School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemVirtue and the Three Monkey Defence: Regulating Ethical Conduct in the Australian Public Service.( 2019)The thesis is an investigation of the efficacy of the “values-based” ethics regulation system (“system”) operated by the Australian Public Service (“APS”). Normative propositions which identify virtue, human character, or dispositions to behave, as determinatively contingent factors in public officials’ compliance with their statutory ethics obligations serve as an entry-point for the investigation. The proposition, that a public officer’s compliance with statutory ethical obligations is down to virtue, is critiqued from the standpoint of the tension which arises from two mutually incompatible narratives argued to coincide in relation to perceptions of ethical conduct in the APS; the first ‘official’ narrative is in the form of the APS Commissioner’s annual State of the Service Report, which regularly reports near perfect compliance of APS officers with their ethical obligations. The second narrative arises from myriad news reports, parliamentary inquiries and whistleblower disclosures, of apparently considerable and systemic misconduct, serious misconduct, corruption, and other forms of misfeasance. In order to put this analysis into effect, the thesis poses the following questions: - To what extent is virtue – expressly or impliedly – a constituent theoretical component in the development of the liberal-democratic tradition and, in particular, the model of Westminster public administration which developed from this tradition in the nineteenth-century? - Does the APS system of ethics regulation rely upon a virtue-ethics type methodology, or is one implied in its design? - What challenges are posed to the efficacy of the APS system of ethics regulation from the standpoints respectively of situationist ethics and sociological theories of interaction? The thesis investigates the historical place of virtue (and related concepts) in the theoretical formation of the liberal-democratic project, and particularly the conceptual development of the social contract and the Westminster model of public administration. The triumvirate concepts of trust, legitimacy, and consent, provide an analytical prism through which to critique the notional place and operation of the statutory system of ethics regulation in the APS and, particularly, certain (arguably) virtue-like statutory provisions which are traditionally emblematic of, or otherwise fundamental to, the principles of Westminster public administration. Nineteenth-century developments such as the disappearance of “virtue” from public discourse and the formative development of the idea of the ‘permanent civil servant’ are analysed in their historical context. The evolution of the modern APS, from its traditional Westminster formulation, to the current results-focused “values-based” system, is described and critiqued in terms of the resulting tensions for the accountability and impartiality of public servants. Finally, the proposition that virtue must properly constitute the basis for a public officer’s compliance with statutory ethical obligations is critiqued from two theoretical perspectives that pose a challenge to virtue-ethics: firstly, the current debate between situationist ethicists and virtue ethicists as to the validity of the so-called fundamental attribution error; and, secondly, interactionist theories, focusing in particular on the work of Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and Anthony Giddens. The thesis proposes that the (unacknowledged) primary purpose of the APS ethics regulation system is to manage perceptions of legitimacy for the sake of the social contract.
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ItemThe concept of interest in Kierkegaard's moral psychology( 2006)The category of interesse, "interest," has been regarded in the critical literature as one of the more marginal terms employed in Kierkegaard's account of the experience of moral selfhood. However, careful attention to the way Kierkegaard uses the term in his phenomenology of consciousness shows the term to pick out something both distinctive and fundamental to the structures of experience and the ontology of selfhood Kierkegaard develops. Through consideration of the identification of consciousness with "interestedness" in Johannes Climacus, a specific sense of interesse as a non-thetic, immediate self-referentiality built into cognition emerges. Interesse is not a thought about a specific object, but a self-reflexivity that attends all thought without the self thereby becoming the object of thought.. The structure of consciousness itself allows interesse to qualify consciousness teleologically, such that the achievement of interested (that is, implicitly selfreferential) thinking becomes the implicit goal of consciousness. It is this teleology that is evident when interesse re-emerges in the Climacan writings in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript's many formulations regarding the self's "impassioned," "personal," "infinite" interest in its eternal blessedness. Interest provides a teleological direction to thought by investing all thought with implicit reference to (and coordination by) the self's highest ends. The trichotomous structure of consciousness is mirrored in the trichotomous structure of selfhood developed in The Sickness Unto Death, and accordingly the structurally given nature of interesse is to be found in this structure as well. The self's self-relation, which is taken to be constitutive of selfhood, is not composed of temporally distinct cognitions of self-relation, but is rather implicit in every intentional thought of actualised selfhood. This sense of immediate self-referentiality is then shown to play, a crucial role in Kierkegaard's account of ethical imagination and moral vision. Interesse allows the self to experience immediately its genuine co-identity with its imaginatively posited selves; as such it allows the self to maintain a connection with what it imagines and so allows imagination to fulfil functions necessary to moral agency rather than being carried away into the "fantastic." Explicating interesse in this way throws into relief Kierkegaard's emphasis upon a language of self-recognition. This language (and the related descriptions of the failure of such self-recognition) expresses a particular model of moral psychology, one that is teleologically qualified such that vision and volition become increasingly co-extensive. The use of mirror metaphors, most notably in For Self-Examination are also shown to describe a selfreflexive mode of apprehension of morally compelling situations, exemplars or texts. Finally, this understanding of interesse is shown to be central to Kierkegaard's repudiation of the Epicurean counsel of indifference towards death. The aspect of interesse as an immediate experience of co-identity allows Kierkegaard to secure a sense in which we can become, contra Epicurus, copresent with our own death. This allows for useful Kierkegaardian interventions into modern debates on the harm of death.
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ItemThe ethics of self cultivation : Nietzsche's middle works( 2004)This thesis examines Nietzsche's middle works in order to challenge those views that dismiss Nietzschean self-cultivation as a symptom of unadulterated narcissism. It aims to develop a far more balanced and refined conception of his idea of self-cultivation by re-examining the much neglected free-spirit trilogy of Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science. Contra Nietzsche's critics, it argues that the kind of self-cultivation he proposes involves a Cynic/Stoic work on the self that enables the subject to bear separation and solitude without resentment. The thesis aims to show that Nietzsche develops an ethics of self-cultivation that draws on the model of Hellenistic and Roman Stoic philosophical therapeia. It suggests that he renovates this therapeutic tradition through his own critical, psychoanalytic insights into narcissism and its transformations. It reconstructs Nietzsche's ethics of self-cultivation in terms of his psychological analysis of the pathological symptoms of narcissism and its healthy or positive transformations. In charting Nietzsche's course from pathological narcissism to mature individualism this thesis reconstructs the philosophical and psychological basis of his critique of Rousseau and Schopenhauer's ethics of pitie/Mitleid, his use and analysis of comedy and humour in his critical, deflationary treatment of the malady of omnipotence, and his exploration of the idea of friendship as a positive counterpoint to damaged forms of intersubjectivity.