Browsing by Subject "Responsibility"
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Item The brothers Karamazov : guilt, alterity and the divine(2014-05) Wojtusik, Jennie Denise; Livers, Keith A., 1963-Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov continually challenges the reader with variations of this concept: “Heart of my heart, my joyful one you must know that verily each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything” (289). The challenge is twofold: how does one envision this utterance moving from the realm of philosophical abstraction to an ontology of responsibility, and what is the obligation I am failing to account for regarding everyone and everything? Contained in this utterance of guilt before all is the relationship between the individual and others; it posits an intrinsic alterity. The Brothers Karamazov does not depict the ethicality of alterity as a secular responsibility, but rather a profoundly Christian one aimed at refuting atheistic Sensualism. Chronologically, then, I will examine how the novel depicts the moral depravity of sensualistic philosophy, how alterity is an ethical demand of responsibility, how it functions as an ontological posturing prior to behavioral acts and cognition, and finally as one that it is inherently religious. Thus, this essay serves as model of how Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of the Other, could be applied to the extant of The Brothers Karamazov.Item “Ethnic” and fantasy : exploring responsibility, respect, and integrity in the design of culturally significant costume for theatre(2020-05-07) Fisher, Stephanie Mae; Glavan, JamesCostume designers must acquire the knowledge and flexibility to understand characters and clothing from diverse cultural backgrounds. This project explores the responsibilities of a costume designer in creating work relating to cultural backgrounds that are not the designer’s own. It seeks to define important academic terms that are not directly a part of costume design research, but form a basis for interrogation of the costume design process for potentially sensitive cultural material. An extensive literature review was conducted first, creating a broad backdrop of knowledge that could be applied to a design process. Using Cinderella stories from China, Japan, and Korea as a vehicle for the investigation, this study examines one designer’s process of designing one character whose qualities remain similar across much of the world, but whose clothing must change depending on story origins. Extensive research was conducted into the clothing for each of the originating cultures, and the designer used this new knowledge along with new understandings of how to engage with culturally significant material to design the “transformation” look for the various Cinderella characters. The study concludes with reflections regarding integrity, understanding, and the importance of engaging with diverse cultural material as a way of building community across the globe.Item Nanti evidential practice : language, knowledge, and social action in an Amazonian society(2008-05) Michael, Lev David, 1969-; Sherzer, Joel; Woodbury, Anthony C.This dissertation examines the strategic deployment of evidential resources in communicative interactions among Nantis, an Arawak people of Peruvian Amazonia. In particular, this work focuses on Nantis' uses of evidentials to modulate representations of responsibility, and shows that two distinct types of responsibility must be distinguished in order to account for the socially instrumental properties of evidential resources: event responsibility and utterance responsibility. Event responsibility concerns praiseworthiness or blameworthiness for happenings in which the relevant individual is causally implicated; while utterance responsibility concerns the socially salient attributes of an utterance (e.g. truthfulness), and not the utterance's consequences. Evidential resources are shown to mitigate event responsibility in Nanti interactions by serving as a pragmatic metaphor, whereby the sensory directness or indirectness encoded by evidentials yields inferences regarding individuals' participation in, and responsibility for, events. The use of evidential resources, principally quotative resources, to modulate utterance responsibility operates on quite different principles. Specifically, quotative resources serve to individuate utterances by attributing them to a particular source, thereby rendering explicit that individual's commitment to the stances expressed by the quoted utterance. In doing so, the use of the quotative resource emphasizes that individual's responsibility for the expressed stance. Quotative resources are also employed to decrease a first party's responsibility for a stance, by attributing it to a third party. In this case, inferences based on the Maxim of Quantity lead interactants to infer reduced commitment on the part of the first party on the basis of the attribution of strong commitment to a third party. Both epistemic stance and a variety of moral and evaluative stances are relevant to utterance responsibility. Significantly, utterance responsibility is