Many research ethics guidelines now oblige researchers to offer research participants the results of research in which they participated. This practice is intended to uphold respect for persons and ensure that participants are not treated as mere means to an end. Yet some scholars have begun to question a generalised duty to disclose research results, highlighting the potential harms arising from disclosure and questioning the ethical justification for a duty to disclose, especially with respect to individual results. In support of (...) this view, we argue that current rationales for a duty of disclosure do not form an adequate basis for an ethical imperative. We review policy guidance and scholarly commentary regarding the duty to communicate the results of biomedical, epidemiological and genetic research to research participants and show that there is wide variation in opinion regarding what should be disclosed and under what circumstance. Moreover, we argue that there is fundamental confusion about the notion of “research results,” specifically regarding three core concepts: the distinction between aggregate and individual results, amongst different types of research, and across different degrees of result veracity. Even where policy guidance and scholarly commentary have been most forceful in support of an ethical imperative to disclose research results, ambiguity regarding what is to be disclosed confounds ethical action. (shrink)

“The forms of thought are first set out and stored in human language,” we read in the preface to the second edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Man thinks through language, and everything he “transforms into language and expresses in it contains a category, whether concealed, mixed, or well defined”. Language, then, harbors thought categories. There is a philosophy of language, but there is also a philosophy implied in language. How is this supposed to work? More specifically, how is this (...) supposed to work in Hegel’s own use of language?This paper is an attempt to give a simple answer to this question. There have been scholarly attempts to tie Hegel’s philosophy to his use of language.1 This paper... (shrink)

During the early 19th century, a peculiarly systematic way of organizing books emerged in Germany. This systematization, which purported to be a rational organization of subject matter, was an outgrowth of the philosophy of Hegel. This article attempts to outline Hegel's organizational practice. It argues that Hegel's encyclopedia was a reaction against the Enlightenment encyclopedia, and that it attempted to restore the systematic mindset of pre-modern reference books. Yet it did this, not in a straightforward fashion, but by developing a (...) method for organizing material that both stresses the interconnectedness of knowledge and promises to be highly scalable. In its attempt to trace the Hegelian organizational method, this article revisits and calls attention to a forgotten work in Hegel scholarship by Michael John Petry, who was the first writer to seriously stress the importance of classification in Hegel's work. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that Hegelianism and information organization can be brought into fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue. (shrink)

The intensive process of differentiation of knowledge that has in the past decade come to include philosophy has had the results, inter alia, that ethics, esthetics, and empirical sociology have undergone a kind of secondary "branching off" from the philosophy of society and culture . On the level of teaching this had the consequence that a department of esthetics and ethics was carved out of the department of historical materialism at the Philosophical Faculty of Moscow University, and was subsequently divided (...) into departments of esthetics and ethics, respectively. It was thus that the independent department of ethics made its appearance for the first time in the history of Moscow University. This occurred in 1969, and recently the department of Marxist- Leninist ethics marked its modest first decade. (shrink)

In this essay we argue that the current social and ethical structure in the Open Source Software Community stem from its roots in academia. The individual developers experience a level of autonomy similar to that of a faculty member. Furthermore, we assert that the Open Source Software Community’s social structure demands benevolent leadership. We argue that it is difficult to pass off low quality open source software as high quality software and that the Open Source development model offers strong accountability. (...) Finally, we argue that Open Source Software introduces ethical challenges for universities and the software development community. (shrink)

In recent writing on the theory of knowledge a distinction has been drawn between ‘the language of appearing’ and ‘the sense-datum language’. The aim of this paper is to suggest that consideration of that distinction and of what Kant’s attitude toward it would have been can shed light on two otherwise-puzzling aspects of his doctrine in the Critique of Pure Reason: his adamant conviction that there are things-in-themselves, and his confidence that the Antinomies are resolved once we admit the transcendental (...) ideality of space and time. (shrink)