Tom Sorell

Automation does not always replace human labour altogether: there is an intermediate stage of human co-existence with machines, including robots, in a production process. Cobots are robots designed to participate at close quarters with humans in such a process. I shall discuss the possible role of cobots in facilitating the eventual total elimination of human operators from production in which co-bots are initially involved. This issue is complicated by another: cobots are often introduced to workplaces with the message (from managers) that they will not replace human operators but will rather assist human operators and make their jobs more interesting and responsible. If, in the process of learning to assist human operators, robots acquire the skills of human operators, then the promise of avoiding replacement can turn out to be false, and if a human operator loses his job, he has been harmed twice over: once by unemployment and once by deception. I shall suggest that this moral risk attends some cobots more than others.

This paper explores ethical issues raised by whole slide image-based computational pathology. After briefly giving examples drawn from some recent literature of advances in this field, we consider some ethical problems it might be thought to pose. These arise from (1) the tension between artificial intelligence (AI) research—with its hunger for more and more data—and the default preference in data ethics and data protection law for the minimisation of personal data collection and processing; (2) the fact that computational pathology lends itself to kinds of data fusion that go against data ethics norms and some norms of biobanking; (3) the fact that AI methods are esoteric and produce results that are sometimes unexplainable (the so-called ‘black box’problem) and (4) the fact that computational pathology is particularly dependent on scanning technology manufacturers with interests of their own in profit-making from data collection. We shall suggest that most of these issues are resolvable.

This paper seeks to identify the distinctive moral wrong of stalking and argues that this wrong is serious enough to criminalize. We draw on psychological literature about stalking, distinguishing types of stalkers, their pathologies, and victims. The victimology is the basis for claims about what is wrong with stalking. Close attention to the experiences of victims often reveals an obsessive preoccupation with the stalker and what he will do next. The kind of harm this does is best understood in relation to the value of privacy and conventionally protected zones of privacy. We compare anti-stalking laws in different jurisdictions, claiming that they all fail in some way to capture the distinctive privacy violation that stalking involves. Further reflection on the seriousness of the invasion of privacy it represents suggests that it is a deeply personal wrong. Indeed, it is usually more serious than obtrusive surveillance by states, precisely because it is more personal. Where state surveillance genuinely is as intrusive as stalking, it tends to adopt the tactics of the stalker, imposing its presence on the activist victim at every turn. Power dynamics —whether rooted in the power of the state or the violence of a stalker —may exacerbate violations of privacy, but the wrong is distinct from violence, threats of violence and other aggression. Nor is stalking a simple expression of a difference in power between stalker and victim, such as a difference due to gender.

Jecker’s paper focuses on the value of sex and sexuality in the lives of older people, and she argues that there is nothing wrong with the use of sex robots to realise that value. She concedes that sex robots marketed today are overwhelmingly designed for heterosexual males, and that their appearance corresponds to certain objectionable stereotypes of sexually attractive women, and of exciting sexual practices. Still, she says, sex robots do not have to be like that, and a less stereotype-ridden design could take away the sexism, heterosexualism and ageism of current ones. I am sympathetic to these conclusions. But I believe that they are not general enough, and I want to take issue with the argumentative strategy that leads to them. The conclusions are not general enough, because disability or bad circumstantial luck can lead to the damaging absence of sex in the lives of people from many adult age groups, not just people in their 70s and 80s. Jecker’s paper starts with the case of couples whose sex life deteriorates with old age. But there are also many people, whether disabled or not, who fail to acquire a sex life, and who want one, sometimes desperately. They, too, have a problem that a suitable sex robot might help …

This chapter examines the role of experience in Thomas Hobbes’ science of politics. Although Hobbes claims for his own formulation of civil philosophy a kind of definitiveness and certainty that only geometry has among the sciences, and although both geometry and civil philosophy are supposed to be the products of reason, where reason excludes experience (sense and memory), the necessity of establishing and submitting to the commonwealth is open to a certain sort of confirmation from experience. This is not because Hobbes concedes cognitive authority to sense and memory after all, but because civil philosophy has a rhetorical purpose that a certain kind of appeal to experience helps to achieve.

