Censorship and Access to Information
While there is much debate about censorship, there is little work in the philosophical literature on the concept itself. In this chapter I try to fill in this gap by providing a definition of censorship. I propose that censorship is "restricting or limiting access to an expression, portion of an expression, or category of expression, which has been made public by its author, based on the belief that it will be a bad thing if people access the content of that expression." With this definition in hand, I consider the sorts of justifications given for censorship and canvass the arguments against censorship.
Vulnerable populations and morally tainted experiments.
This article addresses the dilemma facing an editor when he or she has to decide whether or not to publish a manuscript that describes unethical research. I will explore three options the editor may follow: a) publish the unethical research; b) publish it with an explicit condemnation of the methods used; c) reject the article on moral grounds. I will consider the importance of deterring unethical research, why the deterrence argument has been overlooked and the relevance it has in developing countries which seem to be more exposed to morally tainted experiments. I will suggest a combined policy. For cases in which the ethical problems are serious -- where basic human rights are not respected, where consent has been given without complete or proper information or voluntary participation by subjects, or where deceit has been practised -- I would support the strong policy of rejecting the article on moral grounds. For dubious cases, where the risk assessment can be doubted or where there are suspicions of ethical problems, I argue for a policy under which the article is published along with a serious discussion of the ethical problems suspected, allowing a rebuttal by the authors. In this way, while maintaining a strong deterrent policy, we recognize that sometimes it is not so clear if a research project was unethical, and only in such cases (where the ethical problems are dubious), the article may be published with an editorial.
Hobbes and the Reception of Leviathan
Although there has been much discussion of the reception of Hobbes’s work, Hobbes’s response to his own reception has rarely received much consideration. This article looks at Hobbes’s engagements with his critics. Far from being rearguard actions by a philosopher under siege, or disingenuous attempts to curry favour with those in power, they can be read as moments when Hobbes in fact sought to convert what he saw as the “truth of speculation into the utility of practice.”