Increasingly, national governments across the globe are prioritizing investments in neuroscience. Currently, seven active or in-development national-level brain research initiatives exist, spanning four continents. Engaging with the underlying values and ethical concerns that drive brain research across cultural and continental divides is critical to future research. Culture influences what kinds of science are supported and where science can be conducted through ethical frameworks and evaluations of risk. Neuroscientists and philosophers alike have found themselves together encountering perennial questions; these questions are (...) engaged by the field of neuroethics, related to the nature of understanding the self and identity, the existence and meaning of free will, defining the role of reason in human behavior, and more. With this Perspective article, we aim to prioritize and advance to the foreground a list of neuroethics questions for neuroscientists operating in the context of these international brain initiatives. (shrink)

This article defends three interconnected premises that together demand for a new way of dealing with moral responsibility in developing and using technological artifacts. The first premise is that humans increasingly make use of dissociated technological delegation. Second, because technologies do not simply fulfill our actions, but rather mediate them, the initial aims alter and outcomes are often different from those intended. Third, since the outcomes are often unforeseen and unintended, we can no longer simply apply the traditional (modernist) models (...) for discussing moral responsibility. We need to reinterpret moral responsibility. A schematic layout of a model on Social Role-Responsibility that incorporates these three premises is presented to allow discussion of a new way of interpreting moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper argues for a reappraisal of extant scholarship on delegation in the domain of financial regulation. Through an examination of Japan's experience with financial regulation between 1992 and 2003, it is demonstrated that crisis-induced institutional development entails a shift toward a more flexible, trustee-type bureaucratic structure. While the logic presented in this paper is far from a universally applicable theory of institutional change, it calls into question the relevance of more conventional approaches to the origins of delegation of authority, (...) notably the approach that uses unified and divided government as a key variable. A renewed emphasis on the role of extra-political sources of transfers of authority inside the executive, and also between the legislature and the executive, therefore, is in order. (shrink)

From delegation to specialization: nurses and clinical trial co‐ordinationThis paper considers an area of clinical research that has been delegated by physician‐researchers to nurses and others in the United States, that of clinical trials co‐ordination. It uses interviews with nurse trial co‐ordinators to explore the occupational processes by which the boundaries of work enactment and the definition of work have been established by nurses and others. It then discusses the occupational processes that have been established to formalize a role for (...) nurses in clinical research. It raises the question of (and offers speculation on) whether specialization alone will distinguish nursing from other occupational groups engaged in clinical research work. (shrink)

The invisibility of nursing work has been discussed in the international literature but not in relation to learning clinical skills. Evans and Guile's (Practice‐based education: Perspectives and strategies, Rotterdam: Sense, 2012) theory of recontextualisation is used to explore the ways in which invisible or unplanned and unrecognised learning takes place as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate to and supervise the work of the healthcare assistant. In the British context, delegation and supervision are thought of as skills which are learnt (...) “on the job.” We suggest that learning “on‐the‐job” is the invisible construction of knowledge in clinical practice and that delegation is a particularly telling area of nursing practice which illustrates invisible learning. Using an ethnographic case study approach in three hospital sites in England from 2011 to 2014, we undertook participant observation, interviews with newly qualified nurses, ward managers and healthcare assistants. We discuss the invisible ways newly qualified nurses learn in the practice environment and present the invisible steps to learning which encompass the embodied, affective and social, as much as the cognitive components to learning. We argue that there is a need for greater understanding of the “invisible learning” which occurs as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate and supervise. (shrink)

A notion of delegated causality is introduced here. This subtle kind of causality is dual to interventional causality. Delegated causality elucidates the causal role of dynamical systems at the “edge of chaos”, explicates evident cases of downward causation, and relates emergent phenomena to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Apparently rich implications are noticed in biology and Chinese philosophy. The perspective of delegated causality supports cognitive interpretations of self-organization and evolution.

