Editorial: Critic and Conscience

Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics

Persons of faith are now seeking religious exemptions from laws concerning sex, reproduction, and marriage on the ground that the law makes the objector complicit in the assertedly sinful conduct of others. We term claims of this kind, which were at issue in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, complicity-based conscience claims. Complicity-based conscience claims differ in form and in social logic f...

'In good conscience': conscience-based exemptions and proper medical treatment.

Lack of clarity about the proper limits of conscientious refusal to participate in particular healthcare practices has given rise to fears that, in the absence of clear parameters, conscience-based exemptions may become increasingly widespread, leading to intolerable burdens on health professionals, patients, and institutions. Here, we identify three factors which clarify the proper scope of co...

Utilitarianism, Conscience and Animals

A critic-critic architecture to combine reinforcement and supervised learnings

In real life, learning is greatly speeded-up by the intervention of a teacher who gives examples, or shows, how to perform a certain task. In all this abstract, we let apart structural simpli cations of the problem by the designer which to not deal explicitely with learning. The intervention of the teacher can be realized in di erent ways: verbal explanation, demonstration, guidance, shaping th...

Rationing conscience

Decisions about allocation of limited healthcare resources are frequently controversial. These decisions are usually based on careful analysis of medical, scientific and health economic evidence. Yet, decisions are also necessarily based on value judgements. There may be differing views among health professionals about how to allocate resources or how to evaluate existing evidence. In specific ...