Balance and Belonging: Harmony and its Role in Understanding Morality

Abstract

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.