Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

The literature on algorithmic fairness has examined exogenous sources of biases such as shortcomings in the data and structural injustices in society. It has also examined internal sources of bias as evidenced by a number of impossibility theorems showing that no algorithm can concurrently satisfy multiple criteria of fairness. This paper contributes to the literature stemming from the impossibility theorems by examining how informational richness affects the accuracy and fairness of predictive algorithms. With the aid of a computer simulation, we (...) show that informational richness is the engine that drives improvements in the performance of a predictive algorithm, in terms of both accuracy and fairness. The centrality of informational richness suggests that classification parity, a popular criterion of algorithmic fairness, should be given relatively little weight. But we caution that the centrality of informational richness should be taken with a grain of salt in light of practical limitations, in particular, the so-called bias-variance trade off. (shrink)

Palabras en memoria de Eduardo Bello pronunciadas en la sesión inaugural del V Congreso Internacional de la Sociedad Académica de Filosofía, celebrado del 2 al 4 de febrero de 2011 en La Laguna (Tenerife).

El objetivo propuesto en el siguiente trabajo es elucidar cómo desde la finitud de la existencia puede establecerse la problemática de la temporalidad dentro del entramado de pensamiento de Martin Heidegger. Para ello realizaremos un análisis de la conferencia de 1924 Der Begriff der Zeit, uno de los textos que allanan el camino a Sein und Zeit, en lugar de centrar la investigación en la considerada obra magna de Heidegger. Una reflexión acerca de este texto previo permitirá avanzar en el (...) análisis de la existencia al mostrar cómo el tiempo está arraigado en la existencia individual, no como un solipsismo, sino como apertura de posibilidades respecto del mundo (a la postre compartido con los otros). Una descripción fenomenológica de la muerte posibilitará la apertura al mundo, definiendo una temporalidad existencial que incluye no sólo al instante presente, sino también al pasado (concebido bajo la forma del «haber-sido») y al futuro. (shrink)

In recent years, animal welfare has become an important element of sustainable production that has evolved along with the transformation of animal production systems. Consumer attitudes towards farm animal welfare are changing around the world, especially at emerging markets of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Survey-based research on consumer attitudes towards farm animal welfare has increased. However, the geographical coverage of studies on consumer attitudes and perceptions about farm animal welfare has mostly been limited to Europe, and North America. Until (...) now, Latin American consumers’ attitudes towards animal welfare have not been well studied. Despite the fact that Mexico, Chile and Brazil belong to the same region, there are marked differences between these countries in terms of their economical and geographical characteristics among other factors. Those differences potentially have an impact on consumer attitudes towards animal welfare and livestock production systems in general. Given the evidence from the literature review, it seems advisable that Latin American producers and food industry who engage in animal welfare-enhancing practices should clearly label their products with information on the type of husbandry system to reach those consumers who want to make an informed choice. Therefore, there are some aspects that need to be studied and cannot be worked separately in order to promote and understand consumer attitudes towards dairy and beef systems, such as geography, economic development, and politics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Particularism vs. Universalism Modern vs. Traditional Philosophy and Language Conceptual Decolonization and the Question of Democracy and Consensus The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy Whither African Philosophy?

Many philosophers have pointed out that statistical evidence, or at least some forms of it, lack desirable epistemic or non-epistemic properties, and that this should make us wary of litigations in which the case against the defendant rests in whole or in part on statistical evidence. Others have responded that such broad reservations about statistical evidence are overly restrictive since appellate courts have expressed nuanced views about statistical evidence. In an effort to clarify and reconcile, I put forward an interpretive (...) analysis of why statistical evidence should raise concerns in some cases but not others. I argue that when there is a mismatch between the specificity of the evidence and the expected specificity of the accusation, statistical evidence—as any other kind of evidence—should be considered insufficient to sustain a conviction. I rely on different stylized court cases to illustrate the explanatory power of this analysis. (shrink)

Suppose one hundred prisoners are in a yard under the supervision of a guard, and at some point, ninety-nine of them collectively kill the guard. If, after the fact, a prisoner is picked at random and tried, the probability of his guilt is 99%. But despite the high probability, the statistical chances, by themselves, seem insufficient to justify a conviction. The question is why. Two arguments are offered. The first, decision-theoretic argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics (...) in the prisoner scenario is unacceptable so long as the goal of expected utility maximization is combined with fairness constraints. The second, risk-based argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics in the prisoner scenario lets the risk of mistaken conviction surge potentially too high. The same, by contrast, cannot be said of convictions solely based on DNA evidence or eyewitness testimony. A noteworthy feature of the two arguments in the paper is that they are not confined to criminal trials and can in fact be extended to civil trials. (shrink)

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...) forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

Smith argues that, unlike other forms of evidence, naked statistical evidence fails to satisfy normic support. This is his solution to the puzzles of statistical evidence in legal proof. This paper focuses on Smith’s claim that DNA evidence in cold-hit cases does not satisfy normic support. I argue that if this claim is correct, virtually no other form of evidence used at trial can satisfy normic support. This is troublesome. I discuss a few ways in which Smith can respond.

