Some have objected to human enhancement on the grounds that it violates the autonomy of the enhanced. These objections, however, overlook the interesting possibility that autonomy itself could be enhanced. How, exactly, to enhance autonomy is a difficult problem due to the numerous and diverse accounts of autonomy in the literature. Existing accounts of autonomy enhancement rely on narrow and controversial conceptions of autonomy. However, we identify one feature of autonomy common to many mainstream accounts: reasoning ability. Autonomy can then (...) be enhanced by improving people’s reasoning ability, in particular through cognitive enhancement; given how valuable autonomy is usually taken to be, this gives us extra reason to pursue such cognitive enhancements. Moreover, autonomy-based objections will be especially weak against such enhancements. As we will argue, those who are worried that enhancements will inhibit people’s autonomy should actually embrace those enhancements that will improve autonomy. (shrink)

The right to withdraw from participation in research is recognized in virtually all national and international guidelines for research on human subjects. It is therefore surprising that there has been little justification for that right in the literature. We argue that the right to withdraw should protect research participants from information imbalance, inability to hedge, inherent uncertainty, and untoward bodily invasion, and it serves to bolster public trust in the research enterprise. Although this argument is not radical, it provides a (...) useful way to determine how the right should be applied in various cases. (shrink)

The prospect of consumable meat produced in a laboratory setting without the need to raise and slaughter animals is both realistic and exciting. Not only could such in vitro meat become popular due to potential cost savings, but it also avoids many of the ethical and environmental problems with traditional meat productions. However, as with any new technology, in vitro meat is likely to face some detractors. We examine in detail three potential objections: 1) in vitro meat is disrespectful, either (...) to nature or to animals; 2) it will reduce the number of happy animals in the world; and 3) it will open the door to cannibalism. While each objection has some attraction, we ultimately find that all can be overcome. The upshot is that in vitro meat production is generally permissible and, especially for ethical vegetarians, worth promoting. (shrink)

While philosophers are often concerned with the conditions for moral knowledge or justification, in practice something arguably less demanding is just as, if not more, important – reliably making correct moral judgments. Judges and juries should hand down fair sentences, government officials should decide on just laws, members of ethics committees should make sound recommendations, and so on. We want such agents, more often than not and as often as possible, to make the right decisions. The purpose of this paper (...) is to propose a method of enhancing the moral reliability of such agents. In particular, we advocate for a procedural approach; certain internal processes generally contribute to people’s moral reliability. Building on the early work of Rawls, we identify several particular factors related to moral reasoning that are specific enough to be the target of practical intervention: logical competence, conceptual understanding, empirical competence, openness, empathy and bias. Improving on these processes can in turn make people more morally reliable in a variety of contexts and has implications for recent debates over moral enhancement. (shrink)

As opposed to a ‘one size fits all’ approach, precision medicine uses relevant biological, medical, behavioural and environmental information about a person to further personalize their healthcare. This could mean better prediction of someone’s disease risk and more effective diagnosis and treatment if they have a condition. Big data allows for far more precision and tailoring than was ever before possible by linking together diverse datasets to reveal hitherto-unknown correlations and causal pathways. But it also raises ethical issues relating to (...) the balancing of interests, viability of anonymization, familial and group implications, as well as genetic discrimination. This article analyses these issues in light of the values of public benefit, justice, harm minimization, transparency, engagement and reflexivity and applies the deliberative balancing approach found in theEthical Framework for Big Data in Health and Research to a case study on clinical genomic data sharing. Please refer to that article for an explanation of how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end. Our discussion is meant to be of use to those involved in the practice as well as governance and oversight of precision medicine to address ethical concerns that arise in a coherent and systematic manner. (shrink)

Mitochondrial replacement therapy requires oocytes of women whose mitochondrial DNA will be transmitted to resultant children. These techniques are scientifically, ethically and socially controversial; it is likely that some women who donate their oocytes for general in vitro fertilisation usage would nevertheless oppose their genetic material being used in MRT. The possibility of oocytes being used in MRT is therefore relevant to oocyte donation and should be included in the consent process when applicable. In present circumstances, specific consent should be (...) obtained. However, once MRT becomes more routine, such consent could be incorporated into the general consent process for oocyte donation. The reported lack of proper consent for MRT from the oocyte donor in the first baby born via the technique is an ethical failing and should be corrected in any future practice of MRT. (shrink)

