1. Derecho y cultura, derecho y otros órdenes deónticos, norma y orden jurídico.

The ethics of physical restraint in the Emergency Department has always been an emotive and controversial issue. Recently a vanguard of advocacy groups and regulatory agencies have...

Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this article provides evidence regarding the choices of children in the Kogi indigenous community of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a traditional society living in the mountains of Northern Colombia that practices (...) swidden agriculture, cattle-raising, and enjoys a special cultural status granted by the Colombian Constitution. Two groups of 6–7 and 10–11 year olds were tested on a modified dictator game and several scenarios from a resource distribution task including different fairness criteria. Our results point to the lack of focality of the idea of merit among Kogi children at these ages when deciding on third-party allocation tasks, even when the design prevented equal distribution. (shrink)

A recursive enumerator for a function h is an algorithm f which enumerates for an input x finitely many elements including h(x), f is a k(n)-enumerator if for every input x of length n, h(x) is among the first k(n) elements enumerated by f. If there is a k(n)-enumerator for h then h is called k(n)-enumerable. We also consider enumerators which are only A-recursive for some oracle A. We determine exactly how hard it is to enumerate the Kolmogorov function, which (...) assigns to each string x its Kolmogorov complexity: • For every underlying universal machine U, there is a constant a such that C is k(n)-enumerable only if k(n) ≥ n/a for almost all n. • For any given constant k, the Kolmogorov function is k-enumerable relative to an oracle A if and only if A is at least as hard as the halting problem. • There exists an r.e., Turing-incomplete set A such for every non-decreasing and unbounded recursive function k, the Kolmogorov function is k(n)-enumerable relative to A. The last result is obtained by using a relativizable construction for a nonrecursive set A relative to which the prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity differs only by a constant from the unrelativized prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity. Although every 2-enumerator for C is Turing hard for K, we show that reductions must depend on the specific choice of the 2-enumerator and there is no bound on the quantity of their queries. We show our negative results even for strong 2-enumerators as an oracle where the querying machine for any x gets directly an explicit list of all hypotheses of the enumerator for this input. The limitations are very general and we show them for any recursively bounded function g: • For every Turing reduction M and every non-recursive set B, there is a strong 2-enumerator f for g such that M does not Turing reduce B to f. • For every non-recursive set B, there is a strong 2-enumerator f for g such that B is not wtt-reducible to f. Furthermore, we deal with the resource-bounded case and give characterizations for the class ${\rm S}_{2}^{{\rm P}}$ introduced by Canetti and independently Russell and Sundaram and the classes PSPACE, EXP. • ${\rm S}_{2}^{{\rm P}}$ is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g such that there is a polynomial time tt-reduction which reduces A to every strong 2-enumerator for g. • PSPACE is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g such that there is a polynomial time Turing reduction which reduces A to every strong 2-enumerator for g. Interestingly, g can be taken to be the Kolmogorov function for the conditional space bounded Kolmogorov complexity. • EXP is the class of all sets A for which there is a polynomially bounded function g and a machine M which witnesses A ∈ PSPACEf for all strong 2-enumerators f for g. Finally, we show that any strong O(log n)-enumerator for the conditional space bounded Kolmogorov function must be PSPACE-hard if P = NP. (shrink)

Content-based authorship identification is an emerging research problem in online social media networks, due to a wide collection of issues ranging from security to privacy preservation, from radicalization to defamation detection, and so forth. Indeed, this research has attracted a relevant amount of attention from the research community during the past years. The general problem becomes harder when we consider the additional constraint of identifying the same false profile over different social media networks, under obvious considerations. Inspired by this emerging (...) research challenge, in this paper we propose and experimentally assess an innovative framework for supporting content-based authorship identification and analysis in social media networks. (shrink)

Background Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?Methods To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).Results Across (...) various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge.Conclusions We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric, i.e., stronger for opposition than for approval. (shrink)

La historia del idealismo alemán se articula en torno a una serie de encuentros y desencuentros entre quienes pretenden completar una obra que habría quedado inacabada, y que conduciría a una suerte de constitución definitiva de la filosofía. La correspondencia intercambiada entre I. Kant, J. G. Fic..

