> Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives better. > > -- William MacAskill, What We Owe The Future > > [Longtermism is] quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today. > > -- Émile P. Torres, Against Longtermism Philosophers,1 2 psychologists,3 4 politicians5 and even some tech billionaires6 have sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence (AI) and the dangers it may pose to the long-term future of humanity. (...) Some believe it poses an existential risk (X-Risk)7 to our species, potentially causing our extinction or bringing about the collapse of human civilisation as we know it. The above quote from philosopher Will MacAskill captures the key tenets of ‘longtermism’, an ethical standpoint that places the onus on current generations to prevent AI-related—and other—X-Risks for the sake of people living in the future.1 2 Developing from an adjacent social movement commonly associated with utilitarian philosophy, ‘effective altruism’, longtermism has amassed following of its own. Its supporters argue that preventing X-Risks is at least as morally significant as addressing current challenges like global poverty. However, critics are concerned that such a distant-future focus will sideline efforts to tackle the many pressing moral issues facing humanity now.8 9 Indeed, according to ‘strong’ longtermism,10 future needs arguably should take precedence over present ones. In essence, the claim is that there is greater expected utility to allocating available resources to prevent human extinction in the future than there is to focusing on present lives, since doing so stands to benefit the incalculably large number of people in later generations who will far outweigh existing populations.1 Taken to the extreme, this view suggests it would be morally permissible, or even required, to actively neglect, harm or destroy large swathes of humanity as …. (shrink)

Rodolfo Sacco developed the idea of “mute behaviours” during his studies on mute law. The notion of “mute behaviours” denotes an action that is able to mould a legal relationship without any use of language. Certainly, this concept may give rise to some doubts in relation to the attribution—to a behaviour qualified as mute—of the capability to affect dynamics involving a plurality of people. Aiming to clarify the idea of “mute behaviours” by this point of view, the authors analysed the (...) semiotic terminology used by Sacco himself to explain this notion and the issue of its silent nature. Therefore, the terms “signifying signs” and “symptoms”, deemed by Sacco—respectively—incompatible and compatible with the theory of mute behaviours were considered. The former term was traced back to the notion of conventional and arbitrary sign, the notion of the latter was reconstructed linking it to the concept of signs based on signification and suggesting a possible framework in view of the idea of “presentative meanings” developed by the philosopher Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue. Clarified this dichotomy by a terminological analysis, the authors noticed—as affirmed by Rodolfo Sacco himself—the impossibility to ascribe the notion of gesture to the mute behaviour’s category, as some exegetes proposed. Consequently to this last remark, the authors tried to analyse the relationship between gestures and “mute behaviours”, identifying the category of “sema-pragmatic acts”, that includes gestures and may be seen as an intermediate phase between “mute behaviours” and legally relevant behaviours operated by speaking. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We build from a recent integrative framework unifying these divergent perspectives through the use of dual-process theory and supporting social neuroscience research. Our elaboration considers two complementary notions of direct perception: one (...) primarily stemming from ecological psychology and the other from enactive cognition theory. We use this as the foundation from which to offer an account of the informational basis for social information and assert a set of research propositions to further the science of social cognition. In doing so, we point out how perception of the minds of others can be supported in some cases by lawful information, supporting direct perception of social affordances and perhaps, mental states, and in other cases by cues that support indirect perceptual inference. Our goal is to extend accounts of social cognition by integrating advances across disciplines to provide a multi-level and multi-theoretic description that can advance this field and offer a means through which to reconcile radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the legal situation regarding physician-assisted suicide in the world. Our hypothesis is that the prohibitive stance on physician-assisted suicide in most societies in the world today seems to be related to our moral attitudes toward suicide. This brings us to a discussion about life itself. We claim that the total lack of legal protection for physician-assisted suicide from international organizations and most countries in the world lies in a philosophical assumption that supports much of our (...) common beliefs about what life really is. This assumption states that life must be thought of as not belonging exclusively to the individual. We argue that this assumption is a misconception that can be heard in the debate on suicide. Consequently we endorse a different conception of life which tends to favor a pro-choice stance towards suicide and assisted death in general. This position takes the patient’s decision about when to die more seriously. We conclude that there is no reason why physician-assisted suicide does not deserve legal protection as an individual right to die under international law. (shrink)

