Existing approaches to campaign ethics fail to adequately account for the “arms races” incited by competitive incentives in the absence of effective sanctions for destructive behaviors. By recommending scrupulous devotion to unenforceable norms of honesty, these approaches require ethical candidates either to quit or lose. To better understand the complex dilemmas faced by candidates, therefore, we turn first to the tradition of “adversarial ethics,” which aims to enable ethical participants to compete while preventing the most destructive excesses (...) of competition. As we demonstrate, however, elections present even more difficult challenges than other adversarial contexts, because no centralized regulation is available to halt potential arms races. Turning next to recent scholarship on populism and partisanship, we articulate an alternative framework for campaign ethics, which allows candidates greater room to maneuver in their appeals to democratic populations while nevertheless requiring adherence to norms of social and political pluralism. (shrink)

Text-guided image generation models can be prompted to generate images using nonce words adversarially designed to robustly evoke specific visual concepts. Two approaches for such generation are introduced: macaronic prompting, which involves designing cryptic hybrid words by concatenating subword units from different languages; and evocative prompting, which involves designing nonce words whose broad morphological features are similar enough to that of existing words to trigger robust visual associations. The two methods can also be combined to generate images associated with more (...) specific visual concepts. The implications of these techniques for the circumvention of existing approaches to content moderation, and particularly the generation of offensive or harmful images, are discussed. (shrink)

-/- [Posted here is article as originally published (same title) in ALSA Forum VI (1982) pp. 1-17 plus rebuttal by Thomas D. Barton, pp. 18-22].

This paper explores the notion that business calls for an adversarial ethic, akin to that of sport. On this view, because of their competitive structure, both sport and business call for behaviours that are contrary to ‘ordinary morality’, and yet are ultimately justified because of the goods they facilitate. I develop three objections to this analogy. Firstly, there is an important qualitative difference between harms risked voluntarily and harms risked involuntarily. Secondly, the goods achieved by adversarial relationships in (...) sport go beyond the function of sport, i.e. to entertain audiences. Thirdly, the most plausible account of the athlete’s motivational development starts with their love of the sport, which can explain a commitment to the sporting ethics in a way that is not paralleled in business. I close by drawing attention to the ways in which an Aristotelian conception of business ethics may be able to accommodate these objections. (shrink)

The paper attempts to outline the actual academic debates around the concept of PR ethics. The first part aims to show the intimate link between professionalism and ethics as well as their bearing on the reputation of the PR field. Whether and how ethical public relations are possible is the main issue analyzed in the second part of the article. The two paradigms of public relations, “the attorney-adversary system” and “the two-way symmetrical model”, are put face to face (...) in order to better understand the arguments of their proponents as to the way of approaching to the ethical matters. A main concern of the third part is to answer the question if something is wrong with situational ethics. The problem is approached in the light of virtue ethics, which is itself situational in Aristotel’s sense of the term. In the final part, the paper suggests the possibility to use W. D. Ross’s pluralist deontology as a conceptual structure from which to build a practical model for the analysis of moral dilemmas in the PR practice. (shrink)

Growing technological advances in intelligent artifacts and bitter experiences of the past have emphasized the need to use and operate ethics in this field. Accordingly, it is vital to discuss the ethical integrity of having intelligent artifacts. Concerning the method of gathering materials, the current study uses library and documentary research followed by attribution style. Moreover, descriptive analysis is employed in order to analyze data. Explaining and criticizing the opposing views in this field and reviewing the related literature, it (...) is concluded that the proof of the ethical integrity of the intelligent artifacts is possible due to the specific features of these artifacts and their own moral system. (shrink)

I suggest that Kantian ethics, that is, the ethics of the mature Kant, that of Thomas Nagel, Karl-Otto Apel and Onora O'Neill, is not the caricature of an "engineering" approach in normative ethics that Lecaldano wants to fight in his war on deontological ethics. The ethics of Kant and the Neokantians can be for a consequentialist ethic a more fearsome and interesting adversary than such targets as "common-sense morality", non-existent "dogmatic intuitionism" invented by Sidgwick, non-existent (...) "Catholic morality" that Lecaldano tends to choose as privileged adversaries as if there were no more serious opponents to criticize for those who had good arguments to criticize them. (shrink)