When the absence of an event causes some outcome, it is an instance of omissive causation. For instance, not eating lunch may cause you to be hungry. Recent psychological proposals concur that the mind represents causal relations, including omissive causal relations, through mental simulation, but they disagree on the form of that simulation. One theory states that people represent omissive causes as force vectors; another states that omissions are representations of contrasting counterfactual simulations; a third argues that people think about (...) omissions by representing sets of iconic possibilities – mental models – in a piecemeal fashion. In this paper, we tease apart the empirical predictions of the three theories and describe experiments that run counter to two of them. Experiments 1 and 2 show that reasoners can infer temporal relations from omissive causes – a pattern that contravenes the force theory. Experiment 3 asked participants to list the possibilities consistent with an omissive cause – it found that they tended to list particular privileged possibilities first, most often, and faster than alternative possibilities. The pattern is consistent with the model theory, but inconsistent with the contrast hypothesis. We marshal the evidence and explain why it helps to solve a long-standing debate about how the mind represents omissions. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 41-65, October 2021.

Abstract:Representations of the space of the village, the wilderness, and the overlapping edge of the forest between them often play a critical role in intercultural collisions between the “developing” world's spaces and pressures from the ‘developed’ world's activities within them. These collisions include land grabs and resource extraction, conversion of forest or wilderness to mechanized agriculture, uneven legal disputes over what constitutes ownership and use, and conservation efforts to reduce climate change or restore genetic biodiversity in forests. This study illuminates (...) how the physical and perceptual spaces of village, wilderness, and forest change, resist change, and are forced to change in three key domains: health (traditional medicine), food security (hunting, farming, and resource extraction in general), and use-ownership (as indigenous knowledge, occupancy, and access to land-use generally). Findings from the study disclose a need to include time (as the pace of change) whenever changed perceptions of space are proposed or occur. Recommendations include applying the criterion to strive always for the least disruptive (short-term) procedures for addressing a problem such that those outcomes achieve the most sustainable impacts over the long-term. (shrink)

En el último tercio del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX, la prensa se constituyó en el medio más eficaz de difusión y conocimiento de la moda. Las revistas dirigidas a la mujer se encargaron de divulgar la moda con el fin de orientar su participación en el consumo de la misma. Un buen ejemplo de ello nos lo ofrece la revista La mujer donde coexisten discursos paralelos y contradictorios sobre los efectos que la moda ocasiona en la mujer y (...) en la sociedad. La prensa destacó la importancia que la moda ejercía en la belleza de la mujer y al mismo tiempo se encargó de tranquilizar al patriarcado justificando que la belleza de la mujer debía ser exclusivamente para agradar al marido. Los recursos publicitarios; grabados, anuncios, figurines, láminas, etc., que utiliza la prensa de esta época, sirven para la construcción de un nuevo modelo de feminidad más acorde con determinados aspectos de la modernización. La publicidad sirve como aliciente para que la mujer burguesa adquiera mayor protagonismo en la concepción de lo moderno y dentro del contexto urbano que es donde se desarrolla el consumo de la moda. (shrink)

Herein we make a plea to machine ethicists for the inclusion of constraints on their theories consistent with empirical data on human moral cognition. As philosophers, we clearly lack widely accepted solutions to issues regarding the existence of free will, the nature of persons and firm conditions on moral agency/patienthood; all of which are indispensable concepts to be deployed by any machine able to make moral judgments. No agreement seems forthcoming on these matters, and we don’t hold out hope for (...) machines that can both always do the right thing (on some general ethic) and produce explanations for its behavior that would be understandable to a human confederate. Our tentative solution involves understanding the folk concepts associated with our moral intuitions regarding these matters, and how they might be dependent upon the nature of human cognitive architecture. It is in this spirit that we begin to explore the complexities inherent in human moral judgment via computational theories of the human cognitive architecture, rather than under the extreme constraints imposed by rational-actor models assumed throughout much of the literature on philosophical ethics. After discussing the various advantages and challenges of taking this particular perspective on the development of artificial moral agents, we computationally explore a case study of human intuitions about the self and causal responsibility. We hypothesize that a significant portion of the variance in reported intuitions for this case might be explained by appeal to an interplay between the human ability to mindread and to the way that knowledge is organized conceptually in the cognitive system. In the present paper, we build on a pre-existing computational model of mindreading (Bello et al. 2007) by adding constraints related to psychological distance (Trope and Liberman 2010), a well-established psychological theory of conceptual organization. Our initial results suggest that studies of folk concepts involved in moral intuitions lead us to an enriched understanding of cognitive architecture and a more systematic method for interpreting the data generated by such studies. (shrink)

