This paper argues that the potential of writing on computer ethics to contribute to a deeper understanding of inequalities surrounding the use of information and communications technologies is threatened by forms of technological determinism and liberalism. Such views are prevalent in professional and more popular literature, and even in policy documents, albeit expressed tacitly. Adopting this...

This article shows how the social sciences, particularly human geography, rejected hard determinism by the mid-twentieth century largely on the deontological basis that it is irreconcilable with social justice, yet this rejection came just before a burst of creative development in consequentialist theories of social justice that problematize a facile rejection of determinism on moral grounds, a...

Most transformational linguists would no longer create explicit deep structures. Instead they adopt a surface-tnterpretlve approach. We find deep structures indIspensable for projection into a semantic network. In conjunction wrth a reference architecture based on constraint-posting, they mlnlmlze referential non-determinism% We extend Marcus’ Determm~sm Hypothesis to include rmmed/ate referenc...

In Software Engineering, as in Computing Science, the topics that we teach to our students can be considered as falling into two broad categories: the deterministic, and the non-deterministic. Deterministic topics are those where a specific scenario or operation leads to outcomes that can be assessed in terms of true/false values, and so this classification encompasses large elements of compute...

conditions, would they choose to hold on to the concrete judgment that Bill is morally responsible or the abstract judgment that no one can be responsible in a deterministic universe? The results showed no clear majority on either side. Approximately half of the subjects chose to hold onto the judgment that the particular agent was morally responsible, while the other half chose to hold onto th...

A goal-pursuing agent must somehow ascertain when an action would serve as a means to achieving a goal. Various criteria (causal, evidential, counterfactual) have been proposed (e.g. Joyce 1999). Examining Newcomb’s Problem (Nozick 1969) and more-mundane thought experiments, I argue for an acausal but non-evidentialist counterfactual criterion (but without invoking the “possible worlds” of e.g....