BackgroundThe Authors have laid out an analysis of Italian COVID-19 confirmed data and fatality rates, pointing out how a dearth of health care resources in northern regions has resulted in hard, ethically challenging decisions in terms of granting patient access to intensive care units (ICU).Main textHaving to make such decisions certainly entails substantial difficulties, and that has led many health care professional to seek ethical guidance. The Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care (SIAARTI) has attempted to meet (...) that growing need by a set of recommendations, applying “clinical soundness” as a beacon standard; that approach tends to prioritize patients with higher life expectancy, which could be characterized as a “moderately utilitarian” approach. Yet, such a selection has engendered daunting ethical quandaries. The authors believe it can only be warranted and acceptable if rooted in a transparent decision-making process and verifiable, reviewed criteria. Moreover, the authors have stressed how clinical experimentation in a pandemic setting is a subtext of great interest from an ethical perspective. In Italy, no drug therapy and trials were undertaken for COVID-19 patients for a rather long period of time. When the epidemic was already circulating, an intervention proved necessary on the system of administrative procedures, aimed at expediting the authorization and validation of protocols, then bogged down by bureaucracy. A new system has since been instituted by a government decree that was signed about one month after the first Covid-19 case was officially recorded in the country. Such a swift implementation, which took just a few weeks, is noteworthy and proves that clinical trials can be initiated in a timely fashion, even with a pandemic unfolding. The concerted, action of supportive care and RCTs is the only way to attain effective forms of treatments for COVID-19 and any other future outbreak.ConclusionsThe authors have arrived at the conclusion that the most effective and ethically sound response on the part of any national health care system would be to adequately reconfigure its organizational mechanisms, by making clinical trials and all related administrative procedures consistent with the current state of emergency. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility research has focused often on the business returns of corporate social initiatives but less on their possible social returns. We study an actual company–consumer partnership CSR initiative promoting ecologically correct and conscious consumption of bottled mineral water. We conduct a survey on adult consumers to test the hypotheses that consumer skepticism toward the company–consumer partnership CSR initiative and the moral emotion of elevation mediate the relationship between company CSR motives perceived by consumers and consumer behavioral responses following (...) this CSR initiative. Favorable consumer behavioral responses, in turn, relate positively to consumer support of other green products. The results provide scholars and managers with means of improving their understanding and handling of company–consumer partnership CSR initiatives. (shrink)

I argue that disposition ascriptions—claims like ‘the glass is fragile’—are semantically equivalent to possibility claims: they are true when the given object manifests the disposition in at least one of the relevant possible worlds.

Fairness is one of the most prominent values in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate and, specifically, in the discussion on algorithmic decision-making (ADM). However, while the need for fairness in ADM is widely acknowledged, the very concept of fairness has not been sufficiently explored so far. Our paper aims to fill this gap and claims that an ethically informed re-definition of fairness is needed to adequately investigate fairness in ADM. To achieve our goal, after an introductory section aimed (...) at clarifying the aim and structure of the paper, in section “Fairness in algorithmic decision-making” we provide an overview of the state of the art of the discussion on fairness in ADM and show its shortcomings; in section “Fairness as an ethical value”, we pursue an ethical inquiry into the concept of fairness, drawing insights from accounts of fairness developed in moral philosophy, and define fairness as an ethical value. In particular, we argue that fairness is articulated in a distributive and socio-relational dimension; it comprises three main components: fair equality of opportunity, equal right to justification, and fair equality of relationship; these components are grounded in the need to respect persons both as persons and as particular individuals. In section “Fairness in algorithmic decision-making revised”, we analyze the implications of our redefinition of fairness as an ethical value on the discussion of fairness in ADM and show that each component of fairness has profound effects on the criteria that ADM ought to meet. Finally, in section “Concluding remarks”, we sketch some broader implications and conclude. (shrink)

The opening lines of Seneca's Thyestes (1–13), which feature Tantalus’ reference to the so-called great sinners, have received little critical attention. Through both an intertextual and an intratextual analysis, this article reveals the peculiarities of this allegedly canonical list of sinners by comparing it to similar catalogues in other Senecan dramas, as well as by identifying its structural function within this particular tragedy. This kind of two-fold approach enables a reinterpretation of certain key passages of the drama vis-à-vis lines 1–13, (...) as well as a reassessment of Tantalus’ role as the creative force and architect of the tragedy. (shrink)

