This article seeks to establish a link between the field of business ethics and information ethics by exploring the connection between responsibility and the Internet from an economic perspective. This link finds its expression in the moral theory of Discourse Ethics as suggested by German philosophers such as Juergen Habermas and Karl‐Otto Apel. The term responsibility points in the direction of communication and therefore leads easily to discourse ethics. The economy in general and most economic practices also seem to be (...) intimately linked to questions of responsibility. The growing spread and importance of the Internet poses new challenges and problems but also creates new possibilities for ethics as well as for the economy. Here several of these new developments are analysed and their impact on ethics as well as economy assessed. Consequences for the use and development of information technology are considered. (shrink)

This article seeks to establish a link between the field of business ethics and information ethics by exploring the connection between responsibility and the Internet from an economic perspective. This link finds its expression in the moral theory of Discourse Ethics as suggested by German philosophers such as Juergen Habermas and Karl‐Otto Apel. The term responsibility points in the direction of communication and therefore leads easily to discourse ethics. The economy in general and most economic practices also seem to be (...) intimately linked to questions of responsibility. The growing spread and importance of the Internet poses new challenges and problems but also creates new possibilities for ethics as well as for the economy. Here several of these new developments are analysed and their impact on ethics as well as economy assessed. Consequences for the use and development of information technology are considered. (shrink)

This article seeks to establish a link between the field of business ethics and information ethics by exploring the connection between responsibility and the Internet from an economic perspective. This link finds its expression in the moral theory of Discourse Ethics as suggested by German philosophers such as Juergen Habermas and Karl‐Otto Apel. The term responsibility points in the direction of communication and therefore leads easily to discourse ethics. The economy in general and most economic practices also seem to be (...) intimately linked to questions of responsibility. The growing spread and importance of the Internet poses new challenges and problems but also creates new possibilities for ethics as well as for the economy. Here several of these new developments are analysed and their impact on ethics as well as economy assessed. Consequences for the use and development of information technology are considered. (shrink)

Empirical research into the ethics of emerging technologies, often involving foresight studies, technology assessment or application of the precautionary principle, raises significant epistemological challenges by failing to explain the relative epistemic status of contentious normative claims about future states. This weakness means that it is unclear why the conclusions reached by these approaches should be considered valid, for example in anticipatory ethical assessment or governance of emerging technologies. This paper explains and responds to this problem by proposing an account of (...) how the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be established in ethical and political discourses based on Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics. To better understand the nature of the problem, the relationship between norms, facts and the future is explored in light of potential meta-ethical fallacies faced in the field of empirical ethics. Weaknesses of current approaches to anticipatory ethical assessment and governance are then explored, including the Precautionary Principle and Technology Assessment. We argue that the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be understood within Habermas’ approach to political discourse, which requires ‘translation’ of uncertain claims to be comprehensible to other stakeholders in discourse. Translation thus provides a way to allow for uncertain normative claims to be considered alongside other types of validity claims in discourse. The paper contributes a conceptual account of the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims in discourse and begins to develop a ‘methodology of translation’ which can be further developed for approaches to research and ethical assessment supporting anticipatory evidence-based policy, governance and system design. (shrink)

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to Christiansen's paper, Ellen Christiansen “From ‘ethics of the eye’ to ‘ethics of the hand’ by collaborative prototyping”,Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 12 No. 1.Design/methodology/approach– Reflection and critique of Christiansen's position.Findings– The paper raises questions about the conceptual basis, the realisation of participation and the conditions required for participative practice to be more broadly employed.Originality/value– It is an original response.

