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.

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

This commentary examines the role of sustainability in the latest draft of the WHO pandemic accord, highlighting its notable absence from the official list of guiding principles despite being mentioned frequently throughout the text. It argues that sustainability should be explicitly acknowledged as a core principle and given a clear definition tailored to pandemic preparedness, and proposes defining sustainability as ensuring that immediate emergency responses don't compromise future pandemic preparedness and response capabilities. Including sustainability as a guiding principle would serve (...) two key purposes: validating the relevance of ethical principles in the accord's provisions and emphasizing the importance of long-term planning in pandemic preparedness. The commentary notes that while humans naturally discount future consequences, sustainable pandemic planning requires considering impacts beyond the next pandemic. It recommends coupling any reforms, such as intellectual property changes, with alternative innovation incentives to maintain a balanced approach to pandemic preparedness and response. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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

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)

As a response to the COVID-19 crisis, governments have turned to various discretionary measures such as cash transfers to consumers and businesses with mixed results. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is back on the agenda as well. One of the main advantages of UBI, as scholars like F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James M. Buchanan have argued, is that it does not depend upon competent and benevolent government discretion—which is often in short supply—but upon pre-established rules. This paper argues that the (...) UBI scheme holds tentative promise from the point of view of improving the institutional crisis preparedness of a complex socioeconomic order. The pre-established rules of UBI buttress the rule of law framework that improves the ability of economic agents to spontaneously coordinate their actions in times of crisis characterized by radical uncertainty, disequilibrium shocks, and institutional instability. Furthermore, UBI combines the distribution of fungible resources with the delegation of independent decision-making power to millions of crisis-struck individuals and communities. Compared to discretionary tax-and-transfer schemes, the rules of UBI therefore appear more compatible with the polycentric discovery of novel solutions from the bottom-up. In times of crisis, UBI may be relied upon as one cornerstone of what I shall call the permanent crisis management framework. Having such a permanent scheme may minimize - although it does not altogether eliminate - the need for discretionary transfers, targeted intervention, and technocratic management in times of crisis. However, this theoretical model of UBI as a facilitator of polycentric crisis preparedness faces several practical challenges that need to be addressed in further research. (shrink)

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a potential way in which welfare states could be made more responsive to the ever-shifting evolutionary challenges of institutional adaptation in a dynamic environment. It has been proposed as a tool of “real freedom” (Van Parijs) and as a tool of making the welfare state more efficient. (Friedman) From the point of view of complexity theory and evolutionary economics, I argue that only a welfare state model that is “polycentrically” (Polanyi, Hayek) organized (...) as an evolving network of distributed decision-making can respond to the challenges of complexity in an adaptively efficient manner. UBI has the theoretical possibility to facilitate flexible, bottom-up innovation, since a) it embodies the “rule of law” principles of generality, nondiscrimination, simplicity, and transparency, and b) it grants people widespread freedom to experiment, innovate, and deviate from established practices and norms; but whether it can be made to work as intended depends on a number of variables in its design. I situate my research in the contemporary UBI debate around automation and technological development, which I interpret creatively through the lens of contemporary evolutionary political economy. I advance a syncretic model of institutional design based upon the shared insights of the Santa Fe, Neo-Hayekian, and Neo-Schumpeterian schools of evolutionary economics that, following Adam Thierer and Michael Munger, I call the framework of Permissionless Innovation (PI). Under the PI framework, which is a development of the tradition of evolutionary liberalism (Hume, Smith, Mandeville, Mill, Hayek, Polanyi, Schumpeter, Hodgson), individuals are granted the default right to innovate without having to ask for permission, and the right to basic income, which they can use to support their right to innovate, mutate, and experiment. This framework is a liberal framework to the extent it relies on widespread human freedom as a means of fostering innovation and social learning. And it is an evolutionary framework to the extent that it seeks to facilitate evolutionary socioeconomic processes for the sake of social progress and welfare advancement. I proceed to show, through an analysis of how innovation operates in both the economy and the cultural domain, that UBI can be used as an important cornerstone of an evolutionary liberal model of “ecostructural” governance that treats the socioeconomic order as an ecological garden of spontaneous growths, adaptations, and innovations. I call this the Permissionless Innovation Universal Basic Income (PIUBI) framework. In it, the right to innovate, deviate, and mutate is upheld as the “gold standard” of institutional design whereby individuals are granted widespread freedoms combined with the provision of UBI and other innovation-fostering (carefully bound) services and regulations. In the coming decades, UBI may even enable poor people to take better advantage of Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) and other experimental innovations. Such a framework is compatible with a fast pace of evolutionary development, but the regulatory model accompanying such a framework must be capable of responding to evolutionary lock-ins, maladaptive innovations, self-destructive behaviour on the part of UBI recipients, and the management of catastrophic and existential risks. In the end, I will have shown that the PIUBI framework can be justified as a plausible default institutional mechanism for responding to radical uncertainty, but it needs to be experimentally adapted to changing circumstances with the help of various situation-specific, polycentric, multi-level, approaches. (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)

