Packed with practical strategies and inspiring research about how learning changes the brain this book will empower you with ideas you can apply right away that can positively change children’s lives forever.

The result of two key social developments in recent years are examined here: the partial dismantling of the welfare state and the progress of genetics. Genetic insights are increasingly valuable for risk assessment, and insurers would like to use these insights to help determine premiums. Combined with the fact that social welfare is being curtailed, this could potentially create an uninsured high-risk population. Along with considerations of autonomy and privacy, this is the basis for an ethical critique of insurer's access (...) to information. The result has often been regulation of such information; but the authors argues that due to adverse selection, regulation will not solve these problems, and this may jeopardize the survival of private personal insurance. Instead, we should look towards the resurrection of social insurance, a key component of the welfare state. This will interest academic researchers as well as professionals involved with genetics and insurance. (shrink)

This book treats modal logic as a theory, with several subtheories, such as completeness theory, correspondence theory, duality theory and transfer theory and is intended as a course in modal logic for students who have had prior contact with modal logic and who wish to study it more deeply. It presupposes training in mathematical or logic. Very little specific knowledge is presupposed, most results which are needed are proved in this book.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Across two studies the hypotheses were tested that stressful situations affect both leadership ethical acting and leaders' recognition of ethical dilemmas. In the studies, decision makers recruited from 3 sites of a Swedish multinational civil engineering company provided personal data on stressful situations, made ethical decisions, and answered to stress-outcome questions. Stressful situations were observed to have a greater impact on ethical acting than on the recognition of ethical dilemmas. This was particularly true for situations involving punishment and lack of (...) rewards. The results are important for the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of an organization, especially with regard to the analysis of the Stressors influencing managerial work and its implications for ethical behavior. (shrink)

Biometric facial recognition is an artificial intelligence technology involving the automated comparison of facial features, used by law enforcement to identify unknown suspects from photographs and closed circuit television. Its capability is expanding rapidly in association with artificial intelligence and has great potential to solve crime. However, it also carries significant privacy and other ethical implications that require law and regulation. This article examines the rise of biometric facial recognition, current applications and legal developments, and conducts an ethical analysis of (...) the issues that arise. Ethical principles are applied to mediate the potential conflicts in relation to this information technology that arise between security, on the one hand, and individual privacy and autonomy, and democratic accountability, on the other. These can be used to support appropriate law and regulation for the technology as it continues to develop. (shrink)

I claim that there is pro tanto moral reason for parents to not raise their child on a vegan diet because a vegan diet bears a risk of harm to both the physical and the social well-being of children. After giving the empirical evidence from nutrition science and sociology that supports this claim, I turn to the question of how vegan parents should take this moral reason into account. Since many different moral frameworks have been used to argue for veganism, (...) this is a complex question. I suggest that, on some of these moral frameworks, the moral reason that some parents have for not raising their child on a vegan diet on account of this risk is plausibly as strong as the reason they have for raising their child on a vegan diet. In other words, the moral reason I outline is weighty enough to justify some vegan parents in plausibly finding it permissible to not raise their child on a vegan diet. (shrink)

Excerpt from De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum: Libri Quinque About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We (...) do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

A wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been introduced to stop or slow down the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples include school closures, environmental cleaning and disinfection, mask mandates, restrictions on freedom of assembly and lockdowns. These NPIs depend on coercion for their effectiveness, either directly or indirectly. A widely held view is that coercive policies need to be publicly justified—justified to each citizen—to be legitimate. Standardly, this is thought to entail that there is a scientific consensus on the factual propositions (...) that are used to support the policies. In this paper, we argue that such a consensus has been lacking on the factual propositions justifying most NPIs. Consequently, they would on the standard view be illegitimate. This is regrettable since there are good reasons for granting the state the legitimate authority to enact NPIs under conditions of uncertainty. The upshot of our argument is that it is impossible to have both the standard interpretation of the permissibility of empirical claims in public justification and an effective pandemic response. We provide an alternative view that allows the state sufficient room for action while precluding the possibility of it acting without empirical support. (shrink)

The possibility that autonomous weapons will be deployed on the battlefields of the future raises the challenge of determining who can be held responsible for how these weapons act. Robert Sparrow has argued that it would be impossible to attribute responsibility for autonomous robots' actions to their creators, their commanders, or the robots themselves. This essay reaches a much different conclusion. It argues that the problem of determining responsibility for autonomous robots can be solved by addressing it within the context (...) of the military chain of command. The military hierarchy is a system of distributing responsibility between decision makers on different levels and constraining autonomy. If autonomous weapons are employed as agents operating within this system, then responsibility for their actions can be attributed to their creators and their civilian and military superiors. (shrink)

