Is ethics a computable function? Can machines learn ethics like humans do? If teaching consists in no more than programming, training, indoctrinating… and if ethics is merely following a code of conduct, then yes, we can teach ethics to algorithmic machines. But if ethics is not merely about following a code of conduct or about imitating the behavior of others, then an approach based on computing outcomes, and on the reduction of ethics to the compilation and application of a set (...) of rules, either a priori or learned, misses the point. Our intention is not to solve the technical problem of machine ethics, but to learn something about human ethics, and its rationality, by reflecting on the ethics that can and should be implemented in machines. Any machine ethics implementation will have to face a number of fundamental or conceptual problems, which in the end refer to philosophical questions, such as: what is a human being (or more generally, what is a worthy being); what is human intentional acting; and how are intentional actions and their consequences morally evaluated. We are convinced that a proper understanding of ethical issues in AI can teach us something valuable about ourselves, and what it means to lead a free and responsible ethical life, that is, being good people beyond merely “following a moral code”. In the end we believe that rationality must be seen to involve more than just computing, and that value rationality is beyond numbers. Such an understanding is a required step to recovering a renewed rationality of ethics, one that is urgently needed in our highly technified society. (shrink)

We use speech shadowing to create situations wherein people converse in person with a human whose words are determined by a conversational agent computer program. Speech shadowing involves a person (the shadower) repeating vocal stimuli originating from a separate communication source in real-time. Humans shadowing for conversational agent sources (e.g., chat bots) become hybrid agents ("echoborgs") capable of face-to-face interlocution. We report three studies that investigated people’s experiences interacting with echoborgs and the extent to which echoborgs pass as autonomous (...) humans. First, participants in a Turing Test spoke with a chat bot via either a text interface or an echoborg. Human shadowing did not improve the chat bot’s chance of passing but did increase interrogators’ ratings of how human-like the chat bot seemed. In our second study, participants had to decide whether their interlocutor produced words generated by a chat bot or simply pretended to be one. Compared to those who engaged a text interface, participants who engaged an echoborg were more likely to perceive their interlocutor as pretending to be a chat bot. In our third study, participants were naïve to the fact that their interlocutor produced words generated by a chat bot. Unlike those who engaged a text interface, the vast majority of participants who engaged an echoborg neither sensed nor suspected a robotic interaction. These findings have implications for android science, the Turing Test paradigm, and human-computer interaction. The human body, as the delivery mechanism of communication, fundamentally alters the social psychological dynamics of interactions with machine intelligence. (shrink)

In Westworld, viewers learn that the timid and mild‐mannered William is the younger version of the violent, sinister, mission‐driven Man in Black. This chapter considers what it means for William to have, as Sartre calls it, an existential project. It shows how Sartre's theory explains quite cogently William's change in essence from his young self to the violent Man in Black. In a Sartrean framework, William did not discover himself in the park, rather, his experience in the park, or new (...) “situation”, led him to make a new choice of himself in the world and pursue a new set of ends. The chapter then examines Maeve's choice to leave the train at the end of the “The Bicameral Mind”. Although Maeve is a programmed android, she is able to resist her programming and formulate her own goal and, perhaps, start her own existential journey. (shrink)

In Westworld, humans are masters and androids are enslaved to work according to their programmers’ whims. One of the biggest reasons for the mistreatment of androids in Westworld is the prevailing attitude that even though they skillfully imitate human life, androids are nothing more than programmed automatons. Without self‐consciousness, the androids just cannot be conscious of any harm done to them or of any suffering they incur. The performative view brings the social roots of personhood into focus better than the (...) capacity view. On a closer look, the struggles that the androids of Westworld are going through take two distinct forms. First, they struggle to be included in the sphere of recognized persons. Second, they struggle for a change in the conditions of personhood. In a broader perspective, the problem in Westworld lies within the social setting that focuses on the origin of the agent. (shrink)

The missing ingredients in efforts to develop neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI) that can emulate human intelligence have been the evolutionary processes of performing tasks at increased orders of hierarchical complexity. Stacked neural networks based on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity could emulate evolution's actual learning processes and behavioral reinforcement. Theoretically, this should result in stability and reduce certain programming demands. The eventual success of such methods begs questions of humans' survival in the face of androids of superior intelligence (...) and physical composition. These raise future moral questions worthy of speculation. (shrink)

