We reinvigorate vulnerability theory as a radically ethical device — ethical vulnerability analysis. We bring together fuller vulnerability analysis as theorized by Fineman and Grear in conversation with Levinas and Derrida’s radical vulnerability and the ethics of hospitality to construct a theoretical framework that is firmly anchored in the realities of the everyday that are vulnerability and migration. This novel framework offers a thinking space to subvert approaches to migrants and migration as it compels us to come face-to face with (...) the “other”, which in turn renders the political accountable by her. We deploy ethical vulnerability analysis to deconstruct the EU’s “migration crisis” and investigate whether the activation of temporary protection for displaced persons from Ukraine signifies a humanizing turn in the EU’s asylum and migration policies. In this regard, we submit that this hospitable moment constitutes an “exception to the rule” rather than a paradigm shift. (shrink)

The increased presence of medical AI in clinical use raises the ethical question which standard of explainability is required for an acceptable and responsible implementation of AI-based applications in medical contexts. In this paper, we elaborate on the emerging debate surrounding the standards of explainability for medical AI. For this, we first distinguish several goods explainability is usually considered to contribute to the use of AI in general, and medical AI in specific. Second, we propose to understand the value of (...) explainability relative to other available norms of explainable decision-making. Third, in pointing out that we usually accept heuristics and uses of bounded rationality for medical decision-making by physicians, we argue that the explainability of medical decisions should not be measured against an idealized diagnostic process, but according to practical considerations. We conclude, fourth, to resolve the issue of explainability-standards by relocating the issue to the AI’s certifiability and interpretability. (shrink)

There is a remedy available for many of our ailments: Psychopharmacology promises to alleviate unsatisfying memory, bad moods, and low self-esteem. Bioethicists have long discussed the ethical implications of enhancement interventions. However, they have not considered relevant evidence from psychology and economics. The growth in autonomy in many areas of life is publicized as progress for the individual. However, the broadening of areas at one’s disposal together with the increasing individualization of value systems leads to situations in which the range (...) of options asks too much of the individual. I scrutinize whether increased self-determination and unbound possibilities are really in a person’s best interests. Evidence from psychology and economics challenges the assumption that unlimited autonomy is best in all cases. The responsibility for autonomous self-formation that comes with possibilities provided by neuro-enhancement developments can be a burden. To guarantee quality of life I suggest a balance of beneficence, support, and respect for autonomy. (shrink)

Providing healthcare services frequently involves cognitively demanding tasks, including diagnoses and analyses as well as complex decisions about treatments and therapy. From a global perspective, ethically significant inequalities exist between regions where the expert knowledge required for these tasks is scarce or abundant. One possible strategy to diminish such inequalities and increase healthcare opportunities in expert-scarce settings is to provide healthcare solutions involving digital technologies that do not necessarily require the presence of a human expert, e.g., in the form of (...) artificial intelligent decision-support systems (AI-DSS). Such algorithmic decision-making, however, is mostly developed in resource- and expert-abundant settings to support healthcare experts in their work. As a practical consequence, the normative standards and requirements for such algorithmic decision-making in healthcare require the technology to be at least as explainable as the decisions made by the experts themselves. The goal of providing healthcare in settings where resources and expertise are scarce might come with a normative pull to lower the normative standards of using digital technologies in order to provide at least some healthcare in the first place. We scrutinize this tendency to lower standards in particular settings from a normative perspective, distinguish between different types of absolute and relative, local and global standards of explainability, and conclude by defending an ambitious and practicable standard of local relative explainability. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

Decision making in health care contexts is often deeply challenging for the patients, their close ones, and those who care for them. All of them have and perceive different forms of responsibilitie...

The central argument developed in this essay is that today we are seeing a proliferation of normative orders where once state normativity ruled and the dominant logic was toward producing a unitary normative framing. One synthesizing image we might use to capture these dynamics is that of a movement from centripetal nation-state articulation to a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages. This multiplication in turn can lead to a sort of simplification of normative structures insofar as: these assemblages are partial and (...) often highly specialized formations centered in particular utilities and purposes. The valence of these particular utilities and purposes can range from the search for justice to narrow self-interest . While this is still a minor process in the larger scale of our geopolity, it signals the beginning of a multi-sited, though partial, disruption of its existing formal architecture. This raises questions about the future of crucial frameworks through which modern societies, economies, and polities have operated: the social contract of liberal states, social democracy as we have come to understand it, modern citizenship, and the formal mechanisms that render certain claims legitimate and others illegitimate in liberal democracies. These frameworks have held together complex interdependencies between rights and obligations, power and the law, wealth and poverty, allegiance and exit.Keywords: assemblages; normative; globalization; denationalization; centripetal; centrifugal; utilities; logics; liberal state; claims. (shrink)

The biggest contemporary challenge to democratic legitimacy gravitates around the crisis of democratic representation.

