PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the UK National DNA Database and some of the controversies surrounding it with reference to legal and ethical issues, focusing particularly on privacy and human rights. Governance of this database involves specific exemptions from the Data Protection Act, and this gives a rise to concerns regarding both the extent of surveillance on the UK population and the possibility for harm to all citizens. This is of wider importance since every current citizen, and (...) everybody who visits the UK, could become a record in the DNA database. Principally, the paper seeks to explore whether these exemptions would also imply exemptions for software developers from codes of practice and ethics of their professional societies as relate to constructing or maintaining such data and the database.Design/methodology/approachThe paper makes a comparison between the principles of the DPA, as would need to be followed by all other organizations handling personal data, professional responsibilities‐based codes of ethics of professional societies, and the current reality as reported in relation to the NDNAD and the exemptions offered through the DPA.FindingsPrimarily, if NDNAD was not exempted from certain provisions in the DPA, the potential for the kinds of data leakages and other mishandlings could largely be avoided without the need for further considerations over so‐called “data minimization”. It can be seen how the lack of afforded protection allows for a wide range of issues as relate at least to privacy.Originality/valueThe paper provides the first evaluation of the combination of law, codes of ethics, and activities in the real world as related to NDNAD, with concomitant considerations for privacy, liberty, and human rights. Originality is demonstrated through consideration of the implications of certain exemptions in the DPA in relation to crime and taxation and national security and in relating the expected protections for personal data to widely reported evidence that such protections may be variously lacking. In addition, the paper provides a broad overview of controversies over certain newer kinds of DNA analysis, and other relatively recent findings, that seem generally absent from the vast majority of debates over this kind of analysis. (shrink)

Deception is a reasonably common part of daily life that society sometimes demonstrates a degree of acceptance of, and occasionally people are very willing to be deceived. But can a computer identify deception and distinguish it from that which is not deceptive? We explore deception in various guises, differentiating it from lies, and highlighting the influence of medium and message in both deception and its detection. Our investigations to date have uncovered disagreements relating to the measurements of such cues, and (...) variations in interpretations, as could be problematic in building a deception detection system. (shrink)

Social consciousness – which amounts to something like ‘being woke’ – is a cognitive sensitivity to social injustices in one’s local environment and broader culture. From here, social consciousness can be accounted for in a variety of ways. Recently, it’s been suggested that we can understand social consciousness through the lens of moral encroachment. To be social consciousness, on this account, is to believe in accordance with the dictates of moral encroachment. After considering this account, I raise a few worries: (...) it involves controversial theoretical commitments, entails unintuitive verdicts in important cases, and appears to be too demanding. In light of these worries, I develop a new account of social consciousness as a morally virtuous cognitive disposition that manifests primarily in certain doxastic states. I argue that we should favor the virtue account because it weathers the worries that trouble the encroachment account, and better captures several important features of social consciousness. (shrink)

The claim that prejudice causes prejudiced beliefs is a familiar one. Call it the causal claim. In this paper, I turn to sexism and sexist beliefs to explore the causal claim within the context of current debates in the ethics of beliefs about moral encroachment on epistemic rationality. My goal is to consider and arbitrate between plausible ways of fleshing out the idea that the non-doxastic dimensions of sexism (including its motivational and affective components as well as its structural and (...) institutional varieties) cause sexist beliefs in a normatively significant way – that is, in a way that can render those beliefs epistemically deficient. I suggest that, in conjunction with the assumption that sexist beliefs are epistemically irrational, each position in the ethics of belief debate lends itself to a different interpretation of the causal claim: purism about epistemic rationality supports a narrow interpretation, while revisionism supports a broad one. After developing each interpretation, I argue that – at the heart of the disagreement between them – is a different story about the normative significance of the fact that evidence about an unfortunate truth has a sexist provenance. Along the way, I consider what it means for evidence to be “stacked in favor” of sexist beliefs. (shrink)

RésuméNotre identité sociale influe sur nos croyances. Mais comment évaluer cet impact doxastique d'un point de vue épistémique? Pour obtenir un portrait fiable de l'importance épistémique de l'identité sociale, nous devons explorer la jonction peu étudiée des influences non pertinentes et de l’épistémologie du point de vue, ce qui nous amène à des cas de double preuve d'ordre supérieur. Le fait d'envisager l'identité sociale sous l'angle des influences non pertinentes nous donne une preuve d'ordre supérieur d'erreur, tandis que l'examen selon (...) l'avantage du point de vue fournit une preuve d'ordre supérieur d'exactitude. Nous devons donc soupeser la force de chaque élément de preuve d'ordre supérieur au cas par cas afin d’évaluer épistémiquement l'impact doxastique de l'identité sociale. (shrink)

