Current advances in research, development and application of artificial intelligence systems have yielded a far-reaching discourse on AI ethics. In consequence, a number of ethics guidelines have been released in recent years. These guidelines comprise normative principles and recommendations aimed to harness the “disruptive” potentials of new AI technologies. Designed as a semi-systematic evaluation, this paper analyzes and compares 22 guidelines, highlighting overlaps but also omissions. As a result, I give a detailed overview of the field of AI ethics. Finally, (...) I also examine to what extent the respective ethical principles and values are implemented in the practice of research, development and application of AI systems—and how the effectiveness in the demands of AI ethics can be improved. (shrink)

Many ethics initiatives have stipulated sets of principles and standards for good technology development in the AI sector. However, several AI ethics researchers have pointed out a lack of practical realization of these principles. Following that, AI ethics underwent a practical turn, but without deviating from the principled approach. This paper proposes a complementary to the principled approach that is based on virtue ethics. It defines four “basic AI virtues”, namely justice, honesty, responsibility and care, all of which represent specific (...) motivational settings that constitute the very precondition for ethical decision making in the AI field. Moreover, it defines two “second-order AI virtues”, prudence and fortitude, that bolster achieving the basic virtues by helping with overcoming bounded ethicality or hidden psychological forces that can impair ethical decision making and that are hitherto disregarded in AI ethics. Lastly, the paper describes measures for successfully cultivating the mentioned virtues in organizations dealing with AI research and development. (shrink)

Dance provides natural conditions for studying relationships between coordination patterns and human experience. von Zimmermann and colleagues investigate whether relatively simple or more complex forms of movement coordination are related to pro‐social experiences during group dance. They find that pro‐social experience depends on the degree to which movement patterns are distributed and diversified, but not the degree to which movement patterns are simply unitary.

Industry involvement in the machine learning (ML) community seems to be increasing. However, the quantitative scale and ethical implications of this influence are rather unknown. For this purpose, we have not only carried out an informed ethical analysis of the field, but have inspected all papers of the main ML conferences NeurIPS, CVPR, and ICML of the last 5 years—almost 11,000 papers in total. Our statistical approach focuses on conflicts of interest, innovation, and gender equality. We have obtained four main (...) findings. (1) Academic–corporate collaborations are growing in numbers. At the same time, we found that conflicts of interest are rarely disclosed. (2) Industry papers amply mention terms that relate to particular trending machine learning topics earlier than academia does. (3) Industry papers are not lagging behind academic papers with regard to how often they mention keywords that are proxies for social impact considerations. (4) Finally, we demonstrate that industry papers fall short of their academic counterparts with respect to the ratio of gender diversity. We believe that this work is a starting point for an informed debate within and outside of the ML community. (shrink)

Kants Religionsphilosophie by Ch. A. Thilo. This book is a reproduction of the original book published in 1905 and may have some imperfections such as marks or hand-written notes.

The advent of generative artificial intelligence and the widespread adoption of it in society engendered intensive debates about its ethical implications and risks. These risks often differ from those associated with traditional discriminative machine learning. To synthesize the recent discourse and map its normative concepts, we conducted a scoping review on the ethics of generative artificial intelligence, including especially large language models and text-to-image models. Our analysis provides a taxonomy of 378 normative issues in 19 topic areas and ranks them (...) according to their prevalence in the literature. The study offers a comprehensive overview for scholars, practitioners, or policymakers, condensing the ethical debates surrounding fairness, safety, harmful content, hallucinations, privacy, interaction risks, security, alignment, societal impacts, and others. We discuss the results, evaluate imbalances in the literature, and explore unsubstantiated risk scenarios. (shrink)

The paper is about the interpretation of opaque verbs like “seek”, “owe”, and “resemble” which allow for unspecific readings of their (indefinite) objects. It is shown that the following two observations create a problem for semantic analysis: (a) The opaque position is upward monotone: “John seeks a unicorn” implies “John seeks an animal”, given that “unicorn” is more specific than “animal”. (b) Indefinite objects of opaque verbs allow for higher-order, or “underspecific”, readings: “Jones is looking for something Smith is looking (...) for” can express that there is something unspecific that both Jones and Smith are looking for. Given (a) and (b), it would seem that the following inference is hard to escape, if the premisses are construed unspecifically and the conclusion is taken on its under- specific reading: Jones is looking for a sweater. Smith is looking for a pen. Smith is looking for something Jones is looking for. (shrink)

