Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: philosophy
- Creators: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Kantianism is a duty-based moral theory in which actions have an intrinsic moral worth. This means certain actions are morally right and other are morally wrong, regardless of the intended or realized consequences. The theory relies on the categorical imperative to judge the morality of certain actions. It states that an action is moral if its maxim can be willed universal law and if it avoids treating people as merely a means. In contrast, Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory which focuses on the consequences of an action in judging moral worth. In Utilitarianism, the morally correct action is the one which will maximize utility; that is to say, the morally right action is the one which will produce the greatest amount of happiness and minimize the amount of pain for the greatest number of people.
After applying these two theories to moral dilemmas facing the U.S. Criminal Justice System, including the appropriate collection of DNA evidence, the use of police deception, and the use of criminal punishments such as solitary confinement or the death penalty, it was clear that Kantianism was the ethical theory best suited for guiding the system in treating people ethically. This is because Kantianism’s focus on the intrinsic moral worth of an action rather than its consequences leaves less room for ambiguity than does Utilitarianism.
There is no possibility for an ecological crisis without someone to be in crisis. The environment is not in danger as such, humanity’s ability to persist in it with well-being is. Thus, the ecological crisis is a human crisis, a crisis of meaning. Although ecology is required to understand and address these problems, we must understand the human condition if we wish to address them with any amount of seriousness or hope for success. We will be concerned with the relevance of hermeneutic practices in the study and practice of ecology. By hermeneutic practices, I mean the practices central to the human condition of world-building through perpetual interpretation and re-interpretation informed by one’s facticity. By the study and practice of ecology, I mean the education of ecology’s concepts within a scholastic, primarily university, setting and the usage of said concepts for the purpose of research or societal development respectively. I will argue that the study and practice of ecology would benefit from an inclusion of hermeneutics into its study in the scholastic system by way of developing nuanced understandings of oneself and their relation to the environment, thereby revealing new horizons of possibility in decision-making in society regarding the environment and oneself. To do this, I begin by using hermeneutic strategies in a reading of Gilgamesh to draw comparisons between Gilgamesh’s journey and the development of human society’s relationship to progress. Juxtaposing the concerns posited by the hermeneutic reading of Gilgamesh with Neil Postman’s claim that our contemporary understanding of the world is helpfully understood as what he calls a “Technopoly,” I argue technology has altered our orientation towards the environment in a way that falsely suggests hermeneutics has no place in ecology or any science. Exploring passages from Martin Heidegger, I then argue how humans’ fundamental relationship to interpretation makes hermeneutics the ground from which ecology is able to rise from. Further exploring passages from Heidegger’s work and exploring the etymology of the words “preserve” and “beforehand,” I argue that not only does hermeneutics allow for the study of ecology, but by studying ecology without it we are left in a state prime for mis-handling the Earth, thus making hermeneutics a crucial part of an education in ecology. I close by providing an example of using hermeneutic practices on two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson to display how these hermeneutic practices could be used in conjunction with an education in ecology and illustrate the benefits therein.
Throughout the year I had the opportunity to work on a business venture that utilized dendrites as a unique identifier. Dendrites themselves are completely unique, random, branching structures that occur everywhere in nature. This creative project was inspired by the shape of the dendrite and I created a series of 12 paintings reflecting on my own unique college journey.