Background The 2020-2021 coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is just the latest epidemic event that requires us to rethink and change our understanding of health. Health should no longer be conceived only in relation to human beings, but in unitary terms, as a dimension that connects humans, animals, plants, and the environment (holistic view, One Health). In general, alterations occurring in this articulated chain of life trigger a domino effect. Methodology In this paper, we review the One Health paradigm in the light (...) of the Covid-19 pandemic and distinguish two approaches within it that might be dubbed the Prudent one and the Radical one. Each approach is structured in three levels – epistemological, medical, and ethical. Results In this way, we show how we humans can better address the pandemic today and how, in the future, we can treat the whole living system better, by renouncing our anthropocentric perspective on health. Conclusion We hold that the Prudent approach can be very helpful, and we discuss the medical and ethical issues related to it. We also consider the Radical view and the epistemological turn it requires compared to the Prudent one. (shrink)

Because of its practical advantages, machine learning (ML) is increasingly used for decision-making in numerous sectors. This paper demonstrates that the integral characteristics of ML, such as semi-autonomy, complexity, and non-deterministic modeling have important ethical implications. In particular, these characteristics lead to a lack of insight and lack of comprehensibility, and ultimately to the loss of human control over decision-making. Errors, which are bound to occur in any decision-making process, may lead to great harm and human rights violations. It is (...) important to have a principled way of assigning responsibility for such errors. The integral characteristics of ML, however, pose serious difficulties in defining responsibility and regulating ML decision-making. First, we elaborate on these characteristics and their epistemic and ethical implications. We then analyze possible general strategies for resolving the assignment of moral responsibility and show that, due to the specific way in which ML functions, each potential solution is problematic, whether we assign responsibility to humans, machines, or using hybrid models. Then, we shift focus on an alternative approach that bypasses moral responsibility and attempts to define legal liability independently through solutions such as informed consent and the no-fault compensation system. Both of these solutions prove unsatisfactory because they leave too much room for potential abuses of ML decision-making. We conclude that both ethical and legal solutions are fraught with serious difficulties. These difficulties prompt us to re-weigh the costs and benefits of using ML for high-stake decisions. (shrink)

This paper delves into the use of machine learning-based systems in decision-making processes and its implications for moral responsibility as traditionally defined. It focuses on the emergence of responsibility gaps and examines proposed strategies to address them. The paper aims to provide an introductory and comprehensive overview of the ongoing debate surrounding moral responsibility in automated decision-making. By thoroughly examining these issues, we seek to contribute to a deeper understanding of the implications of AI integration in society.

Political theorists aiming to articulate normative standards for the EU have almost entirely focused on whether or not the EU suffers from a ‘democratic deficit'. Almost nothing has been written, by contrast, on one of the central values underpinning European integration since at least the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), namely solidarity. What kinds of principles, policies, and ideals should an affirmation of solidarity commit us to? Put another way: what norms of socioeconomic justice ought to apply to the (...) EU? This is not an empirical or narrowly legal question. We are not trying to gauge the degree of attachment there currently is in the EU by, for example, citing the latest Eurobarometer poll. We are also not attempting to state the implicit rationale followed by the Court of Justice in its recent ‘solidarity’ jurisprudence, let alone trying to fix what the Commission might mean by it. In this article, I ask the more fundamental question underlying both the legal and the empirical questions: What principles of social solidarity ought to apply between states and citizens of the emerging European polity? This question has rarely been asked or answered by political theorists in an EU context, so we are entering largely uncharted territory. The article develops a tripartite model of EU solidarity in Section 2, and then applies it to the case of free movement of persons in Section 3. (shrink)

is accounted for, among other things, in terms of particular relations between events (or states1) and places or times. Roughly speaking, an event α is said to occur in a place p (or interval t) if the spatial (temporal) extension of α is located in p (or t). Let the predicate ‘Occ’ denote such a relation. From this point of view, part of the content of the above sentences can be associated, respectively, with formulas such as.