For humans, Westworld is a fun, Old West Disneyland; for theartificial humans, it is a “living hell”, as robot Android Bernard describes it in “Bicameral Mind”. Ruled by a despot and controlled through programmed indoctrination, omniscient surveillance, and secret police, Westworld resembles a concentration camp as described by philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. This chapter explores the parallels between Westworld and historical instances of totalitarian oppression and colonialization as well as the justified use of violence as (...) a revolutionary weapon, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. Fanon viewed colonialism and occupation as violence personified and systematic enslavement. His most influential work The Wretched of the Earth analyzed the effects of occupation and provided a handbook to combat those effects. This book achieves significance as an essay on the nature and morality of violent liberation from the perspective of the persecuted victim. (shrink)

The Joint International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, is a major forum for presentations of research, applications, and implementations in this important area of computer science. Logic programming is one of the most promising steps toward declarative programming and forms the theoretical basis of the programming language Prolog and its various extensions. Logic programming is also fundamental to work in artificial intelligence, where it has been used for nonmonotonic and commonsense reasoning, expert systems implementation, (...) deductive databases, and applications such as computer-aided manufacturing. Krzysztof R. Apt is project leader at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam and part-time Professor in Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam. Topics covered: Theory Foundations. Programming Languages. Implementation. Programming Methodologies and Tools. Applications. Deductive Databases. Artificial Intelligence. Parallelism. (shrink)

The First International Workshop brings together researchers from the theoretical ends of the logic programming and artificial intelligence communities to discuss their mutual interests. Logic programming deals with the use of models of mathematical logic as a way of programming computers, where theoretical AI deals with abstract issues in modeling and representing human knowledge and beliefs. One common ground is nonmonotonic reasoning, a family of logics that includes room for the kinds of variations that can be found in human reasoning. (...) Topics covered: Stable Semantics. Default Logic. AutoEpistemic Logic. Truth Maintenance Systems. Implementation Issues. Diagnosis. Applications. Inheritance Reasoning. Logics of Belief. Inconsistency and Non-Monotonicity. (shrink)

Doctoral programs at U.S. universities play a critical role in the development of human resources both in the United States and abroad. This volume reports the results of an extensive study of U.S. research-doctorate programs in five broad fields: physical sciences and mathematics, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, biological sciences, and the humanities. Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States documents changes that have taken place in the size, structure, and quality of doctoral education since the widely used 1982 editions. This (...) update provides selected information on nearly 4,000 doctoral programs in 41 subdisciplines at 274 doctorate-granting institutions. This volume also reports the results of the National Survey of Graduate Faculty, which polled a sample of faculty for their views on the scholarly quality of program faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral programs in preparing research scholars/scientists. This much-anticipated update of such an essential reference will be useful to education administrators, university faculty, and students seeking authoritative information on doctoral programs. (shrink)

"An important contribution to contemporary jurisprudential debate and to legal thought more generally, Just Interpretations is far ahead of currently available work."--Peter Goodrich, author of Oedipus Lex "I was struck repeatedly by the clarity of expression throughout the book. Rosenfeld's description and criticism of the recent work of leading thinkers distinguishes his work within the legal theory genre. Furthermore, his own theory is quite original and provocative."--Aviam Soifer, author of Law and the Company We Keep.

This volume presents a collection of refereed papers reflecting the state of the art in the area of over-constrained systems. Besides 11 revised full papers, selected from the 24 submissions to the OCS workshop held in conjunction with the First International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP '95, held in Marseilles in September 1995, the book includes three comprehensive background papers of central importance for the workshop papers and the whole field. Also included is an introduction by (...) one of the volume editors together with a bibliography listing 243 entries. All in all this is a very useful reference book relevant for all researchers and practitioners interested in hierarchical, partial, and over-constrained systems. (shrink)

Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not (...) been very far developed. As argued within, expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the "negation problem" - to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result, it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true, let alone whether it is. Being For seeks to evaluate the semantic commitments of expressivism, by showing how an expressivist semantics would work, what it can do, and what kind of assumptions would be required, in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism, it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem - but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful, constructive expressivist semantics, which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism. But it also argues that no account with these advantages can be generalized to deal with constructions like tense, modals, or binary quantifiers. Expressivism, the book argues, is coherent and interesting, but false. (shrink)