one of the few areas in which a pragmatic tie exists between evidentiality and epistemic modality, indicating the relative marginality of epistemic modality to evidentiality in Nanti, even at the level of pragmatics. An ethnographic and historical sketch of the Nanti people is provided, and a grammatical description of the Nanti language is also included.Item Should I retaliate?: the role of aggression, forgivingness, moral responsibility, and social interest in the decision to return harm for harm(2003) Locasio, Ann Lee; Manaster, Guy J.This study examined the four constructs of forgivingness, aggression, moral responsibility, and social interest as they impact retaliation among college students. There has been renewed research interest into the concept of forgivingness in the last ten to fifteen years. While forgiveness refers to the propensity to refrain from resentment or seeking revenge against an offender, forgivingness is defined as the tendency to engage in acts of forgiveness across time and across situations. It is a trait or disposition. Research on aggression, moral responsibility, and social interest has been ongoing for several decades. Aggression refers to physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. Moral responsibility means the tendency to act morally, in accordance with generally accepted standards of right and wrong, even when others may choose to do otherwise. Social interest is defined as having a sense of belonging to all of humanity, such that one’s connections with others are focused solely on the common good of all. This study looks at these three constructs along with level of forgivingness as they relate to retaliation. Retaliation in this study was defined as taking back not only what was taken from oneself, but going beyond that, taking more, in order to punish the other participant. Why people retaliate or refrain from doing so is not completely clear, but this study shows that forgivingness and social interest each play a part in predicting level of retaliation. These two constructs were predictors of the outcome variable; however, aggression, moral responsibility, and membership in a group where harm was done, intended, or neither, did not predict retaliation.Item Societal obligation(1970) Bennett, William J. (William John), 1943-; Pincoffs, Edmund L.This dissertation is about legal and moral obligation. In response to the skeptic who questions a) whether there are any obligations at all and/or b) whether particular claims about obligations in particular situations are true, an argument will be advanced affirming the existence of certain societal obligations. These societal obligations are moral obligations and recognition of them is required for demonstrating the legitimacy of the exercise of power by legal institutions. The theories of obligation of H.A. Prichard and W.D. Ross will be criticized. These theories neglect certain dimensions of obligation and do not provide an adequate response to certain forms of skepticism about obligation. Cases in Anglo-American contract law will be presented to reveal the way courts justify imposing obligations on parties in lawsuits. An argument justifying the procedure of the courts will bring to light the societal obligations which are basic to other types of obligation. The theory of obligation will then be tested by applying it to situations in which questions about obligation arise. The example of Socrates in the Crito will be offered as an example of the theory in practice. Finally, there will be discussion of the importance of these societal obligations and discussion about the limits of the inquiry concluded.Item Suicide notes : on Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism(2012-05) Frank, Sarah Noble; Davis, D. Diane (Debra Diane), 1963-; Lesser, Wayne2013 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of Paul de Man’s death, and the twentieth anniversary of the 2003 MLA special session titled “Is Now the Time for Paul de Man?” Is now the time, the panel asked, to put the scandal of de Man’s Wartime Journalism behind us? Arguing (via an allegory of “the suicide note”) that to give Paul de Man a “time” would be a negation of spectrality and a contradiction to his thought, this paper asks instead: How are we to respond to Paul de Man now, thirty years after his death? For as Jacques Derrida writes in his response to Wartime Journalism, this scandal (the scandal of Paul de Man’s suicide note) is “happening to us,” and it is happening now. To read his writings still entails certain responsibilities. Taking Theseus from Euripides’ Hippolytus as the hapless reader par excellence, I suggest that it is not misreading which produces irresponsibility, but rather a failure to have read—or even, perhaps, the failure to have continued reading. How are we to respond to Paul de Man now, thirty years after his death? How are we to grieve his death, to read his suicide note? I conclude, with Avital Ronell, that if we are to have responded to Paul de Man, we will need to do so not by becoming better interpreters, but rather by becoming better mis-readers of the texts he leaves behind, like suicide notes, after his death.