In 2019, several US states passed “heartbeat” bills. Should such bills go into effect, they would outlaw abortion once an embryonic heartbeat can be detected, thereby severely limiting an individual’s access to abortion. Many states allow health care professionals to refuse to provide an abortion for reasons of conscience. Yet heartbeat bills do not include a positive conscience clause that would allow health care professionals to provide an abortion for reasons of conscience. I argue that this asymmetry is unjustified. The (...) same criteria that justify protecting conscientious refusals to provide abortion also justify protecting positive conscientious appeals regarding abortion. Thus, if the law provides legal exemptions for health care professionals who, as a matter of conscience, refuse to provide abortions where it is legal, it should also provide exemptions for health care professionals who, as a matter of conscience, feel obligated to provide abortions where it is illegal. (shrink)

There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should they. In the second part I argue that even if the Lockean arguments fail, committed biblical Christians should think that God has (...) authorized the state only to fill the same general role that political liberals have identified for it. (shrink)

Several writers have argued that the state lacks the moral standing to hold socially deprived offenders responsible for their crimes because the state would be hypocritical in doing so. Yet the state is not disposed to make an unfair exception of itself for committing the same sorts of crimes as socially deprived offenders, so it is unclear that the state is truly hypocritical. Nevertheless, the state is disposed to inconsistently hold its citizens responsible, blaming or punishing socially deprived offenders more (...) often or more harshly than other offenders, even when the crimes are the same. The state’s stable disposition to inconsistently hold offenders responsible undermines its standing to hold offenders responsible for the same reasons that hypocrisy undermines standing; instead of making an unfair exception of itself, the state makes an unfair exception of others. Strikingly, this means that the state lacks the standing to hold anyone responsible for a crime for which it is unfairly disposed to hold citizens responsible inconsistently, not just socially deprived offenders. Thus, it is even more urgent that the state regain its moral standing by working toward a justice system that holds offenders responsible consistently. (shrink)

A term expresses a thick concept if it expresses a specific evaluative concept that is also substantially descriptive. It is a matter of debate how this rough account should be unpacked, but examples can help to convey the basic idea. Thick concepts are often illustrated with virtue concepts like courageous and generous, action concepts like murder and betray, epistemic concepts like dogmatic and wise, and aesthetic concepts like gaudy and brilliant. These concepts seem to be evaluative, unlike purely descriptive concepts (...) such as red and water. But they also seem different from general evaluative concepts. In particular, thick concepts are typically contrasted with thin concepts like good, wrong, permissible, and ought, which are general evaluative concepts that do not seem substantially descriptive. When Jane says that Max is good, she appears to be evaluating him without providing much description, if any. Thick concepts, on the other hand, are evaluative and substantially descriptive at the same time. For instance, when Max says that Jane is courageous, he seems to be doing two things: evaluating her positively and describing her as willing to face risk. Because of their descriptiveness, thick concepts are especially good candidates for evaluative concepts that pick out properties in the world. Thus they provide an avenue for thinking about ethical claims as being about the world in the same way as descriptive claims. -/- Thick concepts became a focal point in ethics during the second half of the twentieth century. At that time, discussions of thick concepts began to emerge in response to certain disagreements about thin concepts. For example, in twentieth-century ethics, consequentialists and deontologists hotly debated various accounts of good and right. It was also claimed by non-cognitivists and error-theorists that these thin concepts do not correspond to any properties in the world. Dissatisfaction with these viewpoints prompted many ethicists to consider the implications of thick concepts. The notion of a thick concept was thought to provide insight into meta-ethical questions such as whether there is a fact-value distinction, whether there are ethical truths, and, if there are such truths, whether these truths are objective. Some ethicists also theorized about the role that thick concepts can play in normative ethics, such as in virtue theory. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interest in thick concepts had spread to other philosophical disciplines such as epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of law. -/- Nevertheless, the emerging interest in thick concepts has sparked debates over many questions: How exactly are thick concepts evaluative? How do they combine evaluation and description? How are thick concepts related to thin concepts? And do thick concepts have the sort of significance commonly attributed to them? This article surveys various attempts at answering these questions. (shrink)

We must resist thoroughly reframing climate change as a health issue. For human health–centric ethical frameworks omit dimensions of value that we must duly consider. We need a new, an environmental, research ethic, one that we can use to more completely and impartially evaluate proposed research on mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Indigenous environmental movements have been important actors in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global environmental politics and environmental justice. Their explicit foci range from the protection of indigenous environmental stewardship systems to upholding and expanding treaty responsibilities to securing indigenous rights in law and policy. This chapter suggests that these movements open important intellectual spaces for thinking about the function of environmental governance institutions in addressing complex environmental issues such as clean water and forest conservation. Different from institutional functions based on market (...) mechanisms or appeals to human psychological tendencies, a variety of indigenous environmentalists suggest that institutions should function to convene reciprocal responsibilities across relatives as diverse as humans, non-human beings such as plants, entities such as water, and collectives such as forests. (shrink)

