This paper proposes a methodological redirection of the philosophical debate on artificial moral agency in view of increasingly pressing practical needs due to technological development. This “normative approach” suggests abandoning theoretical discussions about what conditions may hold for moral agency and to what extent these may be met by artificial entities such as AI systems and robots. Instead, the debate should focus on how and to what extent such entities should be included in human practices normally assuming moral agency and (...) responsibility of participants. The proposal is backed up by an analysis of the AMA debate, which is found to be overly caught in the opposition between so-called standard and functionalist conceptions of moral agency, conceptually confused and practically inert. Additionally, we outline some main themes of research in need of attention in light of the suggested normative approach to AMA. (shrink)

Considerations of nonhuman animal moral agency typically base their reasoning and (very often negative) verdict on a capacity‐focused approach to moral agency. According to this approach, an entity is a moral agent if it has certain intrapersonal features or capacities, typically in terms of conscious reflection and deliberation. According to a practice‐focused notion of moral agency, however, an entity is a moral agent in virtue of being a participant of a moral responsibility practice (MRP). I argue that a practice‐focused approach (...) to moral agency, combined with empirical evidence from research on canid social play and cognition, with support from The Function Argument, makes the notion of nonhuman animal moral agency more likely than usually indicated. However, the support is not absolute, as the practice‐focused approach itself may be put into question. I describe how this objection prompts us to critically assess any empirical, metaethical, or normative assumptions on these matters. These questions, in turn, raise a number of further questions of how we should conceive of, use, and evaluate whatever standards of moral agency we adopt. (shrink)

As the lights at Arclight's swanky movie theater go up, at the end of Mania Akbari's _20 Fingers_, an Iranian gentleman stands up and begins the Question and Answer session with the following in Farsi: 'Ms Akbari, seeing as you've gone to all this trouble, wouldn't it have been better if instead of a film you'd just made an audio recording of the dialogue? You'd have spared us and not wasted our time or your own on this film.'.

Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many beings commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be (...) manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations. (shrink)

This is a first attempt at the philosophical articulation and projection of the Igbo concept of law and the role of law in the traditional environment. In the Igbo traditional setting, the rules of law are uncodified. The author, who teaches philosophy of law and logic at the University of Nigeria, defines the law of a given community as the body of rules recognised as binding by its members. On this concept of law, he has based his attempt to elucidate (...) the philosophical underpinning of those rules recognised in Igbo traditional legal system as law. Unless the philosphical foundation is understood, the traditional law, machinery for enforcement, and legislative and judicial processes may appear incomprehensible. The first part gives a descriptive insight into the moral, religious, socio-political and legal background of the Igbo. The second part is devoted to the fundamental questions concerning the concept of law, the various types of laws, the reciprocal influence between law and Igbo religion and the end of laws. Finally, the author examines the nature of right in Igbo traditional thought and locates the philosophical background. (shrink)

The first study of Plutarch's prose-rhythm was made by Dr. A. W. de Groot, whose results were published in certain preliminary articles and in his Handbook of Greek Prose Rhythm, a work which is one of the landmarks in the history of its subject. In it he insisted that to discover which forms of clausula were favoured or avoided by any author it was not sufficient to make a count and discover which were frequent, which infrequent; for a form may (...) be frequent not because an author feels it suitable for the end of a sentence, but because he likes it at any point in his sentence, or even because we should find it frequent if we picked out words by chance from the dictionary. To discover which rhythms are specially sought or avoided at the end of a sentence we must compare the ends with the sentence as a whole. This Dr. de Groot did for a number of texts, included in which were selections from Plutarch's Lives. (shrink)

Objective: To pilot informed consent materials developed for Aboriginal parents in a vaccine trial, and evaluate their design and the informed consent process.Methods: Cross sectional quantitative and qualitative survey of 20 Aboriginal and 20 non-Aboriginal women in Alice Springs. Information about the proposed research was presented to Aboriginal participants by an Aboriginal researcher, using purpose designed verbal, visual, and written materials. Non-Aboriginal participants received standard materials developed by the sponsor. Questionnaires were used to evaluate recall and understanding immediately and five (...) days later. Qualitative analysis of Aboriginal participants’ interviews was performed.Results: There were no differences between the groups in understanding of diseases prevented by the vaccine, the potential risks of participating, or the voluntary nature of participation. Most Aboriginal participants had difficulty with the concept of a “licensed” versus “unlicensed” vaccine. The non-Aboriginal group had a good understanding of this. Aboriginal participants identified the use of the flipchart, along with a presentation by a doctor and Aboriginal health worker, as preferred delivery modes. Group presentations were preferred rather than one-on-one discussions. The use of the questionnaire posed considerable methodological difficulties.Conclusions: A one-off oral presentation to Aboriginal participants is unlikely to produce “informed consent”. Key but unfamiliar concepts require identification and particularly considered presentation. (shrink)

