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Conscience : toward the mechanism of morality
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2006)
Conscience is frequently cited and yet its mechanism is not understood. Conscience is most familiar as a voice protesting against actions which compromise personal integrity. Persons also cite conscience as that which ...
A defense of Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2005)
Alvin Plantinga argues that naturalism it is irrational for a reflective person to hold to the doctrine of naturalism. If naturalism is true, some evolutionary doctrine must also be true and our evolutionary history must ...
Aristotle on happiness : a comparison with Confucius
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2006)
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines the highest good for humankind in terms of happiness. The nature of happiness includes intellectual activity, virtuous activity, and friendship; and certain external goods are ...
Placement of special obligation in morality
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2005)
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] My thesis attempts to explain how special obligations are moral obligations. The morality of special obligations is put into question by the thesis of ...
Home aestheticus : species being and the struggle for existence
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] In this paper, I argue for the homo aestheticus thesis - the claim that our species nature is that of artistic producer and consumer; that this nature ...
The real banality of evil
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2005)
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his ...
A justified system of intellectual property rights
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
I argue that weak type-protection is the form our legal intellectual property rights should take. Other intellectual property regimes - specifically, strong type-protection (like that of our current American patent system) ...
Critical pluralism : a new approach to religious diversity
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
The world's religions provide a wide range of competing religious claims. The problem of religious diversity is that, while many of these claims are inconsistent with one another, they often seem to rest on roughly equal ...
Against Maximizing Act-Consequentialism
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)
Maximizing act consequentialism holds that actions are morally permissible if and only if they maximize the value of consequences—if and only if, that is, no alternative action in the given choice situation has more valuable ...
Who are the least advantaged?
(Clarendon Press, 2007)
The difference principle, introduced by Rawls (1971, 1993), is generally interpreted as leximin, but this is not how he intended it. Rawls explicitly states that the difference principle requires that aggregate benefits ...
Five Questions on Political Philosophy
(Automatic Press, 2006)
Peter Vallentyne answers five questions posed by the editor of the text on the nature of political philosophy.
On Original Appropriation
(Ashgate, 2007)
Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves. Lockean libertarianism further holds that agents have the moral power to acquire private property in external things as long as a Lockean Proviso—requiring ...
Justice in General: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2003)
This is the first volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume addresses the following three (only loosely ...
Distribution of What?: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2003)
This is the fourth volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume and the second part of Volume 5: Social ...
Social Contract and the Currency of Justice: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2003)
This is the fifth volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume addresses two issues: (1) contractarian ...
Of Mice and Men: Equality and Animals
(Springer Verlag, 2005)
Can material egalitarianism (requiring, for example, the significant promotion of fortune) include animals in domain of the equality requirement? The problem can be illustrated as follows: If equality of wellbeing is what ...
On the Possibility of Paretian Egalitarianism
(Journal of Philosophy, 2005)
We here address the question of how, for a theory of justice, a concern for the promotion of equality can be combined with a concern for making people as well off as possible. Leximin, which requires making the worst off ...
Why Left-Libertarianism Isn't Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)
Over the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in left-libertarianism, which holds (roughly) that agents fully own themselves and that natural resources (land, minerals, air, etc.) belong to everyone in some ...
Capabilities vs. Opportunities for Well-being
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have argued that justice is concerned, at least in part, with the distribution of capabilities (opportunities to function). Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, and John Roemer have argued that ...
Memory and Epistemic Conservatism
(2007)
We are all conservatives, at least when it comes to belief retention. We are forgetful, of course, but we typically do not abandon our beliefs unless we have special reasons to do so. Whichever view one takes of the ...