When Australia was circumnavigated by Europeans in 1801–02, French and British natural historians were unsure how to describe the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land they charted and catalogued. Ideas of race and of savagery were freely deployed by both British and French, but a discursive shift was underway. While the concept of savagery had long been understood to apply to categories of human populations deemed to be in want of more historically advanced ‘civilisation’, the application of this term in (...) the late 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly being correlated with the emerging terminology of racial characteristics. The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, by means of this concept, natural historians began to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to the environmental and climatic variations thought to determine race. This in turn meant that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be understood through new criteria that enabled physical classification, in particular by reference to skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature: the archetypal criteria of race. While race did not replace the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century savagery was re-inscribed by race. (shrink)

How was ‘savagery’ constituted as a field of colonial knowledge? As Europe’s empires expanded, their reach was marked not only by the colonisation of new territories but by the colonisation of knowledge. Path-breaking scholarship since the 1990s has shown how European knowledge of colonised territories and peoples developed from diverse travel writings, missionary texts, and exploration narratives from the 16th century onwards (Abulafia, 2008; Armitage, 2000; De Campos Françozo, 2017; Pratt, 1992). Of prime importance in this work has been the (...) investigation of the pre-positioning of colonised peoples within categories derived from European traditions of historical, religious, legal, and political thought as either ‘savages’ or ‘barbarians’ (Richardson, 2018; Sebastiani, 2013). (shrink)

The distinction between a type and its tokens is a useful metaphysical distinction. In §1 it is explained what it is, and what it is not. Its importance and wide applicability in linguistics, philosophy, science and everyday life are briefly surveyed in §2. Whether types are universals is discussed in §3. §4 discusses some other suggestions for what types are, both generally and specifically. Is a type the sets of its tokens? What exactly is a word, a symphony, a species? (...) §5 asks what a token is. §6 considers the relation between types and their tokens. Do the type and all its tokens share the same properties? Must all the tokens be alike in some or all respects? §7 explains some problems for the view that types exist, and some problems for the view that they don't. §8 elucidates a distinction often confused with the type-token distinction, that between a type (or token) and an occurrence of it. It also discusses some problems that occurrences might be thought to give rise to, and one way to resolve them. (shrink)

Incommensurability is the impossibility to determine how two options relate to each other in terms of conventional comparative relations. This book features new research on incommensurability from philosophers who have shaped the field into what it is today, including John Broome, Ruth Chang and Wlodek Rabinowicz. The book covers four aspects relating to incommensurability. In the first part, the contributors synthesize research on the competing views of how to best explain incommensurability. Part II illustrates how incommensurability can help us deal (...) with seemingly insurmountable problems in ethical theory and population ethics. The contributors address the Repugnant Conclusion, the Mere Addition Paradox and so-called Spectrum Arguments. The chapters in Part III outline and summarize problems caused by incommensurability for decision theory. Finally, Part IV tackles topics related to risk, uncertainty and incommensurability. Value Incommensurability: Ethics, Risk, and Decision-Making will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethical theory, decision theory, action theory, and philosophy of economics. (shrink)

This is a review of contemporary philosophical discussions of population policies. The focus is on normative justification, and the main question is whether population policies can be ethically justified. Although few analytical philosophers have directly addressed this question – it has been discussed more in other academic fields – many arguments and considerations can be placed in the analytical philosophical discourse. This article offers a comprehensive review and analysis of ethically relevant aspects of population policies evaluated on the basis of (...) the main ethical theories. This analysis is preceded by a brief historical contextualisation of when and how population policies became ethically contentious and how this relates to philosophical debates in environmental ethics, population ethics and political philosophy. The article also includes a conceptual analysis of population policies in which the empirical intricacies around individual fertility decisions are sorted out and the different ways in which they can be affected are categorised in a taxonomy which highlight the most relevant ethical aspects of population policies. The ethical analysis shows that while population policies can be justified on the basis of most ethical theories, it all depends on what prior assumptions are made about what is at stake. (shrink)

In this paper I explore white attempts to move toward a proactive position against racism that will amount to more than self-criticism in the following three ways: by assessing the debate within feminism over white women's relation to whiteness; by exploring "white awareness training" methods developed by Judith Katz and the "race traitor" politics developed by Ignatiev and Garvey, and; a case study of white revisionism being currently attempted at the University of Mississippi.