This paper contrasts the conceptions of "Nothigness" and "nihility" in Western continental philosophy and Japanese philosophy. The experience of the Self, and the experiences of the transcendent, are constructed upon the prevalent assumptions of the culture that the individual finds herself in. The question of the relationship between the "I" and the "World" is differently solved (or stabilized, fixed) in different cultures. I seek to defend and interrogate the claim that Japan's core metaphysical stance is that of non-dualistic non-essentialism. In (...) Takeuchi Yoshimi's words, "Japan is nothing." By contrast, Europe is "something" - e.g., history, space, structure, being. The European metaphysics of self-understanding, at least in some aspects of Continental thought, is based on the primacy of being over nothingness, whereas Japanese metaphysics is based on the non-duality of substance and insubstantiality. Japanese metaphysics, Japanese self-identity, is "zero." Japanese metaphysics, including Buddhism, is based on the idea of nonsubstantiality, i.e. groundlessness of Being. We could say that in Japan "the transcendental center that consolidates the system is absent" (Karatani 1990: 70). This analysis illuminates how differently, and still productively, the experience of nihilism can appear in Japan and in the West. (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 complexity approach to political economy suggests that radical uncertainty is a necessary feature of a complex and evolving socioeconomic landscape. Radical uncertainty raises various adaptive challenges that are likely to escalate in the coming decades under the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” It jeopardizes the wellbeing of ordinary citizens, whose welfare prospects, job opportunities, and income stream are rendered insecure. It also renders precarious the robust implementation of universal human rights, including the right to social security. In fact, it will be (...) argued that human rights cannot be institutionally secured unless they are implemented in a “complexity aware” way that takes account of the uncertainty of the socioeconomic order. In particular, in order to better protect the dignity of rights holders, and to allow them to survive and thrive in the face of radical uncertainty, governments ought to explore various institutional alternatives to existing schemes. It will be suggested that most existing conditional welfare policies systematically fall short of complexity-aware institutional implementation to the extent that they rely on unreasonable assumptions regarding the availability of salient technocratic control over the complex socioeconomic order. Some economists and philosophers have suggested that UBI (Universal Basic Income) might be a viable way to implement the right to social security today. I propose that some of UBI’s most ethically and economically controversial features, such as unconditionality and universality, appear relatively appealing in light of the complexity perspective. In the absence of better alternatives, UBI might even be a requirement of a robust implementation of the human right to social security – a right that welfare states are already committed to on the level of ideal theory but predictably fail to respect in practice due to policy incoherence. However, open questions remain about whether UBI can be transformed from an ideal model into a pragmatic policy. (shrink)

In his influential 1949 essay, The Intellectuals and Socialism, F.A. Hayek prophesied that the “revival of liberalism” must coincide with the resurgence of “the courage to be Utopian.” Today, at a time when liberalism is under attack from multiple fronts, we need courage more than ever. Indeed, the rediscovery of the Utopian potential of liberalism coincides with going back to its roots. My paper shows that liberalism, especially in its so-called “epistemic” or "evolutionary" branch whose notable theorists include Adam Smith, (...) J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and F.A. Hayek, provides a framework for “real Utopian” theory and practice. However, I argue that evolutionary liberalism should be enriched with the insights of contemporary evolutionary theory and complexity theory to properly account for the downsides of social evolution and to overcome the understandable charge of social Darwinism. Only then can it robustly realise its emancipatory aspirations and real Utopian promise. (shrink)

