Thesis (Ph.D.)--Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Graduate School, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

We can best understand the moral obligations of citizens and officials concerning public reason as set out by John Rawls when two differing standards latent in his body of work are made explicit. The weaker standard, which I call Public Representation (or PR), is exegetically supported primarily by the proviso found in his “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”. PR allows that citizens may deliberate over serious political matters, both internally and with others, according to whatever perspective and using whatever reasons they please, so long as they believe the positions they advocate are adequately just and adequately justifiable with public reasons. I present PR as establishing a moral minimum citizens and officials bear an obligation to satisfy on pain of failing to garner an adequate degree of justice, respect, legitimacy, and stability. The more demanding standard, which I call Public Judgment (or PJ), is exegetically supported by quotes found throughout Rawls’s work, but especially in Political Liberalism, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. PJ requires that citizens deliberate over serious political matters, both internally and with others, according to a public perspective with public reasons, that they only advocate positions and offer justifications they consider most reasonable, and that they share their thought processes in public. PR is nonobligatory, but achieves significant gains according to each of the four key political values mentioned above, which gives dedicated citizens good reason to embrace it. Chapter one lays out and explores the big picture concepts framing the project; chapter two sets out Rawls’s view on public reason according to the primary texts; chapter three presents four contemporary liberal theorists’ views on public reason – Nicholas Wolterstorff, Robert Audi, David Reidy, and Micah Schwartzman; chapter four uses the lessons of chapter three to help fully unpack and compare Public Representation and Public Judgment; and chapter five considers three potential objections to my view and offers corresponding replies.

This essay aims to investigate how students in upper secondary school perceive the subject religion A. The study is both qualitative and quantitative and I will use a survey to investigate the perception of religion among students both vocationally oriented and theory oriented. I will use questions concerning religious background and perception on the subject in relation to the curriculum but also try to investigate whether there are differences on perception between the vocational and theory orientation. The theoretical approach is mainly based on the curriculum concerning religion A but former research is also used such as books written by Sven G Hartman (2000), Ulf Sjödin (1995), Ove Larsson (1991), Elsie Davidsson (1989) and Anders Törnwall (1988). The result in the study is that students for the most part perceive the subject religion A as something positive and the background has a connection to their present perception. Family, school and society play an important role when it comes to students’ perception regarding religion A, often through media which affects and contributesto a more secular attitude. Curriculum goals and objectives cohere fairly well with the students' perception on the subject and a majority of the asked students feel that education on religion contributes to a more open, tolerant and understanding society where peopleunderstand, accept and respect each other's similarities and differences in a better way.

Background: Hand hygiene is the simplest and most fundamental means to prevent care related infections. It is of great importance that the guideline of hand hygiene is followed for the patient’s sake. Unfortunately, healthcare workers perform hand hygiene too seldom. If the patient comes down with a care related infection, the suffering will increase. The nurse's role is therefore to prevent unnecessary suffering for the patient by following recommendations for hand hygiene. In order to get a broader understanding of the reasons why the compliance of hand hygiene is so low the theory of planned behaviour was used (TPB). This theory explains the human behavior. Aim: The aim of this study was to describe causes of not following recommendations for hand hygiene among health care workers. Method: This literature review was based on quantitative and qualitative scientific articles. Results: The findings indicated that there were several factors that influence the low compliance of hand hygiene recommendations. These were summarized as: workload and lack of time, skin irritation, attitudes and motivation, insufficient access to hand hygiene products, inappropriate glove use, lack of knowledge and unawareness.

Relying mainly on R. B. Pippin’s and D. Moggach’s interpretative works on Kant and Hegel, the thesis tackles the problem of the reception of Kant by Hegel. It does so by looking into the impact of Kant’s first critique on the Preface, the Introduction and the first part of the section Self-consciousness of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Three Kantian conditions for there to be freedom are identified and shown to be reinterpreted by Hegel in a continuist perspective. These three conditions are spontaneity, reflectivity and negativity which propels and retains the free Kantian subject in the Hegelian becoming of reality.

