There are not always enough medical resources to go around and pluralist theories of decision making generally do not explain the principle of justice in a way that provides action-guidance. I adopt a modified and expanded form of the claims-based approach of Rescher and Broome as the framework for a substantive and action-guiding theory of distributive justice. The resulting theory is that limited resources should be distributed according to the strength of a person's entitlement to a resource. In order to determine a person's entitlement, one must determine what context-relevant rights the person has and the strength of his or her claim to the resource, which is determined by a weighing up of context-relevant considerations, which are facts about a person's condition or situation within a certain context that ceteris paribus generate some kind of duty that they be given (or denied, depending on the consideration) the resource. Since both of these are context dependent, I discuss patients' entitlements in terms of limited medical resources.

Kants Critique of Judgment discusses reflective judgment as a faculty that mediates the concept of nature and freedom. The dissertation provides a detailed exploration of the concept of intellectual interest as a significant moment of reflective thinking, a moment unexamined by secondary literature on Kant. In Chapter I, I provide an overview of my examination of intellectual interest. Chapter II, Overview of Judgment, explains the basic characteristics of aesthetic judgment in order to provide a foundation for exploring taste in greater technical detail. Chapter III, Review of the Literature, examines the work of Paul Guyer, Henry Allison, Dieter Henrich, Jean-Françoise Lyotard and Gregg Horowitz. This chapter situates intellectual interest within contemporary discourse on Kant. Chapter IV, Orientation: The Compass of Reason, examines the essay What is Orientation in Thinking? in order to depict the notion of cognitive orientation. Chapter V, Interest, provides a detailed exegesis of the Sections 41 and 42 of the third Critique. Chapter VI, Disinterest, Freedom and Negative Darstellung, uses the interpretation of intellectual interest to redefine disinterest as an occasion of the emergence of freedom. Chapter VII, Poetic Language: Giving Life to Concepts, examines Kants division of the arts in order to recognize poetry as the highest art. This chapter relates Kants comments on poetry back to the problem of language that haunts the third Critique, a problem that has emerged briefly in earlier chapters. Finally, Chapter VIII, Conclusion: The Trick, completes the exegesis of Section 42 by exploring how we might understand art in relation to intellectual interest. This chapter discusses disorientation in relation to reflective judgment and the implications of aesthetic failure in relation to cognition and morality.

PHILOSOPHY JOHN DEWEY AND PRAGMATIC ECONOMICS JENNIFER K. THOMPSON Dissertation under the direction of Professor John Lachs The study of economics and economic life was important to John Dewey throughout his work. In this dissertation I examine the relationship of Deweys philosophy to economic life and economic theory. In particular, I consider the criticisms that Dewey makes of traditional philosophy and the ways in which the mistakes of philosophers have been replicated in the work of scientific economists. The dissertation attempts to explicate what Dewey meant by the experimental method, and it seeks to demonstrate how this method might be applied to economic life and theory. I argue that Deweys account of the experimental method is both one of the most important and the most underdeveloped aspects of his philosophy. I conclude that Deweys late characterization of philosophy without economics as an escapist intellectual gymnastic is one that Dewey scholars must attend to in much further detail if they hope to fully understand what Dewey means by pragmatism. Approved___________________________________________ Date________________

The goal of my dissertation is to bring the exacting account of relations found in Hegel's Science of Logic down to earth by bringing it to bear on global climate change. Chapter by chapter, I explain the complicated, abstract progression of the Logic through concrete examples from global climate change. I render this text more intelligible through clear, empirical illustrations, and bring complex philosophical ideas to life in a visceral, level-headed manner. Not only do I show that global climate change can help us better understand Hegel's Science of Logic, I also show how Hegel's Logic helps us address climate change. I demonstrate how the philosophical concepts in the Science of Logic provide a framework for addressing features of climate change such as understanding how it works, assessing its risks, mitigating its impacts, and exploring policy options. Climate change is also an ethical issue, so I endorse the following moral principle: human beings and other animals ought not to suffer and to die unnecessarily. "Unnecessarily" means when reasonable measures can be taken to prevent or ameliorate suffering and death. I argue that, since reasonable measures are available for mitigating climate change, there is no ethical justification for not preventing the risks posed by global warming.

