Right for the Right Reason: Training Agnostic Networks

We consider the problem of a neural network being requested to classify images (or other inputs) without making implicit use of a "protected concept", that is a concept that should not play any role in the decision of the network. Typically these concepts include information such as gender or race, or other contextual information such as image backgrounds that might be implicitly reflected in unknown correlations with other variables, making it insufficient to simply remove them from the input features. In other words, making accurate predictions is not good enough if those predictions rely on information that should not be used: predictive performance is not the only important metric for learning systems. We apply a method developed in the context of domain adaptation to address this problem of "being right for the right reason", where we request a classifier to make a decision in a way that is entirely 'agnostic' to a given protected concept (e.g. gender, race, background etc.), even if this could be implicitly reflected in other attributes via unknown correlations. After defining the concept of an 'agnostic model', we demonstrate how the Domain-Adversarial Neural Network can remove unwanted information from a model using a gradient reversal layer.Comment: Author's original versio

A Kantian Conception of Free Speech

In this paper I provide an interpretation of Kant’s conception of free speech. Free speech is understood as the kind of speech that is constitutive of interaction respectful of everybody’s right to freedom, and it requires what we with John Rawls may call ‘public reason’. Public reason so understood refers to how the public authority must reason in order to properly specify the political relation between citizens. My main aim is to give us some reasons for taking a renewed interest in Kant’s conception of free speech, including his account public reason. Kant’s position provides resources for dealing with many of the legal and political problems we currently struggle to analyze under this heading, such as the proper distinction between the sphere of justice and the sphere of ethics, hate speech, freedom of speech, defamation, and the public guarantee of reliable media and universal education

Aristotle on Virtue of Character and the Authority of Reason

I argue that, for Aristotle, virtue of character is a state of the non-rational part of the soul that makes one prone to making and acting on decisions in virtue of that part’s standing in the right relation to (correct) reason, namely, a relation that qualifies the agent as a true self-lover. In effect, this central feature of virtue of character is nothing else than love of practical wisdom. As I argue, it not only explains how reason can hold direct authority over non-rational desires but also why Aristotle defines virtue of character as hexis prohairetikē

MeV Right-handed Neutrinos and Dark Matter

We consider the possibility of having a MeV right-handed neutrino as a dark matter constituent. The initial reason for this study was the 511 keV spectral line observed by the satellite experiment INTEGRAL: could it be due to an interaction between dark matter and baryons? Independently of this, we find a number of constraints on the assumed right-handed interactions. They arise in particular from the measurements by solar neutrino experiments. We come to the conclusion that such particles interactions are possible, and could reproduce the peculiar angular distribution, but not the rate of the INTEGRAL signal. However, we stress that solar neutrino experiments are susceptible to provide further constraints in the future.Comment: 7 pages, figure 1 changed, added reference

Right in some respects: reasons as evidence

What is a normative reason for acting? In this paper, I introduce and defend a novel answer to this question. The starting-point is the view that reasons are right-makers. By exploring difficulties facing it, I arrive at an alternative, according to which reasons are evidence of respects in which it is right to perform an act, for example, that it keeps a promise. This is similar to the proposal that reasons for a person to act are evidence that she ought to do so; however, as I explain, it differs from that proposal in two significant ways. As a result, I argue, the evidence-based account of reasons I advance shares the advantages of its predecessor while avoiding many of the difficulties facing it

In defence of agent-based virtue ethics

In 'Against Agent-Based Virtue Ethics' (2004) Michael Brady rejects agent-based virtue ethics on the grounds that it fails to capture the commonsense distinction between an agent's doing the right thing, and her doing it for the right reason. In his view, the failure to account for this distinction has paradoxical results, making it unable to explain why an agent has a duty to perform a given action. I argue that Brady's objection relies on the assumption that an agent-based account is committed to defining obligations in terms of actual motives. If we reject this view, and instead provide a version of agent-basing that determines obligations in terms of the motives of the hypothetical virtuous agent, the paradox disappears

Ideological diversity, hostility, and discrimination in philosophy

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline

Verifying the Interplay of Authorization Policies and Workflow in Service-Oriented Architectures (Full version)

A widespread design approach in distributed applications based on the service-oriented paradigm, such as web-services, consists of clearly separating the enforcement of authorization policies and the workflow of the applications, so that the interplay between the policy level and the workflow level is abstracted away. While such an approach is attractive because it is quite simple and permits one to reason about crucial properties of the policies under consideration, it does not provide the right level of abstraction to specify and reason about the way the workflow may interfere with the policies, and vice versa. For example, the creation of a certificate as a side effect of a workflow operation may enable a policy rule to fire and grant access to a certain resource; without executing the operation, the policy rule should remain inactive. Similarly, policy queries may be used as guards for workflow transitions. In this paper, we present a two-level formal verification framework to overcome these problems and formally reason about the interplay of authorization policies and workflow in service-oriented architectures. This allows us to define and investigate some verification problems for SO applications and give sufficient conditions for their decidability.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, full version of paper at Symposium on Secure Computing (SecureCom09