The Covid-19 pandemic has led to severe shortages of many essential goods and services, from hand sanitizers and N-95 masks to ICU beds and ventilators. Although rationing is not unprecedented, never before has the American public been faced with the prospect of having to ration medical goods and services on this scale.

Many have argued that human enhancement, in particular bioenhancement via genetic engineering, brain-interventions or preimplantation embryo selection, is problematic even if it can be safely implemented. Various arguments have been put forward focusing on issues such as the undermining of autonomy, uneven distribution and unfairness, and the alteration of one’s identity, amongst others. Nevertheless, few, if any, of these thinkers oppose vaccines. -/- In what follows, I argue for the permissibility of a limited set of cognitive enhancements – in particular, (...) the enhancement of evaluative judgment and self-control – by analogy with the permissibility of vaccines. As a result, it follows that if one accepts the permissibility of vaccines one will also, other things being equal, be committed to the permissibility of these enhancements. I then consider and respond to a number of possible objections in order to defend and clarify my position. (shrink)

It is hypothesized that iron from biological tissues, liberated during decay, may have played a role in inhibiting loss of anatomical information during fossilization of extinct organisms. Most tissues in the animal kingdom contain iron in different forms. A widely distributed iron‐bearing molecule is ferritin, a globular protein that contains iron crystallites in the form of ferrihydrite minerals. Iron concentrations in ferritin are high and ferrihydrites are extremely reactive. When ancient animals are decaying on the sea floor under anoxic environmental (...) conditions, ferrihydrites may initialize the selective replication of some tissues in pyrite FeS2. This model explains why some labile tissues are preserved, while other more resistant structures decay and are absent in many fossils. A major implication of this hypothesis is that structures described as brains in Cambrian arthropods are not fossilization artifacts, but are instead a source of information on anatomical evolution at the dawn of complex animal life. (shrink)

The presence of predictive AI has steadily expanded into ever-increasing aspects of civil society. I aim to show that despite reasons for believing the use of such systems is currently problematic, these worries give no indication of their future potential. I argue that the absence of moral limits on how we might manipulate automated systems, together with the likelihood that they are more easily manipulated in the relevant ways than humans, suggests that such systems will eventually outstrip the human ability (...) to make accurate judgments and unbiased predictions. I begin with some reasonable justifications for the use of predictive AI. I then discuss two of the most significant reasons for believing the use of such systems is currently problematic before arguing that neither provides sufficient reason against such systems being superior in the future. In fact, there’s reason to believe they can, in principle, be preferable to human decision makers. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor (Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) famously argued that lexical concepts are unstructured. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of both the classical approach to concepts and Fodor's conceptual atomism, I argue that some lexical concepts are, in fact, structured. Roughly stated, I argue that structured lexical concepts bear a necessary biconditional entailment relation to their structural constituents. I develop this account of the structure of lexical concepts within the framework of Pavel (...) Tichy's (The foundations of Frege's logic. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1988) theory of constructions. I argue that concepts are constructions which can be combined by way of Tichy's construction-forming operations of composition and closure and an additional operation, simplification, which I propose in section 6. The last of these construction-forming operations plays a central role in my account of lexical concept structure. Stated generally, structured lexical concepts are a result of simplifying their structural constituents. (shrink)

“Songspirals are a university for us, they are a map of understandings” (Gay’wu Group of Women, 2019, p. 33). This paper is authored by Bawaka Country, acknowledging Country’s ability to teach and share. Country is homeland and place. Country is everything and the relationships that bring everything to life. Country is knowledge. This paper is shaped and enabled by songspirals. Songspirals are sung and cried by Yolŋu people in north east Arnhem Land, Australia, to awaken Country, to make and remake (...) the life-giving connections between people and place. The Goŋ-gurtha songspiral leads this paper, showing us how a Yolŋu Country-led pedagogy centres Country’s active agency by learning through, with, and as Country. This pedagogy shares with us the ongoing connections within and between generations to ensure that knowledge remains strong and that sharing is done the right way, according to Yolŋu Rom, Law/Lore. This learning is predicated on relationality and responsibility. It is a more-than-human learning in which human knowing is decentred and Country is knowledgeable. It is a learning which recognises and respects its limits and it is a learning in which the ongoing sovereignty of Yolŋu people is front and centre. (shrink)

Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips (...) of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p <.001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p <.001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p <.001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p <.001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Luce Irigaray’s aesthetic of sexual difference, which she develops by extrapolating from Paul Klee’s idea that the role of painting is to render the non-visible rather than represent the visible. This idea is the premise of her analyses of phenomenology and psychoanalysis and their respective contributions to understanding art and sexual identity. I claim that Irigaray assembles an aesthetic of sexual difference that exceeds these familiar intellectual traditions, one that articulates the encounter of non-visible, material (...) forces that engender modes of sexuate being and becoming. I further claim that this encounter is the very matter of artistry and art-making. (shrink)

