The AI and Society discourse has previously drawn attention to the ways that digital systems embody the values of the technology development community from which they emerge through the development and deployment process. Research shows how this effect leads to a particular treatment of gender in computer systems development, a treatment which lags far behind the rich understanding of gender that social studies scholarship reveals and people across society experience. Many people do not relate to the narrow binary gender options (...) of male or female, and many people express their gender identity in much richer ways than the sex/gender binary female/woman and male/man Boolean terms will allow. We ask: are “born-digital” gendered datasets in digital systems experienced as marginalising by those who express their identity beyond the male/female binary? Case Study: Ireland. To answer this universal question, this paper presents the findings of an empirical case study of people in Ireland with diverse gender identities and expressions, and their experiences with public data systems and new technologies. In spite of great social changes in Ireland which have led to constitutional change in favour of LGBTQI + people, born-digital systems were experienced by respondents as embodying socio-cultural values which were no longer accepted in society at large. For many of the respondents, digital technologies routinely marginalise them in all kinds of ways. These systems keep alive violence and oppression long after civil rights have been enshrined in constitutional law. This study is just one example of the way assumptions about digital are disengaged from society-at-large. It is a call to arms to all who are passionate about socially-responsible technology. (shrink)

Standard theories in mereotopology focus on relations of parthood and connection among spatial or spatio-temporal regions. Objects or processes which might be located in such regions are not normally directly treated in such theories. At best, they are simulated via appeal to distributions of attributes across the regions occupied or by functions from times to regions. The present paper offers a richer framework, in which it is possible to represent directly the relations between entities of various types at different levels, (...) including both objects and the regions they occupy. What results is a layered mereotopology, a theory which can handle multiple layers (analogous to the layers of a lasagna) of spatially or spatiotemporally coincident but mereologically non-overlapping entities. (shrink)

According to the prevalent 'sum view' of stuffs, each portion of stuff is a mereological sum of its subportions. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the sum view in the light of a modal temporal mereology which distinguishes between different varieties of summation relations. While admitting David Barnett's recent counter-example to the sum view, we show that there is nonetheless an important sense in which all portions of stuff are sums of their subportions. We use our summation relations (...) to develop, as an alternative to the sum view, an analysis of stuffs that distinguisher between the ways in which different sorts of stuffs are sums of their subportions. (shrink)

A complex network of ethico‐legal rules makes it difficult for health researchers in South Africa to lawfully recruit adolescents to the kinds of sensitive studies where it may be ethically appropriate to proceed without notifying parents or obtaining parental consent. This article responds to a recent proposal to amend the blanket requirement for mandatory parental consent presently contained in section 71 the South African National Health Act 61 of 2003 [NHA]. The proposed amendment is intended to bring the NHA into (...) alignment with South Africa's 2015 Department of Health Guidelines on Ethics in Health Research by permitting greater flexibility for a health research ethics committee to waive parental consent, and permit adolescents to consent independently. A lacuna in this proposal is highlighted with reference to the requirements of South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 [POPIA]: Even if the NHA is amended as proposed, the goal of aligning South African law with prevailing ethics norms in South Africa would not necessarily be attained, as parental consent may still be required by POPIA. This article investigates whether this goal (of aligning the law with ethics) can be attained in a way that is compliant with POPIA. It is concluded that this is indeed possible in a number of ways, and that the best way to attain this goal is by requesting the South African Information Regulator to issue a guidance note to the effect that all health research projects that are approved by institutional health research ethics committees are to be regarded as being in the public interest, which would qualify such health research projects to be exempted from POPIA's consent requirements. (shrink)

Donnelly asserts that Ames has misrepresented his arguments, creating a straw man from Ames's own preconceived notion of the Western liberal tradition while ignoring the substantive debates.

We are working on formalizing a proof of the prime number theorem using Isabelle/HOL. In support of this project we formalized a very general notion of O notation.

