As sharing and secondary research use of biospecimens increases, IRBs and researchers face the challenge of protecting and respecting donors without comprehensive regulations addressing the human subject protection issues posed by biobanking. Variation in IRB biobanking policies about these issues has not been well documented.

Online controlled experiments, also known as A/B tests, have become ubiquitous. While many practical challenges in running experiments at scale have been thoroughly discussed, the ethical dimension of A/B testing has been neglected. This article fills this gap in the literature by introducing a new, soft ethics and governance framework that explicitly recognizes how the rise of an experimentation culture in industry settings brings not only unprecedented opportunities to businesses but also significant responsibilities. More precisely, the article (a) introduces a (...) set of principles to encourage ethical and responsible experimentation to protect users, customers, and society; (b) argues that ensuring compliance with the proposed principles is a complex challenge unlikely to be addressed by resorting to a one-solution response; (c) discusses the relevance and effectiveness of several mechanisms and policies in educating, governing, and incentivizing companies conducting online controlled experiments; and (d) offers a list of prompting questions specifically designed to help and empower practitioners by stimulating specific ethical deliberations and facilitating coordination among different groups of stakeholders. (shrink)

The impact of large digital corporations on our freedom is often lamented but rarely investigated systematically. This paper aims to fill this desideratum by focusing on the power of social media corporations and the freedom of their users. In order to analyze this relationship, I distinguish two forms of freedom and two corresponding forms of power. Social media corporations extend their users’ freedom of choice by providing many new options. This provision, however, comes with the domination by these corporations because (...) it is based on their power of uncontrolled interference. Users could escape this domination through exit. One reason why they do not choose this option is that they would lose the benefits associated with the network effects provided by social media services. A second reason is that the power of social media corporations runs so deep that they are able to manipulate the autonomous decision-making processes of their users. Users are provided with many new avenues for authentic self-presentation on social media. By using them, however, users need to conform to a web interface that is designed by corporations to undermine self-control. Through these two mechanisms, corporations are able to promote an interest in users to present themselves on their platforms. Insofar as this works, they secure the users’ compliance to their domination through subjectivation. This double conjunction of choice and domination, on the one hand, and autonomy and subjectivation, on the other, makes the case that the very power of corporate social media stems from their intrinsic connection to genuine practices of freedom. (shrink)

Sartre’s account of the emotions presupposes a conception of human nature that is never fully articulated. The paper aims to render such conception explicit and to argue that frustration occupies a foundational place in Sartre’s picture of affective existence.

Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may lead (...) to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that (...) encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer's theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states' capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction:the European Union and the Law of Peoples The Argument of Law of Peoples Standards and Grounds for International Stability Human Rights in Federations The Argument of Law of Peoples for Inter‐people Inequality Distributive Justice in Federations Federal and Global Implications Toleration and Stability Reconsidered Acknowledgments Notes.

Collecting and using tissue, blood, urine, and other human biospecimens for various types of research is not new. But for personalized medicine to realize its potential, researchers will need thousands more of these samples for genetic studies. And the particular nature of genetic research—the sensitivity of the information it reveals—has raised a host of ethical questions, some which are new to human subjects research. What counts as informed consent when a biospecimen may be stored for years and used for unforeseen (...) research? How freely can the biospecimens and the genetic information they contain be shared with other researchers? If research uncovers a genetic risk factor or some other important medical .. (shrink)

Bauer, Taub, and Parsi's review of an international sample of standards on informed consent, confidentiality, commercialization, and quality of research in tissue banking reveals that no clear national or international consensus exists for these issues. The authors' response to the lack of uniformity in the meaning, scope, and ethical significance of the policies they examined is to call for the creation of uniform ethical guidelines. This raises questions about whether harmonization should consist of voluntary international standards or international regulations that (...) include an official oversight mechanism and sanctions for noncompliance, and about who should participate in the harmonization process. Moreover, the normative assumptions and political dynamics that shape global policymaking need to be addressed. This commentary explores the policy implications and normative questions raised by the idea of international ethical guidelines for the use of biotechnologies and biotechnological resources such as stored samples of human tissue. (shrink)

A growing number of consumer technology companies are aiming to convince older people that humanoid robots make helpful tools to support aging-in-place. As hybrid devices, socially assistive robots (SARs) are situated between health monitoring tools, familiar digital assistants, security aids, and more advanced AI-powered devices. Consequently, they implicate older people’s privacy in complex ways. Such devices are marketed to perform functions common to smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo) and smart home platforms (e.g., Google Home), while other functions are more specific (...) to older people, including health and safety monitoring and serving as companions to mitigate loneliness. Privacy is a key value central to debates about the ethics of using SARs in aged care, yet there has been very little interchange between these debates and the robust theoretical discussion in the legal literature about the future of privacy and AI governance. Drawing on two qualitative studies of older people’s views on consumer SARs, the paper contributes novel findings about older people’s thinking on privacy and data governance at the intersection of their experiences with present day digital technologies and projections for future AI systems, and places their views in dialogue with debates about the future of privacy protection and AI governance. (shrink)

