Although not ignored, Rahner’s theology has not played a significant influence on the interdisciplinary scholarship between Catholic theology and literature, perhaps because Rahner’s thought is often considered to lack a theological aesthetics. This article encourages a reevaluation of this impression by bringing Rahner’s theology of symbol and his argument for the anonymous Christian into dialogue with the last novel of the acclaimed Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo, Deep River. Endo’s novel challenges theologians to consider Rahner’s insights in concrete, multi-cultural, and non-Christian (...) contexts, and demonstrates the importance of thinking about Rahner’s theology of symbol in terms of narrative. At the same time, Endo’s novel prompts a reconsideration of Rahner’s controversial argument for the anonymous Christian, for Rahner’s thought and Endo’s novel present two different approaches to the issue of religious pluralism. In this dialogue between novelist and theologian, the Incarnational foundation of Rahner’s argument for the anonymous Christian emerges more clearly, a foundation that can be easily missed amidst his abstract rhetoric. (shrink)

There is currently much concern over the use of pharmaceuticals and other biomedical techniques to enhance athletic performance—a practice we might refer to as doping. Many justifications of anti-doping efforts claim that doping involves a serious moral transgression. In this article, I review a number of arguments in support of that claim, but show that they are not conclusive, suggesting that we do not have good reasons for thinking that doping is wrong.

Examining intrapersonal factors theorized to influence ethics reporting decisions, the relation of self-efficacy as a predictor of propensity for internal whistleblowing is investigated within a US and Canadian multi-regional context. Over 900 professionals from a total of nine regions in Canada and the US participated. Self-efficacy was found to influence participant reported propensity for internal whistleblowing consistently in both the US and Canada. Seasoned participants with greater management and work experience demonstrated higher levels of self-efficacy while gender was also found (...) to be influential to self-efficacy. These individual traits, although related to self-efficacy, did not directly relate to propensities for internal whistleblowing. The findings demonstrate that self-efficacy could represent an important individual trait for examining whistleblowing issues. Internal whistleblowing is becoming an important organizational consideration in many areas of North America, yet there is relatively little research on the topic. Organizations seeking effective internal reporting systems should consider the influence of self-efficacy along with its potential reporting influence. By empirically testing an under-examined component of theory related to internal whistleblowing, this effort contributes to management literature, extending the knowledge beyond a US context, and provides recommendation for managing individual bias with internal reporting systems. (shrink)

There has been much debate about whether the concept of disease articulated in Boorse’s biostatistical theory is value-neutral or value-laden. Here, I want to examine whether this debate matters. I suggest that there are two basic respects in which value-ladenness might be important: it could threaten either scientific legitimacy or moral permissibility. I argue that value-ladenness does not threaten the scientific legitimacy of our disease-concept because the concept makes little difference to the formulation and testing of scientific hypotheses. Likewise, (...) even if our disease-concept is value-laden, this does not show it is morally impermissible. To determine its permissibility, we must regard it as a tool to structure social institutions. Seen in that way, whether our disease-concept is morally permissible is a consequentialist matter and depends exquisitely on unanswered empirical questions. (shrink)

In a recent article, Tyler Tate argues that the suffering of children — especially children with severe cognitive impairments — should be regarded as the antithesis of flourishing, where flourishing is relative to one’s individual characteristics and essentially involves receiving care from others. Although initially persuasive, Tate’s theory is ambiguous in several ways, leading to significant conceptual problems. By identifying flourishing with receiving care, Tate raises questions about the importance of care that he does not address, giving rise to a (...) bootstrapping problem. By making flourishing relative to an individual’s circumstances, Tate is forced to confront questions about exactly how relative it can be, suggesting the possibility that, on his view, to flourish is simply to be however one is. In an attempt to surmount these problems, I offer a revision and restatement of Tate’s view that defines the relationship between individualized flourishing and the more conventional, species-relative concept, and describe more clearly the role that care should play with respect to flourishing — one that is instrumental and not merely constitutive. Even this restated view, however, fails to answer difficult questions about how one should respond to the medical needs of some children, highlighting the fact that a conceptual analysis of suffering may do little, in the end, to untangle ethical dilemmas in the care of severely ill children. (shrink)

