On the whole, the US Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022 (US AAA) is a pragmatic approach to balancing the benefits and risks of automated decision systems. Yet there is still room for improvement. This commentary highlights how the US AAA can both inform and learn from the European Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AIA).

This book studies the US Supreme Court and its current common law approach to judicial decision making from a national and transnational perspective. The Supreme Court's approach appears detached from and inconsistent with the underlying fundamental principles that ought to guide it, which often leads to unfair and inefficient results. This book suggests the adoption of a judicial decision-making model that proceeds from principles and rules, using them as premises for developing consistent unitary theories to meet current social conditions. This (...) model requires that judicial opinions be informed by a wide range of considerations, including established legal standards, the insights derived from deductive and inductive reasoning, the lessons learned from history and custom, and an examination of the social and economic consequences of the decision. (shrink)

In 2000, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson mobilized the US public health infrastructure to deal with escalating trends of excess body weight. A cornerstone of this effort was a report entitled The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity. The report stimulated a great deal of public discussion by utilizing the distinctive public health terminology of an epidemic to describe the growing prevalence of obesity in the US population. We suggest (...) that the ensuing controversy was fueled in part by the report's ambiguous usage of the evocative term “epidemic.” In some passages, the report seems to use “epidemic” in a literal sense, suggesting that rising prevalence of excess body weight should be defined technically as a disease outbreak. Other passages of the report present the same key term metaphorically, leaving readers with the impression that the epidemic language is invoked primarily for rhetorical effect. Here, we explore dynamics and implications of both interpretations. This analysis sheds light on the ongoing public argument about the appropriate societal response to steadily increasing body sizes in the US population; likewise, it capitalizes on the accumulated knowledge that the field of public health has garnered from combating diverse historic epidemics. Our interdisciplinary approach deploys critical tools from the fields of rhetoric, sociology and epidemiology. In particular, we draw from metaphor theory and public address scholarship to elucidate how the Call to Action frames public deliberation on obesity. We turn to the applied public health literature to develop a reading of the report that suggests a novel approach to the problem—application of the Epidemic Investigation protocol to streamline the public health response and reframe the public argument about obesity. (shrink)

Why do some types of settings and some combinations of sensory information induce a sense of dread in humans? This article brings empirical evidence from psychological research to bear on the experience of horror, and explains why the tried-and-true horror devices intuitively employed by writers and filmmakers work so well. Natural selection has favored individuals who gravitated toward environments containing the “right” physical and psychological features and avoided those which posed a threat. Places that contain a bad mix of these (...) features induce unpleasant feelings of dread and fear, and therefore have become important ingredients of the settings for horror fiction and films. This article ap­plies McAndrew and Koehnke’s theory of creepiness to the study of classic horror settings and explores the role played by architecture, isolation, association with death, and other environmental qualities in the experience of creepiness and dread. (shrink)

The process of risk assessment of biotechnologies, such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), has normative dimensions. However, the US’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seems committed to the idea that such evaluations are objective. This essay makes the case that the agency’s regulatory approach should be changed such that the public is involved in deciding any ethical or social questions that might arise during risk assessment of GMOs. It is argued that, in the US, neither aggregative nor deliberative (representative) democracy (...) ought to be used to make such determinations. Instead, participatory (deliberative) democracy should be the means by which members of the polity decide which normative concerns ought to underlie FDA’s assessment of GMOs. This paper uses a hypothetical case involving a new GM seed to make that argument. (shrink)

This article considers some political potentialities of the post-constructivist proposal for substituting truth with traceability. Traceability is a measure of truthfulness in which the rationality of a truth-claim is found in accounting for the work done to maintain links back to an internal referent through a chain of mediations. The substitution of traceability for truth is seen as necessary to move the entire political domain towards a greater responsiveness to the events of the natural-social world. In particular, it seeks to (...) disarm the strategy of ... (shrink)

This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on (...) an ‘oracle assumption’ and this is shown to highlight more general difficulties for applying the benefits of diversity to the realities of political problems. The paper then develops a new model of deliberation—based on an relationship between cognitive diversity and diminishing returns to cognitive type—which does not involve an oracle assumption and can therefore support the epistemic value of deliberative democracy even for complex problems. The benefits of diversity are also argued to be better realised though sortition than either democratic elections or epistocracy, pointing to the value of deliberation between randomly selected citizens. Finally, and contrary to past work, the new account suggests that diversity cannot alone establish the superiority of democratic deliberation over all non-democratic alternatives, and that it is insufficient to mount a purely epistemic argument for deliberative democracy. The paper therefore furthers our understanding of the epistemic value of deliberative democracy by clarifying when and to what extent diversity is a benefit to political problem solving. (shrink)

