It can be intuitively understood that sets and their elements in mathematics reflect the atomistic way of thinking in physics: Sets correspond to physical properties, and their elements correspond to particles that have these properties. At the same time, quantum statistics and quantum field theory strongly support the view that quantum particles are not individuals. Some of the problems faced in modern physics may be caused by such discrepancy between set theory and physical theory. The question then arises: Is it (...) possible to reconstruct the concept of set as a collection of objects that model quantum particles rather than as a mere collection of individuals? David Deutsch has argued that identical entities can be diverse in their attributes, and that this nature, what he calls fungibility, must lie at the heart of quantum physics. In line with this idea, a set theory with fungible elements is established, and the collection of such sets is shown to be endowed with an ortholattice structure, which is better known as quantum logic. (shrink)

This paper approaches the question of terraforming—the changing of extraterrestrial environments to be capable of harboring earth-based life—by arguing for a novel conception of moral status that accounts for extraterrestrial bodies like Mars. The paper begins by addressing pro-terraforming arguments offered by James S. J. Schwartz before offering the novel account of moral status. The account offered builds on and modifies Keekok Lee’s No External Teleology Thesis (NETT), while defending a proposed Non-Fungibility Thesis (NFT). The NETT is modified and defended (...) with specific reference to Lee’s work on artifactuality and transgenic organisms. The NFT builds on work around objectification and irreplaceability, offering an account that recognizes the importance of bearers of value above and beyond the mere value they purportedly possess. Finally, the plausibility of the account is established by an overview of its applicability to other possible candidates for moral status. (shrink)

Com formidável velocidade, as máquinas de guerra, diferentes dos aparelhos de Estado, transformam a vítima em instrumento de guerra (acionável, intercambiável e matável), até à sua exaustão final. Assim, categorias inteiras de “populações negadas”, inertes e precárias, são transformadas em ferramentas (úteis e vivas) de violência armada, colocadas, hoje, ao serviço daqueles que reivindicam o direito de matar, e da mesma forma, em “realidades”. “perdidos” que não deixam vestígios de sua passagem pelo mundo. Aqui está a forma inédita e concreta (...) de poder e a divisão das máquinas de guerra (gangues, milícias, grupos rebeldes e estruturas paramilitares), que, além de fazerem morrer e deixarem viver, produzem e reproduzem centenas de “vidas fungíveis”, quais Eles são usados, substituídos e eliminados de acordo com os interesses da violência. Daí a sua natureza “descartável”. Esta composição hermenêutica crítica, que utiliza fundamentalmente o pensamento de Butler, Deleuze, Guattari, Mbembe, Arendt, Agamben e Roxin, além de alguns depoimentos de ex-combatentes colombianos, que pintaram e narraram a guerra, trata de definir e caracterizar a noção “vida fungível” (inexistente na literatura, mas empiricamente verificável). É tão útil quanto sem precedentes para representar formas contemporâneas de violência armada. (shrink)

This paper explores Saidiya Hartman's undertheorized account of 'redress' in conversation with the extensive uptake of her work on Black fungibility, subjection, and critiques of emancipation. Although Hartman uses the term in nearly all of her writing, little work has been done to clarify how Hartman conceptualizes redress as a response to the constitution of Black lives as abstract, exchangeable, and disposable. This paper offers an account of how Hartman theorizes redress, showing how it both resists, and acts as a (...) mechanism for, the constitution of Blackness as fungible. Consequently, I argue that Hartman's readers fundamentally skew her thinking in divorcing redress from her other key concepts. (shrink)

Owned objects are typically viewed as non-fungible-they cannot be freely interchanged. We report three experiments (total N=312) demonstrating this intuition in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, children considered an agent who takes one of two identical objects and leaves the other for a peer. Children viewed this as acceptable when the agent took his own item, but not when he took his peer's item. In Experiment 2, children considered scenarios where one agent took property from another. Children said the (...) victim could take back her own property from the perpetrator, but that she could not take an identical object belonging to the perpetrator. Finally, in Experiment 3A and 3B, children considered scenarios where a teacher could give a child either of two objects to play with-an object that the child had recently played with, or another object that looked the same. Children were more likely to say that the teacher should give the object recently played with when it belonged to the child, compared with when it belonged to the teacher. These findings are informative about the basis of judgments that property is non-fungible, and about young children's representation of ownership rights. They show that children's representation of ownership rights is not limited to principles protecting owners from being deprived. Our findings instead suggest that ownership rights are viewed as pertaining to individual objects. (shrink)

When asked why we are friends with someone, we often point to her good virtues as reasons. If these are the reasons, we have equal reasons to be friends with anyone with such virtues, and we can even replace current friends with anyone with the same or better virtues without substantive loss in friendship. However, it does not seem right that a particular friend is replaceable by just any other person with the same or better virtues. This is the fungibility (...) problem of friendship. This essay outlines a Confucian response to the problem on the basis of the Confucian family-based conception of friendship and the Confucian understanding of particularized virtues. First, in the Confucian understanding, true friends are like family members, toward whom we have special obligations. Family members are nonfungible, and so are friends. Second, even though virtues are general traits that can be shared, the formations and practices of virtues are particularized. Confucian thinkers hold that each person configures virtues and exercises virtues in his or her own way depending on specific circumstances, and that persons with the same virtues may nevertheless possess them in varied fashions and exercise different shades of them in particular ways. Thus, persons of the same generic virtues will still retain their particularities as distinctive individuals. We become friends and remain friends with people in part because of their virtues practiced in ways that we appreciate. This notion of particularly exercised virtues makes it practically impossible for two persons to be identical in virtues. On such an understanding, virtuous friends are nevertheless unique and nonfungible. (shrink)