The third and fourth books of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations deal with the nature and management of human emotion: first grief, then the emotions in general. In lively and accessible style, Cicero presents the insights of Greek philosophers on the subject, reporting the views of Epicureans and Peripatetics and giving a detailed account of the Stoic position, which he himself favors for its close reasoning and moral earnestness. Both the specialist and the general reader will be fascinated by the Stoics' analysis (...) of the causes of grief, their classification of emotions by genus and species, their lists of oddly named character flaws, and by the philosophical debate that develops over the utility of anger in politics and war. Margaret Graver's elegant and idiomatic translation makes Cicero's work accessible not just to classicists but to anyone interested in ancient philosophy and psychotherapy or in the philosophy of emotion. The accompanying commentary explains the philosophical concepts discussed in the text and supplies many helpful parallels from Greek sources. (shrink)

Examines the social and ethical aspects of science and argues that research should incorporate social responsibility, democratic principles, and ethical standards.

The paper argues that ‘All varieties of gratitude are only overall fitting when targeted towards agents,’ for instance that any variety of gratitude for the beautiful sunset is only overall fitting if a supernatural agent such as God exists. The first premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ For this premise, intuitive judgments are offered. The second premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is the paradigmatic variety of gratitude.’ For this premise, an aspect of the (...) common consent of philosophers about gratitude is noted and the metaphysical basicness of prepositional gratitude is argued for. This gives the intermediate conclusion that ‘The paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ The fourth premise is that ‘If the paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents, then all varieties of gratitude are overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ To supply the conditional of this premise, the Paradigmatic Fittingness Principle is offered, which states that ‘Paradigmatic emotions set the fittingness conditions for their non-paradigmatic varieties.’ This principle is argued for by noting that it vindicates some popular and plausible intuitive judgements and gives an error theory of why one might think that gratitude could be fittingly targeted towards non-agents, and by suggesting the absence of any other plausible source of fittingness conditions for non-paradigmatic emotions. (shrink)

I examine how co-parents should handle differing commitments about how to raise their child. Via thought experiment and the examination of our practices and affective reactions, I argue for a thesis about the locus of parental authority: that parental authority is invested in full in each individual parent, meaning that that the command of one parent is sufficient to bind the child to act in obedience. If this full-authority thesis is true, then for co-parents to command different things would be (...) for them to contest one another’s authority. The only course that respects the authority of both parents is for co-parents to agree to command the same thing. Further, what is commanded must not result from a ‘capitulation’ by one co-parent, rather, it should result from a compromise. Parental authority involves a duty to deliberate about which commands it is best to give the child. If a command results from a capitulation, one parent will rightly think of themselves as not having fulfilled their parental duty. Parental compromises are not best understood as bargains or conflicts, but by the metaphor of gifts given by each parent out of respect for the other’s authority. (shrink)

We argue that many intuitions do not have conscious propositional contents. In particular, many of the intuitions had in response to philosophical thought experiments, like Gettier cases, do not have such contents. They are more like hunches, urgings, murky feelings, and twinges. Our view thus goes against the received view of intuitions in philosophy, which we call Mainstream Propositionalism. Our positive view is that many thought-experimental intuitions are conscious, spontaneous, non-theoretical, non-propositional psychological states that often motivate belief revision, but they (...) require interpretation, in light of background beliefs, before a subject can form a propositional judgment as a consequence of them. We call our view Interpretationalism. We argue (i) that Interpretationalism avoids the problems that beset Mainstream Propositionalism and (ii) that our view meshes well with empirical results in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

The paper offers a three-premise argument that a person with first-hand experience of possession and exorcism, such as an exorcist, can have a justified belief in the existence of demons. (1) “Exorcism involves a process by which the exorcist comes to believe that testimony is offered by a demon.” Cited for (1) are the Gospels, the Roman Ritual, some modern cases of exorcism, and exorcism practices in non-Christian contexts. (2) “If defeaters are absent, the exorcist may treat as reliable the (...) process by which he comes to believe that testimony is offered by a demon.” For (2) a case is offered that we have a reliable ability to identify when testimony is being offered and when it is being offered by particular types of agents, what is termed testifier-identification. (3) “In many cases of exorcism, defeaters are absent.” An inductive case is given for (3) by responding to possible defeaters, including several suggested recently by David Kyle Johnson. Therefore, in many cases of exorcism the exorcist may treat as reliable the processes by which he comes to believe that testimony is offered by a demon, and so can have a justified belief in the existence of demons. (shrink)

