According to virtue epistemology, the main aim of education is the development of the cognitive character of students (Pritchard, 2014, 2016). Given the proliferation of technological tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs for solving cognitive tasks, how should educational practices incorporate the use of such tools without undermining the cognitive character of students? Pritchard (2014, 2016) argues that it is possible to properly solve this ‘technology-education tension’ (TET) by combining the virtue epistemology framework with the theory of extended cognition (...) (EXT) (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). He argues that EXT enables us to consider tools as constitutive parts of the students’ cognitive system, thus preserving their cognitive character from technologically induced cognitive diminishment. The first aim of this paper is to show that this solution is not sufficient to solve the TET. Second, I aim to offer a complementary and more encompassing framework of tool-use to address the TET. Then, I apply it to the educational uses of ChatGPT as the most notable example of LLM, although my arguments can be extended to other generative AI systems. To do so, in Sect. 1.1, I present Pritchard’s framework of cognitive character and virtue epistemology applied in education, to which I am committed in this treatment. In Sects. 2 and 3, I respectively illustrate Pritchard’s (2014) solution to the TET, and I highlight the general limitations of his proposal. Thus, in Sect. 4.1 I characterize ChatGPT as a computational cognitive artifact using Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts. In Sect. 4.2, I introduce my proposal, which combines Pritchard’s account of virtue epistemology with Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts to address the TET. Finally, in Sect. 5.1, I present some epistemically virtuous uses of ChatGPT in educational contexts. To conclude, I argue in favor of a multidisciplinary approach for analyzing educational activities involving AI technologies such as ChatGPT. (shrink)

Given the metaphysical and explanatory stalemate between Embedded and Extended cognition, different authors proposed moral arguments to overcome such a deadlock in favor of EXT. Farina and Lavazza attribute to EXT and EMB a substantive moral content, arguing in favor of the former by virtue of its progressiveness and inclusiveness. In this treatment, I criticize four of their moral arguments. In Sect. 2, I focus on the argument from legitimate interventions and on the argument from extended agency. Section 3 concerns (...) the argument from better protection and the argument from better treatment. Sections 4 and 5 are dedicated to counterarguments against each respectively. By distinguishing between EXT and the extended view, I argue that it is sufficient to use this second version for directly addressing and evaluating moral problems on normative grounds, independently of the causal or constitutive cognitive influence of the external resource on the agents’ minds. Moreover, I argue that the arguments and assumptions used by EXT theorists do not foster values of progressiveness and inclusiveness. To conclude, in Sect. 6, I show that the analysis of each argument converges on the conclusion that EXT does not have substantive moral content and implications per se, since they always depend on further assumptions. (shrink)

In a globalizing world, governments are not always able or willing to regulate the social and environmental externalities of global business activities. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI), defined as global institutions involving mainly corporations and civil society organizations, are one type of regulatory mechanism that tries to fill this gap by issuing soft law regulation. This conceptual paper examines the conditions of a legitimate transfer of regulatory power from traditional democratic nation-state processes to private regulatory schemes, such as MSIs. Democratic legitimacy is (...) typically concerned with input legitimacy (rule credibility, or the extent to which the regulations are perceived as justified) and output legitimacy (rule effectiveness, or the extent to which the rules effectively solve the issues). In this study, we identify MSI input legitimacy criteria (inclusion, procedural fairness, consensual orientation, and transparency) and those of MSI output legitimacy (rule coverage, efficacy, and enforcement), and discuss their implications for MSI democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how to represent and reason about legal abrogations and annulments in Defeasible Logic. We examine some options that embed in this setting, and in similar rule-based systems, ideas from belief and base revision. In both cases, our conclusion is negative, which suggests to adopt a different logical model. This model expresses temporal aspects of legal rules, and distinguishes between two main timelines, one internal to a given temporal version of the legal system, and another relative (...) to how the legal system evolves over time. Accordingly, we propose a temporal extension of Defeasible Logic suitable to express this model and to capture abrogation and annulment. We show that the proposed framework overcomes the difficulties discussed in regard to belief and base revision, and is sufficiently flexible to represent many of the subtleties characterizing legal abrogations and annulments. (shrink)

