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(1 - 9 of 9)
- Title
- Reflections on the History of Engineering in the United States : A Preface to Engineering Ethics
- Creator
- Davis, Michael
- Date
- 2005, 1992-11-19
- Publisher
- Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
- Description
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This paper traces the history of the profession of engineering in the United States as a way to gain a better understanding of the field of...
Show moreThis paper traces the history of the profession of engineering in the United States as a way to gain a better understanding of the field of engineering and of engineering ethics.
Lecture at the Center for Academic Ethics and College of Engineering, Wayne State University. Detroit, Michigan. 19 November 1992
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- Title
- The Moral Legislature
- Creator
- Davis, Michael
- Date
- 2006, 1985-11-05
- Publisher
- Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
- Description
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This paper is an experiment in what John Rawls recently called "Kantian constructiivism". It seeks to establish a "suitable connection between...
Show moreThis paper is an experiment in what John Rawls recently called "Kantian constructiivism". It seeks to establish a "suitable connection between a particular conception of the person and first principles of [morality] by means of a procedure of construction. Yet, it differs from Rawls' similar efforts in a number of ways. The emphasis is morality generally, not justice in particular. The construction attempts to be more "realistic" especially in substituting external procedures for Rawls' "veil of ignorance". These differences are, I hope, at least suggested by substituting "the moral legislature" for Rawls' "original position". Section I of this paper explains further what motivates the sort of construction proposed, sections II-V describe the moral legislature itself, explaining as well why it makes sense to construct it as I do and how it differs from some obvious alternatives. Section VI concludes with an example of how the moral legislature might be used, the sketch of an argument for the claim that positive law cannot in in generally be morally obliging.
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- Title
- Methodological Missteps: A Response to Brooks' "On Retribution"
- Creator
- Davis, Michael
- Date
- 2006, 2006-05-14
- Publisher
- Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
- Description
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Thom Brooks claims his paper has only one thesis—that, for epistemological reasons (in particular, requiring a “gold standard of desert”), ...
Show moreThom Brooks claims his paper has only one thesis—that, for epistemological reasons (in particular, requiring a “gold standard of desert”), “retributivism is impossible to enact as a practice”. I think the paper has at least two other theses as well, both unacknowledged and more or less independent of the first. One is that there is only one true retributivism (“pure retributivism” or “retributivism strictly speaking”). This claim seems to rest on an unjustified, and (I believe) unjustifiable, Platonism. The second unacknowledged thesis is that this one true retributivism suffers (and must suffer) from certain flaws, in particular: 1) moral rigorism (forbidding the criminal justice system to show mercy or to deviate in any other way from what the criminal deserves for his crime); 2) methodological individualism (requiring that desert be “a particular criminal’s desert” unaffected by “other factors, such as society’s equilibrium”); and 3) methodological absolutism (an inability to “choose punishments on account of how they might be related to each other and various crimes”). What I propose to do here is, first, briefly dispose of Brooks’ epistemological claim, then (at greater length) explain why retributivism is best thought of as a family of loosely related theories no one of which has the privilege of being “true retributivism” (even though some are certainly historically or conceptually closer to the core of retributive thinking than others) and, last, why, so understood, retributivism does not suffer from any of the three flaws Brooks claims true retributivism must suffer from.
Published as part of the Online Philosophy Conference, May 14, 2006.http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
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- Title
- Ownership of Computer Programs
- Creator
- Snapper, John W.
- Date
- 2006, 1981-12-09
- Publisher
- Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
- Description
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Discusses reasons for against copyrighting computer software programs. Reasons against include the potential for holding back scientific...
Show moreDiscusses reasons for against copyrighting computer software programs. Reasons against include the potential for holding back scientific discoveries. Though the labor that goes into creating computer programs does seem to create property rights, the principle of free thought seems to override this right. The author discusses some of the problems that exist in copyright, trade secret, and patent law and discusses why these laws should be changed to discourage secrecy so they do not interfere with free thought.
Presented at a meeting of the Collegiate Institute for Values and Science, University of Michigan, December 9, 1981
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- Title
- Limitations Upon Legitimate Authority to Suspend and Expel K-12 Public School Students: A Moral Analysis
- Creator
- Ladenson, Robert
- Date
- 2011, 2011
- Publisher
- Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
- Description
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This paper presents a moral analysis of the limitations upon legitimate authority to suspend and expel students in K-12 public schools. The...
Show moreThis paper presents a moral analysis of the limitations upon legitimate authority to suspend and expel students in K-12 public schools. The paper has four sections. The first presents two case vignettes that pose difficult moral issues concerning suspensions and expulsions in K-12 public schools. The second section develops an analysis of the moral bases of a child’s right to receive a K-12 public education. Section three extends the analysis in section two, relating it specifically to limitations upon morally legitimate authority to suspend and expel students in K-12 public schools. The fourth section returns to the two case vignettes and discusses the moral issues they pose from the standpoint of the analysis developed in sections two and three. . The analysis, I hope, will benefit educators, parents, and the general public in helping to identify, clarify their understanding of, and gain insight into principles, which, I believe underlie any morally justifiable policy concerning K-12 public school suspensions and expulsions.
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- Title
- Ethics and Biotechnology - Identifying Issues in the Face of Uncertainities
- Creator
- Weil, Vivian
- Date
- 2009, 1995
- Publisher
- Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
- Description
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The aim of this paper is to delineate ethical issues raised by applications of recombinant DNA technology in agriculture.
- Title
- The Usefulness of Moral Theory in Practical Ethics: A Question of Comparative Cost (A Response to Harris)
- Creator
- Davis, Michael
- Date
- 2009, 2009
- Publisher
- Philosophy Documentation Center
- Description
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I find myself agreeing with almost everything in Harris’s defense of moral theory except the end: moral theories can often be useful in...
Show moreI find myself agreeing with almost everything in Harris’s defense of moral theory except the end: moral theories can often be useful in resolving moral dilemmas. Both students and practitioners of practical ethics should be constantly reminded of this, because in practical ethics we need all of the help we can get. If (as it seems) these two sentences state the conclusion, Harris has committed a non sequitur. While making a good argument for the general usefulness of moral theory in practical ethics, he has not made any argument for its usefulness to students or practitioners as such. He has simply assumed that what is true of some who engage in practical ethics is true of students and practitioners in particular. In theory, of course, moral theory should be useful even to students and practitioners, helping them to identify issues they might have overlooked, to seek information they might otherwise not have thought relevant, and to formulate courses of action that might not otherwise have occurred to them. In practice, however, moral theory will seldom, if ever, be useful (or, at least, useful enough). We do not (as Harris claims) need all the help we can get in practical ethics. What we need is all the help we can get at reasonable cost. We should only invest the time and effort needed to learn and use moral theory when the investment is no greater than for an otherwise equally useful alternative. Since there is at least one equally useful alternative requiring much less investment, the time and effort students and practitioners would have to invest in moral theory will (in general) be much greater than necessary for their purposes. So, neither students nor practitioners need moral theory.
Teaching Ethics Vol. 10, Issue 1, pp. 69-78
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