Throughout the 20th century, market capitalism was defended on parallel grounds. First, it promotes freedom by enabling individuals to exploit their own property and labor-power; second, it facilitates an efficient allocation and use of resources. Recently, however, both defenses have begun to unravel—as capitalism has moved into its “platform” phase. Today, the pursuit of allocative efficiency, bolstered by pervasive data surveillance, often undermines individual freedom rather than promoting it. And more fundamentally, the very idea that markets are necessary to achieve (...) allocative efficiency has come under strain. Even supposing, for argument’s sake, that the claim was true in the early 20th century when von Mises and Hayek pioneered it, advances in computing have rekindled the old “socialist calculation” debate. And this time around, markets—as information technology—are unlikely to have the upper hand. -/- All of this, we argue, raises an important set of governance questions regarding the political economy of the future. We focus on two: How much should our economic system prioritize freedom, and to what extent should it rely on markets? The arc of platform capitalism bends, increasingly, toward a system that neither prioritizes freedom nor relies on markets. And the dominant critical response, exemplified by Shoshana Zuboff’s work, has been to call for a restoration of market capitalism. Longer term, however, we believe it would be more productive to think about how “postmarket” economic arrangements might promote freedom—or better yet, autonomy—even more effectively than markets, and to determine the practical steps necessary to realize that possibility. (shrink)

The era of AI-based decision-making fast approaches, and anxiety is mounting about when, and why, we should keep “humans in the loop” (“HITL”). Thus far, commentary has focused primarily on two questions: whether, and when, keeping humans involved will improve the results of decision-making (making them safer or more accurate), and whether, and when, non-accuracy-related values—legitimacy, dignity, and so forth—are vindicated by the inclusion of humans in decision-making. Here, we take up a related but distinct question, which has eluded the (...) scholarship thus far: does it matter if humans appear to be in the loop of decision-making, independent from whether they actually are? In other words, what is stake in the disjunction between whether humans in fact have ultimate authority over decision-making versus whether humans merely seem, from the outside, to have such authority? Our argument proceeds in four parts. First, we build our formal model, enriching the HITL question to include not only whether humans are actually in the loop of decision-making, but also whether they appear to be so. Second, we describe situations in which the actuality and appearance of HITL align: those that seem to involve human judgment and actually do, and those that seem automated and actually are. Third, we explore instances of misalignment: situations in which systems that seem to involve human judgment actually do not, and situations in which systems that hold themselves out as automated actually rely on humans operating “behind the curtain.” Fourth, we examine the normative issues that result from HITL misalignment, arguing that it challenges individual decision-making about automated systems and complicates collective governance of automation. (shrink)

Where does our sense of beauty come from? Traditional interest in evolutionary aesthetics has proceeded by an almost exclusive focus on Darwin’s Descent of Man, which theorizes the origin of the human aesthetic sense as an instrumental feature of sexual desire. But what if the Descent only gives us half of the story? I argue that we have overlooked a key element in Darwin’s aesthetics that is more readily available in On the Origin of Species, a form of aesthetic experience (...) he associates with “cultivated men.” Instead of an explicit scientific theory of aesthetic pleasure, the Origin provides evidence of this “cultivated” beauty as a narrative practice of aesthetic judgment with specific reference to an evolutionary phenomenon Darwin calls “coadaptation.” I conclude by addressing the demands this new evidence makes on any valid understanding of evolutionary aesthetics and suggest a preliminary model of aesthetic education that could facilitate collaborative dialogue in an increasingly recalcitrant two-cultures debate. (shrink)

This article surveys recent feminist contributions to moral philosophy with an emphasis on those works which engage with debates within mainstream ethics. The article begins by examining a tension said to arise from the two criteria a theory must meet if it is to count as feminist moral theory: the women's experience requirement and the feminist conclusion requirement. Subsequent sections deal with feminist relational theories of rights, feminist work on responsibility and feminist contractarian approaches to ethics. A final section looks (...) at the application of some feminist moral theories to the problem of abortion. (shrink)