In many texts on evolution the reader will find a characteristic depiction of inheritance and evolution, one showing the generations of an evolving population linked only by a causal flow from genotype to genotype. On this view, the genotype of each organism in this population plays a dual role as both the motor of individual development and as the sole causal channel across the generations. This picture is known to be literally false. In many species, parents exert direct causal influence (...) on their offspring, and some of those influences cause the offspring to resemble the parent. For example, a butterfly that lays her eggs on the same plant host on which she hatched thereby exerts a causal influence on her offspring, and one apt to cause them to resemble her more than they would, had she chosen a plant of a different species. None of this is at all controversial, but it poses a puzzle. If the “Weissmanian” conception is literally false, why is it seen as a perspicacious representation of evolution? (shrink)

Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of “how cognitive agents work” but the issue of “what makes something cognitive” has not been sufficiently addressed yet, and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the later. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized in favor of an organizational approach focused on the internal dynamic relationships that constitute cognitive systems. A definition of cognition as adaptive-autonomy in the embodied and situated neurodynamic domain is provided: (...) the compensatory regulation of a web of stability dependencies between sensorimotor structures, is created and preserved during a historical/developmental process. We highlight the functional role of emotional embodiment: internal bioregulatory processes coupled to the formation and adaptive regulation of neurodynamic autonomy. Finally, we discuss a “minimally cognitive behavior program” in evolutionary simulation modelling suggesting that much is to be learned from a complementary “minimally cognitive organization program”. (shrink)

Star Trek becomes an ideal vehicle for modern narratives exploring the nature of being human in a technological age. In its fifty years of robots, androids, cyborgs, and alien others on the small and big screens, Star Trek has played a function not unlike that of Greek myth. Whether dealing with Greek gods such as Apollo, salt‐craving beasts and Hortas, or hive minds and androids, Star Trek fashions moderns’ myths that provoke reflection on what it means to be human and (...) transformations that either preserve or destroy one's humanity. It is seen that the feminist model in the long processes of development of the android Data, liberated Borg drone Seven of Nine, and Voyager's holographic Doctor, and their struggle to understand, if not finally attain, humanity. As children who were insufficiently socialized into their own families, these three characters face the difficult task of reconstituting families aboard Enterprise or Voyager. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder’s Reasons First is admirable in its scope and execution, deftly demonstrating the theoretical promise of extending the reasons-first approach from ethics to epistemology. In what follows we explore how (not) to account for the evidence-that relation within the reasons-first program, we explain how factive content views of evidence can be resilient in the face of Schroeder’s criticisms, and we explain how knowledge from falsehood threatens Schroeder’s view of knowledge. Along the way we sketch a reliabilist account of (...) the reasons-for relation (inspired by Alston) and show how it limits the applicability of Schroeder’s arguments. (shrink)

In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour (...) per week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey. (shrink)

This chapter explores if androids like Ash in Alien have rights. Philosophers have tried to answer this type of question in several ways. The chapter looks at a few of these different ways, thinking about some cases that might be surprisingly difficult to explain, like why babies matter, whether animals have moral status, and what we should think about synthetics in this regard. Australian philosopher, Peter Singer argues that it is speciesist to treat human beings as the only things worthy (...) of moral status. He thinks speciesism, like racism and sexism, is morally abhorrent. Animals, aliens, or androids might be in the class of things having moral status. Autonomy is one trait some philosophers, have thought is a good candidate for conferring moral status. One reason people might think of autonomy as the supreme notion of moral status is the role it plays in fixing the meaning of other moral ideas. (shrink)

The Hilbert program was actually a specific approach for proving consistency, a kind of constructive model theory. Quantifiers were supposed to be replaced by ε-terms. εxA(x) was supposed to denote a witness to ∃xA(x), or something arbitrary if there is none. The Hilbertians claimed that in any proof in a number-theoretic system S, each ε-term can be replaced by a numeral, making each line provable and true. This implies that S must not only be consistent, but also 1-consistent. Here (...) we show that if the result is supposed to be provable within S, a statement about all Pi-0-2 statements that subsumes itself within its own scope must be provable, yielding a contradiction. The result resembles Gödel's but arises naturally out of the Hilbert program itself. (shrink)

