Many industry leaders and academics from the field of machine ethics would have us believe that the inevitability of robots coming to have a larger role in our lives demands that robots be endowed with moral reasoning capabilities. Robots endowed in this way may be referred to as artificial moral agents. Reasons often given for developing AMAs are: the prevention of harm, the necessity for public trust, the prevention of immoral use, such machines are better moral reasoners than humans, and (...) building these machines would lead to a better understanding of human morality. Although some scholars have challenged the very initiative to develop AMAs, what is currently missing from the debate is a closer examination of the reasons offered by machine ethicists to justify the development of AMAs. This closer examination is especially needed because of the amount of funding currently being allocated to the development of AMAs coupled with the amount of attention researchers and industry leaders receive in the media for their efforts in this direction. The stakes in this debate are high because moral robots would make demands on society; answers to a host of pending questions about what counts as an AMA and whether they are morally responsible for their behavior or not. This paper shifts the burden of proof back to the machine ethicists demanding that they give good reasons to build AMAs. The paper argues that until this is done, the development of commercially available AMAs should not proceed further. (shrink)

Brain–computer interfaces are a form of technology that read a user’s neural signals to perform a task, often with the aim of inferring user intention. They demonstrate potential in a wide range of clinical, commercial, and personal applications. But BCIs are not always simple to operate, and even with training some BCI users do not operate their systems as intended. Many researchers have described this phenomenon as “BCI illiteracy,” and a body of research has emerged aiming to characterize, predict, and (...) solve this perceived problem. However, BCI illiteracy is an inadequate concept for explaining difficulty that users face in operating BCI systems. BCI illiteracy is a methodologically weak concept; furthermore, it relies on the flawed assumption that BCI users possess physiological or functional traits that prevent proficient performance during BCI use. Alternative concepts to BCI illiteracy may offer better outcomes for prospective users and may avoid the conceptual pitfalls that BCI illiteracy brings to the BCI research process. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, many music education scholars seek to reconceptualize music education toward social justice. Critical pedagogy is at the fore-front of this shift. However, as teachers aim toward equity through employing critical pedagogy, some undesired effects of using this teaching approach may arise. In this paper, I consider the problematic side of critical pedagogy and ask two important questions: Are there any restrictions or limits placed on who can enact critical pedagogy in music education? And are there any (...) so-called "casualties" of critical pedagogy in music education or in education more generally? To consider these questions philosophically, I employ a critical race lens to explore tenets of critical pedagogy and their applications to music education, as illustrated in the ideas and practices of four elementary music teachers who strove to challenge dominant paradigms of music education. By examining critical pedagogy in music education with a critical lens, I seek to illuminate the philosophical complexities and paradoxes of engaging critical pedagogy in the classroom. (shrink)

Thought experimental methods play a central role in empirical moral psychology. Against the increasingly common interpretation of recent experimental data, I argue that such methods cannot demonstrate that moral intuitions are produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic. I demonstrate, in contrast, that evaluating thought experiments occurs at a near-glacial pace relative to the speed at which reflexive information processing occurs in a human brain. So, these methods allow for more reflective and deliberative processing than has (...) commonly been assumed. However, these methods may still provide insight into some human strategies for navigating unfamiliar moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Moral injury embodies the claim that war is so transgressive for soldiers that it can create situations that may undermine one’s trust in oneself, others, and the world. Central to leading conceptu...

What vision directs pan-Africanism and which developmental model does it support and promote? To answer this question, the article evaluates pan-Africanism within the demands of African modernity and locates the extent to which pan-Africanism meets the aspiration of African modernity. It argues that pan-Africanism has what amounts to a north-bound gaze and supports development imperialism, and shows that for this reason it is not properly grounded on African realities, the consequence of which is the weakness of African modernity. The article (...) suggests a re-articulation of pan-Africanism through the ideology of pro-Africanism, which holds that autonomy and self-will are two cardinal principles that are fundamental to African self-definition but which pan-Africanism is not in a position to provide because it amounts to a subordination of African difference. It concludes that a redirection of the African vision in this direction is a worthier ideological alternative to pan-Africanism. (shrink)

Halley et al. (2023) highlight important equity challenges emerging out of existing health policy’s reliance on self- and family advocacy. As advocacy capacity varies dramatically across groups, pu...

_Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow_ Edited by Angela Hague and David Lavery London: Wallflower Press, 2002 ISBN 1-903364-39-6 198 pp.

