Active ending of the life of a newborn baby is a crime. Yet its clandestine practise is a reality in several European countries. In this paper, we defend the necessity to institute a proper legal frame for what we define as active neonatal euthanasia. The only legal attempt so far, the Dutch Groningen protocol, is not satisfactory. We critically analyse this protocol, as well as several other clinical practises and philosophical stances. Furthermore, we have tried to integrate our opinions as (...) clinicians into a law project, with the purpose of pinpointing several issues, specific of perinatality that should be addressed by such a law. In conclusion, we argue that the legalisation of neonatal euthanasia under exceptional circumstances is the only way to avoid all the “well-intentioned” malpractices associated with ending life at the very dawn of it. (shrink)

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new finite Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

Considerable attention has been paid recently to the gendering of organizations and occupations. Unfortunately, the gendered-organizations approach remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped, as there have as yet been few clear answers to the question central to the perspective: What does it really mean to say that an organization itself, or a policy, practice, or slot in the hierarchy, is “gendered”? Reviewing literature in the gendered-organizations tradition, the author discusses three of the most common ways the perspective has been applied and (...) argues that all of these definitions pose potential problems for the project of meaningful social and organizational change. The article concludes with some suggestions about how a more useful conception of the gendered organization might be built. (shrink)

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...) action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Introduction; Part I. Theoretical Views about Pity and Fear as Aesthetic Emotions: 1. Drama and the emotions: an Indo-European connection? 2. Gorgias: a strange trio, the poetic emotions; 3. Plato: from reality to tragedy and back; 4. Aristotle: the first 'theorist' of the aesthetic emotions; Part II. Pity and Fear within Tragedies: 5. An introduction; 6. Aeschylus: Persians; 7. Prometheus Bound; 8. Sophocles: Ajax; 9. Euripides: Orestes; Appendix: catharsis and the emotions in the definition of tragedy (...) in the Poetics. (shrink)

Much attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. (...) Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated. (shrink)

To describe phenomena that occur at different time scales, computational models of the brain must incorporate different levels of abstraction. At time scales of approximately 1/3 of a second, orienting movements of the body play a crucial role in cognition and form a useful computational level embodiment level,” the constraints of the physical system determine the nature of cognitive operations. The key synergy is that at time scales of about 1/3 of a second, the natural sequentiality of body movements can (...) be matched to the natural computational economies of sequential decision systems through a system of implicit reference called deictic in which pointing movements are used to bind objects in the world to cognitive programs. This target article focuses on how deictic bindings make it possible to perform natural tasks. Deictic computation provides a mechanism for representing the essential features that link external sensory data with internal cognitive programs and motor actions. One of the central features of cognition, working memory, can be related to moment-by-moment dispositions of body features such as eye movements and hand movements. (shrink)

An Introduction to Proof via Inquiry-Based Learning is a textbook for the transition to proof course for mathematics majors. Designed to promote active learning through inquiry, the book features a highly structured set of leading questions and explorations. The reader is expected to construct their own understanding by engaging with the material. The content ranges over topics traditionally included in transitions courses: logic, set theory including cardinality, the topology of the real line, a bit of number theory, and more. The (...) exposition guides and mentors the reader through an adventure in mathematical discovery, requiring them to solve problems, conjecture, experiment, explore, create, and communicate. Ultimately, this is really a book about productive struggle and learning how to learn. This is a print version of the popular open-access online text by Dana C. Ernst. (shrink)

It is argued that once biological systems reach a certain level of complexity, mechanistic explanations provide an inadequate account of many relevant phenomena. In this article, I evaluate such claims with respect to a representative programme in systems biological research: the study of regulatory networks within single-celled organisms. I argue that these networks are amenable to mechanistic philosophy without need to appeal to some alternate form of explanation. In particular, I claim that we can understand the mathematical modelling techniques of (...) systems biologists as part of a broader practice of constructing and evaluating mechanism schemas. This argument is elaborated by considering the case of bacterial chemotactic networks, where some research has been interpreted as explaining phenomena by means of abstract design principles. (shrink)

This article surveys the history of labor- and middle-class-sponsored efforts to mobilize shopping on behalf of working people from the late nineteenth century through the present. It analyzes the class dynamics of these movements to, first, underscore workers' own ability to mount consumer campaigns and, second, critique middle-class campaigns in the present that can treat workers as unorganized, passive victims. It underscores the potential hierarchical dynamics inherent in consumer-labor campaigns, both between classes and within the labor movement, including dynamics of (...) race, gender, and space. (shrink)

