Software users have different sets of personal values, such as benevolence, self-direction, and tradition. Among other factors, these personal values influence users’ emotions, preferences, motivations, and ways of performing tasks—and hence, information needs. Studies of user acceptance indicate that personal traits like values and related soft issues are important for the user’s approval of software. If a user’s dominant personal value were known, software could automatically show an interface variant which offers information and functionality that best matches his or her (...) dominant value. A user’s dominant personal value is the one that most strongly influences his or her attitudes and behaviors. However, existing methods for measuring a user’s values are work intensive and/or interfere with the user’s privacy needs. If interface tailoring for very large groups of users is planned, value approximation has to be achieved on a large scale to assign individualized software to all users of the software. Our work focuses on approximating the dominant values of a user with less effort and less impact on privacy. Instead of probing for a user’s values directly, we explore the potential of approximating these values based on the user’s preferences for key tasks. Producing tailored versions of software is a separate topic not in the focus here. In this paper we rather describe a method to identify user values from task preferences and an empirical study of applying parts of this method. We are proposing the method in this paper for the first time except for a preliminary version orally presented at a workshop. The method consists of a research process and an application process. In the research process a researcher has to identify key tasks occurring in a context under investigation which have a relationship to personal values. These key tasks can be used in the application process to approximate the dominant values of new users in a similar context. In this empirical study we show that the research process of our method allows us to determine key tasks which approximate values in the shared context of nursing. The majority of the nurses were found to have one of the three following dominant values: benevolence, self-direction, or hedonism. Data confirmed common expectations: that nurses with the value of benevolence, when compared to all other nurses, had a higher preference for tasks which helped people immediately or improved their circumstances of the treatment. In relation to all other nurses, participants with self-direction disliked tasks which affected their personal freedom, and users with hedonism had a lower preference for tasks which involved physical work and preferred tasks which promised gratification. Our findings advance measurement of personal values in large user groups by asking questions with less privacy concern. However, the method requires substantial efforts during the initial research process to prepare such measurements. Future work includes replicating our method in other contexts and identifying value-dependent tasks for users with other values than the three values our empirical study mainly focused on. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guilt History:Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion"Werner Hamacher (bio)Translated by Kirk Wetters (bio)History as Exchange EconomySince history cannot be conceived as a chain of events produced by mechanical causation, it must be thought of as a connection between occurrences that meets at least two conditions: first that it admit indeterminacy and thus freedom, and second that it nonetheless be demonstrable in determinate occurrences and in the distinct form of their (...) coherence. Relations can thus be called historical and can be recognized as historical only if they are determined by neither necessity nor chance, and if their causality is of a different order than the mechanical. The temporal structure of history can therefore be characterized on the one hand by the distinct connection of its elements—and on the other hand by the dissolution of all connections that do not assist these elements in achieving their independence.A temporal nexus that clearly does not satisfy these conflicting requirements has been characterized in one of the oldest texts of occidental philosophy as the time of guilt. According to the sentence of Anaximander (from about 500 BC), handed down by Simplicius in his commentary (530 AD) on Aristotle's Physics, the origin and end of all things is subordinated to the law of necessity (katà tó kreòn). "They must pay penance and be judged for their injustice, according to the order of time (katà tèn tou chrónou táxin)"—so the fragment reads in the translation offered by Nietzsche in his treatise "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks." According to Anaximander, the sequence of time orders the rise and fall of all things and orders them in accordance with the law of guilt and punishment so that becoming (génesis) is a guilt (adikía) that must be expiated in perishing. Time and more precisely its táxis, the positing of time, is thought in Anaximander's sentence as an order of guilt and retribution, debt and payback. It is a time of economy in the sense that it is the time of law—and precisely a law that is valid for all beings, a táxis, a decree, an ordinance and an ordering—in which the unavoidable incurring of guilt is atoned in an equivalent penance that is just as unavoidable. The strict coherence of guilt and penance is ascertained by the principle of their equivalence. Time is therefore conceived here as a double process of coming into being and perishing, [End Page 81] a process that occurs in such a way that the genesis is erased in its passing away—so that time is thus erased by time itself.In Anaximander's sentence, however, time is not only the double-process of coming into being and passing away, it is—as a táxis—the common and constantly enduring medium of the exchange of the contrary but equivalent motions of coming into being and perishing. It is the time of the quid pro quo of everything that is generated and passes away within time. Its measure is a justice that represents itself as a táxis and thereby as the positing and the law of all becoming and vanishing, the law of physis and its demise as an onto-economic law. This taxiological order of time places every realm of the natural and human world under a law of substitution without exception; this also allows ethical, juridical, and economic concepts to substitute for one another within this order. The ethical dimension of justice, thus circumscribed by the order of time, is reduced to the juridical dimension of the decree, and both now define themselves according to the calculus of "an exchange economy in an eternally unchanging household of nature."1 It can only, however, be a matter of an ethics of time to the extent that this ethics, already juridified and economized, is subordinated to the schema of exchange, trade, and the equivalence of guilt and retribution. The time of history, ethical time, is thus interpreted in Anaximander's sentence as a normative time of inculpation and expiation. Whatever enters this táxis of time is thereby already guilty and can... (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 15-20, January/February 2022.

