Presently, the social responsibility literature is replete with the diverse ways in which work organizations and the regulatory nation states in which they are domiciled can improve the quality of their workers’ lives. But do workers themselves become motivated to contribute (i.e., give back) to society when they experience a work life of better quality than their peers? Specifically, which sectors of society do such workers contribute to? Through a questionnaire that was administered to a cross section of workers in (...) the private sector of Nigeria, this study found out that quality of work life (QWL) correlates significantly and positively with workers’ motivation to contribute to society. However, workers were less motivated to contribute to Nigeria’s government sector that is globally known for corruption than making contributions to the piety and social infrastructural sectors. Results also revealed that both the paternalistic and consultative forms of social responsibility were positively related with QWL. These results imply that social responsibility should be seen as a veritable platform on which satisfied stakeholders of business organizations can reciprocally make their own contributions for the overall good of society. By virtue of stakeholders’ contributions, the benefits of corporate social responsibility can actually reverberate into other sectors of societal life (e.g., the piety sector) that were never thought of during the design phase of socially responsible programmes. Finally, the study’s findings give credence to Anil Sarin’s Contributory Theory of Existence which states that people who have once received help from a particular organ of society (e.g., educational system, health care system, etc.) will be motivated to contribute to that organ or other organs of society. (shrink)

Ontologized Ethics is a collection of essays in meta-ethics with an emphasis on philosophical discourse in the African context. It focuses primarily on the extent to which metaphysical beliefs may or may not justify moral beliefs, thereby revisiting the issue of the ‘is-ought’ relationship.

Our technological lifeworld has become an info-computational media populated by data and algorithms, an artificial environment for life and shared experiences. In this chapter, I tried to sketch three new assumptions for bioethics – it is hardly possible to substantiate ethical guidelines or an idea of normativity in an aprioristic manner; moral status is a function of data entities, not something solely human; agency is plural and thus is shared or sometimes delegated – in order to chart a proposal for (...) a posthuman bioethics. Posthuman is perhaps not the best expression available, but it covers the idea of a shift from a world centered on self-contained and exclusively human agency to a more comprehensive and relational way of thinking. The “posthuman” label should be understood as a rebuttal of biocentrism and anthropocentrism by moving closer to conceptions we encounter in population ethics or in discourse about biosocial and technical systems. Posthuman bioethics is “environmentalist” without losing the humanistic stance. The question regarding how suitable an infocentric bioethics is in practice remains to be settled. The moral principles in bioethics could be reconceived as relying on these new assumptions, in a postindividualistic manner that accepts formal primacy of causal digital artifacts in affording actions in a world of ambient algorithmic intelligence. (shrink)

The paper challenges the dominant view of the individual’s place in an African (Esan) structure of Being or culture as one cast in the midst, and subject to the operations of (spiritual) forces, which are independently real and existent and can make or mar the individual’s existence based on the kind of relationship he/she establishes with them. The individual is expected to have reverence and awe for these forces; hence he/she is consistently striving to fit into the established structure of (...) Being for his/her own good. The paper asserts that this is not a fair situation because it is the individual who conceptualizes and constructs such an idea of Being to account for his/her perplexing, multifaceted experiences and his/her ontological wonder; the individual is the fundament of Being; he/sheilluminates Being. Thus, though the structure of Being in which the Esan finds himself/herself playing important roles in his/her life and in the society, he/she must not always strive to fit into it, particularly when it outlasts its suitability for answering fundamental and baffling questions that keep confronting the individual in his/her existence. Since Being keeps unfolding and our knowledge of the Being-process is never complete, the individual must therefore consistently revisit, re-conceptualize and improve on the prevalent conception or structure of Being in order to account for current experiences that confront him/her. (shrink)

In this study, I explore the challenges that ideological hegemonies of personhood imbibed by nurses and other healthcare workers could pose for the nursing profession, particularly in terms of inhibiting the acknowledgment of difference. Dominant or hegemonic conceptions of personhood in particular spaces often consist of self‐contained ideas and essentialist ontologies and normativity of what it means to be a person, lack of which results in the denial of personhood and the othering as non‐person or sub‐person. The other as the (...) residue of such self‐contained notions of personhood is most often denied the quality of care that the one who fits within such conceptions enjoy. For nurses and other healthcare workers to overcome such exclusionary tendencies in healthcare, they must overcome hegemonies and ideological dominance and be more open to alternative viewpoints and theories of personhood. I develop these lines of thought by focusing on the rich ideological traditions of Continental and African philosophies showing how exclusion takes place within these traditions based on conceptions of personhood and how such exclusion on the basis of difference impacts negatively on healthcare. I conclude by highlighting the need to go beyond hegemonic philosophies of personhood by decolonizing and demasculinizing healthcare, thereby allowing difference to flourish in an ecology of medical knowledge. (shrink)

Review the Istvan Kiraly V.'s book: Death and History.

