The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose significant health, economic, and social challenges. Given that many of these challenges have moral relevance, the present studies investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic is influencing moral decision-making and whether moralisation of behaviours specific to the crisis predict adherence to government-recommended behaviours. Whilst we find no evidence that utilitarian endorsements have changed during the pandemic at two separate timepoints, individuals have moralised non-compliant behaviours associated with the pandemic such as failing to physically distance themselves from (...) others. Importantly, our findings show that this moralisation predicts sustained individual compliance with government-recommended behaviours. (shrink)

As a member of the BRAIN Neuroethics Subgroup, which drafted the Neuroethics Roadmap, I am proud of our work. The Roadmap is the result of many hours of thoughtful discussion, and reflects strong l...

People with cognitive impairments often have difficulties formulating, understanding, or articulating decisions that others judge reasonable. The frequent response shifts decision-making authority to substitutes through advance directives of the person or guardianship orders from a court. The Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities defends supported decision-making as an alternative to such forms of supplanted decision-making. But supported decision-making raises both metaphysical questions—what is required for a decision to be the person’s own?—and epistemological questions: how do we know what (...) persons judge to be their good, when they have difficulty conceptualizing and articulating? It raises practical questions, too, such as protection against risks of exploitation. This article uses a non-discrimination account of legal personhood drawn from the CRPD to explore how common features of decisions employed by people without cognitive disabilities are important in supported decision-making too. These features include prostheses, guardrails, relationships, and social contexts. (shrink)

This book identifies the organizing concepts of physical and biological phenomena by an analysis of the foundations of mathematics and physics.

In this paper, I first review previous interpretations of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, revealing their inadequacies, and then present my own interpretation. Basing mainly on Wittgenstein's notes for lectures on private sensations, I establish the following points: ‘remembering the connection right’ means ‘reidentifying sensation-types’; the reason for ‘no criterion of correctness’ is that nothing, especially no inner mechanisms nor external devices, can be utilised by the private speaker to tell whether some sensations are of one type or different types; (...) and private names are not really names, private language is not really a language, therefore, private language is a grammatical illusion. My interpretation has the advantage of being able to reconcile Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, which is to dissolve philosophical problems by rearranging grammatical facts, with his actual philosophical practice, at least in the case of private language. (shrink)

According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a (...) large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent a small number of people from certainly suffering the same harms. Along the way, I object to the ex ante view on the grounds that it gives an implausible degree of priority to preventing identified over statistical harms, and to the ex post view on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons. An insight about the nature of claims emerges from these arguments: there are three conceptually distinct senses in which a person’s claim can be said to have a certain degree of strength. I make use of the distinction between these three senses in which a claim can be said to have strength in order to set out a new, more plausible, view about the aggregation of people’s claims under risk. (shrink)

We propose a new theory to explain the nature and function of subjective experience, as a mechanism that guides the organism towards beneficial outcomes. In simple animals, that guidance takes the form of an affect producing a fitness-enhancing response. In human consciousness, there is not a single response, but a range of potential developments allowing a free choice. That range can be modelled as a local prospect: a field of possibilities centred on the present situation and coloured by valence. Building (...) on neural models of global workspace and adaptive resonance, we suggest how such a prospect could be implemented in the brain: as a halo of activation diffusing from, and feeding back into, a core of circulating activation. Using the thought experiment of qualia inversion, we argue that local prospect theory solves the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. We show how our theory explains key characteristics of consciousness: subjectivity, feeling, free will, agency, transience, continuity, integration, selectivity, intentionality, and ‘what it is like’. (shrink)

La philosophie ici perçue comme exigence de se mouvoir dans un espace d'intelligibilité commune ouvert par les Grecs, mais en l'éveillant ou la rendant disponible à ce qui l'appelle sans qu'elle ne puisse le maîtriser : l'infini. F. Guibal avec Levinas exprime que la raison vaut comme langage et responsabilité métaphysique.

Autonomous systems are machines that can alter their behavior without direct human oversight or control. How ought we to program them to behave? A plausible starting point is given by the Reduction to Acts Thesis, according to which we ought to program autonomous systems to do whatever a human agent ought to do in the same circumstances. Although the Reduction to Acts Thesis is initially appealing, we argue that it is false: it is sometimes permissible to program a machine to (...) do something that it would be wrong for a human to do. We advance two main arguments for this claim. First, the way an autonomous system will behave can be known in advance. This knowledge can indirectly affect the behavior of other agents, while the same may not be true at the time the system actually executes its programming. Second, a lack of knowledge of the identities of the victims and beneficiaries can provide a justification during the programming phase that would be unavailable to an agent at the time the autonomous system executes its programming. (shrink)

A persistent paradox apparently infects disability civil rights claims. On the one hand, these rights claims are often understood to apply only to those who are sufficiently impaired in body or in mind to qualify for them because of the disadvantage they endure. On the other hand, asserting significant impairments threatens to undermine the plausibility of these claims as civil rights rather than as welfare for those who are dependent and in need of extra help. Behind this paradox lies a (...) type of categorical understanding of disability civil rights: that disability civil rights are only for those who fall into a category of disability and that this category should be defined in a particular way, in terms of disadvantaging disablement. In this article, I dispel this paradox by deploying a critical analysis of Elizabeth Barnes’s account of physical disability in her recent book, The Minority Body. In her book, Barnes makes the important critical point that disability is not “bad” difference. Instead, she argues that physical disability is a physical condition that the disability rights community is working to promote justice for. I argue that this account fails as a project of ameliorative social metaphysics because it fails to understand the role of impairment in the construction of disability antidiscrimination law. I also argue that her account risks privileging physical disability and is thus problematic as a starting place for examining disability justice. (shrink)

Your Eminences,Dear Brother Bishops and Priests,Dear Brothers and Sisters,Good morning and welcome. I greet Cardinal Farrell and I thank him for his words of introduction. My greeting also goes to all taking part in this international Conference, “Yes to Life! Taking Care of the Precious Gift of Life in its Frailty,” organized by the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, and by the Foundation Il Cuore in una Goccia, one of the groups that work daily in our world to welcome (...) children born in conditions of extreme frailty. These are children that the throw-away culture sometimes describes as being “unfit for life,” and thus condemned to death.No human being can ever be unfit for life, whether due to age, state of... (shrink)

If school districts want to sustain improvements that have been achieved during this period of district transformation, district leaders need to align their district, both vertically and horizontally. Alignment assures that the work of individuals supports their team goals, the work of teams supports their school's goals, the work of schools supports their clusters, and the work of clusters supports the district's strategic direction. This groudbreaking work presents qualitative information about the nature of strategic alignment in school systems and how (...) to create and sustain it. (shrink)

This study used the latent profile transition analysis to analyze whether emotional labor profiles change across time and how these profiles relate to occupational well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, quality of work life, psychological distress, and work–family conflict). A total of 155 full-time Chinese employees completed the questionnaire survey at two time points. Three latent profiles were identified at Time 1 and the same profiles were replicated at Time 2. We determined that the majority of the participants retained the original profiles. (...) Lastly, occupational well-being differed significantly across the identified profiles. The limitations and implications of this study were also provided. (shrink)

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1890 Edition.

(from t.p.) qui continet Historiam Regni Henrici Septimi, Regis Angliae -- Sermones fideles, sive, Interiora rerum -- Tractatum de sapienta veterum -- Dialogum de bello sacro -- Et Novam Atlantidem ... -- in hoc volumine, iterum excusi, includuntur Tractatus de augmentis scientiarum -- Historia ventorum -- Historia vitae [et] mortis.