Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver a metasemantic theory of representation. (...) Furthermore, we argue that these difficulties derive from their exclusive reliance on the notion of information, so we suggest that pure informational accounts should be complemented with functional approaches. (shrink)

:This paper questions the distinction between egalitarianism and prioritarianism, arguing that it is important to separate the reasons for particular social preferences from the contents of these preferences, that it is possible to like equality and separability simultaneously, and that some egalitarians and prioritarians may therefore share the same social preferences. The case of risky prospects, for which Broome has proposed an interesting example meant to show that egalitarians and prioritarians cannot share the same preferences, is scrutinized. The levelling down (...) objection is also examined. (shrink)

Serious concerns about pervasive, persistent, and unjustified social inequalities have prompted a small—but growing—number of academic commentators to raise some hard and troubling questions for those who would like to legalize physician-assisted suicide. In various ways, these commentators have asked: In light of existing social inequalities—inequalities that operate, for example, along sometimes intersecting lines of race, class, age, sex, and disability—how persuasive are autonomy-based arguments in favor of legalization of assisted suicide when those arguments depend on a conception of autonomy (...) that either presupposes social equality or does not expressly account for its absence? How compelling are arguments that we ought to legalize assisted suicide out of feelings of mercy for the sick and dying, when such affective expressions may actually be the socially acceptable manifestation of private ambivalence that includes merciless discrimination? (shrink)

In this article we present a new approach to practical artificial intelligence (AI) ethics in heavy industry, which was developed in the context of an EU Horizons 2020 multi partner project. We begin with a review of the concept of Industry 4.0, discussing the limitations of the concept, and of iterative categorization of heavy industry generally, for a practical human centered ethical approach. We then proceed to an overview of actual and potential AI ethics approaches to heavy industry, suggesting that (...) current approaches with their emphasis on broad high-level principles are not well suited to AI ethics for industry. From there we outline our own approach in two sections. The first suggests tailoring ethics to the time and space situation of the shop floor level worker from the ground up, including giving specific and evolving ethical recommendations. The second describes the ethicist’s role as an ethical supervisor immersed in the development process and interpreting between industrial and technological (tech) development partners. In presenting our approach we draw heavily on our own experiences in applying the method in the Use Cases of our project, as examples of what can be done. (shrink)

It seems that epistemically rational agents should avoid incoherent combinations of beliefs and should respond correctly to their epistemic reasons. However, some situations seem to indicate that such requirements cannot be simultaneously satisfied. In such contexts, assuming that there is no unsolvable dilemma of epistemic rationality, either (i) it could be rational that one’s higher-order attitudes do not align with one’s first-order attitudes or (ii) requirements such as responding correctly to epistemic reasons that agents have are not genuine rationality requirements. (...) This result doesn’t square well with plausible theoretical assumptions concerning epistemic rationality. So, how do we solve this puzzle? In this paper, I will suggest that an agent can always reason from infallible higher-order reasons. This provides a partial solution to the above puzzle. (shrink)

Why do physicians have financial conflicts of interest? They arise because society expects physicians to act in their patients’ interest, while simultaneously, financial incentives encourage physicians to practice medicine in ways that promote their own interests or those of third parties. Because physicians’ clinical choices, referrals, and prescriptions affect the fortune of third parties, these third parties may offer physicians financial incentives to make income-driven clinical choices. In the past, physicians and scholars typically conceived of conflicts of interest as an (...) ethical issue to be resolved according to individual judgment or professional and organizational norms. However, society can mitigate or eliminate conflicts of interest by changing financial and organizational arrangements in medicine. Conflicts of interest, therefore, are as much matters of public policy and management as individual choices or social norms. (shrink)