According to the principle of epistemic closure, knowledge is closed under known implication. The principle is intuitive but it is problematic in some cases. Suppose you know you have hands and you know that ‘I have hands’ implies ‘I am not a brain-in-a-vat’. Does it follow that you know you are not a brain-in-a-vat? It seems not; it should not be so easy to refute skepticism. In this and similar cases, we are confronted with a puzzle: epistemic closure is an (...) intuitive principle, but at times, it does not seem that we know by implication. In response to this puzzle, the literature has been mostly polarized between those who are willing to do away with epistemic closure and those who think we cannot live without it. But there is a third way. Here I formulate a restricted version of the principle of epistemic closure. In the standard version, the principle can range over any proposition; in the restricted version, it can only range over those propositions that are within the limits of a given epistemic inquiry and that do not constitute the underlying assumptions of the inquiry. If we adopt the restricted version, I argue, we can preserve the advantages associated with closure, while at the same time avoiding the puzzle I’ve described. My discussion also yields an insight into the nature of knowledge. I argue that knowledge is best understood as a topic-restricted notion, and that such a conception is a natural one given our limited cognitive resources. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to explain the nature of evidential reasoning, the characteristic difficulties encountered, and the tools to address these difficulties. Our focus is on evidential reasoning in criminal cases. There is an extensive scholarly literature on these topics, and it is a secondary aim of the chapter to provide readers the means to find their way in historical and ongoing debates.

This paper explores the question of the meaning of life, not only from the perspective of its temporal unfolding from birth to death but also from the perspective of its own particular meaning and its final cause, to use Aristotelian categories. In order to discuss this argument I refer myself to Edith Stein to show how crucial moments of her own life give rise to important and de????ining philosophical positions that touch upon questions of personal identity, social and communal relations, (...) and a relationship with God. (shrink)

The essay offers a decolonial reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the ancient legendary Yorùbá African messenger and interpreter of the spiritual tradition of Ifá with the aim to address the problem of hegemonic languages (such as English and French) and epistemic bias that have affected the Yorùbá intellectual tradition. The essay argues that reflection on the deep history of Yorùbá and the applied philosophy of Ọ̀rúnmìlà can better clarify the problem of language and epistemic injustices that European modernity has (...) generated in modern Africa. The essay therefore explores what could be described as the interaction of nature-culture in the Yorùbá African intellectual tradition that continues to be silenced and distorted by imposed hegemonic languages and cultures. Through a new reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà within the context of Ifá, the essay highlights how the problem of language and epistemic injustices disrupts the continuity of inherited African philosophical and historical traditions in modern times. Ultimately, such reading aims at revealing the contribution of the Yorùbá intellectual tradition to the global philosophical and historical discourse. (shrink)

