The emergence of the genetic counseling profession has allowed laypeople to understand and benefit from biological advances, and to make critical decisions about their application. The discipline of genetic counseling has been criticized from its very beginning, in particular because of its early association with the eugenics movement. This paper presents a critical and reflective overview of how genetic counseling is implicitly embedded in the history of eugenics but also counteracts past eugenic practices and ideas. After World War II, attempts (...) were made to distance genetic counseling from eugenics. The first definition of genetic counseling did not position this field as a medical encounter but "as a kind of genetic social work aimed primarily to provide people with an understanding of their family's genetics problems." This approach was a reaction to the genetic and social evolutionary ideas that informed eugenic theories during the first half of the 20th century. Professionals engaged in genetic counseling during the 1940s and1950s rejected eugenic practices, but there was still support for eugenics’ goals of improving heredity and eliminating disease. From the 1960s, genetic counseling underwent professionalization alongside feminization and a definition of core values. Among these values were nondirectiveness counseling and the autonomy of the counselee. The dark shadow of Nazi ideology and other eugenic practices, attempts to employ the historical responsibility of geneticists, and the dynamic medical, social, political, and educational changes of the 1960s and 1970s helped to frame approaches and delineate the goals and limits of the new profession of “genetic counseling.”. (shrink)

Why morality cannot be based on faith in God -- Isms -- Absence of evidence is evidence of absence -- The insidiousness of interpretation -- You will obey -- Sally, Butch, and Plato's dilemma -- The fundamentals of secular morality -- What it means to be moral -- Where do you get your morals? -- The secular seven -- Challenges to secular morality -- Accounting for immorality -- Genocidal century -- Secular solutions -- Moral relativism.

Hegel has long been considered a major thinker of progress. This paper extends Hegel’s philosophy of progress into an outline of a philosophy of technology. It does this not by directly reading the little Hegel wrote on the subject, but by introducing six central Hegelian ideas that bear on the technological thought. It argues that, for Hegel, (1) mankind is destined to change its destiny; (2) that true change involved qualitative change; (3) that true change is conceptual, and not material, (...) change; (4) that history progresses immanently according to its own laws; (5) that history progresses towards ever greater artificiality; and that (6) artificiality is closely linked to freedom. These ideas cohere into a Hegelian metaphysics of technology, which is supportive of the technological enterprise. This paper is meant both to sketch a metaphysical understanding of the technological enterprise, and to trace the intellectual roots of contemporary technological utopianism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper attempts to shed light on Hegel’s recurring comment that Spinoza’s philosophy lacks the ‘principle of individuality’. It shows that this criticism can have three distinct meanings: that Spinozism cannot account for the multiplicity of finite individuals; that Spinozism leads to a moral devaluation of the finite individual; the form of substance is indifferent and lacks a differentiating principle. It is shown that Hegel argued, somewhat incoherently, for all three.

Representations of the fingers are embodied in our cognition and influence performance in enumeration tasks. Among deaf signers, the fingers also serve as a tool for communication in sign language. Previous studies in normal hearing (NH) participants showed effects of embodiment (i.e., embodied numerosity) on tactile enumeration using the fingers of one hand. In this research, we examined the influence of extensive visuo‐manual use on tactile enumeration among the deaf. We carried out four enumeration task experiments, using 1–5 stimuli, on (...) a profoundly deaf group (n = 16) and a matching NH group (n = 15): (a) tactile enumeration using one hand, (b) tactile enumeration using two hands, (c) visual enumeration of finger signs, and (d) visual enumeration of dots. In the tactile tasks, we found salient embodied effects in the deaf group compared to the NH group. In the visual enumeration of finger signs task, we controlled the meanings of the stimuli presentation type (e.g., finger‐counting habit, fingerspelled letters, both or neither). Interestingly, when comparing fingerspelled letters to neutrals (i.e., not letters or numerical finger‐counting signs), an inhibition pattern was observed among the deaf. The findings uncover the influence of rich visuo‐manual experiences and language on embodied representations. In addition, we propose that these influences can partially account for the lag in mathematical competencies in the deaf compared to NH peers. Lastly, we further discuss how our findings support a contemporary model for mental numerical representations and finger‐counting habits. (shrink)

