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This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2020-119791RA-I00; RTI2018-098882-B-I00), the Polish National Science Centre (2020/36/C/HS5/00111; 2017/25/N/HS5/00944), the Swiss National Science Foundation (PZ00P1_179912), and the European Research Council (805498)., Data, Materials, and Software Availability. Anonymized study data, analysis scripts, and stimuli (including translations) have been deposited in the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/yw8ek/), A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges., European Research Council 805498, Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung PZ00P1_179912, Narodowe Centrum Nauki 2017/25/N/HS5/00944, 2020/36/C/HS5/00111, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación PID2020-119791RA-I00, RTI2018-098882-B-I00

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom.

According to L. A. Paul (2014), transformative experiences pose a challenge for decision theory, as their subjective value is not epistemically accessible. However, several authors propose that the subjective values of options are often irrelevant to their ranking; in many cases, all we need for rational transformative decision-making are the known non-subjective values. This stance is in conflict with Paul’s argument that the subjective value can always swamp the non-subjective value. The approach presented in this paper takes Paul’s argument into account and shows how potential swamping can be controlled given that one desires the transformative outcome: If one knows from previous decisions that desired transformative outcomes are associated with positive subjective value and if, in addition, testimony confirms this association for the current decision situation, one can infer that a desired outcome’s expected subjective value has a positive valence. Accordingly, one can rationally choose the desired transformative option if its non-subjective value is no lower than the overall value of any other option.

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia contains one of the earliest and best-known criticisms of John Rawls’s theory of justice in general and the difference principle in particular. The discussion of Nozick’s critique of Rawls in the literature has focused on his argument against “patterned” conceptions of justice, of which the difference principle as Nozick understands it constitutes merely one version among others. In this article I consider the objection Nozick raises against the difference principle specifically, namely that it unfairly favors the “worse endowed” over the “better endowed” members of society. I argue that Nozick’s charge of unfairness against the difference principle is ambiguous between two distinct interpretations of the difference principle and as such divides into two distinct objections, the pre-cooperative and the cooperative fairness objection. I then argue that neither of these two interpretations of the difference principle represents the actual, Rawlsian difference principle accurately and that, more fundamentally, Nozick lacks the concept of politics as the distinctive moral category implicitly at work in Rawls’s theory of justice. Not as much of Nozick’s charge of unfairness against the difference principle therefore remains on reflection as may have appeared at first sight.

This article contributes to normative debates about residential segregation and its relationship to inequality. It defends a position often disregarded in literature: that there is merit to advancing residential integration through some scenarios where advantaged individuals move to disadvantaged areas. It develops this case in dialogue with three other views. In relation to advocates of addressing the inequalities of residential segregation through redistribution, it defends integration as a means of tackling social and political factors that sustain injustice. It challenges those who defend relocating disadvantaged individuals to advantaged areas by highlighting the burdens and demand for cultural assimilation this imposes on the disadvantaged. It considers the worry that advantaged individuals relocating to disadvantaged areas harbours the problematic features of gentrification. It responds that these concerns, while important in some cases, do not arise in all scenarios of this kind.

In two experiments (total N = 693), we explored whether people are willing to consider paintings made by AI-driven robots as art , and robots as artists . Across the two experiments, we manipulated three factors: (i) agent type (AI-driven robot vs. human agent), (ii) behavior type (intentional creation of a painting vs. accidental creation), and (iii) object type (abstract vs. representational painting). We found that people judge robot paintings and human paintings as art to roughly the same extent. However, people are much less willing to consider robots as artists than humans, which is partially explained by the fact that they are less disposed to attribute artistic intentions to robots.

This article offers a functionalist account of trust. It argues that a particular form of trust—Communicated Interpersonal Trust—is paradigmatic and lays out how trust as a social practice in this form helps to satisfy fundamental practical, deliberative, and relational human needs in mutually reinforcing ways. We then argue that derivative (non-paradigmatic) forms of trust connect to the paradigm by generating a positive dynamic between trustor and trustee that is geared towards the realization of these functions. We call this trust’s proleptic potential. Our functionalist approach does not only provide important insights into the practice of trust and its place in the broader web of social life, but also illuminates existing philosophical debates. First, pointing out how opposing theoretical accounts of trust each capitalise on only one of its functions, our paradigm-based approach reveals why they each contain a kernel of truth but are also deficient: the optimal realization of each function is tied to the existence of the other functions as well. Second, we show how a functionalist re-orientation can illuminate two recent disputes regarding (i) the question whether trust is explanatorily two- or three-place and (ii) whether (and to what extent) we can decide to trust others.

