New techniques for modifying the genomes of agricultural organisms create difficult ethical challenges. We provide a novel framework to replace worn-out ethical lenses relying on ‘naturalness’ and ‘crossing species lines.’ Thinking of agricultural intervention as a ‘negotiation’ of ‘integrity’ and ‘agency’ provides a flexible framework for considering techniques such as genome editing with CRISPR/Cas systems. We lay out the framework by highlighting some existing uses of integrity in environmental ethics. We also provide an example of our lens at work (...) by looking at the creation of ‘cisgenic’ potatoes to resist late potato blight. We conclude by highlighting three distinct advantages offered by the integrity framework. These include a more fitting way to look at the practice of scientific researchers, a more inclusive way to consider ethics around agriculture, and a more flexible way to provide the ethical grounds for regulation in different cultural contexts. (shrink)

What can the philosophy of agency learn from Nguyen’s book on games? The most important lesson concerns, to use Nguyen’s terms, the ‘layered’ structure of our agency and the ‘fluidity’ requ...

Schönau et al. (2021) identified four dimensions of agency (authenticity, privacy, self–trust, and responsibility) that may be influenced by the use of neurotechnologies, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) or brain–computer–interfaces (BCI). The Agency Map they proposed depicts the role of each dimension, and indicates how they may interact. The authors emphasize that a strength of their approach is that it allows to capture the agency dimensions that were previously seen as disconnected and independent as intricately interwoven (...) parts of the person’s experience. This intended unification may help to understand personal agency more fully in various contexts important in neuroethical considerations. However, what is missing in Schönau et al.’s analysis is the mechanism—the very link— by which these various dimensions can come together. As Zawadzki (2020) points out discussing his account of the self (PTS–moral aspects)—which also includes the agency dimensions indicated by Schönau et al. (both authenticity, and responsibility, but also autonomy)—what is crucial in order to unify these various dimensions is narrative. (shrink)

Inspired by Weber’s charismatic carrier groups, Eisenstadt coined the term institutional entrepreneur to capture the rare but epochal collective capable of reorienting a group’s value-orientations and transferring charisma, while making them an evolutionary force of structural and cultural change. As a corrective to Parsons’ abstract, ‘top-down’ theory of change, Eisenstadt’s theory provided historical context and agency to moments in which societies experienced qualitative transformation. The concept has become central to new institutionalism, neo-functionalism, and evolutionary-institutionalism. Drawing from the former two, (...) a more robust theory of institutional entrepreneurship from an evolutionary-institutionalist’s perspective is posited. In essence, entrepreneurs formulate institutional projects with dual logic: a collective side focused on innovation where efforts are directed towards organizational symbolic mechanisms of integration and a self-interested side directed towards resource independence, monopolization, mobility, and power-dependence. While outcomes vary based on numerous environmental factors, success leads to (1) greater structural/symbolic independence and (2) ability to reconfigure physical-temporal-social-symbolic space. (shrink)

In a fresh look at the age-old question of nature's laws versus individual choice, Machan offers an insightful discussion of human initiative as a basic feature ...

For a long time, international relations scholars have adopted a narrow view of what is global order, who are its makers and managers, and what means they employ to realize their goals. Amitav Acharya argues that the nature and scope of agency in the global order - who creates it and how - needs to be redefined and broadened. Order is built not by material power alone, but also by ideas and norms. While the West designed the post-war order, (...) the non-Western countries were not passive. They contested and redefined Western ideas and norms, and contributed new ones of their own making. This book examines such acts of agency, especially the redefinitions of sovereignty and security, shaping contemporary world politics. With the decline of Western dominance, ideas and agency from the Rest may make it possible to imagine and build a truly global order. (shrink)

In Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume examines the idea of necessary connection, which, he observes, forms an indispensable part of our idea of cause and effect. He concludes:The idea of necessity arises from some impression. There is no impression convey'd by our senses, which can give rise to that idea. It must, therefore, by deriv'd from some internal impression, or impression of reflexion. There is no internal impression which has any relation to the present business, but (...) that propensity, which custom produces, to pass from an object to the idea of its usual attendant. This therefore is the essence of necessity. Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from causes to effects and from effects to causes, according to their experienced union. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 58 Heft: 4 Seiten: 453-472.