The past few decades have seen a substantial increase in the focus on the myriad ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Included amongst the numerous issues is the existential risk that some believe could arise from the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) which is an as-of-yet hypothetical form of AI that is able to perform all the same intellectual feats as humans. This has led to extensive research into how humans can avoid losing control of an AI that is at (...) least as intelligent as the best of us. This ‘control problem’ has given rise to research into the development of ‘friendly AI’ which is a highly competent AGI that will benefit, or at the very least, not be hostile toward humans. Though my question is focused upon AI, ethics and issues surrounding the value of friendliness, I want to question the pursuit of human-friendly AI (hereafter FAI). In other words, we might ask whether worries regarding harm to humans are sufficient reason to develop FAI rather than impartially ethical AGI, or an AGI designed to take the interests of all moral patients—both human and non-human—into consideration. I argue that, given that we are capable of developing AGI, it ought to be developed with impartial, species-neutral values rather than those prioritizing friendliness to humans above all else. (shrink)

The question of what is philosophy, leads, it would seem, inevitably to diverse and conflicting, if not at times contradictory, answers. It is not only a matter of different philosophic perspectives, but also of fundamentally opposed conceptions of philosophy. Varying philosophic intentions and aims underlie what is taken to be the nature of philosophy and disagreement abounds. Philosophies then tend to differ not so much in terms of what they disagree about but what they consider philosophically sound and important. Phenomenology (...) may share some concerns about basic philosophic problems, like intentionality, with ordinary language philosophy. But they diverge again sharply about the question of what philosophy should accomplish for, and what difference it makes to, human knowledge and understanding. The one sees intentionality as the pervasive structure of human consciousness and reality, and the other sees it as simply part of the various ways in which the uses of language can explain, and thus do away with, philosophical questions on perplexity. This difference about what philosophy should accomplish, its purpose, is not resolvable. It is what on each approach must be considered the very nature of philosophy and its primary task. (shrink)

Some feminist commentators ignore Luce Irigaray’s contributions to rethinking classical and neoclassical theories of the market when their aims and hers are often largely of a piece. Other feminist commentators celebrate Irigaray’s writings by privileging a certain conception of the gift her philosophy is said to evoke because it challenges the logic of the market economy and its masculinist biases. Instead of viewing the market and the gift in a binary way, I argue that Irigaray examines the conditions of possibility (...) for transvaluing value and exchange as such. By way of an internal critique of economic texts and discourses, Irigaray draws out the available conceptual resources for the possibility of a model of exchange between two positively valued – sexuate – subjects. In this article I focus on the texts where Irigaray explicitly engages with key components of political economy – ‘Commodities among Themselves’, ‘Women on the Market’ and ‘Women, the Sacred and Money’ – and also her conceptualisation of a nonmarket economy in Elemental Passions. These brilliant and complex essays yield an understanding of the forms and the flows (value and exchange) of all economies (whether symbolic, linguistic, cultural or political) necessary for cultivating a sexuate economy. (shrink)

(1972). BEING AND DOING: AN INQUIRY INTO THE COLONIZATION, DECOLONIZATION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF AMERICAN SOCIETY AND ITS STATE, Marcus Raskin. World Futures: Vol. 12, No. 1-2, pp. 165-193.

We argue that many modern marketing techniques are morally problematic because they take advantage of a phenomenon known as ‘ego-depletion’ according to which willpower is, similar to physical strength, a limited resource that can be depleted by predictable factors. We argue that this is impermissible for the same reason that spiking someone’s drink to impair their judgment is impermissible.

This work “Escaping Self-Sacrifice: Changing Black Women’s Relationship with Servility” is a deep dive into Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues. Addressing the idea of servility as a burdened virtue that requires self-sacrifice, I strive to reevaluate the traditional role Black women have in their families and within their communities. I argue that the demands of Black women are so excessive that they have lost touch with their self-regarding virtues, causing them to have ethical imbalances within themselves. This work is a part (...) of an ongoing attempt to counter oppressive practices with joy as a form of resistance. I use the idea that simply existing is enough for Black women without the added burden of taking care of everyone else. (shrink)

?Objectivity?; has been a traditional ideal for American journalism despite recent characterizations of the principle as ?biased toward the status quo, against independent thinking, and against countenancing questions of morality and responsibility.?; This article explores the role of traditional objectivity in newspaper coverage of the nomination in Alaska of a socialist commissioner of environmental conservation and the subsequent ?framing?; of public discussion. The human qualities of sensitivity to history, to civil liberties, and to questions of morality appeared in editorials, but (...) professional norms of objectivity denied reporters the right to exercise their creativity and public responsibility. Reportorial sensitivity to diverse sources is necessary, supplemented by a fundamental and far?reaching examination of how reportorial language encodes public and private questions in ways that further established positions of power and privilege. (shrink)

