Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand (...) in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

From Hippocrates to paternalism to autonomy : the new hegemony -- From autonomy to consent -- Consent, autonomy, and the law -- Autonomy at the end of life -- Autonomy and pregnancy -- Autonomy and genetic information -- Autonomy and organ transplantation -- Autonomy, consent, and the law.

As support for clinical ethics committees in the UK grows, care must be taken to define their function, membership and method of working and the status of their decisions.The modern practice of medicine raises a plethora of complex issues—medical, ethical and legal. Doctors and other healthcare professionals increasingly must try to resolve these and may sometimes have to do so in the face of contrary opinion expressed by patients and/or their surrogates. While clearly qualified in the medical arena, and although (...) there is now more ethics teaching in the medical curriculum, healthcare professionals are seldom qualified to adjudicate on ethical or legal matters, or even, perhaps, to recognise them when they arise. Yet, as Doyal says, “clinical life must go on and moral and legal indeterminacy within medicine cries out for practical resolution.”1 Meanwhile, the expectations of patients and their families—and, indeed, of wider society—are that decisions about patient care, resources and therapeutic regimes should be soundly based on appropriate ethicolegal, as well as scientific, principle.Recognition of these additional burdens on healthcare professionals has generated some interest in the provision of ethics consultation. In the USA this has been undertaken by a variety of tribunals and individuals. Hospital ethics committees and ethics consultants feature in many US hospitals and perform a variety of roles. In Europe, a number of countries have also established clinical ethics committees and they are becoming more common in the UK—primarily in England and Wales for the moment. Whereas, however, “[i]n North America, CECs have … become an integral part of the organisational infrastructure of hospitals ...”,1 in the United Kingdom they remain essentially ad hoc bodies, generated for a variety of reasons and with different goals, structures, membership, methods of working and functions. The initial impetus for the …. (shrink)

This book applies philosophical hermeneutics to biblical studies. Whereas traditional studies of the Bible limit their analysis to the exploration of the texts' original historical sense, this book discusses how to move beyond these issues to a consideration of biblical texts' existential significance for the present. In response to the rejection of biblical significance in the late nineteenth century and the accompanying crisis of nihilism, B. H. McLean argues that the philosophical thought of Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Levinas, (...) Deleuze and Guattari provides an alternative to historically oriented approaches to biblical interpretation. He uses basic principles drawn from these philosophers' writings to create a framework for a new 'post-historical' mode of hermeneutic inquiry that transcends the subject-based epistemological structure of historical positivism. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

Which rules should guide our reasoning? Human reasoners often use reasoning shortcuts, called heuristics, which function well in some contexts but lack the universality of reasoning rules like deductive implication or inference to the best explanation. Does it follow that human reasoning is hopelessly irrational? I argue: no. Heuristic reasoning often represents human reasoners reaching a local rational maximum, reasoning more accurately than if they try to implement more “ideal” rules of reasoning. I argue this is a genuine rational achievement. (...) Our ideal rational advisors would advise us to reason with heuristic rules, not more complicated ideal rules. I argue we do not need a radical new account of epistemic norms to make sense of the success of heuristic reasoning. (shrink)

We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organizing, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioral scientists. The former are tasked with encoding as much wise design as possible into machines themselves, as (...) well as providing sandboxes or workspaces to help various stakeholders build practical wisdom in systems that are sufficiently realistic to aid transferring skills learned to real-world use. The latter are needed for the design of exercises and methods of evaluation within these workspaces, as well as ways of empirically assessing the transfer of wisdom from workspace to world. Systematic interaction between these three disciplines (and others) is the best approach to engineering wisdom for the machine age. (shrink)

In 2005, Ethiopia changed its abortion law to curb its high maternal mortality. This has led to a considerable reduction in deaths from unsafe abortions. Abortion is now legal if the woman’s pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, if her health is endangered, if the fetus has a serious deformity, if she suffers from a physical or mental deficiency, or if she is under 18 years of age. The word of the woman, if in compliance with the law, (...) is sufficient to qualify for an abortion. In this context, where the law makes the door slightly open, health workers become important in deciding who gets access to safe services and who doesn’t, thus creating considerable ethical dilemmas. The objective of this study was to explore abortion service providers’ personal experiences and reflections, perceptions of the abortion law, and ethical and dilemmas that arise. Data collection took place from March to May 2016 in Addis Ababa, at different health clinics providing abortion services. Thirty in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions were conducted with 41 abortion service providers at governmental and non-governmental clinics. Content analysis was drawn upon in the interpretation of the findings. When working in a context where the law has slightly opened the door for abortion seeking women, the health workers describe conflicting concerns, burdensome responsibilities, and ambiguity concerning how to interpret and implement the law. They describe efforts to balance their religious faith and values against their professional obligations and concern for women’s health and well-being. This negotiation is particularly evident in the care of women who fall outside the law’s indications. They usually handle ethical dilemmas and decision-making alone without guidance. Moreover, many health workers face a stigma from fellow colleagues not performing abortions and therefore keep their job a secret from family and friends. Health workers in Ethiopia experience ethical dilemmas trying to maneuver between the abortion law, their personal values, and their genuine concern for the health of women. More research is needed to further explore this. (shrink)

