Philosophy

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/4955

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 50

The Ethics of Persuasion
(2026-04-20) Galley, Daniel; Marshall, Colin
In this dissertation, I use ‘persuasion’ to refer to the provision of reasons offered with the intention of changing the target’s mind on some moral matter. A key premise that underlies much of this dissertation is that engaging others in persuasion constitutes an essential way of recognizing their rational agency. This dissertation consists of three papers, all of which focus on the ethics of persuasion. In the first paper, I argue that we have a prima facie moral obligation to not forgo persuading others out of distrust in their rational capacity to sincerely engage with moral reasons, since doing so treats them paternalistically. The second paper responds to the claim that attempts at persuasion can risk precluding the target from exercising their rational autonomy by getting the target to defer to the persuader’s judgment. I argue that while attempts at persuasion can result in the target deferring to the persuader’s judgment, the attempt at persuasion does not risk precluding the target from exercising rational autonomy, but rather the attempt risks expressing an ‘authoritative air.’ In the third paper, I make a contribution to a recent argument made by Cecile Fabre (2023), who claims victims of wrongdoings have a pro tanto moral duty to accept their wrongdoer’s apology. I begin by identifying a category of wrongdoing that I refer to as ‘complex wrongdoings’, that fall outside of Fabre’s duty to accept apologies. I argue that while the victim is under no duty to accept the wrongdoer’s apology in these cases, the victim can still have a moral duty to sincerely engage with the wrongdoer’s apology as a form of persuasion.
Schopenhauer on Character, Cognition, and Moral Responsibility
(2026-02-05) Barker, Aaron; Marshall, Colin
My dissertation addresses some of the central features of Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory ofaction. It does so through three papers that deal in Schopenhauer’s conceptions of moral character, cognition, and moral responsibility. The first paper identifies a puzzle that emerges in Schopenhauer’s discussion of the structure of moral character and its relation to actions. The second paper clarifies several underexplored features of Schopenhauer’s Primacy Doctrine, theory of cognition, and conception of rational deliberation. This paper presents a novel reading of Schopenhauer’s theory of action as involving a feedback loop of motivation. The third paper contextualizes Schopenhauer’s theory of moral responsibility as a significant departure from the Modern European philosophical tradition, shows that Schopenhauer developed an early conception of cognitive bias, and argues that Schopenhauer’s account of moral responsibility implies that agents are morally responsible for their cognitions and biases which reflect their unique, individual character.
Deflationary Challenges and Essentialism
(2025-10-02) O'Dwyer, Kyle Darby; Marshall, Colin; Raven, Michael J.
The title of my dissertation—Deflationary Challenges & Essentialism—is intentionally ambiguous. The first paper formulates an epistemic challenge for the essentialist's essence attitudes. The challenge partly arises from Amie Thomasson's deflationary account of existence and identity conditions. The second and third papers, however, issue challenges for Thomasson's deflationism about metaphysical modality and natures respectively. More specifically, the first paper argues that prominent epistemologies of essence are in an epistemically fragile predicament, owing to the fact that, as I argue, they fail to give a positive answer for how essence attitudes are explained by the essence facts. This makes the essentialist especially vulnerable to, what I call, a deflationary challenge, whereby a realist's explanation for their particular realist attitudes are outweighed by a competing deflationary explanation for those attitudes. Such a challenge may arise from something like Thomasson's deflationary account of existence and identity conditions. The second paper argues that Thomasson's deflationary account of modality—modal normativism—is worryingly circular. By reinterpreting the function of modal discourse as prescriptive, Thomasson must include descriptively functioning modal terms in order to clarify the regulative status of the metalinguistic rules which, per hypothesis, undergird modal discourse. Lastly, the third paper argues that Thomasson's deflationary account of existence and identity conditions faces a debunking challenge. In particular, on Thomasson's deflationism, inferential beliefs fail to be explained in the right way in order to explain why their correctness is not a coincidence, because the relevant thoughts don't feature as the explanans in the complete explanation of those beliefs.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings: Domestication, Disability, and Moral Repair
(2025-10-02) Huerter, Sofia; Blake, Michael
Owing to the unique challenges posed by domestication, the literature on animal captivity has been trapped for years in a gridlock. On the one side, there have been the continued-use advocates, who urged that, were it not for their instrumental value, many domesticated animals would never have been bred. On the other side, there have been the vegan abolitionists, who argued that, contrariwise, non-existence would be preferable. Despite the newness of the topic, however, neither theoretical position was especially novel. Quite the opposite, the moral debate over domestication has in many ways paralleled the arguments from past social movements, ranging from eugenics to the emancipation of slavery. Therefore, in order to think of alternative possibilities, this project first endeavors to discover why the same theoretical dead-ends have recurred continuously. The primary thesis is that domestication is something humans did first to themselves, so that, by tracing the history of these intraspecies relations, an "edible complex" is revealed at the heart of the Western psyche. More importantly, however, rather than eschew the argument from marginal cases, this dissertation gestures towards new forms of alliance, where the liminal status of the oppressed, and most especially people with cognitive disabilities, turns out to be an epistemic boon.