How do humans discover causal relations when the effect is not immediately observable? Previous experiments have uniformly demonstrated detrimental effects of outcome delays on causal induction. These findings seem to conflict with everyday causal cognition, where humans can apparently identify long-term causal relations with relative ease. Three experiments investigated whether the influence of delay on adult human causal judgements is mediated by experimentally induced assumptions about the timeframe of the causal relation in question, as suggested by Einhorn and Hogarth (1986). (...) Causal judgements generally decreased when a delay separated cause and effect. This decrease was less pronounced when the thematic context of the causal relation induced participants to expect a delay. Experiment 3 ruled out an alternative explanation of the effect based on variations of cue and outcome saliencies, and showed that detrimental effects of delay are reduced even more when instructions explicitly mentioned the timeframe of the causal relation in question. Knowledge thus mediates the impact of delay on human causal judgement. Implications for contemporary theories of human causal induction are discussed. (shrink)

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was an Irish philosopher and divine who pursued a number of grand causes, contributing to the fields of economics, mathematics, political theory and theology. He pioneered the theory of 'immaterialism', and his work ranges over many philosophical issues that remain of interest today. This volume offers a complete and accurate edition of Berkeley's extant correspondence, including letters written both by him and to him, supplemented by extensive explanatory and critical notes. Alexander Pope famously said 'To (...) Berkeley every virtue under heaven', and a careful reading of the letters reveals a figure worthy of admiration, sheds new light on his personal and intellectual life, and provides insight into the broad historical and philosophical currents of his time. The volume will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, modern historians and those interested in Anglo-Irish culture. (shrink)

Joseph Heath defends competitive markets and conceptualizes business ethics with reference to Pareto efficiency, which he takes to be the “implicit morality of the market.” His justification for markets is that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes, meaning that markets optimally satisfy consumer preferences. And, for Heath, business ethics is the set of normative constraints—regulation and beyond-compliance norms—needed to preserve that outcome. The present paper accepts Heath’s claim that the economic justification for markets is ethical, in that satisfying consumer preferences is (...) a good. But, contra Heath, the ethical consideration at work is a consequentialist one; and acknowledging this consequentialism exposes limitations of Heath’s “market failures” approach to business ethics. We suggest two limitations, and we expect many will accept our argument that Heath’s conception of business ethics is too narrow. The present paper outlines two broader implications. First, acknowledging that the justification for markets is ethical eliminates the apparent—and false—conflict between purportedly amoral economic activity on one hand and ethical considerations on the other; instead, business ethics is a matter of weighing the consequentialist ethical benefit of economic activity and markets against other moral arguments/other ethical considerations. Second, Heath restricts business ethics to the constraints needed to protect the market’s ability to efficiently satisfy consumer preferences, constraints he calls “efficiency imperatives”; this restriction supports the widespread tendency to think that all social problems are economic; and, a business ethics so-conceived diminishes the perceived importance of noneconomic values—this attitude is dangerous. (shrink)

Is epistemic inconsistency a mere symptom of having violated other requirements of rationality—notably, reasons-responsiveness requirements? Or is inconsistency irrational on its own? This question has important implications for the debate on the normativity of epistemic rationality. In this paper, I defend a new account of the explanatory role of the requirement of epistemic consistency. Roughly, I will argue that, in cases where an epistemically rational agent is permitted to believe P and also permitted to disbelieve P, the consistency requirement plays (...) a distinct explanatory role. I will also argue that such a type of permissiveness is a live possibility when it comes to rational epistemic standards. (shrink)

This paper argues that Rawls’ principles of justice provide a normative foundation for stakeholder theory. The principles articulate (at an abstract level) citizens’ rights; these rights create interests across all aspects of society, including in the space of economic activity; and therefore, stakeholders – as citizens – have legitimate interests in the space of economic activity. This approach to stakeholder theory suggests a political interpretation of Boatright’s Moral Market approach, one that emphasizes the rights/place of citizens. And this approach to (...) stakeholder theory – in terms of citizens – raises a further question, what rights and obligations do economic agents have, beyond those attached to their roles as citizens? Rawls would reject additional rights and obligations of this sort for two reasons, one tied to freedom and one tied to pluralism. Rawls’ work therefore presses us to re-conceptualize the place of ethical claims in the economic context. (shrink)

