Robert Shanklin | Santa Clara University (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Robert Shanklin
Routledge eBooks, Jan 25, 2023
This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regarding access ... more This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regarding access to vaccines and other drugs developed to prevent and treat COVID-19, and more broadly regarding access to essential medicines. We examine two United Nations guidelines-the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines-which assert that pharmaceutical companies have human rights responsibilities to make essential medicines available to patients in the global South, and that member-states are responsible for enforcing these obligations. We develop a moral theory that justifies such human rights duties based on the idea of a "social contract" that more broadly underpins the idea of corporate social responsibility. We conclude by offering practical advice enabling pharmaceutical companies to balance their human rights duties to the global South with their responsibilities to shareholders and the need to sustainably incentivize drug discovery. COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS: Renewed human rights concerns for the global South The COVID-19 global pandemic has raised anew human rights concerns that last erupted on the world stage during the HIV/AIDS crisis roughly three decades ago. Once again there are uncertainties and worries about access to and the affordability of life-saving medications for poor patients, particularly in the Global South. Back then, the private sector developed a number of significant antiretroviral therapies treatments to treat HIV/AIDS patients. To this day, there is no vaccine to protect against HIV/AIDS, owing to the rapid and nimble mutation of the virus. Thus, treatment with antiretrovirals rather than vaccination has become the medical standard of care. Relying on recently enacted World Trade Organization patent protections, the pharmaceutical industry set off a global human rights firestorm by pricing those drugs out of reach for citizens in the Global South, where the virus impacted most tragically. At one point the industry was so tone deaf that it took the unusual step of suing Nelson Mandela in a South African court to assert patent rights. It took almost a decade of global protests, litigation, public shaming, and competition from mostly India-based low-cost generic manufacturers to finally bring the pharmaceutical industry to a reasonable compromise position in which profits and the need for financial incentives to spur innovation were appropriately balanced against the human rights and medical needs of poor patients in the Global South (Joseph 2003; Leisinger 2005; Santoro 2006). Pharmaceutical companies are once again engaged in a race for a cure for a global scourge. Once again, a collision between profits and human rights appears inevitable. Because the SARS-CoV-2 virus does not mutate in the manner of HIV/AIDS, the development of a vaccine is theoretically achievable. Normally vaccines take from two to five years to develop and bring to market,
Philosophy & Technology
An Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on data that reflect racial biases may yield raciall... more An Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on data that reflect racial biases may yield racially biased outputs, even if the algorithm on its own is unbiased. For example, algorithms used to schedule medical appointments in the USA predict that Black patients are at a higher risk of no-show than non-Black patients, though technically accurate given existing data that prediction results in Black patients being overwhelmingly scheduled in appointment slots that cause longer wait times than non-Black patients. This perpetuates racial inequity, in this case lesser access to medical care. This gives rise to one type of Accuracy-Fairness trade-off: preserve the efficiency offered by using AI to schedule appointments or discard that efficiency in order to avoid perpetuating ethno-racial disparities. Similar trade-offs arise in a range of AI applications including others in medicine, as well as in education, judicial systems, and public security, among others. This article presents a fram...
7/18/2011 Many fundamental questions in Ethics concern the nature and structure of goodness. Whil... more 7/18/2011 Many fundamental questions in Ethics concern the nature and structure of goodness. While investigations of goodness have often attended to the variety of ways in which we use the word 'good,' I take a distinctive approach by turning to recent results from theoretical Linguistics. Cross-linguistic evidence strongly suggests that 'good' has a single meaning. However, a close look at the formal grammar of 'good' suggests that there are indeed robustly distinct ways in which we use 'good,' which do not collapse into some fundamental or paradigmatic one (as some have argued). Hence, I motivate and defend the view that 'good' is highly contextually sensitive such that its interpretation is affected not only by the various contexts in which we use it, but also by the various sentences in which we use it. In light of these insights, I propose answers to fundamental questions such as "which of the various uses of 'good' are ethic...
