The aim of this paper is to offer a version of the so-called conversational hypothesis of the ontogenetic connection between language and mindreading (Harris 1996, 2005; Van Cleave and Gauker 2010; Hughes et al. 2006). After arguing against a particular way of understanding the hypothesis (the communicative view), I will start from the justificatory view in philosophy of social cognition (Andrews 2012; Hutto 2004; Zawidzki 2013) to make the case for the idea that the primary function of belief and desire (...) attributions is to justify and normalize deviant patterns of behaviour. Following this framework, I elaborate upon the idea that development of folk psychological skills requires the subjects to engage in conversationally mediated joint and cooperative activities in order to acquire the conceptual capacity of ascribing propositional attitudes. After presenting the general version of the hypothesis, I present several testable sub-hypotheses and some psychological studies that give empirical plausibility to the hypothesis. (shrink)

Symbiosis plays a fundamental role in contemporary biology, as well as in recent thinking in philosophy of biology. The discovery of the importance and universality of symbiotic associations has brought new light to old debates in the field, including issues about the concept of biological individuality. An important aspect of these debates has been the formulation of the hologenome concept of evolution, the notion that holobionts are units of natural selection in evolution. This review examines the philosophical assumptions that underlie (...) recent proposal of the hologenome concept of evolution, and traces those debates back in time to their historical origins, to the moment when the connection between the topics of symbiosis and biological individuality first caught the attention of biologists. The review is divided in two parts. The first part explores the historical origins of the connection between the notion of symbiosis and the concept of biological individuality, and emphasizes the role of A. de Bary, R. Pound, A. Schneider and C. Merezhkowsky in framing the debate. The second part examines the hologenome concept of evolution and explores four parallelisms between contemporary debates and the debates presented in the first part of the essay, arguing that the different debates raised by the hologenome concept were already present in the literature. I suggest that the novelty of the hologenome concept of evolution lies in the wider appreciation of the importance of symbiosis for maintaining life on Earth as we know it. Finally, I conclude by suggesting the importance of exploring the connections among contemporary biology, philosophy of biology and history of biology in order to gain a better understanding of contemporary biology. (shrink)

Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages composed by a host plus its microbiome. The status of holobionts as individuals has recently been a subject of continuous controversy, which has given rise to two main positions: on the one hand, holobiont advocates argue that holobionts are biological individuals; on the other, holobiont detractors argue that they are just mere chimeras or ecological communities, but not individuals. Both parties in the dispute develop their arguments from the framework of the philosophy of biology, in terms (...) of what it takes for a “conglomerate” to be considered an interesting individual from a biological point of view. However, the debates about holobiont individuality have important ontological implications that have remained vaguely explored from a metaphysical framework. The purpose of this paper is to cover that gap by presenting a metaphysical approach to holobionts individuality. Drawing upon a conception of natural selection that puts the focus on the transgenerational recurrence of the traits and that supports the thesis that holobionts are units of selection, we argue that holobionts bear emergent traits and exert downward powers over the entities that compose them. In this vein, we argue, a reasonable argument can be made for conceiving holobionts as emergent biological individuals. (shrink)

A widespread view in philosophy claims that inner speech is closely tied to human metacognitive capacities. This so-called format view of inner speech considers that talking to oneself allows humans to gain access to their own mental states by forming metarepresentation states through the rehearsal of inner utterances (section 2). The aim of this paper is to present two problems to this view (section 3) and offer an alternative view to the connection between inner speech and metacognition (section 4). According (...) to this alternative, inner speech (meta)cognitive functions derivate from the set of commitments we mobilize in our communicative exchanges. After presenting this commitment-based approach, I address two possible objections (section 5). (shrink)