The characterisation of anthropogenic climate change as a violation of basic human rights is gaining wide recognition. Many people believe that tackling this problem is exclusively the job of governments and supranational institutions (especially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This argument can be traced back to the delegated authority model, according to which the legitimacy of political institutions depends on their ability to solve problems that are difficult to address at the individual level. Since the institutions created (...) to tackle climate change fail to do so, their legitimacy is under great pressure and can only be saved by considerations of feasibility. We argue that democratically elected representatives are able to claim that a more robust climate policy is unfeasible, but only because the mandate we as citizens grant them is very restrictive. Instead of shifting responsibility for the thoroughly inadequate response to climate change fully to political representatives, we should highlight the failure of the political community as a whole to fulfil its responsibility at the input-side of the delegation of authority. When individual voters fail to fulfil the minimal obligation to at least vote for parties that explicitly advocate robust climate policies, they cannot hide behind the delegated authority argument, but should accept their complicity in the massive violations of basic human rights caused by the failure to successfully tackle climate change. (shrink)

Today, it becomes more and more common to combine services from different providers into one application. Service composition is however difficult and cumbersome when there is no common trust anchor. Hence, delegation of access rights across trust domains will become essential in service composition scenarios. This article specifies abstract delegation, discusses theoretical aspects of the concept, and provides technical details of a validation implementation supporting a variety of access controls and associated delegation mechanisms. Abstract delegation allows to harmonize the management (...) of heterogeneous access control mechanisms and to offer a unified user experience. The authors observe standardization efforts to reduce application and domain-specific delegation mechanisms, but this variety is very unlikely to completely disappear. (shrink)

By what right, or under whose authority, do you try me? This is a common challenge raised by defendants standing trial in front of international criminal courts or tribunals. The challenge comes from the fact that traditionally criminal law is justified as a response of the state to wrongdoing that has been identified by the state as a crime. Nevertheless, since the early 1990s we have seen the development of international criminal tribunals that have the authority to judge certain crimes. (...) This article examines the moral foundation for the authority of international tribunals, arguing that it can be grounded on delegation of powers from the states with primary jurisdiction. The first part of the article examines whether there is any problem, as a matter of principle, in founding the courts’ jurisdictional authority on delegation of powers. It will argue that contrary to David Luban’s view, there is no inherent problem with states delegating their power to punish to other states or to international tribunals. Nevertheless, in making such a decision the ability of the court to provide fair process—a necessary requirement for the court’s ability to issue authoritative decisions—should be taken into account. The second part of the article takes the ICC as a case study and examines whether its jurisdiction can be grounded on delegation of powers. It will be shown that the court’s jurisdiction can indeed be founded on both direct and indirect delegation of jurisdiction from states with primary jurisdiction. This conclusion suggests that other international tribunals created by either multilateral treaties or by Security Council decisions may also be founded on similar grounds. (shrink)

We study a real-effort environment, where a delegator has to decide if and to whom to delegate a task. Applicants send cheap-talk messages about their past performance before the delegator decides. We experimentally test the theoretical prediction that information transmission does not occur in equilibrium. In our experiment, we vary the message space available to the applicants and compare the information transmitted as well as the level of efficiency achieved. Depending on the treatment, applicants can either submit a Number indicating (...) past performance, an Interval in which past performance falls, or a free Text message. We observe that messages contain information in all treatments. Interestingly, information transmission occurs only in the treatments where messages are intervals or free text. Social welfare is higher if messages are intervals or free text than precise numbers. Gender and ethnicity stereotypes only influence delegation in the Number treatment, where no information transmission takes place. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