Perhaps no name is more clearly associated with the formulation of American psychology than that of William James. Yet, one of James’s last published works, A Pluralistic Universe, is little known and rarely cited in the discipline. On the 100th anniversary of the publication of this book, the authors of this special issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior explore the past, present, and future legacy of the provocative ideas contained in this volume for psychology, including the history (...) of psychology, scientific fragmentation and ethics, the philosophy of science, psychological methods and theories, the psychology of religion, the multicultural movement, and the path of psychology in general. (shrink)

This article explores the place of complexity science within education and educational research. The discussion begins with the suggestion that educational research has a history of adopting interpretive frames from other domains with little adaptation. Complexity science is argued to compel a different sort of positioning, one that requires accommodation and participation rather than unproblematized assimilation and application. The argument is developed by considering the following simultaneities in education (and) research: knower and knowledge; transphenomenality; transdisciplinarity; interdiscursivity; descriptive and pragmatic (...) insights; representation and presentation; affect and effect; and education and research. (shrink)

DALLAS — With a friend videotaping, 27-yearold Christopher Lenzini of Dallas took a hit of Salvia divinorum, regarded as the world’s most potent hallucinogenic herb, and soon began to imagine, he said, that he was in a boat with little green men. Mr. Lenzini quickly collapsed to the floor and dissolved into convulsive laughter.

In early 1909, Charles S. Peirce conducted a series of experiments with three-valued logic, anticipating the pioneering work of Jan Łukasiewicz and Emil Post by ten years. These experiments are entirely contained within six or seven pages of Peirce's Logic Notebook. Due to the work of Atwell Turquette, the formalisms contained in those pages are relatively well understood. What is less understood are Peirce's philosophical reasons for conducting those experiments. His explanation of the need for his "triadic" logic is very (...) brief, taking up little more than a single short page in the Notebook. Here he gives us two clues about his motivations, one connected to modal notions and one to his views on continuity. There are two previous accounts of the philosophical motivations behind triadic logic, due to Max Fisch and Turquette, and to Robert Lane. In this paper, I re-evaluate those views and connect the two clues to Peirce's hypothetical cosmology. I argue that in conducting his three-valued experiments, Peirce was trying to create a logic to capture his notion of the evolving universe. (shrink)

The importance of ethics education for undergraduate engineering students has been emphasized due to the manifold impacts of engineering on society. However, little is known about moral disengagement among engineering students, which could potentially lead to unethical engineering practice. Especially, it is not known how engineering students’ moral disengagement changes over the course of their college studies. In this paper, we conducted a longitudinal, mixed-methods study to investigate moral disengagement among undergraduate engineering students (n = 274) using Bandura’s theory (...) of moral disengagement as a theoretical framework. We found engineering students’ overall propensity to morally disengage did not change over time, but there were statistically significant differences in student responses to three mechanisms of moral disengagement. We further investigated these findings with students’ interviews. Based on our results, we discuss various theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence has spurred the widespread adoption of automated decision systems (ADS). An extensive literature explores what conditions must be met for these systems' decisions to be fair. However, questions of legitimacy -- why those in control of ADS are entitled to make such decisions -- have received comparatively little attention. This paper shows that when such questions are raised theorists often incorrectly conflate legitimacy with either public acceptance or other substantive values such as (...) fairness, accuracy, expertise or efficiency. In search of better theories, we conduct a critical analysis of the philosophical literature on the legitimacy of the state, focusing on consent, public reason, and democratic authorisation. This analysis reveals that the prevailing understanding of legitimacy in analytical political philosophy is also ill-suited to the task of establishing whether and when ADS are legitimate. The paper thus clarifies expectations for theories of ADS legitimacy and charts a path for a future research programme on the topic. (shrink)

