In recent years, campaigns across the globe have called for the removal of objects symbolic of white supremacy. This paper examines the ethics of altering or removing such objects. Do these strategies sanitize history, destroy heritage and suppress freedom of speech? Or are they important steps towards justice? Does removing monuments and renaming schools reflect a lack of parity and unfairly erase local identities? Or can it sometimes be morally required, as an expression of respect for the memories of people (...) who endured past injustices; a recognition of this history's ongoing legacies; and a repudiation of unjust social hierarchies? (shrink)

What should we do with statues and place‐names memorializing people who committed human‐rights abuses linked to slavery and postslavery racism? In this article, I draw on UN principles of transitional justice to address this question. I propose that a successful approach should meet principles of transitional justice recognized by the United Nations, including affirming rights to justice, truth, reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence of human rights violations. I discuss four strategies for handling contested heritage, examining strengths and weaknesses of each (...) strategy. Examples from Bristol, England, highlight common challenges and positive lessons. (shrink)

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. This special issue of Philosophy and Technology investigates whether and to what extent machines, of various designs and configurations, can or should be considered moral subjects, defined here as either a moral agent, a moral patient, or both. The articles that comprise the issue were competitively selected from papers initially prepared for and presented at a symposium on this subject matter convened during (...) the AISB/IACAP 2012 World Congress, held in at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, UK. (shrink)

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic - Tomasz Fisiak Yeats’s Genres and Tensions: A Review of Charles I. Armstrong’s Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History - Wit Pietrzak Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance - Antoni Górny “Artful Exaggeration” - Krzysztof Majer Interviews Bill Gaston Transcultural Theatre in the UK - Uilleam Blacker Talks to Joanna Kosmalska.

The concept of biodiversity has played a central role within conservation biology over the last thirty years. Precisely how it should be understood, however, is a matter of ongoing debate. In this paper we defend what we call a classic multidimensional conception of biodiversity. We begin by introducing two arguments for eliminating the concept of biodiversity from conservation biology, both of which have been put forward in a recent paper by Santana. The first argument is against the concept’s scientific usefulness. (...) The other is against its value as a target of conservation. We show that neither of these objections is successful against the classic multidimensional conception of biodiversity. Biodiversity thus understood is important from a scientific perspective, because it plays important explanatory roles within contemporary ecology. Moreover, although it does not encompass all valuable features of the natural world, this does not show that we should abandon it as a target of conservation. Instead, biodiversity should be conceived as one of many grounds of value associated with ecosystems. This is consistent with concluding that a central aim of conservationists should be to protect biodiversity. (shrink)

In Polish historiography on radio in the Stalinist period, the official propaganda broadcast by Polish Radio is very often juxtaposed with the free and unbiased broadcasting of Radio Free Europe (RFE), which can create the impression that RFE was the only source of information in Poland and tends to diminish the importance of Polish Radio. In fact, both broadcasting institutions were crucial players in Cold War warfare, which was described by George F. Kennan in terms of Clausewitz's “fog of war.” (...) Indeed, both RFE and Polish Radio were listening to each other through the Iron Curtain because “white propaganda” (along with the intelligence obtained from political refugees) was one of the most important sources of information. The two broadcasting stations were more alike than we are willing to admit. For instance, the Polish section of RFE mimicked the post-war strategy of Polish Radio. While the latter pretended to be the continuation and successor of the pre-war institution, RFE's propaganda shaped the programme of Polish Radio for many years. Using this case study on RFE's attitude toward Poland's western borders along the Odra and Nysa Rivers, I show how these two opposing broadcasting stations functioned within an endless propaganda feedback loop. (shrink)

Interval temporal logics provide both an insight into a nature of time and a framework for temporal reasoning in various areas of computer science. In this paper we present sound and complete relational proof systems in the style of dual tableaux for relational logics associated with modal logics of temporal intervals and we prove that the systems enable us to verify validity and entailment of these temporal logics. We show how to incorporate in the systems various relations between intervals and/or (...) various time orderings. (shrink)

We introduce an Automatic Theorem Prover (ATP) of a dual tableau system for a relational logic for order of magnitude qualitative reasoning, which allows us to deal with relations such as negligibility, non-closeness and distance. Dual tableau systems are validity checkers that can serve as a tool for verification of a variety of tasks in order of magnitude reasoning, such as the use of qualitative sum of some classes of numbers. In the design of our ATP, we have introduced some (...) heuristics, such as the so called phantom variables, which improve the efficiency of the selection of variables used un the proof. (shrink)