What is the ethical basis for democracy? What reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? When can we justly ignore democratic decisions? These three questions are intimately connected: understanding what is ultimately important about democracy helps us to understand the authority of democratic decisions over our personal views, and the limits of such authority. Thomas Christiano’s ambitious new book, The Constitution of Equality, aims to provide such an understanding through a discussion (...) of all three questions. Briefly put, in Christiano’s view, public equality is the moral foundation of both democracy and liberal rights, and it serves to explain the authority of democracy as well as its limits. The book aims first of all to ground the principle of public equality in a number of principles related to the nature of personhood, dignity, well-being and formal considerations of justice, on the one hand, and in the need for publicity for social justice, on the other (Chaps. 1 and 2). The book then aims to show how both democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways that they can see are treating them as equals (Chaps. 3 and 4). The account clarifies the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life (Chap. 5). Finally, the book argues that democratic decisions have authority over personal views and that violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy, and that the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons weaken the legitimate authority of democracy (Chaps. 6 and 7). I shall begin by addressing Christiano’s view on the basis of equality, and then shall focus mainly on the central argument for public equality, democracy and its.. (shrink)

The need to turn an enemy into an adversary is an ethical obligation. I try to show that this obligation has multiple religious and philosophical resources. The ethical imperative also requires us to not overstate and magnify any problem at hand to the point that it becomes insurmountable and enmity becomes an end in itself. I do ask the question whether Springs thinks of Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest by taking the knee at football games as an instance of healthy conflict. (...) Are the terms peace and healthy conflict perhaps not better viewed as allegories for the interrogation of the human condition? Perhaps healthy conflict remains a series of questions rather than concrete outcomes. (shrink)

I develop a contractualist theory of just intelligence collection based on the collective moral responsibility to deliver security to a community and use the theory to justify certain kinds of signals interception. I also consider the rights of various intelligence targets like intelligence officers, service personnel, government employees, militants, and family members of all of these groups in order to consider how targets' waivers or forfeitures might create the moral space for just surveillance. Even people who are not doing anything (...) prejudicial to other states' security can be modeled as ceding rights against diagnostic collection--light touch collection limited to ascertaining if someone is likely an intelligence threat--as part of their duty to support just foreign institutions. Foreign intelligence officers could not perform the same job potential targets can reasonably demand their intelligence agencies perform on their behalf without this ceding of rights. More invasive forms of collection can only be justified if officers can reasonably model their citizens consenting to being the target of the same sort of collection by adversary states. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Many companies engage in dialogue with nongovernmental organizations about societal issues. The question is what a regulative ideal for such dialogues should be. In the literature on corporate social responsibility, the Habermasian notion of communicative action is often presented as a regulative ideal for stakeholder dialogue, implying that actors should aim at consensus and set strategic considerations aside. In this article, we argue that in many cases, communicative action is not a suitable regulative ideal for dialogue between companies and NGOs. (...) We contend that there is often an adversarial element in the relation between companies and NGOs, and that an orientation towards consensus can be in tension with this adversarial relation. We develop an alternative approach to stakeholder dialogue called ‘agonistic deliberation.’ In this approach, conflict and strategic considerations play a legitimate and, up to a certain point, desirable role. (shrink)

Charles Taylor defines `hypergoods' as the fundamental, architechtonic goods that serve as the basis of our moral frameworks. He also believes that, in principle, we can use reason to reconcile the conflicts that hypergoods engender. This belief, however, relies upon a misindentification of hypergoods as goods rather than as works of art, an error which is itself a result of an overly adversarial conception of practical reason. For Taylor fails to distinguish enough between ethical conflicts and those relating to (...) the religio-aesthetic domain. A proper identification of hypergoods as aesthetic, moreover, requires us to revise his accounts of ordinary life, of evil and of the controversy over university curricula. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the morality of two types of national security electronic surveillance (SIGINT) programs: the analysis of communication “metadata” and dragnet searches for keywords in electronic communication. The chapter develops a standard for assessing coercive government action based on respect for the autonomy of inhabitants of liberal states and argues that both types of SIGINT can potentially meet this standard. That said, the collection of metadata creates opportunities for abuse of power, and so judgments about the trustworthiness and competence (...) of the government engaging in the collection must be made in order to decide whether metadata collection is justified in a particular state. Further, the moral standard proposed has a reflexive element justifying adversary states’ intelligence collection against one another. Therefore, high-tech forms of SIGINT can only be justified at the cost of justifying cruder versions of signals intelligence collection practiced by a state’s less-advanced adversaries. (shrink)