This English translation of the author's original work has been thoroughly revised, expanded and updated. The book covers logical systems known as type-free or self-referential . These traditionally arise from any discussion on logical and semantical paradoxes. This particular volume, however, is not concerned with paradoxes but with the investigation of type-free sytems to show that: (i) there are rich theories of self-application, involving both operations and truth which can serve as foundations for property theory and formal semantics; (ii) these (...) theories provide a new outlook on classical topics, such as inductive definitions and predicative mathematics; (iii) they are particularly promising with regard to applications. Research arising from paradoxes has moved progressively closer to the mainstream of mathematical logic and has become much more prominent in the last twenty years. A number of significant developments, techniques and results have been discovered. Academics, students and researchers will find that the book contains a thorough overview of all relevant research in this field. (shrink)

Scholars have paid ample attention to Aristotle's works on animals. By contrast, they have paid little or no attention to Theophrastus' writings on plants. That is unfortunate because there was a shared research project in the early Peripatos which amounted to a systematic, and theoretically motivated, study of perishable living beings (animals and plants). This is the first sustained attempt to explore how Aristotle and Theophrastus envisioned this study, with attention focused primarily on its deep structure. That entails giving full (...) consideration to a few transitional passages where Aristotle and Theophrastus offer their own description of what they are trying to do. What emerges is a novel, sophisticated, and largely idiosyncratic approach to the topic of life. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Hursthouse :57–68, 1991) argues that arational actions—e.g. kicking a door out of anger—cannot be explained by belief–desire pairs. The Humean Response to Hursthouse :25–38, 2000b) defends the Humean model from Hursthouse’s challenge. We argue that the Humean Response fails because belief–desire pairs are neither necessary nor sufficient for causing emotional actions. The Emotionist Response is to embrace Hursthouse’s conclusion that emotions provide an independent source of explanation for intentional actions. We consider Döring’s :214–230, 2003) feeling-based Emotionist account and argue that (...) it fails to explain arational actions. Finally, we develop our own Emotionist account, grounded in the Motivational Theory of Emotions one of us has developed. On our account, arational actions form a non-homogeneous class, some members of which must be understood as instrumental actions and some members of which must be understood as displacement behaviors of the kind animals display when their motivations are thwarted or in conflict. (shrink)

I argue that a form of animalism that does not include the belief that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal has a dialectical advantage over other versions of animalism. The main reason for this advantage is that Phase Animalism, the version of animalism described here, has the theoretical resources to provide convincing descriptions of the outcomes of scenarios problematic for other forms of animalism. Although Phase Animalism rejects the claim that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal, it is still appealing to those (...) who believe that our nature is continuous or of a similar kind to that of other physical entities. (shrink)

This paper aims to problematize pregnancy and support the development of a safe alternative method of gestation. Our arguments engage with the health risks of gestation and childbirth, the value assigned to pregnancy, as well as social and medical attitudes toward women’s pain, especially in labor. We claim that the harm caused by pregnancy and childbirth provides a prima facie case in favor of prioritizing research on a method of extra corporeal gestation.

Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on (...) Kripke’s and Putnam’s considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz’s arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too, or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary. (shrink)

The increasing centrality of business firms in contemporary societies calls for a renewed attention to the democratization of these actors. This paper sheds new light on the possibility of democratizing business firms by bridging recent scholarship in two fields—deliberative democracy and business ethics. To date, deliberative democracy has largely neglected the role of business firms in democratic societies. While business ethics scholarship has given more attention to these issues, it has overlooked the possibility of deliberation within firms. As argued in (...) the paper, a combination of reforms based on the ideas of workplace deliberation and business deliberation is necessary in order to promote the prospect of deliberation in different business contexts. The paper also discusses the importance of more democratic firms for deliberative democracy at large and, in particular, for the recent debate on deliberative systems. Finally, the paper suggests new areas of investigation to better understand the prospect of democratic deliberation in business firms. (shrink)

We investigate a contractionless naive set theory, due to Grisin [11]. We prove that the theory is undecidable.

The state regulates the way in which social power is exercised. It sometimes permits, enables, constrains, forbids how we may touch others, make offers, draw up contracts, use, alter, possess and destroy things that matter to people, manipulate, induce weakness of the will, coerce, engage in physical force, persuade, selectively divulge information, lie, enchant, coax, convince, … In each of these cases, we (sometimes unintentionally) get others to act in ways that serve our interests. Which such exercises of power should (...) the state forbid? Which should it permit? An intuitively appealing way to answer this question is, with Ripstein and Kant, to point to the role of freedom: exercises of social power can be legitimately prohibited when (and only when) they restrict people's freedom. But this raises a further question: How do we identify when such exercises of power make people unfree in the relevant sense? Ripstein, in defending Kant, draws a crucial distinction between actions that subject others’ wills to our choices (and which it would therefore be presumptively legitimate for the state to forbid) and actions that merely affect the contexts in which others act (and which it would therefore be presumptively illegitimate for the state to forbid). I query that distinction, and argue that the idea of independence cannot bear, on its own, the weight it is expected to bear within the Kantian framework. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relationship between self-knowledge practices among women of color and structural patterns of ignorance by offering an analysis of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's discussions of self-writing. I propose that by writing about her own experiences in a manner that hails others to critically interrogate their own identities, Anzaldúa develops important theoretical resources for understanding self-knowledge, self-ignorance, and practices of knowing others. In particular, I claim that in her later writings, Anzaldúa offers a rich epistemological account of (...) these themes through her notion of autohistoria-teoría. The notion of autohistoria-teoría demonstrates that self-knowledge practices, like all knowledge practices, are social and relational. Moreover, such self-knowledge practices require contestation and affirmation as well, including, resistance and productive friction. (shrink)

