ZusammenfassungDie rechtliche Regelung der Fortpflanzungsmedizin ist dringend reformbedürftig. Das Embryonenschutzgesetz von 1990 erfasst die neuesten technischen Entwicklungen nicht, ist in manchen Bereichen unstimmig und lückenhaft, setzt die betroffenen Frauen, Paare und Kinder unnötigen gesundheitlichen Risiken aus, erschwert paradoxerweise die Durchsetzung von Kinderrechten und erzeugt Gerechtigkeitsprobleme und Rechtsunsicherheit für die betroffenen Paare und die behandelnden Ärztinnen und Ärzte.Das Embryonenschutzgesetz enthält zudem nur strafrechtliche Verbote. Diese erlauben keine angemessene Reaktion auf die medizinische Entwicklung und den gesellschaftlichen Wandel und werden der Komplexität der (...) Materie nicht gerecht.Diese Probleme müssen gelöst werden. Der Bundesgesetzgeber verfügt seit mehr als 20 Jahren über die Kompetenz zur Regelung der Fortpflanzungsmedizin. Er sollte in der kommenden Legislaturperiode ein umfassendes Fortpflanzungsmedizingesetz schaffen. (shrink)

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

Using Hofstede's culture theory (1980, 2001 Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nation. Sage, NewYork), the current study incorporates the moral development (e.g. Thorne, 2000; Thorne and Magnan, 2000; Thorne et al., 2003) and multidimensional ethics scale (e.g. Cohen et al., 1993; Cohen et al., 1996b; Cohen et al., 2001; Flory et al., 1992) approaches to compare the ethical reasoning and decisions of Canadian and Mainland Chinese final year undergraduate accounting students. The results indicate that Canadian accounting (...) students' formulation of an intention to act on a particular ethical dilemma (deliberative reasoning) as measured by the moral development approach (Thorne, 2000) was higher than Mainland Chinese accounting students. The current study proposes that the five factors identified by the multidimensional ethics scale (MES), as being relevant to ethical decision making can be placed into the three levels of ethical reasoning identified by Kohlberg's (1958, The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in the Years Ten to Sixteen. University of Chicago, Doctoral dissertation) theory of cognitive moral development. Canadian accounting students used post-conventional MES factors (moral equity, contractualism, and utilitarianism) more frequently and made more ethical audit decisions than Chinese accounting students. (shrink)

This book is a record of my dialogues with Stephen Hawking, his graduate assistants and his nurses during a four city public lecture tour I organized for Hawking, including Portland, Eugene, Seattle, Vancouver, BC. We discussed 20th century science and philosophy of science. Since I was often the one being questioned, much of the contents reflect my PhD research at the University of London. My focus was on understanding the limits of science, as represented by quantum theory and relativity. My (...) mentors had been Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, and I was strongly influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. In one in depth presentation to Hawking I suggested that Newtonian space-time and Maxwellian space-time were complementary, were defined by complementary symmetry principles. I had opportunity to present the same arguments to Kip Thorne and Freeman Dyson. Hawking simply remarked that I 'may be right'. Thorne confirmed that practitioners of General Relativity use both depending on the problem at hand. Dyson was emphatic – "Yes. Definitely. Absolutely.". (shrink)

Today the question of the moral foundations of democracy is more important then ever. In this book the author helps to explain when and why democracy is important and also gives us guidance as to how democracies ought to be shaped.

Thomas Murray's graceful and humane book illuminates one of the most morally complex areas of everyday life: the relationship between parents and children. What do children mean to their parents, and how far do parental obligations go? What, from the beginning of life to its end, is the worth of a child? Ethicist Murray leaves the rarefied air of abstract moral philosophy in order to reflect on the moral perplexities of ordinary life and ordinary people. Observing that abstract moral (...) terms such as altruism and selfishness can be buried in the everyday doings of families, he maintains that ethical theory needs a richer description than it now has of the moral life of parents and children. How far should adults go in their quest for children? What options are available to women who do not want to bear a child now? Should couples be allowed to reject a child because of genetic disability or "wrong" gender? How can we weigh the competing claims of the genetic and the rearing parents to a particular child? _The Worth of a Child_ couples impressive learning with a conversational style. Only by getting down to cases, Murray insists, can we reach moral conclusions that are unsentimental, farsighted, and just. In an era of intense public and private acrimony about the place and meaning of "family values," his practical wisdom about extraordinary difficult moral issues offers compelling reading for both experienced and prospective parents, as well as for ethicists, social and behavioral scientists, and legal theorists. (shrink)