A new deduction system for deciding validity for the minimal decidable normal modal logic K is presented in this article. Modal logics could be very helpful in modelling dynamic and reactive systems such as bio-inspired systems and process algebras. In fact, recently the Connectionist Modal Logics has been presented, which combines the strengths of modal logics and neural networks. Thus, modal logic K is the basis for these approaches. Soundness, completeness and the fact that the system itself is a decision (...) procedure are proved in this article. The main advantages of this approach are: first, the system is deterministic, i.e. it generates one proof tree for a given formula; second, the system is a validity-checker, hence it generates a proof of a formula ; and third, the language of deduction and the language of a logic coincide. Some of these advantages are compared with other classical approaches. (shrink)

Logics of binary relations corresponding, among others, to the class RRA of representable relation algebras and the class FRA of full relation algebras are presented together with the proof systems in the style of dual tableaux. Next, the logics are extended with relational constants interpreted as point relations. Applications of these logics to reasoning in non-classical logics are recalled. An example is given of a dual tableau proof of an equation which is RRA-valid, while not RA-valid.

Qualitative description of the movement of objects can be very important when there are large quantity of data or incomplete information, such as in positioning technologies and movement of robots. We present a first step in the combination of fuzzy qualitative reasoning and quantitative data obtained by human interaction and external devices as GPS, in order to update and correct the qualitative information. We consider a Propositional Dynamic Logic which deals with qualitative velocity and enables us to represent some reasoning (...) tasks about qualitative properties. The use of logic provides a general framework which improves the capacity of reasoning. In this way, we can infer additional information by using axioms and the logic apparatus. In this paper we present sound and complete relational dual tableau that can be used for verification of validity of formulas of the logic in question. (shrink)

The book presents logical foundations of dual tableaux together with a number of their applications both to logics traditionally dealt with in mathematics and philosophy (such as modal, intuitionistic, relevant, and many-valued logics) and to various applied theories of computational logic (such as temporal reasoning, spatial reasoning, fuzzy-set-based reasoning, rough-set-based reasoning, order-of magnitude reasoning, reasoning about programs, threshold logics, logics of conditional decisions). The distinguishing feature of most of these applications is that the corresponding dual tableaux are built in a (...) relational language which provides useful means of presentation of the theories. In this way modularity of dual tableaux is ensured. We do not need to develop and implement each dual tableau from scratch, we should only extend the relational core common to many theories with the rules specific for a particular theory. (shrink)

Drawing on findings from the study of prejudice and prejudice reduction, we identify a number of mechanisms through which religious communities may influence the intergroup attitudes of their members. We hypothesize that religious participation could in principle either reduce or promote prejudice with respect to any given target group. A religious community’s influence on intergroup attitudes will depend upon the specific beliefs, attitudes, and practices found within the community, as well as on interactions between the religious community and the larger (...) social environment in which it is embedded. Basing our proposals on findings from the literature on prejudice formation and prejudice reduction allows us to outline useful directions for future studies of religion and prejudice. (shrink)

DESCARTES’S PASSIONS OF THE SOUL AND THE CONTEMPORARY DISPUTE ABOUT THE NATURE OF EMOTION In my article I discuss the connection between the Cartesian theory of passions of the soul and the contemporary dispute between the cognitive and non-cognitive theories of emotions. Defenders of the cognitive theory of emotions identify emotions with judgments. On the other hand, non-cognitivists claim that emotions are feelings caused by changes in physiological conditions relating to the autonomic and motor functions. Both cognitivists’ and non-cognitivists’ approaches (...) meet serious problems. In the paper, I want to show that the Cartesian theory of passions can be considered an anticipation of contemporary views and a compromise between the cognitive and non-cognitive theories of emotions. Keywords: DESCARTES, NATURE OF EMOTION, SOUL, COGNITIVE AND NON-COGNITIVE THEORIES OF EMOTIONS. (shrink)

Artykuł analizuje krytycznie pewne linie argumentacji stosowane przez wielu badaczy Nowego Testamentu na poparcie negatywnej oceny przekazów na temat wypowiedzi Jezusa i wydarzeń w Ewangeliach synoptycznych.

