Ethics committees like Institutional Review Boards and Research Ethics Committees are typically empowered to approve or reject proposed studies, typically conditional on certain conditions or revisions being met. While some have argued this power should be primarily a function of applying clear, codified requirements, most institutions and legal regimes allow discretion for IRBs to ethically evaluate studies, such as to ensure a favourable risk-benefit ratio, fair subject selection, adequate informed consent, and so forth. As a result, ethics committees typically make (...) moral demands on researchers: require them to act in a way the committee considers ethically right or appropriate. This paper argues that moral demands are legitimate only if publicly justifiable; and as a result, committee decisions are subject to a public justification requirement. Ethics committees can permissibly request for more information, changes to the research protocol or that the research is delayed or even stopped only if these demands are publicly justifiable. This latter claim is in turn justified on the basis that moral demands to φ are permissible only if we are in a position to know that the addressee ought to φ and that we are in a position to know a proposition only if it is publicly justifiable. This argument suggests that ethics committees must consciously and explicitly appeal to public reasons in their decision-making. In cases where public reasons cannot be offered, committees would not be permitted to reject a given study or make approval conditional on an amendment. (shrink)

On Kant’s account, “public use of reason” is the use that a truth-seeking scholar makes of his reason when he communicates his thoughts in writing to a world of readers. Commentators tend to treat this account as expressing an egalitarian ideal, without taking seriously the limiting conditions—especially the scholarship condition—built into it. In this paper, I interrogate Kant’s original account of public reason in connection with his construction of the “Oriental” as a linguistically and therefore epistemically and culturally (...) inferior Other. I thereby give reasons to worry that Kant’s account is substantively inegalitarian (even if it is nominally egalitarian). I also draw attention to the fact that Kant constructed a linguistic Other against the backdrop of colonialism and from a position of power. This positionality gave what he said about the Other an ideology-forming and world-making effect. In this way, his exclusionary discursive practices—such as depicting the Oriental as an inferior linguistic Other—could have a lasting impact on knowledge production and on the real-world exercise of public reason. (shrink)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users (...) of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies. (shrink)

As part of a special issue on the intersection between bioethics and political philosophy, I argue that strong intuitions about how the state ought to allocate healthcare are incompatible with quite influential autonomy-centric and neutral strains of liberal political theory. Specifically, I maintain that it is uncontroversial that we should routinely distribute medical treatments in public hospitals in ways that have little to no bearing on patients’ ability to pursue a wide array of ends and further that we cannot (...) easily avoid making judgments of which ways of life are good (or bad) when making such distributions. These intuitions tell against the principles that the state in general should aim merely to protect individuals’ rights to choose their own ways of life and should not take sides on which lives are good (or bad) when adopting policy or law. I show that this tension, which has not been thoroughly addressed in the literature, manifests in at least three types of healthcare decisions, viz., which types of treatments should be offered to patients, how to prioritize among types of treatments, and who should receive a certain type of treatment. I do not prescribe how to resolve the tension, that is, whether to reject autonomy-centric and neutral forms of liberalism or revise judgments about how public medical facilities should allocate healthcare, but instead establish the point that one must choose between them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe responsibility of the food and beverage industry for noncommunicable diseases is a controversial topic. Public health scholars identify the food and beverage industry as one of the main contributors to the rise of these diseases. We argue that aside from moral duties like not doing harm and respecting consumer autonomy, the food industry also has a responsibility for addressing the structural injustices involved in food-related health problems. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, this article first shows (...) how food-related public health problems can be understood as structural injustices. Second, it makes clear how the industry is sustaining these health injustices, and that due to this connection, corporate actors share responsibility for addressing food-related health problems. Finally, three criteria are discussed as grounds for attributing responsibility, allowing for further specification on what taking responsibility for food-related health problems can entail in corporate practice. (shrink)