Plato's Treatment of Injustice in the Republic
(2025-01-23) Bates, Anna; Roberts, Jean
At the most general level, Plato’s Republic addresses the question of whether I should live justly or unjustly to live the best and happiest human life. This dissertation examines Plato’s arguments about injustice and explores three key puzzles concerning injustice in the Republic.The first puzzle concerns Glaucon and Adeimantus’ speeches praising injustice that open Book 2. They both argue that Socrates’ defense of justice should not reference the rewards of a just reputation. Instead, Socrates must only appeal to the intrinsic rewards of justice. However, the puzzle is this: if what I have said exhausts the functions of Glaucon and Adeimantus’ speeches, then Adeimantus’ speech is unnecessary. Adeimantus speaks after Glaucon, and his argument seems to come to the same conclusion as Glaucon’s. So, in what way does Adeimantus’ speech contribute to shaping the rest of the Republic? I argue that Adeimantus' speech articulates a different perspective on injustice than Glaucon’s. Glaucon’s defense of injustice treats injustice as a virtue, and as such Glaucon argues that my aim should be to be as unjust as possible. Adeimantus, like Glaucon, praises injustice, but the view that Adeimantus voices aligns more closely with conventional norms—such as recognizing justice as a virtue. When Adeimantus describes people who choose to do injustice, they make their decisions while accepting that justice is a virtue, and this means that their pursuit of injustice will be more constrained that someone who believes that injustice is a virtue. In the following chapter, I consider a puzzle concerning psychology. As is well known, Plato, in the Republic, divides the human soul into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. Broadly speaking, Socrates characterizes appetite as desiring pleasure and physiological needs. Unfortunately, Socrates does not explicitly delineate the principle of unity, explaining which pleasures count as appetitive or not. The most prevalent interpretation is that all appetitive desires are related to the body; I call this corporeal interpretation. I argue that the domain of appetite is not so narrowly constricted to bodily needs and pleasures. While many appetites are connected to the body, Socrates does not exclusively use examples connected to the body, as the corporeal interpretation seems to assume. Instead, Socrates frequently includes pleasures of the imagination and activities that only aim at superficial pleasure. Additionally, I argue that the corporeal interpretation of appetite does not make sense with Socrates’ definitions of the subclasses of appetitive desires. Socrates’ definitions of the subclasses may support a broader interpretation of appetitive desires because these definitions intentionally leave open-ended the sorts of objects that unnecessary and lawless appetites aim at. The tyrannical character is the central puzzle of my final chapter. The tyrannical character is the culmination of Socrates’ arguments about injustice, as the tyrannical character represents the greatest degree of human injustice. However, many scholars have found Socrates’ depiction of the tyrannical character bizarre or dissatisfying. This is partly because the tyrannical character is often read as a hedonist, and a hedonist is not a likely candidate for a political tyrant. I argue that the tyrannical character seeks freedom from constraint as his dominant end, disregarding laws, conventions, and normative beliefs. When I say that the tyrant seeks freedom from constraint, I mean that he places no limits or restraints on what objects of desire he may choose to pursue, nor does he restrict the means he uses to achieve his desires. The tyrant is ruled by the appetitive part of his soul, specifically his unnecessary desires, so he places no constraint on the objects of his unnecessary appetites. This understanding reflects Glaucon’s depiction of complete injustice while aligning with the progressive decline of unjust souls described by Socrates.
Curating Stories, Caring for Selves: Bioethical Dimensions of Narrative Stewardship
(2024-02-12) Versalovic, Erika; Goering, Sara
Social practices of storytelling help shape who we are. The recognition and uptake we grant others’ stories shapes our understandings of ourselves and our responsibilities to those around us. In this way, I take personal identity formation as a social, or relational, practice. Understanding the ways we make sense of these stories and the ways our stories are told is critical to the ways we care for others. The co-creation and uptake of these identity-stories, then, critically shapes our agency and how we are able to be in the world. This dissertation is a compendium of three papers that explore the ways these social story sharing and building practices affect our ability to empower and care for one another. First, I explore how relational approaches to identity illuminate the roles loved ones can play in medical decisionmaking for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Second, I consider how current data-sharing norms surrounding de-identification may be ill-fit for sharing participant narratives within qualitative research. Finally, I explore how, given varying epistemic resources, we might approach continuing to animate the stories of loved ones who have passed away, in order to integrate them into our own, and to hold their identities even after they have died. Taken together, these papers consider the bioethical dimensions of narrative identity-building practices and the ways the social webs and systems around us shape how we live out those stories. Through considering these narrative construction practices, this project centers how we can better provide stewardship over the narratives of others, and care for each other and ourselves in the process.
