Ukrainian lands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been in proximity of great geopolitical changes several times. During that time the Ukrainian nation – due to various factors – encountered a number of “windows of opportunity” for achieving the realization of dreams about independence and national sovereignty. The author identified in the period considered four “general moments,” of which two have been completed successfully. The first of these occurred in 1990–1991, when for the first time in modern history, Ukrainians (...) managed to achieve a lasting and relatively stable independence. The second of the “moments” – still unresolved – are events that began in the late autumn of 2013. The process, called “Revolution of Dignity”, represents a new quality in the history of the Ukrainian nation, therefore, that the Ukrainians have to defend the status quo but not to seek to achieve an independent being. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the ability of Ukrainians to achieve and maintain independence is largely a function of the relative power of the Russian state as measured with respect to the shape and quality of international relations. (shrink)

The evolution of criminal law in Western legal systems is often portrayed as a path leading from objective to subjective notions of criminal responsibility. By examining the historical development of the notions of subjective responsibility, this article suggests that the function of a wrongdoer’s subjective mental state, in both its substantive and procedural aspect, as an element in the process of attributing criminal responsibility, remains much the same today as it was in antiquity. This is indicated by what subjectivity, as (...) an essential condition of culpability, is said to imply: the distinction between intentional and unintentional acts. Although the notions of intent and malice aforethought are attested to in various sources on ancient Athenian law, there are several kinds of cases in which the role played by these aspects—traditionally referred to as mens rea —remain unsolved in contemporary jurisprudence and legal practice. Yet despite the difficulties of establishing facts in particularly complex criminal cases, setting the boundary between “intentional” and “unintentional” remains crucially important in determining criminal responsibility and thus in distinguishing the “licit” from the “illicit,” which is the very foundation of the rule of law. (shrink)

By mid-2019 there were more than 80 AI ethics guides available in the public domain. Despite this, 2020 saw numerous news stories break related to ethically questionable uses of AI. In part, this is because AI ethics theory remains highly abstract, and of limited practical applicability to those actually responsible for designing algorithms and AI systems. Our previous research sought to start closing this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the creation of a searchable typology (...) of tools and methods designed to translate between the five most common AI ethics principles and implementable design practices. Whilst a useful starting point, that research rested on the assumption that _all_ AI practitioners are aware of the ethical implications of AI, understand their importance, and are actively seeking to respond to them. In reality, it is unclear whether this is the case. It is this limitation that we seek to overcome here by conducting a mixed-methods qualitative analysis to answer the following four questions: what do AI practitioners understand about the need to translate ethical principles into practice? What motivates AI practitioners to embed ethical principles into design practices? What barriers do AI practitioners face when attempting to translate ethical principles into practice? And finally, what assistance do AI practitioners want and need when translating ethical principles into practice? (shrink)

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

On Simone Weil’s “Pythagorean” view, mathematics has a mystical significance. In this paper, the nature of this significance and the coherence of Weil’s view are explored. To sharpen the discussion, consideration is given to both Rush Rhees’ criticism of Weil and Vance Morgan’s rebuttal of Rhees. It is argued here that while Morgan underestimates the force of Rhees’ criticism, Rhees’ take on Weil is, nevertheless, flawed for two reasons. First, Rhees fails to engage adequately with either the assumptions underlying Weil’s (...) religious conception of philosophy or its dialectical method. Second, Rhees’ reading of Weil reflects an anti‐Platonist conception of mathematics his justification of which is unsound and whose influence impedes recognition of the coherence of Weil’s position. (shrink)

