Research that is initiated, designed or funded by sponsor agencies based in countries with relatively high social and economic development, and conducted in countries that are relatively less developed, gives rise to many important ethical challenges. Although clinical trials of HIV vaccines began ten years ago in the US and Europe, an increasing number of trials are now being conducted or planned in other countries, including several that are considered “developing” countries. Safeguarding the rights and welfare of individuals participating as (...) research subjects in developing countries is a priority. In September, 1997, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS embarked on a process of international consultation; its purpose was further to define the important ethical issues and to formulate guidance that might facilitate the ethical design and conduct of HIV vaccine trials in international contexts. This paper summarises the major outcomes of the UNAIDS consultative process. (shrink)

The past decade has seen a renewed interest in moral psychology. A unique feature of the present endeavor is its unprecedented interdisciplinarity. For the first time, cognitive, social, and developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, experimental philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists collaborate to study the same or overlapping phenomena. This review focuses on moral judgments and is written from the perspective of cognitive psychologists interested in theories of the cognitive and affective processes underlying judgments in moral domains. The review will first present and (...) discuss a variety of different theoretical and empirical approaches, including both behavioral and neuroscientific studies. We will then show how these theories can be applied to a selected number of specific research topics that have attracted particular interest in recent years, including the distinction between moral and conventional rules, moral dilemmas, the role of intention, and sacred/protected values. One overarching question we will address throughout the chapter is whether moral cognitions are distinct and special, or whether they can be subsumed under more domain-general mechanisms. (shrink)

This special issue originated in a workshop of June 2017 on ‘Hume’s Thought and Hume’s Circle’ at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in the University of Edinburgh. Among t...

This article compares Kant and Fichte from the double stand- point of identity and difference with regard to two thinkers who were at first united by a master-student relation but who later on drifted apart from each other due to mutual defamation. At the center of the present discussion stands the relationship between spirit of freedom and system’s form which binds Kant and Fichte beyond methodological divergences and doctrinal differ- ences. The critical comparison between Kant and Fichte will be developed (...) in four steps: it will start with the general positioning of Kant within German Idealism, and then move on to Kant’s double critical enterprise of grounding an aprioristic doctrine of principles of nature and freedom; it will later on address the conception championed by Fichte of having pre- sented the “first system of freedom”, and from there it will focus on the manifestations of freedom within Fichte’s philosophical system, with Kant’s position as contrast. (shrink)

The paper is a critical discussion of scholarship on the "Critique of Pure Reason" published during the past ten years. The emphasis is on Anglo-American authors. I identify and discuss three main trends in the field: a shift from the general discussion of transcendental arguments to the analysis and evaluation of particular proofs in Kant; a renewed interest in the doctrine of transcendental idealism and the distinction between things in themselves and appearances; and the emergence of an entire body of (...) literature on Kant's philosophy of mind, centered around the idea of a "transcendental psychology." The main body of the text is supplemented by extensive bibliographical information provided in the notes. (shrink)

In everyday life, people typically observe fragments of causal networks. From this knowledge, people infer how novel combinations of causes they may never have observed together might behave. I report on 4 experiments that address the question of how people intuitively integrate multiple causes to predict a continuously varying effect. Most theories of causal induction in psychology and statistics assume a bias toward linearity and additivity. In contrast, these experiments show that people are sensitive to cues biasing various integration rules. (...) Causes that refer to intensive quantities (e.g., taste) or to preferences (e.g., liking) bias people toward averaging the causal influences, whereas extensive quantities (e.g., strength of a drug) lead to a tendency to add. However, the knowledge underlying these processes is fallible and unstable. Therefore, people are easily influenced by additional task‐related context factors. These additional factors include the way data are presented, the difficulty of the inference task, and transfer from previous tasks. The results of the experiments provide evidence for causal model and related theories, which postulate that domain‐general representations of causal knowledge are influenced by abstract domain knowledge, data‐driven task factors, and processing difficulty. (shrink)

As Husserl already noticed, artworks themselves have a phenomenological character. This means, however, that to experience artworks as phenomena no “epoché” and no “phenomenological reduction” is necessary. The leading question of my essay is whether, and possibly how, this observation can be methodologically generalized for understanding phenomena. I discuss if, and possibly how, a phenomenological reflection on art allows and even demands a general conception of phenomenology that nevertheless does not confuse artworks with phenomena in general. My intention is to (...) show that and how phenomenality can be clarified with reference to its spatial character. Accordingly, works of architecture that are artworks will play a decisive role in my argument. (shrink)

The following article discusses an edition of Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis, issued without a place of publication or publisher in 1719. The article focuses on the claim first advanc...

