This is a review of contemporary philosophical discussions of population policies. The focus is on normative justification, and the main question is whether population policies can be ethically justified. Although few analytical philosophers have directly addressed this question – it has been discussed more in other academic fields – many arguments and considerations can be placed in the analytical philosophical discourse. This article offers a comprehensive review and analysis of ethically relevant aspects of population policies evaluated on the basis of (...) the main ethical theories. This analysis is preceded by a brief historical contextualisation of when and how population policies became ethically contentious and how this relates to philosophical debates in environmental ethics, population ethics and political philosophy. The article also includes a conceptual analysis of population policies in which the empirical intricacies around individual fertility decisions are sorted out and the different ways in which they can be affected are categorised in a taxonomy which highlight the most relevant ethical aspects of population policies. The ethical analysis shows that while population policies can be justified on the basis of most ethical theories, it all depends on what prior assumptions are made about what is at stake. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly adopted to make decisions in domains such as business, education, health care, and criminal justice. However, such algorithmic decision systems can have prevalent biases against marginalized social groups and undermine social justice. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is a recent development aiming to make an AI system’s decision processes less opaque and to expose its problematic biases. This paper argues against technical XAI, according to which the detection and interpretation of algorithmic bias can be handled (...) more or less independently by technical experts who specialize in XAI methods. Drawing on resources from feminist epistemology, we show why technical XAI is mistaken. Specifically, we demonstrate that the proper detection of algorithmic bias requires relevant interpretive resources, which can only be made available, in practice, by actively involving a diverse group of stakeholders. Finally, we suggest how feminist theories can help shape integrated XAI: an inclusive social-epistemic process that facilitates the amelioration of algorithmic bias. (shrink)

Notwithstanding the fact that care ethics has received increased attention, it has also faced much criticism. One of the focal points of critics is the normativity of care. Only when the objective normative basis of care is sufficiently clarified can care practices be evaluated and optimized from an ethical point of view. We emphasize that two levels of normativity can be identified: the context level and the foundational anthropology level. The personalist approach to care ethics is normatively stronger, at least (...) on one level, namely the foundational anthropology level. This personalist approach to care ethics indicates in which direction action must be taken so that human action may be considered ethically sound. (shrink)

To generate empathy in the care of vulnerable older persons requires care providers to reflect critically on their care practices. Ethics education and training must provide them with tools to accomplish such critical reflection. It must also create a pedagogical context in which good care can be taught and cultivated. The care-ethics lab ‘sTimul’ originated in 2008 in Flanders with the stimulation of ethical reflection in care providers and care providers in training as its main goal. Also in 2008, sTimul (...) commenced the organization of empathy sessions as an attempt to achieve this goal by simulation. The empathy session is a practical and fairly straightforward way of working to provoke care providers and care providers in training to engage in ethical reflection. Characteristic of the empathy session in the care-ethics lab is the emphasis on experience as a basis for ethical reflection. (shrink)

Providing good care requires nurses to reflect critically on their nursing practices. Ethics education must provide nurses with tools to accomplish such critical reflection. It must also create a pedagogical context in which a caring attitude can be taught and cultivated. To achieve this twofold goal, we argue that the principles of a right-action approach, within which nurses conform to a number of minimum principles, must be integrated into a virtue ethics approach that cultivates a caring attitude. Ethics education that (...) incorporates both the `critical companionship' method and the use of codes of ethics contributes positively to cultivating critical reflection by nurses. (shrink)

At a Body Worlds exhibition, human corpses are displayed as museum pieces for educational purposes. The bodies are preserved by plastination, a technique invented by Gunther von Hagens and engineered at the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany. Because of the wide controversy surrounding the displays, it is necessary to study how justice obtains. Understood from a Thomistic perspective, the use of a plastinate by Body Worlds is unjust because it dishonors the donor. The goodness of that use fails in (...) terms of object, end, and circumstance. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.4 (Winter 2010): 667–676. (shrink)

