In contrast to his rationalist predecessors, Kant insists that feeling has a pos- itive role to play in moral life. But the exact nature of this role is far from clear. As much as Kant insists that moral action must proceed from a feeling of respect, he maintains with equal insistence that the objective basis of acting from duty must come from practical reason alone, and that when we act from duty we must exclude sensibility from the determining grounds of choice. In what way, then, is respect for the law a feeling? And what place does this feeling have—if any—in Kant’s ethics? The aim of my dissertation is to answer these questions, in part through a close engagement with Kant’s second Critique. I provide a close reading of his claim that our recognition of the moral law must effect both painful and pleasurable feelings in us, and I argue that these feelings, for Kant, are meant to explain how the moral law can figure into the basis of a maxim. By showing why our recognition of the law must be painful from the perspective of self-love, but pleasurable from the perspective of practical reason, Kant is able to show how our desires can acquire normative direction. On my reading, then, the theory of moral sensibility we find in the second Critique addresses a rather troubling form of skepticism: skepticism about moral motivation.In the course of defending this claim, I provide an alternative reading of the development of Kant’s project of moral justification from Groundwork III to the second Critique. Against a wide-spread view in the literature, I suggest that what changes between these texts is not a direction of argument (from freedom to morality, or morality to freedom), but a methodological shift toward the concept of human sensibility. In the later work, I argue, Kant develops a novel approach to moral feeling from the perspective of the deliberating agent; and this in turn clears room in Kant’s ethics for a new kind of a priori knowledge—namely, knowledge of what the activity of practical reason must feel like. The broader aim of my dissertation is thus to put Kant’s work on meta-ethics and moral psychology in closer proximity.

External world skeptics argue that we have no knowledge of the external world. Contextualist theories of knowledge attempt to address the skeptical problem by maintaining that arguments for skepticism are effective only in certain contexts in which the standards for knowledge are so high that we cannot reach them. In ordinary contexts, however, the standards for knowledge fall back down to reachable levels and we again are able to have knowledge of the external world. In order to address the objection that contextualists confuse the standards for knowledge with the standards for warranted assertion, Keith DeRose appeals to the knowledge account of warranted assertion to argue that if one is warranted in asserting p, one also knows p. A skeptic, however, can maintain a context-invariant view of the knowledge account of assertion, in which case such an account would not provide my help to contextualism.

Ancient Greek philosophical schools are said to share a common structure in their ethical theories which is characterized by a eudaimonistic teleology based in an understanding of human nature. At first glance, the skepticism of Sextus Empiricus as described in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism seems to fit into this model insofar as he describes the end of the skeptic as ataraxia, a common account of the expression of human happiness. I argue that this is a misunderstanding of Sextus’s philosophy for several reasons. “The end of skepticism” cannot be eudaimonistic or teleological in the way that other ancient ethical theories are typically understood; moreover, ataraxia is not an end derived from a theory about human nature. For these reasons, the skeptical way of life is radically different than the ethical theories proposed by other schools. I argue that this difference is a result of the character of the skeptical enterprise which involves the implicit rejection of norms in both the epistemological and the ethical spheres.

Emily Dickinson, with a soul passing beyond the confines of mainstream gender ideology, religiosity, natural theology, transcendentalism, and literary conventions, creates the sublime in her poetry, which demonstrates her realization and manipulation of inspiring thoughts and liberating movements experienced where diverse conscience stirrings, ideologies, ideas, axioms and discourses intersect. Dickinsonian sublime offers an example for Jean-François Lyotard¡¦s discourses on the modern and postmodern sublime, which coincidentally mirror Dickinson¡¦s time, her personal response and reaction. Liberating herself from the confines of gender ideology as well as female literary conventions, Dickinson invents her own self and identity, suggesting differences among women, who can be discontinuous and multiple instead of being a category with ¡§ontological integrity¡¨ (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble 23). She embodies a writer who creates according to her nature and experience as a sensitive person constantly investigating inwardly and outwardly, blurring traditionally-assigned gender distinctions, alternating between various roles, and reversing gendered traits instead of just being a subordinate advocate of mainstream domesticity, gender identity, or religiosity. Not traveling on the path constructed by the traditional theological system but abolishing its authority over her thoughts, attitudes, deeds, or interpretations and manipulation of language, Dickinson interrogates received doctrines and develops her own understanding of religion, idiosyncratic employment of the Bible, and definition of language. Inspired but not dominated by new sciences, natural theology, or transcendentalism, Dickinson cultivates and reinforces her ability to analyze, judge, and examine things ¡§without respite, without rest, in one direction¡¨ but in all directions (Ralph Waldo Emerson, ¡§Intellect¡¨ 179), transcending the confines of both natural theology and optimistic transcendentalism while displaying her ¡§active soul,¡¨ "power of forming great conceptions¡¨ and ¡§vehement and inspired passion¡¨ (Longinus, ¡§On the Sublime¡¨ 80) and intending to be what is advocated in Emerson¡¦s ¡§The American Scholar¡¨¡X ¡§Man Thinking¡¨ (64). Not conforming to literary traditions, Dickinson enters a realm of artistic experiment, representing a great poet reflecting the individualism and potentiality of American poetry in her age as well as in the modern and postmodern periods. Not making her readers passive receivers of messages or meanings, her idiosyncratic methods in rhyme, language, images, and syntax promote ¡§the sense of palpitant vigor¡¨ (Amy Lowell 7) and sublimity, repeatedly challenging, deconstructing, or activating her readers¡¦ thinking and various faculties. As a self-reliant nonconformist experimenter with a Socratic philosophic spirit, her poetry of ¡§possibility¡¨ provokes ¡§polymorphous,¡¨ multiple, ¡§psychological¡¨ inspirations and creates a subjective, dynamical, and liberatory sublime.

