A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust (...) harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person's liability to suffer harm. (shrink)

Joanna Mary Firth and Jonathan Quong argue that both an instrumental account of liability to defensive harm, according to which an aggressor can only be liable to defensive harms that are necessary to avert the threat he poses, and a purely noninstrumental account which completely jettisons the necessity condition, lead to very counterintuitive implications. To remedy this situation, they offer a “pluralist” account and base it on a distinction between “agency rights” and a “humanitarian right.” I argue, first, (...) that this distinction is spurious; second, that the conclusions they draw from this distinction do not cohere with its premises; third, that even if one granted the distinction, Firth’s and Quong’s implicit premise that you can forfeit your agency rights but not your “humanitarian right” is unwarranted; fourth, that their attempt to mitigate the counterintuitive implications of their own account in the Rape case relies on mistaken ad-hoc assumptions; fifth, that even if they were successful in somewhat mitigating said counterintuitive implications, they would still not be able to entirely avoid them; and sixth, that even in the unlikely case that none of these previous five critical points are correct, Firth and Quong still fail to establish that aggressors can be liable to unnecessary defensive harm since they fail to establish that unnecessary harm can ever be defensive in the first place. (shrink)

In this article I propose a view which explains how it is possible that the disagreement concerning clear cases of a given vague predicate is genuine, whereas that concerning borderline cases is faultless. I take the possibility of faultless disagreement concerning borderline cases to be an important characteristic of vague predicates and in my view any adequate theory of vagueness should account for it. My proposal might be called “contextual supervaluationism” and it is inspired by Kölbel's relativist view from his (...) paper “Vagueness as Semantic”. Following Kölbel I claim that the range of admissible sharpenings assumed by supervaluationism is context‐dependent, but contrary to him I maintain that we need supertruth as well as truth at a sharpening. Moreover – again unlike Kölbel – I argue that utterances concerning borderline cases are permissible. I claim, however, that such utterances should be assertives rather than assertions, since they express only a weak belief of the speaker. It is the different illocutionary forces of utterances concerning clear cases and borderline cases that make it possible to explain the distinct nature of disagreements over such cases. (shrink)

This paper introduces Basic Intuitionistic Set Theory BIST, and investigates it as a first-order set theory extending the internal logic of elementary toposes. Given an elementary topos, together with the extra structure of a directed structural system of inclusions on the topos, a forcing-style interpretation of the language of first-order set theory in the topos is given, which conservatively extends the internal logic of the topos. This forcing interpretation applies to an arbitrary elementary topos, since any such is equivalent to (...) one carrying a dssi. We prove that the set theory BIST+Coll is sound and complete relative to forcing interpretations in toposes with natural numbers object. Furthermore, in the case that the structural system of inclusions is superdirected, the full Separation schema is modelled. We show that all cocomplete and realizability toposes can be endowed with such superdirected systems of inclusions.A large part of the paper is devoted to an alternative notion of category-theoretic model for BIST, which, following the general approach of Joyal and Moerdijkʼs Algebraic Set Theory, axiomatizes the structure possessed by categories of classes compatible with BIST. We prove soundness and completeness results for BIST relative to the class-category semantics. Furthermore, BIST+Coll is complete relative to the restricted collection of categories of classes given by categories of ideals over elementary toposes with nno and dssi. It is via this result that the completeness of the original forcing interpretation is obtained, since the internal logic of categories of ideals coincides with the forcing interpretation. (shrink)

One of the popular missional consensuses in the context of migration is seeing migrants as “moving targets” for evangelism. There is an urge to respond differently realising that migrants are not merely workers for economic welfare but persons created in the image of God. To reconstruct a model of mission that is embedded in the complex reality of migration, this paper will look into the details of three narratives of Indonesian and Filipino migrants who live and attend a Charismatic church (...) in Sabah, Malaysia. It will give insights into the process of othering and discover the quality of compassion in their lives. Based on their experiences, I argue mission as a compassionate presence provides a sound theological basis for churches to respond to the continuous othering of migrants. It invites us to rethink evangelism, not solely as winning souls for Christ, but to embody Christ by being present. (shrink)