Animate vision systems have gaze control mechanisms that can actively position the camera coordinate system in response to physical stimuli. Compared to passive systems, animate systems show that visual computation can be vastly less expensive when considered in the larger context of behavior. The most important visual behavior is the ability to control the direction of gaze. This allows the use of very low resolution imaging that has a high virtual resolution. Using such a system in a controlled way provides (...) additional constraints that dramatically simplify the computations of early vision. Another important behavior is the way the environment “behaves‘. Animate systems under real-time constraints can further reduce their computational burden by using environmental cues that are perspicuous in the local context. A third source of economy is introduced when behaviors are learned. Because errors are rarely fatal, systems using learning algorithms can amortize computational cost over extended periods. Further economies can be achieved when the learning system uses indexical reference, which is a form of dynamic variable binding. Animate vision is a natural way of implementing this dynamic binding. (shrink)

In recent decades, participants in the debate about whether we are free and responsible agents have tended with increasing frequency to begin their papers or books by fixing the terms “free” and “responsible” in clear ways to avoid misunderstanding. This is an admirable development, and while some misunderstandings have certainly been avoided, and positions better illuminated as a result, new and interesting questions also arise. Two ways of fixing these terms and identifying the underlying concepts have emerged as especially influential, (...) one that takes the freedom required for responsibility to be understood in terms of accountability and the other in terms of desert. In this paper, I start by asking: are theorists talking about the same things, or are they really participating in two different debates? Are desert and accountability mutually entailing? I tentatively conclude that they are in fact mutually entailing. Coming to this conclusion requires making finer distinctions among various more specific and competing accounts of both accountability and desert. Ultimately, I argue, that there is good reason to accept that accountability and desert have the same satisfaction conditions. (shrink)

Nelkin presents a simple and natural account of freedom and moral responsibility which responds to the great variety of challenges to the idea that we are free and responsible, before ultimately reaffirming our conception of ourselves as agents. Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility begins with a defense of the rational abilities view, according to which one is responsible for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. The view is (...) compatibilist -- that is, on the view defended, responsibility is compatible with determinism -- and one of its striking features is a certain asymmetry: it requires the ability to do otherwise for responsibility when actions are praiseworthy, but not when they are blameworthy. In defending and elaborating the view, Nelkin questions long-held assumptions such as those concerning the relation between fairness and blame and the nature of so-called reactive attitudes such as resentment and forgiveness. Her argument not only fits with a metaphysical picture of causation -- agent-causation -- often assumed to be available only to incompatibilist accounts, but receives positive support from the intuitively appealing Ought Implies Can Principle, and establishes a new interpretation of freedom and moral responsibility that dovetails with a compelling account of our inescapable commitments as rational agents. (shrink)

In conclusion, then, the situationist literature provides a rich area of exploration for those interested in freedom and responsibility. Interestingly, it does not do so primarily because it is situationist in the sense of supporting the substantive thesis about the role of character traits. Rather it is because it makes us wonder whether we really do act on a regular basis with the particular normative, epistemic,and reactive capacities that are central to our identity as free and responsible agents.

Urban environmental stewardship and civic engagement -- Several million trees : how planting trees is changing our civic landscape -- Digging together : understanding environmental stewardship in New York City -- Seriously digging : why engaged stewards are different and why it matters -- Tangled roots : how volunteer stewards intertwine local environmental stewardship and democratic citizenship -- Implications for urban environmentalism, the environmental movement, and civic engagement in America.

The cerebral cortex is a rich and diverse structure that is the basis of intelligent behavior. One of the deepest mysteries of the function of cortex is that neural processing times are only about one hundred times as fast as the fastest response times for complex behavior. At the very least, this would seem to indicate that the cortex does massive amounts of parallel computation.This paper explores the hypothesis that an important part of the cortex can be modeled as a (...) connectionist computer that is especially suited for parallel problem solving. The connectionist computer uses a special representation, termed value unit encoding, that represents small subsets of parameters in a way that allows parallel access to many different parameter values. This computer can be thought of as computing hierarchies of sensorimotor invariants. The neural substrate can be interpreted as a commitment to data structures and algorithms that compute invariants fast enough to explain the behavioral response times. A detailed consideration of this model has several implications for the underlying anatomy and physiology. (shrink)

