PurposeSocial media has increased as a marketing channel, and Facebook is the biggest social media company globally. Facebook contains both positive and negative information about companies; therefore, it is important for companies to manage their Facebook page to best serve their own interests. Although most users are familiar with business and marketing activities on Facebook, they use it primarily for fun and personal purposes. The most effective methods for companies to use Facebook have not been clear. The personal nature of (...) Facebook presents unique challenges for companies by raising ethical and social responsibility issues that are important to users. The purpose of this paper is to discover how companies can optimize their use of Facebook as a marketing channel.Design/methodology/approachA survey was conducted. The respondents were 158 users of Facebook in Sweden; complete answers were provided by all respondents. In a series of specific questions and comments, the respondents were asked to describe an optimal marketing solution on Facebook for companies. They rated different functions, which were illustrated with pictures, to help in the cognitive process and to avoid misunderstandings.FindingsMost users who have an opinion on the issue accept marketing on Facebook, but only in the right amount. There are basically two groups: those who think that companies have no place on Facebook and those who want companies to be active on Facebook. The latter group emphasizes the importance of meaningful posts without unsolicited sales messages, and would prefer to search for the companies themselves rather than being bombarded by company messages. By far, status updates and pictures/images were found to be the most important functions to respondents.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample consisted of only Swedish users. Another limitation was that, since many Facebook users do not normally think about the implications of being exposed to marketing on Facebook, they have difficulty taking a position on many issues related to the service.Practical implicationsThe results give companies a clear idea of how to effectively use Facebook in their marketing efforts.Originality/valueA large number of companies are currently asking themselves, “How can we use Facebook in an optimal way?” The results in this study answer this question and lead directly to saving time and resources for these companies. (shrink)

It is almost universally acknowledged that risks have to be weighed against benefits, but there are different ways to perform the weighing. In conventional risk analysis, collectivist risk-weighing is the standard. This means that an option is accepted if the sum of all individual benefits outweighs the sum of all individual risks. In practices originating in clinical medicine, such as ethical appraisals of clinical trials, individualist risk-weighing is the standard. This implies a much stricter criterion for risk acceptance, namely that (...) the risk to which each individual is exposed should be outweighed by benefits for that same individual. The different choices of risk-weighing methods in different policy areas seem to have emerged from traditional thought patterns and social relations, rather than from explicit deliberations on possible justifications for the alternative ways to weigh risks against benefits. It is not obvious how the prevalent differences in risk-weighing practices can be reconstructed in terms of consistent underlying principles of preventive health or social priority-setting. (shrink)

Disposition ascription has been discussed a good deal over the last few decades, as has the revisionary metaphysical view of ordinary, persisting objects known as 'fourdimensionalism'. However, philosophers have not merged these topics and asked whether four-dimensional objects can be proper subjects of dispositional predicates. This paper seeks to remedy this oversight. It argues that, by and large, four-dimensional objects are not suited to take dispositional predicates.

In the first part of this paper, I clear the ground from frequent misconceptions of the relationship between fact and value by examining some uses of the adjective “natural” in ethical controversies. Such uses bear evidence to our “natural” tendency to regard nature as the source of ethical norms. I then try to account for the origins of this tendency by offering three related explanations, the most important of which is evolutionistic: if any behaviour that favours our equilibrium with the (...) environment is potentially adaptive, nothing can be more effective for this goal than developing an attitude toward the natural world that considers it as a dispenser of sacred norms that must be invariably respected. By referring to the Aristotelian notion of human flourishing illustrated in the first part of the paper, in the second I discuss as a case study some ethical problems raised by mini-chips implantable in our bodies. I conclude by defending their potential beneficial effects of such new technological instruments. (shrink)

While in vitro animal meat is not yet commercially available, the public has already begun to form opinions of IVM as a result of news stories and events drawing attention to its development. As such, we can discern public perceptions of the ethics of IVM before its commercial release. This affords advocates of environmentally sustainable, healthy, and just diets with a unique opportunity to reflect on the social desirability of the development of IVM. This work draws upon an analysis of (...) ethical perceptions of IVM in 814 US news blog comments related to the August 2013 tasting of the world’s first IVM hamburger. Specifically, I address three primary questions: How does the public perceive the ethics of IVM development? How acceptable is IVM to the public relative to alternative approaches to reducing animal meat consumption? and What should all of this mean for the ongoing development and promotion of IVM? Ultimately, it is argued that there is a strong need for facilitation of public dialogue around IVM, as well as further research comparing the acceptability of IVM to other alternatives. (shrink)

In the most common approaches to belief dynamics, states of belief are represented by sets that are closed under logical consequence. In an alternative approach, they are represented by non-closed belief bases. This representation has attractive properties not shared by closed representations. Most importantly, it can account for repeated belief changes that have not yet been satisfactorily accounted for in the closed approach.

