In recent papers, Eric Schwitzgebel argues that if physicalism is true, then the United States is probably conscious. My primary aim here is to demonstrate that the source of Schwitzgebel’s conditional argument is the “Problem of Other Minds,” which is a general problem; wherefore, Schwitzgebel’s conclusion should be revised and applied not only to physicalism, but to most contemporary theories of the mind. I analyze the difference between Schwitzgebel’s argument and other arguments against functionalism, arguing that the difference between them (...) is rooted in referring to the causal role of the whole system, rather than referring to the casual role of the system’s parts. This key difference between functionalism and behaviorism explains why the source of Schwitzgebel’s argument stems from the problem of other minds. I conclude that however counterintuitive from a metaphysical point of view, the United States may have its own stream of consciousness, but it has nothing to do with physicalism in particular. (shrink)

Postpartum mood disorders develop shortly after childbirth in a significant proportion of women and have severe effects. Two evolutionary explanations are currently available. The first is that poor postpartum mental health is a consequence of an evolutionary trade-off – a compromise of neurological changes in the maternal brain during pregnancy which, on the one hand, maintain pregnancy, and on the other, increase the likelihood for postpartum women to develop psychopathology. The second explanation is that poor postpartum mental health is a (...) disease of civilization. This theoretical paper demonstrates that both explanations ignore the crucial event of childbirth. I elaborate on environmental features of childbirth, a physiological process that is substantially different in the current versus evolutionary childbirth and postpartum setting, and argue that maternal brain neuroplasticity and biochemical alterations are not an evolutionary trade-off, but an adaptation. Additionally, the incidents of poor postpartum mental health are better viewed as a maladaptation of the typical modern environments – an evolutionary mismatch. Thus, the potential to suffer from poor mental health in postpartum is an external, contingent happening, dependent on contemporary childbirth and postpartum environments, and not due to any essential property women possess as a result of evolutionary compromise. In fact, women are probably adapted to feel like superwomen right after birth, a state of mind that is an aid in adapting to motherhood. Distinguishing between evolutionary concepts in the context of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood is vital for developing more accurate preventions and interventions. (shrink)

When blame is understood to be emotion-based or affective, its emotional tone is standardly identified as one of anger. We argue that this conception of affective blame is overly restrictive. By attending to cases of blame that emerge against a background of a particular kind of hope invested in others, we identify a blaming response characterized not by anger but by sadness: reactive disappointment. We develop an account of reactive disappointment as affective blame, maintaining that while angry blame and disappointed (...) blame are both condemnatory responses, they have distinct evaluative foci and occupy different but complementary roles in our accountability practices. (shrink)

This work offers a systematic interpretation of the problematics of disinterest in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. It examines Kant's thesis that the judgement of taste is free of considerations of morality or utility. Dahan Fan carefully traces Kant's differentiation between the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful, thus casting the relationship between the interests of reason and aesthetic disinterest in a new light.

There is a common refrain in the literature on punishment that presumes the mutual exclusivity of defending retribution and adopting a humanistic or welfare-oriented outlook. The refrain, that if we want to be humane, or care about human welfare, we must abandon retributive punishment, anger, and resentment is readily repeated, endorsed, and relied upon. This article suggests that this opposition is false: retribution and welfare-orientation can not only be endorsed concomitantly, but are complimentary projects, and may even be grounded in (...) the same normative basis, such that if we endorse one we are already committed to ideas that ground reason to care about the other.My primary target will be claims that aim to undermine retributivism by demonstrating the desirability of welfare-orientation. If both can live together, demonstrating the attractiveness of one goes nowhere toward displacing the other. Further, establishing this claim invites further inquiry into classic questions about the “barbaric,” or “morally repugnant” credentials of retributivism. Confronting these claims will elucidate the consistency of adopting both retributive and welfare-oriented views, which, I suggest, can be jointly adopted and pursued. (shrink)

The article presents a novel normative model of shared responsibility for remedying unjust labor conditions and protecting workers’ rights in global supply chains. While existing literature on labor governance in the globalized economy tends to focus on empirical and conceptual investigations, the article contributes to the emerging scholarship by proposing moral justifications for labor governance schemes that go beyond voluntary private regulations and include public enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on normative theories of justice and on empirical-legal research, our Labor Model of (...) Shared Responsibility introduces three main claims: First, that responsibility for protecting and promoting labor standards in global supply chains should be shared by all private and institutional actors involved (whether directly or indirectly) in the production and distribution processes. Second, we offer a normative model for allocating responsibility among the various actors, based on five principles: connectedness, contribution, benefit, capacity, and power. Last, we demonstrate how the normative model could be implemented through various national and international institutional mechanisms. (shrink)

The article presents a novel normative model of shared responsibility for remedying unjust labor conditions and protecting workers’ rights in global supply chains. While existing literature on labor governance in the globalized economy tends to focus on empirical and conceptual investigations, the article contributes to the emerging scholarship by proposing moral justifications for labor governance schemes that go beyond voluntary private regulations and include public enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on normative theories of justice and on empirical-legal research, our Labor Model of (...) Shared Responsibility introduces three main claims: First, that responsibility for protecting and promoting labor standards in global supply chains should be shared by all private and institutional actors involved (whether directly or indirectly) in the production and distribution processes. Second, we offer a normative model for allocating responsibility among the various actors, based on five principles: connectedness, contribution, benefit, capacity, and power. Last, we demonstrate how the normative model could be implemented through various national and international institutional mechanisms. (shrink)

Seyla Benhabib’s article, “Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms” offers a penetrating analysis of the contemporary global order and suggests a normative approach by which to mend its structural failures—viewed from the democratic ideal of popular sovereignty and guided by what she calls “cosmopolitan norms.” The authors take issue with Benhabib's position on both the descriptive and the normative grounds, and make three critical points in this matter: the first two points concern Benhabib's descriptive portrayal of the (...) global order. The third critical point concerns her normative position, i.e., her ideal of the good polity, displayed through her idea of “democratic iteration” operating through global civil society. The critical assessment of Benhabib's views ensues from the authors’ endorsement of the transformationalist position—the state, although somewhat undermined by global processes, still possesses considerable power and maintains a crucial role in determining the trajectory of these processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the theory of excuse, or more precisely, exculpatory excuse, and the question of what it is that justifies the category of excuse. I address different potential grounds for the law of excuse, which are often run together in ways that confound rather than clarify, focusing on the role of blamelessness and unfairness of expectations in the theory of excuse.

An early example is von Neumann's and Charney's Princeton Meteorological Project in the period 1946–53 which ended with daily numerical prediction in less than 2 hours. After this stage, the questions of long-range forecasting and general circulation of the atmosphere became of greater importance. The late 1950s saw the emergence of an alternative: were atmospheric models used mainly for prediction or understanding? This controversial debate in particular occurred during an important colloquium in Tokyo in 1960 which gathered together J. Charney, (...) E. Lorenz, A. Eliassen, and B. Saltzman, among others, and witnessed discussions on statistical methods for predictions and/or maximum simplification of dynamic equations. This phase ended in 1963 with Lorenzs seminal paper on “Deterministic non periodic flows.”. (shrink)

Through a detailed study of the group surrounding Andronov and Grekhova, this article highlights how the configuration of the interaction between techno-science, the State, and production appears to be very specific to the Soviet Union, as compared to the United States or France. We are often used to thinking of the relationship between science and its context by postulating that the core of scientific content is universal while context is variable. This study suggests rather the opposite. For indeed, the local (...) and specific nature of the scientific culture and tradition of nonlinearity in Gor'kiy must be emphasized. It is the political context of World War II and of the Cold War that forced the unification with Western science, in that they set theoretical targets and technical objectives, and stimulated the manufacture of identical products, such as radar and nuclear devices, automated systems, etc. In short, in the relationship of politics and science that is examined here, it is the politics which created unity and universality. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