Machine behavior that is based on learning algorithms can be significantly influenced by the exposure to data of different qualities. Up to now, those qualities are solely measured in technical terms, but not in ethical ones, despite the significant role of training and annotation data in supervised machine learning. This is the first study to fill this gap by describing new dimensions of data quality for supervised machine learning applications. Based on the rationale that different social and psychological backgrounds of (...) individuals correlate in practice with different modes of human–computer-interaction, the paper describes from an ethical perspective how varying qualities of behavioral data that individuals leave behind while using digital technologies have socially relevant ramification for the development of machine learning applications. The specific objective of this study is to describe how training data can be selected according to ethical assessments of the behavior it originates from, establishing an innovative filter regime to transition from the big data rationale n = all to a more selective way of processing data for training sets in machine learning. The overarching aim of this research is to promote methods for achieving beneficial machine learning applications that could be widely useful for industry as well as academia. (shrink)

The current “AI Summer” is marked by scientific breakthroughs and economic successes in the fields of research, development, and application of systems with artificial intelligence. But, aside from the great hopes and promises associated with artificial intelligence, there are a number of challenges, shortcomings and even limitations of the technology. For one, these challenges arise from methodological and epistemological misconceptions about the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Secondly, they result from restrictions of the social context in which the development of applications (...) of machine learning is embedded. And third, they are a consequence of current technical limitations in the development and use of artificial intelligence. The paper intends to provide an overview of current challenges which the research and development of applications in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning have to face, whereas all three mentioned areas are to be further explored in this paper. (shrink)

Certain research strands can yield “forbidden knowledge”. This term refers to knowledge that is considered too sensitive, dangerous or taboo to be produced or shared. Discourses about such publication restrictions are already entrenched in scientific fields like IT security, synthetic biology or nuclear physics research. This paper makes the case for transferring this discourse to machine learning research. Some machine learning applications can very easily be misused and unfold harmful consequences, for instance, with regard to generative video or text synthesis, (...) personality analysis, behavior manipulation, software vulnerability detection and the like. Up till now, the machine learning research community embraces the idea of open access. However, this is opposed to precautionary efforts to prevent the malicious use of machine learning applications. Information about or from such applications may, if improperly disclosed, cause harm to people, organizations or whole societies. Hence, the goal of this work is to outline deliberations on how to deal with questions concerning the dissemination of such information. It proposes a tentative ethical framework for the machine learning community on how to deal with forbidden knowledge and dual-use applications. (shrink)

Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based (...) terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God's goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God's sovereignty with God's love. (shrink)

In the original publication of this article, the Table 1 has been published in a low resolution. Now a larger version of Table 1 is published in this correction. The publisher apologizes for the error made during production.

Béatrice Acklin Zimmermann Barbara Schmitz An der GrenzeTheologische Erkundungen zum BösenUnter dem Eindruck der schrecklichen Ereignisse vom 11. September 2001, von Beslan, Abu Ghraib und Kana ist das Interesse "am Bösen"wiedererwacht. Dabei fällt auf, dass die in Politik und Gesellschaft erfolgten Deutungen des Bösen geprägt sind durch klare Grenzziehungen zwischen "gut"und "böse", die zunehmend auch auf religiöse Kategorien wie Licht-Finsternis, gerecht-sündig, Tod-Leben rekurrieren. Dies provoziert die Frage nach der Trennschärfe von "gut"und "böse": Wo genau verläuft die Grenze zwischen "gut"und (...) "böse"und wer zieht diese Grenze? Ist "das Böse"eine unabhängige Größe oder tritt es vielmehr in Vermischung mit "dem Guten"auf? Und was bedeutet die Grenzziehung zwischen "gut"und böse"im Blick auf Genderkonfigurationen?In ökumenischer Aufgeschlossenheit und aus verschiedenen theologischen Blickwinkeln erkunden die Autoren und Autorinnen dieses Bandes "das Böse"unter dem Gesichtspunkt von Grenzziehungen. Zur Debatte stehen dabei ebenso die Grenzziehung zwischen "gut"und "böse"und die damit verbundenen Dualisierungen wie die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von "Gender"und den Konstruktionen des "Bösen". In kritischer Abgrenzung zur gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlich-politischen Tendenz, das Böse primär beim Anderen, einer bestimmten Nation, Kultur, Gesellschaftsschicht oder Weltanschauung zu verorten, wird in den verschiedenen Beiträge gezeigt, dass eine strenge Grenzziehung zwischen dem "Bösen"und dem "Guten"der Komplexität der Wirklichkeit nicht standhält. Mit Beiträgen von Béatrice Acklin Zimmermann, Ruth Albrecht, Pierre Bühler, Barbara Henze, Ralph Kunz und Ute Nürnberg, Walter Lesch, Karl Matthias Schmidt und Barbara Schmitz. Die HerausgeberinnenBéatrice Acklin Zimmermannist Privatdozentin für Systematische Theologie an der Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Freiburg/Schweiz und Leiterin des Bereiches Theologie und Philosophie an der Paulus-Akademie Zürich. Barbara Schmitzist Studienrätin im Hochschuldienst für den Bereich Altes Testament und Sprachen an der Universität Duisburg-Essen. (shrink)