This article analyses Camille Henrot’s 2013 film Grosse Fatigue in relation to the histories of hypermedia and modes of interaction with the World Wide Web. It considers the development of non-hierarchical systems for the organisation of information, and uses Grosse Fatigue to draw comparisons between the Web, the natural history museum and the archive. At stake in focusing on the way in which information is organised through hypermedia is the question of subjectivity, and this article argues that such systems are (...) made ‘user-friendly’ by appearing to accommodate intuitive processes of information retrieval, reflecting the subject back to itself as autonomous. This produces an ideology of individualism which belies the forms of heteronomy that in fact shape and structure access to information online in significant ways. At the heart of this argument is an attention to the visual, and the significance of art as an immanent mode of analysis. Through the themes of transparency and opacity, and order and chaos, the article thus proposes a defining dynamic between autonomy and automation as a model for understanding the contemporary subject. (shrink)

Edward S. Small _Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre_ Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-8093-1920-9 122 pp.

A sharp distinction between religion and science is, it is argued here, implicit in Rush Rhees's thought. This distinction is, moreover, underpinned by a view of philosophy as purely descriptive, which Rhees shares with Wittgenstein. The first half of this paper criticises both the distinction and this view of philosophy. The second half is constructive rather than critical. A pattern of reasoning in religion is explored, which offers a possibility of insight to those afflicted by the tragic and premature loss (...) of loved ones; a pattern of a kind which is effectively denied by Rhees. Logical relations between this reasoning in religion and reasoning in physics are then discussed, which lend further support to the earlier critical arguments. These relations also exhibit aspects of the coherence of the conception of the world as a divinely created Cosmos, which is consistent with classical theism. (shrink)

The later Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophical inquiry has influenced a number of philosophers who have reflected on the significance of evil for a Christianview of creation. The strengths and shortcomings of this influence are considered here, with particular attention to the work of D. Z. Phillips. Wittgenstein’s legacyemerges as a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand, a sensitive analysis of the religious use of language reveals the anthropomorphic confusion inherent in attempts to depict God as acting, or as failing (...) to act, for morally sufficient reasons. On the other, a sharp distinction between the natural and the spiritual domains, and the opposition to metaphysics with which it is associated, obscure rather than assist the search for understanding. By way of contrast, the paper concludes with a discussion of Simone Weil’s (profoundly metaphysical) conception of Christ’s mediation between creature and Creator; a conception which points the way to a resolution of the intellectual tension to which evil gives rise in the order of creation. (shrink)

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence, in particular machine learning, has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of (...) AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work, we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible or too strict. This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service.’. (shrink)

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning (ML), has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the (...) theory of AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work , we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible (and thus vulnerable to ethics washing) or too strict (unresponsive to context). This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service’. (shrink)

Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993), lexical items included in referring forms are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker’s intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee, the latter encoded by various determiners and pronouns. This article focuses on effects of underspecification of cognitive status, establishing that, although salience and accessibility play an important role in reference (...) processing, the Givenness Hierarchy itself is not a hierarchy of degrees of salience/accessibility, contrary to what has often been assumed. We thus show that the framework is able to account for a number of experimental results in the literature without making additional assumptions about form-specific constraints associated with different referring forms. (shrink)

In both law and ethics, precedent shapes the deliberation of novel issues. Despite the interconnection between new and old decisions, few research ethics boards have an explicit mechanism for archiving issue-based research ethics decisions to inform future decisions. With the intent of promoting expediency, consistency, and accountability in REB decision-making, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre implemented a “decision bank”: a formal mechanism for systematically capturing institutional REB decisions. We describe the development of the decision bank, its implementation, and the lessons we (...) have learned from both. The decision bank, which is categorized by general issue themes such as consent, study design, and privacy, is still in the early implementation phase, but it provides a much-needed method to address the paucity of formal mechanisms and literature in a biomedical field otherwise inundated with evidence-based information. (shrink)

The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This article (...) offers the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin. (shrink)

Tammy A. Kinsey 'Let us Never Speak of It?: Edward S. Small's _Direct Theory_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 51, December 2003.

