The author uses an intersectionality framework to examine how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people evaluate the severity of their violent experiences. Previous research focusing on the severity of anti-LGBT violence has given relatively little attention to race, class, and gender as systems of power. In contrast, results from this study, based on 47 semi-structured, in-depth interviews, reveal that Black and Latino/latina respondents often perceived anti-queer violence as implying that they had negatively represented their racial communities, whereas white respondents (...) typically overlooked the racialized implications of their violent experiences. Furthermore, while lesbians of color emphasized their autonomy and self-sufficiency to challenge this discourse, Black and Latino gay men underscored their emotional and physical strength to undermine perceptions that they were weak for identifying as gay. Results also indicate that LGBT people experience forms of anti-queer violence in different ways depending on their social position, as Black lesbians faced discourse that neither white lesbians nor Black gay men were likely to confront. Thus, these findings suggest that topics primarily associated with homophobia should be examined through an intersectional lens. (shrink)

We respond to recent comments on our proposal to improve justice in ventilator triage, in which we used as an example New Jersey’s publicly available and legally binding Directive Number 2020-03. We agree with Bernard Lo and Doug White that equity implications of triage frameworks should be continually reassessed, which is why we offered six concrete options for improvement, and called for monitoring the consequences of adopted triage models. We disagree with their assessment that we mis-characterised their Model (...) Guidance, as included in the NJ Directive, in ways that undermine our conclusions. They suggest we erroneously described their model as a two-criterion allocation framework; that recognising other operant criterion reveals it ‘likely mitigate[s] rather than exacerbate[s] racial disparities during triage’, and allege that concerns about inequitable outcomes are ‘without evidence’. We highlight two major studies robustly demonstrating why concerns about disparate outcomes are justified. We also show that White and Lo seek to retrospectively—and counterfactually—correct the version of the Model Guideline included in the NJ Directive. However, as our facsimile reproductions show, neither the alleged four-criteria form, nor other key changes, such as dropping the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score, are found in the Directive. These points matter because our conclusions hence stand, because the public version of the Model Guidance had not been updated to reduce the risk of inequitable outcomes until June 2021 and NJ’s Directive still does not reflect these revisions, and, hence, represents a less equitable version, as acknowledged by its authors. We comment on broader policy implications and call for ways of ensuring accurate, transparent and timely updates for users of high-stakes guidelines. (shrink)

A rational person doesn’t believe just anything. There are limits on what it is rational to believe. How wide are these limits? That’s the main question that interests me here. But a secondary question immediately arises: What factors impose these limits? A first stab is to say that one’s evidence determines what it is epistemically permissible for one to believe. Many will claim that there are further, non-evidentiary factors relevant to the epistemic rationality of belief. I will be ignoring the (...) details of alternative answers in order to focus on the question of what kind of rational constraints one’s evidence puts on belief. Our main question concerns how far epistemic permission and obligation can come apart.1 Suppose I am epistemically permitted to believe P, i.e., it would not be irrational for me to believe it. Am I thereby obliged to believe P, or are other options rationally available to me?2 Might I be equally rational in remaining agnostic about P, or even believing not-P? Or could even a slightly stronger or weaker degree of confidence be just as reasonable? (shrink)

I believe that Tom is the proud father of a baby boy. Why do I think his child is a boy? A natural answer might be that I remember that his name is ‘Owen’ which is usually a boy’s name. Here I’ve given information that might be part of a causal explanation of my believing that Tom’s baby is a boy. I do have such a memory and it is largely what sustains my conviction. But I haven’t given you just (...) any causally relevant information, I’ve given my grounds for my belief. I’ve given reasons that might justify me in supposing that Tom’s baby is a boy. Less naturally, the question might be taken as a request for a broader causal explanation of my holding this belief. Appropriate answers might cite all manner of facts concerning the evolution of the human race, why I chose to pursue philosophy and hence came to know Tom, the mechanisms of email transmission, the firing of various neurons, the circumstances of concept formation as a result of which I’m able to grasp the thought that Tom’s baby is a boy, and so on. It is an interesting question what distinguishes the narrower set of answers that I first suggested. I won’t pursue that here. I assume you have a good enough sense of the distinction I’m drawing. We might call the narrower set of answers justifying reasons, the kind of reasons I might cite in justifying my belief. Answers of the first sort are clearly relevant to epistemological evaluation. In assessing whether you know p or are rational in believing it to the degree you do, I will naturally want to consider what reasons you have for your belief. In deliberating myself about whether to believe p, in seeking an answer to the question of whether p, I will naturally consider what reasons or grounds I have to suppose that p. But what I want to focus on here is how explanations of the broader sort bear on such questions as whether to believe p. From a third-person perspective we can ask, ‘In assessing the epistemic status of S’s belief that p, what is the relevance of causal information that lies outside of the realm of justifying reasons?’ From the first-person standpoint we can ask ‘In seeking to answer whether p, how should such causal information affect my deliberations?’ At first it might seem that such broader causal information could have little relevance if any. Like any belief my belief that p can be traced back to innumerable causes from far and wide.. (shrink)

