Losing ownership and control over the development of and connection to our own person detaches us from the most innate embodiment of ourselves, our person. Without being able to develop and connect to our person, we become detached from expressing our identity, exercising our autonomy, and formulating our own values, the most intrinsic features our person encapsulates. While we yearn to act on our own projects to express our identity, exercise our autonomy, and formulate our own values the way we want, morality imposes huge demands on our person that restrain us from doing so. Morality’s major requirement to always act on morally significant projects to produce the overall good puts us at risk of forfeiting our identity, autonomy, and values. Despite these features being the most innate embodiment of ourselves, morality neglects them so that we always participate in its domain of beneficence to further the interests of others who are in need. Even though great benefits result from always acting on morally significant projects to produce the overall good, we are at odds with moral beneficence because of the demands it imposes on our person. In this thesis, it is argued what makes a moral theory too demanding. Arguments by Bernard Williams, Samuel Scheffler, Liam B. Murphy, and Richard W. Miller are evaluated to construct views of what makes a moral theory too demanding for them. Afterwards, differences and commonalities are drawn from their views to frame the final view of what makes a moral theory too demanding that is argued here. All of the philosophers’ views contribute to the claim that we are entitled to our lives outside of morality’s domain of beneficence. Afterwards, it is explained why we are entitled to our lives outside of morality’s domain of beneficence. The most compelling explanation is that the potential development of our own person entitles us to do so outside of morality’s domain of beneficence. By developing our person to its fullest height on our own terms and conditions, we can connect to it in the best way possible. Nonetheless, because we are forced to always participate in morality’s domain of beneficence, we lack the ownership and control over the development of and connection to our own person. The demandingness of morality holds the reins over this relation between the development of and connection to our person when in fact we should.

This dissertation analyses an ethnographic study of how people in a peri-urban, agricultural village in western Kenya have responded to the questions of who will care for children, and how, when those children’s parents, or other primary caregivers, have died. It examines the practical and ideological implications of wide-scale orphaning among a population that has experienced increased numbers and proportions of orphaned children mainly due to HIV/AIDS, as well as the gradual depletion of resources in terms of both the availability of middle-aged adults and the security of economic livelihoods. The research explores how specific caring relationships, as well as general sociality, have been challenged, adapted, and affirmed or rejected normatively and practically in this context. The research revealed a high degree of questioning in people’s efforts to forge responses to children’s orphaned situations. Rarely was there unambiguous consensus in the study context concerning what should be done in response to children’s orphanhood in light of families’ diminished livelihood capacities. More broadly, there was a distinctive concern with how such situations might be appraised in moral terms. The analysis therefore focuses on three main concerns, including: how to understand uncertainty as a condition of life, and the implications of this; how a shared perspective of uncertainty has spurred a concern with morality in the study context, and specifically galvanised a moral economy of kinship; and how the concern with morality affected what was deemed at stake in people’s lives.

This study analyzes the themes of victimization and self-sacrifice as they appear in the life and works of Oscar Wilde. "Victimization" is defined as an instance in which one character disregards, damages, or destroys another's well-being; "self-sacrifice" is an instance in which one character acts to his own detriment in order to help another or through dedication to a cause or belief. Chapter I discusses the way in which these concepts affected Wilde's personal life. Chapters II-VI discuss their inclusion in his romantic/decadent dramas, social comedies, various stories and tales, novel, and final poem; and Chapter VII concludes by demonstrating the overall tone of charitable morality that these two themes create in Wilde's work as a whole.

The purpose of this thesis will be to examine one student's personal struggle in life and how those events have helped him to find his purpose and reason for being. This examination will be done by using a Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) approach to explain how music has been at the forefront of all moral and ethical decisions ever made in his life in order to find his true calling or vocation. This thesis will be broken down into 3 main chapters with several sub chapters taking the reader though the life of Jared M. Ford. This thesis will then culminate with the authors own understanding of what he feels is his purpose for living. A fourth and chapter will also be included to show the author's own musical works in an attempt to give the reader a better understanding of how music has helped him to understand his true calling.

1 Morality and law For the most of us it is quite clear what law is. Most of us have certain idea what law represents. A lot of us may have a different idea, it is because of many elements which affect our law perception. On the most basic level, law is something which is connected to specific values in society. Based on this idea we can certainly say that law is something which guarantees balance in society and system which provides safety. On the other hand, morality is a subject of a discipline called ethics. This subject represents a system which provides and protects distinctive values which have different normative quality. This system is formed by high amount of appropriate rules of behavior and its way to realize this behavior. In the past, the connection between these two systems was very important, it was a noticeable fact that these two systems cooperate and communicate. Even though nowadays these systems are more and more divided, they still interact. In the law of Czech Republic the connection between morality and law can be observed especially in the good manners. Good manners are intentions which are projected throughout the whole law system. The main goal of good manners and morality is to fill the gaps in the law. Another important goal is also to straighten the perception of justice in the...