Knowledge brokers are among the main channels of communication between scientists and the public and a key element to establishing a relation of trust between the two. But translating knowledge from the scientific community to a wider audience presents several difficulties, which can be accentuated in times of crisis. In this paper we study some of the problems that knowledge brokers face when communicating in times of crisis. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected interviews with (...) Italian experts that played a major role as knowledge brokers in the local media. We asked them questions about five main topics: the features and role of science communicators; the use of language in communicating science; the importance of the relation of trust with the public; the peculiarity of communicating in a context of emergency; the problem of disagreement among experts, and its public perception and communication. The goal of this paper is to understand, through the words of knowledge brokers themselves, what they consider as best practices (and obstacles) to create trust between scientists and the public. Our empirical work can inform normative accounts of what knowledge brokering should be about. (shrink)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are generative AI systems capable of producing original texts based on inputs about topic and style provided in the form of prompts or questions. The introduction of the outputs of these systems into human discursive practices poses unprecedented moral and political questions. The article articulates an analysis of the moral status of these systems and their interactions with human interlocutors based on the Habermasian theory of communicative action. The analysis explores, among other things, Habermas's inquiries into (...) the analogy between human minds and computers, and into the status of atypical participants in the linguistic community such as genetically modified subjects and animals. Major conclusions are the LLMs seem to qualify as authors that originally participate in discursive practices but do display only a structurally derivative form of communicative competence and fail to meet the status of communicative agents. In this sense, while the contribution of AI writing systems in public discourse and deliberation can support the process of mutual understanding within the community of speakers, the human actors involved in the development, use, and diffusion of these systems share a collective responsibility for the disclosure of AI authorship and verification and adjudication of validity claims. (shrink)

The study examined disciplinary management in public primary schools and teachers' job effectiveness in Yakurr Local Government Area, Cross River State. Three null hypotheses were formulated accordingly to guide the study. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. Census technique was adopted in selecting the entire population of 98 primary school managers which comprised of 49 head teachers and 49 deputy head teachers across 49 public primary schools available in the area. A questionnaire tagged: "Disciplinary Control in (...) Public Primary Schools and Teachers' Job Effectiveness Questionnaire (DCPPSTJEQ)" designed and administered by the researcher was used as an instrument for data collection. The null hypotheses were all tested at .05 level of significance using Pearson Product Moment Correlation Analysis. Findings from the study revealed that warning, suspension, and dismissal have significant relationships respectively, to primary school teachers' job effectiveness. Based on the findings of this study, it was recommended among others that; there should be fairness in the administration of suspension to all teachers through well- documented procedures. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease has spread throughout the world and its fear has made people to be more cautious in public places. Since precautionary measures are the only reliable protocol to defend ourselves, social distancing is the only best approach to defend against the pandemic situation. The reproduction number i.e. R0 factor of COVID-19, can be slowed down only through the physical distancing norms. This research proposes a deep learning approach for maintaining the social distance by tracking and detecting the (...) people present indoor and outdoor scenarios. Surveillance video is taken as the input and applied into you only look once (YOLO) V3 algorithm. The persons in the video are identified based on the segmentation algorithm present within the framework and then using Euclidean distance the image is evaluated. The bounding box algorithm helps to segregate the humans based on the minimum distance threshold. The proposed method is evaluated for images with peoples in the market, availing essential commodities and students entry inside a campus. Our proposed region-based convolutional neural network (RCNN) algorithm gives a better accuracy over the traditional models and hence the service can be implemented in general for places where social distancing is mandatory. (shrink)

Many scientists, philosophers, and commentators of science have argued that science ought to made responsive to the public, or ought to be “democratized”. This chapter begins by showing that the case for making science responsive to the public compares favorably to the case for making other critical institutions - such as a society’s educational or health care system - responsive to the public. It then shows several ways that science is not currently responsive to the public. (...) It concludes by discussing three unresolved philosophical questions that must be answered in order to determine what it would mean for science to be appropriately responsive to the public. The first comes from the importance of looking at science as a complex system; the second and third arise from considering diversity within the public and within the scientific community, respectively. (shrink)

In September 2020, Helsinki and Amsterdam announced the launch of their open AI registers—the first cities in the world to offer such a service. The AI registers describe what, where, and how AI applications are being used in the two municipalities; how algorithms were assessed for potential bias or risks; and how humans use the AI services. Examining issues of security and transparency, this paper discusses the potential for implementing AI in an urban public service setting and how this (...) might be harnessed to improve services and citizens’ experiences. -/- . (shrink)

The demise of the value-free ideal constitutes a threat to public trust in science. One proposal is that whenever making value judgments, scientists rely only on democratic values. Since the influence of democratic values on scientific claims and recommendations is legitimate, public trust in science is warranted. I challenge this proposal. Appealing to democratic values will not suffice to secure trust because of at least two obstacles: polarization and marginalization.