This article aims at understanding how "ethical public issues" are created, and dealt within a public arena. Here, we view ethical public issues as social constructs, which are the results of issue framing contests. Such an approach will enable us to understand how ethical public issues emerge and are shaped by strategizing actors (including firms, NGOs, the media, and governments), in an attempt to impose their own definition and preferred solution to the issue. We also propose key factors which explain (...) the success of a framing attempt, and evidence of such success. The empirical case of the labor conditions in West Africa's cocoa industry is used to illustrate this theoretical framework and methodological approach. (shrink)

The growing popularization of stakeholder theory among management scholars has offered a useful framework for understanding the multiple and interdependent roles of government and business in an increasingly challenging political and regulatory environment. Despite this trend, attention to the role and responsibility of government to protect citizen rights has been limited. To the two traditional stakeholder theory views of government where the focal organization remains the firm, we propose to add two views by pivoting the government’s place and making it (...) the focal organization. We thus describe governments as serving four roles in the business–government–society nexus. For each role, we analyze typical governmental activities/behaviors, relationships with firms’ stakeholders, as well as the challenges and limits to these roles. We also focus on the central notion of salience amplification, as a means of checks and balances across stakeholders in order to safeguard citizen rights and reveal the greater good. (shrink)

ObjectiveThis study aimed to describe how parents and physicians experienced the informed consent interview and to investigate the aspects of the relationship that influenced parents’ decision during the consent process for a randomised clinical trial in a tertiary neonatal intensive care unit. The secondary objective was to describe the perspectives of parents and physicians in the specific situation of prenatal informed consent.SettingSingle centre study in NICU of the Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal de Créteil, France, using a convenience period from February to (...) May 2016.DesignAncillary study to a randomised clinical trial: Prettineo. Records of interviews for consent. Population: parents and physicians. Mixed study including qualitative and quantitative interview data about participants’ recall and feelings about the consent process. Interviews were reviewed using thematic discourse analysis.ResultsParents’ recall and understanding of the study’s main goal and design was good. Parents and physicians had a positive experience, and trust was one of the main reasons for parents to consent. Misunderstanding was the main reason for refusal.Before birth, three situations can compromise parents’ consent: the mother already consented to participate in other studies, the absence of the father during the interview and the feeling that the baby’s birth is not an imminent possibility.ConclusionsConfronting parents and physicians’ perspectives in research can help us reach answers to sensitive issues such as content and timing of information. Each different types of study raises different ethical dilemmas for consent that might be discussed in a more individual way. (shrink)

This article analyzes the question of how the size of bribes should impact criminal sanctions. In contrast to the commonly held view that punishment should increase with the size of the bribe, we argue to the contrary: that the punishment of the bribee should decrease with the size of the bribe. Our conclusion is based both on a philosophical argument and an economic argument. We argue that all else being equal, as an agent’s reservation price for selling public interests decreases, (...) the culpability of the agent willing to receive a bribe increases. In addition, from an economic perspective, the expected social harm of an official acting with a low reservation price for bribes is much greater than one acting with a high reservation price: both the susceptibility of being bribed as well as the potential for social harm is much greater when the reservation price is low. (shrink)

Despite the growing global consensus regarding the need to ensure minimal labour standards such as adequate safety and health conditions, freedom of association, and the prohibition of child labour, millions of workers across the world continue to work in horrific conditions. Who should be held responsible, both morally and legally, for protecting workers' rights? What moral and legal obligations should individuals and institutions bear toward foreign workers in their countries? Is there any democratic way to generate, regulate, and enforce labour (...) standards in a global labour market? This book address these questions by taking a fresh look at the normative assumptions underlying existing and proposed international labour regulations. By focusing on international labour as a particular sphere of justice, it seeks to advance both the contemporary philosophical debate on global justice and the legal scholarship on international labour. (shrink)