Over the past decade, countries such as France, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Latvia, and Bulgaria have banned face-coverings from public spaces. These bans are popularly known as ‘burqa bans’ as they seem to have been drafted with the aim of preventing people from wearing burqas and niqabs specifically. The scholarly response to these bans has been overwhelmingly negative, with several lawyers and philosophers arguing that they violate the human right to freedom of religion. While this article shares some of the concerns that have been raised, it argues that banning face-coverings in public is morally justified under certain conditions with the exception of facemasks that are necessary for the containment of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. The reason for this is that those who publicly cover their face make it very difficult for other members of society to socially interact with them, especially for those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, which is problematic in an age where many people are chronically lonely or at risk of becoming chronically lonely. As such, this article can be understood as a more elaborate, and arguably more sophisticated, defence of the justification that France offered for its face-covering ban before the European Court of Human Rights, namely that covering one’s face undermines the conditions for ‘living together’.

Conceptual engineering is thought to face an ‘implementation challenge’: the challenge of securing uptake of engineered concepts. But is the fact that implementation is challenging really a defect to be overcome? What kind of picture of political life would be implied by making engineering easy to implement? We contend that the ambition to obviate the implementation challenge goes against the very idea of liberal democratic politics. On the picture we draw, the implementation challenge can be overcome by institutionalizing control over conceptual uptake, and there are contexts – such as professions that depend on coordinated conceptual innovation – in which there are good reasons to institutionalize control in this fashion. But the liberal fear of this power to control conceptual uptake ending up in the wrong hands, combined with the democratic demand for freedom of thought as a precondition of genuine consent, yields a liberal democratic rationale for keeping implementation challenging.

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question - also explored in the experiment - whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook.

The research was supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation grant (PZ00P1_179912, PI Markus Kneer). Data and materials are available on the Open Science Framework at: osf.io/dpsq9/?view_only=54a7c150e03d4d78819b2954cee3a240., At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels--but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favored utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas—and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people’s robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how hypothetical scenarios in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) should strive for more experiential and psychological realism, otherwise their results might not generalize to real-world moral dilemmas., Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) European Commission PZ00P1_179912

Introduction: ‘Illiberal’ is an adjective that is commonly used within contemporary legal, political, and philosophical scholarship. For example, authors might speak of ‘illiberal cultures’,1 ‘illiberal groups’,2 ‘illiberal states’,3 ‘illiberal democracies’,4 ‘illiberal beliefs’,5 and ‘illiberal practices’.6 Yet despite its widespread usage, no in-depth discussions exist of exactly what it means for someone or something to be illiberal, or might mean. This article fills this lacuna by providing a conceptual analysis of the term ‘illiberal practices’, which I argue is basic in that other bearers of the property of being illiberal can be understood by reference to it. Specifically, I identify five ways in which a practice can be illiberal based on the different ways in which this term is employed within both scholarly and political discourses. The main value of this disaggregation lies in the fact that it helps to prevent confusions that arise when people use the adjective ‘illiberal’ in different ways, as is not uncommon.

