This paper is reprinted in the book Machine Ethics, eds. M. Anderson and S. Anderson, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Can computer systems ever be considered moral agents? This paper considers two factors that are explored in the recent philosophical literature. First, there are the important domains in which computers are allowed to act, made possible by their greater functional capacities. Second, there is the claim that these functional capacities appear to embody relevant human abilities, such as autonomy and responsibility. I argue that neither the first (Domain-Function) factor nor the second (Simulacrum) factor gets at the central issue in (...) the case for computer moral agency: whether they can have the kinds of intentional states that cause their decisions and actions. I give an account that builds on traditional action theory and allows us to conceive of computers as genuine moral agents in virtue of their own causally efficacious intentional states. These states can cause harm or benefit to moral patients, but do not depend on computer consciousness or intelligence. (shrink)

This book features papers from CEPE-IACAP 2015, a joint international conference focused on the philosophy of computing. Inside, readers will discover essays that explore current issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, and philosophy of science from the lens of computation. Coverage also examines applied issues related to ethical, social, and political interest. -/- The contributors first explore how computation has changed philosophical inquiry. Computers are now capable of joining humans in exploring foundational issues. Thus, we can ponder machine-generated explanation, (...) thought, agency, and other quite fascinating concepts. The papers are also concerned with normative aspects of the computer and information technology revolution. They examine technology-specific analyses of key challenges, from Big Data to autonomous robots to expert systems for infrastructure control and financial services. -/- The virtue of a collection that ranges over philosophical questions, such as this one does, lies in the prospects for a more integrated understanding of issues. These are early days in the partnership between philosophy and information technology. Philosophers and researchers are still sorting out many foundational issues. They will need to deploy all of the tools of philosophy to establish this foundation. This volume admirably showcases those tools in the hands of some excellent scholars. -/- . (shrink)

Approaches to programming ethical behavior for computer systems face challenges that are both technical and philosophical in nature. In response, an incrementalist account of machine ethics is developed: a successive adaptation of programmed constraints to new, morally relevant abilities in computers. This approach allows progress under conditions of limited knowledge in both ethics and computer systems engineering and suggests reasons that we can circumvent broader philosophical questions about computer intelligence and autonomy.

In this paper, we focus attention on the role of computer system complexity in ascribing responsibility. We begin by introducing the notion of technological moral action (TMA). TMA is carried out by the combination of a computer system user, a system designer (developers, programmers, and testers), and a computer system (hardware and software). We discuss three sometimes overlapping types of responsibility: causal responsibility, moral responsibility, and role responsibility. Our analysis is informed by the well-known accounts provided by Hart and Hart (...) and Honoré. While these accounts are helpful, they have misled philosophers and others by presupposing that responsibility can be ascribed in all cases of action simply by paying attention to the free and intended actions of human beings. Such accounts neglect the part played by technology in ascriptions of responsibility in cases of moral action with technology. For both moral and role responsibility, we argue that ascriptions of both causal and role responsibility depend on seeing action as complex in the sense described by TMA. We conclude by showing how our analysis enriches moral discourse about responsibility for TMA. (shrink)

Rule-based ethical theories like Kant's appear to be promising for machine ethics because of the computational structure of their judgments. On one formalist interpretation of Kant's categorical imperative, for instance, a machine could place prospective actions into the traditional deontic categories (forbidden, permissible, obligatory) by a simple consistency test on the maxim of action. We might enhance this test by adding a declarative set of subsidiary maxims and other "buttressing" rules. The ethical judgment is then an outcome of the consistency (...) test. While this kind of test can generate results, it may be vacuous in the sense that it would do no more than forbid obviously contradictory maxims of action. It is also possible that the kind of inference in such a rule-based system may be non-monotonic. I discuss these challenges to a rule-based machine ethics, starting from the framework of Kantian ethics. (shrink)

Modern life is full of examples of environmentally-mediated “group harms” – what Derek Parfit describes as harms produced by “what we all do together.” Typically, the harms are unintended and arise from the uncoordinated actions of many individuals. Their actions ordinarily are not inherently wrong, no one’s action causes harm to an identifiable individual, and prevention of the expected harm is unlikely unless all, or nearly everyone, reduce or cease to engage in activities that collectively and cumulatively result in harm. (...) Unless the individual’s action is likely to make a difference to the outcome, it is often argued that it is not clear what, if anything, makes it wrong or a breach of personal moral responsibility. Activities that result in climate change and agricultural practices commonly employed within the global system of food production are prominent examples. There are several well-known strategies for dealing with such cases, but often they rest on idealized assumptions regarding the impact that one individual can have, provide answers suitable only in counterfactual circumstances, or rely on the kinds of principles of justice that make it difficult to identify clearly and address directly many important moral problems. The task of this chapter is to examine these strategies and propose alternative freestanding practical principles that can guide our efforts to address the world as we find it and explain the sense of wrongness individuals often experience. (shrink)