_Examines the significance of animal environments in contemporary continental thought._.

This paper describes a pattern of explanation prevalent in the biological sciences that I call a ‘lineage explanation’. The aim of these explanations is to make plausible certain trajectories of change through phenotypic space. They do this by laying out a series of stages, where each stage shows how some mechanism worked, and the differences between each adjacent stage demonstrates how one mechanism, through minor modifications, could be changed into another. These explanations are important, for though it is widely accepted (...) that there is an ‘incremental constraint’ on evolutionary change, in an important class of cases it is difficult to see how to satisfy this constraint. I show that lineage explanations answer important questions about evolutionary change, but do so by demonstrating differences between individuals rather than invoking population processes, such as natural selection.1. Introduction2. Turning a ‘Scale’ into a ‘Plume’3. Lineage Explanations in Biology3.1. The evolution of eyes3.2. The evolution of feathers4. The Two Dimensions of a Lineage Explanation4.1. The production dimension4.2. The continuity dimension4.3. The dual role of the parts5. Constraining the Explanations6. Operational and Generative Lineages7. Explaining Change Without Populations8. Conclusion. (shrink)

The frame problem refers to the fact that organisms must be able to zero in on relevant aspects of the world and intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their goals. In this paper we aim to point out the connection between two leading frameworks for thinking about how organisms achieve this. Predictive processing is a rapidly growing framework within cognitive science which suggests that organisms assign a high ‘weight’ to relevant aspects of the world, (...) effectively treating relevant aspects of the world as if they are more precise. This assignment of weight is called precision-weighting and is the predictive processing account of how organisms allocate their attention. Relevance Realization is a framework that conceptualizes an organism’s ability to realize relevance as resulting from a dynamical system in which a cognitive agent makes use of opponent processing relationships to zero in on relevant aspects of the world. In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization. This connection will demonstrate that although these frameworks have a different intellectual background and use a different set of concepts and vocabulary, they are both pointing to the same underlying process. The fact that these different frameworks have converged on such a similar solution to the problem of how organisms realize relevance serves to demonstrate the plausibility of that solution. (shrink)

Truth by convention, once thought to be the foundation of a uniquely promising approach to explaining our access to the truth in nonempirical domains, is nowadays widely considered an absurdity. Its fall from grace has been due largely to the influence of an argument that can be sketched as follows: our linguistic conventions have the power to make it the case that a sentence expresses a particular proposition, but they can’t by themselves generate truth; whether a given proposition is true—and (...) so whether the sentence that expresses it is true—is a matter of what the world is like, which means it isn’t a matter of convention alone. The consensus is that this argument is decisive against truth by convention. Strikingly, though, it has rarely been formulated with much precision. Here I provide a new rendering of the argument, one that reveals its structure and makes transparent just what assumptions it requires, and then I assess conventionalists’ prospects for resisting each of those assumptions. I conclude that the consensus is mistaken: contrary to what is almost universally thought, there remains a promising way forward for the conventionalist project. Along the way, I clarify conventionalists’ commitments by thinking about what truth by convention would need to be like in order for conventionalism to do the epistemological work it’s intended to do. (shrink)

The development of clinical ethic support in the UK arguably brings with it a series of legal questions, which need to be addressed. Most particularly, these concern questions of due process and formal justice, which I argue are central to the provision of appropriate ethical advice. In this article, I will compare the UK position with the more developed system in the USA, which often provides a template for development in the UK. While it is not argued that the provision (...) of clinical ethics support in the UK will necessarily follow the path mapped in the USA, there are lessons that can be learned from the US experience – particularly in terms of attention to process – from which UK clinical ethics support service might well benefit. (shrink)