In January, 1914, I published in the Classical Quarterly an article on t1he Five Grammatical Chapters of Quintilian, in which I endeavoured to set out the general scheme of the writer and his relation to the educational practice of his time. In the present paper I propose to deal with some of the numerous difficulties of detail—difficulties both of text and meaning—which crop up in chapters 4–7. The technicality of the subject and the abbreviated method of treatment produce much obscurity, (...) even when we have no reason to doubt the text. And as to the text, one can but echo the words of Varro with regard to philological and grammatical questions, ‘librarios haec spinosiora indiligentius elaturos putaui.’ The result is that these chapters provide perhaps more problems than are to be found in the same limits in any first class Latin writer—problems which, though not perhaps of much intrinsic importance, have that interest which must always attach to questions which have baffled generations of commentators. I have divided the questions which I have treated into two classes. The first consists of passages in which I feel some confidence in the text which I have adopted or the meaning which I have proposed. The second consists of those which I fear must be left unsolved, though I hope that I have been able to advance the discussion a few steps. (shrink)

There is concern that human applications of modern genetic technologies may lead inexorably to eugenic abuse. To prevent such abuse, it is essential to have clear, formal principles as well as algorithms for distinguishing genetics from eugenics. This work identifies essential distinctions between eugenics and genetics in the implied nature of the social contract and the importance ascribed to individual welfare relative to society. Rawls's construction of 'justice as fairness' is used as a model for how a formal systems of (...) ethics can be used to proscribe eugenic practices. Rawls's synthesis can be applied to this problem if it is assumed that in the original condition all individuals are ignorant of their genetic constitution and unwilling to consent to social structures which may constrain their own potential. The principles of fairness applied to genetics requires that genetic interventions be directed at extending individual liberties and be applied to the greatest benefit of individuals with the least advantages. These principles are incompatible with negative eugenics which would further penalize those with genetic disadvantage. These principles limit positive eugenics to those practices which are designed to provide absolute benefit to those individuals with least advantage, are acceptable to its subjects, and further a system of basic equal liberties. This analysis also illustrates how simple deviations from first principles in Rawls's formulation could countenance eugenic applications of genetic technologies. (shrink)

It may be affirmed with some confidence that on this topic no generally accepted solution will be found in default of new evidence, for which we can only faintly hope. Against certainty on the matter it would seem that the Everlasting has fixed his canon: quis iustius induit arma scire nefas. Dogmatism is out of place; we must be content with whatever theory is least difficult to reconcile with the texts and with a reasonable interpretation of the course of events (...) at the time and the comments on them of contemporary observers. The thesis advanced in this paper is that there are strong reasons for supposing that the Lex Pompeia Licinia contained a date by which Caesar's command ended, that this date was not the end of February of the year 50 or the year 49 or the end of December of the year 50, that it did not contain a clause forbidding the discussion of a successor to Caesar before March 1, 50, and that if the date ending his command lies between the end of February and the end of December of the year 50, it may have been in fact the Ides of November in that year. (shrink)

It is not at all surprising that August Thalheimer's 1930 essay on fascism should have been so enthusiastically rediscovered, reprinted and widely discussed in left-wing European circles during the 1960's. Informed debate on fascism had reached a major theoretical impasse: factually, more was known than ever before, or, at any rate, enough to dismiss as “empirically inadequate” virtually all of the better known traditional interpretations; yet, conceptually, no new theoretical nets had been cast that might have better accounted for the (...) full range of phenomena to be subsumed under the generic term fascism. Moreover, to the degree that extremely well-researched, specialized monographs had successfully challenged the old theoretical warhorses, few scholars were inclined to hazard new totalizing formulations lest their own heads in turn be severed on the merciless empirical block. (shrink)

In this book a distinguished group of environmental experts argues that in order to solve global environmental problems, we must view them in a broad interdisciplinary perspective that recognizes the relations—the interconnected circle—among ecology, economics, and ethics. Currently the circle is broken, they say, because environmental policy is decided on short-term estimations of material that take little account of the economic or moral burdens that will be borne by future generations if we deplete our resources now. We must, assert the (...) authors, have a better knowledge of the science underlying our environmental problems, we must understand their causes and consequences in relation to our economic and political systems, and we must recognize that an effective response will require a shift in a technologically oriented society’s ethical attitude toward the natural environment. The authors address a wide range of concerns from global atmospheric degradation and spreading toxification of the environment to loss of forests and massive species extinctions. They offer to general readers, students, and professionals practical assessments and remedies for many of these problems. They suggest, for example, mechanisms that provide economic incentives for conservation; engineering and technical adaptations to use resources more effectively and dispose of waste products; better economic accounting procedures for measuring the real environmental costs of our depletion of natural resources; and a remodeled education system that better prepares us to see each individual’s responsibility to the environment. (shrink)