Non Interference for Intuitionist Necessity

The necessity modality of intuitionist S4 is a comonad. In this paper, we study indexed necessity modalities that provide the logical foundation for a variety of applications; for example, to model possession of capabilities in policy languages for access control, and to track exceptions in type theories for exceptional computation. Noninterference properties of the intuitionist logic of indexed necessity modalities capture the limitations on the information flow between formulas that are under the scope of necessity modalities with different indices. The impact of noninterference is seen in the unprovability of certain formulas. Noninterference is necessary for several applications. In models of capabilities, noninterference facilitates distributed reasoning. In models of exceptions, noninterference is necessary to ensure that the exceptions are tracked conservatively. In this paper, we prove noninterference properties for indexed intuitionist necessity S4 modalities. To our knowledge, this is the first examination of noninterference results for the intuitionist S4 necessity modality (even without indexing)

Succour to the Confused Deputy Types for Capabilities

Abstract. The possession of secrets is a recurrent theme in security literature and practice. We present a refinement type system, based on indexed intuitonist S4 necessity, for an object calculus with explicit locations (corresponding to principals) to control the principals that may possess a secret. Type safety ensures that if the execution of a well-typed program leads to a configuration with an object p located at principal a, then a possesses the capability to p. We illustrate the type system with simple examples drawn from web applications, including an illustration of how Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities may manifest themselves as absurd refinements on object declarations during type checking. This is an extended version of a paper that appears in APLAS 2012

An ethical study of the impact hedonistic-utilitarianism exerts on the philosophy and practice of physician-assisted suicide.

Terminal illness and the prospect of a painful and protracted dying process created new medical realities for Western culture in recent decades. Patients challenged traditional medical canons against medical killing by requesting changes in laws to allow physician assistance with suicide (PAS). This challenge occurred within a broader cultural context where core principles of medical common morality (beneficence, patient autonomy, and justice) were questioned. A new study of medical killing is warranted because ethical changes are occurring in current issues surrounding doctors and patients (for example, humanism and autonomy, rights, justice, and the morality of medical killing). Furthermore PAS proponents argue that sometimes there is a moral obligation for beneficent medicine to allay suffering; that is, a doctor must kill or assist his patient’s suicide. This thesis explores the possible influence that John Stuart Mill’s hedonistic-utilitarianism (HU) exerts on one aspect of medical killing, the philosophy and practice of PAS. This study clarifies certain features of the PAS debate and demonstrates weaknesses inherent in HU that impact adversely on medical canons and doctor-patient relationships (DPR). Six features within the PAS debate are examined for HU influence. Chapter 1 delineates how Mill’s key utilitarian pleasure-is-happiness (PH) theme interacts with the topic of PAS in contemporary medico-cultural discussions. Chapter 2 surveys some epochal events in the development of rights, justice, and medical killing, while chapter 3 surveys similarly autonomy, physician paternalism, and sanctity of life (SL)~all in relationship to PAS. The final chapter isolates key HU weaknesses found in PAS arguments and offers moral concerns regarding the utilisation of HU claims to justify changing traditional medical canons to endorse PAS. The thesis contributes to the ongoing medical-ethical dialogue about medical killing by exploring the historical and ethical points crucial to future discussions of medical killing

Spying: A Normative Account of the Second Oldest Profession

My dissertation attends to the urgent ethical problems raised by government spying. It asks and answers three principal questions: What is spying? What principles should regulate government spying? And how can government agents be constrained to follow these principles? The first chapter takes up the conceptual question. I defend the following definition of spying: agent A spies on agent B, if and only if she collects information that relates to B and intends to conceal her information collection from B. The main challenge any conception of spying faces is to cover a relatively wide range of agents often thought to be spies - e.g. defectors, moles, and informants - without including agents not often thought of as spies. This challenge is best met, I argue, by drawing on the concept of collective intentionality. Aldrich Ames, for example, although he did not intend to conceal his information collection from the U.S. government, nevertheless spied on the U.S. government, since he participated in a collectivity, which included his handlers at the KGB, that met both of the conditions stipulated in my definition. Chapters three through six examine the ethics of domestic government spying, i.e. governments spying on their own citizens within their own territories. I make two main arguments. The first is that domestic government spying should be regulated by five principles: just cause, proportionality, necessity, minimization, and discrimination. The second argument is that the law-enforcement and intelligence officials who employ these principles should not alone determine how they apply in particular cases - the principles should be institutionalized. In chapter three I demonstrate that the five principles are supported by widespread intuitions about government spying in liberal democracies. In chapters four through six, I show that the same principles are supported by the moral theory that I think is most plausible: two-level utilitarianism. Since utilitarianism is often thought to strongly conflict with people\u27s ordinary moral intuitions, if I am correct and the same principles can be derived both from widespread intuitions and utilitarianism, then the principles are on strong ground. In chapter seven, I shift my focus from domestic government spying to foreign spying. I focus on two kinds of foreign spying in particular: government spying on foreign individuals and government spying on foreign states. I argue that government spying on foreign individuals and on foreign states should be institutionalized and that both should follow principles similar but not identical to those that governments should follow in the domestic context. In the final two chapters I turn to the institutional question. In chapter eight I examine the two primary American institutions employed to control intelligence agencies: legislative oversight and judicial review. Both I argue employ biased principals and suffer from informational asymmetries. In chapter nine I step back from American institutions and characterize the universe of possible mechanisms to constrain intelligence agencies. Drawing on some of the more promising of these mechanisms, I propose a set of reforms for American institutions. At the heart of my proposal is an elected panel that reviews day-to-day requests to spy and performs longer-term strategic oversight. In order to allay the panel\u27s informational disadvantages compared to intelligence agencies I recommend, among other things, including a devil\u27s advocate in the panel\u27s review procedures and equipping the panel with a small intelligence agency to spy on the spies