How does internet censorship work in China, and how does it reflect the Chinese state’s logic of governing society? An online political publication, Global China, was created by the authors, and the pattern and record of articles being censored was analyzed. Using results from A/b tests on the articles and interviews with relevant officials, the article shows that the state employs delegated censorship, outsourcing significant responsibility to private internet companies and applying levels of scrutiny based on timing, targets, and stage (...) of publication. The dynamic, layered, multistage censorship regime creates significant variation and flexibility across the Chinese internet, most often in decisions about what to censor. This approach aims to maintain regime stability and legitimacy while minimizing costs. Rather than blocking all information and players, the state recognizes its technical and bureaucratic limits but also realizes the benefits of a degree of toleration. Delegated censorship utilizes both power control and power sharing and offers a new understanding of authoritarian state-society relations. (shrink)

This paper argues that we ought to distinguish between ‘assisted’ gestation and ‘delegating’ gestation—and that the relevant difference does not depend on whether it is another human or technological system doing the work.1 In the philosophy of action, there is an important theoretical gap between S ‘helping A to φ’ and S ‘φ-ing on behalf of A’: the former is an instance of joint agency while the latter is an individual’s action. This matters because if the latter counts as an (...) intentional action, then only S is being said to have acted intentionally while, if the former is an intentional action, then both S and A have acted intentionally—which might have consequences for responsibility attributions, for example. To put it brutally, it is the difference between Belarus supporting Putin’s invasion and Belarus doing Putin’s dirty work—and you do not have to be a Russian mother to see that these two alternatives will have very different consequences. In another context, the economics of outsourcing is also built around the same theoretical distinction. But does this matter to gestation and reproduction? It does, argues this paper. Insisting on an ‘assisted’ reproduction framework2–8 reinforces patriarchal stereotypes and continues to put undue burdens on prospective mothers both by perpetuating the stereotype of women as needing help and also by implicating them in an action that might genuinely not be theirs. Delegation, on the other hand, empowers parents—who are in charge, rather than needing help. Furthermore, an action-theoretical delegation framework might be better placed to regulate and anticipate future technological developments, …. (shrink)

The present study aims at elucidating two aspects of Roman governance: first of all, the overlooked, but relevant, power of decision of the consuls (and, in a minor degree, of the praetors); secondly, the relationship between magistrates and Senate. The sources, especially epigraphic senatus consulta, consistently describe a procedure through which the Senate voted to delegate fully or partially decision-making on specific matters of foreign affairs to a consul or praetor who was in Rome. This procedure is present in almost (...) half of the decisions recorded in epigraphic senatus consulta, on a variety of matters throughout the second and first centuries. This procedure was characterised by the use of the formula ita utei ei e re publica fideque sua videbitur esse/videretur (found in both epigraphic and literary sources), which referred to the cultural and ideological connotation that addressed the relationship between the Senate and magistrates. (shrink)

We investigate the determinants of decision rights transfer and its effects on the motivation of an agent. The study is based on a laboratory experiment conducted on 130 subjects playing an innovative principal–agent game. Interestingly, the results show that agents do not favour a delegation and a decision is considered rather burdensome. Although the experiment could not give support for the behavioural hypothesis of higher effort provided by participants who receive choice subsequently, the survey illuminates the interaction between delegation motives, (...) effort motivators, goals and other perceptions of the agents. (shrink)

The place of the written Constitution in our constitutional practice is defined secondarily, from outside the text, not commanded by the text. Like moral readers of our constitutional practice, originalists of all stripes have to argue from outside the text. This makes the new originalist turn to the theory of language come too early; the place of such theory is necessarily subordinate to a convincing moral account of our practice as a whole. To lament the existence of constitutional provisions that (...) do not provide legible descriptions of encompassing states of affairs —as the new originalists implicitly do— is to badly misunderstand a morally salient element of our constitutional practice. The non-encompassing provisions of the Constitution are not incomplete, and hence failed instructions; rather they are complete, successful delegations of authority to constitutionally responsible officials. A delegatory constitutional instruction hands off responsibility and authority; in order to do that, it must be non-encompassing. This is a virtue, not a liability of the written Constitution. The purpose of our constitutional practice is justice-seeking. It aims at better aligning our institutions, policies, laws and the political community as a whole, with the requirements of justice. It aims, that is, at our making moral progress as a political community. Delegations of constitutional authority and responsibility invite the partnership of contemporary constitutional actors, in the justice-seeking enterprise, including and especially courts. Our constitutional courts are common law courts; they are, that is, reason-giving and precedent- drawn, features that make them worthy partners in that enterprise. (shrink)

