After three proceedings in which neuroscience was a relevant factor for the final verdict in Italian courts, for the first time a recent case puts in question the legal relevance of neuroscientific evidence. This decision deserves international attention in its underlining that the uncertainty still affecting neuroscientific knowledge can have a significant impact on the law. It urges the consideration of such uncertainty and the development of a shared management of it.

Alongside significant gains in our understanding of the human mind, research in Cognitive Science has produced substantial evidence that the details of cognitive processes vary across cultures, contexts, and individuals. In order to arrive at a more nuanced account of the workings of the human mind, in this letter we argue that one challenge for the future of Cognitive Science is the integration of this evidence of variation with findings which can be generalized.

Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of (...) second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change. (shrink)

There are three elements in this paper. One is what we shall call ‘the Hungarian project’. This is the collected work of Andréka, Madarász, Németi, Székely and others. The second is Molinini’s philosophical work on the nature of mathematical explanations in science. The third is my pluralist approach to mathematics. The theses of this paper are that the Hungarian project gives genuine mathematical explanations for physical phenomena. A pluralist account of mathematical explanation can help us with appreciating the significance of (...) the Hungarian project. The significance consists in the fruitfulness and spread of the project. The spread is wide because the explanations are written in the very familiar language of first-order logic with identity. For this reason, the explanation is understandable to many mathematicians. Because of the methodology adopted in the Hungarian project, the explanations are fruitful in another sense. In the Hungarian project certain questions are asked that would not be asked with a more usual methodology. The Hungarians are distinguished from other scientists in asking logical and mathematical questions, and these both deepen our understanding of the physical theories and induce further spread to mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

Modelling and simulations have gained a leading position in contemporary attempts to describe, explain, and quantitatively predict the human brain's operations. Computer models are highly sophisticated tools developed to achieve an integrated knowledge of the brain with the aim of overcoming the actual fragmentation resulting from different neuroscientific approaches. In this paper we investigate plausibility of simulation technologies for emulation of consciousness and the potential clinical impact of large-scale brain simulation on the assessment and care of disorders of consciousness, e.g. (...) Coma, Vegetative State/Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome, Minimally Conscious State.Notwithstanding their technical limitations, we suggest that simulation technologies may offer new solutions to old practical problems, particularly in clinical contexts. We take DOCs as an illustrative case, arguing that the simulation of neural correlates of consciousness is potentially useful for improving treatments of patients with DOCs. (shrink)

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified (...) substantive views about justice in outcome distributions. (shrink)

Marginal structural models can be used to estimate the causal effect of a potentially time-varying treatment in the presence of time-dependent confounding via weighted regression. The standard approach of using inverse probability of treatment weighting can be sensitive to model misspecification and lead to high-variance estimates due to extreme weights. Various methods have been proposed to partially address this, including covariate balancing propensity score to mitigate treatment model misspecification, and truncation and stabilized-IPTW to temper extreme weights. In this article, we (...) present kernel optimal weighting, a convex-optimization-based approach that finds weights for fitting the MSMs that flexibly balance time-dependent confounders while simultaneously penalizing extreme weights, directly addressing the above limitations. We further extend KOW to control for informative censoring. We evaluate the performance of KOW in a simulation study, comparing it with IPTW, sIPTW, and CBPS. We demonstrate the use of KOW in studying the effect of treatment initiation on time-to-death among people living with human immunodeficiency virus and the effect of negative advertising on elections in the United States. (shrink)

__Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication__ focuses on recent neuroscientific investigations of infant brains and of patients with disorders of consciousness, both of which are at the forefront of contemporary neuroscience. The prospective use of neurotechnology to access mental states in these subjects, including neuroimaging, brain simulation and brain computer interfaces, offers new opportunities for clinicians and researchers, but has also received specific attention from philosophical, scientific, ethical and legal points of view. This book offers the first systematic assessment of these (...) issues, investigating the tools neurotechnology offers to care for verbally non-communicative subjects and suggesting a multidisciplinary approach to the ethical and legal implications of ordinary and experimental practices. The book is divided into three parts: the first and second focus on the scientific and clinical implications of neurological tools for DOC patient and infant care. With reference to these developments, the third and final part presents the case for re-evaluating classical ethical and legal concepts, such as authority, informed consent and privacy. Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive science, medical ethics, medical technology, and the philosophy of the mind. With implications for patient care, it will also be a useful resource for clinicians, medical centres and health practitioners. (shrink)

Νέα ανάγνωση των επιγραφών που αφορούν τις ιερές αγροικίες του Απόλλωνα στη Δήλο και τη Ρήνεια. Α. Το είδος των επιγραφών επιβάλλει περιορισμούς στην ερμηνεία τους : δεν μπορούν να μας πληροφορήσουν ούτε για τη θέση των αγροικιών αλλά ούτε και για τη μορφή τους. Το γεγονός ότι υπάρχουν δεν πρέπει να μας κάνει να υποτιμήσουμε την σπουδαιότητα των ιδιωτικών αγροκτημάτων για τα οποία δεν διαθέτουμε κανένα παρόμοιο αρχείο. Β. Το έδαφος της Δήλου δεν ήταν λιγότερο πλούσιο από αυτό της (...) Ρήνειας και δεν είχε αποκλειστικό προορισμό την κτηνοτροφία : η αποκατάσταση της ID 452, 16-32 σε σχέση με την ID 467 βεβαιώνει την ύπαρξη ενός αμπελώνα στα Επισθένεια. Η έλλειψη μυλώνα στις αγροικίες της Δήλου δεν αποδεικνύει με κανένα τρόπο την απουσία καλλιέργειας δημητριακών αλλά πρέπει να συσχετισθεί με τον αριθμό των ατόμων που ζούσαν στις αγροικίες. Ενα μικρό ομοιογενές σύνολο κιστοφόρων τετραδράχμων της εποχής των Ατταλιδών είχε αποδοθεί, σε ένα πρόσφατα δημοσιευμένο corpus, στις Σάρδεις και τα Σύνναδα. Προσπαθούμε να αποδείξουμε ότι θα έπρεπε να ακολουθήσουμε ένα διαφορετικό συλλογισμό και τα νομίσματα αυτά να αποδοθούν σε τέσσερεις διαφορετικές πόλεις. Οι πόλεις αυτές θα μπορούσαν να είναι η Διονυσούπολις, η Βλαύνδος, η Λυσιάς ή τα Συννάδα και μία τέταρτη της οποίας η ταυτότητα παραμένει αβέβαιη. Βρισκόμαστε στη Φρυγία και προβληματιζόμαστε για τους λόγους ύπαρξης αυτών των σύντομων νομισματοκοπών. (shrink)

This paper supports the personal data platform cooperative as a means of bringing about John Rawls’s favoured institutional realisation of a just society, the property-owning democracy. It describes personal data platform cooperatives and applies Rawls’s political philosophy to analyse the institutional forms of a just society in relation to the economic power deriving from aggregating personal data. It argues that a society involving a significant number of personal data platform cooperatives will be more suitable to realising Rawls’s principle of fair (...) equality of opportunity. (shrink)

The intriguing issue of pain and suffering in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOCs), particularly in Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome/Vegetative State (UWS/VS) and Minimally Conscious State (MCS), is assessed from a theoretical point of view, through an overview of recent neuroscientific literature, in order to sketch an ethical analysis. In conclusion, from a legal and ethical point of view, formal guidelines and a situationist ethics are proposed in order to best manage the critical scientific uncertainty about pain and suffering in DOCs (...) and ensure the best possible care for the patient. (shrink)