Fat – Therefore, Unhealthy? Oppressing Fat People in the Name of Health
(2023-09-27) Mehl, Kayla Rachel; Goering, Sara
This dissertation is primarily a response to the concern for health objection that is frequently used in an attempt to discredit the fat acceptance movement. I offer a critical understanding of “health” in relation to fatness and argue that dominant understandings of the relationship between health and fat have perpetuated the oppression of people in larger bodies. Fat oppression has taken different forms over time, and is currently disguised as a concern for health and well-being. However, this seemingly legitimate reason for demonizing fatness is also what makes this kind of oppression more insidious.The dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter one advances an understanding of fat oppression as a kind of cultural imperialism perpetuated in today’s society through an overly pathologized narrative of fatness as being antithetical to health. In chapter two, I argue that the dominant and overly medicalized perspective of fatness is communicated to society via a medical model of fatness and that obesity researchers have relied on medical model assumptions in ways that impede both our epistemic aim of generating accurate knowledge about the body and the social aim of improving health. Chapter three provides more motivation for my argument that the medical mode is the primary underlying problem perpetuating fat oppression today by explaining how it plays a central role in the epistemic injustice that people in larger bodies experience. I argue that the medical model should be understood as a deeply entrenched ideology that has unknowingly shaped our social practices in a way that is unjust and yet appears justified. For this reason, simply critiquing agents for not cultivating epistemic virtues or critiquing the ideology itself will not help us achieve justice – this will require that we change the social meanings that inform our actions. Chapter four offers an alternative view of fatness to replace the medical model – the value-neutral model of fatness – which interprets fatness as something that is neutral with respect to well-being. The concluding chapter demonstrates how this alternative view of fatness – as well as things like epistemic friction, participatory research, and education in critical weight studies – can support fat activists' efforts toward achieving fat liberation.
Understanding White Superagency
(2023-08-14) Dout, Cody Charles; Blake, Michael
According to the dominant structuralist view of racism, racist outcomes can be explained by a combination of the following behaviors and phenomena: policies, rules, norms, institutional acts and objects, and implicit bias. Thus, on this view what accounts for a particular racist outcome or the continued reproduction of racist outcomes despite reform are a product of unwitting individuals following bad rules unknowingly causing harm, i.e., harm manifests as the result of complex interactions among well-meaning individuals and institutions. In chapter 1, I argue that this view cannot explain what a theory of racism should fundamentally explain, the apparent persistence of racist outcomes despite reform that has mostly ridden formal rules of racism. I argue that there is a sense in which white people in America simply are the structure. More specifically, whites can employ the structure when they need it to effect changes in the social world that they desire. Indeed, white racists are not beholden to structure (e.g., laws) at all: social structure is there to satisfy their will. Call this the superagential account of racism. I will identify three different ways through which it manifests: vigilantism by proxy, the perpetuation of racist outcomes, and white advantage despite reform. In chapter 2, I examine the overrepresentation of Black boys in the “judgment” categories within special education. None of the prevailing views sufficiently explain the resilience of racist outcomes in the face of reforms enacted to address this overrepresentation. I use a superagential analysis to better explain why Black children, especially boys, are put into these categories that “pipeline” into prison. The problem is not simply the institutional rules or assessment implements, but the professionals who exercise an extraordinary amount of discretionary power over the lives of these children. In chapter 3, I challenge some basic assumptions within the philosophy of migration. I question the easy equation between anti-racist politics and (more) open borders. Paying particular attention to the historical relations between new immigrant groups and the Black population, however, my claim is that this position erases Black interests, and therefore represents a racist view of how to be an anti-racist.
