Ignorance is bliss? HIV and moral duties and legal duties to forewarn

Ignorance is bliss? HIV and moral duties and legal duties to forewarn.

In 1997, a court in Cyprus jailed Pavlos Georgiou for fifteen months for knowingly infecting a British woman, Janet Pink, with HIV-1 through unprotected sexual intercourse. Pink met Georgiou in January 1994 whilst on holiday. She discovered that she had contracted the virus from him in October 1994 but continued the relationship until July 1996 when she developed AIDS. She returned to the UK fo...

Is Ignorance Bliss?

ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. " Thomas Gray If ignorance were bliss, there is information you would pay not to have. Hence the question is whether a rationally-behaving agent would ever do such a thing. This paper demonstrates that 1. A Bayesian agent with a proper, countably additive prior never maximizes utility by paying not to see cost-free data. 2. The definition of " cost-fre...

When Ignorance is Bliss

It is commonly-accepted wisdom that more information is better, and that information should never be ignored. Here we argue, using both a Bayesian and a non-Bayesian analysis, that in some situations you are better off ignoring information if your uncertainty is represented by a set of probability measures. These include situations in which the information is relevant for the prediction task at...

Rights, Duties, HIV/AIDS and Corrections

Arguing from Facts to Duties (and Conversely)

One of the most controversial issues about arguments involving deontic and ethical matters is whether statements of duty or right can be inferred from statements of fact, and conversely. Most analytical philosophers have inclined to give a negative answer, alleging that duties or rights are not implied by mere facts (or the other way round), and hence that no combination of facts can imply a du...