Artificial intelligence (AI) assurance is an umbrella term describing many approaches—such as impact assessment, audit, and certification procedures—used to provide evidence that an AI system is legal, ethical, and technically robust. AI assurance approaches largely focus on two overlapping categories of harms: deployment harms that emerge at, or after, the point of use, and individual harms that directly impact a person as an individual. Current approaches generally overlook upstream collective and societal harms associated with the development of systems, such as (...) resource extraction and processing, exploitative labour practices and energy intensive model training. Thus, the scope of current AI assurance practice is insufficient for ensuring that AI is ethical in a holistic sense, i.e. in ways that are legally permissible, socially acceptable, economically viable and environmentally sustainable. This article addresses this shortcoming by arguing for a broader approach to AI assurance that is sensitive to the full scope of AI development and deployment harms. To do so, the article maps harms related to AI and highlights three examples of harmful practices that occur upstream in the AI supply chain and impact the environment, labour, and data exploitation. It then reviews assurance mechanisms used in adjacent industries to mitigate similar harms, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and how effectively they are being applied to AI. Finally, it provides recommendations as to how a broader approach to AI assurance can be implemented to mitigate harms more effectively across the whole AI supply chain. (shrink)

"This work explores some of the most interesting and vexing issues concerning contemporary marriage, including contraception, reproductive technology, and divorce. Appealing to reason rather than religious authority, the book tackles the most controversial and talked about moral teachings of the Catholic Church and argues for their reasonableness."--Front jacket flap.

Appealing to reason rather than religious belief, this book is the most comprehensive case against the choice of abortion yet published. _The Ethics of Abortion_ critically evaluates all the major grounds for denying fetal personhood, including the views of those who defend not only abortion but also infanticide. It also provides several justifications for the conclusion that all human beings, including those in utero, should be respected as persons. This book also critiques the view that abortion is not wrong even (...) if the human fetus is a person. _The Ethics of Abortion_ examines hard cases for those who are prolife, such as abortion in cases of rape or in order to save the mother’s life, as well as hard cases for defenders of abortion, such as sex selection abortion and the rationale for being “personally opposed” but publically supportive of abortion. It concludes with a discussion of whether artificial wombs might end the abortion debate. Answering the arguments of defenders of abortion, this book provides reasoned justification for the view that all intentional abortions are morally wrong and that doctors and nurses who object to abortion should not be forced to act against their consciences. (shrink)

DMet 10: Prime matter is the origin of all quantities. Hence it is the origin of every dimension of continuous quantity whatever. ...

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extends further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is necessary (...) to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice. (shrink)

Questions about the dignity of the human person give rise to many of the most central and hotly disputed topics in bioethics. In _A Defense of Dignity: Creating Life, Destroying Life, and Protecting the Rights of Conscience_, Christopher Kaczor investigates whether each human being has intrinsic dignity and whether the very concept of "dignity" has a useful place in contemporary ethical debates. Kaczor explores a broad range of issues addressed in contemporary bioethics, including whether there is a duty of (...) "procreative beneficence," the ethics of ectopic pregnancy, and the possibility of "rescuing" human embryos with human wombs or artificial wombs. _A Defense of Dignity_ also treats issues relevant to the end of life, including physician-assisted suicide, provision of food and water to patients in a persistent vegetative state, and how to proceed with organ donation following death. Finally, what are the duties and prerogatives of health care professionals who refuse in conscience to take part in activities that they regard as degrading to human dignity? Should they be forced to do what they consider to be violations of the patient's well being, or does patient autonomy always trump the conscience of a health care professional? Grounded in the Catholic intellectual and moral tradition, _A Defense of Dignity_ argues that all human beings from the beginning to the end of their lives should be treated with respect and considers how this belief should be applied in controversial cases. "_A Defense of Dignity_ provides a skillful, informed, and clear philosophical analysis, from a natural law perspective, of a range of controversial, and sometimes complex, bioethical questions concerning the beginning and end of life. Few authors approach bioethics from a natural law perspective, and few do it as well as Christopher Kaczor. The book should be of interest not only to natural law philosophers and their students, but also to anyone interested in bioethics." —_John Keown, Georgetown University__ "Moral questions at the beginning and ending of life and controversies over liberty of conscience are among the most vexing and important issues of our day. Christopher Kaczor brings his characteristic moral seriousness and philosophical good sense to his treatment of these issues, all of which implicate the key concept of human dignity. This eminently readable collection will provide an invaluable resource for educators and students alike." — Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina_ “Indispensable. Kaczor untangles the various meanings of human dignity to undertake a reexamination of the most serious and difficult issues in medical ethics. The book combines clarity with philosophical precision, faithfulness to Catholic teaching with a thorough engagement with critics." —_J. Budziszewski, University of Texas at Austin_. (shrink)

This teaching case focuses on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at a museum. At the beginning of 2021, the organization found itself in a crisis when more than 2,000 community members and 85 anonymous employees demanded the resignation of the museum’s President due to the language he defended in a job posting advocating for a job applicant to diversify audiences while “maintaining the traditional white core audience of the museum” (Salaz 2021). Students take on the role of an external consultant (...) to assess DEI maturity at the museum. The case challenges students to propose implementation and impact metrics for a DEI action plan. The case facts provide a timely and relevant setting to discuss DEI challenges in not-for-profit organizations. (shrink)

Waiting belongs to the greatly overlooked practices of everyday life, and among the many fields enforcing waiting times, transportation certainly accounts for a most prominent generator.

