Luck egalitarianism is a responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. Its application to health and healthcare is controversial. This article addresses a novel critique of luck egalitarianism, namely, that it wrongfully discriminates against those responsible for their health disadvantage when allocating scarce healthcare resources. The philosophical literature about discrimination offers two primary reasons for what makes discrimination wrong (when it is): harm and disrespect. These two approaches are employed to analyze whether luck egalitarian healthcare prioritization should be considered wrongful discrimination. Regarding harm, it is very plausible to consider the policies harmful but much less reasonable to consider those responsible for their health disadvantages a socially salient group. Drawing on the disrespect literature, where social salience is typically not required for something to be discrimination, the policies are a form of discrimination. They are, however, not disrespectful. The upshot of this first assessment of the discrimination objection to luck egalitarianism in health is, thus, that it fails.

Intelligence operations overwhelmingly focus on obtaining secrets (espionage) and the unauthorized disclosure of secrets by a public official in one political community to another (treason). It is generally understood that the principal responsibility of spies is to successfully procure secrets about the enemy. Yet, in this essay, I ask: Are spies and traitors ethically justified in using cyber operations not merely to acquire secrets (cyber espionage) but also to covertly manipulate or falsify information (cyber manipulation) to prevent atrocities? I suggest that using cyber manipulation operations to parry atrocities is pro tanto morally permissible and, on occasion, required.

In this article I show how David Hume's works provide the ingredients for a conception of religiosity understood as a feeling of wonder concerning nature or existence, accompanied by a playful attitude regarding the imaginative shapes that can be given to this emotion. Hume serves as an inspiration rather than an object of study: I respect the spirit and values of his work, while going beyond his own explicit points. My reading accounts for Hume's aversion to traditional religions (‘superstition’), and for his acknowledgement of the universal attraction of the idea of invisible intelligent power and his own fascination with it. I argue first that superstition is a natural reaction to existential uncertainty. Second, I argue that uncertainty fuels activity, creativity and morality, and thus may be left untended. Though it always involves a measure of pain, too, human happiness is found in challenge and activity. Traditional monotheist religions respond to this need by generating experiences of wonder, thus, however, stimulating passive devotion and dogmatism. Opposing this, the suggestion of Hume's works is to respect the mystery of nature rather than shrouding it in unfounded convictions. The fictional character Philo illustrates how the longing for an answer by is itself can already be a profoundly religious feeling. Hume's descriptions of ancient polytheism and Philo show how this can be accompanied by a playful, imaginative interaction with the world.

Will existing forms of artificial intelligence (AI) lead to genuine intelligence? How is AI changing our society and politics? This essay examines the answers to these questions in Brian Cantwell Smith's The Promise of Artificial Intelligence and Mark Coeckelbergh's The Political Philosophy of AI with a focus on their central concern with judgment—whether AI can possess judgment and how developments in AI are affecting human judgment. First, I argue that the existentialist conception of judgment that Smith defends is highly idealized. While it may be an appropriate standard for intelligence, its implications for when and how AI should be deployed are not as clear as Smith suggests. Second, I point out that the concern with the displacement of judgment in favor of “reckoning” (or calculation) predates the rise of AI. The meaning and implications of this trend will become clearer if we move beyond ontology and metaphysics and into political philosophy, situating technological changes in their social context. Finally, I suggest that Coeckelbergh's distinctly political conception of judgment might offer a solution to the important boundary-drawing problem between tasks requiring judgment and those requiring reckoning, thus filling a gap in Smith's argument and clarifying its political stakes.

Cet article questionne la nature des troubles phonologiques à travers le prisme de la notion de complexité phonologique chez des locuteurs francophones atteints d’aphasie. Si de nombreux travaux ont été consacrés aux erreurs phonétiques portant sur la réalisation des phonèmes, plus rares sont les études qui prennent en compte la dimension phonologique, i.e. l’environnement contextuel. Toutefois certains auteurs montrent que la structure syllabique du mot, ou encore la position des segments au sein des syllabes influencent les réalisations des locuteurs atteints d’une aphasie (Wilshire & Nespoulous, 2003; Buchwald et Miozzo, 2012; Buchwald, 2017). Ces facteurs renvoient à la notion de complexité phonologique.

Cette étude présente une analyse des erreurs phonologiques dans l’aphasie à partir d’un corpus de données empiriques récoltées auprès de huit locuteurs. Plusieurs facteurs de la complexité phonologique sont ici analysés afin de comprendre s’ils jouent un rôle dans la réalisation des erreurs. L’hypothèse est que la présence de séquences consonantiques, la position de ces séquences dans les items (initiale vs médiane), la nature de ces séquences (hétérosyllabique, tautosyllabique) ainsi que la longueur des items (bi vs trisyllabique) influencent la production des erreurs. À travers cette recherche, nous espérons accroître les connaissances sur la nature des déficits phonologiques.

The ethical value of intelligence lies in its crucial role in safeguarding individuals from harm by detecting, locating, and preventing threats. As part of this undertaking, intelligence can include protecting the economic well-being of the political community and its people. Intelligence, however, also entails causing people harm when it violates their vital interests through its operations. The challenge, therefore, is how to reconcile this tension, which Cécile Fabre's recent book Spying through a Glass Darkly does by arguing for the “ongoing and preemptive imposition of defensive harm.” Fabre applies this underlying argument to the specifics of economic espionage to argue that while states, businesses, and individuals do have a general right over their information that prevents others from accessing it, such protections can be forfeited or overridden when there is a potential threat to the fundamental rights of third parties. This essay argues, however, that Fabre's discussion on economic espionage overlooks important additional proportionality and discrimination concerns that need to be accounted for. In addition to the privacy violations it causes, economic espionage can cause harms to people's other vital interests, including their physical and mental well-being and autonomy. Given the complex way in which the economy interlinks with people's lives and society, harms to one economic actor will have repercussions on those secondary economic entities dependent on them, such as workers, buyers, and investors. This, in turn, can produce further harms on other economic actors, causing damages to ripple outward across society.

