What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores (...) questions regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, this book investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI. (AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery of Culture and Education of the Holy See). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetoric and PluralismAndrea A. LunsfordRhetoric and Pluralism, ed. Frederick J. Antczak; xii & 336 pp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995, $59.50.In his (non)conclusion to this volume’s witty Afterword, Wayne Booth remarks on the need to “improve our inquiry into how we inquire together” (p. 307). The fifteen essays collected in Rhetoric and Pluralism are enthusiastically engaged in this project. Although often strikingly different in their methodologies and (...) assumptions, keeping company with Wayne Booth has allowed the contributors to practice—and to try to improve—what inquiry they would preach. Frederick J. Antczak opens with a brief introduction that previews the five sections to come: “Situating Booth”; “Ethics and Fictions”; “Rhetoric and Politics”; “Booth across Disciplines”; and “Booth, Assent, and Argument.” Booth’s Afterword is followed by Lee Artz’s bibliography of Booth’s work.For readers primarily interested in rhetoric, Walter Jost’s “Teaching the Topics: Character, Rhetoric, and Liberal Education” provides a thoughtful exploration of Booth’s contributions to a theory of special topics as well as a strategy for using this theory as a means of integrating liberal education. Those more interested in philosophy may turn first to Alan Brinton’s rereading of Booth’s Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Assent against Brinton’s own understanding of the Cartesian tradition, or to James McOmber’s comparison of Booth, Richard Rorty, and Paul Feyerabend in “Rhetoric without Sophistry.” And those with a primary interest in teaching should be pleased to find that [End Page 276] subject given strong treatment here in Francis-Noel Thomas’s use of Booth’s practice of criticism, and its relationship to the work of all teachers of English, in taking on advocates of a narrowly-conceived cultural literacy. Patsy Callaghan and Ann Dobyns use a Boothian ethics of argument to inform the teaching of first-year English classes.Literature, of course, is featured throughout. Monica Johnstone arrestingly reads Genet’s Querelle against the evaluative model Booth elucidates in The Company We Keep; Susan Shapiro tests Boothian ethical criticism in the case of Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust fiction; and Antczak discusses Martin Luther King’s “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” Two essays, one by Don Bialostosky and one by David Richter, relate Booth’s work to Bakhtinian principles, though with very different ends and effects. Finally, those who wonder whether Booth’s brand of pluralism shies too far away from a rigorous encounter with politics will gain from James Phelan’s careful and convincing extension of Booth’s evaluative criticism and from Barbara Foley’s insistence that Booth’s system of ethical criticism too often ignores or elides issues of class and race.The richest section of this text for me, however, focuses on “Booth across Disciplines.” In three remarkably provocative and highly readable discussions, Peter Rabinowitz, Donald McCloskey, and Eugene Garver take Booth on the road, applying or extending his work to an analysis of the ethics of music (Rabinowitz), the rhetoric of economics (McCloskey), and the significance of the implicit, of “What Goes Without Saying: in Francis Bacon’s Essays (Garver). One mark of important thinkers is surely that they enable creativity, that their thinking sparks the thoughts of many others. Throughout this volume, but particularly in this section, that mark of Booth’s influence is palpably evident.As I read through Rhetoric and Pluralism, and especially when I came to Booth’s playful and multivocalic Afterword, I kept wishing that someone had contributed a piece of oral history to this volume: Booth is still working, still working hard, and there are many more of his range of selves available to us in his spoken voice. Finally, I longed for a detailed analysis of some of Booth’s playful and ironic pieces, which come in for some mention here and there but are not featured in any essay. This openness to play, so much a part of the rhetorical tradition and so necessary to any ethics of postmodernity, is another of Booth’s gifts to all readers.Andrea A. LunsfordOhio State UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In Sophocles' Ichneutai Silenos reproaches the Satyrs for their cowardice. Among other things that he says to them, he contrasts their current attitude to his own bravery in youth; in lines 154-155 he speaks of many monuments of bravery, which he has left in the homes of the nymphs. After illustrating the syntax of these lines and offering a new translation, the author goes on to investigate the possible reference of these "monuments of bravery" and hence of the (alleged) exploits (...) of Silenos. (shrink)