In order to foster social reconciliation in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government has implemented a judiciary system and established a national commemoration period. More importantly, in order to eradicate the ideological foundation of the genocide, the government has outlawed ethnicity as a cornerstone of genocidal propaganda. Ethnography shows that these efforts have been only partially successful and that ethnicity occupies a central, silent space at the centre of Rwandan national politics and social interaction. In this work, I shed light over the entanglement between the memory of the genocide and social identities in Rwanda. I explore the ways in which ordinary Rwandans re-situate their ethnic background through moral categories that surface from the government’s historical narrative of the genocide and of the events that led to it. I analyse the means through which this narrative is established, the judicial enforcement and the memorialisation of the genocide, to illustrate the patterns of blame and legitimacy that saturate these historical constructions. Within these contexts, I explore the ways in which individuals exercise tactical agency in order to re-place their ethnic past in relation to these narratives. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the government’s narrative of the genocide constitutes a moral landscape in relation to which actors acquire — or are denied — instances of victimhood. Negotiation over these instances take the form of accusatory practices which, more or less explicitly, are used in everyday life to define selfhood and otherness with respect to the genocide. My research shows how, cutting across former ethnic boundaries, the category of victimhood represents a form of empowerment, which dialectically depends on the identification of perpetratorship.

Thesis advisor: David M. Rasmussen / In this dissertation I argue for an approach that conceives human rights as both moral and legal rights. The merit of such an approach is its capacity to understand human rights more in terms of the kind of world free and reasonable beings would like to live in rather than simply in terms of what each individual is legally entitled to. While I acknowledge that every human being has the moral entitlement to be granted living conditions that are conducive to a dignified life, I maintain, at the same time, that the moral and legal aspects of human rights are complementary and should be given equal weight. The legal aspect compensates for the limitations of moral human rights the observance of which depends on the conscience of the individual, and the moral aspect tempers the mechanical and inhumane application of the law. Unlike the traditional or orthodox approach, which conceives human rights as rights that individuals have by virtue of their humanity, and the political or practical approach, which understands human rights as legal rights that are meant to limit the sovereignty of the state, the moral-legal approach reconciles law and morality in human rights discourse and underlines the importance of a legal framework that compensates for the deficiencies in the implementation of moral human rights. It not only challenges the exclusively negative approach to fundamental liberties but also emphasizes the necessity of an enforcement mechanism that helps those who are not morally motivated to refrain from violating the rights of others. Without the legal mechanism of enforcement, the understanding of human rights would be reduced to simply framing moral claims against injustices. Many traditional human rights theorists failed to reconcile the moral and legal aspects of human rights. That is why Jürgen Habermas, whose approach to human rights provides the guiding intuition of this dissertation, has been criticized for approaching human rights from a legal point of view, especially in Between Facts and Norms. Most of Habermas’s critics overlooked his goal in the project of reconstructing law. Habermas addresses the question of the legitimacy of modern law by finding good arguments for a law to be recognized as right and just. For him, modern law has two sources of legitimacy: human rights and popular sovereignty. He affirms their mutual presupposition in a system of rights within a constitutional democracy. In order to grasp Habermas’s moral considerations in his account of human rights, one has to go beyond Between Facts and Norms. That is why the relationship Habermas establishes between law and morality should constitute the starting point in understanding the moral dimension of human rights in his account of human rights. That relationship is clarified in the discussion on the interdependence between human rights and human dignity. Human dignity provides the ground from which human rights are interpreted and justified. Human dignity is the standpoint from which individuals can claim rights from one another on the basis of mutual respect. Because of human dignity, members of a political community can live as free and equal citizens. In order to achieve such a goal, there must be structures that facilitate social integration. Thus, the existence of a strong civil society that can stimulate discussion in the public sphere and promote a vigilant citizenry and respect for human rights becomes very important. The protection of human rights becomes a common and shared responsibility. Such a responsibility goes beyond the boundaries of nation-states and requires the establishment of a cosmopolitan human rights regime based on the conviction that all human beings are members of a community of fate and that they share common values which transcend the limits of their individual states. In a cosmopolitan human rights regime, people are protected as persons and not as citizens of a particular state. The realization of such a regime requires solidarity and the politics of compassion. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Arthur Madigan / The human self and society in general have always been in transition and transformation. Our senses of ourselves and of our society are in dialectical relation with our sense of whether or to what degree we feel part of important dimensions such as religion and politics, which are both an expression of our identity and factors that may sometimes change our identity. In modern western society it seems that identity has shifted from what Charles Taylor calls "embeddedness" in religion to a mode of life where religion is, to a great extent, expected to be a personal matter and even a personal choice. This is not impossible to understand, and historical work shows us that there are important continuities between the modern reason that rejects religion and the religion that it rejects. In this complicated process there is no mistaking the emergence of a democratic politics that rests to a significant degree on the rational project of modernity. We might even say that the success of that politics is one of the most important signs of the success of modern reason. In any case, we see in the west the development of a political system that has made society increasingly secular and religion increasingly private. This is not the case everywhere