This review argues that the role of technology in business and society debates has predominantly been examined from the limited, narrow perspective of technology as instrumental, and that two additional but relatively neglected perspectives are important: technology as value-laden and technology as relationally agentic. Technology has always been part of the relationship between business and society, for better and worse. However, as technological development is frequently advanced as a solution to many pressing societal problems and grand challenges, it is imperative (...) that technology is understood and analyzed in a more nuanced, critical, and comprehensive way. The two additional perspectives invite a broader research agenda, one that includes questions, such as “Which values and whose interests has technology come to emulate?”; “How do these values and interests play out in stabilizing the status quo?”; and, importantly, “How can it be contested, disrupted, and changed?” Any research that endorses green, sustainable, environmental, or climate mitigating technologies potentially contributes to maintaining the very thing that it seeks to change if questions such as these are not being addressed. (shrink)

Despite the widespread use of the notion of moral intuition, its psychological features remain a matter of debate and it is unclear why the capacity to experience moral intuitions evolved in humans. We first survey standard accounts of moral intuition, pointing out their interesting and problematic aspects. Drawing lessons from this analysis, we propose a novel account of moral intuitions which captures their phenomenological, mechanistic, and evolutionary features. Moral intuitions are composed of two elements: an evaluative mental state and a (...) feeling of rightness (FOR). We illustrate the phenomenology of the FOR with examples of non-moral and moral cases, and provide a biological and mechanistic account: the emergence of human reasoning capacities created a need for the co-evolution of a psychological system producing the feeling of rightness (the FORs). This system is triggered when we experience conflicting evaluations. The FORs renders evaluations resulting from rational deliberation less compelling than the evaluations produced by simple evolved systems. It thus facilitates optimal decision-making, preventing excessive interference by rational deliberation. Our account sheds light on why moral intuitions are so frequently experienced and why they are so compelling and resistant to argument. In addition, the account fuels interesting speculations about common metaethical intuitions. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of neurorobotics looks to neuroscience to overcome the limitations of modern robotics technology, to robotics to advance our understanding of the neural system’s inner workings, and to information technology to develop tools that support those complementary endeavours. The development of these technologies is still at an early stage, which makes them an ideal candidate for proactive and anticipatory ethical reflection. This article explains the current state of neurorobotics development within the Human Brain Project, originating from a close (...) collaboration between the scientific and technical experts who drive neurorobotics innovation, and the humanities and social sciences scholars who provide contextualising and reflective capabilities. This article discusses some of the ethical issues which can reasonably be expected. On this basis, the article explores possible gaps identified within this collaborative, ethical reflection that calls for attention to ensure that the development of neurorobotics is ethically sound and socially acceptable and desirable. (shrink)

Frequency effects are pervasive in studies of language, with higher frequency words being recognized faster than lower frequency words. However, the exact nature of frequency effects has recently been questioned, with some studies finding that contextual information provides a better fit to lexical decision and naming data than word frequency ( Adelman et al., 2006 ). Recent work has cemented the importance of these results by demonstrating that a measure of the semantic diversity of the contexts that a word occurs (...) in provides a powerful measure to account for variability in word recognition latency ( Johns et al., 2012, 2015 ; Jones et al., 2012 ). The goal of the current study is to extend this measure to examine bilingualism and aging, where multiple theories use frequency of occurrence of linguistic constructs as central to accounting for empirical results ( Gollan et al., 2008 ; Ramscar et al., 2014 ). A lexical decision experiment was conducted with four groups of subjects: younger and older monolinguals and bilinguals. Consistent with past results, a semantic diversity variable accounted for the greatest amount of variance in the latency data. In addition, the pattern of fits of semantic diversity across multiple corpora suggests that bilinguals and older adults are more sensitive to semantic diversity information than younger monolinguals. (shrink)

