So-called digital tracking and tracing systems have been proposed as a means to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2. There are ethical guidelines and evaluations of such systems available. As part of a research project, I will build on and critically evaluate the foundations of such guidelines. The goal is to provide both incremental improvements of the specific requirements for DTTSs and to present and discuss more fundamental challenge, the risk for indirect effects and slippery slopes. The nature of slippery slopes (...) makes ethical guidelines more difficult since it requires a more complex analysis than, for example, using a checklist allows for. (shrink)

‘The Second Mistake’ (TSM) is to think that if an act is right or wrong because of its effects, the only relevant effects are the effects of this particular act. This is not (as some think) a truism, since ‘the effects of this particular act’ and ‘its effects’ need not co-refer. Derek Parfit's rejection of TSM is based mainly on intuitions concerning sets of acts that over-determine certain harms. In these cases, each act belongs to the relevant set in virtue (...) of a causal relation (other than marginal contribution) to a specific harmful event. This feature may make an act wrong, in a fashion consequentialists could admit. That explication of TSM does not rely on the questionable assumption that the set of acts is what harms here. Independently of this, there are several other reasons to prefer it to the ‘mere participation’ approach. Correspondence:c1 [email protected]. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic work with children is popular, but the sophisticated language used in psychoanalytic discourse can be at odds with how children communicate, and how best to communicate with them. _Dialogues with Children and Adolescents: A Psychoanalytic Guide _shows how these aims can be achieved for the most effective clinical outcome with children from infancy up to late adolescence. _Björn Salomonsson_ and _Majlis Winberg Salomonsson_ draw on extensive case material which reveals the essence of communication between child and therapist. They enfranchise (...) the patient of all ages as an equal participant in the therapeutic relationship. Presented in letter form the cases contain no professional terms. Only the final chapter contains theoretical commentaries applicable to each case. These terms and theories help to explain a child’s behaviour, the analyst’s technique and the background to the disorder. This is new creative development in child therapy and analysis which is written in a very accessible style. _Dialogues with Children and Adolescents_ will be essential reading for beginners in psychoanalytic work with children and will cast a fresh light on such work for more experienced clinicians. It will also appeal to the non-professional lay reader. (shrink)

This article is about the role of factual uncertainty for moral decision-making as it concerns the ethics of machine decision-making. The view that is defended here is that factual uncertainties require a normative evaluation and that ethics of machine decision faces a triple-edged problem, which concerns what a machine ought to do, given its technical constraints, what decisional uncertainty is acceptable, and what trade-offs are acceptable to decrease the decisional uncertainty.

Savage et al. propose that music filled a hypothetical “bonding gap” in human sociality by Baldwinian gene-culture coevolution (or protracted cognitive niche construction). Both these stepping stones to an evolutionary account of the function and origin of music are problematic. They are scrutinized in this commentary, and an alternative is proposed.

Recently, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu argued that an action that does not violate a moral right to privacy cannot violate that right if it is extended over time. Specifically, they argue that a moral right to privacy does not protect against gawking or stalking. In this reply the reverse position is defended. Specifically, it is argued that their arguments fails on according to their own definition of the right to privacy. Furthermore, it is argued and illustrated by examples that (...) this conceptual conclusion holds for many other conceptions of the right to privacy. Moreover, it is argued that Persson and Savluescu fail to recognize the privacy-related harm extended to individuals through gawking or stalking. Lastly, the article ends by sketching how the role of privacy in public and consent relates to the given examples. (shrink)

The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) is not only global but globally varied. Yet, AI ethics is all too often overly localised. This paper discusses the potential of a global AI ethics, highlighting several important variables that it should take into account if it is to be as successful an enterprise as it needs to be.

