Artificial intelligence is currently changing many areas of society. Especially in health, where critical decisions are made, questions of control must be renegotiated: who is in control when an automated system makes clinically relevant decisions? Increasingly, the concept of meaningful human control (MHC) is being invoked for this purpose. However, it is unclear exactly how this concept is to be understood in health. Through a systematic review, we present the current state of the concept of MHC in health. The results (...) show that there is not yet a robust MHC concept for health. We propose a broader understanding of MHC along three strands of action: enabling, exercising and evaluating control. Taking into account these strands of action and the established rules and processes in the different health sectors, the MHC concept needs to be further developed to avoid falling into two gaps, which we have described as theoretical and labelling gaps. (shrink)

This essay explores the two main objectives of Bishop’s book, which he analyzes in the context of the care for the dying: the medical metaphysics underlying medical science and biopolitics as governance of the human body. This essay discusses Bishop’s claims in view of newer developments in medicine, especially the turn to the construction of life, and confronts the concept of the patient’s sovereignty with an alternative model of vulnerable agency. In order to overcome the impasses of contemporary bioethics, the (...) essay argues that practical reason requires a two-fold ethics: first, it must develop a new hermeneutics of illness and disease, and second, in order to protect the individuals in the process of dying, moral claims concerning death must be based on the concept of human rights. (shrink)

In The Future of Human Nature, Jürgen Habermas raises the question of whether the embryonic genetic diagnosis and genetic modification threatens the foundations of the species ethics that underlies current understandings of morality. While morality, in the normative sense, is based on moral interactions enabling communicative action, justification, and reciprocal respect, the reification involved in the new technologies may preclude individuals to uphold a sense of the undisposability of human life and the inviolability of human beings that is necessary for (...) their own identity as well as for reciprocal relations. Engaging with liberal bioethics and Catholic approaches to bioethics, the article clarifies how Habermas’ position offers a radical critique of liberal autonomy while maintaining its postmetaphysical stance. The essay argues that Habermas’ approach may guide the question of rights of future generations regarding germline gene editing. But it calls for a different turn in the conversation between philosophy and theology, namely one that emphasizes the necessary attention to rights violations and injustices as a common, postmetaphysical starting point for critical theory and critical theology alike. In 2001, Jürgen Habermas published a short book on questions of biomedicine that took many by surprise.[1] To some of his students, the turn to a substantive position invoking the need to comment on a species ethics rather than outlining a public moral framework was seen as the departure from the “path of deontological virtue,”[2] and at the same time a departure from postmetaphysical reason. Habermas’ motivation to address the developments in biomedicine had certainly been sparked by the intense debate in Germany, the European Union, and internationally on human cloning, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryonic stem cell research, and human enhancement. He turned to a strand of critical theory that had been pushed to the background by the younger Frankfurt School in favor of cultural theory and social critique, even though it had been an important element of its initial working programs. The relationship of instrumental reason and critical theory, examined, among others, by Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse and taken up in Habermas’ own Knowledge and Interest and Theory of Communicative Action became ever-more actual with the development of the life sciences, human genome analysis, and genetic engineering of human offspring. Today, some of the fictional scenarios discussed at the end of the last century as “science fiction” have become reality: in 2018, the first “germline gene-edited” children were born in China.[3] Furthermore, the UK’s permission to create so-called “three-parent” children may create a legal and political pathway to hereditary germline interventions summarized under the name of “gene editing.”In this article, I want to explore Habermas’ “substantial” argument in the hope that philosophy and theology become allies in their struggle against an ever-more reifying lifeworld, which may create a “moral void” that would, at least from today’s perspective, be “unbearable”, and for upholding the conditions of human dignity, freedom, and justice. I will contextualize Habermas’ concerns in the broader discourse of bioethics, because only by doing this, his concerns are rescued from some misinterpretations.[1] Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature.[2] Ibid., 125, fn. 58. 8[3] Up to the present, no scientific publication of the exact procedure exists, but it is known that the scientist, Jiankui He, circumvented the existing national regulatory framework and may have misled the prospective parents about existing alternatives and the unprecedented nature of his conduct. Yuanwu Ma, Lianfeng Zhang, and Chuan Qin, "The First Genetically Gene‐Edited Babies: It's “Irresponsible and Too Early”," Animal Models and Experimental Medicine ; Matthias Braun, Meacham, Darian, "The Trust Game: Crispr for Human Germline Editing Unsettles Scientists and Society," EMBO reports 20, no. 2. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 3 Heft: 1 Seiten: 94-107.

