The environmental impacts of anthropogenic climate change, from an increase in global temperatures melting polar ice caps to the generation of extreme weather events, appear to be happening even mo...

This paper argues that it is permissible for computer scientists and engineers—working with advanced militaries that are making good faith efforts to follow the laws of war—to engage in the research and development of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Research and development into a new weapons system is permissible if and only if the new weapons system can plausibly generate a superior risk profile for all morally relevant classes and it is not intrinsically wrong. The paper then suggests that these conditions (...) are satisfied by at least some potential LAWS development programs. More specifically, since LAWS will lead to greater force protection, warfighters are free to become more risk-acceptant in protecting civilian lives and property. Further, various malicious motivations that lead to war crimes will not apply to LAWS or will apply to no greater extent than with human warfighters. Finally, intrinsic objections—such as the claims that LAWS violate human dignity or that it creates ‘responsibility gaps’—are rejected on the basis that they rely upon implausibly idealized and atomized understandings of human decision-making in combat. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel, neo-republican account of just state surveillance in the information age. The goal of state surveillance should be to avoid and prevent domination, both public and private. In light of that conception of justice, the paper makes three substantive points. First, it argues that modern state surveillance based upon information technology and predicated upon a close partnership with the tech sector gives the state significant power and represents a serious potential source of domination. Second, it argues (...) that, nonetheless, state surveillance can serve legitimate republican ends and so unilateral and private technological attempts to block it may be wrongful. Third, it argues that, despite the serious normative failings of current institutions, state surveillance can be justly regulated and made accountable through a legal liability regime that incentivizes tech company intermediaries to ally with civil society groups in order to safeguard the privacy rights of potential subjects of state surveillance. (shrink)

Questions about dirty hands have often focused on legitimate, secure leaders deciding whether to violate important deontological principles or the rules of interpersonal morality. The purpose of this paper is to show that revolutionaries have dirty hands; revolutionaries do wrong by engaging in unilateral usurpation of the existing system with the hope that latter benefits will justify their actions. Yet, once the revolution securely generates improvements for the common good, the initial usurpation becomes increasingly irrelevant to judgments of the new (...) government’s legitimacy. The paper argues that only retroactive justification—where later success forces opponents and advocates to reinterpret the wrongness of the initial action—can fully capture the complex moral dynamics of revolutions. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

David Morrow argues that solar radiation management falls afoul of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. If we were to engage in large-scale climate engineeri...

Since cyberattacks are nonphysical, standard theories of casus belli — which typically rely on the violent and forceful nature of military means — appear inapplicable. Yet, some theorists have argued that cyberattacks nonetheless can constitute just causes for war — generating a unilateral right to defensive military action — when they cause significant physical damage through the disruption of the target's computer systems. I show that this view suffers from a serious drawback: it is too permissive concerning the types of (...) actions that generate casus belli since many essentially peaceful and non-violent mechanisms can nonetheless cause physical damage. I resolve this difficulty by developing a sovereignty-based account of casus belli and applying it to cyberwarfare. I argue that legitimate states have a constrained right to unilaterally respond with military force to unfriendly actions that bypass or overwhelm the political deliberations of the target state in order to force a change in behaviour contrary to the determinations of the people of the target state. This new account of casus belli avoids the problems of the consequence-based view by plausibly restricting the types of unfriendly action that give rise to casus belli and yet offers an attractive explanation for why some cyberattacks nonetheless do generate a potential right to a unilateral defensive response. (shrink)

Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World presents, with admirable clarity, a new, hybrid conception of global justice that builds on insights from both cosmopolitans and statists, especially their relational variants. Relational cosmopolitans generally argue that substantial economic cooperation and interdependence (i.e., the relevant economic relations) trigger robust obligations of distributive justice. They then argue that, as a matter of fact, these relations obtain globally in virtue of intensifying global trade, capital flows, and labor migration. Thus, relational cosmopolitans conclude that (...) obligations of distributive justice directly apply to the global economic order. Relational statists, by contrast, argue that obligations of distributive justice are trigged by coercive, political relations. Furthermore, these coercive relations only obtain—and can only be justified—within a state. As a consequence, the global order is a ‘secondary site’ of justice that ought to be con. (shrink)

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change.

