Who’s afraid of Perfectionist Moral Enhancement? A Reply to Sparrow

Robert Sparrow recently argues that state-driven moral bioenhancement is morally problematic because it inevitably invites moral perfectionism. While sharing Sparrow’s worry about state-driven moral bioenhancement, I argue that his anti-perfectionism argument is too strong to offer useful normative guidance. That is, if we reject state-driven moral bioenhancement because it cannot remain neutral between different conceptions of the good, we might have to conclude that all forms of moral enhancement program ought not be made compulsory, including the least controversial and most popular state-driven program: compulsory (moral) education. In this paper, I argue that instead, the spirit of Sparrow’s worry should be recast in the language of the capability approach – an approach that strives to enhance people’s capabilities to develop their own conceptions of the good by restricting itself from endorsing thick conceptions of the good. The distinction made regarding thick and thin conceptions of the good helps better capture sentiments against state-driven bioenhancement programs without falling prey to the issues I raise against Sparrow’s anti-perfectionist arguments

A Generalization of the Doubling Construction for Sums of Squares Identities

The doubling construction is a fast and important way to generate new solutions to the Hurwitz problem on sums of squares identities from any known ones. In this short note, we generalize the doubling construction and obtain from any given admissible triple $[r,s,n]$ a series of new ones $[r+\rho(2^{m-1}),2^ms,2^mn]$ for all positive integer $m$, where $\rho$ is the Hurwitz-Radon function

On quiver-theoretic description for quasitriangularity of Hopf algebras

This paper is devoted to the study of the quasitriangularity of Hopf algebras via Hopf quiver approaches. We give a combinatorial description of the Hopf quivers whose path coalgebras give rise to coquasitriangular Hopf algebras. With a help of the quiver setting, we study general coquasitriangular pointed Hopf algebras and obtain a complete classification of the finite-dimensional ones over an algebraically closed field of characteristic 0.Comment: 19 page

Quasi-Quantum Planes and Quasi-Quantum Groups of Dimension p3p^3 and p4p^4

The aim of this paper is to contribute more examples and classification results of finite pointed quasi-quantum groups within the quiver framework initiated in \cite{qha1, qha2}. The focus is put on finite dimensional graded Majid algebras generated by group-like elements and two skew-primitive elements which are mutually skew-commutative. Such quasi-quantum groups are associated to quasi-quantum planes in the sense of nonassociative geomertry \cite{m1, m2}. As an application, we obtain an explicit classification of graded pointed Majid algebras with abelian coradical of dimension $p^3$ and $p^4$ for any prime number $p.$Comment: 12 pages; Minor revision according to the referee's suggestio

Quiver Bialgebras and Monoidal Categories

We study the bialgebra structures on quiver coalgebras and the monoidal structures on the categories of locally nilpotent and locally finite quiver representations. It is shown that the path coalgebra of an arbitrary quiver admits natural bialgebra structures. This endows the category of locally nilpotent and locally finite representations of an arbitrary quiver with natural monoidal structures from bialgebras. We also obtain theorems of Gabriel type for pointed bialgebras and hereditary finite pointed monoidal categories.Comment: 10 page