Variations on Charisma: Shakespeare’s Saintly, Villain, and Lustful Leaders est une étude des mécanismes du leadership charismatique dans Henry V, Richard III et Antoine et Cléopâtre de William Shakespeare, respectivement. Le mémoire explore certains outils, tels que la rhétorique, l'ironie et resignification, qui permettent aux dirigeants de gagner l'amour des disciples, la reconnaissance, et même la crainte. Cette thèse ne traitera pas avec l'essence du charisme en tant que telle, mais plutôt avec les techniques de leadership charismatique. Dans le premier chapitre, j'ai étudié le caractère du roi Harry dans trois différents aspects: en tant que chef militaire, en tant que chef spirituel, et comme un leader politique. Parmi les techniques de leadership charismatique qui déploie Henry V de gagner l'amour de ses disciples et de dévouement est rhétorique. La capacité de livrer le discours à droite dans la conjoncture à droite et à convaincre les adeptes, même dans les moments de difficultés formes sa force clé comme une figure centrale dans la pièce. Le deuxième chapitre traite du leadership charismatique Richard III, qui est évaluée sur le plan éthique parce qu'elle est acquise grâce à assassiner. J'ai essayé d'examiner les relations possibles qui pourraient exister entre le charisme et l'agence moral. Dans ce chapitre, j'ai soulevé des questions sur la mesure dans laquelle le charisme est d'ordre éthique et comment un chef de file, qui usurpes alimentation via assassiner, est charismatique. Une technique qui renforce le leadership charismatique de Richard est l'ironie. Richard III déploie l'ironie de gagner la complicité du public. Dans le troisième chapitre, l'accent est mis sur le caractère de Cléopâtre. La question soulevée dans le chapitre concerne la relation entre le charisme et la lutte pour une identité féminine orientale. politique sexuelle de Cléopâtre est également au cœur de mon étude, car il est revu et de nouveaux sens de Shakespeare d'une manière qui souligne les qualités charismatiques de Cléopâtre. Mots clés: le charisme, la rhétorique, l'agence morale, resignification, William Shakespeare / Variations on Charisma: Shakespeare’s Saintly, Villain, and Lustful Leaders is an investigation of the mechanisms of charismatic leadership in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard III, and Antony and Cleopatra respectively. It explores certain tools, such as rhetoric, irony, and resignification, which allow the leaders to gain the followers’ love, recognition, and even awe. This thesis will not deal with the essence of charisma as such but rather with the techniques of charismatic leadership. In the first chapter, I have studied the character of King Harry in three different aspects: as a military leader, as a spiritual leader, and as a political leader. Among the techniques of charismatic leadership which Henry V deploys to gain his followers’ love and devotion is rhetoric. The ability to deliver the right discourse in the right conjuncture and to persuade the followers even in the moments of hardship forms his key strength as a central figure in the play. The second chapter deals with Richard III’s charismatic leadership which is assessed ethically because it is gained through murder. I have tried to examine the possible relations that might exist between charisma and moral agency. In this chapter, I have raised questions about the extent to which charisma is ethical and how a leader, who usurpes power via murder, is charismatic. One technique which reinforces Richard’s charismatic leadership is irony. Richard III deploys irony to gain the audience’s complicity. In the third chapter, the focus is on the character of Cleopatra. The question raised in the chapter concerns the relationship between charisma and the struggle for an oriental feminine identity. Cleopatra’s sexual politics is also at the heart of my study because it is revisited and resignified by Shakespeare in a way that highlights Cleopatra’s charismatic qualities. Key words: charisma, rhetoric, moral agency, resignification, William Shakespeare

The primary task of this thesis is to explain what the relationship between social practice and the socially emergent self is, and to concurrently explain why this relationship is of significance to an accurate theory of social practice itself. A subsequent aim of this is to explain how the socially emergent self can be used to account for individual engagement in moral practices. Building on George Herbert Mead, it is argued that the social process through which the self emerges moulds the individual’s capacity to engage with social practice. It is argued that combining Mead’s theory of the socially emergent self with relational sociology provides a theoretical framework that can account for how intersubjective and historically situated social practices are taken on by the individual, to the extent that she can engage in such practices both reflectively and pre-reflectively. What is more, this theoretical synthesis is able to account for how social practices are engaged with in an incredibly routine and ‘ordinary’ manner, while also accounting for individual variation in this engagement. This theory is then applied to moral practices. It is contended that individual engagement in moral practice is not altogether different from engagement in social practice generally, and thus the theory offered here also accounts for how individuals are able to engage in moral practice in both a routine and an individualised manner.

