The ethical Principle of Proportionality requires combatants not to cause collateral harm excessive in comparison to the anticipated military advantage of an attack. This principle is considered a major (and perhaps insurmountable) obstacle to ethical use of autonomous weapon systems (AWS). This article reviews three possible solutions to the problem of achieving Proportionality compliance in AWS. In doing so, I describe and discuss the three components Proportionality judgments, namely collateral damage estimation, assessment of anticipated military advantage, and judgment of “excessiveness”. (...) Some possible approaches to Proportionality compliance are then presented, such as restricting AWS operations to environments lacking civilian presence, using AWS in targeted strikes in which proportionality judgments are pre-made by human commanders, and a ‘price tag’ approach of pre-assigning acceptable collateral damage values to military hardware in conventional attritional warfare. The article argues that application of these three compliance methods would result in AWS’ achieving acceptable Proportionality compliance levels in many combat environments and scenarios, allowing AWS to perform most key tasks in conventional warfare. (shrink)

In his recent JME article Daniel Restrepo argues that both legal and ethical rules should protect the so-called Naked Soldiers, combatants engaged in activity unrelated to military operations and unaware of the imminent danger threatening them. I criticize this position from several angles. I deny the existence of any link between vulnerability and innocence, and claim ignorance of deadly threats does not give rise to a morally distinguished type of vulnerability. I argue that actions not contributing to the war effort (...) are nevertheless an inherent part of fighting a war, and that combatants do not signal intention to abandon their commitment to the war effort by undertaking these. I show that by granting hors de combat status to Naked Soldiers, we would unjustly disadvantage their opponents and engender significant and manifold practical difficulties that the proponents of the view fail to solve or even anticipate. Finally, I demonstrate that Restrepo’s general project of “making killing in war difficult to legitimately justify” regardless of why, how and by whom the killing is done is incompatible with just war theory’s basic assumptions. That project is in fact pacifist in nature and as such redundant in light of pacifism’s broader and stronger implications. (shrink)

The speech act of inquiry is generally treated as a default kind of asking questions. The widespread norm states that one inquires whether p only if one does not know that p. However, the fact that inquiring is just one kind of asking questions has received little to no attention. Just as in the declarative mood we can perform not only assertions, but various other speech acts, like guesses or predictions, so in the interrogative mood we can also make various (...) speech act types. I propose a speech-act-theoretic account of a distinct kind of question that I label exam questions. According to the proposed account, one performs an exam question p only if (i) one has access to the answer to p, and (ii) one does not officially know whether the hearer knows the answer to p. Exam questions satisfy all the necessary requirements of being a distinct kind of speech act. Additionally, my proposal contributes to the recent expansion of the normative approach to a variety of speech acts. (shrink)

This book provides an incisive, basic introduction to many-valued logics and to the constructions that are "many-valued" at their origin. Using the matrix method, the author sheds light on the profound problems of many-valuedness criteria and its classical characterizations. The book also includes information concerning the main systems of many-valued logic, related axiomatic constructions, and conceptions inspired by many-valuedness. With its selective bibliography and many useful historical references, this book provides logicians, computer scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians with a valuable survey (...) of the subject. (shrink)

The Laws of Armed Conflict require that war crimes be attributed to individuals who can be held responsible and be punished. Yet assigning responsibility for the actions of Lethal Autonomous Weapon...

According to the normative approach, speech acts are governed by certain norms. Interestingly, the same is true for classes of speech acts. This paper considers the normative treatment of constatives, consisting of such classes as assertives, predictives, suggestives, and more. The classical approach is to treat these classes of illocutions as species of constatives. Recently, however, Simion (Shifty Speech and Independent Thought: Epistemic Normativity in Context, Oxford University Press, 2021) has proposed that all constatives (i) are species of assertion, and (...) (ii) are governed by the knowledge norm. I defend the classical treatment of constatives and show that Simion’s conclusion is untenable. No taxonomy of speech acts can accommodate such a view. More importantly, we can test whether a particular speech act is an assertion or not. I propose five tests of assertion, the passing of which is a necessary condition for being an assertion. Some constative speech acts fail these tests. Thus, contrary to Simion, not all constatives can be regarded as species of assertion. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue S1, Page 283-298, Spring 2022.

If a firm provides incentives by promoting those who have performed well in a job, it may transfer them to a job to which they are not well suited and agents are promoted to their levels of incompetence. Tournaments are an alternative to reputation as a means of ensuring that firms reward good performance when performance is unverifiable.