in the world. In may other places outside the "west" religion and its expressions are more public and individuals consider religion as a significant factor in defining their self-identity. In these places, many people are found expressing and promoting an identity that they consider meaningful in a world that is not fundamentally defined--or only defined--by the sort of secular political system that restricts religious beliefs and practices to the private domain. In these places, there is somewhat less difficulty with the sort of dilemma that we find in many liberal secular parts of the modern west, where even public expressions of religious beliefs are protested or challenged even though the right to such expressions are constitutionally guaranteed for all citizens. The dialectics of religion and politics and their importance in defining human self-identity is the central domain for my research, though I need many detours into other cultural factors in order to substantiate my claims. Bouncing back and forth between western and eastern religious, philosophical, and political perspectives, I finally found some points of contacts in Charles Taylor and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. They became my focus of this research. Still, I felt it necessary to offer a preliminary account of secularism, as our present context, in order to set the background of my exploration of the works and, in some important respects, the lives of Taylor and Gandhi. Hence, my first chapter is an overview of the sources of secularism in the West and in India. The second chapter deals with the Taylorian understanding of diversity, authenticity, and holistic identity. My third chapter is on Gandhi's understanding of diversity, authenticity, and holistic identity. My fourth and final chapter brings to light my own sense of our prospects for an integral understanding of religion, politics, and self-identity within the contexts of post-religious, post-secular, and post-metaphysical thinking. While claims for secular humanism and secular politics have always been somewhat convincing to me, I was not sure why religion should be necessarily so `problematic' for such a program. In fact, the pathologies of both reason and religion have become more explicit to us today. Secularism seems to repeat the exclusivism of the anti-secular stance of some religions by becoming anti-religious itself. Indeed, among secularists and even atheists there is a general trend to consider religions as intrinsically "anti-humanistic" in nature. It is true that secular humanism has sometimes helped religions to explore how deeply "humanistic" they are at heart, in their revelations and traditions. So perhaps, it is possible to have comprehensive frames and theories of humanism and secularism from within the boundaries of religions themselves without negating or diminishing either the spiritual or the secular. A dialogue between Taylor and Gandhi can be useful for us today especially as pointers toward such a humanistic approach to self, religion and politics. This dialogue between these western and the eastern thinkers can enlarge, enrich, and enlighten each other. What we then see, on the one hand, is the limit of a purely secular politics that is lacking a proper metaphysical foundation to guarantee the religious needs of humanity; and on the other hand, we also see the hesitation and struggle of religions to accommodate the demands of secularism. In both cases, we have reason to hope for a new `metaphysics of diversity and authenticity' which in turn might validate a role for religion, and perhaps also the ethical principles that it yields. Still, this is an incomplete and inconclusive dialectic and in that sense only a contribution to ongoing debate. I thank for your attention to my narrative and my proposals. Let me conclude now, so that I can listen to your stories, because you too help me to define myself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Liane L. Young / Thesis advisor: Elizabeth A. Kensinger / Theory of mind refers to the process of representing others’ mental states. This process consistently elicits activity in a network of brain regions: the theory of mind network (ToMN). Typically, theory of mind has been understood in terms of content, i.e. representing the semantic content of someone’s beliefs. However, recent work has proposed that ToMN activity could be better understood in the context of social prediction; or, more specifically, prediction error—the difference between observed and predicted information. Social predictions can be represented in multiple forms—e.g. dispositional predictions about who a person is, prescriptive norms about what people should do, and descriptive norms about what people frequently do. Part 1 examined the relationship between social prediction error and ToMN activity, finding that the activity in the ToMN was related to both dispositional, and prescriptive predictions. Part 2 examined the semantic content represented by moral claims. Prior work has suggested that morals are generally represented and understood as objective, i.e. akin to facts. Instead, we found that moral claims are represented as far more social than prior work had anticipated, eliciting a great deal of activity across the ToMN. Part 3 examined the relationship between ToMN activity and metaethical status, i.e. the extent that morals were perceived as objective or subjective. Objective moral claims elicited less ToMN activity, whereas subjective moral claimed elicited more. We argue that this relationship is best understood in the context of prediction, where objective moral claims represent strong social priors about what most people will believe. Finally, I expand on this finding and argue that a theoretical approach incorporating social prediction has serious implications for morality, or more specifically, for the motivations underlying normative compliance. People may be compelled to observe moral rules because doing so maintains a predictable social environment. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

The present thesis provides insight into the social context in which the perceptions that first-generation Canadians have towards access to healthcare for newcomers may emerge. The study was completed in Ottawa-Gatineau in March and April of 2016 and covered the perspectives of nine people, across eight semi-structured interviews. Following the review of the literature and theoretical framework, the present work highlights the role that first-generation Canadians’ moral worlds play into how they perceive access to healthcare for Canadian newcomers. On the subject of perceptions of first-generation Canadians, this research goes beyond the practical concerns faced by newcomers and delves into people’s moralities as these relate to the interpretation of rights and deservingness of access to subsidized healthcare. In grasping the different ways that health and healthcare are understood, as well as individual perceptions of the granting healthcare to newcomers to Canada, my thesis makes visible moral elements that can help to understand how rights to healthcare can be configured and reconfigured across various contexts.