It is generally unquestioned that human subjects research review boards should assess the ethical acceptability of protocols. It says so right on the tin, after all: they are explicitly called research ethics committees in the UK. But it is precisely those sorts of unchallenged assumptions that should, from time to time, be assessed and critiqued, in case they are in fact unfounded. John Stuart Mill's objection to suppressers of dissent is instructive here: “If the opinion is right, they are deprived (...) of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error”.1 Andrew Moore and Andrew Donnelly's compelling article, “The job of ‘ethics committees’”, is just this sort of challenge to conventional wisdom, a rejection of the notion that review boards should be considering ethical matters at all.2 If true, we should be substantially reforming our research ethics policies. And if false, rebuttals would help strengthen and ground the otherwise unquestioned assumption of the role of ethics committees. As it happens, I will argue that their critiques fall into the second category. While mistaken, they present a valuable opportunity to clarify the role of ethics committees and their relationship to relevant codes. In particular, I will defend a hybrid account where codes have strict primacy, but leave significant room for review boards …. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 7, July 2019, Page 28-30.

What kinds of norms constrain mechanistic discovery and explanation? In the mechanistic literature, the norms for good explanations are directly derived from answers to the metaphysical question of what explanations are. Prominent mechanistic accounts thus emphasize either ontic or epistemic norms. Still, mechanistic philosophers on both sides agree that there is no sharp distinction between the processes of discovery and explanation. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that ontic and epistemic accounts of explanation will be accompanied by ontic and epistemic (...) accounts of discovery, respectively. As we will show here, however, recent discovery accounts implicitly rely on both ontic and epistemic norms to characterize the discovery process. In this paper, we develop an account that makes explicit that, and how, ontic and epistemic norms work together throughout the discovery process. By describing mechanism discovery as a process of pattern recognition we demonstrate that scientists have to develop epistemic activities to distinguish a pattern from its background. Furthermore, they have to determine which epistemic activities successfully describe how the pattern is implemented by identifying the pattern’s components. Our approach reveals that ontic and epistemic norms are equally important in mechanism discovery. (shrink)

With the recent report of a live birth after use of Mitochondrial replacement therapy, sometimes called ‘Three-parent IVF’, the clinical application of the technique is fast becoming a reality. While the United Kingdom allows the procedure under regulatory scrutiny, it remains effectively outlawed in many other countries. We argue that such prohibitions may violate individuals’ procreative rights, grounded in individuals’ interest in genetic affinity. The interest in genetic affinity was recently endorsed by Singapore’s highest court, reflecting an emphasis on the (...) importance of biological ties found across the globe. We apply that reasoning to make the case for a right to ‘Three-parent IVF’. (shrink)

In their recent article, Koplin, Gyngell and Savulescu (2019) assess the viability of the precautionary principle as a decision-making tool to determine whether and under what circumstances germline gene editing should proceed. While their survey of different forms of the precautionary principle is illuminating, the most novel contribution is a new account of the precautionary principle, what they dub the Sufficientarian Precautionary Principle (SPP). SPP is meant to avoid several problems with existing accounts, while comporting with at least some of (...) the intuitive force behind the general idea of the precautionary principle. However, as it is only one subsection of a larger paper, SPP is not fully worked out. In this brief response, I will flesh out some problems with SPP as a decision-making tool – particularly that there is a lack of adequate normative justification for adopting it. While this does not constitute a decisive refutation of the approach, SPP needs considerable refinement and clarification before it can be considered viable for use in decision-making. (shrink)

Are idioms stored in memory in ways that preserve their surface form or language or are they represented amodally? We examined this question using an inci- dental cued recall paradigm in which two word idiomatic expressions were presented to adult bilinguals proficient in Russian and English. Stimuli included phrases with idiomat- ic equivalents in both languages (e.g. “empty words/пycтыe cлoвa”) or in one language only (English—e.g. “empty suit/пycтoй кocтюм” or Russian—e.g. “empty sound/пycтoй звyк”), or in neither language (e.g. “empty rain/пycтoй (...) дoждь”). If idioms are stored in a language-specific format, then phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages would have dual representation, and should therefore be more easily recalled than phrases with idiomatic meaning in only one language. This result was obtained. As such, the findings support the dual-coding theory of memory and are also compatible with models of the bilingual lexicon that include language tags or nodes. (shrink)