:In this essay, I consider a particular version of the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to suffer, namely, that they deserve to feel guilty to the proper degree. Two further theses have been thought to explicate and support the thesis, one that appeals to the non-instrumental goodness of the blameworthy receiving what they deserve, and the other that appeals to the idea that being blameworthy provides reason to promote the blameworthy receiving what they deserve. I call the first "Good-Guilt" and (...) the second "Reason-Guilt.” I begin by exploring what I take to be the strongest argument for Good-Guilt which gains force from a comparison of guilt and grief, and the strongest argument against. I conclude that Good-Guilt might be true, but that even if it is, the strongest argument in favor of it fails to support it in a way that provides reason for the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to feel guilty. I then consider the hypothesis that Reason-Guilt might be true and might be the more fundamental principle, supporting both Good-Guilt and Desert-Guilt. I argue that it does not succeed, however, and instead propose a different principle, according to which being blameworthy does not by itself provide reason for promoting that the blameworthy get what they deserve, but that being blameworthy systematically does so in conjunction with particular kinds of background circumstances. Finally, I conclude that Desert-Guilt might yet be true, but that it does not clearly gain support from either Good-Guilt or Reason-Guilt. (shrink)

Research in communication studies has suggested that Al-Jazeera produces different versions of news stories for different audiences. Yet, examining the linguistic means used to create these versions has remained under-researched. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1992) and Halliday’s Transitivity Model (1985), this study aims at exploring how Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA) and Al-Jazeera English (AJE) discursively represented the participants involved in the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian conflict in headlines. The analysis of transitivity patterns in AJA and AJE headlines reveals both similar and different (...) representations of the conflict. Although they avoided negative labeling of the Russian government, both channels ascribed conflict escalation to it, highlighting civilians suffering and protesting. Nevertheless, while AJE emphasized the Ukrainian government vulnerability, AJA presented the conflict as a confrontation between two symmetrical forces. Similarities are attributed to organizational and social institutional forces, while differences result from different editorial policies and audience preferences. As discursive and social practices, the headlines contribute to shaping audience perceptions of the conflict, with AJA challenging the prevailing western narrative of the conflict while AJE reinforcing it. (shrink)

Responsibility, blameworthiness in particular, has been characterized in a number of ways in a literature in which participants appear to be talking about the same thing much of the time. More specifically, blameworthiness has been characterized in terms of what sorts of responses are fair, appropriate, and deserved in a basic way, where the responses in question range over blame, sanctions, alterations to interpersonal relationships, and the reactive attitudes, such as resentment and indignation. In this paper, I explore the relationships (...) between three particular theses: (i) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is fair to impose sanctions, (ii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that one deserves sanctions, and (iii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is appropriate to respond with reactive attitudes. Appealing to the way in which luck in the outcome of an action can justifiably affect the degree of sanctions received, I argue that (i) is false and that fairness and desert come apart. I then argue that the relationship between the reactive attitudes and sanction is not as straightforward as has sometimes been assumed, but that (ii) and (iii) might both be true and closely linked. I conclude by exploring various claims about desert, including ones that link it to the intrinsic goodness of receiving what is deserved and to the permissibility or rightness of inflicting suffering. (shrink)

The view that ordinary objects are composites of form and matter ("hylomorphism") can be contrasted with the more common view that ordinary objects are composed of only material parts ("matter only"). On a matter-only view the hard question is modal: which modal profile does that (statue-shaped) object have? Does it have the modal profile of a statue, a lump, a mere aggregate? On a hylomorphic view the hard question is ontological: which objects exist? Does a statue (matter-m + statue-form), a (...) lump (matter-m + lump-form), and/or a mere aggregate (matter-m + mere aggregate-form) exist? I defend a novel answer to the hard question for hylomorphism. In particular, I argue that which ordinary objects exist depends, in part, on how subjects respond to the matter they encounter. I argue that, with regard to grounding the existence and modal properties of ordinary objects, response-dependent hylomorphism is superior to both matter only views and to non-response-dependent versions of hylomorphism. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s main contribution to the emergence of experimental philosophy was a new way of thinking about the serial character of experimental practices. His natural and experimental histories document his constant attempts to order experimental inquiries. They consist of large collections of lists and series of items, most of which are called “experiments.” For Bacon, “experiment” is a generic term; it is used for tests and trials, recipes, ideas of experimental investigations, theoretical observations and methodological suggestions. Experiments never stand alone (...) in a natural history; they come in series of numbered items, sometimes grouped under “heads” and “topics of inquiry.” In the Latin natural histories.. (shrink)