Normative political theorists have been growing more and more aware of the many difficult questions raised by the discretionary power inevitably left to public administrators. This article aims to advance a novel normative principle, called ‘principle of restraint’, regulating reform of established administrative agencies. I argue that the ability of public administrators to exercise their power in accordance with the requirements of public reason is protected by an attitude of restraint on the part of potential reformers. Specifically, (...) they should refrain from any reform of an administrative agency that involves a switch to a considerably more loosely interconnected system of values underlying the work of that agency. To illustrate the importance of the principle of restraint, I examine a case from British health policy, showing that a recent reform of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence well exemplifies the serious problems brought by any violation of that principle. (shrink)

Public health scholars and public health officials increasingly worry about health-related misinformation online, and they are searching for ways to mitigate it. Some have suggested that the tools of digital influence are themselves a possible answer: we can use targeted, automated digital messaging to counter health-related misinformation and promote accurate information. In this commentary, I raise a number of ethical questions prompted by such proposals—and familiar from the ethics of influence and ethics of AI—highlighting hidden costs of targeted (...) digital messaging that ought to be weighed against the health benefits they promise. (shrink)

Campaigns highlighting the alleged incompatibility of the Islamic polity with principles of democratic self-governance are longstanding. The basic assumption of the incompatibalist proposition runs as follows: Political legitimacy in Muslim polities can be reduced to a principle of conformity with a set of divinely given rules and norms, the Sharīʿa, occasionally supplemented, and interpreted, by Islamic legal scholars and practitioners. In short, political Islam recognizes the Sharīʿa and Usūl al-fiqh (or, for the purposes of this essay, fiqh, for short) as (...) the Islamic polity’s foundations––those are deemed incompatible with democratic participation. In response, Mohammad Fadel (2018) has argued that the legal instrument of maṣlaḥa, which Fadel summarizes as considerations of the “public good” or “general interest,” can establish the democratic accountability mechanism that critics see missing in political authorities of Sharīʿa–grounded polities. Fadel supports this normative view with reference to some select classical Sunni jurisprudence, particularly the Usūl al-fiqh. I contest this view in two ways: Firstly, on a conceptual level, most thorough analyses of democracy acknowledge responsiveness and active involvement as fundamental components of democratic self-rule. Fadel’s idea of maṣlaḥa does not entirely align with this notion. Secondly, from a doctrinal standpoint, Fadel’s argument is confined solely within the classical Sunni context. That means, Fadel’s argument is contingent upon a significant departure from numerous (potentially the majority) sources within a comprehensive lineage of maṣlaḥa. (shrink)

Shortened and moderately revised version of an essay that initially appeared in Murove (ed.) African Ethics (2009). This chapter is a work of applied ethics that aims to provide a convincing comprehensive account of how a government official in a post-independence sub-Saharan country should make decisions about how to allocate goods such as civil service jobs and contracts with private firms. Should such a person refrain from considering any particulars about potential recipients, or might it be appropriate to consider, for (...) example, family membership, party affiliation, race, or revolutionary stature as reasons to benefit certain individuals at some cost to the public? Which of these factors should be considered an unjust or corrupt basis on which to allocate state goods and which should not? Drawing on an African ethic, this chapter answers these questions with what it calls a “moderate partialism,” according to which a government agent may rightly favor at some cost to the public veterans and victims of state injustices, but not those in her family or party. This chapter seeks to provide a new, unified explanation of why characteristically sub-Saharan values permit some forms of partiality, such as the preferential hiring of those who suffered from or struggled against colonialism, but forbid other, nepotist or prebendalist forms of partiality. (shrink)

Policies that are designed to promote public health should not use coercion to discourage unhealthy decision making. Though public health officials may be experts about medical regularities in a population, they are not experts about which dietary or lifestyle choices are best for particular indiviuals. Experts in regulatory agencies also face several political incentives that undermine their ability effectively to promote health at the population level. Furthermore, without consent, coercive public health policies are extremely difficult to justify (...) to citizens. For these reasons, states should not enforce coercive public health policies, even if the state subsidizes citizens' healthcare. Many of the same reasons to reject coercive public health regulations are also reasons to reject other coercive paternalistic policies. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to develop precise epistemic rules for good public political arguments, by which political measures in the broad sense are justified. By means of a theory of deliberative democracy, it is substantiated that the justification of a political measure consists in showing argumentatively that this measure most promotes the common good or is morally optimal. It is then discussed which argumentation-theoretical approaches are suitable for providing epistemically sound rules for arguments for such theses and (...) for the associated premises, rules whose compliance implies the truth or acceptability of the thesis. Finally, on the basis of the most suitable approach, namely the epistemological one, such systems of rules for the required types of arguments are presented that fulfil the conditions mentioned. (shrink)