How should we approach the daunting task of renewing the ideal of equality? In this book, Christine Sypnowich proposes a theory of equality centred on human flourishing or wellbeing. She argues that egalitarianism should be understood as seeking to make people more equal in the constituents of a good life. Inequality is a social ill because of the damage it does to human flourishing: unequal distribution of wealth can have the effect that some people are poorly housed, badly nourished, (...) ill-educated, unhappy or uncultured, among other things. When we seek to make people more equal our concern is not just resources or property, but how people fare under one distribution or another. Ultimately, the best answer to the question, equality of what?, is some conception of flourishing, since whatever policies or principles we adopt, it is flourishing that we hope will be more equal as a result of our endeavours. Sypnowich calls for both retrieval and innovation. What is to be retrieved is the ideal of equality itself, which is often assumed as a background condition of theories of justice, yet at the same time, dismissed as too homogenising, abstract and rigid a criterion for political argument. We must retrieve the ideal of equality as a central political principle. In doing so, she casts doubt on the value of focussing on cultural difference, and rejects the idea of neutrality that dominates contemporary political philosophy in favour of a view of the state as enabling the betterment of its citizens. ". (shrink)

Accounts of human beings as essentially social have had a long history in philosophy as reflected in the Ancient Greeks; in African and Asian philosophy; in Modern European thinkers such as Mary Wo...

A contribution to a panel on ethics and animals forthcoming in The Harvard Review of Philosophy.

This paper examines an application of epistemic injustice not fully explored in the literature. How does epistemic injustice function in broader contexts of relationships within countries between colonizers and colonized? More specifically, what can be learned about the ongoing structural aspects of hermeneutical injustice in Canada’s settler history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and the resultant erasing and marginalizing of Indigenous histories, languages, laws, traditions, and practices? In this paper, I use insights from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (...) report to challenge dominant understandings of reconciliation, reciprocity, respect for agency, and the rule of law in settler nations. In its retrieval of the richness and diversity of Indigenous collective interpretive resources, both past and present, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission draws on a broad and full account of relationships that have shaped Indigenous lives and communities, non-Indigenous lives and communities, the interactions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and communities, and the relationships of all of these to and through the state. (shrink)

To view organismic functioning in terms of integration is a mistake, although the concept has dominated scientific thinking this century. The operative concept for interpreting the organism proposed here is that of ‘articulation’ or decomposition rather than that of composition from segregated parts. It is asserted that holism is the fundamental state of all phenomena, including organisms. The impact of this changed perspective on perceptual theorizing is profound. Rather than viewing it as a process resulting from internal integration of isolated (...) features detected by receptor neurons into a perceptual whole, the new theory suggests that the task of perceptual processing is to break up what initially exists holistically in sense organs into features and eventually perceived objects. Similarly, the goal of perceptual activity is not Sherrington's, that of integrating essentially unrelated organisms with their environmental surround, but rather to generate percepts in which the environment appears as a field of objects and events independent of the perceiver which are available for manipulation. Perception is a process by which organisms use their embeddedness in physical reality as if they were independent of it. There are a number of interesting results of this conceptual reorientation. The binding problem is eliminated because the percept's holistic character is the precondition for neural activity, not its product. The concept of representation can be dispensed with since the fundamental conceptual motivation for its introduction -- the assumed need to produce an internal copy of what was assumed to exist independently outside the organism in order to integrate organismic behaviour with its environmental causes -- is rejected outright. And finally, the issue of perceptual consciousness is addressed: how does the percept acquire its objective status vis-a-vis a perceiver, and what is the basis of the experiential character of perception? (shrink)

This article draws on data from various sources for 190 developed and developing nations and uses them to examine gender regimes, or forms of patriarchal structures, at the regional level. I argue for multiple, rather than single, measures of gender inequality and illustrate that using many inequality measures exposes a wider range of outcomes within the Global South than the North, also suggesting the inefficacy of this geographic dichotomy. Then I re-examine the outcomes with nations grouped into seven regions, showing (...) that each region has different variables that define their gender inequalities. Finally, I link gendered social institutions and implicitly gendered political-economic structures to gender-inequitable outcomes in six regions to reveal three different gender regimes across the regions. (shrink)

