The U.S. Army conducts extensive training on its core values beginning with initial entry training (IET), commonly referred to as basic training, in order to shape soldiers' behavior and decision making in combat and noncombat situations. This mixed methods study addressed the problem of limited empirical research on the effects of U.S. Army IET on soldiers' moral and character development. The purpose was to explore the effects of Military Police (MP) IET on soldiers in training through a mixed methods quantitative and qualitative model. The theoretical framework for this study was based on Rest's four component model (FCM) of moral development, Hart's model of moral identity, the schemas of the Defining Issues Test (DIT), and the U.S. Army's moral code consisting of the Army values, the Soldiers Creed, and the Warrior Ethos. The DIT was administered at the beginning and conclusion of MP IET to determine change in soldiers' moral judgment. Focus groups of MP IET soldiers identified perceptions of change in moral development. Data analysis using ANOVA and matched pair t tests of DIT scores revealed no significant changes in overall scores, no differences among age groups, and limited differences among genders and educational levels. Results showed significant decline in personal interest scores among females. Focus group results using qualitative content analysis revealed the relationship with drill sergeants as having a significant impact on moral development. This study provides feedback to trainers and leaders on designing effective moral and character education. Soldiers influence societies at home and abroad. This research shows that positive social change is more likely as soldiers receive moral and character education which focuses on developing moral expertise, not just memorization of rules, and which results in moral and trustworthy behavior.

<p>In this thesis I argue that it is an implication of the acceptance of the human right to water and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) that violations of the human right to water can invoke the Responsibility to Protect. Extreme violations of the right to water can invoke the responsibility to react, and ultimately the responsibility to prevent and rebuild. Although this is the case, I argue that the human right to water is unlikely to invoke R2P on its own. Instead, water issues are more likely to compound with issues of poverty, weak political institutions, poor leadership and social tension to create situations that have the potential for mass atrocity. Furthermore, I provide an analysis of the actions that will need to be taken before, during and after an intervention to fulfill the responsibilities to prevent, react and rebuild and the actors that can and/or should take such action.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls names two conditions as necessary and sufficient for an agent to have self-respect. I argue that Rawls’s two conditions constitute an inadequate understanding of self-respect. Contrary to Rawls, I argue that self-respect requires moral desert, and that self-respect is a distinct concept from self-esteem.

This thesis explores the fundamental ethics and purpose of elite higher education. Beginning with an inquiry into the history of American higher education, this work reveals that the U.S. News & World Report “Best College” and “Best University” ranking lists hold an increasingly important role in distinguishing institutions, particularly those within the elite tier. Following an examination of the U.S. News’ methodology, this analysis confronts concerns with individual access to elite institutions. Although there are potential changes to the U.S. News’ methodology that could improve institutional assessment, this thesis does not propose alternative rankings. Rather, it focuses on many institutions’ problematic choice to use the rankings as a guide for admissions and institutional practice. This work evaluates the potentially stratifying components of elite institutions and questions what American higher education inculcates in students. This endeavor concludes by providing suggestions for how to democratize elite institutions in order to realize their respective missions and improve access to educational opportunities. Chapter I: Introduction & Motivation Chapter II: History Chapter III: The U.S. News & World Report Rankings Chapter IV: The Current System of Higher Education Chapter V: For Society’s Benefit

Are health inequalities unjust, and if so, how should we measure and evaluate them? This thesis explores the central moral debates that underlie these sorts of questions about health inequalities, and it argues in support of one particular framework for measuring health inequalities. I begin by shedding light on the questions that need to be asked when attempting to determine which types of health inequalities are unjust. After explaining the complexities of several possible views of health inequity, I use these perspectives to inform my discussion of the debate about whether we ought to measure health inequalities in terms of individuals or groups. I evaluate the key tensions between these two opposing points of view. I then introduce a third possible view, which is Yukiko Asada’s idea that both individual and group-based measures of health inequality leave out important moral information, so it is therefore necessary to include both in order to get a full picture of a population’s health inequality. Next, I respond to objections that the proponents of using either a group or individual measurement of inequality on its own might make to the claim that neither measure is sufficient on its own. Finally, I propose some small changes to Asada’s measurement framework, which I believe will demonstrate why those opposed to her view actually ought to embrace it. I conclude that this approach is a promising solution to some of the difficulties defining health inequities that I have called attention to.

