While Bernard Suits's understanding of games has significantly influenced the philosophy of sport, the longest sustained investigation in The Grasshopper is of make-believe and roleplaying games. Suits’s discussion of make-believe and roleplaying is found in chapters 9 through 12, but what he says there is uncharacteristically unclear. To clarify Suits’s account, the present paper distinguishes between two arguments that Suits interweaves. In the first, Suits argues that game playing is not a species of play. In the second, Suits argues that (...) playing a make-believe or role-playing game is the same — at heart — as playing a game of any type. While the paper takes no position on the former, it defends the latter argument against several important objections by Thomas Hurka and C. Thi Nguyen. It contends, furthermore, that Suits is not simply trying to show that his theory of game playing can account for make-believe and roleplaying games. Rather, Suits is also using make-believe and roleplaying games to clarify exactly how his theory of game playing should be understood. (shrink)

Legal positivists typically describe law as ‘thinly’ normative to distinguish it from the ‘thick’ normative force moral norms have; which legal norms may lack. One popular account of thin normativity is social normativity. But a number of scholars have offered accounts of what it is to be a thin norm that are distinct from social normativity. This paper addresses these alternative accounts of what it is to be a thin norm. It also explores whether law counts as necessarily ‘thinly normative’ (...) on these accounts. I argue that some accounts of thin normativity are so generic (‘super-thin’) that they are unable to distinguish between (thin) norms and nonnormative facts and thus collapse into triviality. I also consider more metaphysically demanding accounts of thin normativity, such as the view that everything is a norm that is essentially represented by deontic modals. However, law might fail to meet the demands of these slightly thicker accounts. I thus propose a view of law as consisting in nonnormative facts (diagnostic categories) and suggest sketching accounts of thin normativity as contingent, rather than necessary, features of laws and legal systems. (shrink)

While the story of Stanislav Petrov – the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who likely saved the world from nuclear holocaust in 1983 – is often trotted out to advocate for the view that human beings ought to be kept “in the loop” of automated weapons’ responses, I argue that the episode in fact belies this reading. By attending more closely to the features of this event – to Petrov’s professional background, to his familiarity with the warning system, and to his decisions (...) to defy his protocol – it becomes clear that Petrov was not seamlessly working “in his loop,” but reassessing it entirely. I claim that this exhibits a paradox intrinsic to all automated loops: namely, that their optimum function in fact rests on unforeseen human interventions that cannot be reliably codified ex ante, that is, that good judgment cannot simply be “programmed into” their protocols. This dependence, moreover, reveals automation’s ineluctable need for virtue ethics – not in the usual sense (whereby ethics deliberates about, say, possible damages and loss of life), but in the sense that ethical judgment, rightly understood, entails the reassessment of all of the conditions surrounding a decision, including whether a protocol should be followed at all. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the situation generated by the unequal distribution of vaccines that -at the international level- has occurred in the framework of the epidemic generated by COVID-19. For this, the concepts of «act» and «word» derived from the theoretical-political theses of Hannah Arendt (1993) are used, with which it was sought to evidence the situation of neocolonialism of vaccines derived from this situation, from the philosophical deconstruction to raise the urgent consequence of neocolonialism in health, which allowed us to (...) infer how Human Rights are not the central axis of the national and state discourses or praxis of the government systems of countries with more stable and stronger economies, since the decisions and behaviors reflect the interests of the main actors of the National States that have economic support for the large-scale purchase of vaccines against COVID-19. Which in turn are the protagonists of a sociopolitical phenomenon that can be categorized as global health neocolonialism, which is presented as a phenomenon of neocolonialism that began with the confidentiality agreements signed between the States of the countries and the pharmaceutical corporations, inside or outside COVAX in the year 2020. Concluding that the massive purchase of vaccines was subject to an exclusivity character to acquire the batches, where some factors of discrimination or non-inclusion are revealed, affirming that COVAX did not comply with the purpose for what was initially created. (shrink)

The U.S. military is developing augmented reality (AR) capabilities for use on the battlefield as a means of achieving greater situational awareness. The superimposition of digital data—designed to expand surveillance, enhance geospatial understanding, and facilitate target identification—onto a live view of the battlefield has important implications for virtuous conduct in war: Can the soldier exercise practical wisdom while integrated into a system of militarized legibility? Adopting a virtue ethics perspective, I argue that AR disrupts the soldier’s immersion in the scene (...) such that he is blinded to features beyond those identified in advance by the military’s system of cybernetic judgment. I turn to Michael Walzer’s classic account of the “naked soldier” dilemma to illustrate how AR capabilities radically shrink the bounds within which the soldier can cultivate the capacity for right conduct. By transforming the ambiguous ethical matter of killing an enemy combatant into the straightforward application of a rule, AR hollows out the soldier’s potential for virtuous action. The “smart battlefield” leaves no space for deliberative judgments that transcend the technical and legal determinations already written into the soldier’s view of the scene. (shrink)