Wilderness for Wildness: Saving the Wild in a Post-Natural World
(2023-08-14) Obst, Arthur; Gardiner, Stephen M
Humanity stands at a crossroads. We are at the brink of a planetary crisis of our own making. Carbon emissions threaten a level of climate instability not seen in this epoch. Accelerating species loss invites the possibility of a “sixth great extinction.” Scientists warn that entire ecosystems are unraveling. Wilderness, some claim, has become a relic of an unretrievable past. At the end of nature, a chorus of new environmentalists insist that wilderness preservation must therefore be abandoned and defend instead a moral duty to manage the biosphere benevolently through unprecedented human intervention. This might involve turning back the sun through solar geoengineering, harnessing genomic engineering to resurrect species, or perhaps using technologies we have yet to even imagine. This dissertation resists such a call by defending the moral value of ‘letting be’: of protecting the existence of wild systems that we do not attempt to control. I call this alternative picture a wildness ethic and argue that it has long been the underlying ethos of wilderness preservation. Moreover, the preservation and promotion of wildness not only remains possible but has never been more urgent. Ultimately, I argue that politically embracing a liberatory wildness ethic, long the beating heart of preservationist philosophy, may be one of the few things capable of staying catastrophe for good.
Science and the Structure of Social Experiment: A Socio-political Study of Climate Data Infrastructure
(2023-01-21) Lawson, Justin; Woody, Andrea
In recent years a growing literature on science addresses the problem - some may even call it a crisis - of science’s public legitimacy (Douglas 2009, Oreskes and Conway 2010, de Melo-Martin and Intemann 2018). Analysts in this literature see in such media phenomena as climate change denial, vaccine hesitancy, and resistance to public health and environmental measures more generally a growing trend of public doubt over well-established, consensus generating scientific research. Each of these analyses has its own diagnosis of the problem and its own suggestions for the solution, which explicitly or otherwise usually includes a clarified understanding of the way science works and the way that it interacts with society and politics. The present dissertation seeks to add what seems to me a missing alternative among these accounts by focussing on just one of the common case studies in this literature - public response to climate change. I take as my point of departure the framework for discussing this set of issues offered in the values in science literature and exemplified by Heather Douglas’ (2009) account in Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal. That framework presupposes a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values and asks what role the non-epistemic values do or ought to play within science’s internal activity. The aim of the dissertation is to challenge an overlooked sister dichotomy to that between epistemic and non-epistemic values, namely that between social and political values. Challenging the dichotomy with respect to science means challenging the view of science as an autonomous, free social association whose proper function is to operate independently from political institutions and political interests. Challenging a clean separation between science and politics reveals a complex borderlands (to borrow a metaphor from Phyllis Rooney 2017) between the social and the political. The dissertation offers some tools for navigating these borderlands beginning with an old philosophical ideal coming from Karl Popper, coming out of the progressive era and the era of early experiments in Communism. That ideal, I argue, offered a social democratic view of the role for science in politics and a view of science as responsible to society through democratic institutions rather than a view of science as autonomous. Following another vein of thought from that era and from Popper, I conceive of infrastructures as politically organized social experiments which can be more or less scientific in character. These tools help me to address what I consider a problematic tendency in the literature on climate denial to claim that climate science became politicized in the late 20th century with industry-sponsored attempts to undermine the conclusions of the IPCC (e.g. Oreskes and Conway 2010). Such narratives overlook the fact that the data and monitoring network upon which the science depends were developed under the auspices of a political organization - the UN - beginning in the 1950s. Narratives such as Edwards (2006) which portray this as an era in which the network became an infrastructure and ceased to be a free association are more attuned to the complex entanglement of science and politics. The aim of the final chapter is to offer an alternative historiographic analysis which pays closer attention to the role of political institutions through funding, appointments and other government activity which provided the conditions for conducting scientific research on climate in the mid 20th century. I focus on the research team led by David Keeling for measuring and calibrating CO2. The tools developed in the dissertation allow me to make some normative points about the democratic legitimacy of the science-led effort to challenge the hegemony of fossil fuel energy infrastructure on the basis of its connection with climate change.
