Some comparisons are hard. How should we think about such comparisons? According to John Broome, we should think about them in terms of vagueness. But the vagueness account has remained unpopular thus far. Here I try to bolster it by clarifying the notion of comparative vagueness that lies at its heart.

Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. According to the standard account, developed most famously by Joseph Raz, ‘incomparability’ means determinate failure of the three classic value relations ( better than , worse than , and equally good ): two value-bearers are incomparable with respect to a value V if and only if (i) it is false that x is better than y with respect to V , (ii) it is false that x (...) is worse than y with respect to V and (iii) it is false that x and y are equally good with respect to V . Most philosophers have followed Raz in adopting this account of incomparability. Recently, however, John Broome has advocated an alternative view, on which value incomparability is explained in terms of vagueness or indeterminacy . In this paper I aim to further Broome’s view in two ways. Firstly, I want to supply independent reasons for thinking that the phenomenon of value incomparability is indeed a matter of the indeterminacy inherent in our comparative predicates. Secondly, I attempt to defend Broome’s account by warding off several objections that worry him, due mainly to Erik Carlson and Ruth Chang. (shrink)

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode (...) these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility. (shrink)

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

Humanae vitae, ideología de género y futuro biotecnológico Humanae vitae, ideologia de gênero e futuro biotecnológico This short article aims to briefly comment on the influence of Humanae Vitae, fifty years after publication. In this context, some aspects related to the positive impact that Humanae Vitae lends to the affective environment of sexuality, both in adulthood and in the early ages of youth, are discussed given the influence of LGTBI ideology. The anthropological view of sexuality provides an environment of respect (...) for the dignity of the person in terms of the deviations that may occur due to the influence of gender ideology. Finally, some international scientific articles are cited, which positively demonstrate the possibility of making science compatible with the unitive and procreative nature of Humanae Vitae in a globalized environment. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Murcia-Lora JM. Humanae vitae, ideología de género y futuro biotecnológico. pers. bioét. 2018; 22: 358-366. DOI: 10.5294/pebi.2018.22.2.11. (shrink)

This chapter explores the implications of moral vagueness for non-naturalist metaethical theories like those recently championed by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others. It characterizes non-naturalism in terms of its commitment to seven theses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience, Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. It starts by offering a number of reasons for thinking that moral predicates are vague in the same way in which “red,” “tall,” and “heap” are said to be. It then argues that the moral non-naturalist seeking to countenance moral vagueness (...) faces a dilemma: are moral properties vague, or perfectly sharp? On either horn of the dilemma, serious problems arise for some of the central tenets of non-naturalism: vague properties seem to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons. (shrink)

On the background of recent concerns regarding online education in times of pandemic and a growing pedagogical divide in terms of unequal access to skilled teachers, we consider it timely to open a debate surrounding the use of social robots in education fulfilling a role that is anchored in the institution of pedagogs in Antiquity and which was somewhat left aside from contemporary inquiries: the pedagogical role of supporting and complementing the teaching activity. We develop our conceptual philosophical contribution to (...) this debate around the following question: Is the use of social robots in primary and lower secondary education an intervention that can contribute positively to bridging the pedagogical divide? We offer a moderate-positive answer to this question within the normative framework of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Namely, we argue that social robots in the form of collaborative robots (cobots) can be co-designed as pedagogical enabling devices to provide support to children for acquiring intellectual virtues necessary in the educational process and thus contribute to solving part of the pedagogical divide. (shrink)

À partir de la reconstitution d’un contexte polémique divisant, dans le dernier quart du ve siècle, les tenants d’une conception traditionnelle de la religion et des savoirs d’une part, et les partisans d’une curiosité nouvelle pour l’étude des « choses d’en haut » (meteora) d’autre part, cet article se propose d’examiner la manière dont l’élément aérien a été investi par les seconds pour devenir le support matériel de l’« invisible » et se substituer ainsi à la divinité. L’analyse des caractéristiques (...) précises que certains philosophes et médecins ont associées à l’air permettra de mettre en évidence le rôle de puissance cosmologique et biologique qui a pu lui être reconnu dans cette tradition de pensée « aérienne ». (shrink)

