In this paper, we point out that explainability is useful but not sufficient to ensure the legitimacy of algorithmic decision systems. We argue that the key requirements for high-stakes decision systems should be justifiability and contestability. We highlight the conceptual differences between explanations and justifications, provide dual definitions of justifications and contestations, and suggest different ways to operationalize justifiability and contestability.

This article demonstrates that immoralism does not sum up the Nietzschean position. Nietzsche made use of ethical categories - notably the categories of “duty”, “virtue”, “justice” or “compassion” - in order to propose a new philosophy of the body. In this attempt to plunge morality back into the heart of organism, Nietzsche reforms morality on physiological grounds. This gesture aims at reconstructing the laws of action.

Using Demographic and Health Survey datasets from Ghana and Nigeria, this study examined whether the protective effects of breast-feeding are greatest where the poorest sanitation conditions prevail. It was found that mixed-fed infants aged between 0 and 11 months tend to have a higher risk of diarrhoea than fully breast-fed children, while the risk of diarrhoea among weaned infants is twice that of mixed-fed infants. The probit regression models employed in the analysis were used to predict the probability of diarrhoea (...) associated with each breast-feeding pattern for both ‘poor’ and ‘good’ sanitation areas. It was found that the risk of diarrhoea among mixed-fed infants in the poor sanitation areas tends to be high while the same risk among fully breast-fed infants tends to be minimal. In essence, the health risks of mixed feeding are real, particularly for infants aged less than 7 months, and are even worse for those weaned before 6 months of age. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1106, Page 536-553, July 2022.

Psychologists have emphasized children's acquisition of information through firsthand observation. However, many beliefs are acquired from others' testimony. In two experiments, most 4yearolds displayed sceptical trust in testimony. Having heard informants' accurate or inaccurate testimony, they anticipated that informants would continue to display such differential accuracy and they trusted the hitherto reliable informant. Yet they ignored the testimony of the reliable informant if it conflicted with what they themselves had seen. By contrast, threeyearolds were less selective in trusting a reliable (...) informant. Thus, young children check testimony against their own experience and increasingly recognise that some informants are more trustworthy than others. (shrink)

This paper argues that the definition of food justice must be defined in more participatory terms. Current accounts of food justice tend to emphasize distributional inequalities. However, there is broad recognition that these distributional inequalities are the result of participative inequalities and that the participation of marginalized groups in advocacy plays an important role in creating just food systems. In addition, thinking of food justice in more participative terms also suggests a more well-rounded and comprehensive approach to dealing with inequalities (...) within the food system. One manner in which the concept of food justice can be redefined to better capture the importance of participative justice is by considering what is required for informed consent. (shrink)

Much of the recent scholarship on the problem of political accountability in Africa leans toward the proposition that it is largely a post-colonial phenomenon that was caused by the destruction of the democratic institutions that were inherited by Africa's political elites. By replacing the democratic institutions they inherited from European colonial powers with quasi-democratic and downright despotic structures, it is argued that African elites became increasingly unaccountable and, in the process, destroyed their otherwise robust economies and impoverished the vast majority (...) of their citizens. In reality, however, the problem of political accountability in Africa is far more complex than that in its origins, character and manifestations. This paper critically examines notions and models of political accountability to demonstrate that the sources of the problem of accountability in Africa are both domestic and external. I argue that, contrary to widespread perception that African states suffer from impunity and lack of accountability, African governments have demonstrated a remarkable degree of responsiveness or accountability in their external relations while remaining virtually unaccountable to their own citizens. Therefore, the solution to the problem of political accountability in Africa should include a combination of internal reforms as well as the concerted support of the international community to generate a robust and sustained demand for accountability of African governments to their citizens. (shrink)

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

A pioneering work in the philosophy of mind, Content and Consciousness brings together the approaches of philosophers and scientists to the mind--a connection that must occur if genuine analysis of the mind is to be made. This unified approach permits the most forbiddingly mysterious mental phenomenon--consciousness--to be broken down into several distinct phenomena, and these are each given a foundation in the physical activity of the brain. This paperback edition contains a preface placing the book in the context of recent (...) work in the area. (shrink)