Non‐invasive brain stimulation is used to modulate brain excitation and inhibition and to improve cognitive functioning. The effectiveness of the enhancement due to transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is still controversial, but the technique seems to have large potential for improvement and more specific applications. In particular, it has recently been used by athletes, both beginners and professionals. This paper analyses the ethical issues related to tDCS enhancement, which depend on its specific features: ease of use, immediate effect, non‐detectability and (...) great variability of effects. If tDCS were to become widespread, there could be some potential side effects, especially the rise of inequality in many selective competitive contexts. I discuss two possible scenarios to counter this effect: that of prohibition and that of compensation, each supported by reasons and arguments that seem plausible and worthy of consideration. In conclusion, I show why I think the scenario of compensation is the preferable one. (shrink)

This paper calls for the development of a method of ectogestation as an emancipatory intervention for women. I argue that ectogestation would have a dual social benefit: first, by providing a gestational alternative to pregnancy, it would create unique conditions to reevaluate one’s reproductive preferences—which, for women, always include gestational considerations—and to satisfy a potential preference not to gestate. Enabling the satisfaction of such a preference is particularly valuable due to the pressures women face to embrace pregnancy as central to (...) their identity, while at the same time being penalised by it. Second, ectogestation would address certain specific negative social implications of gestation and childbirth, which cannot be avoided through social measures as they are caused by the corporeal nature of these phenomena. Finally, I argue that it is unfair to hold ectogestation to a higher standard than other innovations such as modern contraceptives and non-medical egg freezing. (shrink)

The study here is a qualitative research based on multiple case studies of banking service providers to analyze the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the definition of the corporate identity of these kinds of organizations. The results show that, although companies increasingly integrate CSR into their business strategies, there are some aspects of its management such as its communication or the measurement of its results that detract from its success. These results have important implications for those managers pursuing (...) an effective management of CSR policies and strategies in their organizations, especially as the information comes from 6 of the biggest and most important banking institutions in a European country, with a declared assets (loans) volume which represents 62.75% of the total assets in the national banking industry, and thus largely representing the possible heterogeneity of the market in terms of company size, location, legal status, and management styles. (shrink)

In their paper, Romanis and Adkins delve into the potential impact of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) on cases of pregnancy loss1 that do not involve procreative loss. First, they call for more recognition of the negative feelings a person might have due to the premature end of their pregnant state. They claim that, should AAPT minimise concerns about prematurity as anticipated, individuals might feel pressured to opt for partial ectogestation to preserve their or their fetus’ well-being; moreover, they (...) point out that the feelings of loss in the context of AAPT are likely to be worse than the ones reported in neonatal intensive care units cases. Finally, they advocate for care pathways focusing on how the transfer of a fetus to the AAPT could affect the pregnant person, with particular attention to managing the grief potentially caused by the pregnancy loss. I praise the authors for such a call to action—especially since partial ectogestation is expected to become a reality in the short-term future—and I share their demands for additional and more attentive care of (formerly) pregnant patients. However, I am concerned that their approach is so focused on negative feelings towards pregnancy loss that it risks becoming …. (shrink)

This paper critically discusses an objection proposed by Nikolić against the naturalness of the stochastic dynamics implemented by the Bell-type quantum field theory, an extension of Bohmian mechanics able to describe the phenomena of particles creation and annihilation. Here I present: Nikolić’s ideas for a pilot-wave theory accounting for QFT phenomenology evaluating the robustness of his criticism, Bell’s original proposal for a Bohmian QFT with a particle ontology and the mentioned Bell-type QFT. I will argue that although Bell’s model should (...) be interpreted as a heuristic example showing the possibility to extend Bohm’s pilot-wave theory to the domain of QFT, the same judgement does not hold for the Bell-type QFT, which is candidate to be a promising possible alternative proposal to the standard version of quantum field theory. Finally, contra Nikolić, I will provide arguments in order to show how a stochastic dynamics is perfectly compatible with a Bohmian quantum theory. (shrink)