The term complementarity plays a central role in quantum physics, not least in various approaches to defining entanglement and the conditions for its occurrence. It has, however, been used in a variety of ways by different authors, denoting different concepts and relationships. Here we describe and clarify some of them and analyze the role they play with respect to the phenomenon of entanglement. Based on these considerations we discuss the recently proposed system-theoretical generalization of the concepts entanglement and complementarity (Atmanspacher (...) et al. in Found Phys 32(3):379–406, 2002; von Lucadou et al. in J Conscious Stud 14(4):50–74, 2007; Filk and Römer in Axiomathes 21(2):211–220, 2011; Walach and Von Stillfried in Axiomathes 21(2): 185–209, 2011). We hope that a clarification regarding the specific meaning of these terms can be useful to the growing engagement with this interesting hypothesis and its critical investigation. (shrink)

This paper offers an explanation of the fact that sentences of the form (1) ‘X may A or B’ may be construed as implying (2) ‘X may A and X may B’, especially if they are used to grant permission. It is suggested that the effect arises because disjunctions are conjunctive lists of epistemic possibilities. Consequently, if the modal may is itself epistemic, (1) comes out as equivalent to (2), due to general laws of epistemic logic. On the other hand, (...) on a deontic reading of may, (2) is only implied under exceptional circumstances – which usually obtain when (1) is used performatively. (shrink)

P. Clodius’ lex frumentaria of 58 BC tends to be viewed as a populist law that greatly exacerbated, if not largely created, the problems associated with the provision of grain in the 50s. Yet the law was intended to alleviate the high costs due to increased demand created by Cato’s lex frumentaria of 62. Moreover, it was not conceived as a one-shot, populist solution, but was part of a larger strategy aimed at mitigating the problem of supply. In ways hitherto (...) unrealised, Clodius’ annexation of Cyprus and the consular exemption of Delos from taxation formed part of a wider debate on tackling the root cause of high costs and unreliable supply: the resurgence of piracy in the eastern Mediterranean. (shrink)

Beauchamp and Childress’ definition of autonomous decision‐making includes the conditions of intentionality, understanding, and non‐control. In genetics, however, a relational conception of autonomy has been increasingly recognized. This article aims to empirically assess aspects of social influence in genetic testing decision‐making and to connect these with principlist and relational theories of autonomy. We interviewed 18 adult genetic counsellees without capacity issues considering predictive genetic testing for cancer predisposition for themselves and two counselling physicians in Switzerland. We conducted a qualitative analysis, (...) building on a grounded theory study about predictive genetic testing decision‐making. We found that some participants agreed to predictive genetic testing predominantly because relatives wanted them to do it, with some even acting contrary to their own convictions. Others, in contrast, based their decision on purely individualistic reasons but expressed difficulties in explaining their decision to their social environment. Healthcare professionals had a critical influence on decision‐making in many cases without being manipulative, as perceived by counsellees. Still, cases of coercion and social pressure occurred within social relationships. In conclusion, predictive genetic testing decision‐making includes relational and individualistic aspects, and both are compatible with autonomous decision‐making. While the principlist and relational notions of autonomy compete on a theoretical level, they are two sides of the same coin when used as analytical lenses for genetic testing decision‐making. Social acceptance of refusal of testing should be improved to mitigate social pressure. Individuals should be encouraged to decide for themselves how much their social environment influences their decision regarding predictive genetic testing. (shrink)