Moral enhancement is an ostensibly laudable project. Who wouldn’t want people to become more moral? Still, the project’s approach is crucial. We can distinguish between two approaches for moral enhancement: direct and indirect. Direct moral enhancements aim at bringing about particular ideas, motives or behaviors. Indirect moral enhancements, by contrast, aim at making people more reliably produce the morally correct ideas, motives or behaviors without committing to the content of those ideas, motives and/or actions. I will argue, on Millian grounds, (...) that the value of disagreement puts serious pressure on proposals for relatively widespread direct moral enhancement. A more acceptable path would be to focus instead on indirect moral enhancements while staying neutral, for the most part, on a wide range of substantive moral claims. I will outline what such indirect moral enhancement might look like, and why we should expect it to lead to general moral improvement. (shrink)

The current prevailing view is that participation in biomedical research is above and beyond the call of duty. While some commentators have offered reasons against this, we propose a novel public goods argument for an obligation to participate in biomedical research. Biomedical knowledge is a public good, available to any individual even if that individual does not contribute to it. Participation in research is a critical way to support an important public good. Consequently, all have a duty to participate. The (...) current social norm is that individuals participate only if they have a good reason to do so. The public goods argument implies that individuals should participate unless they have a good reason not to. Such a shift would be of great aid to the progress of biomedical research, eventually making society significantly healthier and longer lived. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

Individual health assessments (IHAs) for asymptomatic individuals provide a challenge to traditional distinctions between patient care and non-medical practice. They may involve undue radiation exposure, lead to false positives, and involve high out-of-pocket costs for recipients. A recent paper (Journal of the American College of Radiology 13(12): 1447–1457.e1, 2016) has criticised the use of IHAs and argued that recipients should be classified as ‘presenters’, not ‘patients’, to distinguish it from regular medical care. I critique this classificatory move, on two grounds: (...) one, it is conceptually suspect. Two, it obviates the medical ethics framework for IHAs, potentially exposing recipients of IHAs to lower standards of oversight and protection. Responsible regulation of IHAs will be easier to ethically justify if those seeking IHAs are considered patients and not merely presenters. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that reproductive genetic manipulation technologies like mitochondrial replacement and germline CRISPR modifications cannot be said to save anyone’s life because, counterfactually, no one would suffer more or die sooner absent the intervention. The present article argues that, on the contrary, reproductive genetic manipulations may be life-saving (and, from this, have therapeutic value) under an appropriate population health perspective. As such, popular reports of reproductive genetic manipulations potentially saving lives or preventing disease are not necessarily mistaken, (...) though such terminology still requires further empirical validation. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)

Background Several jurisdictions, including Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and most recently Ireland, have a public interest or public good criterion for granting waivers of consent in biomedical research using secondary health data or tissue. However, the concept of the public interest is not well defined in this context, which creates difficulties for institutions, institutional review boards and regulators trying to implement the criterion. Main text This paper clarifies how the public interest criterion can be defensibly deployed. We first explain the (...) ethical basis for requiring waivers to only be granted to studies meeting the public interest criterion, then explore how further criteria may be set to determine the extent to which a given study can legitimately claim to be in the public interest. We propose an approach that does not attempt to measure magnitude of benefit directly, but rather takes into account metrics that are more straightforward to apply. To ensure consistent and justifiable interpretation, research institutions and IRBs should also incorporate procedural features such as transparency and public engagement in determining which studies satisfy the public interest requirement. Conclusion The requirement of public interest for consent waivers in secondary biomedical research should be guided by well-defined criteria for systematic evaluation. Such a criteria and its application need to be periodically subject to intra-committee and intra-institution review, reflection, deliberation and amendment. (shrink)

The predominant view is that a study using health data is observational research and should require individual consent unless it can be shown that gaining consent is impractical. But recent arguments have been made that citizens have an ethical obligation to share their health information for research purposes. In our view, this obligation is sufficient ground to expand the circumstances where secondary use research with identifiable health information is permitted without explicit subject consent. As such, for some studies the Institutional (...) Review Board/Research Ethics Committee review process should not assess the practicality of gaining consent for data use. Instead the review process should focus on assessing the public good of the research, public engagement and transparency. (shrink)