Most states in the United States have conscience laws protecting conscientious refusal to perform some medical service. Yet many state conscience laws protect providers from being even indirectly involved with some procedure they find objectionable, which can include not only referrals but also simply informing patients of medically indicated but morally contentious options. I argue that such policies are unjust, offering too much protection for integrity in the face of competing values and patient interests. In other words, these policies grant (...) too much weight to integrity. One promising response to this concern is that in addition to integrity, the state should protect professionals so that they avoid complicity that could undermine their moral right to hold others accountable. I argue that this response fails, since it is implausible that these professionals actually lose that right in such contexts. I conclude that these policies should be restricted to better protect patient interests. (shrink)

This article provides practical guidance for researchers who wish to enroll and collect data from pediatric research participants through online and mobile platforms, with a focus on the involvement of both children and their parents in the decision to participate.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square by Cathleen KavenyKyle LambeletProphecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square Cathleen Kaveny CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 464 PP. $49.95"The American public square is not a seminar room" (419). This being the case, Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy without Contempt challenges ethicists, among others, to reconsider the rhetoric of moral address. Rather than a narrow focus on deliberation, (...) Kaveny commends attention to the genre of indictment, and particularly the American jeremiad, as a significant mode of moral address that deserves normative analysis. Kaveny is no partisan of prophecy. But she offers moral and rhetorical criteria of prophetic speech that allow the genre to do its indispensable work.Kaveny's book proceeds in four parts. In the first part she sets the stage for her argument by surveying three prominent accounts of the status of public moral discourse, critiquing each yet drafting them all into a more global [End Page 195] critique of the failure to take into account the central significance of the rhetoric of prophetic indictment. Correcting this neglect in the second part, Kaveny executes a historical retrieval of the American jeremiad, beginning with early Puritan preachers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The point of her at times plodding historical reconstruction is that the jeremiad was not originally socially divisive but rather served to build up the community by calling listeners back to a commonly agreed-on covenant. This uniting function of the jeremiad fails in later generations. Some readers will worry that Kaveny's retrieval risks nostalgia insofar as it conforms to a MacIntyrian declension narrative in which golden origins were irreplaceably fractured.This risk, however, is mitigated by the third and fourth parts of the book, in which Kaveny turns to constructive ethics. She argues that the forensic rhetoric of prophetic indictment should be understood as a chemotherapy. It should not be confused with deliberation, the normal form of moral address. Yet, like chemotherapy, used in the right amount it can restore an ailing patient to health. As we have come to expect, Kaveny is especially adept at taking the moral frameworks developed in one sphere and applying them to another. Trading medical analogies for military, Kaveny argues that best practices of ius bellum verborum can be developed from just war criteria. She adds to these rhetorical constraints that prophetic critique be offered against one's own people with whom one identifies through lamentation and hope. Kaveny concludes with advocacy of prophetic humility and irony as necessary elements of prophetic speech in our pluralistic contemporary context.Although written in accessible prose, Kaveny's book deserves rigorous scholarly engagement. She constructs her argument with the gracious interdisciplinarity of a leading scholar of law and theology at the height of her powers. She is methodologically promiscuous but never shallow, drawing on scholarly fields of moral philosophy, biblical studies, American religious history, in-depth case analysis of contemporary arguments about abortion and torture, and historical paradigms of prophetic virtue (and vice). While scholars in each of these fields will find claims worth engaging in Kaveny's text, ethicists will be particularly interested in her argument for a constrained, continuing need for prophetic indictment.My one critique is that her account of prophetic rhetoric is too conservative. Based on her historical retrieval, Kaveny argues that indictment should serve only to call listeners back to an already agreed-on covenant. It is undoubtedly the case, however, that Kaveny's exemplars of indictment such as Jonah, Lincoln, and King innovated and developed the covenant, even as they invoked it. This complaint aside, Kaveny's book is a major contribution to contemporary conceptualizations of the public square, and stands poised to open new directions for moral analysis of religious actors in pluralistic publics. [End Page 196]Kyle LambeletNotre Dame UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Feminist care theorists Virginia Held and Joan Tronto have suggested that care is relevant to political issues concerning distant others and that care can provide the basis for a more comprehensive moral approach. I consider their approaches with regard to the policy issue of military humanitarian intervention, and raise concerns about exceptionalist attitudes toward international law that entail a collection of costs that I refer to as “the problem of global worldlessness.” I suggest that an ethic of care can overcome (...) these concerns, and offer an Arendt-inflected rereading of some of Tronto's work to show how this is possible. (shrink)