A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition from organisms that lacked consciousness to those with consciousness—to minimal subjective experiencing, or, as Aristotle described it, “the sensitive soul”? In this book, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka propose a new theory about the origin of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the transition to basic consciousness. Using (...) a methodology similar to that used by scientists when they identified the transition from non-life to life, Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest a set of criteria, identify a marker for the transition to minimal consciousness, and explore the far-reaching biological, psychological, and philosophical implications. After presenting the historical, neurobiological, and philosophical foundations of their analysis, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose that the evolutionary marker of basic or minimal consciousness is a complex form of associative learning, which they term unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL enables an organism to ascribe motivational value to a novel, compound, non-reflex-inducing stimulus or action, and use it as the basis for future learning. Associative learning, Ginsburg and Jablonka argue, drove the Cambrian explosion and its massive diversification of organisms. Finally, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose symbolic language as a similar type of marker for the evolutionary transition to human rationality—to Aristotle's “rational soul.”. (shrink)

This book argues that our technological era is the most radical form of anarchism we have ever experienced. People are not only removing the role of the expert as a mediator, but also replacing the role of a transcendent god with an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent technological entity that is totally immanent.

The Head of Janus: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction in Gadamer and Derrida between Agreement and Disagreement. The paper aims to discuss the complexity of the relationship between Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Derrida’s Deconstruction in order to remove the usual opposition between these two thinkers and their philosophical perspectives. It is possible to build a collaboration against every idealistic and subjectivist foundation moving from the hermeneutic-deconstructive interaction between the concepts of identity and difference, understanding and sense, writing and reading etc. Only in this (...) way can the so-called improbable debate become an un-interrupted dialogue: the distance ceases to be an insuperable obstacle and becomes an openness of sense. (shrink)

Health Recommender Systems are promising Articial-Intelligence-based tools endowing healthy lifestyles and therapy adherence in healthcare and medicine. Among the most supported areas, it is worth mentioning active aging. However, current HRS supporting AA raise ethical challenges that still need to be properly formalized and explored. This study proposes to rethink HRS for AA through an autonomy-based ethical analysis. In particular, a brief overview of the HRS’ technical aspects allows us to shed light on the ethical risks and challenges they might (...) raise on individuals’ well-being as they age. Moreover, the study proposes a categorization, understanding, and possible preventive/mitigation actions for the elicited risks and challenges through rethinking the AI ethics core principle of autonomy. Finally, elaborating on autonomy-related ethical theories, the paper proposes an autonomy-based ethical framework and how it can foster the development of autonomy-enabling HRS for AA. (shrink)

Se explora el fundamento que proporciona Vitoria al dominium rerum, es decir, la capacidad del hombre de ser dueño de las cosas. En primer lugar, exponemos sucintamente la concepción vitoriana de la teología como saber que puede y debe ocuparse de cuestiones temporales. Después, se estudia el tema del dominio en su comentario al tratado De restitutione de la Summa theologiae de Tomás de Aquino. Por último, se examina cómo aborda la capacidad humana de dominio en la relectio De indis, (...) donde defiende que los indios americanos son capaces de gobernarse a sí mismos y tener propiedades. Vitoria desarrolla el pensamiento de Tomás de Aquino aplicándolo a nuevos problemas. Según Vitoria, el fundamento del dominio sobre las cosas se encuentra en el dominio sobre uno mismo, que se apoya, a su vez, en la naturaleza humana. Por consiguiente, gozan de dominio incluso las personas que sólo puedan hacer un uso limitado de su razón y su libertad. (shrink)

While different in their approaches, structure and intended readership, the four books reviewed here are connected by their common aim of responding to traditional views of elegy as a minor, ‘softer’ genre, which stands in binary opposition to the magniloquence of epic. These books thus build upon long-established developments in the field of Latin literary criticism, which have contributed to a general reassessment, and deconstruction, of the taxonomic categorisations of Latin texts, and Latin poetry more specifically, pointing out its generic (...) fluidity (e.g. J.E.G. Zetzel, ‘Re-Creating the Canon: Augustan Poetry and the Alexandrian Past’, Critical Inquiry 10 [1983], 83–105; G.B. Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. tr. C. Segal [1986]). Notably, R.O.A.M. Lyne's study on Virgil's Aeneid (R.O.A.M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid [1992]) exemplifies this renewed interest in identifying unaligned and ambiguous perspectives (‘further voices’), especially within poetic texts composed in the Augustan or early imperial period. It is no surprise that the elegiac contents have catalysed these underlying streams of ambiguous, unsettled and self-reflective discourse, which – once allowed into the literary landscape of Latin poetry – shake generic boundaries. That Virgil did not write anything that can be formally regarded as elegy, stricto sensu, makes his oeuvre a promising space of enquiry for oblique and subterranean elegiac resonances. (shrink)

