ABSTRACT Many recent articles argue that participants who seroconvert during HIV prevention trials deserve treatment when they develop AIDS, and there is a general consensus that the participants in HIV/aids treatment trials should have continuing post‐trial access. As a result, the primary concern of many ethicists and activists has shifted from justifying an obligation to treat trial participants, to working out mechanisms through which treatment could be provided. In this paper I argue that this shift frequently conceals an important assumption: (...) that if there is an obligation to supply treatment, then any party who could provide it may be prevailed upon to discharge the obligation. This assumption is false. The reasons why trial participants should get ART affect who has the duty to provide it. We should not burden governments with the obligations of sponsors, nor researchers with the obligations of the international community. And we should not deprive a group of treatment because their need is less salient than that of research participants. Insisting otherwise may lead to people being wrongfully deprived of access to antiretrovirals. (shrink)

The number of people in immediate need of anti‐retroviral treatment (ART) in the southern African region continues to significantly exceed the capacity of health systems there to provide it. Approaches to this complex rationing dilemma have evolved in different directions. The ethical concepts of fairness and equity have been suggested as a basis to guide the development of approaches to select patients for ART. This article reports the results of a case study on patient selection at a rural (...) ART clinic in Lesotho. The purpose of the study was to examine whether or not such concepts had relevance or operative value for a treatment team providing ART in rural Lesotho. The study found that while concepts of fairness and equity were relevant to the work of the treatment team, patient selection practices did not necessarily reflect what these concepts entail. The idea of fairness as a structured, formalized selection process did not figure in the approach to ART provision at the site. A less formal, ‘first‐come‐first‐served’ approach was adopted. While there was knowledge among some team members that social, economic or geographic conditions inhibit individuals and groups from gaining access to ART and that this was inequitable, it was felt that there was little they could do to try to mediate the impact of these conditions. The study's findings pose importance questions about the approach to ART programming in resource constrained settings. The findings also question the relevance of trying to achieve fairness and equity when the gap between need for care and capacity to provide it remains so large. (shrink)

Cancers have a formidable capacity to develop resistance to a large and diverse array of chemical, biologic, and physical anti‐neoplastic agents. This can be largely traced to the instability of the tumor cell genome, and the resultant ability of tumor cell populations to generate phenotypic variants rapidly. It is therefore argued that anti‐cancer strategies should be directed at eliminating those genetically stable normal diploid cells that are required for the progressive growth of tumors. Micro‐vascular endothelial cells comprising (...) the tumor vasculature represent such a normal cell target. Moreover, specificity for tumor associated vasculature by anti‐cancer agents may be achieved by virtue of the fact that many of the endothelial cells that comprise these blood vessels are in an immature, cycling, and ‘activated’ state, in contrast to the endothelial cells associated with normal tissue and organ blood vessels. (shrink)

We examine whether anti-corruption intensity strengthens tax enforcement effectiveness in China. Using hand-collected anti-corruption data and aggregate tax enforcement data, which include the probability of tax audits and tax deficiencies, for a sample of 11,687 firm-year observations from 2012 to 2017, we find that anti-corruption intensity increases the deterrence role and the enforcement role of tax audits. We also identify the fear effect as a possible channel through which anti-corruption intensity affects tax enforcement effectiveness. Overall, the (...) results indicate that anti-corruption intensity can improve a revenue agency’s effectiveness. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalism about logic states that logical theories have no special epistemological status. Such theories are continuous with scientific theories. Contemporary anti-exceptionalists include the semantic paradoxes as a part of the elements to accept a logical theory. Exploring the Buenos Aires Plan, the recent development of the metainferential hierarchy of ST\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {ST}}$$\end{document}-logics shows that there are multiple options to deal with such paradoxes. There is a whole ST\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} (...) \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {ST}}$$\end{document}-based hierarchy, of which LP\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {LP}}$$\end{document} and ST\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {ST}}$$\end{document} themselves are only the first steps. This means that the logics in this hierarchy are also options to analyze the inferential patterns allowed in a language that contains its own truth predicate. This paper explores these responses analyzing some reasons to go beyond the first steps. We show that LP\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {LP}}$$\end{document}, ST\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {ST}}$$\end{document} and the logics of the ST\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {ST}}$$\end{document}-hierarchy offer different diagnoses for the same evidence: the inferences and metainferences the agents endorse in the presence of the truth-predicate. But even if the data are not enough to adopt one of these logics, there are other elements to evaluate the revision of classical logic. Which is the best explanation for the logical principles to deal with semantic paradoxes? How close should we be to classical logic? And mainly, how could a logic obey the validities it contains? From an anti-exceptionalist perspective, we argue that ST\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {ST}}$$\end{document}-metainferential logics in general—and STTω\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf {STT}}_{\omega }$$\end{document} in particular—are the best available options to explain the inferential principles involved with the notion of truth. (shrink)

Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject's environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent's commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism (...) is an implicit part of responsible epistemic practices, we cannot abandon it without compromising our own epistemic agency. The story I tell about the regulation of one's own representational practices yields a new account of the identity conditions for anti-individualistic concepts. (shrink)

Anti‐intellectualists about knowledge‐how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudpaes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti‐intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge‐how to φ. John Bengson and Marc Moffett and Carlotta Pavese have embraced precisely this strategy and have thus (...) claimed, for different reasons, that anti‐intellectualism is defective on the grounds that possessing the ability to φ is not sufficient for knowing how to φ. We investigate this strategy of argument‐by‐counterexample to the anti‐intellectualist's sufficiency thesis and show that, at the end of the day, anti‐intellectualism remains unscathed. (shrink)

Scholars have recently suggested the desirability of moving the migrant female subject to the center of the analysis of sex trafficking and other forms of women’s cross-border migration. At first glance, this seems to be a progressive move forward in empowering women and protecting their human rights, especially those who have been trafficked for the sex trade or have otherwise migrated for work in the sex industry. However, putting the victim of trafficking into the center of trafficking analysis also creates (...) new problems, especially for the formulation and implementation of law and public policy. In this paper, I will first discuss some of the factors that favor putting the female migrant subject at the center of anti-trafficking, such as recognition and respect for the autonomy of the person that is at the center of trafficking. I will then discuss some of the problems that such a reconfiguration would entail. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Guy Kahane asks whether God’s existence is something we should want to be true. Expanding on some cryptic remarks from Thomas Nagel, Kahane’s informative and wide-ranging piece eventually addresses whether personal anti-theism is justified, where personal anti-theism is the view that God’s existence would make things worse overall for oneself. In what follows, I develop, defend, but ultimately reject the Meaningful Life Argument, according to which if God’s existence precludes the realization of certain goods (...) that seem to an agent to constitute a meaningful life, it is rational for an agent both to believe that personal anti-theism is true and to prefer that God not exist. (shrink)

How to accommodate the possibility of lucky true beliefs in necessary (or armchair) truths within contemporary modal epistemology? According to safety accounts luck consists in the modal proximity of a false belief, but a belief in a true mathematical proposition could not easily be false because a proposition believed could never be false. According to Miščević modal stability of a true belief under small changes in the world is not enough, stability under small changes in the cognizer should also (and (...) primarily) be considered. I argue for a more traditional modal reliabilism based on the critical question: how easy is it for a belief to be false, given the way it was formed? A belief (a priori or a posteriori) is then agent-lucky when based on a specific method which might easily lead to a false belief in the target proposition. Miščević suggests a unifying approach in terms of virtue epistemology. It seems to me that this approach, if successful, will undermine the project that he started with: formulate an anti-luck condition in the frame of a modal theory of luck. (shrink)

The demandingness of act consequentialism is well-known and has received much sophisticated treatment.1 Few have been content to defend AC’s demands. Much of the response has been to jettison AC in favor of a similar, though significantly less demanding view.2 The popularity of this response is easy to understand. Excessive demandingness appears to be a strong mark against any moral theory. And if excessive demandingness is a worry of this kind, AC’s goose appears cooked: attempts to show that AC is (...) not particularly demanding are implausible at best. Given that AC requires agents to promote goodness, and given that “goodness” here is most often construed as impartial and aggregative between persons, were I in a position to save others from death by sacrificing myself, I am morally required, on. (shrink)

There is a diffuse sentiment that to anthropomorphize is a mild vice that people tend to do easily and pleasingly, but that an adult well educated person should avoid. In this paper it will be provided an elucidation of ``anthropomorphism'' in the field of common sense knowledge, the issue of animal rights, and about the use of humans as a model in the scientific explanation. It will be argued for a ``constructive anthropomorphism'', i.e., the idea that anthropomorphism is a natural (...) attutude to attribute human psychological features to other individuals, no matter they are actually rational agents, or not. If we know the ``grammar'' of this attutude, we can avoid the risks in overestimating the environmental inputs towards anthropomor­phism and, at the same time, take the heuristic advantages of anthropomor­phism in the use of human mind as a model for both everyday circumstances and scientific enterprise. (shrink)