Taking Catholic sexual ethics and liberal feminist ethics as points of departure, this essay argues that both frameworks are ill-prepared to deal with the moral problems raised by sex trafficking: while Catholic sexual ethics is grounded in a normative understanding of sexuality, liberal feminist ethics argues for women's sexual autonomy, resting upon freedom of action and consent. From a perspective that attends both to the phenomenological interpretation of embodied selves and the Kantian normative interpretation of dignity, it becomes possible to (...) critique both the Catholic and the liberal feminist frameworks of ethics. I argue that Catholic sexual ethics requires a reconceptualization as social ethics in order to meet the challenges of our present time, but that the shift is possible without giving up the moral imperatives of both Catholic and feminist ethics to protect human dignity and women's rights. (shrink)

In the wake of the recent global refugee and migration crisis, Hannah Arendt’s defense of the right to have political rights has become prominent again. Her work is read as an early reminder that the internationally promoted human rights regime may be merely a rhetorical reference, without the will or international authority for political action. I examine Arendt’s analysis in its historical context and then turn to consider Ricœur’s understanding of human rights. The capability to respond to and to be (...) held accountable by others marks Ricœur’s ethics of responsibility. He agrees with Arendt that legal authority must rest upon power and not domination, but he insists that the undercurrent of common power is the moral capability of an agent. The essay examines the ramifications of Ricœur’s ethics for the current crisis of refugees and migration, and it argues that he offers, at the same time, a correction useful for the ethical foundation of human rights. (shrink)

In today’s world, Artificial Intelligence plays a central role in many decision-making processes. However, its use can lead to structural and epistemic injustices—especially in the context of healt...

Vulnerability as a critique of the one-sidedness of the principle of autonomy is at risk of overemphasizing the positive dimension of vulnerability. Moreover, in the discourse on vulnerability, the threat of dehumanization (or moral vulnerability) has not been scrutinized enough ethically. Therefore, the ethics of vulnerability is insufficient when faced with the force of war that requires the conceptualization of vulnerability for political-ethics. The Russian war in Ukraine demonstrates this weakness in a striking way: the called-for openness to the other (...) as well as an active form of nonviolence, as promoted by Judith Butler, may not be an option in times of war. Continuing Jessica Benjamin’s psychoanalytic approach to mutual recognition, the essay shows that the task of morality does not rest upon broadening one’s vulnerability, but rather in understanding vulnerable agency as the dialectic of vulnerability and agency. For the further development of this dialectic, the triadic figuration is emphasized, complementing the dyadic relation of self and other. While the Third can take multiple figurations in the psychoanalytical setting, I understand the Third within the political-ethical context as the possibility of a “moral world” of nonviolence and respect. During war, the role of the bystander is to become a witness who, through the process of witnessing, advocacy, diplomacy, and justice, allows for the moral Third to reemerge. Among others, the ethics of vulnerability must spells out the price for the failure of taking on this responsibility, namely the eclipse of morality. (shrink)