How could the initial, drastic decisions to implement “lockdowns” to control the spread of COVID-19 infections be justifiable, when they were made on the basis of such uncertain evidence? We defend the imposition of lockdowns in some countries by first, and focusing on the UK, looking at the evidence that undergirded the decision, second, arguing that this provided us with sufficient grounds to restrict liberty given the circumstances, and third, defending the use of poorly-empirically-constrained epidemiological models as tools that can (...) legitimately guide public policy. (shrink)

It is notoriously difficult to spell out the norms of inductive reasoning in a neat set of rules. I explore the idea that explanatory considerations are the key to sorting out the good inductive inferences from the bad. After defending the crucial explanatory virtue of stability, I apply this approach to a range of inductive inferences, puzzles, and principles such as the Raven and Grue problems, and the significance of varied data and random sampling.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were put on digital contact tracing, using mobile phone apps to record and immediately notify contacts when a user reports as infected. Such apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as second waves of COVID-19 are raging, these apps are playing a less important role than anticipated. We argue that this is because most countries have opted for app configurations that cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of (...) likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Mathematical modelling suggests that differently configured apps have the potential to do this. These require, however, that some pseudonymised data be stored on a central server, which privacy advocates have cautioned against. We contend that their influential arguments are subject to two fallacies. First, they have tended to one-sidedly focus on the risks that centralised data storage entails for privacy, while paying insufficient attention to the fact that inefficient contact tracing involves ethical risks too. Second, while the envisioned system does entail risks of breaches, such risks are also present in decentralised systems, which have been falsely presented as ‘privacy preserving by design’. When these points are understood, it becomes clear that we must rethink our approach to digital contact tracing in our fight against COVID-19. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has suffered from a false presupposition: that if the answer is yes (for at least some such ethical features), such considerations feature as pro tanto contributions to an artwork's overall aesthetic value, i.e., as (...) merits or flaws which make something have more or less overall aesthetic value. As the case of ethically laden, aesthetic evaluation makes clear, however, good aesthetic judgement is irreducibly multi-dimensional, e.g., "the movie has an engaging soundtrack, tasteful camera work, and takes a misogynistically prurient perspective on its female lead.'' Such a "non-summative" judgement refuses to reduce those various dimensions of aesthetic value to a single aggregate aesthetic evaluation, like "it's a 6/10" or "it's a pretty good movie!" I defend both the modest claim that such non-summative evaluations are not mistaken and the extremist claim that summative (i.e., unidimensional) aesthetic evaluation is defective by considering other domains of normative assessment in which summing seems inappropriate, notably including evaluations of people's character. (shrink)

Ryan Tonkens has issued a seemingly impossible challenge, to articulate a comprehensive ethical framework within which artificial moral agents satisfy a Kantian inspired recipe—"rational" and "free"—while also satisfying perceived prerogatives of machine ethicists to facilitate the creation of AMAs that are perfectly and not merely reliably ethical. This series of papers meets this challenge by landscaping traditional moral theory in resolution of a comprehensive account of moral agency. The first paper established the challenge and set out autonomy in Aristotelian terms. (...) The present paper interprets Kantian moral theory on the basis of the preceding introduction, argues contra Tonkens that an engineer does not violate the categorical imperative in creating Kantian AMAs, and proposes that a Kantian AMA is not only a possible goal for Machine ethics research, but a necessary one. (shrink)