In constructivist contractualist theories, such as Rawls’, principles of justice should mirror beliefs that we all, in some sense, share. One would then arrive at principles that everybody could, in that sense, accept. These principles should specify, among other things, to whom to distribute the relevant benefits and burdens and to whom to assign responsibility for the distribution. In addition to this classical assignment problem, however, constructivist contractualism must also deal with a new, and quite different, assignment problem sincewhat to (...) count as beliefs that weall share depends on how the set of people that make up the “we” is delimited. Thus, for constructivist contractualism, the questions of whom to assign a part in the justification procedure and whom to exclude, and how to justify these inclusions and exclusions, are of crucial importance. In this chapter we consider the inclusion or exclusion of future generations, and how this case illuminates a general problem for constructivist contractualism. (shrink)

Video surveillance is an omnipresent phenomenon in today’s metropolitan life. Mainly intended to solve crimes, to prevent them by realtime-monitoring or simply as a deterrent, video surveillance has also become interesting in economical contexts; e.g. to create customer profiles and analyse patterns of their shopping behaviour. The extensive use of video surveillance is challenged by legal claims and societal norms like not putting everybody under generalised suspicion or not recording people without their consent. In this work we propose a technological (...) solution to balance the positive and negative effects of video surveillance. With automatic image recognition algorithms on the rise, we suggest to use that technology to not just automatically identify people but blacken their images. This blackening is done with a cryptographic procedure allowing to revoke it with an appropriate key. Many of the legal and ethical objections to video surveillance could thereby be accommodated. In commercial scenarios, the operator of a customer profiling program could offer enticements for voluntarily renouncing one’s anonymity. Customers could e.g. wear a small infrared LED to signal their agreement to being tracked. After explaining the implementation details, this work outlines a multidisciplinary discussion incorporating an economic, ethical and legal viewpoint. (shrink)

In recent approaches to ethics, the personal involvement of health care providers and their empathy are perceived as important elements of an overall ethical ability. Experiential working methods are used in ethics education to foster, inter alia, empathy. In 2008, the care-ethics lab ‘sTimul’ was founded in Flanders, Belgium, to provide training that focuses on improving care providers' ethical abilities through experiential working simulations. The curriculum of sTimul focuses on empathy sessions, aimed at care providers' empathic skills. The present study (...) provides better insight into how experiential learning specifically targets the empathic abilities of care providers. Providing contrasting experiences that affect the care providers' self-reflection seems a crucial element in this study. Further research is needed to provide more insight into how empathy leads to long-term changes in behaviour. (shrink)

A fundamental task for any prospective cognitive architecture is information control: routing information to the relevant mechanisms to support a variety of tasks. Jerry Fodor has argued that the Massive Modularity Hypothesis cannot account for flexible information control due to its architectural commitments and its reliance on heuristic information processing. I argue instead that the real trouble lies in its commitment to nativism—recent massive modularity models, despite incorporating mechanisms for learning and self-organization, still cannot learn to control information flexibly enough. (...) After defending this position, I close the paper by discussing wider implications for control and cognitive architecture. (shrink)

This paper considers the view that the basis of equality is the range property of being a moral person. This view, suggested by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (1971), is commonly dismissed in the literature. By defending the view against the criticism levelled against it, I aim to show that this dismissal has been too quick. The critics have generally failed to fully appreciate the fact that Rawls's account is restricted to the domain of distributive justice. On (...) Rawls's view distributive justice is a matter of the fair terms of cooperation among the participants of a system of social cooperation. I argue that this understanding of distributive justice can provide a compelling rationale for considering moral personality as the basis of equality for this domain of morality. That moral persons are indeed equal is further supported by an intuitive argument concerning the irrelevance of morally arbitrary factors, giving us reasons to believe that varying capacities among moral persons does not result in an unequal moral status. The dismissal of Rawls's account of equality has thus been premature, and it remains an important view to consider. (shrink)

