The Temporal-Order Judgment (TOJ) paradigm has been widely investigated in previous studies as an accurate measure of temporal resolution and sequencing abilities in the millisecond time range. Two auditory TOJ tasks are often used: (1) a spatial TOJ task, in which two identical stimuli are presented in rapid succession monaurally and the task is to indicate which ear received the first stimulus and which ear received the second one ( left-right or right-left ), and (2) a spectral TOJ task, in (...) which two tones of different frequencies are presented asynchronously to both ears binaurally and the task is to report the sequence of these tones ( low-high or high-low ). The previous literature studies conducted on young volunteers indicated that the measured temporal acuity on these two tasks depended on the procedure used. As considerable data are now available about age-related decline in temporal resolution ability, the aim of the present study was to compare in elderly subjects the pattern of performance on these two tasks. A total of 40 normal healthy volunteers aged from 62 to 78 years performed two TOJ tasks. The measurement was repeated in two consecutive sessions. Temporal resolution was indexed by the Auditory Temporal-Order Threshold (ATOT), i.e., the minimum time gap between successive stimuli necessary for a participant to report a before-after relation with 75% correctness. The main finding of the present study was the indication of differences in the elderly in performance on two tasks. In the spatial task, the distribution of obtained ATOT values did not deviate from the Gaussian distribution. In contrast, the distribution of data in the spectral task deviated significantly from the Gaussian and was spread more to the right. Although lower ATOT values were usually observed in Session 2 than in Session 1, such difference was significant only in the spectral task. We conclude that although temporal acuity and sequencing abilities in the millisecond time range are probably based in neuronal oscillatory activity, the measured ATOTs in the elderly seem to be stimulus-dependent, procedure-related, and influenced by the perceptual strategies used by participants. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of thresholds in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of what sort of role is played by the idea of a threshold within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around views that employ thresholds. In this article, I develop an account of the concept of thresholds in distributive justice. I argue that this concept contains three elements, which threshold views deploy when ranking possible distributions. These (...) elements are (i) the level of the threshold, (ii) what constitutes the value of the threshold, and (iii) how benefits above and below the threshold must be allocated. I highlight three contributions that this particular account of thresholds makes: it clarifies the nature of the shift that occurs at the threshold; it resolves a common misunderstanding about headcount principles; and it shows how the arbitrariness objection can be met. (shrink)

_Threshold Concepts in Problem-based Learning_ provides a critical discussion and guidance for educational researchers, teachers, innovators and policy makers wanting to explore the interrelationship of PBL and threshold concepts.

Application of egalitarian and prioritarian accounts of health resource allocation in low‐income countries have both been criticized for implying distribution outcomes that allow decreasing/undermining health gains and for tolerating unacceptable standards of health care and health status that result from such allocation schemes. Insufficient health care and severe deprivation of health resources are difficult to accept even when justified by aggregative efficiency or legitimized by fair deliberative process in pursuing equality and priority oriented outcomes. I affirm the sufficientarian argument that, (...) given extreme scarcity of public health resources in low‐income countries, neither health status equality between populations nor priority for the worse off is normatively adequate. Nevertheless, the threshold norm alone need not be the sole consideration when a country's total health budget is extremely scarce. Threshold considerations are necessary in developing a theory of fair distribution of health resources that is sensitive to the lexically prior norm of sufficiency. Based on the intuition that shares must not be taken away from those who barely achieve a minimal level of health, I argue that assessments based on standards of minimal physical/mental health must be developed to evaluate the sufficiency of the total resources of health systems in low‐income countries prior to pursuing equality, priority, and efficiency based resource allocation. I also begin to examine how threshold sensitive health resource assessment could be used in the Philippines. (shrink)

Mental-threshold egalitarianism, well-known examples of which include Jeff McMahan’s two-tiered account of the wrongness of killing and Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights, divides morally considerable beings into equals and unequals on the basis of their individual mental capacities. In this paper, I argue that the line that separates equals from unequals is unavoidably arbitrary and implausibly associates an insignificant difference in empirical reality with a momentous difference in moral status. In response to these objections, McMahan has proposed the introduction (...) of an intermediate moral status. I argue that this move ultimately fails to address the problem. I conclude that, if we are not prepared to give up moral equality, our full and equal moral status must be grounded in a binary property that is not a threshold property. I tentatively suggest that the capacity for phenomenal consciousness is such a property, and a plausible candidate. (shrink)