Informed by ABET accreditation criteria and broader societal needs, ethics has been emphasized as important for engineering professionals. Engineering students are thus exposed to professional ethics and related concerns throughout their college experiences both within and beyond the formal engineering curriculum, but little is known about what learning experiences and lessons engineering students view as most memorable and salient as they approach graduation. Therefore, this paper answers the following research questions: RQ1) What types of experiences do senior engineering students (...) report as salient learning experiences for their ethical and moral formation as they approach graduation? and RQ2) What do students learn from the most commonly discussed types of experiences? To address these questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with senior engineering students and performed inductive thematic analysis on the resulting transcripts. Among various types of experiences that students reported as influencing their ethical and moral perspectives, this paper highlights work experiences, formal education, and family environment as the most frequently mentioned. Our results suggest that work experiences were especially significant for students’ learning of engineering ethics in a professional context, followed by academic experiences as a source of both professional/ethical and more general moral lessons. Many students also described family and friends as influential, especially as related to their general perceptions of morality. Based on these findings, a variety of educational implications are discussed. (shrink)

Consumers have the power to influence the social performance of corporations, but in the United States this power has gone largely unused. And too little attention has been paid to consumer issues by IABS scholars. To better understand why and when consumer boycotts are either effective or successful, this paper studies the reaction to two oil industry incidents: the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the Shell Oil Brent Spar controversy. Five ingredients are identified as important to (...) the understanding of consumer activism: culture, context, cause, challenge, and charisma. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Child's Creation of a Pictorial WorldEllen Handler SpitzThe Child'S Creation of a Pictorial World, by Claire Golomb. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 2004, 388 pp.Children's drawings fill us with wonder and delight. They may tend, however, to puzzle us, especially if we seek to comprehend them in terms appropriate to the drawings of mature artists or in terms relevant for other pictorial forms and expressions. Likewise, they may (...) puzzle us if we make the mistake of supposing that they represent in any direct or obvious way the cognitive development of young children or if we see them only as comical, inept efforts at depicting external reality. Children's drawings stimulate many nagging questions, among them the one as to why it should be that a child who knows so much and who is verbally so articulate may be graphically capable of depicting so little.Claire Golomb's work has proven extraordinarily helpful here as a corrective because Golomb, after many years of research and reflection, writes about these youthful creations not as "print-outs" of a child's mind. She sees them, rather, as exemplars of particular visual representational schemata that are generally available to and employed by young children. And although she regards these schemata as universal, she acknowledges that they are clearly subject to a wide range of individual variability. Over all, the value of Golomb's work lies in her extensive, descriptive research. Acknowledging her intellectual debt to her mentor, Rudolph Arnheim, Golomb reminds her readers that representation is never mimesis pure and simple. Representation is never, she tells us, the result of an "intention to copy nature." Therefore, when young children do otherwise, they ought not to be seen as failing. Their drawings ought not to be viewed as unsuccessful attempts to imitate nature or to depict with faithful realism what appears before their eyes. Rather, as Golomb states and attempts to demonstrate throughout the pages of her well-illustrated volume, children employ graphic schemata that develop over time in terms of shape, color, content, and composition. Ever seeking meaning, children create pictorial worlds that, while they have no one-to-one correlation with the perceptual world, are tied to it, importantly, nonetheless.Golomb assiduously describes and illustrates each of her studies so that her readers are treated to a panorama of this "orderly progression," as she puts it, this evolution of children's graphic work. Her book, moreover, is characterized by a certain social scientific aura; that is to say, she proffers statistics and quantifies her data to prove her points. She takes pains to argue, for example, from research conducted in tandem, apparently, with her daughter, that it is extremely difficult to differentiate, prima facie, the drawings of children who have been diagnosed as disturbed from those who are considered normal. Having worked for a couple of years in a residential treatment center for schizophrenic children, I would aver that this claim might be debatable. However, were one to be [End Page 120] able to so differentiate, this might constitute a challenge to Golomb's theory that the representational schemata are, as she puts it, "robust." According to her findings, they remain more or less in tact. Likewise with regard to the issue of cultural variables. Here Golomb argues, gently and respectfully, against positions taken by two other well-known scholars in the field, Brent and Marjory Wilson, who accord a higher priority than she does to cultural differences. According to the Wilsons, children's drawings are importantly influenced by whatever graphic models are made available to them in a given culture. For Golomb, however, these variables, while significant, do not interfere substantially with the universal classifications she proposes. As she writes, "The drawings of young children are as different one from another as fingerprints, yet they can be classified" (357).In general, then, the body of work Golomb offers in this second edition of her first volume published under the same title in 1992 by the University of California Press importantly contributes, as it initially did, to ongoing research in numerous fields, including art education, early childhood studies, art history, developmental psychology, anthropology, and art... (shrink)