Sensitivity has sometimes been thought to be a highly epistemologically significant property, serving as a proxy for a kind of responsiveness to the facts that ensure that the truth of our beliefs isn’t just a lucky coincidence. But it's an imperfect proxy: there are various well-known cases in which sensitivity-based anti-luck conditions return the wrong verdicts. And as a result of these failures, contemporary theorists often dismiss such conditions out of hand. I show here, though, that a sensitivity-based understanding of (...) epistemic luck can be developed that respects what was attractive about sensitivity-based approaches in the first place but that's immune to these failures. (shrink)

A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...) an explanation would involve showing that our beliefs meet some modal condition, but realists have claimed that this sort of modal interpretation of the challenge deprives it of any force: since the facts in question are metaphysically necessary and so obtain in all possible worlds, it’s trivially easy, even given realism, to show that our beliefs have the relevant modal features. Here I show that this claim is mistaken—what motivates a modal interpretation of the challenge in the first place also motivates an understanding of the relevant features in terms of epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities, and there are indeed epistemically possible worlds where the facts in question don’t obtain. (shrink)

Antipathy towards the possibility that God exists is a common attitude, which has recently been clearly expressed by Thomas Nagel. This attitude is presumably irrelevant to the question whether God does exist. But it raises two other interesting philosophical issues. First, to what extent does this attitude motivate irrational belief? And secondly, how should the attitude be evaluated? This paper investigates that latter issue. Is the hope that God does not exist a morally proper hope? I simplify this question by (...) interpreting the relevant attitude as an aversion towards the Christian picture of the world coupled with a preference for the naturalist atheistic picture. And comparing the content of those two world pictures, I argue that the attitude, though partly explicable, is morally unjustifiable, for clearly recognisable reasons. Regardless, then, of further concerns about the doxastic influence of this attitude, we ought to be ashamed of our antipathy to God, which reflects badly upon us. (shrink)

“Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable. Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only by reference (...) to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, whereas spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular, and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 167-181, July 2022. A growing cadre of influential scholars has converged on a circumscribed definition of empathy as restricted only to feeling the same emotion that one perceives another is feeling. We argue that this restrictive isomorphic matching definition is deeply problematic because it deviates dramatically from traditional conceptualizations of empathy and unmoors the construct from generations of scientific research and clinical practice; insistence on an isomorphic form undercuts much of the functional value (...) of empathy from multiple perspectives of analysis; and combining the opposing concepts of isomorphic matching and self-other awareness implicitly requires motivational content, causing the RIM definition to implicitly require the kind of non-matching emotional content that it explicitly seeks to exclude. (shrink)

What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as "evidence" to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or (...) history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media--including language--that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of "fabulation" (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology's recent "ontological turn," McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology's engagement with the contemporary world. (shrink)

The system of clinical ethics committees (CECs) in the United Kingdom is based on goodwill. No formal requirements exist as to constitution, membership, range of expertise or the status of their recommendations. Healthcare professionals are not obliged to use CECs where they exist, nor to follow any advice received. In addition, the make-up of CECs suggests that ethics itself may be under-represented. In most cases, there is one member with a training in ethics – the rest are healthcare professionals or (...) administrators, although a lawyer is generally also included in the membership. This begs the question as whether CECs can ‘do ethics’, as well whether or not they can take seriously the requirements of due process, formal justice and human rights. Moreover, the role of the patient in this system is opaque. (shrink)

I read Robert Card's recent paper entitled ‘Is there no alternative? Conscientious objection by medical students’ with great interest.1 That Muslim students in America are able to conscientiously object to the cross-gender consultation is somewhat startling. I have just left the Middle East, where I worked as a medical educator for five-and-a-half years , and, to the best of my knowledge, even in the conservative, gender-segregated traditional Muslim culture of the United Arab Emirates, not once did a male or female (...) student refuse to examine a patient of the opposite sex.Several issues, many of which have been described by Padela and del Pozo,2 should be taken into consideration in relation to Muslim students’ conscientious objection to the cross-gender consultation on religious grounds. Although Islam prohibits touching or physical contact by the opposite gender, unless appropriate , in some circumstances, the ‘prohibited becomes permissible’.3 Medicine is one such circumstance. Islam does not …. (shrink)

Topics discussed in this work are abortion, euthanasia, medical negligence and human experimentation.