This article explores the use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques as part of data-driven border checks in the EU. While the idea to group travelers into risk categories in order to differentiate the intensity of border checks has been criticized for its likely impact on privacy and other fundamental rights, the exclusive use of “open,” “public” data was proposed as an alternative that mitigates these issues. However, OSINT remains a rather vague term, as it is unclear what constitutes “open” (...) or “public” data, how the use of such techniques would contribute to the production of security, and whether its use actually mitigates most ethical issues. The goal of this article is to contribute toward a situated answer to these questions. It will provide groundwork by clarifying what OSINT practices could entail in the context of the European border checks regime and by developing an ethical perspective on these practices. I will show that the impact depends not so much on the public availability of the analyzed data, but on the specifics of the implementation of OSINT techniques. Thus, certain uses of OSINT continue to raise severe privacy and fundamental rights issues. (shrink)

In this chapter, I first outline the public health workflow from assessment via goal definition and intervention to evaluation. Further, I discuss the types and subtypes of explanation used in public health research and practice: scientific, justificatory, methodological, and prospective. In doing this, I take the discussion far beyond the usual focus in philosophy of science as answers to “why?”-questions. The chapter ends with a few comments on my proposal.

Public Announcement Logic (PAL), as a paradigmatic fragment of Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL), implements information change by model restriction; under probabilistic semantics this reduces to classical conditioning and therefore yields commutative sequential update (up to conjunction of announced events). By contrast, the minimal Lüders instrument for sharp quantum yes/no questions induces noncommutative state dynamics whenever the associated projectors fail to commute, generating order effects. We formalize PAL updates as conditioning endomorphisms on Boolean event algebras and Lüders updates as completely (...) positive trace-preserving maps on density operators. We prove: (i) all PAL-style fixed-meaning announcement updates commute whenever both orders are defined; (ii) Lüders channels commute on all states if and only if the underlying projectors commute; (iii) consequently, no PAL-style conditioning semantics with context-independent proposition identity can represent Lüders order effects while preserving sequential composition. A conservative embedding theorem is provided: restricting to an abelian algebra generated by commuting projectors, Lüders update collapses to classical conditioning, recovering PAL as a commutative subtheory. (shrink)

This thesis discusses how societies should allocate clinical care resources. The first aim of the thesis is to defend the idea that clinical care resource allocation is a matter for deliberative democratic procedures. I argue that deliberative democracy is justified because of its ability to implement equal respect and autonomy. Furthermore, I address several in-principle objections to the project of applying deliberative democracy to clinical care resource allocation. Most notably, I respond to the narrow view of the scope of deliberative (...) democracy and the critiques of explicit rationing. The second aim of the thesis is to determine what is required by deliberative democracy in clinical care resource allocation. I identify the general requirements that resource allocation agencies should meet, namely public reason, public involvement, transparency, accuracy and revisability. I then examine what is required by deliberative democracy with regard to two particularly salient specific topics, namely the substantive values that should govern resource allocation and the involvement of scientific experts in decision-making. I demonstrate that public reason imposes severe constraints on the substantive values that should be employed. Most of these constraints are rooted in the idea that, under a regime of scarcity, public reason requires that resources be allocated so as to minimise the strongest complaint anyone may have. Out of the variety of values that are commonly proposed as relevant, only priority to the worst-off, ability to benefit, specialness of clinical care and cost are consistent with public reason. Turning to expert involvement, I argue that deliberative democracy can overcome several formidable threats, such as the opacity of expert opinions to laypersons and the tendency to hide uncertainty and disagreement from the public. I also discuss how my proposals on substantive values and expert involvement could be implemented, in order to add to the plausibility of my theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that policing can be defended as consistent with the equality of all before the law – but not by denying that policing occupies a special place in our legal order that is dangerously close to certain ancien régime privileges. In order to defend the special privileges of policing, it is essential to show that they are something quite different from the ancien régime privileges that they in some respects resemble. The crucial conceptual tool for making (...) that argument is the idea of public office. Policing, I argue, is a public office and like other public offices, it comes equipped with a number of special rights, privileges, powers, and immunities that are not generally possessed by all persons in their private capacity. But that situation is no challenge to the equality of all persons before the law. Those special rights do not belong to the office-holder as their private property, to do with them just as they would like. They belong, instead, to the office itself, and they may be exercised only by someone duly appointed to the office (who may also be duly removed from office) and only in pursuit of the purposes that define her office. The idea of public office is what makes possible a necessary and acceptable kind of inequality – that between individual private persons on the one hand and the collective person of the state on the other – while maintaining the kind of equality that matters, which is the equality of all persons vis-à-vis one another. (shrink)