Some of the most challenging questions in philosophical ethics concern the justification of action. Can you have reasons to do something that you are not, and perhaps cannot be, motivated to do? If reasons rest on desires, why respect the rights and interests of others when doing so prevents us from getting what we want? In other words, why be moral? In his 1979 essay, "Internal and External Reasons," Bernard Williams framed the dispute about reason and motivation in a way (...) that captured the philosophical imagination. An explosion of work on reasons and action followed, with influential responses by Christine Korsgaard, John McDowell, and Michael Smith. This volume collects the most important work on the topic, including Williams's seminal essay, the responses by Korsgaard, McDowell, and Smith, and more recent contributions by central figures. Taken together, the selections offer a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art work on internal reasons and a distinctive, focused approach to foundational questions of ethical objectivity. A substantive introduction by Kieran Setiya skillfully guides the reader through the theoretical and conceptual terrain, explaining what is at stake in the larger debate. The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well. In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential reading of the conditional, this appropriateness condition reduces to conditional probability under some natural circumstances. Because this is in particular the case for the so-called diagnostic reading of the conditional, this analysis might help (...) to explain some of Douven and Verbrugge’s empirical observations. (shrink)

In terms of Groenendijk and Stokhofs (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern and Moses (1984) non-monotonic theory of only knowing to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures that are triggered in subclauses not entailed by (...) the whole complex sentence. (shrink)

Cimpian et al. observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gs are f’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still treat it inferentially in a much stronger way: all Gs are f. This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’, ‘contingency’ and ‘relative difference’ from psychology to provide a uniform semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. (...) The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie’s cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics will be grounded on a strengthening of Cohen’s relative readings of generic sentences. In contrast to Leslie and Cohen, we propose a uniform semantic analysis of generics. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f’ is true because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G. We will make use of Kahneman and Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases approach, according to which people tend to confuse questions about probability with questions about representativeness, to explain pragmatically why people treat many generic statements inferentially in a much stronger way. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that interdisciplinarity (ID) is very diverse. Our contribution is a demonstration that considerable diversity exists also on the level of understandings of ID that researchers working in the same ID field express. Specifically, we analyse qualitatively, building on the method of culture contrast, six interviews with researchers working in computational linguistics and language technology in Estonia. We identify six understandings of ID expressed by the interviewees: centred on an ID method; a disciplinary method in an ID (...) field; an ID way of seeing and thinking; ID education; ID interests; one’s field as naturally ID. We show how understandings of ID are significant for analysing research practice, since they are involved in how researchers form a positive picture of themselves and their colleagues. We also show how an awareness of different understandings of ID is useful for discussing the significance of integration in ID. (shrink)

The paper analyses issues related to supervision and support of early career researchers in Estonian academia. We use nine focus groups interviews conducted in 2015 with representatives of social sciences in order to identify early career researchers’ needs with respect to support, frustrations they may experience, and resources they may have for addressing them. Our crucial contribution is the identification of wider support networks of peers and colleagues that may compensate, partially or even fully, for failures of official supervision. On (...) the basis of our analysis we argue that support for early career researchers should take into account the resources they already possess but also recognise the importance of wider academic culture, including funding and employment patterns, and the roles of supervisors and senior researchers in ensuring successful functioning of support networks. Through analysing the conditions for the development of early career researchers – producers of knowledge – our paper contributes to social epistemology understood as analysis of specific forms of social organisation of knowledge production. (shrink)

A distorted representation of one's own body is a diagnostic criterion and core psychopathology of both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Despite recent technical advances in research, it is still unknown whether this body image disturbance is characterized by body dissatisfaction and a low ideal weight and/or includes a distorted perception or processing of body size. In this article, we provide an update and meta-analysis of 42 articles summarizing measures and results for body size estimation (BSE) from 926 (...) individuals with AN, 536 individuals with BN and 1920 controls. We replicate findings that individuals with AN and BN overestimate their body size as compared to controls (ES= 0.63). Our meta-regression shows that metric methods (BSE by direct or indirect spatial measures) yield larger effect sizes than depictive methods (BSE by evaluating distorted pictures), and that effect sizes are larger for patients with BN than for patients with AN. To interpret these results, we suggest a revised theoretical framework for BSE that accounts for differences between depictive and metric BSE methods regarding the underlying body representations (conceptual vs. perceptual, implicit vs. explicit). We also discuss clinical implications and argue for the importance of multimethod approaches to investigate body image disturbance. (shrink)