La vulnerabilidad narrativa, producto de la exclusión de los marcos de representación del contexto, que priva a algunos de ser vistos, escuchados y sentidos por la mayoría, implica la precariedad de amplias generaciones transformadas en “vidas fungibles”, esto es, en instrumentos vivos y animados de las máquinas de la guerra. Estos hombres y mujeres, empero, no son engranajes de la destrucción, sino seres con un nombre y una historia singular. Su capacidad de traducir narrativamente la realidad ofrece otro encuadre de (...) interpretación sobre el pasado y el futuro a partir de su llamado a una nueva vida y al fin de la violencia armada. Aquí reside la propuesta de esta contribución, en la que, usando las reflexiones de Hannah Arendt y de Judith Butler, además de una entrevista a profundidad con un excombatiente colombiano en proceso de reintegración, se advierte en la narración la respuesta a la fungibilidad —‍ la condición de existencias usufructuables, reemplazables y matables‍‍— de forma que se posibilita una vida biográfica, cargada de porvenir. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article concerns the ways in which Afropessimist Calvin Warren misuses and overextends both Wynter’s historiography of the Human and Hartman’s concept “fungible commodity.” First, Calvin Warren flattens the ontology of the political subject described in Wynter’s concept “genres of Man” to argue that the contemporary Black US person exists as “being,” that is, non-being. Second, Warren misaligns with Wynter’s account of the period of historical rupture between the Human and nonhuman. Whereas, for Wynter, this rupture was constituted (...) by the colonial encounter in the Americas, Warren cites chattel slavery as the event wherein the Human and Other, specifically the Black Other, were torn apart. Third, Warren’s use of “fungible commodity” when referencing the contemporary Black lacks a historiographical framework that would account for the continued non-being of Black existence as commodity post-emancipation. (shrink)

In recent years discussions centered around digital inheritance have increased among social media users and across blockchain ecosystems. As a result digital assets such as social media content cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens have become increasingly valuable and widespread, leading to the need for clear and secure mechanisms for transferring these assets upon the testators death or incapacitation. This study proposes a framework for digital inheritance using soulbound tokens and the social recovery pallet as a use case in the Polkadot (...) and Kusama blockchain networks. The findings discussed within this study suggest that while soulbound tokens and the social recovery pallet offer a promising solution for creating a digital inheritance plan the findings also raise important considerations for testators digital executors and developers. While further research is needed to fully understand the potential impacts and risks of other technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing this study provides a primer for users to begin planning a digital inheritance strategy and for developers to develop a more intuitive solution. (shrink)

Biodiversity offsetting is an increasingly popular policy instrument used to compensate for losses in biodiversity and ecosystem services caused by development projects. Although evidence suggests that offsetting can yield significant environmental benefits, application of the policy instrument is surrounded by controversy. Among other things, critics argue that offsetting builds on normatively contentious assumptions regarding the value of nature and the fungibility of biodiversity components, such as species, habitats, ecosystems, and landscapes. A large portion of the criticism targets the allegedly illegitimate (...) commodification of nature that the policy instrument entails. Exploring the significantly more developed normative discussion on carbon offsetting, this article identifies four arguments that plausibly could be made to support the claim that it is wrong to commodify nature in the way biodiversity offsetting schemes do: the common ownership argument, the price argument, the non‐substitutability argument, and the “crowding out” argument. Although none of the arguments definitively invalidate the use of biodiversity offsets, they provide good reasons to proceed with caution when designing and implementing them. (shrink)

The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been astonishing, in particular for the arts and creative industries. The dominant discourse both in mainstream media and in academia today focuses predominantly on what this new technology can do for the art market rather than art itself. However, framing NFTs in art in the context of money and markets draws attention away from the more subtle and creative role of NFTs. Consequently, this article asks: What is the role of NFTs in (...) art, beyond the market? This research complements existing empirical work, by conducting a case study and interviews with members of DADA, a historic NFT art project which is particularly critical towards the role of the art market. The findings foregrounded five roles that NFTs play in art: as (1) a tool for systemic change, (2) a new way to community, (3) a ritual artefact, (4) a means for preservation and (5) a new medium. (shrink)

This paper proposes an account of scientific data that makes sense of recent debates on data-driven and ‘big data’ research, while also building on the history of data production and use particularly within biology. In this view, ‘data’ is a relational category applied to research outputs that are taken, at specific moments of inquiry, to provide evidence for knowledge claims of interest to the researchers involved. They do not have truth-value in and of themselves, nor can they be seen as (...) straightforward representations of given phenomena. Rather, they are fungible objects defined by their portability and prospective usefulness as evidence. (shrink)

Participation in research is supposed to be voluntary and informed. Yet it is difficult to ensure people are adequately informed about the potential uses of their biological materials when they donate samples for future research. We propose a novel consent framework which we call “demonstrated consent” that leverages blockchain technology and generative AI to address this problem. In a demonstrated consent model, each donated sample is associated with a unique non-fungible token (NFT) on a blockchain, which records in its (...) metadata information about the planned and past uses of the sample in research, and is updated with each use of the sample. This information is accessible to a large language model (LLM) customized to present this information in an understandable and interactive manner. Thus, our model uses blockchain and generative AI technologies to track, make available, and explain information regarding planned and past uses of donated samples. (shrink)