In this paper we propose an extension of Defeasible Logic to represent and compute different concepts of defeasible permission. In particular, we discuss some types of explicit permissive norms that work as exceptions to opposite obligations or encode permissive rights. Moreover, we show how strong permissions can be represented both with, and without introducing a new consequence relation for inferring conclusions from explicit permissive norms. Finally, we illustrate how a preference operator applicable to contrary-to-duty obligations can be combined with a (...) new operator representing ordered sequences of strong permissions. The logical system is studied from a computational standpoint and is shown to have linear computational complexity. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of how concepts pertinent to legal contracts can influence certain aspects of their digital implementation through smart contracts, as inspired by recent developments in distributed ledger technology. We discuss how properties of imperative and declarative languages including the underlying architectures to support contract management and lifecycle apply to various aspects of legal contracts. We then address these properties in the context of several blockchain architectures. While imperative languages are commonly used to implement smart contracts, we (...) find that declarative languages provide more natural ways to deal with certain aspects of legal contracts and their automated management. (shrink)

In this paper we show that the Hilbert system of agency and ability presented by Dag Elgesem is incomplete with respect to the intended semantics. We argue that completeness result may be easily regained. Finally, we shortly discuss some issues related to the philosophical intuition behind his approach. This is done by examining Elgesem's modal logic of agency and ability using semantics with different flavours.

In this paper we present a Gentzen system for reasoning with contrary-to-duty obligations. The intuition behind the system is that a contrary-to-duty is a special kind of normative exception. The logical machinery to formalise this idea is taken from substructural logics and it is based on the definition of a new non-classical connective capturing the notion of reparational obligation. Then the system is tested against well-known contrary-to-duty paradoxes.

BackgroundIn this article, we address questions regarding how people consider what they do or do not consent to and the reasons why. This article presents the findings of a citizen forum study conducted by the University of Geneva in partnership with the Geneva University Hospitals to explore the opinions and concerns of members of the public regarding predictive oncology, genetic sequencing, and cancer. MethodsThis paper presents the results of a citizen forum that included 73 participants. A research tool titled "the (...) mechanics of consent" was designed for this study. This tool is a table encouraging participants to reflect on social and research actors, types of data, and desired levels of control while sharing different types of data with different actors. Participants’ discussion that led to the completion of each table were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultsThe results are a compilation of responses from the mechanics of consent tool divided into two sections; the first presents quantitative results of collective responses regarding attitudes to consent to donate their data. The second section present qualitative findings emerged from the discussion amongst participants.DiscussionChoice and control of personal data is crucial for the public to be able to decide who and how to trust. Key information to be disclosed to potential research participants shall include information about potential risks and benefits; who will be accessing and using their data; as well as assurances that their choice will be respected. Furthermore, researchers ought to make sure they are trustworthy, by acting in a competent, reliable, and honest manner. Governance systems ought to be better equipped to address ethical issues raise by the growing presence of non-traditional research actors, consent of exchanges of data via digital devices and online activity such as social media and fairness of data trading. Finally, informed consent is one of the various elements that contribute to conducting ethical research. More needs to be done to strengthen governance and ensure adequate protection of research participants, particularly to address issues related to predictive health analytics. (shrink)

Los fetos, los animales, los cristos malapartianos y pasolinianos nos recuerdan, por encima de todo, que la diagnosis del final de Europa y de su cultura dos veces milenaria comienza con el eclipse del llanto, con la desaparición de la piedad. Porque, a fin de cuentas, de las lágrimas de Aquiles sobre la cabeza canosa de Príamo nació todo. Pasolini y Malaparte sienten intensamente este colapso de la civilización y responden de maneras sorprendentemente afines. Esta contribución inicia una verificación sobre (...) la relación entre los dos escritores más heterodoxos del Novecientos italiano. (shrink)