The future of health research will be characterised by three continuing trends: rising demand for health data; increasing impracticability of obtaining specific consent for secondary research; and decreasing capacity to effectively anonymise data. In this context, governments, clinicians and the research community must demonstrate that they can be responsible stewards of health data. IRBs and RECs sit at heart of this process because in many jurisdictions they have the capacity to grant consent waivers when research is judged to be of (...) particular value. However, several different terms are used to refer to this value, indicating a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the appropriate test for access to health data for research without consent. In this paper we do three things. First we describe the current confusion and instability in terminology relating to public interest in the context of consent waivers. Second we argue for harmonisation of terminology on the grounds of clarity, transparency and consistency. Third we argue that the term ‘public interest’ best reflects the normative work required to justify consent waivers because it is the broadest of the competing terms. ‘Public interest’ contains within its scope positive and negative implications of a study, as well as welfare, justice and rights considerations. In making this argument, we explain the normative basis for consent waivers, and provide a starting place for further discussion about the precise conditions in which a given study can be said to advance the public interest. Ipsos MORI study found that: … the public would be broadly happy with administrative data linking for research projects provided Those projects have social value, broadly defined. Data are de-identified. Data are kept secure. Businesses are not able to access the data for profit. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 20-22.

Michael Hauskeller (“Reflections from a Troubled Stream: Giubliani and Minerva on ‘After-Birth Abortion’) has recently suggested that we should resist rationalist tendencies in moral discourse: “[I]s not all morality ultimately irrational? Even the most strongly held moral convictions can be shown to lack a rational basis.” (Hauskeller 2012, p. 18) Hauskeller was responding to Alberto Giubliani and Francesca Minverva’s (2012) recent defense of the permissibility of killing infants, but his anti-rationality arguments have wide-reaching implications. Yet pace Hauskeller, rationality is indeed (...) of crucial importance to any ethical argument. We should not abandon rationality for the sake of refuting one discomforting hypothesis; instead, rationality must be rigorously employed, here and elsewhere, in the search for the truth. (shrink)

Given the sordid history of injustices linking genetics to race and ethnicity, considerations of justice are central to ensuring the responsible development of precision medicine programmes around the world. While considerations of justice may be in tension with other areas of concern, such as scientific value or privacy, there are also tensions between different aspects of justice. This paper focuses on three particular aspects of justice relevant to this precision medicine: social justice, distributive justice and human rights. We describe the (...) implications of each for the use of race and ethnicity in precision medicine, and also how they intersect and potentially conflict with each another. By attending to these intersections, we aim to enrich and add nuance to debates over how best to proceed with precision medicine initiatives. (shrink)

Ethics committees like Institutional Review Boards and Research Ethics Committees are typically empowered to approve or reject proposed studies, typically conditional on certain conditions or revisions being met. While some have argued this power should be primarily a function of applying clear, codified requirements, most institutions and legal regimes allow discretion for IRBs to ethically evaluate studies, such as to ensure a favourable risk-benefit ratio, fair subject selection, adequate informed consent, and so forth. As a result, ethics committees typically make (...) moral demands on researchers: require them to act in a way the committee considers ethically right or appropriate. This paper argues that moral demands are legitimate only if publicly justifiable; and as a result, committee decisions are subject to a public justification requirement. Ethics committees can permissibly request for more information, changes to the research protocol or that the research is delayed or even stopped only if these demands are publicly justifiable. This latter claim is in turn justified on the basis that moral demands to φ are permissible only if we are in a position to know that the addressee ought to φ and that we are in a position to know a proposition only if it is publicly justifiable. This argument suggests that ethics committees must consciously and explicitly appeal to public reasons in their decision-making. In cases where public reasons cannot be offered, committees would not be permitted to reject a given study or make approval conditional on an amendment. (shrink)

The text introduces the concept behind the Proceedings of the 2018 ZiF Workshop “Studying Migration Policies at the Interface between Empirical Research and Normative Analysis”. It explains why there is a need to study migration policies across disciplines, includes a short note on the current literature, and provides a look back at the workshop. DOI:10.17879/15199624685 .

What role should legislation or policy play in avoiding the complications of in-vitro fertilization? In this article, we focus on single versus double embryo transfer, and assess three arguments in favour of mandatory single embryo transfer: risks to the mother, risks to resultant children, and costs to society. We highlight significant ethical concerns about each of these. Reproductive autonomy and non-paternalism are strong enough to outweigh the health concerns for the woman. Complications due to non-identity cast doubt on the extent (...) to which children are harmed. Twinning may offer an overall benefit rather than burden to society. Finally, including the future health costs for children in reproductive policy is inconsistent with other decisions. We conclude that mandatory single embryo transfer is not justified and that a number of countries should reconsider their current embryo transfer policy. (shrink)