In late January of 1987, the State Treasurer of Pennsylvania, R. Budd Dwyer, shot himself to death in front of a dozen reporters and camera crews during a news conference in his office. Much was subsequently made in the popular press, and within the profession, about the difficult ethical decision television journalists were faced with in determining how much of the very graphic suicide tape to air. A review of the literature in this area suggests, however, that journalists have established (...) a set of relatively detailed conventions for dealing with events involving graphic depictions of death. Analysis of the Dwyer tape and interviews conducted with Pennsylvania television news directors show that eighteen of the twenty stations in the state that carry news used basically the same type and amount of footage in their evening newscasts. One decided to use no tape. One showed the moment of death. When the story broke around noon, two additional stations showed the moment of suicide, but they revised their story for the evening program. In addition, the wide majority of news directors interviewed said they had little difficulty in deciding how to edit the tape. The processing of the Dwyer story suggests that any ethical dilemmas faced by journalists during decision making were put aside for later consideration. The material was edited quickly and according to similar patterns, or conventions, around the state. The study suggests greater attention be given to the definition and interaction of personal professional values, in the ethical sense, and norms of news processing, in the sociological sense. (shrink)

This book discusses Thomistic commentary on the topics of physical premotion, grace, and the permission of sin, especially as these relate to the mysteries of predestination and reprobation. The author examines the fundamental tenets of the classical Thomistic account, and on this basis critiques the 20th century revisionist theories of Domingo Banez, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Francisco Marin-Sola, Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, and Jean-Herve Nicolas. In conclusion, the implications of the traditional view are considered in light of the spiritual life.

Should innovative therapy occur only within a research paradigm and under institutional review board oversight? The health risks from current human embryonic stem cell clinical applications have raised again a fundamental question addressed first in papers submitted to inform the writing of the Belmont Report. Revisiting the thinking underlying the Belmont Report, together with examining changed circumstances since then, leads to a new model for overseeing innovative therapy based on its unique risks and context, important changes since the Belmont Report, (...) and new opportunities for addressing risks through safety and quality systems in health care. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss three different kinds of disagreement that have been, or could reasonably be, characterized as deep disagreements. Principle level disagreements are disagreements over the truth of epistemic principles. Sub-principle level deep disagreements are disagreements over how to assign content to schematic norms. Finally, framework-level disagreements are holistic disagreements over meaning not truth, that is over how to understand networks of epistemic concepts and the beliefs those concepts compose. Within the context of each of these kinds of (...) disagreement it is not possible for the parties to the dispute to rationally persuade one another through only offering epistemic reasons for their conflicting points of view. However, in spite of the inability to rationally persuade, we explore how it may nevertheless be possible to rationally navigate each of these varieties of deep disagreement. (shrink)

Health care in the United States, being a microcosm of the broader society in which it developed, possesses a sordid legacy concerning racial prejudices, biases, and the perpetuation of health and...

The politics of difference emerges as the new desideratum for understanding the complex nature of oppression in education and the way in which multiple and contradictory subjectivities and identities are socially constructed at die intersections of race, gender, and class, among their configurations.

This paper uses a novel account of non-ideal political action that can justify radical responses to severe climate injustice, including and especially deliberate attempts to engineer the climate system in order reflect sunlight into space and cooling the planet. In particular, it discusses the question of what those suffering from climate injustice may do in order to secure their fundamental rights and interests in the face of severe climate change impacts. Using the example of risky geoengineering strategies such as sulfate (...) aerosol injections, I argue that peoples that are innocently subject to severely negative climate change impacts may have a special permission to engage in large-scale yet risky climate interventions to prevent them. Furthermore, this can be true even if those interventions wrongly harm innocent people. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier’s article seeks to bridge a gap between theological and secular bioethics. It should be noted that the “theological” emphasis in the a...