An eye-opener and a head-scratcher, this set of fifty exercices de style offers an oblique and learned introduction to a great classic of ludic literature dating from the twelfth century, the Maqamat of al-Hariri. Each of the fifty tales of the trickster Abu Zayid, some or perhaps all of which contain or are constituted by one or more formal restrictions, is here presented in the form of a pastiche of some familiar or exotic register of writing in English. We can (...) only admire Cooperson for having taught himself to channel Chaucer, Woolf, and Twain, to parrot Singaporean, Nigerian, and Indian English, to compose in dramatic form and in verse, and to riff off Austen as well as a dictionary of law.... What is frustrating to readers is that our translator-imposter does not let us play the game. He explains each exercise and justifies his approach to it in a prefatory note, then adds footnotes, a bibliography, and a glossary of the “dialect” chosen. We are not even allowed to play guess-the-author! The aim of the elaborate and scholarly apparatus attached to these imitative imitations is to give a hint—a necessarily and unapologetically misleading one—of the pleasure and value of the medieval Arabic for its first and later readers.The problem is that pastiche is not only an entertaining exercise. It typically serves a purpose located somewhere between mockery and homage, and sometimes plays both ends against the middle. Cooperson, however, is not mocking Dickens or Gibbon, even less the al-Hariri he clearly admires beyond all others. Consequently, the nonparticipant reader becomes ever more baffled as to what the game is really for. Surely it cannot be intended only to show us how clever and knowledgeable Mr. Cooperson is? Which he certainly is, but not beyond tripping over his own skipping rope. For example, the prisoner's constraint used in the middle of a pastiche of Dickens, when implemented in the way it was defined by its inventor Paul Fournel, excludes the letter z and also cannot accommodate the tilde of señor—and Dickens would have written bade for the past tense of bid. The more you read, the less you smile, the more you quibble as you are drawn into a surely unintended game of spot-the-blooper.It takes genius to write like someone else, which is why the people who get away with it for real use a battery of extratextual devices to deceive (think of Guilleragues, Ossian, Chatterton, Kuzma Proutkov, Romain Gary... ). Cooperson is not seeking to deceive (yet how can a pastiche not gesture toward deception?), but he is not actually offering fifty linked stories by fifty different hands either. What he has produced with the help of his distinguished préfacier, two editors, and a bevy of consultants is a curiously unidentifiable literary object, and quite possibly the only one of its kind.Two statements made by the translator in his introduction disturb me. He says he avoided using most twentieth-century literary models and references in order not to run into copyright issues. This is a declaration of submission to the Copyright Monster invented and unleashed by publishers in flagrant disregard of the laws of the UK, the US, and the EU, all of which allow parody and pastiche without permission of the copyright holder. Second, he “takes seriously the argument that privileged users of Standard English have no business imitating... the speech varieties associated with less privileged communities.” In all times other than our own, the privileged did not deign to use “less privileged” forms of speech (unless they were Victor Hugo), but if now they do not even dare, we can still guess what will happen. The less privileged will seek to use more privileged forms of speech, just as Anglo-Saxon serfs aped Norman French until they ended up speaking English. More recently, wealthy corporations have sought to own whole programming languages by extending the reach of copyright law; perhaps “less privileged communities” are now about to use similar weapons to protect their linguistic turf. We must object as noisily as we can to attempts to enclose public goods by corporations, by self-defining communities, or by any other entities. We would all be the poorer if they should ever succeed. (shrink)

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word (...) for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction. (shrink)

The issue of interpretation is one of the major themes in the study of law and legal practices. Nonetheless, while legal interpretation plays a crucial role in the study of law, scholars have yet to reach an agreement about its nature and status in the discipline. One of the most prolific legal philosophers who is deeply engaged in the discourse of this issue is Ronald Dworkin. This article will examine his views on law as an interpretation. The constructive interpretation model (...) that Dworkin develops has posed a serious challenge for analytical jurisprudence in general, and especially, for legal positivism. The challenge is substantive and methodological; substantive, in the sense that it seeks to radically criticize a sharp separation between law and morality as prevalent in legal positivism, and methodological in the sense that it seeks to put together the analysis of legal concepts with the interpretation of law as it is regarded from the perspective of particular legal cases. Through the concept of law as interpretation, Dworkin wishes to formulate his own understanding of law as a coherent system of legal principles. Keywords: Ronald Dworkin, constructive interpretation model, external and internal skepticism, theory of law, rights thesis, difficult cases. Abstrak: Persoalan interpretasi merupakan salah satu tema besar dalam studi hukum dan praktik hukum. Kendati demikian, sementara interpretasi hukum memainkan peran krusial dalam studi hukum, para pakar masih belum sepakat mengenai hakikat dan kedudukannya dalam disiplin ilmu tersebut. Salah seorang ahli filsafat hukum yang sangat produktif dan sangat serius menggeluti persoalan ini adalah Ronald Dworkin. Artikel ini akan mengkaji pandangan Dworkin tentang hukum sabagai sebuah interpretasi. Model interpretasi konstruktif yang dikembangkan oleh Dworkin merupakan tantangan yang sangat serius bagi yurisprudensi analitis pada umumnya, dan khususnya bagi positivisme hukum. Tantangan ini bersifat substantif dan metodologis. Bersifat substantif dalam arti bahwa Dworkin mengkritik secara radikal pemisahan yang begitu tajam antara hukum dan moralitas seperti lazim terjadi dalam positivisme hukum. Tantangan ini juga bersifat metodologis dalam arti bahwa tantangan tersebut berkehendak menyatukan analisis atas konsep hukum dengan interpretasi terhadapnya, dipandang dari perspektif kasus-kasus hukum partikular. Melalui konsep hukum sebagai interpretasi, Dworkin ingin memformulasikan pemahamannya tentang hukum sebagai sebuah sistem prinsip-prinsip hukum yang koheren. Kata-kata kunci: Ronald Dworkin, model interpretasi konstruktif, skeptisisme eksternal dan internal, teori hukum, tesis hak, kasus-kasus sulit. (shrink)