The anti-capitalist debate has traditionally drawn up battle lines between oppressed individuals on the one hand, and an oppressive system on the other. While this has high rhetorical value, it is based on imprecise use of language. The language confuses an amoral system with im/moral agents but at the same time uses anthropomorphic language to lend capitalism moral agency. This inevitably leads to a confused debate. Given that all opponents of capitalism want the reformation of what they see (...) as a flawed system, precision in the use of the language employed would move the debate into arenas of action, and thus the debate is more likely to generate change. (shrink)

Intellectualists hold that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that, and consequently that the knowledge involved in skill is propositional. In support of this view, the intentional action argument holds that since skills manifest in intentional action and since intentional action necessarily depends on propositional knowledge, skills necessarily depend on propositional knowledge. We challenge this argument, and suggest that instructive representations, as opposed to propositional attitudes, can better account for an agent’s reasons for action. While a propositional-causal theory of action, according (...) to which intentional action must be causally produced “in the right way” by an agent’s proposition-involving reasons, has long held sway, we draw on Elizabeth Anscombe’s insights offer a path toward an alternative theory of action. In so doing, we reject the implicitly Cartesian conception of knowledge at the core of the intentional action argument, while hanging on to the idea that mental states are representations of a certain kind. Our argument provides theoretical support for anti-intellectualism by equipping philosophers with an account of non-propositional, practical content. (shrink)

“Agent-centered” approaches to global poverty insist that effective arguments for poverty reduction must specify the concrete duties of particular duty-bearers. This article takes up a recent, influential, version of this view, Thomas Pogge’s human rights-based argument for global economic reforms to reduce chronic deprivation. While signaling a welcome shift from the diffuse allocation of responsibilities common to much philosophical writing on poverty, I argue that Pogge’s approach too readily assigns to powerful institutions in the global North the role of devising (...) and directing anti-poverty initiatives. In so doing, he overlooks the agency—actual and potential—of the poor themselves, as evidenced by poor-led political movements and poor-centered, participatory models of poverty reduction in development theory and practice. While agent-oriented approaches are right to focus our attention on structures that cause poverty, they ought not to assume that the powerful agents responsible for these are the only—or most appropriate—agents to lead the way to poverty reduction. Just as development organizations working in the global South have come to recognize that the participation of poor communities is critical to the success of development strategies, so should normative theorists writing about global injustice acknowledge the importance of the poor as active agents in poverty reduction efforts. (shrink)

Some futurists and philosophers have urged that recent developments in biotechnology promise advancements that challenge standard accepted views of human nature, the self, and ethical obligation. Additionally, some have urged that developments in artificial intelligence similarly raise interesting new challenges to our conceptions of the mind, morality, and the future direction for conscious entities generally. Some have even gone so far as to argue in defense of “artificial replacement,” which is the view that humanity should be prepared to “hand over (...) the keys,” so to speak, to a new sort of intelligent collection of entities and that we should go extinct gracefully. These views suggest a new challenge to the anti‐natalist view that people should stop procreating: perhaps humanity is obligated to not allow itself to go extinct quite yet, at least until we have ensured that these next stages of intelligent entity have emerged. When we take into consideration some possibilities for entities with minds relevantly different from our own, we confront a challenge to the asymmetry argument that concerns human‐like minds. Call this the “future minds challenge to anti‐natalism.” I will examine some assumptions that underlie such a challenge, and I will argue that some famous articulations of the anti‐natalist stance should be revised in light of such technological advancements. (shrink)

Common sense explanations of human action are often framed in terms of an agent's beliefs and desires. Recent widely received views also take believing and desiring as attitudes of an agent to linguistic or quasi‐linguistic entities. It is here claimed that such a narrow view of cognitive attitudes is not supportable, since even among lingual non‐verbal responses are often overriding evidence for belief and desire, even where they run counter to sincere verbal assents. The view is also curiously non naturalistic (...) in that it disallows ascribing beliefs and desires altogether to non‐lingual and pre‐lingual. In the present paper a “common sense” explanation of action in accordance with the triad Desire, Belief, Action, is seen as a useful phenomenological “theory” provided that language centrality is not taken as essential. (shrink)

Psychopathy is increasingly in the public eye. However, it is yet to be fully and effectively understood. Within the context of the DSM-IV, for example, it is best regarded as a complex family of disorders. The upside is that this family can be tightly related along common dimensions. Characteristic marks of psychopaths include a lack of guilt and remorse for paradigm case immoral actions, leading to the common conception of psychopathy rooted in affective dysfunctions. An adequate portrait of psychopathy is (...) much more complicated, however. Though some neural regions and corresponding functions are commonly indicated, they range across those responsible for action planning and learning, as well as emotional processes. Accordingly, a complete fine-grained map of all neural mechanisms responsible for psychopathy has not been realized, and even if it were, such a map would have limited utility outside of the context of surgical or chemical intervention. The utility of a neural-level understanding of psychopathy is further limited by the fact that it is only applicable in the clinical identification of individual subjects, and the neuro-chemical/biological correction of those subjects after they are positively identified as psychopaths. On the other hand, an information processing model of moral cognition provides for wider-ranging applications. The theoretical and practical implications for such a feasible working model of psychopathic personalities are assessed. Finally, this chapter raises the possibility of directed modification of social-environmental factors (including at the meta-organizational level) discouraging the development of psychopathic personalities in the first place, modifications which are also open to simulation and testing in terms of the same model of moral cognition. (shrink)