Collaboration between the arts and health sectors is gaining momentum. Artists are contributing significantly to public health efforts such as vaccine confidence campaigns. Artists and the arts are well positioned to contribute to the social conditions needed to build trust in the health sector. Health professionals, organizations, and institutions should recognize not only the power that can be derived from the insights, artefacts, and expertise of artists and the arts to create the conditions that make trust possible. The health sector (...) must also recognize that, while it can gain much from partnership with artists, artists risk much—namely, the public's trust—when they are in such partnerships. This essay unpacks these claims and considers the care and ethical considerations that must be brought to these partnerships to yield constructive pathways for ethical collaboration as well as for both establishing public trust and continuing to hold the health care profession accountable for becoming more trustworthy. (shrink)

Ramsey sees life as a gift and a trust given to people by God. This theological understanding of human life frames his judgment of the immorality of euthanasia in its many forms. Assuming Ramsey’s theological insights and framing of this issue, I highlight a particular way of thinking about euthanasia that both seems to capture the essence of the debate and does not necessarily build the moral evaluation into its description. I aim to identify and unpack the description most consistent (...) with the claims made by Ramsey of how other end-of-life (EOL) care options are seen as life choices in order to die well enough. If this project is right-headed, it can be used as a backdrop for assessing how many of the currently accepted and perhaps developing options in EOL and palliative care may or may not be morally distinct from euthanasia. Therefore, those who oppose euthanasia while wanting also to maintain the appropriateness of many of other EOL care options in certain situations are not acting inconsistently. This primarily conceptual work is done in service to those who take Ramsey’s theological framework seriously. (shrink)

Innovative therapy is the name we give to novel medical interventions, radically different from the standard of care, provided in order to benefit a patient, rather than to acquire new knowledge. They are paradigmshifting, not incremental, responses to serious patient problems that standard medical care inadequately addresses. Innovative therapies are often devised by clinicians, not basic science researchers; they do not follow the linear model of basic research, to translation, to clinical research, to application. Instead, they come from thinking backwards (...) from the patient’s circumstances, and forward from deep knowledge of how the body functions, to challenge the limits of current mechanisms for effecting cures. (shrink)

We deny that asymmetrical information is a market failure. In order to make this case, we subject to critical scrutiny the strongest case for this thesis: the view that laws prohibiting insider trading are viable, necessary, or compatible with the rule of law.

The national ethical guidelines relevant to assisted reproductive technology have recently been reviewed by the National Health and Medical Research Council. The review process paid particular attention to the issue of non-medical sex selection, although ultimately, the updated ethical guidelines maintain the pre-consultation position of a prohibition on non-medical sex selection. Whilst this recent review process provided a public forum for debate and discussion of this ethically contentious issue, the Victorian case of JS and LS v Patient Review Panel [2011] (...) VCAT 856 provides a rare instance where the prohibition on non-medical sex selection has been explored by a court or tribunal in Australia. This paper analyses the reasoning in that decision, focusing specifically on how the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal applied the statutory framework relevant to ART and its comparison to other uses of embryo selection technologies. The Tribunal relied heavily upon the welfare-of-the-child principle under the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008. The Tribunal also compared non-medical sex selection with saviour sibling selection. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the Tribunal’s reasoning fails to adequately justify the denial of the applicants’ request to utilize ART services to select the sex of their prospective child. (shrink)

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The Institute Vienna Circle held a conference in Vienna in 2003, Cambridge and Vienna – Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, to commemorate the philosophical and scientific work of Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–1930). This Ramsey conference provided not only historical and biographical perspectives on one of the most gifted thinkers of the Twentieth Century, but also new impulses for further research on at least some of the topics pioneered by Ramsey, whose interest and potential are greater than ever. Ramsey (...) did pioneering work in several fields, practitioners of which rarely know of his important work in other fields: philosophy of logic and theory of language, foundations of mathematics, mathematics, probability theory, methodology of science, philosophy of psychology, and economics. There was a focus on the one topic which was of strongest mutual concern to Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, namely the question of foundations of mathematics, in particular the status of logicism. Although the major scientific connection linking Ramsey with Austria is his work on logic, to which the Vienna Circle dedicated several meetings, certainly the connection which is of greater general interest concerns Ramsey's visits and discussions with Wittgenstein. Ramsey was the only important thinker to actually visit Wittgenstein during his school-teaching career in Puchberg and Ottertal in the 1920s, in Lower Austria; and later, Ramsey was instrumental in getting Wittgenstein positions at Cambridge. (shrink)