In the autumn of 1921, silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of a model and actress named Virginia Rappé. The ensuing scandal created a firestorm of controversy not just around Arbuckle but the entire motion picture industry. Religious and moral reformers seized upon the scandal to decry the decline of “traditional” moral values taking place throughout American society in the aftermath of World War I. The scandal created a common objective for an anti-film coalition representing diverse social and religious groups, all dedicated to bringing about change in the motion picture industry through public pressure, boycotts, and censorship legislation. In the face of this threat, the film industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, with Republican strategist Will Hays as its president. Hays worked to incorporate moral reformers into his new organization, giving them an outlet for their complaints while simultaneously co-opting and defusing their reform agenda. Hays’ use of public relations as the means to institute self-regulation within the motion picture industry enabled Hollywood to survive the Arbuckle scandal and continue to thrive. It also set up the mechanism by which the industry has effectively negotiated public discontent ever since.

This thesis examines the moral philosophical commitments that Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche advance in their respective oppositions to utilitarianism. Though not always under that title, all three reject the claim that promoting happiness is the ultimate end that we pursue, or ought to pursue, through moral principles and values. Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche see this rejection reflected in human nature itself. Each develops a distinctive conception of 'higher self,' or of higher purposes already belonging, in some sense, to each of us, in accordance with which we ought to shape our character. Self-formation, not the mere pursuit of happiness (whether our own or that of others), is thus our true moral project. I focus on each philosopher's account of agency and motivation as the locus in which this view of morality is developed, highlighting the differences that emerge from the details of their respective accounts. This thesis shows that a tight relation between cognition and motive feeling is central, though in different ways, for Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to the motivational structure of those actions through which we develop moral character. According to Kant, recognition of being bound by the moral law (our 'practical cognition' of freedom) is indissolubly linked to the feeling of respect for it, which in turn is explicable only through such recognition. For Schopenhauer, the 'intuitive cognition' that our existence as distinct individuals is illusory is the feeling of compassion. Nietzsche radically expands this point, arguing that, in every act of will, the motive feeling and guiding cognition are uniquely linked. Only a superficial grasp of human motivation supports the idea that pleasure and pain are the common motive forces underlying all our actions. The inner conflict in human nature, the creative tension in self-formation, is not, for Nietzsche, that between a uniquely moral form of motivation and a 'lower' instrumental pursuit of pleasure. Rather, this inner tension, expressed most strikingly and distressingly in extreme ascetic and guilt-ridden strands of Christian morality, is the product of a complex historical conflict between two different modes of behavioural selection – our evolutionary development and the processes of socialization.

Ce mémoire propose une analyse des justifications du paternalisme étatique dans les cas d’acrasie. Nous explorerons d’abord quelques théories et conceptions de l’acrasie, démontrant la nécessité de développer une conception de l’agent acratique qui soit en quelque sorte subdivisible. Mous exposerons par la suite en quoi cette conception de l’individu remet en question certains présupposés fondamentaux du libéralisme. Notre second chapitre sera consacré à une redéfinition de certains principes libéraux en fonction de notre conception de l’individualité. Cette redéfinition nous permettra d’expliquer comment l’intervention étatique de type paternaliste peut être parfois justifiée d’un point de vue libéral. Le cœur de notre argumentation mettra l’accent sur l’importance pour l’État d’assurer l’autonomie de ses citoyens en concevant leur raison comme faculté d’intégration personnelle. Notre troisième chapitre tentera d’explorer divers exemples de cas concrets où les principes développés plus tôt pourront s’appliquer. / The purpose of this master thesis is to analyze paternalistic justifications for State intervention in cases of acrasia. We first start by exploring some theories and conceptions of acrasia showing the necessity to develop a conception of the acratic agent as somehow subdivisible. We then show that this conception of the individual challenges some of the most central presuppositions for political liberalism. Our second chapter means to redefine some liberal principles according to our conception of individuality. This redefinition will enable us to explain how paternalistic State intervention can sometime be justified from a liberal point of view. Our argumentation will focus on the importance for the State to ensure the autonomy of its citizens by securing the role of their reason as a faculty of personal integration. Our third chapter means to explore diverse practical cases in which the principles developed earlier can apply.