One of the legal institutions of the punishment realization, i.e. the probation release, is investigated in the article from the legal comparative point of view. The article covers the legal relations, appearing as the result of application of the probation (setting and realization) towards the imprisoned convicts. The norms of the international and national juridical acts on the punishment realization, which regulate the probation, and the juridical doctrine of the punishment realization, brought forward by Lithuania and foreign countries, is analyzed (...) in the present article. The misunderstandings within the practices of imposition and execution of probation result in continuous discussions on the factual influence of the said institution to the development of social behaviour of the convicted person. The process of execution of probationary release must be directed towards the management of the risk of repeated criminal behaviour of the convicted person and neutralizing of criminal factors, however the existing structure of legal regulation does not provide a possibility to reach the said objectives. This shows one of the main deficiencies of criminal justice of Lithuania – a frequent and sustained application of imprisonment. (shrink)

Eating Disorders, particularly anorexia and bulimia, are of immense contemporary importance and interest. News stories depicting the tragic effects of eating disorders command wide attention. Almost everybody in society has been touched by eating disorders in one way or another, and contemporary obsession with body image and diet fuels fascination with this problem. It is unclear why people develop eating disorders. Clinical and sociological studies have provided important information relating to the relational systems in which eating disorders are mainly found. (...) This paper shows that their explanations are not conclusive and points out that the reasons why people develop eating disorders should not be found in the dysfunctional interactions occurring in both familial and social systems, but in the moral beliefs that underlie these interactions. Eating disorders are impossible to understand or explain, unless they are viewed in the light of these beliefs. A moral logic, that is a way of thinking of interpersonal relations in moral terms, gives shape to and justifies the clinical condition, and finds consistent expression in abnormal eating behaviour. The analysis offered here is not mainstream either in philosophy (eating disorders are in fact seldom the subject of philosophical investigation) or in clinical psychology (the methods of philosophical analysis are in fact seldom utilised in clinical psychology). However, this paper offers a important contribution to the understanding of such a dramatic and widespread condition, bringing to light the deepest reasons, which are moral in nature, that contribute to the explanation of this complex phenomenon. (shrink)

In Our Moral Fate: Evolution and Escape from Tribalism, Buchanan’s challenging attempt to account for morality through an evolutionary lens has, as its turning point, the introduction of the key roles of the human capacity for critical, open-ended moral reasoning and the powerful motivating force of moral identity to exercise it, in order to explain the shift from “shallowly inclusive” to “deeply inclusive moralities” and therefore to account for the possibility of the Two Great Expansions of the moral regard. Nevertheless, (...) these two crucial human traits seem to produce those large-scale social-political effects required by these two momentous moral shifts only under certain necessary conditions, specifically because—according to the author—the widespread and relatively unconstrained exercise of the capacity for critical, open-ended moral reasoning is something of a luxury good, namely, something that requires a considerable surplus reproductive success. This contribution aims at highlighting why a real exercise of human moral reasoning cannot be a luxury good, by raising three fundamental points to ground Buchanan’s novel pathway from a moral standpoint. The first section argues for the introduction of a moral justification for the necessary conditions underlying the REHMR. The second section claims the need for an evolutionary or moral foundation of the moral reasons and principles which inform and prompt the affirmation of an authentic moral identity. Finally, the third section motivates the demand for an elucidation on what deep normative source of morality is specifically at stake in Buchanan’s theory. (shrink)

