Vagueness

The joke has been made by some that if prostitution is indeed the world’s oldest profession, than pornography must be the world’s oldest expression. Indeed, the very word pornography was originally used to describe any art or literature that depicted the life of prostitutes (Jenkins, 2014), while obscenity is a word believed to have come from the Middle French word obscène in the late 16th century, meaning “offensive to the senses, or to taste and refinement” (Harper, 2001). In order to…

In palliative care many of the issues involved arise ethical and legal questions. In many cases it is not easy to discuss the issue of death, and what to do when the end is near it may be a time when decisions regarding the course of treatment must be made. This can be a time of high stress and an emotional rollercoaster for the patient and their families. As I ponder on the fact that at times these hard decisions must be made I cannot disregard the questions and uncertainty that arose as I read…

Issues surrounding presidential constitutional authority as commander in chief implicate many of the most contested issues in constitutional law. Article I of the Constitution gives some war powers to the Congress — namely, the power to declare war — while Article II gives the president the power of Commander-in-Chief. After our tragic misadventure in Indochina, it was the general consensus that what happened was purely a result of presidential usurpation of the power of Congress to “declare…

A trip in Edgar Allan Poe’s remote controlled car. We are all equipped with one of the most powerful and complex tools imaginable, the mind. The brain is our most precious asset however we are yet to comprehensively understand its diverse spectrum of abilities. We have become conscious to the brains different mental states and how they affect personalities. In Edgar Allan Poe’s (Poe) short stories he accurately represents the different altitudes of one’s attitude to create his prized ‘unity of…

The general argument made by author Raymond Carver in his work Little Things is one about a couple facing problems in their marital life and a child suffering because of it. The story begins describing the weather outside and the overall feeling of what is to come. More specifically, Carver discusses that there is something that has come between the couple, but he does not elaborate. Towards the end of the story he writes, “But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and…

Before moving on to understanding the differences between cultural change and cultural genocide it is important to have an understanding of the term culture. As has already been pointed out in both preceding chapters cultural genocide has and is a highly contested concept in both the international legal sphere and the academic sphere. The importance of culture and it’s protection is evidenced in the drafting process of the UNGC which was looked at in chapter one as well as in the words of the…

In his 2012 article for The New Yorker, “Atonement,” Dexter Filkins recounts his time spent in Iraq and explains how he helped connect Lu Lobello, a veteran suffering from severe PTSD, with the Kachadoorians, an Armenian family. While in Iraq, the Kachadoorians suffered devastating casualties and injuries at the hands of Lobello’s unit, Fox Company. Even though the United States Government determined the civilian deaths and injuries were justified, Lobello and many other members of Fox Company…

In some contexts, ambiguous messages are definitely unethical. I don’t consider ambiguity in personal relationships to be severely unethical, because minor noise disruption in the transactional model and homonym usage, language disparity, etc. is normally expected. However, when looking at communications on an international scale, ambiguity can lead to disastrous results in foreign relations and the trust placed in governments by their country’s people. The novelist George Orwell, who wrote…

In the short story White Elephants, written by Ernest Hemingway, he attempts to reveal that if someone wants something done they should perform altruistic actions in the hopes that it ends in personal gain. With little to no information provided about the characters in Hemingway’s story, he forces the reader to acknowledge that minimalistic ideals can result in complex/powerful ones as well. The opening paragraph of most stories often reveal characters and settings in which the reader will get…

through the restraints on the President's power and attempt to create an, “elected monarch,” that would serve for life. His views were way outside the mainstream at the time and this was obviously never put into action. Hamilton also used the overall vagueness of the Article to prescribe powers to the President that were never clearly stated, and to turn the Presidency into something that it was never intended to…