Legal Conceptions of Parenthood: Adoptive Parents as Stewards

In this paper, I outline common conceptions of parenthood and assess the strengths and weaknesses of these models, including the proprietarian, consent, causal, and stewardship models. In what follows, each type of parenthood is evaluated for 1) its description of how a parent comes to be or 2) its normative claims about how a parent should act in regard to their child throughout the child’s life. After weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each conception, I conclude that the stewardship view is the most successful conception of parenthood not only because of its description of what makes a parent a parent, but because it the robust normative account it offers regarding what makes a parent a good parent throughout the life of the child. After making this case, I then apply this ideal model to adoptive parents in order to illustrate that these parents are just as, if not better, suited to be parents than the traditional biological parent is

How (not) to think of the ‘dead-donor’ rule

Although much has been written on the dead-donor rule in the last twenty-five years, scant attention has been paid to how it should be formulated, what its rationale is, and why it was accepted. The DDR can be formulated in terms of either a Don’t Kill rule or a Death Requirement, the former being historically rooted in absolutist ethics and the latter in a prudential policy aimed at securing trust in the transplant enterprise. I contend that the moral core of the rule is the Don’t Kill rule, not the Death Requirement. This, I show, is how the DDR was understood by the transplanters of the 1960s, who sought to conform their practices to their ethics—unlike today’s critics of the DDR, who rethink their ethics in a question-begging fashion to accommodate their practices. A better discussion of the ethics of killing is needed to move the debate forward

Building Ecological Solidarity : Rewilding Practices as an Example

Solidarity within bioethics is increasingly being recognized as an important means of improving health for all. Its contribution seems particularly relevant when there are injustices or inequalities in health and different individuals or groups are disadvantaged. But the current context of ecological collapse, characterized mainly by a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem decline, affects global health in a different way to other factors. This scenario creates new challenges, risks and problems that require new insights from a bioethical perspective. I, therefore, propose an argument in favor of ecological solidarity. The aim of this article is to re-define this concept, outlining which causes should incite action through ecological solidarity and who should be the main recipient of it. To this end, I discuss what the background for practicing ecological solidarity might be: an intrinsically altruistic motivation to attempt to be a better person or a forced response to a political obligation. Finally, by way of example, I argue for rewilding as an effective, practical strategy through which ecological solidarity can be applied in the belief that building ecological solidarity supports a number of key interdependencies and ensures ethical care for the health of the planet

Artificial morality: Making of the artificial moral agents

Abstract: Artificial Morality is a new, emerging interdisciplinary field that centres around the idea of creating artificial moral agents, or AMAs, by implementing moral competence in artificial systems. AMAs are ought to be autonomous agents capable of socially correct judgements and ethically functional behaviour. This request for moral machines comes from the changes in everyday practice, where artificial systems are being frequently used in a variety of situations from home help and elderly care purposes to banking and court algorithms. It is therefore important to create reliable and responsible machines based on the same ethical principles that society demands from people. New challenges in creating such agents appear. There are philosophical questions about a machine’s potential to be an agent, or mora l agent, in the first place. Then comes the problem of social acceptance of such machines, regardless of their theoretic agency status. As a result of efforts to resolve this problem, there are insinuations of needed additional psychological (emotional and cogn itive) competence in cold moral machines. What makes this endeavour of developing AMAs even harder is the complexity of the technical, engineering aspect of their creation. Implementation approaches such as top- down, bottom-up and hybrid approach aim to find the best way of developing fully moral agents, but they encounter their own problems throughout this effort

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

That is how we do it around here: Levels of identification, masculine honor, and social activism against organized crime in the south of Italy

Masculine honor is an important cultural code in the south of Italy. Italian criminal organizations (COs) manipulate and exploit this code to maintain legitimacy among local populations and exert social control in the territory where they operate. This research tested the hypothesis that different levels of identification—the region and the nation—would have opposite associations with male honor-related values and, indirectly, with intentions to oppose COs collectively. Results from a sample of young southern Italians (N?=?170) showed that regional identification positively predicted endorsement of male honor-related values, which in turn were associated with lowered intentions to oppose COs. In contrast, national identification negatively predicted male honor-related values, associated in turn with stronger intentions to oppose COs. These results also held when perceived risk and social dominance orientation were taken into account. Directions for future research are discussed