The heart of the matter -- The evolution of the French medicine -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of interest in France -- The rise of a protected medical market : the United States before 1950 -- The commercial transformation : the United States, 1950-1980 -- The logic of medical markets : the United States, 1980 to the present -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of interest in the United States -- The evolution of Japanese medicine -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of (...) interest in Japan -- Reforms -- Professionalism reconsidered. (shrink)

It has been argued that an epistemically rational agent’s evidence is subjectively mediated through some rational epistemic standards, and that there are incompatible but equally rational epistemic standards available to agents. This supports Permissiveness, the view according to which one or multiple fully rational agents are permitted to take distinct incompatible doxastic attitudes towards P (relative to a body of evidence). In this paper, I argue that the above claims entail the existence of a unique and more reliable epistemic standard. (...) My strategy relies on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. This gives rise to an important problem for those who argue that epistemic standards are permissive, since the reliability criterion is incompatible with such a type of Permissiveness. (shrink)

Bernard Williams briefly discusses agent regret in his broader account of moral luck. The present paper first outlines one way to develop Williams’s notion with reference to the unintended harm; it then suggests that agent regret can be counteracted by externalizing the action that caused unintended harm, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense of externalization; and then the present paper argues that apology is a mechanism by which a person can externalize an offending action/effect—in that way counteracting agent regret. This function for (...) apology—self-repair—is different from others described in the literature, which address the role of apology in repairing relationships. The present paper describes a nonfictional example, that of a veteran of the U.S. war in Iraq who contacts a family gravely injured by him and his combat unit; the veteran is motivated to contact the family to apologize. The example serves as a prototypical case of agent regret. The example is taken from a recent literature on the clinical psychology of self-inflicted “moral injury”; categorizing this example of moral injury as agent regret also helps broaden our understanding of moral injury as a philosophical category and as a psychological phenomenon. (shrink)

Kant posits the schema as a hybrid bridging the generality of pure concepts and the particularity of sensible intuitions. However, I argue that countenancing such schemata leads to a third-man regress. Siding with those who think that the mid-way posit of the Critique of Pure Reason's schematism section is untenable, my diagnosis is that Kant's transcendental inquiry goes awry because it attempts to analyse a form/matter union that is primitive. I therefore sketch a nonrepresentational stance aimed at respecting this primitivity.

Ethics education in the professions has become close to compulsory with continuing education following suit. What is the de facto as opposed to the de jure function of an ethics education program? Have they increased compliance with laws and codes of conduct? Is that the goal? What would an ethics education program look like that was not primarily concerned with compliance with relevant laws or professional codes and not merely an exercise in good public relations? I argue that, ultimately, ethics (...) education is about happiness… not happiness as we generally think of it today, but in the Aristotelian sense of “fulfillment” and the collateral good that is generated for clients and the profession. As a result of this point of view I argue that ethics is not a subject in the normal sense of the term but a meta-subject which implies that teaching ethics as a class or stand alone module in a law, policy or practice management course is usually ineffective. Another implication is that the richest source for moral reflection within a profession are case studies generated by students in clinical assignments, despite the inherent risks associated with making these cases prominent. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a teleological explanation of normativity, i. e., I argue that what an organism is supposed to do is determined by its etiological function. In particular, I present a teleological account of the normativity that arises in learning processes, and I defend it from some objections.

