Epistemologists have recently started appealing to the moral philosophy literature on interpersonal trust in order to help explain the epistemology of testimony. We argue that epistemologists who have given trust a significant role in their accounts of the epistemology of testimony have appealed to very different conceptions of the nature of trust, which have inevitably influenced the shape of their epistemological theorizing. Some have employed accounts of the nature of interpersonal trust according to which trust is a practical phenomenon subject (...) to the will and to practical reasoning. Such accounts face the task of showing how the practical phenomenon that is interpersonal trust has epistemic implications for testimonial belief. Other theorists have employed accounts of the nature of interpersonal trust according to which trust is at least partly a cognitive phenomenon, itself subject to epistemic norms. Such accounts do not face the task of showing how practical rationality has implications for theoretical reason. Instead, they face the rather different tasks of showing how it is that cognitive trusting bears genuinely interpersonal features, and of how theoretical rationality can share features with practical rationality. (shrink)

There are established ethical principles to protect human participants in biomedical research from undue exploitation by researchers. However, in the “Tuskegee Study” in the US, these principles were grossly violated. The task of this paper is to critically examine the ethical implications of that study on future practices in biomedical research, and to suggest ways of ensuring that such practices comply with appropriate ethical values.

In current discussions on African epistemology, the issue of justification of beliefs has mainly been considered from an externalist perspective, such that justification is described as achievable merely through the means of empirical verification and social context of discourse. However, this results in a knowledge-gap since both internalist and externalist perspectives are needed to arrive at a holistic notion of epistemic justification. Consequently, the objective of this article is to fill this gap by employing the methods of conceptual and critical (...) analysis to attempt an internalist interpretation of epistemic justification in the quest for a more balanced view of African epistemology. (shrink)

This paper examines the polemical nature of anti-racist education and discourse in America today. On one side of this issue are those who think of the efforts toward inclusion, diversity, and the pursuit of social justice in academia as serving positive ends. On the other side are those who oppose and vilify such efforts as evidence of the destructive ethos of liberal education. This has led to a situation where universities and schools across the country have seen professors and teachers, (...) including philosophers, experience backlash for speaking seriously and courageously about confronting the problem of racism in society. One recent example of this anomaly is the kind of faux outrage or moral panic that drives the hysteria against Critical Race Theory, an inquiry that examines the intersection of race and law in the United States, as well as unearthing the reality of structural racism in America, often disguised in the mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. This faux moral panic has been used by legislatures across the country, as the raison d’être, to pass bans and enforce policies or rules that restricts how professors (including philosophers), and teachers can talk about race, systemic racism, structural oppression, or the problem of racial injustice in the classroom. In this paper, I explore how this polemical situation creates significant challenges and unique possibilities for the discourse of philosophy, especially for those who are interested in becoming antiracist philosophers, in the context of such legal rules and restrictions. This is not for the faint of heart. (shrink)

In recent years, the work of organizations in the area of digitization has intensified significantly. This trend is also evident in the field of recruitment where job application tracking systems (ATS) have been developed to allow job advertisements to be published online. However, recent studies have shown that recruiting in most organizations is not inclusive, being subject to human biases and prejudices. Most discrimination activities appear early but subtly in the hiring process, for instance, exclusive phrasing in job advertisement discourages (...) qualified applicants from minority groups from applying. The existing works are limited to analyzing, categorizing and highlighting the occurrence of bias in the recruitment process. In this paper, we go beyond this and develop machine learning models for identifying and classifying biased and discriminatory language in job descriptions. We develop and evaluate a machine learning system for identifying five major categories of biased and discriminatory language in job advertisements, i.e., masculine-coded, feminine-coded, exclusive, LGBTQ-coded, demographic and racial language. We utilized the combination of linguistic features with recent state-of-the-art word embeddings representations as input features for various machine learning classifiers. Our results show that the machine learning classifiers were able to identify all the five categories of biased and discriminatory language with a decent accuracy. The Random Forest classifier with FastText word embeddings achieved the best performance with tenfolds cross-validation. Our system directly addresses the bias in the attraction phase of hiring by identifying and classifying biased and discriminatory language and thus encouraging recruiters to write more inclusive job advertisements. (shrink)

This paper discusses citizenship in Finnish religious education in relation to human security. It traces the characteristics of human security that connect citizenship, religion, and education in Finnish policy documents. The article focuses on basic education. Its data were analyzed employing qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that citizenship in Finnish RE entails personal security concerns dealing with psychological and human rights issues. These are found to be essentially human security as conceptualized by the United Nations. However, Finnish policy documents (...) sparingly utilize human security in explicit terms. Finland rather emphasizes the practical applications of human security. Incorporation of explicit global citizen and human rights issues into RE in the new Finnish curriculum seems to project critical global citizenship. This is found to promote human security. Following Finland’s bid for practical application of human security, we recommend that human security be explicitly integrated into the Finnish RE curriculum. (shrink)

A challenge human existence is confronted in contemporary society is the justification of a coherent social order. Most of these justifications have been grounded, over time, on natural approach to the neglect of the African ontological practice. This natural reference fails to account for the ontological practice premised on African belief system which reconciles the natural and spiritual aspects of human existence. The study adopts the analytic approach in philosophy which evolves a clarification of the ontological concept within the African (...) context.The African ontological practice hinges on Dukor’s perspective which provides for a coherent interconnection among social structure, law and belief system towards the certitude and trust making for harmonious human well-being.Social order is enhanced by this African ontological practice and should, therefore, be incorporated into the public sphere. (shrink)