In lowland South America, breath animates human and non-human bodies, pulsating through the materialities of organisms. Humans, however, should manage their bodies to recast and reconfigure breath in its most life-enhancing manifestations: singing and smoking. These are the specialized domains of those able to manage their vitalities in such a way as to produce potent effects in themselves and in the world around them, including influencing atmospheric conditions, the lives of animals and plants and the harming and healing of others. (...) In these relational onto-epistemologies, intersubjectivity, intercorporality and states of non-cognitive interaffection find new depths. Breath, properly managed, can make and unmake worldly forms, including bodies and the societies they come together in. Focusing on two Amerindian communities, the Warekena of northwestern Rio Negro, Brazil and the Shipibo-Konibo of the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru, this article examines the interface between human and non-human subjectivities, and how resonant interaffective atmospheric conditions are induced to promote health. (shrink)

Even his peers called Locke's political philosophy “The ABC of Politics“: not only does he clarify why one should exit the state of nature (government guarantees protection of life, freedom, and wealth) but also what a good government has to provide. A government should protect individuals from assaults of fellow citizens, other countries, and itself. Locke also shows how to put limits to the power of political institutions: by division of powers, by law, by neutral judges, and by making people (...) trust their government -- and having the right to revolt when their trust is betrayed. This book provides a cooperative commentary to all important topics of Locke's "Two Treatises". With entries by Wolfgang von Leyden, Bernd Ludwig, Peter Niesen, Francis Oakley, Birger P. Priddat, Michaela Rehm, Michael Schefczyk, Ludwig Siep, A. John Simmons, und Simone Zurbuchen. (shrink)

English summary: The account of the fate of Stephen takes up a large part in the Acts of the Apostles. Being the first martyr, Stephen became a Saint and the patron of many churches. There is, however, a modern exegetical tradition which blames Stephen himself for his violent death. Against this, Haaker emphasises the psychological and historical plausibility of Luke's account. The volume reflects the drama of the biblical narrative of Stephen and provides incisive examples of its reception history until (...) the 20th century. German description: Der Sammelband dokumentiert die Tagungen der Kulturhermeneutischen Sozietat e. V. der Jahre 2009 bis 2011, bei denen der Diskurs uber Emotionen und Verhalten im Zentrum stand. In den Zusammenhangen der philosophischen und theologischen Ethik werden Artikulationsformen der Moral, Entwicklungen der Theoriebildung und Probleme der Normativitat erortert. Mit Beitragen von Stefan Beyerle, Volker Caysa, Ferdinand Fellmann, Stephan Gratzel, Peter Fischer, Bernd Harbeck-Pingel, Susanne Klinger, Michael Roth, Friedrike Schick und Albrecht Scriba. (shrink)

Context, connection, and coordination (CCC) describe well where the problems that apply to thought-disordered patients with schizophrenia lie. But they may be part of the experience of those with other symptom constellations. Switching is an important mechanism to allow context to be applied appropriately to changing circumstances. In some cases, NMDA-voltage modulations may be central, but gain and shift are also functions that monoaminergic systems express in CCC.

From citizens paying taxes to employees following their bosses’ orders and kids obeying their parents, we take it for granted that a whole range of authorities have the power to impose duties on others. However, although authority is often accepted in practice, it looks philosophically problematic if we conceive persons as free and as equals. -/- In this short and accessible book, Fabian Wendt examines the basis of authority, discussing five prominent theories that try to explain how claims to (...) authority can be vindicated. Focusing in particular on the issue of how states can rightfully claim authority, he rigorously analyses the theories’ arguments and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. He also debates anarchism as an alternative that should be taken seriously if no theory ultimately succeeds in explaining state authority. -/- This clear and engaging book will be essential reading for anyone grappling with the most fundamental questions of authority and obligation in political theory and political philosophy. (shrink)

This volume describes features of biological autonomy and integrates them into the recent discussion of factors in evolution. In recent years ideas about major transitions in evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. They include questions about the origin of evolutionary innovation, their genetic and epigenetic background, the role of the phenotype, and of changes in ontogenetic pathways. In the present book, it is argued that it is likewise necessary to question the properties of these innovations and what was qualitatively generated (...) during the macroevolutionary transitions. The author states that a recurring central aspect of macroevolutionary innovations is an increase in individual organismal autonomy whereby it is emancipated from the environment with changes in its capacity for flexibility, self-regulation and self-control of behavior. The first chapters define the concept of autonomy and examine its history and its epistemological context. Later chapters demonstrate how changes in autonomy took place during the major evolutionary transitions and investigate the generation of organs and physiological systems. They synthesize material from various disciplines including zoology, comparative physiology, morphology, molecular biology, neurobiology and ethology. It is argued that the concept is also relevant for understanding the relation of the biological evolution of man to his cultural abilities. Finally the relation of autonomy to adaptation, niche construction, phenotypic plasticity and other factors and patterns in evolution is discussed. The text has a clear perspective from the context of systems biology, arguing that the generation of biological autonomy must be interpreted within an integrative systems approach. (shrink)