The coming decades will present an immense challenge for the planet: sustainably feeding nearly ten billion people that are expected to be alive by 2050. This is no small task, and one that intersects with climate change, geopolitics, the increased globalization of agricultural markets, and the emergence of new technologies. The world faces a challenge of increased demand, propelled by an expanding world population and a global shift in dietary patterns toward more resource-intensive foods. Moreover, changes in demand occur in (...) the context of declining soil fertility and freshwater availability, agriculture's growing contribution to water pollution and climate change, and the emerging threats to agricultural productivity caused by climate disruption. (shrink)

In a letter to M. Coray, Thomas Jefferson distinguished two distinct notions of political authority. The first was that of ancient Greece, which was characterized by “slavery” and the subjection of the population. Jefferson’s characterization was astute insofar as Aristotle regarded some groups as privileged to rule “by nature,” while all other hereditary groups were fit only to be ruled. The second type, referring to governments of “the present age,” rejected that standard in favor of equality and the promotion of (...) the people’s “happiness.” Unexpectedly, the dichotomy between hereditary privilege systems and egalitarian service to the people maps onto the contrast between “feudal” and “bureaucratic” systems in late imperial Chinese theory. In other words, this insight into the nature of authority was known to theorists both in China and in the “West,” suggesting that it captures something fundamental about the nature of “authority.” This essay probes the dichotomy in two ways, theoretical and historical. In theory, “feudal” systems, east and west, seem to be informed by a substance metaphor, and so both Aristotle and his early modern followers conflated authority with social status, and imagined the latter as a hereditary, noble substance such as gold. In this model, social groups are necessarily ranked, with gold being nobler, for instance, than brass. Because authority inheres in the person as a substance, authority is personalistic. In other words, there is no clear, external standard for checking abuses of power. Classical Chinese bureaucratic theory imagined authority as a tally. In that case, an officer’s performance had to match the office’s public charge. Because the assignment of office is merit-based, tally systems tend to be more egalitarian. Moreover, they naturally provide an external standard for checking abuse, namely, the officer’s effect on the people’s “happiness.” Historically, these two paradigms clashed in England and Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when translations of Chinese texts became available. Using translingual analysis, this essay traces the transformation of authority from a substance model to a tally model in the thinking of several Enlightenment writers, culminating in the writings of Thomas Jefferson. (shrink)

: In its response to pressures to rationalize health care resource allocation, the American health care system has embraced managed care without concurrent comprehensive health care reform, either in the form of the centralized tax-based systems found in Europe and Canada or that of the Clinton reform plan. What survives is managed care without managed competition, employer mandates, or universal access. Two problems inherent in the incentive structure of managed care plans developed in the absence of comprehensive health care (...) reform work against the public interest. First, sacrifices in terms of medical innovation and quality of care may not be offset by greater equity in the distribution of health care. Second, such managed care plans fail to address the need for long-term accountability. (shrink)

In his sociological works Pareto developed a theory of cyclical social change within the general equilibrium framework. Building on an earlier propositional formalization, we translate Pareto's theory into a series of simultaneous equations and simulate the equation system. The dynamic behavior of the simulation is consistent with Pareto's predictions and demonstrates the internal logic of the theory.

Although numerical systems have been regarded as static models of a symbolic system and treated as mythological behavior, it is postulated that these systems are more profitably analyzed as dynamic models, better understood as ritual behavior. As ritual, numerical systems, limited in number and expressive of rhythmicity, contribute to the biogenetic structuralist's notion of “equilibration” between the central nervous system and the environment.The relationship between concrete and abstract numeration is also examined, showing that counting behavior, requiring asymmetrical (...) use of the hands, may contribute to understanding the relationships between handedness and brain hemisphericity, as well as enumeration and memorization. (shrink)

The minimum-uncertainty states for systems with many degrees of freedom are investigated. The limiting situation, relevant to the electromagnetic field, is discussed and it is pointed out that the states that minimize Δp Δq do not tend to the coherent states. These latter, including the vacuum state, are minimum-uncertainty states for the transverse electric and magnetic fields. In an appendix a direct method to obtain the wave functional for the vacuum is presented.

