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The American Association of Orthodontists(AAO) adopted its Code of Ethics and Code of Professional Conduct in May of 1994. This document is meant to provide guidelines for ethical behavior amongst orthodontic professionals. Its main purpose is to protect the public from ethically unsound actions that could be committed by members of the AAO. All members of the AAO agree to abide by the Code, as stated within its preamble: "By accepting membership, all members assume an obligation of self-discipline above and beyond the requirements of laws and regulations, in accordance with these Principles." This study represents a critique of the AAO Code. As the field of medical ethics evolves, so must the documents that govern ethical behavior. The last revision took place in May of 2009 and the wording of the current document can be misinterpreted or abused. The current code leans heavily towards an Agent/Commercial model of practice, where the Orthodontist's role is influenced greatly by patient request and business ambitions. The purpose of this study was to utilize accepted schools of thought in ethical literature to do the following: (1) Point out ethical flaws and weak points in the AAO Code. (2) Present corrections for the Code in order to clarify potential points of contention. These corrections will articulate rules that promote a partnership between practitioner and patient. To accomplish these goals, the Code will be analyzed, line by line, for redundancies, faults, or potential misinterpretations. Principles and Advisory Opinions which can be improved upon will be labeled as "weak." All weak statements will be reformed in a manner where the weak aspects no longer play a role in the Code. The reformed statements will promote the Partnership model of practice in favor of Agent and Commercial models. The Conclusions of the study are as follows: (1) Principle I can be improved by changing it to the following phrase: Members shall be dedicated to providing the highest possible quality orthodontic care to his/her patients within standards commensurate with the accepted science and techniques of orthodontics, the clinical aspects of the patient's condition, and with due consideration being given to the needs and desires of the doctor and patient within a relationship based on partnership. (2)Advisory Opinion IE. should be changed to the following: A second opinion should include a diagnosis and treatment plan recommended to the patient. It must be honest and focus on the facts presented. It is unethical to propound a specific technique, philosophy, training or ability as superior without presenting scientific literature, at least summarized or simplified, to the patient to support claims made. A second opinion must disclose to the patient any conflict of interest of the member providing the opinion. (3) The phrasing of Advisory Opinion IF. is made stronger with the following wording: Patients should be informed of their oral health status without disparaging comments about the patient's prior treatment.(4) The phrasing of Advisory Opinion IG. is made stronger with the following wording: Members should inform their patients of their prognosis, any proposed treatment, and any reasonable alternatives, so that the patient understands their treatment decisions. / Oral Biology

Debt has become a critically important piece of the global economic system that has been integrated into the daily lives of many individuals. This dissertation analyzes and interprets the work of three grassroots organizations resisting indebtedness to propose ethical alternatives to consumer debt within financial capitalism. Specifically, I analyze the Debt Annihilation Team of the Circle of Hope Church, RIP Medical Debt, and the Debt Collective. This dissertation advances prior work in theological and social ethics by attending closely to the work of grassroots organizations that resist the harmful effects of debt within financial capitalism. This dissertation develops a framework to interpret the issue of indebtedness and the groups working to resist it, arguing that debt has subjectivity-shaping powers that form particular subjects. This process is ambiguous, however, capable of forming individuals in harmful or helpful ways. The theological concepts of relational anthropology and realized eschatology also provide analytical tools with which to conceptualize and interpret both the way debt structures individual lives and the struggle against those structures by debt resistance groups. By analyzing how debt resistance groups interact with and conceptualize the debt relation, this dissertation also categorizes the tactics and strategies of U.S.-based debt resistors into a four-part typology: narratives, community and interdependence of debtors, direct actions, and debt as metaphor and ambiguous relation. This typology teases apart the various methods through which these organizations resist the harmful modes of indebtedness and encourage the development of a new political subject capable of resisting the debt relation conjured by financial capitalism. If the debt relation is conceptualized as ambiguous, then there must be some method to re-form a subject that might resist debt within financial capitalism. This typology leads to the development of ethical alternatives, organized into short-term actionable items and long-term proposals to reform the debt relation into one that leads to flourishing rather than exploitation. These proposals also consider the relationship between debt and justice, arguing that a key component of a just debt is the development of a debtors’ union, which will have a voice in the political struggle over consumer debt.