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure (...) of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts; they must be difference-makers for acts. _1_ Signalling, Evolution, and Information _2_ Skyrms’s Measure of Information _3_ Carrying Information versus Information Flow _3.1_ Example 1 _3.2_ Example 2 _3.3_ Example 3 _4_ Signalling Networks Are Causal Networks _4.1_ Causal specificity _4.2_ Formalizing causal specificity _5_ Information Flow as Causal Control _5.1_ Example 1 _5.2_ Examples 2 and 3 _5.3_ Average control implicitly ‘holds fixed’ other pathways _6_ How Does Evolution Create Information? _7_ Conclusion Appendix >. (shrink)

Implicit attitudes are mental states posited by psychologists to explain behaviors including implicit racial and gender bias. In this paper I investigate the belief view of the implicit attitudes, on which implicit attitudes are a kind of implicit belief. In particular, I focus on why implicit attitudes, if they are beliefs, are often resistant to updating in light of new evidence. I argue that extant versions of the belief view do not give a satisfactory account of this phenomenon. This is (...) because proponents of the belief view have focused on overly narrow explanations of recalcitrance in terms of belief storage. Expanding the focus of the belief view to the kinds of irrational and arational transitions between beliefs and other mental states provides compelling (if preliminary) explanations of recalcitrance. (shrink)

Steve Biko died in detention in South Africa in 1977. Critical ethical issues are raised both by the conduct of the doctors responsible for Biko's care and by the subsequent response of the medical profession as a whole. Because those issues are relevant to all healthcare professionals everywhere, the Biko affair provides a useful case study in medical ethics. We discuss the case in this article, describing how we use it in our teaching.

Like Laland et al., I think Mayr’s distinction is problematic, but I identify a further problem with it. I argue that Mayr’s distinction is a false dichotomy, and obscures an important question about evolutionary change. I show how this question, once revealed, sheds light on some debates in evo-devo that Laland et al.’s analysis cannot, and suggest that it provides a different view about how future integration between biological disciplines might proceed.

I use some recent formal work on measuring causation to explore a suggestion by James Woodward: that the notion of causal specificity can clarify the distinction in biology between permissive and instructive causes. This distinction arises when a complex developmental process, such as the formation of an entire body part, can be triggered by a simple switch, such as the presence of particular protein. In such cases, the protein is said to merely induce or "permit" the developmental process, whilst the (...) causal "instructions" for guiding that process are already prefigured within the cells. I construct a novel model that expresses in a simple and tractable way the relevant causal structure of biological development and then use a measure of causal specificity to analyse the model. I show that the permissive-instructive distinction cannot be captured by simply contrasting the specificity of two causes as Woodward proposes, and instead introduce an alternative, hierarchical approach to analysing the interaction between two causes. The resulting analysis highlights the importance of focusing on gene regulation, rather than just the coding regions, when analysing the distinctive causal power of genes. (shrink)

When epistemologists talk about knowledge, the discussions traditionally include only a small class of other epistemic notions: belief, justification, probability, truth. In this paper, we propose that epistemologists should include an additional epistemic notion into the mix, namely the notion of assuming or taking for granted.

Understanding how cooperation evolves is central to explaining some core features of our biological world. Many important evolutionary events, such as the arrival of multicellularity or the origins of eusociality, are cooperative ventures between formerly solitary individuals. Explanations of the evolution of cooperation have primarily involved showing how cooperation can be maintained in the face of free-riding individuals whose success gradually undermines cooperation. In this paper I argue that there is a second, distinct, and less well explored, problem of cooperation (...) that I call the generation of benefit. Focusing on how benefit is generated within a group poses a different problem: how is it that individuals in a group can (at least in principle) do better than those who remain solitary? I present several different ways that benefit may be generated, each with different implications for how cooperation might be initiated, how it might further evolve, and how it might interact with different ways of maintaining cooperation. I argue that in some cases of cooperation, the most important underlying “problem” of cooperation may be how to generate benefit, rather than how to reduce conflict or prevent free-riding. (shrink)

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks — from the way monkeys in a troop communicate, to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this paper, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his (...) formal measure of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts: they must be difference-makers for acts. (shrink)

Comparing engineering to evolution typically involves adaptationist thinking, where well-designed artifacts are likened to well-adapted organisms, and the process of evolution is likened to the process of design. A quite different comparison is made when biologists focus on evolvability instead of adaptationism. Here, the idea is that complex integrated systems, whether evolved or engineered, share universal principles that affect the way they change over time. This shift from adaptationism to evolvability is a significant move for, as I argue, we can (...) make sense of these universal principles without making any adaptationism claims. Furthermore, evolvability highlights important aspects of engineering that are ignored in the adaptationist debates. I introduce some novel engineering examples that incorporate these key neglected aspects, and use these examples to challenge some commonly cited contrasts between engineering and evolution, and to highlight some novel resemblances that have gone unnoticed. (shrink)