The organism is the central entity in biological science. However, consensus with regard to the definition of the underlying concept is lacking. Moreover, several ambiguous life forms exist that challenge current definitions of the term. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the available literature, we provide an overview of the criteria and approaches that have been previously used to define organismality. In addition, we highlight non-paradigmatic biological entities to identify problems that challenge definitions of organismal units. To address these issues, (...) we propose a cross-disciplinary definition of the organism concept and provide a list of key criteria that allow both paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic cases to be unequivocally classified. In this way, our work not only provides newcomers with an overview of this exciting field, but also enhances communication across disciplines. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

The volume offers a unique collection of articles on pediatric neuroenhancement from an international and multidisciplinary perspective. In recent years, the topic of “neuroenhancement” has become increasingly relevant in academia and practice, as well as among the public. While autonomous adults are free to choose neuroenhancement, in children it presents its own ethical, social, legal, and developmental issues. A plethora of potential enhancement agents are on the market. While the manifold issues surrounding the topic have been extensively discussed, there is (...) little work on the specific questions that arise in children and adolescents. This book addresses this gap in the literature: Next to conceptual and normative work on autonomy and self-control, the collection explores the implications for parenting and schooling, and provides input for a discussion of public attitudes. It is a valuable resource for the different academic communities confronted with questions of how to evaluate and approach enhancement in children and is of interest to neuroethicists, scholars in applied ethics and neurology, psychiatrists and psychologists as well as scientists developing enhancement interventions for children. (shrink)

Exponential-constructible functions are an extension of the class of constructible functions. This extension was formulated by Cluckers and Loeser in the context of semi-algebraic and sub-analytic structures, when they studied stability under integration. In this paper, we will present a natural refinement of their definition that allows for stability results to hold within the wider class of [Formula: see text]-minimal structures. One of the main technical improvements is that we remove the requirement of definable Skolem functions from the proofs. As (...) a result, we obtain stability in particular for all intermediate structures between the semi-algebraic and the sub-analytic languages. (shrink)

This is a Time when stabilized meanings have become unstable. No meaning is permanently stable. But there are periods when they can acquire a certain stability. The current global age that took off in the 1980s has unsettled many of the major social, economic, and political meanings of the preceding Keynesian era in the West. My concern is particularly with some of the major categories we use in the social sciences—economy, polity, society, justice, inequality, state, globalization, and immigration. These are (...) all powerful categories that explain much about the realities they represent. Yet those realities are mutants—today’s concept of the economy dominated by finance and high tech is quite different from that of .. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 53-55, September 2012.

The response aims at detecting additional angles in Benhabib's problematic and adding some variables to its potential resolution. I examine two such variables. One concerns the rights-bearing subject. Benhabib addresses the tension between individual universal rights and sovereign self-determination by positing a modified Kantian `cosmopolitan federalism'. While I can support this thesis, I see a whole other reality in the making that offers additional kinds of resolutions as well as a repositioning of cosmopolitan federalism in a different field of forces. (...) Critical here is the incipient denationalizing of citizenship which is taking place inside the nation state, and hence is not predicated on post-national and transnational conditions for citizenship. Such resolutions are precluded in Benhabib's text because of the closure she projects onto the nation state. The second variable I discuss addresses precisely this question of the state today — that is to say, in a context of the ascendance of an international human rights regime and of globalization. Benhabib sees the national and the global as mutually exclusive. In my own research I see a process whereby global logics get partly constituted inside the nation state and the state apparatus itself, producing, again, an incipient denationalizing of what historically was constructed as national. This opens up possibilities for cosmopolitan federalism that Benhabib overlooks given her national—global binary. (shrink)