Here, we provide an ethical analysis of discrimination in private insurance to guide the application of non-discriminatory algorithms for risk prediction in the insurance context. This addresses the need for ethical guidance of data-science experts, business managers, and regulators, proposing a framework of moral reasoning behind the choice of fairness goals for prediction-based decisions in the insurance domain. The reference to private insurance as a business practice is essential in our approach, because the consequences of discrimination and predictive inaccuracy in (...) underwriting are different from those of using predictive algorithms in other sectors. Here we focus on the trade-off in the extent to which one can pursue indirect non-discrimination versus predictive accuracy. The moral assessment of this trade-off is related to the context of application—to the consequences of inaccurate risk predictions in the insurance domain. (shrink)

The 20th century produced overwhelming advances in biomedicine with the 1990s introducing 148,000 patents as part of the mapping and sequencing of the human genome. Bioethical realities and debates of prenatal genetic testing, new reproductive technologies, stem cell research, human cloning and DNA data banks have obscured the less provocative public and social issues of gun control, immunization, employee leave programs to assist care for dying relatives, emergency room use as primary care sites by the uninsured, and medical care provision (...) to the homeless. With the events of September 11, the focus has shifted to bioterrorism: an international and global concern that portends broad environmental consequences while requiring a local, community response of which the business enterprise is a part. The tension that results from a required local and global response to bioterrorism and biotechnology by the business community forms a dialectic and provides a venue for addressing business ethics in an international forum. This paper explores the relationship of events and its meaning for business. Part I provides the background of biotechnology and bioterrorism and how the two form a dialectic reality that shapes ethical debate. Part II presents provocations and questions for an emerging ethic based on the integrative response from the public health, medical, business and religious communities. Four areas for business contribution in shaping emerging ethics in the age of biotechnology—bioterrorism are suggested. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 937-955, September 2022. Reasonableness is a complex notion recently developed by legal and political theorists. John Rawls’s famous proposal of ‘reasonableness as reciprocity’ requires careful testing in the light of several criteria arising from legal doctrine and adjudication. I enquire into this variety of concepts in search of a common thread that makes sense of the use of the same concept in diverse contexts. I assume the normative thrust of reasonableness as (...) an institutional and an individual virtue the basic core of which derives from Aristotelian phronesis. However, this double aspect of reasonableness betrays its major complexity that I try to shape through the help of two categories: subjective agency and objective context. The upshot of my enquiry will be that of showing that we can use another model, alternative to Rawls’s and better able to make sense of the variety of legal and ethical uses: Von Wright’s reasonableness as ‘the right way of living’. (shrink)

Clients may feel trapped into sharing their private digital data with insurance companies to get a desired insurance product or premium. However, private insurance must collect some data to offer products and premiums appropriate to the client’s level of risk. This situation creates tension between the value of privacy and common insurance business practice. We argue for three main claims: first, coercion to share private data with insurers is pro tanto wrong because it violates the autonomous choice of a privacy-valuing (...) client. Second, we maintain that irrespective of being coerced, the choice of accepting digital surveillance by insurers makes it harder for the client to protect his or her autonomy. The violation of autonomy also makes coercing customers into digital surveillance pro tanto morally wrong. Third, having identified an economically plausible process involving no direct coercion by insurers, leading to the adoption of digital surveillance, we argue that such an outcome generates further threats against autonomy. This threat provides individuals with a pro tanto reason to prevent this process. We highlight the freedom dilemma faced by regulators who aim to prevent this outcome by constraining market freedoms and argue for the need for further moral and empirical research on this question. (shrink)