The problem of this thesis was to study the codes of thirteen other states and, in addition, the codes of Texas and the National Education Association, were selected because of the realization that a very small per cent of the teaching profession knows of the existence of such codes and a still smaller per cent knows anything at all of the content of the codes.

This work first exposits and analyzes Marx's implicit moral theory and then examines various objections to the thesis that Marxism and morality are genuinely compatible. Chapter 2 ("Marx's Moral Perspective") traces the development of Marx's moral views and argues that his implicit moral theory is based on the values of freedom (as self-determination), human community and self-realization. Chapter 3 ("Morality and Marx's Theory of Exploitation") argues that Marx's concept of exploitation is, in part, evaluative and involves the violation of the freedom of the exploited due to undemocratic social institutions. In Chapters 4 ("Utilitarian Interpretations of Marx") and 5 ("Freedom, Equality, and Human Dignity in Marx") I argue that Marx is not a utilitarian nor, strictly speaking, a consequentialist of any sort: he does not demand the maximization of a nonmoral good but, rather, a maximum system of equal freedoms, both positive and negative. Chapter 6 ("Marxism, Morality, and Self-Interest") argues (1) that Marx's form of practical reasoning is not purely prudential nor, for any other reason, non-moral in nature and (2) that, in reality, Marx sees moral concerns as well as self-interest as part of revolutionary motivation. Chapter 7 ("Marxism and Moral Historicism") argues against the view that Marx is a "moral historicist," as well as against the thesis that morality is irrelevant from a Marxist point of view because socialism is (purportedly) inevitable. Chapter 8 ("Morality and Ideology") analyzes the Marxist concept of ideology and argues that once we become clear about both this concept and that of morality, we see that morality is not, as a whole, ideological. Chapter 9 ("Marxism, Moral Relativism, and Moral Objectivity") argues that Marxism is not committed to any pernicious form of ethical relativism and then brings to bear hypothetical choice theories and the ideal of unanimous intersubjective agreement. Finally, Chapter 10 ("Marx's Critique of Justice and Rights") takes up Marx's objections to these concepts and argues (1) that they either apply only to certain 'bourgeois' theories or are based on misconceptions and (2) an adequate Marxist moral and social theory must be grounded on theories of justice and human rights.

This thesis will argue that a significant part of our moral experience can be explained by an analogy with the phenomenon of aspect perception discussed by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. I will argue that projectivism cannot give a satisfactory account of moral perception. This difficulty constitutes an argument against projectivism; namely that projectivism is hopeless as an account of the phenomenology of morality, because it is at variance with the way we actually think and talk morally. It will be shown how quasi-realism is an attempt to remove the most important range of objections to projectivism - namely that it cannot account for the phenomena of serious moral thought and talk. I argue that the project of quasi-realism ultimately fails, leaving realism as the theory most able to account for our moral experience. I shall reveal the untenable assumptions of the ‘Absolute’ viewpoint entailed by the non-realist arguments of J.L.Mackie, and reveal the perpectival outlook that lies behind an aspect-seeing account of moral perception, and also illuminate why the key issue for moral realism is the question of whether we can establish moral objectivity. I shall then go on to say how much objectivity is possible. Finally, I shall show how a Wittgensteinian analogy between moral values and aspects helps to explain our common moral experience. The ability to perceive moral values will be shown to be tied in with the concept-dependency of moral perception, relying on discriminations that can only be made through the use of language, and hence through a shared form of life. The account will be shown to be fully capable of giving an account of our common moral experience