Has some of the fruit of feminism begun to rot on the vine? Or is the work of feminist philosophy just beginning? Are we still in thrall to pervasive sexist assumptions at the roots of our thinking and our language? With Marjorie Jolles, Ellen Klein, and Helen Mitchell.

Cohen and Marks (2025) discuss medical exceptionalism within the context of psychedelic access pathways, noting that the medical model is just one of many possible approaches to using, understandin...

The ability to evaluate scientific claims made in various media sources is a critical component of scientific literacy. This study compares how a group of 12th grade students and a group of specialists, including scientists and policy analysts with expertise in global warming, evaluated an editorial about global warming published by an oil company on the World Wide Web. Participants were asked to read the editorial and were asked a set of interview questions about it. Examples from the specialists’ interviews (...) indicate the kinds of responses that are possible with in-depth scientific knowledge. In comparison, although some examples from the students’interviews illustrate competent performance for a nonexpert, other student responses illustrate possible pitfalls. The approach of the present study affords a constructive route for formulating goals for scientific literacy. The approach permits identifying examples of students evaluating scientific claims in more or less competent ways—claims that are in the context of an important socioscientific issue and an actual media source. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that we can make sense of moral norms against consensual, adult incest by appealing to the value of familial relationships and the potential for sex to damage them. Viewing sex as unconscionable between family members helps to enable the loving intimacy normally associated with family relationships. Therefore, there is good reason for incest, even when consensual and between adults, to remain taboo. That being said, I argue that there is insufficient legal justification for all consensual, (...) adult incest to be criminalised. I examine four potential arguments in favor of consensual, adult incest being illegal, and conclude that none of them succeeds in justifying a total legal prohibition against it. (shrink)

Gavin Rae offers an original approach to sovereign violence by looking at a wide range of thinkers, which he organises into three models. Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari form the radical-juridical perspective; Foucault and Agamben the biopolitical; Derrida the bio-juridical – which Rae argues produces the most nuanced account.

This essay investigates the indeterminacy thesis - roughly the claim that the content of authoritative legal materials (such as the texts of constitutions, statutes, cases, rules, and regulations) does not determine the outcome of particular legal disputes. The indeterminacy thesis can be formulated as either "strong" or weak." The strong version of the indeterminacy thesis is demonstrably false, but several weak versions of the thesis are true but lack the radical implications of strong indeterminacy.The strong indeterminacy thesis is the claim (...) that all cases are "hard" cases - or that in any case any conceivable result can be derived from existing legal doctrine. Strong indeterminacy does not hold if there are easy cases - cases in which some outcomes cannot be legally correct. For example, if it were the case that the first paragraph of this abstract did not slander Gore Vidal, then there would be at least one easy case, and strong indeterminacy would be false.Weak versions of the indeterminacy thesis include the claim that important cases are indeterminate, that the law does not necessarily determine outcomes, or that every case could become indeterminate if political conditions supported indeterminacy. These weaker claims may be true, but they lack the critical bite associated with strong indeterminacy.The essay also distinguishes between "determinacy," "indeterminacy," and "underdeterminacy." The law is "determinate" with respect ot a given case if and only if the set of results that can be squared with the legal materials contains only one member. The law is "indeterminate" with respect to a given case if and only if the set of results that can be squared with the legal materials is identical with the set of all imaginable results. The law is "underdeterminate" with respect to a given case if and only if the set of results that can be squared with the legal materials is a nonidentical subset of the set of all imaginable results.This article was first published in 1987, and some of the author's views have been revised in interim. (shrink)

Background: The pharmaceutical industry has been responsible for major medical advances, but the industry has also been heavily criticized. Such criticisms, and associated regulatory responses, are no doubt often warranted, but do not provide a framework for those who wish to reason systematically about the moral dimensions of drug development. We set out to develop such a framework using Beauchamp and Childress's “four principles” as organizing categories. Methods: We conducted a qualitative interview study of people working in the “medical affairs” (...) departments of pharmaceutical companies to determine: (1) whether our data could meaningfully be organized under the headings of “autonomy,” “beneficence,” “nonmaleficence,” and “justice”; (2) how principles might be expressed in this particular commercial setting; and (3) if these principles are expressed, whether and how competing principles are balanced. We then critiqued these findings using existing normative theory. Results: Our interviews demonstrated that three of Beauchamp and Childress's four principles were salient to our participants: beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Within each of these principles, participants had two broad ethical orientations: an altruistic public focus (“other-ness”) and a commitment to their companies (“firm-ness”). Our participants also demonstrated efforts to balance these principles and highlighted the importance of phronesis (or practical wisdom) in balancing and enacting principles. Notably, however, our participants did not spontaneously emphasize the importance of autonomy. Conclusions: It is possible to use qualitative empirical research, together with normative analysis, to derive a framework for pharmaceutical ethics. We suggest that our framework would be useful for those who wish to reason ethically within, or in collaboration with, the pharmaceutical industry. (shrink)