In this research, we focus on the usage of adversarial sampling to test for the fairness in the prediction of deep neural network model across different classes of image in a given dataset. While several framework had been proposed to ensure robustness of machine learning model against adversarial attack, some of which includes adversarial training algorithm. There is still the pitfall that adversarial training algorithm tends to cause disparity in accuracy and robustness among different group. Our (...) research is aimed at using adversarial sampling to test for fairness in the prediction of deep neural network model across different classes or categories of image in a given dataset. We successfully demonstrated a new method of ensuring fairness across various group of input in deep neural network classifier. We trained our neural network model on the original image, and without training our model on the perturbed or attacked image. When we feed the adversarial samplings to our model, it was able to predict the original category/ class of the image the adversarial sample belongs to. We also introduced and used the separation of concern concept from software engineering whereby there is an additional standalone filter layer that filters perturbed image by heavily removing the noise or attack before automatically passing it to the network for classification, we were able to have accuracy of 93.3%. Cifar-10 dataset have ten categories of dataset, and so, in order to account for fairness, we applied our hypothesis across each categories of dataset and were able to get a consistent result and accuracy. (shrink)

What is the relevance of ideals for determining virtuous argumentative practices? According to Bailin and Battersby (2016), the telos of argumentation is to improve our cognitive systems, and adversariality plays no role in ideally virtuous argumentation. Stevens and Cohen (2019) grant that ideal argumentation is collaborative, but stress that imperfect agents like us should not aim at approximating the ideal of argumentation. Accordingly, it can be virtuous, for imperfect arguers like us, to act as adversaries. Many questions are left unanswered (...) by both camps. First, how do we conceptualize an ideal and its approximation? Second, how can we determine what is the ideal of argumentation? Third, can we extend Stevens and Cohen’s anti-approximation argument beyond virtue theory? In order to respond to these questions, this paper develops a second-best perspective on ideal argumentation. The Theory of the Second Best is a formal contribution to the field of utility (or welfare) optimization. Its main conclusion is that, in non-ideal circumstances, approximating ideals might be suboptimal. (shrink)

Why did R.G. Collingwood come to reject the adversarial style of philosophical discussion so popular among his Oxford peers? The main aim of this paper is to explain that Collingwood came to reject his colleagues’ specific style of philosophical dialogue on methodological grounds, and to show how the argument against adversarial philosophical discussion is integrated with Collingwood’s overall criticism of realist philosophy. His argument exploits a connection between method and practice that should be taken seriously even today.

I argue that political forgiveness is sometimes, but not always, compatible with public commemoration of politically motivated wrongdoing. I start by endorsing the claim that commemorating serious past wrongdoing has moral value and imposes moral demands on key actors within post-conflict societies. I am concerned with active commemoration, that is, the deliberate acts of bringing victims and the wrong done to them to public attention. The main issue is whether political forgiveness requires forgetting and conversely whether remembrance can be an (...) impediment to political forgiveness. The notion of political forgiveness, its definition, very possibility and desirability are contentious issues in the contemporary literature. I develop a multidimensional account of political forgiveness with a core element. The core element of political forgiveness involves taking a non-adversarial stance towards perpetrators in the sense of committing to stop holding their wrongdoing against them. The core element of forgiveness is usually combined with other attitudes and practices, which are appropriate depending on the circumstances. This is due to the fact that there are different ways of holding a wrong against an offender. I argue that forgiving perpetrators is not compatible with continue to punishing them, refusing to reconcile with them, and/or reminding them of their misdeed if perpetrators refuse to accept punishment, deny the importance of commemorating the past or wish to reconcile against the victim’s desires. I show that some forms of political forgiveness are not morally legitimate because they conflict with moral demands to punish perpetrators, commemorate atrocities and respect victims. This conclusion is less alarming than it might initially seem because the refusal to forgive politically motivated wrongdoing does not necessarily lead to the perpetuation of violence and conflict. I briefly draw on the example of Argentina in order to show how some forms of political un-forgiveness can be morally legitimate and effective ways for victims to uphold these demands. (shrink)

