2,969 research outputs found
Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert
Some theorists argue that moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory. I take this argument one step further, arguing that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration ought to be covert rather than overt. This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement. My argument for this is that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics. I argue that the covert administration of a compulsory moral bioenhancement program better conforms to public health ethics than does an overt compulsory program. In particular, a covert compulsory program promotes values such as liberty, utility, equality, and autonomy better than an overt program does. Thus, a covert compulsory moral bioenhancement program is morally preferable to an overt moral bioenhancement program
Extrapolating from Laboratory Behavioral Research on Nonhuman Primates Is Unjustified
Conducting research on animals is supposed to be valuable because it provides information on how human mechanisms work. But for the use of animal models to be ethically justified, it must be epistemically justified. The inference from an observation about an animal model to a conclusion about humans must be warranted for the use of animals to be moral. When researchers infer from animals to humans, itâs an extrapolation. Often non-human primates are used as animal models in laboratory behavioral research. The target populations are humans and other non-human primates. I argue that the epistemology of extrapolation renders the use of non-human primates in laboratory behavioral research unreliable. If the model is relevantly similar to the target, then the experimental conditions introduce confounding variables. If the model is not relevantly similar to the target, then the observations of the model cannot be extrapolated to the target. Since using non-human primates in as animal models in laboratory behavioral research is not epistemically justified, using them as animal models in laboratory behavioral research is not ethically justified
[Review of] Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality Through Film
The fourteen essays collected in Xing and Hirabayashi\u27s new volume make a strong argument for serious intellectual work involved not only in the college-level study of moving images for their messages about minority groups but also in pedagogical approaches that take film and video as their primary texts. Written by a collection of scholars who work in ethnic and racial studies and various allied fields, the essays share a concern with pedagogy and with showing how visual media can be used to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and communications, particularly with respect to the thorny topics of ethnicity and race (3). Indeed, despite the book\u27s title, film/video\u27s treatments of minority races and ethnicities are the collection\u27s main focus; gender and sexuality are broached in their intersection with ethnic and racial categories (Elisa Facio\u27s chapter on The Queering of Chicana Studies and Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi\u27s piece on teaching stereotypes of Asian American women, for example), and global/international identities are discussed when they can illuminate a United States context. An eclectic range of Hollywood, avant-garde, independent, and documentary film and video is examined in essays of a likewise broad range of rhetorical styles and methodologies-some firmly grounded in academic theory, others more accessible to the lay-people addressed in the introduction as potential readers
Moral Normative Force and Clinical Ethics Expertise
Brummett and Salter propose a useful and timely taxonomy of clinical ethics expertise (2019). As the field becomes further âprofessionalizedâ this taxonomy is important, and the core of it is right. It needs some refinement around the edges, however. In their conclusion, Brummett and Salter rightly point out that there is a significant difference between the ethicist whose recommendations are procedure- and process-heavy, consensus-driven, and dialogical and the authoritarian ethicist whose recommendations flow from âprivate moral viewsâ (Brummett and Salter, 2019). This admission doesnât go far enough. Brummett and Salterâs taxonomy fails to capture the notion that offering recommendations whose normative force is moral is different in kind from recommendations whose normative force is non-moral, such as those recommendations that are free of moral content or justified by convention. The difference is in kind, not scale. I argue further that clinical ethics expertise, if possible, consists at least in offering recommendations whose normative force is moral. These two claims imply that the taxonomy fails to cut clinical ethics expertise at the joints: the ethicist who offers justified non-moral normative recommendations is a different kind of ethicist from the one who offers justified moral normative recommendations, yet both are categorized as clinical ethics experts. I finish by offering a refinement of the taxonomy that more precisely categorizes clinical ethicists
Moral Enhancement Can Kill