Variations on Charisma: Shakespeare’s Saintly, Villain, and Lustful Leaders est une étude des mécanismes du leadership charismatique dans Henry V, Richard III et Antoine et Cléopâtre de William Shakespeare, respectivement. Le mémoire explore certains outils, tels que la rhétorique, l'ironie et resignification, qui permettent aux dirigeants de gagner l'amour des disciples, la reconnaissance, et même la crainte. Cette thèse ne traitera pas avec l'essence du charisme en tant que telle, mais plutôt avec les techniques de leadership charismatique. Dans le premier chapitre, j'ai étudié le caractère du roi Harry dans trois différents aspects: en tant que chef militaire, en tant que chef spirituel, et comme un leader politique. Parmi les techniques de leadership charismatique qui déploie Henry V de gagner l'amour de ses disciples et de dévouement est rhétorique. La capacité de livrer le discours à droite dans la conjoncture à droite et à convaincre les adeptes, même dans les moments de difficultés formes sa force clé comme une figure centrale dans la pièce. Le deuxième chapitre traite du leadership charismatique Richard III, qui est évaluée sur le plan éthique parce qu'elle est acquise grâce à assassiner. J'ai essayé d'examiner les relations possibles qui pourraient exister entre le charisme et l'agence moral. Dans ce chapitre, j'ai soulevé des questions sur la mesure dans laquelle le charisme est d'ordre éthique et comment un chef de file, qui usurpes alimentation via assassiner, est charismatique. Une technique qui renforce le leadership charismatique de Richard est l'ironie. Richard III déploie l'ironie de gagner la complicité du public. Dans le troisième chapitre, l'accent est mis sur le caractère de Cléopâtre. La question soulevée dans le chapitre concerne la relation entre le charisme et la lutte pour une identité féminine orientale. politique sexuelle de Cléopâtre est également au cœur de mon étude, car il est revu et de nouveaux sens de Shakespeare d'une manière qui souligne les qualités charismatiques de Cléopâtre. Mots clés: le charisme, la rhétorique, l'agence morale, resignification, William Shakespeare / Variations on Charisma: Shakespeare’s Saintly, Villain, and Lustful Leaders is an investigation of the mechanisms of charismatic leadership in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard III, and Antony and Cleopatra respectively. It explores certain tools, such as rhetoric, irony, and resignification, which allow the leaders to gain the followers’ love, recognition, and even awe. This thesis will not deal with the essence of charisma as such but rather with the techniques of charismatic leadership. In the first chapter, I have studied the character of King Harry in three different aspects: as a military leader, as a spiritual leader, and as a political leader. Among the techniques of charismatic leadership which Henry V deploys to gain his followers’ love and devotion is rhetoric. The ability to deliver the right discourse in the right conjuncture and to persuade the followers even in the moments of hardship forms his key strength as a central figure in the play. The second chapter deals with Richard III’s charismatic leadership which is assessed ethically because it is gained through murder. I have tried to examine the possible relations that might exist between charisma and moral agency. In this chapter, I have raised questions about the extent to which charisma is ethical and how a leader, who usurpes power via murder, is charismatic. One technique which reinforces Richard’s charismatic leadership is irony. Richard III deploys irony to gain the audience’s complicity. In the third chapter, the focus is on the character of Cleopatra. The question raised in the chapter concerns the relationship between charisma and the struggle for an oriental feminine identity. Cleopatra’s sexual politics is also at the heart of my study because it is revisited and resignified by Shakespeare in a way that highlights Cleopatra’s charismatic qualities. Key words: charisma, rhetoric, moral agency, resignification, William Shakespeare

Machine ethics is a field of applied ethics that has grown rapidly in the last decade. Increasingly advanced autonomous robots have expanded the focus of machine ethics from issues regarding the ethical development and use of technology by humans to a focus on ethical dimensions of the machines themselves. This thesis contains two essays, both about robots in some sense, representing these different perspectives of machine ethics. The first essay, “Is it Morally Right to use UAVs in War?” concerns an example of robots today, namely the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used in war, and the ethics surrounding the use of such robots. In this essay it is argued that UAVs might affect how the laws of war (LOW) are interpreted, and that there might be need for additional rules surrounding the use of UAVs. This represents the more traditional approach of machine ethics, focusing on the decisions of humans regarding the use of such robots. The second essay, “The Functional Morality of Robots”, concerns the robots of the future – the potential moral agency of robots. The suggestion in this essay is that robots should be considered moral agents if they can pass a moral version of the Turing Test. This represents the new focus of machine ethics: machine morality, or more precisely, machine agency. / <p>QC 20110414</p>