In his insightful book, Trust in a Polarized Age, Kevin Vallier (2021) convincingly shows that the legitimacy and sustainability of liberal democratic institutions are dependent upon the maintenance of social and institutional trust. This insight, I believe, has value beyond the illustrious halls of post-Rawlsian, post-Gausian thought. Indeed, while I remain skeptical towards some of the premises of public reason liberalism, I am convinced that any liberal democratic political philosopher who takes the trust literature seriously and who has made their (...) (pragmatic or principled) peace with redistribution has good reasons to sympathize with the general outlines of the institutional palette that emerges out of his book. In this article, I will take for granted Vallier’s assumption that the erosion of social and institutional trust is a serious problem. This motivates investigating the trust-bearing attributes of the redistributive welfare state and the “principle of social insurance” that underpins it. I reconstruct and critically analyse Vallier’s case for a liberal democratic welfare state. I show that he makes a convincing public reason argument for universal social insurance but proceeds too hastily to exclude the principle of unconditionality from consideration. The rest of my paper consists of defending this claim by presenting two kinds of arguments— empirical and theoretical—that I think public reason liberals like Vallier, according to their own commitments, should be motivated to incorporate into their comprehensive discussion of the public justifications for and against basic income. They will show that Universal Basic Income (UBI), although it remains contentious, has some features that could appeal to a diverse citizenry, and thus tilt the balance of public reason judgments towards UBI. (shrink)

Classical liberals have a long and convoluted history with the welfare state. Welfare policy has engaged liberals ever since the debates round poor relief, land ownership, and distributive justice in authors like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. However, the majority of the welfare state debate, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein, has been conducted primarily on the basis of rule-consequentialist reasoning, weighing the expected (long-term) costs and benefits of different institutional (...) rules. Classical liberals tend to be primarily concerned with welfare in the “happiness of individuals” sense and only secondarily with welfare in the “government handout” sense. This necessitates an investigation into the expected benefits and costs of various institutional rules and social policies. As a result, any disagreements about the best institutional pathway forward must be settled through comparative institutional analysis. Today, it seems to me that the classical liberal perspective must choose between two alternative pathways, each of which has its pros and cons, and each of which seems compatible with the abstract and general rules of the market society: 1) The Minimally Redistributive State based on a classical liberal constitution supported by robust market institutions and a civil society mosaic of polycentric mutual aid networks; or 2) The Welfare State of Law which, in addition to all of the above, adds a few carefully rule-bound and market-conforming redistributive mechanisms, the most important of which is the robust guarantee of something like a conditional minimum income scheme or an unconditional UBI/NIT scheme. In addition, the 3) “Third Way” models of the Social Market Economy and the Free Market Welfare State are also sometimes included as a third option. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess John McDowell's paper "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" (2009) (AMG) and its theory of epistemological openness to the world. I trace its motivations back to Kantian, Sellarsian and Aristotelean roots. I argue that McDowell subscribes to a kind of Holistic Theory of Rationality (HTR). To explain the HTR, I will analyze the Sellarsian notions of the "Manifest Image," the "Myth of the Given" and the "logical space of reasons." I argue that the holistic nature (...) of McDowell's theory gives it particular properties that put it in need of conservatism, because all the elements of the theory "hang together" - i.e. cohere - in a dangerous fashion. I argue that McDowell cannot afford big changes without upsetting the apple-cart. With this in mind, I shall assess the merits and demerits of AMG, and its modified theory of perceptual content, as an attempted conservative reform of HTR. I want to argue that, taken independently, AMG is a good and important change, but taken holistically it is non-conservative, and disruptive, of the McDowellian picture. Thus, if we wish to proceed with the McDowellian path, we are led to a choice between rejecting the local reform (and retreating back to an earlier version) or demanding further explanations of its global implications. (shrink)

In a number of works, James M. Buchanan set out a proposal for a ‘demogrant’— a form of universal basic income that applied the principles of generality and non discrimination to the tax and the transfer sides of the scheme and was to be implemented as a constitutional rule outside the realm of day-to-day politics. The demogrant has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, but this article locates it in Buchanan’s broader constitutional political economy project and shows it was a logical (...) application of his theoretical framework to the problem of inefficient and unfair welfare systems when reform to the basic institutions of majoritarian democracy was not forthcoming. The demogrant aims to end the problems of majority cycling and rent seeking that plague contemporary welfare states and therefore offers a model of welfare without rent seeking—a constitutional welfare state. We compare Buchanan’s demogrant model to other universal basic income and negative income tax models and consider the most important criticisms. We conclude that rescuing the demogrant model from relative obscurity would be a fruitful future task of applied constitutional political economy and public choice. (shrink)

