This article considers lessons about American (individual-centered) anthropocentric (human-centered) thinking that can be applied to how we confer dignity and moral status to beings other than ...humans. Interestingly, global bioethics might glean such lessons from fungi.
ABSTRACT
In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, ...and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.
The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a ...difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical.
The debate on assisted dying and its components, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide has evolved with the emergence of the right to dignity and the wish to hasten death (WTHD). Whilst shaped by ...local legal and sociocultural considerations, appreciation of how patients, healthcare professionals and lawmakers relate notions of dignity to self-concepts of personhood and the desire for assisted dying will better inform and direct support of patients.
Guided by the Systematic Evidence Based Approach, a systematic scoping review (SSR in SEBA) on perspectives of dignity, WTHD and personhood featured in PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CINAHL, Scopus databases and four key Palliative Care journals was conducted. The review hinged on the following questions: “what is the relationship between dignity and the wish to hasten death (WTHD) in the assisted dying debate?”, “how is dignity conceptualised by patients with WTHD?” and “what are prevailing perspectives on the role of assisted dying in maintaining a dying patient’s dignity?”
6947 abstracts were identified, 663 full text articles reviewed, and 88 articles included. The four domains identified include 1) concepts of dignity through the lens of the Ring Theory of Personhood (RToP) including their various definitions and descriptions; 2) the relationship between dignity, WTHD and assisted dying with loss of dignity and autonomy foregrounded; 3) stakeholder perspectives for and against assisted dying including those of patient, healthcare provider and lawmaker; and 4) other dignity-conserving measures as alternatives to assisted dying.
Concepts of dignity constantly evolve throughout the patient's end of life journey. Understanding when and how these concepts of personhood change and trigger the fear of a loss of dignity or intractable suffering could direct timely, individualised and appropriate person-centred dignity conserving measures. We believe an RToP-based tool could fulfil this role and further study into the design of this tool is planned.
This thesis is about urban sociality in the context of an urban settlement in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. I explore issues of urban life through everyday stories of settlers who reside in a ...settlement (also known as a blok) at Nine Mile, Port Moresby. I present settlers' ideas of work and money through their income generating efforts as well as their perception about giving. This thesis explores settlement notions of the forms that relatedness takes through everyday interactions of eating together, sharing and thinking of one another. These actions in turn inform ideas of personhood and gender. I use blok ideas to rethink assumptions about the meaning of land and place in an urban setting. Furthermore I seek to use blok understandings of kinship, personhood and gender to portray an urban sociality that is entwined in relations.
An important philosophical tradition identifies persons as those entities that have minds, such that mind perception is a window into person perception. Psychological research has found that human ...perceptions of mind consist of at least two distinct dimensions: agency (e.g. planning, deciding) and experience (e.g. feeling, hungering). Taking this insight into the semantic space of natural language, we develop a generalizable, scalable computational-linguistics method for measuring variation in perceived agency and experience in large archives of plain-text documents. The resulting text-based rankings of entities along these dimensions correspond to human judgments of perceived agency and experience assessed in blind surveys. We then map both dimensions of mind in historical English-language corpora over the last 200 years and identify two salient trends. First, we find that while women are now described as having similar levels of agency as men, they are still described as more experience-oriented. Second, we find that domesticated animals have gained higher attributions of experience (but not agency) relative to wild animals, especially since the rise of the global animal rights movement in the 1980s.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a relatively highly prevalent psychiatric disorder that is associated with very high personal and socioeconomic costs. This paper provides a state‐of‐the‐art ...review of the relationship between complex trauma and key features of BPD, with a focus on problems with self‐coherence and self‐continuity. We first review evidence for the high prevalence of complex trauma in BPD patients. This is followed by a discussion of emerging knowledge concerning the biobehavioral mechanisms involved in problems related to self and identity in BPD. We emphasize three biobehavioral systems that are affected by complex trauma and are centrally implicated in identify diffusion in BPD: the attachment system, mentalizing or social cognition, and the capacity for epistemic trust—that is, an openness to the reception of social communication that is personally relevant and of generalizable significance. We formulate a new approach to personality and severe personality disorders, and to problems with self and identity in these disorders, rooted in a social‐communicative understanding of the foundations of selfhood. We also discuss how extant evidence‐based treatments address the above‐mentioned biobehavioral systems involved in identity diffusion in BPD and related disorders, and the supporting evidence. We close the paper with recommendations for future research.
Can machines be conscious and what would be the ethical implications? This article gives an overview of current robotics approaches toward machine consciousness and considers factors that hamper an ...understanding of machine consciousness. After addressing the epistemological question of how we would know whether a machine is conscious and discussing potential advantages of potential future machine consciousness, it outlines the role of consciousness for ascribing moral status. As machine consciousness would most probably differ considerably from human consciousness, several complex questions must be addressed, including what forms of machine consciousness would be morally relevant forms of consciousness, and what the ethical implications of morally relevant forms of machine consciousness would be. While admittedly part of this reflection is speculative in nature, it clearly underlines the need for a detailed conceptual analysis of the concept of artificial consciousness and stresses the imperative to avoid building machines with morally relevant forms of consciousness. The article ends with some suggestions for potential future regulation of machine consciousness.
Are we humans destined to become ‘posthuman’? In this paper, we question the claims of posthumanism, accepting some of its broader insights whilst proposing a more empirically and ethically ...appropriate ‘vitalist’ response. We argue that despite recent changes in styles of thought that question the uniqueness of ‘the human’, and despite novel technological developments for augmenting human bodies, we remain – fundamentally – persons. Humans, as persons, are constitutively embedded in and scaffolded by the material, social, semantic and cultural niches they have constructed for themselves. An ‘ethopolitical’ response to our present that recognizes this fact not only requires us to engage with the consequences of making lives in the unequal niches that restrict and stunt the personhood of so many human beings at present, but also requires us to broaden the bandwidth of those who are recognized fully as persons. In our conclusion we briefly develop the theme that this emphasis on personhood can be seen as a vitalist – rather than a humanist – stance.
Decomposing Legal Personhood Garthoff, Jon
Journal of business ethics,
02/2019, Letnik:
154, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The claim that corporations are not people is perhaps the most frequently voiced criticism of the United States Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. There is ...something obviously correct about this claim. While the nature and extent of obligations with respect to group agents like corporations and labor unions is far from clear, it is manifest in moral understanding and deeply embedded in legal practice that there is no general requirement to treat them like natural persons. Group agents may be denied rights to marry, vote, or run for public office. More generally the need to guard against discrimination, the core injustice in racism and sexism, has no direct application to the case of group agents. There is also something obviously incorrect about the claim that corporations are not people. The legal practice of treating some group agents as persons under law is ancient, found already in Roman law at the time of Justinian. In this essay I propose that reflection on this tension reveals that fundamental revision to the doctrine of legal personhood is needed. More specifically I propose that legal personhood be decomposed into at least two elements—standing and liability—and that legal systems reject the principle that an entity possesses one just in case it possesses the other. The import of this change ramifies broadly. Decomposing legal personhood not only enables a satisfactory account of the status of corporations and labor unions, who as such have liability but not standing, it also enables a satisfactory account of the status of those who as such have standing but not liability: severely mentally disabled persons, very young children (including fetuses), and non-human animals with phenomenal consciousness but lacking capacities to understand reasons and justifications.
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