Recently in this journal, Jessica Morley and colleagues (AI & SOC 2023 38:411–423) review AI ethics and education, suggesting that a cultural shift is necessary in order to prepare students for their responsibilities in developing technology infrastructure that should shape ways of life for many generations. Current AI ethics guidelines are abstract and difficult to implement as practical moral concerns proliferate. They call for improvements in ethics course design, focusing on real-world cases and perspective-taking tools to immerse students in challenging (...) situations with relatable personal, social and environmental implications. The present paper considers the ACTWith model of moral cognition for use in such training contexts. Morley and colleagues' paper and contemporary literature are reviewed. Whistleblowing as a source for relatable case studies is discussed, and the purpose of ethics education considered. The ACTWith model is introduced, and correlations with contemporaries noted. The ACTWith model has been successfully employed in a broad range of technology ethics courses in the Netherlands and South Korea. Illustrations are offered. Correlations with contemporary efforts are drawn in the context of software engineering. Summary discussion considers strengths and limitations of the ACTWith program. Overall, the paper emphasizes training high-level moral reasoning through guided inquiry education informing lifetime professional practice, and indicates an outstanding need for teachers able to do the job. (shrink)

To solve the problem of induction we had first better know what it is. Some ways of formulating the worry about induction are underwhelming as they depend on assumptions that don’t survive much scrutiny. Perhaps the most disturbing argument for inductive skepticism appeals to the claim that we could not possibly be justified in taking our inductive methods to be reliable independently of our use of those methods. And the use of inductive methods cannot give us justification to suppose that (...) they are reliable. I argue for a new way to escape the first horn of this dilemma. (shrink)

This article argues that Carol Gilligan's research in moral development psychology, work which claims that women speak about ethics in a "different voice" than men do, is applicable to business ethics. This essay claims that Gilligan's "ethic of care" provides a plausible explanation for the results of two studies that found men and women handling ethical dilemmas in business differently. This paper also speculates briefly about the management implications of Gilligan's ideas.

Existing regulation of end-of-life care is flawed. Problems include poorly-designed laws, policies, ethical codes, training, and funding programs, which often are neither effective nor helpful in guiding decision-making. This leads to adverse outcomes for patients, families, health professionals, and the health system as a whole. A key factor contributing to the harms of current regulation is a siloed approach to regulating end-of-life care. Existing approaches to regulation, and research into how that regulation could be improved, have tended to focus on (...) a single regulatory instrument (e.g., just law or just ethical codes). As a result, there has been a failure to capture holistically the various forces that guide end-of-life care. This article proposes a response to address this, identifying “regulatory space” theory as a candidate to provide the much-needed holistic insight into improving regulation of end-of-life care. The article concludes with practical implications of this approach for regulators and researchers. (shrink)

This disagreement extends to the fundamental details of physical and biochemical theories. On the other hand, (2) There is almostuniversal agreementthatlife did notfirstcome aboutmerely by chance. This is not to say that all scientists think that life’s existence was inevitable. The common view is that given a fuller understanding of the physical and biological conditions and processes involved, the emergence of life should be seen to be quite likely, or at least not very surprising. The view which is almost universally (...) rejected by researchers in the field is that the numerous and prima facie improbable physical and biological requirements for life all fell together just by a fluke, like so many dice tumbling out of a bag and landing all sixes. Most importantly, for the purposes of the following discussion, (3) The conviction that life did not arise largely by chance is treated as epistem- ically prior to the development of alternative theories. C 2007, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation C 2007, Blackwell Publishing, Inc. (shrink)

Tonkens has issued a seemingly impossible challenge, to articulate a comprehensive ethical framework within which artificial moral agents satisfy a Kantian inspired recipe—"rational" and "free"—while also satisfying perceived prerogatives of machine ethicists to facilitate the creation of AMAs that are perfectly and not merely reliably ethical. Challenges for machine ethicists have also been presented by Anthony Beavers and Wendell Wallach. Beavers pushes for the reinvention of traditional ethics to avoid "ethical nihilism" due to the reduction of morality to mechanical causation. (...) Wallach pushes for redoubled efforts toward a comprehensive account of ethics to guide machine ethicists on the issue of artificial moral agency. Options, thus, present themselves: reinterpret traditional ethics in a way that affords a comprehensive account of moral agency inclusive of both artificial and natural agents, or give up on the possibility and “muddle through” regardless. This series of papers pursues the first option, meets Tonkens' "challenge" and pursues Wallach's ends through Beavers’ proposed means, by "landscaping" traditional moral theory in resolution of a comprehensive account of moral agency. This first paper sets out the challenge and establishes the tradition that Kant had inherited from Aristotle, briefly entertains an Aristotelian AMA, fields objections, and ends with unanswered questions. The next paper in this series responds to the challenge in Kantian terms, and argues that a Kantian AMA is not only a possibility for Machine ethics research, but a necessary one. (shrink)