After 50 years of debate, the ethics of aggregation has reached a curious stalemate, with both sides arguing that only their theory treats people as equals. I argue that, on the issue of equality, both sides are wrong. From the premise that “each counts for one,” we cannot derive the conclusion that “more count for more” or its negation. The familiar arguments from equality to aggregation presuppose more than equality: the Kamm/Scanlon “Balancing Argument” rests on what social choice theorists call (...) “(Positive) Responsiveness,” Kamm’s “Aggregation Argument” assumes that “equal” lives are fungible, and Hsieh et al. have it that spreading goods broadly best approximates equality. In each case, the crucial premise is not equality itself but a further idea that Taurek, I argue, can safely reject. I conclude with a conjecture: there is no theory-neutral argument that settles the question of whether the numbers count. (shrink)

In this article, I advance a theory of gendered money and demonstrate how couples give special symbolic meaning to men’s money in domestic exchanges. Unlike previous perspectives on gender and money such as resource theories and gender performance, this framework acknowledges money as a prop and tool that couples use to construct gender boundaries and signal normalcy in the marital relationship. Integrating concepts from economic sociology with Hochschild’s insights on the symbolism of domestic labor, I find that Ukrainians use money (...) as a token and symbol of value, not as a commodity with which to obtain desired outcomes. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 56 married and cohabiting individuals, I discover that couples subvert market meanings of money to enact a Soviet-style gender ideology. By spending men’s money on “necessary” items and avoiding accessing women’s money in the household, couples construct men’s money as both visible and valuable while rendering women’s money non-fungible. These practices highlight the primacy of culture and ideology over relative income, and can help explain the reproduction of male privilege in the household, despite gains in women’s employment and earnings. (shrink)

People are prone to ascribe value to persons they love. However, the relation between love and value is far from straightforward. This is particularly evident given certain views on the nature of love. Setting out from the idea that what causes us to have an attitude towards an object need not be found in the intentional content of the attitude, this paper depicts love as an attitude that takes non‐fungible persons as intentional objects. Taking this view as a starting (...) point, the paper shows why it is difficult to combine with certain views on value. The main challenge comes from the idea that value judgments are universalizable. This view squares badly with the thought that the people whom we love are irreplaceable. Introducing the idea that properties may have different functions in the intentional content of the attitude, this paper determines what precisely it is about love that makes it hard to combine with universalizability. Moreover, it suggests two ways of meeting this challenge. (shrink)

I argue against the intellectualist view of love according to which we (must) love for reasons so that love is rational. Engaging primarily with the quality appraisal view of love, I concede that qualities can cause love but insist that it is misguided to think of love as having reasons. A number of features of human psychology complicate the issue of how lover relates to beloved's qualities. (a) The lover may be attracted to a quality without appraising that quality reflectively. (...) (b) Personal qualities are not perceived in isolation; rather, our assessment of one quality will affect how we perceive another. In fact, we tend to posit essences in persons, and these guide our interpretation of their other qualities. (c) We do not see persons as bundles of qualities but as unique wholes. This is due to our capacity to fetishize particulars, and it dispels the problem of fungibility. (d) We have a tendency to see meaning in things retrospectively—philosophers have mistaken this sense of meaning for rationality. The philosophical movement to incorporate love into rationality fails to recognize that there is a folk metaphysics built deep into our psyches that does not correspond to the worldview of contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

In spite of an overwhelming importance of business groups in the economic development of many countries, systematic inquiry on how the BGs and their affiliated firms approach and contribute to shared value creation and sustainable development is rare. In this paper we address this research gap by investigating two related questions—do BG-affiliated firms differ from non-BG firms in their corporate sustainability strategy and how does BG affiliation influence the relationship between stock of fungible resources and CSS of firms? Drawing (...) from the BG literature we theorize that BG-affiliated firms tend to adopt of both environmental and social sustainability strategies more than non-BG firms. We also argue that although according to resource-based view, the stock of fungible resources of firms positively influences CSS, BG affiliation negatively moderates the relationship between stock of fungible resources and CSS of firms. Stock of fungible resources matters less for BG-affiliated firms in undertaking CSS as they have access to resources of the BG network. We test our theoretical predictions using a proprietary data set of 163 Indian publicly listed firms, out of which 76 are BG-affiliated firms belonging to 74 BGs. The data for corporate environmental and social sustainability strategies have been obtained by administering a survey instrument among the top level executives of the participating firms. We find support for our theoretical predictions that signify that BGs and their affiliates make important contributions to shared value creation and sustainable development in emerging economies like India. (shrink)

Aura & Transvestment is a transmedia project consisting of a series of generative images, an experimental form of cryptomedia and a video essay. By describing its own powers and contradictions, the work explores notions of value, ownership, authenticity, artificial scarcity and abundance in the digital realm. The project is a critical analysis of non-fungible tokens used as proof of ownership for digital art, taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura as a starting point. It argues that, for tokenized art, cryptography (...) serves as an artificial source of auratic power that reverts the political potential of reproducibility falling back to a magical and ritual notion of aura. This time around the ritual performed is that of property, authenticity, ownership, markets and commodification. Finally, the article outlines alternative uses of cryptography and distributed ledger technologies to support artistic labour and proposes transvestment as a temporary counter-action for the reallocation of value from capitalist forms of production and into commons-based models of social coordination. Submitted to this journal is an adaptation of the script for the video essay, alongside other elements of the project. Please visit: https://aura-transvestment.art/. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