This article argues that the condition of women in Third World societies cannot be separated from the colonial experience since the power relationships that were established during the colonial era between Europe and its territories, and between women and men, have not varied significantly and are still recreated through contemporary mechanisms. For example, development projects promoted by Western countries to modernize the Third World have, in the long run, better served their own interests than those of their intended beneficiaries. As (...) a result and contrary to expectations, growth and prosperity still elude the Third World. We also show that during the current international economic crisis, women's unpaid or underpaid labor has become the basis of new development programs and policies and is crucial to the recent phase of capitalist development. We discuss how the structural position and status of women and colonies closely resemble each other and have served as the foundations of the capital accumulation process and the development of industrial nations. The concept of women as a last colony thus becomes a compelling metaphor of liberation and leads us to stress the need for a worldwide process of gender decolonization, entailing the reformulation of power relations between women and men. (shrink)

La bioéthique est à la mode. Il faut " être pour "! La prochaine étude par le législateur français des lois " bioéthiques " en témoigne. Avortement, fabrication d'enfants " prêts-à-porter ", recherche biomédicale, clonage, génétique, rien n'échappe à la bioéthique. Et si, cheval de Troie pénétrant le droit, la morale, les déontologies, elle ne constituait qu'une habile machine de subversion des sciences médicales, d'appropriation globale de l'être humain. Des médecins, des philosophes, parlementaires, juristes engagés dans l'examen des doctrines et (...) mécanismes bioéthiques se sont posés la question. Leur réponse n'est vraiment pas celle du " consensus ". Elle impose au public savant et aux gens prétendus ordinaires et à leurs représentants dans la Cité, une réflexion, un retour vers une nouvelle liberté de penser. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an expressive account of disrespect according to which an action becomes disrespectful in virtue of making an explicitly or implicitly demeaning statement about its target’s moral standing. On my reading, we act disrespectfully whenever we (in word or deed) spread the falsehood that some people can be treated worse than they in fact can be given the correct account of what we owe to each other. After elaborating on the content that renders an action disrespectful (...) and explaining how disrespectful actions come to acquire their distinctive content in the first place, I go on to defend my account against rival approaches and stress its usefulness in detecting a previously disregarded moral phenomenon, namely, the risk of causing moral confusion. I do so by arguing that, given our nature as social cognisers, disrespectful actions are particularly well-suited to pollute our beliefs about what we owe to each other and what is owed to us. (shrink)

Examining the subtle forms of aggression, violence, and harassment that occur in our society and manifest in institutions and places of work, the expert contributors collected here describe the experience of social marginalization and expose how vulnerable individuals work to navigate exclusionary climates. This volume explores how bodies disrupt the status quo in multiple contexts and locations; provides insights into how institutions are structured and how practices that may cause harm are maintained; and, finally, considers progressive and proactive alternatives. This (...) book will be a key resource for academics and professionals in education, sociology, nursing, law, business and political science, as well as organizations and policymakers grappling with aggression in the workplace. (shrink)

This volume includes essays presented at the conference on Emotions and Rationality in Moral Philosophy held at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Bern in October 2005. The authors of this volume share the Humean insight that the ‘sentiments’ have a crucial role to play in elucidating the practice of morality. In a Humean fashion, they warn us against taking an intellectualist view of emotions and reject the rationalist account of morality.

Hymen reconstruction surgery is a simple procedure to repair a woman’s hymen, requested by women who, for religious and cultural reasons, believe they must appear to have an intact hymen on their wedding night. Debates surrounding possible ethical justification for the procedure are complex and heated. These articles from the Harvard Ethics Consortium present and explore the case of a young woman who asked a young female physician on call for a referral for the procedure.

La direction générale des finances publiques a mis en place un dispositif interne de médiation pour aider les équipes de travail à résoudre des situations de conflits relationnels. Conçu comme un outil managérial, dans le respect de la déontologie de la médiation, il permet d'apaiser les tensions par une action plurielle et collective au sein de l'institution.