We have a variety of different ways of dividing up, classifying, mapping, sorting and listing the objects in reality. The theory of granular partitions presented here seeks to provide a general and unified basis for understanding such phenomena in formal terms that is more realistic than existing alternatives. Our theory has two orthogonal parts: the first is a theory of classification; it provides an account of partitions as cells and subcells; the second is a theory of reference or intentionality; it (...) provides an account of how cells and subcells relate to objects in reality. We define a notion of well-formedness for partitions, and we give an account of what it means for a partition to project onto objects in reality. We continue by classifying partitions along three axes: (a) in terms of the degree of correspondence between partition cells and objects in reality; (b) in terms of the degree to which a partition represents the mereological structure of the domain it is projected onto; and (c) in terms of the degree of completeness with which a partition represents this domain. (shrink)

This article discusses mechanisms and principles for assignment of moral responsibility to intelligent robots, with special focus on military robots. We introduce the concept autonomous power as a new concept, and use it to identify the type of robots that call for moral considerations. It is furthermore argued that autonomous power, and in particular the ability to learn, is decisive for assignment of moral responsibility to robots. As technological development will lead to robots with increasing autonomous power, we should be (...) prepared for a future when people blame robots for their actions. It is important to, already today, investigate the mechanisms that control human behavior in this respect. The results may be used when designing future military robots, to control unwanted tendencies to assign responsibility to the robots. Independent of the responsibility issue, the moral quality of robots’ behavior should be seen as one of many performance measures by which we evaluate robots. How to design ethics based control systems should be carefully investigated already now. From a consequentialist view, it would indeed be highly immoral to develop robots capable of performing acts involving life and death, without including some kind of moral framework. (shrink)

This article explores the ‘no-self alternative’ in the debate on the metaphysical and phenomenological concept of the self. It suggests that the no-self alternative may not be an alternative at all and it could simply be the default assumption for all rational approaches to self-consciousness and subjectivity. It outlines several different anti-realist arguments about the self and explains why the idea that there are no selves is counter-intuitive. It shows why the intuitions of phenomenology are traceable to the contingent fact (...) about the causal structure of our brains, which induces in each of us a first-person perspective that makes it difficult to deny the existence of selves. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, I present a distinct interpretation of the inception of the phenomenology of feelings. I show that Husserl’s first substantial discussion of intentional and non-intentional feelings is not from his 1901 Logical Investigations, but rather his 1893 manuscript, “Notes towards a Theory of Attention and Interest”. Husserl there describes intentional feelings as active and non-intentional feelings as passive. Second, I show that Husserl presents a somewhat unique account of feelings in “Notes”, which is partly different (...) from his later theories of feelings found in Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory and Studies Concerning the Structures of Consciousness. In contrast to those mature writings, in “Notes”, Husserl describes intentional feelings while avoiding cognitivism and he analyses non-intentional feelings without employing the content-apprehension schema. On this basis, I argue that “Notes” is an important untapped resource for constructing original phenomenologies of feelings. (shrink)

The fourteenth-century thinker Thomas Bradwardine is well known in both the history of science and the history of theology. The first of the Merton Calculators (mathematical physicists) and passionate defender of the Augustinian doctrine of salvation through grace alone, he was briefly archbishop of Canterbury before succumbing to the Black Death in 1349. This new edition of his Insolubilia, made from all thirteen known manuscripts, shows that he was also a logician of the first rank. The edition is accompanied (...) by a full English translation. In the treatise, Bradwardine considers and rejects the theories of his contemporaries about the logical puzzles known as 'insolubles,' and sets out his own solution at length and in detail. In a substantial introduction, Stephen Read describes Bradwardine's analysis, compares it with other more recent theories, and places it in its historical context. The text is accompanied by three appendices, the first of which is an extra chapter found in two manuscripts (and partly in a third) that appears to contain further thoughts by Bradwardine himself. The second contains an extract from Ralph Strode's Insolubilia, composed in the 1360s, repeating and enlarging on Bradwardine's text; and the third consists of an anonymous text that applies Bradwardine's solution to a succession of different insolubles"--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

