This study investigates the interrelation of outer appearance and spatial configuration of modern Chinese court buildings with the party-state’s strategy of building regime legitimacy. The spatial element of this relation is explored in four different court buildings in Kunming, Chongqing, Shanghai and Xi’an. It is argued that court buildings contribute to the empowerment of individuals who appear as parties in trials. Courthouses also facilitate the courts’ function of exercising social control and the application of an instrumentalist approach to the principle (...) of public trials. Both the grounding of court buildings in the past and their compliance with international models of a modern independent judiciary are aspects of consolidating regime legitimacy. (shrink)

Sometimes it seems intuitively plausible to hold loosely structured sets of individuals morally responsible for failing to act collectively. Virginia Held, Larry May, and Torbj rn T nnsj have all drawn this conclusion from thought experiments concerning small groups, although they apply the conclusion to large-scale omissions as well. On the other hand it is commonly assumed that (collective) agency is a necessary condition for (collective) responsibility. If that is true, then how can we hold sets of people responsible for (...) not having acted collectively? This paper argues that that loosely structured inactive groups sometimes meet this requirement if we employ a weak (but nonetheless non-reductionist) notion of collective agency. This notion can be defended on independent grounds. The resulting position on distribution of responsibility is more restrictive than Held's, May's or T nnsj 's, and this consequence seems intuitively attractive. (shrink)

Defenses of the possibility of collective guilt feelings falls roughly into two categories: collectivistic positions that assign guilt feelings to groups as such but play down the experiential component in guilt feelings, and individualistic positions which understand collective guilt feelings in terms of individual experiences. The analogy between collective and individual guilt feelings is examined from two collectivistic viewpoints. It is argued that the functional states of collectives and individuals with respect to guilt are less analogous than collectivists assume. Instead, (...) an individualistic perspectival understanding of collective guilt feelings is proposed. Groups as such cannot feel guilty in the morally relevant sense, but guilt as felt by individuals can have a distinctively collective character, such that the feeling still may be an appropriate response to assignments of collective responsibility. (shrink)

In their Unfit for the Future, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu argued that there is no moral right to privacy, which resulted in a string of papers. This paper addresses an argument in their most recent contribution, according to which there is no moral right to privacy because individuals cannot control their access to information. Here their argument is first denied after which their epistemic conception of a moral right to privacy is criticized.

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 258-281, April 2022.

A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain – spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and neurophysiology to clinical data – is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection, action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the vertebrate brain can be seen to form (...) a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain – culminating in the cerebral cortex of mammals – came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity, sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone. (Published Online May 1 2007) Key Words: action selection; anencephaly; central decision making; consciousness; control architectures; hydranencephaly; macrosystems; motivation; target selection; zona incerta. (shrink)

This article proposes a way to zoom in on the concept of the social license to operate from the broader normative perspective of contractarianism. An SLO can be defined as a contractarian basis for the legitimacy of a company’s specific activity or project. “SLO”, as a fashionable expression, has its origins in business practice. From a normative viewpoint, the concept is closely related to social contract theory, and, as such, it has a political dimension. After outlining the contractarian normative background (...) to the SLO, we will show how academic concepts such as legitimacy and stakeholder management have a tendency to provide the intellectual underpinning for the business case for securing an SLO. While business case perspectives on the SLO may well be in line with the use of the term in business practice, we will highlight certain difficulties and ambiguities related to the instrumental use of the expression. In the final section, we briefly introduce the articles of this Special Issue to the reader and explain how they relate to the topic. (shrink)

This book is the first monograph that takes a comprehensive approach to Jacques Derrida as a philosopher of technology. It refines and complements his mainstream image as a philosopher of language and deconstructionist of classical literary and philosophical texts. This volume outlines the key features of Derrida’s alternative philosophy of technology, a philosophy which Sjöstrand argues, avoids the problems associated with, on the one hand, a Heideggerian orientation, which completely separates thinking and technology and, on the other, an empirically oriented (...) ”post-phenomenology” that can be said to be hegemonic within the field today. Based on a sustained interpretation of Derrida, and a robust, coherent philosophy of technology, a phenomenology of technology is developed that, in a radical way, extends the concept of technology to cover the entire field of phenomenology. This places the technological not in opposition to humanity, but rather always already in close proximity to man and, consequently, to life, ethics, politics, democracy and religion. Strikingly, this important aspect of Derrida’s thinking is only rarely analyzed or discussed by his many exegetes. This text appeals to graduates and researchers working on Derrida, phenomenology, and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

