December 2008 marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, arguably the single most important and influential document endorsed by the United Nations. Jacques Maritain was a primary author of the religious liberty clauses of the 1948 Declaration, and the most prominent Christian philosopher ofthe twentieth century. Maritain developed a radical critique of prevailing Westem political and social thought. A persuasive critic of secular humanism and legal positivism, Maritain sought a cultural renewal of Christian Europe by means (...) of rediscovering an integral Christian humanism. This essay explores the central ideas in Maritain's philosophical defense of universal human rights. Maritain placed the philosophical foundation of human rights in natural law, and assumed the existence of a "natural spirituality of intelligence" grasped by a connatural, pre-philosophic intuition. Yet Pope Benedict XVI challenges the central philosophical assumptions at the foundation of Maritain's defense of human rights. (shrink)

This remarkably lucid and original book presents a powerful case for the rationality of induction, a defense beginning with a “nomological-explanatory solution” and concluding with a “theological-explanatory solution.” Foster’s arguments range from his opening defense of the rationality of the methods of inductive and inferential reasoning, that is, the reasoning at the foundation of modern scientific discoveries about the natural world, to his conclusion linking the existence of universal and necessary laws of nature to the existence of a personal creator (...) God as the ultimate source of those laws. (shrink)

This early work by Derrida, his 1953/ 54 dissertation, introduced the philosophy of Husserl to French intellectuals. Derrida’s professed goal in this work is to “arrange for access to and complete intelligibility of a historical movement: that of Husserlian phenomenology”. According to Derrida, Husserl began with the intention of undertaking a philosophical revolution, but in the end remained “the prisoner of a great classical tradition: the one that reduces human finitude to an accident of history, to an ‘essence of man’ (...) that understands temporality against a background of possible or actual eternity in which it has or could have participated”. Derrida announces with these opening comments that he does not share in this “great classical tradition,” which so clearly served as the inspiration for Husserl’s turn toward philosophy and his lifelong search, which was a search for philosophic certitude and a search for meaning. (shrink)

We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key challenge raised by Soares et al. (2015), that shutdown-seeking AIs will manipulate humans into shutting them down. We conclude by comparing (...) our approach with Soares et al.'s corrigibility framework. (shrink)

New discoveries in neuroscience challenge our understanding of human responsibility and justice. Recent studies suggest that psychopaths not only exhibit specific behavioral patterns but may also have a distinct neuroanatomical blueprint. Scientists have shown that a significant number of individuals who have demonstrated psychopathic behaviors have reduced volume and other anatomical changes in various regions of the cerebral cortex as well as decreased functional connectivity between different brain areas (i.e., smaller dysfunctional amygdalae). These findings raise ethical questions about how our (...) criminal system deals with these individuals. Should dysfunctional anatomical or diseased features exonerate affected individuals from any responsibility for their criminal activity or the suffering they have caused to their victims? It is estimated that individuals with the signs and symptoms of antisocial personality disorder make up 25% of inmates. Should individuals classified with this disorder be incarcerated with other criminals? In this paper, we summarize the results of the latest brain imaging studies performed on individuals with antisocial personality traits, referred to as psychopaths or sociopaths, and we explore some of the ethical issues concerning psychopathy and the law. (shrink)

This article re-examines the theoretical basis for environmental and heritage interpretation in tourist settings in the light of hermeneutic philosophy. It notes that the pioneering vision of heritage interpretation formulated by Freeman Tilden envisaged a broadly educational, ethically informed and transformative art. By contrast, current cognitive psychological attempts to reduce interpretation to the monological transmission of information, targeting universal but individuated cognitive structures, are found to be wanting. Despite growing signs of diversity, this information processing approach to interpretation remains dominant. (...) The article then presents the alternative paradigm of hermeneutics through the works of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, to provide a broader interpretation of interpretation. This not only captures the essence of Tilden’s definition but construes heritage interpretation as a more inclusive, culturally situated, critically reflexive and dialogical practice. (shrink)