Will Kymlicka a formulé une théorie libérale du droit des minorités en arguant que l'on doit protéger les cultures minoritaires des influences extérieures, car, selon lui, ces cultures fournissent aux individus un contexte de choix significatif qui permet la prise de décision autonome. Il limite donc la portée de sa théorie aux minorités « culturelles », c'est-à-dire les minorités nationales et immigrantes, qui peuvent fournir ce contexte de choix significatif aux individus. Évidemment, les injustices vécues par ces deux types de minorités, aussi sévères soient-elles, n'épuisent pas les expériences d'injustices vécues par les membres de groupes minoritaires et minorisés (i.e. minorités sexuelles, femmes, Afro-Américains, etc.). On pourrait donc être tenté d'élargir la portée de la théorie du droit des minorités pour rendre compte de toutes les injustices vécues en tant que minorité. Toutefois, je défends la thèse selon laquelle cette extension est impossible dans le cadre d'une théorie libérale, car une de ses méthodes typiques, la « théorie idéale », limite la portée critique des thèses de Kymlicka et parce que l'autonomie individuelle a un caractère si fondamental pour les libéraux, qu'ils ne peuvent rendre compte du fait que certaines décisions individuelles autonomes peuvent contribuer à perpétuer des systèmes et des normes injustes. / Will Kymlicka defends a liberal theory of minority rights, arguing that we must protect minority cultures from outside influences, as these cultures provide individuals with a meaningful context of choice that allows autonomous decision-making. This defence of minority rights limits the scope of his theory by focusing on 'cultural' minorities, that is to say, national minorities and immigrants, which can provide individuals with this meaningful context of choice. Obviously, the injustices experienced by these two types of minorities, however severe they are, do not exhaust the injustices experienced by members of minority groups and minoritized groups (i.e. sexual minorities, women, African Americans, etc.). One might be tempted to expand the scope of the theory of minority rights to account for all the injustices experienced as a minority. However, I argue that this extension is not possible within a liberal theorical framework where 'ideal theory' limits the critical force of Kymlicka’s thesis and in which the centrality of individual autonomy prevents liberals to realize that certain individual decisions contribute to the perpetuation of unjust systems, values and norms.

Hypercomputation, which is the general concept embracing all machinery capable of carrying out more tasks than Turing Machines and beyond the Turing Limit, has implications for various fields including mathematics, physics, computer science and philosophy. Regarding its philosophical aspects, it is necessary to reveal the position of hypercomputation relative to the classical computational theory of mind in order to clarify and broaden the scope of hypercomputation so that it encompasses some phenomena which are regarded as problematic because of their property of being uncomputable. This thesis points to a relation between hypercomputation and the agent-causation theory of free will by exploring that theory&#039 / s alleged infinite-regress feature, which has been regarded by some authors as problematic and used against the agent causation theory. In order to cope with this problem, we propose a certain hypercomputer, viz. the reverse Zeus machine. The reverse Zeus machine can help to understand the infinite-regress aspect of agent causation better than accelerating Turing machines (or ordinary Zeus machines). Accelerating Turing machines are abstract machines which perform temporal patterning in an accelerating manner by executing each step in half the time required for the previous step. This allows them to compute infinitely many operations in finite time. Although reverse Zeus machines have the same working principle as accelerating Turing machines, we show that agent causation can be represented by reverse Zeus machines better than by the classical Zeus machines.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

Thesis--Lund. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-158) and index.

Thesis--Lund. / Includes index. Bibliography: p. 150-158.

Habilitationsschrift--Salzburg. / Bibliography: p. [xvii]-xxiv.

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