One of the most enigmatic and inevitably most suggestive words that Hölderlin’s philosophical work delivers to us is the neologism introduced in the summer of 1799: aorgisch, aorgic. A principle that is both ontological and mimetic, the aorgic undoubtedly represents the presence of the sublime in Hölderlin, albeit concealed terminologically, but also a particular declination that makes it not always easy to assimilate to the theories of the eighteenth-century and romantic sublime. This paper attempts to probe the role played by (...) the aorgic in the configuration of an aesthetics of the tragic by considering two precise moments: the writing, Grund zum Empedokles, which seeks to give speculative legitimacy to the unfinished tragedy on Empedocles, and the notes that accompanied the translations of Sophocles that Hölderlin published in 1804. Interpreted as the dimension of the formless, but also of the possible, the aorgic is necessarily thought by Hölderlin always next to its opposite pole, the organic, that is the dimension of the human in the broad sense (art, culture, history). The relationship between these two poles is not only dialectical, along the lines of Fichte’s Wechselwirkung, but also analogical, recovering that relationship between physis and techne that Aristotle had already indicated in the second book of Physics. The aorgic therefore represents the necessary alienation to which nature is subjected in order to become culture (or art), a passage that, from the point of view of traditional aesthetic categories, could be read as the transition from the (natural) unrepresentability of the sublime to the (cultural) configuration of the beautiful: from chaos to form. (shrink)

Powers, capacities and dispositions (in what follows I will use these terms synonymously) have become prominent in recent debates in metaphysics, philosophy of science and other areas of philosophy. In this paper I will analyse in some detail a well-known argument from scientific practice to the existence of powers/capacities/dispositions. According to this argument the practice of extrapolating scientific knowledge from one kind of situation to a different kind of situation requires a specific interpretation of laws of nature, namely as attributing (...) dispositions to systems. My main interest will be to discuss what characteristics these dispositions need to have in order to account for the scientific practice in question. I will furthermore assess whether the introduction of dispositions in the context of the extrapolation argument can be described as a ‘revitalization’ or as a ‘return’ to those notions repudiated by early modern philosophers. More particularly I will argue for the following claims: I. In repudiating scholastic terminology, including substantial forms with their causal powers, post-cartesian philosophers focussed on a concept of causation that was much stronger than 21st century conceptions of causation. For this reason alone, whatever ‘causal’ is supposed to mean in today’s causal powers, embracing causal powers is not a simple return to a pre-cartesian notion. II. The dispositions presupposed in scientific practice need not (and should not) be construed in causal terms (whether strong or weak). III. While some early modern philosophers contrasted the characterisation of the natural world in terms of substantial forms (and their causal powers) on the one hand and a mathematical characterization on the other and suggested that these approaches are incompatible, the dispositions postulated by the extrapolation argument to account for scientific practice are themselves characterized in mathematical terms. More precisely: The behaviour the systems are disposed to display is – at least in physics – often characterized in mathematical terms. IV. The dispositions assumed in the law-statements in scientific practice are determinable rather than determinate properties. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and human (...) sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally. (shrink)

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some (...) of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren hat sich eine Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Gremien zur Ethikberatung entwickelt: vom Konsil mit einem einzelnen Berater bis zum Ethikkomitee. In dem Band werden die Ethikberatung, ihre Entwicklung und Anwendung, sowie die Gründung von Gremien in Krankenhäusern, Pflegeeinrichtungen, Hospizen und von niedergelassenen Ärzten anhand von Fallbeispielen erläutert. Dabei schlagen die Autoren eine Brücke zwischen traditioneller philosophischer Ethik und anwendungsbezogener klinischer Ethik. Auch rechtliche Fragen werden erörtert.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Nihilism Skepticism Nihilism and Skepticism.

Epistemische Tugenden sind Eigenschaften des forschenden Subjekts, die in wissenschaftlichen Kulturen als Bedingung fur die Produktion, Vermittlung oder den Erwerb von Wissen angesehen werden. Sie lassen sich nicht auf ein abstraktes Sollen reduzieren, wie es oft von Ethikkommissionen oder politischen Bewegungen an die Wissenschaft herangetragen wird. Die methodische Erzeugung von Wissen ware kaum moglich, wenn es nicht erkenntnisfordernde Tugenden wie Geduld, Aufmerksamkeit, Genauigkeit, Intuition, Wahrhaftigkeit, Neugierde, Strenge oder Zuverlassigkeit gabe, die den an sich prekaren Erkenntnisprozess stabilisieren und in eine bestimmte (...) Richtung lenken. Die Beitrage dieses Sammelbandes befassen sich mit epistemischen Tugenden aus (wissenschafts-)historischer, philosophischer, medien- und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf dem Verhaltnis von wissenschaftlichen und soziokulturellen beziehungsweise moralischen Normen. Mit Beitragen von: Lorraine Daston, Martin Doll, Andreas Gelhard, Raymond Geuss, Ruben Hackler, Michael Hagner, Jens Kertscher, Markus Krajewski, Marcel Lepper, Martin Mulsow, Oliver Nievergelt, Tanja Paulitz, Robert Proctor, Katja Sabisch, Sandro Zanetti, Cornelia Zumbusch. (shrink)

This paper offers a theory of spatial indexicals like _here_ and _there_ on which such expressions are variables associated with presuppositional constraints on their values. I show how this view handles both referential and bound uses of these indexicals, and I propose an account of what counts as the location of the context on a given occasion. The latter is seen to explain a wide range of facts about what the spatial indexicals can refer to.