The developmental history of the vertebrate eye begins at an early embryonic stage, with the formation of the body axes and induction of neural tissue. Several recent experimental embryological and genetic studies in teleost fish have produced new insights into the morphogenetic and molecular regulation of eye formation. Molecular signaling pathways and patterned expression of transcription factors implicated in eye determination are discussed, and the importance of morphogenetic cell movements is emphasized. BioEssays 24:519–529, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Este artículo reflexiona acerca de las especificidades de la constitución de los monumentos conmemorativos en vínculo con la historia reciente. Para ello, la mirada se centrará en la noción de contramonumentos, entendiendo a estos últimos como aquellas producciones que, inicialmente de la mano de un grupo de artistas alemanes, desafían las premisas del monumento tradicional. En base a esto, se expone, en primera instancia el desarrollo histórico del monumento, destacando determinados sucesos que se consideran significativos dentro de la extensa cronología (...) en la que éste se inscribe; en un segundo momento, se recuperan una serie de reflexiones y debates que problematizan y cuestionan la efectividad de estos objetos culturales en relación a la evocación del pasado; y finalmente, se presentan y analizan un conjunto de producciones artísticas que se enmarcan dentro de lo que se reconoce como contramonumentos. En este sentido, se considera que la revisión de los aspectos formales, conceptuales y funcionales a partir de las cuales James E. Young definió en la década de los noventa a los contramonumentos, ilumina y habilita nuevas reflexiones sobre las diversas intervenciones, acciones de resistencia y producciones artísticas que se llevan a cabo en la actualidad, muchas de las cuales pueden ser pensadas como contramonumentos. (shrink)

Es posible apreciar una serie de factores que han debilitado al contexto democrático, específicamente, la actividad legislativa, que encuentra diversos desafíos que se suman a la problematización del estudio. Es en el contexto de Parlamento Abierto que la participación ciudadana cobra relevancia científica en el marco de la teoría de la democracia representativa. Mediante metodología mixta se responderá la siguiente pregunta de investigación: ¿cómo se generan espacios democratizados en la actividad legislativa del Parlamento Abierto? Este artículo es una primera aproximación (...) a una investigación doctoral en curso, cuyos resultados y conclusiones serán presentados en un próximo congreso del CUICIID. (shrink)

This collection of essays is dedicated to the prolific career of Paul Ricoeur. Honoring his work, this anthology addresses questions and concerns that defined Ricoeur’s.

Supervaluationism holds that the future is undetermined, and as a consequence of this, statements about the future may be neither true nor false. In the present paper, we explore the novel and quite different view that the future is abundant: statements about the future do not lack truth-value, but may instead be glutty, that is both true and false. We will show that the logic resulting from this “abundance of the future” is a non-adjunctive paraconsistent formalism based on subvaluations, which (...) has the virtue that all classical laws are valid in it, while no formula like φ ∧ ¬φ is satisfiable ; The peculiar behaviour of abundant logical consequence has an illuminating analogy in probability logic; abundance preserves some important features of classical logic when it comes to express those important retrogradations of truth which are presupposed by the argument de praesenti ad praeteritum. (shrink)

During the first months of 1887, while completing the drafts of his Mitteilungen zur Lehre vom Transfiniten, Georg Cantor maintained a continuous correspondence with Benno Kerry. Their exchange essentially concerned two main topics in the philosophy of mathematics, namely, (a) the concept of natural number and (b) the infinitesimals. Cantor's and Kerry's positions turned out to be irreconcilable, mostly because of Kerry's irremediably psychologistic outlook, according to Cantor at least. In this study, I will examine and reconstruct the main points (...) in the discussion around (a) and (b) and stress some interesting aspects of the philosophical and mathematical thought of Benno Kerry. (shrink)

A good number of people currently thinking and writing about reasons identify a reason as a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude.1 I will argue that using this as our fundamental account of what a reason is generates a fairly deep and recalcitrant ambiguity; this account fails to distinguish between two quite different sets of considerations that count in favor of certain attitudes, only one of which are the “proper” or “appropriate” kind of reason for them. (...) This ambiguity has been the topic of recent discussion, under the head “the wrong kind of reasons problem.”2 I will suggest that confusion about “the wrong kind of reason” will be dispelled by changing our account of what a reason is. While I agree both that reasons are considerations and that certain.. (shrink)

