On benevolence and love of others

Hobbes is famous for his insights into the impact of man’s fear, glory and greed on war and peace, not for his views on the bearing of men’s benevolence on the commonwealth. Are Hobbesian people even capable of love of others? In the literature, we find two main answers: one view is that Hobbes ruled out the possibility of disinterested benevolence among men; the other is that Hobbes considered actions driven by genuine benevolence possible but uncommon. After reviewing in broad outlines the two above positions, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the claim that Hobbes did not consider relevant to establish if men are capable of genuine benevolence or not, because he maintained that benevolent men can be as inept as egoists in differentiating apparent and real good for themselves and their loved ones and the effect of misguided altruism on the commonwealth is as damaging as the effect of ill-advised egoism.Postprin

Malicious Membership Queries and Exceptions

We consider two issues in polynomial-time exact learning of concepts using membership and equivalence queries: (1) errors in the answers to membership queries and (2) learning finite variants of concepts drawn from a learnable class. To study (1), we introduce a malicious membership query, in which errors are permitted on a set of strings in the domain, such that the number of strings plus the sum of their lengths is bounded by L. Equivalence queries are answered correctly, and algorithms are allowed time polynomial in the usual parameters and L. We present a new polynomial-time learning algorithm in this model for monotone DNF formulas. To study (2), we consider classes of concepts that are polynomially closed under finite exceptions and a natural operation to add exception tables to a class of concepts. Applying this operation, we obtain the class of monotone DNF formulas with finite exceptions. We give a new polynomial-time algorithm to learn the class of monotone DNF formulas with ..