This paper describes intellectual property legislation in the European Union, the US and the Draft Treaty on the legal protection of unoriginal databases, usually available in the Internet. I argue that this type of legislation, if enforced upon developing countries and countries in transition through international ‘agreements’, could in effect deprive them of their own information commons, their own public domain. With examples from China, India, Africa and Iceland, I argue that this deprivation in the case of developing countries is, (...) morally, equal to a virtual war against them by the West, wholly unjustified and dangerous-an example of virtual imperialism. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework to examine the relationship between models and observations. To make our analysis precise,models are reduced to first-order theories that represent both terminological knowledge – e.g., the laws that are supposed to regulate the domain under analysis and that allow for explanations, predictions, and simulations – and assertional knowledge – e.g., information about specific entities in the domain of interest. Observations are introduced into the domain of quantification of a distinct first-order theory that describes their nature (...) and their organization and takes track of the way they are experimentally acquired or intentionally elaborated. A model mainly represents the theoretical knowledge or hypotheses on a domain, while the theory of observations mainly represents the empirical knowledge and the given experimental practices. We propose a precise identity criterion for observations and we explore different links between models and observations by assuming a degree of independence between them. By exploiting some techniques developed in the field of social choice theory and judgment aggregation, we sketch some strategies to solve inconsistencies between a given set of observations and the assumed theoretical hypotheses. The solutions of these inconsistencies can impact both the observations – e.g., the theoretical knowledge and the analysis of the way observations are collected or produced may highlight some unreliable sources – and the models – e.g. empirical evidences may invalidate some theoretical laws. (shrink)

En la literatura sobre las emociones una de las teorías con mayor fuerza es la llamada “teoría James-Lange”. En esta obra se intenta hacer una crítica a dicha teoría a partir de algunas observaciones de Wittgenstein sobre el uso de conceptos psicológicos, sacando a la luz dos confusiones gramaticales que surgen en ella. Para ello, se construye primero la categoría de “programa de naturalización de las emociones” que recoge las teorías del Descartes, James y Prinz, siguiendo la metodología de Lakatos. (...) Luego, se identifica como problema central el de la naturalización de la intencionalidad. Para luego exponer algunas herramientas de Wittgenstein para estudiar la gramática de la pregunta por el objeto y la intencionalidad las emociones, mostrando que las respuestas del programa de naturalización no son satisfactorias y no respetan las reglas de ciertos usos del lenguaje. (shrink)

A key issue in the business ethics field is the design of effective measures for assessing the ethical culture of organizations. The Corporate Ethical Virtues Model (CEV), developed by Kaptein in 2008, is an instrument for measuring ethical culture, and has been applied, adapted and validated in different contexts. In 2013, DeBode, Armenakis, Field and Walker developed the CEV–S, a shortened version of the original scale. Both the CEV and CEV–S assess eight dimensions based on corporate ethical virtues: clarity, congruency (...) of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability and sanctionability. The objective of this study is to present a Spanish version of the CEV–S and its validation process. The scale was applied to two samples of 114 and 193 Colombian employees from two companies operating in the services sector. The confirmatory factor analyses revealed a good fit for the eight-factor structure of the Spanish CEV–S and the statistical tests applied showed good levels of reliability and validity for this scale. The adequate psychometric properties shown by the Spanish CEV–S may support its use in future research to measure organizational ethical culture in Spanish-speaking settings. (shrink)

1. Cine y vanguardias : el cine como promesa estético-política desde Dziga Vertov y Jean Epstein -- 2. Deleuze y las potencias del cine : el acontecimiento de lo inorgánico -- 3. De la vida inorgánica a la vida histórica : recuperación del carácter narrativo del cine a partir de Jacques Ranciere.

In this paper, I argue that the debate on Composition as Identity—the thesis that any composite object is identical to its parts—is deadlocked because both the defenders and the detractors of the claim have so far failed to take its philosophical core at face value and have, as a result, defended and criticized respectively something that is not Composition as Identity. After establishing how Composition as Identity should properly be understood and proposing for it a new interpretation centered around the (...) novel notion of metaphysical information, I set forth a strategy to defend it that crucially rests on the indefinite extensibility of the domain of quantification. I eventually suggest that “Composition as Analysis” is a name that better reflects the content and theoretical proposal of the thesis that Composition as Identity is supposed to be. (shrink)

Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) – the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory measures. In both (...) samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to “what” happened, but not necessarily “when” it happened. (shrink)

