Bromleigh McCleneghan and Lee Hull Moses have written a book about being not-perfect parents in a not-perfect world. The result, Hopes and Fears: Everyday Theology for New Parents and Other Tired, Anxious People, is a joyous celebration of child-rearing in which any parent no matter how perfect can share. 'I want to have a happy and healthy marriage, and I want to have happy, faithful kids,' proclaims co-author McCleneghan in the introduction to the book. 'But I reject the pervasive cultural (...) lie that a happy marriage and the faithful kids are somehow the byproducts of some rigorous and largely unattainable personal or moral perfection.' Thus, Hopes and Fears is neither a 'how-to' book nor a mere meditation. Rather, the authors seek to find the beautiful and the spiritual in the sometimes mundane activities that parents have performed since the beginning of history, while at the same time allowing beautiful and spiritual insights of the past to inform and shape the activities of modern parenting. Thus, the words of a hymn can trigger an idea about how to deal with bedtime, and an exercise in baby-naming can lead to a better understanding of a passage in Isaiah. The intertwining of the spiritual and familial in this book constantly surprises and delights: a quote from Paul Tillich can stand next to one from Tina Fey or What to Expect When You're Expecting. We are often reminded that the authors, two longtime friends, are ordinary working mothers. Fortunately, they are also experienced and well-read congregational leaders, and they bring that perspective to their reflections. Hopes and Fears is also about sharing, in the widest and deepest sense of that word. As many parents know, learning to share is one of the most difficult things for many children to acquire. McCleneghan and Moses have decided to teach by example with this book, noting: 'we're hopeful that as we share our lives—the trials and tribulations and incredible joys—other parents will feel inspired to reflect on their own experiences, and perhaps even to consider new ways in which their own faith is relevant to their identities as parents.' Hopes and Fears: Everyday Theology for New Parents and Other Tired, Anxious People is highly suitable for group study as well as individual reflection. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, (...) and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...) human lives are worse than very long lives wholly devoid of pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, or any other goods, or (2) very short lives containing nothing but suffering are worth living. Since neither result is plausible, we ought to reject the view that life itself is good. On the view I favor, any given life may be worth living because of the goods that it contains, but life itself is neutral. (shrink)

This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (project number CS170100008); the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. ACOLA collaborates with the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi to deliver the interdisciplinary Horizon Scanning reports to government. The aims of the project which produced this report are: 1. Examine the transformative role that artificial intelligence may play in (...) different sectors of the economy, including the opportunities, risks and challenges that advancement presents. 2. Examine the ethical, legal and social considerations and frameworks required to enable and support broad development and uptake of artificial intelligence. 3. Assess the future education, skills and infrastructure requirements to manage workforce transition and support thriving and internationally competitive artificial intelligence industries. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept both of the following claims: (1) consciousness matters morally, and (2) species membership doesn’t matter morally. In other words, many reject speciesism but accept what we might call 'sentientism'. But do the reasons against speciesism yield analogous reasons against sentientism, just as the reasons against racism and sexism are thought to yield analogous reasons against speciesism? This paper argues that speciesism is disanalogous to sentientism (as well as racism and sexism). I make a case for the following (...) asymmetry: (a) some non-humans clearly have interests, but (b) no non-conscious entities clearly have interests. This asymmetry, I argue, renders sentientism resistant to the standard argument against speciesism. (shrink)

I argue that naturalistic pictures provide a guide and a justification for our concept of colour. The crucial relation between pictures and colours is to be brought out, not by reference to the ‘internal’ relations between colours (for example, what differentiates green from red), but by considering how colours are differentiated from the wider range of visually discriminable qualities. Naturalistic pictures effect such a differentiation by simulating colour-like qualities such as gold, amber, and blond, while requiring nothing beyond the three-dimensional (...) manifold of colour space. The seeming simplicity and salience of colour in our visual experience should be recognized as depending on our familiarity with this reductive power of naturalistic pictures. While some sense of these issues has been given expression by many thinkers, the idea is significantly articulated in remarks of Wittgenstein's that were prompted by his reading of a letter the painter Runge wrote to Goethe. (shrink)

