Lucio T. Maffei

The United States’ Civil War was one of the most impactful moments in global history, causing ripples that originated along the North American Eastern Coast but would end up shaking every continent – especially Europe. As Americans turned on Americans to protect or defeat the institution of slavery, the economic elite around the globe carefully calculated which course of action would be most safe and profitable. In this same time period, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels wrote on the conflict covering everything from the intricacies of the Union military tactics to the application of leftist theory to the concepts of slavery and forced labor. Particularly, the pair commentated on the state of affairs in the United Kingdom as Britain pondered which side it would publicly support and economically condone. Over the many decades that have passed since then, many Marxist and progressive scholars have also used the theories of Marx and Engels to extrapolate claims further reaching than those directly made by the philosophers during their lifetimes. rough examining the contemporary writings of Marx and Engels on the topic and applying their theories to the events, it is revealed that the motivations of capitalism undermined any morality of the British aristocracy and shaped their response to the US Civil War as well as the war itself.

This paper seeks to break what I call the Theist-Atheist Stalemate – atheists say God can’t proven and theists say that God cannot be disproven, seemingly arriving at an en passé where no affirmative stance can be taken on divine existence. My hypothesis we actually can break this stalemate for the atheists and functionally disprove God. To demonstrate that, this paper will delve into an investigation into the most basic structure of our universe. Using this information and some determinations about the nature of statistics and large numbers, we will evaluate the likelihood of God’s existence in a sea of inconceivably many possible worlds. This will be done through a series of premises and conclusions that come to the ultimate conclusion that the probability of God’s existence is unimaginably close to zero.

In this piece, I ultimately argue against the validity of punishment and reward. This is accomplished through accepting three general statements about punishment and deserving, endurance and responsibility, and identity and time. These premises are: (1) Punishment is justified if and only if the thing being punished is deserving of punishment (2) If a thing is deserving of punishment, then the thing being punished must have the exact same properties as the thing that committed the punishment worthy action. (3) It is impossible for any thing being punished to have the exact same properties as the thing that committed the punishment worthy action. I then assert that if this argument is valid and sound, punishment is not justified through a modus tollens relationship. Further, I argue that any metaethical relationship that holds for punishment must also hold for reward just in the inverse. Thus, reward is not justified either. I conclude by discussing what I call the aftermath of accepting this conclusion. If we are to disregard the conceptualizations of punishment and reward, many aspects of our world would be deeply affected as many of our systems of justice and economy would be invalidated. The consequences are too far reaching to full address here, but I focus on how I think this understanding ought to shape our conceptions of debts and responsibilities, criminal justice, and resource distribution.