An increasing number of complex and important decisions are now being made with the aid of opaque algorithms. This has led to calls from both theorists and legislators for the implementation of a right to an explanation for algorithmic decisions. In this paper, we argue that, in most cases and for most kinds of explanations, there is no such right. After differentiating a number of different things that might be meant by a ‘right to an explanation,’ we argue that, for (...) the most plausible and popular versions (a right to an explanation for a specific bureaucratic decision, a right to an explanation grounded in public reason considerations, or a right to a higher-level explanation of an entire system of automated decision-making), such a right is either superfluous, impossible to obtain, or not the best way to secure relevant normative goods. We also argue that proponents of a right to an explanation carve off certain kinds of automated decisions as requiring more justification than others in similar areas of social (and natural) science policy, a demarcation we argue is unjustified. While there will be some cases where an explanation is the only thing that can secure an important normative good (e.g. when an explanation is the only thing that would catch an unjustified individual decision), we argue these cases are too rare and scattered to ground something as weighty as a right to an explanation. (shrink)

This essay examines the interconnected nature of salvation and health, and it does so by engaging both recent qualitative research and three scriptural accounts from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In doing so, the essay argues that salvation and health—and their conceptual pairings, sin and disease—are never individualistic. These realities are always cosmic, communal, and interpersonal, even as sin and disease are fundamentally disintegrating and isolating. The salvation and health of people suffering with substance use issues are bound (...) up with the transformations of governing principalities and powers, social realities, and relationships. Health care practitioners and clergy should be wise, communal guides offering care and accompaniment in the pursuit of salvation and health. (shrink)

The field of emotion regulation has developed rapidly, and a number of emotion regulatory strategies have been identified. To date, empirical attention has focused on contrasting specific regulatio...

One recent topic of debate in Bayesian epistemology has been the question of whether imprecise credences can be rational. I argue that one account of imprecise credences, the orthodox treatment as defended by James M. Joyce, is untenable. Despite Joyce’s claims to the contrary, a puzzle introduced by Roger White shows that the orthodox account, when paired with Bas C. van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle, can lead to inconsistent beliefs. Proponents of imprecise credences, then, must either provide a compelling reason to (...) reject Reflection or admit that the rational credences in White’s case are precise. (shrink)

While research has focused on why certain entrepreneurs elect to create innovative solutions to social problems, very little is known about why some social entrepreneurs choose to scale their solutions while others do not. Research on scaling has generally focused on organizational characteristics often overlooking factors at the individual level that may affect scaling decisions. Drawing on the multidimensional construct of moral intensity, we propose a theoretical model of ethical decision making to explain why a social entrepreneur’s perception of moral (...) intensity of the social problem, coupled with their personal desire for control, can significantly influence scaling decisions. Specifically, we propose that higher levels of perceived moral intensity will positively influence the likelihood of scaling through open as opposed to closed modes in order to achieve greater speed and scope of social impact. However, we also propose this effect will be negatively moderated by a social entrepreneur’s higher levels of desire for control. Our model has implications for research and practice at the interface of ethics and social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

The new regulations on xenotransplantation pay insufficient attention to the broad ethical problems raised by this technique and that the abandonment of a national body with overall regulatory authority in this area is a mistake.Following reports from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics1 and, most importantly, the Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation2 , the UK Xenotransplantation Interim Regulatory Authority was established in 1997. The existence of a national body to govern xenotransplantation was deemed to be of critical importance by (...) the Kennedy report given the practical and ethical issues associated with xenotransplantation. Indeed, the Kennedy report recommended that ultimately UKXIRA should be placed on a statutory footing.2 The remit of UKXIRA was to advise the Secretary of State on particular applications, gather information on issues such as safety, and assess whether the preconditions identified by the Kennedy report had been met.3In December 2006, UKXIRA was quietly disbanded, and the Department of Health issued a statement of guidance, the terms of which now govern xenotransplantation in the UK. This document superseded procedures that had been in place since 1998, which had placed the overall regulation of applications to conduct xenotransplantation in the hands of UKXIRA and, ultimately, the Secretary of State.4 The revised guidance defines xenotransplantation as being: “… any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation, or infusion into a human recipient of either live tissues or organs retrieved from animals, or, human body fluids, cells, tissue or organs that have undergone ex vivo contact with live non-human animal cells, tissues or organs.”5 . Given the range and nature of the procedures covered by the guidance, it is surprising, not to say a little worrying, that it is so …. (shrink)