Book review: Tomasz Kwarciński, Agnieszka Wincewicz-Price, Metaekonomia II. Zagadnienia z filozofii makroekonomii, Kraków, Copernicus Center Press 2019.

W dniach 9–13 września 2016 roku na Uniwersytecie Humboldtów w Berlinie odbyła się konferencja „What is said – what is meant”. Konferencja miała dwie wyraźnie oddzielone części: pierwsza „What is said” odbywała się w dniach 9–10 września, a druga „What is meant” – w dniach 12–13 września. Odróżnienie tego, co powiedziane, od tego, co w inny sposób komunikowane, wywodzi się zwykle z filozofii Paula Grice’a...

Are epistemic reasons normative in the same sense as, for instance, moral reasons? In this paper I examine and defend the claim that epistemic reasons are normative only relative to an epistemic standard. Unlike moral reasons they are not substantially normative, because they fail to make an independent contribution to obligations or permissions simpliciter. After presenting what I take to be the main argument for this view, I illustrate that the argument has often been defended by examples which controversially presuppose (...) strong epistemic obligations or pragmatic reasons for belief. Opponents of the argument often deny the existence of obligations and reasons of these kinds. I therefore examine whether the argument can withstand that line of critique by employing new examples. (shrink)

This book offers a new account of what it is to act for a normative reason. The first part of the book examines the problems of causal accounts of acting for reasons and suggests to solve them by a dispositional approach. The author argues for a dispositional account which unites epistemic, volitional, and executional dispositions in a complex normative competence. This ‘Normative Competence Account’ allows for more and less reflective ways of acting for normative reasons. The second part of the (...) book clarifies the relation between the normative reason that an agent acts for and his or her motivating reasons. It refutes the widely held ‘identity view’ that acting for a normative reason requires the normative reason to be identical with a motivating reason. The author describes how normative reasons are related to motivating reasons by a relation of correspondence, and proposes a new understanding of how normative reasons explain those actions that are performed for them. Determined by Reasons engages with current debates from a wide range of different philosophical areas, including action theory, metaethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and ontology, to develop a new account of acting for normative reasons. (shrink)

I argue for the view that there are important similarities between knowledge and acting for a normative reason. I interpret acting for a normative reason in terms of Sosa’s notion of an apt performance. Actions that are done for a normative reason are normatively apt actions. They are in accordance with a normative reason because of a competence to act in accordance with normative reasons. I argue that, if Sosa’s account of knowledge as apt belief is correct, this means that (...) acting for a normative reason is in many respects similar to knowledge. In order to strengthen Sosa’s account of knowledge, I propose to supplement it with an appeal to sub-competences. This clarifies how this account can deal with certain Gettier cases, and it helps to understand how exactly acting for a normative reason is similar to apt belief. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with the relation between motivating and normative reasons. According to a common and influential thesis, a normative reason is identical with a motivating reason when an agent acts for that normative reason. I will call this thesis the ‘Identity Thesis’. Many philosophers treat the Identity Thesis as a commonplace or a truism. Accordingly, the Identity Thesis has been used to rule out certain ontological views about reasons. I distinguish a deliberative and an explanatory version of the (...) Identity Thesis and argue that there are no convincing arguments to accept either version. Furthermore, I point out an alternative to the Identity Thesis. The relation between motivating and normative reasons can be thought of as one of representation, not identity. (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)

Agents sometimes act for normative reasons—for reasons that objectively favor their actions. Jill, for instance, calls a doctor for the normative reason that Kate is injured. In this article I explore a dispositional approach to acting for a normative reason. I argue for the need of epistemic, motivational, and executional dispositional elements of a theory of acting for a normative reason. Dispositions play a mediating role between, on the one hand, the normative reason and its normative force, and the action (...) on the other hand. Thereby, they help to deal with problem cases such as cases of deviant causal chains and improper instrumental motivation. (shrink)

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine-grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse-grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if (...) the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence-based correspondence. (shrink)