Ethics for the Depressed: A Value Ethics of Engagement

I argue that depressed persons suffer from “existential guilt,” which amounts to a two-part compulsion: 1) the compulsive assertion or sense of a vague and all-encompassing or absolute threat that disrupts action and intention formation, and 2) the compulsive taking of such disruption to be a reason for inaction. I develop in response an “ethics for the depressed,” an ethical theory directed to those suffering from existential guilt. The first part of this dissertation, comprising Chapters 2 through 4, largely concerns the first aspect of existential guilt: it is a metaethics for the depressed, or “ethics as a reliable guide” as a response to “demoralization” and “hypermoralized deliberation.” There I challenge what I call the Stocker-Smith account of depressive loss of motivation as being a loss of desires and argue instead that it involves the defeating presence of what the phenomenologist Matthew Ratcliffe calls “pre-intentional” mental states, a category that I redefine and expand to include second-order “quasi-beliefs” and habits of feeling, that interfere with intention formation and action despite the persistence of desire. The second part of this dissertation, comprising Chapters 5 and 6, largely concerns the second aspect of existential guilt: it is a normative ethics for the depressed, or a “value ethics of engagement” premised on “contingent value ranking.” After demonstrating in the first part that depressed persons may retain their desires and values in depression, I premise a value ethics upon what I call the consistent desire for a “sense of stability” in response to experiences of precarity and isolation. From the phenomenology of value, I develop a concept of the heart as the set of “felt values” or intuitive value paradigms that are themselves pre-intentional states or dispositions. I thus attempt to structure a complete ethical theory, integrating plural philosophical traditions and founded on the phenomenological category of pre-intentional mental states, in response to the presence of existential guilt and its component compulsions as experienced by an otherwise reasonable interlocutor. I put an orthodox style of philosophy in service of an unorthodox agent: one who is “aspiringly autonomous.

Global Justice as Fairness: Non-domination, Human Rights & the Global Basic Structure

Most Rawlsian approaches to global justice fall into one of two main types—cosmopolitanisms that expand the scope of Rawls's domestic theory to the entire world, and those that, following Rawls's The Law of Peoples, develop a liberal foreign policy rooted in the toleration of “decent” but nonliberal peoples. Global Justice as Fairness offers an alternative to these by incorporating some aspects of each, as well as some unique features, into a coherent whole that avoids their more significant drawbacks. Employing a distinctive understanding of the global original position and a republican view of freedom, the theory generates two principles that aim to ensure the agency and non-domination of peoples. These principles provide the broad outlines of a just global basic structure for states that is both realistic and utopian. The most basic parameters of Rawlsian theories of global justice are the subject of and parties to the original position(s). Global Justice as Fairness is unique among such theories by identifying the global basic structure as subject (as cosmopolitans do) while also taking peoples, not persons, as the parties (following Rawls's law of peoples). It is also alone in severing the tie between domestic and global justice and recognizing the fact of reasonable global pluralism, according to which it is unreasonable to expect all peoples to hold liberal conceptions of domestic justice. Global Justice as Fairness excludes the parties’ knowledge of their domestic conceptions behind the veil of ignorance, forcing them to rely on their generic interests as peoples. This picture of peoples’ rationality is developed with an account of global primary goods rooted in their agency and a global analog of citizenship. Thus situated, the parties are led to select two principles of justice for a global basic structure formulated in terms of the republican vision of freedom. The first principle specifies a human rights regime that ensures the minimal conditions needed for peoples to maintain their distinctly political form of group agency. The second provides guidelines for minimizing the domination of peoples through a just global political and economic order within which they can freely exercise that agency

Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception

The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work