Objects have dispositions. Dispositions are normally analyzed by providing a meaning to disposition ascriptions like ‘This piece of salt is soluble’. Philosophers like Carnap, Goodman, Quine, Lewis and many others have proposed analyses of such disposition ascriptions. In this paper we will argue with Quine that the proper analysis of ascriptions of the form ‘x is disposed to m ’, where ‘x’ denotes an object, ‘m’ a manifestation, and ‘C’ a condition, goes like this: ‘x is of natural kind k’, (...) and the generic ‘ks are m ’ is true. For the analysis of the generic, we propose an analysis in terms of causal powers: ‘ks have the causal power to m’. The latter, in turn, is analyzed in a very precise way, making use of Pearl’s probabilistic graphical causal models. We will show how this natural kind-analysis improves on standard conditional analyses of dispositions by avoiding the standard counterexamples, and that it gives rise to precise observable criteria under which the disposition ascription is true. (shrink)

Studies on transposable elements of the Ac family have led to different models for excision gap repair in either plants or Drosophila. Excision products generated by the plant transposable elements Ac and Tam3 imply a more or less straightforward ligation of broken ends; excision products of the Drosophila P element indicate the involvement of ‘double‐strand break’ (DSB) repair. Recent findings that excision products of Ac and Tam3 can also contain traces of the element ends indicate, however, that DSB repair might (...) be an alternative repair mechanism in plants. A functional DSB repair mechanism in plants can also be deduced from the observed rapid increases of Ac copy number during plant development and from the involvement of Ac in the generation of internal Ac deletions. On the other hand, alternative repair mechanisms may also be functional in Drosophila, because some of the ‘footprints’ generated upon P excision can be explained by a mechanism that has been postulated for excision gap repair in plants. It is concluded that plants and Drosophila can use similar repair mechanisms, but that the predominance of a certain repair mechanism is determined by the host. (shrink)

: By introducing us into core concepts of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, Elena Esposito shows their relevance for contemporary social sciences and the study of unsettled times….

Improving human characteristics goes beyond compensating for an impairment. This book explores the rich and complex relationship between enhancement and impairment, showing that the study of disability offers new ways of thinking about the social and ethical implications of improving the human condition.

Taking as a point of departure the thesis that philosophical content and stylistic form are internally related to each other, we explore in our text the possibilities enabled by the literary form of the letter. We begin with a brief description of the current situation of the academic philosophy around the world characterized by international migrations of thinkers and thoughts. In the second section, we highlight the importance of the literary form of the letter in the current background dominated by (...) the canonical format of the paper. In the third and fourth sections we focus on the main features and current use of this literary form and examine its possibilities for philosophy. In the final section, we render plausible our thesis examining with different examples how is possible to write letters about philosophy and to do philosophy in and through letters. (shrink)

Ziel des Aufsatzes ist es, das Projekt angewandter interkultureller Philosophie „Briefe über Philosophie weltweit“ vorzustellen. Der Beitrag ist in vier Teile gegliedert. Im ersten Abschnitt werden Anlass und Profil des Projektes vorgestellt. Der „akademische Nomadismus“ der Gegenwart verstärkt die immer schon interkulturelle Verfasstheit der akademischen Praxis und stellt den lebensweltlichen Anlass des Projektes dar, dies in Form von Briefen über die verschiedenen Bedingungen des Philosophierens auch zu reflektieren. Im zweiten Abschnitt wird genauer nach Erfahrungen gefragt, die in den Briefen zum (...) Ausdruck kommen und die wir als „interkulturelle Erfahrungen“ bezeichnen und näher bestimmen wollen. Thema des dritten Abschnitts ist die gewählte Darstellungsform für derartige interkulturelle Erfahrungen, nämlich die Briefform als Medium für Perspektivität. Im vierten Abschnitt machen wir abschließend den Versuch, das Projekt als Form angewandter interkultureller Philosophie zu profilieren. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.