As i was finalizing this introduction to the Special Issue on CRISPR genome editing for Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, news broke that the Chinese scientist He Jiankui had been sentenced in Chinese court to three years in prison for "illegal medical practice" for his role in the creation of the world's first genome-edited babies. This official reprimand reinforced the worldwide condemnation and censure that followed He's announcement in November 2018 that his team at the Southern University of Science and (...) Technology in Shenzhen, China, had used the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing tools on human embryos created via in vitro fertilization. He produced and brought to term two babies carrying... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to determine whether age-related differences in utilitarian moral decision-making during sacrificial moral dilemmas extend to non-sacrificial dilemmas in real-world settings. As affect and emotional memory are associated with moral and prosocial behaviors, we also sought to understand how these were associated with moral behaviors during the 2020 spring phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Older age, higher negative affect, and greater reports of reflecting on negative aspects of the pandemic were associated (...) with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find goods, while older age and higher negative affect alone were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find medical supplies. Older age was associated with what appeared at first to be non-utilitarian moral behaviors with regard to the purchasing of these supplies; However, they also reported distributing these goods to family members rather than engaging in hoarding behaviors. These findings suggest that advancing age may be associated with engagement in utilitarian moral decision-making in real-world settings more than the sacrificial moral decision-making literature would suggest. (shrink)

Through the relatively new science and technology known as synthetic biology, scientists are attempting to create useful new life forms. Any attempt to “create life” inevitably prompts some to ask whether man is trespassing into areas properly reserved for a divine creator. The potential creative power of synthetic biology raises this concern to a level that has not been known before. Thus a new chapter in the history of the relationship between science and religion is being written. This article presents (...) some of the scholarly perspectives on that chapter. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the filmakers' intention of making a film about Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture series on Friedrich Holderlin's poem, 'Der Ister,' as an 'act of philosophical expression'. With and against Heidegger's principles of thought and the possibilities of expression, I argue the filmmakers undermine its generic classification as an essay film through interruption, a technique that is exemplary of Holderlin's poetry.

We examined the “othering” of Asian Americans in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given past evidence that pathogen-related threat perceptions can exacerbate intergroup biases, as well as salient public narratives blaming the Chinese for the pandemic, we assessed whether individuals experiencing a greater sense of threat during the pandemic were more likely to apply the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype to Asian Americans. Over a seven-week period, we recruited 1,323 White Americans to complete a measure of the perceived Americanness of Asian, (...) Black, and White targets. Asian targets were consistently perceived as less American than White targets, across variations in subjective health threat and regional case counts. The direct and indirect connections of political ideology to the observed patterns were examined, revealing that White participants who blamed China for the pandemic were more likely to apply the perpetual foreigner stereotype to Asian Americans. These results indicate that the othering of Asian Americans is pervasive among White Americans and that variables related to social conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic can predict the potency of this association. (shrink)

A 365 million year‐old trilobite moult‐carcass assemblage was described by Błażejowski et al. (2015) as the oldest direct evidence of moulting in the arthropod fossil record. Unfortunately, their suppositions are insufficiently supported by the data provided. Instead, the morphology, configuration and preservational context of the highly fossiliferous locality (Kowala Quarry, Poland) suggest that the specimen consists of two overlapping, queued carcasses. The wider fossil record of moulting actually extends back 520 million years, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study behaviour, ecology (...) and development in early animals. Taking cues from modern analogues, it is possible to quantify precise details about moulting behaviour to determine broad‐scale evolutionary trends, ontogenetic sequences and morphological selection pressures. In this review, we argue that this rich source of data has been underused in evolutionary studies, though has great potential for investigating the life history and evolution of arthropods in deep time. (shrink)

De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice throws new light on the terrain between theory and practice in transdisciplinary discourses of design and art. The collection brings together a selection of essays on spatiality, difference, cultural aesthetics, and identity in the expanded field of place-making and being.

These essays use particular issues, thinkers and texts to engage the question of God in early Christianity.

Responding to Randall and Gibson''s (1990) call for more rigorous methodologies in empirically-based ethics research, this paper develops propositions — based on both previous ethics research as well as the larger organizational behavior literature — examining the impact of attitudes, leadership, presence/absence of ethical codes and organizational size on corporate ethical behavior. The results, which come from a mail survey of 149 companies in a major U.S. service industry, indicate that attitudes and organizational size are the best predictors of ethical (...) behavior. Leadership and ethical codes contribute little to predicting ethical behavior. The paper concludes with an assessment of the relevant propositions, as well as a delineation of future research needs. (shrink)