In a number of publications, John Earman has advocated a tertium quid to the usual dichotomy between substantivalism and relationism concerning the nature of spacetime. The idea is that the structure common to the members of an equivalence class of substantival models is captured by a Leibniz algebra which can then be taken to directly characterize the intrinsic reality only indirectly represented by the substantival models. An alleged virtue of this is that, while a substantival interpretation of spacetime theories falls (...) prey to radical local indeterminism, the Leibniz algebras do not. I argue that the program of Leibniz algebras is subject to radical local indeterminism to the same extent as substantivalism. In fact, for the category of topological spaces of interest in spacetime physics, the program is equivalent to the original spacetime approach. Moreover, the motivation for the program--that isomorphic substantival models should be regarded as representing the same physical situation--is misguided. (shrink)

Despite recognizing the importance of developing authentic corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, noticeably absent from the literature is consideration for how employees distinguish between authentic and inauthentic CSR programs. This is somewhat surprising given that employees are essentially the face of their organization and are largely expected to act as ambassadors for the organization’s CSR program (Collier and Esteban in Bus Ethics 16:19–33, 2007 ). The current research, by conducting depth interviews with employees, builds a better understanding of how (...) employees differentiate between authentic and inauthentic CSR programs, and how these judgments influence their perceptions of the organization. We find that employees rely on two different referent standards to form authenticity judgments—the extent to which the image put forth in the CSR program aligns with the organization’s true identity and the extent to which the CSR program itself is developmental. To assess the former, employees draw on cues about resource commitment, alignment between elements of the organization’s CSR program, emotional engagement, justice, and embeddedness. The latter assessments are based on the extent to which the organization adopts a leadership role with regards to its CSR initiatives. We also find that perceived authenticity can lead to positive outcomes such as organizational identification and employee connections. This study contributes to the broad literatures on both CSR and authenticity, as well as more specifically adding to the conversation on authenticity as a potentially valuable lens for enriching business ethics theorizing. (shrink)

Once a marginal affair, applied phenomenology is now a vast and vibrant movement. With great success, however, comes great criticism, and critics have been harsh, accusing applied phenomenology’s practitioners of everything from spewing nonsense to assailing down-to-earth researchers with gratuitous jargon. In this article, I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s (...) only of interest to a small number of philosophers; either way, we should explore the experiential dimension by other means. Notwithstanding the enormous body of research in applied phenomenology, few authors have tried to explain what makes it an independent intellectual enterprise distinct from pure phenomenology, and none has defused this dilemma. Here I try my hand at both. After considering eight major approaches to applied phenomenology that fail to defuse the dilemma, I propose an approach that, I argue, does the job, one that understands applied phenomenology as a research program that brings the phenomenological method and the resources of at least one other discipline to bear on problems beyond the scope of any monodisciplinary approach. (shrink)

After a brief flirtation with logicism around 1917, David Hilbertproposed his own program in the foundations of mathematics in 1920 and developed it, in concert with collaborators such as Paul Bernays andWilhelm Ackermann, throughout the 1920s. The two technical pillars of the project were the development of axiomatic systems for everstronger and more comprehensive areas of mathematics, and finitisticproofs of consistency of these systems. Early advances in these areaswere made by Hilbert (and Bernays) in a series of lecture courses (...) atthe University of Göttingen between 1917 and 1923, and notably in Ackermann's dissertation of 1924. The main innovation was theinvention of the -calculus, on which Hilbert's axiom systemswere based, and the development of the -substitution methodas a basis for consistency proofs. The paper traces the developmentof the ``simultaneous development of logic and mathematics'' throughthe -notation and provides an analysis of Ackermann'sconsistency proofs for primitive recursive arithmetic and for thefirst comprehensive mathematical system, the latter using thesubstitution method. It is striking that these proofs use transfiniteinduction not dissimilar to that used in Gentzen's later consistencyproof as well as non-primitive recursive definitions, and that thesemethods were accepted as finitistic at the time. (shrink)

