Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Philosophy, June 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

In this dissertation I argue, first, that an Aristotelian/Kindist approach to ethics is superior to the dominant approach of the 20th Century because it avoids deep meta-ethical puzzles, and second, that we should reject traditional Aristotelian approaches to ethics and adopt what I call Cultural Kindism instead. The view that dominated the last century mandates that we think of some things -- e.g. pleasure, knowledge, virtue -- as good “full stop,” or good simpliciter. I argue that a) this approach entails a set of seemingly irresolvable disagreements about the nature of goodness, namely, whether we ought to be (anti)realists, (non)cognitivists, (non)naturalists, etc., b) Aristotelians avoid these debates, and c) we have strong reason to favor an approach that avoids these debates. According to traditional Aristotelianism, evaluations of living things are, when justified, grounded in facts about the species of which the object of evaluation is a member. A member is defective and (thereby) lives a deprived life, just in case the member fails to meet the standard for good members of its kind. Against these philosophers I argue that the idea that we can ground (moral) evaluations of people by reference to their membership in the biological kind ‘human being’ is at best without foundations, and at worst (for the Aristotelian), pushes us to the dominant approach of the 20th Century. On the Aristotelian approach I defend, it is not a person’s membership in a biological kind (or species) that grounds evaluations of her, but rather her membership in what I call a cultural kind. Cultural kinds include parent, spouse, friend, philosopher, citizen, and so on, and are defined by the set of ends appropriate to a member of that kind. A parent has the end of the welfare of her children, a spouse the welfare of his spouse, a philosopher the end of wisdom and the pursuit of wisdom, and so on. According to Cultural Kindism, people become objects of evaluation not because they have been born into a particular biological kind, but because they come to be members of various cultural kinds. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

M.Phil. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Abstract not available

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2004. / Thesis directed by Kristin S. Shrader-Frechette for the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. "April 2004." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 385-406).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2009. / Thesis directed by David Solomon for the Department of Philosophy. "December 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 274-279).

This thesis investigates Habermas's attempt to establish a credible form of universalism in moral and political philosophy by means of the theoretical approach which he terms "discourse ethics." The central question motivating this study is whether Habermas succeeds in this ambition. Discourse ethics specifies a procedure which purports to enable all agents involved in a conflict of interest in which issues of justice are at stake to come to a rational and cooperative resolution. It proposes a position unique among contemporary approaches to justice in the strength and character of its anti-relativist stance: the plurality of human cultures and the situated character of human understanding do not, according to this theory, bar the way to arriving at a minimal form of moral universalism. Although the procedure specified in communicative ethics elucidates only a narrow range of concerns--those pertaining to justice in the strict sense--it aims to do so in a way valid across all human cultures. / Habermas's strategy for the defence of a species-wide moral universalism is, I argue, both the key feature of his position, and the least well understood. Discussion of discourse ethics to date has focussed almost exclusively on the question of its appropriateness to the context of modern, Western pluralism. An important reason for this focus has been the intricacy of Habermas's argumentative strategy, which links the recent work on discourse ethics to his longstanding project of developing a theory of communicative action. / The principle aim of this thesis is to clarify Habermas's position by explicating his programme of justification. In so doing, I draw attention to several problems in his approach as a mechanism for cross-cultural conflict adjudication, and endeavour to provide a more perspicuous account of the relation of Habermas's theory to its main philosophical competitors, especially Rawlsian deontology, and contextualism.

The possibility of considering the ethical domain as cognitive is a principal concern of contemporary moral philosophy. Following an analysis of Hilary Putnam's internal realism, I discuss how our usual conceptions of truth and factuality should be modified in order to render philosophical discourse free of the fact/value distinction. I then present a response to Gilbert Harman's argument for non-cognitivism in ethics and argue that, within an internal realism that incorporates such modified conceptions, the non-cognitive argument no longer carriers any weight.

Thesis (MEducation)--University of South Australia, 2000.