Purposes and duties in scientific modelling

More people than ever are paying attention to philosophical questions about epidemiological models, including their susceptibility to the influence of social and ethical values, sufficiency to inform policy decisions under certain conditions, and even their fundamental nature. One important question pertains to the purposes of epidemiological models, for example, are COVID-19 models for ‘prediction’ or ‘projection’? Are they adequate for making causal inferences? Is one of their goals, or virtues, to change individual responses to the pandemic? In this essay, we offer our perspective on these questions and place them in the context of other recent philosophical arguments about epidemiological models. We argue that clarifying the intended purpose of a model, and assessing its adequacy for that purpose, are moral-epistemic duties, responsibilities which pertain to knowledge but have moral significance nonetheless. This moral significance, we argue, stems from the inherent value-ladenness of models, along with the potential for models to be used in political decision making in ways that conflict with liberal values and which could lead to downstream harms. Increasing conversation about the moral significance of modelling, we argue, could help us to resist further eroding our standards of democratic scrutiny in the COVID-19 era.

Moral Status and Moral Significance

This chapter discusses the relations between moral status (or standing) and what the author calls moral significance. Something has moral significance just in case it morally counts for its own sake, or is something that must be taken into consideration in itself when moral judgments about what ought or ought not to be done are made. The chapter argues that the moral status of something is dependent on what is morally significant about it. Nothing can have moral status if there is not anything morally significant about it. On the other hand, something can be morally significant, even though it does not have moral status. The notion of moral significance is then the more fundamental notion and the notion of moral status could be dispensed with. In fact, it would simplify and clarify matters if it were dispensed with.

A Phenomenological Approach to Skeptical Theism

"The purpose of the present essay is to present a version of the evidential argument from evil and to propose a ‘skeptical theistic’ response from a phenomenological point of view. In a word, the problem with the evidential argument from evil is that it attempts to put forth as justified an interpretation of the moral significance of historical events which actually exceeds the limits of human knowledge and which is based on a misinterpretation of experience. The essay also corrects certain analytic-philosophical notions regarding the nature of appearance, terminating with a discussion of the familiar critiques of analytic skeptical theism and the question of whether the belief in the existence of God might not be affected by the apparent skepticism implied by the phenomenological approach to knowledge in general. Keywords: existence of God, argument from evil, skeptical theism, phenomenology, analytic philosophy "

EXPLORATION ON THE TEACHING DESIGN OF HEALTH MANAGEMENT COURSE

In the era of public health emergencies, this paper puts forward the ideas and programs of Ideological and political teaching design of health management course. The design is based on many events occurred in health emergencies as cases, at the same time, it constructs the collection of Ideological and political elements of the course, organically integrates with the professional knowledge of health management, and carries out the problem-oriented hybrid teaching, so as to better guide students to actively think about the ideological and moral significance contained in each case and internalize it into their own values when learning professional knowledge and to help them shape the correct "Three Outlooks" and ultimately achieve the teaching and education goal of cultivating the interdisciplinary health management professionals with both ability and political integrity.

Social Justice as a Category in Political Science Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to determine an objective definition of social justice as a category in political science. The author draws attention to the fact that since the times of ancient Greece, this has been a central concept accompanying in–depth analyses of politics. Making references to classical approaches, the author tries to determine the main formal elements common in publicly postulated interpretations. The concept proposed by the author relies on differentiation between two perspectives on the idea as part of a discursive understanding of politics. Within this framework, solely integration of distribution and recognition allows for capturing the phenomenon of overlapping economic inequalities and hierarchical status orders in societies. Both mechanisms are united by the fact that the starting point for implementing the principles of social justice is the sanctioning of equal moral significance to every member of a political community.

Terrorism and Its Claims to “Distinctive Significance”

Chapter 3 addresses four philosophical attempts to show that terrorist attacks, definitional issues aside, have a special moral significance. In their very different ways, these philosophers articulate a concern about terrorism also widely held amongst non-specialists. The philosophers addressing the idea of special significance most directly are Samuel Scheffler, Jeremy Waldron, and Lionel McPherson. Waldron does not use the phrase “special moral significance,” but the idea is at work in his discussion. The fourth is Karen Jones, who doesn’t use “special significance” but her discussion of terrorist disruption of “basal security” seems to mark some distinctive moral feature of terrorism in addition to its being a tactic committed to attacking non-combatants. That makes her claim relevant here. The chapter argues that these various attempts fail to make the strong case they promise, and that the failure is instructive for our understanding of terrorism and for policies to deal with it.

Individualist Utilitarianism and Converging Theories of Rights

The paper develops two core themes of Derek Parfit’s philosophy. The first is his goal of unifying the two main rival impartial moral theories, Kantian deontology and consequentialism, therefore reinforcing their claim to pertain to objective moral truths. The second is his focus on the moral significance of the combined effects of many agents’ behaviour, and on the challenges this poses to ordinary moral thinking. This is a theme that runs throughout his work, that he returns to at the very end of volume iii of On What Matters. Kantianism and consequentialism have been thought to fundamentally diverge on the issue of rights and trade-offs. The chapter first outlines the version of consequentialism taken to be most plausible, calling it ‘individualist utilitarianism’, which differs from so-called ‘classical utilitarianism’ in taking the moral importance of well-being to be grounded on the moral importance of the persons whose well-being it is. This paves the way for a pluralist Kantian and utilitarian account of human rights, grounded on the moral significance both of persons’ well-being and their dignity as rational autonomous agents. The chapter then turns to the topic of the threat to access to the means of subsistence, both for the current poor and future generations, posed by global as well as domestic socio-economic structures and anthropogenic climate change. This harm is the combined effect of the ongoing patterns of behaviour of a vast number of agents. The chapter argues that individualist utilitarianism and Kantianism converge on the conclusion that the duty to avoid harms of this kind should be analysed as a shared duty of basic justice, non-fulfilment of which constitutes a structural human rights violation.