A study was carried out involving persons representing high-anxious, low-anxious and repressor types according to the classification of Weinberger, Davidson & Schwartz, selected using the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and the trait anxiety scale of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. In seeking indicators of anxiety in repressors and high-anxious groups, the authors decided to analyse the level of dogmatism observed in utterance texts. The research was intended to determine whether styles of coping with threatening stimuli condition the level of dogmatism, (...) which was regarded as a cognitive defence mechanism against anxiety. The method of formal analysis of texts was used to identify their level of dogmatism, measured using the Dogmatism Quotient developed by Ertel. The highest value of the Dogmatism Quotient was recorded for repressors, and the lowest for the low-anxious subjects; a similar pattern was also observed for certain particular dimensions of dogmatism. Statistically significant differences in the level of dogmatism were found between the repressor and lowanxious groups and between the high-anxious and low-anxious groups. The study confirmed the previously discovered pattern whereby repressors exhibit more similarities to high-anxious than to low-anxious persons. (shrink)

In the paper Evans’s argument concerning indeterminate identity statements is presented and discussed. Evans’s paper in which he formulated his argument is one of the most frequently discussed papers concerning identity. There are serious doubts concerning what Evans wanted to prove by his argument. Theorists have proposed two competing and incompatible interpretations. According to some, Evans purposefully constructed an invalid argument in order to demonstrate that the vague objects view cannot diagnose the fallacy and is therefore untenable. According to others, (...) Evans wanted to formulate a (valid) argument to the effect that there cannot be vague identity statements whose vagueness is due solely to the existence of vague objects. As it has been argued, if it is the former interpretation which is correct, than the argument really is invalid, but it is doubtful whether it achieves its aim. It might be claimed that “the vague objects view” it refutes is not the view that most vague objects theorists hold. The main part of the paper is devoted to the second interpretation and the discussions concerning the validity of the argument on this interpretation. It appears that the vague objects theorist is in a position to object to the validity of every single step of the proof. (shrink)

We present a relational proof system in the style of dual tableaux for the relational logic associated with a multimodal propositional logic for order of magnitude qualitative reasoning with a bidirectional relation of negligibility. We study soundness and completeness of the proof system and we show how it can be used for verification of validity of formulas of the logic.

The Welfare-Funded Sex Doula Programme is a proposed sexual needs service that advances the sexual citizenship of disabled people by providing specially trained ‘sex doulas’ to meet the various, often complex, sexual needs of disabled people. Conceived as providing disabled individuals with practical sexual support services, the role of the sex doula includes advocacy, counselling, therapy, and practical relief from sexual tension. The programme constitutes a robust, comprehensive, and theoretically cohesive welfare service that seeks to provision access to sexual citizenship (...) for disabled people. -/- Grounded in Aristotelian concepts of flourishing, the programme identifies sexual citizenship as a fundamental basic need and seeks to ensure that disabled people have the opportunity to achieve the same level of sexuality as able-bodied people. Work advancing the programme includes both philosophical and theoretical arguments showing how the programme is justified under several moral frameworks, and claims made therein have resulted in velitation in the literature regarding the potential of such a programme to violate individuals’ negative rights. (shrink)

The leading models of disability struggle to fully encompass all aspects of “disability.” This difficulty arises, the author argues, because the models fundamentally misunderstand the nature of disability. Current theoretical approaches to disability can be understood as “nounal,” in that they understand disability as a thing that is caused or embodied. In contrast, this paper presents an adverbial perspective on disability, which shows that disability is experienced as a personally irremediable impediment to daily-living tasks or goals-like-ours. The picture theory of (...) disability technically constitutes a species of relational approach because its analysis references the interplay between an individual and their environment; it differs from other relational accounts, however, by interpreting disability as a certain kind of negative experience—rather than a function of that relationship. This purely descriptive theory makes no normative claims about disability and operates as both a mechanism for the evaluation of the experience of disability and a heuristic device for the proper interpretation of disability. When disability is reframed in this way, the theory offers a particularist perspective which shows if, when, where, and how disability is experienced. (shrink)