In British Hegelianism we find, forgotten, a weighty theory of individuality. This theory remains one of the most sustained attempts in the history of philosophy to analyze the individual, not in the social or psychological sense, but as a logical-metaphysical category. The Idealist conceptualization of the individual is bound with their unconventional theory of universals, for they argued that any individual is a “concrete universal,” and vice versa. This article reconstructs the British Idealist theory of individuality, highlighting its key insights: (...) (a) the individual is not a simple unit, but a small system with interrelated parts; (b) the individual is not simply given, but is mediated by thought; (c) the individual is the conceptual glue holding the parts together and assigning them their respective places; (d) the conceptualization of the individual lies at the intersection of logic, aesthetics and systems theory. (shrink)

Is it possible for the state simultaneously to respect deep cultural differences and to protect the hard-won citizenship rights of vulnerable group members, particularly women? This 2001 book argues that it is not only theoretically needed, but also institutionally feasible. Rejecting prevalent normative and legal solutions to this 'paradox of multicultural vulnerability', Multicultural Jurisdictions develops a powerful argument for enhancement of the jurisdictional autonomy of religious and cultural minorities while at the same time providing viable legal-institutional solutions to the problem (...) of sanctioned intra-group rights violation. This new 'joint governance' approach is guided by an innovative principle that strives for the reduction of injustice between minority groups and the wider society, together with the enhancement of justice within them. This book will interest students of political and social theory, law, religion, institutional design, as well as cultural and gender studies. (shrink)

National and international criminal law systems are continually seeking doctrinal and theoretical frameworks to help them impose individual liability on collective perpetrators of crime. The two systems move in parallel and draw on each other. Historically, it has been mostly international criminal law that leaned on domestic legal systems for its collective modes of liability. Currently, however, it is the emerging jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court that is at the forefront of innovation, with the doctrine of indirect co-perpetration taking (...) the lead in international prosecutions. The article assesses the potential contribution as well as the limits of this compound doctrine to domestic criminal law jurisprudence, particularly with regard to small-group criminality. Four modes of indirect co-perpetration are discussed, namely shared control, concerted control, controlling board, and flawed triangle perpetration. A doctrine of indirect co-perpetration would enable liability in these modes of perpetration, perhaps with the exception of the latter, which marks the limits of its applicability. (shrink)

The intuition holding that an organized crime leader should be punished more severely than a subordinate who directly commits an offence is commonly reflected in legal literature. However, positing a direct relationship between the severity of punishment and the level of seniority within an organizational hierarchy represents a departure from a more general idea found in much of the substantive criminal law writings: that the severity of punishment increases the closer the proximity to the physical commission of the offence. This (...) paper presents an analysis of the said intuition and attempts to ascertain its roots. Rejecting both retribution and deterrence theory as valid explanations, it will be inferred that the imposition of harsher punishment on organized crime leaders is properly based on the multiplicity of offences for which they are responsible, and not the nature of their involvement in any specific offence. (shrink)

Courts and commentators do not differentiate between defendants who perpetrate crimes by means of inanimate weapons or trained animals and those who perpetrate crimes by means of other human beings used as innocent agents. I argue that this widely accepted comparability is grossly insensitive to the violation of the human dignity of the person whom the perpetrator has turned into an instrument to an offence. Identifying the innocent agent as a possible second victim of the offence alongside the intended victim (...) raises several issues of both morality and law. First, the question of moral pertinence: do the scenarios that the law recognises as cases of innocent agency involve a violation of the dignity of the innocent agent? Second, the question of criminalisation: is it appropriate to invoke criminal law to protect the dignity of the innocent agent? Third, the question of the protected interest: assuming that both the dignity of the innocent agent and their autonomy are compromised, which of these violations is graver? I argue that there is a strong connection between the doctrine of innocent agency and the violation of the dignity of the innocent agent; that the violation of the innocent agent’s dignity is severe enough to warrant criminalisation and that this is simple enough to enforce; and that the injury to the innocent agent’s dignity is more significant than the injury to their autonomy. The operative proposal of this article is that the law should recognise perpetration by means of innocent agents as an aggravated mode of commission or an aggravating factor in punishment. (shrink)

The border is one of the most urgent issues of our times. We tend to think of a border as a static line, but recent bordering techniques have broken away from the map, as governments have developed legal tools to limit the rights of migrants before and after they enter a country's territory. The consequent detachment of state power from any fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border, an adjustable legal construct untethered in space. This transformation (...) upsets our assumptions about waning sovereignty, while also revealing the limits of the populist push toward border-fortification. At the same time, it presents a tremendous opportunity to rethink states' responsibilities to migrants. This book proposes a new, functional approach to human mobility and access to membership in a world where borders, like people, have the capacity to move. (shrink)