Communication plays an important role in promoting sustainable consumption. Yet how the academic literature conceptualizes and relates communication and sustainable consumption remains poorly understood, despite growing research on communication in the context of sustainable consumption. This article presents the first comprehensive review of sustainable consumption communication (SCC) research as a young and evolving field of scholarly work. Through a systematic review and narrative synthesis of N = 67 peer-reviewed journal articles, we consolidated the research conducted in this field into four (...) distinct types: communication as an approach to (1) behavior change, (2) self-empowerment, (3) systems change, and (4) reflection on current discourses and practices around sustainable consumption. Our findings reveal that most journal articles focus on incremental changes in individual consumer behavior (“weak” sustainable consumption) and employ communication as an intervention tool with little reference to communication science and theory. They also reveal integration challenges arising from the disciplinary diversity and fragmentation characteristic of the research field. Future research should develop shared frameworks and terminology, diversify its foci, synthesize relevant evidence, and innovate critical perspectives that go beyond one-way business-to-consumer communication. The results of our review can serve researchers engaged in sustainable consumption communication to better systematize their efforts and contribute more effectively to changing systems of consumption in the future. (shrink)

A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of (...) truth, a claim that has been criticized by Joseph Raz, Joshua Cohen, and David Estlund. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms fail due to the fact that political liberalism can remain non-committal on the nature of truth, leaving the concept of truth in the domain of comprehensive doctrines while still avoiding the issues raised by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund. Further substantiating this point is the fact that Rawls would, and should, include parties in the overlapping consensus whose views on truth may be incoherent. Once it is seen that political liberalism allows such incoherence to reasonable parties, it is clear that the inclusion of truth and the requirement of coherence urged by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund requires more of reasonable people than is necessary for a political consensus. (shrink)

In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)

Trois questions principales sont examinées dans cette entrée encyclopédique : 1) Qu’est-ce que la suspension du jugement ? Quelle est la relation entre la suspension du jugement et l’enquête ? 3) Quelle est la valeur de la suspension du jugement ?

All parties involved in researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing COVID-19 vaccines need guidance on their ethical obligations. We focus on pharmaceutical companies' obligations because their capacities to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute vaccines make them uniquely placed for stemming the pandemic. We argue that an ethical approach to COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution should satisfy four uncontroversial principles: optimising vaccine production, including development, testing, and manufacturing; fair distribution; sustainability; and accountability. All parties' obligations should be coordinated and mutually consistent. For (...) instance, companies should not be obligated to provide host countries with additional booster shots at the expense of fulfilling bilateral contracts with countries in which there are surges. Finally, any satisfactory approach should include mechanisms for assurance that all parties are honouring their obligations. This assurance enables countries, pharmaceutical companies, global organisations, and others to verify compliance with the chosen approach and protect ethically compliant stakeholders from being unfairly exploited by unethical behaviour of others. (shrink)

Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these “stakeholders' desiderata”) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainability (...) of artificial systems and reviews their desiderata. We provide a model that explicitly spells out the main concepts and relations necessary to consider and investigate when evaluating, adjusting, choosing, and developing explainability approaches that aim to satisfy stakeholders' desiderata. This model can serve researchers from the variety of different disciplines involved in XAI as a common ground. It emphasizes where there is interdisciplinary potential in the evaluation and the development of explainability approaches. (shrink)

The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...) resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

Countermeasures for mpox (formerly known as monkeypox), primarily vaccines, have been in limited supply in many countries during outbreaks. Equitable allocation of scarce resources during public health emergencies is a complex challenge. Identifying the objectives and core values for the allocation of mpox countermeasures, using those values to provide guidance for priority groups and prioritisation tiers, and optimising allocation implementation are important. The fundamental values for the allocation of mpox countermeasures are: preventing death and illness; reducing the association between death (...) or illness and unjust disparities; prioritising those who prevent harm or mitigate disparities; recognising contributions to combating an outbreak; and treating similar individuals similarly. Ethically and equitably marshalling available countermeasures requires articulating these fundamental objectives, identifying priority tiers, and recognising trade-offs between prioritising the people at the highest risk of infection and the people at the highest risk of harm if infected. These five values can provide guidance on preferable priority categories for a more ethically sound response and suggest methods for optimising allocation of countermeasures for mpox and other diseases for which countermeasures are in short supply. Properly marshalling available countermeasures will be crucial for future effective and equitable national responses to outbreaks. (shrink)

Dieses Dossier befasst sich mit der Gleichstellung der Geschlechter: Wie muss man sich Gleichberechtigung in der Kindererziehung vorstellen? Können auch Männer Feministen sein? Was ist feministische Philosophie? Welche philoso- phischen Theorien gibt es zu Männern und Frauen?

