This paper is aimed to understand the state of the art and the resulting consequences of the legal framework in Europe, with regard to the protection of children's data. Especially when they interact with networked and robotic toys, like in 'My friend Cayla' case. In order to evaluate the practical implications of the use of IoT devices by children or teenager users, the first part of the paper presents an analysis of the international guiding principles of the protection of minors, (...) a category which enjoys a higher level of protection of their fundamental rights, due to their condition of lack of physical and psychological maturity. Secondly, the focus is moved upon the protection of personal data of children. Only after confronting previous data protection legal instruments and having compared them with the novelties set forth in General Data Protection Regulation, it is reasonable to assume that new provisions such as "privacy by design" principle, adequacy of security measures and codes of conduct, can support data controllers in ensuring compliance in the field of IoT toys. In conclusion, the paper supports a view of Data Protection Authorities as a relevant player in enhancing these renovated tools in order to achieve the protection of children's rights, as to ensure their substantial protection against the threats of the interconnected world. (shrink)

Avec l'arrivée dans les années 1990 du développement des OGM et de méthodes de séquençage de l'ADN, la question de la brevetabilité du vivant est devenue un débat d'ordre éthique majeur. Encore aujourd'hui, la possibilité de déposer des brevets dans le domaine des biotechnologies est un thème d'actualité. Face à la complexité d'un sujet peu ou mal connu du grand public, Pierre Sartor nous propose d'aborder avec clarté les différents domaines touchés par les brevets du vivant, afin d'en comprendre les (...) problématiques et les enjeux. Le droit, l'économie, l'éthique, les aspects sociétaux et écologiques y sont développés, exemples concrets à l'appui. (shrink)

Can addiction be credibly invoked as an excuse for moral harms secondary to particular decisions to use drugs? This question raises two distinct sets of issues. First, there is the question of whether addiction is the sort of consideration that could, given suitable assumptions about the details of the case, excuse or mitigate moral blameworthiness. Most discussions of addiction and moral responsibility have focused on this question, and many have argued that addiction excuses. Here I articulate what I take to (...) be the best argument for this view, based on the substantial difficulty that people with severe addiction experience in controlling drug-related behavior. This, I argue, may in some cases be sufficient to ground a mitigating excuse, given the way in which addiction undermines agents’ responsiveness to relevant moral reasons to do otherwise. Much less attention has been devoted to a second set of issues that critically affect the possibility of applying this mitigating excuse in particular cases, derived from the ambivalent nature of agential control in addiction. In order to find a fitting response to moral harm, the person with the right standing to blame must make a judgment about the extent to which the agent possessed certain morally relevant capacities at the time of the act. In practice, this will often prove tremendously difficult to assess. The ethical challenge for the person with the right standing to blame is fundamentally one of making a judgment about matters that seem underdetermined by the available evidence. (shrink)

Reasoning with cases has been a primary focus of those working in AI and law who have attempted to model legal reasoning. In this paper we put forward a formal model of reasoning with cases which captures many of the insights from that previous work. We begin by stating our view of reasoning with cases as a process of constructing, evaluating and applying a theory. Central to our model is a view of the relationship between cases, rules based on cases, (...) and the social values which justify those rules. Having given our view of these relationships, we present our formal model of them, and explain how theories can be constructed, compared and evaluated. We then show how previous work can be described in terms of our model, and discuss extensions to the basic model to accommodate particular features of previous work. We conclude by identifying some directions for future work. (shrink)

O presenta artigo se constitui em um estudo interpretativo a respeito dos efeitos da inserção maciça de tecnologias conectadas à rede mundial de computadores, em nossa cultura. Celebradas a ponto de se alastrarem como objeto de desejo por toda a parte, essas tecnologias, sobretudo as mídias móveis, têm se tornado ubíquas e não há um único segmento da sociedade que não tenha sido tocado por essa inserção. A educação formal em nosso país, por meio de políticas públicas como o Programa (...) Nacional de Tecnologia Educacional – Proinfo, procurou introduzir nas escolas da rede recursos para agregar qualidade ao nosso ensino básico, sabidamente precário. Entretanto a iniciativa se depara com resistências de toda a sorte, tanto por parte de gestores quanto de professores. Esse artigo pondera sobre essas resistências procurando ultrapassas questões, tais como falta de capacitação dos gestores, incidência de problemas técnicos ou mera falta interesse nas tecnologias. Busca pistas dessa oposição silenciosa a partir das alterações promovidas pela “virtualidade” na relação simbólica do sujeito com o meio, incidindo na esfera de sua identidade. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Fricker’s influential account of testimonial injustice (hereafter ‘TI’) should be expanded to include cases of TI from mutually neutralising countervailing prejudices. In this kind of case, the hearer is given due credibility by the speaker. I describe a relevant case, defend it from objections, highlight how it differs from extant cases of due-credibility TI and describe its distinctive features. This case demonstrates how paying attention to the way multiple prejudices operate in concert leads to (...) expanding the repertoire of cases of TI and casts light on the harms of TI. (shrink)