In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

This article examines the legitimacy attached to different types of multi-stakeholder data partnerships occurring in the context of sustainable development. We develop a framework to assess the democratic legitimacy of two types of data partnerships: open data partnerships and closed data partnerships. Our framework specifies criteria for assessing the legitimacy of relevant partnerships with regard to their input legitimacy as well as their output legitimacy. We demonstrate which particular characteristics of open and closed partnerships can be expected to influence an (...) analysis of their input and output legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper is an exposition and evaluation of the Agustín Rayo's views about the epistemology and metaphysics of mathematics, as they are presented in his book The Construction of Logical Space.

This volume is a study of the influence of Timaeus on the development of Western cosmology in three axial periods of European culture: Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

After a wave of breakthroughs in image‐based medical diagnostics and risk prediction models, machine learning (ML) has turned into a normal science. However, prominent researchers are claiming that another paradigm shift in medical ML is imminent—due to most recent staggering successes of large language models—from single‐purpose applications toward generalist models, driven by natural language. This article investigates the implications of this paradigm shift for the ethical debate. Focusing on issues like trust, transparency, threats of patient autonomy, responsibility issues in the (...) collaboration of clinicians and ML models, fairness, and privacy, it will be argued that the main problems will be continuous with the current debate. However, due to functioning of large language models, the complexity of all these problems increases. In addition, the article discusses some profound challenges for the clinical evaluation of large language models and threats to the reproducibility and replicability of studies about large language models in medicine due to corporate interests. (shrink)

ExcerptThis special issue of Telos focusing on the work of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg aims to reinvigorate the critical engagement with his work in the English-speaking world by casting a new light on his thought and its fundamental concerns. The American reception of Blumenberg reached an initial high point in the late 1980s and 1990s with Robert M. Wallace's remarkable translation of three monumental volumes: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983), Work on Myth (1985), and The Genesis of (...) the Copernican World (1987). This reception often (though not exclusively) focused on the questions prompted by Blumenberg's contributions to…. (shrink)

Feeling good: four ways -- Finding that feeling -- The place of pleasure -- Knowing what's what -- Making things happen -- Being good -- Love and friendship -- Putting it together.

ExcerptI. Blumenberg's Theses According to the introduction to a recent German volume of essays: “The reception of the Metaphorology, perhaps Blumenberg's most systematic theoretical work, has only just begun.”1 The Metaphorology appeared in English in 2010, translated by Robert Savage, and what goes for the German metaphorology-reception applies to a lesser degree to the rest of Blumenberg's work.2 His three big texts—The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1985), The Genesis of the Copernican World (1987), and Work on Myth (1988)—were published (...) in rapid succession by MIT Press, but they seem to have been quickly eclipsed by the…. (shrink)

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...) More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation. (shrink)

[1.] Dialectical and historical materialism, by G.A. Wetter.

This book is a fiftieth anniversary republication of Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", a classic in the philosophy of mind. Through its argument for the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, it played an essential role in making the study of consciousness a central part of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It also spurred the now flourishing scientific attention to the consciousness of non-human creatures: mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, and insects. The book also includes a second essay (...) offering Nagel's more recent thoughts on the most promising positive response to the mind-body problem, as posed in the original essay. (shrink)

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth-the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers just how valuable moral (...) theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)

Respect, Pluralism, and Justice is a series of essays which sketches a broadly Kantian framework for moral deliberation, and then uses it to address important social and political issues. Hill shows how Kantian theory can be developed to deal with questions about cultural diversity, punishment, political violence, responsibility for the consequences of wrongdoing, and state coercion in a pluralistic society.

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Typically, nudging is a technique for steering the choices of people without giving reasons or using enforcement. In benevolent cases, it is used when people are insufficiently responsive to reason. The nudger triggers automatic cognitive mechanisms – sometimes even biases – in smart ways in order to push irrational people in the right direction. Interestingly, this technique can also be applied to doxastic attitudes. Someone who is doxastically unresponsive to evidence can be nudged into forming true beliefs or doxastic attitudes (...) that are propositionally justified. When doxastic nudging uses non-rational mechanisms, the worry is that nudging cannot result in justified beliefs or knowledge, as the resulting doxastic attitudes lack the right kind of basis. In this paper, I will argue that given the right background views about knowledge, justified beliefs and the relevant processes, epistemic nudging is possible even in these cases. That is, all kinds of nudging can – in appropriate circumstances – produce justified beliefs or knowledge in the nudgee. (shrink)

Escalating demands for limited food supplies at America’s food banks and pantries during the COVID-19 pandemic have raised ethical concerns underlying “first-come, first-served” distributions strategies. A series of model ethical principles are designed to guide ethical allocations of these resources to assure greater access among persons facing food insecurity.

In the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, the concepts of the "norm" and "normal" are ambiguously replaced by "rule" and "regular." Important distinctions, inherited directly from Carl Schmitt are thereby obscured. Kurt Hildebrandt, whose work on the norm is more explicitly biopolitical, provides further contextualization for Schmitt's legal theory; likewise, Georges Canguilhem has analyzed the biological metaphors latent within the concept of the juridical norm. In conclusion I argue that it also makes sense to read Agamben's work in (...) the context of the normative discourse. (shrink)