I met Ernie in 1965 on the wrestling mats of our high school in North Bergen, New Jersey, a township on top of the plateau overlooking Hoboken and across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Hoboken then was still the Hoboken of Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” (1954).1 Even though the Hudson was less than a mile across at that point, it was a wide spiritual divide. We were Jersey boys, not New Yorkers. Ernie was as ambitious as I was about (...) wrestling, and, so, after the season was over, we used to take a bus to Journal Square in Jersey City, and then walk about eight city blocks to a gym to lift weights. In those days, high schools didn’t have weight rooms; and gyms were scarce, men only, quite filthy, and entirely devoid of cardio equipment and Nautilus machines. They were all sweat, grunts, groans, and clanking iron. By 1968, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, after a grueling wrestling practice at the high school, we would take a bus to New York City (it took about a half hour to get into “the City” by bus, less if the Lincoln Tunnel was not crowded), and then a short subway ride up to the New York Athletic Club on 59th street, across from Central Park, to spend a couple of hours working out with former university wrestling stars—guys in their mid-twenties from places like Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Iowa—who were training to make the Olympic team. Even with all of this wrestling time, we were frustrated by the fact that there was nowhere to work out on Sundays. We investigated and found out that the Jersey City YMCA had a wrestling mat and was open on Sundays. We then spent our Sunday afternoons working out there, so as not to miss a day of wrestling. Wrestling was our savior: a healthy way to get out anger.2 But it wasn’t all wrestling. We did something else too: We talked. We spent many hours together introspecting out loud, and just trying to make sense of things. Ernie has mentioned in print one early topic of discussion: “We spent years trying to solve various logical conundra like how on earth the Virgin Mary could have been a virgin.... (shrink)

(2010). The Theatrical Satanism of Self-Awareness Itself. Angelaki: Vol. 15, shadows of cruelty sadism, masochism and the philosophical muse – part two, pp. 29-43.

We address the question of the effectiveness of affirmative action agreements concluded by a regulatory body with employers in order to achieve greater equality in employment. We analyse the pattern of affirmative action agreements concluded by the Fair Employment Commission with employers in Northern Ireland between 1990 and 2000. We examine the association between these agreements and changes occurring in the religio-political composition of these employer's workforces during that period, based on a statistical analysis of monitoring data collected by the (...) Commission from employers, compared with employers that did not enter into such agreements. We find that firms reaching agreements with the Commission demonstrated significant evidence of change over the decade. We conclude that such agreements were likely to have been an integral part of the processes driving change in the Northern Ireland labour market in the 1990s. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ranks alongside Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as one of the most profound and influential works in moral philosophy ever written.

We focus on Folieism, Rey's brand of Eliminativism about languages, according to which words, sentences, phonemes, and such, and consequently languages, do not exist; they are intentional inexistents, on a par with unicorns that speakers, under an ineluctable illusion, mistake as real. We present a simplified reconstruction of his argument, challenge what we take to be its presuppositions, and argue that its conclusion has unwanted social/ethical consequences and construes linguistics writ large in a strange light, as a kind of pretense, (...) leading us to reject Folieism. (shrink)

The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated (...) according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of _human_ nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences. A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference. (shrink)

Fictional terms are terms that have null extensions, and in this regard pejorative terms are a species of fictional terms: although there are Jews, there are no kikes. That pejoratives are fictions is the central consequence of the Moral and Semantic Innocence (MSI) view of Hom et al. (2013). There it is shown that for pejoratives, null extensionality is the semantic realization of the moral fact that no one ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation solely in virtue (...) of their group membership. In having null extensions, pejorative terms are much like mythological terms like ‘unicorn horn’ that express concepts with empty extensions, even though it was thought otherwise: people who falsely believed the mythology were mislead into thinking that ordinary objects (i.e. whale tusks) were magical objects, and pejoratives terms work likewise. For example, the term ‘kike’ is supported by the ideology of anti-Semitism, and speakers who fall prey to its influence (perniciously or not) are mislead into thinking that ordinary people (i.e. Jews) are inherently worthy of contempt. In this paper, we explore the consequences of this parallelism, with an eye to criticisms of MSI. In particular, we will re-visit identity expressivist views - those that hold that there are kikes and that they are Jews, and hence deny null extensionality - arguing that this embeds a mistake of fiction for fact. Among the issues to be discussed are the role of fictional truth in understanding pejorative sentences and the relation of the semantics of pejoratives to offensive use of language. We conclude with meta-semantic reflections on the origins of word meanings. (shrink)

Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen argue that human beings have fundamental dignity and basic rights (“human rights”) in virtue of the kind of entity they are—creatures bearing a rational nature. The indicia of a rational nature are the basic natural capacities—which obtain from the point a rational creature comes into existence—for thinking, deliberating, and choosing, whether or not these capacities are immediately exercisable. All human beings, including those who are asleep, or under general anesthesia, or who are in (...) deep comas or persistent minimally conscious states, are bearers of a rational nature. The same is true of those suffering even severe cognitive disabilities. A person with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, for example, has not undergone a change of nature—he is not a creature different in species or otherwise different in kind from what he was before the onset of the disease. Bearers of fundamental dignity and basic rights, which includes all human beings, must not be treated as mere objects or instruments by, for example, subjecting them to damaging or deadly experimentation designed for the benefit of others. So the question at the heart of debates over human embryo research is the empirical one, fully accessible to inquiry using scientific methods of analysis: Is the human embryo, from the formation of the zygote forward, a human being, viz., a living member of the species Homo sapiens. George and Tollefsen assess the evidence and conclude that the answer to that question is unambiguously yes. (shrink)