This article examines the architecture of public access and of private digital networks in order to establish in what ways they might be (a) subject to regulation, (b) alter the authority of the national state, and (c) have positive or negative impacts on liberal democracy and on the political potential of civil society. Two of the key issues explored in this context are the meaning of regulation, which is likely to be quite different from our historically grounded understandings of state (...) regulation, and, second, the sharp and often overlooked differences between public access and private digital networks. (shrink)

This article examines the questions of Power and Discourse in this particular period and argues that we can go beyond the recognition of multiplicities in all domains and hence that we can work at producing a shared normative ground for at least some of these multiple critical positions. It does so by focusing on one particular issue, the need to produce a new narrative about the relation of the national state and the global economy. A more precise and critical appraisal (...) of this interaction signals the existence of new political openings both in and outside the formal political system, and of a new politics that could allow citizens to demand accountability from the new global actors. These new political openings and new politics entail the development of a normativity that engages the question of whose claims are legitimate in a context where the supposed neutrality of markets and technology are seen as obviating the need for normative approaches; and represent a critique of older political lineages centered exclusively in the national state that easily excluded many groups which never completely identified with the national state and its representation of the nation. One of the key tasks for intellectuals today is to dig out the inner architecture of power from under the new rational-technical discourses within which it is embedded. (shrink)

The importance of the justification of our beliefs is a long-debated question. The question of how our memory beliefs are justified, however, is a question we have usually neglected as our memory does not seem to draw much attention to itself. As long as it works, we do not even notice that we use it most of the time. In my opinion, the question of how our memory beliefs are justified, however, should play a bigger role in the philosophical debate. (...) The reason for this claim is that most of our beliefs are memory beliefs. A position, I will argue for in this paper. Based on empirical findings in Cognitive Science, I will explain that our memory is not only involved in forming beliefs about the past but more controversially in forming beliefs about the present, in reasoning processes and even more controversially in forming beliefs about the future. If beliefs about what has been, about what is the case in the present and even about what will have been the case in the future are memory beliefs, reconsidering our strict focus on the justification of mere beliefs seems to be a change in debate worth considering. (shrink)

In this paper, we first classify different types of second opinions and evaluate the ethical and epistemological implications of providing those in a clinical context. Second, we discuss the issue of how artificial intelligent could replace the human cognitive labour of providing such second opinion and find that several AI reach the levels of accuracy and efficiency needed to clarify their use an urgent ethical issue. Third, we outline the normative conditions of how AI may be used as second opinion (...) in clinical processes, weighing the benefits of its efficiency against concerns of responsibility attribution. Fourth, we provide a ‘rule of disagreement’ that fulfils these conditions while retaining some of the benefits of expanding the use of AI-based decision support systems in clinical contexts. This is because the rule of disagreement proposes to use AI as much as possible, but retain the ability to use human second opinions to resolve disagreements between AI and physician-in-charge. Fifth, we discuss some counterarguments. (shrink)

‘Authority’ is a term widely used in scholarly debate, including the history of philosophy. However, what is meant by this term is not always clear and the concept is not very well defined. One reason for this is certainly that the phenomenon itself is complex and the corresponding terms are used with a degree of latitude. This makes it difficult to adequately compare and connect the insights that various case studies have to offer. For historians of philosophy, it is thus (...) important to get a sufficient grasp of the concept of authority. This is even more urgent when one studies commentary traditions, in which secondary texts are written in virtue of the existence of texts clad with high authority. Our article combines historical textual research with insights from epistemology, thus providing a discussion of the concept of authority and its importance in textual traditions. We propose a descriptive model that can be used for examining epistemic authority in historical texts. An example from ancient Platonism serves to show both the complexity of the phenomenon and the clarifications that our approach may offer. (shrink)

As individuals enter their 80s, they are inevitably confronted with the problem of neuronal loss in the brain. The incidence of the common movement disorder ‘mild parkinsonian signs’ (MPS) is approximately 50% over the age of 85 years. It has long been known that the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta is a neuropathological hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD). Recently, two papers1,2 present clear evidence for a high burden of mitochondrial DNA deletions within substantia nigra neurons (...) in aged individuals and individuals with PD, pointing towards a common pathway inevitably leading to neuronal dysfunction and death. BioEssays 28: 963–967, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)