Immigration in a Global Economy: Why the Left Should Embrace Open Borders
(2022-07-14) Ball-Blakely, Michael; Blake, Michael
My dissertation explores the implications of discretionary control over immigration policies, arguing that the class-based selection that it facilitates plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining issues of global and domestic injustice. High-income countries have the authority and power to decide, with few exceptions, who gets admitted, under what conditions, and for how long. The result is that poor nonwhite would-be immigrants are largely excluded and the skilled and affluent are confronted by relatively porous borders. While this is largely taken for granted—including within liberal political philosophy—I argue that discretionary control ought to be rejected. Global and domestic justice are best served by opening borders to the least advantaged. I argue for freedom of movement for the globally least advantaged for two related reasons. First, the power of high-income countries to regulate their movement plays a key role in constructing their proneness and precarity. It leads to the spatial segregation of negative externalities and undesirable opportunities in already marginalized communities. Second, the ability to exclude low-income and “unskilled” would-be immigrants harms low-socioeconomic status people in both sending and receiving countries. In addition to causing the brain drain, it contributes to status harms and failures of equal opportunity for low-socioeconomic status residents. In chapters 2 and 3 I develop the first argument. Chapter 2 explains how discretionary immigration control contributes to the domination-for-exploitation of low-income countries and their residents by global capital. The ability of transnational corporations to leverage their mobility and bargaining power as a way of pressuring down wages, tax policies, environmental protections, and workplace standards depends on a prone and powerless population. With open borders, by contrast, such policies would promote largescale immigration from low- to high-income countries. This would change the incentive structure of those actors with the power to regulate the behavior of transnational corporations. In chapter 3 I criticize the green border argument—the claim that we ought to restrict immigration into high-income countries as a way of fighting the climate crisis. In addition to exaggerating the emissions generated by immigration and requiring that we avoid all poverty reduction strategies, the green border argument is also counterproductive. By focusing blame on low-income immigrants, the green border argument prevents global coalitions between affected parties, undermines support for environmental movements, and allows high-income countries to avoid the perceived costs of climate migration, thus removing an incentive to pursue mitigation and global adaptation strategies. In chapter 4 I develop the second argument. Here I switch from the global to domestic justice, illustrating how skill-selective immigration policies have an unintended effect of exacerbating domestic status harms. The traits selected against—low education, low incomes, and “unskilled” labor track the markers of merit used to construct the social status of low-socioeconomic status residents. Finally, skill-selection undermines movement towards equal opportunity by providing high-income countries with an already trained and educated workforce.
Tower to Agora: Insularity and Philosophical Methodology
(2022-01-26) Addington, Dustyn Stone; Lee, Carole J
Academic philosophy sits at a methodological crossroads, facing threats to its foundational practices, well-justified challenges to its lack of diversity across several axes, and fears of irrelevancy in response to modern challenges like widespread conspiracism. This thesis aims to explore these pressure points through the lens of academic philosophy’s insularity problem—its cloistered state within the ivory tower. Aiming to help bring academic philosophy out of this sequestered state, it considers three problems that insular philosophical methodology engenders. First, the epistemic status of philosophical intuitions is threatened by empirical evidence pointing toward a susceptibility to irrational biases. While intuitions can be calibrated by an agent’s confidence, confidence can only be calibrated by a sufficiently diverse community of other agents. Philosophy’s demographic homogeneity must therefore change for intuitions to be adequately calibrated. Second, philosophical argumentation seems ineffective in the face of conspiracism. This is largely because the agonistic method is inattentive to the social motivations of belief in conspiracy theories. Without adapting philosophical methodology to account for this social dimension, philosophers cannot aide in the fight against unwarranted conspiracism. Finally, public philosophy appears to be a fruitful strategy to improve philosophy’s relevance, and therefore chances for survival. However, obstacles stand in the way of public philosophy’s flourishing, rooted in academic philosophy’s condescending attitude toward both the public and public philosophy, and the lack of appropriate training for public philosophy projects. A revolution in both attitude and training methodology is essential for public philosophy to succeed, and for it to save academic philosophy from extinction.
Disability, Identity, and the Body as a Context of Choice: Making Space for the Mere Difference View in Healthcare Justice
(2021-10-29) Tubig, Paul Andrew; Goering, Sara L.