Recent years have yielded many discussions on how to endow autonomous agents with the ability to make ethical decisions, and the need for explicit ethical reasoning and transparency is a persistent theme in this literature. We present a modular and transparent approach to equip autonomous agents with the ability to comply with ethical prescriptions, while still enacting pre-learned optimal behaviour. Our approach relies on a normative supervisor module, that integrates a theorem prover for defeasible deontic logic within the control loop (...) of a reinforcement learning agent. The supervisor operates as both an event recorder and an on-the-fly compliance checker w.r.t. an external norm base. We successfully evaluated our approach with several tests using variations of the game Pac-Man, subject to a variety of “ethical” constraints. (shrink)

In this paper we show how defeasible logic could formally account for the non-monotonic properties involved in motivational attitudes like intention and obligation. Usually, normal modal operators are used to represent such attitudes wherein classical logical consequence and the rule of necessitation comes into play, i.e., ⊢A/⊢ □A, that is from ⊢A derive ⊢ □A. This means that such formalisms are affected by the Logical Omniscience problem. We show that policy-based intentions exhibit non-monotonic behaviour which could be captured through a (...) non-monotonic system like defeasible logic. To this end we outline a defeasible logic of intention that specifies how modalities can be introduced and manipulated in a non-monotonic setting without giving rise to the problem of logical omniscience. In a similar way we show how to add deontic modalities defeasibly and how to integrate them with other motivational attitudes like beliefs and goals. Finally we show that the basic aspect of the BOID architecture is captured by this extended framework. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the debate on human enhancement from the perspective of the evolutions of responsibility paradigms, and in particular from the perspective of the so-called Responsible Research and Innovation approach. The aim is not to explore the arguments pro or contra the ethical legitimacy and/or technical feasibility of human enhancement, but rather exploring if, and how, the RRI perspective can shape the debate on human enhancement.In particular, the human enhancement debate will be read through the lenses of (...) four main responsibility paradigms that we sketch by examining both, the historical and conceptual evolution of the responsibility idea and the dynamics of its ascription. In order to provide a useful scheme for interpreting human enhancement, RRI will be characterised as a distinctive responsibility model that can subsequently be used to frame the debate on HE with a particular emphasis on its normative implications, as well as on its social and political significance. (shrink)

This paper provides a computational framework, based on defeasible logic, to capture some aspects of institutional agency. Our background is Kanger-Lindahl-Pörn account of organised interaction, which describes this interaction within a multi-modal logical setting. This work focuses in particular on the notions of counts-as link and on those of attempt and of personal and direct action to realise states of affairs. We show how standard defeasible logic (DL) can be extended to represent these concepts: the resulting system preserves some basic (...) properties commonly attributed to them. In addition, the framework enjoys nice computational properties, as it turns out that the extension of any theory can be computed in time linear to the size of the theory itself. (shrink)

Almost all countries and fertility clinics impose age limits on women who want to become pregnant through Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). Age limits for aspiring fathers, however, are much less common and remain a topic of debate. This article departs from the principle of reproductive autonomy and a conditional positive right to receive ART, and asks whether there are convincing arguments to also impose age limits on aspiring fathers. After considering three consequentialist approaches to justifying age limits for aspiring fathers, (...) we take in a concrete normative stance by concluding that those are not strong enough to justify such cut-offs. We reinforce our position by drawing a comparison between the case of a 39-year-old woman who wants to become a single mother via a sperm donor on the one hand, and on the other hand the same woman who wants to have a child with a 64-year-old man who she loves and who is willing to care for the child as long as he is able to. We conclude that, as long as appropriate precautions are taken to protect the welfare of the future child, couples who want to receive fertility treatment should never be limited on the basis of the age of the (male) partner. An absence of age limits for men would respect the reproductive autonomy of both the man and the woman. (shrink)

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