Tom Sorell

Risk assessment tools are increasingly used in policing to enhance decision-making accuracy and objectivity; yet their implementation has raised significant ethical concerns regarding issues of bias, transparency, and governance. This paper examines the ethical complexities of risk assessment tools through an analysis of four instruments: the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), previously developed and used by Durham Constabulary; the Active Risk Management System (ARMS), used across all police forces in England and Wales; the Offender Assessment System (OASys), used to profile risk of reoffending by probation services in the UK; and the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), a widely researched tool deployed in US corrections contexts whose ethical challenges are directly relevant to tools now entering policing practice. A thematic framework identifies 10 key challenges for the field, including disparities in accuracy metrics, fairness trade-offs, bias linked to demographics and social identity, and retraining. The paper contextualises these issues within influential roles, including tool developers, decision-makers, and oversight committees. The credible risk of ethical harms arising from the use of risk assessment tools underscores the need for rigorous validation, transparency, and adaptive governance to minimise these risks. This paper arises from a meeting of an interdisciplinary working group convened at Ethox, University of Oxford, comprising academics in philosophy, law, psychology, psychiatry, and criminology, as well as police stakeholders.

Tom Sorell's book concerns not simply capital punishment but the use of philosophical theories of right and wrong. He argues that such theories are not to be regarded as giving expert knowledge of value, still less a definite technique for resolving practical dilemmas. Instead, they improve moral rhetoric and raise the standard of persuasive speech for and against capital punishment, abortion and euthanasia by introducing higher standards of justification for claims about these practices. _Moral Theory and Capital Punishment_ illustrated how philosophical theory can be applied to questions of wide public concern. It introduces the leading moral theories proposed by philosophers and derives from them a variety of arguments for and against the death penalty. The conclusion reached is that capital punishment is morally justifiable in certain cases but extremely difficult to introduce safely into general legislation.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the book, which brings together contributions from some of the most distinguished Hobbes scholars, and some promising newcomers. It is divided into three sections. The first considers how _Leviathan_ stands among Hobbes's political treatises, and whether it deserves its undoubted pre-eminence. The second section explores various connections in _Leviathan_ between the human passions and politics, including the ways in which sovereignty and subjection are responses to problems posed by the passions. And the third section takes up selected questions about the treatment in _Leviathan_ of theology and religion. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Scientia is the term that early modern philosophers applied to a certain kind of demonstrative knowledge, the kind whose starting points were appropriate first principles. In pre-modern philosophy, too, scientia was the name for demonstrative knowledge from first principles. But pre-modern and early modern conceptions differ systematically from one another. This book offers a variety of glimpses of this difference by exploring the works of individual philosophers as well as philosophical movements and groupings of the period. Some of the figures are transitional, falling neatly on neither side of the allegiances usually marked by the scholastic/modern distinction. Among the philosophers whose views on scientia are surveyed are Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Gassendi, Locke, and Jungius. The contributors are among the best-known and most influential historians of early modern philosophy.

The legal profession faces mounting pressures, including case backlogs and limited access to legal services. Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s GPT series, have been touted as potential solutions, promising to streamline tasks such as legal drafting, summarisation, analysis, and advice. Proponents argue these models can enhance efficiency, accuracy, and access to justice. However, significant risks remain. LLMs are prone to bias, factual hallucinations, and opaque reasoning processes, which can have severe consequences in high-stakes legal contexts. For responsible use in law, legal use cases must be accurately operationalised into LLM tasks that are sensitive to legal settings, as do the evaluation metrics used to evaluate LLMs performing those tasks. This paper presents a rapid literature review of LLM research in legal contexts since ChatGPT-4’s release in March 2023. We examine how legal tasks are operationalised for LLMs and what evaluation metrics are used, with a focus on how these align—or fail to align—with real-world legal practice. We argue that existing studies often overlook the institutional, organisational, and professional contexts in which these tools would be deployed. This oversight limits the practical relevance of current evaluations and proposes directions for more contextually grounded research and responsible deployment strategies.