Among other interesting proposals, Juan Comesaña’s _Being Rational and Being Right_ makes a challenging case that one’s evidence can include falsehoods. I explore some ways in which we might have to rethink the roles that evidence can play in inquiry if we accept this claim. It turns out that Comesaña’s position lends itself to the conclusion that while false evidence is possible and not even terribly uncommon, I can be rationally sure that I don’t currently have any and perhaps also (...) that I won’t get any, and (absent certain evidence to the contrary) you are not afflicted with any either. This conclusion might seem too good to be true. I finish by raising a puzzle about one of the main motivations for Comesaña’s view. (shrink)

Various conceptions of philosophy of education have been mooted over the last sixty years. The paper looks at five of these, associated particularly with R. S. Peters, D. W. Hamlyn, David Bakhurst, Philip Kitcher, and Harvey Siegel. It shows differences and sometimes overlaps among these, to do with whether or not philosophy of education should be seen as a branch of philosophy, as central to philosophy as a whole, or as a form of applied philosophy. The paper puts most weight (...) on the last of these while recognizing the importance of work on the enculturation of young human beings as exemplified in Hamlyn’s and Bakhurst’s writings. (shrink)

Drawing on contemporary agency theory and the phenomenological-existential tradition, this paper uses Mr. Stevens, the narrator-butler of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, to examine the interplay and potential tensions between different aspects (and thus different standards) of human agency. Highlighting the problem of mission creep described by John Martin Fischer, in which a notion expands beyond the original purpose, I use Stevens’s thoughts on dignity to outline three different ways actions can (or can fail to) trace back to (...) agents—autonomy as self-control, authenticity as sincerity, and authenticity as ownership. I then propose that the way Stevens embraces and acts consistently within his subservient professional role (autonomy as self-control) weakens his ability to take responsibility for his life in the sense required by authenticity as ownership. Because the self-responsibility of authenticity requires normative flexibility (the ability to revise and reshape one’s commitments and values), when normatively inflexible agents act in self-controlled ways according to their roles or welfare standards, they may limit their ability to take responsibility for their lives. In addition to illuminating debates about whether robust human agency is compatible with subservience, the normative flexibility involved in authenticity has implications for human agency more broadly. (shrink)

The idea that education should equip people to lead flourishing lives and help others to do so is now becoming salient in policy-making circles. Philosophy of education can help here by clarifying what flourishing consists in. This essay examines one aspect of this. It rejects the view that well-being goods are derivable from human nature, as in the theories of Howard Gardner and Edmond Holmes. It locates them, rather, as cultural products, but not culturally-relative ones, drawing attention to the proliferating (...) forms they have taken over the past three or four centuries. It looks to aesthetics and art criticism as a guide to a philosophical treatment of well-being goods more generally. It also takes off from aesthetics and art criticism in seeking to identify reliable authorities on the flourishing life. On this, it rejects elitist conceptions in favour of a more democratic model, emphasising its importance in education for citizenship. (shrink)

The Fine-tuning argument takes the existence of life as evidence that an agent had a hand in making the universe. The argument is thought to hinge on the claim that ‘fine-tuning’ of various parameters is required for life to evolve. Jonathan Weisberg argues that even granting that life can provide evidence for design, further data about the fine-tuning required add nothing to the case. Weisberg charges the argument rests on unsupported assumptions about a designer’s preference for a fine-tuned universe (over (...) and above favouring life). I argue that he is mistaken. The assumptions that Weisberg grants (for the sake of argument) are sufficient to make fine-tuning relevant to design. (shrink)

Everyone will agree that education ought to prepare young people to lead a meaningful life, but there are different ways in which this notion can be understood. A religious interpretation has to be distinguished from the secular one on which this paper focuses. Meaningfulness in this non-religious sense is a necessary condition of a life of well-being, having to do with the nesting of one’s reasons for action within increasingly pervasive structures of activity and attachment. Sometimes a life can seem (...) meaningless when it is not so in fact. In more extreme cases it may in fact be to some extent meaningless. Equipping young people for a meaningful life is a worthwhile, but not all-important educational aim. Educators should help them not only to see their lives as meaningful but also to lead lives that <are> meaningful. This involves continuous engagement in the nesting of reasons mentioned above. Where autonomy is also an aim, temperamental attunement to possible options – rather than exposure to all possible options – and time to explore them are important considerations. Questions arise here both about social justice and about whether current school curriculum and timetabling arrangements help or hinder pupils in living a meaningful life. (shrink)

The thymus is a unique primary lymphoid organ that supports the production of self‐tolerant T‐cells essential for adaptive immunity. Intrathymic microenvironments are microanatomically compartmentalised, forming defined cortical, and medullary regions each differentially supporting critical aspects of thymus‐dependent T‐cell maturation. Importantly, the specific functional properties of thymic cortical and medullary compartments are defined by highly specialised thymic epithelial cells (TEC). For example, in the medulla heterogenous medullary TEC (mTEC) contribute to the enforcement of central tolerance by supporting deletion of autoreactive T‐cell (...) clones, thereby counterbalancing the potential for random T‐cell receptor generation to contribute to autoimmune disease. Recent advances have further shed light on the pathways and mechanisms that control heterogeneous mTEC development and how differential mTEC functionality contributes to control self‐tolerant T‐cell development. Here we discuss recent findings in relation to mTEC development and highlight examples of how mTEC diversity contribute to thymus medulla function. (shrink)

This paper argues for a theory of phenomenal intentionality (herein referred to as ‘Structuralism’), according to which perceptual experiences only possess intentional content when their phenomenal components are appropriately related to one another. This paper responds to the objections (i) that Structuralism cannot explain why some experiences have content while others do not, or (ii) why contentful experiences have the specific contents that they have. Against (i), I argue that to possess content, an experience must present itself as an experience (...) of something distinct from itself, and that only experiences whose components are suitably structured satisfy this requirement. Against (ii), I argue that Structuralists can provide a deeper explanation of perceptual content than other theories of phenomenal intentionality by showing how the content-determining relations among our experiences depend on the selection pressures under which our perceptual systems developed. (shrink)

Richard Peters argued for a general education based largely on the study of truth-seeking subjects for its own sake. His arguments have long been acknowledged as problematic. There are also difficulties with Paul Hirst's arguments for a liberal education, which in part overlap with Peters'. Where justification fails, can historical explanation illuminate? Peters was influenced by the prevailing idea that a secondary education should be based on traditional, largely knowledge-orientated subjects, pursued for intrinsic as well as practical ends. Does history (...) reveal good reasons for this view? The view itself has roots going back to the 16th century and the educational tradition of radical Protestantism. Religious arguments to do with restoring the image of an omniscient God in man made good sense, within their own terms, of an encyclopaedic approach to education. As these faded in prominence after 1800, old curricular patterns persisted in the drive for ‘middle-class schools’, and new, less plausible justifications grew in salience. These were based first on faculty psychology and later on the psychology of individual differences. The essay relates the views of Peters and Hirst to these historical arguments, asking how far their writings show traces of the religious argument mentioned, and how their views on education and the development of mind relate to the psychological arguments. (shrink)

This paper proposes an analysis of statements about universals according to which such statements assert nothing more than that the evidence we’d take to confirm them obtains, where this evidence is understood to consist solely of patterns in the behavior of particulars that cannot be explained by other regularities in the way things behave. On this analysis, to say that a universal exists is simply to say that there is such a pattern in the behavior of certain particulars, and for (...) any predicate F that is presumed to correspond to a universal, to say that a particular is F is simply to say that its behavior exhibits a pattern of this sort. I argue that there is no theoretical work that we want postulations and ascriptions of universals to do that they’d be unfit for if analyzed in this way, and consequently that there is no reason to treat such statements as asserting anything more than what the proposed analysis suggests. (shrink)

