Perhaps in response to civil libertarians, to stricter commitment laws or to a professional paranoia that we are being persecuted by our legal colleagues, it has become fashionable for some psychiatrists to protest that certain patients are being allowed, legally, to "die with their rights on." Such allegations are presented in anecdotes which presumably illustrate the harms which resulted when...

Among political theorists there is a dispute over the status of ideal theory [see, for instance, Pennington (2011), Tomasi (2012)]. Ideal theory is characterized by its reliance on abstract arguments and thought experiments concerning questions such as: What is justice? or What rights do we owe each other? As such, ideal theory will always have a place in philosophy departments. However, recent...

Internet Connection Records were one of the key aspects of the recent Investigatory Powers Act 2016. This was a new term for what had been previously referred to as “communications data”, that is, data sent along with a message but not the message itself. Access to this data, which is already allowed and undertaken, by law enforcement is seen as a crucial part of their evidence and investigator...

tion. Why put the point that way? Because one path leads to an abundant life, and the other is a dishonest, if elaborate, form of suicide. Stewards distinguish themselves first by accepting responsibility, and then by acting on that responsibility to preserve, protect, and nurture something precious, through recurrent threats, for the purpose of delivering that precious thing to future generati...

In 2010, the Active Living Research (ALR) conference theme was " Engaging Communities to Create Active Living Environments. " This theme was based on the idea that getting a sedentary nation moving is a job for all of us. Research can help empower communities, just as data from scientific studies gives empowered communities ammunition in policy debates. The conference program highlighted ways w...

Questions of identity and difference appear to be ubiquitous in the landscape of contemporary political theory. Debates among egalitarian liberals, libertarians, socialists, and Marxists about the appropriate distributive arrangements in modern societies have, for better or worse, been overshadowed of late by the challenge of a politics of identity.1 The impulse for this form of politics has be...

We address the problem of solving a task T = (T1, ...Tm) (called (m, 1)-BG), in which a processor returns in an arbitrary one of m simultaneous consensus subtasks T1, ...Tm. Processor pi submits to T an input vector of proposals (propi,1, ..., propi,m), one entry per subtask, and outputs, from just one subtask , a pair ( , propj,l) for some j. All processors that output at output the same propo...

In " Freedom and Resentment, " P.F. Strawson seeks to recast the ordinary debate about moral responsibility and accountability. His main opponent is the incompatibilist – someone who does not believe that the claim that free will exists and the claim that everything that occurs is causally determined are compatible. Strawson also offers a critique of the view that is held by a certain kind of c...

This paper examines Moroccan author Baqqâli’s novel al-TEûfân al-‘Azraq [The Blue Flood, 1976] from the perspective of its use of an artificial intelligence (AI) as a guiding force in a sequestered community. In the novel, the desert refuge for scientists is controlled by a massive computer. The protagonist becomes aware that the AI has become sentient and is planning to use nuclear weapons to ...