René Descartes’ 1637 “bête machine” characterization of nonhuman animals has assisted in the strengthening of the Genesis 1:26 and 1: 28 disparate categorization of nonhuman animals and human animals. That characterization appeared in Descartes’ first important published writing, the Discourse on the Method, and can be summarized as including the ideas that nonhuman animals are like machines; do not have thoughts, reason or souls like human animals; and thus, cannot be categorized with humans; and, as a result, do not experience pain or certain other feelings. This characterization has impeded the primary objective of environmental ethics - the extension of ethical consideration beyond human animals - and has supported the argument that not only the nonhuman animal but also the rest of nature has only instrumental worth/value. As is universally recognized, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, just a few decades after Descartes’ death, took issue with Descartes’ dualism by arguing that the Leibnizian monad, with its active power, was the foundation of, at least, all of life. This argument must result in the conclusion that nonhuman and human animals are necessarily categorized collectively, just as Charles Darwin later argued. In fact, when the writings of Descartes and Michel de Montaigne are reviewed, it becomes apparent that Descartes never believed his bête machine characterization but embraced it to achieve not only his philosophical objectives but also his anatomical and physiological objectives. Philosophically, Descartes was answering Montaigne’s skepticism and his use of nonhuman animal examples to discredit human reason. Also, Descartes spent a major part of, at least, the last twenty-two years of his fifty-four year life dissecting nonhuman animals. Finally, the role that the politics and policies of the Christian institutions played in these matters is of primary importance. Similar politics and policies of the Christian institutions have since played, and still play, an important role in the continuing, unreasonable, disparate categorization of human animals and nonhuman animals. Philosophy seems to be the only discipline that can, if it will, take issue with that characterization.

In the last few years alone, calls for transparency by consumers have grown louder. No longer are consumers willing to sit back and allow firms to make `closed door' decisions that benefit the company (and its executives) at the expense of consumers and society. This dissertation begins to answer the call for a greater understanding of transparency from both practitioner and academic perspectives. In particular, this dissertation focuses on systematically developing a succinct definition of perceived firm transparency, developing a valid measure of transparency, and empirically testing antecedents and consequences of transparency. Two studies were conducted to develop the transparency scale following a thorough review of the transparency literature across six fields. Study 1 was dedicated to scale development and validation for the transparency construct. Study 2 was dedicated to further validating the transparency scale and testing its psychometric properties and validity. The complete proposed model was tested in Study 3 utilizing scenarios in a between-subjects design with a student sample. Study 4 further tested the proposed model in a slightly more ecologically valid setting with a more diverse sample. Studies 3 and 4 showed that transparency has significant direct impact on reducing skepticism, and increasing trust, attitude toward the firm, and purchase intention; and these impacts are of substantial magnitude. Studies 3 and 4 also tested a few antecedents of perceived firm transparency including perceived firm reciprocity, perceived consumer effort, and negative information. Reciprocity and consumer effort both had a significant impact on perceptions of firm transparency in Studies 3 and 4, and negative information impacted perceptions of transparency in Study 3 only. At its core, transparency means that a firm is perceived to be open and forthright with stakeholders. This dissertation shows that stakeholders reward firms for being transparent; and those rewards come in the form of decreased skepticism and increased favorable attitudes toward the firm, trust, and purchase intention. Managers can focus on increasing perceptions of transparency by providing stakeholders with opportunities for mutual conversations, by making easy for stakeholders to learn about the company and its offerings, and by sharing more balanced information about itself that reflects both the positives and the negatives.