ProtoSociology
When Maria is feeling pain in her thigh and says she has arthritis, what are the contents of that... more When Maria is feeling pain in her thigh and says she has arthritis, what are the contents of that assertion and its corresponding belief? An externalist might argue that, because ‘arthritis’ refers only to inflammations of the joints, Maria speaks falsely and moreover does not actually believe she has arthritis. An internalist, on the other hand, might argue that Maria does believe she has arthritis, though her belief is false on the grounds that arthritis is a condition only of the joints. The internalist-externalist debate about semantic and mental contents thus concerns whether the contents of certain claims and beliefs depend on facts external to the people having those beliefs or not. However, rather than just join up with either side, I argue that we should re-frame the debate so as to allow for hybrid internalist-externalist views, on the grounds that such views can help explain certain phenomena associated with slurs and pejoratives. If the debate can indeed be recast in this way and if hybrid views offer significant explanatory power, then such views deserve further exploration.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak necessity modals. First we id... more This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak necessity modals. First we identify a number of explananda: their wellknown intuitive difference in strength between 'must' and 'ought' as well as differences in connections to probabilistic considerations and acts of requiring and recommending. Here we argue that important extant analyses of the semantic differences, though tailored to account for some of these aspects, fail to account for all. We proceed to suggest that the difference between 'ought' and 'must' lies in how they relate to scalar and binary standards. Briefly put, must(φ) says that among the relevant alternatives, φ is selected by the relevant binary standard, whereas ought(φ) says that among the relevant alternatives, φ is selected by the relevant scale. Given independently plausible assumptions about how standards are provided by context, this explains the relevant differences discussed.
Journal of Human Rights
Abstract This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regardin... more Abstract This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regarding access to vaccines and other drugs developed to prevent and treat COVID-19, and more broadly regarding access to essential medicines. We examine two United Nations guidelines–the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines–which assert that pharmaceutical companies have human rights responsibilities to make essential medicines available to patients in the global South, and that member-states are responsible for enforcing these obligations. We develop a moral theory that justifies such human rights duties based on the idea of a “social contract” that more broadly underpins the idea of corporate social responsibility. We conclude by offering practical advice enabling pharmaceutical companies to balance their human rights duties to the global South with their responsibilities to shareholders and the need to sustainably incentivize drug discovery.
The Journal of Aesthetic Education
Abstract:We share aesthetic experiences, for instance by going to the movies or the theater or by... more Abstract:We share aesthetic experiences, for instance by going to the movies or the theater or by tasting wine together. Sharing aesthetic experiences has received less philosophical scrutiny than it deserves, given its apparent pervasiveness in everyday life and its philosophical import. There are philosophical as well as empirical grounds for thinking that sharing aesthetic experiences can be more meaningful and richer in both phenomenal and epistemic content, as contrasted with solitary ones. This paper sketches an account of sharing aesthetic experience and, in doing so, draws connections between sharing experiences of aesthetic objects on the one hand and aesthetic judgments and education on the other. It then introduces a notion of aesthetic conversations as a central aspect of such experiences, judgment, and learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of ways in which sharing aesthetic experiences is a rich area for further philosophical exploration.
Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics
According to widely-accepted approaches to the semantics of gradable adjectives like ‘expensive,’... more According to widely-accepted approaches to the semantics of gradable adjectives like ‘expensive,’ for some object to count as expensive is for its cost to exceed some contextually salient standard or threshold of cost. The standard or threshold is doing important theoretical work; on the face of it, it separates costs that are high enough to count as expensive from those that are not. This may seem like a simple job to do; a threshold on the scale of cost might be some quantity of cost, or a range of quantities. However, examples like ‘expensive’ can be misleading, because many gradables are more complex. For example, consider ‘healthy’ or ‘clever’, where the notion of a threshold of health or intelligence is much less clear—what would a quantity of health amount to? The question of exactly what a standard or threshold is, especially in more complex cases, has not received widespread attention, even within the literature on gradables. This is, or ought to be, surprising given how central a role the notion plays in those analyses. In any case, there is a lacuna in the literature on gradables, which this paper aims to start filling. We argue that this lacuna indicates a need for an account of the notion of a standard or threshold (as that notion is used in formal semantics), one that is independent of other commitments internal to any given semantics for gradables. Moreover, we argue, the right account of standards or thresholds could offer a more ontologically parsimonious account of certain phenomena observed with gradables, including antonymy, extreme-ness, multi-dimensionality, and apparent connections to the semantics of modals like ‘ought’ and ‘must.’