Contra Jackendoff, we argue that within the parallel architecture framework, the generality of language does not require a rich conceptual structure. To show this, we put forward a delegation model of specialization. We find Jackendoff's alternative, the subdivision model, insufficiently supported. In particular, the computational consequences of his representational notion of modularity need to be clarified.

Ten years ago, Megan Shinal sought the care of neurosurgeon Steven Toms for the surgical treatment of a recurrent nonmalignant tumor in the pituitary region of her brain. In their twenty-minute meeting, Shinal did not make a final decision about which surgical approach she wished to pursue. Subsequently, she spoke with Tom's physician assistant once by phone and once in person, when she signed the consent form, which did not appear to designate which surgical approach she had chosen. During the (...) operation—a total resection—Toms perforated Shinal's carotid artery, resulting in hemorrhage, stroke, brain injury, and partial blindness. The jury found that Toms had fulfilled his informed-consent obligations prior to performing the resection; however, in June 2017, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania overturned the decision, relying on the Pennsylvania Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error Act. The court found that the language of the act is unambiguous in its requirement that “a physician's duty to provide information to a patient sufficient to obtain her informed consent is non-delegable.” Presumably, this rule of nondelegation applies beyond the surgical theater to other major treatment decisions. And it is unclear whether it applies to other professionals in a subordinate position to the treating physician, such as residents and fellows. (shrink)

This essay reviews John Gardner’s recent books, From Personal Life to Private Law, and Torts and Other Wrongs. Both books offer profound insights into private law’s concerns with justice and our reasons for action. The essay focuses on Gardner’s continuity thesis, and in particular on his idea that a third party may act on behalf of a wrongdoer as her delegee. Three settings are considered. First, I will discuss settings in which the state or another third party acts to remedy (...) a wrong without the wrongdoer’s consent. Second, I will review settings in which the legal remedies at issue – e.g., general damages or punitive damages – may not fit well with the idea that the state is acting on behalf of a wrongdoer. Third, I will analyze settings in which the state may be acting on behalf of right holders, yet still be concerned with the continuity thesis. Assessing each of these contexts offers further insights into the purpose of private law remedies. (shrink)

Independent central banks are major centres of unelected power in contemporary capitalist societies. While critics allege that they are incompatible with democratic values, defenders argue that delegating monetary policy to an independent central bank is an important policy tool elected institutions may use to credibly commit to low inflation. This paper defends a moderate view that neither requires dismantling central bank independence nor turns a blind eye to its risks for the proper functioning of a democratic regime. It proposes a (...) set of concrete constitutional rules that limit central bank power while allowing it to serve its core function. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of delegation of morality to a machine, through a consideration of whether or not non-humans can be considered to be moral. The aspect of morality under consideration here is protection of privacy. The topic is introduced through two cases where there was a failure in sharing and retaining personal data protected by UK data protection law, with tragic consequences. In some sense this can be regarded as a failure in the process of delegating morality to (...) a computer database. In the UK, the issues that these cases raise have resulted in legislation designed to protect children which allows for the creation of a huge database for children. Paradoxically, we have the situation where we failed to use digital data in enforcing the law to protect children, yet we may now rely heavily on digital technologies to care for children. I draw on the work of Floridi, Sanders, Collins, Kusch, Latour and Akrich, a spectrum of work stretching from philosophy to sociology of technology and the “seamless web” or “actor–network” approach to studies of technology. Intentionality is considered, but not deemed necessary for meaningful moral behaviour. Floridi’s and Sanders’ concept of “distributed morality” accords with the network of agency characterized by actor–network approaches. The paper concludes that enfranchizing non-humans, in the shape of computer databases of personal data, as moral agents is not necessarily problematic but a balance of delegation of morality must be made between human and non-human actors. (shrink)

