Hugh Desmond

Hugh Desmond
Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Philosophy

PhD

About

40
Publications
5,858
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203
Citations
Introduction
I’m a philosopher and ethicist of science and technology, with focuses on philosophy of biology, cultural evolution, human enhancement, Big Data and online communication, values in science, research ethics and integrity, science communication, science policy, and trust. My two main current projects are: (1) understanding what sense it has to view organism behaviour as agent-like in a Darwinian framework, (2) understanding the various dimensions of what it means to say “trust the science”
Additional affiliations
February 2021 - January 2022
French National Centre for Scientific Research
Position
  • PostDoc Position
September 2019 - present
University of Antwerp
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
Description
  • Part-time
Education
October 2011 - December 2016
KU Leuven
Field of study
  • Philosophy

Publications

Publications (40)
Article
Background: Codes of conduct for research integrity provide ambivalent guidance on the role that the values of society as well as political and economic interests can or should play in scientific research. The development of clearer guidance on this matter in the future should consider the attitudes of researchers.Methods: We conducted 24 semi-stru...
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Ever since its inception, the theory of evolution has been reified into an “-ism”: Darwinism. While biologists today, by and large, do not use the term “Darwinism” in their research, it still enjoys currency in broader academic and societal contexts. “Darwinian approaches” proliferate across the sciences and humanities, and in public discourse, var...
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The elimination of gatekeepers for scientific publication has been represented as a means to promote the core moral values of open science, including democratic decision-making and inclusiveness. I argue that this framing ignores the reality that gatekeeping is a way of structuring prestige hierarchies, and that without gatekeeping, some other stru...
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Despite its public visibility and impact on policy, the activity of expert communication rarely receives more than a passing mention in codes of scientific integrity. This paper makes the case for an ethics of expert communication, introducing a framework where expert communication is represented as an intrinsically ethical activity of a deliberati...
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While the debate on values in science focuses on normative questions on the level of the individual (e.g. should researchers try to make their work as value free as possible?), comparatively little attention has been paid to the institutional and professional norms that researchers are expected to follow. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct a...
Chapter
The ideas Darwin published in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in the nineteenth century continue to have a major impact on our current understanding of the world in which we live and the place that humans occupy in it. Darwin’s theories constitute the core of the contemporary life sciences, and elicit enduring fascination as a poten...
Chapter
What does it mean for our species—or for any species—to be successful? Human Success: Evolutionary Origins and Ethical Implications examines the concept of human success from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with contributions from leading paleobiologists, anthropologists, geologists, philosophers of science, and ethicists. It tells the tale...
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Algorithm engineering is sometimes portrayed as a new 21 st century return of manipulative social engineering. Yet algorithms are necessary tools for individuals to navigate online platforms. Algorithms are like a sensory apparatus through which we perceive online platforms: this is also why individuals can be subtly but pervasively manipulated by...
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According as the principle of natural selection is generalized to explain (adaptive) patterns of human behavior, the exact nature of the selective environment becomes less clear. While the environment and the individual are relatively separable in the non-human biological context, they are highly entangled in the context of moral, social, and insti...
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Claims that our species is an “evolutionary success” typically do not feature prominently in academic articles. However, they do seem to be a recurring trope in science popularization. Why do we seem to be attracted to viewing human evolution through the lense of “success”? In this chapter we discuss how evolutionary success has both causal-descrip...
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What does it mean for our species—or for any species—to be successful? Human Success: Evolutionary Origins and Ethical Implications examines the concept of human success from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with contributions from leading paleobiologists, anthropologists, geologists, philosophers of science, and ethicists. It tells the tale...
Chapter
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In one vision of human success, future human evolution lies in enhancing our bodies and especially our minds, in order to achieve new levels of cooperation, morality, and wellbeing. In unadulterated form, this vision combines a pessimism in the human evolutionary heritage with an optimism in what technological enhancement could offer. I point to a...
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Even if the “value-free ideal of science” (VFI) were an unattainable goal, one could ask: can it be a useful fiction, one that is beneficial for the research community and society? This question is particularly crucial for scholars and institutions concerned with research integrity (RI), as one cannot offer normative guidance to researchers without...
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Social media has invaded our private, professional, and public lives. While corporations continue to portray social media as a celebration of self-expression and freedom, public opinion, by contrast, seems to have decidedly turned against social media. Yet we continue to use it just the same. What is social media, and how should we live with it? Is...
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The principle of clinical equipoise has been variously characterized by ethicists and clinicians as fundamentally flawed, a myth, and even a moral balm. Yet, the principle continues to be treated as the de facto gold standard for conducting ran-domized control trials in an ethical manner. Why do we hold on to clinical equipoise, despite its shortco...