Despite the fundamentally binary character of justification , an upsurge in recent Anglo-American scholarship offers some highly sophisticated and widely diverging conceptions of in criminal law. In the present article we identify eight distinct conceptions of partial justification. We find, however, that each of them is predicated on a different conceptual fallacy. Any sound concept of partial justification in criminal law ought to meet the dual challenge of utility and consistency: it should usefully convey a message that advances the conduct-guiding (...) function of criminal law and retain some consistency with the key attributes of complete justification, particularly its allowing function and the implications of its typically universal nature. We maintain that none of the conceptions offered to date meets this challenge. The different meanings attached to partial justification do not further the guiding function of criminal law beyond what is achieved by the scalar concept of wrongfulness; indeed, they undermine the guiding utility of criminal law by obscuring the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible, thereby also diminishing the expressivity of the criminal conviction. Furthermore, extending partial universality to the proposed notions of partial justification implausibly marks retaliating victims and intervening third parties, who react to allegedly partially justified conduct, as partly blameworthy, whereas present legal doctrine rightly affords them a full defense. (shrink)

Common law treats cases of misfire in which the actor has a valid defence in relation to either the intended victim or the victim actually harmed as particular instances of ‘transferred malice’. It is said that just as the actor’s intention is fictitiously ‘transferred’ from the intended victim to the victim harmed so are defences, meaning that any—and only—defences that would have been available to the actor had he harmed the intended victim will be granted to him with regard to (...) the harm caused to the actual victim. I argue that the blanket solution of transferring defences ‘as is’, without accounting for their differing rationales and their specific implications for cases of misfire, produces bad reasoning and oversimplified decisions—and should therefore be substituted by a separate examination of the actor’s liability with respect to each victim and each type of defence. However, I reject the more robust argument that commentators have made, that a conclusion against transferring defences entails a conclusion against transferred malice in general. I argue that the underlying logic of transferred malice—i.e., treating victims of equivalent wrongs alike—stays intact even if we excise from it the treatment of cross-victim defences. (shrink)

In the recently published collection, Criminal Law and the Authority of the State, two contributions allude to an analogy with parental authority as a means to a better understanding of the institution of criminal punishment, but reach different conclusions. Malcolm Thorburn uses the parental authority analogy to justify the institution of state punishment as an assertion of robust authority over offenders. Antje du Bois-Pedain uses the same analogy to advocate the idea of punishment as an inclusionary practice, designed to reintegrate (...) offenders into society. I argue that Thorburn’s theory of robust authority is inconsistent if not self-contradictory when it tries to assume a liberal posture, and that du Bois-Pedain’s reintegrative model provides a better account of the justification and objectives of state punishment. (shrink)

Criminal law doctrine fails to provide an adequate solution for imputing responsibility to organized crime leaders for the offenses committed by their subordinates. This undesirable state of affairs is made possible because criminal organizations adopt complex organizational structures that leave their superiors beyond the reach of the law. These structures are characterized by features such as the isolation of the leadership from junior ranks, decentralized management, and mechanisms encouraging initiative from below. They are found in criminal organizations such as the (...) American Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, and even outlaw motorcycle gangs. The paper offers a doctrine that may transcend this shortcoming. Referred to as “leaders’ liability,” this doctrine will be assessed and appraised through a comparison with competing theories such as accomplice liability, Organisationsherrschaft , and conspiracy. (shrink)

The article explores two recurring themes in the scholarly writings on ‘transferred malice’ the doctrine designed by Anglo-American law to allow full criminal responsibility where the defendant caused harm to a different object than the one he had in mind, due to either accident or mistake. First, in face of the diversity of views advocating the eradication of transferred malice, the article searches for the provinces in which that doctrine should still have relevance to our legal system. It is often (...) assumed that malice cannot transfer amongst different offences, which has led many scholars to conclude that the doctrine is superfluous. The analysis here offered counters both assumption and conclusion alike, as well as the common view that differentiates between the implications of accident and mistake. Second, reflecting on the different criteria proposed to restrict the implementation of transferred malice such as physical and immediate harm to the actual object, remoteness of the actual harm from the harm intended, and foreseeability as to the actual harm the article provides an analytical framework by which to assess these criteria and to determine which of them proves more persuasive. The result is a notion of transferred malice that strikes a favourable balance with the requirement of mens rea. (shrink)