Despite remarkable empirical and methodological advances, our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary processes that made us human remains fragmented and contentious. Here, we make the radical proposition that the cultural communities within which Homo emerged may be understood as a novel exotic form of organism. The argument begins from a deep congruence between robust features of Pan community life cycles and protocell models of the origins of life. We argue that if a cultural tradition, meeting certain requirements, arises in the (...) context of such a “social protocell,” the outcome will be an evolutionary transition in individuality whereby traditions and hominins coalesce into a macroscopic bio-socio-technical system, with an organismal organization that is culturally inherited through irreversible fission events on the community level. We refer to the resulting hypothetical evolutionary individual as a “sociont.” The social protocell provides a preadapted source of alignment of fitness interests that addresses a number of open questions about the origins of shared adaptive cultural organization, and the derived genetic adaptations that support them. Also, social cooperation between hominins is no longer in exclusive focus since cooperation among traditions becomes salient in this model. This provides novel avenues for explanation. We go on to hypothesize that the fate of the hominin in such a setting would be mutualistic coadaptation into a part-whole relation with the sociont, and we propose that the unusual suite of derived features in Homo is consistent with this hypothesis. (shrink)

Despite remarkable empirical and methodological advances, our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary processes that made us human remains fragmented and contentious. Here, we make the radical proposition that the cultural communities within which Homo emerged may be understood as a novel exotic form of organism. The argument begins from a deep congruence between robust features of Pan community life cycles and protocell models of the origins of life. We argue that if a cultural tradition, meeting certain requirements, arises in the (...) context of such a “social protocell,” the outcome will be an evolutionary transition in individuality whereby traditions and hominins coalesce into a macroscopic bio-socio-technical system, with an organismal organization that is culturally inherited through irreversible fission events on the community level. We refer to the resulting hypothetical evolutionary individual as a “sociont.” The social protocell provides a preadapted source of alignment of fitness interests that addresses a number of open questions about the origins of shared adaptive cultural organization, and the derived genetic adaptations that support them. Also, social cooperation between hominins is no longer in exclusive focus since cooperation among traditions becomes salient in this model. This provides novel avenues for explanation. We go on to hypothesize that the fate of the hominin in such a setting would be mutualistic coadaptation into a part-whole relation with the sociont, and we propose that the unusual suite of derived features in Homo is consistent with this hypothesis. (shrink)

According to a standard account of incomparability, two value bearers are incomparable if it is false that there holds a positive value relation between them. Due to the vagueness of the comparative predicates it may also be indeterminate as to which relation that holds - for each relation it is neither true nor false that it holds. John Broome has argued that indeterminacy cannot coexist with incomparability and since there seems to exist indeterminacy there cannot exist incomparability. At the core (...) of his argument lies the collapsing principle. There are several arguments against this principle; Erik Carlson has advanced most of these. In this paper two strategies in dealing with these arguments are discussed. One strategy is to deny the existence of a certain kind of properties; another strategy that has been advanced by Christian Constantinescu is to restrict the collapsing principle. In the paper it is argued that the first of these strategies is the most promising strategy. A novel argument in favour of this strategy is presented and several objections to the strategy are rebutted. Finally it is concluded that, even though this strategy deals with most objections, without a better argument in favour of the principle the debate seems to run into a stalemate. (shrink)

This paper defends the possibility of dirty hands against the longstanding skepticism that an action cannot be simultaneously right and wrong and that dirty hands cases are therefore impossible. While skeptics are right to recognize that prima facie reasons against violating moral duties may be overridden, they are wrong to deny that actions required by necessity may nevertheless remain wrong. Dirty hands cases capture the simultaneous necessity of disregarding moral duties in certain circumstances and the reprehensibility of wronging people even (...) in cases in which this is all-things-considered permissible. Rather than indicating any deficiency in our moral reasoning, the capacity to accommodate the possibility of dirty hands, along with the reality of moral conflict, is a strength of a moral theory. (shrink)

Recently a lot has been written on the topic of value incomparability. While there is disagreement on how we are to understand incomparability, most seem to accept Ruth Chang's claim that all comparisons must proceed in some specific respect. Call this the Requirement for Specification. Interestingly, even though most seem to accept this requirement, next to nothing has been written on it. In this paper I focus on the requirement and discuss two different but related topics. First, an important observation (...) is made: as it turns out, the requirement plays an important explanatory role for the thesis that incomparability is to be understood in terms of vagueness. Second, I consider what is entailed by the Requirement for Specification. There is a general worry that the requirement entails that there is no such thing as goodness simpliciter. The line of thought is that if we always must specify in which way something is e.g., better than something else, then perhaps things cannot be better simpliciter. And if there is no such thing as betterness-simpliciter, then can there be such a thing as goodness simpliciter? Finally, I consider how an answer to this question affects the view that incomparability is vagueness. (shrink)

