Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

Most guidelines and proposalsfor Internet research ethics are based onregulations for human subjects research. In therelated research, Internet material is viewedas animate and described as people. Humanitiesresearchers have rarely been a part of thedebate about Internet research ethics and thepractices of these scholars have not been takeninto consideration when drafting most of theguidelines. This threatens to limit the kindsof Internet research that can be performed – critical strategies are particularlydiscouraged – and the ways that researchers andother users understand the Internet.Researchers (...) who use human subjects models havenot fully acknowledged computer mediation, theconstructed aspects of Internetrepresentations, and the screen. If we viewInternet material as cultural production thenthe models for Internet research would be ArtHistory and Visual Culture, English andLiterary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Musicand Sound Studies, and Theatre and PerformanceStudies. A more complete integration of theseapproaches into Internet Studies – either as asole investigatory strategy or in tandem withother forms of inquiry – would changeresearchers' ethical questions. It would alsoshow instances in which human subjectsguidelines do not apply to complex Internetmaterial. It is imperative to demonstrate thatInternet material is not people because thisconception makes highly constructed words andimages seem natural and stereotypedrepresentations appear to be real. (shrink)

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating (...) in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user. (shrink)

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)

El objeto de la presente investigación se coloca en el contexto caracterizado por la crisis económica global iniciada en 2008. La finalidad principal consiste en analizar el problema del condicionamiento financiero de las políticas sociales redistributivas y del trabajo en el ordenamiento de la Unión Europea: sus efectos en la justiciabilidad de los derechos sociales frente a la Corte de justicia de la Unión Europea y los fundamentos filosóficos de la metamorfosis producida.

In this paper, I argue that Husserl offers an important, although almost completely neglected so far, contribution to the reductionist/antireductionist debate about testimony. Through a phenomenological analysis, Husserl shows that testimony works through the constitution of an intentional intersubjective bond between the speaker and the hearer. In this paper I focus on the Logical Investigations, a 1914 manuscript now published as text 2 in Husserliana 20.2, and a 1931 manuscript now published as Appendix 12 in Husserliana 15. I argue that, (...) in those texts, Husserl highlights three essential phenomenological features of testimony: a) testimony is personal, meaning that it only takes place among persons, b) testimony is social, meaning that it requires the joint effort of multiple cognitive agents, c) testimony is community-building, meaning that it generates a long-lasting social bond among the parts involved. (shrink)

This paper addresses a largely neglected question in ongoing debates over disagreement: what is the relation, if any, between disagreements involving credences and disagreements involving outright beliefs? The first part of the paper offers some desiderata for an adequate account of credal and full disagreement. The second part of the paper argues that both phenomena can be subsumed under a schematic definition which goes as follows: A and B disagree if and only if the accuracy conditions of A's doxastic attitude (...) are such that, if they were fulfilled, this would ipso facto make B's doxastic attitude inaccurate, or vice-versa. (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)

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)

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)

Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is explained by a (...) fairly flatfooted interpretation of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue, however, that the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule are fulfilled only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the rule. That gloss is unpacked in terms of the subject’s ability to be acquainted with the phenomenal character of their thoughts. (shrink)

Most scientific theories are globally inconsistent. Chunk and Permeate is a method of rational reconstruction that can be used to separate, and identify, locally consistent chunks of reasoning or explanation. This then allows us to justify reasoning in a globally inconsistent theory. We extend chunk and permeate by adding a visually transparent way of guiding the individuation of chunks and deciding on what information permeates from one chunk to the next. The visual representation is in the form of bundle diagrams. (...) We then extend the bundle diagrams to include not only reasoning in the presence of inconsistent information or reasoning in the logical sense of deriving a conclusion from premises, but more generally reasoning in the sense of trying to understand a phenomenon in science. This extends the use of the bundle diagrams in terms of the base space and the fibres. We then apply this to a case in physics, that of understanding binding energies in the nucleus of an atom using together inconsistent models: the liquid drop model and the shell model. We draw some philosophical conclusions concerning scientific reasoning, paraconsistent reasoning, the role of logic in science and the unity of science. (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)

Elements of Symbolic Logic by Hans Reichenbach provides the first analysis of tenses from a translinguistic, transgrammatical, transcultural logical viewpoint. However, the author does not address the problem of relations between the tenses and temporality, whose investigation is devoted to physics. Despite the brilliant discovery, an irreconcilable gap between the two different epistemological perspectives emerges at a glance. Where Reichenbach stopped is precisely where one must start from to continue the exploration on the exterminated continent that one can glimpse behind (...) his study. (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)

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)

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 extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani (2009a) to infinitely-lived societies. First, some novel characterisations of inegalitarian leximax social welfare relations are derived based on the Individual Benefit Principle (IBP), which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This is surprising because the IBP does not explicitly incorporate any preference for inequality, nor does it assign priority to well-off members of society. Second, some impossibility results are derived that highlight a (...) general tension between standard fairness and efficiency axioms in social choice, and a liberal Principle of Non-Interference that generalises IBP. (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...

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)

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)

: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.