Many assume that we can be responsible only what is voluntary. This leads to puzzlement about our responsibility for our beliefs, since beliefs seem not to be voluntary. I argue against the initial assumption, presenting an account of responsibility and of voluntariness according to which, not only is voluntariness not required for responsibility, but the feature which renders an attitude a fundamental object of responsibility (that the attitude embodies one’s take on the world and one’s place in it) also guarantees (...) that it could not be voluntary. It turns out, then, that, for failing to be voluntary, beliefs are a central example of the sort of thing for which we are most fundamentally responsible. (shrink)

I hope to show that, although belief is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, "believing at will" is impossible; one cannot believe in the way one ordinarily acts. Further, the same is true of intention: although intention is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, the features of belief that render believing less than voluntary are present for intention, as well. It turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that you can no more intend at will than believe at will.

Conscientious objections (CO) can be disruptive in a variety of ways and may disadvantage patients and colleagues who must step-in to assume care. Nevertheless, nurses have a right and responsibility to object to participation in interventions that would seriously harm their sense of integrity. This is an ethical problem of balancing risks and responsibilities related to patient care. Here we explore the problem and propose a nonlinear framework for exploring the authenticity of a claim of CO from the perspective of (...) the nurse and of those who must evaluate such claims. We synthesized the framework using Rest’s Four Component Model of moral reasoning along with tenets of the International Council of Nursing’s (ICN) Code of Ethics for Nurses and insights from relevant ethics and nursing ethics literature. The resulting framework facilitates evaluating potential consequences of a given CO for all involved. We propose that the framework can also serve as an aid for nurse educators as they prepare students for practice. Gaining clarity about the sense in which the concept of conscience provides a defensible foundation for objecting to legally, or otherwise ethically, permissible actions, in any given case is critical to arriving at an ethical and reasonable plan of action. (shrink)

ABSTRACTExperiences that contradict one's core concepts elicit intense emotions. Such schema incongruence can elicit awe, wherein experiences that are too vast...

In this paper I consider fairness of blaming a wrongdoer. In particular, I consider the claim that blaming a wrongdoer can be unfair because blame has a certain characteristic force, a force which is not fairly imposed upon the wrongdoer unless certain conditions are met--unless, e.g., the wrongdoer could have done otherwise, or unless she is someone capable of having done right, or unless she is able to control her behavior by the light of moral reasons. While agreeing that blame (...) has a characteristic force, I am skeptical of this charge of unfairness. My skepticism concerns itself less with the particular conditions of fairness proposed than with the idea that blame can be rendered unfair by its characteristic force. If to blame a person were simply to perform certain intentional actions, then, as we will see, blame could be rendered unfair by its force. But to blame a person is not just to act in certain ways. It is, at least in large part, to make certain judgments or adopt certain attitudes. However, it is unclear how these attitudes or judgments carry "force"? and also unclear whether they can be rendered unfair by their force. Examining these issues, I will suggest that much of the force of blame is found in a set of judgments--most centrally, the judgment that one person failed to show proper regard for others. But, I will argue, once it is granted that such judgments are true, their characteristic force cannot render them unfair. (shrink)

I first pose a challenge which, it seems to me, any philosophical account of forgiveness must meet: the account must be articulate and it must allow for forgiveness that is uncompromising. I then examine an account of forgiveness which appears to meet this challenge. Upon closer examination we discover that this account actually fails to meet the challenge—but it fails in very instructive ways. The account takes two missteps which seem to be taken by almost everyone discussing forgiveness. At the (...) end, I sketch an alternative account of forgiveness, one that I think meets the challenge and avoids the missteps. (shrink)

A common line of thought claims that we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, while less sophisticated creatures are not, because we are, and they are not, self-aware. Our self-awareness is thought to provide us with a kind of control over ourselves that they lack: we can reflect upon ourselves, upon our thoughts and actions, and so ensure that they are as we would have them to be. Thus, our capacity for reflection provides us with the control over ourselves (...) that grounds our responsibility. I argue that this thought is subtly, but badly, confused. It uses, as its model for the control that grounds our responsibility, the kind of control we exercise over ordinary objects and over our own voluntary actions: we represent to ourselves what to do or how to change things, and then we bring about that which we represent. But we cannot use this model to explain our responsibility for ourselves and our actions: if there is a question about why or how we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, it cannot be answered by appeal to a sophisticated, self-directed action. There must be some more fundamental account of how or why we are responsible. I replace the usual account with a novel but natural view: responsible mental activity can be modeled, not as an ordinary action, but as the settling of a question. This shift will require abandoning the tempting but troublesome thought that responsible activity involves discretion and awareness—which, I argue, we must abandon in any case. (shrink)