Bernard Williams influentially attacked ethical theory. This paper assesses arguments for the ‘anti-theory’ position in ethics, including mainly arguments put forward by Williams but also arguments put forward by others. The paper begins by discussing what is supposed to be theory in ethics and what ethical intuitions are taken to be by those involved in the theory versus anti-theory debate. Then the paper responds to the objections that ethical theory is mistaken to prize principles, mistaken to prize rationalism, (...) mistaken to presume or prize foundational unity, mistaken to presume morality is deeply impartial, mistaken to presume to tell agents how to deliberate, mistaken to presume or prize ethical codifiability, mistaken to presume value commensurability, and mistaken to eliminate ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Must opponents of creating conscious artificial agents embrace anti-natalism? Must anti-natalists be against the creation of conscious artificial agents? This article examines three attempts to argue against the creation of potentially conscious artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of these questions. The examination reveals that the argumentative strategy each author pursues commits them to the anti-natalist position with respect to procreation; that is to say, each author's argument, if applied consistently, should lead them to embrace (...) the conclusion that procreation is, at best, morally problematic. However, the article also argues that anti-natalists can find the production of some possible artificially conscious AI permissible. Thus, the creation of potentially conscious AI could be accepted by both friends and foes of anti-natalism. (shrink)

Should you be willing to forego any sure good for a tiny probability of a vastly greater good? Fanatics say you should, anti-fanatics say you should not. Anti-fanaticism has great intuitive appeal. But, I argue, these intuitions are untenable, because satisfying them in their full generality is incompatible with three very plausible principles: acyclicity, a minimal dominance principle, and the principle that any outcome can be made better or worse. This argument against anti-fanaticism can be turned into (...) a positive argument for a weak version of fanaticism, but only from significantly more contentious premises. In combination, these facts suggest that those who find fanaticism counterintuitive should favor not anti-fanaticism, but an intermediate position that permits agents to have incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti-fanatical. (shrink)

Liberal democracy suffers from an internal contradiction stemming from its ideological roots and rending it from within. On the one hand its goal is to generate a system of laws and rules that maximize individual rights and liberties; on the other hand, some of its fundamental assumptions pertaining to the Subject restrict the political and social agent's existential experience to a limited threshold of speech and action. The central assumption of this article is that the main meeting point of the (...) critics of modernity, Apel and Habermas primarily, and the post-structuralists, Foucault and Deleuze, in regard to the Subject, rehabilitates liberal discourse and creates an opening for a political theory that maximizes the freedom of the individual as a structured, anti-essentialist Subject. I will show that the expansion of the concept of the self in the two streams sheds new light on the concepts of political control and liberty, and in this way extends the normative discussion of all aspects of the political agent's status in a modern democracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAchievements are among the things that make a life good. Assessing the plausibility of this intuitive claim requires an account of the nature of achievements. One necessary condition for achievement appears to be that the achieving agent acted competently, i.e. was not just lucky. I begin by critically assessing existing accounts of anti-luck conditions for achievements in both the ethics and epistemology literature. My own proposal is that a goal is reached competently, only if the actions of the would-be-achiever (...) make success likely, and that this is the reason why she acts that way. (shrink)

Instability occurs when the very fact of choosing one particular possible option rather than another affects the expected values of those possible options. In decision theory: An act is stable iff given that it is actually performed, its expected utility is maximal. When there is no stable choice available, the resulting instability can seem to pose a dilemma of practical rationality. A structurally very similar kind of instability, which occurs in cases of anti-expertise, can likewise seem to create dilemmas (...) of epistemic rationality. One possible line of response to such cases of instability, suggested by both Jeffrey (1983) and Sorensen (1987), is to insist that a rational agent can simply refuse to accept that such instability applies to herself in the first place. According to this line of thought it can be rational for a subject to discount even very strong empirical evidence that the anti-expertise condition obtains. I present a new variety of anti-expertise condition where no particular empirical stage-setting is required, since the subject can deduce a priori that an anti-expertise condition obtains. This kind of anti-expertise case is therefore not amenable to the line of response that Jeffrey and Sorensen recommend. (shrink)