My dissertation seeks to defend the “mere difference” view of disability from the charge that it leads to objectionable implications in healthcare justice. The mere difference view, briefly put, conceptualizes disability as a morally neutral human trait, analogous to race, sex, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, that ought to be treated in society as such. Its main claim is that disability is not a categorically or definitely bad state to be in but is instead simply another variation of human diversity. Disability as mere difference is a powerful counter to demeaning, pitiable depictions of disabilities as misfortunes and disabled lives as personal tragedies. It is meant to capture and validate the embodied experience and non-tragic identities of disabled people as represented in disability rights and pride movements. For numerous philosophers, this view raises the following worry: if disability were mere difference and not a bad or harmful state to be in, then there apparently would be no moral grounds to support medical research and interventions to prevent, reverse, or remove disability, such as maintaining or restoring the non-disability status of citizens who have become disabled due to some injury or physiological process. This objection is often raised to maintain the bad difference view of disability. In response, I argue that embodiment provides a context of choice that not only makes it possible for us pursue a certain range of life options, but also makes them meaningful in relation to how we understand ourselves and the good life. Abrupt or dramatic changes in a person’s embodiment, even though the new embodiment may not be intrinsically or definitely bad, can be inimical to the agency of the modified individual by upending their context of choice. If the state has a responsibility to secure the agency of its citizens and certain physiological states are important conditions for agency—such as providing a stable context of choice—then the state has a moral obligation to secure the physiological conditions for agency through medical interventions. My goal is to provide a plausible account that both contributes to the destigmatization of disability while providing justification for a robust set of entitlements regarding the provision of healthcare resources. In Chapter one, I argue for the mere difference view and elaborate the particular objection that it restricts what medical care and resources citizens are entitled to receive from the state. Chapter two presents the idea that embodiment is an important context of choice for autonomy. Building upon feminist insights on the relation of the body to autonomy and repurposing Will Kymlicka’s notion of context of choice, I argue that specific embodied forms not only enable us to pursue a certain range of life options but make them meaningful to us. For this reason, treating or preventing disability through medical interventions may be justified as a practice of identity-maintenance and, in turn, autonomy-maintenance. Chapter three addresses a serious worry that subsidizing healthcare institutions to actively prevent, ameliorate, and eliminate disability expresses a negative social meaning that disability is a devalued embodied form of life, which reinforces the harms of attitudinal and structural ableism. This is an iteration of the expressivist argument that is often deployed in issues of selective reproduction and disability avoidance. I will defend the expressivist argument against prominent objections, recognizing that such devaluations are indeed sometimes expressed. Yet rather than rectifying this social harm by eliminating those practices, I recommend altering the broader social context that imbues disabled life with negative social meaning. This move helps to provide identity and agency maintenance across body types. Chapter four engages with hard cases for my position and offers a justification for providing citizens access to medical resources to alter or augment their bodies in ways that fit with their identity, like gender transition care for transgender people.
The Mismeasure of Woman: The Epistemic and Social Impacts of Gendered Citation Practices
(2021-10-29) McCusker, Darcy; Lee, Carole
This dissertation will explore the philosophical problems that arise from the finding that women are cited less frequently than men in a number of sciences, what I’ll call gendered citation practices. Gendered citation practices have received little philosophical attention despite the importance of citations to the practice of science. Citations are used by scientists in every publication to connect their work to the community that they are a part of. Citations are public (to the extent that publications are public--minimally they are visible to members of the scientific community with institutional or other access to published articles), which makes them easier to track and quantify than many other types of barriers women face in science. Citations are also an increasingly important metric that are either currently used or raised as a potential metric for informing decisions about funding, hiring, and promotion. Disparities in citations have the potential for substantial impacts on the career trajectory of women in science, especially when compounded with other gender disparities. The three papers of this dissertation discuss some of the philosophical issues that arise from gendered citation practices. The first paper argues that GPCs are a form of epistemic injustice, where women are denied access to uptake, a term borrowed from Longino. The second paper provides a sympathetic extension of Longino’s views and argues that citations can be used to measure uptake and ensure that all members of the community are treated equitably. The third paper considers what would happen if citations were given even more weight in key decisions in scientists’ careers and shows that women may be subject to even more epistemic injustice when grants are given to the most highly cited researchers.
Balance and Belonging: Harmony and its Role in Understanding Morality
(2021-10-29) Miller, Joseph Len; Marshall, Colin
In my dissertation I explore the moral relevancy of the relationship between an agent and their surroundings by assessing how we understand, and how we ought to understand, moral problems. This dissertation is composed of three papers that address a different facet of the structure, and our understanding of the structure, of moral problems. The first paper highlights contexts in which assumptions about moral problems are being made (and issues with those contexts). The second paper focuses on a particular popular assumption about how moral problems are structured (e.g., they are cooperative problems) that arises from these kinds of studies and offers an alternative way of understanding how moral problems are structured based in Native American philosophy. The third paper focuses on explaining how a particular Native American conception (Muscogee) of moral problems might look.