The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions. Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also (...) be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons. (shrink)

For much of the past two centuries, religion has been understood as a universal phenomenon, a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary through time and geographically, but there is an element, religion, that is to be found in all cultures during all time periods. Taking apart this assumption, Brent Nongbri shows that the idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or (...) science is a recent development in European history—a development that has been projected outward in space and backward in time with the result that religion now appears to be a natural and necessary part of our world. Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Nongbri demonstrates that in antiquity, there was no conceptual arena that could be designated as “religious” as opposed to “secular.” Surveying representative episodes from a two-thousand-year period, while constantly attending to the concrete social, political, and colonial contexts that shaped relevant works of philosophers, legal theorists, missionaries, and others, Nongbri offers a concise and readable account of the emergence of the concept of religion. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce was born in September 1839 and died five months before the guns of August 1914. He is perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced. He made significant contributions throughout his life as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, engineer, and inventor. He was a psychologist, a philologist, a lexicographer, a historian of science, a lifelong student of medicine, and, above all, a philosopher, whose special fields were logic and semiotics. He is (...) widely credited with being the founder of pragmatism. In terms of his importance as a philosopher and a scientist, he has been compared to Plato and Aristotle. He himself intended "to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle." Peirce was also a tormented and in many ways tragic figure. He suffered throughout his life from various ailments, including a painful facial neuralgia, and had wide swings of mood which frequently left him depressed to the state of inertia, and other times found him explosively violent. Despite his consistent belief that ideas could find meaning only if they "worked" in the world, he himself found it almost impossible to make satisfactory economic and social arrangements for himself. This brilliant scientist, this great philosopher, this astounding polymath was never able, throughout his long life, to find an academic post that would allow him to pursue his major interest, the study of logic, and thus also fulfill his destiny as America's greatest philosopher. Much of his work remained unpublished in his own time, and is only now finding publication in a coherent, chronologically organized edition. Even more astounding is that,despite many monographic studies, there has been no biography until now, almost eighty years after his death. Brent has studied the Peirce papers in detail and enriches his account with numerous quotations from letters by Peirce and by his friends. This is a fascinating account of a p. (shrink)

In information societies, operations, decisions and choices previously left to humans are increasingly delegated to algorithms, which may advise, if not decide, about how data should be interpreted and what actions should be taken as a result. More and more often, algorithms mediate social processes, business transactions, governmental decisions, and how we perceive, understand, and interact among ourselves and with the environment. Gaps between the design and operation of algorithms and our understanding of their ethical implications can have severe consequences (...) affecting individuals as well as groups and whole societies. This paper makes three contributions to clarify the ethical importance of algorithmic mediation. It provides a prescriptive map to organise the debate. It reviews the current discussion of ethical aspects of algorithms. And it assesses the available literature in order to identify areas requiring further work to develop the ethics of algorithms. (shrink)

"[Brent] has produced a thoughtful, sometimes moving, and entirely accessible intellectual biography which is also, under the circumstances, indispensable." —The New York Review of Books "... a fine biography."—The New York Times Book Review "... an extraordinary, inspiring portrait of the largely forgotten Peirce, a progenitor of modern thought who devised a realist metaphysics and attempted to achieve direct knowledge of God by applying the logic of science." —Publishers Weekly In this expanded paperback edition of the critically acclaimed biography (...) of a true American original, the philosopher-polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, Joseph Brent refines his interpretation of Peirce’s thought and character based on new research, and has added a glossary and a detailed chronology. (shrink)