This descriptive-correlational study determines the teaching efficacy among public Higher Education Institutions during the Academic Year 2021-2022. With 200 teacher-respondents, and with the use of weighted mean, standard deviation, t-test for independent samples, One-way ANOVA, and Pearson’s r, the findings are. 1) There is a significant difference in the extent of teaching efficacy of college instructors of HEIs in Sulu when data are categorized according to age, civil status, and educational attainment. But there is no significant difference in terms (...) of gender, length of service, and appointment status. Teachers who are 30 years old & above, separated, and with MA/MS degrees have better ways of assessing the level of confidence college instructors of HEIs in Sulu in their ability to guide students to success which includes helping students learn, building effective programs for students, and effectively changing student learning. 2) There is a very high correlation among the sub-categories subsumed under the extent of teaching efficacy of college instructors of HEIs in Sulu. (shrink)

We examined the relationship between New Public Administration and Service Delivery in Public Organizations in Nigeria. The main focus of new administration is the use of market techniques to improve the performance of the public sector. The main features of NPA include performance contracting, cost recovering, commercialization, decentralization and accountability among others. The study adopts a content analysis method through the use of secondary data. The study recommends among others that the implementation of the reform can be (...) tackled by being more practical, sensitizing public servants in an adequate/timely manner, and taking into cognizance the environmental realities of the Nigerian public service. It concludes that new public management is sine qua non for any civil service that wants to be effective in service delivery. (shrink)

This article analyzes a rhetorical genre ecology emerging in the aftermath of a natural disaster in Ghana. Drawing on news articles and opinion pieces, a presidential speech, a government post-disaster assessment summary, and a World Bank Group action report, I argue that in their operation within the contingent environment of public spheres, genre uptakes may be highly unpredictable, but also serve multiple, varied functions that together respond to the multiplicity of exigences presented by the diffused contexts of publics. The (...) analysis explains how diffused contexts of genre interaction shape social action, and how these interactions, in turn, enact publics. (shrink)

This study is intended to measure the readiness of the public elementary school heads on the principles of sustainable leadership. This study utilized the mixed-method design. Creswell & Clark (2017), defined mixed methods research as a research approach that combines both qualitative and quantitative methods in a single study to gain a more comprehensive understanding of a research question or topic. This approach allows researchers to leverage the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative methods. The following major findings on (...) the quantitative aspect are: the school heads are slightly ready on the worldview principle while moderately ready to influence and complexity. However, they are highly ready to network, self-leadership, and work across boundaries. Positive themes emerged for the qualitative part with the results as: improved communication, increased motivation, and enhanced creativity. It can be concluded that the school heads are slightly ready when it comes to worldview principles. The SDO should create capacity training that could increase the readiness of the school heads on this principle of sustainable leadership. (shrink)

The performing arts and their financing have been analyzed by cultural economics. Many papers have focused on importance of state intervention both as a financing agent, as a provider and producer of cultural services. Otherwise, several studies have appeared focusing on management of the performing arts in Management Accounting framework. This paper shows relevance of performance indicators for evaluating cultural policies and focuses on symphony orchestras financed with public funds. The objective is verifying strategy compliance and measure the efficient (...) and effective use of the public resources and evaluate the social and cultural profitability too. This paper also proposes a change in the symphonic orchestras current strategy for increasing social and cultural profitability. (shrink)

'Public engagement with science' is gaining currency as the framing for outreach activities related to science. However, knowledge bearing on the topic is siloed in a variety of disciplines, and public engagement activities often are conducted without support from relevant theory or familiarity with related activities. This first Element in the Public Engagement with Science series sets the stage for the series by delineating the target of investigation, establishing the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration and community partnerships for (...) effective public engagement with science, examining the roles public engagement with science plays in academic institutions, and providing initial resources about the theory and practice of public engagement with science. This will be of use to academics who would like to conduct or study public engagement with science as well as to public engagement practitioners as a window into relevant academic knowledge and cultures. (shrink)

Public reason as a political ideal aims to reconcile reasonable disagreement; however, is public reason itself the object of reasonable disagreement? Jonathan Quong, David Estlund, Andrew Lister, and some other philosophers maintain that public reason is beyond reasonable disagreement. I argue this view is untenable. In addition, I consider briefly whether or not two main versions of the public reason principle, namely, the consensus version and the convergence version, need to satisfy their own requirements. My discussion (...) has several important implications for the debate on public reason. (shrink)

The public rejection of scientific claims is widely recognized by scientific and governmental institutions to be threatening to modern democratic societies. Intense conflict between science and the public over diverse health and environmental issues have invited speculation by concerned officials regarding both the source of and the solution to the problem of public resistance towards scientific and policy positions on such hot-button issues as global warming, genetically modified crops, environmental toxins, and nuclear waste disposal. The London Royal (...) Society’s influential report “Public Understanding of Science”, which spearheaded the now-thriving area of science... (shrink)