§1. Introduction. Asymptotic cones of metric spaces were first invented by Gromov. They are metric spaces which capture the ‘large-scale structure’ of the underlying metric space. Later, van den Dries and Wilkie gave a more general construction of asymptotic cones using ultrapowers. Certain facts about asymptotic cones, like the completeness of the metric space, now follow rather easily from saturation properties of ultrapowers, and in this survey, we want to present two applications of the van den Dries-Wilkie approach. Using ultrapowers (...) we obtain an explicit description of the asymptotic cone of a semisimple Lie group. From this description, using semi-algebraic groups and non-standard methods, we can give a short proof of the Margulis Conjecture. In a second application, we use set theory to answer a question of Gromov.§2. Definitions. The intuitive idea behind Gromov's concept of an asymptotic cone was to look at a given metric space from an ‘infinite distance’, so that large-scale patterns should become visible. In his original definition this was done by gradually scaling down the metric by factors 1/nfornϵ ℕ. In the approach by van den Dries and Wilkie, this idea was captured by ultrapowers. Their construction is more general in the sense that the asymptotic cone exists for any metric space, whereas in Gromov's original definition, the asymptotic cone existed only for a rather restricted class of spaces. (shrink)

If the condemnation and crucifixion of Christ is interpreted in the key of Lutheran divine omniscience and absence of alternative possibilities, an apparent contradiction regarding the moral responsibility and duties of the Israelite executioners of Christ would arise. This contradiction would be the following: How can we sustain the moral responsibility of the executioners if they did not have alternative possibilities and, according to Christ’s first Saying on the cross, they did not know what they were doing? How could it (...) be possible to attribute duties to the executioners if they were not able to fulfill them? These problems can be addressed from a semicompatibilistic perspective of moral responsibility. It could be argued that: 1) the absence of alternative possibilities does not exclude the fact that the executioners could be considered morally responsible for Christ’s crucifixion, and that 2) the impossibility of fulfilling certain duties does not imply that the executioners would not have had these duties and cannot be considered morally responsible for their breach. (shrink)

Patients who are incompetent need a surrogate decision maker to make treatment decisons on their behalf. One of the main ethical questions that arise in this context is what standard ought to govern such decision making. According to the Substituted Judgment Standard, a surrogate ought to make the decision that the patient would have made, had he or she been competent. Although this standard has sometimes been criticized on the grounds of being difficult to apply, it has found wide appeal, (...) since it it is alleged to protect incompetent patients? right to autonomy. The main purpose of the thesis is to evaluate SJS, from a conceptual and ethical perspective. It argues that the traditional formulation of SJS is seriously incomplete, and discusses alternative ways of completing it. Moreover, it questions the received view on how SJS should be morally justified, by offering arguments against the view that decision making in accordance with this standard extends the patient's opportunities for self-determination. Instead it suggests a virtue-ethical approach according to which the moral point of SJS-based decision making is not to protect the patient's interests, but to express respect for person. The thesis also critically assesses empirical studies according to which surrogates often fail to correctly predict patients? actual treatment preferences. It is shown that such results cannot, for a number of reasons, support the conclusion drawn that surrogates are ill-equipped to make decisions that comply with SJS. (shrink)

This article explores the use of model organisms in studying the cognitive phenomenon of decision-making. Drawing on the framework of biological control to develop a skeletal conception of decision-making, we show that two core features of decision-making mechanisms can be identified by studying model organisms, such as E. coli, jellyfish, C. elegans, lamprey, and so on. First, decision mechanisms are distributed and heterarchically structured. Second, they depend heavily on chemical information processing, such as that involving neuromodulators. We end by discussing (...) the implications for studying distinctively human decision-making. (shrink)