We here present explicit relational theories of a class of geometrical systems (namely, inner product spaces) which includes Euclidean space and Minkowski spacetime. Using an embedding approach suggested by the theory of measurement, we prove formally that our theories express the entire empirical content of the corresponding geometric theory in terms of empirical relations among a finite set of elements (idealized point-particles or events) thought of as embedded in the space. This result is of interest within the general phenomenalist tradition (...) as well as the theory of space and time, since it seems to be the first example of an explicit phenomenalist reconstruction of a realist theory which is provably equivalent to it in observational consequences. The interesting paper "On the Space-Time Ontology of Physical Theories" by Ken Manders, Philosophy of Science, vol. 49, number 4, December 1982, p. 575-590, has significant affinities to this one. We both, in a sense, try to formally vindicate Leibniz's notion of a relational theory of space, by constructing theories of spatial relations among physical objects which are provably equivalent to the standard absolutist theories. The essential difference between our approaches is that Manders retains Leibniz's explicitly modal framework, whereas I do not. Manders constructs a spacetime theory which explicitly characterizes the totality of possible configurations of physical objects, using a modal language in which the notion of a possible configuration occurs as a primitive. There is no doubt that this is a more accurate realization of Leibniz's own conception of space than the embedding-based approach developed here. However, it also remains open to objections (such as those cited here from Sklar) on account of the special appeal to modal notions. Our approach here, by contrast, aims to avoid the special appeal to modal notions by giving directly a set of laws which are satisfied by a configuration individually, if and only if it is one of the allowable ones. One thus avoids the need for reference to possible but not actual configurations or objects, in the statement of the spacetime laws. We may then take this alternative set of laws as the actual geometric theory, and do away with the hypothetical entity called 'space'. Yet at the same time there is no invocation of modality, except in the ordinary sense in which every physical theory constrains what is possible. So that a relationalist is not forced to utilize a modal language (though Leibniz certainly does.). (shrink)

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Sixth Sense: Its Cultivation and Use" by Charles Henry Brent. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Income inequality in the US has now reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Management, as a field of scholarly inquiry, has the potential to contribute in significant ways to our understanding of recent inequality trends. We review and assess recent research, both in the management literature and in other fields. We then delineate a conceptual framework that highlights the mechanisms through which business practice may be linked to income inequality. We then outline four general areas in which management scholars (...) are uniquely positioned to contribute to ongoing research: data and description, organizational dynamics, collective action, and value flows and tradeoffs. To stimulate future research, we highlight a number of relevant research questions and link these questions to existing management research streams that could be leveraged to address them. (shrink)

In this interview, Daniel Little provides an overview of his life and work in academia. Among other things, he discusses an actor-centred approach to theory of social ontology. For Little, this approach complements the assumptions of critical realism, in that it accords full ontological importance to social structures, causal mechanisms, and enduring and influential normative systems. The approach casts doubt, however, on the idea of ‘strong emergence' of social structures, the idea that social structures have properties and causal (...) powers that cannot, in principle be explained by their constituents (social actors) and their relationships. Little’s approach to social ontology endorses instead the idea of relative explanatory autonomy. During the interview, many points of convergence become evident between this actor-centred approach to social ontology and the fundamental insights of critical realism. According to Little, analysis of social ontology also turns out to be especially relevant to philosophy of history. (shrink)

Recent work on interpretability in machine learning and AI has focused on the building of simplified models that approximate the true criteria used to make decisions. These models are a useful pedagogical device for teaching trained professionals how to predict what decisions will be made by the complex system, and most importantly how the system might break. However, when considering any such model it’s important to remember Box’s maxim that "All models are wrong but some are useful." We focus on (...) the distinction between these models and explanations in philosophy and sociology. These models can be understood as a "do it yourself kit" for explanations, allowing a practitioner to directly answer "what if questions" or generate contrastive explanations without external assistance. Although a valuable ability, giving these models as explanations appears more difficult than necessary, and other forms of explanation may not have the same trade-offs. We contrast the different schools of thought on what makes an explanation, and suggest that machine learning might benefit from viewing the problem more broadly. (shrink)

Introduction -- Spinoza : a user's guide -- The curious incident of the rude driver in the SUV -- What's love got to do with it? -- On not being oneself or the shmoopy effect -- The big picture -- What is mind? : no matter : what is matter? : never mind -- True freedom -- Bodies in motion -- The body politic -- Religion -- The environment -- Conclusion: How to be a Spinozist in three easy steps.

Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is a powerful examination of current metaphors for and synonyms of teaching. It offers an account of the varied and conflicting influences and conceptual commitments that have contributed to contemporary vocabularies--and that are in some ways maintained by those vocabularies, in spite of inconsistencies and incompatibilities among popular terms. The concern that frames the book is how speakers of English invented (in the original sense of the word, "came upon") our current vocabularies for teaching. Conceptually, (...) this book is unique in the educational literature. As a whole, it presents an overview of the major underlying philosophical and ideological concepts and traditions related to knowledge, learning, and teaching in the Western world, concisely introducing readers to the central historical and contemporary discourses that shape current discussions and beliefs in the field. Because the organization of historical, philosophical, theoretical, and etymological information is around key conceptual divergences in Western thought rather than any sort of chronology, this text is not a linear history, but several histories--or, more precisely, it is a genealogy. Specifically, it is developed around breaks in opinion that gave or are giving rise to diverse interpretations of knowledge, learning, and teaching--highlighting historical moments in which vibrant new figurative understandings of teaching emerged and moments at which they froze into literalness. The book is composed of two sorts of chapters, "branching" and "teaching." Branching chapters include an opening treatment of the break in opinion, separate discussions of each branch, and a summary of the common assumptions and shared histories of the two branches. Teaching chapters offer brief etymological histories and some of the practical implications of the terms for teaching that were coined, co-opted, or redefined within the various traditions. Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is an essential text for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and foundations of teaching and is highly relevant as well for students, faculty, and researchers across the field of education. (shrink)

Using clear language and numerous examples, each chapter of this guide analyses an individual plateau from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, interpreting the work for students and scholars.

The capacity to collect and analyse data is growing exponentially. Referred to as ‘Big Data’, this scientific, social and technological trend has helped create destabilising amounts of information, which can challenge accepted social and ethical norms. Big Data remains a fuzzy idea, emerging across social, scientific, and business contexts sometimes seemingly related only by the gigantic size of the datasets being considered. As is often the case with the cutting edge of scientific and technological progress, understanding of the ethical implications (...) of Big Data lags behind. In order to bridge such a gap, this article systematically and comprehensively analyses academic literature concerning the ethical implications of Big Data, providing a watershed for future ethical investigations and regulations. Particular attention is paid to biomedical Big Data due to the inherent sensitivity of medical information. By means of a meta-analysis of the literature, a thematic narrative is provided to guide ethicists, data scientists, regulators and other stakeholders through what is already known or hypothesised about the ethical risks of this emerging and innovative phenomenon. Five key areas of concern are identified: informed consent, privacy, ownership, epistemology and objectivity, and ‘Big Data Divides’ created between those who have or lack the necessary resources to analyse increasingly large datasets. Critical gaps in the treatment of these themes are identified with suggestions for future research. Six additional areas of concern are then suggested which, although related have not yet attracted extensive debate in the existing literature. It is argued that they will require much closer scrutiny in the immediate future: the dangers of ignoring group-level ethical harms; the importance of epistemology in assessing the ethics of Big Data; the changing nature of fiduciary relationships that become increasingly data saturated; the need to distinguish between ‘academic’ and ‘commercial’ Big Data practices in terms of potential harm to data subjects; future problems with ownership of intellectual property generated from analysis of aggregated datasets; and the difficulty of providing meaningful access rights to individual data subjects that lack necessary resources. Considered together, these eleven themes provide a thorough critical framework to guide ethical assessment and governance of emerging Big Data practices. (shrink)

By combining and augmenting recent arguments that have appeared in the literature, I show how a modified Rawlsian theory of justice generates a strong environmental and animal rights ethic. These modifications include significant changes in the conditions of the contract situation vis-a-vis A Theory of Justice, but I argue that these modifications are in fact more consistent with Rawls’ basic assumptions about the functions of a veil of ignorance and a thin theory of the good.