Despite the fundamentally binary character of justification, an upsurge in recent Anglo-American scholarship offers some highly sophisticated and widely diverging conceptions of “partial justification” in criminal law. In the present article we identify eight distinct conceptions of partial justification. We find, however, that each of them is predicated on a different conceptual fallacy. Any sound concept of partial justification in criminal law ought to meet the dual challenge of utility and consistency: it should usefully convey a message that advances the (...) conduct-guiding function of criminal law and retain some consistency with the key attributes of complete justification, particularly its allowing function and the implications of its typically universal nature. We maintain that none of the conceptions offered to date meets this challenge. The different meanings attached to partial justification do not further the guiding function of criminal law beyond what is achieved by the scalar concept of wrongfulness; indeed, they undermine the guiding utility of criminal law by obscuring the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible, thereby also diminishing the expressivity of the criminal conviction. Furthermore, extending partial universality to the proposed notions of partial justification implausibly marks retaliating victims and intervening third parties, who react to allegedly partially justified conduct, as partly blameworthy, whereas present legal doctrine rightly affords them a full defense. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence surveillance can be used to diagnose individual cases, track the spread of Covid‐19, and help provide care. The use of AI for surveillance purposes (such as detecting new Covid‐19 cases and gathering data from healthy and ill individuals) in a pandemic raises multiple concerns ranging from privacy to discrimination to access to care. Luckily, there exist several frameworks that can help guide stakeholders, especially physicians but also AI developers and public health officials, as they navigate these treacherous shoals. (...) While these frameworks were not explicitly designed for AI surveillance during a pandemic, they can be adapted to help address concerns regarding privacy, human rights, and due process and equality. In a time where the rapid implementation of all tools available is critical to ending a pandemic, physicians, public health officials, and technology companies should understand the criteria for the ethical implementation of AI surveillance. (shrink)

The global distributive implications of automatically allocating political membership according to territoriality (jus soli) and parentage (jus sanguinis) principles have largely escaped critical scrutiny. This article begins to address this considerable gap. Securing membership status in a given state or region--with its specific level of wealth, degree of stability, and human rights record--is a crucial factor in the determination of life chances. However, birthright entitlements still dominate both our imagination and our laws in the allotment of political membership to a (...) given state. In this article we explore the striking conceptual and legal similarities between intergenerational transfers of citizenship and property. The analogy between inherited citizenship and the intergenerational transfer of property allows us to use existing qualifications found in the realm of inheritance as a model for imposing restrictions on the unlimited and perpetual transmission of membership--with the aim of ameliorating its most glaring opportunity inequalities. (shrink)

In today's age of restrictionism, a growing number of countries are closing their gates of admission to most categories of would-be immigrants with one important exception. Governments increasingly seek to lure and attract “high value” migrants, especially those with access to large sums of capital. These individuals are offered golden visa programs that lead to fast-tracked naturalization in exchange for a hefty investment, in some cases without inhabiting or even setting foot in the passport-issuing country to which they now officially (...) belong. In the U.S. context, the contrast between the “Dreamers” and “Parachuters” helps to draw out this distinction between civic ties and credit lines as competing bases for membership acquisition. Drawing attention to these seldom-discussed citizenship-for-sale practices, this essay highlights their global surge and critically evaluates the legal, normative, and distributional quandaries they raise. I further argue that purchased membership goods cannot replicate or substitute the meaningful links to a political community that make citizenship valuable and worth upholding in the first place. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 78-80.

A comparative method of studying the biological bases of personality compares human trait dimensions with likely animal models in terms of genetic determination and common biological correlates. The approach is applied to the trait of sensation seeking, which is defined on the human level by a questionnaire, reports of experience, and observations of behavior, and on the animal level by general activity, behavior in novel situations, and certain types of naturalistic behavior in animal colonies. Moderately high genetic determination has been (...) found for human sensation seeking, and marked strain differences in rodents have been found in open-field behavior that may be related to basic differences in brain neurochemistry. Agonistic and sociable behaviors in both animals and humans and the trait measure of sensation seeking in humans have been related to certain common biological correlates such as gonadal hormones, monoamine oxidase (MAO), and augmenting of the cortical evoked potential.The monoamine systems in the rodent brain are involved in general activity, exploratory behavior, emotionality, socialization, dominance, sexual and consummately behaviors, and intracranial self-stimulation. Preliminary studies have related norepinephrine and enzymes involved in its production and degradation to human sensation seeking. A model is suggested that relates mood, behavioral activity, sociability, and clinical states to activity of the central catecholamine neurotransmitters and to neuroregulators and other transmitters that act in opposite ways on behavior or stabilize activity in the arousal systems. Stimulation and behavioral activity act on the catecholamine systems in a brain–behavior feedback loop. At optimal levels of catecholamine systems activity (CSA) mood is positive and activity and sociability are adaptive. At very low or very high levels of CSA mood is dysphoric, activity is restricted or stereotyped, and the organism is unsocial or aggressively antisocial. Novelty, in the absence of threat, may be rewarding through activation of noradrenergic neurons. (shrink)