Law for the Common Man: An Individual-Level Theory of Values, Expanded Rationality, and the Law

This article makes an admittedly bold attempt at outlining an analytical framework for addressing this question. Instead of looking at the legal implications of bounded rationality -- an exercise highly worthy in its own right -- this article advances a theory of expanded rationality. This theory retains the element of rationality in that people respond to incentives in an attempt to attain utility, and it does not question the observation that decision-making is often bounded due to various factors

The Democratic Standard Of Care In Tort Law

Social life is inherently risky. Who should bear the costs of accidental harm? That issue has been traditionally addressed in tort legal doctrine under the concept of breach of the negligence standard of care. Trial courts provide juries with instructions that, put roughly, direct the jury to decide whether the defendant’s conduct fell below what a reasonably prudent person would have done if in the defendant’s circumstances. Without further judicial direction on that issue, the jury effectively has excessive discretion in rendering a verdict. Such discretion, opens the door for at least two kinds of potential injustice. Juries could treat like cases differently, and juries can easily ignore or fail to give due consideration to a society’s diverse, irreconcilable, and competing conceptions of the good as to what constitutes reasonable prudence. To mitigate such, I have created “democratic standard theory.” I claim that a theory based on the overarching moral and political commitments of the Kantian tradition can only specify what constitutes negligent breach if it incorporates, as facts, the actual values of the individuals subject to the risk at issue. Since individuals’ comprehensive conceptions of the good conflict, majority rule, constrained by constitutional essentials, should determine what constitutes breach of the negligence standard of care. Thus, in each dispute over negligence in tort, democratic standard theory sets the stakes of negligent risk, especially the costs of accidental harm, in accordance with the values of as many as possible of the individuals locally affected by the particular kind of act at issue

Weak and Strong Necessity Modals: On Linguistic Means of Expressing "A Primitive Concept OUGHT"

This paper develops an account of the meaning of `ought', and the distinction between weak necessity modals (`ought', `should') and strong necessity modals (`must', `have to'). I argue that there is nothing specially ``strong'' about strong necessity modals per se: uses of `Must p' predicate the (deontic/epistemic/etc.) necessity of the prejacent p of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent ``weakness'' of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing whether the necessity of the prejacent is verified in the actual world. `Ought p' can be accepted without needing to settle that the relevant considerations (norms, expectations, etc.) that actually apply verify the necessity of p. I call the basic account a modal-past approach to the weak/strong necessity modal distinction (for reasons that become evident). Several ways of implementing the approach in the formal semantics/pragmatics are critically examined. The account systematizes a wide range of linguistic phenomena: it generalizes across flavors of modality; it elucidates a special role that weak necessity modals play in discourse and planning; it captures contrasting logical, expressive, and illocutionary properties of weak and strong necessity modals; and it sheds light on how a notion of `ought' is often expressed in other languages. These phenomena have resisted systematic explanation. In closing I briefly consider how linguistic inquiry into differences among necessity modals may improve theorizing on broader philosophical issues

Deriving Value from Big Data Analytics in Healthcare: A Value-focused Thinking Approach

With the potential to generate more insights from data than ever before, big data analytics has become highly valuable to many industries, especially healthcare. Big data analytics can make important contributions to many areas, such as enhancements in the quality of patient care and improvements in operational efficiencies. Big data analytics provides opportunities to address concerns such as disease diagnoses and prevention. However, it has posed challenges such as data security and privacy issues. Also, healthcare institutions have concerns about deriving the greatest benefit from their big data analytics endeavors. Therefore, identifying actionable objectives that can help healthcare organizations derive the maximum value from big data analytics is needed. Using the value-focused thinking (VFT) approach, we interviewed individuals associated with data analytics in healthcare to identify actionable objectives that one needs to consider to derive value from big data analytics, which practitioners can use for their own endeavors and provide opportunities for future research