Bioethics should pay more attention to globalization and some of its consequences than it has done so far. The COVID-19 pandemic would not have been possible without globalization, which has also increased some of its negative consequences. Globalization has intensified wildlife trade in the world. One of the main hypotheses about the origin of this pandemic is that it originated in illegal forms of wildlife trade in China. In the last 30 or 40 years, there have been zoonotic outbreaks at (...) a much frequent pace than before, many of those have been related to wildlife trade. Legal and illegal wildlife trade has grown in the shadow of globalization. Second, globalization has had a huge impact on the redistribution of wealth in the world. Since 1990 income inequality has increased in most high- and in many middle- and low-income countries. A country’s level of pre-COVID income inequality is the best predictor of the COVID death rate. These two issues are not unrelated. People living in poverty in LMIC tend to suffer more from infectious diseases and tend to be marginalized from the health sector. Additionally, poverty tends to reproduce the conditions under which zoonotic diseases can more easily spread. (shrink)

Se recogen en este texto, transcrito por Javier Martínez Contreras, redactor de todos los textos presentados oralmente en el Coloquio sobre Hermenéutica y sentido, coordinado por Andrés Ortiz-Osés, la destacada participación de Zabala, Grondin y Ortiz-Osés, en su dispuatio acerca de sus tesis hermen..

I argue that men can be oppressed by virtue of being men; however, our definitions of men and masculinity must be redefined and reclaimed from the dominant white perspective. My claims are: (1) current arguments on the oppression of men simpliciter are misguided as they fail to encompass the experiences of all men; (2) any question regarding the oppression of men must reject the current static and universal definition of men; (3) the oppression of men is an instantiation of structural (...) oppression that allows for men to be both privileged and oppressed in different, forms, degrees, and dimensions; (4) the oppression of Latino men qua Latino men is an example of men being oppressed as men. Therefore, (5) we must redefine and reclaim the definition of “men” and “masculinity.” Last, (6) this redefinition cannot be done a priori but must use intersectionality as a regulative method to illuminate the oppression of men that remains obscured in other, one-dimensional approaches to the topic of the oppression of men. (shrink)

En este artículo argumento que la distinción entre los términos “ética” y “moral” es estipulativa y que nada nos impone un cierto significado de los términos: ni su etimología ni la tradición filosófica. Argumento específicamente en contra de una estipulación según la cual “ética” se refiere a la afirmación de la conciencia individual autónoma o auténtica, mientras que “moral”, a la esfera de la observancia de reglas impuestas por la sociedad. Si el propósito de la estipulación es mostrar la mayor (...) importancia relativa de la primera sobre la segunda, por sí sola, esta distinción no nos da ninguna justificación de por qué la conducta ética es superior a la moral. Nada realmente significativo, fuera del ámbito de la teoría que hace la distinción, depende de la estipulación terminológica entre “ética” y “moral”. (shrink)

This article explores the possibility that there is a parental duty to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for the medical benefit of future children. Using one genetic disorder as a paradigmatic example, we find that such a duty can be supported in some situations on both ethical and legal grounds. Our analysis shows that an ethical case in favor of this position can be made when potential parents are aware that a possible future child is at substantial risk of inheriting (...) a serious genetic condition. We further argue that a legal case for a duty to use PGD for medical benefit can be made in situations in which potential parents have chosen to conceive through in vitro fertilization and know that any children conceived are at substantial risk of having a serious genetic condition. (shrink)

El neodualismo postanalítico atribuyó a Russell, el primer Wittgenstein y Popper una actitud radicalmente anti-fundamentalista, con posterioridad a la teoría de los juegos del lenguaje del segundo Wittgenstein, debido a tres motivos, al menos según Von Wright y Apel, a saber: la fundamentación dogmática inductivista del positivismo lógico en los dos primeros casos; las sucesivas refundaciones meramente hipotéticas del racionalismo crítico en Popper; y, finalmente, la fundamentación explicativo-comprensiva preconizada de un modo meliorista por el pragmatismo semántico en aquel último caso. (...) Pero a pesar de este acuerdo básico, von Wright y Apel discreparon acerca del sentido meramente pragmático, o más bien pragmático-transcendental que, a pesar de todo, se debería seguir otorgando a la noción de fundamentación en los seguidores de estas nuevas tendencias del neodualismo postanalítico. (shrink)

El principal problema del panpsiquismo es el problema de la combinación. Como solución se distinguen dos tipos de panpsiquismo: el panpsiquismo constitutivo y el panpsiquismo emergentista. Pero esta distinción opera sobre la distinción entre fundación y causalidad. Sin embargo, se verán razones para considerar que causalidad y fundación no son distintos. De modo que la distinción entre los anteriores panpsiquismos colapsa. Posibilitando la postulación de un nuevo tipo de panpsiquismo, el panpsiquismo de construcción. También, se trazará un primer esbozo de (...) solución para el problema de la combinación desde el punto de vista del panpsiquismo de construcción. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the claim that the successful reduction of qualitative to physical states requires some sort of intelligible connection between our qualitative and physical concepts, which in turn requires a conceptual analysis of our qualitative concepts in causal-functional terms. While I defend this claim against some of its recent critics, I ultimately dispute it, and propose a different way to get the requisite intelligible connection between qualitative and physical concepts.