In what way might public statues wrong people? In recent years, philosophers have drawn on speech act theory to answer this question by arguing that statues constitute harmful or disrespectful forms of speech. My aim in this paper will be add a different theoretical perspective to this discussion. I will argue that while the speech act approach provides a useful starting point for thinking about what is wrong with public statues, we can get a fuller understanding of these (...) wrongs by drawing on resources from recent work in situated affectivity. I will argue that public statues can be understood as affective artifacts and that this can both help us understand both the deep affective wrongs caused by public statues and offer a possible explanation as to why some people are so strongly opposed to their removal. (shrink)

What, if anything, can justify public shaming? Philosophers who have written on this topic have pointed out the role of public shaming in enforcing valuable social norms. In this paper, I defend an alternate, supplementary justification for public shaming: as a form of moral self-defence. Moral self-defence is the defence of one’s moral standing – being recognized as an equal in the eyes of oneself and others – rather than the defence of one’s physical body or rights. (...) Agents can engage in moral self-defence by publicly criticizing, blaming, or expressing other negative feelings towards wrongdoers, which sometimes constitutes contributions to public shaming. (shrink)

In cases where structural oppression conditions the broader public sphere, the democratic ideal of a receptive public may be threatened by at least two possible outcomes which appear to undermine its stated goal of increasing understanding of counterhegemonic ideas amongst mainstream, oppressive groups. Either (a) counterhegemonic ideas are defanged to make them sufficiently palatable to a new audience, or (b) counterhegemonic ideas are taken up intact, and as a result the extant networks of publics which depend on oppressive (...) structures and hierarchies will be destroyed. As we will argue, in certain cases of colonialism such as the Straits Philosophical Society in colonial Singapore, the conditions which receptive publics are supposed to ameliorate: (i) the social costs of speech, (ii) inequality of epistemic labour, and (iii) the antagonism between groups, are not only an irreducible feature of counterhegemonic efforts, but are in fact increased in the attempt to maintain receptive publics. However, this may be more a feature than a bug: receptive publics need not be seen only as communicative intermediaries for oppressed groups, but as a possible dialectical step towards new modes of socio-material life. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional (...) response to the listening problem: the establishment of what we call Receptive Publics, discursive spaces designed to improve listening skills and to give space for counterhegemonic ideas. (shrink)

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing (...) how it incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members. (shrink)

It might seem obvious that the scientific process should not be biased. We strive for reliable inference, and systematically skewing the results of inquiry apparently conflicts with this. Publication bias—which involves only publishing certain types of results—seems particularly troubling and has been blamed for the replication crisis. While we ultimately agree, there are considerable nuances to take into account. Using a Bayesian model of scientific reasoning we show that a scientist who is aware of publication bias can (theoretically) interpret the (...) published literature so as to avoid acquiring biased beliefs. Moreover, in some highly specific circumstances she might prefer not to bother with policies designed to mitigate or reduce the presence of publication bias—it would impose a cost in time or effort that she would not see any benefit in paying. However, we also argue that science as a social endeavour is made worse off by publication bias. This is because the social benefits of science are largely secured via go-between agents, various non-experts who nonetheless need to make use of or convey the results of scientific inquiry if its fruits are to be enjoyed by society at large. These are unlikely to be well-informed enough to account for publication bias appropriately. As such, we conclude, the costs of having to implement policies like mandatory pre-registration are worth imposing on scientists, even if they would perhaps not view these costs as worth paying for their own sake. The benefits are reaped by the go-between agents, and we argue that their perspective is quite properly favoured when deciding how to govern scientific institutions. (shrink)

There are a number of important links and similarities between public health and safety. In this extended essay, Gregg D. Caruso defends and expands his public health-quarantine model, which is a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. In developing his account, he explores the relationship between public health and safety, focusing on how social inequalities and systemic injustices affect health outcomes and crime rates, (...) how poverty affects brain development, how offenders often have pre-existing medical conditions (especially mental health issues), how involvement in the criminal justice system itself can lead to or worsen health and cognitive problems, how treatment and rehabilitation methods can best be employed to reduce recidivism and reintegrate offenders back into society, and how a public health approach could be successfully applied within the criminal justice system. Caruso's approach draws on research from the health sciences, social sciences, public policy, law, psychiatry, medical ethics, neuroscience, and philosophy, and he delivers a set of ethically defensible and practically workable proposals for implementing the public health-quarantine model. The essay begins by discussing recent empirical findings in psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences that provide us with an increased understanding of the social and neurological determinants of health and criminal behavior. It then turns to Caruso's public health-quarantine model and argues that the model provides the most justified, humane, and effective approach for addressing criminal behavior. Caruso concludes by proposing a capability approach to social justice grounded in six key features of human well-being. He argues that we cannot successfully address concerns over public health and safety without simultaneously addressing issues of social justice—including the social determinants of health (SDH) and the social determinants of criminal behavior (SDCB)—and he recommends eight general policy proposals consistent with his model. (shrink)

