Search results for "Utilitarianism"

PANDEMIE E CONTRATTO SOCIALE. NOTE PEDAGOGICHE SULLA FORMA DEI LEGAMI NEL NOSTRO TEMPO

2021

Several are the crises generated by the pandemic. In each of these crises (health, economic, social, educational...), there are many “breaks” in the “taken for granted” that lead to ask radical questions about human life.In this horizon and according to the approach of phenomenological-hermeneutic fundamental pedagogy, the paper aims at highlighting one of the hypotheses which, starting from modernity, has been very influential: the social contract. In particular, the paper focuses on same consequences that derive from having intended the social contract as model not only of political life but also,of any possible intersubjective bond. Therefore, the paper inquiries on what the ontological …

La Biología Sintética; reto biotecnológico y bioético en las Ciencias de la Vida

2020

[ES] La Biología Sintética supone un reto científico y bioético de futuro, tanto a nivel medioambiental, como también en el mejoramiento humano y de otras especies. Por ello, el trabajo abordará dos aspectos principalmente. La síntesis en el laboratorio de células artificiales para la fabricación de un principio activo farmacéutico y por otra parte la reflexión bioética acerca de la potencialidad de dichas técnicas, advirtiendo la diferencia en los límites de la síntesis de vida y creación de vida. Actualmente, se calcula que hay 1.7 millones de especies conocidas de las 14 millones que se estima en la naturaleza. En los últimos 10 años se han generado más de 3000 patentes de organismos gen…

Consciousness and Moral Status of Animals

2021

Consciousness is the basis for granting moral status, but it is ephemeral and elusive. Both the ontological and epistemic dimension of consciousness cause hard problems for modern science and the philosophy of mind. On the one hand, consciousness is subjective, and includes conscious states with a phenomenal or qualitative character – “qualia”. It consists of mental states which are accessible to a subject only from the first-person perspective. A being is phenomenally conscious when there is something that is like to be that being. Utilitarianism uses the hedonistic strategy of the moral status, ascribing to that the demand for us to treat sentience as the fundamental property for obtainin…

Adam Smith and the Law

2013

Facebook’s Emotional Contagion Experiment as a Challenge to Research Ethics

2016

This article analyzes the ethical discussion focusing on the Facebook emotional contagion experiment published by the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em> in 2014. The massive-scale experiment manipulated the News Feeds of a large amount of Facebook users and was successful in proving that emotional contagion happens also in online environments. However, the experiment caused ethical concerns within and outside academia mainly for two intertwined reasons, the first revolving around the idea of research as manipulation, and the second focusing on the problematic definition of informed consent. The article concurs with recent research that the era of social med…

Applying the Identity Status Paradigm to Managers’ Moral Identity

2019

We investigated the applicability of the identity status paradigm in identifying different stages of moral identity maturity among managers, focusing on how they solve moral conflicts in the context of work. Researchers conducted two theory-driven studies. Study 1 was based on focus group discussions among 16 managers, while Study 2 was based on open-ended questionnaire items from 180 managers. Both studies supported the hypothesized identity statuses. The status named diffusion included a lack of commitment to moral values and associated with avoiding moral questions at work. In foreclosure, extrinsic (e.g., organizational) values were adopted and applied to personal decision-making. Manag…

Compte rendu de lecture. Malcolm Quinn, Utilitarianism and the Art School, London, Pickering and Chatto, 2013.

2014

Unethical Brotherly Love: Zell Kravinsky and Maximum Human Utility

2014

The case of American investor and philanthropist Zell Kravinsky (1956-) presents numerous ethical challenges regarding our social responsibility to others. In 2003, after disbursing the bulk of his forty-five-million-dollar fortune to various charities, Kravinsky made the decision to donate one of his kidneys to an impoverished African-American woman he had met only once. In doing so he courageously saved a life, but also incurred the wrath of his family, friends, and many observers in the media who questioned his sanity. To Kravinsky, however, refusal to donate would have been tantamount to murder, constituting a violation of his belief in ‘maximum human utility’ – a concept that insists o…

Liberalism, how many divisions?

2022

Liberalism is a very broad political family which, if taken in the broadest sense, brings together authors with diverse positions whose only common point is their attachment to freedom. Therefore, to find one’s way around in this political family, it is essential to establish classification criteria. There are many possibilities: Liberals can be classified by nationality, by period, by preferred field of interest (economic liberalism, political liberalism), etc. This article proposes to classify them following two criteria, the conception of freedom on the one hand, and the utilitarian or jusnaturalist basis of the attachment to freedom on the other. These two criteria generate an operation…

The utility function and the emotional well-being function

2004

Behind the utility function, which is the basis for economic and finance theory, is a philosophical and ethical approach based essentially on the Utilitarian and Hedonistic schools. Once qualitative, the utility function’s approach shifted to a quantitative one based on the work of the mathematician, D. Bernoulli. This quantitative approach is normative and based on a maximizing agent. In this paper, the “emotional well-being” function is developed which mixes the ethics of a rational economic individual with those of a more complete individual who is simultaneously conditioned by economic, instinctive, social, religious, ethical, and esthetic values. This new utility function of emotional …