Philosophers have tended to construe friendship as an intimate relationship involving mutual love, and have focused their discussions on this ‘true’ form of friendship. However, everyone recognizes that we use the word ‘friend’ and its cognates to refer, non-ironically, to those with whom we share various relationships that are not terribly intimate or which do not involve mutual love. I argue that there exists no general reason to restrict our philosophical focus to ‘true’ friendships, and allege that we can gain (...) important insights if we broaden our perspective to include lesser friends. I contend that friendships, in the broad sense (encompassing both ‘true’ and lesser forms), are necessarily relationships that are the product of significant collaborative norm manipulation. And I argue that understanding friendship in this way helps explain important features, including the difference between friendships and familiar relations, the non-fungibility of friends, and why friendships are often in flux. (shrink)

William Harvey's famous quantitative argument fromDe motu cordis about the circulation of blood explained how a small amount of blood could recirculate and nourish the entire body, upending the Galenic conception of the blood's motion. This paper argues that the quantitative argument drew on the calculative and rhetorical skills of merchants, including Harvey's own brothers. Modern translations ofDe motu cordisobscure the language of accountancy that Harvey himself used. Like a merchant accounting for credits and debits, intake and output, goods and (...) moneys, Harvey treated venous and arterial blood as essentially commensurate, quantifiable and fungible. For Harvey, the circulation of blood was an arithmetical necessity. The development of Harvey's circulatory model followed shifts in the epistemic value of mercantile forms of knowledge, including accounting and arithmetic, also drawing on an Aristotelian language of reciprocity and balance that Harvey shared with mercantile advisers to the royal court. This paper places Harvey's calculations in a previously underappreciated context of economic crisis, whose debates focused largely on questions of circulation. (shrink)

The social capital literature has focused on the functional and structural properties of social relations, partially neglecting the way in which they are experienced by individuals. Drawing on anthropological and social theory, this article distinguishes two ideal-typical forms of social capital — reciprocity and trust — based on the meaning of the social relations that embed them. Reciprocity is the type of social capital embedded within personal relations, triply defined in the factual, social and temporal dimensions by co-presence, reciprocity and (...) memory, respectively. Trust is the type of social capital embedded within relations with strangers, defined by the condition of impersonality or anonymity. These two types of social capital cannot be reduced to extremes in a continuum, nor are they fungible, and while reciprocity is by definition particularistic (this is the source of its strength as a linking mechanism), trust has a universalistic potential. Analytical and empirical implications of this distinction are outlined. (shrink)

Decentralised ledgers are gaining momentum following the interest of industries and people in smart contracts. Major attention is paid to blockchain applications intended for trading assets that exploit digital cryptographic certificates called tokens. Particularly relevant tokens are the non-fungible tokens (NFTs), namely, unique and non-replicable tokens used to represent the cryptographic counterpart of assets ranging from pieces of art through to licenses and certifications. A relevant consequence of the hard-coded nature of blockchains is the hardness of probing, in particular (...) when advanced searchers involving the capabilities of the smart contracts or the assets digitised by NFTs are required. For this purpose, a formal representation for the operational semantics of smart contracts and of tokens has become particularly urgent, especially in economy and finance, where blockchains become increasingly relevant. Hence, we feel the need to tailor Semantic Web technologies to achieve that semantic representation at least for NFTS. This article reports on an ontology that leverages the Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (“OASIS”) towards the semantic representation of smart contracts responsible for managing ERC721-compliant NFTs and running on the Ethereum blockchain. Called Ether-OASIS, the proposed ontology adopts OASIS and tailors its behaviouristic approach to the Ethereum blockchain by conceiving smart contracts as agents running on the blockchain and, consequently, smart contract interactions as agent commitments. Smart contracts are represented in terms of their actions, purposes and tokens that they manage, thus realising a blockchain that is more usable both by users and automated applications. The ontology is evaluated using standard ontological metrics and applied on a case study concerning the minting and transferring of NFTs that digitise batches of wheat. (shrink)

This paper aims to address conceptual issues concerning black holes in the context of string theory, with the aim of illuminating the ontological unification of gravity and matter, and the interpretation of cosmological models. §1 describes the central concepts of the theory: the fungibility of matter and geometry, and the reduction of gravity and supergravity. The ‘standard’ interpretation presented draws on that implicit in the thinking of many (but not all) string theorists, though made more explicit and systematic than usual. (...) §2 explains how to construct a stringy black hole, and some of its features, including evaporation. §3 critically examines the assumptions behind such modeling, and their bearing on ontological questions. (shrink)