According to ‘Excluders’, descriptive uncertainty – but not normative uncertainty – matters to what we ought to do. Recently, several authors have argued that those wishing to treat normative uncertainty differently from descriptive uncertainty face a dependence problem because one's descriptive uncertainty can depend on one's normative uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to determine whether the phenomenon of dependence poses a decisive problem for Excluders. I argue that existing arguments fail to show this, and that, while stronger ones (...) can be found, Excluders can escape them. (shrink)

I argue to a conclusion I find at once surprising and intuitive: although many considerations show trust useful, valuable, important, or required, these are not the reasons for which one trusts a particular person to do a particular thing. The reasons for which one trusts a particular person on a particular occasion concern, not the value, importance, or necessity of trust itself, but rather the trustworthiness of the person in question in the matter at hand. In fact, I will suggest (...) that the degree to which you trust a particular person to do a particular thing will vary inversely with the degree to which you must rely, for the motivation or justification of your trusting response, on reasons that concern the importance, or value, or necessity of having such a response. (shrink)

Adults who are incapacitated and alone, having no surrogates, may be known as “unbefriended.” Decision-making for these particularly vulnerable patients is a common and vexing concern for healthcare providers and hospital ethics committees. When all other avenues for resolving the need for surrogate decision-making fail, patients who are incapacitated and alone may be referred for “public guardianship” or guardianship of last resort. While an appropriate mechanism in theory, these programs are often under-staffed and under-funded, laying the consequences of inadequacies on (...) the healthcare system and the patient him or herself. We describe a qualitative study of professionals spanning clinical, court, and agency settings about the mechanisms for resolving surrogate consent for these patients and problems therein within the state of Massachusetts. Interviews found that all participants encountered adults who are incapacitated and without surrogates. Four approaches for addressing surrogate needs were: work to restore capacity; find previously unknown surrogates; work with agencies to obtain surrogates; and access the guardianship system. The use of guardianship was associated with procedural challenges and ethical concerns including delays in care, short term gains for long term costs, inabilities to meet a patient’s values and preferences, conflicts of interest, and ethical discomfort among interviewees. Findings are discussed in the context of resources to restore capacity, identify previously unknown surrogates, and establish improved surrogate mechanisms for this vulnerable population. (shrink)

Although theoretically rigorous, the book is comprehensible to the beginning qualitative researcher.

This article is made available under Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND, which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited.

In spite of the seemingly omnipresent corruption and Mafia activity plaguing modern Russia it is nevertheless possible, and desirable, to conduct business ethically there, as the author testifies. Pamela Woolley has recently completed a full time MBA at London Business School, prior to which her career was in international telecommunications. She has long been interested in Russia and worked in Moscow during the summer between her two years of study. The experience has prompted her to seek a more permanent (...) position in the region and was the impetus behind writing this article. She also wishes to thank Dr Jan Dauman of InterMatrix Group for his interest and contribution to the information gathered in the preparation of this article. (shrink)

Establishing and maintaining reference is a crucial part of discourse. In spoken languages, differential linguistic devices mark referents occurring in different referential contexts, that is, introduction, maintenance, and re-introduction contexts. Speakers using gestures as well as users of sign languages have also been shown to mark referents differentially depending on the referential context. This article investigates the modality-specific contribution of the visual modality in marking referential context by providing a direct comparison between sign language and co-speech gesture with speech in (...) elicited narratives. Across all forms of expression, we find that referents in subject position are referred to with more marking material in re-introduction contexts compared to maintenance contexts. Furthermore, we find that spatial modification is used as a modality-specific strategy in both DGS and German co-speech gesture, and that the configuration of referent locations in sign space and gesture space corresponds in an iconic and consistent way to the locations of referents in the narrated event. However, we find that spatial modification is used in different ways for marking re-introduction and maintenance contexts in DGS and German co-speech gesture. The findings are discussed in relation to the unique contribution of the visual modality to reference tracking in discourse when it is used in a unimodal system with full linguistic structure versus in a bimodal system that is a composite of speech and gesture. (shrink)

