With the rise and public accessibility of AI-enabled decision-support systems, individuals outsource increasingly more of their decisions, even those that carry ethical dimensions. Considering this trend, scholars have highlighted that uncritical deference to these systems would be problematic and consequently called for investigations of the impact of pertinent technology on humans’ ethical decision-making. To this end, this article conducts a systematic review of existing scholarship and derives an integrated framework that demonstrates how intelligent decision-support systems (IDSSs) shape humans’ ethical decision-making. (...) In particular, we identify resulting consequences on an individual level (i.e., deliberation enhancement, motivation enhancement, autonomy enhancement and action enhancement) and on a societal level (i.e., moral deskilling, restricted moral progress and moral responsibility gaps). We carve out two distinct methods/operation types (i.e., processoriented and outcome-oriented navigation) that decision-support systems can deploy and postulate that these determine to what extent the previously stated consequences materialize. Overall, this study holds important theoretical and practical implications by establishing clarity in the conceptions, underlying mechanisms and (directions of) influences that can be expected when using particular IDSSs for ethical decisions. (shrink)

Solidarity is one of the central concepts in social theory and has gained much attention due to the multiple challenges that the EU has been facing the last decade and due to the most recent COVID-19 pandemic. Although the debate on the nature and conditions of solidarity has been revitalized, there remains a large variety in how to conceptualize solidarity. In contrast to other approaches, we do not conceive solidarity as normative concept, but as descriptive–analytical one. Therefore, we provide a (...) theory-based definition that is prone to capture the empirical dimensions of solidarity. Accounting for the dynamic and interactive character of solidarity as subject to permanent societal and political renegotiation, we conceptualize solidarity from a discourse perspective and follow a multilevel design breaking down the understandings of solidarity on different levels. This approach contributes to the research of solidarity that is interested to capturing the ‘real world’ dimensions of solidarity. (shrink)

Research by academics, professional organizations, and businesses on ethics in the workplace often relies on surveys that ask employees to report how frequently they have observed others engaging in unethical behavior. But what do these frequencies in observer-reports say about the frequencies of committed unethical behavior? This paper is the first to address this question by empirically exploring the relationship between observer- and self-reports. Our survey research among the Swiss working population shows that for all 37 different forms of unethical (...) behavior investigated, observer-reports show higher frequencies than self-reports. Ratios of observer- to self-reports vary substantially among these forms, ranging from 1.46 for improperly gathering competitor’s confidential information to 6.4 for engaging in (sexual) harassment or creating a hostile work environment. The results indicate that researchers should not assume that the frequency in self-reports can generally be approximated by the frequency in observer-reports. Four possible explanations are presented for the differences in ratios, with recommendations for future research. (shrink)

We show that any theory of tame henselian valued fields is NIP if and only if the theory of its residue field and the theory of its value group are NIP. Moreover, we show that if is a henselian valued field of residue characteristic \=p\) such that if \, depending on the characteristic of K either the degree of imperfection or the index of the pth powers is finite, then is NIP iff Kv is NIP and v is roughly separably (...) tame. (shrink)

Paulin J. Hountondji is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary African philosophy. His critique of ethnophilosophy as a colonial, exoticising and racialized undertaking provoked contentious debates among African intellectuals on the proper methods and scope of philosophy and science in an African and global context since the 1970s. His radical pledge for scientific autonomy from the global system of knowledge production made him turn to endogenous forms of practising science in academia. The horizon of his philosophy (...) is the quest for critical universality from a historical, and situated perspective. Finally, his call for a notion of culture that is antithetical to political movements focused on a single identitarian doctrine or exclusionary norms shows how timely his political thought remains to this day. This book gives a comprehensive overview of Hountondji’s philosophical arguments and provides detailed information on the historical and political background of his intellectual oeuvre. It situates Hountondji in the dialogue with his African colleagues and explores links to current debates in philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonialism and the social sciences. (shrink)

In recent years inclusion has become one of the most dominant values and objectives in education. However, there is still considerable disagreement concerning the theoretical concept of inclusion and its normative implications. This article suggests an understanding of inclusion that first differentiates analytically between societal and communal forms of inclusion, and second, situates the value of inclusion in the debate around recognition and freedom. Furthermore, it connects the discussion to some dilemmas and difficulties we might face in education. The overall (...) approach and goal of the article is to contribute to the on-going debate on the nature and value of inclusion and inclusive education. (shrink)