This thesis contributes to a better conceptual understanding of how self-organized control works. I begin by analyzing the control problem and its solution space. I argue that the two prominent solutions offered by classical cognitive science (centralized control with rich commands, e.g., the Fodorian central systems) and embodied cognitive science (distributed control with simple commands, such as the subsumption architecture by Rodney Brooks) are merely two positions in a two-dimensional solution space. I outline two alternative positions: one is distributed control (...) with rich commands, defended by proponents of massive modularity hypothesis; the other is centralized control with simple commands. My goal is to develop a hybrid account that combines aspects of the second alternative position and that of the embodied cognitive science (i.e., centralized and distributed controls with simple commands). Before developing my account, I discuss the virtues and challenges of the first three. This discussion results in a set of criteria for successful neural control mechanisms. Then, I develop my account through analyzing neuroscientific models of decision-making and control with the theoretical lenses provided by formal decision and social choice theories. I contend that neural processes can be productively modeled as a collective of agents, and neural self-organization is analogous to democratic self-governance. In particular, I show that the basal ganglia, a set of subcortical structures, contribute to the production of coherent and intelligent behaviors through implementing “democratic" procedures. Unlike the Fodorian central system—which is a micro-managing “neural commander-in-chief”—the basal ganglia are a “central election commission.” They delegate control of habitual behaviors to other distributed control mechanisms. Yet, when novel problems arise, they engage and determine the result on the basis of simple information (the votes) from across the system with the principles of neurodemocracy, and control with simple commands of inhibition and disinhibition. By actively managing and taking advantage of the wisdom-of-the-crowd effect, these democratic processes enhance the intelligence and coherence of the mind’s final "collective" decisions. I end by defending this account from both philosophical and empirical criticisms and showing that it meets the criteria for successful solution. (shrink)

The so-called Substituted Judgment Standard is one of several competing principles on how certain health care decisions ought to be made for patients who are not themselves capable of making decisions of the relevant kind. It says that a surrogate decision-maker, acting on behalf of the patient, ought to make the decision the patient would have made, had the latter been competent. The most common way of justifying the Substituted Judgment Standard is to maintain that this standard protects patients’ right (...) to autonomy, or self-determination, in the situation where they are no longer able to exercise this right on their own. In this paper we question this justification, by arguing that the most commonly suggested moral reasons for allowing and encouraging people to make their own choices seem not to apply when the patient’s decision-making is merely hypothetical. We end with some brief sketches of possible alternative ways of justifying the Substituted Judgment Standard. (shrink)

It seems odd that in such a densely theological text that Augustine would bring up something like the KK-thesis, which is so epistemological. Yet, as one progresses through the book it does begin to make sense. In this paper, I aim to try to come to some understanding of how and why Augustine uses something like the KK-thesis in Book 11 of The City of God. The paper will progress in the following way: First, I discuss Jaakko Hintikka's work on (...) the KK-thesis in order to have a clear idea of what the KK-thesis is, and some associated problems with it. Next, since Augustine most explicitly deals with the KK-thesis in De Trinitate, with the help of Gareth Matthews work, I discuss Augustine's use of the KK-thesis there. Finally, I return to The City of God, in order come to an understanding of Augustine's use of the KK-thesis there. (shrink)

§1. Introduction. Asymptotic cones of metric spaces were first invented by Gromov. They are metric spaces which capture the ‘large-scale structure’ of the underlying metric space. Later, van den Dries and Wilkie gave a more general construction of asymptotic cones using ultrapowers. Certain facts about asymptotic cones, like the completeness of the metric space, now follow rather easily from saturation properties of ultrapowers, and in this survey, we want to present two applications of the van den Dries-Wilkie approach. Using ultrapowers (...) we obtain an explicit description of the asymptotic cone of a semisimple Lie group. From this description, using semi-algebraic groups and non-standard methods, we can give a short proof of the Margulis Conjecture. In a second application, we use set theory to answer a question of Gromov.§2. Definitions. The intuitive idea behind Gromov's concept of an asymptotic cone was to look at a given metric space from an ‘infinite distance’, so that large-scale patterns should become visible. In his original definition this was done by gradually scaling down the metric by factors 1/nfornϵ ℕ. In the approach by van den Dries and Wilkie, this idea was captured by ultrapowers. Their construction is more general in the sense that the asymptotic cone exists for any metric space, whereas in Gromov's original definition, the asymptotic cone existed only for a rather restricted class of spaces. (shrink)