What does effective poverty relief entail? How are we to assess the capacity of advanced industrialized societies to solve the problem of poverty? What role, if any, is left for the welfare state? This chapter argues that poverty relief, far from being primarily a matter of post hoc redistribution, primarily consists in a Hayekian-Schumpeterian discovery (or innovation) procedure whereby the problems of the poor are continuously discovered, identified, and eventually solved from the bottom up. This suggests new avenues for reform. (...) I argue, from the point of view of complexity theory, that governments must overcome knowledge and governance problems that limit their competence in the realm of solving the problems of the poor. As a result, any efficient system of poverty relief is unlikely to emerge from imposing an efficient and equitable top-down delivery of given goods and services based on established practices or preferences. The knowledge of what goods and services are required, and what practices should be modified to produce them, is not given to policy makers; it needs to be discovered. And this discovery is best modeled as an entrepreneurial, inquisitive, and experimental process. This process is best understood by applying complexity theory and the Austrian (Hayekian) epistemic paradigm. (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)

Liberal-minded basic income scholars often argue that UBI has two key properties that work together to justify it. Let us call these the freedom justification and the narrative justification. On the one hand, UBI is defended because it gives people more freedom to do what they want to do. (Stigler, 1946, Friedman, 1962; Van Parijs, 1995; Widerquist, 2013) They exhibit primary concern for the purely formal properties of the regime of liberal neutrality. On the other hand, many scholars, including many (...) of the same liberal scholars, argue that UBI also pushes society substantively towards desirable social outcomes. They combine the freedom justification with substantive predictions and expectations. (Rifkin, 1995; Murray, 2016; Weeks, 2020) However, I show that both existentialist philosophy (Sartre) and complexity theory (Knight, Hayek, Schumpeter) suggest that a liberal social order is compatible, at best, with rough pattern prediction about a multiply realizable future that remains narratively open to multiple possible trajectories. Liberal neutrality, to the extent that it nourishes radical freedom, is incompatible with strong, stable narrative predictions. As Nozick put, it “liberty upsets patterns”. This is true of all liberal UBI models, and liberal institutions in general. (shrink)

This essay comprises two chapters from the first part of Bollnow’s book on moods, namely the second chapter on the concept of Stimmung and the third chapter on Stimmungen as the sustaining foundation of the soul. It argues that moods constitute the simplest and most original form in which human life comes to know itself. Moods are understood as a specific harmony between, first, the inner and outer world; second, the states of the body and the soul; and, third, the (...) individual faculties of the soul. Moods differ from emotions in the narrow sense, which are always intentionally directed towards a specific object, whereas moods do not have any specific object; they are states of being, structuring and coloring human existence as a whole. Hence, no system of moods is provided, but their extensive diversity is indicated. Furthermore, transient, unsteady, or “moody” moods are distinguished from persistent or basic moods. (shrink)

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)

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)

The Finnish experiment of 2017–18 is a crucial test case. It provides one of the most robust experimental tests of a universal basic income (UBI) in the context of an advanced industrialised society. And it is a real milestone, since it represents a nonutopian approach to UBI that can be palatable to middle class voters. But its partial success is also a partial failure. Although it is too early to render judgement, the Finnish case shows that there are many obstacles (...) for the successful implementation of theoretical models. Experiments often fall short of the ideal experimental conditions. This speaks against taking too optimistic a view on the next steps. (shrink)

This article analyses the phenomenology and ontology of videogames through the lens of semiotics. The difference between games and more traditional narrative models (such as those found in books and movies) lies on the structural level. The game narrative needs to be ‘written’ (played) before it can be ‘read’ (interpreted). Games provide fluidity of interactive immersion: the interface as the place of the merger between the player and the game. A connection, without delay, is established between the movement of the (...) player’s hands and the virtual movement across virtual space-times of the virtual characters/events on the screen. The connection is cybernetic, of course, and real. The actuality of the virtual is established as the action of the finger movements of the player. Games require at least a minimum degree of interaction. The player has a role as the master of the code, as the last string of code attached to complete the sequence. Such is the definition of the Cinematic under the formal demands of the Ludic: the defining-delimiting-restricting background which nonetheless, by its very (fixed) presence, provides the nurturing ground for the appearance and presence of (fluid) malleability as the ‘gap’ or ‘lack’ in the structure to be filled – in whatever manner – by the player in the act of his or her (world-constitutive) existential engagement. (shrink)