The tripartite model of militant extremist mind-set proposed by Stankov et al. (2010b) includes three components: War (justification of violent acts); God (extremist acts are moral because they are done in the name of God/Allah); and West (violence against Western countries is justified because they are perceived as evil). There is a lack of conceptual framework regarding psychological mechanism that underlie radicalization and extremism, and there is little evidence regarding risk factors for radicalization in the scientific literature. In the present (...) study, it is hypothesized that irrational beliefs and a constellation of personality factors are two possible psychological mechanisms that put adolescents in a vulnerable position and could influence them to develop an extremist mind-set. The sample consists in 295 Romanian adolescents, ages 15-18 years, and the mean age being 16.41. The present study was conducted in several schools from Bihor County located in the north-western part of Romania. Adolescents took part on a voluntary basis in the study after the written, informed consent was obtained from their parents. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the structure of Militant Extremist Mind-Set Scale confirmed the three-factor model of the extremist mind-set. Two confirmatory factor analyses were also conducted for the other two administered scales: CASI and Mini-IPIP. The results support the previous models for both subscales, including items loading on factors. SEM analysis was performed with AMOS 23 statistical package on a final sample size of 242 participants and there were no missing data. Fifth structural models were specified. The fifth model had adequate fit based on all three indices including the RMSEA (0.054), CFI (0.958), and SRMS (0.047). Global evaluation of self seems to be the only irrational belief that was somewhat related with the extremis mind-set, being part of it. Neuroticism was not identified as being a variable that could have a direct influence on mind-set extremism, or an indirect influence through personality. Religious adherence is a good predictor of extremist ideology. A global personality factor consisting in low Intellect/Imagination, low Extraversion and high Agreeableness seems to be a vulnerability factor that influences people to believe in extremist ideology. (shrink)

Task unrelated thought (TUT) refers to thought directed away from the current situation, for example a daydream. Three experiments were conducted on healthy participants, with two broad aims. First, to contrast distributed and encapsulated views of cognition by comparing the encoding of categorical and random lists of words (Experiments One and Two). Second, to examine the consequences of experiencing TUT during study on the subsequent retrieval of information (Experiments One, Two, and Three). Experiments One and Two demonstrated lower levels of (...) TUT and higher levels of word-fragment completion whilst encoding categorical relative to random stimuli, supporting the role of a distributed resource in the maintenance of TUT. In addition the results of all three experiments suggested that experiencing TUT during study had a measurable effect on subsequent retrieval. TUT was associated with increased frequency of false alarms at retrieval (Experiment One). In the subsequent experiments TUT was associated with no advantage to retrieval based on recollection, by manipulating instructions at encoding (Experiment Two), and/or at retrieval (Experiment Three). The implications of the results of all three experiments are discussed in terms of recent accounts of memory retrieval and conscious awareness. (shrink)

The Birth of the Philologist from the Spirit of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Nietzsche’s Inaugural Lecture On the Personality of Homer. This essay highlights Schopenhauer’s decisive and unexplored role in Nietzsche’s Über die Persönlichkeit Homers. Following Schopenhauer’s negative assessment of the study of history, Nietzsche criticizes F. A. Wolf’s organic systematization of the sciences of antiquity and foregrounds the aesthetic dimension of philology. Contrary to Wolf, Nietzsche believes that historical investigation is subordinate to the essential pedagogical function of philology; and only through (...) its aesthetic component can philology establish which literary works of antiquity are to be considered truly “classical.” The debate on the Homeric question after the publication of Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum illustrates that philologists have paradoxically become opponents and “destroyers” of the ideal of antiquity. Nietzsche shows how a methodological approach inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy can revive the relationship between philology and art. Nietzsche’s arguments to counter Wolf’s thesis about the problem of Homer’s personality implicitly rest on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. In particular, through Schopenhauer’s conception of genius, Nietzsche rehabilitates the individuality of the poetic author of the Iliad and Odyssey, even though this poet does not correspond to the one referred to as “Homer” in antiquity. (shrink)

This is the first of two papers in which we propose an evolutionary route for the transition from sensory processing to unlimited experiencing, or basic consciousness. We argue that although an evolutionary analysis does not provide a formal definition and set of sufficient conditions for consciousness, it can identify crucial factors and suggest what evolutionary changes enabled the transition. We believe that the raw material from which feelings were molded by natural selection was a global sensory state that we call (...) overall sensation, which is a by-product of the incessant activity of the highly interconnected nervous systems that characterize all neural animals. We argue that global sensory states generated limited experiencing once they became coupled to the simplest kinds of nervous-system-mediated learning, a coupling that occurred in the most ancient taxa of neural animals, which were similar to present-day cnidarians and ctenophores. In such animals, limited experiencing involves a small number of persistent global sensory states. These sensory states, however, do not have a function and do not act as motivational states. As we argue in the next paper, with the evolution of associative learning they evolved into systems that gave animals basic consciousness. (shrink)