The fields of linguistic pragmatics and legal interpretation are deeply interrelated. The purpose of this paper is to show how pragmatics and the developments in argumentation theory can contribute to the debate on legal interpretation. The relation between the pragmatic maxims and the presumptions underlying the legal canons are brought to light, unveiling the principles that underlie the types of argument usually used to justify a construction. The Gricean maxims and the arguments of legal interpretation are regarded as presumptions subject (...) to default used to justify an interpretation. This approach can allow one to trace the different legal interpretive arguments back to their basic underlying presumptions, so that they can be compared, ordered, and assessed according to their defeasibility conditions. This approach allows one to understand the difference between various types of interpretive canons, and their strength in justifying an interpretation. (shrink)

O julgamento da ADPF 54 pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal teve como efeito a regulamentação do início da proteção constitucional à vida, silenciada na Constituição Federal de 1988 e na legislação ordinária. Todavia, a tramitação perante o Legislativo de Projeto de Lei prevendo a criminalização da interrupção da gravidez por diagnóstico de anencefalia fetal reacende as tensões acerca dos limites da atuação dos poderes Judiciário e Legislativo na concretização dos direitos fundamentais, as quais serão analisadas no presente trabalho à luz do (...) direito comparado, a fim de compreender como a regulamentação do direito à vida se estabeleceu em outros Estados Democráticos. (shrink)

While some form of loss of control is often assumed to be a common feature of the diverse manifestations of addiction, it is far from clear how loss of control should be understood. In this paper, I put forward a concept of decrease in control in addiction that aims to fill this gap and thus provide a general framework for thinking about addictive behavior. The development of this account involves two main steps. First, I present a view of degrees of (...) control as the degree to which an agent would be responsive to potential or counterfactual sufficient reasons to do otherwise. Second, I sketch an account of the relevant control-undermining factors in addiction that is consonant with my proposed view of degrees of control. Being a high-level functional property, reasons-responsiveness is particularly well suited to frame an account of control-undermining factors that is doubly pluralistic: it encompasses the contribution of factors both internal and external to the agent, and it is consistent with various proposals as to the precise nature of the anomaly taking place in the psychology of addiction. (shrink)

Advancements and deployments of AI-based systems, especially Deep Learning-driven generative language models, have accomplished impressive results over the past few years. Nevertheless, these remarkable achievements are intertwined with a related fear that such technologies might lead to a general relinquishing of our lives’s control to AIs. This concern, which also motivates the increasing interest in the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) research field, is mostly caused by the opacity of the output of deep learning systems and the way that it is (...) generated, which is largely obscure to laypeople. A dialectical interaction with such systems may enhance the users’ understanding and build a more robust trust towards AI. Commonly employed as specific formalisms for modelling intra-agent communications, dialogue games prove to be useful tools to rely upon when dealing with user’s explanation needs. The literature already offers some dialectical protocols that expressly handle explanations and their delivery. This paper fully formalises the novel Explanation–Question–Response (EQR) dialogue and its properties, whose main purpose is to provide satisfactory information (i.e., justified according to argumentative semantics) whilst ensuring a simplified protocol, in comparison with other existing approaches, for humans and artificial agents. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the attempt to reorient the discussion (...) about moral expertise. (shrink)

L’article propose une interprétation théorique du processus de rupture entre les attentes créées par les conversations sur les applications de rencontres et le moment du premier face-à-face. Cet effet est connu par les utilisateurs de ces applications. Néanmoins, il a été moins analysé dans la littérature. Dans un premier temps, l’auteur analyse le processus de désillusion à l’ère de la rencontre en ligne. Ensuite, à travers la phénoménologie sociale et la sociologie interactionniste, l’article présente une interprétation de ce phénomène d’une (...) part par les dynamiques de la rencontre en ligne qui commence dans la sphère des contemporains pour avancer vers la sphère des consociés, selon la théorie socio-phénoménologique et, d’autre part, par la production d’une identité virtuelle qui nécessite confirmation dans la réalité hors ligne, selon la sociologie interactionniste. (shrink)

In previous works, an ontology of properties for quantum mechanics has been proposed, according to which quantum systems are bundles of properties with no principle of individuality. The aim of the present article is to show that, since quasi-set theory is particularly suited for dealing with aggregates of items that do not belong to the traditional category of individual, it supplies an adequate meta-language to speak of the proposed ontology of properties and its structure.