In these collaborative, theoretical and performative pieces our aim is towards radical expansions of various formal parameters in western philosophy through art praxis that de-centres the roles played by the animal subject, industrial technologies, and soil in modernist paradigms. Exceeding these conventions demands pushing against/past blockages (aporias) to broader engagement with whatever refigured subjectivities are called into constellative gathering in the process. The immanent multiplicity of constellative (Soilogic) analysis ‘cuts in all directions’ in its insistence on attempting to ‘upend’ multiple (...) disciplines simultaneously rather than remaining mere cross-disciplinary embellishment between art and philosophy. Opening new ruptures in horizons of interpretation and maintaining them through artistic and philosophical agitation involves a ‘fidelity to the impossible’ (Young), and a reach beyond the known and tried. It is also a reach towards a blurring of Techne and poeisis in the inter(fur)faces of Dawn (a dark Horse), Gladys (a Goat), and the debris field of the zeppelin USS Macon that crashed into the ocean and sank off the coast of Monterey, CA in 1935. Initially we did so by painting portraits of Nietzsche and Benjamin on Dawn, putting them into conversation with each other on the question of Animality. We then attempted to make ‘haptic’ contact with the Macon while posing performative questions about interrelations, telepathies and hauntings among Animalities, Techne and more-than-humanist Materialities. (shrink)

This article focuses on soils as more-than-human subjects who are both living entities and ‘lenses’ through which we may begin to rethink some of the conventional parameters of ecology, communication and even the grounding of some western philosophical traditions on which these boundaries have stood. Just as the very term ‘more-than-human’ potentially exceeds the relegation of both soilogic agents and animalities to subservient status, likewise this discussion embarks from a more-than-humanist (‘posthumanist’) position. As we attempt to interact with living systems (...) and ways of being in broader, more expansive terms, it becomes possible to catch conceptual glimpses of less hierarchical ontologies as they are understood by some more-than-western cultures. I have also drawn inspiration from artistic, theoretical and political movements in the west that have sought to interrupt the primacy of Eurocentric humanism in institutions and philosophical arenas. This presages dirty thinking. (shrink)

Research ethics, once a platform for declaring intent, discussing moral issues and providing advice and guidance to researchers, has developed over time into an extra-legal regulatory system, complete with steering documents (ethics guidelines), overseeing bodies (research ethics committees) and formal procedures (informed consent). The process of institutionalizing distrust is usually motivated by reference to past atrocities committed in the name of research and the need to secure the trustworthiness of the research system. This article examines some limitations of this approach. (...) First, past atrocities cannot provide the necessary justification unless institutionalized distrust is a necessary or efficient means to prevent future ones – and there are several reasons to doubt this. Second, the efficacy of ethics review in safeguarding morally acceptable research depends on the moral competence and integrity of individual researchers – the very qualities that institutionalized distrust calls into question. Third, ethics guidelines cannot, as is sometimes assumed, educate or guide researchers in moral behaviour unless they already possess considerable capacity for moral judgment. Fourth, institutionalized distrust is a potential threat to the moral competence and integrity of researchers by encouraging a blinkered view of ethical issues, inducing moral heteronomy through incentives, and alienating them to research ethics. We conclude that the moral problem posed by inappropriate short-term behaviour on behalf of researchers is dwarfed by the potential long-term consequences if their moral competence is allowed to deteriorate. Measures must therefore be taken to ensure that researchers are equipped to take their individual responsibility and are not obstructed from so doing. (shrink)

I extend Ainslie's core claims with three cortico-striatal models that respectively subserve the key constructs of resolve, suppression, and routine habit. I show that these models suggest a more dynamical and symbiotic relation among the constructs: there are more ways they interact to reinforce willpower, and the temporal dimension of the interactions can often determine the effectiveness of the reinforcement.

We consider the expressive power of second - order generalized quantifiers on finite structures, especially with respect to the types of the quantifiers. We show that on finite structures with at most binary relations, there are very powerful second - order generalized quantifiers, even of the simplest possible type. More precisely, if a logic is countable and satisfies some weak closure conditions, then there is a generalized second - order quantifier which is monadic, unary and simple, and a uniformly obtained (...) sublogic of which is equivalent to. We show some other results of the above kind, relating other classes of quantifiers to other classes of structures. For example, if the quantifiers are of the simplest non-monadic type, then the result extends to finite structures of any arity. We further show that there are second - order generalized quantifiers which do not increase expressive power of first- order logic but do increase the power significantly when added to stronger logics. (shrink)