Giulio Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of IIT's measure of consciousness,phi(Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical circumstances. Our analysis shows that IIT's identification of consciousness with the causal efficacy with which differentiated networks accomplish global information transfer (which is what Φ in fact measures) is mistaken. This misidentification has the consequence of requiring (...) the attribution of consciousness to a range of natural systems and artifacts that include, but are not limited to, large-scale electrical power grids, gene-regulation networks, some electronic circuit boards, and social networks. Instead of treating this consequence of the theory as a disconfirmation, IIT embraces it. By regarding these systems as bearers of consciousnessex hypothesi, IIT is led toward the orbit of panpsychist ideation. This departure from science as we know it can be avoided by recognizing the functional misattribution at the heart of IIT's identity claim. We show, for example, what function is actually performed, at least in the human case, by the cortical combination of differentiation with integration that IIT identifies with consciousness. Finally, we examine what lessons may be drawn from IIT's failure to provide a credible account of consciousness for progress in the very active field of research concerned with exploring the phenomenon from formal and neural points of view. (shrink)

The philosophical–ethical literature and the public debate on autonomous vehicles have been obsessed with ethical issues related to crashing. In this article, these discussions, including more empirical investigations, will be critically assessed. It is argued that a related and more pressing issue is questions concerning safety. For example, what should we require from autonomous vehicles when it comes to safety? What do we mean by ‘safety’? How do we measure it? In response to these questions, the article will present a (...) foundation for a continued discussion on these issues and an argument for why discussions about safety should be prioritized over ethical concerns related to crashing. (shrink)

While this is not the first attempt at drawing a parallel between the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the writings and musical experimentations of John Cage pertaining to silence, we try to further develop this fortunate example of synchronous investigations into the subject matter by pointing out the analogous transformations in their thought, leading from a silence that can be qualified as “mystical” or “spiritual” to an experience that confronts the listener with the very real contingency of their grammar itself, (...) all the while basing ourselves on previous arguments and contributions. In the context of western classical music, we will show that by circumventing a conventional use of musical silence in which it is treated as an ordinary language-game, the authors discover an extramusical experience of silence that they will first explore by the means of spirituality before making the remarkable turn towards an understanding of silence as that which founds our every experience, be it at the cost of silence itself. (shrink)

A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain – spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and neurophysiology to clinical data – is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection, action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the vertebrate brain can be seen to form (...) a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain – culminating in the cerebral cortex of mammals – came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity, sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone. (Published Online May 1 2007) Key Words: action selection; anencephaly; central decision making; consciousness; control architectures; hydranencephaly; macrosystems; motivation; target selection; zona incerta. (shrink)

Ethnic slur terms and other group-based slurs must be differentiated from general pejoratives and pure expressives. As these terms pejoratively refer to certain groups of people, they are a typical feature of hate speech contexts where they serve xenophobic speakers in expressing their hatred for an entire group of people. However, slur terms are actually far more frequently used in other contexts and are more often exchanged among friends than between enemies. Hate speech can be identified as the most central, (...) albeit not the most frequent, mode of use. I broadly distinguish between hate speech, other pejorative uses, parasitic uses, neutral mentioning, and unaware uses. In this paper, authentic examples of use and frequency estimates from empirical research will help provide accurate definitions and insight into these different modes that purely theoretical approaches cannot achieve. (shrink)

Although popular, control accounts of privacy suffer from various counterexamples. In this article, it is argued that two such counterexamples—while individually resolvable—can be combined to yield a dilemma for control accounts of privacy. Furthermore, it is argued that it is implausible that control accounts of privacy can defend against this dilemma. Thus, it is concluded that we ought not define privacy in terms of control. Lastly, it is argued that since the concept of privacy is the object of the right (...) to privacy if the former cannot be defined in terms of control, neither can the latter. (shrink)

According to the class of de minimis decision principles, risks can be ignored (or at least treated very differently from other risks) if the risk is sufficiently small. In this article, we argue that a de minimis threshold has no place in a normative theory of decision making, because the application of the principle will either recommend ignoring risks that should not be ignored (e.g., the sure death of a person) or it cannot be used by ordinary bounded and information-constrained (...) agents. (shrink)

Pascal Boyer achieves a felicitous integration of what is known about human ownership psychology by deriving ownership intuitions from the interaction of resource acquisition and our cooperative sociality. By exploring the sense of ownership already present in the domain of resource acquisition, I sketch an evolutionary path to the open-ended nature of the specifically human version of that sense.

In this reply I defend Kripke’s creationist thesis for mythical objects against Jeffrey Goodman’s counter-argument to the thesis, 35–40, 2014). I argue that Goodman has mistaken the basis for when mythical abstracta are created. Contrary to Goodman I show that, as well as how, Kripke’s theory consistently retains the analogy between creation of mythical objects and creation of fictional objects, while also explaining in what way they differ.