There were three broad categories of academic responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male : method; findings; and broader reflections on the book’s place in American social life and democracy. This article focuses primarily on archival academic responses to Kinsey’s work that appeared in the year following the book’s publication. Many academics agreed that some aspects of Kinsey’s method were flawed and that his interpretations sometimes overreached his raw data. Nonetheless, they also agreed that (...) no one else had gathered such a diverse sampling of interviewees whose behaviors Kinsey could use to create new interpretive models of human sexuality. As Kinsey’s research was deliberately interdisciplinary, his research and statistical methodologies began to catch on in the human sciences and to encourage academics and intellectuals to rethink their human science practices. As academics reflected on the volume’s larger meaning in American life, several of them thought it exemplified the worst American values while others saw the very existence of the Male volume as an excellent example of the ability of free citizens to pursue and to publish research on any topic. While members of the American intelligentsia championed the Male volume and its findings as democratic, the reception of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published at an intense moment of the cold war, was viewed as a communist threat to American security for revealing the sexual secrets of the public. (shrink)

From 1950 to 1952, statisticians W.G. Cochran, C.F. Mosteller, and J.W. Tukey reviewed A.C. Kinsey and colleagues’ methodology. Neither the history-and-philosophy of science literature nor contemporary theories of interdisciplinarity seem to offer a conceptual model that fits this forced interaction, which was characterized by significant power asymmetries and disagreements on multiple levels. The statisticians initially attempted to exclude all non-technical matters from their evaluation, but their political and personal investments interfered with this agenda. In the face of McCarthy’s witch (...) hunts, negotiations with Kinsey and his funding institutions became integral to the review group’s work. This paper analyzes the heavy burden of emotional and affective labor in this collaboration, the conflicts caused by competing visions of objectivity, and the uses of statistical knowledge to gain and sustain authority. Kinsey’s refusal to adopt the recommended probability sample damaged his already precarious position even further and marked him as a biased researcher who put his personal agenda above methodological rigor. Kinsey’s uncooperative demeanor can be explained by distrust resulting from numerous adverse reactions to his work and by fear of having his sexuality exposed. This case study illustrates that the very concept of valid numbers can become an arena for power struggles and that quantification alone does not guarantee productive exchanges across disciplines. It calls for a deeper conceptual analysis of the prerequisites for successful scientific collaborations. (shrink)

It is commonplace to point out that Alfred Kinsey's taxonomic work on gall wasps provided a methodology for his studies of human sexual behavior. It is equally commonplace to point out that, when researching and presenting his sexual studies, Kinsey's professedly neutral scientific data were constrained by a social agenda. What I have done in this paper is to join these two claims and demonstrate, with particular reference to Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, how his (...) zoology helped guide Kinsey to a naturalistic ethics that, despite contrasts to, shared certain parallel logical failures with the traditional ethics of his critics. (shrink)