There are two main ways of understanding the function of surrogate decision making in a legal context: the Best Interests Standard and the Substituted Judgment Standard. First, we will argue that the Best Interests Standard is difficult to apply to unconscious patients. Application is difficult regardless of whether they have ever been conscious. Second, we will argue that if we accept the least problematic explanation of how unconscious patients can have interests, we are also obliged to accept that the Substituted (...) Judgment Standard can be coherently applied to patients who have never been conscious at the same extent as the Best Interests Standard. We then argue that acknowledging this result is important in order to show patients respect. (shrink)

BackgroundIn Sweden, individuals with visual field loss have their driving license withdrawn. The literature clearly indicates that individuals with VFL are unsafe drivers on a group level. However, many drivers with VFL can be safe on an individual level. The literature also suggests that self-perception, beliefs, and insights of one’s own capabilities are related to driving performance. This study had three aims: To investigate self-perceived driving capability ratings for individuals with VFL; to compare these ratings between groups with different medical (...) conditions associated with VFL ; and to relate the self-perception ratings to actual driving performance in an advanced driving simulator.MethodsParticipants comprised 723 individuals whose driver’s license had been withdrawn because of VFL and 92 normally sighted elderly individuals. All participants completed a background survey, rated difficulties with different traffic situations, rated their strengths and weaknesses as drivers, and rated aspects that were important for causing traffic accidents. Of the VFL group participants, 264 also completed a simulator-based driving test that they knew could lead to renewal of their driving license. VFL participants and normally sighted was at the same age when they completed the simulator driving test.ResultsOverall, individuals with VFL rated their capabilities as high on all instruments and scales used, even higher than the elderly normally sighted control group. The only VFL etiology group that rated lower than other groups was the diabetes group. Safety orientation and internal control orientation values were best at discriminating between VFL participants in terms of self-perception of driving performance. Participants categorized as “high” in terms of safety skills and internal control were more modest in their ratings. Finally, participants who passed the simulated driving test did not differ from those who failed, in any of the self-perception measures.ConclusionSelf-perception ratings among individuals with VFL were higher than those of normally sighted elderly individuals. Self-assessed skills did not predict driving performance. Groups with different VFL etiologies rated similarly. Self-ratings of driving abilities cannot be used to assess actual driving performance. Actual driving tests are necessary to discriminate between safe and unsafe drivers with VFL. (shrink)

Rwanda is often depicted as a success story by policy makers when it comes to issues of gender. In this paper, we show how the problem of gendered inequality in agriculture nevertheless is both marginalized and instrumentalized in Rwanda’s agriculture policy. Our in-depth analysis of 12 national policies is informed by Bacchi’s _What’s the problem represented to be?_ approach. It attests that gendered inequality is largely left unproblematized as well as reduced to a problem of women’s low agricultural productivity. The (...) policy focuses on framing the symptoms and effects of gendered inequality and turns gender mainstreaming into an instrument for national economic growth. We argue that by insufficiently addressing the socio-political underlying causes of gendered inequality, Rwanda’s agriculture policy risks reproducing and exacerbating inequalities by reinforcing dominant gender relations and constructing women farmers as problematic and men as normative farmers. We call for the policy to approach gendered inequality in alternative ways. Drawing on perspectives in feminist political ecology, we discuss how such alternatives could allow policy to more profoundly challenge underlying structural constraints such as unequal gender relations of power, gender norms, and gender divisions of work. This would shift policy’s problematizing lens from economic growth to social justice, and from women’s shortcomings and disadvantages in agriculture to the practices and relations that perpetuate inequality. In the long term, this could lead to transformed gender norms and power relations, and a more just and equal future beyond what the dominant agricultural development discourse currently permits. (shrink)

Now available from Rowman & Littlefield, the third edition of this introductory critical thinking text features streamlined chapters, Think for Yourself activities, and a complete glossary of critical thinking terms.