Happiness studies have rekindled interest in the measurement of subjective well-being, and often claim to track faithfully ‘what people care about’ in their lives. It is argued in this article that seeking to respect individuals’ preferences in the context of making intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons for social evaluation has important and somewhat surprising implications, which shed light, in particular, on subjective measures and their objective alternatives, such as Sen’s capability approach. Four points are made. First, raw subjective well-being scores are (...) problematic because they involve different calibration norms for different individuals or for the same individuals at different times. Money-metric and similar measures appear more attractive in this perspective. Second, if individuals genuinely care about their relative positions, incorporating such relative aspects in the evaluation of individual situations does not necessarily lead to rewarding the selfish and malevolent. Third, in the context of risk, relying on ex ante preferences may clash with a concern for ex post preferences, which are better informed. Fourth, focusing on opportunities or capabilities may fail to respect preferences. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that, because it is subject to twinning and fusion, the early human embryo cannot hold strong moral standing. Supposedly, the fact that an early human embryo can twin or fuse with another embryo entails that it is not a distinct individual, thus precluding it from holding any level of moral standing. I argue that appeals to twinning and fusion fail to show that the early human embryo is not a distinct individual and that these appeals do not (...) provide us with plausible reasons for denying the strong moral standing of the early human embryo. I recognize one possible exception to this general assessment, a particular version of the appeal to fusion. Embryo fusion that results in tetragametic chimerism provides some reason for doubting the early human embryo's moral standing. But twinning and fusion are otherwise irrelevant in this context. (shrink)

Although the topic has been extensively studied, many issues about understanding of indirect requests in children are still unsolved. Our contribution is to distinguish genuine and ironic hints, focusing on the latter. We examined the understanding of ironic hints and ironic imperatives in 5- to 9-year-old children and in adults, in various situational contexts. The main result of this study was that ironic hints were more difficult to understand than ironic imperatives only when the context was neutral. When the context (...) was ironic, there was no significant difference. Discussion highlights how context enables young children to understand very indirect requests like ironic hints. (shrink)

On a tendance à voir une sorte de hiatus entre la communication politique moderne et les différents aspects du rituel qui ont jusqu'ici prévalu dans les sociétés traditionnelles. Cet article montre que l'apparition de ces nouvelles formes de communication politique n'implique pas mécaniquement la disparition de pratique liées à toute une conception de la vie publique ; loin qu'il y ait réellement antinomie entre le travail rituel et l'utilisation des médias, ceux-ci favorisent l'émergence de nouvelles formes qui combinent les referents (...) anciens et les procédures modernes. La recherche présentée ici résulte d'une enquête sur la vie politique locale dans un département français (l'Yonne) et sur les pratiques symboliques d'hommes politiques d'envergure nationale, tel le président Mitterrand. L'auteur analyse d'un point de vue anthropologique les rituels de consensus et les rituels d'affrontement pratiqués dans notre société. Si les rites d'affrontement sont profondément transformés dans leur forme et leur contenu, les rites consensuels perdurent, et trouvent dans les médias un prolongement, une chambre d'écho. Par ailleurs, de nouveaux rites surgissent qui combinent tradition, dimension religieuse et stratégie de communication. (shrink)

Beginnings and the hyperthematic structures of game and narrative -- Hyperthematic structures of dance and music -- Hyperthematic expansion of light and color -- The hyperthematic structure of visual arts -- Hyperthematization of the corporation -- Expansive reconstruction of H5 to H15 -- Expansive reconstruction of the hyperthemes of light and color -- Expansive reconstruction of the hyperthemes of the visual arts.

Joseph Heath states that our paper “misinterpret[s]” and so misrepresents his account. The present Commentary corrects the record. Our paper (Cohen and Peterson 2019) outlined Heath’s account on his own terms; it explained that Heath distances himself from consequentialism. But then we argued that Heath is mistaken and so offered a repaired version of the market failures approach. Our central concern, in the original paper and in this short Commentary, is showing that the economic argument for markets is at the (...) same time ethical, and then being more precise about the ethical consideration that does the work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers the two most important German online editions of Nietzsche's works, Nietzsche Source and Nietzsche Online, from a user's perspective. After a description of the print editions on which they are based, an assessment is made of their completeness, their textual reliability, the usefulness of their navigation menus and the usefulness of their search functions. The article finds that there are noteworthy differences in completeness and reliability, that the accessibility of the posthumous notes could be improved in (...) both cases, and that Nietzsche Source has a better search function than Nietzsche Online. The ideal online edition would be an augmented mixture of both editions. (shrink)