Audio and video footage produced with the help of AI can show politicians doing discreditable things that they have not actually done. This is deepfaked material. Deepfakes are sometimes claimed to have special powers to harm the people depicted and their audiences—powers that more traditional forms of faked imagery and sound footage lack. According to some philosophers, deepfakes are particularly “believable,” and widely available technology will soon make deepfakes proliferate. I first give reasons why deepfake technology is not particularly well suited to producing “believable” political misinformation in a sense to be defined. Next, I challenge claims from Don Fallis and Regina Rini about the consequences of the wide availability of deepfakes. My argument is not that deepfakes are harmless, but that their power to do major harm is highly conditional in liberal party political environments that contain sophisticated mass-media.

In democracies, conflicts between public opinion and expert opinion can be morally and politically charged. Conflicts over vaccines are a case in point. I argue that public opinion must defer to expert scientific opinion even where this disturbs the normal presumption in favour of parental decisions over children's welfare: parenthood does not confer medical expertise. On the other hand, scientific expertise should not be asserted in ways that unnecessarily disturb co-operation between health authorities and parents in supporting children's welfare.

`Modern' philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes, whose writings, along with the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, superseded Aristotelian and scholastic science and philosophy. The contributors to this volume examine the thought of thirteen writers in all fields of philosophy and the sciences, some much studied, others relatively neglected. The essays show that the break between the `new' and the traditional philosophies is not as complete as is usually suggested.

ABSTRACT 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.

One of the commonest complaints in Britain against the current National Health Service is that business and commercial values are being allowed, and even encouraged, to dominate the more humane values involved in caring for people in their weakness. What is the situation and where are the problems, and what can Britain learn from Germany and Holland? We are grateful to the distinguished author on business ethics and member of our Editorial Board, Professor Tom Sorell, for undertaking the production of this FOCUS section of the October Review on such a sensitive and topical issue.

Both of the following can be true together: (1) Impairments make people worse off, adding to the difficulties of making a life go well; and (2) people who have impairments deserve respect. Not only are these claims consistent, but it is also natural to connect them; it is natural to say that (2) is true because(1) is true. People who need to overcome great obstacles to succeed deserve respect for trying to overcome them, let alone for succeeding. The following are also consistent with (1) and (2), and are, in my view, true:(3) Some impairments leave people less badly off than the able-bodied or minded think; (4) those with impairments are worse off than they would be if social policies were different; and (5) the basis for many if not all impairments is physical.

Philosophy written in English is overwhelmingly analytic philosophy, and the techniques and predilections of analytic philosophy are not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and hostile to textual commentary. Analytic usually aspires to a very high degree of clarity and precision of formulation and argument, and it often seeks to be informed by, and consistent with, current natural science. In an earlier era, analytic philosophy aimed at agreement with ordinary linguistic intuitions or common sense beliefs, or both. All of these aspects of the subject sit uneasily with the use of historical texts for philosophical illumination.How, then, can substantial history of philosophy find a place in analytic philosophy? If history of philosophy includes the respectful, intelligent use of writings from the past to address problems that are being debated in the current philosophical journals, then history of philosophy may well belong to analytic philosophy. But if history of philosophy is more than this; if it is concerned with interpreting and reinterpreting a certain canon, or perhaps making a case for extending this canon, its connection with analytic philosophy is less clear. More obscure still is the connection between analytic philosophy and a kind of history of philosophy that is unapologetically antiquarian. This is the kind of history of philosophy that emphasises the status of a philosophical text as one document among others from a faraway intellectual world, and that tries to acquaint us with that world in order to produce understanding of the document.In this book, ten distinguished historians of philosophy, mostly trained in the analytic tradition, explore the tensions between, and the possibilities of reconciling, analytic philosophy and history of philosophy.