We present a theory of honor violence as a form of costly signaling. Two types of honor violence are identified: revenge and purification. Both types are amenable to a signaling analysis whereby the violent behavior is a signal that can be used by out-groups to draw inferences about the nature of the signaling group, thereby helping to solve perennial problems of social cooperation: deterrence and assurance. The analysis shows that apparently gratuitous acts of violence can be part of a system (...) of norms that are Pareto superior to alternatives without such signals. For societies that lack mechanisms of governance to deter aggression or to enforce contracts, norms of honor can be a rational means of achieving these functions. The theory also suggests that cultures can become trapped in inefficient equilibria owing to path-dependent phenomena. In other words, costly signals of honor may continue to be sent even when they are no longer providing useful information. (shrink)

Natalie Stoljar posits that those who have internalized oppressive norms lack normative competence, which requires true beliefs and critical reflection. A lack of normative competence makes agents nonautonomous, according to Stoljar. This framework is thereby meant to address what she calls the “feminist intuition”—the intuition that oppressive norms are incompatible with autonomy. On my view, however, Stoljar’s normative competence account of autonomy is subject to a worrying problem. Her account misattributes nonautonomy to those who perpetrate the oppression, making those who (...) are oppressed and those who oppress count as equally nonautonomous. I argue that this is implausible and demonstrate in this paper that we can establish an asymmetry of autonomy between those who oppress others and those who are made the target of oppression. (shrink)

No exact definition of an “organic” substance has been agreed upon by the chemical community and textbook definitions vary substantially. The question of what exactly constitutes an “organic” substance is explored in this paper. Various carbon-containing substances that have been by some considered to be “inorganic” are examined in an attempt to ascertain whether carbon in these compounds display different chemical behavior than what is expected of carbon in an “organic” substance. Types of substances considered are carbon allotropes, carbides, carbonates (...) and bicarbonates, cyanide and cyanate ions, carbido clusters, carbon oxides, and compounds without hydrogen.Graphic abstract. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Steel’s multiverse project in his ‘Gödel’s program’ (Steel [2014]), first by comparing it to those of Hamkins [2012] and Woodin [2011], then by detailed analysis what’s presented in Steel’s brief text. In particular, we reconstruct his notion of a ‘natural’ theory, describe his multiverse axioms and his translation function, and assess the resulting status of the Continuum Hypothesis. In the end, we reconceptualize the defect that Steel thinks CH might suffer from and isolate what it would take (...) to remove it while working within his framework. As our goal is to present as coherent and compelling a philosophical and mathematical story as we can, we allow ourselves to augment Steel’s story in places (e.g., in the treatment of Amalgamation) and to depart from it in others (e.g., the removal of ‘meaning’ from the account). The relevant mathematics is laid out in the appendices. (shrink)

Stumbling Toward Justice is a collection of stories of one man's odyssey through the darkness of the modern world.

This research proposes that broad-based employee share ownership (ESO) affects corporate environmental performance (CEP). Drawing upon corporate governance literature, social exchange theory, and stakeholder utility theory, we propose that employees as owners adopt more favorable attitudes toward beneficial outcomes for CEP, and that the broad-based impact of ESO overwhelms the impact of CEO ownership. Also, we propose that these relationships are contingent upon trade union presence as a form of worker voice that amplifies the ESO influence on CEP. The empirical (...) results from U.S. publicly traded companies from 2009 to 2016 indicate that broad-based ESO is linked to positive CEP by companies, and provides some support for all proposed hypotheses. This study provides scholarly and practical implications for the effects of shared capitalist modes of ownership and employee engagement on corporate sustainability. (shrink)