In 2003, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Regina McKnight, an African American woman who was convicted at the age of twenty‐two for committing “homicide by child abuse.” She became the first woman in the United States to be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for experiencing a stillbirth. Rather than an outlier case in the annals of American jurisprudence that stretched law beyond reason while restraining compassion and justice, McKnight's conviction inspired similar prosecutions of other poor black women (...) and then of other women. More than one‐third of states consider pregnant women's illicit drug use a form of child abuse, resulting in unprecedented forms of criminal and civil punishment. Laws previously understood to protect pregnant women from domestic violence during pregnancy, such as fetal protection laws, now serve as the vehicles for prosecuting pregnant women. What these prosecutions and laws expose are the multitudinous ways in which the criminalization of poor pregnant women—and normalization of that criminalization, such that even doctors and nurses are expected to participate in it—serve to humiliate women, interfere with their reproductive health, and ultimately rob women of reproductive autonomy. (shrink)

Trust and monitoring are traditionally antithetical concepts. Describing trust as a property of a relationship of reliance, we introduce a theory of trust and monitoring, which uses mathematical models based on two classes of functions, including _q_-exponentials, and relates the levels of trust to the costs of monitoring. As opposed to several accounts of trust that attempt to identify the special ingredient of reliance and trust relationships, our theory characterizes trust as a quantitative property of certain relations of reliance that (...) can be quantified and expressed as a scalar quantity. Our theory is applicable to both human–human and human–artificial agent interactions, as it is agnostic with respect to the concrete realization of trustworthiness properties, and is compatible with many views differing on which properties contribute to trust and trustworthiness. Finally, as our mathematical models make the quantitative features of trust measurable, they provide empirical studies on trust with a rigorous methodology for its measurement. (shrink)

In the literature, there have been several methods and definitions for working out whether two theories are “equivalent” or not. In this article, we do something subtler. We provide a means to measure distances between formal theories. We introduce two natural notions for such distances. The first one is that of axiomatic distance, but we argue that it might be of limited interest. The more interesting and widely applicable notion is that of conceptual distance which measures the minimum number of (...) concepts that distinguish two theories. For instance, we use conceptual distance to show that relativistic and classical kinematics are distinguished by one concept only. (shrink)

Ethical reflection on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a priority. In this article, we propose a methodological model for a comprehensive ethical analysis of some uses of AI, notably as a replacement of human actors in specific activities. We emphasize the need for conceptual clarification of relevant key terms (e.g., intelligence) in order to undertake such reflection. Against that background, we distinguish two levels of ethical analysis, one practical and one theoretical. Focusing on the state of AI at present, we (...) suggest that regardless of the presence of intelligence, the lack of morally relevant features calls for caution when considering the role of AI in some specific human activities. (shrink)

:In this article, we begin by identifying three main neuroethical approaches: neurobioethics, empirical neuroethics, and conceptual neuroethics. Our focus is on conceptual approaches that generally emphasize the need to develop and use a methodological modus operandi for effectively linking scientific and philosophical interpretations. We explain and assess the value of conceptual neuroethics approaches and explain and defend one such approach that we propose as being particularly fruitful for addressing the various issues raised by neuroscience: fundamental neuroethics.

Are we really free? Can we be? To find out, the author guides us in a philosophical dialogue between different scientific disciplines, from psychology to biology, passing through neuroscience, through countless curiosities and curious anecdotes, from racist plants to pig trials. The result is a popular essay that intrigues, but also a concrete example of how philosophical practice can really improve everyday life.

This paper proposes a new conjecture for Solon fr. 12 G.-P.2. In this, as in other poems, Solon shows a clear desire to present himself as an expert in the political milieu and to serve as a guide for the community of Athens. The politician’s penetrating gaze, his far-sighted νόος, is able to grasp in nuce the development of political dynamics which, if they prevail, could mean the ruin of the city as a whole. Solon frames his νόος as an (...) indispensable tool for the analysis of the city and its optimal and timely planning. To a secular conception of the νόος, which is the essential characteristic of the excellent politician, is added a traditional one that considers the νόος as a gift of Apollo. In this way, Solon appears as a politically engaged poet of the πόλις who mediates between the fighting factions and tries to work for the good of the community. (shrink)