One important distinction in psychology is between inferences based on associative memory and inferences based on analysis and rules. Much previous empirical work conceive of associative and analytical processes as two exclusive ways of addressing a judgment task, where only one process is selected and engaged at a time, in an either-or fashion. However, related work indicate that the processes are better understood as being in interplay and simultaneously engaged. Based on computational modeling and brain imaging of spontaneously adopted judgment (...) strategies together with analyses of brain activity elicited in tasks where participants were explicitly instructed to perform similarity-based associative judgments or rule-based judgments ( n = 74), we identified brain regions related to the two types of processes. We observed considerable overlap in activity patterns. The precuneus was activated for both types of judgments, and its activity predicted how well a similarity-based model fit the judgments. Activity in the superior frontal gyrus predicted the fit of a rule-based judgment model. The results suggest the precuneus as a key node for similarity-based judgments, engaged both when overt responses are guided by similarity-based and rule-based processes. These results are interpreted such that similarity-based processes are engaged in parallel to rule-based-processes, a finding with direct implications for cognitive theories of judgment. (shrink)

This article explores communicative aspects of preparing others, by studying prenatal education classes in which midwives prepare expectant parents for delivery. Data include documentation from classes and interviews with the presenters. This twofold dataset enables investigation into how ideologies of communication figure into the production of discourse. A dominant idea is that discourse can stand in for lived experience in the endeavor to decrease nervousness and fear in the expectant parents. The observation data are therefore analyzed by paying attention to (...) how the expectant parents’ future deliveries are discursively represented. Drawing on the conceptual framework for analyzing anticipatory discourse, the study shows how the midwives largely frame this future as predictable and the mother as highly agentive. When addressing unexpected turbulence, however, the midwives use the opportunity to stress the agency of medical professionals to maintain a representation of the delivery event as generally predictable. (shrink)

Implant ethics is defined here as the study of ethical aspects of the lasting introduction of technological devices into the human body. Whereas technological implants relieve us of some of the ethical problems connected with transplantation, other difficulties arise that are in need of careful analysis. A systematic approach to implant ethics is proposed. The major specific problems are identified as those concerning end of life issues (turning off devices), enhancement of human capabilities beyond normal levels, mental changes and personal (...) identity, and cultural effects. (shrink)

Due to modern biochemistry and, in particular, recent developments in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics, human samples have become the most important raw materials for advancement in the health sciences. Such material has been at the center of fundamental biomedical research for a long time. What is new is its increased usefulness in research with direct clinical relevance, such as the development of drugs. Because of the larger commercial involvement in such research, this has also led to greater economic interests in (...) human biological material and in the information that can be extracted from it. (shrink)

Sweden is probably one of the most secularized nations in the world. Therefore religious arguments tend to play a smaller role in the public bioethical debate than in most other countries. Issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, and therapeutic cloning have been far less controversial in Sweden than elsewhere. Instead, other issues have dominated recent bioethical debates in Sweden, in particular those concerning privacy and the control over biological information about individuals.

The empirical basis for this article is threeyears of experience with ethical rounds atUppsala University Hospital. Three standardapproaches of ethical reasoning are examined aspotential explanations of what actually occursduring the ethical rounds. For reasons given,these are not found to be satisfyingexplanations. An approach called ``imaginativeethics'', is suggested as a more satisfactoryaccount of this kind of ethical reasoning. Theparticipants in the ethical rounds seem to drawon a kind of moral competence based on personallife experience and professional competence andexperience. By listening to (...) other perspectivesand other experiences related to one particularpatient story, the participants imaginealternative horizons of moral experience andexplore a multitude of values related toclinical practice that might be at stake. Inhis systematic treatment of aesthetics in theCritique of Judgement, Kant made use ofan operation of thought that, if applied toethics, will enable us to be more sensitive tothe particulars of each moral situation. Basedon this reading of Kant, an account ofimaginative ethics is developed in order tobring the ethical praxis of doctors and nursesinto sharper relief. The Hebraic and theHellenic traditions of imagination are used inorder to illuminate some of the experiences ofethical rounds. In conclusion, it is arguedthat imaginative ethics and principle-basedethics should be seen as complementary in orderto endow a moral discourse with ethicalauthority. Kantian ethics will do the job if itis remembered that Kant suggested only amodest, negative role of principle-baseddeliberation. (shrink)