Large Language Models (LLMs) could be a useful tool for lawyers. However, empirical research on their effectiveness in conducting legal tasks is scant. We study securities cases involving cryptocurrencies as one of numerous contexts where AI could support the legal process, studying GPT-3.5’s legal reasoning and ChatGPT’s legal drafting capabilities. We examine whether a) GPT-3.5 can accurately determine which laws are potentially being violated from a fact pattern, and b) whether there is a difference in juror decision-making based on complaints (...) written by a lawyer compared to ChatGPT. We feed fact patterns from real-life cases to GPT-3.5 and evaluate its ability to determine correct potential violations from the scenario and exclude spurious violations. Second, we had mock jurors assess complaints written by ChatGPT and lawyers. GPT-3.5’s legal reasoning skills proved weak, though we expect improvement in future models, particularly given the violations it suggested tended to be correct (it merely missed additional, correct violations). ChatGPT performed better at legal drafting, and jurors’ decisions were not statistically significantly associated with the author of the document upon which they based their decisions. Because GPT-3.5 cannot satisfactorily conduct legal reasoning tasks, it would be unlikely to be able to help lawyers in a meaningful way at this stage. However, ChatGPT’s drafting skills (though, perhaps, still inferior to lawyers) could assist lawyers in providing legal services. Our research is the first to systematically study an LLM’s legal drafting and reasoning capabilities in litigation, as well as in securities law and cryptocurrency-related misconduct. (shrink)

The idea of human-like robots with artificial intelligence (AI) engaging in sports has been considered in the light of robotics, technology and culture. However, robots with AI can also be used to clarify ethical questions in sports such as boxing with its inherent risks of brain injury and even death.This article develops an innovative way to assess the ethical issues in boxing by using a thought experiment, responding to recent medical data and overall concerns about harms and risks to boxers. (...) The thought experiment imagines a fight between a human and a robot. Critical issues about head trauma and brain injuries are then discussed. These can be summed up in two ethical questions: ‘why is it acceptable for a boxer to deliver concussive and recurrent subconcussive punches to a human head (skull and brain), powerful enough to achieve a knockout, or score more points, or to potentially inflict an injury immediately or eventually resulting in death?’, with the reciprocal question, ‘why is it acceptable to allow oneself to be injured in a like manner, possibly fatally, by an opponent?’The two questions are explored using the thought experiment in two matching perspectives: where the human boxer is attacking and the robot boxer is defending; and conversely, where the human boxer is on the receiving end of punches delivered by the robot. Each perspective opens with some general remarks, followed by an analysis of the boxing contest and eliciting some implications for future opportunities for the sport. (shrink)

Ascribing autonomous status to agents is a valuable practice. As such, we ought to care about how we engage in practices of autonomy ascription. However, disagreement between first-personal experiences of an agent's autonomy and third-personal determinations of their autonomy presents challenges of ethical and epistemic concern. My view is that insights from a dialogical rather than nondialogical account of autonomy give us the resources to combat the challenges associated with autonomy ascription. I draw on Andrea Westlund's account of dialogical autonomy—on (...) which autonomy requires a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external critical perspectives—to make my case. (shrink)

Mechanism design is a form of optimization developed in economic theory. It casts economists as institutional engineers, choosing an outcome and then arranging a set of market rules and conditions to achieve it. The toolkit from mechanism design is widely used in economics, policymaking, and now in building and managing online environments. Mechanism design has become one of the most pervasive yet inconspicuous influences on the digital mediation of social life. Its optimizing schemes structure online advertising markets and other multi-sided (...) platform businesses. Whatever normative rationales mechanism design might draw on in its economic origins, as its influence has grown and its applications have become more computational, we suggest those justifications for using mechanism design to orchestrate and optimize human interaction are losing traction. In this article, we ask what ideological work mechanism design is doing in economics, computer science, and its applications to the governance of digital platforms. Observing mechanism design in action in algorithmic environments, we argue it has become a tool for producing information domination, distributing social costs in ways that benefit designers, and controlling and coordinating participants in multi-sided platforms. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study examined the moderating role of ethical leader behavior in the effects of daily perceived job insecurity on work outcomes the next day (i.e., work engagement and customer-directed helping) through occupational regret the next morning among frontline service employees working in adverse work situations (i.e., the coronavirus disease pandemic). Using experience sampling method, data were collected from 135 frontline service employees across five consecutive workdays. The results showed that daily perceived job insecurity had (...) a negative indirect effect on work engagement and customer-directed helping the next day through (increased) occupational regret the next day in the morning. In addition, ethical leader behavior moderated the negative indirect effect of daily perceived job insecurity on next-day work engagement and customer-directed helping through next-morning occupational regret. Specifically, these negative effects were especially stronger among employees who had observed low levels of ethical leader behavior the previous day. The theoretical implications of the present findings for researchers and their practical implications for managers are discussed. (shrink)