In this paper, I focus on three issues intertwined in current debates between endurantists and perdurantists—(i) the dimension of persisting objects, (ii) whether persisting objects have timeless, or only time-relative, parts, and (iii) whether persisting objects have proper temporal parts. I argue that one standard endurantist position on the first issue is compatible with standard perdurantist positions on parthood and temporal parts. I further argue that different accounts of persistence depend on the claims about objects' dimensions and not on the (...) auxiliary claims about parthood and temporal parts. (shrink)

Classical education includes an apprenticeship in the art of rhetoric. It also gives a central place to the study of major works of literature, philosophy, and theology. There is often, however, an assumed disconnection between the art of rhetoric and the study of great texts. This disconnection undermines students’ ability to hear the voices of these texts as conversation partners in ongoing debates. This article illustrates how historically-based rhetorical-poetic reading enables us to hear the voices in a given text and (...) to consider how they work together. The argument first outlines some modern assumptions about the relation between poetry and rhetoric. The second part explains what rhetorical-poetic reading involves when approaching John Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost. The final section focuses on the second book of Milton’s poem, establishing how layered persuasive purposes constitute the fabric of the work and what the poem reveals through its curious dramatization of demonic deliberation. (shrink)

Mereological principles are sometimes used to support general claims about the structure and arrangement of objects in the world. I focus initially on one such mereological principle, the weak supplementation principle (WSP). It is not obvious that (WSP) is prescribed by ordinary thinking about parthood. Further, (WSP) is not needed for a fairly strong formal characterization of the part–whole relation. For these reasons, some arguments relying on (WSP) might be countered by simply denying (WSP). I argue more generally that there (...) is no reason to assume that one core mereology functions as a common basis for all plausible metaphysical theories. (shrink)

The relationship between students and higher education is seen to have become increasingly transactional. We approach the study of the student–HE relationship in a novel way, by focusing on students’ behaviour post-university, rather than on student narratives. Conceptually, the article builds on multidimensional views of student engagement and the differentiation between psychological transactional contracts – where students who achieve better academic results are more likely to donate – and relational contracts – where students donate more following engagement in social experiences. (...) Making use of longitudinal data on donation behaviour from over 50,000 alumni from an English university over two decades, we find that while students who get better degree outcomes are more likely to donate, the association between participation in social experiences and donations is much stronger. This questions prevalent transactional models of HE and underlines the limitations of purely consumerist views of the relation between students and higher education institutions, even in the marketized UK context. (shrink)

It is often assumed that indeterminacy in mereological relations—in particular, indeterminacy in which collections of objects have fusions—leads immediately to indeterminacy in what objects there are in the world. This assumption is generally taken as a reason for rejecting mereological vagueness. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between mereological vagueness and existential vagueness. I hope to show that the connection between the two forms of vagueness is not nearly so clear-cut as has been supposed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the linkages and relationships between the officially prescribed school ethos and that which emerges from social interaction. Qualitative data drawn from one Grant-Maintained-Integrated and one Catholic primary school in Northern Ireland show how school ethos, defined as the observed practices and interactions of school members, often departs considerably from school ethos defined as those values and beliefs which the school officially supports. On the basis of the data it is argued that much (...) of what we understand of school ethos is superficial and contradictory. With this in mind the paper concludes by presenting a new angle on ethos which, when taken in conjunction with the other perspectives, further enhances our understanding of how schools work. (shrink)

This article is concerned with understanding continuity and stability in teaching, and their significance. It looks particularly at the work of Anthony Giddens on structure and agency, that of Martin Heidegger on the limits of discursive and theoretical analysis, and the communitarian strand within ethics. It applies this discussion to understandings of teachers’ work in the context especially of policy and agendas for change, arguing that continuity and the notion of a community of practitioners is critical to maintaining the distinctive (...) ethical quality of teaching. (shrink)

Many alternatives or supplements to principalism seek to reconnect medical ethics with the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the persons directly involved in ethically troublesome situations. This shift of attention, from deeds to doers, from principles to principals, acknowledges the importance of the moral agents involved in the situation — particular practitioners, patients, and families. Taking into account the subjective, lived experience of moral decision-making parallels recent efforts in the teaching of medicine to give the patient''s subjectivity — his or (...) her personal experience of being sick or disabled — epistemological parity with scientific medicine''s objective, biomedically-oriented view of the person''s sickness or disability.Moreover, the shift from principalism to principals signals a growing realization that ethical problems in the profession of medicine are inseparable from its practice. Philosophers and other humanists working in medicine should resist the temptation to institutionalize a professional role as solver of ethical problems, clarifier of values, or mediator of disputes and work instead to help practitioners practice medicine reflectively. (shrink)

Provides an overview of the professional, legal and ethical issues teachers may encounter in the classroom and the school.