The Threshold of the Visible World advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic--Kaja Silverman explores the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies. Accounting for these phenomena on both a conscious and an unconcious level, Silverman analyzes the psychic and textual conditions under (...) which our "field of vision" can be expanded. The title of this book is taken from Lacan's essay on the mirror stage. In that text, Lacan writes that "the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world." He thereby suggests that the visible world has no existence as such until the infant subject has access to an image of self. Lacan intimates that the mirror provides the frame through which one relates to others within the domain of vision, stressing the priority of narcissism and the ego over all other libidinal transactions. The Threshold of the Visible World provides a psychic, social and political specification of Lacan's claim, and most particularly of its implications for the subject's relations to the social other. This is accomplished through examination of the ego, as well as two other categories at the center of Lacan's account of the mirror stage: ideality and identification. This book is an ethical-political project which leads to the re-elaboration of a number of crucial theoretical categories--Silverman offers an account of the bodily ego, of identification, of idealization, of the gaze, of the look, and of the "photographic." The Threshold of the Visible World leads as well to the formulation of a fresh model for conceptualizing sexual, racial and class "difference," and the terms under which it might be dismantled. This book thus seeks to apprehend the field of vision through the frame of a different kind of bodily ego, and discover the pleasures to be derived from corporeal transport. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of thresholds and limits in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of their role within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around threshold views in distributive justice. In this thesis, I develop an account of the conceptual structure of such views. Such an account helps understand and characterize threshold views, can subsume what may seem to be different debates about such views under one conceptual header, and can (...) be used to further examine and develop patterns of justice that draw on thresholds. In light of this account, I propose a novel characterization of sufficientarianism which sheds new light on the distinctiveness of sufficientarianism as a distributive principle and on the common objections to sufficientarianism. Moreover, I examine and defend limitarianism, which is the view that people should not have more than a certain amount of wealth. In particular, I argue in favour of limitarianism as a midlevel principle for guiding institutional design and individual actions and, furthermore, as a specification of what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints. (shrink)

The threshold problem is the task of adequately answering the question: “Where does the threshold lie between knowledge and lack thereof?” I start this paper by articulating two conditions for solving it. The first is that the threshold be neither too high nor too low; the second is that the threshold accommodate the significance of knowledge. In addition to explaining these conditions, I also argue that it is plausible that they can be met. Next, I argue that many popular accounts (...) of knowledge cannot meet them. In particular, I lay out a number of problems that standard accounts of knowledge face in trying to meet these conditions. Finally, near the end of this paper, I argue that there is one sort of account that seems to evade these problems. This sort of account, which is called a cluster account of knowledge, says that knowledge is to be accounted for in terms of truth, belief and a cluster of epistemic properties and also that knowledge doesn’t require having all members of the cluster, but merely some subset. (shrink)

Phenomena like meat sharing in hunter-gatherers, altruistic self-sacrifice in intergroup conflicts, and contribution to the production of public goods in laboratory experiments have led to the development of numerous theories trying to explain human prosocial preferences and behavior. Many of these focus on direct and indirect reciprocity, assortment, or (cultural) group selection. Here, I investigate analytically how genetic relatedness changes the incentive structure of that paradigmatic game which is conventionally used to model and experimentally investigate collective action problems: the public (...) goods game. Using data on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies I then estimate a threshold value determining when biological altruism turns into maximizing inclusive fitness in this game. I find that, on average, contributing no less than about 40% of individual fitness to public goods production still is an optimal strategy from an inclusive fitness perspective under plausible socio-ecological conditions. (shrink)

How, and how well, do people switch between exploration and exploitation to search for and accumulate resources? We study the decision processes underlying such exploration/exploitation trade‐offs using a novel card selection task that captures the common situation of searching among multiple resources (e.g., jobs) that can be exploited without depleting. With experience, participants learn to switch appropriately between exploration and exploitation and approach optimal performance. We model participants' behavior on this task with random, threshold, and sampling strategies, and find that (...) a linear decreasing threshold rule best fits participants' results. Further evidence that participants use decreasing threshold‐based strategies comes from reaction time differences between exploration and exploitation; however, participants themselves report non‐decreasing thresholds. Decreasing threshold strategies that “front‐load” exploration and switch quickly to exploitation are particularly effective in resource accumulation tasks, in contrast to optimal stopping problems like the Secretary Problem requiring longer exploration. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) is said to occur when a continuum of equally spaced physical changes is perceived as unequally spaced as a function of category membership (Harnad, S. (Ed.) (1987). Psychophysical and cognitive aspects of categorical perception: A critical overview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A common suggestion is that CP for color arises because perception is qualitatively distorted when we learn to categorize a dimension. Contrary to this view, we here report that English speakers show no evidence of lowered discrimination (...) thresholds at the boundaries between blue and green categories even though CP is found at these boundaries in a supra-threshold task. Furthermore, there is no evidence of different discrimination thresholds between individuals from two language groups (English and Korean) who use different color terminology in the blue-green region and have different supra-threshold boundaries. Our participants' just noticeable difference (JND) thresholds suggest that they retain a smooth continuum of perceptual space that is not warped by stretching at category boundaries or by within-category compression. At least for the domain of color, categorical perception appears to be a categorical, but not a perceptual phenomenon. (shrink)