Why humanism, still/again? The very same question was asked – not for the first time, nor for the last – by Sartre, in a rhetorical mood, in his 1946 landmark treatise, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, a work which propounded many of the topics and doctrines that were to become the core of the new French existentialist movement in philosophy and literature. In differentiating “his” philosophy from the other humanist traditions of the time – from those allied with it, like Marxism, (...) to those hostile to it, like Christianity – he chose to define “existentialist” humanism as radically distinct from “essentialist” or “classical” humanism (basically everything pre-Sartre or pre-Existentialism). Humanism he defined as “une theorie qui prend l’homme comme fin et comme valeur supérieure." In his reading of history, this pre-existentialist humanism of his forebears, as represented by Enlightenment’s offspring, unduly emphasized such things as “human nature”, “human rights” (god-given or natural) and social law-likeness – all essentialist, anti-individualistic theories of the human condition. Existentialism wanted to strip away the last vestiges of any essentialist salvaging of the absoluteness of Man’s condition: “l’homme est libre, l’homme est liberté”; “Nous sommes seuls, sans excuses … l’homme est condamné à être libre." Instead of history or the social condition being the sculptor of man, it is man himself who is the author of his own destiny and of the course of history. This open up possibilities of progress but also temptations of hubris and disaster. (shrink)

Tämä artikkeli esittelee utilitaristisen valistusliberalismin käsityksen sananvapaudesta. Sen perusväite on, että tiedonhaluinen, kehittyvä ja demokraattinen yhteiskunta hyötyy pitkällä tähtäimellä enemmän laajan sananvapauden sallimisesta kuin sen maltillisestakin rajoittamisesta. Tämän näkökulman mukaan haitallisen puheen – kuten vihapuheen ja muun loukkaavan puheen – tukahduttaminen on epätoivottavaa mutta tilannekohtaisesti hyötylaskelmien mukaan perusteltavissa, jos laajan sananvapauden pitkän tähtäimen hyödyt on otettu riittävästi huomioon. Ongelma onkin siinä, että näitä pitkän tähtäimen hyötyjä ei yleensä ole otettu riittävästi huomioon. Sananvapauden haitat ovat kiistattomia, joten sananvapauden uskottavan puolustuksen tulee (...) lähteä tämän todellisuuden hyväksymisestä. Sen tulee tarjota uskottava teoreettinen vaihtoehto houkutteleville valtiollisille ratkaisuille, kuten kohdennetulle vihapuhelainsäädännölle. Väitän, että radikaalin valistusliberalismin esittämä laajan sananvapauden malli tarjoaa tällaisen vaihtoehdon. (shrink)

My paper proposes a tentative framework of bio-existential semiotics based on a reading of Peirce, Darwin, Heidegger, Tarasti, and others. According to this view, there is an evolutionary continuum to life. Human beings are natural organisms and they exhibit many similar bio-existential phenomena. Natural evolution also produces the anthropological, societal and global semiotic processes that constitute cultural evolution as an outgrowth. In the bio-existential perspective, the world is composed of imperfect systems and imperfect consciousnesses where every lifeform must struggle for (...) its existence. Every “Dasein” must face the fact that it must die because it cannot comprehend or control the universe in its totality. This is why life and existence are “tragic” phenomena. Every bio-existential Dasein is a partial comprehension of the universe, and the only way the universe can comprehend itself is through these partial perspectives, which are born to imperfection and die in imperfection, but whose imperfection is of the essence of the universe. This is why bio-existentialism makes for a “tragic” perspective: we are mortals, and all mortals must die. Nonetheless, there is also hope and optimism in this view of life. In conceiving of existence as having certain universal principles that extend from biology to sociology, semioticians and philosophers can formulate new ways of looking at the world. Together with scientists and artists, they can hopefully work towards a better – or at least more refined – ethical attitude towards science, nature and society. (shrink)