Supererogation has gained attention as a means of explaining the voluntary behaviours of individuals and organizations that are done for the benefit of others and which go above what is required of legislation and what may be expected by society. Whilst the emerging literature has made some significant headway in exploring supererogation as an ethical lens for the study of business there remain several important issues that require attention. These comprise, the lack of primary evidence upon which such examinations have (...) been made, attention has been given to only singular pro-social acts of organizations, and the focus has been upon the actions of large organizations. Furthermore, Heyd’s (Supererogation, Cambridge University Press, 1982) original taxonomy of six supererogatory acts, comprising Moral Heroism, Beneficence, Volunteering, Favour, Forgiveness and Forbearance, has been considered to be complete and other forms of supererogatory acts have not yet been explored. In order to address these gaps this study poses the research questions: First, it studies how a single, contemporary SME performs multiple supererogatory acts in its attempts to address its social and environmental goals that go beyond CSR. Second, it seeks to gain a deeper theoretical understanding of Heyd’s (Supererogation, Cambridge University Press, 1982) taxonomy of six forms of supererogation through the capture of primary data. This research makes a three-year case study examination of a single SME that has been formally recognized for its work in addressing social and environmental issues at local, national and global levels. Primary data are acquired of the supererogatory acts that it performs through a three-year participant observation case study, utilizing 61 interviews and 3 focus groups with internal and external stakeholders. In doing so, it addresses the empirical limitations of the extant research, substantiates each of the forms that supererogatory acts may take, and makes a contribution to the theory of supererogation by identifying a further class of act that is ‘Sharing’. (shrink)

This article explores a framework for analyses of what has variously been termed the ‘implied’, ‘imagined’, ‘virtual’ or ‘putative’ reader/addressee – the effect by which ostensibly ‘monologic’ texts, such as news media commentary, political pronouncements and academic essays project particular attitudes, beliefs and expectations on to the reader/addressee. The framework is demonstrated in being applied to an examination of the construal of putative addressee positioning in a selection of mass media texts concerned with the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza in (...) 2014. The framework is novel in the way in which it mobilises the account of the options for dialogistic positioning offered by the appraisal-framework literature, combined with some insights from Toulmin’s notion of the argumentative ‘warrant’. Conclusions are offered as to how such analyses of the readers being ‘written into the text’ can extend insights into the rhetorical workings of such texts and their ideological functionality in naturalising particular value positions. (shrink)

Disavowals such as "That's not who I am" are one way to distance ourselves from unsavory actions in order to try to mitigate our responsibility for them. Although such disclaimers can be what Harry Frankfurt calls "shabbily insincere devices for obtaining unmerited indulgence," they can also be a way to renew our commitments to new values as part of the processes of aspiration and moral improvement. What, then, separates backsliding aspirants from those in denial who seek unmerited indulgence? Drawing on (...) Christine Korsgaard, on the one hand, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, on the other, I propose a two-dimensional account of practical identity that makes sense of a certain kind of self-ignorance and helps us distinguish the aspirant from the superficially similar cases of denial and resignation. A key factor is how one responds to what I call residual practical identities. (shrink)

By introducing the concept of “mental data,” Palermos (2023) highlights an underappreciated aspect of data ethics that policymakers would do well to heed. Sweeping artificial intelligence (AI) legi...

This article explores two central notions of ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialogics’ based on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin respectively, as well their varying interanimations within Stalin-Marxist Russian societyIt is proposed that these two positions are incommensurably located alongside one another in contemporary education. I argue that Bakhtin offers diametrically oppositional educational provocations to those of Vygotsky.The implications of these interpretations will be explored with consideration of their underlying philosophical incompatibilities and contradictions, as well as the opportunities such a consideration pose (...) for educational practice today. (shrink)

Medical ethicists conventionally assume that the requirement to employ informed consent procedures is grounded in autonomy. It seems intuitively plausible that providing information to an agent promotes his autonomy by better allowing him to steer his life. However, James Taylor questions this view, arguing that any notion of autonomy that grounds a requirement to inform agents turns out to be unrealistic and self-defeating. Taylor thus contends that we are mistaken about the real theoretical grounds for informed consent procedures. Through analysing (...) Taylor's arguments and showing that they do not stand up to scrutiny, it is possible to defend the view that autonomy is a plausible theoretical basis for informed consent, and to enhance our understanding of the relationship between autonomy and informed consent. (shrink)