This paper investigates some implications of moral development theory for teaching ethics. A summary of moral development theory, focusing on the work of James Rest, provides the basis for our investigation. We conclude that students in a philosophical ethics course experience greater gains in moral reasoning than a control group. However, the large range of students’ moral development results in discrepancies between their developmental level and the more sophisticated level of reasoning around which philosophy curricula are designed. We explore the (...) implications of this for teaching philosophical ethics and discuss teaching strategies that facilitate growth in moral reasoning. (shrink)

Clear-cut cases of decision-making under risk (known probabilities) are unusual in real life. The gambler’s decisions at the roulette table are as close as we can get to this type of decision-making. In contrast, decision-making under uncertainty (unknown probabilities) can be exemplified by a decision whether to enter a jungle that may contain unknown dangers. Life is usually more like an expedition into an unknown jungle than a visit to the casino. Nevertheless, it is common in decision-supporting disciplines to proceed (...) as if reasonably reliable probability estimates were available for all possible outcomes, i.e. as if the prevailing epistemic conditions were analogous to those of gambling at the roulette table. This mistake can be called the tuxedo fallacy. It is argued that traditional engineering practices such as safety factors and multiple safety barriers avoid this fallacy and that they therefore manage uncertainty better than probabilistic risk analysis (PRA). PRA is a useful tool, but it must be supplemented with other methods in order not to limit the analysis to dangers that can be assigned meaningful probability estimates. (shrink)

When is it morally acceptable to expose others to risk? Most moral philosophers have had very little to say in answer to that question, but here is a moral philosopher who puts it at the centre of his investigations.

By replacement is meant an operation that replaces one sentence by another in a belief set. Replacement can be used as a kind of Sheffer stroke for belief change, since contraction, revision, and expansion can all be defined in terms of it. Replacement can also be defined either in terms of contraction or in terms of revision. Close connections are shown to hold between axioms for replacement and axioms for contraction and revision. Partial meet replacement is axiomatically characterized. It is (...) shown that this operation can have outcomes that are not obtainable through either partial meet contraction or partial meet revision. (shrink)

Different similarity relations on sets are introduced, and their logical properties are investigated. Close relationships are shown to hold between similarity relations that are based on symmetrical difference and operators of belief contraction that are based on relational selection functions. Two new rationality criteria for minimal belief contraction, the maximizing property and the reducing property, are proposed.

The aim of this article is to enrich the care ethics framework by uncovering the relationship between care and loyalty, offering insights into the complexities of children’s experiences of care in school. Through twelve interviews with pupils in sixth grade, I analyse the intersection of loyalty and care. The findings reveal two dimensions, conceptualized as internal care loyalty and external care loyalty. Internal care loyalty involves the relationship between the one-caring and the cared-for, shaping the (1) motivation, (2) understanding, and (...) (3) reciprocity of care. External care loyalty extends beyond this relationship, encompassing (1) social inclusion and (2) conflict support. Employing a perspective grounded in care ethics, deepens the understanding of the interconnection between care and loyalty among peers and actualize the question of partiality in an educational context. This article blends feminist philosophical theory with qualitative empiricism, shedding light on the complexity and nuances of caring in peer-relations. (shrink)

Formal representations of values and norms are employed in several academic disciplines and specialties, such as economics, jurisprudence, decision theory and social choice theory. Sven Ove Hansson closely examines such foundational issues as the values of wholes and the values of their parts, the connections between values and norms, how values can be decision-guiding and the structure of normative codes with formal precision. Models of change in both preferences and norms are offered, as well as a method to base (...) the logic of norms on that of preferences. Hansson has developed a unified formal representation of values and norms that reflects both their static and their dynamic properties. This formalized treatment, carried out in terms of both informal value theory and precise logical detail, will contribute to the clarification of certain issues in the basic philosophical theory of values and norms. (shrink)