Given the pain, discomfort, anxiety, heartbreak, and boredom that most humans experience in their lives, is it morally permissible to create them? Some philosophers lately have answered ‘No’, contending that it is wrong to create a new human life when one could avoid doing so, because it would be bad for the one created. This view is known as ‘anti-natalism’. Some contributors to this volume argue that anti-natalism is true because: agents have a prima facie duty to (...) prevent suffering; it is immoral to violate another’s right not to be harmed without having consented to it; and it is a serious wrong to exploit the weakness of a poorly off being to become a biological parent. Others here argue against anti-natalism on the ground, for instance, that many of our lives are not so bad and in fact are quite good and that the logic of anti-natalism absurdly entails pro-mortalism, the view that we should kill off as many people as possible. This book explores these and related issues concerning the evaluative question of how to judge the worthwhileness of lives and the normative question of what basic duties entail for the creation of new lives. Most chapters initially appeared as part of a special issue of the _South African Journal of Philosophy_ (2012) and are here reprinted along with two additional essays on the topic. (shrink)

Robust Virtue Epistemology maintains that knowledge is achieved just when an agent gets to the truth through, or because of, the manifestation of intellectual virtue or ability. A notorious objection to the view is that the satisfaction of the virtue condition will be insufficient to ensure the safety of the target belief; that is, RVE is no anti-luck epistemology. Some of the most promising recent attempts to get around this problem are considered and shown to ultimately fail. Finally, a (...) new proposal for defending RVE as a kind of anti-luck epistemology is defended. The view developed here turns importantly on the idea that knowledge depends on ability and luck in a way that is gradient, not rigid, and that we know just when our cognitive success depends on ability not rather, but more so, than luck. (shrink)

I argue for the unexceptionality of evidence about what rationality requires. Specifically, I argue that, as for other topics, one’s total evidence can sometimes support false beliefs about this. Despite being prima facie innocuous, a number of philosophers have recently denied this. Some have argued that the facts about what rationality requires are highly dependent on the agent’s situation and change depending on what that situation is like. (Bradley 2019). Others have argued that a particular subset of normative truths, those (...) concerning what epistemic rationality requires, have the special property of being ‘fixed points’—it is impossible to have total evidence that supports false belief about them. (Smithies 2012; Titelbaum 2015). Each of these kinds of exceptionality permits a solution to downstream theoretical problems that arise from the possibility of evidence supporting false belief about requirements of rationality. However, as I argue here, they incur heavy explanatory burdens that we should avoid. (shrink)

ArgumentUsing the example of the anti-tuberculosis vaccine BCG during the 1920s and 1930s, this article asks how a labile laboratory-modified bacteria was transformed into a genuine standard vaccine packaged and commercialized as a pharmaceutical product. At the center of the analysis lies the notion of standardization inquiring why and how a local laboratory process with standard operating procedures (SOPs) reached its limits and was transformed when the product faced international distribution. Moving from Paul Ehrlich's initial technological notion ofWertbestimmungreferring to (...) a practice physiologically testing the effects of ill-defined antitoxins, the concept of standardization is extended to pharmaceutical and economical meanings implying quality control for biological therapeutic agents produced by a variety of industrial entrepreneurs. Following the request for product uniformity, two ways to maintain levels of compatibility and commonality are depicted opposing SOPs and end-product control. Furthermore, standardization is understood as a spiral, never ending process where progressive transformation of the vaccine in its production and medical uses periodically recreated the necessity of standardization. Developments analyzed are thus understood as a stabilization process aligning laboratory settings, products, and practices with medical theories and practices through technical, bureaucratic, and organizational systems. A paradox of the analysis is that standardization as a historical phenomenon and moment in the history of drug development was initially linked to a problem of under-determination of what was to be standardized and to a knowledge gap before it could become a central concept for quality control. (shrink)

What is special about successful action explanation is that it reveals what the agent saw in her action. Most contemporary philosophers assume that this amounts to explanation in terms of the reason for which the agent acted. They also assume that such explanations conform to a realist picture of explanation. What is disputed is whether the reason is a psychological state or a normative state of affairs . I argue that neither psychological states nor their contents suffice to make actions (...) intelligible in the right way , while Anti-Psychologism can’t explain acting on bad reasons . The alternative that I propose, Proceduralism, has it that explaining an action requires simulating the agent’s practical deliberation. On this view, explanation is not grounded in reasons, and thereby avoids the problems with “bad” reasons that Anti-Psychologism faces. Instead, in simulating to the same conclusion as the agent, the “explainer” comes to see what the agent saw in her action, thereby satisfying the Reasonableness Constraint. Proceduralism requires giving up on the assumption that the reason for which the agent acts explains the action and on the realist picture of action explanation. In addition, it accounts for the incomprehension that explainers experience when they encounter “alien” psychologies – psychologies that are deeply different from their own. (shrink)