This paper proposes that existing computational modeling research programs may be combined into platforms for the information of public policy. The main idea is that computational models at select levels of organization may be integrated in natural terms describing biological cognition, thereby normalizing a platform for predictive simulations able to account for both human and environmental costs associated with different action plans and institutional arrangements over short and long time spans while minimizing computational requirements. Building from established research programs, the (...) proposal aims to take advantage of current momentum in the direction of the integration of the cognitive with social and natural sciences, reduce start-up costs and increase speed of development. These are all important upshots given rising unease over the potential for AI and related technologies to shape the world going forward. (shrink)

Setting aside all exclusion-style worries about the redundancy of postulating additional, non-physical mental causes for effects that can already be explained in purely physical terms, dualists who treat mental properties as supervening on physical properties still face a further problem: in cases of mental-to-mental causation, they cannot avoid positing an implausibly coincidental coordination in the timing of the distinct causal processes terminating, respectively, in the mental effect and its physical base. I argue that this problem arises regardless of whether one (...) treats the mental cause as causing both the mental effect and its physical base, or whether one treats the latter as having instead been caused by some physical state, and that the problem also does not depend on which theory of causation one adopts. A third option of treating the mental cause and its physical base as producing the mental effect and its physical base by a single causal process that they both contribute to is found to come up short as well. (shrink)

In accordance with a recent statement released by the World Health Organization, the Canadian province of Ontario is moving to ban payment for plasma donation. This is partially based on contentions that remuneration for blood and blood products undermines autonomy and personal dignity. This paper is dedicated to evaluating this claim. I suggest that traditional autonomy-based arguments against commodification of human body parts and substances are less compelling in the context of plasma donation in Canada, but that there is another (...) autonomy-based objection to paid plasma donation that has not received sufficient attention. Namely, the stigma that surrounds exchanging plasma for payment makes it difficult to make an autonomous decision to engage in this activity. I suggest that this problem can be overcome in one of two ways; by banning payment for plasma, or by reducing the stigma surrounding this practice. I provide an indication of how we might work to achieve the latter, contending that this possibility should be taken seriously, due to the difficulties in achieving a sufficient supply of plasma without remuneration. (shrink)

The paper argues that nationality and national sentiment have been, until recently, neglected concepts in liberal, as distinct from conservative, political and educational philosophy, It claims that, appropriately detachedfrom nationalistic ideas associated with the political right, the promotion of national sentiment as an educational aim is not incompatible with liberalism and, more strongly, may be desirablefor reasons of personal and cultural identity as well asfor redistributive reasons. The paper then explores issues to do with British nationality inparticular, arguingfor a remodelled (...) conception to replace the traditional one; and finally it looks at curricular implications, especially in the British context, of aiming at the cultivation of national sentiment within a liberalframework. (shrink)

Democratic equality challenges both utilitarianism and classical liberal and libertarian thought which continues to exert a major influence in the politics of many capitalist countries. This chapter aims to clarify the content of, and motivation for, democratic equality. Section 1 begins with an outline of democratic equality. It introduces and clarifies, in a preliminary way, two key elements of democratic equality: the notion of fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle. Section 2 explains why Rawls considers democratic equality a (...) better account of what justice requires than rival accounts. Sections 3 and 4 briefly review some outstanding interpretative and normative issues within democratic equality. Section 4 also looks at the question of how far democratic equality can properly incorporate the just claims of sick and disabled people. Democratic equality incorporates a principle of productive reciprocity, however, this incorporation of productive reciprocity in democratic equality remains rather undeveloped. (shrink)

We define ethical system infrastructure as being composed of three major factors – means, motivation, and opportunity. Means are defined as organizational rules, policies, and procedures. Motivation focuses upon the values and the interests being pursued by the position occupant and the organizational value system, while opportunity is discussed in terms of the environment in which the dilemma occurs, proposing that position in the hierarchy presents its own unique set of ethical dilemmas. Ethical breeches are discussed in terms of the (...) interactional processes among means, motivation, and opportunity. Finally, a sequential process is suggested to use the infrastructural components to institutionalize organizational ethics training and subsequent behavior. (shrink)