Electricity is an indicator that shows the progress of a civilization; it is a product that has greatly changed the way we think about the world. Electricity price forecasting became a fundamental task in all countries due to the deregulation of the electricity market in the 1990s. This work examines the effectiveness of using multiple variables for price prediction given the large number of factors that could influence the price of the electricity market. The tests were carried out over four (...) periods using data from Spain and deep learning models. Two different attribute selection methods based on Pearson’s correlation coefficient have been used to improve the efficiency of the training process. The variables used as input to the different prediction models were chosen, considering those most commonly used previously in the literature. This study attempts to test whether using time series lags improves the non-use of lags. The results obtained have shown that lags improve the results compared to a previous work in which no lags were used. (shrink)

This article aims to improve the knowledge on Generation Z as employees within workforce and in the workplace, as well as on the main thematic trends that drive the research on the topic. To this end, and using bibliometric techniques, a sample of 102 publications on this subject from Web of Science between 2009 and 2020 is analyzed. Research discusses the most published and most cited authors and journals to have a broad view of the context of the subject. Later, (...) through a longitudinal view, the study mainly focuses on analyzing the evolution of thematic clusters, to assess the progress of the themes, as well as the network around the principal motor cluster of each period. The obtained results suggest a hardly developed topic, which started to draw attention in 2018, while still having a wide margin for growth. The core of research on the topic has evolved around “Generation-Z” “generations,” “workplace,” “management” and “attitudes,” “leadership,” “career,” or “learning-teaching-education,” although a low keyword stability among periods was noted. There is a need for further development on a variety of aspects regarding this generation and the labor market, as the study shows a clear orientation toward management and generational diversity within the workplace. (shrink)

This article investigates three things: (1) what development might be, (2) how development and ethics might be related, and (3) what an ethics of development might look like. First, I show how if we move away from an essentialist metaphysics of being to a possibilist-functionalist metaphysics of becoming in our understanding of development, we can reconceptualize ethics as self-directed ontogeny. Thus, ethics turns out to be a part of development. Secondly, I sketch out the possibility of an ethics of development, (...) showing how it should be based on three desiderata: (1) sustainability, promoting the long-term existence of the maximum human and non-human biodiversity, (2) democracy, promoting human-human relationships that are bidirectional and, to the extent possible, non-imposing, and (3) non-ethnocentrism, promoting true modernity; a modernity not predicated on a non-existent abstract universality but on concrete syncretism. The ultimate aim of this ethics of development is the optimization of individual and collective subjectivity and agency across time. (shrink)

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., humancenteredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the early development of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply (...) traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; and (5) the focus of environmental literature on wilderness, and possible future developments of the discipline. (shrink)

This thesis is presented from a historical life history, the conscious world of an academic whose thoughts were not dogmatic nor censured, neither within or without the university. It was a dialogue with others who never hesitated to judge him as critical and heuristic. The only way to be authenti..

In this provocative book, Jason Brennan challenges our fundamental assumptions about voting, revealing why it is not a duty for most citizens--in fact, he ...

Interview with Robert Gordon (Ph.D., Columbia). Discussed topics include his academic career in philosophy and views on the simulation theory of mind.

This paper argues that Aristotle’s account of friendship can be applied equally to cases of friendship in association and personal friendship. It argues that both types of friendship are similar insofar as both are primarily concerned with the common good that serves as the basis of the friendship. This notion of the common good is what allows Aristotle to draw a connection between personal relationships, the more circumscribed associations, and the political association. This focus on the common good allows one (...) to look to the political association to inform one’s understanding of both friendship and justice in both the smaller associations and in personal relationships. (shrink)

the standard reading of plato's Republic is that justice is predicated of the ideal city and of the philosophers, and that all other constitutions, both psychic and political, that are mentioned in the course of the dialogue are in some way or another defective and unjust. A non-standard reading appears to be gaining traction, however. Unorthodox Plato commentators such as Silverman, Jonas, Nakazawa, Braun, and Rowe argue that the ideal city—lovingly named 'Kallipolis'—is not just, that it is merely an improvement (...) upon, but not a complete cure for, the Luxurious City that is described immediately before it.1 If we want to gaze upon a just city, these unorthodox commentators propose, look no farther than the City of... (shrink)