Giulio Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of IIT's measure of consciousness,phi(Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical circumstances. Our analysis shows that IIT's identification of consciousness with the causal efficacy with which differentiated networks accomplish global information transfer (which is what Φ in fact measures) is mistaken. This misidentification has the consequence of requiring (...) the attribution of consciousness to a range of natural systems and artifacts that include, but are not limited to, large-scale electrical power grids, gene-regulation networks, some electronic circuit boards, and social networks. Instead of treating this consequence of the theory as a disconfirmation, IIT embraces it. By regarding these systems as bearers of consciousnessex hypothesi, IIT is led toward the orbit of panpsychist ideation. This departure from science as we know it can be avoided by recognizing the functional misattribution at the heart of IIT's identity claim. We show, for example, what function is actually performed, at least in the human case, by the cortical combination of differentiation with integration that IIT identifies with consciousness. Finally, we examine what lessons may be drawn from IIT's failure to provide a credible account of consciousness for progress in the very active field of research concerned with exploring the phenomenon from formal and neural points of view. (shrink)

The ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ (Principles) that provide guidance for the implementation of the United Nations’ ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ framework (Framework) will probably succeed in making human rights matters more customary in corporate management procedures. They are likely to contribute to higher levels of accountability and awareness within corporations in respect of the negative impact of business activities on human rights. However, we identify tensions between the idea that the respect of human rights is a perfect (...) moral duty for corporations and the Principle’s ‘human rights due diligence’ requirement. We argue that the effectiveness of the ‘human rights due diligence’ is in many respects dependent upon the moral commitment of corporations. The Principles leave room for an instrumental or strategic implementation of due diligence, which in some cases could result in a depreciation of the fundamental norms they seek to promote. We reveal some limits of pragmatic approaches to coping with business-related human rights abuses. As these limits become more apparent, not only does the case for further progress in international and extraterritorial human rights law become more compelling, but so too does the argument for a more forceful discussion on the moral foundations of human rights duties for corporations. (shrink)

The issue of the biological origin of consciousness is linked to that of its function. One source of evidence in this regard is the contrast between the types of information that are and are not included within its compass. Consciousness presents us with a stable arena for our actions—the world—but excludes awareness of the multiple sensory and sensorimotor transformations through which the image of that world is extracted from the confounding influence of self-produced motion of multiple receptor arrays mounted on (...) multijointed and swivelling body parts. Likewise excluded are the complex orchestrations of thousands of muscle movements routinely involved in the pursuit of our goals. This suggests that consciousness arose as a solution to problems in the logistics of decision making in mobile animals with centralized brains, and has correspondingly ancient roots. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic work with children is popular, but the sophisticated language used in psychoanalytic discourse can be at odds with how children communicate, and how best to communicate with them. _Dialogues with Children and Adolescents: A Psychoanalytic Guide _shows how these aims can be achieved for the most effective clinical outcome with children from infancy up to late adolescence. _Björn Salomonsson_ and _Majlis Winberg Salomonsson_ draw on extensive case material which reveals the essence of communication between child and therapist. They enfranchise (...) the patient of all ages as an equal participant in the therapeutic relationship. Presented in letter form the cases contain no professional terms. Only the final chapter contains theoretical commentaries applicable to each case. These terms and theories help to explain a child’s behaviour, the analyst’s technique and the background to the disorder. This is new creative development in child therapy and analysis which is written in a very accessible style. _Dialogues with Children and Adolescents_ will be essential reading for beginners in psychoanalytic work with children and will cast a fresh light on such work for more experienced clinicians. It will also appeal to the non-professional lay reader. (shrink)

