In the Capabilities Approach literature “capabilities” are the real freedoms individuals possess to achieve certain “functionings,” which are the doings and beings that constitute a good life. I argue that this approach requires, or at least can benefit from, an account of the psychosocial mechanisms involved in capability limitation. The...
Over the past decade, it has come to light that many published scientific findings cannot be reproduced. This has led to the replication crisis in science. Many researchers feel that they can no longer trust much of what they read in scientific journals, and the public is becoming ever more...
In the contemporary U.S., the state, through the Legislative Assembly, the State Board of
Education, and the Department of Education, sets policies for K-12 education. These include goals
and standards that affect the kinds of influences local officials, parents, and students can have
on various education programs, required and elective...
Some authors defending the "hereditarian" hypothesis with respect to differences in average IQ scores between populations have argued that the sorts of environmental variation hypothesized by some researchers rejecting the hereditarian position should leave discoverable statistical traces, namely changes in the overall variance of scores or in variance-covariance relating scores...
Science is difficult for even its researchers to understand. Science journalists must understand scientific discoveries well enough to write clear, accurate explanations of scientific discoveries for laypeople. A sense of ethical judgment will help journalists ensure that their accounts are reliable and appropriate. Responsible science journalists will maintain a working...
This paper distinguishes three concepts of “race”: bio-genomic cluster/race, biological race, and social race. We map out realism, antirealism, and conventionalism about each of these, in three important historical episodes: Frank Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962, A.W.F. Edwards’ 2003 response to Lewontin (1972), and contemporary discourse. Semantics is especially...
Hume’s division of truth into agreement with matters of fact or relations of ideas casts doubt on our capacity to have moral knowledge, as moral propositions do not seem to fall obviously into either category. This thesis looks at how two views, ‘descriptive moral functionalism’ and ‘moral concept essentialism’, try...
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JonathanKaplan, Committee Member, representing the School of History, Philosophy, and
I defend robust realism from arguments that raise epistemological challenges to it based on considerations about either moral disagreement or the genealogy of our moral beliefs. The first argument is the “Argument from Conciliationism,” which contends that the moral disagreements that obtain between moral peers give us reason to believe...
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Jonathan M. Kaplan, Committee Member, representing the School of History,
Philosophy, and
In this thesis, I conduct an analysis of paradigmatic background assumptions deployed in engineering decision-making processes, in order to understand how these assumptions, operating tacitly and in tension with each other, contribute to decisions that are ethically less effective and less substantial than they would otherwise be. I do so...
This research is an effort to explore the nature of good work, a concept that describes work that is beneficial to the physical, psychological, and social dimensions of its stakeholders, including and especially the worker. This effort is divided into four distinct parts. First, the construct of good work is...