Reigning regulatory frameworks for biomedical research impose on researchers and research ethics committees an obligation to protect research participants from risks that are unnecessary, disproportionate to potential research benefits, and non-minimized. Where the research has no potential to produce results of direct benefit to the subjects and the subjects are unable to give consent, these requirements are strengthened by an additional condition, that risks should not exceed a certain minimal threshold. In this article, I address the question of whether there (...) should be limits of permissible risks in non-therapeutic research involving competent and healthy subjects. Some commentators argue that competent and informed individuals should have a right to participate even in extremely risky research and that research ethics committees should never reject studies because they are too dangerous. To use David Shaw's expression, competent volunteers should have ‘a right to participate in high-risk research’. I argue that this idea is ill-founded, as it does not take into account the social mission and complex collaborative nature of research practice as well as the inequity of power between researchers and subjects. Imposition of limits on permissible risks for healthy volunteers is justified by the need to protect research enterprise and the need to protect the weaker party, namely the subjects. Also, I suggest that the best way to set boundaries on research risks is to leave the judgment of risk acceptability to research ethics committees. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Aufsatz prüft, unter welchen Bedingungen ein Psychologismus für motivierende Gründe der gegenwärtig wachsenden Kritik standhalten kann. Zwei zentrale antipsychologistische Argumente, das „Spezialfallargument“ und das „Idealfallargument“, werden rekonstruiert und zurückgewiesen. Sie werfen dem Psychologismus vor, unsere praktische Überlegung lediglich in Spezialfällen adäquat zu beschreiben und damit unvereinbar zu sein, dass Personen im Idealfall aus normativen Gründen handeln. Der Aufsatz zeigt auf, dass diese Argumente voraussetzen, dass der motivierende Grund identisch ist mit demjenigen, was aus der Sicht des Handelnden als (...) normativer Grund erscheint. Diese Voraussetzung wird zurückgewiesen, so dass ein Psychologismus zum Vorschein kommt, der von den antipsychologistischen Argumenten unberührt bleibt. Stattdessen wird eine Konzeption motivierender Gründe vertreten, welche die Handlungserklärung und die Rationalisierung von Handlungen als zentrale Funktion motivierender Gründe betrachtet. (shrink)

In the scholarly debate, refugeehood is often understood to arise from a special need for basic protection, i.e., for protection of basic needs and rights. However, the main definitions of refugeehood shift to duties when aiming to develop this view. Either, refugees are defined as all those individuals who can receive basic protection from the international community, and thus arguably ought to be protected, or refugees are defined as all those to whom a special form of protection, namely protection by (...) admission is owed. The paper argues that either definition is incompatible with a commonsense desideratum on consistent and plausible criteria for refugeehood, since these definitions imply that refugeehood depends partly on the capacities of protecting states and on the needs of third parties. Instead, refugeehood is defined by the need for basic protection and by flight aiming to remedy this condition. (shrink)

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)

Health research ethics training is highly variable, with some researchers receiving little to none, which is why ethical frameworks represent critical tools for ethical deliberation and guiding responsible practice. However, these documents' voluntary and abstract nature can leave health researchers seeking more operationalised guidance, such as in the form of checklists, even though this approach does not support reflection on the meaning of principles nor their implications. In search of more reflective and participatory practices in a pandemic context with distance (...) learning, this study explored whether co-design could support engagement and reflection on ethical principles amongst early-stage health researchers. In a pilot test using the Swiss Personalized Health Network's ethical framework for Responsible Usage of Personal Data in Health Research as a case study, we engaged health researchers to design visuals of four ethical principles. In two online workshops, participants (N = 10, N = 8) completed activities such as individual reflection, collaborative ideation, sketching, prototyping, discussion, and feedback. Our analysis shows that the co-design process helped foster in-depth engagement and reflection on the meaning and relevance of the SPHN ethical principles. Participants reported enjoying the experience, and most felt that visuals could motivate engagement with ethical frameworks. This study demonstrates the feasibility of a participatory, design-oriented approach to promote engagement with research ethics among early-career health researchers and highlights key challenges and lessons learned. In doing so, it lays the foundation for future research to investigate the impact of design-oriented, participatory learning to foster reflection and deliberation in ethics education. (shrink)

How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of (...) not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion. (shrink)

Joanna Demers argues that Houellebecqs apocalypse can be understood as a system analogous to Hegels, and interrogates the ethics of such a system.

A blueprint for social change showing how we can reverse the destructive attitudes that threaten our world.

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history (...) and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement. (shrink)

The Normative Competence Account characterizes acting for a normative reason as action which manifests the agent’s complex normative competence. But which role does the correspondence between the n...