The Retributivist approach to punishment attempts to address the challenges posed by utilitarian conception that punitive actions should strictly be associated with a costeffective means to certain independently identifiable goods at the expense of justice. Justice proffers how the guilty deserve to be punished and no moral consideration relevant to punishment outweighs an offender’s criminal desert. However, this just desert provokes difficulty in discerning proportionality between the moral gravity of each offence and the specific penalties attached. This consequently degenerates to (...) another form of ‘lex talionis’ (revenge) in punitive justice. (shrink)

Within the notion of punishment in the Yoruba culture, the physical and non-physical aspects of human existence are reconciled to arrive at a justifiable punitive action. The metaphysical presuppositions in Yoruba punitive system reflect a coherent interconnection among social structure, law and belief system for the harmonious human well-being of the individual and the community. Furthermore, the judicious imposition of punitive measures on the offender establishes the significance of attributing responsibility for every human action without antagonism and animosity. Nevertheless, the (...) offender, within the tradition, is restitutively reconciled with himself, the victim and the community at large. The social order based on these principles creates and modifies the contemporary understanding of penology and penal practice. (shrink)

Job seekers find themselves increasingly duped and misled by fraudulent job advertisements, posing a threat to their privacy, security and well-being. There is a clear need for solutions that can protect innocent job seekers. Existing approaches to detecting fraudulent jobs do not scale well, function like a black-box, and lack interpretability, which is essential to guide applicants’ decision-making. Moreover, commonly used lexical features may be insufficient as the representation does not capture contextual semantics of the underlying document. Hence, this paper (...) explores to what extent different categorizations of fraudulent jobs can be classified. In addition, this paper seeks to find what type of features are most relevant in classifying the type of fraudulent job. In this paper, we develop and validate a machine learning system for identifying identity theft, corporate identity theft and multi-level marketing amongst fraudulent job advertisements. We utilized four classes of features: empirical rule set-based features, bag-of-word models, most recent state-of-the-art word embeddings and transformer models for various machine learning classifiers. The machine learning models were validated by evaluating them on a publicly available job description dataset. Our results indicate that the word embeddings and transformer-based features consistently outperformed the handcrafted rule-set based features class. Ultimately, a Gradient Boosting classifier with a combination of empirical rule-set based features, parts-of-speech tags and bag-of-words vectors achieved the best performance with an F1-score of 0.88. (shrink)

This article featuring Nigeria constitutes one of five articles in a collection of essays on local capacity-building in research ethics by graduates from the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics MHSc in Bioethics, International Stream programme funded by the Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences (FIC). The first National Health Research Ethics Committee was inaugurated in 2006. Since then, more institutional health research ethics committees continue to be formed. However, research ethics challenges in Nigeria are (...) systemic and require a systems approach to address them effectively. Nigeria requires capacity-building for authentic acculturation of health systems as well as for health research, education, and advocacy within the research community and the general public. Further, it requires relevant legislation and effective regulatory measures. (shrink)

This paper describes a three-year project designed to build the capacity of members of research ethics committes to perform their roles and responsibilities efficiently and effectively. The project participants were made up of a cross-section of the membership of 13 Research Ethics Committees (RECs) functioning in Nigeria. They received training to develop their capacity to evaluate research protocols, monitor trial implementation, provide constructive input to trial staff, and assess the trial's success in promoting community engagement in the research. Following the (...) training, technical assistance was provided to participants on an ongoing basis and the project's impacts were assessed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results indicate that sustained investment in capacity building efforts (including training, ongoing technical assistance, and the provision of multiple tools) improved the participants’ knowledge of both the ethical principles relevant to biomedical research and how effective REC should function. Such investment was also shown to have a positive impact on the knowledge levels of other RECs members (those who did not receive training) and the overall operations of the RECs to which the participants belonged. Building the capacity of REC members to fulfill their roles effectively requires sustained effort and investment and pays off by enabling RECs to fulfill their essential mission of ensuring that trials are conducted safely and ethically. (shrink)

This paper describes a three‐year project designed to build the capacity of members of research ethics committes to perform their roles and responsibilities efficiently and effectively. The project participants were made up of a cross‐section of the membership of 13 Research Ethics Committees (RECs) functioning in Nigeria. They received training to develop their capacity to evaluate research protocols, monitor trial implementation, provide constructive input to trial staff, and assess the trial's success in promoting community engagement in the research.Following the training, (...) technical assistance was provided to participants on an ongoing basis and the project's impacts were assessed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results indicate that sustained investment in capacity building efforts (including training, ongoing technical assistance, and the provision of multiple tools) improved the participants’ knowledge of both the ethical principles relevant to biomedical research and how effective REC should function. Such investment was also shown to have a positive impact on the knowledge levels of other RECs members (those who did not receive training) and the overall operations of the RECs to which the participants belonged. Building the capacity of REC members to fulfill their roles effectively requires sustained effort and investment and pays off by enabling RECs to fulfill their essential mission of ensuring that trials are conducted safely and ethically. (shrink)