Michael Bratman’s work is established as one of the most important philosophical approaches to group agency so far, and Shared Agency, A Planning Theory of Acting Together confirms that impression. In this paper I attempt to challenge the book’s central claim that considerations of theoretical simplicity will favor Bratman’s theory of collective action over its main rivals. I do that, firstly, by questioning whether there must be a fundamental difference in kind between Searle style we-intentions and I-intentions within that type (...) of framework. If not, Searle’s type of theory need not be less qualitatively parsimonious than Bratman’s. This hangs on how we understand the notions of modes and contents of intentional states, and the relations between modes, contents, and categorizations of such states. Secondly, by questioning whether Bratman’s theory steers clear of debunking or dismissing collectivity. Elsewhere I have claimed that the manoeuvres Bratman suggested to avoid circularity in his conceptual analysis (in 1992 and 1997) undermine the strength of his resulting notion of collective action. Bratman responds in detail to this objection in his new book and I return to the issue towards the end of the paper. (shrink)

Many studies in big data focus on the uses of data available to researchers, leaving without treatment data that is on the servers but of which researchers are unaware. We call this dark data, and in this article, we present and discuss it in the context of high-performance computing facilities. To this end, we provide statistics of a major HPC facility in Europe, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart. We also propose a new position tailor-made for coping with dark data and (...) general data management. We call it the scientific data officer and we distinguish it from other standard positions in HPC facilities such as chief data officers, system administrators, and security officers. In order to understand the role of the SDO in HPC facilities, we discuss two kinds of responsibilities, namely, technical responsibilities and ethical responsibilities. While the former are intended to characterize the position, the latter raise concerns—and proposes solutions—to the control and authority that the SDO would acquire. (shrink)

English summary: Bjorn Pecina reconstructs Fichte's philosophy of religion in its evolution from a practical self-consciousness to the theory of love and affects, which he developed late in life.

Defenses of the possibility of collective guilt feelings falls roughly into two categories: collectivistic positions that assign guilt feelings to groups as such but play down the experiential component in guilt feelings, and individualistic positions which understand collective guilt feelings in terms of individual experiences. The analogy between collective and individual guilt feelings is examined from two collectivistic viewpoints. It is argued that the functional states of collectives and individuals with respect to guilt are less analogous than collectivists assume. Instead, (...) an individualistic perspectival understanding of collective guilt feelings is proposed. Groups as such cannot feel guilty in the morally relevant sense, but guilt as felt by individuals can have a distinctively collective character, such that the feeling still may be an appropriate response to assignments of collective responsibility. (shrink)

The issue of the biological origin of consciousness is linked to that of its function. One source of evidence in this regard is the contrast between the types of information that are and are not included within its compass. Consciousness presents us with a stable arena for our actions—the world—but excludes awareness of the multiple sensory and sensorimotor transformations through which the image of that world is extracted from the confounding influence of self-produced motion of multiple receptor arrays mounted on (...) multijointed and swivelling body parts. Likewise excluded are the complex orchestrations of thousands of muscle movements routinely involved in the pursuit of our goals. This suggests that consciousness arose as a solution to problems in the logistics of decision making in mobile animals with centralized brains, and has correspondingly ancient roots. (shrink)

Global university rankings have become increasingly important ‘calculative devices’ for assessing the ‘quality’ of higher education and research. Their ability to make characteristics of universities ‘calculable’ is here exemplified by the first proper university ranking ever, produced as early as 1910 by the American psychologist James McKeen Cattell. Our paper links the epistemological rationales behind the construction of this ranking to the sociopolitical context in which Cattell operated: an era in which psychology became institutionalized against the backdrop of the eugenics (...) movement, and in which statistics of science became used to counter a perceived decline in ‘great men.’ Over time, however, the ‘eminent man,’ shaped foremost by heredity and upbringing, came to be replaced by the excellent university as the emblematic symbol of scientific and intellectual strength. We also show that Cattell’s ranking was generative of new forms of the social, traces of which can still be found today in the enactment of ‘excellence’ in global university rankings. (shrink)