Human knowledge is a phenomenon whose roots extend from the cultural, through the neural and the biological and finally all the way down into the Precambrian “primordial soup.” The present paper reports an attempt at understanding this Greater System of Knowledge (GSK) as a hierarchical nested set of selection processes acting concurrently on several different scales of time and space. To this end, a general selection theory extending mainly from the work of Hull and Campbell is introduced. The perhaps most (...) drastic change from previous similar theories is that replication is revealed as a composite function consisting of what is referred to as memory and synthesis. This move is argued to drastically improve the fit between theory and human-related knowledge systems. The introduced theory is then used to interpret the subsystems of the GSK and their interrelations. This is done to the end of demonstrating some of the new perspectives offered by this view. (shrink)

This paper examines whether the prospect of compensation may render otherwise disproportionate harms proportionate. It argues that we should reject this possibility. Instead, it distinguishes duties of compensation as a requirement of rectificatory justice from a harm’s degree of compensability, and argues that only the latter is relevant to proportionality. On this view, failing to compensate constitutes a distinct wrong, while harms that are not adequately compensable carry extra weight in proportionality calculations. This explains how the prospect of compensation affects (...) permissions to harm, without relying on the dubious assumption that disproportionate harms may be rendered proportionate by future compensation. (shrink)

This thesis is an inquiry into the Liberal Principle of Legitimacy, formulated by John Rawls in his later writings. According to this principle, the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justifiable to all citizens. This view can be interpreted in different ways, and I argue that the presently most popular way of doing so faces serious problems. The aim is to identify and defend a more plausible version of the principle, which overcomes these problems, and yet (...) preserves the most essential and appealing features of the approach. Among the most central issues for how to interpret the principle are how to understand the notion of justifiability to a person, and who should be included in the group of persons referred to as "all citizens". On the currently received view, only justifiability to those who count as "reasonable" matter, and justifiability to these persons is understood in non-moral terms, as being determined by what is accessible to them, given the beliefs that they happen to hold. I argue that we have good reasons to reject both of these suggestions. We should instead spell out justifiability to a person in terms of what could be reasonably accepted in a moral sense, which allows us to retain the appealing idea that legitimacy is dependent on justifiability to all citizens over whom political power is exercised. I further suggest that we can use the original position – Rawls’s version of the social contract – to determine what is justifiable to all in this sense. I defend this suggestion against the expected objection that it will not be able to take reasonable pluralism – the assumption of deep disagreement between citizens – into account, by explaining why we should sharply distinguish this principle of political legitimacy from the theory of Political Liberalism. This distinction also contributes to my response to the objection, raised against this principle, that it is self-defeating. That my suggested interpretation allows us to convincingly respond to this line of criticism is yet another reason as to why it is preferable to the standard view. (shrink)

The Will Theory of Rights has commonly been criticized for excluding from the class of rights bearers all subjects who are incapable of agency. The Interest Theory of Rights faces the challenge of avoiding undue proliferation of the class of rights bearers. I advance a novel argument for a specific demarcation of the class of rights bearers. I then argue that this demarcation implies that the function of the moral rights of subjects incapable of exercising agency is to protect them (...) from being treated with illegitimate disregard in a certain sense. I advance reasons for holding that this theory is neither a Will Theory nor an Interest Theory, or a combination of these theories. The proposed account is significant also if it is interpreted as a version of the Interest Theory. It brings significant benefits in the form of cohesiveness, simplicity, and intuitive appeal. (shrink)

Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the (...) concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I carry out an analysis of an event in Sweden called ‘the spring turnout’. It is a traditional event where cows are allowed out into the fields after the winter. I show how i...

This paper challenges one line of argument which has been advanced to justify imposing risks of collateral harm on prospective beneficiaries of armed humanitarian interventions. This argument - the ‘Beneficiary Principle’ - holds that non-liable individuals’ immunity to being harmed as a side effect of just armed humanitarian interventions may be diminished by their prospects of benefiting from the intervention. Against this, I defend the view that beneficiary status does not morally distinguish beneficiaries from other non-liable individuals in such a (...) way as to permit exposing them to greater risks of being harmed. The argument proceeds in four steps. I first show that the BP can neither be grounded in liability-based nor in lesser-evil justifications for harming. I then argue that a standalone justification for unintended harming based on beneficiary status would face at least two critical challenges. The first concerns the BP’s applicability to collectives; the second questions the normative weight we can plausibly ascribe to beneficiary status when beneficiaries are such by virtue of being victims of wrongful threats of harm. I argue that standing to benefit is morally irrelevant when the benefit consists in the mitigation or prevention of wrongful harms, and consequently suggest that the BP may only serve as a distributive principle in allocating risks of harm if it is disambiguated in a number of critical aspects and applied in a more narrowlydefined set of circumstances. (shrink)