This entry addresses the question of whether justice is thick, thin, or neither. It discusses three main ways of understanding the difference between thick and thin – Williams’ 1985 distinction, the Continuum Approach, and Hare’s distinction. The question of how to classify justice turns out to be a problem for Williams’ 1985 distinction. If the Continuum Approach is correct, it’s far from clear why it would matter whether a given concept is classified as thick, thin, or neither. Hare’s distinction, on (...) the other hand, allows for a strong case to be made for the claim that “justice” is thick. And if “justice” is thick, in Hare’s sense, then there are at least two potential implications. The first is that justice might be a genuine value property, assuming it’s impossible for “just” to have a value-neutral counterpart. The second is that there might be intractable intercultural disagreements about what things are just. (shrink)

In this article I argue that phenomenal intentionality fundamentally consists in a horizonality structure, rather than in a relation to a representational content or the determination of accuracy conditions. I provide a distinctive modal model of intentionality that conceives of phenomenal intentionality as the enjoyment of a plus ultra that points beyond what is actual. The directedness of intentionality on the world, thus, consists in “pointing ahead” to possibilities. The principal difficulty for the modal model is logical: the most obvious (...) way of implementing such a structure results in an analogue of Russell’s paradox. However, this paradox can be avoided by fine-tuning the modal logic deployed in this setting. This way of fine-tuning the logic ultimately amounts to intuitive benefits. For, it captures the intensional character of intentionality, since the way that our mental states refer to things is conception-dependent. Moreover, the way I interpret the modal model leads to a conception of intentionality as a feature of dynamic, diachronic patterns in the way that mental acts subjectively appear, rather than as a synchronic property. We ought to think of intentionality as fundamentally a temporal, subjective determination. In a generalization on Sellars’ approach to concepts, I hold that phenomenally intentional mental presentations involve modal laws and are inconceivable without them. (shrink)

The nearly omnipotent character known only as “Q” dramatically enters the Star Trek universe when he puts all humanity in the person of Captain Jean‐Luc Picard, on trial in the first episode of TNG. Acting as self‐professed prosecutor, judge, and jury, Q promises Picard an “absolutely equitable” trial, only to coerce Picard into pleading “guilty” by threatening to kill his crew. Q could be like the “Leviathan” of Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), an absolute sovereign who has the power to keep people (...) from warring with each other, but who can't be held accountable or subject to any civil law in the use of that power. Enlisting Hobbes and Locke, this chapter examines the motives behind Q's enigmatic actions and sees what Q, deep down, might believe about justice. Hobbes begins with a basic right of nature that all people possess: our liberty to ensure the preservation of our own life. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with an ambiguous aspect of Kant’s ethics, namely, how moral change is possible. Kant conceives that change is possible, indeed desirable, without making clear the mechanism by which this change occurs. I conclude that one’s moral development must come about through the autonomous rationality of humanity. This allows for the moral law to be held at all times and for the rejection of immoral sentiments and inclinations. Further, it is constant soul-searching that allows one to keep (...) a check on their maxims, facilitating the development of a moral disposition. (shrink)

Philosophy has long been fascinated by miracles, and with good reason. Where, however, the problem of the miracle once offered unparalleled insight into the inner workings of natural laws and of human knowledge, today, the attention commanded by it is essentially political. The sovereign’s miraculous suspension is the most well studied of these political dimensions, but this formulation is, in fact, ill-suited to the complexities inherent in the concept of the miracle. Political theology understands the miracle poorly, for it captures (...) only the inaugural movement of exception; it knows nothing of the social and political conditions it inspires. A key claim defended in this article is that the miracle possesses continuing interest for philosophy precisely because it lies in the heart of contemporary political formations, instituting a bond that tethers a collective to its present. It is thus more interesting as a figure of inception than of exception. The miraculous is uniformly distinguished as the unengendered, the neutral point of equilibrium against which any distribution of beings is measured. This is the meaning given the miraculous in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and this article frames the political aspect of that theme by developing their concept of miraculation, which foregrounds the movement of inception. The article works out a conceptual genealogy, tracing the descent of the miracle back from Deleuze and Guattari to Baruch Spinoza and David Hume. Each contributes an element essential for the constitution of miraculation. It is argued that the miracle has always bound ‘desire and the social’, though in diverse ways. (shrink)