The rising tide of corporate scandals and audit failures has shocked the public, and the integrity of auditors is being increasingly questioned. It is crucial for auditors and regulators to understand the main causes of audit failure and devise preventive measures accordingly. This study analyzes enforcement actions issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission against auditors in respect of fraudulent financial reporting committed by listed companies in China. We find that auditors are more likely to be sanctioned by the regulators (...) for failing to detect and report material misstatement frauds rather than disclosure frauds. Further analysis of the material misstatements indicates that auditors are more likely to be sanctioned for failing to detect and report revenue-related frauds rather than assets-related frauds. In sum, our results suggest that regulators believe auditors have the responsibility to detect and report frauds that are egregious, transaction-based, and related to accounting earnings. The results contribute to our knowledge of auditors’ responsibilities for detecting frauds as perceived by regulators. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, at least in the English-speaking part of the world, has been largely devoted to problems of an ontological or epistemological nature. This concentration of effort by many acute analytical minds has not produced any general agreement with respect to the solution of these problems; it seems likely, on the contrary, that the wealth of proposed solutions, each making some claim to plausibility, has resulted in greater disagreement than ever before, (...) and in some cases disagreement about issues so fundamental that certain schools of thought now find it unrewarding, if not impossible, to communicate with one another. Moral philosophers of almost all schools seem to agree, however, that no major possibility has been neglected during this period, and that every proposed solution which can be adjudged at all plausible has been examined with considerable thoroughness. It is now common practice, for example, for the authors of books on moral philosophy to introduce their own theories by what purports to be a classification and review of all \emph{possible} solutions to the basic problems of analysis; and in many cases, indeed, the primary defense of the author's own position seems to consist in the negative argument that his own position cannot fail to be correct because none of the others which he has mentioned is satisfactory. (shrink)

Roderick Firth's writings on epistemology amount to an exceptionally careful and cogent defense of an account of perceptual knowledge in the tradition Firth called 'radical empiricism.' This important book collects all of Firth's major works on epistemology; it also contains his only publication in ethics, the extremely influential essay on 'Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer.' In addition, the book includes a number of important previously unpublished essays. Together, these writings constitute the most finished and compelling version (...) of traditional empiricist epistemology. This book will be of value to students and scholars of epistemology, phenomenalism, and ethics. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance is a major and increasing problem globally. Economics has engaged with this issue increasingly over the last 20 years. Much of this concerns assessments of the cost of various forms of resistance, but it also includes economic analyses of interventions and policies designed to contain resistance. Analysis has, however, thus far largely neglected possible distributional issues associated with such interventions and analysis. The article explores three normative bases for the conduct of economic analysis: welfarism; extra-welfarism focused on health (...) gain; and extra-welfarism focused on capability assessment. It then considers issues intrinsic to antimicrobial resistance in terms of the distributional implications and how these might be handled within economic analyses from each of the normative perspectives, before considering the actual focus of empirical studies on these distributional issues. The article concludes that the different normative starting points for economic analysis will affect how distributional issues are incorporated into analysis, but suggests that all analyses could benefit from greater discussion of these issues. (shrink)

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. (...) Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life--understood as both a biological and social phenomenon--it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We (...) conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect. (shrink)

Each year thousands of individuals enrol in clinical trials as healthy volunteers to earn money. Some of them pursue research participation as a full-time or at least a part-time job. They call themselves professional or semiprofessional guinea pigs. The practice of paying healthy volunteers raises numerous ethical concerns. Different payment models have been discussed in literature. Dickert and Grady argue for a wage-payment model. This model gives research subjects a standardised hourly wage, and it is based on an assumption that (...) research participation is morally indistinguishable from other forms of unskilled labour. In this paper, I will challenge this assumption. I will argue that human guinea pigging has particular characteristics which taken together make it significantly different from other forms of labour. Participation in research is skill-independent. Healthy volunteers are valuable not because they are skilful persons, but because they are human bodies. The role of research volunteers is mainly passive. They are not asked to produce goods or deliver services. They are paid for enduring unpleasant, painful and risky interventions performed by investigators. Research volunteering involves inherent risks and uncertainties, and subjects have little or no control over their minimisation and materialisation. I conclude that participation in clinical research is a specific kind of activity. It is more like renting out one’s body to strangers, than working. Thus, research participation should not be treated on par with other forms of employment. (shrink)

In this paper non-Hausdorff manifolds as potential basic objects of General Relativity are investigated. One can distinguish four stages of identifying an appropriate mathematical structure to describe physical systems: kinematic, dynamical, physical reasonability, and empirical. The thesis of this paper is that in the context of General Relativity, non-Hausdorff manifolds pass the first two stages, as they enable one to define the basic notions of differential geometry needed to pose the problem of the evolution-distribution of matter and are not in (...) conflict with the Einstein equations. With regard to the third stage, various potential conflicts with physical reasonability conditions are considered with a tentative conclusion that non-Hausdorff manifolds are more likely to pass this stage than is typically assumed. When dealing with some of these problems, the modal interpretation of non-Hausdorff manifolds is invoked, according to which they represent bundles of alternative possible spacetimes rather than single spacetimes. (shrink)