This article investigates discourses of Sweden’s success in gender mainstreaming. Using the theoretical concept of myth, discourse analysis is performed on different categories of texts. The aim is to analyse how this discourse of success is constructed and to increase the understanding of its components. The themes identified in the reading include adaptation, integration, volume and initiatives. In conclusion, it is argued that a conflation of gender mainstreaming with gender equality has been a vital part of the construction of Sweden (...) as the best case of gender mainstreaming. (shrink)

Geven, Ben‐Shakhar, Kindt and Verschuere point out that research on deception detection usually employs instructed cheating. They experimentally demonstrate that participants show slower reaction times for concealed information than for other information, regardless of whether they are explicitly instructed to cheat or whether they can freely choose to cheat or not. Finding this ‘cognitive signature of lying’ with self‐initiated cheating too is argued by the authors to strengthen the external validity of deception detection research. [75].

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Will to Power in Nietzsche’s Published Works and the NachlassLinda L. WilliamsIt is universally acknowledged by scholars of Nietzsche’s work that will to power is one of the most important notions in Nietzsche’s writings, but strangely, like the other “central” notions of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, there are relatively few aphorisms in either the published or unpublished material that include the term. In the case of will to (...) power, however, Nietzsche promises in a footnote in On the Genealogy of Morals to discuss and explore the notion of will to power in a book entitled The Will to Power. 1 Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, among others, have argued persuasively that Nietzsche abandoned this project. 2 Nevertheless, the phrase “will to power” remains the most notorious feature of Nietzsche’s philosophy, probably due to its unfortunate and mistaken connections with the Third Reich. As Walter Kaufmann notes, the notion of will to power did not “spring fully formed from Nietzsche’s brow like Pallas Athena.” 3 This was an idea that evolved over time. This paper examines both the published and his unpublished writings (the Nachlass) to gain a better understanding of how this important phrase developed.The Nachlass can be divided roughly into three different kinds of work. 4 The first kind is comprised of the works Nietzsche was editing right before his collapse. These works are Ecce Homo, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and The Antichrist, and they were so polished that we can safely take them as [End Page 447] equal in status to the works that Nietzsche had already published or, like Twilight of the Idols, were being published at the time of his collapse. The second kind are Nietzsche’s early, finished pieces that were never published, the so-called Schriften, primarily his lectures and writings while he was employed at Basel. These pieces are presumably complete and polished, although Nietzsche chose not to publish them, but they do not affect this inquiry, since will to power was a relatively late concept for Nietzsche.The third kind of work consists of Nietzsche’s notes, which vary from sentence fragments or single sentences to sketchy outlines of various projects to several long paragraphs in essay form. Nietzsche’s notebooks looked like anyone’s notebook, with passages lined out, words jotted in the margins, and overwriting. Some of the entries in the Nachlass can be found with only minor revisions in the books Nietzsche had published, and since he painstakingly recopied his books in his neatest handwriting right before he sent them to his editor, these strikingly similar entries are most probably the penultimate copy drafts of the published aphorisms.The writings that did not find their way into publication in any form are problematic. Are they rough drafts of some future work which Nietzsche was unable to complete due to his illness? If so, some of these controversial notes would have been waiting for years. Are they ideas that Nietzsche entertained but ultimately rejected? If so, we should not place them on par with the ideas in his published works. Even if we consider these notes rough drafts of future works, it remains unclear whether we should consider what is written in these notes to be as indicative of what Nietzsche thought as the works he authorized for publication. Sometimes what is written in the unpublished notes on a particular topic is very different from what is written on that topic in the published works. Bernd Magnus made this kind of case against the Nachlass notes concerning eternal recurrence, 5 and I want to make a similar claim about the notes concerning will to power. Reviewing the Nachlass notes in conjunction with the published aphorisms will give us a better understanding of how the published and unpublished notes differ.The term “will to power” (Wille zur Macht) first appeared in publication in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 6 In the aphorism “On 1001 Goals” Nietzsche describes a people’s tablets of good and bad as the voice of its will to power. Wille zur Macht appears in only two more aphorisms in the course of this long work, in “On Self-Overcoming” and in... (shrink)