Bourrat and Griffiths :33, 2018) have recently argued that most of the evidence presented by holobiont defenders to support the thesis that holobionts are evolutionary individuals is not to the point and is not even adequate to discriminate multispecies evolutionary individuals from other multispecies assemblages that would not be considered evolutionary individuals by most holobiont defenders. They further argue that an adequate criterion to distinguish the two categories is fitness alignment, presenting the notion of fitness boundedness as a criterion that (...) allows divorcing true multispecies evolutionary individuals from other multispecies assemblages and provides an adequate criterion to single out genuine evolutionary multispecies assemblages. A consequence of their criterion is that holobionts, as conventionally defined by hologenome defenders, are not evolutionary individuals except in very rare cases, and for very specific host-symbiont associations. This paper is a critical response to Bourrat and Griffiths’ arguments and a defence of the arguments presented by holobiont defenders. Drawing upon the case of the hologenomic basis of the evolution of sanguivory in vampire bats, I argue that Bourrat and Griffiths overlook some aspects of the biological nature of the microbiome that justifies the thesis that holobionts are evolutionarily different to other multispecies assemblages. I argue that the hologenome theory of evolution should not define the hologenome as a collection of genomes, but as the sum of the host genome plus some traits of the microbiome which together constitute an evolutionary individual, a conception I refer to as the stability of traits conception of the hologenome. Based on that conception I argue that the evidence presented by holobiont defenders is to the point, and supports the thesis that holobionts are evolutionary individuals. In this sense, the paper offers an account of the holobiont that aims to foster a dialogue between hologenome advocates and hologenome critics. (shrink)

Philippe Huneman has recently questioned the widespread application of mechanistic models of scientific explanation based on the existence of structural explanations, i.e. explanations that account for the phenomenon to be explained in virtue of the mathematical properties of the system where the phenomenon obtains, rather than in terms of the mechanisms that causally produce the phenomenon. Structural explanations are very diverse, including cases like explanations in terms of bowtie structures, in terms of the topological properties of the system, or in (...) terms of equilibrium. The role of mathematics in bowtie structured systems and in topologically constrained systems has recently been examined in different papers. However, the specific role that mathematical properties play in equilibrium explanations requires further examination, as different authors defend different interpretations, some of them closer to the new-mechanistic approach than to the structural model advocated by Huneman. In this paper, we cover this gap by investigating the explanatory role that mathematics play in Blaser and Kirschner’s nested equilibrium model of the stability of persistent long-term human-microbe associations. We argue that their model is explanatory because: i) it provides a mathematical structure in the form of a set of differential equations that together satisfy an ESS; ii) that the nested nature of the ESSs makes the explanation of host-microbe persistent associations robust to any perturbation; iii) that this is so because the properties of the ESS directly mirror the properties of the biological system in a non-causal way. The combination of these three theses make equilibrium explanations look more similar to structural explanations than to causal-mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at the (...) species-level (genomic adaptations). In this paper, we cover this gap by investigating the nature of hologenomic adaptations. By drawing on the case of the evolution of sanguivory diet in vampire bats, we argue that a trait constitutes a hologenomic adaptation when its evolution can only be explained if the holobiont is considered the biological individual that manifests this adaptation, while the bacterial taxa that bear the trait are only opportunistic beneficiaries of it. We then use the philosophical notions of emergence and inter-identity to explain the nature of this form of individuality and argue why it is special of holobionts. Overall, our paper illustrates how the use of philosophical concepts can illuminate scientific discussions, in the trend of what has recently been called metaphysics of biology. (shrink)

States restrict immigration on a massive scale. Governments fortify their borders with walls and fences, authorize border patrols, imprison migrants in detention centers, and deport large numbers of foreigners. Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of Immigration argues that immigration restrictions are systematically unjust and examines how individual actors should respond to this injustice. Javier Hidalgo maintains that individuals can rightfully resist immigration restrictions and often have strong moral reasons to subvert these laws. This book makes the case that (...) unauthorized migrants can permissibly evade, deceive, and use defensive force against immigration agents, that smugglers can aid migrants in crossing borders, and that citizens should disobey laws that compel them to harm immigrants. Unjust Borders is a meditation on how individuals should act in the midst of pervasive injustice. (shrink)