There is recent empirical evidence that personal identity is constituted by oneâs moral traits. If true, this poses a problem for those who advocate for moral enhancement, or the manipulation of a personâs moral traits through pharmaceutical or other biological means. Specifically, if moral enhancement manipulates a personâs moral traits, and those moral traits constitute personal identity, then it is possible that moral enhancement could alter a personâs identity. I go a step further and argue that under the right conditions, moral enhancement can constitute murder. I then argue that these conditions are not remote
Information Bottlenecks, Causal States, and Statistical Relevance Bases: How to Represent Relevant Information in Memoryless Transduction
Discovering relevant, but possibly hidden, variables is a key step in
constructing useful and predictive theories about the natural world. This brief
note explains the connections between three approaches to this problem: the
recently introduced information-bottleneck method, the computational mechanics
approach to inferring optimal models, and Salmon's statistical relevance basis.Comment: 3 pages, no figures, submitted to PRE as a "brief report". Revision:
added an acknowledgements section originally omitted by a LaTeX bu
Delusion, Proper Function, and Justification
Among psychiatric conditions, delusions have received significant attention in the philosophical literature. This is partly due to the fact that many delusions are bizarre, and their contents interesting in and of themselves. But the disproportionate attention is also due to the notion that by studying what happens when perception, cognition, and belief go wrong, we can better understand what happens when these go right. In this paper, I attend to delusions for the second reasonâby evaluating the epistemology of delusions, we can better understand the epistemology of ordinary belief. More specifically, given recent advancements in our understanding of how delusions are formed, the epistemology of delusions motivates a proper functionalist account of the justification of belief. Proper functionalist accounts of the justification of belief hold that whether a belief is justified is partly determined by whether the system that produces the belief is functioning properly. Whatever pathology is responsible for delusion formation, restoring it to its proper function resolves the epistemic condition, an effect which motivates proper functionalism
Engendering moral postâpersons: A novel selfâhelp strategy
Humans are morally deficient in a variety of ways. Some of these deficiencies threaten the continued existence of our species. For example, we appear to be incapable of responding to climate change in ways that are likely to prevent the consequent suffering. Some people are morally better than others, but we could all be better. The price of not becoming morally better is that when those events that threaten us occur, we will suffer from them. If we can prevent this suffering from occurring, then we ought to do so. That we ought to make ourselves morally better in order to prevent very bad things from happening justifies, according to some, the development and administration of moral enhancement. I address in this paper the idea that moral enhancement could give rise to moral transhumans, or moral post-persons. Contrary to recent arguments that we shouldnât engender moral post-persons, I argue that we should. Roughly, the reasons for this conclusion are that we can expect moral post-persons to resemble the morally best of us, our moral exemplars. Since moral exemplars promote their interests by promoting the interests of others (or they promote othersâ interests at the expense of their own) we can expect moral post-persons to pursue our interests. Since we should also pursue our own interests, we should bring about moral post-persons
A measure of statistical complexity based on predictive information with application to finite spin systems
NOTICE: this is the authorâs version of a work that was accepted for publication in 'Physical Letters A'. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in PHYSICAL LETTERS A, 376 (4): 275-281, JAN 2012. DOI:10.1016/j.physleta.2011.10.066
Upper Bound on the Products of Particle Interactions in Cellular Automata
Particle-like objects are observed to propagate and interact in many
spatially extended dynamical systems. For one of the simplest classes of such
systems, one-dimensional cellular automata, we establish a rigorous upper bound
on the number of distinct products that these interactions can generate. The
upper bound is controlled by the structural complexity of the interacting
particles---a quantity which is defined here and which measures the amount of
spatio-temporal information that a particle stores. Along the way we establish
a number of properties of domains and particles that follow from the
computational mechanics analysis of cellular automata; thereby elucidating why
that approach is of general utility. The upper bound is tested against several
relatively complex domain-particle cellular automata and found to be tight.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables,
http://www.santafe.edu/projects/CompMech/papers/ub.html V2: References and
accompanying text modified, to comply with legal demands arising from
on-going intellectual property litigation among third parties. V3: Accepted
for publication in Physica D. References added and other small changes made
per referee suggestion
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