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering (...) how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, socio-historical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific socio-political contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust-rather than trust-can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the inter-relationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions come from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society. (shrink)

This article advances research on moral responsibility in organizations by drawing on both philosophical virtue ethics grounded in the Aristotelian tradition and Positive Organizational Scholarship research concerned with virtuousness. The article discusses the very conditions that make possible the realization of virtues and virtuousness, respectively. These conditions ground notions of moral responsibility and the resulting praise or blame on organizational contexts. Thus, we analyze the way individuals and organizations may be ascribed interconnected degrees of retrospective moral responsibility and blame as (...) depending on the interplay between the individual conditions leading to virtue and the organizational conditions leading to virtuousness. Based on this analysis, we develop a two‐level account of moral responsibility in organizations that connects individual and organizational moral responsibility through the concepts of virtue and virtuousness. This is further operationalized into practical guidelines to ascribe degrees of individual and organizational blame, which can be used as a tool by managers, policymakers, or industry regulators. (shrink)

This paper questions the conceptual and pragmatic worth of the category of relational values. Combining philosophical reasoning with ethnographic field-work in Wallmapu/Chile, I analyse a variety of ways in which people think about, value and behave toward the land. I thereby demonstrate that relational-ity is inherent to held, instrumental and intrinsic values. This means that there is no meaningful way in which to distinguish relational values from more familiar types of values. Yet, to be able to argue that a distinct (...) class of relational values exists, those who have proposed the term have been compelled to silence or downplay the relational natures of those other values. This has the perverse effect of confining, rather than promoting, relational thinking. (shrink)

This article introduces a new scale to measure executive servant leadership, situating the need for this scale within the context of ethical leadership and its impacts on followers, organizations and the greater society. The literature on servant leadership is reviewed and servant leadership is compared to other concepts that share dimensions of ethical leadership (e.g., transformational, authentic, and spiritual leadership). Next, the Executive Servant Leadership Scale (ESLS) is introduced, and its contributions and limitations discussed. We conclude with an agenda for (...) future research, describing ways the measure can be used to test hypotheses about organizational moral climate, ethical organizational culture, corporate responsibility, and institutional theory. (shrink)

Social robots are increasingly developed for the companionship of children. In this article we explore the moral implications of children-robot friendships using the Aristotelian framework of virtue ethics. We adopt a moderate position and argue that, although robots cannot be virtue friends, they can nonetheless enable children to exercise ethical and intellectual virtues. The Aristotelian requirements for true friendship apply only partly to children: unlike adults, children relate to friendship as an educational play of exploration, which is constitutive of the (...) way they acquire and develop virtues. We highlight that there is a relevant difference between the way we evaluate adult-robot friendship compared to children-robot friendship, which is rooted in the difference in moral agency and moral responsibility that generate the asymmetries in the moral status ascribed to adults versus children. We look into the role played by imaginary companions (IC) and personified objects (PO) in children’s moral development and claim that robots, understood as Personified Robotic Objects (PROs), play a similar role with such fictional entities, enabling children to exercise affection, moral imagination and reasoning, thus contributing to their development as virtuous adults. Nonetheless, we argue that adequate use of robots for children’s moral development is conditioned by several requirements related to design, technology and moral responsibility. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to investigate into the peculiarities of the reflection of sense as the main idea of modern European philosophy. This idea refers to self-consciousness, about which modern empirical philosophy speaks in the language of reflection (J. Locke), and rationalism - in the language of Cogito (R. Descartes). For Kant, Cogito is a transcendental condition for the formation of concepts, and therefore reflection should be transcendental. According to Husserl, the main task of phenomenological reflection was to (...) obtain essences of processes, to build things from the acts of Cogito. In Husserl's words, reflection "carries the world as a meaningful sense". Such a sense (smysl) becomes a problem escaping both from analysis and interpretation. Its peculiarity lies in the deontological status of sense: the phrase "a sense should be" connects the sense with a realm of duty, and duty provides a correlation between Ego and integrity of the world, language and culture. Reflection of sense (smysl) becomes the process of comprehension, the mechanism of formation of the whole set of meanings in the culture. (shrink)