La recepción de la Wissenschaft der Logik de G. W. F. Hegel en la filosofía argentina fue tardía y focal. A la casi nula atención al aspecto especulativo de la filosofía hegeliana durante el positivismo decimonónico, continuó un superficial interés en las primeras décadas del siglo XX que derivó en dos comentarios de la Wissenschaft der Logik: La Lógica de Hegel de M. A. Virasoro y Hegel y la dialéctica de C. Astrada. Para Virasoro la obra representaba un posicionamiento lógico (...) contrapuesto al formal con derivaciones gnoseológicas y metafísicas; para Astrada ella exponía la fundamentación del método dialéctico, el cual tenía relevancia ontológica y política. Ambos filósofos coincidieron en un interés crítico por la obra y en un privilegio exegético de la Doctrina del ser por sobre la Esencia y el Concepto. Las diferencias y las continuidades entre ambas interpretaciones conformaron la recepción inicial de la Wissenschaft der Logik en la filosofía argentina. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bioethics Reconsidered: Theory and Method in a Post-Christian, Post-Modern AgeH. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. (bio)A candid assessment of the moral significance of our post-Christian, post-modern era calls for a reconsideration of the very project of bioethics. For many bioethicists, concerns for theory and method are secondary. 1 These scholars presuppose a common morality and a reasonable, overlapping consensus regarding [End Page 336] an appropriate polity. They assume as well that (...) we, as humans, possess middle-level principles, casuistic capacities, and guiding intuitions that enable us, inter alia, to identify which allocations of health care are unfair, whether the purchase of organs from the poor is exploitative, and if physicians may require as a condition for treatment agreement on a professional standard for the disclosure of information in the acquisition of consent. In this account of bioethics, we are taken to share a content-full moral understanding. Theory may illuminate that understanding and method may resolve particular controversies, but neither is necessary to disclose the nature of the moral life in the domain of health care. The account presents us as bound by a content-full morality, about which we have pretheoretical knowledge and in terms of which we are able to reach appropriate decisions, even if we have competing theoretical understandings of that morality.This dominant account of bioethics has interesting similarities with Roman Catholic moral theology in assuming (1) the existence of a common canonical morality grounded in our nature, our sentiments, and/or our reason, as well as (2) the ability of reason, reflection, or analysis to disclose the substance of that morality. The difficulty is that there are diverse moral sentiments, sympathies, and visions. The depth of our disagreements can be gauged in our substantive disputes regarding abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and health care reform. Furthermore, no appeal to middle-level principles or to casuistry can bridge such differences when people really disagree. Such appeals only underscore what separates.Consider how an appeal to the principle of autonomy or justice in mediating disputes regarding the licensing of for-profit euthanatization services or the enactment of a health care proposal like that produced by the Clinton administration in 1993 (White House 1993) will only disclose how deep the disagreements are, if the disputants are a Rawlsian and a Nozickian (Rawls 1971, Nozick 1974). Or, consider an appeal to casuistry for the resolution of health care policy debates among parties, some of whom consider dumping and skimming to be morally exemplar acts of autonomy, frankness, and appropriate stewardship of resources (Engelhardt and Rie 1988), while the other parties regard them as exemplar acts of injustice. Such disputants will agree neither about the proper descriptions of the cases, nor about how to derive moral guidance from them, because they bring to the cases disparate moral senses and different understandings of moral rationality. In a world in which there are as many different accounts of fairness and justice as there are major religions, and where many may hold that exploiters are those who do not allow the poor to sell their organs to the rich, the presumption of a moral consensus or background morality (Bayertz 1994) serves more as an ideology than as a general authoritative moral disclosure. [End Page 337]In addition, it is not possible to choose among many 2 of the competing visions or accounts of justice, fairness, and appropriate behavior on the basis of sound rational argument. To choose authoritatively among competing content-full moralities or moral accounts, one must already have background moral guidance. If one is to choose the account that maximizes benefits over harms, one must be able to compare competing benefits. For example, in terms of consequences, one cannot compare liberty and equality outcomes without already knowing how to rank liberty and equality. One must already know the answer about which morality—e.g., the one that gives priority to liberty over equality, or the one that gives priority to equality over liberty—is authoritative. Nor will an appeal to preference satisfaction solve the difficulty of determining how to establish the canonical ethics and bioethics. One must first know how one should correct preferences, compare impassioned versus considered... (shrink)