John of Damascus (ca. 650/660 – 754 AD) is one of the first contemporary witnesses to critically examine the emergence of Islam and its holy scripture, the Qur’an. John came from a distinguished Melkite family that held political offices in state finance for generations. Like his father, he was initially a civil servant under the Arab rule of Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (685 – 705). The anti-Christian movement that began in that time forced him to withdraw from public life and enter (...) the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. While at the monastery, John grappled with the text of the “new” religion and defended the Christian position. In this milieu, the interpretation of the divine incarnation occupied a central position. By demonstrating the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ, John makes convergences with the Qur’anic movement of the new rulers. In doing so, he highlights the Qur’ans high esteem of the Virgin Mary as well as the birth and humanity of her Son, Jesus Christ. In this way, he seeks to bring Christianity into agreement with the Qur’an and to break down theological barriers. (shrink)

The generation of synthetic data is becoming a fundamental task in the daily life of any organization due to the new protection data laws that are emerging. Because of the rise in the use of Artificial Intelligence, one of the most recent proposals to address this problem is the use of Generative Adversarial Networks. These types of networks have demonstrated a great capacity to create synthetic data with very good performance. The goal of synthetic data generation is to create data (...) that will perform similarly to the original dataset for many analysis tasks, such as classification. The problem of GANs is that in a classification problem, GANs do not take class labels into account when generating new data, it is treated as any other attribute. This research work has focused on the creation of new synthetic data from datasets with different characteristics with a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network. CGANs are an extension of GANs where the class label is taken into account when the new data is generated. The performance of our results has been measured in two different ways: firstly, by comparing the results obtained with classification algorithms, both in the original datasets and in the data generated; secondly, by checking that the correlation between the original data and those generated is minimal. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen and David Estlund have recently defended utopophilia against utopophobia. They argue we should not dumb down the requirements of ethics or justice to accommodate people’s motivational failings. The fact that certain people predictably will not do the right thing does not imply they are unable to do so, or that they are not obligated to do so. Utopophiles often defend left-wing ideas; for instance, Cohen argues that people’s unwillingness to do what socialism requires does not imply that (...) socialism is bad, but instead that people are bad. This essay shows that utopophiles must also endorse certain “conservative” conclusions, such as that most poor adults in the developed West are obligated to act more prudently, get jobs, become net taxpayers, avoid having children they cannot afford, and act to avoid needing welfare or assistance. (shrink)

Este artículo va a estar centrado en una cuestión fundamental: ¿pueden compararse las visiones éticas de Dostoievski e Ignacio de Loyola? Haciendo una revisión pormenorizada de las bases existenciales dostoievskianas, podremos comprobar cómo la vida de Ignacio de Loyola parece coincidir con la hoja de ruta que, más tarde, elaboraría Dostoievski en sus obras en busca de una plenitud humana. El hombre pleno propuesto por el autor ruso es un reflejo del San Ignacio que conocemos por su Autobiografía, un personaje (...) que pasó de los confines existenciales más arraigados en el yo a una vida por y para los demás basada en una idea fundamental: «En todo, amar y servir». (shrink)

Assuming that linguistic representation has been studied only by linguists using grammaticality judgments, Branigan & Pickering present structural priming as a novel alternative. We show that their assumptions are incorrect for cognitive-functional linguistics, exposing converging perspectives on form/meaning pairings between generativists and cognitive-functional linguists that we hope will spark the cross-disciplinary discussion necessary to produce a cognitively plausible model of linguistic representation.

The Middle Persian literature from the early Islamic centuries frequently deals with practical theological issues faced by the Zoroastrian communities under foreign domination. Here, we present a number of questions regarding a Zoroastrian’s conversion to Islam and his subsequent repentance and desire to return to Zoroastrianism and answers given by ninth- and tenth-century Zoroastrian priestly authorities. It is shown how the priests cite ancient traditions found in the Pahlavi versions of Avestan texts to justify their answers, and then apply them (...) to the contemporary social reality. (shrink)

Research Articles Jason Brennan, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

Describes the received theory of necessary and sufficient conditions, explains some standard objections to it, and lays out alternative ways of thinking about conditions and conditionals.