Digital organizations form part of the new wave of blockchain technologies, following Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. “Utopia ofion” offers an analysis of the utopian promise of digital organizations through a reading of one such project, Colony. We provide a critique of the ideology of Colony's white paper, supplemented by readings of pages from its website, as a member of a genre of texts that promote their products through seemingly neutral, technical descriptions. Colony's texts suggest an abstract, contextless and scaleless organizational (...) solution—powered by smart contracts on a blockchain—that, according to its proponents, might be applied to any social situation, from small firm to state-level governance. For its users, this organization combines a promise of sovereignty removed from that of the state, as well as implied financial returns. Our reading of Colony echoes the critiques of scholars arguing that cyberlibertarianism is a dominant politic of blockchain technologies. Furthermore, drawing on critiques of code as law and the elision of the social in smart contracts, we argue that Colony's vision presents a model of technical organization that substitutes for the state in the context of waning popular sovereignty. We ultimately suggest an understanding of digital organizations reminiscent of the settler colonial situation: the assumption of an empty social space to be filled, and the promise of sovereignty and riches for those occupying it. Analysis of these logics is relevant as hype increases around non-fungible tokens, Web3, and the corporate metaverse as well as data practices more widely. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation by Daniel GrollMelissa MoschellaGROLL, Daniel. Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 256 pp. Cloth, $74.00In Conceiving People, Daniel Groll argues that, generally speaking, those intending to conceive with the help of donor gametes have a moral obligation to use an open donor rather than (...) an anonymous one. This obligation is grounded on the likelihood that their children will have a significant future interest in acquiring genetic knowledge, defined as "knowledge of who one's genetic progenitors are." Groll labels this view the significant interest view, which he argues for largely on empirical grounds.Before beginning his defense of the significant interest view, Groll dedicates chapter 2 to arguing that parents who conceive with the help of donor gametes should not keep this a secret from their children. His position on this point reflects the current consensus on the subject, but he offers a novel argument for it, based on the claim that keeping "the secret" in itself harms the parent–child relationship by inherently compromising the intimacy proper to that relationship.Chapter 3 presents the significant interest view in greater detail, distinguishing it from two other approaches: (1) the "Profound Prudential Good view," taken from the work of David Velleman, according to which "genetic knowledge is a profound prudential good and people who lack it will have tremendous trouble figuring out who they are," and (2) the view that "people have a right to genetic knowledge." Unlike these competing approaches, Groll's view "does not directly depend on claims about the value of genetic knowledge" but is based primarily on the fact that "many donor-conceived people are subjectively interested in having genetic knowledge," combined with the claim that parents have an obligation to promote their children's well-being by satisfying their worthwhile significant subjective interests. Because Groll's argument depends on the worth and significance of genetic knowledge, it is vulnerable to what he calls the "sideshow objection"—that is, that the significant interest view is just a sideshow, and the worth of genetic knowledge is what actually does the important normative work. At the same time, Groll's view that the interest in genetic knowledge is worthwhile and significant also leaves him open to the "bionormativity objection," according to which the interest in genetic knowledge "is morally problematic in virtue of evincing and entrenching a kind of bionormative prejudice" that sees the biological family as a normative ideal. [End Page 141]Responding to these two objections is the task of chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 argues that genetic knowledge is an objective but "prudentially optional good," meaning that "its value is not fungible, but a life that lacks it is not thereby impoverished." This distinguishes Groll's view from the profound prudential good view, which he characterizes as a form of "genetic chauvinism." Groll argues that genetic knowledge is valuable because it can provide insight into personal identity by answering questions about how I came to be and who I am like, but that the genetic knowledge is not the only or best way to answer these questions (thus explaining why it is optional, and why the significant interest view is not just a sideshow).Chapter 5 addresses the "bionormativity objection," which includes both "heteronormativity" (privileging families headed by a mother and father) and "biogenetic normativity" (privileging genetically related families). Groll ultimately responds to this objection by arguing that, even if (as Groll believes) our current society overemphasizes the importance of genetic relationships, "the interest in genetic knowledge is rationally intelligible quite apart from the bionormative social milieu that surrounds it."Chapters 6 through 8 present the implications of the preceding argument. Chapter 6 argues that the reasons to use an open donor are generally conclusive, because most reasons parents might have to use an anonymous donor do not outweigh the child's significant interest in obtaining genetic knowledge. Chapter 7 considers the responsibilities of gamete donors, arguing that gamete donation is not morally objectionable because it is permissible for donors to transfer prospective parenthood responsibilities... (shrink)

In the bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto (2008: 2) defines an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Many have since defined a bitcoin as a chain of digital signatures. This latter definition continues to appear in reports from central banks, advocacy centers, and governments, as well as in academic papers across the disciplines of law, economics, computer science, cryptography, management, and philosophy. Some have even used it to argue that what we now call bitcoin is not the real bitcoin. (...) The definition fails, however. This is important because the Chain Definition obscures Satoshi’s solution to a dilemma in the design of electronic cash, as well as the truth about bitcoin’s privacy and fungibility. In this article, I explain why the Chain Definition fails and what Satoshi likely endorsed instead. Along the way, I untangle some issues around bitcoin fungibility and clarify some others around the ontology of digital assets. (shrink)

Barnett and Block claim that Bagus and Howden support indirectly the concept of market failure. In this paper, we show that maturity mismatching in an unhampered market may imply entrepreneurial error but cannot be considered a market failure. We demonstrate why fractional-reserve banking leads to business cycles even if there is no central bank and why maturity mismatching does not per se lead to clusters of errors in a free market. Finally, in contrast to the examples provided by Barnett and (...) Block, we assure that maturity mismatching does not imply the creation of two incompatible contracts due to the fungible nature of money. (shrink)

Building on Pietz’s speculation about the construction of a “history of the fetish’ that might be related to, yet stand apart from the fetish as a historical construct, this paper asks if there might be novel yet unmarked contemporary fetish-formations. Taking the later chapters of Pietz’s volume, which focuses on capital and techno-political infrastructures, this essay suggests that non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs,” might be thought of as failed fetishes, objects that work to occlude the material infrastructure that supports blockchain, (...) yet do not cohere because due to contemporary technology, they lack the sensuous materiality required by Pietz’s phenomenologically-shaped understanding of Marxism. Regardless of the correctness of this speculative claim about NFTs, this discussion suggests that Pietz’s original, groundbreaking argument on the fetish still has relevance to, and a great deal of creative promise for, analysis in the current day. (shrink)