This article sketches an idealized strategy for the identification of neural correlates of consciousness. The proposed strategy is based on a state space approach originating from the analysis of dynamical systems. The article then focuses on one constituent of consciousness, phenomenal awareness. Several rudimentary requirements for the identification of neural correlates of phenomenal awareness are suggested. These requirements are related to empirical data on selective attention, on completely intrinsic selection and on globally unconscious states. As an example, neuroscientific findings on (...) synchronized γ activity are categorized according to these requirements. (shrink)

Das Christentum sagt, dass Jesus Christus sowohl wahrer Mensch als auch wahrer Gott war. Doch wie kann das genauer gedacht werden? Das Buch rekonstruiert umfassend, wie Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel und damit einer der einflussreichsten und interessantesten Denker der Moderne diese Frage beantwortet. Anschließend wird Hegels Lösungsansatz aus theologischer wie aus philosophischer Perspektive kritisiert und der Ansatz eines eigenen Vorschlags skizziert. Zuletzt wird der explizite und implizite Umgang mit Hegel in der gegenwärtigen Theologie untersucht.

Philosophical discussions on causal inference in medicine are stuck in dyadic camps, each defending one kind of evidence or method rather than another as best support for causal hypotheses. Whereas Evidence Based Medicine advocates the use of Randomised Controlled Trials and systematic reviews of RCTs as gold standard, philosophers of science emphasise the importance of mechanisms and their distinctive informational contribution to causal inference and assessment. Some have suggested the adoption of a pluralistic approach to causal inference, and an inductive (...) rather than hypothetico-deductive inferential paradigm. However, these proposals deliver no clear guidelines about how such plurality of evidence sources should jointly justify hypotheses of causal associations. We here develop such guidelines by first giving a philosophical analysis of the underpinnings of Hill’s viewpoints on causality. We then put forward an evidence-amalgamation framework adopting a Bayesian net approach to model causal inference in pharmacology for the assessment of harms. Our framework accommodates a number of intuitions already expressed in the literature concerning the EBM vs. pluralist debate on causal inference, evidence hierarchies, causal holism, relevance, and reliability. (shrink)

Narrative allegory is distinguished from mythology as reality from symbol; it is, in short, the proper intermedium between person and personification. Where it is too strongly individualized, it ceases to be allegory […]. In the community of scholars of intermedia research, the above quoted citation is commonly regarded as Coleridge’s coining of the term “intermedium” or “intermediality”. However, a short glance at the discursive strategy of his argument emphasizes that his notion of “intermedium” must be closely linked to the poetics (...) and aesthetics of 19th-century romanticism. For the romantic poet, the term of “intermedium” does not point to media relations or intermedia processes but to.. (shrink)

There is an underlying assumption in the social sciences that consciousness and social life are ultimately classical physical/material phenomena. In this ground-breaking book, Alexander Wendt challenges this assumption by proposing that consciousness is, in fact, a macroscopic quantum mechanical phenomenon. In the first half of the book, Wendt justifies the insertion of quantum theory into social scientific debates, introduces social scientists to quantum theory and the philosophical controversy about its interpretation, and then defends the quantum consciousness hypothesis against (...) the orthodox, classical approach to the mind-body problem. In the second half, he develops the implications of this metaphysical perspective for the nature of language and the agent-structure problem in social ontology. Wendt's argument is a revolutionary development which raises fundamental questions about the nature of social life and the work of those who study it. (shrink)