It has become quite noticeable that modern world politics across the globe has lacked a guiding morality in which we can hold states morally accountable in both the international and domestic spheres. This can be seen in the never-ending wars and occupations across the Middle East, South-East Asia, and many other places around the world. Now, attempting to implement such guiding moral principles seems to be an impossible task mainly because of the massive difficulties that one would face in trying to get the 195 countries around the world to agree on such principles. Because of this, most will probably accuse me of eurocentrism, which I hope to avoid in this paper. Despite this fact, I believe that the inevitable effects of the Climate Crisis and the need to see basic human rights observed across the world are enough reason to at least discuss the question: How can we begin to hold collective agents, states specifically, accountable for their actions?

Serving in the military is often a disruptive event in the lives of those who join, precipitating a reassessment of the service member’s ethical sensibilities or, tragically, resulting in lasting moral injury and trauma. The military experience compels them to navigate multiple identities, from citizen to warrior and back. Their religious identity, sometimes rooted in a civilian religious community, can be altered by military participation. Those who find faith during service often adopt one rooted in military culture. Still others find faith after leaving the service, providing a salve for the disruption of military experience. In many cases, religious cultural toolkits provide necessary meaning-making frameworks to make sense of war; however, these same frameworks can exacerbate trauma when moral expectations do not reflect reality, resulting in moral injury. Drawing on a series of inductive, in-depth qualitative interviews with forty-eight veterans and six military chaplains, this dissertation explores how varied religious resources and potentially traumatic events affect the lives of post-9/11 veterans who once or currently identified as Christian. Adding to existing research on moral injury, it traces how military chaplains, ethics education, just war theory rhetoric, and formal religious practice supplied by the military alter the course of service members’ moral lives. As these resources aim and re-aim them at the military’s institutional strategic goals, service members come to inhabit the warrior identity. Amid this new identity and the realities of modern warfare, trauma is likely, and service members must navigate an interruption to their deeply held moral beliefs, narratives, and expectations. After service, lasting moral wounds, traumatic experiences, and a loss of identity can make reintegrating to the civilian sector challenging, thus precipitating or exacerbating trauma. These narrative trajectories reveal how veterans use Christian faith or other systems of meaning-making to understand war and their identities as service members and veterans. Drawing on post-traumatic theologies and feminist and womanist ethics, this dissertation argues that these stories uncover tainted theological frameworks and a military culture in need of redemption. / 2023-11-04T00:00:00Z

Thesis advisor: Stephen J. Pope / This dissertation develops a Roman Catholic account of the flourishing and virtuous agency of people with schizophrenia in the United States. At least two million people in the United States live with this brain disease, whose symptoms (e.g. delusions and avolition) complicate virtuous living. This dissertation remedies the neglect of schizophrenia in Catholic ethics and advances Christian ethics beyond the best available work done on the flourishing and virtuous agency of people with it by Protestant authors by: a) drawing its understanding of the content of human flourishing and of the theological and cardinal virtues from Christian theological and ethical commitments rather than from non-Christian sources; b) grounding the social supports that would increase the likelihood of clinical recovery and, therefore, of agency, habituation, virtue, and flourishing; c) showing via careful work in virtue theory whether, why, how, to what extent, and under which circumstances people with schizophrenia can live virtuously; and d) clarifying the meaning of the theological and cardinal virtues and their relevance for people with schizophrenia. Chapter One elucidates the challenges confronting people with schizophrenia in the United States from their illness itself and from the nation’s failed social response to them, as well as the opportunities available to them through clinical, functional, and personal recovery. Chapter Two concludes that, despite their liabilities, recent secular interpretations of the good life can or do conceptualize flourishing as possible even as constraints such as those associated with schizophrenia endure rather than only after they have been removed. Chapter Threes and Four find that Roman Catholic magisterial teachings about schizophrenia and an analogized reading of Luke 8:26-39 can helpfully