At this time when the development of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are changing the world around us, philosophers and scientists, first of all, must converge to analyze the present and predict the ethical-social consequences and biological dangers associated with new “living entities” that are not the result of the natural evolutionary process. As synthetic/artificial life forms (xenobots, robots, transgenic organisms, etc.) become more and more abundant and sophisticated, it seems first of all necessary to bring some order to all (...) this new biodiversity, establishing what is alive and what is not, and analyzing the consequences of this incessant creative activity. Here I intend to organize all these human-made entities and clarify their status as living beings or artificial elements, leaving the door open to an uncertain future in which we will be able to see how “the artificial” and “the natural” could merge to originate something different from everything known. Accordingly, I propose the creation of a new domain, Lithbea, which includes all synthetic and artificial entities within a new kingdom called Humade (derived from human-made). I have also included viruses in a new realm, the Viral kingdom, because they were excluded from the classical three-domain tree of life despite playing a fundamental role in the evolution of biodiversity on Earth. Finally, I make a brief comment on the unpredictability of the unknown, the implications of this new landscape of biodiversity, and the uncertain future of all these advances. (shrink)

Television commercials are often thought of as bothersome multimedia artefacts that by their very existence spoil our viewing pleasure at regular intervals. Not only that, but they seem to have the habit of ordering us around. This aspect of TV ads has often been commented on by experts and laypersons alike. Therefore, we decided to tackle this issue and look at the prototypical expression of directives, that is, imperatives in voice-overs in television commercials. To this end we have carried out (...) an empirical analysis of imperatives in voice-overs in the MATVA corpus which contains transcriptions of nearly 800 voice-overs in British TV ads recorded on six days during 2009, 2010 and 2011. We provide an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative profile of imperatives in contemporary TV advertising. This includes information on the distribution of imperatives, the most common verbs in imperative clauses, and their discourse function. We are also able to show conclusively that the directive force of imperatives in TV ads is more akin to advice or recommendation than commands, and explain from a discourse-pragmatic perspective why this is so. (shrink)

Traditionally, political philosophers and theorists (from Plato and Aristotle to Montesquieu) not only systematically distinguished a greater number of political regimes than we are accustomed to distinguish today (identifying several varieties of democracy and non-democracy, according to several normative criteria) but also used these distinctions for specifically evaluative purposes: distinctions among political regimes corresponded to the degree to which a political regime facilitated important values (e.g., the common good, the good life, freedom, etc.). Questions of evaluation often took priority over (...) questions of justification. Contemporary political theory, by contrast, with some exceptions, has mostly operated within the restricted distinction between (liberal) democratic and non-democratic regimes, and has failed to attend to the morally significant differences among "imperfect" or "less justified" political regimes. Questions of justification have mostly taken priority over questions of evaluation. In this paper, I explore the possibilities for constructing an evaluative theory of imperfect (or not fully justified) political regimes. I argue that a political regime is a system for the division of the labor of political decisionmaking that can (and has historically been) evaluated from three different perspectives: the perspective of the decisions made through it, the perspective of the interests promoted and protected through it, and the perspective of its stability in regards to the kinds of characters it fosters and through which it is sustained. Each of these perspectives provides their own criteria for evaluation: the idea of a well-organized regime for the "decisions" perspective, the idea of a public-goods producing regime for the "interests" perspective, and the idea of a "resilient" regime for the stability perspective. Nevertheless, I also show that these criteria are not necessarily congruent with one another, and that a fully justified regime need not be ideal along any of these dimensions. I suggest that this problem is unavoidable insofar as political regimes facilitate the pursuit of more than one central value. (shrink)

Hobbits and hooligans -- Ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists -- Political participation corrupts -- Politics doesn't empower you or me -- Politics is not a poem -- The right to competent government -- Is democracy competent? -- The rule of the knowers -- Civic enemies.