As an unfunded federal mandate, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires public and private entities to ensure disability accommodations without providing state funding to pay for these accommodations. Disability accommodations under the ADA can take many forms, including audio description of a museum exhibit, designated parking for people with disabilities, or accessible toilet stalls. For each of these examples, once it is established or installed, the accommodation is available to serve the needs of numerous disabled individuals. Individualized service accommodations for (...) disability accessibility emerge only once the individual with the disability makes the request. For example, a deaf job candidate requests communication access for a job interview. The request for the accommodation is individual-dependent, and in the case of signed language interpreting, individual-specific and not fungible. Given that the unfunded mandate of the ADA does not directly provide a mechanism to alleviate expenses related to providing service accommodations to individuals, which can serve as a deterrent to inclusive practices, the question arises as to whether the ADA discriminates against individuals who require ongoing service accommodations. (shrink)

Why does workplace gender diversity matter? Here, we provide a review of the literature on both justice‐based and organizational benefits of workplace gender diversity that, importantly, is informed by evidence regarding sex differences and their relationship with vocational behavior and outcomes. This review indicates that the sexes are neither distinctly different, nor so similar as to be fungible. Justice‐based gains of workplace gender diversity include that it may cause less sex discrimination and may combat androcentrism in products and services. (...) We then consider potential instrumental benefits of workplace gender diversity to organizations, including for team and firm performance, innovation, occupational well‐being, and corporate governance. The evidence of positive association is currently strongest for occupational well‐being and governance. We recommend that policy makers ground gender diversity initiatives in this comprehensive and evidence‐based understanding of the benefits of workplace gender diversity. (shrink)

Our aim is to draw a set of distinctions among types of goods which has significant implications for theories of distributive justice. We begin by providing a general account of two sets of properties--fungibility and nonfungibility, divisibility and indivisibility--and argue that goods can be distinguished according to these criteria. Further, we contend that these distinctions entail complications for structural principles of distributive justice (i.e., principles such as maximin that distribute payoffs to positions). As an example we consider James Fishkin’s discussion (...) of structural principles, arguing that Fishkin’s view that (i) value, structure, and assignment are independent holds only to the degree that the goods considered are fungible and divisible, (ii) structural principles face difficulties beyond those which Fishkin identifies and addresses with his principle of nontyranny, since structural principles cannot accommodate highly non¬fungible, indivisible goods, and (iii) these difficulties can be managed through the application of a value-sensitivity proviso. We then show that two important goods, medical care and advanced education, are highly nonfungible and indivisible and thus support the distinctions drawn earlier. Finally, we specify the nature of complementary contributions as well as coordination problems between structural principles and the value-sensitivity proviso in their application to distributive justice issues. -/- . (shrink)

The recent committee report from the Institute of Medicine in Washington, DC, containing proposals for controlling conflicts of interest 1 reflects the medical profession’s limited understanding of the actual scope of the issues and demonstrates how reactive academic physicians have become to media and congressional priorities instead of those of the medical field. The near-exclusive focus on the compromising of medical decision-making by the receipt of fungible support from the commercial sector fails to identify critical interdependencies of the relationship (...) between academic physicians and capitalist industry, the historical and economic context in which it takes place and the other stakeholders in the process who are trying to, or should be trying to, manage similar issues of ethical prioritisation of manpower and resources, allegiances and alliances.In the process of protecting ourselves, our patients and our institutions from the scourge of the market and its undue influence, we are participating in a much larger discussion, which we are so far neglecting. In redefining academia–industry relations, we are also negotiating over the means of support for translational clinical research, our educational mission as experts and our capacity to serve at centres of excellence in healthcare. Even more fundamentally, the process of examining ourselves and our institutions for conflicts of interest that negatively impact on our ability to protect and to treat our patients, as well as on how we educate the next generations of healthcare workers, goes to the moral core of what it means to be healing arts professionals.The Institute of Medicine report has chosen to overlook the existing complex …. (shrink)

A concept for teaching business ethics and its relationship with business law is developed. Legal regulations form the essential boundaries of the business game. Many students do not realize the degree to which law is dependent upon ethical actors to achieve its objectives. At least three examples are insightful in this regard: First, the interpretive requirements of legal rules often rely on the ethical character of the interpreting business actor to achieve their objectives. Second, law does not prohibit harms from (...) occurring, it only associates costs with behaviors. Third, law cannot compensate society for non-fungible harms. Legal regulations do not sustain the orderly function of society without ethical business actors. (shrink)

A concept for teaching business ethics and its relationship with business law is developed. Legal regulations form the essential boundaries of the business game. Many students do not realize the degree to which law is dependent upon ethical actors to achieve its objectives. At least three examples are insightful in this regard: First, the interpretive requirements of legal rules often rely on the ethical character of the interpreting business actor to achieve their objectives. Second, law does not prohibit harms from (...) occurring, it only associates costs with behaviors. Third, law cannot compensate society for non-fungible harms. Legal regulations do not sustain the orderly function of society without ethical business actors. (shrink)

This article centres around objectification. It offers an analysis of the notions that are involved in this phenomenon, their moral wrongness, as well as the connections that exist between them. Martha Nussbaum has suggested that seven notions are involved in objectification: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. She espouses the view that the instrumentalisation of human beings is especially problematic as compared to the other ways in which we can treat human beings as objects (...) . In this paper, I argue against the view that instrumentalisation should be thought of as more suspicious from a moral point of view than the rest of the ways in which people can be treated as objects. Singling out extreme instrumentality for being especially problematic might lead us to underestimate the wrongness involved in the other ways of treating human beings as objects, and can therefore potentially distort our understanding of what, more generally, is wrong with objectifying human beings. (shrink)