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag diskutiert ausgehend vom Hospiz- und Palliativgesetz (2015) Fragen der Gerechtigkeit in der Gesundheits- und insbesondere in der Palliativversorgung. Die Logik einer gerechten Verteilung nach Bedarf in solidarischen Gemeinschaften wird zunächst gerechtigkeitstheoretisch rekonstruiert. Die Frage der nachvollziehbaren Feststellung des Versorgungsbedarfs erweist sich so als zentrale Gerechtigkeitsfrage. Um aber palliative Versorgungsbedarfe festzustellen, braucht es Vorstellungen eines Normalverlaufs des Sterbens. Auf dieser Grundlage sich etablierende Vorstellungen des „guten Sterbens“ stehen dann in der Gefahr, die Selbstbestimmung von Patientinnen und Patienten zu gefährden. Als besonders schwierig erweist sich die Festlegung eines nachvollziehbaren Versorgungsbedarfs in stark von individuellen Vorstellungen geprägten Lebensbereichen, z. B. wenn es um psycho-soziale und spirituelle Versorgungsbedarfe geht. Das darf aber nicht dazu führen, dass in diesen Bereichen keine Angebote der palliativen Versorgung vorgehalten werden, wie es derzeit im Bereich der allgemeinen Palliativversorgung weitgehend der Fall ist.

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has placed intensive care units (ICU) triage at the center of bioethical discussions. National and international triage guidelines emerged from professional and governmental bodies and have led to controversial discussions about which criteria—e.g. medical prognosis, age, life-expectancy or quality of life—are ethically acceptable. The paper presents the main points of agreement and disagreement in triage protocols and reviews the ethical debate surrounding them. Sources of data Published articles, news articles, book chapters, ICU triage guidelines set out by professional societies and health authorities. Areas of agreement Points of agreement in the guidelines that are widely supported by ethical arguments are (i) to avoid using a first come, first served policy or quality-adjusted life-years and (ii) to rely on medical prognosis, maximizing lives saved, justice as fairness and non-discrimination. Areas of controversy Points of disagreement in existing guidelines and the ethics literature more broadly regard the use of exclusion criteria, the role of life expectancy, the prioritization of healthcare workers and the reassessment of triage decisions. Growing points Improve outcome predictions, possibly aided by Artificial intelligence (AI); develop participatory approaches to drafting, assessing and revising triaging protocols; learn from experiences with implementation of guidelines with a view to continuously improve decision-making. Areas timely for developing research Examine the universality vs. context-dependence of triaging principles and criteria; empirically test the appropriateness of triaging guidelines, including impact on vulnerable groups and risk of discrimination; study the potential and challenges of AI for outcome and preference prediction and decision-support.

Faced with relatively old and ageing populations, a growing number of higher-income countries are struggling to provide affordable and decent care to their older citizens. This contribution proposes a new policy for dealing with this challenge. Under certain conditions, I argue that states should pay their citizens to move to foreign care homes in order to ease the pressure on domestic care institutions. This is the case if—but not necessarily only if—(1) a significant proportion of resident citizens do not currently have access to adequate aged and nursing care; (2) the care in the foreign care homes is not worse than the one that is available in domestic care homes; (3) sending states conduct regular checks to ascertain that the level of care abroad is not worse or delegate this task to reliable local monitoring bodies; (4) appropriate measures have been taken to ensure that this type of migration does not harm local residents; and (5) the public money spent on the payments is not better spent on other ways of easing the pressure on domestic care institutions. I end by defending the proposed payments against the objection that they create morally problematic inequalities by exerting greater pressure on members of lower socioeconomic classes to migrate than on their more affluent compatriots.

Predictability is a prerequisite for effective human control of artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the inability to predict the malfunctioning of AI impedes timely human intervention. In this paper, we employ a computerized navigation task, a lunar lander game, to investigate empirically how AI's predictability compares to humans' predictability. To this end, we ask participants to guess whether the landings of a spaceship in this game performed by AI and humans will succeed. We show that humans are worse at predicting AI performance than at predicting human performance in this environment. Significantly, participants underestimate the differences in the relative predictability of AI and, at times, overestimate their prediction skills. We link the difference in predictability to differences in the approaches, i.e. different landing patterns, employed by AI and humans to succeed in the task. These results highlight important differences in perception of AI and human with implications for human-computer interaction.