It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely (...) available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, a behaviour that is intrinsic to our daily lives. As humans, we decipher the meaning of newspaper articles, books, legal matters, religious texts, political speeches, emails, and even dinner conversations every day. But how is knowledge mediated through these forms? What constitutes the process of interpretation? And how do we draw meaning from the world around us so that we might understand our position in it? In this Very Short Introduction (...) Jens Zimmermann traces the history of hermeneutic theory, setting out its key elements, and demonstrating how they can be applied to a broad range of disciplines: theology; literature; law; and natural and social sciences. Demonstrating the longstanding and wide-ranging necessity of interpretation, Zimmermann reveals its significance in our current social and political landscape. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. (shrink)

As first pointed out by Saul, the co-referential names in sentences like and defy substitution _salva veritate_: Clark Kent went into the phone booth, and Superman came out. I never made it to Karl-Marx-Stadt, but I visited Chemnitz last year. This paper elaborates and compares two solutions to Saul's substitution problem, both of which turn on an asymmetry between names that share their bearers. According to the first solution there is a semantic distinction between neutral names and restricted names. According (...) to the second solution, only neutral names are properly used, whereas the use of restricted names involves code-switching and pragmatic re-interpretation. As it turns out, the semantic approach deals more easily with changing names as in, whereas the pragmatic account is more adequate in explaining hidden identity cases like. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “The Circular Conditions of Second-order Science Sporadically Illustrated with Agent-based Experiments at the Roots of Observation” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: I follow the general tenor of Füllsack’s target article but I have some basic reservations as to the utilization of the thermodynamics involved.

Some of the short pieces attributed in various Arabic manuscripts to Alexander of Aphrodisias in fact derive from Proclus's Elements of Theology. Twenty such pieces were published in 1973 by G. Endress, who traced the unnamed translator to the circle of Kindi. Another such piece is here identified, published, and assigned to the same translator. Its beginning and end seem to have been revised by a later transmitter. Section II of the article adduces a parallel case where the original Arabic (...) version still exists. Section III surveys a number of related pieces that would also appear to have been changed in transmission. Section IV argues that most if not all were once united in a single collection of Proclus and Alexander. Section V argues that since certain changes of detail were evidently made during or soon after translation, the general arrangement of the Kindi-circle Alexander, as of the Kindi-circle Liber de Causis and the Kindi-circle, is also likely to be peculiar to the Arabic tradition. The text from which Proclus Arabus was first translated need not have differed substantially from the transmitted Greek. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions frequently make reference to the situation in which they are uttered. In fact, there are expressions whose whole point of use is to relate to their context of utterance. It is such expressions that this article is primarily about. However, rather than presenting the richness of pertinent phenomena (cf. Anderson & Keenan 1985), it concentrates on the theoretical tools provided by the (standard) two-dimensional analysis of context dependence, essentially originating with Kaplan (1989)--with a little help from Stalnaker (1978) (...) and Lewis (1979a, 1980), and various predecessors including Kamp (1971) and Vlach (1973). The current article overlaps in content with the account in Zimmermann (1991), which is however much broader (and at times deeper).. (shrink)

Smart Cities consist of a multitude of interconnected devices and services to, among others, enhance efficiency, comfort, and safety. To achieve these aims, smart cities rely on an interplay of measures including the deployment of interventions targeted to foster certain human behaviors, such as saving energy, or collecting and exchanging sensor and user data. Both aspects have ethical implications, e.g., when it comes to intervention design or the handling of privacy-related data such as personal information, user preferences or geolocations. Resulting (...) concerns must be taken seriously, as they reduce user acceptance and can even lead to the abolition of otherwise promising Smart City projects. Established guidelines for ethical research and practice from the psychological sciences provide a useful framework for the kinds of ethical issues raised when designing human-centered interventions or dealing with user-generated data. This article thus reviews relevant psychological guidelines and discusses their applicability to the Smart City context. A special focus is on the guidelines’ implications and resulting challenges for certain Smart City applications. Additionally, potential gaps in current guidelines and the limits of applicability are reflected upon. (shrink)

Due to the technology of machine learning, new breakthroughs are currently being achieved with constant regularity. By using machine learning techniques, computer applications can be developed and used to solve tasks that have hitherto been assumed not to be solvable by computers. If these achievements consider applications that collect and process personal data, this is typically perceived as a threat to information privacy. This paper aims to discuss applications from both fields of personality and image analysis. These applications are often (...) criticized by reference to the protection of privacy. This paper critically questions this approach. Instead of solely using the concept of privacy to address the risks of machine learning, it is increasingly necessary to consider and implement ethical anti-discrimination concepts, too. In many ways, informational privacy requires individual information control. However, not least because of machine learning technologies, information control has become obsolete. Hence, societies need stronger anti-discrimination tenets to counteract the risks of machine learning. (shrink)

