Theologie und Metaphysik stehen in einem Spannungsverhältnis. Versuchen der Rehabilitierung eines starken metaphysischen Systemsdenkens steht das 'nachmetaphysische Denken' entgegen, welches das Projekt einer rationalen Metaphysik verabschiedet. Wendel und Breul unternehmen einen Vermittlungsversuch: Sie formulieren eine 'Metaphysik nach Kant' als Leitparadigma der Theologie, die ernst nimmt, dass Metaphysik für eine rationale Begründung des Glaubens unverzichtbar ist, sie zugleich jedoch methodisch nur in der Verwurzelung in einer Praxis personaler Lebensformen haltbar ist. So gelingt es diesem Neuansatz, eine an die Moderne anschlussfähige (...) praktische Begründung religiöser Hoffnung zu entwickeln."-- Back cover. (shrink)

Die Pluralität theologischer Denkansätze wurde in jüngster Zeit mit einem Exklusivitätsanspruch von Teilen Analytischer Theologie konfrontiert. Vertreter*innen 'kontinentaler' Theologie sehen sich dadurch zu einem Metadiskurs über die Frage herausgefordert, wie Theologie heute grundsätzlich zu formatieren ist. In diesem Band treten Positionen zum ersten Mal in einen direkten argumentativen Austausch.

New fetal therapies offer important prospects for improving health. However, having to consider both the fetus and the pregnant woman makes the risk–benefit analysis of fetal therapy trials challenging. Regulatory guidance is limited, and proposed ethical frameworks are overly restrictive or permissive. We propose a new ethical framework for fetal therapy research. First, we argue that considering only biomedical benefits fails to capture all relevant interests. Thus, we endorse expanding the considered benefits to include evidence-based psychosocial effects of fetal therapies. (...) Second, we reject the commonly proposed categorical risk and/or benefit thresholds for assessing fetal therapy research. Instead, we propose that the individual risks for the pregnant woman and the fetus should be justified by the benefits for them and the study’s social value. Studies that meet this overall proportionality criterion but have mildly unfavorable risk–benefit ratios for pregnant women and/or fetuses may be acceptable. (shrink)

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue (...) that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun. -/- Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics. (shrink)

This paper discusses different ways of formulating regulation that takes into account a responsibility towards future generations in environmental issues. A rights-based or human-rights based approach, based on notions of intergenerational equity, can be problematic on a conceptual level, and implementation of rights for future generations is challenging. An alternative approach is based on the assignment of duties to present generations rather than rights of future generations. This approach, which is often used in regulation concerning sustainability, uses goal regulation to (...) avoid conceptual problems with rights of future generations while it still provides the opportunity to safeguard their interests and needs. (shrink)

Exponential-constructible functions are an extension of the class of constructible functions. This extension was formulated by Cluckers and Loeser in the context of semi-algebraic and sub-analytic structures, when they studied stability under integration. In this paper, we will present a natural refinement of their definition that allows for stability results to hold within the wider class of [Formula: see text]-minimal structures. One of the main technical improvements is that we remove the requirement of definable Skolem functions from the proofs. As (...) a result, we obtain stability in particular for all intermediate structures between the semi-algebraic and the sub-analytic languages. (shrink)

Building artificial moral agents (AMAs) underscores the fragmentary character of presently available models of human ethical behavior. It is a distinctly different enterprise from either the attempt by moral philosophers to illuminate the “ought” of ethics or the research by cognitive scientists directed at revealing the mechanisms that influence moral psychology, and yet it draws on both. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have tended to stress the importance of particular cognitive mechanisms, e.g., reasoning, moral sentiments, heuristics, intuitions, or a moral grammar, (...) in the making of moral decisions. However, assembling a system from the bottom-up which is capable of accommodating moral considerations draws attention to the importance of a much wider array of mechanisms in honing moral intelligence. Moral machines need not emulate human cognitive faculties in order to function satisfactorily in responding to morally significant situations. But working through methods for building AMAs will have a profound effect in deepening an appreciation for the many mechanisms that contribute to a moral acumen, and the manner in which these mechanisms work together. Building AMAs highlights the need for a comprehensive model of how humans arrive at satisfactory moral judgments. (shrink)