In this paper I provide support for the view that at least some forms of adversariality in argumentation are legitimate. The support comes from Aristotle’s theory of illegitimate adversarial argumentation in dialectical contexts: his theory of eristic in his work On Sophistical Refutations. Here Aristotle develops non-epistemic standards for evaluating the legitimacy of dialectical procedures, standards which I propose can be understood in terms of the pragmatic notion of context as common ground. Put briefly, Aristotle makes the answerer’s meaning (...) in giving assent in dialectical contexts the basis for further moves in the game of dialectic. Moves which subvert the answerer’s meaning or do not solicit the answerer’s consent are marked as eristic, i.e. adversarial in a problematic sense. I conclude with remarks on what Aristotle’s theory may teach us about how semantic features relate to the normative evaluation of argumentation. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke’s Essay, stands a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. In this paper, I argue that although there are many respects in which Astell and Masham are radically opposed, the two women (...) also have a surprising amount in common. Rather than interpret their ideas solely in relation to the ‘canonical’ philosophies of the time – Lockean empiricism and Malebranchean occasionalism – I examine the ways in which Astell and Masham are influenced by the metaphysical theories of the Cambridge Platonists, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. On this basis, I argue that a remarkably similar theological approach underlies the metaphysical and feminist arguments of Astell and Masham. (shrink)

This essay responds to four critical essays by Rosemary Kellison, Ebrahim Moosa, Joseph Winters, and Martin Kavka on the author’s recent book, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (Cambridge, 2018). Parts I and II work in tandem to further develop my accounts of strategic empathy and agonistic political friendship. I defend against criticisms that my argument for moral imagination obligates oppressed people to empathize with their oppressors. I argue, further, that healthy conflict can be motivated by (...) a kind of “secular” love. This enables my position to immanently criticize and mediate the claims that one must either love (agapically) one’s opponent in order to engage them in “healthy conflict,” on one hand, or that one must vanquish, exclude, or “cancel” one’s opponent, on the other. In Part III, I demonstrate how my account mediates the challenge of an alleged standing opposition between moral imagination and socio-theoretical critique. I defend a methodologically pragmatist account of immanent prophetic criticism, resistance, and conflict transformation. Finally, I respond to one critic’s vindication of a strong enemy/adversary opposition that takes up the case of white supremacist violence in the U.S. I argue that the time horizon for healthy conflict must be simultaneously immediate and also long-term, provided that such engagements remain socio-critically self-reflexive and seek to cultivate transformational responses. (shrink)

Humanity has begun to move from the natural world intothe cyber world. Issues surrounding this mentalmigration are debated in philosophical dialogue. Thelead character is Becket Geist, a romantic philosopherwith views tempered by 20th century science. He openswith a monologue in which he argues that loss of theworld in exchange for the cyber world is dark andinevitable. His chief adversary is Fortran McCyborg,a cyborg with leanings toward Scottish philosophy. The moderating force is Nonette Naturski who championsnaturalism, conservation of humanist ideals, andprudent (...) conclusions. The ensuing dialogue examineseight counter-arguments to Geist''s vision. Thearguments and Geist''s replies lead to unanticipatedchanges in position that cascade to a chillingclose. (shrink)

Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instead of as a person worthy of respect. On this view, the task of sexual ethics becomes putting the other’s subjectivity above their status as erotic object so as to avoid the harms of objectification. Ward and Anderson argue that such a view disregards the crucial, moral role that erotic objecthood plays in sexual encounters. Important moral features of intimacy are disclosed through (...) the experience of being an erotic object for another, as well as in perceiving another as an erotic object. Drawing on phenomenology, especially the insights of Simone de Beauvoir, Ward and Anderson argue that erotic encounters are shaped by the human condition of ambiguity, where being an object for others is intertwined with bodily agency. Because sexual agency is complex in this way, theories of sexual ethics and responsibility must widen their focus beyond transparent communication and authoritative expressions of will. (shrink)

Adversarial philosophy is under attack (!), but I speculate that it is useful for working out the level of a philosopher and sometimes for increasing the respect awarded to some individuals and groups. There may be no alternative to it when you have an excess of philosophers of around the same level.

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things,—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

Eristic has been studied more and more intensively in recent years in philosophy, law, communication theory, logic, proof theory, and A.I. Nevertheless, the modern origins of eristic, which almost all current researchers see in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, are considered to be a theory of the illegitimate use of logical and rhetorical devices. Thus, eristic seems to violate the norms of discourse ethics. In this paper, I argue that this interpretation of eristic is based on prejudices that contradict the (...) original intention of modern eristic. Eristic is not an art of being right or winning an argument, but an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to gain argumentative acceptance. For this reason, eristic must be seen as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Especially in the age of alternative facts and post-factual politics, this makes eristic a valuable discipline. (shrink)

Many take Kantian ethics to founder when it comes to our duties to animals. In this paper, I advocate a novel approach to this problem. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first, I canvass various passages from Kant in order to set up the problem. In the second, I introduce a novel approach to this problem. In the third, I defend my approach from various objections. By way of preview: I advocate rejecting the premise that nonhuman (...) animals are nonrational. (shrink)

We recently presented our Efimov K-theory of Diamonds, proposing a pro-diamond, a large stable (∞,1)-category of diamonds (D^{diamond}), and a localization sequence for diamond spectra. Commensurate with the localization sequence, we now detail four potential applications of the Efimov K-theory of D^{diamond}: emergent time as a pro-emergence (v-stack time) in a diamond holographic principle using Scholze’s six operations in the ’etale cohomology of diamonds; a pro-Generative Adversarial Network and v-stack perceptron; D^{diamond}cryptography; and diamond nonlocality in perfectoid quantum physics.

This paper argues for the normative significance of attention. Attention plays an important role when describing an individual’s mind and agency, and in explaining many central facts about that individual. In addition, many in the public want answers and guidance with regard to normative questions about attention. Given that attention is both descriptively central and the public cares about normative guidance with regard to it, attention should be central also in normative philosophy. We need an ethics of attention: a (...) field of study of which normative pressures, if any, govern attention. Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, i.e. to what is subject to such normative pressures. Philosophers should develop an ethics of attention that helps to provide normative guidance and that is commensurate in its richness to the descriptive significance of attention. The second half of the paper sketches a framework that may help us to get started at developing the ethics of attention. (shrink)

This book examines the role of military virtues in today's armed forces. -/- Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, and military organizations, yet there is (...) little that regulates the behavior of soldiers towards civilian populations. As a result, troops trained for combat in today's missions sometimes experience difficulty in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations after major combat is over. It can be argued that today's missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional ones, which are mainly about enhancing military effectiveness, but a convincing case can be made that a lot can already be won by interpreting these traditional virtues in different ways. -/- This volume offers an integrated approach to the main traditional virtues, exploring their possible relevance and proposing new ways of interpretation that are more in line with the military tasks of the 21st century. -/- The book will be of much interest to students of military ethics, philosophy, and war and conflict in general. (shrink)