Contrary to the received view, decision theory is not primarily devoted to instrumental (ends-to-means) reasoning. Instead, its major preoccupation is the derivation of ends from other ends. Given preferences over basic alternatives, it constructs preferences over alternatives that have been modified through the addition of value object modifiers (modes) that specify probability, uncertainty, distance in time etc. A typology of the decision-theoretical modes is offered. The modes do not have (even extrinsic) value, but they transform the value of objects to (...) which they are applied. A rational agent's total set of preferences should be coherent, but from this it does not follow that her preferences over mode-containing objects have to be derivable from her preferences over mode-free objects. (shrink)

The prescriptive has both an objective and a subjective interpretation. In the objective sense, what one ought to do depends on what is actually true. In the subjective sense it depends on what one believes to be true. Ordinary usage seems to vacillate between these two interpretations. An example (the indecisive terrorist) is used to show that a subjective ought statement can have a determinate truth-value in situations where the corresponding objective ought statement has no truth-value, not even an unknowable (...) one. Therefore the subjective ought is not definable in terms of the objective ought. However, definability in the other direction is not excluded by this argument. (shrink)

SUGGESTED COURSES Introductory level A (Requires very little background in logic .): 4: -9 - - -7 -2 Introductory level B: -9,:+-+ -,2:+,2: -,3:20+-22+ -7 -2 ...

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 1, Page 3-7, February 2022.

In this paper, I wish to argue that an explanation is not a logical structure¸ that it cannot be characterised in syntactic terms, but that it is rather an epistemological structure, and, more specifically, a structure organising conceptual content. I will start from a trivial example and systematically look at the effects of making premises more general or more specific or of reshuffling the same content into another set of premises, thereby exposing the implicit suppositions and consequences of some commonly (...) held views and showing their untenability. (shrink)

Healthcare depends increasingly on advanced medical technology. In addition, other forms of technology contribute to determine how our lives are influenced by disease and disability. The extent to which persons with impaired bodily functions are forced to live their lives differently than other people depends to a large part on a variety of technologies, from wheelchairs to computer interfaces, from hearing aids to garage doors. This wide-ranging influence of technology has important ethical aspects, but has seldom been discussed in bioethics, (...) the ethics of technology, or other branches of applied ethics. (shrink)

The introduction of self-driving vehicles gives rise to a large number of ethical issues that go beyond the common, extremely narrow, focus on improbable dilemma-like scenarios. This article provides a broad overview of realistic ethical issues related to self-driving vehicles. Some of the major topics covered are as follows: Strong opinions for and against driverless cars may give rise to severe social and political conflicts. A low tolerance for accidents caused by driverless vehicles may delay the introduction of driverless systems (...) that would substantially reduce the risks. Trade-offs will arise between safety and other requirement on the road traffic system. Over-reliance on the swift collision-avoiding reactions of self-driving vehicles can induce people to take dangerous actions, such as stepping out in front of a car, relying on its fast braking. Children travelling alone can violate safety instructions such as the use of seatbelts. Digital information about routes and destinations can be used to convey commercial and political messages to car users. If fast passage can be bought, then socio-economic segregation of road traffic may result. Terrorists and other criminals can hack into a vehicle and make it crash. They can also use self-driving vehicles for instance to carry bombs to their designed places of detonation or to wreak havoc on a country’s road system. (shrink)

Analytical tools that give precision to the concept of "independence of syntax" are developed in the form of a series of substitutivity principles. These principles are applied in a study of the rôle of language in belief revision theory. It is shown that sets of sentences can be used in models of belief revision to convey more information than what is conveyed by the combined propositional contents of the respective sets. It is argued that it would be unwise to programmatically (...) restrain the use of sets of sentences to that of representing propositional contents. Instead, the expressive power of language should be used as fully as possible. Therefore, syntax-independence should not be seen as a criterion of adequacy for language-based models of information-processing, but rather as a property that emerges from some but not all the idealization processes through which such models are constructed. (shrink)

Should Probabilistic Design Replace Safety Factors? Content Type Journal Article Pages 151-168 DOI 10.1007/s13347-010-0003-6 Authors Neelke Doorn, Department of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, PO Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Sven Ove Hansson, Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Teknikringen 78 B, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 2.