In this chapter, I introduce three different types of AI-based moral enhancement proposals discussed in the literature – substitutive enhancement, value-driven enhancement, and value-open moral enhancement. I analyse them based on the following criteria: effectiveness, examining whether they bring about tangible moral changes; autonomy, assessing whether they infringe on human autonomy and agency; and developmental impact, considering whether they hinder the development of natural moral skills. This analysis demonstrates that no single approach to AI enhancement can satisfy all proposed criteria, (...) suggesting a need for pluralism in devising AI-based enhancement tools. The most advisable approach to AI-based enhancement is to explore and develop a variety of tools that cater to the diverse needs of users and address different weaknesses in moral decision-making. (shrink)

The Cameron government has recently negotiated a deal with the EU which permits the UK to restrict access to in-work benefits for recent EU migrants in the first four years of residence. Withdrawing access to in-work benefits will lead to significant inequalities in pay between British workers and their EU equivalents working at the same job, in the same general situation. The proposal has been widely decried as discriminatory. Is it? I do not, in this article, ask the legal question: (...) Does it violate anti-discrimination norms implicit in the treaties? Rather, I will ask the moral question underlying the legal one: Would, say, Polish citizens denied in-work benefits that British citizens receive be victims of wrongful discrimination? This question deserves consideration not simply because it will help us to evaluate some of the central concerns at stake in the Brexit debates but also because it will allow us to explore the role of norms against discrimination according to nationality within the EU, to address the nature of the European commitment to freedom of movement, and, in the reverse direction, to better understand our own moral commitment to anti-discrimination norms. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that doxastic responsibility, i.e., responsibility for holding a certain doxastic attitude, is not based on direct doxastic control. There are two different kinds of direct doxastic control to be found in the literature, intentional doxastic control and evaluative doxastic control. Although many epistemologists agree that we do not have intentional doxastic control over our doxastic attitudes, it has been argued that we have evaluative doxastic control over the majority of our doxastic attitudes. (...) This has led to the assumption that doxastic responsibility is based on evaluative doxastic control. In the first part of this paper I will introduce the notion of doxastic responsibility and the framework of doxastic guidance control as well as the approaches to direct and indirect doxastic control. I will then argue that doxastic responsibility is not based on direct doxastic control by showing that doxastic responsibility is neither based on intentional nor on evaluative doxastic control. (shrink)

Nelle "Ricerche filosofiche" e in altre opere Wittgenstein discute un argomento per la conclusione che non esiste qualcosa come il seguire una regola. Questa conclusione, a sua volta, sembrerebbe implicare che le parole del linguaggio non hanno un significato. E quest’ultima conclusione, infine, sembrerebbe implicare che la comunicazione è impossibile. Questa linea di pensiero è, ovviamente, paradossale: il comunicare è un fenomeno non solo possibile, ma assolutamente comune. La serie di argomenti in questione deve quindi, da qualche parte, nascondere un (...) errore. Ma dove? "Seguire una regola" introduce il lettore ai tentativi di rispondere a questa domanda che si sono succeduti negli ultimi quattro decenni, a partire dalla pubblicazione dell’epocale "Wittgenstein su regole e linguaggio privato" di Saul Kripke. (shrink)

The sense of self has always been a topic of high interest in both psychoanalysis and most recently in neuroscience. Nowadays, there is an agreement in psychoanalysis that the self emerges from the relationship with the other (e.g., the caregiver) in terms of his/her capacity to attune, regulate, and synchronize with the emergent self of the infant. The outcome of this relational/intersubjective synchronization is the development of the sense of self and its regulatory processes both in dynamic psychology and neuroscience. (...) In this work, we propose that synchrony is a fundamental biobehavioral factor in these dialectical processes between self and others which shapes the brain–body–mind system of the individuals, including their sense of self. Recently in neuroscience, it has been proposed by the research group around Northoff that the self is constituted by a brain-based nested hierarchical three-layer structure, including interoceptive, proprio-exteroceptive, and mental layers of self. This may be disrupted, though, when traumatic experiences occur. Following the three levels of trauma theorized by Mucci, we here suggest how different levels of traumatic experiences might have an enduring effect in yielding a trauma-based topographic and dynamic re-organization of the nested model of self featured by dissociation. In conclusion, we propose that different levels and degrees of traumatic experience are related to corresponding disruptions in the topography and dynamic of the brain-based three-layer hierarchical structure of the self. (shrink)