L’almanacco di corte e la guida della città – nota anche come «guida dei forestieri» – rappresentano due delle derivazioni più notevoli degli almanacchi europei del diciottesimo secolo per la loro varietà e consolidamento nel tempo. Questa ricerca si propone di indagare le origini europee di questo particolare segmento editoriale, ponendo l’accento sulle sue derivazioni nel contesto dell’Europa meridionale, in particolare in Spagna, Portogallo e negli stati italiani. L’obiettivo principale è quello di evidenziare le somiglianze tra la produzione spagnola, portoghese (...) e italiana nel Settecento, tenendo conto dei criteri editoriali e testuali. Allo stesso tempo, però, questo studio intende anche mettere in evidenza le caratteristiche specifiche dell’almanacco di corte e della guida della città in ciascuno degli stati, al fine di tracciare un ritratto il più completo possibile di questo oggetto tipografico. (shrink)

In this paper we defend that elective ventilation (EV), even if conceived as the instrument to maximise the chances of organ recovery, is mainly the means to provide the patient who is dying with a dignified death in several ways, one of them being the possibility of becoming an organ donor. Because EV does not harm the patient and permits the medical team a better assessment of the patient's clinical trajectory and a better management of the dying process by the (...) family, EV does not violate the principle of non-beneficence nor the principle of autonomy if we restrict the initiation of EV to those cases in which it is not known what the previous wishes of the patient were as regards to his or her care at the end of life. (shrink)

This manuscript describes the responses and correlates of outpatients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders to a tool designed to measure comprehension before obtaining informed consent for research participation. We used the Evaluation to Sign Consent form to document comprehension in 100 outpatients as part of their consent to participate in an ongoing study of an exercise intervention. The findings suggest that using this form is a feasible and acceptable approach to documenting comprehension of research procedures prior to obtaining informed consent. Age (...) 49 years and older and the receipt of intramuscular antipsychotic medication predicted the need for additional assistance to complete the Evaluation to Sign Consent form successfully (χ2 = 8.29, P = 0.016). Nurse researchers should consider documenting comprehension with this tool owing to its availability, time efficiency and utility. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 7-8, November - December 2020, Page 891-893.

Peter Mack asserts a truism in the Preface of Reading Old Books: Writing with Tradition. He argues from the first paragraph that “literary tradition provides essential imaginative resources for wri...

Benjamin Buchloh’s two interviews with Gerhard Richter, which bookend this slim volume, are fascinating glimpses into the artist’s interior life, and thus rewarding. Unfortunately, jargon and proli...

The so-called uncontrolled donation after circulatory determination of death (uDCDD) have been implemented in several countries, including Spain and France, to increase the availability of organs for transplantation. These protocols allow obtaining kidneys, livers and lungs of patients who do not survive cardio-pulmonary resuscitation performed in out-of-hospital settings. Simultaneously with the development and recent proliferation of these protocols, some emergency teams have begun to employ unconventional methods of CPR, with still uncertain but promising results. The coexistence of these two possibilities (...) raises some questions: At what point should attempts to save a patient with circulatory arrest be abandoned so that this individual can begin to be considered as a potential organ donor? How to manage potential conflicts of loyalties that may arise within emergency and procurement teams? How should the information to the families of those patients and potential organ donors be managed? This article gathers the conclusions of a workshop in which an interdisciplinary working group addressed these and other questions related to DCDD and non-conventional CPR. (shrink)

