certain way, morally speaking, play an important role in moral epistemology, usually in the guise of "moral intuitions."
A Defense of Corporal Punishment: A Humane Alternative to Incarceration
Year of Dissertation:
2010
If we hold that severe punishment is sometimes justifiable, as almost all philosophers do, then we hold that it is morally permissible for the state to cause criminal offenders to experience substantial suffering. It is generally taken to be permissible to punish in ways that cause quite significant psychological suffering extended over vast amounts of time. Imprisonment, currently the most popular severe punishment, does this. However, in contemporary Western societies, causing suffering by inflicting even a moderate amount of physical pain is generally taken to be morally wrong, perhaps even beyond the pale. In many circles, seriously questioning this latter assumption is taboo, since it is taken as obvious that corporal punishment is an unfortunate relic of a less civilized past. In my view, this assumption is anything but obvious. Punishment inevitably causes suffering, and the psychological suffering caused by currently popular methods of punishment can be, and often is, severe and devastating. Corporal punishment can be imposed in a way that does not break the skin, scar, or cause any permanent physical damage. If these conditions are met, certain forms of corporal punishment can be shown to have significant morally relevant advantages over currently popular forms of punishment, especially imprisonment. Corporal punishment is more humane than imprisonment, since the amount of pain caused can be precisely calibrated, which enables the punisher to avoid causing a disproportionate amount of suffering. With imprisonment, this cannot be done, and the amount of suffering experienced by offenders with formally equivalent sentences often varies immensely. In the dissertation, I discuss this and other advantages of corporal punishment and I defend the practice against objections that claim that it is cruel, inhumane, inhuman, and degrading. Particular attention is paid to the issue of degradation, since most philosophically-developed objections to corporal punishment claim that the practice is degrading.
The Responsibilities of Reason: Kant and care
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Sibyl Schwarzenbach
I argue that care, as a moral value and a practice of moral significance, should have a place in Kantian ethics. There is neither and ethic of care nor an ethic of justice as such but rather simply ethics, which includes care and justice, as well as other values. Kantian ethics has been criticized in the care literature for allegedly devaluing emotion, exalting abstraction over attention to context, and offering a flawed conception of persons. I argue that a close reading of Kant's texts reveals these objections to be unsuccessful. I show how care can be understood in a Kantian theoretical framework. Finally, I examine care as a political value and the caring society as a model of social, political, and economic organization.
Deflationism about Truth and Meaning
Year of Dissertation:
2013
The aim of my thesis is to defend a deflationary view of truth and meaning. I characterize the view as a doctrine holding that truth is a purely logical notion, and truth-theoretic notions don't play a serious explanatory role in an account of meaning and content. We use truth-terms (e.g. `true') everywhere, from the discourse of ordinary conversation to those of the hard science and morality. The ubiquity of truth-terms gives rise to the impression that truth is a profound notion playing substantive explanatory roles. This impression, say deflationists, is unduly inflated--the ubiquity of truth-terms is not a sign of the richness but thinness of the concept of truth. In my thesis, I aim to defend this view by responding to some of its well-known objections. To defend a view often involves a modification, which is especially relevant to the case of deflationism due to the plethora of its variants. I have chosen two variants--Horwich's and Field's--in order to find out what features are to be had by a well-rounded variant of deflationism. My special interest is on the merits of a deflationary theory of truth as it is applied to an account of meaning and content. The specifics of each chapter are summarized in the following.
More Important Than Your Life: War, Individualism, and Justice
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Modern systematic just war theory since the 16th century has been committed to both individualism and anti-individualism at the same time. This is revealed after it is recognized that modern just war theory has two inconsistent components. First, there is a theory of public war wherein the political sovereign has unique moral responsibility for the justice of war while political subjects can be obligated to serve in war upon command. Second, there is a theory of discrimination wherein it is permissible to deliberately target combatants waging an unjust war but it is impermissible to target the innocent. These two components of just war theory posit two conflicting views of the distribution of responsibility for just war within political communities. This conflict is the result of the confused place individualism has had in modern just war theory. The theory of public war has its roots in the anti-individualist theories of justice in Augustine and Aquinas. Many theorists have attempted to reconcile the theory of public war and the theory of discrimination with individualism. Three such theories are examined. These are the theories of Vitoria, Grotius, and Walzer. Each of these attempts fails because the theory of public war is inconsistent with individualism. The only theory of just war that can be consistent with individualism is a theory of private war wherein all participants in war are responsible for the justice of war and no one is obligated to serve upon command. McMahan's theory of just war is an example of such a theory. The individualist theory of private war has troubling implications for political society, however, in that it renders the realization of political authority impossible. It is concluded that anti-individualist theories of just war ought to be considered and one such theory is articulated though not systematically defended.