In Sophocles’ Ichneutai the second phase of the Satyrs’ tracking of the stolen cows begins with twenty-seven lyric lines (vv. 176-202), during which the Satyrs progressively advance towards the cave of the nymph Kyllene. The papyrus assigns the entire passage to the Chorus of the Satyrs. But it seems most probable that here we have a lyric dialogue between the Chorus and Silenos, with the greater part actually belonging to him. The lyric passage is full of exhortations and instructions to (...) the Satyrs for the tracking, which most likely come from the lips of Silenos. In the preceding trimeters Silenos has promised his sons to stay and guide them in their tracking, using his words and also a ‘hound-inciting’ whistling (172-175). What follows is an impressive stage-representation (and parody) of ancient hunting with dogs, in which apparently Silenos assumes the role of a hunter, while the Satyrs assume that of tracking-hounds. (shrink)

Addressing key issues arising from the nature of death, 'Death, Dying and the Ending of Life' examines important topics relating to bioethics, philosophy and literature.

The prelims comprise: Seeing Infectious Disease as Central The Birth of Bioethics Amid the Decline of Infectious Disease The Shifting Concerns of Public Health Bioethics and Public Health: How the Twain Didn't Meet The Case of HIV Bridging the Gap: Seeing Bioethics in Terms of the Patient as Victim and Vector An Ordinary Example Summing Up: Autonomous Agency in the Context of Infectious Disease Notes.

Seventy-three children between 6 and 7 years of age were presented with a problem having ambiguous subgoal ordering. Performance in this task showed reliable fingerprints: a non-monotonic dependence of performance as a function of the distance between the beginning and the end-states of the problem, very high levels of performance when the first move was correct, and states in which accuracy of the first move was significantly below chance. These features are consistent with a non-Markov planning agent, with an inherently (...) inertial decision process, and that uses heuristics and partial problem knowledge to plan its actions. We applied a statistical framework to fit and test the quality of a proposed planning model. Our framework allows us to parse out independent contributions to problem-solving based on the construction of the value function and on general mechanisms of the search process in the tree of solutions. We show that the latter are correlated with children's performance on an independent measure of planning, while the former is highly domain specific. (shrink)

Organ trafficking and trafficking in persons for the purpose of organ transplantation are recognized as significant international problems. Yet these forms of trafficking are largely left out of international criminal law regimes and to some extent of domestic criminal law regimes as well. Trafficking of organs or persons for their organs does not come within the jurisdiction of the ICC, except in very special cases such as when conducted in a manner that conforms to the definitions of genocide or crimes (...) against humanity. Although the United States Code characterizes trafficking as a transnational crime with national implications, (22 U.S.C. § 7101(b)(24) (2010)), trafficking is rarely prosecuted in domestic courts. It has thus functioned in practice largely as what might be judged a stateless offense, out of the purview of both international and national courts. Yet these forms of organ trafficking remain widespread—and devastating to those who are its victims. In this article, we begin by describing what is known about the extent of organ trafficking and trafficking in persons for the purpose of removal of organs. We then critically evaluate how and why such trafficking has remained largely unaddressed by both international and domestic criminal law regimes. This state of affairs, we argue, presents a missed chance for developing the legitimacy of international criminal law and an illustration of how far current international legal institutions remain from ideal justice. (shrink)

How do affect and cognition interact in managerial decision making? Over the last decades, scholars have investigated how managers make decisions. However, what remains largely unknown is the interplay of affective states and cognition during the decision-making process. We offer a systematization of the contributions produced on the role of affect and cognition in managerial decision making by considering the recent cross-fertilization of management studies with the neuroscience domain. We implement a Systematic Literature Review of 23 selected contributions dealing with (...) the role of affect and cognition in managerial decisions that adopted neuroscience techniques/points of view. Collected papers have been analyzed by considering the so-called reflexive (X-) and reflective (C-) systems in social cognitive neuroscience and the type of decisions investigated in the literature. Results obtained help to support an emerging “unified” mind processing theory for which the two systems of our mind are not in conflict and for which affective states have a driving role toward cognition. A research agenda for future studies is provided to scholars who are interested in advancing the investigation of affect and cognition in managerial decision making, also through neuroscience techniques – with the consideration that these works should be at the service of the behavioral strategy field. (shrink)