In Public Reason Confucianism, Sungmoon Kim presents an important Confucian political theory that seeks to combine a specific conception of Confucianism and the ideal of public reason. My article examines this theory and identifies some of the theoretical complications with Rawlsian public reason.

The future of health research will be characterised by three continuing trends: rising demand for health data; increasing impracticability of obtaining specific consent for secondary research; and decreasing capacity to effectively anonymise data. In this context, governments, clinicians and the research community must demonstrate that they can be responsible stewards of health data. IRBs and RECs sit at heart of this process because in many jurisdictions they have the capacity to grant consent waivers when research is judged to be of (...) particular value. However, several different terms are used to refer to this value, indicating a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the appropriate test for access to health data for research without consent. In this paper we do three things. First we describe the current confusion and instability in terminology relating to public interest in the context of consent waivers. Second we argue for harmonisation of terminology on the grounds of clarity, transparency and consistency. Third we argue that the term ‘public interest’ best reflects the normative work required to justify consent waivers because it is the broadest of the competing terms. ‘Public interest’ contains within its scope positive and negative implications of a study, as well as welfare, justice and rights considerations. In making this argument, we explain the normative basis for consent waivers, and provide a starting place for further discussion about the precise conditions in which a given study can be said to advance the public interest. Ipsos MORI study found that: … the public would be broadly happy with administrative data linking for research projects provided Those projects have social value, broadly defined. Data are de-identified. Data are kept secure. Businesses are not able to access the data for profit. (shrink)

Proponents of the public goods argument ('PGA') seek to ground the authority of the state on its putative indispensability as a means of providing public goods. But many of the things we take to be public goods – including many of the goods commonly invoked in support of the PGA – are actually what we might term publicized goods. A publicized good is any whose ‘public’ character results only from a policy decision to make some good (...) freely and universally available. This fact poses complications for the PGA, insofar as the set of possible publicized goods is quite extensive indeed. (shrink)

In ‘Public Reason and Prenatal Moral Status’ (2015), Jeremy Williams argues that the ideal of Rawlsian public reason commits its devotees to the radically permissive view that abortion ought to be available with little or no qualification throughout pregnancy. This is because the only (allegedly) political value that favours protection of the foetus for its own sake—the value of ‘respect for human life’—turns out not to be a political value at all, and so its invocation in support of (...) considerations bearing upon the permissibility of abortion is beyond public reason’s remit. Thus, it will scarcely if ever be legitimate to restrict women’s equality and bodily autonomy for the sake of the foetus, even at full term. In this paper, I argue that Williams fails to establish that Rawlsian reasonable citizens must endorse the radically permissive stance vis-à-vis abortion. Citizens can, I claim, reasonably accord the value of respect for human life weight, and indeed converge on the claim that it outweighs other salient political values, during later stages of gestation. Nevertheless, Williams’s argument gets something right in that it reveals why the value of respect for human life is inadmissible at the bar of public reason in early stages of pregnancy. But then, far from throwing Rawlsian public reason into disrepute, Williams’s argument actually (albeit inadvertently) provides arguably more compelling grounds than any hitherto rallied for endorsing Rawls’s much maligned claim that opposition to the duly qualified right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy is ‘unreasonable’. (shrink)

Procreation is the ultimate public goods problem. Each new child affects the welfare of many other people, and some (but not all) children produce uncompensated value that future people will enjoy. This essay addresses challenges that arise if we think of procreation and parenting as public goods. These include whether individual choices are likely to lead to a socially desirable outcome, and whether changes in laws, social norms, or access to genetic engineering and embryo selection might improve the (...) aggregate outcome of our reproductive choices. (shrink)