Liberals claim that the exercise of state power must be justified on terms that all citizens can reasonably accept. They also support democracy. The challenge is to bring these two desideratum in line-- to ensure that democratic deliberations are somehow predicated on claims that all citizens can reasonably accept. Put differently, the challenge is to set the terms of public reason. Liberal philosophers advance grand theories of political justice towards this end. They claim that a reasonable argument in the political sphere is one that conforms to theory x. The difficulty is that there will be those who reasonably reject theory x, preferring theory y or z, or eschewing theory altogether. Pessimism at the prospect of agreement on higher-order theories of justice leads some to advocate simple majority rule. The thesis argues that convergence on higher order theory is not essential to public reason. The Supreme Court of Canada’s method of adjudication under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is used as a model. Where basic rights are engaged, or are alleged to be engaged, the Court examines the reasonableness of law and policy using a series of open-ended tests. These tests discipline their deliberations by focusing attention on generally accepted facts and values (notably, the values expressed by the Charter). The thesis contends that the Court’s open-ended, contextual approach can serve as a model for broader public reasoning. The thesis then explores the role of religious arguments within this model. In a polity committed above all to Charter values, what is the place of religion in the justification of law? It is argued that religion is understood to be private and inscrutable under the Charter. This is what justifies the Court’s generous reading of the right to religious freedom. It also justifies our forbidding state coercion in the name of religion. With the preceding ideas in mind, the thesis examines Canadian law and public discourse on the issues of therapeutic cloning (ch.4) and same sex marriage (ch.5).

If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is, wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me. (C. Brontë, 10 May 1836) Before Charlotte Brontë wrote her first novel for publication, she admitted her mixed feelings about imagination. Brontë’s letter shows that she feared both pity and condemnation. She struggled to attend to the imaginative world that brought her pleasure and to fulfill her duties in the real world so as to avoid its contempt. Brontë’s early correspondence attests to her engrossment with the Angrian world she created in childhood. She referred to this world as the “infernal world” and to imagination as “fiery,” showing the intensity and potential destructiveness of creativity. Society did not draw Brontë the way that the imagined world did, and in each of Brontë’s four mature novels, she recreated the tricky navigation between the desirable imagined world and the necessary real world. Each protagonist resolves the struggle differently, with some protagonists achieving more success in society than others. The introduction of this dissertation provides critical and biographical background on Brontë’s juxtaposition of imagination/desire and reason/duty. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic supplies the basis for understanding the ways that the protagonists express imagination, and John Kucich’s Repression in Victorian Fiction defines the purposefulness of repression. The four middle chapters examine imagination’s manifestations and purposes for the protagonists. The final chapter discusses how the tension caused by the competing desires to express and repress imagination distinguishes Brontë’s style.

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.

Liberals claim that the exercise of state power must be justified on terms that all citizens can reasonably accept. They also support democracy. The challenge is to bring these two desideratum in line-- to ensure that democratic deliberations are somehow predicated on claims that all citizens can reasonably accept. Put differently, the challenge is to set the terms of public reason. Liberal philosophers advance grand theories of political justice towards this end. They claim that a reasonable argument in the political sphere is one that conforms to theory x. The difficulty is that there will be those who reasonably reject theory x, preferring theory y or z, or eschewing theory altogether. Pessimism at the prospect of agreement on higher-order theories of justice leads some to advocate simple majority rule. The thesis argues that convergence on higher order theory is not essential to public reason. The Supreme Court of Canada’s method of adjudication under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is used as a model. Where basic rights are engaged, or are alleged to be engaged, the Court examines the reasonableness of law and policy using a series of open-ended tests. These tests discipline their deliberations by focusing attention on generally accepted facts and values (notably, the values expressed by the Charter). The thesis contends that the Court’s open-ended, contextual approach can serve as a model for broader public reasoning. The thesis then explores the role of religious arguments within this model. In a polity committed above all to Charter values, what is the place of religion in the justification of law? It is argued that religion is understood to be private and inscrutable under the Charter. This is what justifies the Court’s generous reading of the right to religious freedom. It also justifies our forbidding state coercion in the name of religion. With the preceding ideas in mind, the thesis examines Canadian law and public discourse on the issues of therapeutic cloning (ch.4) and same sex marriage (ch.5).

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.