Ethical extensionism is a common argument pattern in environmental and animal ethics, which takes a morally valuable trait already recognized in us and argues that we should recognize that value in other entities such as nonhuman animals. I exposit ethical extensionism’s core argument, argue for its validity and soundness, and trace its history to 18th century progressivist calls to expand the moral community and legal franchise. However, ethical extensionism has its critics. The bulk of the paper responds to recent (...) criticisms, including (1) environmental ethicists’ objection against its austere conception of moral value (2), feminist ethicists’ claim that extensionism fails to account for the moral significance of difference, (3) disability theorists’ concern that ethical extensionist arguments are offensive, and (4) animal rights theorists’ lament that extensionism is a practical failure. While something is to be gained from each criticism, I argue that they ultimately fail and that extensionism remains compelling. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to explore an analogy between logic and ethics, as Wittgenstein understands them in the Tractatus. First, I argue that Wittgenstein regards logic as a condition of the possibility of meaning, in the sense that logic makes meaningful language and thought possible. Second, I ask why Wittgenstein calls both logic and ethics ‘transcendental’. I suggest that, while logic is a condition of the possibility of semantic meaning, ethics is a condition of the (...) possibility of existential meaning. Without ethics, life could not be meaningful. Third, I show that harmony and agreement play a crucial role in Wittgenstein’s accounts of logic and ethics. A meaningful proposition can be true or false, a meaningful life can be happy or unhappy, and both truth and happiness consist in some kind of harmony or agreement with reality. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between naturalism and morality and to assess their compatibility. Naturalism is defined as respect for science, for its methods and results. From this respect for science, one can infer two distinct philosophical naturalisms: the methodological and the metaphysical. The relationship between these forms of naturalism and morality depends on the correct conception of morality. This paper differentiates between objectively realistic conception and all other conceptions and argues that while other conceptions (...) can easily fit morality into a naturalistic worldview, objectively realistic conception faces theoretical challenges, including the challenge of explaining how moral facts and concepts play an explanatory role and the challenge of bridging the is/ought gap. The paper focuses on Railton's ethical naturalism as a prominent naturalistic theory of morality and evaluates its ability to overcome these challenges. The conclusion is that, so long as we consider a theory like Railton's, naturalism and realistically conceived morality are incompatible. (shrink)

In medical ethics, business ethics, and some branches of political philosophy (multi-culturalism, issues of just allocation, and equitable distribution) the literature increasingly combines insights from ethics and the social sciences. Some authors in medical ethics even speak of a new phase in the history of ethics, hailing "empirical ethics" as a logical next step in the development of practical ethics after the turn to "applied ethics." The name empirical ethics is ill-chosen (...) because of its associations with "descriptive ethics." Unlike descriptive ethics, however, empirical ethics aims to be both descriptive and normative. The first question on which I focus is what kind of empirical research is used by empirical ethics and for which purposes. I argue that the ultimate aim of all empirical ethics is to improve the context-sensitivity of ethics. The second question is whether empirical ethics is essentially connected with specific positions in meta-ethics. I show that in some kinds of meta-ethical theories, which I categorize as broad contextualist theories, there is an intrinsic need for connecting normative ethics with empirical social research. But context-sensitivity is a goal that can be aimed for from any meta-ethical position. (shrink)

What is wrong with government whistleblowing and when can it be justified? In my view, ‘government whistleblowing’, i.e., the unauthorized acquisition and disclosure of classified information about the state or government, is a form of ‘political vigilantism’, which involves transgressing the boundaries around state secrets, for the purpose of challenging the allocation or use of power. It may nonetheless be justified when it is suitably constrained and exposes some information that the public ought to know and deliberate about. Government whistleblowing (...) should then be viewed, along the lines of civil disobedience, as a collective cognition- and legitimacy-enhancing device. (shrink)

This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...) well-being directly, without the use of invariance conditions, and to distinguish between real changes in well-being and merely representational changes in the unit of measurement. The qualitative framework is shown to have important implications for a range of issues in axiology and social choice theory, including the characterization of welfarism, axiomatic derivations of utilitarianism, the meaningfulness of prioritarianism, the informational requirements of variable-population ethics, the impossibility theorems of Arrow and others, and the metaphysics of value. (shrink)