Routledge eBooks, Jan 25, 2023
This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regarding access ... more This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regarding access to vaccines and other drugs developed to prevent and treat COVID-19, and more broadly regarding access to essential medicines. We examine two United Nations guidelines-the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines-which assert that pharmaceutical companies have human rights responsibilities to make essential medicines available to patients in the global South, and that member-states are responsible for enforcing these obligations. We develop a moral theory that justifies such human rights duties based on the idea of a "social contract" that more broadly underpins the idea of corporate social responsibility. We conclude by offering practical advice enabling pharmaceutical companies to balance their human rights duties to the global South with their responsibilities to shareholders and the need to sustainably incentivize drug discovery. COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS: Renewed human rights concerns for the global South The COVID-19 global pandemic has raised anew human rights concerns that last erupted on the world stage during the HIV/AIDS crisis roughly three decades ago. Once again there are uncertainties and worries about access to and the affordability of life-saving medications for poor patients, particularly in the Global South. Back then, the private sector developed a number of significant antiretroviral therapies treatments to treat HIV/AIDS patients. To this day, there is no vaccine to protect against HIV/AIDS, owing to the rapid and nimble mutation of the virus. Thus, treatment with antiretrovirals rather than vaccination has become the medical standard of care. Relying on recently enacted World Trade Organization patent protections, the pharmaceutical industry set off a global human rights firestorm by pricing those drugs out of reach for citizens in the Global South, where the virus impacted most tragically. At one point the industry was so tone deaf that it took the unusual step of suing Nelson Mandela in a South African court to assert patent rights. It took almost a decade of global protests, litigation, public shaming, and competition from mostly India-based low-cost generic manufacturers to finally bring the pharmaceutical industry to a reasonable compromise position in which profits and the need for financial incentives to spur innovation were appropriately balanced against the human rights and medical needs of poor patients in the Global South (Joseph 2003; Leisinger 2005; Santoro 2006). Pharmaceutical companies are once again engaged in a race for a cure for a global scourge. Once again, a collision between profits and human rights appears inevitable. Because the SARS-CoV-2 virus does not mutate in the manner of HIV/AIDS, the development of a vaccine is theoretically achievable. Normally vaccines take from two to five years to develop and bring to market,
Philosophy & Technology
An Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on data that reflect racial biases may yield raciall... more An Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on data that reflect racial biases may yield racially biased outputs, even if the algorithm on its own is unbiased. For example, algorithms used to schedule medical appointments in the USA predict that Black patients are at a higher risk of no-show than non-Black patients, though technically accurate given existing data that prediction results in Black patients being overwhelmingly scheduled in appointment slots that cause longer wait times than non-Black patients. This perpetuates racial inequity, in this case lesser access to medical care. This gives rise to one type of Accuracy-Fairness trade-off: preserve the efficiency offered by using AI to schedule appointments or discard that efficiency in order to avoid perpetuating ethno-racial disparities. Similar trade-offs arise in a range of AI applications including others in medicine, as well as in education, judicial systems, and public security, among others. This article presents a fram...
7/18/2011 Many fundamental questions in Ethics concern the nature and structure of goodness. Whil... more 7/18/2011 Many fundamental questions in Ethics concern the nature and structure of goodness. While investigations of goodness have often attended to the variety of ways in which we use the word 'good,' I take a distinctive approach by turning to recent results from theoretical Linguistics. Cross-linguistic evidence strongly suggests that 'good' has a single meaning. However, a close look at the formal grammar of 'good' suggests that there are indeed robustly distinct ways in which we use 'good,' which do not collapse into some fundamental or paradigmatic one (as some have argued). Hence, I motivate and defend the view that 'good' is highly contextually sensitive such that its interpretation is affected not only by the various contexts in which we use it, but also by the various sentences in which we use it. In light of these insights, I propose answers to fundamental questions such as "which of the various uses of 'good' are ethic...