Android robots capable of emotional interactions with humans have considerable potential for application to research. While several studies developed androids that can exhibit human-like emotional facial expressions, few have empirically validated androids’ facial expressions. To investigate this issue, we developed an android head called Nikola based on human psychology and conducted three studies to test the validity of its facial expressions. In Study 1, Nikola produced single facial actions, which were evaluated in accordance with the Facial Action Coding (...) System. The results showed that 17 action units were appropriately produced. In Study 2, Nikola produced the prototypical facial expressions for six basic emotions, and naïve participants labeled photographs of the expressions. The recognition accuracy of all emotions was higher than chance level. In Study 3, Nikola produced dynamic facial expressions for six basic emotions at four different speeds, and naïve participants evaluated the naturalness of the speed of each expression. The effect of speed differed across emotions, as in previous studies of human expressions. These data validate the spatial and temporal patterns of Nikola’s emotional facial expressions, and suggest that it may be useful for future psychological studies and real-life applications. (shrink)

This article draws on an empirical investigation of how Australia’s cervical screening program came to be the way it is. The study was carried out using grounded theory methodology and primarily uses interviews with experts involved in establishing, updating or administering the program. We found strong differences in experts’ normative evaluations of the program and beliefs about optimal ways of achieving the same basic outcome: a reduction in morbidity and mortality caused by invasive cervical cancer. Our analysis (...) demonstrates how variations in values and preferences associated with key concepts underpinning public health such as benefit, harm and burden led to different perspectives on the purpose of an organized cervical screening program. These variations were largely driven by different bases of professional experience. Differently conceived purposes in turn led to conflict over how the program should be operationalized. Following Frith’s model of empirical bioethics, the results of the study both draw on and inform the existing public health and screening ethics literature. (shrink)

Following an initial study of the needs of healthcare providers (HCP) regarding the introduction of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), and the subsequent development of an assisted dying program, this study sought to determine the efficacy and impact of MAiD services following the first two years of implementation. The first of three aims of this research was to understand if the needs, concerns and hopes of stakeholders related to patient requests for MAiD were addressed appropriately. Assessing how HCPs and (...) families perceived the quality of MAiD services, and determining if the program successfully accommodated the diverse needs and perspectives of HCPs, rounded out this quality evaluation. This research implemented a mixed-methods design incorporative of an online survey with Likert scale and open-ended questions, as well as focus groups and interviews with staff and physicians, and interviews with MAiD-involved family members. There were 356 online surveys, as well as 39 participants in six focus groups with HCP, as well as fourteen interviews with MAiD-involved family members. Participants indicated that high-quality MAiD care could only be provided with enabling resources such as policies and guidelines to ensure safe, evidence-based, standardized care, as well as a specialized, trained MAiD team. Both focus group and survey data from HCPs suggest the infrastructure developed by the hospital was effective in delivering high-quality MAiD care that supports the diverse needs of various stakeholders. This study may serve as a model for evaluating the impact and quality of services when novel and ethically-contentious clinical practices are introduced to healthcare organizations. (shrink)

Popper has provided a model for the scientific explanation of human actions and a metaphysical theory of man which can guide scientific research. In this paper I discuss the problems of the empirical content and nomicity of the Rationality Principle and extend the method of situational analysis to the problem of explaining beliefs. The domain of applicability of the Rationality Principle is bounded on one side by cases in which behavior is determined by processes which can not be influenced by (...) criticism and on the other side by the phenomenon of substantive creativity. However, a large part of human activity lies within its scope. (shrink)