Sometimes it is not so bad to decide in a hurry: Influence of different levels of temporal opportunity on the elaboration of purchasing intention The present study examines the impact of different levels of time pressure on the elaboration of purchase intention. Participants formed attitudes towards two stores and then indicate in which stores they would go shopping. Descriptions of the stores were experimentally constructed in order to indicate whether participants rely on an attribute-based or an attitude-based strategy when forming (...) their purchase intention. Participants made their choices under time pressure or were given unlimited time to deliberate. Results show that in 5 second limit and unlimited time conditions, they rely more on an attitude-based decision strategy and chose the less optimal store. Under moderate time pressure, participants are able to use relevant knowledge about the stores and rely more on an attribute-based strategy. Results are discussed in light of the Unconscious Theory of Thought. (shrink)

I propose an analysis of lying with uninformative speech acts. The orthodox view states that lying is restricted to assertions. However, the growing case for non-assertoric lies made by presuppositions or conventional implicatures challenges this orthodoxy. So far, the only presuppositions to have been considered as lies were informative presuppositions. In fact, uninformative lies were not discussed in the philosophical literature. However, limiting the possibility of lying to informative speech acts is too restrictive. Firstly, I show that standard, uninformative presuppositions (...) can also be lies. Secondly, I extend this picture into uninformative lies made by declarative statements. To implement my proposal, I do not need a new definition of lying. Recently popular commitment-based definitions of lying are able to properly handle uninformative lies. (shrink)

This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this (...) has consequences for theorising about norms of other speech acts and generates certain arbitrary divisions. In the central part, I analyse two groups of speech acts. Firstly, ordinary speech acts, like predictions or retractions. Secondly, I indicate how the normative view can be extended to so-called ancillary speech acts, like presuppositions or implicatures. I end with a discussion of possible extensions of the normative approach, focusing on the debate on lying. (shrink)

Efforts to ban Autonomous Weapon Systems were both unsuccessful and controversial. Simultaneously the need to address the detrimental aspects of AWS development and proliferation continues to grow in scope and urgency. The article presents several regulatory solutions capable of addressing the issue while simultaneously respecting the requirements of military necessity and so attracting a broad consensus. Two much stricter solutions – regional AWS bans and adoption of a no first use policy – are also presented as fallback strategies in case (...) achieving AWS’ compliance with the Laws of Armed Conflict proved elusive. Together, the solutions presented form an outline of a flexible regulatory strategy able to adjust to different technological outcomes and providing a sensible compromise to solve the current deadlock on the AWS issue. (shrink)

The article reviews the book Elementy etyki lekarskiej [Issues in Physician Ethics], by Tadeusz Biesaga.

The widely accepted view states that an intention to deceive is not necessary for lying. Proponents of this view, the so-called non-deceptionists, argue that lies are simply insincere assertions. We conducted three experimental studies with false explanations, the results of which put some pressure on non-deceptionist analyses. We present cases of explanations that one knows are false and compare them with analogical explanations that differ only in having a deceptive intention. The results show that lay people distinguish between such false (...) explanations and to a higher degree classify as lies those explanations that are made with the intention to deceive. Non-deceptionists fail to distinguish between such cases and wrongly classify both as lies. This novel empirical finding indicates the need for supplementing non-deceptionist definitions of lying, at least in some cases, with an additional condition, such as an intention to deceive. (shrink)