Reasons for love: why we can’t do otherwise than love what is lovable Harry Frankfurt famously argues that loving someone is not done for reasons. While focusing on the (plausible) claims that parents need no reasons for loving their children and that it is absurd to ascribe a duty (or reason) to love X to someone who does not happen to love X, he overlooks an aspect of love that does connect it to reasons in a particular way: in daily (...) conversation human beings spend enormous amounts of time and reflection to explaining and trying to understand love. I interpret the omnipresence of ‘love-talk’ as an indication of the nature of love in human beings: we love someone or something for reasons. Drawing on insights from the guise of the good-debate on the nature of desire, I argue that regardless of the infinite variety of things and persons that can be loved, the objects are all loved under the same form: the form of being lovable. The notion of a ‘lovability characterization’ entails a notion of ‘reasons’ that does not require reasons to be universalisable and that allows the loving-for-reasons view to avoid the fungibility-objection. In reply to the objection that the loving-for-reasons view makes love overly rationalistic, I point out that reason should not be understood as an external authority that commands us to do certain things, but as an internal power, integral to who we are, that shapes our conscious life, our mental attitudes and their objects. (shrink)

According to quality theories of love, love is fitting by virtue of properties of the loved person. Despite their immediate plausibility, quality theories have met with many objections. Here I focus on two that strike at the heart of what makes the quality theory an appealing account of love, specifically, the theory’s ability to accommodate the fact that loving someone is a way of valuing them for who they are. The fungibility objection and the problem of love’s object maintain that (...) if a person is loved on the basis of their qualities, they are not valued in the right kind of way. I propose a new kind of quality theory which both answers these objections and is independently well-motivated. Specifically, I argue that to love a person as a whole, one must value them as an organic unity. (shrink)

In several recent publications in the philosophy of chemistry we have made use of a repertoire of analytical concepts to guide our investigations. Perhaps studies of other sophisticated knowledge garnering practices could benefit from adopting this analytical scheme if we want to understand their merits and drawbacks. Our suggestions for shaping methodologies for philosophical studies in particular fields of interest includes both the natural sciences, legal systems in action, economies and their management, warfare, preparing the dishes of a cuisine, and (...) so on. Adopting our proposals would encourage philosophers to examine our world seen as fields of material and cultural/social entities affording opportunities for action. At a certain level of analysis, the products of such action, appear to be perfectly identical entities, fungibles. There are no fungibles in nature. They must therefore be thought of as constituents of iconic models. Our scheme for critically examining the practices of investigators is meant to ensure the intelligibility both of the relevant discourse and the trustworthiness of the practices of the discipline in question. The Third Wittgenstein's ‘hinges’ that function as necessities and yet are vulnerable to empirical assessment provide a generic frame for analyses of human practices. (shrink)

The blockchain social movement led to the emergence of Web3, a new, token-orchestrated iteration of the World Wide Web comprised of decentralized applications. With Web3, users can adopt a unique digital identity, known as a self-sovereign identity, that allows them to have access to their data and be central administrators of their transportable and interoperable identity. An inherent feature of digital identity in Web3 is that, in some cases, it can live forever. Web3 users, therefore, may accumulate digital assets, such (...) as non-fungible tokens, in an attempt to leave a digital legacy behind. Terror-management theory, a social and evolutionary psychology theory, was theoretically applied to the act of digital asset accumulation as a potential mechanism of escaping death-related fears. In contrast, the current uses of non-fungible tokens (ie, proof-of-ownership) and soulbound tokens (ie, proof-of-character) were evaluated from a Logotherapy perspective to inform how Web3 could evolve toward a Decentralized Society. (shrink)

Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (...) (e.g., dirty money). Here we investigate the development of the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. We study children ages 5–6 and 8–9, who are sensitive to both object history and morality, and thus possess the component pieces needed to think that a dollar may not be like any other. Across three principal studies (and three additional studies in Appendix S1; N = 327; 219 five‐ and six‐year‐olds; 108 eight‐ and nine‐year‐olds), we find that children are less likely to want money with negative moral history, a pattern that was stronger and more consistent among 8‐ and 9‐year‐olds than 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds. These findings highlight pressing directions for future research that could help shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. (shrink)

The commercial trading of human organs, along withvarious related activities (for example, advertising)was criminalised throughout Great Britain under theHuman Organ Transplants Act 1989.This paper critically assesses one type of argumentfor this, and similar, legal prohibitions:commodification arguments.Firstly, the term `commodification' is analysed. Thiscan be used to refer to either social practices or toattitudes. Commodification arguments rely on thesecond sense and are based on the idea that having acommodifying attitude to certain classes of thing(e.g. bodies or persons) is wrong. The commodifyingattitude consists (...) of three main elements: denial ofsubjectivity, instrumentality, and fungibility.Secondly, in the light of this analysis, the claimthat organ sale involves commodifying the human bodyis examined. This claim is found to be plausible butinsufficient to ground an argument against organ sale,because the very same commodifying attitude is likelyto be present in cases of (unpaid) organ donation. Itis also argued that commodifying bodies per semay not be wrong.Thirdly, the view that organ sale involvescommodifying persons is examined. Although this andthe claim that it is wrong to commodify persons areprobably true, there is – it is argued – littlereason to regard organ sale as worse in this respectthan other widely accepted practices, such as thebuying and selling of labour.The conclusion is that although commodification is auseful ethical concept and although commodificationarguments may sometimes be successful, thecommodification argument against organ sale is notpersuasive. This is not to say, though, that thereare no arguments for prohibition – simply that thisparticular justificatory strategy is flawed. (shrink)