A small consortium of philosophers has begun work on the implications of epistemic networks (Zollman 2008 and forthcoming; Grim 2006, 2007; Weisberg and Muldoon forthcoming), building on theoretical work in economics, computer science, and engineering (Bala and Goyal 1998, Kleinberg 2001; Amaral et. al., 2004) and on some experimental work in social psychology (Mason, Jones, and Goldstone, 2008). This paper outlines core philosophical results and extends those results to the specific question of thresholds. Epistemic maximization of certain types does (...) show clear threshold effects. Intriguingly, however, those effects appear to be importantly independent from more familiar threshold effects in networks. (shrink)

The continuity thesis of the Poznań school threshold model of the growth of scientific knowledge is considered in the light of the example of Van der Waals' and Boyle-Mariotte's laws. It is argued - using both traditional logical means and the structuralist reconstruction of the example - that the continuity thesis does not hold. A distinction between 'a historical and a systematic point of view' is introduced and it is argued that the continuity thesis of the threshold model presupposes the (...) systematic point of view. However, looking at matters from the systematic point of view need not yield the original theory, looked at from the historical point of view. Applied to the case of Van der Waals/Boyle-Mariotte laws, it turns out that the latter law is not a true idealizing special case of the former, contrary to the continuity thesis. The structuralist analysis of the example indicates that Boyle-Mariotte's law is a false factual law from the historical point of view. However, viewed from the systematic point of view, Boyle-Mariotte's law turns out to be a law which is expandable, adding the relevant new concepts, to an idealized version of Van der Waals' law. This idealizing version of Van der Waal's law in turn is a structuralist specialization of the (general) Van der Waals' law. (shrink)

In “Constitutivism without Normative Thresholds,” Kathryn Lindeman raises two objections to what she aptly calls Threshold Constitutivism. My aim in this short discussion is to respond to her first objection. Although I will argue that this objection fails, I will also argue that thinking through how to respond to it reminds us of something important, namely, that many of the Norm-Governed Kinds that are directly related to intentional action are social kinds, that is, kinds whose existence conditions we ourselves (...) collectively write. Everyone, whether constitutivist or not, needs to think seriously about what those existence conditions should be. [1] Journal of Ethics and Social Policy 12 (3): 231-258 (2017). [2] Lindeman’s second objection depends on her view, which I do not share, that “Normative Constitutivism has ambitions to be an explanatory strategy for norms in general” (238, my emphasis). (shrink)