De acordo com as interpretações mais conhecidas (por exemplo, Hofmann, Strauss, Löwith ou Kuhn), o pensamento jurídico e político de Carl Schmitt mantém distância de Aristóteles. Este artigo tem a intenção de mostrar que a concepção de direito de Schmitt, apesar de ser desenvolvida em um contexto diferente, contém semelhanças significativas com o entendimento de direito em Aristóteles. Para mostrar essa proximidade, considera-se especialmente a noção de totalidade presente no conceito aristotélico de polis, que implica que a unidade política é (...) o principal modo de se realizar o direito. According to mostly known interpretations (e.g.: Hofman, Strauss, Löwith or Kuhn), the legal and political thought of Carl Schmitt keeps distance from Aristotle's. This article intends to show that Schmitt's concept of law, despite developed in a different context, holds significant likelihood with Aristotle's comprehension of law. With the Purpose of building this proximity, the notion of entirety present in the Aristotelic concept of polis implies that political unit is the main way to accomplish law. (shrink)

Preemption games are widely used to model patent races, innovation adoption and market entry problems. A previously neglected feature of these problems is that the agents’ states (e.g. R&D …rms’ technological improvements) are kept secret and stochastically change over time. We fully characterize equilibrium in preemption games where private information evolves according to Poisson processes, and provide a strategic rationale for the common wisdom that ‘big things happen fast.’ In the context of patent races we surprisingly …nd that strengthening patent (...) rights need not increase innovation disclosure. Furthermore, we clarify a basic welfare tradeo¤ between duplication costs and preemption: the former likely take place in early stages of the race, and preemption in later stages. (shrink)

Este ensayo trata de la confrontación entre principios universalistas y particularistas en lo que respecta a la construcción de identidades colectivas y nacionalidades (con especial referencia al Tercer Mundo). Por un lado tenemos los principios universalistas, basados generalmente en el racionalismo clásico y la Ilustración, cuyo representante más conspicuo en el campo de la filosofía comparativa de la historia fue el Marqués de Condorcet. A esta corriente se le puede achacar una equiparación entre ciencias naturales y sociales, un optimismo histórico (...) acrítico y una clara tendencia niveladora y centralizadora. Por otro lado tenemos los principios particularistas, relativistas y parcialmente tradicionalistas, que sostienen la autonomía de las ciencias sociales y que buscan comprender la verdad inherente a las llamadas culturas arcaicas y extra-europeas, mediante un impulso intuitivo y reconstructivo (que contiene aspectos identificatorios y empáticos). Dos de los representantes moderados de esta tendencia son G.B. Vico y J.G. Herder. Mediante una crítica de ambas corrientes el autor cree posible una síntesis fructífera de ambos principios, considerados como complementarios (sobre todo en sus versiones moderadas): la ética universal (en especial los derechos humanos) sería la base para un derecho efectivo a la diferencia. (shrink)

