Book Review Reason in the Balance by Sharon Bailin and Mark Battersby Whitby, ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2010. Pp. xiv, 1-349. Softcover ISBN-13: 978-007-007341-8, ISBN-10: 007007341-4 CDN$ 97.95.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology widely used to support human decision-making. Current areas of application include financial services, engineering, and management. A number of attempts to introduce AI decision support systems into areas which more obviously include moral judgement have been made. These include systems that give advice on patient care, on social benefit entitlement, and even ethical advice for medical professionals. Responding to these developments raises a complex set of moral questions. This paper proposes a clearer replacement question (...) to them. The replacement question asks under what circumstances, if any, people would accept a moral judgement made by some sort of machine. Since, it is argued, the answer to this replacement question is positive, urgent practical moral problems are raised. (shrink)

This article enquires into the value of 'concepts' as a framework for the school curriculum by questioning their contribution towards our responsibilities for thinking about the earth. I take Derrida's deconstructive reading of Plato's Timaeus to show how spaces in meaning can be revealed, and more transgressive ways of knowing invited in. Derrida's Kh ra marks the opportunity for something new, productive and unforeseeable to arise as the play of traces unfurls. A deconstructive reading of the geography national curriculum policy (...) exposes the impracticality and impossibility of following the text as a definitive scheme and basis for curriculum planning. The paper ends with a spacing of a real place for the geography curriculum by appropriating four different ways of knowing Whitby, a harbour town in north-east England, outside the conceptual scheme. The paper contrasts an approach that is essentially general, conceptual and at the level of the plan, map or net, with a deconstructive approach that welcomes in other, more ethically responsible and imaginative meanings. (shrink)

In their attempt to develop a nonanthropocentric ethic, many biocentric philosophers have been content to argue for the expansion of the moral community to include natural entities. In doing so, theyhave implicitly accepted the idea that the conceptions of moral duties developed by anthropocentric philosophers to describe the moral relationships that hold between humans can be directly applied to the human/nature relationship. To make this expansion plausible, they have had to argue that natural entities have traits that are similar to (...) the morally relevant traits of human beings. Not only are these arguments often unconvincing, but it seems implausible that thesame moral concepts and principles that govern human relationships also should govern human/nonhuman relationships. Many nonanthropocentric ethics, I argue, are (mistakenly) anthropomorphic.To go beyond this relationship I recommend the development of a nonanthropomorphic biocentric ethic. (edited). (shrink)

This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As...

In this paper, we take moral agency to be that context in which a particular agent can, appropriately, be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. In order to understand moral agency, we will discuss what it would take for an artifact to be a moral agent. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the paper, we take the artifactual question to be a useful way into discussion but ultimately misleading. We set out a number of (...) conceptual pre-conditions for being a moral agent and then outline how one should — and should not — go about attributing moral agency. In place of a litmus test for such an agency — such as Allen et al.'s Moral Turing Test — we suggest some tools from the conceptual spaces theory and the unified conceptual space theory for mapping out the nature and extent of that agency. (shrink)

This paper serves as introduction to a significantly longer paper in progress. It argues that, within the ethics community, the wider philosophical establishment and society in general, people have been far too lax about what to accept as morally “right” behaviour – far too quick to let themselves and, all too often, each other off the hook. By drawing comparisons to artefactual behaviour and the objections people raise to calling that behaviour the morally acceptable behaviour of authentic moral agents, this (...) paper lays out a framework by which human ethics and meta-ethics can more fruitfully be approached. An earlier paper of ours argued that, for an action to be morally right, one must have a convergence of the right motivations, the right means, and the right consequences. The underlying insight is that deontological, virtue-ethics-based, and consequentialist accounts all have their necessary role to play, but each tends to get too focused on itself and its merits to the loss of the bigger picture; while utilitarian accounts, as perhaps the most prominent division within consequentialism, face the further problem of failing to allow for those occasions where the needs of the few, or the one, outweigh the needs of the many, as Ursula K. LeGuin so devastatingly addressed. Although the requirement to align motivations, means, and consequences may seem impossibly onerous, it need not be, provided one is prepared to allow that moral behaviour is far more difficult to achieve, either for artefacts or human beings, than it might seem at first glance. Mistakes will be made. Perhaps it matters more to take responsibility for those mistakes than to assure oneself, despite reasonable argument to the contrary, that one has avoided them. It is time to hold artefactual and natural agent alike to a higher standard. (shrink)

The extent to which Latin was familiar to the inhabitants of late sixth- and early seventh-century Constantinople is a topic of current discussion and interest. While there is little evidence to suggest a significant knowledge of Latin even among the educated in the seventh century, it is clear that in the late sixth century the language was still familiar to a section of the upper classes. Among native easterners, the degree of this familiarity would certainly have varied considerably, from those (...) who could recognise a few words of Latin, through the lawyers, administrators and military men who had a specialised, professional knowledge, to the small proportion who could detect the Virgilian echoes in Corippus' panegyric of Justin II. Whether Paul the Silentiary, epigrammatist and panegyrist of the Emperor Justinian's church of S. Sophia, should be included in the small category who were acquainted with Latin literature is indeed a more far-reaching issue than that of the survival of Latin in the eastern capital, since it is an element in the larger problem of the extent to which late Greek poets knew and imitated the work of their Latin predecessors. The broad generalisations of the past no longer satisfy modern scholarship, which rightly demands rigorous scrutiny of the evidence for each individual author. (shrink)

The ‘turgid archaisms’ of Paul the Silentiary's style have ensured that his two hexameter Ekphrases, describing the Emperor Justinian's sixth-century church of S. Sophia in Constantinople and its ambo, have lately attracted little interest, except among art historians who seek to extract nuggets of architectural information. On the other hand, the eighty or so pagan epigrams by Paul which are preserved in the Palatine and Planudean Anthologies have received attention in recent years both because of their literary interest and for (...) the social and historical information which they contain. In my opinion, the much more substantial Ekphrases likewise deserve to be examined as literary and historical documents. The title Ekphrasis disguises the historical interest of the works: unlike the majority of the epigrams, these poems are no mere literary exercises, but official, public works, undoubtedly commissioned by Justinian, and delivered on specific and identifiable occasions. Only the central portion of the major poem describing S. Sophia comprises technical architectural ekphrasis; this is preceded and followed by panegyrical material appropriate to the occasion of recitation which together takes up almost half the total length of the poem . Here the Emperor Justinian, patron of the church, and Eutychius, Patriarch of Constantinople, are praised, and the events leading up to the occasion of the poem sketched. This topical part of the work provides evidence for the ceremonial which accompanied the poem's recitation and demonstrates the type of imperial propaganda pertinent to the end of the reign of Justinian. Moreover, an explanation for a limited number of stylistic flaws in a work which, by contemporary standards at least, is of high literary quality, may lie in the recognition that Paul was obliged to complete his poem in time for a specific occasion. It is with these three occasional aspects of the work that I shall here be concerned. (shrink)