John McCumber; The Threshold of Bio-Ethics: Philosophical Warrant in the Thought of Stephen Erickson, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Mor.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.4 (2000) 303-318 [Access article in PDF] The Threshold of the Self Bradford Vivian The subject has a history. Classical Greek sculpture expressed a fascination with the formal beauty of one's self. Ever gazing outward or upward, the marble figures symbolized the Greek preoccupation with a boldness of being, a constant focus on the ideals of the body and mind, which, through their pursuit, might allow (...) one a foretaste of heaven. Centuries later, as the pagan symbols of the ancient world were replaced with those of the growing Byzantine Empire, blocks of the same marble were fashioned into very different expressions. The ideals of form made manifest in the smooth, taught lines and surfaces of classical Greek sculpture were supplanted by Byzantine art's attention to the less perfect details of the individual: distinctive and common faces, beards, clothing, and less glorified bodies. The gazes of the Byzantine statues were cast down, contemplative, reflecting Byzantium's early Christian emphasis upon the modesty of human existence, the pious appraisal of one's time on Earth. Each of these sculptural styles is a material way of thinking and expressing one's being in the world. In this context, each is also symptomatic of the conditions in which such being was possible.The subject must not be conceived as a transcendent entity. Quite to the contrary, there is a historicity to our being and its expression, to our subjectivity and its elaboration. Within a more sweeping perspective, our epochal narratives of the subject--as well as the modes of thought and speech by which we make sense of ourselves--change with each passing age.At the forefront of the current era is a manifold effort to rethink and elaborate anew the concept of the subject. Feminist scholars have initiated political critique and transformation by arguing that the very notion of a subject in Western discourse has functioned as a trope of masculine privilege cloaked in the language of equality and secular humanism. 1 Postmodernists, of course, define contemporary subjectivity as de-centered and fragmented by nature (e.g., Baudrillard 1994; Latour 1993; Lyotard 1984). And [End Page 303] a variety of interdisciplinary studies illuminate the role of modern science and technology in not only sustaining our being, but actually constituting the human; in short, our daily interdependence and union with artificial body parts, synthetic products, life-support machines, test-tube reproduction, computers, and more, characterizes the arrival of what has been called "the posthuman." 2 Like ancient marble from a quarry, however, all of these materials are sculpted in historically specific ways to simultaneously think and express our subjectivity.What role might rhetoric play in this re-imagining of subjectivity? Modern Western thought has defined the subject according to content--that is, by the nature of the essence or being the subject is said to possess. Drawn around this content, the subject comes to appear enclosed, perhaps autonomous, and identical to itself. In this essay, however, I argue that the self may be conceived as a form--a rhetorical form--that exists only in its continual aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming. The self is, by this account, isomorphic with the threshold out of which it is composed. Such a formulation makes the self open to difference, to continual movement and transformation, instead of identical to itself.I aim in this essay to explore the abstract rhetorical forms and functions out of which the self is composed. The distinction here amounts to no longer asking, "What is a subject?" but, "What conditions and forces enable the ongoing production of the self?" Commensurate with such a proposal, it will be essential to ask how this movement--this continual becoming--of the self is brought about. The answer to this question ultimately will amplify the role of rhetoric in, not simply expressing, but actually producing conditions of being. In what follows, I begin by reviewing the very general aspects of subjectivity that I wish to call into question. Thereafter, I explore how the subject might be conceived differently. Finally, I discuss the manner in which rhetoric may... (shrink)

The threshold law for N-body fragmentation under dipole forces is formulated. It emerges from the energy dependence of the normalization of the correlated continuum wave function for N fragments. It is shown that the dipole threshold law plays a key role in understanding all threshold fragmentation phenomena since it links the classical threshold law for long-range Coulomb interactions to the statistical law for short-range interactions. Furthermore, a tunnelling mechanism is identified as the common feature which occurs for all three classes (...) of interactions, short-range, dipole and Coulomb. (shrink)

If you believe that there are restrictions on what we as moral agents can do to others, but that these restrictions can give way in the face of competing considerations, then you believe in thresholds for rights. In this dissertation I develop an account of thresholds for rights, in defence of a position which is often stated but rarely explained or defended. I begin with the obvious question: How much needs to be at stake before a right's claim (...) is overridden? ;Less obvious, but equally crucial, are questions about the distribution of the total which needs to be at stake. After developing a framework for answering that question, in subsequent chapters I deal with other factors which may influence our judgements about the overridability of rights' claims, including the numbers and identities of the agents involved. (shrink)

A dynamic threshold, which controls the nature and course of learning, is a pivotal concept in Page's general localist framework. This commentary addresses various issues surrounding biologically plausible implementations for such thresholds. Relevant previous research is noted and the particular difficulties relating to the creation of so-called instance representations are highlighted. It is stressed that these issues also apply to distributed models.

Every threshold is placed at an edge, and yet not merely an edge, for the threshold always carries with it a sense of opening up toward or closing away from. Only that place at the edge that anticipates or remembers can constitute a threshold. The threshold thus is not a place in which one can remain – to do so is for it to cease to be a threshold – but is always a place of movement and transition. Indeed, one (...) might say that the threshold is the coalescence of a time into the form of a place, since the threshold only appears as a threshold in that time of opening-toward or closing-away-from. The being of the threshold as a place is therefore essentially determined by the event of approach or withdrawal, anticipation or remembrance, arrival or departure, coming-to-be or passingaway. (shrink)