ProtoSociology
When Maria is feeling pain in her thigh and says she has arthritis, what are the contents of that... more When Maria is feeling pain in her thigh and says she has arthritis, what are the contents of that assertion and its corresponding belief? An externalist might argue that, because ‘arthritis’ refers only to inflammations of the joints, Maria speaks falsely and moreover does not actually believe she has arthritis. An internalist, on the other hand, might argue that Maria does believe she has arthritis, though her belief is false on the grounds that arthritis is a condition only of the joints. The internalist-externalist debate about semantic and mental contents thus concerns whether the contents of certain claims and beliefs depend on facts external to the people having those beliefs or not. However, rather than just join up with either side, I argue that we should re-frame the debate so as to allow for hybrid internalist-externalist views, on the grounds that such views can help explain certain phenomena associated with slurs and pejoratives. If the debate can indeed be recast in this way and if hybrid views offer significant explanatory power, then such views deserve further exploration.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak necessity modals. First we id... more This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak necessity modals. First we identify a number of explananda: their wellknown intuitive difference in strength between 'must' and 'ought' as well as differences in connections to probabilistic considerations and acts of requiring and recommending. Here we argue that important extant analyses of the semantic differences, though tailored to account for some of these aspects, fail to account for all. We proceed to suggest that the difference between 'ought' and 'must' lies in how they relate to scalar and binary standards. Briefly put, must(φ) says that among the relevant alternatives, φ is selected by the relevant binary standard, whereas ought(φ) says that among the relevant alternatives, φ is selected by the relevant scale. Given independently plausible assumptions about how standards are provided by context, this explains the relevant differences discussed.
Journal of Human Rights
Abstract This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regardin... more Abstract This article addresses the human rights obligations of pharmaceutical companies regarding access to vaccines and other drugs developed to prevent and treat COVID-19, and more broadly regarding access to essential medicines. We examine two United Nations guidelines–the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines–which assert that pharmaceutical companies have human rights responsibilities to make essential medicines available to patients in the global South, and that member-states are responsible for enforcing these obligations. We develop a moral theory that justifies such human rights duties based on the idea of a “social contract” that more broadly underpins the idea of corporate social responsibility. We conclude by offering practical advice enabling pharmaceutical companies to balance their human rights duties to the global South with their responsibilities to shareholders and the need to sustainably incentivize drug discovery.
The Journal of Aesthetic Education
Abstract:We share aesthetic experiences, for instance by going to the movies or the theater or by... more Abstract:We share aesthetic experiences, for instance by going to the movies or the theater or by tasting wine together. Sharing aesthetic experiences has received less philosophical scrutiny than it deserves, given its apparent pervasiveness in everyday life and its philosophical import. There are philosophical as well as empirical grounds for thinking that sharing aesthetic experiences can be more meaningful and richer in both phenomenal and epistemic content, as contrasted with solitary ones. This paper sketches an account of sharing aesthetic experience and, in doing so, draws connections between sharing experiences of aesthetic objects on the one hand and aesthetic judgments and education on the other. It then introduces a notion of aesthetic conversations as a central aspect of such experiences, judgment, and learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of ways in which sharing aesthetic experiences is a rich area for further philosophical exploration.
Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics
According to widely-accepted approaches to the semantics of gradable adjectives like ‘expensive,’... more According to widely-accepted approaches to the semantics of gradable adjectives like ‘expensive,’ for some object to count as expensive is for its cost to exceed some contextually salient standard or threshold of cost. The standard or threshold is doing important theoretical work; on the face of it, it separates costs that are high enough to count as expensive from those that are not. This may seem like a simple job to do; a threshold on the scale of cost might be some quantity of cost, or a range of quantities. However, examples like ‘expensive’ can be misleading, because many gradables are more complex. For example, consider ‘healthy’ or ‘clever’, where the notion of a threshold of health or intelligence is much less clear—what would a quantity of health amount to? The question of exactly what a standard or threshold is, especially in more complex cases, has not received widespread attention, even within the literature on gradables. This is, or ought to be, surprising given how central a role the notion plays in those analyses. In any case, there is a lacuna in the literature on gradables, which this paper aims to start filling. We argue that this lacuna indicates a need for an account of the notion of a standard or threshold (as that notion is used in formal semantics), one that is independent of other commitments internal to any given semantics for gradables. Moreover, we argue, the right account of standards or thresholds could offer a more ontologically parsimonious account of certain phenomena observed with gradables, including antonymy, extreme-ness, multi-dimensionality, and apparent connections to the semantics of modals like ‘ought’ and ‘must.’