Despite continuing controversies regarding the vital status of both brain-dead donors and individuals who undergo donation after circulatory death (DCD), respecting the dead donor rule (DDR) remains the standard moral framework for organ procurement. The DDR increases organ supply without jeopardizing trust in transplantation systems, reassuring society that donors will not experience harm during organ procurement. While the assumption that individuals cannot be harmed once they are dead is reasonable in the case of brain-dead protocols, we argue that the DDR (...) is not an acceptable strategy to protect donors from harm in DCD protocols. We propose a threefold alternative to justify organ procurement practices: (1) ensuring that donors are sufficiently protected from harm; (2) ensuring that they are respected through informed consent; and (3) ensuring that society is fully informed of the inherently debatable nature of any criterion to declare death. (shrink)

Despite frequent reference to the spatial turn, this is the first volume to explicitly address how theory and practice concerning space, is used in a variety of ...

Bioethicists involved in end‐of‐life debates routinely distinguish between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. Meanwhile, previous work in cognitive science has revealed that when people characterize behaviour as either actively ‘doing’ or passively ‘allowing’, they do so not purely on descriptive grounds, but also as a function of the behaviour’s perceived morality. In the present report, we extend this line of research by examining how medical students and professionals (N = 184) and laypeople (N = 122) describe physicians’ behaviour in end‐of‐life scenarios. (...) We show that the distinction between ‘ending’ a patient’s life and ‘allowing’ it to end arises from morally motivated causal selection. That is, when a patient wishes to die, her illness is treated as the cause of death and the doctor is seen as merely allowing her life to end. In contrast, when a patient does not wish to die, the doctor’s behaviour is treated as the cause of death and, consequently, the doctor is described as ending the patient’s life. This effect emerged regardless of whether the doctor’s behaviour was omissive (as in withholding treatment) or commissive (as in applying a lethal injection). In other words, patient consent shapes causal selection in end‐of‐life situations, and in turn determines whether physicians are seen as ‘killing’ patients, or merely as ‘enabling’ their death. (shrink)

Detecting sensitive information considering privacy is a relevant issue on Online Social Networks (OSNs). It is often difficult for users to manage the privacy associated with their posts on social networks taking into account all the possible consequences. The aim of this work is to provide information about the sensitivity of the content of a publication when a user is going to share it in OSN. For this purpose, we developed a privacy-assistant agent that detects sensitive information. Based on this (...) information, the agent provides a message through a nudge mechanism warning about the possible risks of sharing the message. To avoid being annoying, the agent also considers the user’s previous behaviour (e.g. if he previously ignored certain nudges) and adapts the messages it sends to give more relevance to those categories that are more important to the user from the point of view of the privacy risk. This agent was integrated into the social network Pesedia. We analysed the performance of different models to detect a set of sensitive categories (i.e. location, medical, drug/alcohol, emotion, personal attacks, stereotyping, family and association details, personal details and personally identifiable information) in a dataset of tweets in Spanish. The model that obtained the best results (i.e. F1 and accuracy) and that was finally integrated into the privacy-assistant agent was transformer-based. (shrink)

The age of digital technology has introduced new complications into the issues of fair and private use of copyrighted material. In fact, the question of private use of another's work has been transformed from a side issue in intellectual property jurisprudence into the very center of intellectual property discussions about rights and privileges in a networked world. This paper will explore the nuanced difference between fair and private use as articulated in the US and the European Copyright Laws. Part One (...) will explain the legal use and meaning of fair use and its justifications. We maintain that it is almost impossible to resolve the issue of the fair/private use's legal nature, if one has not previously resolved copyright's legal nature. Legal resolution of such conflicts, as we shall demonstrate, follows different rules, and the messages sent to users and authors vary greatly depending on the jurisdiction. Part Two will examine the issue of Private Use as Fair Use by Design. We will look at the impact of Digital Rights Management on fair use and explore if the nature of private use as fair use has changed because we are dealing with the protection of digital content. We will show that protecting digital works by code, via various digital rights management schemes is shrinking the public domain of information and restricting private use as fair use. (shrink)