Many generic sentences express stable inductive generalizations. Stable inductive generalizations are typically true for a causal reason. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is also the case for the generalizations expressed by generic sentences. More in particular, we discuss the possibility that many generic sentences of the form ‘ks have feature e’ are true because kind k have the causal power to ‘produce’ feature e. We will argue that such an analysis is quite close to a probabilistic (...) based analysis of generic sentences according to which ‘relatively many’ ks have feature e, and that, in fact, this latter type of analysis can be ‘grounded’ in terms of causal powers. We will argue, moreover, that the causal power analysis is sometimes preferred to a correlation-based analysis, because it takes the causal structure that gives rise to the probabilistic data into account. (shrink)

In this letter from Ireland I give a brief introduction into the history of academic philosophy in Ireland and a schematic overview of the current philosophical landscape. I point out some advantages and some disadvantages of practicing philosophy in Ireland against Germany and put those into a general historical and cultural context. Finally, I provide key information for anybody interested in finding out more about philosophy in Ireland.

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 62 Heft: 2 Seiten: 318-320.

A body of research documents teacher–child reading behaviors in educational settings. Few will disagree that the potential for word and narrative comprehension increases when children’s prior knowledge is activated and when children’s focus is fully on the reading session. Despite this, little is known about the potential for establishment of joint attention and activation of prior knowledge in an early childhood education and care setting and how early childhood educators prepare young children to participate in shared book reading sessions before (...) formal reading starts. Based on video data of teachers (N = 12) and small groups of children (N = 72) reading picture books and picture book apps in kindergarten, we sought to shed light on what behaviors occur before reading starts. The analyses were conducted in two phases. The first phase was based on 48 videotaped readings and followed a descriptive quantitative approach to investigate early childhood teachers’ time use before the reading session, with readings of both print books and picture book apps. The second phase was based on two app readings in which the pre-reading phases stood out for their long duration. A qualitative analytical approach was applied to describe the teacher–child behavior, establishment of joint attention, and activation of prior knowledge during the two specific pre-reading events. Even though the sample is small, we find clear examples of pre-reading strategies specific to app readings. In this s... (shrink)

Cross-sectional studies indicate that normal aging is accompanied by decreases in brain structure. Longitudinal studies, however, are relatively rare and inconsistent regarding their outcomes. Particularly the heterogeneity of methods, sample characteristics and the high inter-individual variability in older adults prevent the deduction of general trends. Therefore, the current study aimed to compare longitudinal age-related changes in brain structure in two large independent samples of healthy older adults ; the Longitudinal Healthy Aging Brain database project at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, (...) and 1000BRAINS at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. Annual percentage changes in the two samples revealed stable to slight decreases in cortical thickness over time. After correction for major covariates, i.e., baseline age, sex, education, and image quality, sample differences were only marginally present. Results suggest that general trends across time might be generalizable over independent samples, assuming the same methodology is used, and similar sample characteristics are present. (shrink)

Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research support institutions are only starting to target social media researchers. In this paper, we present a practical solution to sharing social media data with the help of a social science data archive. Our aim is to contribute to (...) the effort of enhancing comparability and reproducibility in social media research by taking some first steps towards setting standards for sustainable data archiving. We present a showcase for sharing social media data with the example of a big dataset containing geotagged tweets through a research data archive. We provide a general background to the process of long-term archiving of research data. After some consideration of the current obstacles for sharing and archiving social media data, we present our solution of archiving the specific dataset of geotagged tweets at the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences, a publicly funded German data archive for secure and long-term archiving of social science data. We archived and documented tweet IDs and additional information to improve reproducibility of the initial research while also attending to ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account Twitter’s terms of service in particular. (shrink)

The evolution of complex life forms, such as multicellular organisms, is the result of a number of evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs). Several attempts have been made to explain their origins, many of which have been internalist (i.e., based largely on internal properties of these life form's ancestors). Here, we show how an externalist perspective, via the ecological scaffolding model in which properties of complex life forms arise from an external scaffold, can shed new light on the question of ETIs. (...) Ultimately, we anticipate progress in the field will occur by recognizing the importance of both the internalist and externalist modes of explanation for ETIs. We illustrate this by considering an extension of the ecological scaffolding model by niche construction in which particles modify the environment which later becomes the scaffold giving rise to collective-level individuality. (shrink)