This chapter examines the distinction among observers, participants, and agents from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. It first examines an exemplary discourse on the nonscientific theme of “beauty” using the evil stepmother in “Snow White” as an example. It discusses this theme from the perspective of interactive constructivism and interprets it as a problem between universalist and anti-universalist approaches. The chapter then demonstrates numerous connections between constructivism and Dewey's Pragmatic theory of inquiry. Dewey, for (...) example, had already distinguished spectators, agents, and participants, even though he did not articulate those distinctions in a systematic way. This chapter follows upon Dewey's insights, suggesting ways in which a constructivist theory of observation can enrich contemporary Pragmatist arguments. (shrink)

Although Henry David Thoreau stands outside the Christian canon, his outlook on the relations among spirituality, ecology, and economy highlights how Christian theologians can develop a theological work ethic in our era of economic and ecological precarity. He can furthermore help theologians counter the pro-work bias in much Christian thought. In Walden, Thoreau shows that the best work is an ascetic practice that reveals and reaps the abundance of nature and connects the person to the immanent divine and thereby glimpsing (...) eternity. Thoreau thus offers the outline of a transformed theology of work even as he challenges Protestant vocationalism in the early industrial era. He is therefore a fitting if challenging guide for formulating a theology of the self as agent and product of work, at a moment when the postindustrial ideal of work that is both meaningful and remunerative seems ever more unattainable while the negative impact of our work on nonhuman nature is ever more apparent. (shrink)

The problem of epistemic luck arises when a person has a true belief that is only true by luck. Before Gettier, it was believed that the element of justification would be sufficient for knowledge; but he showed that it is possible to have a justified true belief that is not an example of knowledge because of the intrusion of luck. Duncan Pritchard has examined epistemic luck in an extensive and detailed manner. He offers a modal account of luck based on (...) two elements: a possible-worlds analysis of counterfactual conditions and a significance condition for the factors that make the truth of the belief lucky. Pritchard argues for the superiority of this account to those that focus on whether the truth of the belief is “accidental” and on whether the believer has sufficient control over the belief. Epistemic luck may be “reflective” or “veritic”. Both undermine knowledge claims, although Pritchard gives the central role to veritic luck in his anti-luck epistemology, which is based on two elements: a safety principle and a condition to ensure that the cognitive faculties of the agent are not impaired. In this article, we will describe, analyze, and subsequently, evaluate the viewpoint of Pritchard. In addition to the critiques offered by others, ambiguities in his counterfactual account of luck and other components of his theory detract from his theory. (shrink)

I defend the claim that Kant is a moral antirealist, or (as he would state it) moral idealist. I first define moral realism and moral idealism, concluding that moral idealism requires that every moral property depend upon the minds of moral agents. Kant's metaethical theory is idealist regarding the nature of value, since it depends upon the voluntary choices of moral agents in pursuing particular ends, the nature of right, since the categorical imperative stems from moral agents' (...) own reason, and the nature of moral agency, since freedom is construed in terms of the use of reason. (shrink)

Leah Andress,1 Anjali Gupta,2 Nida Siddiqi,3 Kwaku Marfo2,3 1University at Buffalo School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Department of Pharmacy Practice, Buffalo, 2Montefiore Medical Center, The University Hospital for Albert Einstein College of Medicine Department of Abdominal Organ Transplant Program, Bronx, 3Montefiore Medical Center, Department of Pharmacy, Bronx, NY, USA: Rabbit anti-thymocyte globulin has proven benefit as induction therapy in renal transplant recipients, achieving reduced acute rejection rates and better short-term allograft function, with slightly higher rates of complications such (...) as infections and malignancy. Compared with other agents, the most benefit from rATG induction has been observed in renal transplant recipients at high immunologic risk for rejection. However, in special populations, such as pediatrics, the elderly, and hepatitis C-positive and human immunodeficiency virus-positive renal transplant recipients, additional information is needed to delineate the absolute benefit of rATG induction compared with other induction agents. Selection of rATG as the choice of induction therapy in renal transplant recipients should be guided by a cost-effective approach in balancing efficacy, safety, and cost. This review summarizes the published literature on efficacy, safety, and cost of rATG induction in renal transplantation. Keywords: anti-thymocyte globulin, renal transplantation, induction therapy. (shrink)

