Did the NSA and GCHQ Diminish Our Privacy? What the Control Account Should Say

A standard account of privacy says that it is essentially a kind of control over personal information. Many privacy scholars have argued against this claim by relying on so-called threatened loss cases. In these cases, personal information about an agent is easily available to another person, but not accessed. Critics contend that control accounts have the implausible implication that the privacy of the relevant agent is diminished in threatened loss cases. Recently, threatened loss cases have become important because Edward Snowden’s revelation of how the NSA and GCHQ collected Internet and mobile phone data presents us with a gigantic, real-life threatened loss case. In this paper, I will defend the control account of privacy against the argument that is based on threatened loss cases. I will do so by developing a new version of the control account that implies that the agents’ privacy is not diminished in threatened loss cases

Grounding Responsibility in Appropriate Blame

When confronted with the question of why it is appropriate to morally blame a person for some bad action, it may seem plausible to reply that she is morally responsible for it. Some authors, inspired by Peter Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment," argue, however, that thinking this way is backwards. They believe that a person is morally responsible for some bad action because it would be appropriate to blame her for it. The aims of this paper are to present this account, to highlight some of its important but often overlooked features, and to defend it against pressing objections

Factors that Affect Willingness to Borrow Student Loans among Community College Students

Research suggests that student loan borrowing has increased at the community college level. This trend is worrisome to many, as research is inconclusive regarding whether loans are positively correlated with achieving a college degree. Many also contend that choosing not to borrow a student loan due to loan aversion can negatively impact a student’s chance of reaping the financial benefits of a college degree. This study surveyed three community colleges in the Midwest to better understand how acculturation, time perspective, and financial literacy impact community college students’ willingness to borrow student loans. Except for financial literacy, none of the variables differed significantly across people of African American, Latino, Caucasian, and Asian ancestry. Furthermore, none of the variables correlated significantly with willingness to borrow student loans. Out of the more malleable traits, such as financial literacy, acculturation, and time perspective, only the “present-fatalistic” time domain and financial literacy scores were significantly correlated. These results suggest that community college students are similar to each other in regard to their acculturation, orientation to time, and financial literacy. Furthermore, differences in community college students’ decisions to borrow student loans are more likely due to unique characteristics rather than due to time perspective, acculturation, or financial literacy

The right to privacy and the deep self

This paper presents an account of the right to privacy that is inspired by classic control views on this right and recent developments in moral psychology. The core idea is that the right to privacy is the right that others not make personal information about us flow unless this flow is an expression of and does not conflict with our deep self. The nature of the deep self will be spelled out in terms of stable intrinsic desires. The paper argues that this view has advantages over alternative accounts of the right to privacy, that it is extensionally adequate in interesting test cases, that there is a good reason to think that the right to privacy, thus understood, can be justified, and that this view helps identify what kind of information is protected by the right to privacy

Blame it on Disappointment: A Problem for Skepticism about Angry Blame

Blame skeptics argue that we have strong reason to revise our blame practices because humans do not fulfill all the conditions for it being appropriate to blame them. This paper presents a new challenge for this view. Many have objected that blame plays valuable roles such that we have strong reason to hold on to our blame practices. Skeptics typically reply that non-blaming responses to objectionable conduct, like forms of disappointment, can serve the positive functions of blame. The new challenge is that skeptics need to show that it can be appropriate (or less inappropriate) to respond with this kind of disappointment to people’s conduct if it is inappropriate to respond with blame. The paper argues that current blame-skeptical views fail to meet this challenge

Free will, determinism, and the right levels of description

ABSTRACT Recently, many authors have argued that claims about determinism and free will are situated on different levels of description and that determinism on one level does not rule out free will on another. This paper focuses on Christian List’s version of this basic idea. It will be argued for the negative thesis that List’s account does not rule out the most plausible version of incompatibilism about free will and determinism and, more constructively, that a level-based approach to free will has better chances to meet skeptical challenges if it is guided by reasoning at the moral level – a level that has not been seriously considered so far by proponents of this approach