This paper reports research on the influence of corporate and individual characteristics on managers'' social orientation in Germany. The results indicate that mid-level managers expressed a significantly lower social orientation than low-level managers, and that job activity did not impact social orientation. Female respondents expressed a higher social orientation than male respondents. No impact of the political system origin (former East Germany versus former West Germany) on social orientation was shown. Overall, corporate position had a significantly higher impact on social (...) orientation than did the characteristics of the individuals surveyed. (shrink)

It is critical to remember details about meetings with healthcare providers. Forgetting could result in inadequate knowledge about ones' health, non-adherence with treatments, and poorer health outcomes. Hearing the health care provider plays a crucial role in consolidating information for recall. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has meant a rapid transition to videoconference-based medicine, here described as telehealth. When using telehealth speech must be filtered and compressed, and research has shown that degraded speech is more challenging to remember. Here we present (...) preliminary results from a study that compared memory for health information provided in-person to telehealth. The data collection for this study was stopped due to the pandemic, but the preliminary results are interesting because the pandemic forced a rapid transition to telehealth. To examine a potential memory deficit for health information provided through telehealth, we presented older and younger adults with instructions on how to use two medical devices. One set of instructions was presented in-person, and the other through telehealth. Participants were asked to recall the instructions immediately after the session, and again after a 1-week delay. Overall, the number of details recalled was significantly lower when instructions were provided by telehealth, both immediately after the session and after a 1-week delay. It is likely that a mix of technological and communication strategies by the healthcare provider could reduce this telehealth memory deficit. Given the rapid transition to telehealth due to COVID-19, highlighting this deficit and providing potential solutions are timely and of utmost importance. (shrink)

New biotechnologies have the potential to both dramatically improve human well-being and dramatically widen inequalities in well-being. This paper addresses a question that lies squarely on the fault line of these two claims: When as a matter of justice are societies obligated to include a new biotechnology in a national healthcare system? This question is approached from the standpoint of a twin aim theory of justice, in which social structures, including nation-states, have double-barreled theoretical objectives with regard to human well-being. (...) The first aim is to achieve a sufficient level of well-being in each of six core dimensions. In the special case of healthcare systems, this aim is focally but not exclusively attentive to achieving health sufficiency as one of the core dimensions. The second aim is to combat the emergence and persistence of densely woven patterns of systematic disadvantage that tend to undermine the achievement of a sufficient level of health and the other core elements of well-being of some persons and groups. Judgments about entitlements to health related resources, including new biotechnologies, are made in light of a threshold notion of health sufficiency. What is enough or sufficient health? The answer that is defended here is that sufficient health is enough health for a decent human life, understood as enough health to live a full life course without preventable, significant functional disability or decrement in health, or treatable pain or suffering. When a state must include a new biotechnology in its national healthcare system is also influenced by ancillary concerns about the connection between health and other core dimensions of well-being. What counts as a significant functional impairment or health decrement is thus explicated, in part, in relation to the theory’s sufficiency aim for the other essential dimensions of well-being, and thus for a decent life, overall. Those elements of health that play a critical role in the experience of sufficient reasoning, affiliation, security, respect and self determination are especially important; any loss of health function or capacity that threatens the individual’s prospects for sufficiency in these other dimensions, including the relational egalitiarian concerns they entail, constitutes a significant functional impairment. Within national borders, individuals are thus entitled to those health-related goods and services that are essential for a sufficiency of each of the dimensions of well-being; with regard to self determination and respect, what is sufficient by way of guaranteed access to specific goods and services is going to depend on the implications of such access for where an individual stands in relation to her co-nationals. The content of any entitlement to health-related goods and services is also necessarily dynamic. What can be done for health and the other core dimensions of well-being as a function of technological innovation and diffusion is in constant flux. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this analysis for the conditions under which states are obligated to include access in their healthcare systems to one biotechnology, deep brain stimulation. (shrink)

Throughout the history ofthe U.S. national park system, park advocates and managers have changed both acquisition priorities and internal management policies. The park movement began with the establishment of large, spectacular natural areas, primarily in the West. As the movement developed there was more emphasis on the biological, on recreation, and on parks near population centers. GraduaIly, scenic wonders and uniqueness have become less necessary to designation and the types of sites eligible have diversified. Early managers treated the parks as (...) relatively unchanging, threatenedby little other than human vandalism. Initially managers removed “bad” animals, such as wolves, and suppressed disturbances, such as fire. Modem management values processes as weIl as objects and recognizes change and disturbance as integral to park maintanence. A conversion to an ecosystem mode of management does not answer all questions concerning values, however, and may present some disadvantages, such as a tendency to treat nature as aseries of functions and energy equations, thus weakening aesthetic values. (shrink)

