Transformations in the biological, medical and legal processes of infertility, substantial modifications in family structure and the advancement of methods and techniques of reproductive technology will affect the next step in both legal and medical terms to address the regulation of bioethics and law in Kosovo. There is a need to establish perspectives in both ethical and professional terms, since the Republic of Kosovo is in the process of drafting a Civil Code. Many of these issues have been raised and (...) addressed during the review and evaluation of family law in the context of harmonisation and inclusion of this law in the Civil Code of the Republic of Kosovo. During the several meetings of official members with different interest groups regarding family law, the need has been raised to regulate family law to be included in the Civil Code for motherhood and fatherhood in the case of reproduction with biomedical assistance, as well as for the birth contract as a donation for another person (so-called surrogate motherhood). These bioethical and legal issues indicate the urgent need for legal harmonisation of a multidimensional platform specifically based on the principles of public health and universal human rights Conclusion. These bio-ethical and legal interferences indicate the urgent need for legal harmonization of a multidimensional platform specifically designed based on the principles of public health and universal human rights. (shrink)

In this article, we critically scrutinize the principle of proportionality when used in the context of security and government surveillance. We argue that McMahan’s distinction from just warfare between narrow proportionality and wide proportionality can generally apply to the context of surveillance. We argue that narrow proportionality applies more or less directly to cases in which the surveilled is liable and that the wide proportionality principle applies to cases characterized by ‘collateral intrusion’. We argue, however, that a more demanding criterion (...) than the lesser-evil justification that wide proportionality frequently entails is necessary in cases characterized by intentional intrusion upon non-liable individuals. The distinction between foreseeing and intending intrusion into the lives of individuals who are not liable has not previously been specifically addressed in discussions concerning surveillance ethics. This specification is thus increasingly important due to the general growing tendency for adherence to the precautionary principle and policies aimed at anticipating criminal acts before they are committed. Preventive surveillance of non-liable actors is considered an important instrument for obtaining this aim and thus calls for moral scrutiny in terms of permissibility and proportionality. We suggest the concept ‘wide proportionality +’ which applies to cases of intentional intrusion of non-liable individuals. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

Cost conversations are essential to informed consent because patients have a right to information that they think is relevant, and patients overwhelmingly report that cost information is relevant to their medical decisions. Providers have an ethical responsibility to provide necessary information for informed consent, and therefore must discuss costs. The Shared Decision Making model is ideal for enabling this exchange of information, and decision aids are also helpful. Although barriers exist, many useful tools can help providers fulfill this obligation, and (...) encouraging progress is being made to improve cost transparency from insurers and facilities. (shrink)

Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social–technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of Wikipedia is deeply intertwined with various data-driven algorithmic systems, which Wikipedians rely on to help manage (...) and govern the “anyone can edit” encyclopedia at a massive scale. These bots, scripts, tools, plugins, and dashboards make Wikipedia more efficient for those who know how to work with them, but like all organizational culture, newcomers must learn them if they want to fully participate. I illustrate how cultural and organizational expertise is enacted around algorithmic agents by discussing two autoethnographic vignettes, which relate my personal experience as a veteran in Wikipedia. I present thick descriptions of how governance and gatekeeping practices are articulated through and in alignment with these automated infrastructures. Over the past 15 years, Wikipedian veterans and administrators have made specific decisions to support administrative and editorial workflows with automation in particular ways and not others. I use these cases of Wikipedia’s bot-supported bureaucracy to discuss several issues in the fields of critical algorithms studies; critical data studies; and fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning—most principally arguing that scholarship and practice must go beyond trying to “open up the black box” of such systems and also examine sociocultural processes like newcomer socialization. (shrink)

The dominance of capitalism, through the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, is maintained as an illusion through the use of four main strategies. In order to obtain the consent of the population, mass schooling tends to produce graduates who accept this illusion because they are vulnerable to these strategies and cannot imagine a post-capitalist world. However, through education, people can better appreciate the problematic reality of unbridled capitalism, such as the degradation of the global ecosystem. It is argued here that programs (...) which are designed to address these problems, such as Education for Sustainable Development, are dependent upon citizens developing a critical consciousness. This consciousness is firstly able to confront the four strategies maintaining capitalism’s dominance. It is argued that an education which engages with spiritual ideals and values regarding how a good life is understood in an aspirational sense, enables people to engage with the dominance of capitalism and to envision other possibilities for society in which capitalism is harnessed to serve the greater public good. This requires education’s ontology – as the character of students – to critically read the world, imagine possibilities which can constitute a good life, and are courageous to enact the social actions required to make these ideals a reality. This is made possible by an education which returns to the spiritual roots of ideals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Scottish judge and ‘eccentric’ philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) significance within Enlightenment thought is usually seen as stemming from his Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., 1773–1792). The OPL was a major contribution to the Enlightenment’s debate over the philosophy of language, and established Monboddo’s reputation as an innovative and influential, yet controversial and credulous proto-anthropologist. In the following I explore Monboddo’s Egyptomania and the role it plays in his account of the origins and development of (...) religion within his larger ‘History of Man’. Monboddo’s idiosyncratic and untimely fusion of conjectural history, Buffon-inspired natural history, Christian theology, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and credulous interest in Egyptology, especially in Antient Metaphysics (6 vols., 1779–1799), make him extremely difficult to place within the Scottish Enlightenment. I want to bring Monboddo back into our conversation about the Scottish Enlightenment, shed light in the process on his highly idiosyncratic combination of enlightened and unenlightened thought and, using Monboddo’s example, emphasize some interesting if unexpected aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment’s application of the ‘science of human nature’ to the study of religion. For Monboddo, human civilization and religious knowledge owes their existence to Egyptian daemon-kings. (shrink)