Due to Gӧdel’s incompleteness results, the categoricity of a sufficiently rich mathematical theory and the semantic completeness of its underlying logic are two mutually exclusive ideals. For first- and second-order logics we obtain one of them with the cost of losing the other. In addition, in both these logics the rules of deduction for their quantifiers are non-categorical. In this paper I examine two recent arguments –Warren (2020), Murzi and Topey (2021)– for the idea that the natural deduction rules for (...) the first-order universal quantifier are categorical, i.e., they uniquely determine its semantic intended meaning. Both of them make use of McGee’s open-endedness requirement and the second one uses in addition Garson’s (2013) local models for defining the validity of these rules. I argue that the success of both these arguments is relative to their semantic or infinitary assumptions, which could be easily discharged if the introduction rule for the universal quantifier is taken to be an infinitary rule, i.e. non-compact. Consequently, I reconsider the use of the ω-rule and I show that the addition of the ω-rule to the standard formalizations of first-order logic is categorical. In addition, I argue that the open-endedness requirement does not make the first-order Peano Arithmetic categorical and I advance an argument for its categoricity based on the inferential conservativity requirement. (shrink)

Albinism is a global public health issue but it assumes a peculiar nature in the African continent due, in part, to the social stigma faced by persons with albinism in Africa. I argue that there are two essential reasons for this precarious situation. First, in the African consciousness, albinism is an alterity or otherness. The PWA in Africa is not merely a physical other but also an ontological other in the African community of beings, which provides a hermeneutic for the (...) stigmatising separateness or difference of the PWA. The second reason hinges on a distinction drawn by Jürgen Habermas between the ethical point of view and the moral point of view. While the former consists of the ethos, customs, or idea of the good shared by a group of persons with a shared tradition or way of life, the latter consists of what is good for all and transcends particular traditions or ways of life. Consequently, the African ethical point of view, the ethics of solidarity, justifies within the African worldview the established alterity and, by implication, stigmatization of PWAs. On this view, actions that promote harmony and prevent discord and disequilibrium among accepted beings in the African community are permissible. I further show that unless there is a change in the physical and ontological conception of PWAs and a leap from the ethical point of view to the moral point of view, the negative attitudes toward PWAs will not change. The leap to the moral point of view does not suggest an abandonment of the ethical point of view but only recommends that the two meet halfway in respect for universally accepted norms of human actions. To achieve this, I will show that much needs to be done in the areas of policy formulation, law, health care services, and education. (shrink)

Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles. However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions and their features. Such action-centred particularism is, I argue, compatible with generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘Be X’ but rejects any implication that the relevant X-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.

COnstantien Sandis speaks to Nassim Taleb about inductive knowledge,black swans, Hume, Popper, and Wittgenstein.

Interview with Constantine Sigov, dedicated to the history of the "European Dictionary of Philosophies": from the emergence of an idea in the early 90's in France until the accomplishment of the Ukrainian edition in 2019.

The anthology contains twenty-two essays and is divided into two parts. The essays are, in the main, critical responses to aspects of what has come to be known in action theory as the ‘Standard View’ – the view that traces back to Donald Davidson's contribution to twentieth-century philosophy of action. The view under criticism treats actions as bodily movements caused in a non-deviant way by belief–desire pairs, construes these belief–desire pairs as the primary reasons for the actions that they cause, (...) and embraces event-causality.The issue of how we should conceive of action is taken up in several essays. For example: in Essay 1, Fred Dretske challenges the view that actions are external events that are the effect of the reasons for which the action is done. In Essay 16, Helen Steward, proposes that, instead of treating the availability of a reason-giving explanation as essential to action, we should construe action as ‘an exercise of the power of bodily control by an animal’. In Essay 21, Jonathan Dancy argues for a deflationary approach to actions, which forgoes treating actions ‘as individuals, with identity conditions’.Other authors – for example, Stephen Everson, Rowland Stout and Maria Alvarez – focus on the issue of what reasons for action are. Are they psychological states, or propositions, or states of affairs? Also under review is how to distinguish different kinds of reason: normative and explanatory reasons, and even explanatory and motivating reasons. (shrink)