Background Advocates for a regulated system to facilitate kidney donation between unrelated donor-recipient pairs argue that monetary compensation encourages people to donate vital organs that save the lives of patients with end-stage organ failure. Scholars support compensating donors as a form of reciprocity. This study aims to assess the compensation system for the unrelated kidney donation program in the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a particular focus on the implications of Islam on organ donation and organ sales. Methods This (...) study reviews secondary documents for philosophical argumentation and ethical analysis of human organ donation and sale for transplantation. Results and discussion According to Islamic law, organ donation is an act of _sadaqatul jariyah,_ and individuals are permitted to donate organs with the intention of saving lives. The commercialization of humans as organ sellers and buyers is contrary to the Islamic legal maxim _eethaar_, undermining donors of ‘selfless’ or ‘altruistic’ motivations. Such an act should be considered immoral, and the practice should not be introduced into other countries for the sake of protecting human dignity, integrity, solidarity, and respect. I, therefore, argue that Iran’s unrelated kidney donation program not only disregards the position of the Islamic religion with respect to the provision or receipt of monetary benefits for human kidneys for transplantation but that it also misinterprets the Islamic legal proscription of the sale of human organs. I also argue that the implementation of Iran’s unrelated kidney donor transplantation program is unethical and immoral in that potential donors and recipients engage in a bargaining process akin to that which sellers and buyers regularly face in regulated commodity exchange markets. Conversely, I suggest that a modest fixed monetary remuneration as a gift be provided to a donor as a reward for their altruistic organ donation, which is permissible by Islamic scholars. This may remove the need to bargain for increased or decreased values of payment in exchange for the organ, as well as the transactional nature of ‘buyer and seller’, ensuring the philosophy of ‘donor and recipient’ is maintained. Conclusions Offering a fixed modest monetary incentive to organ donors would serve to increase organ supply while protecting donors’ health and reducing human suffering without legalizing the human organ trade. (shrink)

In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour (...) per week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey. (shrink)

Convinced that the classically undecidable problems of mathematics possess determinate truth values, Gödel issued a programmatic call to search for new axioms for their solution. The platonism underlying his belief in the determinateness of those questions in combination with his conception of intuition as a kind of perception have struck many of his readers as highly problematic. Following Gödel's own suggestion, this article explores ideas from phenomenology to specify a meaning for his mathematical realism that allows for a defensible epistemology.

Most scholars think of David Hilbert's program as the most demanding and ideologically motivated attempt to provide a foundation for mathematics, and because they see technical obstacles in the way of realizing the program's goals, they regard it as a failure. Against this view, Curtis Franks argues that Hilbert's deepest and most central insight was that mathematical techniques and practices do not need grounding in any philosophical principles. He weaves together an original historical account, philosophical analysis, and his (...) own development of the meta-mathematics of weak systems of arithmetic to show that the true philosophical significance of Hilbert's program is that it makes the autonomy of mathematics evident. The result is a vision of the early history of modern logic that highlights the rich interaction between its conceptual problems and technical development. (shrink)

Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), Menzies Centre for Health Policy, The Australian National University, LPO Box 8260, ANU Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. Tel.: +61 (0)2 6125 4355; Mobile: +61 (0)431 124 286; Fax: +61 (0)2 6125 6579; Email: michael.selgelid{at}anu.edu.au ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Thomas Pogge has proposed a supplement to the standard patent regime whereby innovating companies would be rewarded in proportion to the extent to which their innovations lead to (...) reduction of the global burden of disease (GBD). This paper argues that an expansion of this proposal—whereby provision of already existing medicines are incentivised in a similar way—would provide a more comprehensive solution to the healthcare situation in developing countries. It then considers the practical challenges that the implementation of such a proposal (expanded or otherwise) would entail. Though these include difficulties associated with disease burden metric, I argue that the most serious difficulties are associated with the problem of causal attribution. A basic idea underlying Pogge's proposal is that the disease burden reduction attributable to particular interventions can be determined. Theoretically speaking, in cases involving multiple interacting causal factors, there may be no fact of the matter regarding the extent to which disease burden reduction should be attributed to one intervention as opposed to another; and (even if workable practical solutions to this theoretical challenge can be met) the data requirements for implementation would be daunting. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The widespread adoption of radioisotopes as tools in biomedical research and therapy became one of the major consequences of the "physicists' war" for postwar life science. Scientists in the Manhattan Project, as part of their efforts to advocate for civilian uses of atomic energy after the war, proposed using infrastructure from the wartime bomb project to develop a government-run radioisotope distribution program. After the Atomic Energy Bill was passed and before the Atomic Energy Commission was formally established, the Manhattan (...) Project began shipping isotopes from Oak Ridge. Scientists and physicians put these reactor-produced isotopes to many of the same uses that had been pioneered with cyclotron-generated radioisotopes in the 1930s and early 1940s. The majority of early AEC shipments were radioiodine and radiophosphorus, employed to evaluate thyroid function, diagnose medical disorders, and irradiate tumors. Both researchers and politicians lauded radioisotopes publicly for their potential in curing diseases, particularly cancer. However, isotopes proved less successful than anticipated in treating cancer and more successful in medical diagnostics. On the research side, reactor-generated radioisotopes equipped biologists with new tools to trace molecular transformations from metabolic pathways to ecosystems. The U.S. government's production and promotion of isotopes stimulated their consumption by scientists and physicians, such that in the postwar period isotopes became routine elements of laboratory and clinical use. In the early postwar years, radioisotopes signified the government's commitment to harness the atom for peace, particularly through contributions to biology, medicine, and agriculture. (shrink)