Con el objetivo de evidenciar la forma en que la diversidad sociodemográfica ha resignificado el proceso de desarrollo territorial y origina líneas de fuga que trascienden la hegemonía de los poderes económicos-políticos-ambientales en los Llanos-Orientales, se realiza una metodología experimental que combina análisis situacionales, la genealogía, y la reconstrucción histórica de fenómenos sociales a través de 87 entrevistas a líderes sociales entre el 2019-2021. Los resultados muestran un territorio de activa conexión cultural que favorecen la lucha contra hegemónica dentro de (...) las metáforas de “el mito del Estado nación” y “la imposibilidad de generar alternativas”. El análisis expone la existencia de rebeliones de conducta a través de resistencias cotidianas creativas, políticas y culturales, que favorecen el poder de la confianza, la solidaridad, la cooperación, el afecto, así como los liderazgos colectivos. Se concluye que el poder central no tiene la capacidad de capturar estas resistencias ya que no tiene la potencia analítica para percibir la reconfiguración del espíritu humano ni las variaciones del tejido social. (shrink)

For the first time in print, this article reports passages from John Rawls’s graduate papers and annotations on books and manuscripts from his personal library. The analysis of this material shows the historical inaccuracy of the widespread assumption that Rawls’s philosophy owes very little to American pragmatism. Peirce’s notion of truth, as well as the holistic critique of pragmatism thatMortonWhite began in the late 1940s, prove significant at the very beginning of Rawls’s philosophical enterprise. In the light of this material, (...) it might be argued that Rawls’s elaboration of ‘reflective equilibrium’ started at least in part as an attempt to overcome the pending problems of pragmatism. (shrink)

Feminist reflections on the sexual division of labour have given rise to a body of knowledge on the ethics of care from different disciplines, including philosophy, in which outstanding contributions to the topic have been formulated. This approach is applicable to the analysis of any phenomenon and particularly that of disasters. As various investigations have highlighted, the consequences on the population throughout all of a disaster’s phases (prevention, emergency, and reconstruction) require an analysis of differentiated vulnerabilities based on gender and (...) other identity categories, such as social class, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual identity, etc. The interrelation between all these variables gives rise to differentiated impacts that cannot be ignored in catastrophic contexts, where survival and sustaining life are at stake, so care becomes a central issue. Research on the topic has also identified that, along with the analysis of social vulnerability, we must consider the capacity for agency, both individual and collective, where care is once again of vital importance. Considering the gender approach and its multiple intersections is thus a fundamental theoretical-practical proposal for the study of disasters from philosophy, as it implies an unavoidable epistemic, ontological, and ethical reflection in the face of risk reduction. (shrink)

Comentario del Proemio de la reciente constitu-ción apostólica Veritatis Gaudiumdel Papa Francisco que ordena los estudios eclesiásticos. Dicho texto introductorio de la Constitución ofrece elementos característicos del ideario del actual Pontífice desde los que plantea con novedad y decisión propuestas importantes de renovación del sistema de los estudios eclesiásticos que merecen ser consideradas con algún detall.

Background Consent policies for post-mortem organ procurement (OP) vary throughout Europe, and yet no studies have empirically evaluated the ethical implications of contrasting consent models. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel indicator of governance quality based on the ideal of informed support, and examine national differences on this measure through a quantitative survey of OP policy informedness and preferences in seven European countries. -/- Methods Between 2017–2019, we conducted a convenience sample survey of students (n = 2006) in (...) Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Denmark (DK), Germany (DE), Greece (GR), Slovenia (SI) and Spain (ES), asking participants about their donation preferences, as well as their beliefs and views about the policy in place. From these measures, we computed indices of informedness, policy support, and fulfilment of unexpressed preferences, which we compared across countries and consent systems. -/- Results Our study introduces a tool for analyzing policy governance in the context of OP. Wide variation in policy awareness was observed: Most respondents in DK, DE, AT and BE correctly identified the policy in place, while those in SI, GR and ES did not. Respondents in opt-out countries (AT, BE, ES and GR) tended to support the policy in place (with one exception, i.e., SI), whereas those in opt-in countries (DE and DK) overwhelmingly opposed it. These results reveal stark differences in governance quality across countries and consent policies: We found a preponderance of informed opposition in opt-in countries and a general tendency towards support–either informed or uninformed–in opt-out countries. We also found informed divergence in opt-in countries and a tendency for convergence–either informed or uninformed–among opt-out countries. -/- Conclusion Our study offers a novel tool for analyzing governance quality and illustrates, in the context of OP, how the strengths and weaknesses of different policy implementations can be estimated and compared using quantitative survey data. (shrink)