One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the lay public relies immensely on the knowledge of public health officials. At every phase of the pandemic, the testimony of public health officials has been crucial for guiding public policy and individual behavior. The reason is simple: public health officials know a lot more than you and I do about public health. As lay people, we rely on experts. This seems straightforward. But the (...) COVID-19 pandemic has shown that public health officials seem undecided as to what, precisely, their role is; are they providing the public information as it presents itself, or are they informing the public in a way that produces a desired or optimal outcome? In this article, I answer the following question: what are public health officials morally obligated to tell the public? As I see it, these are the main options: (1) public health officials should tell the full truth, regardless of outcome; or (2) they should tell partial truths or lies that are aimed to promote a socially optimal outcome. My answer to this question is that public health officials are only allowed to lie under very narrow and rare conditions. -/- . (shrink)

It is widely agreed that one of the core functions of government is to supply public goods that markets either fail to provide or cannot provide efficiently. I will suggest that arguments for government provision of public goods require fundamental moral judgments in addition to the usual economic considerations about the relative efficacy of markets and governments in supplying them. While philosophers and policymakers owe a debt of gratitude to economists for developing the theory of public goods, (...) the link between public goods and public policy cannot be forged without moral reflection on the proper function and scope of government power. (shrink)

Researchers and Institutional Review Board members often disagree about the permissibility of some parts or all of the former’s proposed research. At least sometimes, this disagreement is reasonable. This is often because there are competing values and no clear solution as to how to balance these values. Arguably, given that there are multiple reasonable ways in which these values might be balanced, IRBs are subject to an asymmetric public justification requirement. This requirement implies that IRBs should defer to researchers (...) when the disagreement is reasonable. After briefly defending this claim, this paper examines its implications with respect to three questions that IRBs face. We argue that IRBs should not impose a strict limit on payments to participants, that they should take a more expansive view of what types of research are authorized by broad consent forms, and there should be no hard cap on risks participants might choose to undergo. (shrink)

Various authors have recently expressed doubts about the public relevance of philosophy. These doubts target both academic philosophy in general and particular subfields of philosophy. This paper investigates whether these doubts are justified through two tests in which the lack of public relevance of a philosophical paper is operationalized as the degree to which that paper is isolated. Both tests suggest that academic philosophy in general is more isolated from the broader public than it should be, and (...) confirm the hypothesis that some subfields of philosophy are more isolated than others. We argue that this lack of public relevance is caused by the incentive structure of academic philosophy and discuss a range of individual-level and incentive-level solutions. (shrink)

Publication ethics is an important aspect of both the research and publication enterprises. It is particularly important in the field of biomedical science because published data may directly affect human health. In this article, we examine publication ethics policies in biomedical journals published in Central and Eastern Europe. We were interested in possible differences between East European countries that are members of the European Union (Eastern EU) and South-East European countries (South-East Europe) that are not members of the European Union.The (...) most common ethical issues addressed by all journals in the region were redundant publication, peer review process, and copyright or licensing details. Image manipulation, editors’ conflicts of interest and registration of clinical trialswere the least common ethical policies. Three aspects were significantly morecommon in journals published outside the EU: statements on the endorsement of international editorial standards, contributorship policy, and image manipulation.On the other hand, copyright or licensing information were more prevalent in journals published in the Eastern EU. The existence of significant differences amongbiomedical journals’ ethical policies calls for further research and active measuresto harmonize policies across journals. On the other hand, copyright or licensing information were more prevalent in journals published in the Eastern EU. The existence of significant differences among biomedical journals’ ethical policies calls for further research and active measures to harmonize policies across journals. (shrink)

In Liberalism without Perfection, Jonathan Quong develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defense of the consensus model of public reason – a model which incorporates both a public-reasons-only requirement and an accessibility requirement framed in terms of shared evaluative standards. While the consensus model arguably predominates amongst public reason liberals, it is criticized by convergence theorists who reject both the public-reasons-only requirement and the accessibility requirement. In this paper, I argue that while we have good (...) reason to reject Quong’s call for a public-reasons-only requirement, all public reason liberals should endorse at least some shared evaluative standards and, hence, an accessibility requirement. (shrink)

Much of contemporary political philosophy revolves around debates over perfectionism, which is the view that the state may, or should, promote valuable conceptions of the good life and discourage conceptions that are worthless or bad. Collis Tahzib has recently proposed a unique theory of perfectionism. I examine two central aspects of his theory: the amalgamation of public reason and perfectionism, and the employment of the Rawlsian lexical priority. I argue that Tahzib’s idea of perfectionist public reason has certain (...) serious problems. Additionally, Tahzib, like many other perfectionists, has neglected that many excellences are at once personal and civic. I sketch a perfectionist account of civic virtue, with the hope of opening up space for defending and justifying perfectionism. (shrink)