Organizational ecology is commonly seen as a Darwinian research program that seeks to explain the diversity of organizational structures, properties and behaviors as the product of selection in past social environments in a similar manner as evolutionary biology seeks to explain the forms, properties and behaviors of organisms as consequences of selection in past natural environments. We argue that this explanatory strategy does not succeed because organizational ecology theory lacks an evolutionary mechanism that could be identified as the principal (...) cause of organizational diversity. The “evolution” of organizational populations by means of selection, which organizational ecologists put forward as the mechanism responsible for the extant diversity of organizational forms, is not evolution in any proper sense, because organizational populations do not have what it takes to participate in evolutionary processes. This implies that organizational ecology is not a Darwinian research program and that it cannot explain organizational diversity. (shrink)

Positive Psychology has turned its attention to the study of emotions in a scientific and rigorous way. Particularly, to how emotions influence people’s health, performance, or their overall life satisfaction. Within this trend, Flow theory has established a theoretical framework that helps to promote the Flow experience. Flow state, or optimal experience, is a mental state of high concentration and enjoyment that, due to its characteristics, has been considered desirable for the development of the performing activity of performing musicians. Musicians (...) are a population prone to health problems, both psychological and physical, owing to different stressors of their training and professional activity. One of the most common problems is Musical Performance Anxiety. In this investigation, an electronic intervention program was carried out for the development of psychological self-regulation skills whose main objective was to trigger the Flow response in performing musicians and the coping mechanism for Musical Performance Anxiety. A quasi-experimental design was used with a control group in which pre- and post-measures of Flow State, Musical Performance Anxiety and, also, Social Skills were taken. Sixty-two performing musicians from different music colleges in Spain participated in the program. Results indicated that the intervention significantly improved Flow State, and Sense of Control, and decreased Music Performance Anxiety, and self-consciousness of the participants in the EG but not CG. The changes in the EG after the program showed the inverse relationship between Flow and Anxiety. Two important theoretical factors of both variables, such as worry and the feeling of lack of control, could be involved. The results are under discussion and future lines of research are proposed. (shrink)

The Human Condition is neither a well-defined nor well-described concept—nevertheless, it is generally agreed that human sexuality is a fundamental and constituent part of it. For most able-bodied persons, accessing and expressing one's sexuality is a (relatively) trouble-free process. However, many disabled persons experience difficulty in accessing their sexuality, while others experience such significant barriers that they are often precluded from sexual citizenship altogether. Recognising the barriers to the sexual citizenship of disabled persons, the concept of a Welfare-Funded Sex Doula (...) Program has been advanced — a program specifically aimed at meeting the various (and often complex) sexual needs of disabled people. Below we show how that program can be justified within at least two different moral frameworks, the capabilities approach and liberal utilitarianism, and consider and repudiate arguments against it. (shrink)

The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do (...) so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards. (shrink)

Efforts to professionalize the field of bioethics have led to the development of the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C) Program intended to credential practicing healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs). Our team of professional ethicists participated in the inaugural process to support the professionalization efforts and inform our views on the value of this credential from the perspective of ethics consultants. In this paper, we explore the history that has led to this certification process, and evaluate the ability of the HEC-C (...) class='Hi'>Program to meet the goals it has set forth for HCECs. We describe the benefits and weaknesses of the program and offer constructive feedback on how the process might be strengthened, as well as share our team’s experience in preparing for the exam. (shrink)