There are an increasing number of ways to enhance human abilities, characteristics, and performance. In recent years, the ethical debate on enhancement has focused mainly on the ethical evaluation of new enhancement technologies. Yet, the search for an adequate and shared understanding of enhancement has always remained an important part of the debate. It was initially undertaken with the intention of defining the ethical boundaries of enhancement, often by attempting to distinguish enhancements from medical treatments. One of the more recent (...) approaches comes from Julian Savulescu, Anders Sandberg, and Guy Kahane. With their welfarist account, they define enhancement in terms of its contribution to individual well-being: as any state of a person that increases the chances of living a good life in the given set of circumstances. The account aims to contribute both to a shared and clear understanding of enhancement and to answering the question of whether we should enhance in certain ways or not. I will argue that it cannot live up to either claim, in particular because of its inherent normativity and its failure to adequately define well-being. Nevertheless, it can make a valuable contribution to an ethics of enhancement. As I will show, the welfarist account refocuses the debate on a central value in health care: well-being, which can be a relevant aspect in assessing the permissibility of biomedical interventions – especially against the background of new bioethical challenges. To fulfil this function, however, a more differentiated understanding of well-being is needed. (shrink)

The paper aimed to reconstruct Twardowski's approach to the problem of free will and his analyses of the consequences of various solutions to this problem in ethics and criminal law. According to Twardowski, if we understand ‘free will’ as the possibility of making resolutions other than actually made, then (most probably) nobody has free will. Our resolutions are determined by a set of mental dispositions (character) and incentives that activate these dispositions. However, the existence of freedom of will such understood (...) is not a necessary condition for the correct functioning of ethical systems or criminal law. On the contrary, ethical systems and criminal law seem to assume that at least some of our resolutions are determined by our relatively stable dispositions. Only then can these resolutions and the actions that follow them be ascribed to certain agents. Twardowski's views on free will are presented here in the context of the metaphilosophical positions of the Lvov–Warsaw School, the central European branch of analytic philosophy. His position is also juxtaposed with Brentano's view of free will and Łukasiewicz's approach to the determinism/indeterminism debate. This juxtaposition illustrates the variety of philosophical positions and the diversity of the metaphilosophical toolkit applied in early analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This study of the Sicilian Questions of the philosopher and mystic Ibn Sabٴ īn of Murcia interprets the structure and sources of the text as a reflection of intellectual life in the late Almohad Arab West.

Material artefacts consist of many smaller – and ultimately natural – objects such as molecules and atoms that have been intentionally rearranged in such a way as to take the shape of a particular artefact and fulfil its functions. Whenever the arrangement of several parts results in properties that go beyond the properties of the individual parts or their sum, it can be said that this arrangement has resulted in a new object. Once created, material artefacts may take part in (...) natural processes such as reproduction and evolution and cannot be fundamentally distinguished from fully natural objects. This article provides a number of – mainly biological – examples that show the traditional Aristotelian dichotomy between nature and artefacts to be highly problematic and suggest a continuum instead. Most importantly, it is argued that living beings and artefacts are equally capable – or sometimes incapable – of self-reproduction and that there are numerous objects which are both living beings and artefacts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThere is substantial evidence to suggest that deafness is associated with delays in emotion understanding, which has been attributed to delays in language acquisition and opportunities to converse. However, studies addressing the ability to recognise facial expressions of emotion have produced equivocal findings. The two experiments presented here attempt to clarify emotion recognition in deaf children by considering two aspects: the role of motion and the role of intensity in deaf children’s emotion recognition. In Study 1, 26 deaf children were (...) compared to 26 age-matched hearing controls on a computerised facial emotion recognition task involving static and dynamic expressions of 6 emotions. Eighteen of the deaf and 18 age-matched hearing controls additionally took part in Study 2, involving the presentation of the same 6 emotions at varying intensities. Study 1 showed that deaf children’s emotion recognition was better in the dynamic rather than static condition, whereas the hearing children sh... (shrink)

An overview of the feminist theory literature on welfare policy and politics is presented. This introductory essay places a particular emphasis on the works that fall within the political sociology and normative political philosophy genres. In a lengthy digression, the article offers a tribute to the work of Iris Marion Young. It examines the centrality of her thinking about distribution, cultural marginalization, the welfare state bureaucracy, transnational responsibility and solidarity, and the pitfalls of maternalist discourse for this field. In the (...) conclusion, the article makes brief remarks about each of the contributions to the special issue on Feminist Theory and Welfare. (shrink)

We describe the relationships between dog owners' personality attributes (assessed via questionnaire), their behaviours and the dog's behaviours observed during brief dog-owner and dog-stranger interactions (N = 78). Interactions comprised the owner commanding the dog to sit, and the stranger showing a ball to the restrained dog and then hiding it. Owners scoring higher on neuroticism and openness used more commands (gestural and verbal) when asking the dog to sit, and the dogs of owners higher on neuroticism obeyed with a (...) longer latency and spent more time looking at the stranger. More extraverted owners praised their dog more, and it took longer for their dogs to look at the stranger but they spent more time looking at the stranger, whereas dogs of more agreeable owners spent more time looking at the ball. Based on these results we conclude that some aspects of owners' personality appear to be tied to their dog's attentional concerns. Keywords: dog-human interaction; personality; multivariate statistical methods. (shrink)

This paper looks to evolve a discourse about the body in medieval women's mystical experience via an understanding of the life and work of Saint Catherine of Genoa as écriture-féminine. Drawing upon Catherine's resolution of binarism through the articulation of sexuality and textuality, I argue that the female mystic's experience of the body as site of struggle helps move beyond analysis of a binary experience to a politics of speaking the body directly.

