Ethics is the branch of philosophy that explores the nature of moral virtue and evaluates human actions. Philosophical ethics differs from legal, religious, cultural and personal approaches to ethics by seeking to conduct the study of morality through a rational, secular outlook that is grounded in notions of human happiness or well-being. A major advantage of a philosophical approach to ethics...

The retrieval of entity data has always been a core application of database systems and querying an entity's attributes can be efficiently done using declarative languages like SQL. But today's retrieval tasks more and more focus also on conceptual aspects of entities, which often are not directly expressed by attributes. For instance, users might want to find a 'thrilling' novel, unfortunately...

This paper explores an ongoing conflict concerning the nature of software design. This conflict manifests itself as antagonism between managers and developers, debates about agile vs. plan-driven methodologies and aspiring developers’ dissatisfaction with their courses. One side views design as a plandriven information processing task involving rational decision-making (the Reason-Centric Persp...

Basic income and degrowth are both ideas with a great critical potential. They force us to reflect on our views of people and society, on our visions and values. Many of the “truths” related to the industrial society are suddenly watered down and even reversed as soon as we start to take the two concepts seriously. Even if there are moderate versions of both degrowth and basic income that may b...