Several studies have explored differences between North American and European doctor patient relationships. They have focused primarily on differences in philosophical traditions and historic and socioeconomic factors between these two regions that might lead to differences in behaviour, as well as divergent concepts in and justifications of medical practice. However, few empirical intercultural studies have been carried out to identify in practice these cultural differences. This lack of standard comparative empirical studies led us to compare differences between France and the (...) USA regarding end-of-life decision-making. We tested certain assertions put forward by bioethicists concerning the impact of culture on the acceptance of advance directives in such decisions. In particular, we compared North American and French intensive care professional's attitudes toward: (1) advance directives, and (2) the role of the family in decisions to withhold or withdraw life-support. (shrink)

La internacionalización de las economías exige de los gobiernos el fortalecimiento de las relaciones comerciales con otros países en todo el planeta. Las herramientas más utilizadas en las últimas décadas han sido los tratados de libre comercio que, además de la desgravación total o parcial y progresiva, implican cambios en las condiciones internas relativas a la normatividad aplicada, con el ánimo de facilitar las relaciones de comercio, la búsqueda de un lenguaje aduanero común, así como la estandarización de las operaciones (...) aduaneras. Es una exigencia cada vez mayor que obliga a que se hagan ajustes a los procesos y procedimientos internos; aunado a ello, están los organismos multilaterales a los que cada vez se unen más países, con el propósito de buscar mejores condiciones económicas, políticas y sociales para sus administrados, pero es necesario prestar atención a las afectaciones que tales exigencias e implementaciones presuponen no solo en el ordenamiento interno, sino en la aplicación misma de las normas. (shrink)

El objetivo de nuestro artículo es ofrecer una interpretación del capítulo sobre “El esquematismo de los conceptos puros del entendimiento” de la Crítica de la razón pura de Immanuel Kant. Nuestra hipótesis es que en la doctrina del esquematismo se decide la posibilidad de la constitución ontológica del objeto como objeto. Consiguientemente, mostraremos que únicamente con los esquemas trascendentales nos encontramos con los predicados ontológicos fundamentales de la objetividad. Esto se demuestra estableciendo que solo gracias a la doctrina del esquematismo (...) se pone de manifiesto el dinamismo interno de la cooperación entre la sensibilidad y el entendimiento que da lugar al conocimiento objetivo. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es examinar una dualidad en la concepción objetiva de la substancia de la Crítica de la razón pura de Kant. Con este fin se analiza el esquema trascendental de la categoría de substancia y accidente. Nuestra hipótesis es que en el texto kantiano pueden distinguirse dos diferentes concepciones de la substancia. Por un lado, las substancias1 son los objetos relativamente permanentes de nuestra experiencia cotidiana. Por otro lado, la substancia2 es la materia absolutamente permanente de (...) la que están compuestas las substancias1. Dado que las substancias1 son accidentes o modos de existir de la substancia2, ambas concepciones son parte de una teoría coherente. (shrink)

Se examina el problema de la circularidad argumental en la fundamentación del conocimiento desde la teoría de la argumentación. Los argumentos dirigidos a probar que sabemos son sospechosos de dos falacias: petición de principio y apelación a la ignorancia. Se examinan las definiciones clásicas de ambas falacias y se dictamina que bajo tales definiciones los argumentos fundamentadores serían falaces. A continuación se proporcionan nuevas definiciones de ambas falacias, más acordes con el trabajo reciente en teoría de la argumentación y se (...) sostiene que, bajo estas definiciones, no todos los argumentos fundamentadores son falaces. In this paper I examine the problem of circularity in the justification of knowledge from the point of view of argumentation theory. I introduce the expression founding argument for the arguments we use to try to prove that we know, and explain the classical account of the two fallacies that may be committed: ad ignorantiam and petitio principii. A new definition of both fallacies, based on recent work in the theory of argumentation, is used to show that not every founding argument is fallacious. (shrink)

Teniendo presente la enseñanza de la teología y cierta renuencia observable en los medios teológicos al trato con la filosofía, el estudio expone en primer lugar la relación ineludible entre filosofía y teología por razón de las coinci-dencias dadas entre ellas a pesar de la diferencia formal de ambas. A continuación, se describe el régimen general de relación entre los dos saberes, relación de tensa complementariedad que se sustan-cia en un circuito dialógico, para abordar después la importancia para el pensamiento (...) teológico de la relación con dos grandes ámbi-tos de la filosofía: el pensamiento metafísico y la antropología. El estudio termina con algunas con-clusiones prácticas referidas a la labor docente sobre la justificación. (shrink)