Computational psychiatry is a quickly evolving discipline that aims to understand psychopathology in terms of computational, hence algorithmic processes. While cognitive phenomena, especially beliefs or ways of “reasoning”, can more easily be formalized, meaning re-described in mathematical terms and then entered computational models, there is speculation as to whether phenomenology might be formalizable too. In other words, there are speculations in terms of what aspects of the human experience, rather than specific cognitive processes alone, can enter computational models. Here, we (...) explore the possibility of formalizing and modeling a phenomenological account of schizophrenia, using the concepts of “minimal self” and “intentionality”. To test the applicability of these concepts for formalization and modeling, we first aim to clarify some misunderstandings around the very nature of minimal self and intentionality, namely: whether these concepts entail a “minimal” sense of self, or might be better described in “transparent” sensory-integration and information processing terms. We then try to apply the concepts to a computational logic based on Marr’s levels of description, a fundamental account for understanding the rationale of computational psychiatry. Overall, we are asking via what conditions phenomenology can enter a computational logic. (shrink)

The computational approach to psychiatric disorders, including delusions, promises explanation and treatment. Here, we argue that an information processing approach might be misleading to understand psychopathology and requires further refinement. We explore the claim of computational psychiatry being a bridge between phenomenology and physiology while focussing on the ontological commitments and corresponding methodology computational psychiatry is based on. Interconnecting ontological claims and methodological practices, the paper illustrates the structure of theory-building and testing in computational psychiatry.First, we will explain the ontological (...) commitments computational psychiatry is grounded in, theBayesian Brain hypothesis(BBH) of unconscious inference, paired with normative deontic approaches applied to gauge psychopathology. We then turn to the steps taken in empirical paradigms, from definitions, which are used as starting points, to the operationalisation and isolation of cognitive processes and hypothesis testing based on algorithmic models, to consecutive interpretations regarding the aetiology of psychiatric disorders. We outline how experimental paradigms in computational psychiatry are specifically designed to confirm aberrations in assumed inferential processes, which are thought of as being the underlyingcore invariant features.We will illustrate a gap between the ontological commitments of computational psychiatry and the operationalisation and testing of the cognition assumed to be relevant for psychopathology. This conceptual gap is of utmost importance when designing computational paradigms and may impede a crisp understanding of the approach. Lastly, in evaluating the conceptual gap, it becomes apparent that the information processing formalism used in computational psychiatry is still grounded in rational cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 36 Heft: 2 Seiten: 305-321.

Let K be an NIP field and let v be a Henselian valuation on K. We ask whether [Formula: see text] is NIP as a valued field. By a result of Shelah, we know that if v is externally definable, then [Formula: see text] is NIP. Using the definability of the canonical p-Henselian valuation, we show that whenever the residue field of v is not separably closed, then v is externally definable. In the case of separably closed residue field, we (...) show that [Formula: see text] is NIP as a pure valued field. (shrink)

Critiques of development aid from its recipient’s sometimes draw our attention to the perception of paternalism on the part of ‘development industry’ actors. Even within participatory project designs, critical voices recount experiences of clear power divides and informal hierarchies determining the content and form of ‘cooperation’. While neoliberal as well as neo-Marxist scholars base their critiques on a distributive scheme of global justice, post-development theory emphasizes respect and recognition as the central aspect of justice Indeed, post-development theorists continue to complain (...) of neo-colonial power structures between nations as well as on a micro-level between the ‘experts’ and local people. The latter feel misrecognized in being judged according to the parameters of Western actors within the international community. This article explores how charges of misrecognition within development cooperation challenge the assumption by many liberal political theorists that more global justice could be achieved through more aid. (shrink)

Self-driving vehicles (SDVs) will need to make decisions that carry ethical dimensions and are of normative significance. For example, by choosing a specific trajectory, they determine how risks are distributed among traffic participants. Accordingly, policymakers, standardization organizations and scholars have conceptualized what (shall) constitute(s) ethical decision-making for SDVs. Eventually, these conceptualizations must be converted into specific system requirements to ensure proper technical implementation. Therefore, this article aims to translate critical requirements recently formulated in scholarly work, existing standards, regulatory drafts and (...) guidelines into an explicit five-step ethical decision model for SDVs during hazardous situations. This model states a precise sequence of steps, indicates the guiding ethical principles that inform each step and points out a list of terms that demand further investigation and technical specification. By integrating ethical, legal and engineering considerations, we aim to contribute to the scholarly debate on computational ethics (particularly in autonomous driving) while offering practitioners in the automotive sector a decision-making process for SDVs that is technically viable, legally permissible, ethically grounded and adaptable to societal values. In the future, assessing the actual impact, effectiveness and admissibility of implementing the here sketched theories, terms and the overall decision process requires an empirical evaluation and testing of the overall decision-making model. (shrink)

The article carves out a tripartite ontology and related cosmological views, prevalent in many African philosophical accounts, and shows their significance for environmental ethics. It presents distinct cultural practices towards non-human animals and the environment such as totemism, taboos, and the sacralization of natural sites. In a next step, the author identifies specific moral principles that can be derived from this complex ontology and its related cultural practices, such as sufficiency, care, and sharing. This approach in environmental ethics can be (...) situated as constituting a ‘plural holism’. Finally, the article contrasts this plural holism with neoliberal and neo-colonial practices prevalent in the contemporary world and calls for a consideration of these ethical values to guide the necessary transformation of our societies. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 1 Seiten: 163-173.