Understanding the role of ‘‘representations’’ in cognitive science is a fundamental problem facing the emerging framework of embodied, situated, dynamical cognition. To make progress, I follow the approach proposed by an influential representational skeptic, Randall Beer: building artificial agents capable of minimally cognitive behaviors and assessing whether their internal states can be considered to involve representations. Hence, I operationalize the concept of representing as ‘‘standing in,’’ and I look for representations in embodied agents involved in simple categorization tasks. (...) In a first experiment, no representation can be found, but the relevance of the task is undermined by the fact that agents with no internal states can reach high performance. A simple modification makes the task more “representationally hungry,” and in this case, agents’ internal states are found to qualify as representations. I conclude by discussing the benefits of reconciling the embodied-dynamical approach with the notion of representation. (shrink)

The Humean theory of motivation remains the default position in much of the contemporary literature in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. Yet despite its widespread support, the theory is implausible as a view about what motivates agents to act. More specifically, my reasons for dissatisfaction with the Humean theory stem from its incompatibility with what I take to be a compelling model of the role of motivating reasons in first-person practical deliberation and third-person action explanations. So after first (...) introducing some assumptions about the nature of agency in section one, I will turn to articulating and defending this account of motivating reasons in sections two through four of the paper. Section five then provides some background on the Humean theory before I argue directly against it in section six and critically examine the leading arguments for the view in section seven. Given limitations of space, however, I save the task of developing a positive anti-Humean view for another occasion. (shrink)

Spam electronic mails (emails) refer to harmful and unwanted commercial emails sent to corporate bodies or individuals to cause harm. Even though such mails are often used for advertising services and products, they sometimes contain links to malware or phishing hosting websites through which private information can be stolen. This study shows how the adaptive intelligent learning approach, based on the visual anti-spam model for multi-natural language, can be used to detect abnormal situations effectively. The application of this approach (...) is for spam filtering. With adaptive intelligent learning, high performance is achieved alongside a low false detection rate. There are three main phases through which the approach functions intelligently to ascertain if an email is legitimate based on the knowledge that has been gathered previously during the course of training. The proposed approach includes two models to identify the phishing emails. The first model has proposed to identify the type of the language. New trainable model based on Naive Bayes classifier has also been proposed. The proposed model is trained on three types of languages (Arabic, English and Chinese) and the trained model has used to identify the language type and use the label for the next model. The second model has been built by using two classes (phishing and normal email for each language) as a training data. The second trained model (Naive Bayes classifier) has been applied to identify the phishing emails as a final decision for the proposed approach. The proposed strategy is implemented using the Java environments and JADE agent platform. The testing of the performance of the AIA learning model involved the use of a dataset that is made up of 2,000 emails, and the results proved the efficiency of the model in accurately detecting and filtering a wide range of spam emails. The results of our study suggest that the Naive Bayes classifier performed ideally when tested on a database that has the biggest estimate (having a general accuracy of 98.4%, false positive rate of 0.08%, and false negative rate of 2.90%). This indicates that our Naive Bayes classifier algorithm will work viably on the off chance, connected to a real-world database, which is more common but not the largest. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the pragmatic relevance of race in history. Kant and Hegel's racist development thesis assumes that nonwhite, non-European racial groups are defective practical agents. In response, philosophers have opted to drop race from a theory of history and progress. They posit that denying its pragmatic relevance amounts to anti-racist egalitarianism. I dub this tactic “colorblind cosmopolitanism” and offer grounds for its rejection. Following Du Bois, I ascribe, instead, a pragmatic role to race in history. (...) Namely, Du Bois argues that race is an “instrument of progress” that advances emancipatory struggle. He appeals to the writing of history—or historiography—to cultivate group consciousness of historical memory in order to strengthen intragroup bonds among the racially oppressed, especially black Americans, and create intergroup bonds that reconstruct the republic on the basis of universal ideals. I detail Du Bois's defense of the black struggle for freedom in the wake of the U.S. Civil War to provide a concrete illustration of “spirit” in American history. (shrink)