In adversarial machine learning, attackers add carefully crafted perturbations to input, where the perturbations are almost imperceptible to humans, but can cause models to make wrong predictions. In this paper, we did comprehensive review of some of the most recent research, advancement and discoveries on adversarial attack, adversarial sampling generation, the potency or effectiveness of each of the existing attack methods, we also did comprehensive review on some of the most recent research, advancement and discoveries on (...) class='Hi'>adversarial defense strategies, the effectiveness of each defense methods, and finally we did comparison on effectiveness and potency of different adversarial attack and defense methods. We came to conclusion that adversarial attack will mainly be blackbox for the foreseeable future since attacker has limited or no knowledge of gradient use for NN model, we also concluded that as dataset becomes more complex, so will be increase in demand for scalable adversarial defense strategy to mitigate or combat attack, and we strongly recommended that any neural network model with or without defense strategy should regularly be revisited, with the source code continuously updated at regular interval to check for any vulnerability against newer attack. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to reflect on the impact of biases related to artificial intelligence (AI) systems developed to tackle issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, with special focus on those developed for triage and risk prediction. A secondary aim is to review assessment tools that have been developed to prevent biases in AI systems. In addition, we provide a conceptual clarification for some terms related to biases in this particular context. We focus mainly on nonracial biases (...) that may be less considered when addressing biases in AI systems in the existing literature. In the manuscript, we found that the existence of bias in AI systems used for COVID-19 can result in algorithmic justice and that the legal frameworks and strategies developed to prevent the apparition of bias have failed to adequately consider social determinants of health. Finally, we make some recommendations on how to include more diverse professional profiles in order to develop AI systems that increase the epistemic diversity needed to tackle AI biases during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to ground an alliance between Cynthia Willett’s theory of an ethics of eros and Hasana Sharp’s argument for a politics of renaturalization. Both approaches seek a vocabulary and practices for ethical life, which is not circumscribed by the requirement of rationality and is deeply attentive to relationships. The relations to which an ethics of eros and renaturalization must attend include social relations – the tender ministrations of mothers, lovers, and friends that sustain and (...) nourish (and sometimes threaten) each of us. Our lives, bodies, and minds, however, are also deeply involved with the nonhuman environment. Our existence depends on air, water, bacteria, shelter, and infinite other nonhuman beings. Our desires and needs include a habitable environment and even "biophilia." The increasing fragility of our ecosystems suggests that there is more need than ever for an ethics that goes not just beyond man – although that is certainly an ongoing project – but beyond the human. This essay is an attempt to ally our approaches in the feminist effort to produce a broad basis for ethics, allowing for a robust consideration of nonhuman nature. (shrink)

Game theory involves deliberating about what to do in light of what other people are likely to do. One of the central frameworks of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma, in which participants who make rational choices end up in suboptimal outcomes. Using the prisoner’s dilemma to model competition between firms sets the stage for a new and promising approach to business ethics: the market failures approach.

This article draws together research from various sub-disciplines of philosophy to offer an overview of recent philosophical work on the ethics of historic preservation. I discuss how philosophers writing about art, culture, and the environment have appealed to historical significance in crafting arguments about the preservation of objects, practices, and places. By demonstrating how it relates to core themes in moral and political philosophy, I argue that historic preservation is essentially concerned with ethical issues.

In this introductory essay, I describe feminist ethics as a kind of approach to morality that says we ought to pay attention to the facts on the ground and empirical information in order to know whether and how a moral problem is a gendered problem. One of the best accounts of feminist ethics is by Hilde Lindemann, who wrote that feminist ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct how gender operates within our moral and social beliefs and (...) practices.” She doesn’t define feminism as a theory about women, and neither do I. The term 'feminist' has more to do with the sources of this approach to ethics than the ultimate goals of such theorists; women were influential and early advocates of the view that sometimes a moral problem is a problem because it is gendered. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine six arguments concerning or making use of empirical psychological evidence in metaethics and normative ethics. Generally speaking, I find that the ambitious ones fail and the more modest ones ought to moderate their conclusions further.

