In this paper, I am concerned with what automation—widely considered to be the “future of work”—holds for the artificially intelligent agents we aim to employ. My guiding question is whether it is normatively problematic to employ artificially intelligent agents like, for example, autonomous robots as workers. The answer I propose is the following. There is nothing inherently normatively problematic about employing autonomous robots as workers. Still, we must not put them to perform just any work, if we want to avoid (...) blame. This might not sound like much of a limitation. Interestingly, however, we can argue for this claim based on metaphysically and normatively parsimonious grounds. Namely, all I rely on when arguing for my claim is that the robots we aim to employ exhibit a kind of autonomy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Historico‐theological Debates From History to Philosophy Conclusions References and Further Reading.

I. Allgemeine Betrachtungen.--II. Die Erfahrung.--III. Kausalität, Hypothesen.--IV. Fortsetzung.--V. Naturwissenschaftliche prinzipe.--VI. Die Erkenntnis.

A mutual fund family incubates a fund when it creates a privately subsidized fund not available to the general investing public. It destroys unsuccessful incubator funds. The few successful funds will report higher incubation returns than the market return in advertisements intended to attract money from individual investors. This practice is currently allowed by the SEC. The evidence is that incubation returns are not a good predictor of subsequent fund performance and likely serve to mislead unsuspecting investors.

How can we enhance police integrity? The authors surveyed over 3000 police officers from 30 U.S. police departments on how they would respond to typical scenarios where integrity is challenged. They studied three police agencies which scored highly on the integrity scale: Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and St. Petersburg, Florida. The authors conclude that enhancing police integrity goes well beyond culling out "bad apple" police officers. Police administrators should focus on four aspects: organizational rulemaking; detecting, investigating and disciplining (...) rule violations; circumscribing the informal "code of silence" that prohibits police from reporting the misconduct of their colleagues; and understanding the influence of public expectations and agency history. (shrink)

First published in 1960. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In his newly reissued and revised book, the philosopher Ian Dearden at- tempts a critical inquiry into a philosophical position he calls “nonsensi- calism,” which he takes to correspond to the view “that it is possible to be mistaken in thinking one means anything by what one says”.1 He holds that an unexamined assumption to this effect is implicit in a large swathe of philosophical work dating from a period stretching throughout most of the 20th century, thanks to the widespread (...) tendency of philosophers to accuse each other of talk- ing nonsense. This is, according to the author of the book, most visible in the earlier and later philosophical writings of Wittgenstein, in logical pos- itivism, and in representatives of the Oxford-based “ordinary language” philosophy movement, as well as in the writings of many of those subse- quently writing under the influence of these. Dearden coins a special term to refer to the sort of error that philosophers are accusing each other of having committed: he calls such cases of error “illusions of meaning.”. (shrink)