This is the first paper in the invited collection. Koggel starts with Code’s first book to record the key objections she raises against traditional and mainstream epistemological accounts. They are the sort of objections that will thread their way through all her work and be important to the development of feminist epistemology. I will then introduce, summarize, and discuss the work Code does on virtue ethics in Epistemic Responsibility and speculate on why she abandons this path in the rest of (...) her work. Code uses virtue ethics and, specifically, virtues of the intellect, to frame an account of moral responsibility that I find interesting, promising, and still relevant to the contemporary revival of virtue ethics and to feminist epistemology more generally. (shrink)

Samantha Brennan notes in her survey article, “Recent Works in Feminist Ethics,” that “the reshaping of moral concepts in light of feminist critiques of individualism and feminist development of relational alternatives represents significant progress in feminist ethics, indeed in ethics at large.” Two suggestions in this claim serve as a starting point for my application of a relational approach to inequalities in a global context. First, equality is a moral concept that has been and continues to be central to Western (...) liberal theory. The global context reveals liberalism's dominance on the world scene as well as increases in inequalities of wealth both within and across borders. I claim that this context calls for renewed vigilance in the “reshaping of moral concepts” that are central to liberal theory. To clarify, I do not argue that feminists must work with these concepts. Rather I hold that some concepts, one of them being equality, have enduring moral value and this makes continued feminist analyses of them important, particularly in the contemporary global context. (shrink)

This Article examines the ways in which market vendors in Kampala, Uganda, responded to plans to redevelop their markets through the concession of long-term leases to private investors. These plans met with massive resistance from the marketers, with significant outcomes. The Article uncovers how the marketers actively negotiated a “gray space” between legality and illegality and creatively used the law, with a view to asserting themselves as the legitimate rulers of their markets. It shows how the marketers engaged in highly (...) diverse modalities of struggle, stretching across the legal/illegal boundary. They organized in multiple configurations which were flexible, hybrid and mutant in character, rather than being fixed in particular organizational categories. In their struggles, the marketers engaged in shifting alliances and with a disparate range of political allies. Their politics were fluid, untamed and pragmatic, but also contradictory and fractured. This flexibility and pragmatism enabled them to navigate a complex political landscape and to make instrumental use of a generally unfavorable legal environment. (shrink)

Le propos de l’article est l’analyse de la cérémonie de la prise d’habit au sein de l’Ordre Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel aux xviie et xviiie siècles. À partir des sources normatives, picturales et hagiographiques, cette cérémonie est détaillée, notamment la scénographie de l’avant/après, gommant toute marque féminine (présence de cheveux, soins pour un teint pâle, vêtement ajusté, usage de soieries, de bijoux, etc.). Certaines pratiques témoignent de la mise en impatience de ce passage de la soie au drap, qui se traduit (...) par des prises d’habit clandestines, prématurées ou des portraits de mondaines usurpatrices en habit de carmélites. Il est vrai que le modèle absolu de La Madeleine, compte tenu des origines le plus souvent princières des postulantes, n’est pas étranger au prestige de la métamorphose. Réalité et construction représentative permettent de montrer comment le Carmel s’est approprié une cérémonie, qui, dans le contexte compétitif entre les ordres de la liturgie tridentine, valorise la femme, par le biais de la moniale, affranchie des attributs de son sexe. Mais surtout, la vêture a su rendre spectaculaire et désirable ce qui a priori ne l’est pas, la pauvreté et la pénitence du corps et de ses attributs, dans le but avoué du recrutement de nouvelles postulantes. De la rivalité entre drap et soie, le vainqueur n’est pas forcément celui que l’on croit. (shrink)

This book examines links between post-conflict security, peace and development in Africa, Latin America, Europe and New Zealand. Young peace researchers from the Global South as well as from Italy and New Zealand address in case studies traumas in Northern Uganda, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants in the Ivory Coast, economic and financial management of terrorism in Kenya, organised crime in Brazil, mental health issues in Colombia, macro realism in Europe and global defence reforms within the military apparatus since 1990. (...) The book reviews linkages between regional stability, development and peace in post-conflict societies while adding on to the post 2015 international agenda and discusses linkages between peace, security and development. (shrink)