During its century-long unfolding, spreading in numerous directions, Husserlian phenomenology while loosening inner articulations, has nevertheless maintained a somewhat consistent profile. As we see in this collection, the numerous conceptions and theories advanced in the various phases of reinterpretations have remained identifiable with phenomenology. What conveys this consistency in virtue of which innumerable types of inquiry-scientific, social, artistic, literary – may consider themselves phenomenological? Is it not the quintessence of the phenomenological quest, namely our seeking to reach the very foundations (...) of reality at all its constitutive levels by pursuing its logos? Inquiring into the logos of the phenomenological quest we discover, indeed, all the main constitutive spheres of reality and of the human subject involved in it, and concurrently, the logos itself comes to light in the radiation of its force (Tymieniecka). Papers by: Kristana Arp, Gary Backhaus, Mafalda Blanc, Piotr Blaszczyk, Manuel Bremer, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Peter Abumhenre Egbe, Jesus Adrian Escudero, Wayne Froman, Jorge Garcia-Gomez, David Grunberg, Dasuke Kamei, Arion Kelkel, Filip Kolen, Tze-wan Kwan, Leonard Lawlor, Grahame Lock, Nancy Mardas, Nikolay Milkov, Cezary J. Olbromski, Helena De Preester, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Luca Vanzago, Anatoly Zotov. (shrink)

This article addresses the underresearched issue of exclusion of a social group that consists of people experiencing involuntary childlessness, which has not been thoroughly researched in this perspective yet. Apart from the available literature on this subject, there were also used conclusions from research that represent only a small part of the author’s unpublished doctoral dissertation Niepłodność w narracjach małżeństw jako indywidualne i wspólne strategie uczenia się egzystencjalnego [Infertility in the accounts of married couples as individual and joint strategies of (...) existential learning]. The author argues that the marginalization of childless people is a consequence of receiving no external support from state organs and institutions (mostly from the educational and medical sector) that would make it possible to prevent infertility or, if it is diagnosed, to make available all possible ways to overcome it. (shrink)

Ajdukiewicz called his article Problemat idealizmu transcendentalnego w sformułowaniu semantycznym [The Semantic Version of Transcendental Idealism], published in “Przegląd Filozoficzny” in 1937, a “turning point” of his philosophical development. The aim of the paper is to present various aspects of this turn. Firstly, the historical and philosophical background of the 1937 paper is sketched. It includes the metaphilosophical position of the Lvov‑Warsaw School, and the development of methods applied in this group. Secondly, Ajdukiewicz’s ideas up to 1937 are outlined in (...) order to present what the semantic turn consisted in. Next, the program of the semantic theory of knowledge is sketched, and the steps of Ajdukiewicz’s argumentation against transcendental idealism, with an emphasis on the use of metalogical and semantic results, are presented. Finally, Ajdukiewicz’s proposal is discussed from the methodological point of view. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 11, November 2024, Page 35-37.

The nature of the self is an important point at which philosophy and literature intersect. Text, Body and Indeterminacy acknowledges this connection by forging a link between the philosophical concept of the self and the category of the literary character. The philosophical horizon of Text, Body and Indeterminacy is delineated by the neo-pragmatist debate on selfhood. The book entwines the ideas of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman by stressing similarity in their aestheticizing of ethics and by showing the difference in (...) their understanding of the self as textual or bodily. The characters created by Pater and Wilde are freshly assessed within this dual philosophical perspective. Their doppelgngers are seen as the forerunners of postmodernist concepts: the cerebral fl[neur is reflected in Rortys model ironist, and the sensuous aesthete returns through Shustermans notion of the somatic self. Text, Body and Indeterminacy establishes how Pater renders his protagonists through discursive patternstropes of Decadence, philosophical theorems, and mythsonly to subvert these vocabularies and to emphasize the reality of the body, the extra-textual dimension of the self. It also shows how Wildes sensuous personae, both bodily and indeterminate, transcend the vocabularies available to the Wildean fl[neurs. Through its interpretations, Text Body and Indeterminacy uniquely combines literary portraits by Pater and Wilde, highlights interlocking themes and, in every reading, points to the ethical gains of tilting the idea of selfhood into the somatic realm. (shrink)

In the 21st century what the future holds for young learners is unclear, what is clear is that they need to be confident, capable and resilient. As wider communication about education is increasing there is a developing understanding that children in settings across the globe learn in the same ways and have the same needs. This book considers international and multicultural learning environments from both theoretical and practical perspectives, written by specialists in early years education in the UK and in (...) international contexts. The theoretical perspectives are supported by eight case studies, from Uganda, Indonesia, Mexico, Qatar, Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom and Romania. (shrink)

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed. This (...) collection includes essay which address from different and complementary points of view the issue of the social and political relevance of philosophical debates on realism. (shrink)