The ethics of artificial intelligence is a widely discussed topic. There are numerous initiatives that aim to develop the principles and guidance to ensure that the development, deployment and use of AI are ethically acceptable. What is generally unclear is how organisations that make use of AI understand and address these ethical issues in practice. While there is an abundance of conceptual work on AI ethics, empirical insights are rare and often anecdotal. This paper fills the gap in our current (...) understanding of how organisations deal with AI ethics by presenting empirical findings collected using a set of ten case studies and providing an account of the cross-case analysis. The paper reviews the discussion of ethical issues of AI as well as mitigation strategies that have been proposed in the literature. Using this background, the cross-case analysis categorises the organisational responses that were observed in practice. The discussion shows that organisations are highly aware of the AI ethics debate and keen to engage with ethical issues proactively. However, they make use of only a relatively small subsection of the mitigation strategies proposed in the literature. These insights are of importance to organisations deploying or using AI, to the academic AI ethics debate, but maybe most valuable to policymakers involved in the current debate about suitable policy developments to address the ethical issues raised by AI. (shrink)

Der wachsenden Bedeutung psychologischer Beratung und Planung steht ein nur begrenztes theoretisches Wissen gegenüber. Die sozialwissen- schaftliche Grundlagendiskussion der sechziger Jahre, die Kuhn-Lakatos-Kontroverse sowie der Versuch Sneeds, den Theoriebegriff modelltheoretisch neu zu konstruieren, haben das damit aufgegebene methodologische Problem unberücksichtigt gelassen. Die Arbeit entwickelt die Grundlagen für eine Theorie falsifizierbarer Handlungsbewertung, die diese methodologische Lücke für den psychologischen Praktiker schliessen soll.

According to the objective Bayesian approach to inductive logic, premisses inductively entail a conclusion just when every probability function with maximal entropy, from all those that satisfy the premisses, satisfies the conclusion. When premisses and conclusion are constraints on probabilities of sentences of a first-order predicate language, however, it is by no means obvious how to determine these maximal entropy functions. This paper makes progress on the problem in the following ways. Firstly, we introduce the concept of a limit in (...) entropy and show that, if the set of probability functions satisfying the premisses contains a limit in entropy, then this limit point is unique and is the maximal entropy probability function. Next, we turn to the special case in which the premisses are categorical sentences of the logical language. We show that if the uniform probability function gives the premisses positive probability, then the maximal entropy function can be found by simply conditionalising this uniform prior on the premisses. We generalise our results to demonstrate agreement between the maximal entropy approach and Jeffrey conditionalisation in the case in which there is a single premiss that specifies the probability of a sentence of the language. We show that, after learning such a premiss, certain inferences are preserved, namely inferences to inductive tautologies. Finally, we consider potential pathologies of the approach: we explore the extent to which the maximal entropy approach is invariant under permutations of the constants of the language, and we discuss some cases in which there is no maximal entropy probability function. (shrink)

We study questionnaire responses to situations in which sacrificing one life may save many other lives. We demonstrate gender differences in moral judgments: males are more supportive of the sacrifice than females. We investigate a source of the endorsement of the sacrifice: antisocial preferences. First, we measure individual proneness to spiteful behavior, using an experimental game with monetary stakes. We demonstrate that spitefulness can be sizable—a fifth of our participants behave spitefully—but it is not associated with gender. Second, we find (...) that gender is consistently associated with responses even when we account for individual differences in the propensity to spitefulness. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the periodic table’s origins and history, and of the elements which conspired to make it chemistry’s most recognisable icon. We pay attention to Mendeleev’s role in the development of a system for organising the elements and chemical knowledge while facilitating the teaching of chemistry. We look at how the reception of the table in different chemical communities was dependent on the local scientific, cultural and political context, but argue that its (...) eventual universal acceptance is due to its unique ability to accommodate possessed knowledge while enabling novel predictions. Furthermore, we argue that its capacity to unify apparently disconnected phenomena under a simple framework facilitates our understanding of periodicity, making the table an icon of aesthetic value, and an object of philosophical inquiry. Finally, we briefly explore the table’s iconicity throughout its representations in pop art and science fiction. (shrink)