This paper explores how whiteness as the transcendental norm shapes the meaning structure of Black-being-in-the-world. If home is a place, a site, a dwelling of acceptance, where one is allowed to feel safe, to relax, to let one’s guard down, then being Black in white supremacist America is anathema to being at home for Black people. Indeed, to be Black is to be a stranger, something “strange,” “scary,” “dangerous,” an “outsider.” To be Black within white America belies what it means (...) to dwell, to reside, to rest. In other words, one’s sense of racialized Black embodiment remains on guard, unsettled, hyperalert. Phenomenologically, there is a profound sense of alienation, where one’s racialized body is ostracized and shunned. On this score, I examine, within the mundane context of an elevator, how the dynamics of intersubjectivity and sociality are strained through the dynamics of the white gaze. The white gaze, among other things, functions to police the meaning of the Black body and attempts to de-subjectify Black embodiment. In this way, the only real perspective is white. Black bodies are deemed devoid of a perspective on the world as there is no subjectivity, no sense of agential meaning making. One might say that Black people, on this view, constitute an essence, a typified mode of being. Unlike the existentialist thesis where existence precedes essence, Black people are locked into an objecthood, a fungible and fixed essence. This racial and racist myth is what, for Schutz, would collapse the importance that he places on intersubjectivity and sociality. Indeed, within this paper, I delineate the threatening, necro-political dimensions of whiteness that I experienced after writing the well-known article “Dear White America.” That experience cemented, for me, and for many other readers, what it means to occupy the residence of whiteness, an abode that can take one’s life in the blink of an eye. The experience of the racialized stranger means walking a tightrope, a precarious situation where one flirts with death, where one’s body is deemed hypersexual, inferior, frightening, and monstrous. Based upon this construction, the white body is deemed the site of virtue, safety, deliverer, protector of all things white and pure. Think here of “the white man’s burden” or the idea of “white manifest destiny.” Stain, blemish, taint, and defilement are indelible markers of the stranger. And based upon the logics of racial purity, one must extinguish the “vermin,” the “criminals,” the “rapists.” While I don’t explore this within the paper, Schutz scholars will immediately recognize the genocidal implications of what would have been at stake for Schutz had he not escaped Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic gaze and his Anschluss of Austria. My sense is that Schutz would have understood not just the horrors of white racism but would appreciate the necessity of theorizing the need to rethink home as existentially capacious and intersubjectively vibrant. I conclude this paper by thinking through the concept of “breakdown”, delineating its spatial, phenomenological, and subjectively embodied implications. Breakdown, as I use the term, upends forms of white racialized habituation, creating possible embodied psychic space for what I term un-suturing, which involves undoing the machinations of white safety in the face of alterity, where the stranger invokes wonder and self-critique. (shrink)

Does public condemnation or shaming of human rights abuses by the United Nations influence foreign aid delivery calculus across Western donor states? I argue that countries shamed in the United Nations Human Rights Council encourage donor states to channel more aid via international and local non-governmental organizations. Furthermore, I find this effect to be more pronounced with increased media coverage. The findings of this paper suggest that international organizations do influence advanced democracies’ foreign policy. Moreover, the paper also finds that (...) donor governments do not punish recipient leaders by scaling back on government-to-government aid, which is more fungible, despite public condemnations of their human rights practices owing largely to strategic concerns. These results are robust to a number of alternative data and estimation techniques. (shrink)

Martha C. Howell challenges dominant interpretations of the relationship between the so-called commercial revolution of late medieval Europe and the capitalist age that followed. She argues that the merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and consumers in cities and courts throughout Western Europe, even in the urbanized Low Countries that are the main focus of this study, were by no means proto-capitalist and did not consider their property a fungible asset. Even though they freely bought and sold property using sophisticated financial techniques, (...) they preserved its capacity to secure social bonds by intensifying market regulations and by assigning new meaning to marriage, gift-giving, and consumption. Later generations have sometimes found such actions perplexing, often dismissing them as evidence that business people of the late medieval and early modern worlds did not fully understand market rules. Howell, by contrast, shows that such practices were governed by a logic specific to their age and that, however primitive they may appear to subsequent generations, these practices made Europe's economic future possible. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Hume’s claims about the nature of moral sentiments (mainly in T 3.1.2) using as a foil the Kantian challenge to all material practical principles: they are all of the same type, being based on self-love and making all choices, including moral ones, hedonically fungible. The paper explores Hume’s views on pleasure as constitutive of moral sentiment as an answer to that challenge arguing that for him only pleasure is essentially valuable for beings like us. (...) It thus grounds a notion of value which, through a “progressive or dynamic” view of human nature, informs a conception of moral pleasure – a “taste in character traits” – as a distinctive type of pleasure that is not amenable to a mere quantitative criterium to guide moral choice. Keywords: Hume’s moral philosophy, moral sentiments, human nature, Kant. (shrink)

In his late unfinished work on aesthetic theory, Adam Smith develops the concept of rythmus to explore such arts as music, dance and poetry. Smith argues that rythmus communicates emotion in a very specific way. For Smith, narrative arts, such as drama or the novel, predominately seek to recreate or represent in the minds of their readership or audience the emotions of the characters that are portrayed. But what we experience through rythmus, by contrast, is an original, and not a (...) sympathetic, feeling. Rythmus is the communicative medium of a paradoxical mode of collective feeling in which each person feels his or her own emotions, and yet all feel the same thing; in which social being is at once non-fungible and shared. (shrink)