In ‘Represent me: please! Towards an ethics of digital twins in medicine’,1 Braun analyses the potential for simulations of human organs and bodies, or ‘digital twins,’ to faithfully a person. Drawing from several French philosophers, he introduces ‘first conditions for digital twins to take on an ethically justifiable form of representation’.1 The analysis predominantly focuses on challenges that arise in terms of representation, embodiment, control by the patients after which the twin is modelled. Many challenges are posited on the existence (...) of digital twins as autonomous technologies capable of acting on behalf of the patient. One may be reasonably sceptical about the potential to achieve ‘digital twins’ in the near future; the author, to his credit, acknowledges this fact in the section ‘Simulating a precise efficacy’ while still providing a faithful overview of a nascent field of development. Given the state of development described in the paper, the risk of autonomous digital twins in the near future seems remote. There are two clear ethical risks of digital twin which, to my reading, deserve more attention than they receive in Braun’s analysis. Let us refer to these as the ‘near-term’ challenges of digital twins, in the sense that their significance does not turn on the degree of agency or embodiment of digital twins, but rather their mere existence and potential …. (shrink)

This paper poses the question of whether people have a duty to participate in digital epidemiology. While an implied duty to participate has been argued for in relation to biomedical research in general, digital epidemiology involves processing of non-medical, granular and proprietary data types that pose different risks to participants. We first describe traditional justifications for epidemiology that imply a duty to participate for the general public, which take account of the immediacy and plausibility of threats, and the identifiability of (...) data. We then consider how these justifications translate to digital epidemiology, understood as an evolution of traditional epidemiology that includes personal and proprietary digital data alongside formal medical datasets. We consider the risks imposed by re-purposing such data for digital epidemiology and propose eight justificatory conditions that should be met in justifying a duty to participate for specific digital epidemiological studies. The conditions are then applied to three hypothetical cases involving usage of social media data for epidemiological purposes. We conclude with a list of questions to be considered in public negotiations of digital epidemiology, including the application of a duty to participate to third-party data controllers, and the important distinction between moral and legal obligations to participate in research. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Psychedelic substances have great promise for the treatment of many conditions, and they are the subject of intensive research. As with other medical treatments, both research and clinical use of psychedelics depend on our ability to ensure informed consent by patients and research participants. However, some have argued that informed consent for psychedelic use may be impossible, because psychedelic experiences can be transformative in the sense articulated by L. A. Paul (2014). For Paul, transformative experiences involve either the acquisition of (...) knowledge that cannot be obtained in any other way or changes in the self. Either of these characteristics may appear to undermine informed consent. This article argues, however, that there is limited evidence that psychedelic experiences are transformative in Paul's sense, and that they may not differ in their transformative features from other common medical experiences for which informed consent is clearly possible. Further, even if psychedelic experiences can be transformative, informed consent is still possible. Because psychedelic experiences are importantly different in several respects from other medical experiences, this article closes with recommendations for how these differences should be reflected in informed consent processes. (shrink)

What makes a consensus among scientists credible and convincing? This paper introduces the notion of a "hard-won" consensus and uses examples from recent debates over climate change science to show that this heuristic standard for evaluating the quality of a consensus is widely shared. The extent to which a consensus is "hard won" can be understood to depend on the personal qualities of the participating experts; the article demonstrates the continuing utility of the norms of modern science introduced by Robert (...) K. Merton by showing that individuals on both sides of the climate science debate rely intuitively on Mertonian ideas—interpreted in terms of character—to frame their arguments. (shrink)

The numerical representations of measurement, geometry and kinematics are here subsumed under a general theory of representation. The standard theories of meaningfulness of representational propositions in these three areas are shown to be special cases of two theories of meaningfulness for arbitrary representational propositions: the theories based on unstructured and on structured representation respectively. The foundations of the standard theories of meaningfulness are critically analyzed and two basic assumptions are isolated which do not seem to have received adequate justification: the (...) assumption that a proposition invariant under the appropriate group is therefore meaningful, and the assumption that representations should be unique up to a transformation of the appropriate group. A general theory of representational meaningfulness is offered, based on a semantic and syntactic analysis of representational propositions. Two neglected features of representational propositions are formalized and made use of: (a) that such propositions are induced by more general propositions defined for other structures than the one being represented, and (b) that the true purpose of representation is the application of the theory of the representing system to the represented system. On the basis of these developments, justifications are offered for the two problematic assumptions made by the existing theories. (shrink)