Constructing and Being Constructed: Relational Trans Identity and Responsibility for Microaggressions
(2020-10-26) Sumpter, Sam; Lee, Carole
This project centers on the question: Given the everyday and structural dynamics of gender oppression, how should we treat others’ genders in our everyday interactions with them, particularly given that those everyday interactions are often subject to or structured by disputed meaning? To address this question, I focus on considering the practical possibility of trans liberation through the lens of empowerment, and offer an account of moral responsibility that’s grounded in the need to build social conditions and responsibility practices that make empowerment opportunities for trans people more obvious, accessible, and abundant. I start by characterizing empowerment as agency that aims to establish or enhance autonomy -- i.e., it is action through which an agent takes or increases control over some aspect(s) of her life. I propose a heterogenous framework for empowerment by considering five overlapping dimensions of empowerment: the site, relational dynamics, source of the constraint on agency, outcome sought, and timing. In particular, I focus on the dimensions that establish conditions of empowerment, or conditions that structurally balance power by making dissent both possible and meaningful. I then concentrate on one particularly fraught site of meaning dispute for trans agents, that of identity. In particular, I focus on Hilde Lindemann’s account of narrative relational identity, under which any given individual’s identity is a system of meaning constituted by a web of first personal narratives she tells about herself, and by second and third personal narratives others tell about her, where all of those narratives are grounded and justified by master narratives. Lindemann proposes that when first, second, and third personal narratives about a given identity conflict, we should work to identify the most accurate narrative. She further proposes using counterstories to combat toxic master narratives and amplify the credibility of marginalized peoples’ narratives. By contrast, I argue that while counterstories can be important, increasing social credibility for trans agents is only possible to the extent that trans agents are sufficiently able to exert social power. I propose, then, that we ought to focus not on accuracy but on developing identity practices that first create conditions of empowerment. In particular, I argue that in order to establish conditions of empowerment in our everyday identity practices, we should engage in identity practices that build and ensure a meaningful balance of power in our identity-constructing relationships and interactions. Building off of JosÃ© Medina’s account of epistemic responsibility, I argue that we have responsibilities to attain minimal knowledge about our social others and their relevance to us. I further argue that a given agent A has responsibilities both in she responds to others’ first-personal narratives about themselves, and also in how she responds to others’ second- and third-personal narratives about herself. I conclude by applying this framework to a specific instantiation of everyday oppression, the microaggression. I demonstrate that my account advances the current discussion of microaggressions by giving us sharper tools for understanding the moral harms and obligations generated by microaggressions, namely by focusing on how microaggressions trade on and exacerbate vulnerability dynamics in our everyday relationships.
Consensus and Collaboration in Contemporary Scientific Practice
(2020-10-26) Pham, Michelle Trang; Woody, Andrea
I argue that there is no single, monolithic conception of ‘consensus’ in scientific practice. I distinguish between two categories of aggregative and collaborative consensus. Collaborative consensus, which is produced by interdependent groups, has not been adequately explored in the context of contemporary scientific practice. A central contribution in my dissertation is the proposal of normative conditions for well-functioning collaboration. The trustworthiness of collaboratively-produced consensus positions should include consideration about whether they meet these proposed normative conditions. I also use the distinctions and analyses discussed to assess the public controversy regarding the IPCC’s consensus position on anthropogenic climate change, looking at the arguments of skeptics and a prominent defender, Naomi Oreskes. Both Oreskes and skeptics, I argue, wrongly invoke aggregative consensus to assess the IPCC’s position. However, the group is a collaboration, and their consensus position cannot be assessed according to standards of aggregation. I instead assess the IPCC using the proposed normative conditions for well-functioning collaboration. I show that they generally satisfy them, and I then provide a different response to skeptics for why there are good social reasons to trust the IPCC.
Facing the Genocidal Present
(2020-10-26) Covarrubias Cabeza, Julio; Blake, Michael
This dissertation argues that genocide, in settler colonies like the US, is a processual and structural condition, not an event; one that does not require genocidal intent, since genocide is the background hum—the rhythm—that organizes and orients institutions and politics. Although my focus is, by and large, on violence directed and organized around Mexican and Central American immigrants, I argue that—not just anti-Brown violence, but racialized violence against nonwhite groups coded as “threats,” should be regarded as a form of structural genocide. This is because, if the settler colonial drive to “eliminate the native” is the background structure shaping politics and life in America, the dynamics this process unleashes are ones that can jump populations once these, like Indigenous people, get in the way or become surplus to the state’s requirements. In order to explain some of the dynamics of the ebbs and flows of genocide, in particular the demographic targeting of immigrant males for sequestration and removal, I argue that another dynamic inherent in the settler project of American empire must be accounted for, and this has to do with the aim, as DuBois put it, of securing the future for white people in perpetuity. It was these fears of the coming majority-minority nation, and phobias about Mexican males, I argue, that formed part of the background assumptions of the immigration enforcement strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence, which expanded and militarized border security. Read in this context, I contend, the strategy meets key elements of genocidal harbingers that begin with the targeting of subordinate males. Finally, I show how this genocidal tendency is part of an extended global system of racist and politicized violence characterized by torture—one whose construction is intended to destabilize the populations it targets as a method of racial control. I demonstrate this by arguing that the lynchpin for understanding this system is the old vision of American eugenicists, the vision, as I describe it, of a white settler empire, steered by an Anglo-supremacist racial elitism that recruits subject peoples and retools them for distinct purposes—as is happening, I claim, with the many Mexican Americans that staff immigration enforcement agencies.