Nie war Freundschaft populärer als heute. Sie gilt als entscheidende Zutat für ein gutes und glückliches Leben. Viele haben auch viele Freunde - jedoch will sich das versprochene Glück nicht so recht einstellen. Woran liegt das? Björn Vedder verknüpft in seiner Zeitdiagnose der Freundschaft philosophische Überlegungen mit der Analyse von popkulturellem Material sowie literarischen Klassikern. Er zeigt, was Freundschaft heute bedeutet, wie sie (auch zu uns selbst) gelingen kann und warum Facebook-Freunde echte Freunde sind. Dabei nimmt er die pessimistischen Kulturkritiken (...) der Gegenwart ernst, teilt deren Defätismus aber nicht, sondern zeigt Wege aus den Pathologien der modernen Freundschaft auf. (shrink)

In this paper, we try to shed light on the ontological puzzle pertaining to models and to contribute to a better understanding of what models are. Our suggestion is that models should be regarded as a specific kind of signs according to the sign theory put forward by Charles S. Peirce, and, more precisely, as icons, i.e. as signs which are characterized by a similarity relation between sign (model) and object (original). We argue for this (1) by analyzing from a (...) semiotic point of view the representational relation which is characteristic of models. We then corroborate our hypothesis (2) by discussing the conceptual differences between icons, i.e. models, and indexical and symbolic signs and (3) by putting forward a general classification of all icons into three functional subclasses (images, diagrams, and metaphors). Subsequently, we (4) integratively refine our results by resorting to two influential and, as can be shown, complementary philosophy of science approaches to models. This yields the following result: models are determined by a semiotic structure in which a subject intentionally uses an object, i.e. the model, as a sign for another object, i.e. the original, in the context of a chosen theory or language in order to attain a specific end by instituting a representational relation in which the syntactic structure of the model, i.e. its attributes and relations, represents by way of a mapping the properties of the original, which hence are regarded as similar in a relevant manner. (shrink)

"Forgetting" plays an important role in the lives of individuals and communities. Although a few Holocaust scholars have begun to take forgetting more seriously in relation to the task of remembering—in popular parlance as well as in academic discourse on the Holocaust—forgetting is usually perceived as a negative force. In the decades following 1945, the terms remembering and forgetting have often been used antithetically, with the communities of victims insisting on the duty to remember and a society of perpetrators desiring (...) to forget. Thus, the discourse on Holocaust memory has become entrenched on this issue. This essay counters the swift rejection of forgetting and its labeling as a reprehensible act. It calls attention to two issues: first, it offers a critical argument for different forms of forgetting; second, it concludes with suggestions of how deliberate performative practices of forgetting might benefit communities affected by a genocidal past. Is it possible to conceive of forgetting not as the ugly twin of remembering but as its necessary companion? (shrink)

Ethnic slur terms and other group-based slurs must be differentiated from general pejoratives and pure expressives. As these terms pejoratively refer to certain groups of people, they are a typical feature of hate speech contexts where they serve xenophobic speakers in expressing their hatred for an entire group of people. However, slur terms are actually far more frequently used in other contexts and are more often exchanged among friends than between enemies. Hate speech can be identified as the most central, (...) albeit not the most frequent, mode of use. I broadly distinguish between hate speech, other pejorative uses, parasitic uses, neutral mentioning, and unaware uses. In this paper, authentic examples of use and frequency estimates from empirical research will help provide accurate definitions and insight into these different modes that purely theoretical approaches cannot achieve. (shrink)

Although popular, control accounts of privacy suffer from various counterexamples. In this article, it is argued that two such counterexamples—while individually resolvable—can be combined to yield a dilemma for control accounts of privacy. Furthermore, it is argued that it is implausible that control accounts of privacy can defend against this dilemma. Thus, it is concluded that we ought not define privacy in terms of control. Lastly, it is argued that since the concept of privacy is the object of the right (...) to privacy if the former cannot be defined in terms of control, neither can the latter. (shrink)