This dissertation studies three aspects of the economics of climate change: how rising sea levels will affect coastal homeowners in Florida; how changes in weather will affect the prevalence of crime in the United States; and why skepticism about climate change is so common among the general public. Chapter 1 uses housing market data to estimate the welfare costs of shoreline loss along coastal beaches in Florida. I develop a structural housing market model and use it to provide a welfare interpretation for the coefficients from a new “discontinuity matching” hedonic research design. Using housing sales data, beach width surveys, and historical beach nourishment records, I then estimate Florida homeowners’ willingness to pay for an extra foot of sand. I find that changes in beach width have little impact on housing prices, except possibly at very eroded beaches. Chapter 2 estimates the impact of climate change on the prevalence of criminal activity in the United States. The analysis is based on monthly crime and weather data for 2,972 U.S. counties from 1960 to 2009. The results show that temperature has a strong positive effect on criminal behavior, and that between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 35,000 murders, 216,000 cases of rape, 1.6 million aggravated assaults, 2.4 million simple assaults, 409,000 robberies, 3.1 million burglaries, 3.8 million cases of larceny, and 1.4 million cases of vehicle theft. The social cost of these climate-related crimes is between 20 and 68 billion dollars. Chapter 3 develops a model of rational skepticism about policy-relevant scientific questions. Many policy debates have three features: first, individuals initially disagree about some scientific question; second, new evidence about the question becomes available; and third, the evidence may be systematically biased. Under these conditions, Bayesian disagreements persist even in the face of an infinite quantity of new evidence. Furthermore, Bayesian updating based on the new evidence produces “skeptics”, in the sense that individuals whose prior beliefs conflict most with the observable evidence end up with the most extreme posterior beliefs about the degree of bias. These results provide insight into the phenomenon of climate skepticism.

The purpose of this thesis is to be able to conclude which of the two, cause fit communication or cause commitment communication, is the best strategy for companies to adapt when looking to reduce consumer skepticism when communicating their CSR. CSR is nowadays a core component in every business yet so many managers find it hard to justify because they do not reap the benefits from engaging in CSR (Porter & Kramer, 2006). CSR has to be communicated in order for companies to reap the benefits from their endeavors (McElhaney, 2009). However, when companies do this consumers tend to get skeptical about the CSR motives of the company, which results in companies not gaining any benefits from their CSR at all (Bhattacharya, 2010). To solve this problem, researchers have suggested many different communication strategies to reduce consumer skepticism when companies communicate their CSR. In this thesis we test the consumer skepticism reducinge ffects of Cause Fit Communication and Cause Commitment Communication to conclude which of the two is the most efficient at reducing consumer skepticism. To fulfill our purpose we have used a quantitative method and constructed a survey where we have asked people about their perception of different companies’ CSR communication when the companies used Cause Fit Communication or Cause Commitment Communication. The answers from the respondents were analyzed through which we could conclude which of the two strategies is better. From our findings it was very hard to conclude which of the two communication strategies was the best at reducing consumer skepticism. However, we could see that Cause Commitment Communication had the highest consumer skepticism reducing effects. After having conducted this research we truly believe that the two communication strategies can be just as efficient at reducing consumer skepticism as long as one follows the guidelines we have provided in this thesis.

What does emancipation mean today? In political theory, the idea of emancipation has typically been understood as a process of rationalization involving the promotion of human rights or the historical overcoming of capitalism. However, in contemporary social criticism the earlier antagonism between liberalism and Marxism has largely been replaced by the conflict between Enlightenment thinking and Enlightenment critique. The tension between Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment skepticism can be taken as emblematic of the two main tendencies within contemporary critical thought. However, a similar ambivalence can be found in the classical critical theory of the so-called Frankfurt School. Given that we have to distinguish between two types of critical theoretical thought, is it even possible to answer the question about emancipation in an unambiguous way? The overall aim of this study is to examine the meaning of emancipation in contemporary critical thought. More specifically, the principal aim is to demonstrate that Jürgen Habermas’s critical theory can be understood as an attempt to overcome the opposition between the early and the late Frankfurt School in order subsequently to evaluate this attempt and thereby judge whether Habermas’s approach can serve as a key for combining the concepts of emancipation corresponding to these two types of critique. My main objection to Habermas’s reformulation of critical theory is that it is characterized by a lack of emancipatory potential and a lack of critical force. In trying to pave the way for an alternative approach, my strategy for accommodating the tensions between the two models of critical theory is to show that emancipation can be viewed as a process involving three disparate yet interconnected stages: an initial break in the continuity of history; a collective political struggle in order to realize the utopian vision thereby opened up; and, a possible understanding among the participants in a discourse.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 247-252). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.