We argue that microbiome research should be more reflective on the methods that it relies on to build its datasets due to the danger of facing a methodological problem which we call “epistemic misalignment.” An epistemic misalignment occurs when the method used to answer specific scientific questions does not track justified answers, due to the material constraints imposed by the very method. For example, relying on 16S rRNA to answer questions about the function of the microbiome generates epistemic misalignments, due (...) to the different temporal scales that 16S rRNA provides information about and the temporal scales that are required to know about the functionality of some microorganisms. We show how some of these exist in contemporary microbiome science and urge microbiome scientists to take some measures to avoid them, as they may question the credibility of the field as a whole. (shrink)

A restrictive view of self-control identifies exercises of self-control with synchronic intrapsychic processes, and pictures diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies not as proper instances of self-control, but as clever ways of avoiding the need to exercise that ability. In turn, defenders of an inclusive view of self-control typically argue that we should construe self-control as more than effortful inhibition, and that, on grounds of functional equivalence, all these diverse strategies might be properly described as instances of self-control. In this paper, I (...) take a fresh look at this debate by focusing on cases of addiction. I argue that addicted agents face a paradigmatic sort of self-control challenge, which makes addiction an important test case for theories of self-control. And I discuss evidence that highlights both the unreliability of synchronic intrapsychic strategies and the crucial role that is played by diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies in successful attempts at achieving abstinence by addicted individuals. Abstaining addicts are a paradigmatic case of agents who successfully exercise self-control, and they mostly do so by relying on diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies. This, I argue, lends further support to an inclusive view of self-control. (shrink)

We propose a new interpretation of the equation E=mc² in special relativity by generalizing ideas of ontological emergence to fundamental physics. This allows us to propose that mass, as a property, can be considered to emerge from energy, using a well-known definition of weak ontological emergence. Einstein’s famous equation gains in this way a clearer philosophical interpretation, one that avoids the problems of previous attempts, and is fully consistent with the kinematic properties of special relativity, while yielding fresh insights concerning (...) the nature of mass. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

Criminal liability for acts committed by AI systems has recently become a hot legal topic. This paper includes three different contributions. The first contribution is an analysis of the extent to which an AI system can satisfy the requirements for criminal liability: accomplishing an actus reus, having the corresponding mens rea, possessing the cognitive capacities needed for responsibility. The second contribution is a discussion of criminal activity accomplished by an AI entity, with reference to a recent case involving an online (...) bot, the Random Darknet Shopper. This discussion will provide the context for the analysis of commonalities and differences between criminal activities by humans and by artificial systems. The third contribution concerns the evaluation of different ways of addressing criminal activities by AI systems in a regulatory perspective. (shrink)

Human cerebral organoids are three-dimensional biological cultures grown in the laboratory to mimic as closely as possible the cellular composition, structure, and function of the corresponding organ, the brain. For now, cerebral organoids lack blood vessels and other characteristics of the human brain, but are also capable of having coordinated electrical activity. They have been usefully employed for the study of several diseases and the development of the nervous system in unprecedented ways. Research on human cerebral organoids is proceeding at (...) a very fast pace and their complexity is bound to improve. This raises the question of whether cerebral organoids will also be able to develop the unique feature of the human brain, consciousness. If this is the case, some ethical issues would arise. In this article, we discuss the necessary neural correlates and constraints for the emergence of consciousness according to some of the most debated neuroscientific theories. Based on this, we consider what the moral status of a potentially conscious brain organoid might be, in light of ethical and ontological arguments. We conclude by proposing a precautionary principle and some leads for further investigation. In particular, we consider the outcomes of some very recent experiments as entities of a potential new kind. (shrink)

Accidents involving autonomous vehicles raise difficult ethical dilemmas and legal issues. It has been argued that self-driving cars should be programmed to kill, that is, they should be equipped with pre-programmed approaches to the choice of what lives to sacrifice when losses are inevitable. Here we shall explore a different approach, namely, giving the user/passenger the task of deciding what ethical approach should be taken by AVs in unavoidable accident scenarios. We thus assume that AVs are equipped with what we (...) call an “Ethical Knob”, a device enabling passengers to ethically customise their AVs, namely, to choose between different settings corresponding to different moral approaches or principles. Accordingly, AVs would be entrusted with implementing users’ ethical choices, while manufacturers/programmers would be tasked with enabling the user’s choice and ensuring implementation by the AV. (shrink)