This article combines historiographic reflections on the open-work concept in serial music with a new philology of Pierre Boulez's Don, the opening piece of Pli selon pli. I begin by presenting challenges in defining the open-work concept. I also deconstruct the dual use of the term ‘serialism’ to define a set of compositional techniques and a musical style. This leads me to a reconsideration of the similarities between the changing compositional strategies of Boulez and John Cage (and their influence on others) during a time of formal and stylistic experimentation in the 1950s. Finally, I segue to Boulez's compositional plans for Don. In doing so, I provide a concrete example of how the techniques of serialism often belie the aesthetic and extramusical connotations at play in works that are serial in style.

A normative defense of espionage and counterintelligence activities in the service of foreign policy goals must show at least two things. First, it must show which foreign policy goals, if any, provide a justification for such activities. Second, it must provide an account of the means that intelligence agencies are morally permitted, indeed morally obliged, to use during those activities. I first discuss Ross Bellaby's probing critique of my defense of economic espionage. I then turn to the other four essays, which consider the ethics of the means by which espionage and counterintelligence activities are conducted.

This article challenges the orthodox view of international law, according to which states have no legal duty to cooperate. It argues for this legal duty in the context of COVID-19, based on the ethical principles of solidarity, stewardship, and subsidiarity. More specifically, the article argues that states have a legal duty to cooperate during a pandemic (as solidarity requires); and while this duty entails an extraterritorial responsibility to care for and assist other nations (as stewardship requires), the legal duty to cooperate still allows states to attend first to the basic needs of those under their own jurisdiction—namely, fellow nationals and residents (as subsidiarity requires). The article provides a definition and philosophical justifications for this legal duty that are lacking in the literature by examining its application to a current COVID-19 controversy: namely, states’ responsibility to assist other countries in greater need by, inter alia, exporting at a discount or donating scarce COVID-19 treatments (including vaccines). In providing a principled tripartite account of pandemic governance, this conceptual and normative article offers a new lens for debating the potential international treaty for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response that has now been drafted and is under negotiation at the World Health Assembly, by responding to the recent backlash against multilateralism by substantiating global co-responsibilities in times of pandemics and beyond.

This essay contends that the ethics around the use of spy technology to gather intelligence (TECHINT) during espionage and counterintelligence operations is ambiguous. To build this argument, the essay critically scrutinizes Cécile Fabre's recent and excellent book Spying through a Glass Darkly, which argues that there are no ethical differences between the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) obtained from or by human assets and TECHINT in these operations. As the essay explains, Fabre arrives at this position by treating TECHINT as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. The essay argues instead that TECHINT is unlikely to act as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. As such, TECHINT might transform existing practices of espionage and counterintelligence, giving rise to new ethical challenges not captured in Fabre's analysis. To illustrate the point, the essay builds an analogy between TECHINT and recent armed conflicts in which precision weapons have been deployed. Although precision weapons seem ethically desirable, their availability has created new practices of waging war that are ethically problematic. By analogy, TECHINT, though not intrinsically undesirable, has the capacity to generate new practices of intelligence gathering that are ethically problematic—potentially more than HUMINT. Ultimately, recent negative experiences with the use of precision weaponry should caution against an overly positive assessment of TECHINT's ethical desirability.

This essay starts by accepting Cécile Fabre's argument in her book Spying through a Glass Darkly that intelligence work, including using incentives and pressures to encourage betrayal and treason, can be morally justified based on the criteria of necessity, effectiveness, and proportionality. However, while assessments of spying tend to be based on Cold War notions, I explore it here in the messier reality of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and “new wars.” In addition, I suggest a methodological expansion: adding a sociological perspective to the ethical discussion by exploring the wider effects on society, over longer periods, of the operation of informers. Based on these shifts in perspective and context, I identify additional social harms generated by espionage that should lead to a more restrictive view of ethical espionage than the one emerging from Fabre's work. I argue that many of these social harms are created by the mass recruitment of informers, in asymmetrical conflicts where governments have leverage over suspected communities, and given the (often mistaken) belief that everyone recruited to act as informer is an “asset,” primarily providing advantages. I argue, therefore, that the decisive issue is one of scale: many of the ethical problems created by espionage in these contexts result from the widespread systematic recruitment of informers, while small-scale, targeted, ad-hoc recruitment can more easily avoid such problems.

The use of facial recognition technology (FRT) as a form of intelligence has recently made a prominent public appearance in the theater of war. During the early months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities relied on FRT as part of the country's defensive activities, harnessing the technology for a variety of purposes, such as unveiling covert Russian agents operating amid the Ukrainian population; revealing the identity of Russian soldiers who committed war crimes; and even identifying dead Russian soldiers. This constellation of uses of FRT—in a war increasingly waged on the digital and information front—warrants ethical examination. The essay discusses some of the most serious concerns with FRT in the context of war, including the infringement of informational privacy; the indiscriminate and disproportionate harms it may inflict, particularly when the technology is coupled with social media intelligence; and the potential abuse of the technology once the fog of war dissipates. Some of these concerns parallel those to be found in nations that are not engulfed in war, but others are unique to war-torn settings.