Currently, two frameworks of causal reasoning compete: Whereas dependency theories focus on dependencies between causes and effects, dispositional theories model causation as an interaction between agents and patients endowed with intrinsic dispositions. One important finding providing a bridge between these two frameworks is that failures of causes to generate their effects tend to be differentially attributed to agents and patients regardless of their location on either the cause or the effect side. To model different types of error attribution, we augmented (...) a causal Bayes net model with separate error sources for causes and effects. In several experiments, we tested this new model using the size of Markov violations as the empirical indicator of differential assumptions about the sources of error. As predicted by the model, the size of Markov violations was influenced by the location of the agents and was moderated by the causal structure and the type of causal variables. (shrink)

Causal queries about singular cases, which inquire whether specific events were causally connected, are prevalent in daily life and important in professional disciplines such as the law, medicine, or engineering. Because causal links cannot be directly observed, singular causation judgments require an assessment of whether a co‐occurrence of two events c and e was causal or simply coincidental. How can this decision be made? Building on previous work by Cheng and Novick (2005) and Stephan and Waldmann (2018), we propose (...) a computational model that combines information about the causal strengths of the potential causes with information about their temporal relations to derive answers to singular causation queries. The relative causal strengths of the potential cause factors are relevant because weak causes are more likely to fail to generate effects than strong causes. But even a strong cause factor does not necessarily need to be causal in a singular case because it could have been preempted by an alternative cause. We here show how information about causal strength and about two different temporal parameters, the potential causes' onset times and their causal latencies, can be formalized and integrated into a computational account of singular causation. Four experiments are presented in which we tested the validity of the model. The results showed that people integrate the different types of information as predicted by the new model. (shrink)

Scientific exploration and thus our knowledge about the outside world is subject to the conditions of our experience.These conditions are condensed here into an interface model which,besides being physical,has an additional interface structure not reducible to physics. We suggest that this structure can dynamically be characterized by separate modes.Their selection and operation presupposes free will and a rudimentary concept of time and space. Based on some analogies with quantum networks it is argued that the 'observed' gets 'dressed'as a consequence of (...) the observing. Interface dynamics and system dynamics supplement each other without over- determination. (shrink)

The authors challenge the reigning “causal power framework” as an explanation for whether a particular outcome was actually caused by a specific potential cause. They test a new measure of causal attribution in two experiments by embedding the measure within the Structure Induction model of Singular Causation (SISC, Stephan & Waldmann, 2016).

I defend the claim that in psychological theories concerned with theoretical or practical rationality there is a constitutive relation between normative and descriptive theories: Normative theories provide idealized descriptive accounts of rational agents. However, we need to resist the temptation to collapse descriptive theories with any specific normative theory. I show how a partial separation is possible.

ABSTRACTModern technological means allow for meaningful interaction across arbitrary distances, while human morality evolved in environments in which individuals needed to be spatially close in order to interact. We investigate how people integrate knowledge about modern technology with their ancestral moral dispositions to help relieve nearby suffering. Our first study establishes that spatial proximity between an agent's means of helping and the victims increases people's judgement of helping obligations, even if the agent is constantly far personally. We then report and (...) meta-analyse 20 experiments elucidating the cognitive mechanisms behind this effect, which include inferences of increased efficaciousness and personal involvement. Implications of our findings for the scientific understanding of ancestral moral dispositions in modern environments are discussed, as well as suggestions for how these insights might be exploited to increase charitable giving. Our meta-analysis provides a practical example.. (shrink)

El presente artículo compara a Kant y a Fichte en la perspectiva doble de identidad y diferencia referida a dos pensadores a quienes une una primera relación de maestro y alumno y a quienes separa una posterior difamación mutua. En el centro de la presentación se encuentra la relación entre espíritu de libertad y forma del sistema que une a Kant y a Fichte más allá de divergencias metódicas y de diferencias doctrinales. La comparación crítica entre Kant y Fichte se (...) desarrollará en cuatro etapas: partirá de la ubicación general de Kant dentro del idealismo alemán y se extenderá a la empresa doble de Kant, expresada de forma crítica, de una doctrina de los principios apriorística de naturaleza y libertad, para después ir a la concepción enfáticamente reclamada por Fichte de un “primer sistema de la libertad”,[1] y de ahí a las manifestaciones de la libertad en el sistema filosófico de Fichte, teniendo como punto de vista rector el contraste con Kant.[2] Palabras clave: [1] En la forma de citación de la Gesamtausgabe de Fichte se señalará el tomo y el volumen con números romanos y arábigos respectivamente, y después el número de página en cuestión. [2] El presente artículo es parte de un proyecto de carácter más amplio, cuyo tema es la dilucidación del aporte filosófico de Kant y de Fichte; de ahí que se haga continua referencia a publicaciones particulares de mi autoría. (shrink)

In spite of the importance of point mutations for evolution and human diseases, their natural spectrum of incidence in different species is not known. Here I propose to determine these spectra by comparing consecutive sequence periods in stretches of repetitive DNA. The article presents the analysis of more than 51,000 such point mutations identified by this approach in the genomes of human, chimpanzee, rat, mouse, pufferfish, zebrafish, and sea squirt. I propose to explain the observed spectra by auto‐mutagenic mechanisms of (...) genome variation involving the inter‐conversions of nucleotides, single base‐pair inversions and their combinations. (shrink)