This paper aims at bridging a gap between the history of American animal behavior studies and the history of sociobiology. In the post-war period, ecology, comparative psychology and ethology were all investigating animal societies, using different approaches ranging from fieldwork to laboratory studies. We argue that this disunity in “practices of place” explains the attempts of dialogue between those three fields and early calls for unity through “sociobiology” by J. Paul Scott. In turn, tensions between the naturalist tradition and the (...) rising reductionist approach in biology provide an original background for a history of Edward Wilson’s own version of sociobiology, much beyond the William Hamilton’s papers usually considered as its key antecedent. Naturalists were in a defensive position in the geography of the fields studying animal behavior, and in reaction were a driving force behind the various projects of synthesis called “sociobiology”. (shrink)

Newcomers and more experienced feminist theorists will welcome this even-handed survey of the care/justice debate within feminist ethics. Grace Clement clarifies the key terms, examines the arguments and assumptions of all sides to the debate, and explores the broader implications for both practical and applied ethics. Readers will appreciate her generous treatment of the feminine, feminist, and justice-based perspectives that have dominated the debate.Clement also goes well beyond description and criticism, advancing the discussion through the incorporation of a broad range (...) of insights into a new integration of the values of care and justice. Care, Autonomy, and Justice marks a major step forward in our understanding of feminist ethics. It is both direct and helpful enough to work as an introduction for students and insightful and original enough to make it necessary reading for scholars. (shrink)

Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems (...) of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. (shrink)

The field of computational law has increasingly moved into the focus of the scientific community, with recent research analysing its issues and risks. In this article, we seek to draw a structured and comprehensive list of societal issues that the deployment of automatically processable regulation could entail. We do this by systematically exploring attributes of the law that are being challenged through its encoding and by taking stock of what issues current projects in this field raise. This article adds to (...) the current literature not only by providing a needed framework to structure arising issues of computational law but also by bridging the gap between theoretical literature and practical implementation. Key findings of this article are: (1) The primary benefit (efficiency vs. accessibility) sought after when encoding law matters with respect to the issues such an endeavor triggers; (2) Specific characteristics of a project—project type, degree of mediation by computers, and potential for divergence of interests—each impact the overall number of societal issues arising from the implementation of automatically processable regulation. (shrink)

In this work, Colleen Clements presents her case for the need to subject the field of bioethics to a critical external analysis apart from the current postmodern assumptions. Clements argues that, since the 1970s, bioethics has refuted human values in favour of political consensus building. This failure to recognize basic human values in the ethical critique of modern medicine has lead to a dehumanization of the medical system by the field. Clements proceeds to advocate a naturalistic theory of bioethics that (...) reinstates primary human values. (shrink)

Slavery and slave trade gave birth to racism and society has been struggling towards its prevention and possible elimination with little success. Martin Luther King Jr wrote in his letter from the Birmingham jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Until this undeniable fact is understood and emphasized our contemporary society is heading towards a state of an uncontrollable wildfire of anarchy. It (...) is obvious that all fingers are not equal but that does not negate the fact that all men irrespective of colour or race are created equal—configured with brain, flesh, water, and blood. Racial discrimination is a moral and systemic sin that must be confronted and vehemently condemned. The main thrust of this paper is to expose various forms of racial discrimination ravaging the contemporary society with a view to postulating ideas geared towards its prevention and possible elimination. Relying on observational and historical methods, relevant data required will be elicited. The paper identified among other things that racism is resurging in the 21st century to a threatening dimension that if a coordinated action is not urgently taken, it will result into an uncontrollable wildfire of anarchy. The researcher therefore recommends the need to reemphasize respect and tolerance for all humanity. (shrink)