Saying so can make it so, J. L. Austin taught us long ago. Famously, John Searle has developed this Austinian insight in an account of the construction of institutional reality. Searle maintains that so-called Status Function Declarations, allegedly having a “double direction of fit”, synchronically create worldly institutional facts, corresponding to the propositional content of the declarations. I argue that Searle’s account of the making of institutional reality is in tension with the special theory of relativity—irrespective of whether the account (...) is interpreted as involving causal generation or non-causal grounding of worldly institutional facts—and should be replaced by a more modest theory which interprets the results of Status Function Declarations in terms of mere Cambridge change and institutional truth. I end the paper by indicating the import of this more modest theory for theorizing about the causal potency of institutional phenomena generated by declarations. (shrink)

A model of coherentist belief contraction is constructed. The outcome of belief contraction is required to be one of the coherent subsets of the original belief set, and a set of plausible properties is proposed for this set of coherent subsets. The contraction operators obtained in this way are shown to coincide with well-known belief base operations. This connection between coherentist and foundationalist approaches to belief change has important implications for the philosophical interpretation of models of belief change.

Biological conservation practices and approaches take many forms. Conservation projects do not only differ in their aims and methods, but also concerning their conceptual and normative background assumptions and their underlying motivations and objectives. We draw on philosophical distinctions from the ethics of conservation to explain variances of different positions on conservation projects along six dimensions: (1) conservation ideals, (2) intervention intuitions, (3) the moral considerability of nonhuman beings, (4) environmental values, (5) views on nature and (6) human roles in (...) nature. The result is a map of the moral landscape of biological conservation, on which these six dimensions are layered. This map functions as a heuristic tool to understand conceptual and normative foundations of specific conservation projects, which we will illustrate with four paradigmatic examples: the Pisavaara Strict Nature Reserve, Predator Free New Zealand, the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve and the Great Green Wall Project. With this map as a heuristic tool, we aim to conceptually illuminate disagreement and clarify misunderstandings between representatives of different environmental protection strategies and to show that the same project can be supported (or criticised) on different grounds. (shrink)

Den moralfilosofiska traditionen har sina begränsningar. De frågor som stått i centrum för den moralfilosofiska diskussionen har ofta varit helt andra än de som människor i det praktiska livet har uppfattat som centrala moraliska problem. En viktig begränsning är att moralfilosofin, liksom beslutsteorin, nästan uteslutande har handlat om hur man hanterar välavgränsade problem där handlingsalternativen är givna. I det verkliga livet löser vi ofta moraliska problem genom att finna på nya handlingsalternativ, som inte fanns med från början.1 En annan begränsning (...) är att moralfilosofin till allra största delen har handlat om situationer där konsekvensen av de olika handlingsalternativen är välkänd. I det praktiska livet är det annorlunda. Vi vet sällan med säkerhet vad som kommer att bli följden av de olika alternativ som vi väljer mellan. Man kan också uttrycka detta så att moralfilosofin i huvudsak rör sig i en tänkt deterministisk värld, där man inte behöver räkna med någon slump. Detta är aningen märkligt mot bakgrund av det oerhörda genomslag som sannolikhetstänkande och på senare år även kaos har fått inom andra vetenskapsområden. Det finns naturligtvis förklaringar till detta moralfilosofins kvardröjande i en äldre världsbild. Redan i det deterministiska fallet uppstår svårhanterliga problem som man gärna ger sin odelade uppmärksamhet. Dessutom finns det en särskild disciplin, beslutsteorin, som behandlar beslut under risk och osäkerhet. Man har i allmänhet tänkt sig ett slags arbetsfördelning, där problemen med risk och osäkerhet utelämnas i moralfilosofin för att i stället hanteras inom beslutsteorin med rena rationalitetsprinciper (dvs. utan att moraliska principer är inblandade). Enligt min mening är denna arbetsfördelning inte hållbar. Betrakta t ex osäkerheten om hur klimatet kommer att förändras med nuvarande utsläppstrender för växthusgaser. Denna osäkerhet ger upphov inte enbart till ett problem om rationellt beslutsfattande utan också till moraliska problem.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In his paper ?On Having Bad Contractions, Or: No Room for Recovery? [Te97], N. Tennant attacks the AGM research program of belief revision. We show that he misrepresents the state of affairs in this field of research.