Martin González

Disregard of gender and of women’s contributions in the higher education curriculum is still a widespread phenomenon. Building on feminist institutionalism, this article explores the forms and types of resistance that efforts to engender the higher education curriculum must contend with and discusses the ways in which resistance to curricular reform is entrenched in a web of both gender-specific and apparently gender-neutral academic informal rules. In doing so, the authors use empirical evidence collected by an action-research project undertaken at a faculty of political and social sciences in a Catalan public university. The Spanish case is intriguing because mainstreaming gender in higher education has been prescribed by various national and regional laws that are nonetheless poorly implemented. The article also reflects on the positive feedback loop action-research projects can facilitate within gendered institutions such as universities and pinpoints the role of feminist agency in counteracting resistance to institutional change.

El artículo reconstruye tres estratos de un concepto de lo social que puede encontrarse en la filosofía práctica de Immanuel Kant sin recurrir a sus textos de antropología e historia. Para ello se especifican las nociones de coexistencia humana y coacción recíproca universal que describe en su Metafísica de las costumbres, con el fin de indicar que con ellas no cabe referirse a una sociedad, sino a la forma de una. Posteriormente se reconstruyen algunas coordenadas de la “comunidad ética” presentes en La religión..., para argumentar, por una parte, que aquí puede hablarse de una sociedad como tal, y por otra, que esta puede conformar un puente entre la forma de la sociedad jurídica y la formación ética de las personas, i.e., entre el uso externo de la libertad y su uso interno, al socializar máximas morales y abrigar estas una peculiar normatividad intrínseca

In this paper we present the authors’ experience of teaching a course in Ethics for Engineers, which has been delivered four times in three different universities in Spain and Chile. We begin by presenting the material context of the course, and especially the intellectual background of the participating students, in terms of their previous understanding of philosophy in general, and of ethics in particular. Next we set out the objectives of the course and the main topics addressed, as well as the methodology and teaching resources employed to have students achieve a genuine philosophical reflection on the ethical aspects of the profession, starting from their own mindset as engineers. Finally we offer some results based on opinion surveys of the students, as well as a more personal assessment by the authors, recapitulating the most significant achievements of the course and indicating its underlying Socratic structure

Is ethics a computable function? Can machines learn ethics like humans do? If teaching consists in no more than programming, training, indoctrinating… and if ethics is merely following a code of conduct, then yes, we can teach ethics to algorithmic machines. But if ethics is not merely about following a code of conduct or about imitating the behavior of others, then an approach based on computing outcomes, and on the reduction of ethics to the compilation and application of a set of rules, either a priori or learned, misses the point. Our intention is not to solve the technical problem of machine ethics, but to learn something about human ethics, and its rationality, by reflecting on the ethics that can and should be implemented in machines. Any machine ethics implementation will have to face a number of fundamental or conceptual problems, which in the end refer to philosophical questions, such as: what is a human being (or more generally, what is a worthy being); what is human intentional acting; and how are intentional actions and their consequences morally evaluated. We are convinced that a proper understanding of ethical issues in AI can teach us something valuable about ourselves, and what it means to lead a free and responsible ethical life, that is, being good people beyond merely “following a moral code”. In the end we believe that rationality must be seen to involve more than just computing, and that value rationality is beyond numbers. Such an understanding is a required step to recovering a renewed rationality of ethics, one that is urgently needed in our highly technified society.

An engineer who becomes an educator in a school of software engineering has the mission to teach how to design and construct software systems, therein applying his or her knowledge and expertise. However, due to their engineering background, engineers may forget that educating a person is not the same as designing a machine, since a machine has a well-defined goal, whilst a person is capable to self-propose his or her own objectives. The ethical implications are clear: educating a free person must leave space for creativity and self-determination in his or her own discovery of the way towards personal and professional fulfillment, which cannot consist only in achieving goals selected by others. We present here an argument that is applicable to most fields of engineering. However, the dis-analogy between educating students and programming robots may have a particular appeal to software engineers and computer scientists. We think the consideration of three different stages in the educational process may be useful to engineers when they act as educators. We claim that the three stages are essential to engineering education. In particular, education is incomplete if the third stage is not reached. Moreover, mentoring is incompatible with an educational assessment framework that considers the goals of the engineer are always given by others. In our view, then, an integral education is not only beyond programming the behavior of students, but also beyond having them reach those given goals.