The role of Alfred Kinsey, America's most influential sexologist, in the cultural revolution of sex and gender during the past fifty years remains as unquestionable as it has been controversial. This admiring biography argues that Kinsey also qualifies as an authentic great man of science in the tradition of Darwin. Kinsey's expert authority was recently challenged by James Jones, who claimed in his 1997 biography that Kinsey's terrible personal secrets—homosexuality and masochism—plagued his life and ruined his (...) science. Jonathan Gathorne‐Hardy sets out to repair Kinsey's reputation by defending him against this “Kenneth Starr school of biography” . The author seeks to rescue Kinsey's achievement from the stigmatizing charge that it was flawed because it subordinated science to subjectivity.Gathorne‐Hardy emphasizes Kinsey's methodological creativity and his interviewing genius. During his early career, when he worked on gall wasps, Kinsey's science developed as a practice of scrupulous collection, observation, and documentation. Even in graduate school, he was dubbed “get a million Kinsey,” and his belief in sheer quantity—as well as quantification—was just as apparent when he turned his attention to human sexuality. In 1938 Kinsey taught a course on marriage at Indiana University, where he spent his entire working life. Limited to married or engaged students and faculty, the course covered reproductive physiology, contraception, and a host of other sexual topics in explicit detail. Kinsey also used the course to gather data about his students' sex lives. The thousands of sexual histories collected at the Institute for Sex Research in later years—7,985 by Kinsey alone—attest to his scientific commitment to behavior as the only legitimate basis for a science of sex.The behavioral unit of analysis chosen by Kinsey was the orgasm—or “outlet,” as Kinsey called it. Because it was countable, the theory went, it was objective. Kinsey's ethic of measurement resulted in interviews involving at least 350 standard questions, whose answers were recorded in a custom code designed to fit on a single sheet of paper divided into 287 squares. Among the ironies of Kinsey's method was the fact that his sex histories measured linguistic rather than sexual behavior. What Kinsey actually compiled was a huge cache of stories, not direct observations of sexual behavior. Kinsey, who gathered more sexual stories than any other person alive, systematically aimed to eradicate all quirks and complexities in order to produce a statistical portrait of population‐wide behavior. Meanings might be historically important, but numbers, not narratives, would yield truth. The easy use of “human males” and “human females” in the titles of Kinsey's famous reports suggests how universal his scientific claims were—and also how devoid of temporal and cultural particularity.The resulting conception of human sexual nature is probably best represented in Kinsey's six‐point scale, where behavioral possibilities ranged from exclusively homosexual at one pole to exclusively heterosexual at the other. Diversity emerged as the premier fact about sexual behavior. While this placed men and women uncomfortably close to their primate cousins on an evolutionary map, making human sexual exceptionalism objectively unsustainable, it also produced a reformist sensibility that rooted its demand for toleration in the powerful evidence of natural facts. It is difficult to overstate how shocking Kinsey's picture of polymorphous sexuality was in a culture devoted to either/or binaries and prone to harsh judgments about deviation from norms. Kinsey's contribution was to point out the gap between ideology and behavior . That lots of people did lots of things at odds with professed sexual morality was, for some, a welcome relief and call to revolution. For others, it was a reason to hate Kinsey and blame him for changes in the realm of gender and sexuality already well under way by midcentury.No biographies can save scientific heroes from the fatal charge that their methods and findings were bound up in their lives, or they would not be biographies worth reading. This attests to the stubborn endurance of the psychoanalytic paradigm. Kinsey despised Freud for passing off philosophy as science. Yet because of the conventions of post‐Freudian biography, Gathorne‐Hardy must explore exactly those dimensions of Kinsey's life and character that Freud embraced but that Kinsey himself would never have admitted into the precincts of science. His childhood illnesses and struggles with an overbearing father, his rage against religion, fondness for music, charismatic yet autocratic style, and his own anguished sexuality are keys to puzzling out not only a life in science, but a life.Gathorne‐Hardy can hardly ignore evidence that Kinsey's own sexual appetites were diverse—“bisexual” is this author's preferred designation—or that his enterprise in sex research involved experimentation: the mostly married male members of Kinsey's team were expected to engage in sexual activities with one another and one another's wives. Kinsey's wife Clara was a confidant and supporter from the start. Their loving marriage was also an open marriage. Mac was a participant‐observer in the world of sex research. She had a series of affairs with Kinsey's colleagues and even changed the bedsheets during energetic sessions of sexual cinematography that took place in the attic of their home. Yet the Kinseys also shielded their children from their own unorthodox sexual practices.This biography concludes by suggesting that Kinsey died tragically in 1957, convinced that his enemies had the upper hand. Kinsey was wrong. The diversity he championed has become a theoretical staple in the human and life sciences as well as a practical goal in social policies related to gender, race, and sexuality. However unfinished it may be, it is difficult to imagine Kinsey's revolution being reversed in either science or society. (shrink)

Although there have long been protective arrangements to safeguard diplomats and embassies abroad—notably norms and guarantees codified in multilateral treaties, such as the 1969 UN Convention on S...