The paper introduces a new type of rules into Natural Deduction, elimination rules by composition. Elimination rules by composition replace usual elimination rules in the style of disjunction elimination and give a more direct treatment of additive disjunction, multiplicative conjunction, existence quantifier and possibility modality. Elimination rules by composition have an enormous impact on proof-structures of deductions: they do not produce segments, deduction trees remain binary branching, there is no vacuous discharge, there is only few need of permutations. This new (...) type of rules fits especially to substructural issues, so it is shown for Lambek Calculus, i.e. intuitionistic non-commutative linear logic and to its extensions by structural rules like permutation, weakening and contraction. Natural deduction formulated with elimination rules by composition from a complexity perspective is superior to other calculi. (shrink)

Disagreement persists about when, if at all, disenfranchisement is a fitting response to criminal wrongdoing of type X. Positive retributivists endorse a permissive view of fittingness: on this view, disenfranchising a remarkably wide range of morally serious criminal wrongdoers is justified. But defining fittingness in the context of criminal disenfranchisement in such broad terms is implausible, since many crimes sanctioned via disenfranchisement have little to do with democratic participation in the first place: the link between the nature of a criminal (...) act X (the ‘desert basis’) and a fitting sanction Y is insufficiently direct in such cases. I define a new, much narrower account of the kind of criminal wrongdoing which is a more plausible desert basis for disenfranchisement: ‘political wrongdoing’, such as electioneering, corruption, or conspiracy with foreign powers. I conclude that widespread blanket and post-incarceration disenfranchisement policies are overinclusive, because they disenfranchise persons guilty of serious, but non-political, criminal wrongdoing. While such overinclusiveness is objectionable in any context, it is particularly objectionable in circumstances in which it has additional large-scale collateral consequences, for instance by perpetuating existing structures of racial injustice. At the same time, current policies are underinclusive, thus hindering the aim of holding political wrongdoers accountable. (shrink)

We introduce the Bounded Axiom A Forcing Axiom . It turns out that it is equiconsistent with the existence of a regular ∑2-correct cardinal and hence also equiconsistent with BPFA. Furthermore we show that, if consistent, it does not imply the Bounded Proper Forcing Axiom.

Various geoengineering technologies that would deliberately alter the climate system have been proposed as a way to alleviate risks of global warming. Technologies that would shield incoming sunlight to cool the planet, so called solar radiation management, are particularly controversial. Considering insights from social studies of simulation modeling and research on expectations in science and technology, I argue that climate modeling has a central role in producing visions of SRM. I draw upon an empirical analysis of scientific research on SRM (...) to examine how a creative play with technological ideas becomes possible through climate modeling. This enables scientists to project and study environmental impacts of speculative SRM methods in virtual experiments and to develop and refine ideas for adjusting sunlight. Hence, while climate models are used to improve scientific understandings of climate system behavior and to anticipate possible environmental impacts of SRM, they also become inventive tools, allowing scientists to envision novel ways of climate control and optimization. Given the importance of simulation studies to knowledge production on SRM, I critically reflect on the challenges that arise when visions about an engineered climate future are first and foremost produced in climate simulations. (shrink)

This textbook introduces undergraduate students of language and linguistics to the basic ideas, insights, and techniques of contemporary semantic theory. The book starts with everyday observations about word meaning and use and then gradually zooms in on the question of how speakers manage to meaningfully communicate with phrases, sentences, and texts they have never come across before. Extensive English examples provide ample illustration.

The article presents a full proof‐theoretic semantics for natural deduction based on an extended inversion principle: the elimination rule for an operator q may invert the introduction rule for q, but also vice versa, the introduction rule for a connective q may invert the elimination rule for q. Such an inversion—extending Prawitz' concept of inversion—gives the following theorem: Inversion for two rules of operator q (intro rule, elim rule) exists iff a reduction of a maximum formula for q exists. The (...) inversion theorem is specified to two logics, Lambek calculus (LC) and intuitionistic linear logic (ILL), with four propositional connectives: two multiplicatives (implication and conjunction) and two additives (conjunction and disjunction), with two quantifiers and two modals. LC is defined by using elimination rules by composition. ILL is defined by using usual general elimination rules. Elimination rules by composition are an exciting alternative to general elimination rules; in some cases, they do not need permutations. (shrink)