Recent developments in AI and robotics enable people to create _personalised digital duplicates_ – these are artificial, at least partial, recreations or simulations of real people. The advent of such duplicates enables people to overcome their individual scarcity. But this comes at a cost. There is a common view among ethicists and value theorists suggesting that individual scarcity contributes to or heightens the value of a life or parts of a life. In this paper, we address this topic. We make (...) five main points. First, that there is a plausible _prima facie_ case for the scarcity threat: AI may undermine the value of an individual human life by making us less scarce. Second, notwithstanding this prima facie threat, the role of scarcity in individual value is disputable and always exists in tension with the contrasting view that scarcity is a tragedy that limits our value. Third, there are two distinct forms of scarcity – instrumental and intrinsic – and they contribute to value in different ways. Fourth, digital duplication technology may undermine instrumental scarcity, to at least some extent, but the axiological consequences of this are highly variable. Fifth, digital duplication technology does not affect intrinsic scarcity, and may actually heighten it. (shrink)

Gallup Polls have reported on the perceived ethics of various professions in the US since 1976. Clergymen and pharmacists were consistently identified as two of the most ethical professionals in the 1980''s and 1990''s. Business executives have not fared well in these polls and have not been rated among the top ten most ethical professions in any of the years the poll was taken. Ethical codes have not done much to belay the perception that the US business executive is not (...) very ethical. Whether the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will impact the ethical behavior of business executives remains to be seen. (shrink)

This paper investigates how intuitions about scientific discovery using artificial intelligence can be used to improve our understanding of scientific discovery more generally. Traditional accounts of discovery have been agent-centred: they place emphasis on identifying a specific agent who is responsible for conducting all, or at least the important part, of a discovery process. We argue that these accounts experience difficulties capturing scientific discovery involving AI and that similar issues arise for human discovery. We propose an alternative, collective-centred view as (...) superior for understanding discovery, with and without AI. This view maintains that discovery is performed by a collective of agents and entities, each making contributions that differ in significance and character, and that attributing credit for discovery depends on various finer-grained properties of the contributions made. Detailing its conceptual resources, we argue that this view is considerably more compelling than its agent-centred alternative. Considering and responding to several theoretical and practical challenges, we point to concrete avenues for further developing the view we propose. (shrink)

Summary This essay examines the first 30 years of the US Bureau of Mines' synthetic fuel programme during which time Arno C. Fieldner (1881–1966), the Bureau's chief chemist in Washington, DC, established the direction of its fuel research. Fieldner was a world-renowned authority on coal combustion, whose technological style of coal research emphasized the potential applications of the research. He was a keen observer of international developments in coal research and made their study an essential and important part of the (...) Bureau's synthetic liquid fuel programme. International developments, particularly Germany's coal-to-oil or synthetic liquid fuel industry, continued to interest the Bureau during the 1930s–1940s, and, after the Second World War, seven German synthetic fuel scientists came to the USA under Project Paperclip to assist in the construction and operation of the Bureau's coal hydrogenation (liquefaction) and Fischer-Tropsch demonstration plants in Louisiana, Missouri. The two plants were the centrepiece of the Bureau's $87·6 million post-war synthetic fuel programme. During their period of operation from 1949 to 1953 the plants successfully converted American coals to synthetic fuel, and although they were much more efficient than the older German plants, the economics of the conversion became a matter of considerable debate. The Bureau accomplished its objective, however. It had demonstrated the technological feasibility of converting domestic coals to petroleum-like liquids, but the newly elected congress, showing little interest in continuing the programme, ended its financial support and permanently shut down the Missouri operation in 1953. (shrink)

This chapter examines the work in chemistry that led to the discovery of boron and explores the implications of this episode for the scientific realism debate. This episode begins with Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of acidity and his prediction that boracic acid contains oxygen and a hypothetical, combustible substance that he called the boracic radical. And it culminates in the work of Davy, Gay-Lussac, and Thénard, who used potassium to extract oxygen from boracic acid and thereby discovered boron. This episode constitutes (...) a novel predictive success of Lavoisier’s theory of acidity, which was not even approximately true. Selective realists attempt to accommodate such false-but-successful theories by showing that their success is due to the fact that they have approximately true parts. This episode poses a strong challenge to selective realism because the parts of Lavoisier’s theory that are responsible for its success are not even approximately true. (shrink)

In eastern spiritual traditions, samsara has long been associated with the cycle of birth and death. But what are the hidden depths of samsara, and just how far does it go?