On the question of civil disobedience the Crito seems out of step with what Socrates says on thematter in other dialogues. This paper argues that Socrates does not abandon his earlier preference for philosophy over the law by choosing to stay and die, but rather, it is because of his preference for philosophy and the philosophic way of life that he ends up not escaping. This paper reaches its conclusion by showing that the argument of the Laws is unpersuasive to (...) Socrates because the Laws are unjust. (shrink)

While most Christians have come to accept that there should be no attempt on the part of the state to coerce strict matters of conscience, many actively support the state coercively interfering with certain modes of conduct that violate God’s moral law. The development of this stance occurred during the seventeenth century English toleration debates. Then, tolerationists argued that there should be toleration for dissenting Protestant denominations, and eventually for Catholics, heretics, and atheists, too. But very few strict biblical Christians, (...) even today, endorse extending legal toleration, for example, to homosexual conduct or same-sex marriage. Two strategies, attributable to Locke, fail to support this asymmetry between religious error and the characteristic types of ‘Christian immorality’. I draw on arguments from the toleration debates to show that the boundaries of legal toleration should be extended to include these violations of divine moral law, and that strict biblical Christians should agree. (shrink)

This article provides a critical review of new policies in China, the United States, and the European Union that characterize genomic data as a national strategic resource. Specifically, we review policies that regulate human genomic data for economic, national security, or other strategic purposes rather than ethical or individual rights purposes.

This article considers the relationship between moral philosophy and constitutional theory through a detailed examination of the work of Jeremy Waldron—an unavoidable voice in contemporary constitutionalist debate. Through a rigorous, original and holistic deconstruction of his work and its philosophical implications, I argue that Waldron’s engagement with core philosophy within his constitutional scholarship is wholly problematic, containing a number of ambiguities and apparent inconsistencies. These issues, I suggest, may stem from an at times rather casual treatment of the realist/anti-realist issue (...) of core philosophy, perhaps owing something to his view that it is in fact safely irrelevant to his constitutional pursuits. In any case, this view, I argue, is misguided, and the problems which result are real: they not only create issues of theoretical consistency and clarity; they put Waldron’s constitutional theory in danger. Like all good tales, I suggest there are lessons to be learned from this: one must think, and think carefully, about the philosophical background of one’s work, and take care in setting this out in a clear, thorough and coherent way—the stakes are too high not to. With this in mind, this article also lays some groundwork for a path into constitutional theory firmly grounded in my own anti-realist moral scepticism. (shrink)

Stephen Law’s evil-god challenge is the argument that since an evil god is just as likely as the God of theism, there is no reason to believe that theism is true over believing there is a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnimalevolent. There have been several attempts to answer the challenge, but recently John Collins has defended the evil-god challenge and also extended the argument past Law’s original formulation. In this article, I defend the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas (...) against the evil-god challenge. In particular, I explain how Aquinas’s theodicy involving God’s goodness and Aquinas’s privation view of evil avoid the challenge. (shrink)

Extant research suggests that individuals employ traditional moral heuristics to support their observed altruistic behavior; yet findings have largely been limited to inductive extrapolation and rely on relatively few traditional frames in so doing, namely, deontology in organizational behavior and virtue theory in law and economics. Given that these and competing moral frames such as utilitarianism can manifest as identical behavior, we develop a moral framing instrument—the Philosophical Moral-Framing Measure (PMFM)—to expand and distinguish traditional frames associated and disassociated with observed (...) altruistic behavior. The validation of our instrument based on 1015 subjects in 3 separate real stakes scenarios indicates that heuristic forms of deontology, virtue-theory, and utilitarianism are strongly related to such behavior, and that egoism is an inhibitor. It also suggests that deontic and virtue-theoretical frames may be commonly perceived as intertwined and opens the door for new research on self-abnegation, namely, a perceived moral obligation toward suffering and self-denial. These findings hold the potential to inform ongoing conversations regarding organizational citizenship and moral crowding out, namely, how financial incentives can undermine altruistic behavior. (shrink)

The question of whether the existence of evil in the world is compatible with the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God has been debated for centuries. Many have addressed classical arguments from evil, and while recent scholarship in analytic philosophy of religion has produced newer formulations of the problem, most of these newer formulations rely on a conception of God that is not held by all theists. In Bringing Good Even Out of Evil: Thomism and the Problem of Evil, (...) B. Kyle Keltz defends classical theism against contemporary problems of evil through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his interpreters. Keltz discusses Aquinas’s thought on God, evil, and what kind of world God would make, then turns to contemporary problems of evil and shows how they miss the mark when it comes to classical theism. Some of the newer formulations that the book considers include James Sterba’s argument from the Pauline principle, J. L. Schellenberg’s divine hiddenness argument, Stephen Law’s evil-god challenge, and Nick Trakakis’s anti-theodicy. (shrink)