There is a current and ongoing crisis in intellectual property rights. With the increasing digitization of media, and the increasing public access to digital tools and resources, commerce in intellectual property has been beset by problems. The prevalence of unauthorized copying and unauthorized creation of derivative works has led government and industry to ever more harsh and extreme means of protection of intellectual property rights, and these measures are increasingly infringing upon the both the rights and the everyday lives of the public at large. My intention here is to investigate this crisis, and its basis, from a Marxist perspective. This investigation will be broken down into two primary portions: the first being concerned with the current situation and proper action with regard to it, and the second being concerned with the elements that have brought about the current situation and their wider implications, both theoretical and practical. In the first section I first investigate the current crisis in a Marxist light, then consider the same issues from a Utilitarian, a Kantian, and, finally, a Lockean view, in order to show that these perspectives support conclusions consonant with the initial Marxist exposition. The case that I argue throughout, on these four separate theoretical bases, is that contemporary U.S. copyright law cannot be justifiably applied to digital media, and that ethical considerations call for copyright terms with regard to digital media to be radically diminished or eliminated. In the second section, I investigate further the progression of technology that led to the current crisis in intellectual property, outlining similar potential and actual changes in other technological applications, particularly those regarding martial technologies and their applicability in international terrorism. This allows me to draw some preliminary conclusions regarding the ontology of technology having to do with Marcuses notion of complete automation, and what I call the monadization of power.

Traditionally, liberalism has been committed to the rights and freedoms of individuals. Recently, that idea has been challenged by the multiculturalist notion that, in some instances, group-based claims must be addressed to fully accommodate the freedom of individuals. This project addresses directly the question of whether liberals can countenance group-based claims and, if they can, whether they should. To this end, I examine four approaches to the question of whether liberals can be multiculturalists. These responses are the best examples of how liberals respond to group-based claims, spanning from a position that argues that liberalism entails multiculturalism to an outright dismissal of any multiculturalist accommodation of group-based claims. I argue that, in the end, there are really only two viable positions: either the liberal must reject multiculturalism in order to retain basic liberal principles or liberalism must be revised in order to address those aspects of multiculturalism which are legitimate. Neither option is fully satisfactory. I conclude that deciding which option is preferable depends on what costs the liberal is willing to bear.

A standard epistemic view of political legitimacy (e.g. Platos or Rousseaus) holds that political outcomes are legitimate if they are correct. There is a dispute between such views, however, about who can expertly produce such outcomes. Platonists believe it to be the true philosopher, while Democrats believe it to be the majority. A standard procedural view suggests outcomes are legitimate for reasons that concern the procedure and not the substantive quality of its outcomes. It holds that the procedure is legitimate if it is fair or conforms to background principles of justice. In this case, democracy is understood as occupying a relatively subordinate role in the framework of a civil constitution. But the substance of justice is disputed; and even if we adopt a view of justice as fairness we have not yet addressed, much less made plausible, the capacity of a democratic procedure to track just outcomes. There are compelling reasons to think that the criteria for justifying democratic outcomes are epistemic. I argue that in order for democratic outcomes to be legitimate the procedures of which they are a product must meet some epistemic criteria. The epistemic features of a procedure enable it to track outcomes correct by a procedure-independent moral standard. Deliberation is a vital democratic procedure since it enables groups of citizens to track the reasons for choosing a course of action over others.