In standard modal logic, □ ≡ ∼◊ ∼ and ◊ ≡ ∼□∼. I will, first, examine why in tense-logic, Arthur Prior thinks that ∼ ◊ ∼ is weaker than □ and ∼ □ ∼ is weaker than ◊. I will, then, examine whether there are similar motivations in modal logic to take ∼ ◊ ∼ to be weaker than □ and ∼ □ ∼ to be weaker than ◊. The upshot will be that, just as certain metaphysical views within the (...) philosophy of time motivate one to deny the standard tense equivalences, certain metaphysical views within the metaphysics of modality motivate one to deny the standard modal equivalences. (shrink)

In The Minority Body, Elizabeth Barnes rejects prevailing social constructionist accounts of disability for two reasons. First, because they understand disability in terms of oppressive social responses to bodily impairment, they cannot make sense of disability pride. Second, they maintain a problematic distinction between impairment and disability. In response to these challenges, this paper defends a version of the social model of disability, which we call the Social Exclusion Model. On our account, to be disabled is to be in a (...) bodily or psychological state that is represented as an impairment in the prevailing ideology of one’s society, and to be excluded from valuable activities on the basis of this representation. While this model refers to a distinction between disability and impairment, it makes no presuppositions about which bodies function ‘normally’ and which do not. It is the ideology of impairment rather than impairment itself that does any work to determine whether a person is disabled. We argue that this model answers some of the important objections that Barnes raises against prevailing social constructionist accounts of disability, and that it’s focus on the oppressive social positioning of disabled people gives it explanatory power that Barnes’s own account lacks. (shrink)

Dana S. Belu combines Heidegger's phenomenology of technology with feminist phenomenology in order to make sense of the increased technicization of women's reproductive bodies during conception, pregnancy, and birth.

Eye movements during false-belief tasks can reveal an individual's capacity to implicitly monitor others' mental states (theory of mind - ToM). It has been suggested, based on the results of a single-trial-experiment, that this ability is impaired in those with a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD), despite neurotypical-like performance on explicit ToM measures. However, given there are known attention differences and visual hypersensitivities in ASD it is important to establish whether such impairments are evident over time. In addition, investigating implicit (...) ToM using a repeated trial approach allows an assessment of whether learning processes can reduce the ASD impairment in this ability, as is the case with explicit ToM. Here we investigated the temporal profile of implicit ToM in individuals with ASD and a control group. Despite similar performance on explicit ToM measures, ASD-diagnosed individuals showed no evidence of implicit false-belief tracking even over a one-hour period and many trials, whereas control participants did. These findings demonstrate that the systems involved in implicit and explicit ToM are distinct and hint that impaired implicit false-belief tracking may play an important role in ASD. Further, they indicate that learning processes do not alleviate this impairment across the presentation of multiple trials. (shrink)

This article offers a nuanced analysis of identity reconstitution in transnational gay relations. Drawing from critical ethnography, the author focuses on Filipino gay-identified hosts, who remain invisible in global analyses of sexuality and tourism, as they create a gay space in Malate, an ex-sex and current tourist district in the city of Manila. Challenging the perception that gay identity is Western made, the author focuses on how gay host identity is constituted through hosts’travel/mobility and in relation to urban place. She (...) discusses place-making as a strategy that allows gay hosts to see their identities transformed in Malate despite their social exclusion in the process of urban gentrification. (shrink)

Jim buys a ticket in a million-ticket lottery. He knows it is a fair lottery, but, given the odds, he believes he will lose. When the winning ticket is chosen, it is not his. Did he know his ticket would lose? It seems that he did not. After all, if he knew his ticket would lose, why would he have bought it? Further, if he knew his ticket would lose, then, given that his ticket is no different in its chances (...) of winning from any other ticket, it seems that by parity of reasoning he should also know that every other ticket would lose. But of course he doesn’t know that; in fact, he knows that not every ticket will lose. (shrink)

In this anthology of new and classic articles, fifteen noted feminist philosophers explore contemporary ethical issues that uniquely affect the lives of women. These issues in applied ethics include autonomy, responsibility, sexual harassment, women in the military, new technologies for reproduction, surrogate motherhood, pornography, abortion, nonfeminist women and others. Whether generated by old social standards or intensified by recent technology, these dilemmas all pose persistent, 'nagging,' questions that cry out for answers.