Love in Descartes' Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy
(2020-08-14) Tate, Melanie; Rosenthal, Michael
I argue for an account of RenÃ© Descartes’ theory of love that is deeply rooted in his metaphysics and heavily influences his moral philosophy. Descartes maintains that the soul “join[s] itself in volition” to those it loves (AT XI: 387; Voss: 62). The main aim of my dissertation is to explain what it means to join oneself in volition to objects of love, to analyze Descartes’ reasons for why one ought to join oneself in volition to others, and to argue that joining oneself in volition to others can prevent hatred. One joins oneself in volition to others, I argue, when one imagines oneself as forming a whole with others. In "The Passions of the Soul," Descartes presents an expansive view of volition, which includes volitions to imagine something one has never seen, to consider something immaterial, and to think of a non-existent object, such as a chimera. The volition to join with an object of love is a volition along these lines – we imagine ourselves as forming a whole with others when we join ourselves in volition to them. This understanding of the role of volition in Cartesian love differs from Lilli Alanen’s view that the role of volition is to affirm that objects of love that appear good for oneself are actually good for oneself. Descartes maintains that we should see ourselves as forming a whole with others. I argue that we should see ourselves as forming a whole with others because we actually do form a whole with others. Patrick Frierson argues that we should see ourselves as forming a whole with others, on Descartes’ view, not because we actually do form a whole with others, but because seeing ourselves in this way increases our joy. I draw on passages from the Principles of Philosophy, Meditations on First Philosophy, and correspondence with Pierre Chanut in order to argue that the universe forms a whole in the sense that it is intentionally created by God to function well. Generally, Descartes holds that moral philosophy should be based on true beliefs about metaphysics. His moral claim that we should see ourselves as forming a whole with others is, I argue, based on his metaphysical claim that we do form a whole with others. Descartes warns against separating ourselves from others. Hatred is an emotion that “incites the soul to will to be separated from the objects that are presented to it as harmful” (AT XI: 387; Voss: 62). I argue that we should never hate others, on Descartes’ view, because hatred separates us from goods within others, causes sadness, and makes us malicious. Hasana Sharp argues that Descartes holds hatred is necessary to protect the body, yet I argue there are other means of protecting the body that do not require hatred. In contrast to hatred, there are several beneficial consequences of love. I argue that we are able to love every person, on Descartes’ view, because every person has good qualities. Every person has free will, and every person is able to possess other good qualities as well, such as virtue and intelligence. Descartes holds that we are able to excite intellectual emotions, which are emotions that are caused by the soul. We are able to will ourselves to experience intellectual love toward others by considering a good quality within them, and we are able to will ourselves to experience intellectual joy by considering a good quality that belongs to ourselves. I argue that intellectual love can serve as a remedy for the passion of hatred, and intellectual joy can serve as a remedy for the passion of sadness. Descartes holds that intellectual emotions can occur alongside passions, and when they do, they affect the soul more strongly than passions. We can will ourselves to consider a good quality within others in order to excite intellectual love toward them, and we can will ourselves to consider a good quality within ourselves in order to excite intellectual joy. When intellectual love or intellectual joy occurs alongside the passion of hatred or sadness, intellectual love or intellectual joy will affect us more strongly than hatred or sadness. We are always able to find a good quality within ourselves or others because, on Descartes’ view, all objects and circumstances are good in some way.
Modulating Agency: the Moral & Aesthetic Import of Closed-Loop Deep-Brain Stimulation
(2020-02-04) Brown, Timothy Emmanuel; Goering, Sara L
Deep-Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an FDA-approved treatment for symptoms of motor disorders—with experimental use for psychiatric disorders. DBS, however, causes a variety of side effects. The next generation of DBS systems—Closed-Loop DBS (CL-DBS)—will be able to record users’ neural activity in real time and adjust stimulation in order to meet users’ needs or demands. Moral philosophers question DBS’s influence on users’ experiences of authenticity, identity, and autonomous agency. Many of characterizations of (CL-)DBS, however, may not make sense of how DBS complicates, rather than simply impedes or bolsters, users’ abilities to exercise agency. This dissertation is a collection of three papers that propose frameworks for understanding how DBS users form relationships with their implants in order to express agency, how DBS has an impact on the aesthetic dimensions of the experience of agency, and how CL-DBS may prove trustworthy for users without a number of safeguards.

Browse

Recent Submissions