This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This essay considers Pamela Sue Anderson’s work in relation to her participation in the Enhancing Life Project from 2015 until her death in 2017. Offering a critical interpretation and reconstruction of Anderson’s final work, this essay also gestures beyond it. It begins by narrating her participation in the Enhancing Life Project. Next, it focuses on her treatment of capability and vulnerability, identifying shifts in her thought and bringing theological symbols and a constructive theological interest to the conversation. Anderson depicted the (...) relation of capability and vulnerability as a “threshold for enhancing human life.” This contribution examines her implied metaphor of a spatial or temporal crossing point and evaluates Anderson’s original post-Kantian conceptualization of threshold in relation to the shifts in her thinking. A sympathetic but more adequate approach to enhancing vulnerable life can be informed by Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological approach to lived experience and her construal of the body as a lived situation. When vulnerability is interpreted as a situated susceptibility to being changed, for good or for ill, then threshold language can be reintroduced in relation to the intensification, enhancement, and transformation of life, that is, of the “aliveness of life.”. (shrink)

This article critically examines the legal arguments presented on behalf of Charlie Gard’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, based on a threshold test of significant harm for intervention into the decisions made jointly by holders of parental responsibility. It argues that the legal basis of the argument, from the case of Ashya King, was tenuous. It sought to introduce different categories of cases concerning children’s medical treatment when, despite the inevitable factual distinctions between individual cases, the duty of the (...) judge in all cases to determine the best interests of the child is firmly established by the case law. It argues that the focus should not have been on a threshold for intervention but on whether his parents had established that the therapy they wanted was a viable alternative therapeutic option. In the April hearing, Charlie’s parents relied on the offer of treatment from a US doctor; by July they had an independent panel of international experts supporting their case although by this time the medical evidence was that it was too late for Charlie. One of Charlie’s legacies for future disputes may be that his case highlighted the need for evidence as to whether the treatment parents want for their child is a viable alternative therapeutic option before a court can determine which therapeutic option is in the best interests of the child. (shrink)

It has been argued that the precautionary principle is incoherent and thus useless as a guide for regulatory policy. In a recent paper in Bioethics, Wareham and Nardini propose a response to the ‘precautionary paradox’ according to which the precautionary principle's usefulness for decision making in policy and regulation contexts can be justified by appeal to a probability threshold discriminating between negligible and non‐negligible risks. It would be of great significance to debates about risk and precaution if there were a (...) sound method for determining a minimum probability threshold of negligible risk. This is what Wareham and Nardini aim to do. The novelty of their approach is that they suggest that such a threshold should be determined by a method of public deliberation. In this article I discuss the merits of Wareham and Nardini’s public deliberation method for determining thresholds. I raise an epistemic worry about the public deliberation method they suggest, and argue that their proposal is inadequate due to a hidden assumption that the acceptability of a risk can be completely analysed in terms of its probability. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva is one of the most creative and prolific writers to address the personal, social, and political trials of our times. Linguist, psychoanalyst, social and cultural theorist, and novelist, Kristeva's broad interdisciplinary appeal has impacted areas across the humanities and social sciences. S. K. Keltner's book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the breadth of Kristeva's work. In an original and insightful analysis, Keltner presents Kristeva's thought as the coherent development and elaboration of a complex, multidimensional threshold constitutive of (...) meaning and subjectivity. The ‘threshold' indicates Kristeva's primary sphere of concern, the relationship between the speaking being and its particular social and historical conditions; and Kristeva's interdisciplinary approach. Kristeva's vision, Keltner argues, opens a unique perspective within contemporary discourses attentive to issues of meaning, subjectivity, and social and political life. By emphasizing Kristeva's attention to the permeable borders of psychic and social life, Keltner offers innovative readings of the concepts most widely discussed in Kristeva scholarship: the semiotic and symbolic, abjection, love, and loss. She also provides new interpretations of some of the most controversial issues surrounding Kristeva's work, including Kristeva's conceptions of intimacy, social and cultural difference, and Oedipal subjectivity, by contextualizing them within her methodological approach and oeuvre as a whole. _Julia Kristeva: Thresholds_ is an engaging and accessible introduction to Kristeva's theoretical and fictional works that will be of interest to both students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Much of the extant discussion focuses on the question of whether contextualism resolves skeptical paradoxes. Understandably. Yet there has been less discussion as to the internal structure of contextualist theories. Regrettably. Here, for instance, are two questions that could stand further discussion: (i) what is the linguistic basis for contextualism and (ii) what is the parameter that shifts with context?