ground necessary social supports, but the former requires greater conceptual clarification and development, while the latter emphasizes Jesus’s agency rather than that of the Gerasene man and depicts a total healing from total brokenness that is unavailable to or not fully representative of people with schizophrenia today. Chapter Five argues that Thomas Aquinas’s understandings of perfect and imperfect beatitude provide the best way for Christian ethics to conceptualize the possibility, content, and requirements of the flourishing of people with schizophrenia. Thomistic ethics can ground necessary social supports, and Aquinas’s virtue theory, as interpreted by William C. Mattison and developed by the scientifically-informed and socially-attuned threshold thesis, can show whether, why, how, to what extent, and under which circumstances people with schizophrenia can live virtuously before onset of illness, between onset and the threshold point of clinical recovery, and at and beyond the threshold. Chapters Six and Seven use Thomistic virtue ethics to explain the meaning of the theological and cardinal virtues, respectively, and their relevance for people with schizophrenia. The result is a wider and deeper Christian assessment of their possibilities for agency, habituation, virtue, and flourishing, even as schizophrenia’s challenges continue to varying degrees. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Kristin E. Heyer / Discourse about climate change has the potential to empower moral agency toward sustainable praxis or arrest action by furthering moral oblivion. This dissertation analyzes sources for moral narratives about climate change—in theology and ethics, in public discourse and the news media, and in social movements—to determine their relative influence on agency. Because climate change and environmental degradation are wicked problems, there are always multiple ways to understand the problems and propose solutions that influence agential action. This dissertation promotes a pragmatic approach to environmental ethics, which analyzes the particularities of each problem to mediate the interconnected impact of historic injustice, social sin, and lived experiences of harm. Social movements provide new moral visions for enacting social change opposing structural injustice. The environmental justice movement, generated from experiences of environmental racism in the disposal of toxic waste, provides both a corrective moral vision and normative metrics by which sustainable action can be measured: recognition, participation, and distributive justice. Application of these normative principles makes it possible to analyze the extent to which environmental action pursues redress for structural injustice or continues to perpetuate social and environmental harm. Rooted in a social praxis of Christian hope, environmental ethics ought to stimulate the moral imagination to sustain action pursuant to tangible and lasting social change. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Catherine Cornille / Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / In the last decade, virtue ethics has steadily grown as a viable and useful framework for addressing the problems and challenges of climate change. Interest in broader concerns of environmental virtue ethics has intensified in the study of particularly “ecological” character traits that reveal how human flourishing is embedded in ecological relations, and that promote practices of restoration ecology. As an exercise in Muslim-Christian comparative theological ethics, cumulatively, this dissertation attempts to contribute to this ongoing discourse. More specifically, its principal task becomes clarified by the central methodological question of how virtue is acquired, cultivated, and may become developed. From a Catholic standpoint, the critical aim concerns developing the proper hermeneutic to both shape and inform virtue responses to climate change. In this regard, the ethical perspective continues to emphasize three crucial implications that must be kept at the forefront of any effective, systematic response to the urgent struggle of climate justice, namely, radical inequality that disproportionately affects the poor and most vulnerable, basic commitments to protect creation and care for non-human creatures, and solidarity with future generations. To this end, proposing practical means and key conditions for the pursuit of ecological conversion, this comparative theological approach is developed to cultivate a more suitable response. Building solidarity and practicing hospitality, this virtue-rooted approach proposes lessons in developing sobriety, attunement, and resilience in accord with hope.A core concern that I address is the lack of engagement with both concrete problems and shared challenges that transcend religious boundaries. In The Future of Ethics, Willis Jenkins contributes key focus toward “reform projects,” that is, actual cases of cultural change and religious creativity. In a pragmatic way, he suggests that these social movements offer vital lessons that demonstrate how to become better managers of humanity’s planetary powers. In a “prophetic” spirit, furthermore, he claims these lessons should enable and may inspire persons as moral agents