The Spontaneous Order and Preferences for Flexibility

Designing political institutions able to secure the conditions for cooperation among persons who exhibit widely diverse perspectives, underpinned by different structures of preferences and goals, constitutes, perhaps, the greatest challenge of contemporary political theorising. F. A. Hayek's theory of the spontaneous order provides one key insight on what political institutions of complex societies should look like: since only individuals know their structures of preferences, goals and their relevant circumstances, theorists and planners, by virtue of their inability to collect such dispersed knowledge, cannot design and devise and devise fine-grained systems of rules aimed at defining people’s specific terms of cooperation. In order to create the conditions for cooperation in complex societies, Hayek suggests, we must design political institutions that define a large protected sphere of actions, which equips individuals with the ability to shape their specific terms of cooperation on the basis of their own local knowledge. Hayek identifies such an institutional arrangement in the protection of Lockean rights to life, liberty and property. In this thesis, I attempt to show that an aptly modified version of Hayek's theory of the spontaneous order lends itself to a contractarian justification. In particular, I aim to demonstrate that individuals, who are uncertain about their future preferences and goals, have instrumental reasons to converge on institutional arrangements that define a large protected sphere of action, which allows them to define their specific terms of cooperation on the basis of local knowledge which will unveil to them during their life paths. In fact, individuals' uncertainty about their future structures of preferences and goals elicits the emergence of preferences for flexibility, which make them abstract from their current set of preferences and goals when facing a social contract bargaining scenario, and invite them to choose institutional arrangements which leave the door open for adaptation to changes in their future identities. Preferences for flexibility, I aim to show, can solve much political disagreement stemming from people's seemingly incompatible structures of preferences and goals

The ethics of entrepreneurship ; a Millian approach

What is morally valuable—if anything at all—in entrepreneurship? Existing normative takes can be broadly categorized as belonging to two main views: a backward and a forward-looking approach. The former sees entrepreneurial activity as a permissible emergent product of individuals’ interactions within the boundaries of people’s existing rights; the latter looks at entrepreneurship in the broader context of market processes and emphasizes its role in generating Pareto-improvements in social welfare. In this paper, I suggest that certain instances of entrepreneurship can be intrinsically valuable when they constitute Millian Experiments in Living, that is when entrepreneurial ventures are the expression of an entrepreneur’s conception of the good. Engaging in entrepreneurial activity which reflects one’s conception of the good helps individuals in cultivating their individuality and originality by means of subjecting their normative beliefs to empirical scrutiny, thus allowing one to confirm, revise, or refine them

Market participation, self-respect, and risk tolerance

How important is the experience of risk in business endeavors for self-respect and moral development? Tomasi prompts this question with his attempt to reconcile Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness with free-market capitalism, by claiming that economic activity is a way for people to exercise their autonomy, responsibility, and self-authorship, including through voluntary risk-taking. Critics argue that the social environment generated through market institutions is ill-suited for developing a sense of responsibility and autonomy among citizens. We refine the case for economic liberty by looking at the link between risk-taking and attitudes toward democratic citizenship. We highlight the critical role of ethical business practice as a contributor to the stability of liberal-democratic societies

Market Participation, Self-respect, and Risk Tolerance

How important is the experience of risk in business endeavors for self-respect and moral development? Tomasi prompts this question with his attempt to reconcile Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness with free-market capitalism, by claiming that economic activity is a way for people to exercise their autonomy, responsibility, and self-authorship, including through voluntary risk-taking. Critics argue that the social environment generated through market institutions is ill-suited for developing a sense of responsibility and autonomy among citizens. We refine the case for economic liberty by looking at the link between risk-taking and attitudes toward democratic citizenship. We highlight the critical role of ethical business practice as a contributor to the stability of liberal-democratic societies

The dark side of AI in professional services

The introduction and widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence in the professions has the potential to deliver a number of critical public goods, such as widening access to justice and healthcare through AI-powered professional services. Yet, the deployment of AI in the professions does not come without challenges, exemplified by the concerns about explainability, privacy, and human agency. In this paper, we explore how these issues may give rise to dark sides of AI in professional services and illustrate how an uncoordinated process of adoption and deployment can threaten the scope of AI-powered services. In particular, we illustrate how the adoption and deployment of AI in services may undermine the fiduciary duty between clients and professionals that, so far, has safeguarded the relationship between them, creating a ‘market for lemons’ of professional services. We conclude with a reflection on plausible ways forward to facilitate and smooth the transition to AI-powered services

Diritto naturale o evoluzionismo?

Analisi della concezione del diritto negli esponenti della Scuola Austriaca e del LIbertarianism, delle differenze e delle affinità del loro evoluzionismo con la tradizione dei Natural Right

An institutional taxonomy of adoption of innovation in the classic professions

The study of technical innovation in Professional Services has attracted growing interest among scholars, who have sought to analyze the process of organizational change and service transformation. However, very little attention has been devoted to understanding the process of adoption and diffusion of technical innovation in professional sectors. In this paper, we suggest that the relevance and peculiarity of institutional dynamics at play in the professional sectors warrant a specific focus aimed at laying out how they affect adoption and diffusion of technical innovation. In particular, we highlight that cultural-cognitive and normative pillars, embedded in the classic or regulated professions, may significantly insulate professionals from efficient-choice lenses and act as either drivers or barriers of adoption of technical innovations depending on the nature of the technology in question. Our proposed hypothesis is that institutional mechanisms act as drivers for the adoption of trajectorial innovations i.e. technologies that improve existing sets of practices and routines, and as barriers for paradigmatic innovations i.e. technologies that substantively alter existing practices and/or strip away certain tasks from the hands of professionals. Finally, we illustrate the role that social norms play as transmission mechanism of cultural-cognitive and normative pressures

Recent advances in nonlinear speech processing: Directions and challenges

This book presents recent advances in nonlinear speech processing beyond nonlinear techniques. It shows that it exploits heuristic and psychological models of human interaction in order to succeed in the implementations of socially believable VUIs and applications for human health and psychological support. The book takes into account the multifunctional role of speech and what is “outside of the box” (see Björn Schuller’s foreword). To this aim, the book is organized in 6 sections, each collecting a small number of short chapters reporting advances “inside” and “outside” themes related to nonlinear speech research. The themes emphasize theoretical and practical issues for modelling socially believable speech interfaces, ranging from efforts to capture the nature of sound changes in linguistic contexts and the timing nature of speech; labors to identify and detect speech features that help in the diagnosis of psychological and neuronal disease, attempts to improve the effectiveness and performance of Voice User Interfaces, new front-end algorithms for the coding/decoding of effective and computationally efficient acoustic and linguistic speech representations, as well as investigations capturing the social nature of speech in signaling personality traits, emotions and improving human machine interactions.