The Patient Preference Predictor (PPP) is intended to improve treatment decision making for incapacitated patients. The PPP would collect information about the treatment preferences of people with different demographic and other characteristics. It could be used to indicate which treatment option an individual patient would be most likely to prefer, based on data about the preferences of people who resemble the patient. The PPP could be incorporated into existing US law governing treatment for incapacitated patients, although it is unclear whether (...) it would be classified as evidence of a specific patient’s preferences or those of a reasonable person sharing certain characteristics with the patient. Ethical concerns about the quality and significance of PPP choices could influence legal decision makers’ views of the PPP. (shrink)

In their 2008 paper, Persson and Savulescu suggest that for moral bioenhancement (MBE) to be effective at eliminating the danger of ‘ultimate harm’ the intervention would need to be compulsory. This is because those most in need of MBE would be least likely to undergo the intervention voluntarily. By drawing on concepts and theories from epidemiology, this paper will suggest that MBE may not need to be universal and compulsory to be effective at significantly improving the collective moral standing of (...) a human populace and reducing the threat of ultimate harm. It will identify similarities between the mechanisms that allow biological contagions (such as a virus) and behaviours (such as those concerned with ethical and unethical actions) to develop, spread, and be reinforced within a population. It will then go onto suggest that, just as with the epidemiological principle of herd immunity, if enough people underwent MBE to reach a minimum threshold then the incidence and spread of immoral behaviours could be significantly reduced, even in those who have not received MBE. (shrink)

This paper is an extended exploration of Mead's phrase the emergence of the novel. I describe and characterize emergent systems-complex dynamical systems that display behavior that cannot be predicted from a full and complete description of the component units of the system. Emergence has become an influential concept in contemporary cognitive science [A. Clark Being there, Cambridge: MIT Press], complexity theory [W. Bechtel & R.C. Richardson Discovering complexity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], artificial life [R.A. Brooks & P. Maes Artificial (...) life IV, Cambridge: MIT Press; C.G. Langton Artificial life III, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; C.G. Langton et al. Artificial life II, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley), and robotics [S. Forrest Emergent computation, Cambridge: MIT Press]. I propose that novelty is a necessary property of emergent systems, and I'll explore a specific kind of emergent system: an improvisational theater ensemble. This is an example of emergence in a small social group, which I call collaborative emergence to emphasize several important contrasts with other complex systems that manifest emergence, such as connectionist networks and Alife simulations. (shrink)

Clinical biobanks processing data of participants in the European Union fall under the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation, which among others includes requirements for consent. These requirements are further specified by the Article 29 Working Party —an EU advisory body currently known as the European Data Protection Board. Unfortunately, their guidance is cause for some confusion. While the GDPR allows participants to give broad consent for research when specific research purposes are still unknown, the WP29 guidelines suggest that (...) additional consent for specific uses should be obtained in addition to broad consent when this becomes applicable. This discrepancy elicits the question whether clinical biobanks can fail the requirement of consent if they obtain broad consent, but not a specific consent for each biomedical study. We analysed this discrepancy within the framework of contextual integrity, in order to describe the context-relative informational norms that govern information flows in clinical biobanks. However, our analysis demonstrates that there is no uniform set of norms that can be applied to all clinical biobanks. As such, neither the GDPR nor the WP29 guidance can act as a “one size fits all” approach to all clinical biobanks. Rather, differences between clinical biobanks—especially regarding the scientific aims and patient populations—make the case for context-relative norms that determine the appropriate type of consent. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer some brief reflections on Jordan Wessling’s book, Love Divine: A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity. I explain what I take to be its strengths in articulating an account of divine love that solves a variety of problems that classical theism cannot solve. Then I articulate a potential problem for Wessling’s account of divine love and hell.