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics.

Se reflexiona sobre las fuentes de la normatividad según el neokantismo contemporáneo que ha dividido a los neokantianos en realistas y constructivistas. Se analiza el kantismo constructivista de Christine Korsgaard, para mostrar sus alcances y limitaciones, y se propone como alternativa fundar la normatividad en la sola idea de libertad, en cuanto valor interno o absoluto no normativo, como la entiende Kant. Esta propuesta que permite esbozar las líneas de un neokantismo que articule los modelos constructivistas y realistas a partir de la sola idea de libertad. The article carries out a reflection on the sources of normativity in contemporary Neo-Kantianism, which has divided Neo-Kantians into realists and constructivists. After analyzing the constructivist Kantianism of Christine Korsgaard, we propose an alternative: that of grounding normativity solely on the idea of freedom, as an internal value or non-normative absolute, as Kant understands it. This proposal makes it possible to outline a Neo-Kantianism that articulates constructivist and realist models on the sole basis of the idea of freedom.

The article suggests that the Kantian account of mental illnesses is part of his study of logic in an attempt to claim, above all, that they hinder the training of attention, which will later allow us to publicly pursue knowledge. To this, the author elucidates the epistemic place that Kant gives to attention (_Aufmerksamkeit_)_ _in his transcendental, metaphysical, and anthropological remarks, given the important role it plays in the public elaboration of knowledge. Addressing the place that Kant gives to mental weaknesses and illnesses in his anthropology lessons, the article sheds light on some correlations between these pathologies and attention, considering that mental weaknesses, as well as, mental illnesses warp, or are caused by, the fragile attention with which we direct our thoughts. This permits to shed light on a Kantian ideal related to the sovereignty of our attention, understood as a condition of possibility of the individual autonomy.

We report a scanning tunnelling microscopy investigation of the emission of dislocations around nanoindentations in the form of dislocation arrangements previously called hillocks , consisting of two pairs of Shockley partial dislocations, each encompassing a stacking fault. The spatial arrangement and size distribution of hillocks around the nanoindentation traces are studied. We show that standard dislocation theory for an isotropic continuum can be used to describe the stability of the hillocks, their size and spatial distribution and the broadening of the corresponding extended dislocations near the surface. A model is proposed in which hillocks originate from the split into dislocations partials of primary perfect dislocation loops punched into the crystal by the scanning tunnelling microscope tip. This model implies the operation of a novel dislocation mechanism involving long-range transport of matter across the surface

La intensa discusión que mantienen los constructivistas y realistas en torno a si Kant habría asumido una teoría de valor “proyeccionista” o “detectivista”, ha puesto al desnudo las insuficiencias del lenguaje y los términos empleados. Lo que podríamos llamar “lenguaje de Eutifrón”, no parece abrigar la suficiente sensibilidad como para capturar la singularidad de la ética kantiana. Ciertamente, Kant realiza afirmaciones proyeccionistas y detectivistas, y esto se debe a que su enfoque acerca de la normatividad posee componentes tanto constructivistas como realistas. En virtud de ello, el presente trabajo defiende la tesis de que la ética kantiana asume una teoría “constitutivista” del valor, la cual, en pocas palabras, entiende que las fuentes de la normatividad y el valor son construcciones reflexivas del agente que implican, al mismo tiempo, y de forma performativa, la asunción realista de la libertad en cuanto que valor absoluto.

Se reflexiona sobre las fuentes de la normatividad según el neokantismo contempo ráneo que ha dividido a los neokantianos en realistas y constructivistas. Se analiza el kantismo constructivista de Christine Korsgaard, para mostrar sus alcances y li mitaciones, y se propone como alternativa fundar la normatividad en la sola idea de libertad, en cuanto valor interno o absoluto no normativo, como la entiende Kant. Esta propuesta que permite esbozar las líneas de un neokantismo que articule los modelos constructivistas y realistas a partir de la sola idea de libertad.