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016, 2016). The goals are to contribute to the debate on the identification and analysis of the ethical implications of algorithms, to provide an updated analysis of epistemic and normative (...) concerns, and to offer actionable guidance for the governance of the design, development and deployment of algorithms. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between democracy and republicanism, and its consequences; and articulates new theoretical insights into connections between liberty, law and democratic politics.

El fenómeno originario de la pertenencia explicita uno de los problemas fundamentales de la tradición filosófica continental: la relación cuerpo-mundo. Dicha relación se ha construido tradicionalmente a partir de la propia mismidad del sujeto (Yo) o de su corporalidad, afirmando que es porque tengo un cuerpo que puedo decir que pertenezco a un mundo. Ante esta problemática se alza una fenomenología de la pertenencia propuesta por R. Barbaras, la cual expresa la necesidad de re-pensar la concepción de la subjetividad, así (...) como la necesidad de una inversión en la relación cuerpo-mundo a partir de la pertenencia al mundo del propio sujeto. Ahí es donde aparece el verdadero sentido y alcance ontológico de la experiencia del cuerpo puesto que tener un cuerpo no significa otra cosa más que pertenecer y la aparición sólo podrá darse desde dentro del mundo, a partir de nuestra inscripción en él. Así, la ecología corporal constituirá un ejemplo específico que muestra el alcance de dicha inversión y explicitará el parentesco ontológico entre el cuerpo y el mundo. (shrink)

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016, 2016). The goals are to contribute to the debate on the identification and analysis of the ethical implications of algorithms, to provide an updated analysis of epistemic and normative (...) concerns, and to offer actionable guidance for the governance of the design, development and deployment of algorithms. (shrink)

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in terms of ontological (...) parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative. (shrink)

In “Human‐Animal Chimeras: The Moral Insignificance of Uniquely Human Capacities,” Julian Koplin argues against the views that all uniquely human traits have moral significance or that all the traits humans have in common with other animals “are morally insignificant.” He recommends instead the adoption of “a better framework for thinking about the moral status of part‐human beings,” one that emphasizes the “phenomenal value (or disvalue)” chimeric animals are likely “to enjoy (or suffer).” If the moral status of these chimeric animals (...) is grounded in the phenomenal value of their interests—that is, their interests as nonhuman animals—current protections for animals used in research may be inadequate to protect those interests. (shrink)

Over the past year media outlets and scientific and bioethics journals have reported about several medical and scientific innovations touted as having the potential to fundamentally change not only how diseases and disorders are diagnosed and treated but even how to alter the genomes of future generations. The purported “miracle” blood-testing technology of Theranos and the potential use of the genome editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 to modify human and nonhuman organisms reflect dramatic advances in scientific understanding about the biological mechanisms of (...) humans and other living organisms. Yet evidence about whether these and other innovative biomedical technologies are safe and effective and lead to improved health outcomes for patients young and old is often in dispute. How to assess the safety and effectiveness of innovative biomedical technologies, who should be involved in that effort, and how to define risks and benefits of those technologies are questions at the intersection of values, interests, and politics. (shrink)

Human consciousness is widely understood to be underpinned by rich and diverse functional networks, whose breakdown results in unconsciousness. Candidate neural correlates of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness include: (1) disrupted frontoparietal functional connectivity; (2) disrupted brain network hubs; and (3) reduced spatiotemporal complexity. However, emerging counterexamples have revealed that these markers may appear outside of the state they are associated with, challenging both their inclusion as markers of conscious level, and the theories of consciousness that rely on their evidence. In this study, (...) we present a case series of three individuals in disorders of consciousness (DOC) who exhibit paradoxical brain responses to exposure to anesthesia. High-density electroencephalographic data were recorded from three patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) while they underwent a protocol of propofol anesthesia with a targeted effect site concentration of 2 μg/ml. Network hubs and directionality of functional connectivity in the alpha frequency band (8–13 Hz), were estimated using the weighted phase lag index (wPLI) and directed phase lag index (dPLI). The spatiotemporal signal complexity was estimated using three types of Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZC). Our results illustrate that exposure to propofol anesthesia can paradoxically result in: (1) increased frontoparietal feedback-dominant connectivity; (2) posterior network hubs; and (3) increased spatiotemporal complexity. The case examples presented in this paper challenge the role of functional connectivity and spatiotemporal complexity in theories of consciousness and for the clinical evaluation of levels of human consciousness. (shrink)

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance the (...) discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)