The phenomenological interpretation of the human being is not a naturalistic explanation. Likewise phenomenology does not interpret the human being as an example of a complex animal: from a phenomenological point of view man is not an animal, inasmuch as his definition and his essence imply a specifically human component, which cannot be attributed to the linear development of animal complexity. However, this does not mean that any animal component is excluded from the structure of humans. How can human animality (...) be acknowledged without denying human specificity and upholding a reductionist view? The purpose of the paper is to analyse and compare two different ways in which the phenomenological tradition has answered this question. (shrink)

In what follows, I shall focus on what may be defined as the engineering of hu- mans from a philosophical perspective. More precisely, I shall reflect upon the way in which our language increasingly changes when we define our relationship with emerging technologies, specifically human digital twins, which, as our tech- nological replica, can serve as privileged standpoints to try to understand the meaning of the shift from using distinguishable words to define humans and technologies (for instance, when we happen (...) to talk about our health in terms of self-perception) to using indistinguishable words to define humans and technol- ogies (for instance, when we happen to talk about our health in terms of human digital twins’ diagnoses and prognoses). The change of our language shows a kind of optimisation that is taken to the extreme, starting with the optimisation of human bodies’ performances: the more engineered humans are (in that they identify their purpose not with feeling good, for instance, but with preforming in faster and more profitable ways), the better they are (in that they measure themselves not against typically human values, such as feeling good, for in- stance, but against typically engineering values, such as efficiency). But a re- markable paradox emerges, whose meaning shall be the core of my philosophical reflection: the more humans work on optimising themselves, the more they (par- adoxically) work on moving optimisation from themselves, i.e. their capabilities as autonomous humans (starting with self-perception), to technologies, i.e. ways of engineering, specifically automating, themselves. (shrink)

La relazione tra bellezza e utilità in architettura appare più complicata nel presente che nel passato. In particolare, nella cultura contemporanea si manifesta un antagonismo paradossale tra la prima e la seconda: più nascondiamo, e addirittura neghiamo, la dimensione dell’utilità di un oggetto architettonico più abbiamo la possibilità di aumentare la dimensione della sua bellezza. Ragionare sul significato della nozione di forma, articolata in morphe (la forma concreta, reale) ed eidos (la forma astratta, ideale), può portarci verso una soluzione possibile, (...) secondo la quale parlare di un eidos, che è eteronomo e referenziale e risponde ai bisogni e alle aspirazioni degli esseri umani, significa parlare di un eidos che include, e non esclude, l’idea che l’oggetto architettonico sia utile alle richieste umane – in particolare, a qualcosa che potremmo chiamare “misura umana ideale”. Allora, un oggetto architettonico può essere bello se la sua dimensione estetica afferma, e non nega, la sua utilità, perché affermare la sua utilità significa affermare una parte essenziale del suo statuto identitario. In ultimo, la relazione tra morphe ed eidos può essere istruttiva anche a proposito di altri due casi: il primo riguarda una morphe che sembra generare un eidos inedito; il secondo riguarda l’utilità di un elemento ornamentale. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze some rising issues that indexicality places to Husserl’s phenomenological semantics. We will conduct the discussion availing ourselves of the husserlian formulation of the problem and his attempt to solution, and of approaches to the problem from analytic philosophy and linguistics. In particular, in order to understand what essentially characterize indexicality and make it a puzzling problem, we will examine two of its fundamental features, that is the relationships it maintains with context and (...) perspective. We will try to sound out their compatibility with Husserl’s analysis and to highlight some internal difficulties in the phenomenological approach to the topic. (shrink)

BackgroundThe aim of this study is to explore the association of family socioeconomic status and internal and external schoolwork support with adolescents’ school satisfaction and whether schoolwork support modifies these associations.MethodsData come from the cross-sectional Health Behavior in School-aged Children study collected in 2018 from Slovak 15-year-olds. SES was measured by Family Affluence Scale. School satisfaction was measured via school engagement and attitudes toward education. Schoolwork support was measured regarding two groups of sources inside and outside the family, separately. Logistic (...) regression models were used to explore the associations of SES and schoolwork support with school satisfaction as well as the moderating effect of schoolwork support.ResultsAdolescents with low SES were more likely to feel indifferent toward school and education, and similarly, adolescents who did not have schoolwork support inside or outside the family. Schoolwork support moderated the associations of SES with school satisfaction. Adolescents with low and middle SES without support inside or outside the family were more likely to feel indifferent than satisfied.ConclusionAdolescents from low and middle SES without schoolwork support inside or outside the family are more likely to feel indifferent toward school and education. (shrink)