We elaborate on the approach to syllogistic reasoning based on “case identification” (Stenning & Oberlander, 1995; Stenning & Yule, 1997). It is shown that this can be viewed as the formalisation of a method of proof that dates back to Aristotle, namely proof by exposition ( ecthesis ), and that there are traces of this method in the strategies described by a number of psychologists, from St rring (1908) to the present day. We hypothesised that by rendering individual cases explicit (...) in the premises, the chance that reasoners would engage in a proof by exposition would be enhanced, and thus performance improved. To do so, we used syllogisms with singular premises (e.g., this X is Y ). This resulted in a uniform increase in performance as compared to performance on the associated standard syllogisms. These results cannot be explained by the main theories of syllogistic reasoning in their current state. (shrink)

In 2005, The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) developed four new ethical principles of organic agriculture to guide its future development: the principles of health, ecology, care, and fairness. The key distinctive concept of animal welfare in organic agriculture combines naturalness and human care, and can be linked meaningfully with these principles. In practice, a number of challenges are connected with making organic livestock systems work. These challenges are particularly dominant in immature agro-ecological systems, for example those that (...) are characterized by industrialization and monoculture. Some of the current challenges are partly created by shortages of land and manure, which encourage zero-grazing and other confined systems. Other challenges are created in part by the conditions for farming and the way in which global food distribution systems are organized, e.g., how live animals are transported, how feed is traded and transported all over the globe, and the development of infrastructure and large herds. We find that the overall organic principles should be included when formulating guidelines for practical organic animal farming. This article explores how the special organic conceptions of animal welfare are related to the overall principles of organic agriculture. The aim is to identify potential routes for future development of organic livestock systems in different contexts and with reference to the specific understanding of animal welfare in organic agriculture. We include two contrasting cases represented by organic livestock systems in northwestern Europe and farming systems in tropical low-income countries; we use these cases to explore the widely different challenges of organic livestock systems in different parts of the world. (shrink)

As the title “Doing without Concepts” suggests Edouard Machery argues that psychologists should stop using the notion of concept because: (1) the only interesting generalizations about concepts can be drawn at the level of types of concepts (prototypes, exemplars and theories) and not the level of concept in general; and (2) competences such as categorization or induction can rely on these different types of concepts (there is not a one to one correspondence between type of concept and competence). I try (...) to make the point that these two elements are not wholly compatible. If several types of concepts are used to perform a given competence (point (2)), then they have to be well regulated (e.g. which type is activated when, which type wins in case of conflict). These regulatory mechanisms can then be the basis for interesting generalizations (against point (1)). On the other hand, it is possible that point (1) applies to competences as well: that there are no interesting generalizations to be drawn about categorization in general. In which case different types of categorization are likely to be underlain by different types of concepts (against point (2)). Even though the arguments laid out in the book are forceful and well supported by empirical evidence, a more positive thesis might have been both more successful rhetorically and more interesting scientifically. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems and its Criticisms” by Hugo Cadenas & Marcelo Arnold. Upshot: I discuss two aspects of Cadenas & Arnold’s target article. The first concerns some clarifications of the sociological importance of the concept of autopoiesis and the second the criticisms of this concept and its applications in the social sciences.

A foundational idea of evo‐devo is that morphological variation is not isotropic, that is, it does not occur in all directions. Instead, some directions of morphological variation are more likely than others from DNA‐level variation and these largely depend on development. We argue that this evo‐devo perspective should apply not only to morphology but to evolution at all phenotypic levels. At other phenotypic levels there is no development, but there are processes that can be seen, in analogy to development, as (...) constructing the phenotype (e.g., protein folding, learning for behavior, etc.). We argue that to explain the direction of evolution two types of arguments need to be combined: generative arguments about which phenotypic variation arises in each generation and selective arguments about which of it passes to the next generation. We explain how a full consideration of the two types of arguments improves the explanatory power of evolutionary theory. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/Egbvma_uaKc. (shrink)

SummaryIt is argued that Hugo de Vries's conversion to Mendelism did not agree with his previous theoretical framework. De Vries regarded the number of offspring expressing a certain character as a hereditary quality, intrinsic to the state of the pangene involved. His was a shortlived conversion since after the ‘rediscovery’ he failed to unify his older views with Mendelism. De Vries was never very much of a Mendelian. The usual stories of the Dutch ‘rediscovery’ need, therefore, a considerable reshaping.