On the one hand, there seem to be compelling parallels to moral responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness in domains other than the moral. For example, we often praise people for their aesthetic and epistemic achievements and blame them for their failures. On the other hand, it has been argued that there is something special about the moral domain, so that at least one robust kind of responsibility can only be found there. In this paper, I argue that we can adopt a (...) unifying framework for locating responsible agency across domains, thereby capturing and explaining more of our actual practices. The key, I argue, is to identify the right conditions for being morally accountable, which I take to be a matter of having an opportunity of a good enough quality to act well. With this account in hand, I argue that we can adopt a unifying framework that allows us to recognize parallels across domains, even as it points the way to important differences among them. (shrink)

I argue there are some objects which do not respect the Law of the Excluded Middle, i.e., which are such that, for some property F, the disjunction Fo v ~Fo fails to be true. I call such objects “odd objects” and present three examples—fictional objects, nonsort objects, and quantum objects. I argue that each of these objects is best understood as violating LEM. I, then, discuss Jessica Wilson’s account of metaphysical indeterminacy. I show how the indeterminacy which arises with odd (...) objects can be accounted for on Wilson’s account. I, then, argue that my Wilson-inspired, but non-LEM-respecting, account of metaphysical indeterminacy is superior to Wilson’s in terms of costs and benefits. (shrink)

I believe that the data is both fascinating and instructive, but in this paper I will resist the conclusion that we must give up Invariantism, or, as I prefer to call it, Unificationism. In the process of examining the challenging data and responding to it, I will try to draw some larger lessons about how to use the kind of data being collected. First, I will provide a brief description of some influential theories of responsibility, and then explain the threat (...) to them from the experimental results. Finally, I will set out my general approach to the data, as well as some specific suggestions about how to think about each set of experiments. I will conclude that philosophers searching for a unified theory need not give up, but that at the same time they can learn a great deal from the new data. (shrink)

When people are making certain medical decisions – especially potentially transformative ones – the specter of regret may color their choices. In this paper, I ask: can predicting that we will regret a decision in the future serve any justificatory role in our present decision-making? And if so, what role? While there are many pitfalls to such reasoning, I ultimately conclude that considering future retrospective emotions like regret in our decisionmaking can be both rational and authentic. Rather than indicating that (...) one is about to make a mistake or that there is some underlying value that one already cares about but is overlooking, the prediction that one will regret a decision in the future makes one confront how her present values and priorities may change as a result of her choice in ways she cannot presently anticipate. (shrink)

Background: Current practice frequently fails to provide care consistent with the preferences of decisionally-incapacitated patients. It also imposes significant emotional burden on their surrogates. Algorithmic-based patient preference predictors (PPPs) have been proposed as a possible way to address these two concerns. While previous research found that patients strongly support the use of PPPs, the views of surrogates are unknown. The present study thus assessed the views of experienced surrogates regarding the possible use of PPPs as a means to help make (...) treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. -/- Methods: This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to determine the views of experienced surrogates [n=26] who were identified from two academic medical centers and two community hospitals. The primary outcomes were respondents’ overall level of support for the idea of using PPPs and the themes related to their views on how a PPP should be used, if at all, in practice. -/- Results: Overall, 21 participants supported the idea of using PPPs. The remaining five indicated that they would not use a PPP because they made decisions based on the patient’s best interests, not based on substituted judgment. Major themes which emerged were that surrogates, not the patient’s preferences, should determine how treatment decisions are made, and concern that PPPs might be used to deny expensive care or be biased against minority groups. -/- Conclusions: Surrogates, like patients, strongly support the idea of using PPPs to help make treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. These findings provide support for developing a PPP and assessing it in practice. At the same time, patients and surrogates disagree over whose preferences should determine how treatment decisions are made, including whether to use a PPP. These findings reveal a fundamental disagreement regarding the guiding principles for surrogate decision-making. Future research is needed to assess this disagreement and consider ways to address it. (shrink)