This journal article reflects on the conceptualization of a three-day meeting convened to open space for thinking differently about the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, and to begin to explore the possibility of working beyond the constraints of standard urban studies and regimes of spatial planning through which the city is conventionally viewed and researched. The incentive underpinning the 2015 Performative Urbanisms workshop was the desire to find areas of correspondence and overlap in the often widely separated realms of scholarly (...) research and grassroots urban activism. To this end, a group of international and Johannesburg-based academics, writers, artists, analysts, and activists came together to explore a range of themes around the city and its visual, spatial, textual, and especially performative, representations, in the context of its functioning as a global city in comparative perspective. As the contents of this Special Issue show, the workshop provided space to consider diverse research methodologies, creative writings, and artistic strategies aimed at moving beyond formulaic constructs of Johannesburg, and instead to offer an accounting of its novelties, complexities, and originalities. (shrink)

Intention is at the heart of criminal law. If it is not the mens rea requirement found most often in offences, it is still the standard against which other grades of fault tend relatively to be judged. It has generated much controversy, as the crucial question, “Did the defendant intend X?” is resistant to clear answers. This paper argues that intention-questions are difficult because intention is not the thing law takes it to be: Importantly, contrary to law's assumptions, it is (...) neither a state of mind nor is it connected in an exclusive manner to the reasons for which we act. (shrink)

Understanding how healthcare responsibility is distributed will give insight on how health‐care is delivered and how members of a society are expected to practice health‐care. The raising cost of health‐care has resulted in restructuring of the existing Canadian healthcare system toward a system that controls costs by placing more healthcare responsibility on the individual. This shift might create more difficulty for immigrants and refugees to obtain equitable health‐care and put blame on them when they experience illness. This paper is drawn (...) from the results of a larger qualitative study exploring Vietnamese Canadian women's breast cancer and cervical cancer screening practices. Interview data were gathered from 15 Vietnamese Canadian women and six healthcare providers. We will demonstrate that (a) despite the strong influence of individualism, Vietnamese women and their healthcare providers value both individual liberty and the interrelationship between individual and society; (b) limited funding and unequal distribution of healthcare resources impacted how immigrant and refugee women practice health‐care. Thus, motivating and fostering immigrant and refugee women's healthcare practice require both individual and institutional effort. To foster immigrant and refugees’ healthcare practices, healthcare policy makers and providers need to consider how to distribute healthcare resources that meet immigrants’ and refugees’ healthcare needs in the most equitable way. (shrink)

This paper examines the creation of what I have called “The Other Average Man” of nineteenth-century science. This other average man was created during the course of the career of the Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet and his development of physique sociale and the controversial l’homme moyen. Rather than discuss Quetelet’s abstract average man, which has received considerable attention, the paper focuses on the real average men that Quetelet imagined would do the work of providing data for physique sociale. To do (...) so, it investigates three moments in Quetelet’s administrative career in Belgium: his early life in Ghent and Brussels during the brief polity of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, his remarkable transformation of the Académie Royale de Belgique in the 1820s, and an 1846 debate at the Academy on the possible determinism entailed by Quetelet’s statistical account of human behavior. These stories not only point to the creation of another average man in Quetelet’s social physics, but also demonstrate the importance of Belgium’s unique historical context for understanding one of nineteenth-century Europe’s most enduring contributions to the social sciences. (shrink)

In her interesting paper on cross-jurisdictional legal approaches to brain death, Ariane Lewis considers whether informed consent is required for DNC testing in the UK, and proposes that it is not...

Canada has recently published a new Clinical Practice Guideline on the diagnosis and management of brain death. It states that consent is not necessary to carry out the interventions required to make the diagnosis. A supporting article not only sets out the arguments for this but also contends that ‘UK laws similarly carve out an exception, excusing clinicians from a prima facie duty to get consent’. This is supplemented by the claim that recent court decisions in the UK similarly confirm (...) that consent is not required, referencing two judgements in _Battersbee_. We disagree with the authors’ interpretation of the law on consent in the UK and argue that there is nothing in _Battersbee_ to support the conclusion that consent to testing is not necessary. Where there is a disagreement about testing for brain death in the UK, court authorisation is required. (shrink)