Objectives Practitioners in contemplative traditions commonly report experiencing an awareness that is distinct from sensory objects, thoughts, and emotions (“awareness itself”). They also report experiences of a void or underlying silence that is closely associated with this awareness. Subjects who carry out the Headless Way exercises frequently report an experience of emptiness or void at the same time as other contents (void-like experiences). The goals of this study were to (1) assess the reliability of these methods in eliciting the recognition (...) of awareness and void-like experiences in participants who had no prior exposure to these techniques, (2) investigate the prevalence of these experiences in these tasks, and (3) to differentiate these experiences from closely related and potential precursor experiences. -/- Method Twenty adults participated in in-depth individual interviews in which they were guided through the Headless Way exercises. A thematic analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts. -/- Results Twelve of the participants reported a void-like experience, and five participants reported an experience of awareness itself. These experiences were respectively categorized as subsets of the more general categories of perceptual absences and the sense of not being person-like. Another novel finding was the real-time reports of awareness and void-like experiences during the exercises. -/- Conclusions Our findings provide preliminary evidence that the Headless Way exercises can effectively induce experiences of emptiness and awareness in participants without prior experience. The findings suggest that such experiences can be elicited outside of a traditional meditation context, including in non-meditators. Furthermore, the experience of not being person-like and of perceptual absences may be precursors and more general forms of recognizing awareness itself and the void-like nature of the mind. (shrink)

Immunology researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities of reproducibility, reuse and secondary analyses of immunology data. Open-access datasets are being applied in the validation of the methods used in the original studies, leveraging studies for meta-analysis, or generating new hypotheses. To promote these goals, the ImmPort data repository was created for the broader research community to explore the wide spectrum of clinical and basic research data and associated findings. The ImmPort ecosystem consists of four components–Private Data, Shared Data, Data (...) Analysis, and Resources—for data archiving, dissemination, analyses, and reuse. To date, more than 300 studies have been made freely available through the ImmPort Shared Data portal , which allows research data to be repurposed to accelerate the translation of new insights into discoveries. (shrink)

In response to commentators, we argue that whether waiving patent rights will meaningfully improve access to COVID-19 vaccines for low income and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in the short term, is an empirical matter. We also reject preferentially allocating vaccines to countries that hosted trials because doing so unethically favours those with research infrastructure, rather than those facing the worst burdens from COVID-19.

Монографія об‘єднала зусилля науковців факультету міжнародної економіки Дніпропетровського національного університету імені Олеся Гончара та учасників Міжнародної науково-практичної конференції «Стратегії економічного розвитку країн в умовах глобалізації» у процесі пошуку й визначення стратегічних орієнтирів економічного розвитку України в глобальному середовищі й обрання своєї вірної дороги. На відміну від Ван Гога, усі дороги якого ведуть у нікуди, ми віримо, що спроможні обрати ту саму – нашу дорогу у світле й заможне майбутнє, й усі наші зусилля не будуть марними.

The publication was carried out on the initiative and assistance of the Project “Green Decisions of Business - Unity for Sustainable Development”, which is implemented by the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Organization of Employers, in partnership with the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Council, the Dnipropetrovsk Investment Agency with the support of the Program for the Promotion of Green Modernization of the Ukrainian Economy, implemented by the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) GmbH. The monograph is devoted to the study of various aspects of the (...) development of the "green" economy both globally and locally. The theoretical foundations of the development of the "green" economy, the features of the functioning of the markets for "green" goods and services, the world experience in the development of the "green" economy, the prospects for the development of the "green" economy at the local and regional level are substantiated. The collective monograph will be interesting for the general public: students, teachers, scientists, businessmen, officials, government officials. (shrink)