In this article I reject the claim that the responsibilities acquired by gamete providers can be transferred to their biological children's intending parents. I defend this position by first showing that arguments in defence of the transferability of responsibilities in gamete provision cases fail to distinguish between the transfer and delegation of responsibility. I then provide an argument against the transferability of responsibilities in gamete provision cases that differs from the ones offered by James Lindemann Nelson and Rivka Weinberg. Though (...) I conclude that gamete providers have inalienable responsibilities towards their biological offspring, I note that the precise ethical and policy implications this has for gamete provision remain somewhat unclear. (shrink)

One of the measures taken by states to relieve the burden of providing for asylum seekers and refugees is privatization and delegation of asylum regimes. I analyze the privatization and delegation of authority that is taking place within asylum systems and describe three tiers of privatization/delegation: 1. admission at points of entry or criminalization of undocumented entry, 2. status determination, 3. social integration and provision of social and economic rights and benefits. I then ask why states are privatizing and delegating (...) authority within the context of asylum systems and argue that privatization and delegation of authority are intended to be used to maintain control and reduce immigration and integration of asylum seekers. Governments are often helpless in their attempts to manage refugee migration and need to recruit other sectors to assist them in regaining control over immigration. This “tool” is particularly instrumental as it allows governments to maintain—to a large extent—control of immigrations and at the same time distance themselves from their responsibilities, from human rights violations, etc. Governments attempt to have private or other actors carry out acts that they cannot—whether because of practical reasoning or due to legal constraints. Finally, I argue that asylums systems are a special locus; thus, special care, great caution, much regulation, or complete refrain from privatizing at all, is paramount since privatization of asylums systems carries unique and severe consequences. (shrink)

Roy Sorensen has argued that vagueness in the law cannot be justified by appeal to the value of power-delegation, and thereby threatens to take away one of the main reasons for thinking that vagueness can be valuable to law. Delegation of power to officials is justified, he thinks, only if these officials are in a better position to discover whether a particular x is F, a condition not satisfied in cases of vagueness. I argue that Sorensen’s argument is unsound: delegation (...) of power can be valuable even if the delegates are not in a better position to answer that question. (shrink)

Obtaining informed consent from patients prior to a medical or surgical procedure is a fundamental part of safe and ethical clinical practice. Currently, it is routine for a significant part of the consent process to be delegated to members of the clinical team not performing the procedure (eg, junior doctors). However, it is common for consent-taking delegates to lack sufficient time and clinical knowledge to adequately promote patient autonomy and informed decision-making. Such problems might be addressed in a number of (...) ways. One possible solution to this clinical dilemma is through the use of conversational artificial intelligence using large language models (LLMs). There is considerable interest in the potential benefits of such models in medicine. For delegated procedural consent, LLM could improve patients’ access to the relevant procedural information and therefore enhance informed decision-making.In this paper, we first outline a hypothetical example of delegation of consent to LLMs prior to surgery. We then discuss existing clinical guidelines for consent delegation and some of the ways in which current practice may fail to meet the ethical purposes of informed consent. We outline and discuss the ethical implications of delegating consent to LLMs in medicine concluding that at least in certain clinical situations, the benefits of LLMs potentially far outweigh those of current practices. (shrink)