Since testing for HIV infection became possible in 1985, testing of pregnant women has been conducted primarily on a voluntary, ‘opt-in’ basis. Faden, Geller and Powers, Bayer, Wilfert, and McKenna, among others, have suggested that with the development of more reliable testing and more effective therapy to reduce maternal-fetal transmission, testing should become either routine with ‘opt-out’ provisions or mandatory. We ask, in the light of the new rapid tests for HIV, such as OraQuick, and the development of antiretroviral treatment (...) that can reduce maternal-fetal transmission rates to <2%, whether that time is now. Illustrating our argument with cases from the United States (US), Kenya, Peru, and an undocumented Mexican worker in the US, we show that when testing is accompanied by assured multi-drug therapy for the mother, the argument for opt-out or mandatory testing for HIV in pregnancy is strong, but that it is problematic where testing is accompanied by adverse events such as spousal abuse or by inadequate intrapartum or follow-up treatment. The difference is not a ‘double standard’, but reflects the presence of conflicts between the health interests of the mother and the fetus – conflicts that would be abrogated by the assurance of adequate, continuing multi-drug therapy. In light of these conflicts, where they still occur, careful processes of informed consent are appropriate, rather than opt-out or mandatory testing. (shrink)

This paper suggests that art cannot be defined in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Instead, we propose that there are several sufficient conditions for something's being art, and that a successful definition will consist of a disjunction of minimally sufficient conditions. Our proposal owes much to the insights of Berys Gaut's ‘“Art” as a Cluster Concept’ but offers a much simpler logical formulation, which, in addition, is immune to the objections that have been raised to Gaut's account. (...) This paper agrees with Gaut's claim that there are borderline cases of art, and suggests that they arise from indeterminacy about the content of some of the minimally sufficient conditions. It is argued that this disjunctive account is superior to classical theories, resemblance-to-paradigm theories, and prototype theories of art. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

This article explores how neutralisation can explain people's lack of commitment to buying Fair Trade products, even when they identify FT as an ethical concern. It examines the theoretical tenets of neutralisation theory and critically assesses its applicability to the purchase of FT products. Exploratory research provides illustrative examples of neutralisation techniques being used in the FT consumer context. A conceptual framework and research propositions delineate the role of neutralisation in explaining the attitude-behaviour discrepancies evident in relation to consumers' FT (...) purchase behaviour, providing direction for further research that will generate new knowledge of consumers' FT purchase behaviour and other aspects of ethical consumer behaviour. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, we first document the virtually complete absence of infectious disease examples and concerns at the time bioethics emerged as a field. We then argue that this oversight was not benign by considering two central issues in the field, informed consent and distributive justice, and showing how they might have been framed differently had infectiousness been at the forefront of concern. The solution to this omission might be to apply standard approaches in liberal bioethics, such as autonomy (...) and the harm principle, to infectious examples. We argue that this is insufficient, however. Taking infectious disease into account requires understanding the patient as victim and as vector. Infectiousness reminds us that as autonomous agents we are both embodied and vulnerable in our relationships with others. We conclude by applying this reunderstanding of agency to the examples of informed consent and distributive justice in health care. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, we first document the virtually complete absence of infectious disease examples and concerns at the time bioethics emerged as a field. We then argue that this oversight was not benign by considering two central issues in the field, informed consent and distributive justice, and showing how they might have been framed differently had infectiousness been at the forefront of concern. The solution to this omission might be to apply standard approaches in liberal bioethics, such as autonomy (...) and the harm principle, to infectious examples. We argue that this is insufficient, however. Taking infectious disease into account requires understanding the patient as victim and as vector. Infectiousness reminds us that as autonomous agents we are both embodied and vulnerable in our relationships with others. We conclude by applying this reunderstanding of agency to the examples of informed consent and distributive justice in health care. (shrink)