I assess the conditions that philosophers of mind usually use to identify mental representations. I argue in favor of a minimal definition of mental representation, which is similar to definitions endorsed by some philosophers of embodied cognition. I claim that, even if we endorse this minimal definition of mental representation, important aspects of perception cannot be explained in representational terms. Therefore I suggest endorsing a non-representational approach to perception made of a combination of the enactive approach and ecological psychology and (...) claim that perception is a direct relation to opportunities for action offered by perceptual niches. (shrink)

Passive Brain-Computer interfaces (pBCIs) are a human-computer communication tool where the computer can detect from neurophysiological signals the current mental or emotional state of the user. The system can then adjust itself to guide the user towards a desired state. One challenge facing developers of pBCIs is that the system's parameters are generally set at the onset of the interaction and remain stable throughout, not adapting to potential changes over time such as fatigue. The goal of this paper is to (...) investigate the improvement of pBCIs with settings adjusted according to the information provided by a second neurophysiological signal. With the use of a second signal, making the system a hybrid pBCI, those parameters can be continuously adjusted with dynamic thresholding to respond to variations such as fatigue or learning. In this experiment, we hypothesize that the adaptive system with dynamic thresholding will improve perceived game experience and objective game performance compared to two other conditions: an adaptive system with single primary signal biocybernetic loop and a control non-adaptive game. A within-subject experiment was conducted with 16 participants using three versions of the game Tetris. Each participant plays 15 minutes of Tetris under three experimental conditions. The control condition is the traditional game of Tetris with a progressive increase in speed. The second condition is a cognitive load only biocybernetic loop with the parameters presented in Ewing et al. (2016). The third condition is our proposed biocybernetic loop using dynamic threshold selection. Electroencephalography was used as the primary signal and automatic facial expression analysis as the secondary signal. Our results show that, contrary to our expectations, the adaptive systems did not improve the participants' experience as participants had more negative affect from the BCI conditions than in the control condition. We endeavored to develop a system that improved upon the authentic version of the Tetris game, however, our proposed adaptive system neither improved players’ perceived experience, nor their objective performance. Nevertheless, this experience can inform developers of hybrid passive BCIs on a novel way to employ various neurophysiological features simultaneously. (shrink)

This article explores four topics raised by Eyal Zamir and Barak Medina's treatment of constrained deontology. First, it examines whether mathematical threshold functions are the proper way to think about limits on deontology, given the discontinuities of our moral judgments and the desired phenomenology of rule-following. Second, it asks whether constrained deontology is appropriate for public as well as private decision-making, taking issue with the book's conclusion that deontological options are inapplicable to public decision-making, whereas deontological constraints are applicable. Third, (...) it examines the issue of the relationship between deontology and efficiency, asking whether deontological constraints should yield in situations where everyone would expect to benefit from their suspension, either ex ante or ex post . Finally, the article concludes that constrained deontology is susceptible to political abuse because of the many degrees of freedom involved in identifying constrained actions and the point at which those constraints yield to consequentialist benefits. (shrink)

In this paper I address the objection to sufficientarianism posed by Paula Casal and Richard Arneson, that it is hard to conceive of a sufficiency threshold such that distribution is highly important just below it, and not required at all just above it. In order to address this objection, I elaborate on the idea that sufficientarianism structurally can be seen to require two separate thresholds, which may or may not overlap. I then argue that a version of such a (...) view is plausible. Lastly, I distinguish this view from related proposals in the literature. (shrink)

When should doctors seek protective custody to override a parent’s refusal of potentially lifesaving treatment for their child? The answer to this question seemingly has different answers for different subspecialties of pediatrics. This paper specifically looks at different thresholds for physicians overriding parental refusals of life-sustaining treatment between neonatology, cardiology, and oncology. The threshold for mandating treatment of premature babies seems to be a survival rate of 25–50%. This is not the case when the treatment in question is open (...) heart surgery for a child with congenital heart disease. Most cardiologists would not pursue legal action when parents refuse treatment, unless the anticipated survival rate after surgery is above 90%. In pediatric oncology, there are case reports of physicians requesting and obtaining protective custody for cancer treatment when the reported mortality rates are 40–50%. Such differences might be attributed to differences in care, a reasonable prioritization of quality of life over survival, or the role uncertainty plays on prognoses, especially for the extremely young. Nonetheless, other, non-medical factors may have a significant effect on inconsistencies in care across these pediatric subspecialties and require further examinations. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a novel characterization of sufficientarianism. I argue that sufficientarianism combines three claims: a priority claim that we have non-instrumental reasons to prioritize benefits in certain ranges over benefits in other ranges; a continuum claim that at least two of those ranges are on one continuum; and a deficiency claim that the lower a range on a continuum, the more priority benefits in that range have. This characterization of sufficientarianism sheds new light on two long-standing philosophical (...) debates, namely about the distinctiveness of sufficientarianism as a distributive principle and about the common objections to sufficientarianism. (shrink)