This article argues that Jeremy Bentham put forward a distinctive and original theory of representative democracy which can be helpfully analysed through his concept of the ‘deputy’. A deputy, Bentham argued, evoked a specific political relationship between governors and the governed – a relationship that was functionally different to that between the people and a ‘representative’ or a ‘delegate’. Whereas a representative was suggestive of too great a degree of governmental independence from the people and a delegate implied an excessive (...) dependency of governors upon the governed, a deputy for Bentham best described the relationship between the rulers and the ruled that should subsist in a representative democracy. A political form based on deputies, who were to be relatively free to conduct the business of government yet simultaneously accountable to their sovereign electors, was the only way in his eyes to guarantee the promotion of utility in politics and the security of the people from being misruled. (shrink)

Third-party punishment (TPP) has been shown to be an effective mechanism for maintaining human cooperation. However, it is puzzling how third-party punishment can be maintained, as punishers take on personal costs to punish defectors. Although there is evidence that punishers are preferred as partners because third-party punishment is regarded by bystanders as a costly signal of trustworthiness, other studies show that this signaling value of punishment can be severely attenuated because third-party helping is viewed as a stronger signal of trustworthiness (...) than third-party punishment. Third-party helpers donate their payoffs to victims of defection in games instead of punishing defectors as third-party punishers do. Then, under what circumstances can third-party punishment be maintained by costly signaling when helping is also present? We show that punishers are preferred over helpers by fourth-party individuals as their delegates to deter potential exploitation. This suggests that costly signaling can facilitate the maintenance of third-party punishment in partner choice with delegation interactions. (shrink)

Delegating a policy question to a panel of experts is similar in some ways to deferring to an expert about the right answer to some personal decision, but also crucially distinct from it. Most importantly, delegation is compatible with understanding why the expert’s decision is correct or incorrect, whereas deference excludes such understanding. As a matter of administrative logic, however, delegating agents cannot be required to understand whether the policy questions they delegate are decided correctly. This has important implications for (...) the role of moral experts in delegated policy-making. Notably, while conventional academic wisdom regards deference to moral experts as highly objectionable, no analogous objection applies when policy questions are delegated to panels that include moral experts. (shrink)

Like many ethics debates surrounding emerging technologies, neuroethics is increasingly concerned with the private sector. Here, entrepreneurial visions and claims of how neurotechnology innovation will revolutionize society—from brain-computer-interfaces to neural enhancement and cognitive phenotyping—are confronted with public and policy concerns about the risks and ethical challenges related to such innovations. But while neuroethics frameworks have a longer track record in public sector research such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, much less is known about how businesses—and especially start-ups—address ethics in tech (...) development. In this paper, we investigate how actors in the field frame and enact ethics as part of their innovative R&D processes and business models. Drawing on an empirical case study on direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups, we find that actors engage in careful boundary-work to anticipate and address public critique of their technologies, which allows them to delineate a manageable scope of their ethics integration. In particular, boundaries are drawn around four areas: the technology’s actual capability, purpose, safety and evidence-base. By drawing such lines of demarcation, we suggest that start-ups make their visions of ethical neurotechnology in society more acceptable, plausible and desirable, favoring their innovations while at the same time assigning discrete responsibilities for ethics. These visions establish a link from the present into the future, mobilizing the latter as promissory place where a technology’s benefits will materialize and to which certain ethical issues can be deferred. In turn, the present is constructed as a moment in which ethical engagement could be delegated to permissive regulatory standards and scientific authority. Our empirical tracing of the construction of ‘ethical realities’ in and by start-ups offers new inroads for ethics research and governance in tech industries beyond neurotechnology. (shrink)

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article delineates a process through which members of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles unintentionally delegate boundary work and membership-identification to anonymous others in everyday life. Living in the midst of a non-Jewish world, orthodox men are often approached by others, both Jews and non-Jews, who categorize them as “religious Jews” based on external marks such as the yarmulke and attire. These interactions, varying from mundane interactions to anti-Semitic incidents, are then tacitly (...) anticipated by members even when they are not attending to their “Jewishness”—when being a “Jew” is interactionally invisible. Through this case, I argue that, in addition to conceptualizing boundaries and identifications as either emerging in performance or institutionally given and stable, the study of boundaries should also chart the sites in which members anticipate categorization and the way these anticipations play out in everyday life. (shrink)