"Ethical Explorations: Moral Dilemmas in a Universe of Possibilities" by Brendan Shea is an open access textbook that provides a comprehensive study of ethical philosophy. Shea makes it his task to chart the sprawling landscape of moral thought from ancient times to the present, employing a straightforward, easily accessible style. -/- In the book, each chapter addresses a distinct ethical theory. Shea discusses everything from Plato's allegorical Cave to contemporary issues in bioethics. The text features relatable narratives, clear explanations of (...) core concepts, thought-provoking questions, and handy glossaries to help readers grasp the subject matter. -/- Among the topics, you'll find the principles of utilitarianism through the adventures of a princess, an exploration of duty via a story about a golem, and a look at natural law theory through an engaging science-fiction tale. Contemporary themes also make an appearance, including discussions on Marxism, Nietzsche's radical ideas, Simone de Beauvoir's intersection of feminism and existentialism, and racial theories from W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King. -/- As an open access (CC-BY) textbook, "Ethical Explorations" is freely available to everyone, making the study of moral philosophy accessible to all. It's a tool that gives its readers the means to wrestle with ethical questions in an ever-changing world. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between ethical judgement writ large (as opposed to merely moral judgement) and motivation. We discuss arguments for and against views on which ethical judgement entails motivation, either alone or under conditions of rationality or normalcy, either at the individual or community level.

This essay develops a framework for understanding what I call the ethics of reflexivity, that is, the norms that govern attitudes and actions with respect to one’s own worth. I distinguish five central aspects of the reflexive commitment to living in accordance with one’s personal ideals: the extent to which and manner in which one regards oneself from an evaluative point of view, the extent to which one cares about receiving the respect of others, the degree to which one (...) interprets one’s personal ideals in an individualistic or collective manner, the degree to which one’s commitment to living in accordance with one’s personal ideals is rigid or flexible, and the worthiness of one’s personal ideals. This framework, I argue, illuminates the nature and moral significance of virtuous and vicious forms of the character trait of pride. (shrink)

This paper sketches an emotion-aware model of environmental ethics education. The proposal draws on insights from feminists scholars, moral sentimentalism, as well as work in the pedagogy of discomfort traditions. It identifies and defends four core elements of climate change ethic, noting how they shed new light on the aims and challenges of environmental ethics education.

Democritus of Abdera, best known as a cosmologist and the founder of atomism, wrote more on ethics than anyone before Plato. His work Peri euthumiês (On Contentment) was extremely influential on the later development of teleological and intellectualist ethics, eudaimonism, hedonism, therapeutic ethics, and positive psychology. The loss of his works, however, and the transmission of his fragments in collections of maxims (gnomai), has obscured the extent his contribution to the history of systematic ethics and influence (...) on later philosophy, especially in the Hellenistic age. In this essay I review the evidence basis for Democritus’ ethics, discuss the rhetorical and logical aspects of his maxims, attempt to synthesize the fragments into an overall interpretation, and offer a summary some of the more influential aspects of his ethics. (shrink)

This chapter explores the cognitive and moral significance of the kind of imaginative experience poetry offers. It identifies two forms of imaginative experience that are especially important to poetry: ‘experiencing-as’ and ‘experience-taking’. Experiencing-as is ‘inherently first-personal, embodied, and phenomenologically characterized’ while in experience-taking one ‘takes the perspective of another, simulating some aspect or aspects of his psychology as if they were his own’. Through a sensitive and probing reading of Paul Celan’s Psalm, the chapter shows the role these two forms (...) of experience play in producing the unique form of ethical and epistemic value poetry can bear. The chapter’s argument for this has important implications for our understanding of the poetic imagination and nature of our experience of meaning in poetic contexts. (shrink)

Several scholars familiar with Sextus Empiricus’s Pyrrhonism who have attentively read his Against the Ethicists have gotten the impression that something strange is going on in this book. For, at variance with the ‘official’ Pyrrhonian attitude of universal suspension of judgment, a number of passages of Against the Ethicists seem to ascribe to the Pyrrhonist both a type of negative dogmatism and a form of realism, which together amount to what may be called ‘moderate ethical realism’. The purpose of this (...) paper is to determine whether Sextus does embrace such a position in Against the Ethicists. (shrink)

This book is an invitation to academic administrators, at every level, to engage in reflection on the ethical dimensions of their working lives.