Answering the Conventionalist Challenge to Natural Rights Theory

The Natural Rights of Children

What does libertarian theory, Murray Rothbard’s theory in particular, tell us about the rights of children? The two foundational principles of Rothbardian libertarianism are the sanctity of private property and the rule of non-aggression. Persons, including children, are “self-owners”. Yet children, at a young age, are not yet capable of functioning fully as “self-owners.” They must be cared fo...

Answering the Bayesioskeptical Challenge

Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights?

In the first installment of this four‐part series we examined a number of arguments for abortion rights which can be classified as appeals to pity. In this article I will present and critique more appeals to pity, along with two additional kinds of argument: appeals to tolerance and ad hominem (literally, ʺagainst the personʺ). Of course, not every defender of abortion rights holds to all or an...

On a bioethical challenge to disability rights.

Tensions exist between the disability rights movement and the work of many bioethicists. These reveal themselves in a major recent book on bioethics and genetics, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. This book defends certain genetic policies against criticisms from disability rights advocates, in part by arguing that it is possible to accept both the genetic policies and the rights of ...

The Quantum Challenge in Concept Theory and Natural Language Processing

The mathematical formalism of quantum theory has been successfully used in human cognition to model decision processes and to deliver representations of human knowledge. As such, quantum cognition inspired tools have improved technologies for Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. In this paper, we overview the quantum cognition approach developed in our Brussels team during the...