Recently, Jakob Thraine Mainz and Rasmus Uhrenfeldt defended a control-based conception of a moral right to privacy —focusing on conceptualizing necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a privacy right violation. This reply comments on a number of mistakes they make, which have long reverberated through the debate on the conceptions of privacy and the right to privacy and therefore deserve to be corrected. Moreover, the reply provides a sketch of a general response for defending the limited access conception of the (...) right to privacy against control-based intuitions. (shrink)

In our response to a truly diverse set of commentaries, we first summarize the principal topical themes around which they cluster, then address two “outlier” positions. Next, we address ways in which commentaries by non-integrated information theory authors engage with the specifics of our IIT critique, turning finally to the four commentaries by IIT authors.

In 2017, Tom Gruber held a TED talk, in which he presented a vision of improving and enhancing humanity with AI technology. Specifically, Gruber suggested that an AI-improved personal memory (APM) would benefit people by improving their “mental gain”, making us more creative, improving our “social grace”, enabling us to do “science on our own data about what makes us feel good and stay healthy”, and, for people suffering from dementia, it “could make a difference between a life of isolation (...) and a life of dignity and connection”. -/- In this paper, Gruber’s idea will be critically assessed. Firstly, it will be argued that most of his pro-arguments for the APM are questionable. Secondly, the APM will also be criticized for other reasons, including the risks and affects to the users’ and other’s privacy and the users’ autonomy. (shrink)

This book is the first monograph that takes a comprehensive approach to Jacques Derrida as a philosopher of technology. It refines and complements his mainstream image as a philosopher of language and deconstructionist of classical literary and philosophical texts. This volume outlines the key features of Derrida’s alternative philosophy of technology, a philosophy which Sjöstrand argues, avoids the problems associated with, on the one hand, a Heideggerian orientation, which completely separates thinking and technology and, on the other, an empirically oriented (...) ”post-phenomenology” that can be said to be hegemonic within the field today. Based on a sustained interpretation of Derrida, and a robust, coherent philosophy of technology, a phenomenology of technology is developed that, in a radical way, extends the concept of technology to cover the entire field of phenomenology. This places the technological not in opposition to humanity, but rather always already in close proximity to man and, consequently, to life, ethics, politics, democracy and religion. Strikingly, this important aspect of Derrida’s thinking is only rarely analyzed or discussed by his many exegetes. This text appeals to graduates and researchers working on Derrida, phenomenology, and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

This article proposes a new definition of information security, the ‘Appropriate Access’ definition. Apart from providing the basic criteria for a definition—correct demarcation and meaning concerning the state of security—it also aims at being a definition suitable for any information security perspective. As such, it bridges the conceptual divide between so-called ‘soft issues’ of information security and more technical issues. Because of this it is also suitable for various analytical purposes, such as analysing possible security breaches, or for studying conflicting (...) attitudes on security in an organization. The need for a new definition is demonstrated by pointing to a number of problems for the standard definition type of information security—the so-called CIA definition. Besides being too broad as well as too narrow, it cannot properly handle the soft issues of information security, nor recognize the contextual and normative nature of security. (shrink)

: After clarifying some misunderstandings, I discuss the inescapability of bias in research in more practical terms, followed by an exemplification of why epigenetics does not shatter a ….

Context: Political psychology rests on the assumption of the existence of a world outside and independent of consciousness. This ontological materialism is hardly spoken of within the field, as it ….

The purpose of this article is to present a model of well-being based on current research in neurobiology and psychology, integrated in an evolutionary perspective of the human mind. Briefly, the primary purpose of nervous systems is to direct an animal toward behavior should be conducive to survival and procreation, and as a rule of thumb this implies either approach or avoidance. While behavior originally was based on reflexes, in humans the brain contains a system of negative and positive affect. (...) Although an array of functions has evolved that employ emotions in order to handle various pursuits, recent studies suggest that they converge on shared neural circuits involved in mood, that is, they converge on circuits designed to generate reward and punishment. Happiness can be construed as the net output of these brain modules. Neural circuits tend to gain in strength and influence upon frequent activation, which suggests a strategy for improving happiness and mental health: to avoid excessive stimulation of negative modules, to use cognitive interference to enhance the "turn off" function of these modules, and to exercise modules involved in positive feelings. (shrink)