[Grace as God’s Self-giving and Respect] Employing the methods of formal and transcendental analysis, the topic is introduced by departing from the experience of love between human beings. Love proves itself to be a unity of self-giving and respect. Both of these related elements of the notion of love are then put to the test in the light of that mode of divine loving called ‘grace’. By studying the history of dogma, this notion of grace is brought to a full (...) definition. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to describe the experiences of undergoing a presymptomatic genetic test for the hereditary and fatal Huntington’s disease, using a case study approach. The study was based on 18 interviews with a young woman and her husband from the decision to undergo the test, to receiving the results and trying to adapt to them, which were analysed using a life history approach. The findings show that the process of undergoing a presymptomatic test involves several closely (...) connected ethical and medical questions, such as the reason for the test, the consequences of the test results and how health-care services can be developed to support people in this situation. (shrink)

The work of general practitioners is infused by norms from several movements, of which evidence based medicine, patient-centredness, and virtue ethics are some of the most influential. Their precepts are not clearly reconcilable, and structural factors may limit their application. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework that explains how GPs respond, across different fields of interaction in their daily work, to the pressure exerted by divergent norms. Data was generated from unstructured interviews with and observations of sixteen Swedish (...) GPs and family medicine residents between 2015 and 2017. Straussian Grounded Theory was used for analysis. We found that GPs’ maxims of action can be characterised in terms of dichotomous responses to demands from four distinct sets of norms, or “voices”: the situation, the self, the system, and the profession. From the interactions between these voices emerge sixteen clusters of maxims of action. Based on the common features of the maxims in each cluster, we have developed a conceptual framework that appears to be rich enough to capture the meaning of the ethical decisions that GPs make in their daily work, yet has a high enough level of abstraction to be helpful when discussing the factors that influence those decisions. Our four-dimensional model of GPs’ responses to norms is a first step toward a middle-range theory of quality from GPs’ perspective. It brings out the complexity of their practice, reveals tensions that easily remain invisible in more concrete accounts of their actions, and aids the transferability of substantive theories on GPs’ ethical decision making. By explaining the nature of the ethical conflicts that they experience, we provide some clues as to why efforts to improve quality by imposing additional norms on GPs may meet with varying degrees of success. (shrink)

Decision making for incompetent patients is a much-discussed topic in bioethics. According to one influential decision making standard, the substituted judgment standard, the decision that ought to be made for the incompetent patient is the decision the patient would have made, had he or she been competent. Although the merits of this standard have been extensively debated, some important issues have not been sufficiently explored. One fundamental problem is that the substituted judgment standard, as commonly formulated, is indeterminate in content (...) and thus offers the surrogate little or no guidance. What the standard does not specify is just how competent one should imagine the patient to be, and what else one ought to envision about the patient’s hypothetical outlook and the circumstances surrounding his or her decision making. The article discusses this problem of underdetermined decision conditions. (shrink)

Should people be involved as active participants in longitudinal medical research, as opposed to remaining passive providers of data and material? We argue in this article that misconceptions of ‘autonomy’ as a kind of feat rather than a right are to blame for much of the confusion surrounding the debate of dynamic versus broad consent. Keeping in mind two foundational facts of human life, freedom and dignity, we elaborate three moral principles – those of autonomy, integrity and authority – to (...) better see what is at stake. Respect for autonomy is to recognize the other's right to decide in matters that are important to them. Respect for integrity is to meet, in one's relationship with the other, their need to navigate the intersection between private and social life. Respect for authority is to empower the other – to help them to cultivate their responsibility as citizens. On our account, to force information onto someone who does not want it is not to respect that person's autonomy, but to violate integrity in the name of empowerment. Empowerment, not respect for autonomy, is the aim that sets patient-centred initiatives employing a dynamic consent model apart from other consent models. Whether this is ultimately morally justified depends on whether empowerment ought to be a goal of medical research, which is questionable. (shrink)

The target article focuses on the predictive coding of and something happened and the and response to make. We extend that scope by addressing the aspect of perception and action. Successful interaction with the environment requires predictions of everything from millisecond-accurate motor timing to far future events. The hierarchical framework seems appropriate for timing.