The paper argues that ‘All varieties of gratitude are only overall fitting when targeted towards agents,’ for instance that any variety of gratitude for the beautiful sunset is only overall fitting if a supernatural agent such as God exists. The first premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ For this premise, intuitive judgments are offered. The second premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is the paradigmatic variety of gratitude.’ For this premise, an aspect of the (...) common consent of philosophers about gratitude is noted and the metaphysical basicness of prepositional gratitude is argued for. This gives the intermediate conclusion that ‘The paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ The fourth premise is that ‘If the paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents, then all varieties of gratitude are overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ To supply the conditional of this premise, the Paradigmatic Fittingness Principle is offered, which states that ‘Paradigmatic emotions set the fittingness conditions for their non-paradigmatic varieties.’ This principle is argued for by noting that it vindicates some popular and plausible intuitive judgements and gives an error theory of why one might think that gratitude could be fittingly targeted towards non-agents, and by suggesting the absence of any other plausible source of fittingness conditions for non-paradigmatic emotions. (shrink)

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Technology regulation is one of the most important public policy issues facing society and governments at the present time, and further clarity could improve decision making in this complex and challenging area. Since the rise of the internet in the late 1990s, a number of approaches to technology regulation have been proposed, prompted by the associated changes in society, business and law that this development brought with it. However, over the past decade, the impact of technology has been profound and (...) the associated issues for government have extremely challenging, ranging across cyber security, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. To that end, this article introduces a Theory of Institutional Technology Actors and Norms (TITAN), a normatively informed and institutionally-based account of technology regulation. It focuses on the moral and legal (including regulatory) rights and responsibilities of the relevant actors and seeks to inform the development of regulation that is both fit for purpose, rights compliant and fair for all concerned. The account incorporates the perspectives of four key categories of groups in society: producers of technology, users of technology, government regulators, and normative policy shapers. (shrink)

It is argued that God cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The first premise is that if someone cannot be benefited, then they cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The second premise is that God cannot be benefited. Concerning the first premise, it is argued that a necessary component of prepositional gratitude is the desire to benefit one’s benefactor. Then it is argued that such a desire is fitting only if one’s benefactor can in fact be (...) benefited. Concerning the second premise, it is noted that classical theism widely attributes blessedness to God. It is argued that if God is blessed then God necessarily has as much well-being as it is possible for God to have, and hence God cannot be benefited. Also noted are some ways in which God’s blessedness is compatible with less orthodox ideas about God’s passibility. The argument is then defended against eight objections. (shrink)

Paraconsistent and dialetheist approaches to a theory of truth are faced with a problem: the expressive resources of the logic do not suffice to express that a sentence is just true—i.e., true and not also false—or to express that a sentence is consistent. In his recent book, Spandrels of Truth, Jc Beall proposes a ‘just true’-operator to identify sentences that are true and not also false. Beall suggests seven principles that a ‘just true’-operator must fulfill, and proves that his operator (...) indeed fulfills all of them. He concludes that just true has been expressed in the language. I argue that, while the seven conditions may be necessary for an operator to express just true, they are not jointly sufficient. Specifically, first, I prove that a further plausible desideratum for necessary conditions on ‘just true’ is not fulfilled by Beall's proposal, namely that ‘just true’ ascriptions should themselves be just true, and not also false (or equivalently, that the ‘just true’-operator iterates). Second, I show that Beall's operator does not adequately express just true, but that it merely captures an arbitrary proper subset of the just true sentences. Further, there is no prospect of extending the proposal in order to encompass a more reasonable subset of the just true sentences without presupposing that we have antecedent means to characterize the class of just true sentences. (shrink)

This paper argues that it cannot be fitting to blame God. I show that divine immutability, even on a weak conception, implies that God's ethical character cannot change. I then argue that blame aims at a change in the ethical character of the one blamed. This claim is directly intuitive, explains a wide set of intuitions about when blame is unfitting, and is implied by most of the theories blame offered in the philosophical literature. Since blame targeted at God aims (...) to change God's ethical character, an impossibility, such blame is not fitting. I then draw on this conclusion to sketch a new theodicy. I argue that a necessary condition on being blameworthy is that one can be blamed under some possible condition. So, God cannot be blameworthy. Further, I argue that if someone cannot be blameworthy, then they cannot do wrong. Wrong actions tend to make us blameworthy, but since God cannot be blameworthy nothing can tend to make him blameworthy – God cannot do wrong. (shrink)