Cephalopods are extraordinary molluscs equipped with vertebrate‐like intelligence and a unique buoyancy system for locomotion. A growing body of evidence from the fossil record, embryology and Bayesian molecular divergence estimations provides a comprehensive picture of their origins and evolution. Cephalopods evolved during the Cambrian (∼530 Ma) from a monoplacophoran‐like mollusc in which the conical, external shell was modified into a chambered buoyancy apparatus. During the mid‐Palaeozoic (∼416 Ma) cephalopods diverged into nautiloids and the presently dominant coleoids. Coleoids (i.e. squids, cuttlefish (...) and octopods) internalised their shells and, in the late Palaeozoic (∼276 Ma), diverged into Vampyropoda and the Decabrachia. This shell internalisation appears to be a unique evolutionary event. In contrast, the loss of a mineralised shell has occurred several times in distinct coleoid lineages. The general tendency of shell reduction reflects a trend towards active modes of life and much more complex behaviour. (shrink)

‘Natural selection’ is, it seems, an ambiguous term. It is sometimes held to denote a consequence of variation, heredity, and environment, while at other times as denoting a force that creates adaptations. I argue that the latter, the force interpretation, is a redundant notion of natural selection. I will point to difficulties in making sense of this linguistic practise, and argue that it is frequently at odds with standard interpretations of evolutionary theory. I provide examples to show this; one example (...) involving the relation between adaptations and other traits, and a second involving the relation between selection and drift. (shrink)

In discussions of moral responsibility for collectively produced effects, it is not uncommon to assume that we have to abandon the view that causal involvement is a necessary condition for individual co-responsibility. In general, considerations of cases where there is “a mismatch between the wrong a group commits and the apparent causal contributions for which we can hold individuals responsible” motivate this move. According to Brian Lawson, “solving this problem requires an approach that deemphasizes the importance of causal contributions”. Christopher (...) Kutz’s theory of complicitious accountability in Complicity from 2000 is probably the most well-known approach of that kind. Standard examples are supposed to illustrate mismatches of three different kinds: an agent may be morally co-responsible for an event to a high degree even if her causal contribution to that event is a) very small, b) imperceptible, or c) non-existent (in overdetermination cases). From such examples, Kutz and others conclude that principles of complicitious accountability cannot include a condition of causal involvement. In the present paper, I defend the causal involvement condition for co-responsibility. These are my lines of argument: First, overdetermination cases can be accommodated within a theory of coresponsibility without giving up the causality condition. Kutz and others oversimplify the relation between counterfactual dependence and causation, and they overlook the possibility that causal relations other than marginal contribution could be morally relevant. Second, harmful effects are sometimes overdetermined by non-collective sets of acts. Over-farming, or the greenhouse effect, might be cases of that kind. In such cases, there need not be any formal organization, any unifying intentions, or any other noncausal criterion of membership available. If we give up the causal condition for coresponsibility it will be impossible to delimit the morally relevant set of acts related to those harms. Since we sometimes find it fair to blame people for such harms, we must question the argument from overdetermination. Third, although problems about imperceptible effects or aggregation of very small effects are morally important, e.g. when we consider degrees of blameworthiness or epistemic limitations in reasoning about how to assign responsibility for specific harms, they are irrelevant to the issue of whether causal involvement is necessary for complicity. Fourth, the costs of rejecting the causality condition for complicity are high. Causation is an explicit and essential element in most doctrines of legal liability and it is central in common sense views of moral responsibility. Giving up this condition could have radical and unwanted consequences for legal security and predictability. However, it is not only for pragmatic reasons and because it is a default position that we should require stronger arguments (than conflicting intuitions about “mismatches”) before giving up the causality condition. An essential element in holding someone to account for an event is the assumption that her actions and intentions are part of the explanation of why that event occurred. If we give up that element, it is difficult to see which important function responsibility assignments could have. (shrink)

Many studies in big data focus on the uses of data available to researchers, leaving without treatment data that is on the servers but of which researchers are unaware. We call this dark data, and in this article, we present and discuss it in the context of high-performance computing facilities. To this end, we provide statistics of a major HPC facility in Europe, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart. We also propose a new position tailor-made for coping with dark data and (...) general data management. We call it the scientific data officer and we distinguish it from other standard positions in HPC facilities such as chief data officers, system administrators, and security officers. In order to understand the role of the SDO in HPC facilities, we discuss two kinds of responsibilities, namely, technical responsibilities and ethical responsibilities. While the former are intended to characterize the position, the latter raise concerns—and proposes solutions—to the control and authority that the SDO would acquire. (shrink)