The hologenome concept of evolution is a hypothesis about the evolution of animals and plants. It asserts that the evolution of animals and plants was partially triggered by their interactions with their symbiotic microbiomes. In that vein, the hologenome concept posits that the holobiont (animal host + symbionts of the microbiome) is a unit of selection. -/- The hologenome concept has been severely criticized on the basis that selection on holobionts would only be possible if there were a tight transgenerational (...) host-genotype-to-symbiont-genotype connection. As our current evidence suggests that this is not the case for most of the symbiont species that compose the microbiome of animals and plants, the opportunity for holobiont selection is very low in relation to the opportunity for selection on each of the species that compose the host microbiome. Therefore, holobiont selection will always be disrupted ‘from below’, by selection on each of the species that compose the microbiome. -/- This thesis constitutes a conceptual effort to defend philosophically the hologenome concept. I argue that the criticism according to which holobiont selection requires tight transgenerational host-genotype-to-symbiont-genotype connection is grounded on a metaphysical view of the world according to which the biological hierarchy needs to be nested, such that each new level of selection includes every entity from below. Applied to hologenomes, it entails that the hologenome is a collection of genomes, and selection of hologenomes is assumed to entail cospeciation of the host with the species that constitute its microbiome. -/- Against that interpretation, I propose the ‘stability of traits’ account, according to which hologenome evolution is the result of the action of natural selection in a non-nested hierarchical world. In that vein, hologenome evolution does not entail cospeciation, and thus it does not require tight transgenerational host-genotype-to-symbiont-genotype connection. By embracing a multilevel selection perspective, I argue that hologenome evolution results from the simultaneous action of natural selection on each of the lineages that compose the microbiome, and on the assemblage composed by the host genome plus the functional traits of its microbiome. Hologenome selection occurs when the evolution of the traits of the microbiome result from their effects on the fitness of the host, and it can take the form of multilevel selection 1, or multilevel selection 2. In both cases, hologenome selection entails the evolution of microbiome traits, as well as evolution of the host genome, rather than cospeciation of lineages. (shrink)

Political philosophy in the last decades has turned away from universal narratives of progress, on grounds that these narratives produce exclusion and justify domination. However, the universal values that underlie emancipatory political projects seem to presuppose universal history, which explains its persistence in some contemporary political philosophers committed to such projects. In order to find a response to the paradox according to which universal history is inherently exclusionary and yet necessary to uphold universal values, I examine the contrast between Adorno’s (...) and Lyotard’s perspectives on the problem of writing history ‘after Auschwitz’. For both philosophers, Auschwitz interrupts our fundamental normative and cognitive values, because any attempt to identify the meaning of the camps by means of these values misunderstands the suffering that took place in them. Yet this interruption produces a feeling that calls for the institution of new universal normative values. For Adorno, this value is a purely negative command to act in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself. For Lyotard, by contrast, it is the demand to invent new idioms that make it possible to find meaning in Auschwitz. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a new argument in defence bacterial species pluralism. To do so, I shall first present the particular issues derived from the conflict between the non-theoretical understanding of species as units of classification and the theoretical comprehension of them as units of evolution. Secondly, I shall justify the necessity of the concept of species for the bacterial world, and show how medicine and endosymbiotic evolutionary theory make use of different concepts of bacterial species due to their (...) distinctive purposes. Finally, I shall show how my argument provides a new source of defence for bacterial pluralism. (shrink)

States heavily restrict immigration, and many people violate these restrictions. For example, unauthorized immigrants cross borders without official permission, and other actors, such as people smugglers, assist them in doing so. How should we evaluate resistance to immigration law from a moral perspective? In this article, I survey recent work on the ethics of resisting immigration law. In particular, I examine three categories of resistance to immigration law as the following: unauthorized immigration, people smuggling, and citizens' resistance to laws that (...) prohibit them from assisting or interacting with unauthorized immigrants. (shrink)

Margulis’ evolutionary theory entails a revision of certain core concepts of traditional biology. One of these changes is related to the hot debate about units of selection. This paper considers Margulis’ proposal as a new research tradition (RT) and evaluates its consequences to the mentioned issue. Three ideas are suggested here: firstly, that her theory represents the revision of many classical biological concepts; secondly, that her position implies a reappraisal of many traditional issues in philosophy of biology; and thirdly, that (...) studying it from Lakatos and Laudan’s ideas about RT allows us to enlighten the richness of her theory. (shrink)

This article develops a dilemma for Buddhist Reductionism that centers on the nature of normative reasons. This dilemma suggests that Buddhist Reductionism lacks the resources to make sense of normative reasons and, furthermore, that this failure may cast doubt on the plausibility of Buddhist Reductionism as a whole.