Abstract As Paul B. Thompson suggests in his recent seminal paper, “‘There’s an App for That’: Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means,” technical standards restructure property (and other social) relations. He concludes with the claim that the development of technical standards of commodification can serve purposes with bad effects such as “the rise of the factory system and the deskilling of work” or progressive effects such as how “technical standards for animal welfare… discipline the unwanted consequences of market forces.” (...) In this reply, we want to append several points to his argument and suggest that he rightly points out that standards can promote various goods; however, there are peculiar powers wielded by standardization processes that might profitably be unpacked more systematically than Thompson's article seems to suggest. First, the concealment of the technopolitics around standards is largely due to their peculiar ontological status as recipes for reality. Second, technical standards can and do commit violence against persons, but such violence is often suffered not in the formation of class consciousness, as Marx might have put it, but as a failure to conform to the laws of nature . Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0048-1 Authors Lawrence Busch, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 429A Berkey Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

“Big Data” and data analytics affect all of us. Data collection, analysis, and use on a large scale is an important and growing part of commerce, governance, communication, law enforcement, security, finance, medicine, and research. And the theme of this symposium, “Individual and Informational Privacy in the Age of Big Data,” is expansive; we could have long and fruitful discussions about practices, laws, and concerns in any of these domains. But a big part of the audience for this symposium is (...) students and faculty in higher education institutions (HEIs), and the subject of this paper is data analytics in our own backyards. Higher education learning analytics (LA) is something that most of us involved in this symposium are familiar with. Students have encountered LA in their courses, in their interactions with their law school or with their undergraduate institutions, instructors use systems that collect information about their students, and administrators use information to help understand and steer their institutions. More importantly, though, data analytics in higher education is something that those of us participating in the symposium can actually control. Students can put pressure on administrators, and faculty often participate in university governance. Moreover, the systems in place in HEIs are more easily comprehensible to many of us because we work with them on a day-to-day basis. Students use systems as part of their course work, in their residences, in their libraries, and elsewhere. Faculty deploy course management systems (CMS) such as Desire2Learn, Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas to structure their courses, and administrators use information gleaned from analytics systems to make operational decisions. If we (the participants in the symposium) indeed care about Individual and Informational Privacy in the Age of Big Data, the topic of this paper is a pretty good place to hone our thinking and put into practice our ideas. (shrink)

Genic selectionism holds that all selection can be understood as operating on particular genes. Critics (and conventional biological wisdom) insist that this misrepresents the actual causal structure of selective phenomena at higher levels of biological organization, but cannot convincingly defend this intuition. I argue that the real failing of genic selectionism is pragmatic – it prevents us from adopting the most efficient corpus of causal laws for predicting and intervening in the course of affairs – and I offer a Pragmatic (...) account of causation itself which ultimately bears out the claim that genic selectionism misrepresents the causal structure of selective contexts. (shrink)

There are documented differences in the efficacy of medical treatment for pain for men and women. Women are less likely to have their pain controlled and receive less treatment than men. We are investigating one possible explanation for this gender pain gap: that there is a difference in how women and men report their pain to physicians, and so there is a difference in how physicians understand their pain. This paper describes an exploratory study into gendered attitudes towards reporting uncontrolled (...) pain to a physician. This exploratory study provided subjects with a vignette describing a situation in which their pain is not being treated adequately and asked them questions about their attitudes towards self-advocacy and the strategies they would likely use to express themselves. We found that women scored higher than men on measures of patient likelihood to self-advocate. Women also reported intending to use more varied self-advocacy strategies than men. This suggests it is unlikely that patient’s communication styles are to blame for the gender pain gap. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'all or nothing (AON)'. AON presents a false dilemma by suggesting that there are only two options – either all or nothing – when in fact there are many more options in the middle ground between those two extremes. AON also happens in the political arena anytime a politician insists that being against one of the policies is equivalent to being against all of them. Often people adopt (...) a kind of all or nothing attitude when it comes to supporting a candidate or political party. Of course, the argument suggests that gun laws would be completely ineffectual – criminals would still find ways to buy guns. But AON also appears in politics when people are proposing or drafting laws and policy. (shrink)

The term “Electronic Health Records” means something different to each of the stakeholders in health care, but it always seems to carry a degree of emotional baggage. Increasingly, EHRs are advertized as a nearly unmitigated good that will transform medical care, improve safety and efficiency, allow better patient engagement, and open the door to an era of cheap, effective, timely, and patient-centered care. Indeed, for some EHR proponents the benefits of adopting them are so obvious that adoption has become an (...) end in itself. But for others — and especially for a number of skeptical practitioners and patients — EHR is a code word that portends the corporate transformation of health care delivery, the loss of patient privacy, the demand that patients bear more responsibility in health care, and the unreflective takeover of the health care system by people who do not understand medical care or how health care relationships unfold. (shrink)

Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

Beginning in the 20th century, scientific research came to be dominated by a growing class of credentialed, professional scientists who overwhelmingly displaced the learned amateurs of an earlier time. By the end of the century, however, the exclusive realm of professional scientists conducting research was joined, to a degree, by “citizen scientists.” The term originally encompassed non-professionals assisting professional scientists by contributing observations and measurements to ongoing research enterprises. These collaborations were especially common in the environmental sciences, where citizen scientists (...) participated in counting wildlife and measuring environmental conditions. Later, patient groups began to play a more active role in supporting clinical trials and collecting health records from affected individuals. (shrink)

Kyle Fritz argues for the following conditional statement: if healthcare providers should be allowed to conscientiously object to providing abortions in jurisdictions where abortions...

Books reviewed:John Barton, Joel and Obadiah: A Commentary John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, Volume III: Companions and CompetitorsWilliam E. Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of QRichard A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark's GospelMaurice Casey, Aramaic Sources of Mark's GospelPhilip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its WayChristopher M. Tuckett, Christology and the New Testament: Jesus and His Earliest FollowersMarkus Bockmuehl, The Cambridge Companion to JesusShelly (...) Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and ChristianityStephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late AntiquityJ. Nimmo Smith, A Christian's Guide to Greek Culture. The Pseudo‐Nonnus Commentaries on Sermons 4, 5, 39 and 43 by Gregory of Nazianzus: Introduction, Translation and Notes.David Thomas, Early Moslem Polemic Against Christianity: Abu Isa al‐Warraq's ‘Against the Incarnation’Thomas O'Loughlin, Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish WritingsCaroline M. Baron and Jenny Stratford, The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent Benson Bobrick, The Making of the English BiblePeter Marhall and Alec Ryrie, The Beginnings of English ProtestantismRobert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England. Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation EnglandNicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c.1530–1700John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689William Gibson, The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and AccordWarwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth CenturiesJames M. Byrne, God: Thoughts in an Age of Uncertainty Michael Palmer, The Question of God: An Introduction and SourcebookMichel René Barnes, The Power of God: ΔYNAMIΣ in Gregory of Nyssa's Trinitarian TheologyThomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on VirtueStanley M. Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth‐Century Theology and PhilosophyDavid Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and ApocalypseJohn Sullivan, Catholic Education: Distinctive and InclusiveGeorge Dennis O'Brien, The Idea of a Catholic UniversityGunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje, A History of Western ThoughtEllen Wagner, Essays on Plato's PsychologyAnthony Kenny, Aquinas on BeingJame Daly, Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of EnlightenmentManfred Kuehn, Kant: A BiographyP. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to ModernityStephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, KierkegaardDavid Braybrooke, Natural Law ModernizedMaría Pía Lara, Rethinking EvilW. W. Meisner, Freud and PsychoanalysisJennifer Jackson, Truth, Trust and MedicineJeremy Sugarman and Daniel P. Sulmasy, Methods in Medical EthicsH. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. and Mark J. Cherry, Allocating Scarce Medical Resources: Roman Catholic PerspectivesMaura A. Ryan, The Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction: The Cost of LongingMichael Walsh, Dictionary of Christian Biography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and the PoetsCatalin ParteniePierre Destrée and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann, editors. Plato and the Poets. Mnemosyne Supplements: Monographs on Greek and Latin Language and Literature, 328. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. xxii + 434. Cloth, $217.00.This beautifully produced volume is a collection of nineteen essays, half of them being initially presented as papers given at a 2006 conference in Louvain. Seven chapters focus on the Republic and address a variety (...) of issues: the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry (Glenn W. Most); Plato’s criticism of poetry and his negative attitude toward women (Penelope Murray); mimêsis as appearance-making (Gabriel Richardson); the meaning of mimêsis (Jera Marušič); Plato’s criticism and appreciation of poetry (Stephen Halliwell); thumos and the criticism of poetry (Pierre Destrée); painting, poetry, and the cognitive division of the soul (Rachel Singpurwalla). One chapter deals with myth, invented story, and true account in the Timaeus (Gretchen Reydams-Schils). Two are devoted to the Laws—mimetic correctness and choric poetry (Antony Hatzistavrou), and tragedy and philosophy (Susan Sauvé Meyer). The remaining nine chapters deal with other dialogues, although they are often discussed in connection with the Republic; the topics they discuss include: theia moira, enthousiasmos, and mimêsis in Gorgias (Fritz-Gregor Herrmann); divine possession, inspiration, and mimêsis in Ion and Republic (with references to Plato’s entire corpus, Catherine Collobert); the poet and the rhapsode as hermêneus in Ion (Carlotta Capuccino); the poet, the mad lover, and the mad philosopher as the true interpreter in Ion and Phaedrus (Francisco Gonzalez); inspiration and Plato’s psychology in Ion, Phaedrus, Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus (Stefan Büttner); theia moira in Ion and Meno, and the poets’ incomplete ascension in Symposium (Dominic Scott); Plato’s use of poetry and poets in Symposium (Elizabeth Bel-fiore); poetry and image-making in Republic and Sophist (Noburu Notomi); and poetry, the tripartition of the soul and the Form of Beauty in Phaedrus (Elizabeth Pender).As Stephen Halliwell put it in his essay, there is the seemingly Platonic attitude “which criticizes, censors and even ‘banishes’ poets, and which speaks in terms of unmasking the false pretensions and the damaging influence of poetry. But there is also the Platonic stance which never ceases to allow the voices of poetry to be heard in Plato’s own writing, which presupposes not only extensive knowledge but also ‘love’ of poetry on the part of Plato’s readers, and which at certain key junctures claims for itself nothing less than the status of a new kind of philosophical poetry and art: the status, indeed, of ‘the greatest music’ [Phaedo 61a; cf. Phaedrus 248d, 259b] and even of ‘the finest and best tragedy’ [Laws 817b]” (241). All the contributors address, in one way or another, the puzzling contrast between these two views on poetry. Halliwell, for instance, claims that Book X of the Republic “offers not a simple repudiation of the best poets but a complicated counterpoint in which resistance and attraction to their work are intertwined, a counterpoint which (among other things) explores the problem of whether, and in what sense, it might be possible to be a ‘philosophical lover’ of poetry” (244). While Most argues that “there is little or no evidence for any consciousness” of a generic opposition between philosophy and poetry tout court before Plato, “this opposition may even be in the process of being constructed” in his Republic (19) (Notomi, too, discusses this topic, and refers to the view according to which the “ancient quarrel” was Plato’s invention). [End Page 291]In reading the nineteen essays of this volume, one realizes that in Plato there is not just one poetics, or two contrasting views on poetry, but—as the editors put it—“several models of what poetry is and what the poets do” (xxii). One would have liked that these several models be explicitly discussed in a concluding chapter. The editors, however, acknowledge that neither they nor their authors aimed at achieving a unified vision of the subject: “While certain recurring themes crystallize themselves with increasing complexity in the course of the various discussions, there remain both contradictions and incompatibilities between results... (shrink)