<p> What role does beauty play in our moral formation? What difference does the perception of beauty make to the way we live our lives? In order to answer these questions, I look to the twentieth-century Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Relatively little has been written about Balthasar&rsquo;s ethics. He is, perhaps, best known for his retrieval of beauty as a transcendental property of being. Balthasar, though, never set down an extended account of his ethics or moral theology. While he had no explicit ethic, he certainly thought that his theology could be lived. The <i>Theo-Drama,</i> for instance, discusses the implications that the perception of beauty has for Christian life. </p><p> I do not intend to present &ldquo;Balthasar&rsquo;s ethics.&rdquo; Instead I will offer a &ldquo;Balthasarian ethic.&rdquo; Drawing from his theological aesthetics and dramatics, I will outline the morality implicit in his theology: a Balthasarian theo-dramatic ethics. We can see this kind of ethic at work, I contend, in some of Balthasar&rsquo;s lesser-known works on Christian life. I will then go beyond Balthasar to consider how we might put this moral formation into practice in the possibility of living out Christian pacifism in the nation-state and in our treatment of non-human animals. </p><p> This dissertation points to the convergence of method and performance. The method of theo-dramatic ethics can never be distilled to a set of abstract rules or terms. We can do so artificially in order to better express what makes performances of the good beautiful. But it is the performance, not the method, of theo-dramatic ethics that we find enrapturing. Being formed by performances of beauty better enables us to recognize and express new forms of beauty. My thesis is that recognizing beauty as the foundation of moral formation affirms the formational power of the Christian tradition as well as that of new experiences and practices because in both cases we are responding to beauty.</p>

This thesis engages with three topics and the relationships between them: (i) the phenomenon of disagreement (paradigmatically, where one person makes a claim and another denies it); (ii) the normative character of disagreements (the issue of whether, and in what sense, one of the parties is “at fault” for believing something that's untrue); (iii) the issue of which theory of what truth is can best accommodate the norms relating belief and truth. People disagree about all sorts of things: about whether climate is changing, death penalty is wrong, sushi is delicious, or Louis C.K. is funny. However, even focusing on disagreements in the evaluative domain (e.g., taste, moral and comedic), where people have the intuition that there is ‘no fact of the matter' about who is right, there are significant differences that require explanation. For instance, disagreement about taste is generally perceived as shallow. People accept to disagree and live comfortably with that fact. By contrast, moral disagreement is perceived as deep and sometimes hard to tolerate. Comedic disagreement is similar to taste. However, it may involve an element of ‘intellectual snobbery' that is absent in taste disagreement. The immediate questions are whether these contrasts allow of precise characterization and what is responsible for them. I argue that, once a case is made for the truth-aptness of judgments in these areas, the contrast can be explained in terms of variable normative function of truth – as exerting a lightweight normative constraint in the domain of taste and a stricter constraint in the moral domain. In particular I claim that while truth in the moral domain exerts a sui generis deontic control, this normative feature of truth is silent in both the taste and the comedic domains. This leads me to investigate how to conceive of truth in the light of normative variability. I argue that an amended version of deflationism – minimally inflated deflationism – can account for the normative variability of truth.

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Protectionism: Applying Ethics Consistently focuses on the discrepancy between morality amongst human beings as opposed to morality with regard to all other life forms. The introduction explains important terminology, terms, methods and goals. The chapters that follow examine four prominent contemporary ethical theories that extend ethics to protect other life forms. Each chapter presents one of the four theories, immediately followed by a discussion of that theory. The first chapter discusses the work of Tom Regan, a philosopher who asserts that certain non-human animals hold rights, and that people are obligated to uphold corresponding duties to respect these rights. The second chapter examines the work of the philosopher Peter Singer, who recommends protection for some non-human animals based on sentience and utilitarian principles. The third chapter is dedicated to the work of Andrew Linzey, a theologian, who indicates a Christian obligation of servitude toward non-human animals based on Jewish and Christian scripture. The fourth chapter presents and examines the work of Paul Taylor, a philosopher who offers a theory of environmental ethics based on the inherent worth of certain plants and animals. The fifth chapter has two sections. Section A expands on Linzey's work to demonstrate consistency across faith traditions. Without focusing on any one tradition, this section highlights protectionist qualities within the Vedic/Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Islamic, and Indigenous religious traditions. Section B is an exercise in consistency in applied philosophy, which offers an ethical theory, the Minimize Harm Maxim. This theory is not my personal theory, but merely results from philosophic consistency and impartiality in applied ethics, based on current Western ethics regarding human life. The conclusion restates the ethical dilemma - a discrepancy in our current ethical system - and reaffirms the need for continued philosophical explorations of ethical theory and practice with regard to life, toward a morality that is less partial and more consistent.