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Distrust in scientific experts can be surprisingly stubborn, persisting despite evidence supporting the experts' views, demonstrations of their competence, or displays of good will. This stubborn distrust is often viewed as a manifestation of irrationality. By contrast, this article proposes a logic of "status distrust": low-status individuals are...
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Social media has invaded our private, professional, and public lives. While corporations continue to portray social media as a celebration of self-expression and freedom, public opinion, by contrast, seems to have decidedly turned against social media. Yet we continue to use it just the same. What is social media, and how should we live with it? Is...
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We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many (though not all) respects.
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In enhancement ethics, evolutionary theory has been largely perceived as supporting liberal views on enhancement, where decisions to enhance are predominantly regulated by the principle of individual autonomy. In this paper I critique this perception in light of recent scientific developments. Cultural evolutionary theory suggests a picture where i...
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Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary process...
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The dominant view today on evolutionary progress is that it has been thoroughly debunked. Even value-neutral progress concepts are seen to lack important theoretical underpinnings: (1) natural selection provides no rationale for progress, and (2) natural selection need not even be invoked to explain large-scale evolutionary trends. In this paper I...
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Background Professional communities such as the medical community are acutely concerned with negligence: the category of misconduct where a professional does not live up to the standards expected of a professional of similar qualifications. Since science is currently strengthening its structures of self-regulation in parallel to the professions, th...
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Environmental heterogeneity is invoked as a key explanatory factor in the adaptive evolution of a surprisingly wide range of phenomena. This article aims to analyze this explanatory scheme of categorizing traits or properties as adaptations to environmental heterogeneity ("heterogeneity adaptations"). First it is suggested that this scheme can be u...
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In the past decade, policy‐makers in science have been concerned with harmonizing research integrity standards across Europe. These standards are encapsulated in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Yet, almost every European country today has its own national‐level code of conduct for research integrity. In this study we document i...
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Scientific experts face a fundamental dilemma between prioritizing actionability and prioritizing scientific transparency in their communications. It is argued that this dilemma has an ethical dimension that should be anticipated in ethical guidelines for scientists.
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Biologists explain organisms’ behavior not only as having been programmed by genes and shaped by natural selection, but also as the result of an organism’s agency: the capacity to react to environmental changes in goaldriven ways. The use of such ‘agential explanations’ reopens old questions about how justified it is to ascribe agency to entities l...
Book
The word “organism” represents an original keyword of the early-modern philosophical world. As it was first developed by Leibniz, it seems to blend together two different conceptual paradigms: the Cartesian model of the “machines” and the Aristotelian legacy of the “individual natures”. According to the first, nature represents itself the prototype...
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Some of the most significant policy responses to cases of fraudulent and questionable conduct by scientists have been to strengthen professionalism among scientists, whether by codes of conduct, integrity boards, or mandatory research integrity training programs. Yet there has been little systematic discussion about what professionalism in scientif...
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Philosophers of science and meta-scientists alike now typically model scientists’ behavior as driven by credit maximization. In this paper I argue that this modeling assumption cannot account for how scientists have a default level of trust in each other’s assertions. The normative implication of this is that science policy should not only focus on...
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Implicit contextual factors mean that the boundary between causal and non-causal explanation is not as neat as one might hope: as the phenomenon to be explained is given descriptions with varying degrees of granularity, the nature of the favored explanation alternates between causal and non-causal. While it is not surprising that different descript...
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It is an ongoing controversy whether natural selection is a cause of population change, or a mere statistical description of how individual births and deaths accumulate. In this paper I restate the problem in terms of the reference class problem, and propose how the structure of stable equilibrium can provide a solution in continuity with biologica...
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Many have argued that there is no reason why natural selection should cause directional increases in measures such as body size or complexity across evolutionary history as a whole. In this paper I argue that this conclusion does not hold for selection for adaptations to environmental variability, and that, given the inevitability of environmental...
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Path-dependence offers a promising way of understanding the role historicity plays in explanation, namely, how the past states of a process can matter in the explanation of a given outcome. The two main existing accounts of path-dependence have sought to present it either in terms of dynamic landscapes or branching trees. However, the notions of la...
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