Snyder’s book ‘Exploiting hope’ is as relevant as ever. His book is about the hope of desperate individuals seeking treatments that cannot be found in conventional medicine. The book engages with hope in the setting of phase I cancer trials, stem cell interventions, right-to-try laws and crowd funding, offering a new language to explain our discomfort with some of these quests. At the same time the book seems particularly relevant given current events. While despair and quests for novel interventions touched (...) only a few patients with specific conditions up to a year ago, they are now familiar to us all. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic all of us probably experienced hope for interventions that could save us... (shrink)

May 2020 marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Miguel Sánchez-Mazas, founder of Theoria. An International Journal of Theory, History and Foundations of Science, and regarded as the person who brought mathematical logic to Spain. Here we present some of his biographical features and a summary of his contributions, from his early work in the 1950s - introducing contemporary advances in logic and philosophy of science in a philosophically backward milieu dominated by the scholasticism of that era in Spain (...) - to the development of a project of Lebnizian lineage aimed at producing an arithmetic calculation that would elude some of the difficulties confronting Leibniz’s calculus. (shrink)

The Opening Chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, called "Sense Certainty," is brief: 283 lines or about seven and a half pages in the critical edition of Hegel's works . Just over half the text is devoted to a series of thought experiments1 that focus on "the Here" and "the Now" as the two basic forms of immediate sensuous particularity Hegel calls "the This." The chapter's main goal is to demonstrate that, in truth, the object of sense certainty is precisely (...) the opposite of what it purports to be: "the This" is mediated abstract universality. However, not just the truth of Hegel's claim but its very meaning has been the subject of dispute from early on.2 A currently influential interpretive . (shrink)

China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, has attracted widespread attention, with much discussion as to its meaning and intention. This article argues that one of the best ways to understand the BRI is to see it in the context of China’s two-thousand-year history as an empire. What kind of empire was the Chinese Empire? How did it see itself, and what was its characteristic mode of action? What was the meaning of the (...) “tribute system”? The celebrated voyages (1405–1433) of the Ming admiral Zheng He are taken as a typical example of Chinese imperial behaviour (rather than being seen, as is common, as an aberrant and exceptional episode). By examining this and other aspects of Chinese imperial history, it is hoped that some light might be shed on what the Chinese leadership as in mind with its Belt and Road Initiative, and what the rest of the world should expect from it. (shrink)

The US Securities and Exchange Commission recently proposed rules relating to shareholder (independent) director nominations to publicly-traded companies. While shareholder groups, such as institutional investors, consumer groups, and shareholder activists, generally support the proxy reform, the business community, including The Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce, are critical of the proposal, arguing that it will 'open the door' to special interest directors, e.g., labour unions or other groups having a social or political agenda contrary to the economic interests (...) of the shareholder owners of the corporation. An analysis of the proposed rules, however, show that the mechanisms offered to nominate and elect independent directors offer little or no threat of any shareholder group placing special interest directors on the board of a publicly-traded company in the USA. The article concludes with a recommended managerial course of action for executives and boards to follow in the unlikely event that shareholders are seriously threatening to place a special interest director(s) on the proxy ballot. (shrink)

In this essay, I recount and examine my response to a genetic diagnosis of my disabled daughter. My daughter was forty‐nine before the diagnosis came. All her disabilities were traceable to a de novo single gene variant on the PURA gene that was discovered only in 2014. I speak of the jolt and the recalibration that this discovery engendered, concluding that, while it seemed that everything had changed, nothing had changed. But my family did discover a community in which Sesha (...) joins other PURA‐perfect sons and daughters and where we as a family acquire a “horizontal identity” marked by a genetic variant. (shrink)

McGovern, Kevin In December 2008, the US President's Council on Bioethics issued a White Paper titled 'Controversies in the Determination of Death.'1 Responding to contemporary critiques of the concept of brain death, the Council upholds the validity of this neurological standard for determining death. Significantly, it also proposes replacing the existing explanation of this standard with a new, very different rationale. As well, it argues that 'total brain failure' is a better name for this condition than 'brain death.' This article (...) summarises and then comments on this important statement. (shrink)