Recent debates about supererogatory rescues have sought to explain how it can be wrong to perform a suboptimal rescue although it would be permissible not to rescue at all. This paper proposes a new solution to this puzzle. It argues that existing accounts have neglected two critical considerations. First, contrary to what is commonly assumed, a rescue’s supererogatory nature has no bearing on the duties that apply to agents who rescue in supererogatory fashion. Second, we cannot justify harms caused as (...) a side effect of supererogatory rescues by appealing to the fact that it would have been permissible not to rescue at all. Ultimately, the paper proposes, the same duties that apply in cases in which rescuing is required also apply in cases in which rescuing is supererogatory. A rescue’s supererogatory nature, it turns out, is not the game changer we thought it was. (shrink)

Abstract During the Copernican revolution the supporters of the Ptolemaic theory argued that the tower experiment refuted the Copernican hypothesis of the (diurnal) motion of the earth, but was in agreement with the Ptolemaic theory. In his defence of the Copernican theory Galileo argued that the experiment was in agreement both with Copernican and Ptolemaic theory. The reason for these different views of the same experiment was not that the two theories were incommensurable, as Paul Feyerabend argues, but that Galileo (...) introduced a new theory of motion which he used as an auxiliary hypothesis in his discussion of the tower experiment, while those defending the Ptolemaic theory used the old Aristotelian theory of motion. Already before the Copernican revolution the Aristotelian theory of motion was criticized by philosophers in Paris, who suggested the impetus theory of motion. The later versions of this theory had the consequence that the tower experiment no longer refuted the hypothesis of the (diurnal) motion of the earth. Thus the impetus theory removed an old and important objection to the heliocentric theory. Galileo's inertial dynamics had the same function in the discussion of the tower experiment. (shrink)

This paper sketches elements of a theory of the ethics of autonomised harming: the phenomenon of delegating decisions about whether and whom to harm to artificial intelligence (AI) in self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems. First, the paper elucidates the challenge of integrating non-human, artificial agents, which lack rights and duties, into our moral framework which relies on precisely these notions to determine the permissibility of harming. Second, the paper examines how potential differences between human agents and non-human, artificial agents (...) might bear on the permissibility of delegating life-and death decisions to AI systems. Third, and finally, the paper explores a series of resulting complexities. These include the challenge of weighing autonomous systems’ promise to reduce harm against the intrinsic value of rectificatory justice as well as the peculiar possibility that delegating harmful acts to AI might render ordinarily impermissible acts permissible. By illuminating what happens when we extend normative theory beyond its traditional boundaries, this discussion offers a starting point for assessing the moral permissibility of delegating consequential decisions to non-human, artificial agents. (shrink)

Although tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is the only medication approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for acute ischemic stroke, there is no consensus about the need for informed consent for its use. As a result, hospitals throughout the U.S. have varying requirements regarding obtaining informed consent from patients for the use of tPA, ranging from no requirement for informed consent to a requirement for verbal or written informed consent. We conducted a study to (1) determine current (...) beliefs about obtaining patients’ informed consent for tPA among a large group of stroke clinicians and (2) identify the ethical, clinical, and organizational factors that influence tPA consent practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted by trained and experienced investigators and research staff to identify key barriers to implementing acute stroke services. Part of the interview explored current beliefs and practices around informed consent for tPA.This was a multicenter study that included 38 Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospital locations. Participants were 68 stroke team clinicians, serving primarily on the neurology (35 percent) or emergency medicine (41 percent) service. We conducted thematic analysis based on principles of grounded theory to identify codes about consent for tPA. We used interpretive convergence to ensure consistency among the individual investigators’ codes and to ensure that all of the investigators agreed on coding and themes.We found that 38 percent of the stroke clinicians did not believe any form of consent was necessary for tPA, 47 percent thought that some form of consent was necessary, and 15 percent were unsure. Clinicians who believed tPA required informed consent were divided on whether consent should be written (40 percent) or verbal (60 percent). We identified three factors describing clinicians’ attitudes about consent: (1) legal and policy factors, (2) ethical factors, and (3) medical factors.The lack of consensus regarding consent for tPA creates the potential for delays in treatment, uneasiness among clinicians, and legal liability. The identified factors provide a potential framework to guide discussions about developing a standard of care for acquiring the informed consent of patients for the administration of tPA. (shrink)

Can artifacts be agents in the same sense as humans? This paper endorses a pragmatic stance to that issue. The crucial question is whether artifacts can have free will in the same pragmatic sense as we consider humans to have a free will when holding them responsible for their actions. The origin of actions is important. Can an action originate inside an artifact, considering that it is, at least today, programmed by a human? In this paper it is argued that (...) autonomy with respect to norms is crucial for artificial agency. (shrink)