Successful teamwork doesn't work overnight, what makes teamwork potent is team building. (Plagiarism) According to Abdullah, et. al., (2022) team building training can improve group cohesiveness or the quality of sticking together or unity teamwork more likely to be higher with a significant score difference. This study used mixed methods both qualitative and quantitative data collection, and an analysis method to answer the research method, random sampling is named as such because the data set is chosen via random selection, where (...) every member of the population has an equal probability of being selected (Tao, 2023). The respondents were 100 restaurant employees and 10 managers from the chosen restaurant in Malolos City in Bulacan. The subcategories of team building, including activities, communication, skills, personality, problem-solving, and values, have all received a consensus of strong agreement, with weighted averages falling within the range of 3.26 to 3.44. This level of agreement aligns with the scores for motivation at 3.43 and productivity at 3.38. These values have been calculated by determining the mean, which spans from 3.25 to 4.00. The advantages of team building that is being observed by the managers is to create familiarity and teamwork among the employees, to improve the quality of service and the quality of the food especially the respondents are in the food service sector, development, and training for the employees to achieve the establishments’ goal and lastly rebuilding and build a relationship with one employee to another. However, for the disadvantages, it costs a lot of money to conduct team building in the management. Therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected. Despite the fact that there is a low correlation between teambuilding activities and motivation and employee productivity, there is still a significant relationship between the variables. (shrink)

An essay review of Léna Soler, Emiliano Trizio, and Andrew Pickering (eds.), Science As It Could Have Been: Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press).

In the debates regarding the ethics of human enhancement, proponents have found it difficult to refute the concern, voiced by certain bioconservatives, that cognitive enhancement violates the autonomy of the enhanced. However, G. Owen Schaefer, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu have attempted not only to avoid autonomy-based bioconservative objections, but to argue that cognition-enhancing biomedical interventions can actually enhance autonomy. In response, this paper has two aims: firstly, to explore the limits of their argument; secondly, and more importantly, to (...) develop a more complete understanding of autonomy and its relation to cognitive enhancement. By drawing a distinction between the capacity for autonomy and the exercise and achievement of autonomy and by exploring the possible effects of cognitive enhancement on both competence and authenticity conditions for autonomy, the paper identifies and explains which dimensions of autonomy can and cannot, in principle, be enhanced via direct cognitive interventions. This allows us to draw conclusions regarding the limits of cognitive enhancement as a means for enhancing autonomy. (shrink)

In non‐literal uses of language, the content an utterance communicates differs from its literal truth conditions. Loose talk is one example of non‐literal language use (amongst many others). For example, what a loose utterance of (1) communicates differs from what it literally expresses: (1) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock. Loose talk is interesting (or so I will argue). It has certain distinctive features which raise important questions about the connection between literal and non‐literal language use. This paper aims to (...) (i.) introduce a range of novel data demonstrating certain overlooked features of loose talk, and (ii.) develop a new theory of the phenomenon which accounts for these data. In particular, this theory is motivated by the need to explain minimal pairs such as (2)-(3): (2) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock, but she did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly. (3) ?? Lena did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly, but she arrived at 9 o'clock. (2) and (3) agree in their truth conditions. Yet they differ in felicity. As such, they constitute a problem for any account which hopes to predict the acceptability of the loose use of a sentence from its truth conditions and the context of utterance alone. Instead, it will be argued, to explain loose talk phenomena we must posit an additional layer of meaning outstripping truth conditions. This layer of meaning is shown to exhibit a range of properties, all of which point to its being semantically encoded. Thus, if correct, the theory provides a new example of how semantic meaning must extend beyond literal, truth‐conditional content. (shrink)

Political theorists study the attributes of desirable social-moral states of affairs. Schaefer (forthcoming) aims to show that "static political theory" of this kind rests on shaky foundations. His argument revolves around an application of an abstruse mathematical theorem -- Kakutani's fixed point theorem -- to the social-moral domain. We show that Schaefer has misunderstood the implications of this theorem for political theory. Theorists who wish to study the attributes of social-moral states of affairs should carry on, safe in (...) the knowledge that Kakutani's theorem poses no threat to this enterprise. (shrink)

Kolloquiumsbeiträge des XV. Deutschen Kongresses für Philosophie 1990 in Hamburg. Mit Beiträgen von Herbert Schnädelbach, Hilary Putnam, Karl-Otto Apel, Walter Ch. Zimmerli, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Wolfgang Bartuschat, Elke Hahn und Klaus Vieweg, Roland Simon-Schaefer, Ruedi Imbach, Georg Wieland, Jan Peter Beckmann, Pierre Aubenque, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Gernot Böhme, Dietrich Böhler, Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Kambartel, Oswald Schwemmer, Dieter Birnbacher, Karl-Friedrich Wessel, Friedrich Rapp, Otfried Höffe, Henning Ottmann und Terry Pinkard.