In the classical Turing test, participants are challenged to tell whether they are interacting with another human being or with a machine. The way the interaction takes place is not direct, but a distant conversation through computer screen messages. Basic forms of interaction are face-to-face and embodied, context-dependent and based on the detection of reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies. Our idea is that interaction detection requires the integration of proprioceptive and interoceptive patterns with sensorimotor patterns, within quite short time lapses, so that (...) they appear as mutually contingent, as reciprocal. In other words, the experience of interaction takes place when sensorimotor patterns are contingent upon one’s own movements, and vice versa. I react to your movement, you react to mine. When I notice both components, I come to experience an interaction. Therefore, we designed a “minimal” Turing test to investigate how much information is required to detect these reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies. Using a new version of the perceptual crossing paradigm, we tested whether participants resorted to interaction detection to tell apart human from machine agents in repeated encounters with these agents. In two studies, we presented participants with movements of a human agent, either online or offline, and movements of a computerized oscillatory agent in three different blocks. In each block, either auditory or audiovisual feedback was provided along each trial. Analysis of participants’ explicit responses and of the implicit information subsumed in the dynamics of their series will reveal evidence that participants use the reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies within short time windows. For a machine to pass this minimal Turing test, it should be able to generate this sort of reciprocal contingencies. (shrink)

It has seemed to many philosophers—perhaps to most—that believing is not voluntary, that we cannot believe at will. It has seemed to many of these that this inability is not a merely contingent psychological limitation but rather is a deep fact about belief, perhaps a conceptual limitation. But it has been very difficult to say exactly why we cannot believe at will. I earlier offered an account of why we cannot believe at will. I argued that nothing could qualify both (...) as having been done “at will,” in the relevant sense, and as a belief. Thus, no believer could believe at will. If my arguments are correct, our inability to believe at will reveals no genuine lack in our powers of mind, any more than an inability to draw a square circle reveals a lack of artistic skill. My account has been recently criticized by Kieran Setiya, who has provided an account of his own. Here I revisit and defend my account, hopefully in a way that will both make my thought clearer and illumine some of the broader differences between Setiya’s approach and my own. I then briefly consider Setiya’s own argument, in part to further develop the contrast. (shrink)

The proliferation of big data analytics in criminal justice suggests that there are positive frames and imaginaries legitimising them and depicting them as the panacea for efficient crime control. Criminological and criminal justice scholarship has paid insufficient attention to these frames and their accompanying narratives. To address the gap created by the lack of theoretical and empirical insight in this area, this article draws on a study that systematically reviewed and compared multidisciplinary academic abstracts on the data-driven tools now shaping (...) decision-making across several justice systems. Using insights distilled from the study, the article proposes three frames for understanding how the technologies are portrayed. Inherent in the frames are a set of narratives emphasising their ostensible status as vital crime control mechanisms. These narratives obfuscate the harms of data-driven technologies and evince idealistic imaginaries of their capabilities. The narratives are bolstered by unequal structural arrangements, specifically the unevenly distributed digital capital with which some are empowered to participate in technology development for criminal justice application and other forms of penal governance. In unravelling these issues, the article advances current understanding of the dynamics that sustain the depiction of data-driven technologies as prime crime prevention and law enforcement tools. (shrink)

We sometimes seem to face fundamental moral uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about what is morally good or morally right that cannot be reduced to ordinary descriptive uncertainty. This phenomenon raises a puzzle for noncognitivism, according to which moral judgments are desire-like attitudes as opposed to belief-like attitudes. Can a state of moral uncertainty really be a noncognitive state? So far, noncognitivists have not been able to offer a completely satisfactory account. Here, we argue that noncognitivists should exploit the formal analogy between (...) moral uncertainty and moral multi-objective decision problems. Our ‘multi-objective story’ enables noncognitivists to save our moral uncertainty thought and talk by explaining how the underlying phenomenon could be noncognitive. (shrink)