This essay explains why there are good reasons to practice philosophy as a way of life. The argument begins with the assumption that we should live well but that our understanding of how to live well can be mistaken. Philosophical reason and reflection can help correct these mistakes. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that philosophical reasoning often fails to change our dispositions and behavior. Drawing on the work of Pierre Hadot, the essay claims that spiritual exercises and communal engagement mitigate the (...) factors that prevent us from living in accord- ance with our conceptions of the good life. So, many of us have reasons to engage in philosophical reasoning along with behavioral, cognitive, and social strategies to alter our behavior and attitudes so that they’re in line with our philosophical commitments. In these respects, many of us should practice philosophy as a way of life. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Sellars, Cumpa (2014, 2018) and Buonomo (2021) have argued that we can evaluate our metaphysical proposals on fundamental categories in terms of their capacity for reconciling the scientific and the manifest image of the world. This criterion of fundamentality would allow us to settle the question of which categories among those proposed in the debate—e.g., substance, structure or facts—have a better explanatory value. The aim of this essay is to argue against a central assumption of (...) the criterion: semantic descriptivism. Specifically, I aim at showing that the criterion rests on the idea that the manifest picture is mostly a description of the world, and thus, it commits us with certain realism. Instead, I argue that at least some of the vocabulary we use to construct our manifest picture of the world, mental vocabulary, is evaluative rather than descriptive and thus creates problems in reconcile the manifest picture with scientific psychology and neurosciences. I conclude with some remarks on alternatives that could provide a way out of the fundamentality criterion. (shrink)

Many political theorists argue that immigration restrictions are unjust and defend broadly open borders. In this paper, I examine the implications of this view for individual conduct. In particular, I argue that the citizens of states that enforce unjust immigration restrictions have duties to disobey certain immigration laws. States conscript their citizens to help enforce immigration law by imposing legal duties on these citizens to monitor, report, and refrain from interacting with unauthorized migrants. If an ideal of open borders is (...) true, these laws are unjust. Furthermore, if citizens comply with their legal duties, they contribute to violating the rights of migrants. We are obligated to refrain from contributing to rights-violations. So, citizens are obligated to disobey immigration laws. I defend the moral requirement to disobey immigration laws against the objection that disobedience to the law is excessively risky and the objection that citizens have political obligations to obey the law. (shrink)

The units or levels of selection debate concerns the question of what kind of biological systems are stable enough that part of their evolution is a result of the process of natural selection acting at their level. Traditionally, the debate has concerned at least two different, though related, questions: the question of the level at which interaction with the environment occurs, and the question of the level at which reproduction occurs. In recent years, biologists and philosophers have discussed a new (...) aspect of this debate, namely the possibility that certain multi-species consortia formed by a host and its microbiome may act as a unit of selection. This thesis, however, has not been without criticism, as it is doubtful that such consortia could meet the conditions required to achieve the degree of stability that would allow them to experience natural selection. The purpose of this paper is to systematically examine such criticisms and to defend the thesis that the holobiont/hologenome can act as a genuine level of selection both in the form of an interactor and in the form of a reproducer. To do so, it will be argued that the microbiome should be characterized in functional rather than taxonomic terms. (shrink)

Derek Parfit influentially defends reductionism about persons, the view that a person’s existence just consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of a series of physical and mental events. Yet some critics, particularly Mark Johnston, have raised powerful objections to Parfit’s reductionism. In this paper, I defend reductionism against Johnston. In particular, I defend a radical form of reductionism that Buddhist philosophers developed. Buddhist reductionism can justify key features of Parfit’s position, such as the claims (...) that personal identity is not what matters and can also be indeterminate. Furthermore, Buddhist reductionism can avoid Johnston’s objections to Parfit’s reductionism. I conclude that reductionists have good reasons to favor Buddhist reductionism over Parfit’s version. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Do Buddhist philosophical commitments support a particular theory of well-being? Most authors who have examined this question argue that Buddhist ideas are compatible with multiple theories of well-being. In this paper, I contend that one tradition of Buddhist philosophy—Abhidharma—does imply a specific theory of welfare. In particular, Abhidharma supports hedonism. Most Ābhidharmikas claim that only property-particulars called dharmas ultimately exist and I argue that an Abhidharmic theory of well-being should only refer to these properties. Yet the only dharmas that (...) could plausibly be intrinsically good are phenomenal properties that are good in virtue of how they feel. Thus, the only intrinsically good things are pleasures. I defend this surprising conclusion from various interpretative objections and show that my argument can also inform contemporary philosophical debates about welfare. (shrink)