Apart from the predictable end-of-the-century tendency to look backwards in time, it is not surprising that much commentary on contemporary American politics has taken on a reflective tone as we approach the end of the 20th century. Unresolved issues of race, class, and culture continue to raise fundamental questions about the legitimacy and functioning of modern liberalism. This is as true today as it was at the beginning of the century when the capitalist social order took on its characteristically modern (...) form in America. Thus, one finds increasing numbers of contemporary academics and activists struggling to understand from whence we have come so as to provide insight and guidance for the future. (shrink)

In the article, “Basic Issues of Christian Eschatology Interpreted by Berdyaev”, Richard Gorban covers some eschatological aspects of Mykola Berdyaev. He considers the kernel of the basic issues of Christian eschatological doctrine the way the thinker understands them, determining his own conception of paradox of time. The researcher emphasizes the following issues in the system of religious and philosophical views of Berdyaev: connection of the fate of an individual soul with the fate of the world, death and eternity, end of (...) history, Hell ontology; eschatological prospects of evil pathways and its ontological extermination; growth of the God’s Realm and growth of Antichrist kingdom; personal apocalypses and the world apocalypses. (shrink)

The emotion–cognition integration in Mather et al. can be extended by specifying the relationship between competition and arousal in the reverse direction. According to affective monitoring, competition raises arousal, which, when sustained, results in negative affect, evoking theta oscillations, and when resolved, in positive affect, evoking gamma oscillations. Competition should be considered a core process in both cognition and emotion.

_Purpose._ This article reveals the importance of the analysis of the theory of generations to identify the essential characteristics of the phenomenon of youth. _Theoretical basis_ of this study is socio-philosophical anthropology, i.e. philosophical anthropology using certain methods of sociological, socio-psychological and ethnological research, as well as philosophical comprehension of the application of these methods in special sciences. _Originality._ The authors rethought the theoretical and practical potential of generational theory through its reconceptualization based on philosophical anthropology, which created an opportunity (...) to shift research attention from the attempts to identify superhistorical characteristics of youth to the identification of the essential nature of specific historical and sociocultural features of young people as representatives of a particular culture. _Conclusions._ Defining the youth phenomenon requires accounting at least three constraints that on the one hand, play a role of warnings that deter from theoretical and practical errors in the study of the youth phenomenon, and on the other hand, guidelines for identifying real, specific characteristics of youth as a social phenomenon. Limitations of theoretical and practical analysis of young people are as follows: first, the need to consider demographic data not as final, but only as initial and preliminary, such that require further substantive socio-cultural analysis; second, the inadmissibility of ignoring the cultural diversity of the manifestations of the youth phenomenon, instead the need to identify the special characteristics of youth of different ethnic, religious and other groups; third, the need to take into account the specifics of self-identification of those who identify themselves as young people as a social group. (shrink)

1 Here’s a way to think about poverty. People who live in poverty do so because they have few opportunities to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In fact the gap between rich and poor has increased in recent times due to the more wholesale adoption of capitalist practices around the world. The institutions of business and government conspire to give the poor a Hobson’s choice of minimal wage McJobs or unemployment. Neglect of both urban ghettoes and the rural poor (...) has been systematic, if not conscious. The very idea of capitalism reinforces the notion that some are meant to be poor and some are meant to be rich. Such a system must be overridden at times by government to help the poor cope with their lot. The only solution is a massive redistribution of income and a system of capitalism that is severely restrained. All of this is at best highly unlikely. Even if there were such a redistribution policy we could not count on government to execute it fairly. (shrink)

The Belgian polymath Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet pioneered social statistics. Applying his training in mathematics to the physical and psychological dimensions of individuals, he identified the 'average man' as characterised by the mean values of measured variables that follow a normal distribution. He believed that comparing the features of individuals against this average would allow scientists to better explore the processes that determine normal and abnormal qualities. Quetelet's methods influenced many, among them Florence Nightingale, and his simple measure for classifying (...) a person's weight, dividing it by the square of their height, is widely known as the body mass index. First published in French in 1835 and reissued here in the 1842 English translation, this is his most influential work and includes a new preface that succinctly states his aim to be 'the analysis of normal man through his actions and of intellectual man through his productions'. (shrink)

In a previous publication, I offered a novel argument against physicalist approaches to the Incarnation called “the Two Sons Worry.” In brief, I argued that a physicalist who is committed to the ecumenical teachings about the Incarnation cannot easily escape the worry that there are two persons in Jesus Christ. Keith Hess has recently pointed out a flaw in the argument that I present. In this paper, I offer a reply that fixes the argument, thus leaving the problem for the (...) physicalist intact. (shrink)

First Edition 1995, Second Edition 2012.

The premise behind this paper is that "we" have a very serious Fear Problem. As a stream of inquiry in the larger In Search of Fearlessness Movement, the author pursues a long lingering question and concern about how the West has near neglected the call to examine "fearlessness" in contradistinction to the East. With the purpose to build a better understanding of fearlessness, theories about it, and how it fits into the author's most recent turn to co-developing a philosophy of (...) fearism.... (shrink)

Mary R. Lefkowitz, Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from the Myths, Yale University Press, ISBN - 9780300101454Marcel Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in a Cultural Context, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN - 9780801869549.