Experience seems to give us insight about what objects are valuable, which actions are right or wrong. These experiences seem, at the very least, to provide us with some direction about the appropriate response towards various objects and actions. But many philosophers argue that our experiences can be explained in terms of our background psychology, in particular, our background moral beliefs, as well as our immediate experience of emotions or other conative states. Thus, such experiences cannot play a role in justifying the practical beliefs they help to shape. This project begins (in chapter 1) by criticizing the account of human psychology that underlies the above account of the connection between experience and value. In particular, I develop a different account of practical experience, which looks at the developmental aspect of our practical views. This account of practical experience is influenced by Jesse Prinzs account of emotions as embodied perceptual states. In chapter 2, I use my account to criticize the Standard Philosophical Account of Human Psychology. I also develop an account of how experience leads to the formation of moral judgment, and discuss the important role of compassion in our developing practical views. In chapter 3, I extend my discussion of the Standard Philosophical Account of Human Psychology to an important view about reasons for action, which I call the Standard Account of Practical Reasons, according to which all reasons for action are grounded in a persons subjectively held desires and attitudes. I argue that given our experience as practical agents, we are justified in treating others evaluative perspective as (potentially) authoritative for us. In chapter 4, I discuss and criticize some of the most widely held accounts of emotions.

This dissertation develops a theory of symbolic rationality, which it posits as an affectively informed mode of cognition modeled on Kants conception of reflective judgment as presented in his Critique of Judgment but with an emphasis on our need to account for the sociality or intersubjective dimension of judgment. Thus symbolic rationality is a name for the way we collectively work on, with, or through the excesses and remains produced by everyday-objective or scientific-objective synthetic and systematic thought. Insofar as the dissertation posits a crisis of symbolic rationality, it takes this form of thoughts emergence to be coincident with the loss of an externally, culturally mediated traditional and symbolic social order. Living in a post-traditional era, we gain the right to press claims on behalf of reason against the forms that order our social lives, but just as we gain that right, we also lose meaningful (social) contact with the materials that have been excluded from that order. Value now seems to arise mysteriously from the objective, economic world while still making its appeal to some point of contact with our desires in the form of commodities, but the world of materials rejected in favor of those sanctioned desires thereby disappears. A theory of symbolic rationality continues to make some sense of the need we have to coordinate our excesses in such strange cultural modes as styles, fads, hobbies, but insofar as these are experienced as both hollow and inescapable, it does not directly give us access to what motivates these cultural mediations. By way of both Kantian and Hegelian philosophical aesthetics, the dissertation argues that it is to works of art that we must look in order to encounter a cultural form systematically committed to making cultural contradictions palpable, and that we can further look to contemporary political struggles to see something similar in and around currently contested social symbols such as marriage.

A major focus in recent studies of Josiah Royce has been on his relevance to applied ethicsto ethics in the public sphere. These accounts have shown, in numerous ways, the historical and ongoing relevance of Royces ethics. But each glimpse of a part has revealed the pressing need for a sustained treatment of the whole. Believing that such an account would also serve as a bridge of communication between Roycean ethics and the broader community of ethicists, my dissertation seeks to fill this gap. My central argument is that Royce provides a successful model of an ethics that is publicly forceful in its occasional criticism of ethical violation while respectful of plurality and difference, and rational and consistent in making the distinction. In this study, I work to advance the literature on Royce, by showing the major but underappreciated influence of his contributions to the field of applied ethics, and by showing the centrality of applied ethics to the development of his philosophical system. These efforts appear to have been original and enduring, as Royce gives what I argue is the first systematic environmental ethics in the American philosophical tradition, and he pioneered the use of the case study method in business ethics. Second, I explore the connection of Royces ethics to his systematic philosophy. While scholarship has tended to focus on either Royces ethics and social/political thinking or his metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, I seek to show how these various aspects of his thinking are mutually supporting. Third, I show the sustained presence of applied ethics throughout his philosophy, from his first books to his last writings. This contrasts with a common belief that Royce turned to questions of ethics only in the last decade of his life. Fourth, I show how interdisciplinary studies deeply informed his ethics, and gave him a remarkable ability to understand the complexity and nuance of ethical dilemmas, while making his thought useful to addressing contemporary efforts to increase interdisciplinary participation in applied ethics.