Categorization and memory for specific items are fundamental processes that allow us to apply knowledge to novel stimuli. This study directly compares categorization and memory using delay match to category (DMC) and delay match to sample (DMS) tasks. In DMC participants view and categorize a stimulus, maintain the category across a delay, and at the probe phase view another stimulus and indicate whether it is in the same category or not. In DMS, a standard item working memory task, participants encode (...) and maintain a specific individual item, and at probe decide if the stimulus is an exact match or not. Constrained Principal Components Analysis was used to identify and compare activity within neural networks associated with these tasks, and we relate these networks to those that have been identified with resting state-fMRI. We found that two frontoparietal networks of particular interest. The first network included regions associated with the dorsal attention network and frontoparietal salience network; this network showed patterns of activity consistent with a role in rapid orienting to and processing of complex stimuli. The second uniquely involved regions of the frontoparietal central executive network; this network responded more slowly following each stimulus and showed a pattern of activity consistent with a general role in role in decision-making across tasks. Additional components were identified that were associated with visual, somatomotor and default mode networks. (shrink)

Several political theorists argue that states have rights to self-determination and these rights justify immigration restrictions. Call this: the self-determination argument for immigration restrictions. In this article, I develop an objection to the self-determination argument. I argue that if it is morally permissible for states to restrict immigration because they have rights to self-determination, then it can also be morally permissible for states to deport and denationalize their own citizens. We can either accept that it is permissible for states to (...) deport and denationalize their own citizens or reject the self-determination argument. To avoid this implication, we should reject the self-determination argument. That is, we should also reject the conclusion that rights to self-determination can justify any significant immigration restrictions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople smugglers help transport migrants across international borders without authorization and in return for compensation. Many people object to people smuggling and believe that the smuggling of migrants is an evil trade. In this paper, I offer a qualified defense of people smuggling. In particular, I argue that people smuggling that assists refugees in escaping threats to their rights can be morally justified. I then rebut the objections that people smugglers exploit migrants, have defective motivations, and wrongly violate the law. (...) My conclusion is that people smuggling is sometimes a permissible way of helping refugees to evade unjust immigration restrictions and compelling states to bear their fair share of the global refugee population. (shrink)

A large body of evidence suggests that the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) improves learning. In courses that use PSI, the material is divided into units, students must pass a test on each unit before advancing to the next unit, there’s no group-level instruction, and students advance in the course at their own pace. While studies find that PSI improves learning outcomes in a wide range of settings, researchers haven’t studied the effectiveness of PSI in critical thinking classes. In this (...) paper, I argue that teaching critical thinking with PSI can effectively promote critical thinking skills. I describe a course that uses PSI to teach critical thinking and I present evidence from pre- and post-tests that indicates that students substantially improved their reasoning skills in this course. I also discuss the costs and drawbacks of using this method of instruction and consider ways of addressing these problems. (shrink)

Many people think that citizenship should not be for sale. On their view, it is morally wrong for states to sell citizenship to foreigners. In this article, I challenge this view. I argue that it is in principle permissible for states to sell citizenship. I contend that, if states can permissibly deny foreigners access to citizenship in some cases, then states can permissibly give foreigners the option of buying citizenship in these cases. Furthermore, I defend the permissibility of selling citizenship (...) against the objections that selling citizenship values citizenship in the wrong way, corrupts civic norms, and unfairly discriminates against poor foreigners. I conclude by noting that, although selling citizenship is not intrinsically wrong, it could still be wrong for states to sell citizenship in practice. If existent immigration restrictions are unjust, then it may be impermissible for states to sell citizenship in the real world. (shrink)

The harms associated with wireless mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) are well documented. They have been linked to anxiety, depression, diminished attention span, sleep disturbance, and decreased relationship satisfaction. Perhaps what is most worrying from a moral perspective, however, is the effect these devices can have on our autonomy. In this article, we argue that there is an obligation to foster and safeguard autonomy in ourselves, and we suggest that wireless mobile devices pose a serious threat to our capacity to fulfill (...) this obligation. We defend the existence of an imperfect duty to be a ‘digital minimalist’. That is, we have a moral obligation to be intentional about how and to what extent we use these devices. The empirical findings already justify prudential reasons in favor of digital minimalism, but the moral duty is distinct from and independent of prudential considerations. (shrink)