Masked priming experiments occasionally revealed surprising effects: Participants responded slower for congruent compared to incongruent primes. This negative congruency effect was ascribed to inhibition of prime-induced activation [Eimer, M., & Schlaghecken, F. . Response faciliation and inhibition in subliminal priming. Biological Psychology, 64, 7–26.] that sets in if the prime activation is sufficiently strong. The current study tests this assumption by implementing manipulations designed to vary the amount of prime-induced activation in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 3, NCEs were (...) observed despite reduced prime-induced activation. Experiment 2 revealed no NCE with at least similar prime strength. Thus, the amount of prime activation did not predict whether or not NCEs occurred. The findings are discussed with regard to the inhibition account and the recently proposed account of mask-induced activation [cf. Lleras, A., & Enns, J. T. . Negative compatibility or object updating? A cautionary tale of mask-dependent priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 475–493; Verleger, R., Jaskowski, P., Aydemir, A., van der Lubbe, R. H. J., & Groen, M. . Qualitative differences between conscious and nonconscious processing? On inverse priming induced by masked arrows. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 494–515]. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Liberalism and Inclusiveness Liberalism: Political and Metaphysical Collaborating on Ideas of the Good Powers of Self‐Control Conclusion References.

According to simulation or shared-substrates models of emotion recognition, our ability to recognize the emotions expressed by other individuals relies, at least in part, on processes that internally simulate the same emotional state in ourselves. The term “emotional expressions” is nearly synonymous, in many people's minds, with facial expressions of emotion. However, vocal prosody and whole-body cues also convey emotional information. What is the relationship between these various channels of emotional communication? We first briefly review simulation models of emotion recognition, (...) and then discuss neuroscientific evidence related to these models, including studies using facial expressions, whole-body cues, and vocal prosody. We conclude by discussing these data in the context of simulation and shared-substrates models of emotion recognition. (shrink)

This article explores how neutralisation can explain people's lack of commitment to buying Fair Trade (FT) products, even when they identify FT as an ethical concern. It examines the theoretical tenets of neutralisation theory and critically assesses its applicability to the purchase of FT products. Exploratory research provides illustrative examples of neutralisation techniques being used in the FT consumer context. A conceptual framework and research propositions delineate the role of neutralisation in explaining the attitude-behaviour discrepancies evident in relation to consumers' (...) FT purchase behaviour, providing direction for further research that will generate new knowledge of consumers' FT purchase behaviour and other aspects of ethical consumer behaviour. (shrink)

In the last few years, annexins have been discovered in several nematodes and other parasites, and distinct differences between the parasite annexins and those of the hosts make them potentially attractive targets for anti‐parasite therapeutics. Annexins are ubiquitous proteins found in almost all organisms across all kingdoms. Here, we present an overview of novel annexins from parasitic organisms, and summarize their phylogenetic and biochemical properties, with a view to using them as drug or vaccine targets. Building on structural and biological (...) information that has been accumulated for mammalian and plant annexins, we describe a predicted additional secondary structure element found in many parasite annexins that may confer unique functional properties, and present a specific antigenic epitope for use as a vaccine. (shrink)

Syndromic surveillance uses new ways of gathering data to identify possible disease outbreaks. Because syndromic surveillance can be implemented to detect patterns before diseases are even identified, it poses novel problems for informed consent, patient privacy and confidentiality, and risks of stigmatization. This paper analyzes these ethical issues from the viewpoint of the patient as victim and vector. It concludes by pointing out that the new International Health Regulations fail to take full account of the ethical challenges raised by syndromic (...) surveillance. (shrink)

The book's aim is to give a working representation of what metaphysics is today. The historical contributions reveal the roots of metaphysical themes and how today's methods are linked to their Aristotelian and Leibnizian past. The volume also touches on the relationships between ontological and linguistic analysis, the questions of realism and ontological commitment, the nature of abstract objects, the existential meaning of particular quantification, the primitiveness of identity, the question of epistemic versus ontological vagueness, the necessity of origin, the (...) nature of natural necessity, the possibility of intermittent existence, the notion of a temporal part and its place in an account of persistence, the question of identity and change across time and possible worlds, and many more. Readership: A toolbox for any researcher in metaphysics and an essential source for any PhD student with ontological interests. (shrink)