Since 1968, the irreversible loss of functioning of the whole brain, called brain death, is assimilated to individual’s death. The almost universal acceptance of this neurological criterion of death had decisive consequences for the contemporary medicine, such as the withdrawal of mechanical ventilation in these patients and organ retrieval for transplantation. The new criterion was successfully accepted in part because the assimilation of brain death state to death was presented by medicine --and acritically assumed by most of societies-- as a (...) scientific and objective fact. Nevertheless, many people do not think that the patients suffering brain death are actually dead. We show here that those people are not necessarily wrong. It can be argued that, in fact, the justification of the neurological criterion is not scientific but moral. We outline the thesis that the problem surrounding the vital status of brain dead patients is due to a confusion between factual and normative questions. Furthermore, we claim that the donation of organs and the withdrawal of life-support could be ethically acceptable even if the patients suffering brain death are considered as alive. As an alternative to the dead donor rule, we propose a justification for organ donation of brain-dead patients based on the (moral) concepts of harm and consent : what truly justifies the procurement of organs on those patients is not that they are dead, but that they wish to donate their organs and that, since they have irreversibly lost their brain, they cannot be harmed. (shrink)

Considerando el incremento del interés por las emociones en diversos campos de estudio y en la vida cotidiana junto con los importantes avances teóricos de los últimos años, este artículo pretende realizar un análisis y una síntesis de los aspectos teóricos más relevantes para comprender qué es una emoción. Se identifican los diferentes componentes de un episodio emocional, como el sentimiento de la emoción, las expresiones faciales, las tendencias a la acción, entre otros y se analizan las diferentes relaciones causales (...) entre estos componentes que proponen algunas de las teorías más relevantes en la actualidad, como la teoría Neurocultural y la Teoría del Acto Conceptual. Se concluye que las emociones son fenómenos complejos que combinan tanto aspectos biológicos como aspectos culturales y psicológicos, que se relacionan estrechamente con las necesidades psicológicas y con el bienestar. Además, el lenguaje y los procesos de socialización son claves para lograr una educación emocional que facilite la adaptación social y el bienestar de las personas. (shrink)

The ever‐increasing demand for organs led Spain, France, and other European countries to promote uncontrolled donation after circulatory determination of death (uDCDD). For the same reason, New York City has recently developed its own uDCDD protocol, which differs from European programs in some key ways. The New York protocol incorporates a series of technical and management improvements that address some practical problems identified in response to European uDCDD protocols. However, the more fundamental issue of whether uDCDD donors are dead when (...) organs are procured remains problematic for the New York City protocol and, indeed, for all uDCDD protocols. In the United States, two amendments to the legal criteria of death have been suggested to avoid a formal violation of the dead donor rule in DCDD protocols: first, replacing the requirement “irreversible” with the weaker term “permanent,” and second, using the term “circulatory” instead of “cardiac” to identify the key function that must be lost to declare death. While intended to facilitate controlled DCDD, these modifications create a problem for uDCDD protocols: if extracorporeal membrane oxygenation is introduced to preserve the organs, then circulation is restored after death is declared. In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Kevin Munjal and colleagues call for a new ethical construct and policy so that uncontrolled and controlled DCDD can coexist. (shrink)

This study examined health professionals’ (HPs) experience, beliefs and attitudes towards brain death (BD) and two types of donation after circulatory death (DCD)—controlled and uncontrolled DCD. Five hundred and eighty-seven HPs likely to be involved in the process of organ procurement were interviewed in 14 hospitals with transplant programs in France, Spain and the US. Three potential donation scenarios—BD, uncontrolled DCD and controlled DCD—were presented to study subjects during individual face-to-face interviews. Our study has two main findings: (1) In the (...) context of organ procurement, HPs believe that BD is a more reliable standard for determining death than circulatory death, and (2) While the vast majority of HPs consider it morally acceptable to retrieve organs from brain-dead donors, retrieving organs from DCD patients is much more controversial. We offer the following possible explanations. DCD introduces new conditions that deviate from standard medical practice, allow procurement of organs when donors’ loss of circulatory function could be reversed, and raises questions about “death” as a unified concept. Our results suggest that, for many HPs, these concerns seem related in part to the fact that a rigorous brain examination is neither clinically performed nor legally required in DCD. Their discomfort could also come from a belief that irreversible loss of circulatory function has not been adequately demonstrated. If DCD protocols are to achieve their full potential for increasing organ supply, the sources of HPs’ discomfort must be further identified and addressed. (shrink)