This paper seeks to develop a phenomenological account of the disorientation of grief, specifically the relationship between disorientation and the breakdown in practical self-understanding at the heart of grief. I argue that this breakdown cannot be sufficiently understood as a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space that leaves the bereaved individual at a loss as to how to go on. Examining the experience of losing a loved person and a loved person-to-be, I instead propose (...) that this breakdown should be understood primarily in relation to a distinctive kind of futurity operative in disorientation, irrespective of the extent to which there is a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space. Drawing on the resources afforded by Heidegger’s phenomenology, I argue that it is a core characteristic of the experience of disorientation in grief that the grieving person can no longer meaningfully press ahead into a specific futural self. This view comes with certain advantages over existing accounts of the temporality of grief for making sense of the disorientated relationship to futurity, which the appeal to Heideggerian resources makes possible. (shrink)

This paper seeks to develop a phenomenological account of the disorientation of grief, specifically the relationship between disorientation and the breakdown in practical self-understanding at the heart of grief. I argue that this breakdown cannot be sufficiently understood as a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space that leaves the bereaved individual at a loss as to how to go on. Examining the experience of losing a loved person and a loved person-to-be, I instead propose (...) that this breakdown should be understood primarily in relation to a distinctive kind of futurity operative in disorientation,irrespectiveof the extent to which there is a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space. Drawing on the resources afforded by Heidegger’s phenomenology, I argue that it is acore characteristicof the experience of disorientation in grief that the grieving person can no longer meaningfully press ahead into aspecific futural self. This view comes with certain advantages over existing accounts of the temporality of grief for making sense of the disorientated relationship to futurity, which the appeal to Heideggerian resources makes possible. (shrink)

The Things We Do and Why We Do Them argues against the common assumption that there is a kind of thing called "action" which all reason-giving explanation of action are geared towards. Sandis explains why all theories concerned with the form which any such explanation must take fail from the outset, and shows how various debates on the nature of so-called motivating reasons only arise because the participants all share a number of mistaken views which follow from the basic assumption (...) under attack. In so doing, he urges philosophers and psychologists alike to stop asking whether the explanation of action is causal, and to focus instead on its multifarious objects. This book will appeal to anyone interested in motivational psychology, the reasons for which we act, and the philosophy of explanation in general. (shrink)

This essay is motivated by the thought that the things we do are to be distinguished from our acts of doing them. I defend a particular way of drawing this distinction before proceeding to demonstrate its relevance for normative ethics. Central to my argument is the conviction that certain ongoing debates in ethical theory begin to dissolve once we disambiguate the two concepts of action in question. If this is right, then the study of action should be accorded a far (...) more prominent place within moral philosophy than previously supposed. I end by considering an extension of the above to aesthetic evaluation and,mutatis mutandis, that of our lives in general. (shrink)

A solid cast of contributors present the first collection of essays on the Philosophy of Action.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Throughout his work Hegel distinguishes between the notion of an act from the standpoint of the agent and that of all other standpoints. He terms the formerHandlung and the latterTat. This distinction should not be confused with the contemporary one between action andmerebodily movement. For one, bothHandlungandTatare aspects of conduct that results from the will,viz. Tun. Moreover, Hegel's taxonomy is motivated purely by concerns relating to modes of perception. So whereas theorists such as Donald Davidson assert thatallactions are events that (...) are intentional under some description, Hegel reserves the term ‘action’ for those aspects of behaviour that are highlighted by a specific set of agent-related descriptions. This is not an ontological category, since there are no such objects as actions-under-specific-descriptions.Sophocles'sTheban Trilogyreveals the central role that these notions must play in any Hegelian understanding of tragic drama. Indeed the contrasts that matter most to Hegel's general take on both epic and tragic poetry are more closely related to the study of action than the standard theory attributed to Hegel would seem to allow. It is more fruitful, then, to incorporate Hegel's insights into such tragedies to the model of action employed by him than it is to try to make them fit whatever ‘theory’ of tragedy might appear to be hinted at in hisAesthetics. (shrink)