Reklama jako sztuka perswazji wykorzystuje obecnie każdą technikę i każdy środek w celu zwiększenia swego wpływu na potencjalnego konsumenta. Ważnym aspektem reklamy są tzw. słowa-klucze, które ze względu na swą semantykę wywołują różnorodne pozytywne konotacje i skojarzenia. Słowa te transportują pewne wartości, które zostają przez konsumenta przenoszone na reklamowany produkt, co przyczynia się do zwiększenia wartości danego produktu w oczach konsumenta. Analizie poddano 100 tekstów reklamowych, które ukazały się w prasie niemieckiej w latach 2001-2002. Słowa-klucze zostały wyodrębniane osobno z czterech (...) grup tekstów reklamowych w zależności od reklamowanego produktu: leki, biżuteria, kosmetyki, samochody. W prezentowanym artykule wykazano, że użycie słów-kluczy zależy od reklamowanego produktu, co związane jest z reprezentowanymi przez te słowa różnymi wartościami i wywoływanymi przez nie różnymi konotacjami i skojarzeniami. W reklamie leków największą rolę odgrywają takie wartości jak skuteczność i naturalność, które spełniają w pełni oczekiwania konsumenta co do stosowania reklamowanych leków. Reklamy biżuterii podkreślają trwałość, tradycję i kosztowność produktów, dzięki czemu odnoszą się do emocji konsumentów i podkreślają ich status społeczny. Reklama samochodów kieruje uwagę konsumenta na bezpieczeństwo, technikę i komfort reklamowanych pojazdów, co podkreśla dostosowanie się do głównych potrzeb kupującego. Reklamy kosmetyków zachwalają natomiast swe produkty takimi określeniami, jak pielęgnacja, efektywność i skuteczność. Wspomniane słowa-klucze wskazują bezpośrednio lub poprzez skojarzenia i konotacje różne wartości, które odgrywają istotną rolę w danym społeczeństwie. Poprzez podświadome przeniesienie tych wartości na reklamowany produkt potencjalny konsument nie dokonuje zakupu określonego produktu, lecz postrzega ten produkt przez pryzmat związanych w nim wartości i decyduje się na kupno, jeśli dane wartości spełniają jego potrzeby. W wyniku powyższych rozważań można stwierdzić, iż konsument nie kupuje jedynie materialnego produktu, który dla konsumenta tylko w nieistotny sposób różni się od innych produktów tego samego rodzaju, ale wartości przekazywane przez reklamę pod postacią słów-kluczy. (shrink)

Reputation is often seen as central to the coordination of transactions in sharing economy platforms. Participants perform a double role regarding reputation management: while engaging in exchanges with other peers, they build their individual ‘reputation capital’ and simultaneously execute community oversight. In Couchsurfing (CS), a network often cited as paradigmatic of the sharing economy, there is, however, a clear bias for positive references. In the digital economy literature, participants’ friendly behaviour is understood as motivated by self-interest and an incentive to (...) maintain a positive reputation. Social research on reputation in CS attributes the bias to fear of retaliation, but also hints at norms of reciprocity leading travellers to require positive feedback for hospitality. This article analyses the lived experience of reputation management in CS and argues that participants seek to reconcile direct and general reciprocity. It proposes breaking these practices down into boundary-work and creative avoidance and argues these result in insufficient protection of inexperienced participants against problematic members. (shrink)

In this article I consider a certain characteristic of our times as a “secular age,” namely, a series of complications in our understanding of transgression. Transgression implies the presence of some rules and laws which can be violated. As long as the rules and laws are perceived as right, as a way of protecting the values which would otherwise perish, transgression appears to be a wrong thing to do, a misdeed, a criminal act. Needless to say, the very conceptual structure (...) makes sense only provided that the distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, lawful and lawless are not arbitrary, which, in turn, depends on the presence of the concept of truth. In the secular age, though, the concept of truth becomes not only difficult to handle, since it is incompatible with the modern frame of mind, but also assumes some derogatory connotations, up to the point when to insist on the distinction between (truly) right and (truly) wrong is in itself a wrong thing to do. That is the state of contemporary societies which G. K. Chesterton examines in his work Heretics. The effect of Chesterton’s reflections is a new map of right/wrong, good/evil, lawless/lawful permutations. After Chesterton, I comment on the character of a new heretic, one for whom transgression, understood as the attack on buried-for-long orthodoxy, is too easy a thing to do. To illustrate the mentioned changes of perspective, I refer to an exemplary criminal figure of the West, that is, the biblical serpent, and its criticism. (shrink)

Just War Theory debates discussing the principle of the Moral Equality of Combatants involve the notion of Invincible Ignorance; the claim that warfi ghters are morally excused for participating in an unjust war because of their epistemic limitations. Conditions of military deployment may indeed lead to genuinely insurmountable epistemic limitations. In other cases, these may be overcome. This paper provides a preliminary sketch of heuristics designed to allow a combatant to judge whether or not his war is just. It delineates (...) the sets of relevant facts uncontroversially accessible and inaccessible to contemporary professional soldiers. Relevant facts outside these two sets should by default be treated as inaccessible until proven otherwise. Even such a rudimentary heuristic created in this way demonstrates that practical recommendations of MEC-renouncing Just War Theory are not too challenging to follow and still signifi cantly impact a compliant combatant’s behavior. (shrink)