Digilantism is punishment through online exposure of supposed wrongdoing. Paedophile hunting is one example, and the practice is open to many of the classical objections to vigilantism. But it lies on a spectrum that contains many other kinds of digilantism. Scambaiting is among the other kinds. It consists of attracting online approaches from perpetrators of different kinds of online advance-fee fraud. Characteristically, it takes the form of protracted email exchanges between scammers and scambaiters. These exchanges are mainly down-to-earth and occasionally testy conversations about the details of fictitious money transfers or involved explanations of delays in payment. They succeed in their purpose if they waste a lot of their targets’ time, but they can also be pursued as a sort of comic art form. Scambaiting exchanges seem often, but not always, to be relatively harmless. They therefore help to make intelligible a region of morally permissible digilantism on the spectrum of digilantism. Not that scambaiters never go too far, but their typical weapons inflict and risk inflicting far less harm than those of other digilantes, and there are actual scambaiting norms that have been chosen because of their relative harmlessness.

Mass-marketing frauds are on the increase. Given the amount of monies lost and the psychological impact of MMFs there is an urgent need to develop new and effective methods to prevent more of these crimes. This paper reports the early planning of automated methods our interdisciplinary team are developing to prevent and detect MMF. Importantly, the paper presents the ethical and social constraints involved in such a model and suggests concerns others might also consider when developing automated systems.

`Modern' philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or `modern' philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies have more in common than the orthodox account suggests. In two survey articles and thirteen essays on individual philosophers, the contributors show that the rise of modern philosophy was much more complicated and much more interesting than is usually thought. They consider not only metaphysics and the sciences but also claims of Machievelli, Hobbes and Spinoza to have invented `modern' ethics and politics. These two aspects of `modernity' in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant.

Thomas Hobbes might seem an unlikely source for a theory of emergency powers applicable to liberal democracies in our own day. He advocated the concentration of political, judicial, economic and military authority, and was in favour of great latitude for a monarch or assembly in the choice of means to security. His theory demands absolute submission to law on the part of citizens, with no constitutional limitations on what laws can require. 1 The same theory demands preventive measures against sedition, and has a very expansive conception of seditious behavior. What is more, the concentration of power with wide discretion is supposed to be politics as usual.

William Of Ockham Quodlibetal Questions Vols. 1 and 2 translated by Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Kelley, Yale University Press 1991. ISBN 0–300–04832–7 (set) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. III: The Correspondence trans. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny Cambridge University Press, 1991, xviii + 412 pp Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction by Emily R. Grosholz, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1991. viii + 161 pp Cartesian Logic: An Essay on Descartes's Conception of Inference by Stephen Gaukroger, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1989. viii + 145 pp La philosophie d'Antoine Arnauld by A. R. Ndiaye, Paris: J. Vrin, 1991. 376 pp Stuart Brown, ed. Nicolas Malebranche: His Philosophical Critics and Successors Assen: Van Gorcum, 1991, 173 pp The Equality of the Sexes by François Poulain de la Barre, Classics of Philosophy and Science, translated with an introduction and notes by Desmond M. Clarke, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1990, pp. 149, £35.00 Expérience et Raison: les Fondements de la Morale selon Locke by J. M. Vienne, Paris, Vrin, 1991, 298 pp Rezension der Schrift: ‘Britische Gassendi‐Rezeption am Beispiel John Lockes’ von Rolf W. Puster, (Quaestiones. Themen und Gestalten der Philosophie 3), Friedrich Frommann Verlag. Stuttgart‐Bad Cannstatt 1991 (168 Seiten) The Light of the Soul Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche and Descartes by Nicholas Jolley, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990. pp. x + 209 The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay On the Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself by Donald Phillip Verene, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. pp. xi + 263. Price £30.00 The Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1992, £30.00 h/b, £10.95 pb Kant and his Influence ed. by G. MacDonald Ross and T. McWalter, Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990. pp. xv + 374. £40.00 Menachem Fisch William Whewell: Philosopher of Science Oxford: Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press), 1991. pp. xiv + 220. £30. ISBN 0 19 824240 9 Bradley: A Research Bibliography by Richard Ingardia. Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1991. pp. 195. US$35. ISBN 0–912632–88–7 Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship by Nicholas Griffin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. pp. xiv + 410. Price £45.00.