The article analyzes the interaction of Orthodoxy and the state and its role in asserting national identity in the context ofRomania’s modernization process. I have developed the concept of tendential modernity for studying the distinctive nature of Romanian modernity Modernity in Romania focused primarily on national and geostrategic problems, due to the absence of a state encompassing all Romanians. The Orthodox Church had been recognized as a symbol of national identity, therefore it was included among the basic institutions that would (...) support the national project, in order to serve the new purposes imposed by modernity. In the context of the modernization process undergone by Romanian society, the church is not separated from the state, but becomes a church of the state, a church whose prerogatives are established by the secular power; thus the church is defined as an institution that is embedded in the process of modern change decided by the state. As a matter of fact, modernity itself was ambivalent and ambiguous, which influenced decisively the role of Orthodoxy in the assertion of Romanian identity. (shrink)

In line with the tradition of the Conversational School of Philosophy, this essay provides a rare and unique space of discourse for the authors to converse about the place of the ‘ethno’ in African philosophy. This conversation is a revisit, a renewal of the key positions that have coloured the ethnophilosophy debate by the conversers who themselves are notable contributors to arguments for and against the importance of ethnophilosophy in the unfolding of African philosophy particularly in the last decade or (...) so. There are four key positions that have been argued for in the pages of this paper: ethnophilosophy is not African philosophy and it is useless and inimical to the growth of African philosophy and should thus be jettisoned – Matolino; ethnophilosophy is the foundation for African philosophy as it provides the raw materials for African philosophical discourse – Ogbonnaya and Agada; ethnophilosophy has some value for African philosophy but it is definitely not the foundation for genuine African philosophy the way criticism and rigours are – Attoe; and ethnophilosophy can be adequately conceived as African philosophy particularly in terms of its etymology as culture or race philosophy, dealing with a philosophical or critical reflections on, and exposition of, immanent principles in African thought – Mangena and Etieyibo. These conversers provide good arguments for the positions they hold, arguments that are of course, open for further interrogation. Two points can be concluded from the ethnophilosophy debate provided in this essay: the disparities in views among conversers it seems, stem ultimately from the understanding of ethnophilosophy that each converser holds, which varies from the notion of a method used at some point in the history of African philosophy, to an etymological understanding as culture philosophy; and the debate about ethnophilosophy in the spirit of any philosophical tradition remains a perennial one that is yet to be concluded. This essay certainly concretises what is on ground and paves the way for further discussions. Keywords: Ethno, African philosophy, Foundationalist, Universalist, Particularist, The common moral position, Ethnophilosophy. (shrink)

In line with the tradition of the Conversational School of Philosophy, this essay provides a rare and unique space of discourse for the authors to converse about the place of the ‘ethno’ in African philosophy. This conversation is a revisit, a renewal of the key positions that have coloured the ethnophilosophy debate by the conversers who themselves are notable contributors to arguments for and against the importance of ethnophilosophy in the unfolding of African philosophy particularly in the last decade or (...) so. There are four key positions that have been argued for in the pages of this paper: ethnophilosophy is not African philosophy and it is useless and inimical to the growth of African philosophy and should thus be jettisoned – Matolino; ethnophilosophy is the foundation for African philosophy as it provides the raw materials for African philosophical discourse – Ogbonnaya and Agada; ethnophilosophy has some value for African philosophy but it is definitely not the foundation for genuine African philosophy the way criticism and rigours are – Attoe; and ethnophilosophy can be adequately conceived as African philosophy particularly in terms of its etymology as culture or race philosophy, dealing with a philosophical or critical reflections on, and exposition of, immanent principles in African thought – Mangena and Etieyibo. These conversers provide good arguments for the positions they hold, arguments that are of course, open for further interrogation. Two points can be concluded from the ethnophilosophy debate provided in this essay: the disparities in views among conversers it seems, stem ultimately from the understanding of ethnophilosophy that each converser holds, which varies from the notion of a method used at some point in the history of African philosophy, to an etymological understanding as culture philosophy; and the debate about ethnophilosophy in the spirit of any philosophical tradition remains a perennial one that is yet to be concluded. This essay certainly concretises what is on ground and paves the way for further discussions. (shrink)