I argue against Milić's (2017) proposal of analyzing “selfless assertions” (Lackey 2007) as proper, i.e., as assertions which satisfy the norm of assertion. In his view, selfless assertions are hedged assertions governed by the knowledge norm. In my critique, I show that Milić does not make a case that selfless assertions constitute such a special class of assertions. Moreover, he does not deliver a clear criterion for differentiating between flat-out assertions and hedged ones. What is more, his proposal leaves some (...) cases of selfless assertions unexplained. The outcome is that we are still left without a satisfactory account of selfless assertions as proper assertions. (shrink)

Arguments from human dignity feature prominently in the Lethal Autonomous Weapons moral feasibility debate, even though their exists considerable controversy over their role and soundness and the notion of dignity remains under-defined. Drawing on the work of Dieter Birnbacher, I fix the sub-discourse as referring to the essential value of human persons in general, and to postulated moral rights of combatants not covered within the existing paradigm of the International Humanitarian Law in particular. I then review and critique dignity-based arguments (...) against LAWS: argument from faulty targeting process, argument from objectification, argument from underappreciation of the value of human life and the argument from the absence of mercy. I conclude that the argument from the absence of mercy is the only dignity-based argument that is both valid and irreducible to another class of arguments within the debate, and that it offers insufficient justification for a global ban on LAWS. (shrink)

The article examines the figure of the spy—alongside themes related to espionage—as employed in two books by the Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson : the volume of poems For All We Know and the novel Exchange Place. Carson’s oeuvre is permeated with the Troubles and he has been hailed one of key writers to convey the experience of living in a modern surveillance state. His depiction of Belfast thematizes questions of terrorism, the insecurity and anxiety it causes in everyday life, (...) as well as the unceasing games of appearances and the different ways of verifying or revising identities. In Carson’s later work, however, these aspects acquire greater philosophical depth as the author uses the themes of doubles, spies, and makeshift identities to discuss writing itself, the construction of subjectivity, and the dialogic relationship with the other. Taking a cue from Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s conceptions of “oneself as another,” the article examines how Carson’s spy-figures can be read as metaphors for processes of self-discovery and identity-formation, tied to the notion of “self-othering.” Carson employs the figure of the spy—who juggles identities by “donning” different clothes or languages—to scrutinize how one ventures into the dangerous territory of writing, translation and love, as well as to reconsider notions of originality and self-mastery. Ultimately, Carson conceptualizes literature as specially marked by deceptions and metamorphoses, defining in these terms the human condition. (shrink)

This paper offers a normative account of the speech act of explanation with understanding as its norm. The previous accounts of the speech act of explanation rely on the factive notion of understanding and maintain that proper explanations require knowledge. I argue, however, that such accounts are too demanding and do not reflect the everyday practice of explanation and the attribution of understanding. Instead, I argue that the non-factive, objectual attitude of understanding is sufficient for a proper explanation. On the (...) normative level, explanations are governed by an audience-centred norm, i.e., they are sensitive to the epistemic position of the audience. According to the proposed account, an explanation is a communicative act in which one puts the audience in a position to understand the explained phenomenon. This proposal fits into the recent wave of applications of the normative account and makes space for the pluralism of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

Opracowanie ma charakter poglądowo-teoretyczny, powstało bowiem na podstawie przeglądu dostępnej literatury przedmiotu. Publikacja skierowana jest zarówno do naukowców jak i studentów zajmujących się tematyką starzenia się ludności, starości i osób starszych oraz do coraz szerszego grona zainteresowanych tymi zagadnieniami praktyków, w tym polityków i decydentów oraz reprezentantów usług publicznych, przedstawicieli mediów i organizacji pozarządowych. ** The study is illustrative and theoretical in nature, as it was based on a review of the available literature on the subject. The publication is addressed (...) to both scholars and students dealing with the subjects of population ageing, old age, and older adults, as well as to a growing group of practitioners interested in these issues, including politicians and decision-makers as well as representatives of public services, the media, and non-governmental organizations. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the problem of characterization of strengthenings of the so-called Lukasiewicz-like sentential calculi. The calculi under consideration are determined byn-valued Lukasiewicz matrices (n>2,n finite) with superdesignated logical values. In general. Lukasiewicz-like sentential calculi are not implicative in the sense of [7]. Despite of this fact, in our considerations we use matrices analogous toS-algebras of Rasiowa. The main result of the paper says that the degree of maximality of anyn-valued Lukasiewicz-like sentential calculus is finite and equal to (...) the degree of maximality of the correspondingn-valued Lukasiewicz calculus. (shrink)