Drawing from a four-year study of US science institutions that support biological control of arthropods, this article examines the decline in biological control institutional capacity in California within the context of both declining public interest science and declining agricultural research activism. After explaining how debates over the public interest character of biological control science have shaped institutions in California, we use scientometric methods to assess the present status and trends in biological control programs within both the University of California Land (...) Grant System and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. We present available data on the number of scientific positions and the types of positions to discuss the impact on the amount of public interest research on biological control in California. We use sociograms to depict how biological control science networks have been reconfigured over time. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that the following factors contributed to the decline of biological control science in California over the 45-year period analyzed: (1) the institutional reconfiguration of university research priorities; (2) the fraying networks within and increasing specialization of biological control science; (3) the transformation of the social organization of the life science work, including privatization; and (4) the abandonment of this thematic area by civil society activist groups. This broad array of forces suggests that biological control, as a public interest science, will require a deliberate intervention, based on advocacy of clear public interest criteria. (shrink)

Although the literature has focused on individual differences in authenticity, recent findings suggest that authenticity is sensitive to context; that is, it is also a state. We extended this perspective by examining whether incidental affect influences authenticity. In three experiments, participants felt more authentic when in a relatively positive than negative mood. The causal role of affect in authenticity was consistent across a diverse set of mood inductions, including explicit (Experiments 1 and 3) and implicit (Experiment 2) methods. The link (...) between incidental affect and state authenticity was not moderated by ability to down-regulate negative affect (Experiments 1 and 3) nor was it explained by negative mood increasing private self-consciousness or decreasing access to the self system (Experiment 3). The results indicate that mood is used as information to assess one's sense of authenticity. (shrink)

The safety and stability of the power supply system are affected by some faults that often occur in power system. To solve this problem, a criterion algorithm based on the chaotic neural network and a fault detection algorithm based on discrete wavelet transform are proposed in this paper. MATLAB/Simulink is used to establish the system model to output fault signals and travelling wave signals. Db4 wavelet decomposes the travelling wave signals into detail signals and approximate signals, and these (...) signals are combined with the two-terminal travelling wave location method to achieve fault location. And the wavelet detail coefficients are extracted to input to the proposed chaotic neural network. The results show that the criterion algorithm can effectively determine whether there are faults in the power system, the fault detection algorithm has the capabilities of locating the system faults accurately, and both algorithms are not affected by fault type, fault location, fault initial angle, and transition resistance. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the problem of load frequency control and sensor fault-tolerant control in the multiarea power grid. To solve these problems, a sliding mode control strategy based on an interval observer is designed. First, an interval observer is designed to obtain the boundary estimation information of the system state online, which is used to reconstruct the load disturbance online. Based on the reconstructed values, an integral sliding mode controller is designed to keep the system frequency stable when (...) the load is disturbed. Then, sensor fault is diagnosed by interval residual. An augmented observer is designed to estimate sensor fault online by equivalent transformation, and the sensor fault is compensated by the fault estimation to reduce the influence of fault on system performance and ensure the reliable and stable operation of the power system. The simulation results show the superiority of the proposed control strategy. (shrink)

Nowadays, the power systems are getting more and more complicated because of the delays introduced by the communication networks. The existence of the delays usually leads to the degradation and/or instability of power system performance. On account of this point, the traditional load frequency control approach for power system sketches a destabilizing impact and an unacceptable system performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a new LFC based on adaptive integral second-order sliding mode control approach for the large-scale (...) power system with communication delays. First, a new linear matrix inequality is derived to ensure the stability of whole power systems using Lyapunov stability theory. Second, an AISOSMC law is designed to ensure the finite time reachability of the system states. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the AISOSMC is designed for LFC of the LSPSwCD. In addition, the report of testing results presents that the suggested LFC based on AISOSMC can not only decrease effectively the frequency variation but also make successfully less in mount of power oscillation/fluctuation in tie-line exchange. (shrink)