Contemporary experimental philosophers sometimes use versions of an argument from the history of philosophy to defend the claim that what they do is philosophy. Although experimental philosophers conduct surveys and carry out what appear to be experiments in psychology, making them methodologically different from most analytic philosophers working today, techniques like theirs were not out of the ordinary in the philosophy of the past, early modern philosophy in particular. Or so some of them argue. This paper disputes the argument, citing important differences between early modern philosopher-scientists – Descartes, Hobbes and Boyle – and their supposed modern counterparts. Although there is some continuity between early modern philosopher-scientists and the contemporary experimentalists, it is mostly a continuity of interest in empirically informed philosophy, not a distinctively experimental philosophy

This is an introduction to a special number of Midwest Studies discussing the 2008 global financial crisis and the ethical issues it raised. The immediate origins of the crisis are discussed, as are some of the exotic financial instruments involved, and some of the strategies for valuing and trading these instruments. This is necessary background for attributions of moral responsibility and blame to both individuals and institutions in the American financial system and its counterparts elsewhere in the developed world.

There is something intuitively correct about singling out emergency workers for legal protection, and for criminalizing not just assault, but obstruction. Moreover, at least one sophisticated theory of right and wrong--Scanlon's--indicates some deep reasons for endorsing these intuitions. After applying Scanlon's theory in the relevant way, I want to argue that the grounds it provides for recent Scottish legislation and UK sentencing guidelines can also be given for punishing more severely offences that current English law trivialises

This article considers the relation between public and private morality as a stumbling block to a unified moral theory, and therefore as a source of skepticism about moral theory. It aims to show that some of the difficulties for theory in this area are a product of assuming that private morality has a certain priority over the public, and that moral life is unitary. These assumptions are questionable and perhaps question-begging. If they are dropped, the strength of the requirements of public morality increases, and utilitarianism and other impersonal theories appear less problematic as theories of public life, and of the relation between public and private life.

Principlism is the approach promoted by Beauchamp and Childress for addressing the ethics of medical practice. Instead of evaluating clinical decisions by means of full-scale theories from moral philosophy, Beauchamp and Childress refer people to four principles—of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Now it is one thing for principlism to be invoked in an academic literature dwelling on a stock topic of medical ethical writing: end-of-life decisions, for example. It is another when the topic lies further from the mainstream. In such cases the cost of reaching for the familiar Beauchamp and Childress framework, with its formulaic set of concerns, may be to miss something morally important. After discussing an example of the sort of academic literature I have in mind, I propose to distinguish the uses of the formulaic from the uses of the more unapologetically theoretical in applied ethics, and to suggest that the latter can make up for some of the limitations of the former. This is not to say that the more theoretical literature has no limitations of its own, or that it should take the place of the formulaic. On the contrary, there is room in applied ethics and a use in applied ethics for both. But there is a sense in which there is a greater dependence of principlism on theory than the other way round, and at the end I try to spell out the significance of this fact.

It is possible to defend the death penalty for aggravated murder in more than one way, and not every defence is equally compelling. The paper takes up arguments put forward by two very distinguished advocates of the death penalty, Mill and Kant. After reviewing Mill's argument and some weaknesses in it, I shall sketch another line of reasoning that combines his conclusion with premisses to be found in Kant. The hybrid argument provides at least the basis for a sound defence of execution for the most serious murders.

The two ideals referred to are the ideal of the just state and the ideal of responsible agency. The view of Kant was that not every civil state could rightfully take the life of those that commit murder because not every civil state recognises the freedom, equality, and independence of citizens in the idealised civil state envisioned by Kant. The question is whether the death penalty can be justified in a properly constituted state even if most of the civil states in the world that apply the death penalty are guilty of injustice. Kant's argument does not support the death penalty for even the worst crimes if it is unjustly legislated or unjustly administered. These arguments add weight to arguments against the death penalty. The more severe the penalty, the stronger the safeguards ought to be against its wrongful imposition. In addition to the just state, the ideal of responsible agency impinges on the death penalty. People are able to satisfy the ideal of responsible agency only if they rise above the threshold for being minimally responsible or if they rise above the threshold for being able to be held responsible. They must be able to take --by claiming-- responsibility. The ideal of responsible agency governs not only the execution of intention, but also deliberation before and after the action. A willingness to take the consequences is necessary for full-blown responsible agency. The worldly ideal does not rule out the death penalty because even in an imperfect world it does not cancel out the force of the ideal of responsible agency.

The sense in which Hobbes produced a science of politics is often misunderstood. It was not a science because it was derived somehow from scientific psychology or mechanics. It was not a science in the sense that he broke down states into their component systems and their properties. Instead, it is a normative doctrine. It states precepts for citizens to escape the condition of total war, and it states precepts for sovereigns to legislate well (frame "good laws" in the sense of Leviathan, ch. 30.) The normativity of Hobbes's science is often missed. It contributes to what I call the "autonomy" of Hobbes politics within his system.