Although assertions are often characterised as essentially informative speech acts, there is a widespread disagreement concerning how the informativeness of assertions should be understood. This paper proposes the informativeness norm of assertion, which posits that assertions are speech acts that essentially deliver new information. As a result, if one asserts something that is already commonly known, one’s assertion is improper. The norm is motivated by appealing to unique conversational patterns associated with informative and uninformative uses of assertions, an analogy between (...) assertions and inquiries, and a distinction between assertions and uninformative speech acts. By focusing on the normative approach to speech acts, the paper discusses how particular norms of assertion deal with the data supporting the norm of informativeness. To be informative, the speaker must consider the epistemic position of the audience. Since the majority of norms proposed in the literature are speaker-centred, they fail to explain the submitted data. Looking more broadly, focusing on the informativeness of assertions underscores the crucial role of the audience in construing adequate speech act accounts. (shrink)

Grzegorz W. Kolodko, one of the world's leading authorities on economics and development policy and a key architect of Poland's successful economic reforms, applies his far-reaching knowledge to the past and future of the world economy, introducing a framework for understanding our global situation that transcends any single discipline or paradigm. Deploying a novel mix of scientific evaluation and personal observation, Kolodko begins with a brief discussion of misinformation and its perpetuation in economics and politics. He criticizes the simplification (...) of complex economic and social issues and investigates the link between developments in the global economy and cultural change, scientific discoveries, and political fluctuations. Underscoring the necessity of conceptual and theoretical innovation in understanding our global economic situation, Kolodko offers a provocative study of globalization and the possibility of coming out ahead in an era of worldwide interdependence. Deeply critical of neoliberalism, which sought to transfer economic control exclusively to the private sector, Kolodko explores the virtues of social-economic development and the new rules of the economic game. He concludes with a look at our near and distant future, questioning whether we have a say in its making. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that Turri’s (2015a) experimental study concerning selfless assertions is defective and should therefore be rejected. One performs a selfless assertion when one states something that one does not believe, and hence does not know, despite possessing well supported evidence to the contrary. Following his experimental study, Turri argues that agents in fact both believe and know the content of their selfless assertions. In response to this claim, I demonstrate that the conclusions he draws are premature (...) in this regard. More specifically, I criticize his methodology, showing that his study is not only incomplete but also yields contradictory results. In closing, I propose how such a study should be conducted in order to receive comprehensive results. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to apply a general methodology for constructing statistical methods, which is based on decision theory, to give a statistical description of preferential rankings, with a focus on the rankings’ dependence on categorical variables. In the paper, I use functions of description errors that are based on the Kemeny and Hamming distances between preferential orderings, but the proposed methodology can also be applied to other methods of estimating description errors.

Let Γn be a formula of LPA meaning “there is a proof of φ from PA-axioms, in which ω-rule is iterated no more than n times”. We examine relations over pairs of natural numbers of the kind. ≦H iff PA + RFNn' ⊩ RFNn .Where H denotes one of the hierarchies ∑ or Π and RFNn is the scheme of the reflection principle for Γn restricted to formulas from the class C implies “φ is true”, for every φ ∈ C). (...) Our main result is that. ≦H if n ≦ n' and k ≦ max. (shrink)

The text describes main US missile defence efforts in the first years of D. Trump’s administration. The analysis of current aspects of BMD (Ballistic Missile Defence) deployments is enhanced by probability analysis examining missile defence reliability. Donald Trump took office in the time of increased military competition between the West and Russia and a dangerous regional crisis related to North Korean nuclear arsenal and its ballistic tests. BMD appeared to bring additional chances to US deterrence options in regional scale, allowing (...) more successful first strike or active defence posture. Notably, D. Trump’s administration managed to raise defence expenditures including BMD spending. (shrink)

The Nikāyas contain several apophatic descriptions of a state of cessation that occurs during the life of an individual. Furthermore, some texts suggest that this cessation paradoxically coincides with liberating insight. This article attempts to draw out philosophical implications of these passages and to reconstruct the ideas serving as their basis. To make better sense of these ideas, the article compares early Buddhist views with certain developments in modern philosophy of mind. It argues that cessation of khandha-s and saḷāyatana-s may (...) be viewed as suspension of various aspects of globally available phenomenal consciousness. It hypothesizes that this suspension is necessary due to the latter's processed character, which precludes direct cognition of reality. It attempts to account for a cognitive nature of cessation by suggesting the possibility of the mind (citta) working independently of phenomenal consciousness. It also considers the issue of cognitive content of cessation and of its expressibility. (shrink)