Automatic Generation Control in modern power systems is getting complex, due to intermittency in the output power of multiple sources along with considerable digressions in the loads and system parameters. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to calculate Power System Restoration Indices of a 2-area thermal-hydro restructured power system. This study also highlights the necessary ancillary service requirements for the system under a deregulated environment to cater to large-scale power failures and (...) entire system outages. An abrupt change in consumer load demands and disturbances in any control region of a multiarea system causes severe fluctuations in frequency and interarea power exchanges. However, simple Proportional and Integral controllers are most prevalent in the literature to effectively resolve AGC issues, while its integral gain is smaller due to the larger overshoot in transient performance. Therefore, an attempt has been made with a novel control strategy, known as the pseudoderivative feedforward with feedback controller, is developed to keep the interarea power exchanges and the frequency to the specified limits after load changes. A PDFF controller is designed and implemented using the flower pollination algorithm to obtain optimal dynamic performance for different types of potential power flows in a restructured power system under investigation. The proposed PDFF controller localizes the zero at an optimal place that reduces the rise time of the step-response to reduce the excessive overshoot and gives much better dynamic performances as compared to the PI control structure. The Integral Square Error is considered as a performance criterion to derive the optimized gain of the PDFF control structure using FPA. Different PSRI are computed based on the transient response of the 2-area deregulated multisource system and different restoration measures to be taken are also discussed. The simulation results clearly show that the proposed approach is very powerful in decreasing the frequency and tie-power digressions under different load perturbations. (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of a robust sampled-data H ∞ load frequency control scheme for power systems with randomly occurring time-varying delays. By using the input-delay technique, the sampled-data LFC model is reformulated as a continuous time-delay representation. Then, Bernoulli-distributed white noise sequences are used to describe randomly occurring time-varying delays in the sampled-data LFC model. Some less conservative conditions are achieved by utilizing the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and employing Jensen inequality and reciprocal convex combination lemma (...) to ensure the considered power system has mean-square asymptotic stability under the designed control scheme. The derived results are based on linear matrix inequalities that can readily be solved using the MATLAB LMI toolbox. The criteria obtained are used to analyze the upper bounds for time delays, and a comparison study to validate the efficacy of the presented method is presented. (shrink)

Security issue against different attacks is the core topic of cyberphysical systems. In this paper, optimal control theory, reinforcement learning, and neural networks are integrated to provide a brief overview of optimal robust control strategies for a benchmark power system. First, the benchmark power system models with actuator and sensor attacks are considered. Second, we investigate the optimal control issue for the nominal system and review the state-of-the-art RL methods along with the NN implementation. Third, we propose (...) several robust control strategies for different types of cyberphysical attacks via the optimal control design, and stability proofs are derived through Lyapunov theory. Furthermore, the stability analysis with the NN approximation error, which is rarely discussed in the previous works, is studied in this paper. Finally, two different simulation examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. (shrink)

Adaptive dynamic programming, which belongs to the field of computational intelligence, is a powerful tool to address optimal control problems. To overcome the bottleneck of solving Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equations, several state-of-the-art ADP approaches are reviewed in this paper. First, two model-based offline iterative ADP methods including policy iteration and value iteration are given, and their respective advantages and shortcomings are discussed in detail. Second, the multistep heuristic dynamic programming method is introduced, which avoids the requirement of initial admissible control and achieves (...) fast convergence. This method successfully utilizes the advantages of PI and VI and overcomes their drawbacks at the same time. Finally, the discrete-time optimal control strategy is tested on a power system. (shrink)

This paper investigates a distributed energy management strategy for the port power system under false data injection attacks. The attacker can tamper with the interaction information of energy equipment, penetrate the boundary between port information system and port power system, and cause serious operation failure of port energy equipment. Firstly, a hierarchical topology is proposed to allocate the security resources of the port power system. Secondly, by reconstructing the topological structure of the port information system, the robustness (...) of the information system is improved, and the impact of false data injection attacks on the port power system is reduced, which realizes secure distributed energy management of the port power system. Finally, the simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, and the defense capability of the port power system is improved. (shrink)

This article presents a novel control approach, hybrid neuro-fuzzy, for the load frequency control of a four-area interconnected power system. The advantage of this controller is that it can handle nonlinearities, and at the same time, it is faster than other existing controllers. The effectiveness of the proposed controller in increasing the damping of local and inter-area modes of oscillation is demonstrated in a four-area interconnected power system. Areas 1 and 2 consist of a thermal reheat power (...) plant, whereas Areas 3 and 4 consist of a hydropower plant. Performance evaluation is carried out by using fuzzy, artificial neural network, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, and conventional proportional and integral control approaches. Four different models with different controllers are developed and simulated, and performance evaluations are carried out with said controllers. The result shows that the intelligent HNF controller has improved dynamic response and is at the same time faster than ANN, fuzzy, and conventional PI controllers. (shrink)