Several countries have implemented COVID-19 health passes or certificates to promote a safer return to in-person social activities. These passes have been proposed as a way to prove that someone has been vaccinated, has recovered from the disease, or has negative results on a diagnostic test. However, many people have questioned their ethical justification. This article presents some practical and ethical problems to consider in the event of wishing to implement these passes. Among the former, it is questioned how accurate (...) diagnostic tests are as a means of ensuring that a person is not contagious, whether vaccination guarantees immunity, the fact that health passes can be forged, whether they encourage vaccination, and the problem that there is no universally recognized health pass. Among the ethical issues, it is discussed whether health passes promote discrimination and inequality and whether they violate rights to privacy and freedom. It is concluded that health passes have enough ethical justification to be implemented. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow’s argument that, for the foreseeable future, genome editing will be an identity-affecting intervention subject to the critique of the nonidentity problem (Sparrow 2022) is convincing...

Little is known of Edmund Husserl's direct encounter with Georg Cantor's ideas on Platonic idealism and the abstraction of number concepts during the late 19th century, when Husserl's philosophical orientation changed considerably and definitely. Closely analyzing and comparing the two men's writings during that important time in their intellectual careers, I describe the crucial shift in Husserl's views on psychologism and metaphysical idealism as it relates to Cantor's philosophy of arithmetic. I thus establish connections between their ideas which have been (...) until now been virtually unsuspected and contribute to a better understanding of the development of Husserl's thought and of the philosophical and metaphysical ideas within which Cantor chose to frame his theories. (shrink)

Many authors have described the ethical issues associated with international adoption for all members of the adoption triad, including adoptive parents, birth parents and the adopted child, and for both sending and receiving countries. This paper explores how political variants of care ethics, combined with a narrative approach to practice, can be used as a conceptual framework for ethically informed practice with families formed via international adoption. Political variants of care ethics foreground the particularized needs of the individual, but also (...) take into account the broader social, political, economic and cultural dynamics in which the experience of individuals occurs. This framework is particularly applicable to collaborative work with individuals or groups, such as families formed via international adoption, whose experience is both highly individualized and shaped by broader contexts and issues of social justice. This paper describes how changes in the social construction of international adoption have meaning for applied ethics and practice. Political variants of care ethics are then explored as a framework for ethical decision making. Finally, the relevance of a narrative, approach to practice is considered. This approach focuses on understanding the needs and experiences of families from their own points of view and within the social, economic, cultural and political contexts in which they have lived; linking a relationship-based, narrative approach to practice to important assumptions in many models of care ethics. (shrink)

In recent years, functionalism has emerged as the most appealing candidate for a materialistic theory of mind. Its central thesis - that types of mental states can be defined in terms of their causal and counterfactual relations to the sensory stimulations, other internal states, and behavior of the entities that have them - offers hope for a reasonable materialism: it promises type-identity conditions for beliefs, sensations, and emotions that are not irreducibly mental, yet would permit entities that are physically quite (...) different to be in mental states of the same type. (shrink)

Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role. We refer to these two hypotheses as instrumental agency (...) and constitutive agency, respectively. Evidence comes from a variety of fields, including neural, behavioral, and phenomenological research, but so far with confounds that prevent an experimental distinction between these hypotheses. Here we advance the debate by proposing a novel double-participant setup that aims to isolate agency as the key variable that distinguishes bodily movement in active and passive conditions of perception. We pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. There was no evidence favoring the stronger hypothesis of constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, we caution that during debriefing several participants reported using cognitive strategies that did not rely on spatial perception. We conclude that this approach is a viable direction for future research, but that greater care is required to establish and confirm the desired modality of first-person experience. (shrink)

Arguing for censorship of the poets in the Republic, Socrates draws most of his examples from Homer. These examples often depict soldiers facing death on the battlefield. Homer, in turn, often represents a soldier’s death with the image of dogs and birds scavenging upon his body. Homer’s representations of death, then, often include dogs or birds, and these images are found in the near background of Plato’s Republic. How does Plato himself use these animal images? I discuss Plato’s depictions of (...) dogs and birds, and characterize his general notion of their function in moral education and mental functioning. (shrink)

En este artículo analizo la idea de que se puede hacer filosofía a través de la poesía y trato de darle sentido a la expresión “poesía filosófica”. Sostengo que hay básicamente dos modos de entender esta expresión: 1) como ejemplificación, es decir, la poesía puede servir como ejemplo filosófico de distintas maneras; y 2) como articulación de una teoría filosófica. Aquí analizo la idea de que se puede obtener un tipo de conocimiento sui generis a través de la poesía, así (...) como la de que la poesía puede justificar supuestas verdades filosóficas. Rechazo estas dos ideas y, con ellas, la tesis de que se puede articular una teoría filosófica a través de la poesía. Sin embargo, acepto que no hay nada intrínseco a la poesía que le impida hacerlo, aunque, en general, esto no sucede. (shrink)

This paper has two specific goals. The first is to demonstrate that the theorem in MetaphysicsΘ 9, 1051a24-27 is not equiva-lent to Euclid’s Proposition 32 of book I (which contradicts some Aristotelian commentators, such as W. D. Ross, J. L. Heiberg, and T. L. Heith). Agreeing with Henry Mendell’s analysis, I ar-gue that the two theorems are not equivalent, but I offer different reasons for such divergence: I propose a pedagogical-philosoph-ical reason for the Aristotelian theorem being shorter than the Euclidean (...) one (and the previous Aristotelian versions). Aristotle wants to emphasize the deductive procedure as a satisfactory method to discover scientific knowledge. The second objective, opposing some consensus about geometrical deductions/theo-rems in Aristotle, is to briefly propose that the theorem, exactly as we found it in Metaphysics and without any emendation to the text (therefore opposing Henry Mendell’s suggested amend-ments), allows the ancient philosopher to demonstrate that universal mathematical knowledge is in potence in geometrical figures. This tentatively proves that Aristotle emphasizes that geometrical deduction is sufficient to actualize mathematical knowledge. (shrink)