Different opinions about the simplicity of God may be connected with different understandings of how abstract terms are used to name the properties which are affirmed of a being. If these terms are taken to signify parts of that being, this being is not a simple one. Thomas Aquinas, who attributes essence, existence and perfections to God, nevertheless thinks that these are not different parts of God. When essence, existence and perfections are attributed to God, they all denominate the same, (...) the Being of the first cause. For Aquinas, this is a consequence of his way of introducing the language about God by basing it upon the philosophical ways leading to God as first cause. Awareness of this connection between Divine attributes and the arguments for God’s existence is crucial for an adequate understanding of Aquinas’ position. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

Starting from the problem of tolerance in a multicultural society, the author undermines the limits of a classical‐liberal foundation (negative tolerance) and suggests the need for a new meaning: a positive concern of tolerance implying appreciation of a variety of social cultures and value traditions. On an ethical level, positive tolerance can be grounded in the Discourse Theory, developing the classical Kantian deontological ethics in a transcendental‐pragmatic and in a transcendental‐hermeneutic sense. In this way, discourse ethics can answer two questions (...) posed by tolerance in a multicultural society: the duty to support all in the pursuit of their ideals and realize positive tolerance as well as its restrictions. (shrink)

Um princípio moral a priori, segundo Kant, não resulta dizer que ele vem antes da experiência moral, mas que pode ter uma origem independente dela, recebendo uma justificação sem um recurso à experiência. A Metafísica dos Costumes de Kant é de ordem metodológica, sendo que o método analítico consiste em que a partir do saber filosófico aplica-se o princípio a casos particulares. Desse modo, Kant procura estabelecer o princípio supremo da moralidade e, este seria um juízo sintético a priori, tendo (...) as formas puras da sensibilidade e do entendimento para possibilitarem os juízos sintéticos a priori. Além disso, o princípio supremo da moralidade justificará a priori e deduzirá dele as obrigações morais. Há três proposições fundamentais das quais Kant estabelece para apresentar o princípio supremo da moralidade: a primeira refere-se ao valor moral da ação da qual está em seu cumprimento por dever e não simplesmente em conformidade com o dever; a segunda proposição afirma que uma ação desempenhada por dever não tem seu valor no propósito a ser atingido, mas na máxima que a determina; e por fim, a terceira declara o dever sendo a necessidade de uma ação executada por respeito à lei. Kant alcança o imperativo moral através de desdobramentos conceituais, onde formula o Imperativo Categórico sendo uma máxima de ação que possui um valor universal, isto é, aplicada ao indivíduo e para todos os outros seres racionais. Todo comportamento moral é, segundo Kant, comportamento regrado. Isso quer dizer que o agir moralmente consiste em seguir a lei moral de certo modo. Há um quadro de deveres apontado na obra Metafísica dos Costumes, onde se apresenta a distinção entre os deveres para consigo e deveres para com os outros e, dessa maneira, entende-se em deveres para consigo como, não cometer suicídio e desenvolver os talento, e assim, em deveres para com os outros se entende como, manter as promessas e ajudar as pessoas que necessitam. E portanto, Kant critica a Regra de ouro por não fazer essa distinção entre deveres para consigo e deveres para com os outros. O imperativo categórico institui a necessidade de julgar as máximas desde um ponto de vista imparcial, e uma máxima de ação é uma regra de agir que tem validade apenas para um indivíduo. Desse modo, uma ação praticada por dever tem seu valor na máxima que a determina, isto é, uma máxima de ação é uma regra subjetiva do agir, a possível portadora do dever moral. Kant testa as máximas a partir daquilo que ele considera o princípio supremo da moralidade, ou seja, o Imperativo Categórico. Logo, um imperativo é um mandamento da razão, onde todos os imperativos exprimem-se pelo verbo dever. Sendo assim, há duas subclasses básicas de imperativos: hipotéticas ou categóricas. Um imperativo hipotético apresenta uma ação como necessária para atingir um determinado fim, e os imperativos hipotéticos ainda se subdividem em problemáticos, isto é, para uma intenção possível, e em assertóricos, para uma intenção real. O Imperativo Categórico é o princípio que estabelece se as máximas de ação, ou seja, são regras subjetivas do agir, que podem ser consideradas