The condition into which humans entered since the dawn of modernity altered and led to the disenchantment of traditional (pre-modern) ways of thinking and theorizing in the different spheres of being and discourse mainly due to an emphasis on reason, freedom and the autonomy of the subject. Ethics in particular has continued to experience since modernity a shift from preoccupation with fixated, absolutist systems of ethics such as those built on notions of God and nature to a preoccupation with the (...) formal, individualistic, fallible or subjective ethical systems that ensue from free and autonomous subjects. The Ethics of Subjectivity presents an examination and analysis of the theorization of this subject-based ethics particularly as presented in the works of key ethicists and philosopher since modernity. These key figures include Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Popper, Feyerabend, Habermas, Lacan and Levinas. The volume also examines the implications of the shift to the subject as the focal point of modern ethics for the ever-evolving field of ethics. (shrink)

Modern societies are characterized by a division of epistemic labor between laypeople and epistemic authorities. Authorities are often far more competent than laypeople and can thus, ideally, inform their beliefs. But how should laypeople rationally respond to an authority’s beliefs if they already have beliefs and reasons of their own concerning some subject matter? According to the standard view, the beliefs of epistemic authorities are just further, albeit weighty, pieces of evidence. In contrast, the Preemption View claims that, when one (...) discovers what an authority believes, it is not permissible to rely on any of one’s own reasons concerning the subject matter. The original version of this view, as proposed by Linda Zagzebski, has recently been severely criticized for recommending blind trust and for abandoning even minimal standards for critical thinking. In our paper, we defend a new version of the Preemption View—Defeatist Preemptionism—in a way that differs radically from Zagzebski’s. We argue that our view can be derived from certain widely accepted general epistemic principles. In particular, we claim that preemption can be identified as a special case of source sensitive defeat. Moreover, we argue that Defeatist Preemptionism does not lead to the undesirable consequences that critics ascribe to the Preemption View. The paper thus articulates the foundations and refinements of the Preemption View, such that it adequately captures the phenomenon of epistemic authority and the rational requirements related to it. (shrink)

With AI permeating our lives, there is widespread concern regarding the proper framework needed to morally assess and regulate it. This has given rise to many attempts to devise ethical guidelines that infuse guidance for both AI development and deployment. Our main concern is that, instead of a genuine ethical interest for AI, we are witnessing moral diplomacies resulting in moral bureaucracies battling for moral supremacy and political domination. After providing a short overview of what we term ‘ethics washing’ in (...) the AI industry, we analyze the 2021 UNESCO Intergovernmental Meeting of Experts (Category II) tasked with drafting the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and show why the term ‘moral diplomacy’ is better suited to explain what is happening in the field of the ethics of AI. Our paper ends with some general considerations regarding the future of the ethics of AI. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation between the various forces which underlie human action and verbal reports about our reasons for acting as we did. I maintain that much of the psychological literature on confabulations rests on a dangerous conflation of the reasons for which people act with a variety of distinct motivational factors. In particular, I argue that subjects frequently give correct answers to questions about the considerations they acted upon while remaining largely unaware of why they take themselves to (...) have such reasons to act. Pari passu, experimental psychologists are wrong to maintain that they have shown our everyday reason talk to be systematically confused. This is significant because our everyday reason-ascriptions affect characterizations of action that are morally and legally relevant. I conclude, more positively, that far from rendering empirical research on confabulations invalid, my account helps to reveal its true insights into human nature. (shrink)

We establish the existence uncountably many atoms in the subvariety lattice of the variety of involutive residuated lattices. The proof utilizes a construction used in the proof of the corresponding result for residuated lattices and is based on the fact that every residuated lattice with greatest element can be associated in a canonical way with an involutive residuated lattice.

2020 is the year of the first pandemic lived through the Internet. More than half of the world population is now online and because of self-isolation, our moral and social lives unfold almost exclusively online. Two pressing questions arise in this context: how much can we rely on the Internet, as a set of technologies, and how much should we trust online platforms and applications? In order to answer these two questions, I develop an argument based on two fundamental assumptions: (...) the development stage of today’s Internet is a contingent and not a necessary one and technologies are never neutral. My argument is that today’s pandemic produced an acceleration of the change which started almost 30 years ago, one of online migration, datafication and algorithmization of day to day life, a change in which digital technologies take on the classic role of institutions, both formal and informal. My thesis is a descriptive one, although it has some normative implications: this take over is not just a translation, but a modification or mutation which demands a creative collective answer, although users don’t have direct power over it. When they play the role of institutions, these technologies are surrogates or simulacra. I offer the paradigmatic case of online education, an experiment we were forced into because of the pandemic, in order to show that the institutional matrix of education cannot be reproduced online, due to the limitations of the medium and of the applications, especially those concerning physical presence. In the end I will critically address the question of the role played by Artificial Intelligence in the pandemic, and then I will show that the open source ethics was more useful in approaching scientifically and technologically the problems generated by the epidemic. (shrink)