Motivational internalism about moral judgments is the plausible view that accepting a moral judgment is necessarily connected to motivation motivation. However, it conflicts with the Humean theory that motives must be constituted by desires. Simple versions of internalism run into problems with people who do not desire to do what they believe right. This has long been urged by David Brink. Hence, many internalists have adopted more subtle defeasible views, on which only rational agents will have a desire to (...) act. I will argue that more complex versions run into problems with self-effacing values of the sort Parfit highlights in another context. Such values can only be attained indirectly. After proposing a general account of motivation suited to the internalist thesis, I argue that Anti-Humeanism is better suited to accommodating the internalist insight. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemologists have recently made a few isolated attempts to demonstrate the particular ways, in which specific types of knowledge are partly social. Two promising cases in point are Lackey’s dualism in the epistemology of testimony and Goldberg’s process reliabilist treatment of testimonial and coverage-support justification. What seems to be missing from the literature, however, is a general approach to knowledge that could reveal the partly social nature of the latter anytime this may be the case. Indicatively, even though Lackey (...) :345–361, 2007) has recently launched an attack against the Credit Account of Knowledge on the basis of testimony, she has not classified her view of testimonial knowledge into any of the alternative, general approaches to knowledge. Similarly, even if Goldberg’s attempt to provide a process reliabilist explanation of the social nature of testimonial knowledge is deemed satisfactory, his attempt to do the same in the case of coverage-support justification does not deliver the requisite result. This paper demonstrates that CAK can in fact provide, pace Lackey’s renunciation of the view, a promising account of the social nature of both testimonial and coverage-supported knowledge. Additionally, however, it can display further explanatory power by also revealing the social nature of knowledge produced on the basis of epistemic artifacts. Despite their disparities, all these types of knowledge count as partly social in nature, because in all these cases, according to CAK, the epistemic credit for the individual agent’s true belief must spread between the individual agent and certain parts of her epistemic community. Accordingly, CAK is a promising candidate for providing a unified approach to several and, perhaps all possible, instances of what we may call ‘weak epistemic anti-individualism’ within mainstream epistemology: i.e., the claim that the nature of knowledge can occasionally be both social and individual at the same time. (shrink)

According to Fischer and Ravizza, an agent has guidance control over some action A, whenever A is issued from one of their own moderately reasons-responsive mechanisms. This involves two elements: the process P leading to their action being suitably responsive to reasons-; and their taking an attitude towards processes of kind P such that they see themselves as the agents of the behaviour those processes issue. For the purposes of this paper, I assume that guidance control amounts to actually (...) guiding some action. I present, and defend, a counterexample in which an agent intentionally acts via a suitably reasons-responsive process which they have taken responsibility for and yet, intuitively, does not actually guide their action. On this basis, I argue that taking responsibility for a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism is not sufficient for having guidance control. (shrink)

An increasingly popular objection to anti-intellectualism about know-how is that there are clear cases where an agent having the dispositional ability to φ does not suffice for her knowing how to φ. Recently, Adam Carter has argued that anti-intellectualism can only rise to meet this sufficiency objection if it imposes additional constraints on know-how. He develops a revisionary anti-intellectualism, on which knowing how to φ not only entails that the agent possesses a reliable ability to φ, but (...) also that she is equipped with certain kind of intellectual grasp of the method by which she is able to reliably φ. This paper argues that Carter's revisionary know-how does not constitute an improvement over the more standard version of anti-intellectualism. Moreover, it is argued that Carter's additional demands concede too much to the intellectualist, and, as a result, commit his revised anti-intellectualism to familiar problems facing the intellectualist account of know-how. In other words, his attempts to respond to the sufficiency objection constitutes a dangerous compromise to the intellectualist. The paper finishes with a final analysis that suggests, in the end, there are still reasons to prefer standard anti-intellectualism over intellectualism. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: Dengsø and Kirchhoff offer a revised dynamic conception of the individual in place of the bounded cognitive agent of classical cognitive science. However, this may not be sufficiently robust to ground the enquiries into individual and cultural differences that remain vital in the proposed “deterritorialized cognitive science.” It also needs to make contact with rich traditions of 4E (...) research on socially distributed cognition, which are neglected in Dengsø and Kirchhoff’s critique. It is just because individualization is a fragile process, and because boundaries are hard-won achievements, that anti-individualists who highlight the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and dynamism of cognitive ecologies must reconfigure rather than eliminate or efface the individual. (shrink)

Most anti-paternalists claim that informed and competent self-regarding choices are protected by autonomy, while ill-informed or impaired self-regarding choices are not. Joel Feinberg, among many others, argues that we can in this way distinguish impermissible “hard” paternalism from permissible “soft” paternalism. I argue that this view confronts two related problems in its treatment of ill-informed decision-makers. First, it faces a dilemma when applied to decision-makers who are responsible for their ignorance: it either permits too much, or else too little, (...) intervention to satisfy its proponents. Second, the most promising rationales in favor of the view ignore the distinction between an agent’s voluntarily bringing about some state of affairs, on the one hand, and an agent’s voluntarily assuming a risk, on the other. I conclude that a decision-maker’s ignorance is irrelevant to the permissibility of intervention on her behalf. If it is permissible to intervene in a given ill-informed choice, it would be permissible to intervene in an otherwise similar but informed choice, at least provided that intervention would produce similar benefits in both cases. This shows that we should sometimes accept straightforwardly paternalistic rationales. (shrink)