We discuss the mathematical structures that underlie quantum probabilities. More specifically, we explore possible connections between logic, geometry and probability theory. We propose an interpretation that generalizes the method developed by R. T. Cox to the quantum logical approach to physical theories. We stress the relevance of developing a geometrical interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewpoint. This book draws upon linguistics, legal theory, computing, and dialectics to present an argumentation-based approach to statutory interpretation. By translating and summarizing the existing legal interpretative canons (...) into eleven patterns of natural arguments - called argumentation schemes - the authors offer a system of argumentation strategies for developing, defending, assessing, and attacking an interpretation. Illustrated through major cases from both common and civil law, this methodology is summarized in diagrams and maps for application to computer sciences. These visuals help make the structures, strategies, and vulnerabilities of legal reasoning accessible to both legal professionals and laypeople. (shrink)

Quantum Mechanics is a fundamental physical theory about atomic-scale processes. It was built between 1920 and 1940 by the most distinguished physicists of that time. The accordance between the predictions of the theory and experimental results is remarkable. The physical interpretation of its mathematical constructs, however, raised unprecedented controversies. Ontological, semantic, and epistemic vagueness abound in the orthodox interpretations and have resulted in serious misunderstandings that are often repeated in textbooks and elsewhere. In this work, we identify, criticize, and clarify (...) the most spread ones. (shrink)

This paper proposes to model legal reasoning asdialectical theory-constructiondirected by teleology. Precedents are viewed asevidence to be explained throughtheories. So, given a background of factors andvalues, the parties in a case canbuild their theories by using a set of operators,which are called theory constructors.The objective of each party is to provide theoriesthat both explain the evidence (theprecedents) and support the decision wished by thatparty. This leads to theory-basedargumentation, i.e., a dialectical exchange ofcompeting theories, which support opposedoutcomes by explaining the same (...) evidence and appealingto the same values. The winneris the party that can reply with a more coherent theoryto all theories of its adversary. (shrink)

Science is the most powerful tool of the twentieth century, but is its influence properly harnessed? This book examines the often-difficult relationship between scientists and those who govern them. A distinguished group of specialists looks at the history of this relationship, where it stands today, and what needs to be done to ensure that science is used in the future for the greatest good of the greatest number.

Following the proposal of a new kind of selective structural realism that uses as a basis the distinction between framework and interaction theories, this work discusses relevant applications in fundamental physics. An ontology for the different entities and properties of well-known theories is thus consistently built. The case of classical field theories—including general relativity as a classical theory of gravitation—is examined in detail, as well as the implications of the classification scheme for issues of realism in quantum mechanics. These applications (...) also shed light on the different range of applicability of the ontic and epistemic versions of structural realism. (shrink)

The paper offers an interpretation of the thesis developed by Fichte in the Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre following “the philosophy one chooses depends on the man one is” as a deepening of symbolic practices and dispositions that philosophy shares with ordinary consciousness. To support this interpretation, the paper describes how Fichte defines individual character formation and how it relates to a historical determinate is presented through a quick excursion in the Nicolaischrift of 1801 (§2). Through a critical and synthetic (...) view of the process of initiation into philosophy, the paper shows how the choice of philosophy is a choice for philosophy (§ 3) and invests a certain “skill” that is produced in the pre-philosophical dimension (§ 4). Through discussion of the Fichtian concepts of “instinct of reason” and “new sensory,” how the choice for philosophy, interpretable as the production of a new habitus, the fichtean doctrine of Science realizes itself fully as ‘critique’ (§ 5). (shrink)

This paper proposes an argumentation-based procedure for legal interpretation, by reinterpreting the traditional canons of textual interpretation in terms of argumentation schemes, which are then classified, formalized, and represented through argument visualization and evaluation tools. The problem of statutory interpretation is framed as one of weighing contested interpretations as pro and con arguments. The paper builds an interpretation procedure by formulating a set of argumentation schemes that can be used to comparatively evaluate the types of arguments used in cases of (...) contested statutory interpretation in law. A simplified version of the Carneades Argumentation System is applied in a case analysis showing how the procedure works. A logical model for statutory interpretation is finally presented, covering pro-tanto and all-things-considered interpretive conclusions. -/- . (shrink)

This paper proposes an argumentation-based procedure for legal interpretation, by reinterpreting the traditional canons of textual interpretation in terms of argumentation schemes, which are then classified, formalized, and represented through argument visualization and evaluation tools. The problem of statutory interpretation is framed as one of weighing contested interpretations as pro and con arguments. The paper builds an interpretation procedure by formulating a set of argumentation schemes that can be used to comparatively evaluate the types of arguments used in cases of (...) contested statutory interpretation in law. A simplified version of the Carneades Argumentation System is applied in a case analysis showing how the procedure works. A logical model for statutory interpretation is finally presented, covering pro-tanto and all-things-considered interpretive conclusions. (shrink)