to resist and overcome how conditions of “moral pluralism and cultural conflict” alienate ethical responses. From a comparative theological perspective, I critique his understanding of hospitality, how his strategy systematically ignores contributions of religious others and his relative lack of engagement with non-Christian sources. I argue that the discipline of comparative theology functions to make a particularly important contribution to this issue, pointing to the usefulness of virtue ethics that highlight the types of people we should become, the capabilities and distinct contributions of religious perspectives, and the methods of virtue cultivation that might serve climate ethics in understanding the complex goal of “reinhabitation.” I define this aspirational concept of reinhabitation as threefold, providing an altered sense of place, “spiritual landscape,” and practice of everyday life. In response to climate change, therefore, this dissertation attempts to forward a possible method of ethical reasoning as much as a discrete role for the discipline of comparative theology. As virtue ethics is supplemented dialectically with the use of case-based reasoning, the dialogical method allows a back-and-forth style of reasoning that enables judgments to be challenged and revised and even allows the possibility to listen and learn from others. The current literature of climate ethics tends to fall short of how theoretical work on virtue must be guided toward concretely affecting how flourishing becomes understood, implicating both the practice of everyday life and moral formation. While highlighting friendship as a possible basis for shaping ecological agency, I argue that the virtue ethics of Thomas Aquinas continues to provide important lessons in “broadening” justice to include those who are excluded from their “due” share, and encompasses the “community of the universe.” However, in Thomas’s understanding of ecological agency, Christian theology must confront, rehabilitate, and seek to reconcile limitations and inherited problems. In particular, I shall address habitual tendencies to either dominate or exclude other, non-human creatures in Christian visions of flourishing. In common, Islamic approaches seem to be developing the question of ecological agency with a more acute consciousness toward habits and virtues that integrate ecological concerns. In the virtue ethics of Abū Hamid al-Ghazālī, I turn to an alternative model of virtue cultivation that emphasizes bodily practices in its development perspective, with a more corporeal and therapeutic way to practice temperance, enact justice in accord with law, and perhaps fostering hope. In this dissertation, as a result of this dialogical engagement, I argue for the incorporation of both case-based reasoning and development of virtue ethics. Taken together, this method of reasoning can draw inquiry into cooperative habits of solidarity and may create conditions for practicing hospitality. In sum, what kind of justice is necessary? In the concluding chapter, based on the case of the Niger Delta, I begin to sketch the outlines for a model of restorative justice with the promising basis of Muslim-Christian dialogue, the key role of climate change witnesses, and building possible pathways toward building resilience in the name of the greater common good. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

A long-standing and fundamental question in the field of business ethics concerns the status of corporate moral agency. Is it possible for a corporation to constitute a moral agent in the same way as an individual can? Many collectivist theories have attempted to answer this question in the affirmative. An influential contribution to this discussion is made by Christian List and Phillip Pettit in Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents (2011). In this work, the authors argue for the possibility of corporate moral agency by grounding it in certain rational capacities realizable both by individuals and corporations. Important for their project is the concept of incentive compatibility, taken from the literature on mechanism design. The authors introduce this concept as a desideratum for good organizational design, and as a component for the proper functioning of a corporate moral agent. In this paper, I give an account of and critically examine List and Pettit’s theory. Specifically, I problematize the two strategies presented by the authors in their program to demonstrate how this desideratum might be satisfied. The first strategy encounters problems when faced with impossibility results associated with judgment aggregation, familiar from the literature on social choice. The second strategy is complicated by inconsistencies that arise in connection to the underlying premises in regards to human psychology and rationality, established early on by the authors. This presents significant obstacles for the authors’ larger project. If both strategies fail, and a corporation is unable to reach a state of incentive compatibility, then it also fails to function properly as an agent according to List and Pettit’s own definitions. If an entity is unable to function properly as an agent, then, I argue, there seems to be no reason to attribute agency to it.