It has been repeatedly stated that approach and avoidance reactions to emotional faces are triggered by the intention signalled by the emotion. This line of thought suggests that each emotion signals a specific intention triggering a specific behavioural reaction. However, empirical results examining this assumption are inconsistent, suggesting that it might be too short-sighted. We hypothesise that the same emotional expression can signal different social messages and, therefore, trigger different reactions; which social message is signalled by an emotional expression should (...) be influenced by moderating variables, such as the group membership of the expresser. In two experiments, we show that group membership influences approach and avoidance reactions to emotional expressions: Emotions (fear and happiness) expressed by in-group members elicited concordant behaviour, whereas emotions expressed by out-group members activated the reverse pattern. A third experiment, in which participants directly evaluated smiling and fearful individuals resembling in-group and out-group members supported this result. (shrink)

As Dieter Lohmar (Citation2002; Citation2012) has shown, in the Logical Investigation Husserl sketches a peculiar type of reduction, the so-called “Reduktion auf den reellen Bestand.” Husserl does not explicitly put this kind of reduction forward, though, and he does definitely not clarify how it works, and what its elements properly are. Lohmar proposes to understand it as a kind of empiricist reduction to mere sense-data. On the contrary, I believe that it should be considered as entailing also the apprehensional forms (...) of sense-data, though not the so-called apprehensional senses. In this article, I will offer some arguments and textual evidence in favour of this claim, and I will conclude by proposing that, despite Husserl’s unclarity on the issue, the reduction to the real components of experience, rather than being simply an ancestor of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, should be seen as the regulative model of all later forms of reduction. (shrink)

On croit connaître le Prince. En fait, on colporte parfois à son propos une vulgate interprétative fondée sur des approximations ou des partis pris de traduction dans des éditions françaises qui se répètent et s'engendrent l'une l'autre. Le texte paraît si " connu ", voire si " évident ", que l'on pourrait oublier ainsi de s'interroger sur le rapport des traductions avec l'original italien ; c'est une des raisons pour lesquelles le texte original (récemment établi par Giorgio Inglese sous (...) le titre de De principatibus) est publié, dans cette édition, en regard d'une traduction entièrement inédite. Le travail des traducteurs repose ici sur la reconstitution de la logique propre de la syntaxe, sans en gommer les condensations étranges voire les anacoluthes, sur le respect de la cohérence du lexique, sans sacrifier les multiples échos qui balisent l'ouvrage, mais aussi sur la tentative de retrouver le rythme si particulier de la prose machiavélienne qui a tant fait pour le succès de ce que Machiavel nomme " son opuscule ". Cette édition est accompagnée d'une présentation qui inscrit le texte dans son temps et dans le réseau complexe de ses enjeux politiques et théoriques. Elle comporte également un grand commentaire linéaire du Prince qui engage une nouvelle interprétation de l'œuvre. La postface permet de voir comment se forge et naît, dans l'écriture du Prince, une langue capable de rendre compte des " choses nouvelles " de la politique. (shrink)

This article revisits Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice through one specific aspect of Axel Honneth’s recognition theory. Taking a first cue from Honneth’s critique of the limitations of the “language-theoretic framework” in Habermas’ discourse ethics, it floats the idea that the two categories of Fricker’s groundbreaking analysis—testimonial and hermeneutical injustice—likewise lean towards a speech-based metric. If we accept, however, that there are also implicit, preverbal, affective, and embodied ways of knowing and channels of knowledge transmission, this warrants an expansion of Fricker’s (...) original concept. By drawing on Honneth’s recognition theory, I argue it is possible to extend the account of epistemic injustice beyond Fricker’s two central categories, to glimpse yet another register of serious “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” I define this harm as prediscursive epistemic injury and offer two central cases to illustrate this additional form of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

What is the Specious Present? Which is its duration? And why, ultimately, do we need it to figure in our phenomenological account of temporal perception? In this paper, after introducing the role of the Specious Present in the main models that account for our phenomenological present, and after considering the deflationary objection by Dennett, I claim—thanks to a spatial analogy—that there could be a good criterion to distinguish between a present experience and a past experience, that there are good reasons (...) to sustain the Specious Present, and that there could be a precise way to define the nature—and to measure the duration—of the Specious Present; as I will clarify, our capability and possibility to act and react are central in this perspective. If we accept this change of perspective, there is a definite sense in which the Specious Present is part of our temporal phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a qualified defense of the claim that cognitive biases are not necessarily signs of irrationality, but rather the result of using normative standards that are too narrow. I show that under certain circumstances, behavior that violates traditional norms of rationality can be adaptive. Yet, I express some reservations about the claim that we should replace our traditional normative standards. Furthermore, I throw doubt on the claim that the replacement of normative standards would license optimistic verdicts (...) about human rationality. (shrink)