How can we be certain that another creature is a conscious being? One path is to rely on introspective reports we can grasp in communication or observation of their behavior. Another path is to infer mentality and consciousness by means of markers tied to their intentional behavior, that is, agency. In this paper we will argue that even if agency is a marker of consciousness in several normal instances (paradigmatically, for mature and healthy human beings), it is not (...) a good marker in several pathological instances, such as the blindsight case, the vegetative state, the akinetic mutism and the locked-in syndrome. If we are right, this can be of great utility in neuroethics; for those kinds of disorders of consciousness are not, after all, instances of complete absence of consciousness. (shrink)

One of the orienting claims in Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China is that an adequate accounting for the pluralism of technicity remains forthcoming. Hui brings this to our atten...

Fiction is an important tool in an artist/designer/developer’s vocabulary, but its usage is polyvalent. Speculative research in this article introduces the ‘rudiment’ to embrace the undeveloped and the improvisory phases of research practice. Fiction is used to reflect on the ways practicing designers and developers might already engage in misanthropic thinking – involving automated technologies. Tracing the misanthropic agencies in relation to automated technologies contributes to expanding the ways designers and developers reflect on the technical potential of their designs, with (...) whom they are designing (and for) and the way they understand their reflexive self. Bringing together Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist (1999) and its account of an elevator crash, their design and maintenance, with a narrative account of software agents enables an investigation into the promises made through a design-for-the-prevention-of-failure imperative. These examples highlight the relation between physical and non-physical failures such as failures to connect or to create intimacy. Those who contribute to designing in this article get caught up in configuring misanthropic agencies involving themselves, the designed artefact and the spaces they both inhabit be that an elevator in a housing block, or a sexbot in an online chat room. I will argue that the misanthropic agencies of automated technologies can have a confining impact on our emergent modes of design. Automated software operating in virtual spaces are confining in as much as they attempt to connect things to exploit the de-personalized aspects of automated, misanthropic agency. (shrink)

In this short essay I express my own deep sympathy with Nel Noddings’s ethic of care and applaud her stubborn resistance in Happiness and Education to what John Dewey would have called false dualisms, such as those between intelligence and emotion, theory and practice, or vocation and academic studies.However, I question whether the sort of caring relation she depicts so beautifully in this and many other books is sufficiently robust to alone carry the weight of the moral life that she (...) supports, and whether her suspicion of community, while sounding important cautions, does not leave us with an ethical vision that is too thin to deliver the sort of education she prescribes. To this end, I argue that she judges Victor Frankl’s conception of freedom too harshly and his response to human suffering with an uncharacteristic lack of charity. Following well-known communitarian arguments of MichaelWalzer and CharlesTaylor I suggest that some account of a situated human agent who can choose freely to enter into relation is necessary to sustain the role of caring in education that has been Noddings most significant philosophical contribution. (shrink)

In this presentation, I argue for a conception of rational capacities that makes us epistemic agents without essential reference or appeal to self-consciousness/self-knowledge, contrary to McDowell, Moran, and others. At the same time, his conception of rational capacities as powers at the personal level saves our epistemic agency against worries that Hilary Kornblith has put forward.

One of Schopenhauer’s pinnacle contributions to philosophy was the discovery of the nature of the noumenon. Whereas Kant was content to leave the question of the thing-in-itself forever a mystery, Schopenhauer devised a strategy by which to peer beyond the veil of phenomena. The key which unlocks the mystery of the noumenon lies in Schopenhauer’s analysis of bodily agency as an examination of concrete acts of willing presents “a way from within … to that real inner nature of things (...) to which we cannot penetrate from without” and thereby opens, “so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken by attack from without.”. (shrink)

Citizen participation, by now one of the main topics on the institutional agenda in many European countries, involves different fields of public action, mostly on a local level – social inclusion, urban renewal, development, the environment, health/social services, etc. It still remains, however, vague as a concept with a great variety of actors, procedures and powers involved in its practices. In this scenario, the present article asks two questions: what powers and what freedoms are involved in participation? How are they (...) constructed and increased? The article then goes on to argue how voice is relevant for understanding the many stories of participation, referring to the classic concept of voice formulated by Albert Hirschman and the elaborations offered by Amartya Sen and Arjun Appadurai in their dialogue over capabilities and capacities. (shrink)

Suggesting that underlying some violent behavior is an unhealthy identification of one's self with one's behavior, such that there is no reflective space between the acting self and unwanted or violent action, Alexandra Pârvan echoes many contemporary psychotherapeutic models in suggesting that a central goal of psychotherapy for perpetrators and recipients of violence should be to encourage clients to distance the acting self from the self's experience and behavior. Pârvan observes that this is already a feature of "attachment-informed psychotherapy," but (...) she argues that "the distinction between self and action can only be effectively established from outside strictly psychological perspectives" (p.... (shrink)