In this paper we examine the relationship between diligence and ethics and the connection between procrastination and ethical misconduct for lawyers. From there we ask the question of whether legal education does enough to teach law students good habits of time management that might minimize the kind of procrastination that so often goes hand in hand with lawyer malfeasance. Far from concluding that legal education addresses these issues adequately we advance the claim that legal education actually teaches procrastination. Drawing on (...) the work of Neil Fiore and his book: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play we argue that law students are often susceptible to the psychological factors that lead to procrastination: fear of failure, fear of success and resentment of authority. From there we outline aspects of legal education that feed into rather than combating these vulnerabilities. Finally we outline recommendations for how legal education could begin to take more seriously the relationship between time management and legal ethics and to model and inculcate good time management skills. (shrink)

An old and well-known objection to non-classical logics is that they are too weak; in particular, they cannot prove a number of important mathematical results. A promising strategy to deal with this objection consists in proving so-called recapture results. Roughly, these results show that classical logic can be used in mathematics and other unproblematic contexts. However, the strategy faces some potential problems. First, typical recapture results are formulated in a purely logical language, and do not generalize nicely to languages containing (...) the kind of vocabulary that usually motivates non-classical theories—for example, a language containing a naïve truth predicate. Second, proofs of recapture results typically employ classical principles that are not valid in the targeted non-classical system; hence, non-classical theorists do not seem entitled to those results. In this paper, we analyze these problems and provide solutions on behalf of non-classical theorists. To address the first problem, we provide a novel kind of recapture result, which generalizes nicely to a truth-theoretic language. As for the second problem, we argue that it relies on an ambiguity and that, once the ambiguity is removed, there are no reasons to think that non-classical logicians are not entitled to their recapture results. (shrink)