11 found
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  1. Three Ways in Which Pandemic Models May Perform a Pandemic.Philippe Van Basshuysen, Lucie White, Donal Khosrowi & Mathias Frisch - 2021 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 14 (1):110-127.
    Models not only represent but may also influence their targets in important ways. While models’ abilities to influence outcomes has been studied in the context of economic models, often under the label ‘performativity’, we argue that this phenomenon also pertains to epidemiological models, such as those used for forecasting the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic. After identifying three ways in which a model by the Covid-19 Response Team at Imperial College London may have influenced scientific advice, policy, and individual responses, (...)
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  2. Were Lockdowns Justified? A Return to the Facts and Evidence.Philippe van Basshuysen & Lucie White - 2021 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 31 (4):405-428.
    Were governments justified in imposing lockdowns to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? We argue that a convincing answer to this question is to date wanting, by critically analyzing the factual basis of a recent paper, “How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis” (Winsberg et al. 2020). In their paper, Winsberg et al. argue that government leaders did not, at the beginning of the pandemic, meet the epistemic requirements necessitated to impose lockdowns. We focus on (...)
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  3. Privacy versus Public Health? A Reassessment of Centralised and Decentralised Digital Contact Tracing.Lucie White & Philippe van Basshuysen - 2021 - Science and Engineering Ethics 27 (2):1-13.
    At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users (...)
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  4. When is Lockdown Justified?Lucie White, Philippe van Basshuysen & Mathias Frisch - 2022 - Philosophy of Medicine 3 (1):1-22.
    How could the initial, drastic decisions to implement “lockdowns” to control the spread of COVID-19 infections be justifiable, when they were made on the basis of such uncertain evidence? We defend the imposition of lockdowns in some countries by first, and focusing on the UK, looking at the evidence that undergirded the decision, second, arguing that this provided us with sufficient grounds to restrict liberty given the circumstances, and third, defending the use of poorly-empirically-constrained epidemiological models as tools that can (...)
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  5. Without a Trace: Why did Corona Apps Fail?Lucie White & Philippe van Basshuysen - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (12):1-4.
    At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were put on digital contact tracing, using mobile phone apps to record and immediately notify contacts when a user reports as infected. Such apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as second waves of COVID-19 are raging, these apps are playing a less important role than anticipated. We argue that this is because most countries have opted for app configurations that cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of (...)
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  6. Making a Murderer: How Risk Assessment Tools May Produce Rather Than Predict Criminal Behavior.Donal Khosrowi & Philippe van Basshuysen - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (4):309-325.
    Algorithmic risk assessment tools, such as COMPAS, are increasingly used in criminal justice systems to predict the risk of defendants to reoffend in the future. This paper argues that these tools may not only predict recidivism, but may themselves causally induce recidivism through self-fulfilling predictions. We argue that such “performative” effects can yield severe harms both to individuals and to society at large, which raise epistemic-ethical responsibilities on the part of developers and users of risk assessment tools. To meet these (...)
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  7. How to Overcome Lockdown: Selective Isolation versus Contact Tracing.Lucie White & Philippe van Basshuysen - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (11):724-725.
    At this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, two policy aims are imperative: avoiding the need for a general lockdown of the population, with all its economic, social and health costs, and preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by the unchecked spread of infection. Achieving these two aims requires the consideration of unpalatable measures. Julian Savulescu and James Cameron argue that mandatory isolation of the elderly is justified under these circumstances, as they are at increased risk of becoming severely ill (...)
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  8. Mit Kontaktdaten gegen die Pandemie: Zur Ethik von Corona Warn-Apps.Philippe van Basshuysen & Lucie White - 2021 - Ethik in der Medizin 33 (3):387-400.
    Zu Beginn der Pandemie im Frühjahr 2020, und nach einem weitreichenden Lockdown, ruhten große Erwartungen auf Corona-Warn-Apps, um einen erneuten Lockdown zu verhindern. Diese Erwartungen haben sich nicht erfüllt; stattdessen wurden in Deutschland als Reaktion auf erneute Wellen von COVID-19 weitere Kontaktbeschränkungen verordnet. Wie hätte die digitale Kontaktverfolgung wirksamer gestaltet werden können? Wir argumentieren, dass es ein Spannungsfeld zwischen der Datensparsamkeit und einer wirksamen Bekämpfung der Pandemie besteht. Im Gegensatz zur deutschen Corona-Warn-App wäre eine Variante der App, in der pseudonymisierte (...)
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  9. The Epistemic Duties of Philosophers: An Addendum.Philippe van Basshuysen & Lucie White - 2021 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 31 (4):447-451.
    We were slightly concerned, upon having read Eric Winsberg, Jason Brennan and Chris Surprenant’s reply to our paper “Were Lockdowns Justified? A Return to the Facts and Evidence”, that they may have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of our argument, so we issue the following clarification, along with a comment on our motivations for writing such a piece, for the interested reader.
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  10. Emerging from Lockdown - What Went Wrong?Philippe van Basshuysen & Lucie White - manuscript
    As many Western countries emerged from initial periods of lockdown in spring 2020, they had brought COVID-19 infection rates down significantly. This was followed, however, with more drastic second and third waves of viral spread, which many of these same countries are struggling to bring under control, even with the implementation of further periods of lockdown. Could this have been prevented by policymakers? We revisit two strategies that were focus of much discussion during the early stages of the pandemic, and (...)
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  11. Nagelian Reduction and Coherence.Philippe van Basshuysen - 2014 - Romanian Journal of Analytic Philosophy 8 (1):63-94.
    It can be argued (cf. Dizadji‑Bahmani et al. 2010) that an increase in coherence is one goal that drives reductionist enterprises. Consequently, the question if or how well this goal is achieved can serve as an epistemic criterion for evaluating both a concrete case of a purported reduction and our model of reduction : what conditions on the model allow for an increase in coherence ? In order to answer this question, I provide an analysis of the relation between the (...)
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