Political oeconomy in the 18th century operated in the absence of the conception of an autonomous social order articulated in the later concepts of `the economy' and `society'. Without a self-sustaining mechanism oriented to stability and endogenous economic growth, national prosperity and social order were assumed to depend upon the detailed interventions in economic life that are characteristic of mercantilism and the police of the poor. Smith's theory that autonomous economic growth underpinned a stable order of social interdependencies based upon (...) the division of labour allowed him to move beyond or modify these assumptions. It freed him from the ideas that constant interference in the relationship between agriculture and manufacturing was necessary in order to guarantee food security and that social order and national prosperity depended upon enforcing constraints upon the interests of wage earners. (shrink)

In contrast to most publications on the ethics of paying research subjects, which start by identifying and analyzing major ethical concerns raised by the practice (in particular, risks of undue inducement and exploitation) and end with a set of—more or less well-justified—ethical recommendations for using payment schemes immune to these problems, this paper offers a systematic, principle-based ethical analysis of the practice. It argues that researchers have aprima faciemoral obligation to offer payment to research subjects, which stems from the principle (...) of social beneficence. This principle constitutes an ethical “spine” of the practice. Other ethical principles of research ethics (respect for autonomy, individual beneficence, and justice/fairness) make up an ethical “skeleton” of morally sound payment schemes by providing additional moral reasons for offering participants (1) recompense for reasonable expenses; and (2a) remuneration conceptualized as a reward for their valuable contribution, provided (i) it meets standards of equality, adequacy and non-exploitation, and (ii) it is not overly attractive (i.e., it does not constitute undue inducement for participation or retention, and does not encourage deceptive behaviors); or (2b) remuneration conceptualized as a market-driven price, provided (i) it is necessary and designed to help the study achieve its social and scientific goals, (ii) it does not reinforce wider social injustices and inequalities; (iii) it meets the requirement of non-exploitation; and (iv) it is not overly attractive. The principle of justice provides a strong ethical reason for not offering recompenses for lost wages (or loss of other reasonably expected profits). (shrink)

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

The sexual citizenship of disabled persons is an ethically contentious issue with important and broad-reaching ramifications. Awareness of the issue has risen considerably due to the increasingly public responses from charitable organisations which have recently sought to respond to the needs of disabled persons—yet this important debate still struggles for traction in academia. In response, this paper continues the debate raised in this journal between Appel and Di Nucci, concurring with Appel’s proposals that sexual pleasure is a fundamental human right (...) and that access to sexual citizenship for the severely disabled should be publicly funded. To that endeavour, this paper refutes Di Nucci’s criticism of Appel’s sex rights for the disabled and shows how Di Nucci’s alternative solution is iniquitous. To advance the debate, I argue that a welfare-funded ‘sex doula' programme would be uniquely positioned to respond to the sexual citizenship issues of disabled persons. (shrink)

This study was conducted during 111 days of coronavirus disease 2019 lockdown and reviewed current media articles that revealed government bodies and institutions have come to view people not as priceless treasures, but in terms of the money they can generate and the economic value they may give to a nation. This view was contrasted with the historic Christian concept of inherent royalty and value that is intrinsic to all people, and embodied in monarchs and bishops. This study focuses on (...) a review of historical literature and biblical texts around monarchy and the episcopacy in light of current media articles related to COVID-19. It found that politics and policy need to be grounded into the more fundamental aspects of our human condition and that it is the compassion and care people have for those who are more fragile: be it financially, physically, mentally or spiritually, that bishops and monarchs should be embodying in a time of COVID-19.Contribution: This study drew its key insights from contested historical thoughts on the role of monarchs and bishops. The results of this line of thinking challenge us as we consider the future function and role of these positions, and what they mean in times of crises. The key insight gained is the reminder that the lives of all people in our communities are important as each person holds an intrinsic value that cannot be traded for the sake of a country’s economy and business desires to turn a profit during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

1. If Taylor's first two proposals are accepted, we must introduce a term to replace "know" in a familiar, but weaker, sense of the word. In ordinary speech it is correct to say that I know that p, even if my conviction that p might be somewhat increased by further evidence. In Taylor's stronger sense of "know" and "knowledge," it is doubtful that we have much, if any, knowledge. For even if we sometimes have evidence which is conclusive, and which (...) therefore might be said to "justify" complete conviction, it can still be doubted that in such cases we are as fully convinced as we could be. (shrink)