This article starts with a critical reflection on John Westlake’s reading of the history of empire and the English/British East India Company – for him, essentially, the proper concern of ‘constitutional history’ rather than international law. For Westlake, approaching this history through the prism of nineteenth-century positivist doctrine, the Company’s exercise of war powers could only result from state delegation. Against his warnings to international lawyers not to stray from the proper boundaries of international legal inquiry, the article proceeds to (...) recover Hugo Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency in his early treatise De iure praedae. For Grotius, corporations could wage public war on behalf of the state yet, at the same time, were in law capable of waging private war in their own right. The article proceeds to reflect on the practice of corporate belligerency in the centuries separating Westlake and Grotius; it concludes with observations on the implications of Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency today. (shrink)

In “Missing the Forest for the Trees: Aduhelm, Accelerated Approvals & the Agency,” Dr. Matthew Herder argues that agency capture and politicized discretion drive delays in confirmatory trials of accelerated approval drugs amongst other concerns at US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In highlighting this important problem and offering nuanced insight into agency workings based in part on interviews with twenty-three unnamed FDA officials and a three-drug case study, Dr. Herder suggests two innovative solutions. However, amidst broader debates balancing agency (...) expertise, data, and delegation, these proposed policy solutions would benefit from more corroborative evidence and consideration of institutional advantages within constitutional limits. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between Christian pastoral care and Artificial Intelligence systems. Four aspects are identified from definitions of pastoral care: the horizon of contingency in mortality, the role of wisdom rather than mere information, the oppressive and/or liberatory potential of AI and the importance of empathic presence. In rejecting a transhumanist argument that mental processes are substrate-independent, it is contended that pastoral carers embrace, rather than seeking to circumvent, their crucial finitude in being humans who care. A distinction (...) is drawn between probabilistic reasoning and judgement in retaining a vital place for decision-making that is social. Whilst not eschewing value in AI systems, this article argues for critical evaluation of technologically framed contributions to addressing barriers to people's participation. The importance of empathy is highlighted—in the light of claims not only of robotic mimicry but of interindividual models of emotion. It is concluded that the notion of artificial care be ruled out although the possibilities of AI-assisted care are not dismissed. Opportunities for humans to abdicate from the responsibilities to care, in favour of AI substitutes, are deemed to be best avoided. (shrink)

Assisted conception can be distinguished from assisted gestation.1 These processes have tended to be grouped together under the generic term assisted reproductive technology in the bioethical literature. According to Chloe Romanis, however, it is worth distinguishing interventions such as surrogacy, uterus transplantation, and potentially artificial placenta technology, as falling under the genus assisted gestative technologies. This is because gestation carries unique ethico-legal implications as compared with conception. The proposed genus of assisted gestative technologies is a helpful first step in the (...) endeavour to distinguish between the different ethico-legal landscapes across various ‘assisted reproductive technologies.’ I am generally in favour of adopting AGT as a term which separates various forms of gestational services from other kinds of reproductive technologies. Yet, if assisted gestative technologies can be considered a genus of assisted reproductive technologies, we might consider surrogacy, UTx, and artificial placenta technology their individual species. Between these various species of AGTs, I would argue, there remains enough ethico-legal diversity to warrant independent discussion about the descriptive and normative functions of each AGT and the relationship between gestation, genetic relatedness and legal/moral parenthood. Chloe Romanis claims that legal and social issues about attribution of parenthood and the importance that might be placed on information about gestational origins affect all forms of AGTs.1 I take it ethical ambiguities arise because the relationship between who gestates, genetic relatedness to the prospective child, and claims to legal/moral parental responsibility can be disrupted or made ambivalent with the involvement of third-party support. For many of those who do not require reproductive assistance, the gestational labour, genetic relatedness and parental responsibility would traditionally …. (shrink)