Anastasius of Sinai is best known as a seventh century monk, theologian, and presbyter, whose writings defended the Chalcedonian creed, explored the union of God and humanity, and supported his congregation's faith after the Moslem invasion of Egypt. His Hexaemeron reveals yet another facet of his work: that of biblical scholarship. In this extensive commentary on the creation account of Genesis, Anastasius compares and discusses several Greek translations of the biblical text. Thus he becomes for us an important source of (...) information about the Septuagint and other Greek translations of the Bible circulating during the Byzantine Period, especially those incorporated by Origen into the Hexapla. The Hexaemeron also raises some possibilities about the early library at Sinai and invites a comparison with the famous Codex Sinaïticus. (shrink)

Kafka’s works very often work as parables in which the lesson has been lost; or at least is ingeniously obfuscated from immediate understanding from the reader. His short story “In the Penal” Colony is no exception: the Traveller visits a penal colony with an unusual take on capital punishment as a sophisticated machine, built by the former commandant, inscribed unto the flesh of the criminals the law whose violation has resulted in their excruciating painful death. Our proposal is that the (...) story is a clear reference of a very commonplace Jewish ritual of laying “tefillin”, i.e. phylacteries containing certain commandments and to be affixed to one’s head and arm every morning, and that such preoccupation of ensuring the transmission of the law by physical inscription unto the mind and the flesh. (shrink)

This chapter provides a broad overview of the relationship between climate change and environmental justice. It provides (1) a brief review of the concept of environmental justice, (2) discussion about how environmental justice applies to climate change, and (3) several examples of how environmental justice has been integrated into climate governance.

Philosophy lacks criteria to evaluate its philosophical theories. To fill this gap, this essay introduces nine criteria to compare worldviews, classified in three broad categories: objective criteria (objective consistency, scientificity, scope), subjective criteria (subjective consistency, personal utility, emotionality), and intersubjective criteria (intersubjective consistency, collective utility, narrativity). The essay first defines what a worldview is and exposes the heuristic used in the quest for criteria. After describing each criterion individually, it shows what happens when each of them is violated. From the (...) criteria, it derives assessment tests to compare and improve different worldviews. These include the is-ought, ought-act, and is-act first-order tests; the critical and dialectical second-order tests; the mixed-questions and first-second-order third-order tests; and the we-I, we-it, and it-I tests. The essay then applies these criteria and tests to a concrete example, comparing the Flying Spaghetti Monster deity with Intelligent Design. For another application, it draws more general fruitful suggestions for the dialogue between science and religion. (shrink)

Quiconque considère la résurgence du cynisme à la Renaissance pénètre un domaine vaste, mais laissé en friche par les philosophes et délaissé des littéraires. Quelques exemples suffisent à en évaluer l'étendue : reconnaître Diogène dans le Christ et faire - subrepticement - du premier des Adages un adage diogénique ; s'assimiler à Diogène roulant son tonneau pour illustrer la fabrique du Tiers Livre ; attaquer saint Augustin pour son incapacité à comprendre l'impudeur des cyniques ; souhaiter comme idéal pour l'homme (...) de n'être "serf de personne". Voilà quatre positions où l'on aura reconnu Erasme, Rabelais, Montaigne ainsi que La Boétie et qui attestent que, si le cynisme est bien une philosophie de la Renaissance, il a aussi été un formidable moyen de penser et de parler à neuf. Alors que le bien-dire envahit l'espace public, le dire vrai des cyniques, incisif, est apte à façonner des formes littéraires inédites et à procurer de nouveaux moyens critiques. Contre ceux qui pensent conforter la morale avec des discours bien-pensants, Diogène n'affirmait-il pas, crânement, que l'exercice de la vertu n'est pas pour les pisse-froid, qu'on peut être obscène et vertueux, violent et pédagogue, tout en restant "joyeux entre mille"? (shrink)

Social learning is likely to include affective processes: it is necessary for newcomers to discover what value to attach to objects, persons, and events in a given social environment. This learning relies largely on the evaluation of others’ emotional expressions. This study has two objectives. Firstly, we compare two closely related concepts that are employed to describe the use of another person’s appraisal to make sense of a given situation: social appraisal and social referencing. We contend that social referencing constitutes (...) a type of social appraisal. Secondly, we introduce the concept of affective social learning with the hope that it may help to discriminate the different ways in which emotions play a critical role in the processes of socialization. (shrink)

