Copyright (c) 2013 University of Connecticut All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles Recent documents in Torrington Articles en-us Thu, 09 May 2013 13:05:25 PDT 3600 http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/6 http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/6 Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:00:19 PDT This book is a guide for middle school students trying to navigate the rules and strategies of debate and mock trial. Hopefully, it will also serve as a valuable tool for teachers and coaches and, in particular, for college students who are assisting middle school debate teams as a form of community engagement.

]]> Gary W. Levvis http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/5 http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/5 Tue, 11 Sep 2012 12:35:10 PDT John Hardwig argues that patients have a duty to end their lives when their continued existence imposes serious hardship on their caregivers. Hardwig has deflected many critics’ objections concerning the practical implications of his position. Our goal is to demonstrate the self-contradictory nature of the duty-to-die thesis. Once we eliminate the vagueness (over the essential conditions subtending a presumed duty to die) and the ambiguity (implicit in Hardwig’s use of the term “duty”), we find that the essential conditions for such a duty cannot be simultaneously satisfied. The problem is that the very process by which the duty to die is determined affects the qualitative states of the patient that are central to the determination itself. Although the duty-to-die thesis is defended on the basis of the harms caused to others by one’s continued existence, we conclude the essay by dispatching the idea that a duty to die might be a duty to oneself.

]]> Gary W. Levvis et al. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/4 http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/4 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 09:40:12 PDT This essay shows how Scottish Common-Sense rationalism and evangelical religion conjoined in the later eighteenth century to create a powerful, mutually-reinforcing “Evangelical Enlightenment” with powerful antislavery implications. The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 cleared the way for an unprecedented wave of socially-progressive, religiously-undergirded American nationalism. This threat stimulated slaveholders and their allies to defend the institution through strategies designed to preclude the alliance of a powerful national state with the sanction of religion—the only combination powerful enough to overthrow slavery in a free republic.

]]> Robert P. Forbes http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/3 http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/3 Wed, 18 Jul 2012 07:12:29 PDT Race, we are told, is a “social construction.” If this is so, Thomas Jefferson was its principal architect. Jefferson consciously framed his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to check the rising status of Africans and to combat growing critiques of slavery from America’s European friends. Jefferson did this by importing the slaveholder’s sense of slaves as chattel into an Enlightenment world view, providing a metaphysical foundation for prejudice by transmuting the traditional Christian concept of the saved vs. the damned into material and aesthetic terms. Recasting in quasi-scientific language the ancient doctrine of the mark of Cain, Jefferson formalized a doctrine of “skin depravity” in which the Manichaean dichotomy between black and white preempted questions about slavery and became the keystone of the new republic.

]]> Robert P. Forbes http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/2 http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/2 Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:42:52 PDT This is a negative appraisal of Raymond Bechard's "The Berlin Turnpike" on the basis of its unbalanced treatment of the the phenomenon of trafficking within Connecticut and the United States. The book omits any consideration of victim service providers and fails in its goal to let victims speak for themselves. The organization, scholarship and even the methods by which the book has been marketed are called into question.

]]> Gary W. Levvis http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/1 http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/torr_articles/1 Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:23:03 PDT Robert P. Forbes