El texto presenta un estudio sobre Juán Amós Comenio (1592-1670) como clásico del pensamiento educativo, el hilo conductor ha consistido en tener presente el carácter sociocultural de la educación, es decir, en no perder de vista una verdad elemental: las aportaciones en el ámbito educativo, trátese de discursos, de prácticas, o bien de ambos, aún cuando pudieran presentarse ante nuestros ojos con cierto grado de abstracción, son elaboraciones que proceden de personas concretas que viven coordenadas de tiempo y espacio precisas (...) y que por ende, se vuelven comprensibles con mayor profundidad y plenitud en la medida que uno se aproxima a la forma en que vivió esta persona. Este libro constituye un proyecto de investigación más amplio, pero prioritariamente aborda aspectos de las atmósferas del siglo XVII propias de la Europa protestante que marcan la vida de Comenio b) algunas tradiciones y legados que sustentan su proyecto educativo. (shrink)

La humildad copernicana establece que el Universo es un lugar homogéneo en el que las leyes aplican indistintamente en cualquier lugar, es decir, no existe un centro o lugar privilegiado. En ese sentido el lugar que ocupa la Tierra en el Universo es como cualquier otro, nada especial y mucho menos relacionado al favor de un Dios omnipotente cuya creación favorita sea el ser humano. Siendo esto así, sería entonces factible pensar la existencia de muchos otros planetas que como la (...) Tierra alberguen vida y sustenten civilizaciones tan o más avanzadas como la nuestra. Sin embargo, ¿por qué aún no hemos contactado con otras civilizaciones? Esto último se conoce como la paradoja de Fermi. ¿Por qué si la Tierra es solo un punto más en el Universo parece que no hay otras Tierras y otros seres inteligentes con quienes contactar? Una posible solución que intentamos discutir en el presente texto es la Hipótesis de la Tierra Rara, según la cual, en efecto, el planeta Tierra es una cosa extraordinaria en el universo. Más allá de discutir la plausibilidad de esta hipótesis frente a otras, interesa puntualizar algunos corolarios que se siguen de la misma, y su implicación para el copernicanismo desde un punto de vista filosófico. (shrink)

The paper problematises the reliability and ethics of using social media data, such as sourced from Twitter or Instagram, to carry out health-related research. As in many other domains, the opportunity to mine social media for information has been hailed as transformative for research on well-being and disease. Considerations around the fairness, responsibilities and accountabilities relating to using such data have often been set aside, on the understanding that as long as data were anonymised, no real ethical or scientific issue (...) would arise. We first counter this perception by emphasising that the use of social media data in health research can yield problematic and unethical results. We then provide a conceptualisation of methodological data fairness that can complement data management principles such as FAIR by enhancing the actionability of social media data for future research. We highlight the forms that methodological data fairness can take at different stages of the research process and identify practical steps through which researchers can ensure that their practices and outcomes are scientifically sound as well as fair to society at large. We conclude that making research data fair as well as FAIR is inextricably linked to concerns around the adequacy of data practices. The failure to act on those concerns raises serious ethical, methodological and epistemic issues with the knowledge and evidence that are being produced. (shrink)

The objective of this article was to analyze inequalities in Colombia using a strategic prospective approach to identify the social, economic and cultural dynamics that prolong such asymmetries and propose actions to reduce these gaps. The methodology employed is based on the use of advanced prospective analysis tools, such as influence matrices and variable mobility diagrams, in addition to the identification of key actors involved in the formulation and execution of public policies. The results point to the complexity of the (...) interactions between critical variables such as access to technologies, gender equity and youth participation in employment; likewise, the study showed that certain actors, such as the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Equality and Equity, have a significant influence on the achievement of objectives that seek to mitigate social inequalities in Colombia. The study concludes the need to work on public policies for social and economic development, but with an approach based on education and changes in cultural patterns in society that allow the gradual reduction of inequalities. The discussion points out that through strategic collaboration among diverse actors and a comprehensive approach, progress can be made towards a sustained reduction of inequalities, promoting a more equitable and inclusive development in Colombian society. (shrink)