When journalists and health researchers address the subject of patients in the United States undergoing unproven stem cell–based interventions, they have historically crafted narratives about "stem cell tourism" to facilities located in such countries as China, India, Mexico, Panama, and Thailand. These latter nations often are depicted as jurisdictions where clinics providing access to SCBIs operate without meaningful oversight, relevant regulations are nonexistent or have significant loopholes, and regulatory bodies are underfunded, understaffed, corrupt, or otherwise unable to provide effective oversight (...) (Caul-field et al. 2009;... (shrink)

The history of philosophy is replete with attempts at invoking rationality as a means of directing and even subduing human desire and emotion. Understood as that which moves human beings to action, desire and emotion come to be associated with human freedom and rationality as a means of curbing that freedom. Plato, for instance, takes for granted a separation between thought and action that drives a wedge between our rational ability to exercise self-discipline and the free expression of desire and (...) emotion. Hobbes, on the other hand, replaces our internal ability for rational self-control with the external authority of the political State. So long as freedom and control are pitted against one another, human beings are incapable of attaining a symbiosis of these two elements of human action so essential to realizing true democracy. Unlike Plato, John Dewey sees in democracy the greatest potential for individual and social life. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the educational philosophy of Dewey, which culminates in an educational aesthetic, appeals to and makes the most of the symbiosis of freedom and self-control, emotion and reason. Dewey’s educational aesthetic not only offers an alternative to traditional methods of education, but also demonstrates how the goal of a democratic way of life is made feasible by means of intelligently guided self-discipline—a form of self-control guided by intelligence that is not a constraint upon freedom, but instead embodies greater opportunity for freedom. I trace the basis for this synthesis, in the social-political and pedagogical principles of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both Locke and Rousseau offer educational theories that begin turning our attention toward the essential partnership required of rationality and emotion. Dewey's educational aesthetic is then considered as a response to alienating forms of education that continue to pit control and freedom against one another, and which thwart the intellectual and emotional development necessary for autonomy and democratic forms of social organization. (shrink)

In our commentary we briefly review the work on the neurological differences between the rational ethical analysis used in professional contexts and the reflexive emotional responses of our daily moral reasoning, and discuss the implications for the claim that our normative arguments should not rely on the emotion of repugnance.

Yoga is the exercise of choice for so many because it makes you feel great in body and mind. But modern images of yoga have long featured the same kinds of bodies--white, slim, young, cis-gendered, able. Harmony Willow Hansen knows that a celebration of every kind of body brings more joy and inclusivity to all of us. She has been drawing joyful people in practice for years, creating a presence on Instagram that reaches hundreds of thousands of yoga lovers. Her (...) figures include older people, trans people, differently-abled people, people in different body types and weights. Harmony's art is all about bodies where anyone can find themselves and feel seen. Here are an array of positions including beginner poses, seated and low poses, lying down poses, standing poses, and partner poses, as well as prenatal and children's poses and flow. Readers will share in the ease and confidence that radiate from these yogis. An ideal gift for any yoga lover."--Amazon. (shrink)

This paper examines the planning, execution, and closure of the US–Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of U.S. foreign assistance. Working closely with the NAS, U.S. conservationists used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecosystem ecology to developing (...) countries. In this context, by way of the NAS’s Pacific Science Board, two countries’ biologists initiated the preliminary cooperative project in the DMZ in 1966. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The U.S. side attributed the cooperation failure to Korean culture while the Korean side criticized the unequal structure of their cooperation. Joining the global historiography of Cold War scientific collaboration, this paper pays particular attention to the intermediaries of the collaborative project and their rivalry. It argues that political struggles revolving around the position of go-betweens – as what I call knowledge brokers – on the recipient side provoked contestation between American and Korean scientists. The contention between the two sides played out in the collaboration coming to an end, albeit partially. Throughout this analysis, this study suggests paying more serious attention to the politics of scientific exchange among actors on the recipient side as an outset from which to analyze the heterogeneity of the Korean side without losing sight of their active role in the building process of American hegemony. (shrink)

Institutional Religious Accommodation in the US and Europe Jean Cohen argues that recent US Supreme Court decisions about institutional accommodation are problematic. She rightly points out that justice and the liberal concept of freedom of consciousness cannot do the work in Hobby Lobby and Hosanna-Tabor: what does the work is a medieval political-theological conception of church immunity and sovereignty. The first part of this commentary sketches how the autonomy of churches and religious associations can be considered from a liberal perspective, (...) avoiding the pitfall of the medieval idea of libertas ecclesiae based on church immunity and sovereignty. The second part discusses the European jurisprudence about institutional accommodation claims and concludes that until now the European Court of Human Rights is more nuanced and its decisions are more in line with liberalism than the US Jurisprudence. (shrink)