The recent literature on epistemic injustice has convincingly showed that injustice is often self-concealing, because those who suffer it lack the hermeneutical resources to talk about it. How, then, are the victims of epistemic injustice capable of denouncing and resisting it? The article seeks an answer to this question by inquiring into what Judith Shklar calls the “sense of injustice.” Following Shklar, I argue that the identification and critique of injustice relies on feeling rather than established moral values. In order (...) to clarify how feelings can be the source of universal claims, I turn to an interpreta - tion of Kant’s analysis of the feeling of the sublime developed by Jean-François Lyotard. According to this interpretation, any act of communication generates a silence that calls to be expressed. Following this view, I argue that epistemic injustice leads to a universalist act of epistemic resistance on the basis of the feeling that silenced voices ought to be head. (shrink)

When agents insert technological systems into their decision-making processes, they can obscure moral responsibility for the results. This can give rise to a distinct moral wrong, which we call “agency laundering.” At root, agency laundering involves obfuscating one’s moral responsibility by enlisting a technology or process to take some action and letting it forestall others from demanding an account for bad outcomes that result. We argue that the concept of agency laundering helps in understanding important moral problems in a number (...) of recent cases involving automated, or algorithmic, decision-systems. We apply our conception of agency laundering to a series of examples, including Facebook’s automated advertising suggestions, Uber’s driver interfaces, algorithmic evaluation of K-12 teachers, and risk assessment in criminal sentencing. We distinguish agency laundering from several other critiques of information technology, including the so-called “responsibility gap,” “bias laundering,” and masking. (shrink)

The German word Destruktion was used by Heidegger in the sense that philosophy should destroy some ontological concepts and the everyday meanings of certain words. Tradition allows the transmission of knowledge and sensations of continuity and connection with the past, but it must be critically evaluated so that it does not perpetuate certain prejudices. According to Heidegger, tradition transmits, but it also conceals. Tradition induces self-evidence and prevents us from accessing the origin of concepts. It makes us believe that we (...) do not need to return to that origin. Making tradition transparent dissolves the concealments it has provoked. Here I will apply this idea to the mental and the physical by suggesting that the mind-body problem has inherited occultations that are born in Descartes himself. As a result, what could be a new philosophical framework for the research in consciousness emerges: That as an individual cognitive being I cannot avoid splitting reality into what I am and what I am not, extending then the individual duality to a collective error transmitted culturally. (shrink)

Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as some recent cases illustrate, the moral concerns with (...) these activities cannot be reduced simply to the effects they have on individuals. Rather, we will argue, the wrongness of these activities relates to the threats they present to the legitimacy of political orders. This occurs primarily through a mechanism we call “emergent manipulation,” rather than through the sort of manipulation that involves specific individuals. (shrink)

A number of findings in the field of machine learning have given rise to questions about what it means for automated scoring- or decisionmaking systems to be fair. One center of gravity in this discussion is whether such systems ought to satisfy classification parity (which requires parity in accuracy across groups, defined by protected attributes) or calibration (which requires similar predictions to have similar meanings across groups, defined by protected attributes). Central to this discussion are impossibility results, owed to Kleinberg (...) et al. (2016), Chouldechova (2017), and Corbett-Davies et al. (2017), which show that classification parity and calibration are often incompatible. This paper aims to argue that classification parity, calibration, and a newer, interesting measure called counterfactual fairness are unsatisfactory measures of fairness, offer a general diagnosis of the failure of these measures, and sketch an alternative approach to understanding fairness in machine learning. (shrink)

