Research Areas
Conflict and Dispute Resolution
Conflict resolution as a movement and interdisciplinary field initially focused, in the 1950s, on international conflict born of the cold war under nuclear threat. It has since evolved to embrace group and interpersonal conflict on more local levels as well.. While many disciplines contribute to the understanding of conflict and its resolution on various levels, the Philosophy Department is one appropriate home base, because the theory and practice of conflict resolution admit of philosophic interest as much as any values-intensive area of study or professional practice. In addition, there are instructive points of affinity between conflict resolution and ethics, theoretical or applied.
Ethical theory is ultimately concerned with evaluating and ordering basic human interests. And any attempt to apply ethics in practical settings must weigh and balance conflicting interests in their raw particularity: interest-balancing is as incumbent upon theoretical and applied ethics as it is upon legal philosophy and the law. The form of conflict resolution that faculty in our Department teach and research aspires to cognizance of the moral issues implicated in local human conflicts, the arguable moral values implicated in the process itself, and analogous methodological issues for moral inquiry and local conflict resolution. Our Department's faculty are concerned with making the affinities between applied moral reasoning and local conflict resolution explicit. As there is a "philosophy of" other established domains of human study or enterprise, there is a "philosophy of" conflict resolution, the critical examination of its theory and practice.
While the value of conflict resolution (CR) per se may seem obvious, the reasons for preferring any particular CR strategy are open to question on both philosophic and empirical grounds: the choice of cooperative over competitive strategies, or vice versa, wants explanation and justification. Therefore, it should be no surprise that our interdisciplinary Department within the intensively interdisciplinary setting of Carnegie Mellon University harbors efforts to research and teach conflict and dispute resolution.
Members (Preston Covey, Alex London) and affiliates (Martha Harty, Laurel Rose) of the Department teach courses in Conflict & Dispute Resolution and the Department's Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics has produced and proposed numerous computer-based programs for exploring the area of Conflict Resolution.