Recommender systems assist users in receiving preferred or relevant services and information. Using such technology could be instrumental in addressing the lack of relevance digital mental health apps have to the user, a leading cause of low engagement. However, the use of recommender systems for digital mental health apps, particularly those driven by personal data and artificial intelligence, presents a range of ethical considerations. This paper focuses on considerations particular to the juncture of recommender systems and digital mental health technologies. (...) While separate bodies of work have focused on these two areas, to our knowledge, the intersection presented in this paper has not yet been examined. This paper identifies and discusses a set of advantages and ethical concerns related to incorporating recommender systems into the digital mental health ecosystem. Advantages of incorporating recommender systems into DMH apps are identified as a reduction in choice overload, improvement to the digital therapeutic alliance, and increased access to personal data & self-management. Ethical challenges identified are lack of explainability, complexities pertaining to the privacy/personalization trade-off and recommendation quality, and the control of app usage history data. These novel considerations will provide a greater understanding of how DMH apps can effectively and ethically implement recommender systems. (shrink)

Should involuntarily childless people have the same opportunities to access parenthood as those who are not involuntarily childless? In the context of assisted reproductive technologies, affirmative answers to this question are often cashed out in terms of positive rights, including rights to third-party reproduction. In this paper, we critically explore the scope and extent to which any such right would hold up morally. Ultimately, we argue for a departure away from positive parental rights. Instead, we argue that the state has (...) an imperfect duty to benefit involuntarily childless people in relation to their parental aspirations. (shrink)

The growing demand for uterus transplantation (UTx) invites continued philosophical evaluation of the function of UTx (and what constitutes its ‘success’), as well as the recipient eligibility for UTx. Currently, UTx caters to partnered, cisgender women of childbearing age looking to get pregnant and give birth to a biogenetically related child. The medical justification for this—the treatment of uterine infertility—explains the primacy of this practice. However, this dominant conceptualization of UTx does not necessarily capture the diverse needs for which both (...) cis- and transgender women might take interest in UTx that are not strictly procreative, such as bodily integrity and gender identity reasons. In this paper, I argue that non-procreative motivations for uterus acquisition ought to be taken seriously as a matter of non-discrimination and consistency. (shrink)

What aspects of philosophical style really count? What aspects of philosophical writing count only as matters of style? Some features of philosophical writing and talking do seem to be of merely ornamental significance, worthy subjects only of gossip or banter. We are familiar with the academic sneer with which poor Professor Kluck is charged with having “somehow managed to confuse” one thing with another. A more serious stylistic matter, of course, would be Professor Kluck’s own willingness to use the apparatus (...) of modal logic in his pathetic endeavors. Or is that a matter of style? If so, does the same concept apply to such amusing and affective phenomena as accent and cadence? We have heard Professor Chisholm’s rising terminal voice inflection, if only because it is so widely imitated. One thinks of Professor Earle’s favorite condemnation “boring” pronounced with an “o” which seems to touch base on every vowel sound known to man. We are impressed by Goodman’s pithiness, and we register his penchant for alliterative triples. We compare Bergmann’s Laocöonian baroque prose with Quine’s soothing urbanity. It is an interesting fact that these are the features which come to mind when we begin to consider the whole question of philosophical style. Have we so internalized the parts that really count that they seem “white,” neutral, style-free? There might well be historical factors which encourage such blindness. Varying degrees of lingering transcendentalism about philosophical method would not be easily reconciled with the awful idea that one is merely speaking a local dialect. Of course the transcendentalism itself is rarely owned up to as such, as if it is assumed that it is Reason which speaks but that it is in poor taste to say so. Alternative methods, when confronted, generate distaste, horror, or the head-shaking sort of wonderment of the Eighteenth Century Parisian who wondered how on earth anyone could be a Persian. (shrink)