leis práticas. Em outras palavras, o Imperativo Categórico é uma norma para decidir quais máximas podem ser transformadas em leis práticas. A fórmula geral do Imperativo Categórico, “Age apenas segundo uma máxima tal que possas ao mesmo tempo querer que ela se torne lei universal’’ é o único princípio da moralidade. Portanto, a universalidade de uma máxima é a exigência do princípio supremo da moral de Kant. Ter uma vontade boa é exatamente cumprir o dever pelo dever, e é exatamente isso que confere valor moral a nossas ações. Logo, seguir uma lei moral é apenas uma condição necessária do agir moralmente, mas não é suficiente. Kant em a Fundamentação da metafísica dos costumes sustenta, desse modo, que: “Não há nada em lugar algum, no mundo e até mesmo fora dele, que se possa pensar como sendo irrestritamente bom, a não ser tão-somente uma boa vontade.” (KANT, GMS, 4: 393) Segundo Kant o conceito de bom e mau não tem que ser determinado antes da lei moral, isto é, não existe nada de modo absoluto bom, mas apenas existe uma boa vontade. Desse modo, Kant critica tanto a ética antiga de virtudes e a ética utilitarista de seu tempo. Algumas propriedades são até favoráveis a essa boa vontade e podem facilitar muito sua obra, contudo não têm qualquer valor intrínseco incondicional, mas pressupõem sempre ainda uma boa vontade, que restringe, aliás, com razão, a alta estima em que são tidas e não permite tê-las como absolutamente boas. A moderação nos afectos e paixões, o autodomínio e a sóbria deliberação não somente são coisas boas sob muitos aspectos, mas parece até mesmo constituir uma parte do valor intrínseco da pessoa; só que falta muito ainda para declará-los sem restrição como bons. Pois, sem princípios de uma boa vontade, podem tronar-se extremamente maus, e o sangue-frio de um malfeitor torna-o não só mais perigoso, mas também ainda mais imediatamente abominável aos nossos olhos do que teria sido assim considerado sem isso. (KANT, GMS, 4: 393) Kant afirma, assim, que as virtudes de certo modo podem ser más se não existir uma vontade boa para guia-la, logo, ele não louva de modo absoluto as virtudes e também não admite que a felicidade possa ser o fim último que justifica as ações morais, mas a priorização do correto e não do bem. E por fim, Kant argumenta contra a ética utilitarista, declarando que uma ação não pode ser considerada como sendo absolutamente boa a partir de seus resultados. Desse modo, há regras morais que se deve cumprir, independente dos resultados ou consequências. A proposta da ética kantiana em sustentar que existem princípios auto evidentes, ou seja, normas morais, ou o tal princípio supremo da moralidade, onde prioriza o correto ao invés do bem, ao meu ver revela a pureza da ação do homem em contraste com sua capacidade para tal. Assim, quando Kant refere-se as ações, não apenas as consequências delas as tornam certas ou erradas, isto é, erradas independentemente das suas consequências, aliás, uma ação é errada quando com ela infringe-se intencionalmente algumas das normas morais. E por fim, acredito ser pior provocar um mal que permitir que um mal ocorra, como por exemplo, é pior matar uma pessoa que deixá-la morrer. E também, seria pior dar origem a um mal intencionalmente que dar a origem a um mal que não pretendemos produzir, como por exemplo, é pior torturar alguém que fazer algo que resulte em sofrimento como efeito colateral. (shrink)

Intellectual property (IP) can internalize positive externalities associated with the creation and discovery of ideas, thereby increasing investment in efforts to create and discover ideas. However, IP law also causes negative externalities. Strict IP rights raise the transaction costs associated with consuming and building on existing ideas. This causes a tragedy of the anticommons, in which valuable resources are underused and underdeveloped. By disincentivizing creative projects that build on existing ideas, IP protection, even if it increases original innovation, can inadvertently (...) reduce the rate of iterative innovation. The net effect of IP law on innovation and welfare depends on the relative magnitude of these positive and negative externalities. We argue that the current regime probably suffers from excessive, and excessively rigid, IP protection. This motivates the search for institutional alternatives and complements. We suggest that a monocentric IP rights regime may not be the only, or the most efficient, way to internalize the positive externalities of innovation. The knowledge economy supports the emergence of diverse, polycentric forms of bottom-up self-governance, both market and community led, that entail the citizen coproduction of the norms and practices of intellectual creation and discovery. (shrink)