In the theater the fictional Dr. Kelekian’s relief that he does not have to talk to family members about his patient’s cancer treatment draws uneasy laughter from the audience. Doctors, patients, and family members alike recognize the situation, even if hearing it so baldly expressed discomfits them.Why do physicians and other health care professionals, including lawyers and bioethicists, so often view families as “trouble”? And why do families so often see medical professionals as uncaring and uncommunicative? Presumably everyone wants the (...) same goal—recovery or the best possible outcome for the patient. And yet trouble clearly exists. We do not see the problem as one of “dysfunctional families” or “callous doctors,” although there are undoubtedly many of each. (shrink)

In the theater the fictional Dr. Kelekian’s relief that he does not have to talk to family members about his patient’s cancer treatment draws uneasy laughter from the audience. Doctors, patients, and family members alike recognize the situation, even if hearing it so baldly expressed discomfits them.Why do physicians and other health care professionals, including lawyers and bioethicists, so often view families as “trouble”? And why do families so often see medical professionals as uncaring and uncommunicative? Presumably everyone wants the (...) same goal—recovery or the best possible outcome for the patient. And yet trouble clearly exists. We do not see the problem as one of “dysfunctional families” or “callous doctors,” although there are undoubtedly many of each. (shrink)

In this paper, Ayelet Shachar begins by restating the main idea of her important book The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality and then goes on to address in a constructive spirit the main themes raised by the five preceding comments written by scholars in the fields of law, philosophy and political science.Dans cet article, Ayelet Shachar commence par rappeler l’idée centrale de son livre important The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality avant de répondre de manière (...) constructive aux cinq commentaires qui précèdent, rédigés par des experts dans les domaines du droit, de la philosophie et de la science politique. (shrink)

Cet article est la traduction française de l’introduction du livre d’Ayelet Shachar, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», avec la permission de l’éditeur, tirée de The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Traduction de Martin Provencher.This paper is the French translation of Ayelet Shachar’s introduction, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global (...) Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Translation by Martin Provencher. (shrink)

We consider Effort Games, a game-theoretic model of cooperation in open environments, which is a variant of the principal-agent problem from economic theory. In our multiagent domain, a common project depends on various tasks; carrying out certain subsets of the tasks completes the project successfully, while carrying out other subsets does not. The probability of carrying out a task is higher when the agent in charge of it exerts effort, at a certain cost for that agent. A central authority, called (...) the principal, attempts to incentivize agents to exert effort, but can only reward agents based on the success of the entire project.We model this domain as a normal form game, where the payoffs for each strategy profile are defined based on the different probabilities of carrying out each task and on the boolean function that defines which task subsets complete the project, and which do not. We view this boolean function as a simple coalitional game, and call this game the underlying coalitional game. We suggest the Price of Myopia as a measure of the influence the model of rationality has on the minimal payments the principal has to make in order to motivate the agents in such a domain to exert effort.We consider the computational complexity of testing whether exerting effort is a dominant strategy for an agent, and of finding a reward strategy for this domain, using either a dominant strategy equilibrium or using iterated elimination of dominated strategies. We show these problems are generally #P-hard, and that they are at least as computationally hard as calculating the Banzhaf power index in the underlying coalitional game. We also show that in a certain restricted domain, where the underlying coalitional game is a weighted voting game with certain properties, it is possible to solve all of the above problems in polynomial time. We give bounds on PoM in weighted voting effort games, and provide simulation results regarding PoM in another restricted class of effort games, namely effort games played over Series-Parallel Graphs. (shrink)

The Jurisprudence Lecture, delivered by Ayelet Shachar, challenges the established dichotomy between open and closed borders, showing that one of the most remarkable developments of recent years is...