In several jurisdictions, sex offenders may be offered chemical castration as an alternative to further incarceration. In some, agreement to chemical castration may be made a formal condition of parole or release. In others, refusal to undergo chemical castration can increase the likelihood of further incarceration though no formal link is made between the two. Offering chemical castration as an alternative to further incarceration is often said to be partially coercive, thus rendering the offender’s consent invalid. The dominant response to (...) this objection has been to argue that any coercion present in such cases is compatible with valid consent. In this article, we take a different tack, arguing that, even if consent would not be valid, offering chemical castration will often be supported by the very considerations that underpin concerns about consent: considerations of autonomy. This is because offering chemical castration will often increase the offender’s autonomy, both at the time the offer is made and in the future. (shrink)

A crucial question for a process view of life is how to identify a process and how to follow it through time. The genidentity view can contribute decisively to this project. It says that the identity through time of an entity X is given by a well-identified series of continuous states of affairs. Genidentity helps address the problem of diachronic identity in the living world. This chapter describes the centrality of the concept of genidentity for David Hull and proposes an (...) extension of Hull’s view to the ubiquitous phenomenon of symbiosis. Finally, using immunology as a key example, it shows that the genidentity view suggests that the main interest of a process approach is epistemological rather than ontological and that its principal claim is one of priority, namely that processes precede and define things, and not vice versa. (shrink)

One puzzling feature of talk about properties, propositions and natural numbers is that statements that are explicitly about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions from statements that don't mention them at all. Thus it seems that the existence of numbers, properties and propositions can be established`from nothing'. This metaphysical puzzle is tied to a series of syntactic and semantic puzzles about the relationship between ordinary, metaphysically innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts, statements that explicitly mention (...) numbers, properties and propositions, but nonetheless appear to be equivalent to the former. I argue that the standard solutions to the metaphysical puzzles make a mistaken assumption about the semantics of the loaded counterparts. Instead I propose a solution to the syntactic and semantic puzzles, and argue that this solution also gives us a new solution to the metaphysical puzzle. I argue that instead of containing more semantically singular terms that aim to refer to extra entities, the loaded counterparts are focus constructions. Their syntactic structure is in the service of presenting information with a focus, but not to refer to new entities. This will allow us to spell out Frege's metaphor of content carving. (shrink)

I consider cases where you increase the risk that, e.g., someone will die, without increasing the risk that you will kill them: in particular, cases in which that increasing of risk is accompanied by a decreasing of risk of the same degree such that the risk imposition has been offset. I defend the moral legitimacy of such offsetting, including carbon-offsetting.

Throughout his philosophical development, Wittgenstein was more concerned with language than with any other topic. No other philosopher has been as influential on our understanding of the deep problems surrounding language, and yet the true significance of his writing on the subject is difficult to assess, since most of the current debates regarding language tend to overlook his work. In this book, Thomas McNally shows that philosophers of language still have much to learn from Wittgenstein's later writings. The book (...) examines the finer details of his arguments while also clarifying their importance for debates outside the field of Wittgenstein studies. Presenting the issues thematically, the book explores how the arguments in the Philosophical Investigations remain relevant, compelling us to reflect in novel and challenging ways on the nature of language. (shrink)

Many people consider Martin Heidegger the most important German philosopher of the twentieth century. He is indisputably controversial and influential. Athough much has been written about Heidegger, this may be the best single volume covering his life, career, and thought. For all its breadth and complexity, Heidegger's perspective is quite simple: he is concerned with the meaning of Being as disclosure. Heidegger's life was almost as simple. He was a German professor, except for a brief but significant period in which (...) he supported the Nazi regime. While that departure from philosophy continues to haunt his name and work, one must question whether his thought from 1912 to 1976 should be measured by the yardstick of his politics from May, 1933, through February, 1934. Th is anthology addresses his complex but simple thought and his simple but complex life. In a real sense, Sheehan claims, there is no content to Heidegger's topic and legacy, only a method. But method must not be taken to mean a technique or procedure for philosophical thinking. Rather, the topic of Heidegger's thought and his pursuit of that topic, the "what" and the "how," are one and the same thing. Heidegger writes, "Alles ist Weg," "Everything is way," and man's Being is to be on-the-way in essential movement. Heidegger, argues in our essence we humans are the topic and the point is not to be led there so much as to come to know what we already know and to become what we already are. This brilliant collection confirms this truism, and is an excellent introduction to the work of this seminal thinker. (shrink)