The fact-value distinction has structured and still structures ongoing debates in metaethics, and all of the major positions in the field (expressivism, cognitivist realism, and moral error theory) subscribe to it. In contrast, I claim that the fact-value distinction is a contingent product of our intellectual history and a prime object for questioning. The most forceful reason for rejecting the distinction is that it presupposes a problematic understanding of the subject-object divide whereby one tends to view humans as the sole source of normativity in the world. My dissertation aims to disclose the background against which human ethical praxis is widely seen as a unique and special phenomenon among other phenomena. I show that ethical norms, as delimited by utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, etc., derive from an originary proto-ethical normativity at the heart of the real itself. Every object, human and nonhuman, presents itself as a bottomless series of cues or conditions of appropriateness that determine adequate and inadequate ways of relating to it. That is, objects demand something from other objects if they are to be related to; they condition other objects by soliciting a change in disposition, perception, or sense, and for this reason are sources of normativity in and unto themselves. Ethical norms, or values, are the human expression of the adequacy conditions with which all objects show themselves. In the post-Kantian landscape it is widely thought that human finitude constitutes the origin of ethical norms. Consequently, the world is divided up into morally relevant agents (humans) on one side, and everything else on the other. Adopting a deflationary view of agency, I argue that human-human and human-world relations differ from other relations in degree rather than kind. Thus, instead of a fact-value distinction, value is inextricably bound up with the factual itself. The critical upshot of my project is that traditional subject-oriented ethical theories have served to conceal the real demands of non-human objects (such as animals, plants, microorganisms, and artificially intelligent machines) in favor of specifically human interests. Such theories have also been leveraged frequently in exclusionary practices with respect to different groups within the human community (e.g. women and those of non-European descent) based on arbitrary criteria or principles.

Liability laws currently in use rely on a fault-based system that focuses on a causal connection between driver actions and the resulting road accident. The role of the driver is set to reduce with the emergence of autonomous vehicles, so how will liability adapt to meet the needs of an autonomous world? The paper discusses possible frameworks of liability that could be implemented in the future, and accentuates the importance of the causal aspects of the current framework in the new system.

Emmanuel Levinas views the phenomenological tradition as being predicated on an asymmetrical relationship between the self and the other in which the self possesses the power to dominate and represent the other. This leads to the reduction of the other to the same. Instead, he wants to flip this relationship in favor of the other by showing how the very qualities of alterity and infinity enable the other to resist the self’s attempts at representation. Furthermore, he conceives of an ethics in which the self is compelled to listen to the other’s command and respond accordingly. The inherent issue in such an ethics as Levinas’s is that the self is held responsible for responding to a command which it cannot represent in some meaningful way. Thus, either Levinas contradicts himself or there must be some way to respond to the other’s command prior to representation. Levinas himself says that the transcendent relationship itself involves the convergence of the self and the other through language. Language occurs prior to representation and involves the putting in common of both the self and the other’s worlds. It is an ethical donation to the Other. As well, Levinas’s idea of paternity suggests the dialogical nature of the self in the ethical relationship. Using theories of self-consciousness by Hegel, Sartre, and Meade, I show how the dialogical nature of the social self enables it to enter into a transcendent relationship without committing an act of violence.

The oppression of nonhuman animals in Western culture observed in societal institutions and practices such as the factory farm, hunting, and vivisection, exhibits alarming linkages and parallels to some episodes of the oppression of human animals. This work traces the foundations of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy and connects them to the oppressions of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism. In outlining a uniform theory of oppression detailed through the marginalization, isolation, and exploitation of human and nonhuman animals alike, parallels among the groups emerge as the fused oppression of each exhibits a commonality among them. The analysis conducted within this work highlights the development and sustainment of oppression in the West and illuminates the socio-historical tendencies apparent in the oppression of human and nonhuman animals alike.

Maintaining the essential features of local democracy, representation and contestation, my theory allows for the representation of the interest of subpopulations in the global community by actors such as nongovernmental organization and intergovernmental organizations. I will begin by outlining what features are necessary for a theory’s consideration as democratic in nature. Then, relying upon democracy in a broad sense, it will be my aim to demonstrate that the right to democracy is universal human right. The following stage will provide the backing, by way of the moral progress of human rights, that the right to democracy is expressible by “importantly affected” subgroups in the global arena. The final stage of my conceptual defense will focus on the validation of representatives who have no institutional connection with the populations they represent. With such established, the paper will proceed into a practical defense, discussing how claims made by actors can be accepted or rejected by represented subpopulations. It will then become necessary to demonstrate that the paternalistic claims made by representatives are incorporable into a democratic theory without forgoing the essence of democracy. To show this is feasible, methods of appealing paternalistic claims by way of international human rights courts will be explained. Finally, possibilities to mediate general feasibility issues will be explored.