Non-symmetric relations like loves or between can apply to the same relata in non-equivalent ways. For example, loves may apply to Abelard and Eloise either by Abelard’s loving Eloise or by Eloise’s loving Abelard. On the standard account of relations, different applications of a relation to fixed relata are distinguished by the direction in which the relation applies to the relata. But neither Directionalism nor its most popular rival, Positionalism, offer accounts of differential application that generalize to relations of arbitrary (...) symmetry structure. Here, I develop an alternative account, Relative Positionalism, which distinguishes different applications of a relation to fixed relata in terms of the ways in which the relata are characterized relative to one another. In presenting and defending Relative Positionalism, this paper covers some of the same ground as my [2016], but avoids the latter’s algebraic approach and focuses on interpretative issues—in particular, how to make sense of relative property instantiation—that were not addressed in the earlier paper. (shrink)

One would be hard pressed to deny the ordinary man's trust in the moral deliverances of his conscience. Joseph Butler put the case for the infallibility of conscience, when he remarked: ‘Had it strength, as it had right; had it power, as it had manifest authority; it would absolutely govern the world’ . I think it obvious, in retrospect, that Butler underestimated its ‘strength’ and ‘power’, while overextending its ‘right’ and ‘authority’. Perhaps it is too rash a claim to maintain (...) that conscience serves as an inadequate guide in our moral deliberations, but, to be sure, it can hardly be defended as a sufficient guide to moral conduct. (shrink)

Jurisprudential debate about the grounds of law often focuses on the status of morality. Given the undoubted fact of judicial engagement with morality in legal reasoning, the key question is whether morality legitimately counts as a ground of law. This article seeks to challenge the special status accorded to morality in debates about the grounds of law. The claim I seek to advance is that very often judicial engagement with morality is not different in kind to judicial engagement with other (...) diverse objects of legal reasoning. What the comparison tends to show is that instances of “moral reasoning” in law do not obviously challenge our account of the grounds of law. Rather these instances can be viewed as central case examples of legal reasoning. Conventional grounds of law are left untouched. (shrink)

This paper identifies the difficulties in confronting novel history from both a rigorous scientific and artistic literary perspectives and suggests a practical reconciliation—in the form of a discussion and metaphorical opening space—between the two apparent poles of historical understanding and their accompanying genres, types, and tropes.

The prime number theorem, established by Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin independently in 1896, asserts that the density of primes in the positive integers is asymptotic to 1/ln x. Whereas their proofs made serious use of the methods of complex analysis, elementary proofs were provided by Selberg and Erdos in 1948. We describe a formally verified version of Selberg's proof, obtained using the Isabelle proof assistant.

The decision of the House of Lords in Gillick v West Norfolk Area Health Authority carved out a safe space for competent minors to confidentially access sexual and reproductive health care and advice in the UK. Ireland is one of the few common law jurisdictions that has not endorsed Gillick or a similar mature minor doctrine, nor has it securely legislated for the right to consent of those aged 16 and 17 years. The legal lacuna created by this deficiency has (...) left young persons in Ireland seeking sexual and reproductive healthcare, and the clinicians who provide this, in a challenging place. While this void has been partially filled with policy statements by bodies such as the Irish College of General Practitioners and the Health Service Executive, nonetheless the legal shortcomings leave both a sense of insecurity, and real world difficulties for adolescents seeking to access to sexual and reproductive healthcare. (shrink)

Newton distinguishes between absolute and relative places. Both types of places endure through time and may be occupied by various objects at various times. But unlike absolute places, each relative place stands in fixed spatial relations with one or more reference objects. Relative plac-es with independent reference objects (e.g. a ship and the earth) may move relative to one another. Relative places, not absolute places, are used to locate objects and track their movements in common-sense reasoning and in disciplines such (...) as biology, engineering, and geology. The purpose of this paper is to develop a formal theory for reasoning about relative places and their changing relations to both other places and to material objects. (shrink)

An investigation of criminal attempts unearths some of the most fundamental, intriguing and perplexing questions about criminal law and its place in human action. When does attempting begin? What is the relationship between attempting and intending? Do we always attempt the possible and, if so, possible to whom? Does attempting involve action and does action involve attempting? Is my attempt fixed by me or can another perspective reveal what it is? How 'much' action is needed for an attempt, how 'much' (...) intention is needed and can these matters be decided categorically? Bebhinn Donnelly-Lazarov's answers to these questions will interest criminal law theorists, philosophers and lawyers or law reformers, who encounter the mixed practical and philosophical phenomenon of attempting. Inspired by G. E. M. Anscombe's philosophy, Part I examines attempting generally and its relationship with intention, action subjectivity, and possibility. From the conclusions reached, Part II proposes a specific theory of criminal attempts. (shrink)