This brief essay examines emergent spaces for politics and emergent political actors. The particular concern here is with types of politics that do not run through the formal political system, one with shrinking options for a growing number of US citizens and immigrants. Informal political actors and street-level politics in cities are major instances of this. US cities have a long history of street-level politics. The contents, the purposes, the mobilizers and the enactors of these politics have changed over time. (...) Today’s global cities are a very specific type of place because they bring together both the most globalized sectors of capital and the new transnational professionals, on the one hand, and a growing number of immigrants and native minoritized groups in a single, complex space. (shrink)

In this paper, we first classify different types of second opinions and evaluate the ethical and epistemological implications of providing those in a clinical context. Second, we discuss the issue of how artificial intelligent could replace the human cognitive labour of providing such second opinion and find that several AI reach the levels of accuracy and efficiency needed to clarify their use an urgent ethical issue. Third, we outline the normative conditions of how AI may be used as second opinion (...) in clinical processes, weighing the benefits of its efficiency against concerns of responsibility attribution. Fourth, we provide a ‘rule of disagreement’ that fulfils these conditions while retaining some of the benefits of expanding the use of AI-based decision support systems in clinical contexts. This is because the rule of disagreement proposes to use AI as much as possible, but retain the ability to use human second opinions to resolve disagreements between AI and physician-in-charge. Fifth, we discuss some counterarguments. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

There is a remedy available for many of our ailments: Psychopharmacology promises to alleviate unsatisfying memory, bad moods, and low self-esteem. Bioethicists have long discussed the ethical implications of enhancement interventions. However, they have not considered relevant evidence from psychology and economics. The growth in autonomy in many areas of life is publicized as progress for the individual. However, the broadening of areas at one’s disposal together with the increasing individualization of value systems leads to situations in which the range (...) of options asks too much of the individual. I scrutinize whether increased self-determination and unbound possibilities are really in a person’s best interests. Evidence from psychology and economics challenges the assumption that unlimited autonomy is best in all cases. The responsibility for autonomous self-formation that comes with possibilities provided by neuro-enhancement developments can be a burden. To guarantee quality of life I suggest a balance of beneficence, support, and respect for autonomy. (shrink)

The increased presence of medical AI in clinical use raises the ethical question which standard of explainability is required for an acceptable and responsible implementation of AI-based applications in medical contexts. In this paper, we elaborate on the emerging debate surrounding the standards of explainability for medical AI. For this, we first distinguish several goods explainability is usually considered to contribute to the use of AI in general, and medical AI in specific. Second, we propose to understand the value of (...) explainability relative to other available norms of explainable decision-making. Third, in pointing out that we usually accept heuristics and uses of bounded rationality for medical decision-making by physicians, we argue that the explainability of medical decisions should not be measured against an idealized diagnostic process, but according to practical considerations. We conclude, fourth, to resolve the issue of explainability-standards by relocating the issue to the AI’s certifiability and interpretability. (shrink)

‘Authority’ is a term widely used in scholarly debate, including the history of philosophy. However, what is meant by this term is not always clear and the concept is not very well defined. One reason for this is certainly that the phenomenon itself is complex and the corresponding terms are used with a degree of latitude. This makes it difficult to adequately compare and connect the insights that various case studies have to offer. For historians of philosophy, it is thus (...) important to get a sufficient grasp of the concept of authority. This is even more urgent when one studies commentary traditions, in which secondary texts are written in virtue of the existence of texts clad with high authority. Our article combines historical textual research with insights from epistemology, thus providing a discussion of the concept of authority and its importance in textual traditions. We propose a descriptive model that can be used for examining epistemic authority in historical texts. An example from ancient Platonism serves to show both the complexity of the phenomenon and the clarifications that our approach may offer. (shrink)

The intent of the exploration is not an attempt to uncover Oakeshott's intellectual influences, but rather to show the importance and coherence of Oakeshott's various themes by showing how they modify, amplify, and contrast with similar and related themes in the thought of seven better known thinkers - Montaigne, St. Augustine, Hegel, Hobbes, Benjamin Constant, Rousseau, and Hume."--BOOK JACKET.

The biggest contemporary challenge to democratic legitimacy gravitates around the crisis of democratic representation.