Prediction-based decisions, which are often made by utilizing the tools of machine learning, influence nearly all facets of modern life. Ethical concerns about this widespread practice have given rise to the field of fair machine learning and a number of fairness measures, mathematically precise definitions of fairness that purport to determine whether a given prediction-based decision system is fair. Following Reuben Binns (2017), we take ‘fairness’ in this context to be a placeholder for a variety of normative egalitarian considerations. We (...) explore a few fairness measures to suss out their egalitarian roots and evaluate them, both as formalizations of egalitarian ideas and as assertions of what fairness demands of predictive systems. We pay special attention to a recent and popular fairness measure, counterfactual fairness, which holds that a prediction about an individual is fair if it is the same in the actual world and any counterfactual world where the individual belongs to a different demographic group (cf. Kusner et al. (2018)). (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to offer a reconstruction of the moral theory defended by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, aided by other contemporary texts that contribute to explain and refine such a theory. The first step of this reconstruction is to show that Callicles offers a perspectivist theory of moral judgements, according to which moral judgements can be issued from two radically distinct perspectives, the contractual and the natural one. The second step is to show that Callicles makes use (...) of a peculiar conception of nature that allows him to claim that certain natural rights and privileges stemming from the natural perspective of valuation must override those rights stemming from the contractual perspective. The resulting theory, as well as being worthy of philosophical interest, does not appear to be vulnerable to most of the objections advanced by the dominant interpretations, nor does it entail the implausible sort of hedonism that Plato attributes to Callicles in this dialogue. (shrink)

The attention economy — the market where consumers’ attention is exchanged for goods and services — poses a variety of threats to individuals’ autonomy, which, at minimum, involves the ability to set and pursue ends for oneself. It has been argued that the threat wireless mobile devices pose to autonomy gives rise to a duty to oneself to be a digital minimalist, one whose interactions with digital technologies are intentional such that they do not conflict with their ends. In this (...) paper, we argue that there is a corresponding duty to others to be an attention ecologist, one who promotes digital minimalism in others. Although the moral reasons for being an attention ecologist are similar to those that motivate the duty to oneself, the arguments diverge in important ways. We explore the application of this duty in various domains where we have special obligations to promote autonomy in virtue of the different roles we play in the lives of others, such as parents and teachers. We also discuss the consequences of our arguments for employers, software developers, and policy makers. (shrink)

En este artículo se plantea una reconsideración de la elección del reduccionismo de Parfit en Razones y personas como la posición que mejor explica el vínculo de dos sucesos mentales separados en el tiempo. Sin embargo, veremos cómo Parfit basa dicha elección en la consideración de la noción de persona como una sustancia, lo que en principio deja fuera cualquier otra perspectiva. El problema aparece cuando éste no considera apropiadamente el origen histórico de la pregunta en Locke, donde la noción (...) de “persona” se caracteriza en función de la “conciencia de sí”, lo que abre la posibilidad de entender dicha noción a partir de su naturaleza modal en vez de sustancial. En esta medida, se verá cómo esta tercera alternativa incluye una explicación de la conciencia de sí que podría considerarse más razonable bajo los propios términos de Parfit. (shrink)

Holm (2022) argues that a class of algorithmic fairness measures, that he refers to as the ‘performance parity criteria’, can be understood as applications of John Broome’s Fairness Principle. We argue that the performance parity criteria cannot be read this way. This is because in the relevant context, the Fairness Principle requires the equalization of actual individuals’ individual-level chances of obtaining some good (such as an accurate prediction from a predictive system), but the performance parity criteria do not guarantee any (...) such thing: the measures merely ensure that certain population-level ratios hold. (shrink)

Algorithmic systems and predictive analytics play an increasingly important role in various aspects of modern life. Scholarship on the moral ramifications of such systems is in its early stages, and much of it focuses on bias and harm. This paper argues that in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems it is essential to understand the relation between algorithms, autonomy, and agency. We draw on several recent cases in criminal sentencing and K–12 teacher evaluation to outline four key ways in (...) which issues of agency, autonomy, and respect for persons can conflict with algorithmic decision-making. Three of these involve failures to treat individual agents with the respect they deserve. The fourth involves distancing oneself from a morally suspect action by attributing one’s decision to take that action to an algorithm, thereby laundering one’s agency. (shrink)

Several noted economists and prominent international organizations have recently advocated for the implementation of guest worker programs in developed states. Their primary argument is that guest worker programs would serve as a powerful mechanism for reducing global poverty and inequality. For example, economist Dani Rodrik estimates that guest worker programs in wealthy states would generate $200 billion or more annually for poor countries. According to Rodrik, liberalizing the temporary movement of workers would “produce the largest possible gains for the world (...) economy and for poor countries in particular,” in comparison with other policies, such as trade liberalization. (shrink)