Thanks to his unsurpassed eye and his fearless willingness to take a stand, Clement Greenberg (1909 1994) became one of the giants of 20th century art criticism a writer who set the terms of critical discourse from the moment he burst onto the scene with his seminal essays Avant Garde and Kitsch (1939) and Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940). In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington in 1971, Greenberg provides his most (...) expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art, arguing for an esthetic that flies in the face of current art world fashions. Greenberg insists despite the attempts from Marcel Duchamp onwards to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged that taste is inexorable. He argues that standards of quality in art, the artist's responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic's responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. The obsession with innovation the epidemic of newness leads, in Greenbergs view, to the boringness of so much avant garde art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us particularly in the transcribed seminar sessions, never before published to watch the critics mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his theories. His views, often controversial, are the record of a lifetime of looking at and thinking about art as intensely as anyone ever has. (shrink)

In this philosophical paper, we explore computational and biological analogies to address the fine-tuning problem in cosmology. We first clarify what it means for physical constants or initial conditions to be fine-tuned. We review important distinctions such as the dimensionless and dimensional physical constants, and the classification of constants proposed by Lévy-Leblond. Then we explore how two great analogies, computational and biological, can give new insights into our problem. This paper includes a preliminary study to examine the two analogies. Importantly, (...) analogies are both useful and fundamental cognitive tools, but can also be misused or misinterpreted. The idea that our universe might be modelled as a computational entity is analysed, and we discuss the distinction between physical laws and initial conditions using algorithmic information theory. Smolin introduced the theory of "cosmological natural selection" with a biological analogy in mind. We examine an extension of. (shrink)

A sample of 703 Spanish psychologists completed an online survey containing 114 behaviors related to professional practice in different areas. The aim of the study was to learn which professional behaviors create ethical dilemmas most often for psychologists and how they respond to these issues. Findings suggest that psychologists who have actually faced a particular dilemma are less strict on judging the inappropriateness of a possible ethical transgression than those psychologists who have not experienced it. Also, four clusters can be (...) identified according to the attitude of respondents toward the dilemmas, namely ?rejection,? ?aprioristic,? ?utilitarian,? and ?no conflict.? (shrink)

Kirby and Paris have exhibited combinatorial algorithms whose computations always terminate, but for which termination is not provable in elementary arithmetic. However, termination of these computations can be proved by adding an axiom first introduced by Goodstein in 1944. Our purpose is to investigate this axiom of Goodstein, and some of its variants, and to show that these are potentially adequate to prove termination of computations of a wide class of algorithms. We prove that many variations of Goodstein's axiom are (...) equivalent, over elementary arithmetic, and contrast these results with those recently obtained for Kruskal's theorem. (shrink)

Para o autor, o tema das relações entre ciência e espiritualidade merece renovado espaço ante o grande público e, não menor, no ambiente escolar ou familiar. Para ele, pessoas sábias, e não apenas letradas, partem para a aventura de desbravar tanto o mundo exterior da ciência quanto o mundo interior do espírito humano. Clemente acredita que na sociedade do conhecimento e da informação em que se vive, aprendem-se tantas coisas, muitas das quais de parco sentido e propósito. Mas é preciso (...) atravessar o rio da vida com segurança. Ciência e transcendência, para o autor, quando integradas, constituem a via disponível ao ser humano para conhecer a verdade e o bem, anseios maiores que, no íntimo, todos têm. (shrink)

The aim of this communication is to consider morphological processes in sociology, mainly through the study of the stability of forms of sociality. At the same time, it aims to study the regulation of constraints, related to an increasingly conflictual environment, through political organization. We use a specific theoretical framework: the catastrophe theory developed by René Thom in topology, further developed by Claude Bruter from a physics point of view, and reworked by Jacques Viret in biology. The idea is to (...) show the existence of archetypal processes organizing social forms. (shrink)