Cet article retrace le succès précoce d’une artiste grecque ottomane, Eleni Iliadis, dans le monde artistique d’Istanbul pendant la Première Guerre mondiale et son éviction de l’histoire de l’art turque après la fondation de la République en 1923. En s’inspirant des nouvelles approches féministes de l’histoire de l’art, cet article rend visible l’histoire cachée d’Iliadis : son éducation artistique à Munich, les expositions auxquelles elle participe, les récompenses et le patronage de l’État qu’elle reçoit pendant la guerre à Istanbul, en (...) particulier pour sa peinture récemment redécouverte, Le Joueur de Guitare. J’examine les politiques genrées d’éducation artistique, de production et de réception dans le monde de l’art des débuts des années 1920 et analyse en quoi l’identité d’Iliadis en tant qu’artiste femme et non-musulmane a représenté un défi pour la nouvelle histoire nationale de l’art turque, dominée par les hommes, qui l’a finalement éradiquée de la mémoire culturelle. (shrink)

In his first paper, ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’, Stanley Cavell defended the methods of ordinary language philosophy against various charges made by his senior colleague, Benson Mates, under the influence of the empirical semantics of Arne Naess.1 Cavell’s argument hinges on the claim that native speakers are a source of evidence for 'what is said' in language and, accordingly, need not base their claims about ordinary language upon evidence. In what follows, I maintain that this defence against empirical (...) semantics applies equally well to experimental philosophy's attack on doing philosophy from the armchair. In so doing, I attempt to clarify – and adjust – Cavell's claim that statements about ordinary language are rule-descriptions that are neither analytic nor synthetic. (shrink)

This paper argues that there was considerably more philosophy of action in moral theory before 1958 (when Anscombe complained of its lack under the banner 'philosophy of psychology') than there has been since. This is in part because Anscombe influenced the formation of 'virtue theory' as yet another position within normative ethics, and her work contributed to the fashioning of 'moral psychology' as an altogether distinct (and now increasingly empirical) branch of moral philosophy.

This paper argues that there was considerably more philosophy of action in moral theory before 1958 (when Anscombe complained of its lack under the banner 'philosophy of psychology') than there has been since. This is in part because Anscombe influenced the formation of 'virtue theory' as yet another position within normative ethics, and her work contributed to the fashioning of 'moral psychology' as an altogether distinct (and now increasingly empirical) branch of moral philosophy.

The Internet has been identified in human enhancement scholarship as a powerful cognitive enhancement technology. It offers instant access to almost any type of information, along with the ability to share that information with others. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the enhancement potential of the Internet. We argue that unconditional access to information does not lead to cognitive enhancement. The Internet is not a simple, uniform technology, either in its composition, or in its use. We will (...) look into why the Internet as an informational resource currently fails to enhance cognition. We analyze some of the phenomena that emerge from vast, continual fluxes of information–information overload, misinformation and persuasive design—and show how they could negatively impact users’ cognition. Methods for mitigating these negative impacts are then advanced: individual empowerment, better collaborative systems for sorting and categorizing information, and the use of artificial intelligence assistants that could guide users through the informational space of today’s Internet. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2020, Page 180-186.

Intellectual property has become the apple of discord in today’s moral and political debates. Although it has been approached from many different perspectives, a final conclusion has not been reached. In this paper I will offer a new way of thinking about intellectual property rights (IPRs), from a left-libertarian perspective. My thesis is that IPRs are not (natural) original rights, aprioric rights, as it is usually argued. They are derived rights hence any claim for intellectual property is weaker than the (...) correlative duties attached to self-ownership and world-ownership rights, which are of crucial importance in any left-libertarian view. Moreover, IPRs lack priority in front of these two original rights and should be overridden by stronger claims of justice. Thus, as derived rights, IPRs should not benefit of strong enforcement like any original rights especially if it could be in the latters’ detriment. (shrink)