J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy has been hailed as a major interpretation of modern moral thought. Schneewind's narrative, however, elides several serious interpretive issues, particularly in the transition form late medieval to early modern thought. This results in potentially distorted accounts of Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, and G. W. Leibniz. Since these thinkers play a crucial role in Schneewind's argument, uncertainty over their work calls into question at least some of Schneewind's larger agenda for the history of (...) ethics. (shrink)

In the discussion of religion and art, it is quite difficult to exactly define what makes art ‘religious’. In this article, the author suggest six different perspectives in which a work of art—any work of art—could be interpreted as ‘religious’, as an embodiment of the complex relationship between art and religion. These perspectives are not mutually exclusive: one and the same art work could be approached on multiple levels at once. Nor do they disqualify other methodologies of studying art and (...) religion. These perspectives provide conceptual windows to understand what people (could) mean when they discuss religious art. The six perspectives are: (1) material, (2) contextual, (3) referential, (4) reflexive, (5) ritual, and (6) existential. They vary from the more or less objective to the more subjective, and as such from artist-intended to viewer/listener-perceived (with or without help of clues provided by the artist and/or the object itself). The author illustrates who these different perspectives can vary in defining certain pieces of art as religious by using three very different case studies: the Isenheimer Altarpiece, one of Hugo Ball’s famous sound poems, and the digital game Child of Light. (shrink)

J. B. Schneewind's "The Invention of Autonomy" has been hailed as a major interpretation of modern moral thought. Schneewind's narrative, however, elides several serious interpretive issues, particularly in the transition from late medieval to early modern thought. This results in potentially distorted accounts of Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, and G. W. Leibniz. Since these thinkers play a crucial role in Schneewind's argument, uncertainty over their work calls into question at least some of Schneewind's larger agenda for the history of (...) ethics. (shrink)

The present article examines if the principle of freedom of the high seas as formulated by Hugo de Groot still plays a significant role in international law. The article starts from an analysis of De Groot's ideas on the law of the sea and then turns to the freedom of the high seas in the modern law of the sea. In both cases, the legal framework is assessed against the background of the activities that require regulation. Freedom of the (...) high seas, although it has lost ground to other ordering principles, remains significant at the level of principles. However, at the level of designing an effective regime for current problems in oceans management, which to a large extent are caused by deficiencies in the enforcement scheme implicit in freedom of the high seas, the writings of De Groot, in whose time those activities did not require any significant measure of international coordination and cooperation, offer little assistance. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Science of Interdisciplinary Research: A Polyocular Framework for Wicked Problems” by Hugo F. Alrøe & Egon Noe. Upshot: Alrøe and Noe are right in addressing Rittel and Webber’s notion of “wicked problems” as crucial for interdisciplinary research. However, I can see neither that they are providing a sufficiently clear understanding of “science” in their concept of a “second-order science of interdisciplinary research,” nor that their “polyocular framework” can contribute anything useful to addressing (...) the practical challenges posed by wicked problems. (shrink)

This essay aims to contribute comparative points of contact between two influential figures of nineteenth century aesthetic reflection; namely, Victor Hugo’s artful considerations on architecture in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris and G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical appraisal of the artform in his Lectures on Fine Art. Although their individual views on architecture are widely recognized, there is scant comparative commentary on these two thinkers, which seems odd because of the relative convergence of their historically situated observations. Owing to this shortage, (...) I note that, while certainly not identical, Hugo and Hegel share an aesthetic family resemblance in how they hold similar ideas on architecture’s symbolic function, cognitive content, and, ultimately, how the artform’s ability to remain a standing paragon of meaning was razed by successive modes of cultural communication. Consequently, the essay works to show some congruent aesthetic affinities between these two great figures, but which appears to be overlooked in the literature. (shrink)