Word Meaning in Legal Interpretation

Professor Sinnott-Armstrong argues against the arguments published by Professor Prakash and Professor Alexander in an article on legal interpretation in which they defended the thesis that all interpretation properly so-called seeks to uncover the intended meaning of the author(s). Against their arguments, the Author defends coherence and importance of word meaning. In Part I, he more precisely defines the these that Alexander and Prakash deny and Professor Sinnott-Armstrong defends. In Part II, he will show why Alexander and Prakash\u27s arguments fail to rule out word meanings. In PArt III, he will put these debates in a larger theoretical context and show why word meaning is important to legal interpretation

AI Methods in Bioethics

Commentary about the role of AI in bioethics for the 10th anniversary issue of AJOB: Empirical Bioethic

I’m not the person I used to be: The self and autobiographical memories of immoral actions

People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative than those in which other people lied to or emotionally harmed them. Furthermore, people judge those actions that happened further in the past to be more morally wrong than those that happened more recently. Finally, for periods of the past when they believed that they were very different people than they are now, participants judge their actions to be more morally wrong and more negative than those actions from periods of their pasts when they believed that they were very similar to who they are now. The authors discuss these findings in relation to theories about the function of autobiographical memory and moral cognition in constructing and perceiving the self over time

Reliable but not home free? What framing effects mean for moral intuitions

Various studies show moral intuitions to be susceptible to framing effects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing effects does not show that moral intuitions have a unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moral intuitions are fairly stable with respect to what intuitions we have, the effect of framing on the strength of those intuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy

Protocol for Extraction and Electron Microscopy Visualization of Lipids in Viburnum tinus Fruit Using Cryo-Ultramicrotomy.

We recently reported that Viburnum tinus fruit generates its metallic blue color using globular lipid inclusions embedded in its epicarpal cell walls. This protocol describes steps to visualize the lipidic nature of the nanostructure using cryo-ultramicrotomy, chloroform extraction, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging. This method is useful to localize and characterize novel lipidic nanostructures embedded in both plant and animal tissues at the TEM resolution. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Middleton et al. (2020)

Accelerating epistasis analysis in human genetics with consumer graphics hardware

BACKGROUND: Human geneticists are now capable of measuring more than one million DNA sequence variations from across the human genome. The new challenge is to develop computationally feasible methods capable of analyzing these data for associations with common human disease, particularly in the context of epistasis. Epistasis describes the situation where multiple genes interact in a complex non-linear manner to determine an individual's disease risk and is thought to be ubiquitous for common diseases. Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR) is an algorithm capable of detecting epistasis. An exhaustive analysis with MDR is often computationally expensive, particularly for high order interactions. This challenge has previously been met with parallel computation and expensive hardware. The option we examine here exploits commodity hardware designed for computer graphics. In modern computers Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have more memory bandwidth and computational capability than Central Processing Units (CPUs) and are well suited to this problem. Advances in the video game industry have led to an economy of scale creating a situation where these powerful components are readily available at very low cost. Here we implement and evaluate the performance of the MDR algorithm on GPUs. Of primary interest are the time required for an epistasis analysis and the price to performance ratio of available solutions. FINDINGS: We found that using MDR on GPUs consistently increased performance per machine over both a feature rich Java software package and a C++ cluster implementation. The performance of a GPU workstation running a GPU implementation reduces computation time by a factor of 160 compared to an 8-core workstation running the Java implementation on CPUs. This GPU workstation performs similarly to 150 cores running an optimized C++ implementation on a Beowulf cluster. Furthermore this GPU system provides extremely cost effective performance while leaving the CPU available for other tasks. The GPU workstation containing three GPUs costs $2000 while obtaining similar performance on a Beowulf cluster requires 150 CPU cores which, including the added infrastructure and support cost of the cluster system, cost approximately$82,500. CONCLUSION: Graphics hardware based computing provides a cost effective means to perform genetic analysis of epistasis using MDR on large datasets without the infrastructure of a computing cluster

Clarifying ethical intuitionism

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Ethical Intuitionism, whose core claim is that normal ethical agents can and do have non-inferentially justified first-order ethical beliefs. Although this is the standard formulation, there are two senses in which it is importantly incomplete. Firstly, ethical intuitionism claims that there are non-inferentially justified ethical beliefs, but there is a worrying lack of consensus in the ethical literature as to what non-inferentially justified belief is. Secondly, it has been overlooked that there are plausibly different types of non-inferential justification, and that accounting for the existence of a specific sort of non-inferential justification is crucial for any adequate ethical intuitionist epistemology. In this context, it is the purpose of this paper to provide an account of non- inferentially justified belief which is superior to extant accounts, and, to give a refined statement of the core claim of ethical intuitionism which focuses on the type of non- inferential justification vital for a plausible intuitionist epistemology. Finally, it will be shown that the clarifications made in this paper make it far from obvious that two intuitionist accounts, which have received much recent attention, make good on intuitionism’s core claim