The spread of unethical behavior in organizations has mainly been studied in terms of processes occurring in a general social context, rather than in terms of actors’ reactions in the context of their specific social relationships. This paper introduces a dynamic social network analysis framework in which this spread is conceptualized as the result of the reactions of perpetrators, victims, and observers to an initial act of unethical behavior. This theoretical framework shows that the social relationships of the actors involved (...) in an initial act impact in multiple ways the likelihood that unethical behavior spreads. It reveals furthermore that social relationships may change in the wake of unethical behavior, such that indirect negative consequences can arise for organizations. The proposed framework provides a basis for the development of a formal stochastic actor-oriented model of network dynamics which would enable simulations of the spread of unethical behavior. (shrink)

The practice of self-diagnosing, amplified by the spread of psychiatric knowledge through social media, has grown rapidly. Yet, the motivations behind this trend, and, critically, its psychological repercussions remain poorly understood. Self-ascribing a psychiatric label always occurs within a broader narrative context, with narratives serving as essential interpretive tools for understanding oneself and others.In this paper, we identify four principal motivators for people pursuing self-diagnosis, pertaining to 1. waiting time and cost of mental health resources, 2. recognition, 3. identity formation, (...) and 4. destigmatization. We compare these motivators against the backdrops of psychiatric narratives, including DSM-based (operationalism), bio-medical, and Neurodiversity narratives, to evaluate the psychological implications of self-ascriptions. We show that while self-ascription aligns with many motivations, it also carries the risk of essentialism across all analyzed narratives, which can over-simplify and sometimes misrepresent people’s attempts to find meaning through psychiatric labels. Essentialism makes narratives less comprehensive, responsive, and resourceful.We contend that self-ascriptions are not inherently problematic; instead, they show the need for greater focus and understanding in psychiatric practices and the importance of incorporating people’s experiences and perspectives in clinical settings. However, both the narratives and the social climate from which they emerge may need adjustments to make self-ascriptions meaningful, comprehensive, and resourceful tools. (shrink)

In a behavioral study we analyzed the influence of visual action primes on abstract action sentence processing. We thereby aimed at investigating mental motor involvement during processes of meaning constitution of action verbs in abstract contexts. In the first experiment, participants executed either congruous or incongruous movements parallel to a video prime. In the second experiment, we added a no-movement condition. After the execution of the movement, participants rendered a sensibility judgment on action sentence targets. It was expected that congruous (...) movements would facilitate both concrete and abstract action sentence comprehension in comparison to the incongruous and the no-movement condition. Results in Experiment 1 showed a concreteness effect but no effect of motor priming. Experiment 2 revealed a concreteness effect as well as an interaction effect of the sentence and the movement condition. The findings indicate an involvement of motor processes in abstract action language processing on a behavioral level. (shrink)

The common-sense view that reasons guide us in thought and action and that humans are essentially reason-responsive animals is increasingly under attack by defenders of what one can call the Rationalisation View, which emphasises that we typically rationalise actions and judgements that are based on intuition rather than reasoning. This article defends the former view of human Reason, partly by replying to prominent advocates of the latter, partly by proposing accounts of reflective reasoning and rationalisation that bring to light a (...) common, underappreciated feature: they both involve the capacity to see considerations as reasons. This capacity, the author conjectures, should be the starting point for investigating the faculty we call ‘Reason’, its evolutionary origin, and the (ir)rationality of different kinds of thought associated with it. (shrink)

Mathematics plays an important part in Novalis s work that has been underappreciated until now. This study reconstructs and contextualizes Novalis s sources and analyzes selected passages from Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia and from his novel fragment Heinrich von Ofterdingen. It presents Novalis s treatment of mathematics as being at once scientifically informed and truly poetic.".