It is argued that God cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The first premise is that if someone cannot be benefited, then they cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The second premise is that God cannot be benefited. Concerning the first premise, it is argued that a necessary component of prepositional gratitude is the desire to benefit one’s benefactor. Then it is argued that such a desire is fitting only if one’s benefactor can in fact be (...) benefited. Concerning the second premise, it is noted that classical theism widely attributes blessedness to God. It is argued that if God is blessed then God necessarily has as much well-being as it is possible for God to have, and hence God cannot be benefited. Also noted are some ways in which God’s blessedness is compatible with less orthodox ideas about God’s passibility. The argument is then defended against eight objections. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that Platonic Forms are angels. I make this identification by claiming that Platonic Forms have the characteristics of angels, in particular, that Platonic Forms are alive. I offer four arguments for this claim. First, it seems that engaging in self-directed action is a sufficient condition for being alive. The Forms are, as teleological activities, self-directed actions. Second, bodies receive their being from their Forms, and some bodies are essentially alive. Third, in the Good, all (...) the types of goodness, including life, are identical. The Forms are appearances of the Good. Fourth, since the Good imparts as much goodness as it can, the Forms are alive unless there is some bar to their being alive. There are good reasons to think that there is no such bar. I then show that ethical vices do not give body to human form, but give body to other forms—those that are evil angels. Lastly, I provide a survey of the relationships that various religious traditions posit between ethical vice and the demonic. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the use of military robots in terms of the jus in bello concepts of discrimination and proportionality. It argues that while robots may make mistakes, they do not suffer from most of the impairments that interfere with human judgment on the battlefield. Although robots are imperfect weapons, they can exercise as much restraint as human soldiers, if not more. Robots can be used in a way that is consistent with just war theory when they are programmed to (...) avoid using force against all but the most clearly hostile targets. However, the essay also cautions against using robots for counterinsurgency because they may alienate people in the contested area and lead to an escalation of hostilities. (shrink)

The first decade of this century has seen the nascency of the first mathematical theory of general artificial intelligence. This theory of Universal Artificial Intelligence (UAI) has made significant contributions to many theoretical, philosophical, and practical AI questions. In a series of papers culminating in book (Hutter, 2005), an exciting sound and complete mathematical model for a super intelligent agent (AIXI) has been developed and rigorously analyzed. While nowadays most AI researchers avoid discussing intelligence, the award-winning PhD thesis (Legg, 2008) (...) provided the philosophical embedding and investigated the UAI-based universal measure of rational intelligence, which is formal, objective and non-anthropocentric. Recently, effective approximations of AIXI have been derived and experimentally investigated in JAIR paper (Veness et al. 2011). This practical breakthrough has resulted in some impressive applications, finally muting earlier critique that UAI is only a theory. For the first time, without providing any domain knowledge, the same agent is able to self-adapt to a diverse range of interactive environments. For instance, AIXI is able to learn from scratch to play TicTacToe, Pacman, Kuhn Poker, and other games by trial and error, without even providing the rules of the games. These achievements give new hope that the grand goal of Artificial General Intelligence is not elusive. This article provides an informal overview of UAI in context. It attempts to gently introduce a very theoretical, formal, and mathematical subject, and discusses philosophical and technical ingredients, traits of intelligence, some social questions, and the past and future of UAI. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

The paper investigates whether imaginative states about propositions can be assessed in terms of fittingness (also known as correctness, appropriateness, aptness). After characterizing propositional imaginings and explaining the idea of fittingness, I present some considerations in favour of the no conditions view: imagining seems to be the sort of action that cannot be done unfittingly, and imaginings have no external cognitive nor conative goals in light of which they could be unfitting. I then examine the local conditions view, that there (...) can be fittingness conditions on imaginings, but that these are inherited from the mental projects in which imaginings can play a role. Given that there are virtues of the imagination such as creativity and spontaneity, and given that imaginings are subject to purposive mechanisms, and given that there are cases in which it is unfitting to fail to imagine, I endorse the general conditions view, on which imaginings have a goal, and therefore fittingness conditions, even outside the context of mental projects. I then examine 4 versions of the general conditions view and argue that imaginings aim to make contents available to mental projects. (shrink)

The present paper is the result of a long struggle to understand how the notion of compositionality can be used to motivate the structure of a sentence. While everyone seems to have intuitions about which proposals are compositional and which ones are not, these intuitions generally have no formal basis. What is needed to make such arguments work is a proper understanding of what meanings are and how they can be manipulated. In particular, we need a definition of meaning that (...) bans all mentioning of syntactic structure; it is not the task of semantics to state in which way things are put together in syntax. The present paper presents such a theory of meaning. This, in tandem with some minimal assumptions on the syntactic process (that there can be no deletion) yield surprisingly deep insights into natural language. First, it rehabilitates a lot of linguistic work as necessary on semantic grounds and defends it against potential claims of redundancy. For example, θ-roles and linking are an integral part of semantics, and not syntax. To assume the latter is to put the cart before the horse. Second, as a particular example we shall show that Dutch is not strongly context free even if weakly context free. To our knowledge, this is the first formal proof of this fact. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)