El primer objetivo de este artículo es mostrar que explicaciones genuinamente geométricas/matemáticas e intrínsecamente diagramáticas de fenómenos físicos no solo son posibles en la práctica científica, sino que además comportan un potencial epistémico que sus contrapartes simbólico-verbales carecen. Como ejemplo representativo utilizaremos la metodología geométrica de John Wheeler (1963) para calcular cantidades físicas en una reacción nuclear. Como segundo objetivo pretendemos analizar, desde un marco inferencial, la garantía epistémica de este tipo de explicaciones en términos de dependencia sintáctica y semántica (...) del contenido lo inferido en las premisas, lo cual denominaremos criterio de validez inferencial (CVI). (shrink)

In this chapter, we turn our attention to the effects of the attention economy on our ability to act autonomously as a group. We begin by clarifying which sorts of groups we are concerned with, which are structured groups (groups sufficiently organized that it makes sense to attribute agency to the group itself). Drawing on recent work by Purves and Davis (2022), we describe the essential roles of trust (i.e., depending on groups to fulfill their commitments) and trustworthiness (i.e., the (...) property of a group that makes trusting them fitting) in autonomous group action, with particular emphasis on democratic institutions (which we view as group agents) and democratic legitimacy (which depends on trust and trustworthiness). We then explain how engagement maximization promotes polarization, which is detrimental to trust and trustworthiness and, in turn, democratic legitimacy and democratic institutions. We close by considering what groups might do to protect themselves from the threat posed to them by the attention economy. (shrink)

This study is concerned with linguistic competence and relationship between the socio-demographic profile in terms of parents’ education background and assigned household chores. The researcher made questionnaires and essay tests and administered among senior high school students who were randomly chosen as respondents. To analyze and interpret data, mean, standard deviation, T-test, and One-Way Analysis of Variance were utilized. ANOVA was conducted to determine whether there was a significant relationship between the socio-demographic profile and the level of linguistic competency of (...) the senior high school students. Findings revealed that there was no significant relationship between the parents’ educational attainment and linguistic competences. ANOVA was conducted again to determine whether there was a significant relationship between the assigned household chores and the level of linguistic competency of the senior high school students. Similarly, results indicate that linguistic competences do not differ among respondents with different assigned household chores. In addition, T-test was conducted to determine whether there was a significant difference among the level of linguistic competencies of the senior high school students in Ormoc City Regional Sports Academy, but the gathered results revealed that there was no significant difference among linguistic competence level. However, there was a significant difference in the linguistic competence in organization of ideas among senior high school students. Grade 11 students have significantly higher mean in organization of ideas than Grade12 students. Major findings revealed that the respondents were at the basic level under the Common European Framework of References for Languages. Generally, the linguistic competence of the senior high school students should be improved. A proposed remedial activity in English writing skills is adapted to level up the linguistic competence of the senior high school students. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

New media (highly interactive digital technology for creating, sharing, and consuming information) affords users a great deal of control over their informational diets. As a result, many users of new media unwittingly encapsulate themselves in epistemic bubbles (epistemic structures, such as highly personalized news feeds, that leave relevant sources of information out (Nguyen forthcoming)). Epistemically paternalistic alterations to new media technologies could be made to pop at least some epistemic bubbles. We examine one such alteration that Facebook has made in (...) an effort to fight fake news and conclude that it is morally permissible. We further argue that many epistemically paternalistic policies can (and should) be a perennial part of the internet information environment. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics II 4 Aristotle famously raises a puzzle concerning moral habituation, and he seems to dissolve it by recourse to the analogy between moral virtue and skills. A new interpretation of the chapter is offered on the basis of an important evaluative dissimilarity then noted by Aristotle, one almost universally disregarded by interpreters of the chapter. I elucidate the nature of the dissimilarity in question and argue for its paramount importance for understanding Aristotle’s conception of moral agency. I (...) also show that it is the particularly intricate and puzzling character of the chapter that has prevented scholars from noticing such a dissimilarity and from integrating it to the interpretation of the chapter. (shrink)