This article examines which lessons political philosophers can learn from discussions within Critical Philosophy of Race. The article assumes a social-constructionist understanding of “race” and focuses on the question of how we can reconcile normative universalism with sensitivity to differences that have been created by processes of racialisation. To answer this question, it looks exemplarily at debates within three different fields of political philosophy: normativity, politics, and law. First, it presents objections voiced by critical race theory against liberal, ideal conceptions (...) of justice. Second, the article reconstructs the main arguments for and against affirmative action as a policy measure directed at minority groups. Third, it focuses on racial inequalities in the context of penal law. By way of conclusion, it suggests how debates around justice and punishment and the conceptual lenses offered by CPoR can be fruitfully applied to the German context. (shrink)

Two decades ago, the introduction of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) sparked enthusiastic reactions. With implicit measures like the IAT, researchers hoped to finally be able to bridge the gap between self-reported attitudes on one hand and behavior on the other. Twenty years of research and several meta-analyses later, however, we have to conclude that neither the IAT nor its derivatives have fulfilled these expectations. Their predictive value for behavioral criteria is weak and their incremental validity over and above self-report (...) measures is negligible. In our review, we present an overview of explanations for these unsatisfactory findings and delineate promising ways forward. Over the years, several reasons for the IAT’s weak predictive validity have been proposed. They point to four potentially problematic features: First, the IAT is by no means a pure measure of individual differences in associations but suffers from extraneous influences like recoding. Hence, the predictive validity of IAT-scores should not be confused with the predictive validity of associations. Second, with the IAT, we usually aim to measure evaluation (“liking”) instead of motivation (“wanting”). Yet, behavior might be determined much more often by the latter than the former. Third, the IAT focuses on measuring associations instead of propositional beliefs and thus taps into a construct that might be too unspecific to account for behavior. Finally, studies on predictive validity are often characterized by a mismatch between predictor and criterion (e.g., while behavior is highly context-specific, the IAT usually takes into account neither situation nor domain). Recent research, however, also revealed advances addressing each of these problems, namely (1) procedural and analytical advances to control for recoding in the IAT, (2) measurement procedures to assess implicit wanting, (3) measurement procedures to assess implicit beliefs, and (4) approaches to increase the fit between implicit measures and behavioral criteria (e.g., by incorporating contextual information). Implicit measures like the IAT hold an enormous potential. In order to allow them to fulfill this potential, however, we have to refine our understanding of these measures, and we should incorporate recent conceptual and methodological advancements. This review provides specific recommendations on how to do so. (shrink)

The Περὶ κόσμου was considered a central text in the study of Aristotle’s corpus in both the ancient and medieval worlds. However, despite a small revival of interest in the text in the 20th century, scholarship has somewhat set the Περὶ κόσμου aside, considering it merely to be a work of poetical and theological rather than philosophical import. Selene Brumana’s La scienza del divino nel Περὶ κόσμου Ps.-Aristotelico aims to address this lacuna in the literature, and to show how the (...) author of... (shrink)

L’interrogation en Italie du Nord : ce que les corpus nous disent et les questions qu’ils laissent ouvertesCet article traite de l’interrogation dans les variétés de l’Italie du Nord, plus précisément celles du ladin dolomitique. Une discussion sur les corpus disponibles, leurs avantages et leurs inconvénients est complétée par la présentation de mes enquêtes dialectales : méthodologie et données recueillies. Ainsi, on verra comment la recherche basée sur des corpus déjà existants et l’enquête de terrain peuvent se compléter, les données (...) des atlas linguistiques offrant un point de départ indispensable à des investigations plus spécifiques et nécessaires. (shrink)

Care is among the most important concepts in healthcare. It is not only a descriptive concept, but it also conveys a normative orientation. Approaches to the ethics of care have shown that care can indeed be understood as an overarching normative concept that integrates different normative orientations. Nonetheless, determining what constitutes good care is usually a matter of finding reasonable compromises. In healthcare settings, a typical compromise involves finding a balance between optimal care for individuals on the one hand and (...) the institutional demands of providing care to many care receivers over long periods of time as well as the limits of what can legitimately be asked of individual care providers on the other. (shrink)

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book examines the concept of care and care practices in healthcare from the interdisciplinary perspectives of continental philosophy, care ethics, the social sciences, and anthropology. Areas addressed include dementia care, midwifery, diabetes care, psychiatry, and reproductive medicine. Special attention is paid to ambivalences and tensions within both the concept of care and care practices. Contributions in the first section of the book explore phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to care (...) and reveal historical precursors to care ethics. Empirical case studies and reflections on care in institutionalised and standardised settings form the second section of the book. The concluding chapter, jointly written by many of the contributors, points at recurring challenges of understanding and practicing care that open up the field for further research and discussion. This collection will be of great value to scholars and practitioners of medicine, ethics, philosophy, social science and history. (shrink)