In this article I take on the “Transcendentalist Challenge” to naturalized phenomenology, highlighting how the ontological and methodological commitments of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy point in the direction of an integration of the transcendental and the scientific, thus making room for a productive exchange between philosophy and psychological science when it comes to understanding consciousness and its place in nature. Discussing various conceptions of naturalized phenomenology, I argue that what I call an “Integrationist View” is required if we are to make sense (...) of the possibility of productive exchange between phenomenology and the sciences. My main argument is that if we conceive of consciousness as a structure of behavior ontologically prior to the distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity and third- and first-person perspectives, we arrive at a view of the transcendental as not essentially separate from the domain of science, but rather as contingent organizational norms of empirical nature that are best illuminated through a dialectical exchange between phenomenological and scientific approaches. I end by showing how Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the “Schneider case” in an example of such an integration. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. In addition, it presents the fundamentals of his beliefs about language, epistemology, and an extensive treatment of revealed religion and its relation to politics. Beginning with premises that were sometimes controversial, such as that every human action is caused by the agent's desire for his own good, Hobbes derived shocking conclusions, such as that the civil government enjoys absolute (...) control over its citizens and that the sovereign has the right to determine which religion is to be practiced in a commonwealth. Hobbes's contemporaries recognized the power of the arguments in Leviathan and many of them wrote responses to it. Selections from books by John Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Edward Hyde, George Lawson, William Lucy, Samuel Pufendorf and Thomas Tenison are included in this edition. Leviathan is divided into four parts: In the first part, Of Man, Hobbes presents a view of human beings and of the natural world in general that is materialistic and mechanistic. In the second part, Of Commonwealth, he defends the theory of absolute sovereignty, the view that the government has all the political power and has the right to control any aspect of life. In the third part, Of a Christian Commonwealth, he critiques concepts like revelation, prophets, and miracles in such a way that it becomes doubtful whether they can be rationally justified. In the fourth part, Of the Kingdom of Darkness, he explains various ways in which priestly religion has corrupted religion and transgressed the rights of the sovereign. In this revised edition of Hobbes's classic work, A.P. Martinich improves Hobbes's punctuation for the sake of clarity. He has also added new notes for readers, extensive cross references, and substantial part of Hobbes's reply to Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan. (shrink)

Two of the greatest challenges facing humanity are environmental degradation and the persistence of poverty. Both can be met by instituting a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) that would slow pollution and natural-resource depletion while collecting funds to avert poverty worldwide. Unlike Hillel Steiner's Global Fund, which is presented as a fully just regime governing the use of planetary resources, the GRD is meant as merely a modest but widely acceptable and therefore realistic step toward justice. Paula Casal has set forth (...) various ways in which this step might be improved upon. Solid counter-arguments can be given to her criticisms and suggestions. But to specify the best (effective and realizable) design of an appropriate global institutional mechanism with some confidence, economists, political scientists, jurists, environmental scientists, and activists would need to be drawn in to help think through the immense empirical and political complexities posed by this urgent task. (shrink)

Musing for Puncta special issue on "Critically Sick: New Phenomenologies Of Illness, Madness, And Disability.".

Citizens of affluent countries bear a far greater responsibility for world poverty than they typically realise. This is so because poverty is more severe, more widespread and more avoidable than officially acknowledged and also because it is substantially aggravated by supranational institutional arrangements that are designed and imposed by the governments and elites of the more powerful states. It may seem that this analysis of world poverty implies that citizens of affluent countries have forfeited their right not to be killed (...) in the course of a redistributive war and that such a war would be both just and permissible. In fact, however, it has none of these three implications. This finding should be welcomed insofar as violence and macho talk of violence are in our world highly counterproductive responses to the injustice of poverty. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Indifference is a term often used to describe the sort of freedom had by the will according to the libertarian, or Molinist account. It is thought to be a univocal term. In fact, however, it is used in at least seven different ways, in a variety of domains during the early modern period. All of them have plausible roots in Descartes, but he himself uses the term in only one sense, and failure to notice this consistent use by him (...) has bedeviled interpretations of his account of the will. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to reflect on selected works of Aleksander Watt placed in the context of De imitatione Christi by Thomas à Kempis and to verify the view that suffering functions in the consciousness and poetic imagination of the writer as a value conducive to the spiritual development of the individual. The author analyzes the poet’s memoirs in order to show how reading the book he discovered during WWII, while exiled in Kazakhstan, influenced Wat’s choices and (...) attitudes, or his perception of the decisions he made. Then the article interprets the poetic texts that emphasize the theme of suffering and following Jesus Christ. The Wiersze somatyczne [Somatic Poems] cycle is discussed, on top of Wat’s works based on the symbolism of the crown of thorns and the death on the cross, the excerpts from his drama Kobiety z Monte Olivetto [The Women of Monte Olivetto], and the poem with the incipit “U szczytu antynomij….” [At the top of antinomies...], which is formed into the shape of the cross. The researcher reads them in a hermeneutical way in the course of which she analyzes the symbols and biblical allusions, associates literary metaphors with autobiographical traces of the poet’s experiences, and uncovers the connection between the texts of the two authors. The main thesis of the article is that in the discussed works, there is a dolorous theme – that is, one in which suffering is exposed and presented as an ethically valuable experience. A reading of a number of works in which pain, depicted in various ways, is at the same time a reminiscence of the poet’s own physical and mental anguish and a reference to the Passion of Christ, allows one to conclude that for the author of Wiersze śródziemnomorskie [The Mediterranean Poems], suffering is a state of spiritual transformation that brings man closer to the sphere of the sacred. The author ultimately concludes that, in light of the work of Thomas à Kempis, Wat’s dolorism appears as a modern interpretation of the idea of following Christ, marked by the necessity of being different from Him. (shrink)