With the continual development of artificial intelligence and smart computing in recent years, quantitative approaches have become increasingly popular as an efficient modeling tool as they do not necessitate complicated mathematical models. Many nations have taken steps, such as transitioning to online schooling, to decrease the harm caused by coronaviruses. Inspired by the demand for technology in early education, the present research uses a radial basis function neural network modeling technique to predict preschool instructors’ technology usage in classes based on (...) recognized determinant characteristics of technology acceptance. In this regard, this study utilized the RBFNN approach to predict preschool teachers’ technology acceptance behavior, based on the theory of planned behavior, which states that behavioral achievement, in our case the actual technology use in class, depends on motivation, intention and ability, and behavioral control. Thus, this research design is based on an adapted version of the technology acceptance model with eight dimensions: D1. Perceived usefulness, D2. Perceived ease of use, D3. Perceived enjoyment, D4. Intention to use, D5. Actual use, D6. Compatibility, D7. Attitude, and D8. Self-efficacy. According to the TAM, actual usage is significantly predicted by the other seven dimensions used in this research. Instead of using the classical multiple linear regression statistical processing of data, we opted for a NN based on the RBF approach to predict the actual usage behavior. This study included 182 preschool teachers who were randomly chosen from a project-based national preschool teacher training program and who responded to our online questionnaire. After designing the RBF function with the actual usage as an output variable and the other seven dimensions as input variables, in the model summary, we obtained in the training sample a sum of squares error of 37.5 and a percent of incorrect predictions of 43.3%. In the testing sample, we obtained a sum of squares error of 14.88 and a percent of incorrect predictions of 37%. Thus, we can conclude that 63% of the classified data are correctly assigned to the models’ dependent variable, i.e., actual technology use, which is a significant rate of correct predictions in the testing sample. This high significant percentage of correct classification represents an important result, mainly because this is the first study to apply RBFNN’s prediction on psychological data, opening up a new interdisciplinary field of research. (shrink)

There are powerful skeptical challenges to the idea that we are free. And yet, it seems simply impossible for us to shake the sense that we really are free. Some are convinced that the skeptical challenges are insurmountable and resign themselves to living under an illusion, while others argue that the challenges can be met. Even among those who believe that our sense of ourselves as free is at least roughly accurate, there are deep differences of opinion concerning what freedom (...) requires. On the one hand, there are “libertarians” about freedom, those who believe both that we are free and that freedom requires the falsity of determinism. On the other hand, there are “compatibilists”, those who believe that freedom is compatible with determinism. While there is an impressive variety of arguments and motivations available on all sides of the debate over freedom, our inescapable sense of ourselves as free has played a recurrent and key role in the debate, sometimes explicit and sometimes not. In this paper, I explore one way that our self-conception has been used by libertarians against compatibilists, and I argue that the reasoning employed is not convincing. The libertarian appeal to our self-conception hinges on locating in each of us an essential commitment to indeterminism, or, more cautiously, a commitment to something that, with the addition of a few plausible (if not self-evident) premises, entails indeterminism. The idea, then, is that we are “natural” indeterminists, seeing our actions as undetermined (or, again, more cautiously, as having qualities that, upon reflection, we can recognize entail the falsity of determinism). By itself, this is not an argument to the effect that we are correct in 1 believing that our actions are undetermined, or to the effect that freedom requires indeterminism. But if we are in fact natural indeterminists when it comes to our own actions, then that fact serves as important motivation for libertarianism, especially if our supposed natural indeterminism captures our unshakeable sense of freedom. Kant famously located our sense of freedom in our nature as rational agents, claiming that we must act under the “idea of freedom.”2 This has suggested to many that: (R) Rational deliberators, in virtue of their very nature as rational deliberators, must represent themselves as free.. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess a challenging argument made by McKenna (J Ethical Theory, 2019) that free will might be important in justifying our moral responsibility practices even if free will is not important insofar as it is required for desert of blame and praise. I offer an alternative picture, according to which while we can justify our practices of moral responsibility in terms that appeal to free will without using terms that explicitly appeal to desert, desert is necessarily implicated (...) nevertheless by the very practices we seek to justify. In the process, I set out my understanding of the nature of blame and address the question of whether blame should always be understood as deserved in a sense distinct from fitting. (shrink)

The doctrine of double effect, together with other moral principles that appeal to the intentions of moral agents, has come under attack from many directions in recent years, as have a variety of rationales that have been given in favor of it. In this paper, our aim is to develop, defend, and provide a new theoretical rationale for a secular version of the doctrine. Following Quinn (1989), we distinguish between Harmful Direct Agency and Harmful Indirect Agency. We propose the following (...) version of the doctrine: that in cases in which harm must come to some in order to achieve a good (and is the least costly of possible harms necessary), the agent foresees the harm, and all other things are equal, a stronger case is needed to justify Harmful Direct Agency than to justify Harmful Indirect Agency. We distinguish between two Kantian rationales that might be given for the doctrine, a “dependent right” rationale, defended by Quinn, and an “independent right” rationale, which we defend. We argue that the doctrine and the “independent right” rationale for it are not vulnerable to counterexamples or counterproposals, and conclude by drawing implications for the larger debate over whether agents' intentions are in any way relevant to permissibility and obligation. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme (...) of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics. (shrink)