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl argues that “sign” is an ambiguous word because it refers to two essentially different signitive functions: indication and expression. Indications work in an evidential way, providing information through a direct association of the sign and the presence of an object or state of affairs. Expressions work in a non-evidential way, pointing to possible experiences and displaying that the speaker or someone else has had such experience. In this paper I show that Husserl went back to (...) the distinction between indications and expressions in a much later text, a manuscript from 1931, in order to distinguish between two kinds of communication with different essential features. I call these indicative and expressive communication. My claim is that Husserl’s distinction between these two types of communication is a crucial contribution to the phenomenology of knowledge sharing. In knowledge sharing, we appropriate someone else’s knowledge as someone else’s knowledge. Husserl shows that only expressive communication, and not indicative communication, makes this appropriation possible. Since Husserl argues that only humans use expressive communication, his analysis of indicative and expressive communication is also a contribution to understanding the uniquely human capacity for accumulating knowledge. (shrink)

This special issue of the Journal Law, Medicine & Ethics takes up the concern of informed consent, particularly in times of controversy. The dominant moral dilemmas that frame traditional bioethical concerns address medical experimentation on vulnerable subjects; physicians assisting their patients in suicide or euthanasia; scarce resource allocation and medical futility; human trials to develop drugs; organ and tissue donation; cloning; xenotransplantation; abortion; human enhancement; mandatory vaccination; and much more. The term “bioethics” provides a lens, language, and guideposts to the (...) study of medical ethics. It is worth noting, however, that medical experimentation is neither new nor exclusive to one country. Authors in this issue address thorny subjects that span borders and patients: from matters dealing with children and vaccination to the language and perception of consent. (shrink)

This book explores the problem of realism, both metaphysical and scientific. Renowned specialists in the field - including Michael Devitt, David Papineau, Mark Sainsbury and Wesley Salmon - contribute new essays that shed new light on the main topics in the current realism/antirealism debate. Discussing a wide range of issues related to realism, both in metaphysics and in the philosophy of science, they address more specific questions including those concerning metaphysical realism, scientific realism, the relations between epistemology and ontology, causation, (...) dispositions and personal identity, and the relations between science and common sense. Presenting a comprehensive overview of the problem of realism, as well as in-depth discussion of particular topics, this book offers valuable insights for both students and researchers in the field. It can also be used in undergraduate and graduate courses of philosophy. (shrink)

En 1989, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham exprimait ainsi ses regrets : « Aujourd'hui encore, la voix de la femme noire est largement passée sous silence... L'histoire africaine-américaine n'a pas su aborder suffisamment la question du genre, de même que l'histoire des femmes a échoué à aborder la question raciale ». D'après elle, l'histoire des femmes africaines-américaines n'était ni un domaine marginal ni un sous-thème pittoresque. Elle soutenait au contraire que le fait d'inclure les femmes noi...

The aim of this paper is to provide an account of how hunger motivates us to seek food and eat. It seems that the way that it feels to be hungry must play some role in it fulfilling this function. We propose that hunger is best viewed as a complex state involving both affective and somatic constituents, as well as, crucially, changes in the way in which the hungry agent’s attention is deployed. We argue that in order to capture the (...) distinctive way in which hunger motivates we need to articulate the relations amongst such components. The resulting account explains how hunger as an aversive affective reaction to a state of need motivates us specifically to eat and not to just to rid ourselves of the unpleasant sensations associated to it. We suggest, however, that there is more than this to the overall affective experience of the hungry agent, because hunger ordinarily facilitates the elicitation of other, positive affective reactions such as interest and appetite, and recruits them to further its function. (shrink)

I discuss Steinhart’s argument against Benacerraf’s famous multiple-reductions argument to the effect that numbers cannot be sets. Steinhart offers a mathematical argument according to which there is only one series of sets to which the natural numbers can be reduced, and thus attacks Benacerraf’s assumption that there are multiple reductions of numbers to sets. I will argue that Steinhart’s argument is problematic and should not be accepted.