The relevant alternatives approach in epistemology1 arose some years ago partly out of the hope to be able to reconcile our ordinary claims of knowledge with our inability to answer the skeptic. It was supposed to give rise to an account of knowledge according to which our ordinary claims of knowledge are true, even though the claims about our lack of knowledge that the skeptics make in one of their more persuasive moments are also true. To know, according to such (...) an account, is to have evidence sufficient to rule out all the relevant alternatives. In ordinary life few alternatives are relevant. For example, whether or not we are brains in a vat is not a relevant alternative that we have to be able to rule out. In the debate with the skeptic it may become relevant, and accordingly we might not know something any more then, even though we have the same evidence as in ordinary life. The skeptics cleverly make more and more alternatives relevant, and that is how they succeed. But their success in the philosophy seminar is no threat to our ordinary claims of knowledge, or so the theory goes. (shrink)

This paper introduces a class of graphical independence models that is closed under marginalization and conditioning but that contains all DAG independence models. This class of graphs, called maximal ancestral graphs, has two attractive features: there is at most one edge between each pair of vertices; every missing edge corresponds to an independence relation. These features lead to a simple parameterization of the corresponding set of distributions in the Gaussian case.

This paper considers the question whether the notion of the relative apriori, central to Michael Friedman’s transcendentalist programme for philosophy of science, is available also to philosophers who reject appeals to a synthetic a priori. After tracing the rediscovery of the relative a priori and delineating its potential, the question is considered whether Friedman’s arguments against Quinean naturalism and Carnap’s attenuated logicism tell against a conception of philosophy as scientific metatheory that combines logical and empirical inquiries. Finding an opening here (...) it is argued that this conception can also help itself to the notion of a relative a priori which, it is agreed, is central to historically informed theorising about science. (shrink)

I propose a new formalist account of legal (/proximate) causation – one that holds legal causation to be a matter of amoral, descriptive fact. The account starts with a metaphysical relation, akin to but distinct from common-sense causation, and it argues that legal causation aligns exactly with that relation; it is unified and principled.

An answer to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution.

Soft robots promise an exciting design trajectory in the field of robotics and human–robot interaction (HRI), promising more adaptive, resilient movement within environments as well as a safer, more sensitive interface for the objects or agents the robot encounters. In particular, tactile HRI is a critical dimension for designers to consider, especially given the onrush of assistive and companion robots into our society. In this article, we propose to surface an important set of ethical challenges for the field of soft (...) robotics to meet. Tactile HRI strongly suggests that soft-bodied robots balance tactile engagement against emotional manipulation, model intimacy on the bonding with a tool not with a person, and deflect users from personally and socially destructive behavior the soft bodies and surfaces could normally entice. (shrink)

The inventor of the concepts of emics and etics, linguist Kenneth Pike, uses this volume as a forum to explain their development and their usage today. He is joined in the debate by renowned anthropologist Marvin Harris. Eight other scholars add to the scholarly discourse and demonstrate applications of the concepts in a variety of disciplines. Referring to insider versus outsider, subjective versus objective views of the world, these concepts are vital for researchers dealing with cultures other than their own.