Ethcis

Philosophy of Religion provides a critical examination of the central philosophical issues associated with religion. Topics may include such things as the existence and nature of a deity, good and evil, miracles, souls, life after death, and revelations and may include such relationships as those between myth and religion, religious experience and justification, faith and knowledge, and between religious beliefs and moral conduct. 

A central theme for the course this semester will be an analysis of the relation between logical argumentation and first person lived experience. What happens when/if reason and experience contradict each other? This will include applying the tools of philosophy to real world issues surrounding some of the most all-pervasive questions of human existence: why are we here? Where did we come from? What should we do? A significant portion of the class will also cover the problem of suffering with the obvious connection to the current pandemic.

Climate change constitutes one of the most pressing problems of global justice. However, despite the recent success of the international negotiations embodied in the Paris Agreement, most scientists and activists agree that the adopted measures are not adequate or ‘just’ considering the magnitude of the problem. To make matters worse, the announced withdrawal of the US from the agreement threatens to further erode the path towards a sustainable and fair future. On the contrary, the European Union for most of the time has presented itself as a strong advocate for progressive climate action and has been called a climate vanguard or ‘green normative power’. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the EU’s role concerning climate change from a perspective of global political justice. Building on a tripartite theoretical conception of justice, consisting of ‘non-domination’, ‘impartiality’ and ‘mutual recognition’, it inquires whether the EU’s climate strategy and approach to the international negotiations indeed can be considered just and which conceptions of justice have been central. The paper finds that after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, the EU has increasingly shifted from mainly relying on strategies linked to an impartial understanding of justice towards those that resemble mutual recognition and non-domination. While this shift was in parts necessary to move forward the international regime, it eventually could become detrimental concerning the quest for global climate justice.

Suicide has traditionally been silenced by media, following experts recommendations pointing to a possible induction of imitative behaviour in the population. However, this position has recently changed and psychologists and psychiatrists, in addition to the World Health Organization (WHO), request the media to rise awareness about this serious social problem aiming to fight it. Every year, more than 800,000 people commit suicide in the world, which means that one person
dies every 40 seconds. Therefore, we depart from a new and apparently agreed upon approach: we must inform. This position being accepted, it is very important to define the limits and the terms. Bibliography on this topic is scarce, only existing one self-regulation reference written by health professionals and journalists in Spain (2018). The aim of this research
is to analyze the information on suicide published on the first five months of 2019 by the two main general newspapers in Spain by applying the Code of Ethics on the Treatment of Suicide in the Media promoted by the Association of Journalists of the Balearic Islands. The results show an improvable practice as well as concurring errors remediable to
satisfy the demands of organizations, family members and victims by means of responsible and useful journalism.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has spread across industries (e.g., business, science, art, education) to enhance user experience, improve work efficiency, and create many future job opportunities. However, public understanding of AI technologies and how to define AI literacy is under-explored. This vision poses upcoming challenges for our next generation to learn about AI. On this note, an exploratory review was conducted to conceptualize the newly emerging concept "AI literacy", in search for a sound theoretical foundation to define, teach and evaluate AI literacy. Grounded in literature on 30 existing peer-reviewed articles, this review proposed four aspects (i.e., know and understand, use and apply, evaluate and create, and ethical issues) for fostering AI literacy based on the adaptation of classic literacies. This study sheds light on the consolidated definition, teaching, and ethical concerns on AI literacy, establishing the groundwork for future research such as competency development and assessment criteria on AI literacy.

In this article I try to show in what sense Emmanuel Levinas’ ‘ethics as first philosophy’ moves our ethical thinking away from what has been called ‘centrist ethics’. Proceeding via depictions of the structure of Levinasian ethics and including references to examples as well as to some empirical research, I try to argue that human beings always already find themselves within an ethical universe, a space of meaning. Critically engaging with the writings of David Gunkel and Lucas Introna, I try to argue that these thinkers, rather than clarifying, distort our ethical understanding of how we stand in relation to artefacts. Drawing a distinction between how pervasive our ethical relationship to other human beings, and living animals, is and how the nature of artefacts is tied to us, I conclude by indicating that the aspiration to give artefacts an ethical face suggests a fantasy to avoid ethical responsibility and generates what I call a ‘compensatory logic’.

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhib...

No presente ensaio problematizaremos o amor a partir dos entrecruzamentos furtivos e transhistóricos entre o apanágio polêmico do erotismo, como interpretado por Jean-Pierre Vernant no texto “Figures féminines de la mort en Grèce” (VERNANT, 2011, pp.131-152), e o caráter transfigurador dos vínculos amorosos que irrompem na espontaneidade dos encontros insurgentes, os quais se opõem, de acordo com Marguerite Duras no récit intitulado La Maladie de la Mort, aos direitos e deveres promulgados na instância da socialização, ou seja, às relações condicionadas pelo contrato. Mais precisamente, o nosso ensaio é uma tentativa de (1) apontar a relevância do amor para a Antiguidade arcaica, tanto no que se refere ao enfrentamento da efemeridade própria à vida humana, quanto no que tange à busca por distinção mediante a realização da bela morte; e de (2) mostrar a importância e a urgência de se pensar, na contemporaneidade, o amor como um ato que se atrela à potencialidade ético-política da existência, cuja estetização se cumpre pelo abandono em relação àquilo que insiste em permanecer o mesmo.

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhib...

The phenomenon of cross-border reproductive care raises a number of sensitive and cutting edge problems, both from a legal, as well as from an ethical perspective. The objective of this contribution is to tackle some of them by means of a case study which entails five examples of assisted reproductive technology (ART), that is to say in the field of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and/or surrogacy, all examples – except the last one – based on real court cases. This contribution covers some of the issues that can arise, mainly based on selected cases, as decided by different national or European courts (CJEU and ECtHR).

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhib...

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhib...

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhib...

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhib...