This study examines the presence of ethical climates in skilled nursing facilities and identifies their antecedents (work group, job position, tenure). A cross-sectional survey design was implemented. A total of 359 facilities were selected in the Midwestern United States. Responses were received from nurses representing 100 of those facilities (28%). A total of 656 usable questionnaires were returned of the 3060 distributed (21.4% response rate). Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, and multivariate and univariate analyses of variance were used. The results (...) confirmed the presence of five ethical climates. Significant differences between registered and licensed practical nurses with regard to egoistic and independence ethical climates were found. Furthermore, nurses in management and non-management positions differed significantly in their perceptions of caring and egoistic climates. The results suggest incongruence in value perceptions and imply that researchers and practitioners have to direct efforts towards preventing and identifying reasons behind this. (shrink)

This book examines the negative power that child maltreatment has on individuals and society ethically and politically, while analyzing the positive power that parental love and healthy families have. To address how best to confront the problem of child maltreatment, it examines several policy options, ultimately defending a policy of licensing parents, while carefully examining the tension between child and adult rights and duties.

Philosophical theories about parental licensing tend to pay insufficient attention to forms of discrimination that may be inherent in, or result from, a system of parental licensing. By situating these theories in relation to the status quo on parental licensing, we aim to show how many of them reinforce what philosophers have called “biologism”: the privileging of families formed through biological reproduction over families formed in other ways. Much of our discussion focuses on biologism, although we also (...) touch on other forms of discrimination that parental licensing can cause or exacerbate, such as classism, sexism, homophobia, racism, and ableism. We firmly believe that any adequate proposal in favour of parental licensing must take worries about discrimination seriously. Unfortunately, most philosophical proposals fail to do so. (shrink)

As medical technology continues to improve, more people will live longer lives with multiple chronic illnesses with increasing cumulative debilitation, including cognitive dysfunction. Combined with the aging of society in most developed countries, an ever-growing number of patients will require surrogate decision-makers. While advance care planning by patients still capable of expressing their preferences about medical interventions and end-of-life care can improve the quality and accuracy of surrogate decisions, this is often not the case, not infrequently leading to demands for (...) ineffective, inappropriate and prolonged interventions. In 1980 LaFollette called for the licensing of prospective parents, basing his argument on the harm they can do to vulnerable people. In this paper, I apply his arguments to surrogate decision-makers for cognitively incapacitated patients, rhetorically suggesting that we require potential surrogates to qualify for this position by demonstrating their ability to make reasonable and rational decisions for others. I employ this theoretical approach to argue that the loose criteria by which we authorize surrogates’ generally unchallenged power should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Although systems for licensing professionals are far from perfect, and their problems and costs should not be ignored, they are justified as a necessary means of protecting innocent people's vital interests. Licensing defends patients from inept doctors, pharmacists, and physical therapists; it protects clients from unqualified lawyers. We should protect people who are highly vulnerable to those who are supposed to serve them, those with whom they have a special relationship. Requiring professionals to be licensed is the most (...) plausible way of doing that. Given the overwhelming support for the licensing of these professionals, I find it odd that so many people categorically reject proposals to license parents. Although the relationship between a parent and her children is different in some respects, it is also relevantly similar to that between a professional and those she serves. To defend these claims, I show how and why the rationale for licensing parents parallels the rational for licensing professionals. I then ask whether such a program could be justifiably implemented. Finally, I describe and reject what I see as the flawed view of the relationship between parents and their children. (shrink)

In this essay I shall argue that the state should require all parents to be licensed. My main goal is to demonstrate that the licensing of parents is theoretically desirable, though I shall also argue that a workable and just licensing program actually could be established.

The Hague Conference on Private International Law currently has a Parentage/Surrogacy Project, which evaluates the legal status of children in cross-border situations, including situations involving international contract pregnancy. Should a convention focusing on international contract pregnancy emerge from this project, it will need to be consistent with the Hague convention on Intercountry Adoption. The latter convention prohibits adoptions unless, among other things, ‘the competent authorities of the receiving State have determined that the prospective adoptive parents are eligible and suited to (...) adopt’. Included in it, therefore, is a parental vetting or licensing requirement. In our view, a similar requirement must also appear in any Hague Convention on international contract pregnancy if the two conventions are to be ethically consistent with one another. In particular, there should be a licensing requirement in such a convention for at least some of the prospective parents in contract pregnancy arrangements. We consider several arguments against this conclusion, and argue that none of them is successful. (shrink)

This paper presents a signaling game to formalize the interaction between a developing country and a pharmaceutical firm negotiating the supply of an essential medicine. During these negotiations, the government may threaten the firm with the issue of a compulsory license to force price reductions. However, the threat may be a poor signaling device of the government’s willingness to issue a compulsory license. Our model shows that, for a government, the threat may be used in various ways to fool the (...) pharmaceutical firm about its real objectives. This result is consistent with stylized facts showing that threat strategies are used to obtain very opposite outcomes. (shrink)

Hugh LaFollette has proposed that in order to prevent statistically expected harm that many parents inflict on their children prospective parents should be licensed. This article evaluates his proposal by looking at various facts, statistical data and probability estimates related to sex differences in human mating and parenting behaviour provided by evolutionary psychology. It is suggested that these evolutionary considerations create a serious stalemate between certain basic moral principles to which LaFollette subscribes, thus rendering the entire proposal morally impracticable. It (...) is also argued along similar lines that parental licensing would endanger some of the most personal and intimate human relationships that, in LaFollette’s view, are essential for developing one’s capacity for impartial morality. (shrink)

Given the importance of work engagement for organizations and the almost unified and steadfast understanding of its benefits, it is imperative to investigate the potential downside of work engagement to prevent unexpected damage. However, there has been relatively little research on its negative impacts. Drawing on the moral licensing theory, this study identifies the potential negative effects of work engagement by exploring the mediating role of psychological entitlement. An online experiment and a survey are conducted to test the theoretical (...) model. The results reveal that work engagement leads to deviant workplace behavior through psychological entitlement only in cases where there is a higher level of relationship conflict with supervisors. The conclusions of this study shed light on how work engagement negatively affects organizations. The current study also contributes to practice by suggesting that supervisors should be aware of employees with a higher level of work engagement and communicate with them in a reasonable manner. (shrink)

This paper proposes that both weak and strong NPIs in English are sensitive to the downward entailingness of their licensers. It is also proposed, however, that these two types of NPIs pay attention to different aspects of the meaning of their environment. As observed by von Fintel and Chierchia, weak NPIs do not attend to the scalar implicatures of presuppositions of their licensers. Strong NPIs see both the truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (scalar implications, presuppositions) meaning of their licensers. This theory accounts (...) for the puzzling inability, noted by Rullmann and Gajewski, of Strawson anti-additive operators to license strong NPIs, as well as for the effects of Zwarts’s hierarchy of negative strength. Additional issues concerning comparative quantifiers, few, and proportional quantifiers are addressed. (shrink)

This article proposes a way to zoom in on the concept of the social license to operate from the broader normative perspective of contractarianism. An SLO can be defined as a contractarian basis for the legitimacy of a company’s specific activity or project. “SLO”, as a fashionable expression, has its origins in business practice. From a normative viewpoint, the concept is closely related to social contract theory, and, as such, it has a political dimension. After outlining the contractarian normative background (...) to the SLO, we will show how academic concepts such as legitimacy and stakeholder management have a tendency to provide the intellectual underpinning for the business case for securing an SLO. While business case perspectives on the SLO may well be in line with the use of the term in business practice, we will highlight certain difficulties and ambiguities related to the instrumental use of the expression. In the final section, we briefly introduce the articles of this Special Issue to the reader and explain how they relate to the topic. (shrink)

In this paper we re-examine Hugh LaFollette's proposal that the state carefully determine the eligibility and suitability of prospective parents before granting them a?license to parent?. Assuming a prima facie case for licensing parents grounded in our duty to promote the welfare of the child, we offer several considerations that complicate LaFollette's radical proposal. We suggest that LaFollette can only escape these problems by revising his proposal in a way that renders the license effectively obsolete, a route he implicitly (...) adopts in his recent revisiting of the licensing proposal. We conclude that there is little merit in the idea of licensing?natural? parents as a practical policy proposal, and raise some questions about its continued use in relation to adoptive and foster parents. (shrink)

Government encouragement of free markets is a highly effective means of fostering pharmaceutical innovation; the NIH, by including “free-market provisions” in its licensing agreements that discourage anti-competitive and research-impeding behavior, can do a great deal to support this goal even without legislative overhaul.

In this paper, I will argue that some prominent objections to parental licensing rely on dubious claims about the existence of a very stringent, if not indefeasible, right to parent, which would be violated by licensing. I claim that attaching such stringency to the right only makes sense if we make a number of idealising assumptions. Otherwise, it is deeply implausible. Instead, I argue that we should evaluate parental licensing policies in much the same way we would (...) harm reduction policies. By adopting this critical perspective, we can see that there are powerful, but quite different, reasons to be cautious about parental licensing relating to our ability to minimize the harmful effects of mass-parenting in a world of minimal surveillance and intervention. (shrink)

I consider a technology holder that has to decide whether to file for a patent or rely on secrecy, and a competing firm that can enter the market through technology transfer or imitation. Acknowledging that imitation is uncertain, imperfect, and takes time to materialise, as well as that intellectual property protection is not absolute, I find that technology transfer will always occur if the technological efficiency to imitate is sufficiently low. This will happen regardless of the protection choice of the (...) inventor. Conversely, highly efficient imitation technologies will lead to imitation instead of licensing. I also consider that a trade secret might accidentally leak and thus lose its economic value, thereby rendering secrecy less preferable to patenting. Additionally, the risk of leakage might also lead to more imitation than licensing. Finally, considering that, in practice, the probability of leakage might increase with the number of firms practising a secret, I suggest an increase in the attractiveness of the patent system. (shrink)

Pet-keeping is one of the most widespread human-animal relationships in the world. Despite its prevalence, this practice frequently results in animal welfare violations, including neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Pet-keepers often fail to adequately understand how to care for and interact with their pet. This article defends a novel proposal to regulate pet-keeping: a scheme of state licensing. On this proposal, prospective pet-keepers would be required to obtain a license by demonstrating competence in caring for a domesticated animal before acquiring (...) one. The article makes two significant contributions. First, it provides a robust theoretical defense of pet-keeping licenses. Second, it defends the feasibility of licensing, details the requirements it would impose, and suggests guidelines for plausible implementation. By extending regulation into the private sphere and setting enforceable standards for care, licensing can significantly reduce preventable harms to domesticated animals and better protect their interests. (shrink)

This article exploits the “binary license” offered by the title of the symposium in which it appears (“Comparative Relativism”) as a kind of promise of connection. The author suggests, however tentatively, that in the challenge of heterogeneity, fractality, perspective/-alism, and multiplicities lies the power of the forking pathway: the moment a relation is created through divergence. If we are invited—in the same breath—to consider forms of comparison and forms of relativism (dropping difference and similarity), we are also offered two paths, (...) one based on a world of singularities and multiplicities, and the other on a world of not-quite repetitions. The article asks if the binary is not essential to the epistemic work that Western (Euro-American) scholars might want to do, since we forever reinvent the divide between the modern and the post-/pre-modern. Strathern assumes the anthropologist's license to talk about concepts through persons, and begins by asking how Papua New Guineans who come together in a city compare themselves, and in contrast to ethnic comparisons elsewhere (e.g., contra Sarah Green's Balkan interactions). In talking about persons through concepts, it is worth asking what is entailed in relativizing one scholar's work through that of another. The author says that her “hunch” is that in both cases the analyst might wish to have the liberty of discerning—in the same breath—the multiplicities of what John Law and Annemarie Mol call perspectivalism (their very general alternative to comparison) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's radically divergent perspectivism (a self-contained, recursive and above all socially specific relativism). (shrink)

Positive Polarity indefinites, such as some in English, are licensed in simplex negative sentences as long as they take wide scope over negation. When it surfaces under a clausemate negation, some can in principle take wide scope either by movement or by some semantic mechanism; e.g., it can take pseudoscope if it is interpreted as a choice function variable. Therefore, there is some uncertainty regarding the way in which PPI indefinites get licensed: can pseudoscope suffice? In this article we show, (...) using novel data from Hindi-Urdu and English, that pseudoscope is not sufficient, and that it is the syntactic position of PPI indefinites at LF, rather than their actual scope, which is relevant for licensing. These facts support a unified view of PPI indefinites as generalized quantifiers, and disfavor analyses where they are, or can be, interpreted as choice function variables. (shrink)

Offensive street speech--racist and sexist remarks that can make its targets feel both psychologically and physically threatened--is surprisingly common in our society. Many argue that this speech is so detestable that it should be banned under law. But is this an area covered by the First Amendment right to free speech? Or should it be banned? In this elegantly written book, Laura Beth Nielsen pursues the answers by probing the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens. Using a combination of field observations (...) and in-depth, semistructured interviews, she surveys one hundred men and women, some of whom are routine targets of offensive speech, about how such speech affects their lives. Drawing on these interviews as well as an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, Nielsen argues that racist and sexist speech creates, reproduces, and reinforces existing systems of hierarchy in public places. The law works to normalize and justify offensive public interactions, she concludes, offering, in essence, a "license to harass." Nielsen relates the results of her interviews to statistical surveys that measure the impact of offensive speech on the public. Rather than arguing whether law is the appropriate remedy for offensive speech, she allows that the benefits to democracy, to community, and to society of allowing such speech may very well outweigh the burdens imposed. Nonetheless, these burdens, and the stories of the people who bear them, should not remain invisible and outside the debate. (shrink)

Accurate and timely genome replication is a universal feature of living organisms and a prerequisite for cell proliferation. In eukaryotes, genomic DNA replication initiates in two steps, origin licensing and origin firing, reflecting the loading and activation of the MCM replicative helicase motor on origin DNA. Biochemical reconstitution of these steps in the budding yeast model system signified a major advance towards understanding the molecular and structural details of eukaryotic replication initiation events. With recent successes in reconstituting origin (...) class='Hi'>licensing with purified human proteins, a mechanistic picture is beginning to emerge on how DNA replication initiates in higher eukaryotes and how it deviates from the paradigms established in budding yeast. In this review, we highlight similarities and differences in licensing mechanisms between yeast and metazoa. (shrink)

In this chapter, we seek to offer a fresh perspective on whether or not doctors should be “licensed to kill”. As that phrase indicates, we metaphorically refer to the adventures of fictional spy James Bond, although we hope, in doing so, that readers will not think that we are belittling the serious topic with which the chapter is concerned. Having surveyed some of the familiar arguments for and against allowing medically-assisted dying, we advance a new proposal, which seeks to strike (...) a compromise between such arguments. Our exploratory model builds on an analogy with armed response police units as they operate in England, and specifically with situations in which such officers are found to have killed someone in the course of their duties. Rather than confer immunity prospectively (as proponents of assisted dying often seek) or deny immunity completely (as opponents insist), our policy would provide a potential retrospective excuse. (shrink)

In _Poetic License,_ Marjorie Perloff insists that despite the recent interest in "opening up the canon," our understanding of poetry and poetics is all too often rutted in conventional notions of the lyric that shed little light on what poets and artists are actually doing today. On topics ranging from general problems of canonicity to the critical evaluation of such poets as Plath, Ginsberg, and others, Perloff introduces nonconventional ideas of the nature of poetic texts and reframes the discussion of (...) postmodern "paratexts." Her discussion reformulates basic presuppositions of what poetry is and what it can do and leads us to see the great possibilities still open to lyric poetry at a time when, as Yeats predicted, "the center cannot hold.". (shrink)

This study examines the passages in Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān, the quranic commentary of Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), that address apparent violations of the ordinary rules of grammar and style for the sake of end rhyme. Analysis shows that al-Ṭabarī assigns importance to end rhyme in the Quran and recognizes the effects that it has on the text. The term he uses for this quranic phenomenon is al-tawfīq bayna ruʾūs al-āyāt “making the verse-final words match,” which (...) justifies acceptable variations of the ordinary rules of Arabic for the sake of end rhyme. This differs from the term for poetic license in poetry, ḍarūra “necessity,” to which al-Ṭabarī also refers in several passages of his commentary. In al-Ṭabarī’s view, the latter concept rather serves to justify the use of forms and structures in poetry that do not meet the standard of eloquent Arabic speech and so would not occur in the Quran. (shrink)

Frank Jackson has put forward a famous thought experiment of a physician who has to decide on the correct treatment for her patient. Subjective consequentialism tells the physician to do what intuitively seems to be the right action, whereas objective consequentialism fails to guide the physician’s action. I suppose that objective consequentialists want to supplement their theory so that it guides the physician’s action towards what intuitively seems to be the right treatment. Since this treatment is wrong according to objective (...) consequentialism, objective consequentialists have to license it without calling it right. I consider eight strategies to spell out the idea of licensing the intuitively right treatment and argue that objective consequentialism is on the horns of what I call the licensing dilemma : Either the physician’s action is not guided towards the intuitively right treatment. Or the guidance towards the intuitively right treatment is ad hoc in some respect or the other. (shrink)

Offensive street speech--racist and sexist remarks that can make its targets feel both psychologically and physically threatened--is surprisingly common in our society. Many argue that this speech is so detestable that it should be banned under law. But is this an area covered by the First Amendment right to free speech? Or should it be banned?In this elegantly written book, Laura Beth Nielsen pursues the answers by probing the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens. Using a combination of field observations and (...) in-depth, semistructured interviews, she surveys one hundred men and women, some of whom are routine targets of offensive speech, about how such speech affects their lives. Drawing on these interviews as well as an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, Nielsen argues that racist and sexist speech creates, reproduces, and reinforces existing systems of hierarchy in public places. The law works to normalize and justify offensive public interactions, she concludes, offering, in essence, a "license to harass."Nielsen relates the results of her interviews to statistical surveys that measure the impact of offensive speech on the public. Rather than arguing whether law is the appropriate remedy for offensive speech, she allows that the benefits to democracy, to community, and to society of allowing such speech may very well outweigh the burdens imposed. Nonetheless, these burdens, and the stories of the people who bear them, should not remain invisible and outside the debate. (shrink)

This book considers the efficacy of the common regulatory model of the licensing regime as a means of regulating animal use in England, with a particular focus on wild animals and the regime’s ability to ensure animal welfare needs are met. Using information gleaned from over 550 inspection reports relating to the period 2008 through 2019, obtained using FOI Act requests, the book analyses the extent to which animals used by these industries are protected by law. Tyson analyses the (...) limitations present in the practical application of English legislation responsible for creating a number of relevant licensing regimes.The regimes discussed include: The Zoo Licensing Act 1981, the now repealed Welfare of Wild Animals in Travelling Circuses Regulations 2012, and the Animal Welfare Regulations 2018, introduced under the Animal Welfare Act 2006. Exploring the weakness in the use of this type of regulatory model, Tyson proposes compelling recommendations for change in future policy development. Making an important contribution to the question of enforcement of animal welfare laws, this book provides useful and original insights into the implementation of licensing regimes, and will be of particular interest to scholars of animal welfare law, animal ethics, and critical animal studies. (shrink)

This chapter focuses specifically on the application and mechanisms of licensing regimes as a regulatory vehicle, exploring when and how licensing might be employed and to what end.

This chapter outlines the history of the zoo industry in England and its regulation, leading to the consideration of the first piece of legislation analyzed as part of this book: the Zoo Licensing Act 1981.

This chapter provides a series of recommendations for change which would allow existing and future licensing regimes governing the use of animals to be put to best effect. This includes recommendations for licensing regimes conceived under s.13 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006 as well as those licensing regimes, such as the Zoo Licensing Act 1981, which are introduced as stand-alone primary legislation.

Philosophical counselors are now debating whether they should be licensed in the way psychiatrists, psychologists, and other similar helping professions are. The side favoring licensing claim it is a step on the way to making philosophical counseling “a profession.” In this paper I explain why licensing has nothing to do with making a profession of philosophical counseling—and what does. In particular, I offer a definition of profession, explain its application to philosophical counseling, and defend it against competitors (especially (...) various sociological definitions). I also explain the importance of licensing, registration, and certification—and its disadvantages for philosophical counseling. (shrink)

When picking up a book titled Licensed to Practice: The Supreme Court Defines the American Medical Profession, one cannot be faulted for expecting a rather dry legal discourse on the Supreme Court case that cemented medical licensure as the norm of American life. James Mohr dispels these expectations from the very first page of the volume. Instead of recitation of legal doctrine, Mohr begins with a murder mystery. While we know from the very first pages the answer to “whodunit,” the (...) rest of the book masterfully explains why they did it. As it turns out, what led to the murder was an intense fight over the proper way to practice medicine. Mohr’s work is.. (shrink)

This chapter draws together the findings of the research in order to answer the question: Is licensing an effective means to regulate the use of animals, and wild animals in particular? It is concluded that licensing can be used as an important tool to scrutinize industry and provide additional protection to animals by virtue of that increased scrutiny, albeit under the proviso that the licensing regime in question is considered to fit the model for “responsive regulation” and (...) it is drafted in a way that allows it to be correctly enforced. (shrink)

Culture clashes -- Ontology, copyright, and artistic practice -- The myth of unoriginality -- Authorship, power, and responsibility -- Toward an ontology of authored works -- The rights of authors -- The rights of others -- Appropriation and transformation -- Afterword.

Physician prescribing practices contributed to the US opioid epidemic, leading to increased regulation of opioid prescribing. In some instances, prescribers are unscrupulous or corrupt. They are criminally investigated and subject to prosecution. Less egregious opioid prescribing infractions are addressed through state medical licensing boards. At stake are physicians’ licenses to practice medicine.

Moral licensing theory posits that individuals who initially behave morally may later display behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic. While previous literature mainly focused on individual moral licensing, the influences from the social environment have barely been investigated. To address this issue, the present paper develops a conceptual framework of social moral licensing and outlines two main avenues for future research via six propositions. The first avenue entitled “the conspicuousness of moral licensing” considers moral (...) licensing that comes into play when people are observed by others. The second avenue entitled “the relativity of moral licensing” focusses on social comparisons between individuals, their ingroups and outgroups. Specific and testable social moral licensing effects are derived in both avenues. By doing so, this paper outlines promising directions for future studies in this new research stream. (shrink)

This paper uses a partially ordered set of syntactic categories to accommodate optionality and licensing in natural language syntax. A complex but well-studied data set pertaining to the syntax of quantifier scope and negative polarity licensing in Hungarian is used to illustrate the proposal. The presentation is geared towards both linguists and logicians. The paper highlights that the main ideas can be implemented in different grammar formalisms, and discusses in detail an implementation where the partial ordering on categories (...) is given by the derivability relation of a calculus with residuated and Galois-connected unary operators. (shrink)

Hugh LaFollette proposed parental licensing in 1980 (and 2010)--not as a requirement for pregnancy, but for raising a child. If you have a baby, are not licensed, and do not get licensed, the baby would be put up for adoption. Despite the intervention required in an extremely personal area of life, I argue that those who endorse the harm principle ought to endorse parental licensing of this sort. Put differently, I show how the harm principle strengthens the case (...) for parental licensing. (shrink)

Polarity phenomena in language are pervasive and quite diverse. A quite familiar polarity item (PI) is any. Any a PI because it exhibits limited distribution: it is ungrammatical in positive sentences, but becomes fine with negation, in questions, with modal verbs, and in the scope of downward entailing quantifiers like few.

Social license reflects environmental and social change, and sees community as an important stakeholder and partner. Science, scientists, and science policy have a key role in the processes that generate social license. In this paper, we focus on the interaction between science and social license in salmon aquaculture in south-eastern Tasmania. This research suggests that social license will be supported by distributed and credible knowledge co-production. Drawing on qualitative, interpretive social research we argue that targeted science, instilled by appropriate science (...) policy, can underpin social license by supporting emerging, distributed, and pluralistic knowledge production. Where social license is important and environmental contexts are complex, such knowledge production might support environmental governance, and so improve outcomes in coastal zone management and beyond. (shrink)

The pervasiveness of AI-empowered technologies across multiple sectors has led to drastic changes concerning traditional social practices and how we relate to one another. Moreover, market-driven Big Tech corporations are now entering public domains, and concerns have been raised that they may even influence public agenda and research. Therefore, this chapter focuses on assessing and evaluating what kind of business model is desirable to incentivise the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) factors. In particular, the chapter explores the implications of this (...) discourse for SDG #17 (global partnership) and how this goal may encourage Big Tech corporations to strengthen multi-stakeholder partnerships that promote effective public-private and civil society partnerships and the meaningful co-presence of non-market and market values. In doing so, the chapter proposes an analysis of the sociological notion of "social license to operate" (SLO) elaborated in the mining and extractive industry literature and introduces it into the discourse on sustainable digital business models and responsible management of risks in the digital age. This serves to explore how such a social license can be adopted as a practice by digital business models to foster trust, collaboration and coordination among different actors - AI researchers and initiatives, institutions and civil society at large - for the support of SDGs interrelated targets and goals. (shrink)

This chapter is a journey into the ontological significance of place in consideration of the Atlantic Tasmanian salmon industry and its challenges to the ethical discourse around the social license to operate (SLO) beyond the oxymoron of a name. It centres the discourse around the salmon itself. A once totem animal, responsible for the balance of Canada’s abundant ecosystem, now reduced to a mere source of protein, manipulated, and commodified by Tasmania’s ‘big business’ and against the SLO of Flanagan’s ‘Toxic’. (...) It applies Ortega y Gasset’s mid-twentieth century solution to the problem of our western disconnection from place to the current neoliberal political framework. This welcomes an inclusive dialogue with kinship structures of the Mi’kmaq peoples reflected also in the ontological narrative of the First Nations people of Tasmania. This multidisciplinary journey necessitates a concept of the SLO founded upon ethical responsibility and a cultural license if it is to genuinely hold to account the corporate sovereign. (shrink)

The distribution of the focus particle even is constrained: if it is adjoined at surface structure to an expression that is entailed by its focus alternatives, as in even once, it must be appropriately embedded to be acceptable. This paper focuses on the context-dependent distribution of such occurrences of even in the scope of non-monotone quantifiers. We show that it is explained on the assumption that even can move at LF Syntax and semantics, 1979). The analysis is subsequently extended to (...) occurrences of negative polarity items in these environments, which mirror the abovementioned distribution of even and which invalidate standard characterizations of NPI licensing conditions in terms of downward-entailingness. The idea behind the extension is that NPIs denote weak elements that are associates of covert even. The paper concludes by discussing two comprehensive theories of NPI licensing and how our proposal relates to them. (shrink)

The debate over the attribution of personhood to non-human entities is of an increasing concern to both academia and institutions. The intelligence, autonomy and efficiency exhibited by modern AI systems, raise pressing questions regarding the moral responsibility issues their use entails. In our paper we focus our discussion on autonomous war machines, as their actions touch upon issues of life and death and their design, production and use cause philosophical controversies. Prompted by the classic position of Daniel Dennett, defending the (...) possibility that autonomous intelligent systems are responsible for their actions, we consider a) the argument of cognitive and / or functional equivalence of humans and machines, b) the argument of autonomy as such and c) the argument of excessive efficiency of the actions of intelligent machines. Our investigation upholds a skeptical stance towards the issue of recognition of moral personhood, while illuminating aspects such as the difference between cognition and intelligence, the necessary and sufficient conditions that imply moral responsibility and the differences between the ontological and the epistemological examination of the above problems. Finally, the contradiction between the demand for clear and solid decision-making criteria and the endless nature of a philosophical analysis that strives to be consistent is emphasized. (shrink)

The tension between economic policy and health policy is a longstanding dilemma, but one that was brought to the fore with the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement in 1994. The pharmaceutical industry has long argued that intellectual property protection is vital for innovation. At the same time, there are those who counter that strong IPP negatively impacts the affordability and availability of essential medicines in developing countries. However, actors on both sides of the debate were (...) in agreement that something needed to be done to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, especially in developing countries. In response to sustained and significant pressure from civil society groups, members of the World Trade Organization agreed to the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health in 2001. The Declaration clarified that countries unable to manufacture the needed pharmaceuticals could obtain more affordable generics elsewhere if necessary. (shrink)

Adults are not always capable of representing children’s views and interests, and many ethical issues in paediatric research could be better approached if children’s perspectives are taken into consideration. Children do not currently serve as institutional review board (IRB) members or provide support to IRBs who review and decide on paediatric research proposals. Based on research on moral development, however, many children are competent and could play expert roles in the IRB process with significant benefits to the latter. In this (...) article, we argue that competent children should be permitted to assist members of IRBs in reviewing proposed paediatric research. We present three reasons in favour of involving children in IRB activities: (1) this allows children to be more adequately represented; (2) this yields a more sensitive approach to ethical complexities in paediatric research; and (3) this can improve the quality of paediatric research and enhance the well-being of research subjects. We offer a model of how competent children could play a role in the IRB process and we discuss the application of this model in the context of global paediatric research in Ghana. We address some worries about involving children in IRBs, focusing on different stakeholders involved in the research review process: the impact on children, IRB members and paediatric researchers. (shrink)