David Svolba

Fitchburg State University
  •  10492
    Collected and edited by Noah Levin Table of Contents: UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our D…Read more
  •  615
    Justice at the Margins: The Social Contract and the Challenge of Marginal Cases
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (1): 51-67. 2017.
    Attempts to justify the special moral status of human beings over other animals face a well-known objection: the challenge of marginal cases. If we attempt to ground this special status in the unique rationality of humans, then it becomes difficult to see why nonrational humans should be treated any differently than other, nonhuman animals. We respond to this challenge by turning to the social contract tradition. In particular, we identify an important role for the concept of recognition in atte…Read more
  •  89
    Swindell, Frankfurt, and ambivalence
    Philosophical Explorations 14 (2). 2011.
    J.S. Swindell has argued that Harry Frankfurt's analysis of ambivalence is ambiguous and that it fails to do justice to the full range of this psychological phenomenon. Building on her criticism of Frankfurt, Swindell offers an analysis of ambivalence which is supposed to clarify ambiguities in Frankfurt's analysis and reveal varieties of ambivalence that Frankfurt's analysis allegedly overlooks. In this brief reply, I argue that Frankfurt's analysis of ambivalence is neither ambiguous nor objec…Read more
  •  61
    Is there a Rawlsian Argument for Animal Rights?
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (4): 973-984. 2016.
    Mark Rowlands defends a Rawlsian argument for animal rights, according to which animals have rights because we would assign them rights when deciding on the principles of morality from behind a veil of ignorance. Rowlands’s argument depends on a non-standard interpretation of the veil of ignorance, according to which we cannot know whether we are human or non-human on the other side of the veil. Rowlands claims that his interpretation of the veil is more consistent with a core commitment of Rawl…Read more
  • A Review of Brian Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion? (review)
    Science, Religion and Culture 1 83-87. 2014.