The philosophical–ethical literature and the public debate on autonomous vehicles have been obsessed with ethical issues related to crashing. In this article, these discussions, including more empirical investigations, will be critically assessed. It is argued that a related and more pressing issue is questions concerning safety. For example, what should we require from autonomous vehicles when it comes to safety? What do we mean by ‘safety’? How do we measure it? In response to these questions, the article will present a (...) foundation for a continued discussion on these issues and an argument for why discussions about safety should be prioritized over ethical concerns related to crashing. (shrink)

According to the class of de minimis decision principles, risks can be ignored (or at least treated very differently from other risks) if the risk is sufficiently small. In this article, we argue that a de minimis threshold has no place in a normative theory of decision making, because the application of the principle will either recommend ignoring risks that should not be ignored (e.g., the sure death of a person) or it cannot be used by ordinary bounded and information-constrained (...) agents. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a model of well-being based on current research in neurobiology and psychology, integrated in an evolutionary perspective of the human mind. Briefly, the primary purpose of nervous systems is to direct an animal toward behavior should be conducive to survival and procreation, and as a rule of thumb this implies either approach or avoidance. While behavior originally was based on reflexes, in humans the brain contains a system of negative and positive affect. (...) Although an array of functions has evolved that employ emotions in order to handle various pursuits, recent studies suggest that they converge on shared neural circuits involved in mood, that is, they converge on circuits designed to generate reward and punishment. Happiness can be construed as the net output of these brain modules. Neural circuits tend to gain in strength and influence upon frequent activation, which suggests a strategy for improving happiness and mental health: to avoid excessive stimulation of negative modules, to use cognitive interference to enhance the "turn off" function of these modules, and to exercise modules involved in positive feelings. (shrink)

Savage et al. propose that music filled a hypothetical “bonding gap” in human sociality by Baldwinian gene-culture coevolution (or protracted cognitive niche construction). Both these stepping stones to an evolutionary account of the function and origin of music are problematic. They are scrutinized in this commentary, and an alternative is proposed.

Social entrepreneurship increasingly involves collective, voluntary organizing efforts where success depends on generating and sustaining members’ participation. To investigate how such participatory social ventures achieve member engagement in pluralistic institutional settings, we conducted a qualitative, inductive study of German Renewable Energy Source Cooperatives. Our findings show how value tensions emerge from differences in RESCoop members’ relative prioritization of community, environmental, and commercial logics, and how cooperative leaders manage these tensions and sustain member participation through temporal, structural, and collaborative compromise strategies. (...) We unpack the mechanisms by which each strategy enables members to justify organizational decisions that violate their personal value priorities and demonstrate their varying implications for organizational growth. Our findings contribute new insights into the challenges of collective social entrepreneurship, the capacity of hybrid organizing strategies to mitigate value concessions, and the importance of logic combinability as a key dimension of pluralistic institutional settings. (shrink)

It is a plain fact that biology makes use of terms and expressions commonly spoken of as teleological. Biologists frequently speak of the function of biological items. They may also say that traits are 'supposed to' perform some of their effects, claim that traits are 'for' specific effects, or that organisms have particular traits 'in order to' engage in specific interactions. There is general agreement that there must be something useful about this linguistic practice but it is controversial whether it (...) is entirely appropriate, and if so why it is.Many theorists have defended the use of seemingly teleological terms by appeal to an etiological notion of function (Wright, 1973; Millikan, 1984, 2002; Neander, 1991; .. (shrink)

: After clarifying some misunderstandings, I discuss the inescapability of bias in research in more practical terms, followed by an exemplification of why epigenetics does not shatter a ….

Context: Political psychology rests on the assumption of the existence of a world outside and independent of consciousness. This ontological materialism is hardly spoken of within the field, as it ….