Psychedelics are experiencing a renaissance in mental healthcare. In recent years, more and more early phase trials on psychedelic-assisted therapy have been conducted, with promising results overall. However, ethical analyses of this rediscovered form of treatment remain rare. The present paper contributes to the ethical inquiry of psychedelic-assisted therapy by analysing the ethical implications of its therapeutic mechanisms proposed by the relaxed beliefs under psychedelics (REBUS) hypothesis. In short, the REBUS hypothesis states that psychedelics make rigid beliefs revisable by increasing the influence of bottom-up input. Put differently, patients become highly suggestible and sensitive to context during a psychedelic session, amplifying therapeutic influence and effects. Due to that, patients are more vulnerable in psychedelic-assisted therapy than in other therapeutic interventions; they lose control during a psychedelic session and become dependent on the therapeutic setting (including the therapist). This enhanced vulnerability is ethically relevant and has been exploited by some therapists in the past. Therefore, patients in current research settings and starting mainstream medical settings need to be well informed about psychedelics’ mechanisms and their implications to give valid informed consent to treatment. Furthermore, other security measures are warranted to protect patients from the vulnerability coming with psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Although collegial relationships are among the most prevalent types of interpersonal relationships in our lives, they have not been the subject of much philosophical study. In this paper, we take the first step in the process of developing an ethics of collegiality by establishing what qualifies two people as colleagues and then by determining what it is that gives value to collegial relationships. We argue that A and B are colleagues if both exhibit sameness regarding at least two of the following three features: (i) the same work content or domain of activity; (ii) the same institutional affiliation or common purpose; and/or (iii) the same status or level of responsibility. Moreover, we describe how the potential value of collegial relationships is grounded in the relationship goods that two colleagues have reason to generate qua colleagues, namely, collegial solidarity and collegial recognition. Two interesting conclusions that can be drawn from our analysis are that one has to be proficient at one’s work if one is to be considered a good colleague and that we are also more likely to be better colleagues if we regard the work we do as valuable. Finally, we draw special attention to the working conditions that are conducive to the generation of good collegial relationships and suggest some policies to promote them.

As people grow old, many risk becoming chronically lonely which is associated with e.g. depression, dementia, and increased mortality. Whoever else should help to protect them from this risk, various philosophers have argued that any children that they might have will often be among them. Proceeding on this assumption, this article considers what filial duties to protect ageing parents from loneliness consist of, or might consist of. I develop my answer by showing that a view that may be intuitively plausible, namely that they simply require children to visit their ageing parents regularly when they can do so at reasonable cost and call, text, and/or email them from time to time, is defective in three respects. First, it ignores children’s potential responsibilities to encourage and/or facilitate social interaction between their parents and third parties. Second, it ignores their potential responsibilities to help provide their parents with non-human companionship. Third, it elides over their duties to coordinate their efforts to offer loneliness protection with others. What I end up proposing instead, then, is an approach for protecting ageing parents from loneliness that is multi-faceted.

One consequence of the lockdowns that many countries have introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is that people have become more vulnerable to loneliness. In this contribution, I argue that even if this does not render lockdowns unjustified, it is morally incumbent upon states to make reasonable efforts to protect their residents from loneliness for as long as their social confinement measures remain in place. Without attempting to provide an exhaustive list of ways in which this might be done, I identify four broad measures that I believe many, if not most, states ought to take. These require states to (i) help ensure that people have affordable access to the internet, as well as opportunities for learning how to use this medium so as that they can digitally connect to others; (ii) help people to have harmonious and rewarding intimate relationships; and try to make (iii) non-human companionship as well as (iv) various non-social solutions to loneliness widely available.

This essay examines three potential arguments against high-frequency trading and offers a qualified critique of the practice. In concrete terms, it examines a variant of high-frequency trading that is all about speed—low-latency trading—in light of moral issues surrounding arbitrage, information asymmetries, and systemic risk. The essay focuses on low-latency trading and the role of speed because it also aims to show that the commonly made assumption that speed in financial markets is morally neutral is wrong. For instance, speed is a necessary condition for low-latency trading’s potential to cause harm in “flash crashes.” On the other hand, it also plays a crucial role in a Lockean defense against low-latency trading being wasteful developed in this essay. Finally, this essay discusses the implications of these findings for related high-frequency trading techniques like futures arbitrage or latency arbitrage—as well as for an argument as to why quote stuffing is wrong. Overall, the qualifications offered in this essay act as a counterbalance to overblown claims about trading at high speeds being wrong.