In this short critical analysis, the author examines the recent argument by Moen in his article ‘Is Prostitution Harmful?' In highlighting why prostitution does not cause harm to either member involved in the act, Moen argues that prostitution is not an ethical concern. However, while Moen is able to clearly challenge contemporary objections to prostitution, the author of this review will suggest that Moen's argument is itself incomplete as it does not address essential key ontological issues. This critical analysis will (...) briefly suggest why this omission weakens Moen's argument. Finally, it will conclude with examining why prostitution differs substantially from other professions through the type of harm that it causes to the moral agents involved. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Luhmann and the Constructivist Heritage: A Critical Reflection” by Eva Buchinger. Upshot: I acknowledge the value of Buchinger’s contribution to my understanding of Luhmann’s theory of social systems and seek some clarification and elaboration concerning specific issues. In particular, I raise some questions about the concepts of meaning processing and of psychic systems and persons, with reference to related ideas developed by Gordon Pask and myself. I also question how Luhmann uses the term “autopoiesis.”.

The main goal of this paper is to revisit, synthesize, and critique John R. Searle’s thinking over time concerning social ontology and what it means for something to be a social construction. Primarily, I undertake this task by elucidating and problematizing aspects of John R. Searle’s _The Construction of Social Reality_ (herein, _CSR_) (1995), though attention is paid to his later and corollary works. Certainly, there are many other philosophers who attend to analyzing the very meaning of social ontology or (...) social constructionism considered as a program and many other philosophers who concern themselves with what it means to say that something is socially constructed. I focus largely on _CSR_ because it remains both immensely influential and because it represents one of the earliest attempts by an analytic philosopher to provide an analysis of the very meaning of what it means to say that “X is a social construction” or what “social ontology/social constructionism” entails. Although much of what follows constitutes a revisitation of the crucial elements of _CSR_, what is novel about my analysis is that I synthesize and organize the main aspects of Searle’s thinking through time in a single article. I also draw attention to others’ concerns and amendments to his positions and offer my own novel objections and possible improvements to his corpus. This is no small feat: Many details, as well as others’ appraisals, amendments, and so forth must be overlooked for this endeavor to be possible at all. This being so, I do my best to point readers in directions to follow for further exploration or arguments against Searle’s views as I proceed. (shrink)

In recent years, criticism of Slavoj Žižek has intensified at a frantic pace, to the extent that he has all but been erased from the public sphere. Alongside his exclusion from dominant media-platforms such as The Guardian and the The New York Times, the denunciation of his work by the academic community has reached an excessive level, with thinkers such as Noam Chomsky seeking to undermine the empirical validity of his thought in a surprisingly personalized manner.

ABSTRACTIn the late 1970s the big bang model of cosmology was widely accepted and interpreted as implying the universe had a beginning. At the end of that decade William Lane Craig revived an argument for God known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument based on this scientific consensus. Furthermore, he linked the big bang to the supposed biblical concept of creation ex nihilo found in Genesis. I shall critique Craig's position as expressed in a more recent update and argue that contemporary (...) cosmology no longer understands the big bang as the ultimate beginning, seriously undermining the KCA. I will further contend that book of Genesis should not be understood as describing creation ex nihilo anyway. (shrink)

The controversy surrounding the use of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, for COVID-19 has raised numerous ethical and policy problems. Since the suggestion that HCQ has potential for COVID-19, there have been varying responses from clinicians and healthcare institutions, ranging from adoption of protocols using HCQ for routine care to the conduct of randomised controlled trials to an effective system-wide prohibition on its use for COVID-19. In this article, we argue that the concept of ‘disease public profile’ has become a prominent, (...) if not the sole, determinant in decision-making across various healthcare responses to the pandemic. In the case of COVID-19, the disease’s public profile is based on clinical and non-clinical factors that include contagiousness, clinical presentation and media coverage. In particular, we briefly examine the dangers of a heightened public profile in magnifying the inequality of diseases and undermining three key ethical concepts, namely evidence-based practice, sustainable allocation and meaningful consent. (shrink)