A simple argument suggests that we can fruitfully model advanced AI systems using expected utility theory. According to this argument, an agent will need to act as if maximising expected utility if they’re to avoid exploitation. Insofar as we should expect advanced AI to avoid exploitation, it follows that we should expected advanced AI to act as if maximising expected utility. I spell out this argument more carefully and demonstrate that it fails, but show that the manner of its failure (...) is instructive: in exploring the argument, we gain insight into how to model advanced AI systems. (shrink)

New entrant policy, literature, and research offers an important angle for exploring where dominant agrarianism is reproduced and contested. As new entrants seek access to land, finance, and expertise, their credibility is filtered through a cultural and policy environment that favors some farming models over others. Thus, seemingly apolitical policy tools geared at getting new people into farming may carry implicit norms of who these individuals should be, how they should farm, and what their values should entail. A normative gaze (...) of farming often masks the financial, cultural, labor relation, and land tenure dimensions that are the underlying drivers of agrarian change. This paper applies social reproduction theory to explore a diversity of social labor processes that new entrant farmers practice to arrive at the point of agricultural production. Interviews with new entrant and successor farmers in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) are presented first, followed by an analysis of new entrant policy instruments over the last two decades in Scotland. We find that new entrant policy fails to engage with a crisis of social reproduction in the food system because of a commitment to agrarian ideals of the self-sufficient and entrepreneurial farmer. By inviting newcomers into a dynamic of increasing precarious and uncompensated labor, very often by way of family relations, new entrant policy may act as a form of “predatory inclusion.” We argue that to be successful in reproducing the agricultural sector, new entrant farmer policy must be first a policy at attending to relations in the social sphere. Recognizing and supporting the diversified strategies farmers take on to assemble land for production would not only drive more just policy, but set the conditions for a more adaptive food system. (shrink)

When solving problems, like making predictions or choices, people often “sample” possibilities into mind. Here, we consider whether there is structure to the kinds of thoughts people sample by default—that is, without an explicit goal. Across three experiments we found that what comes to mind by default are samples from a probability distribution that combines what people think is likely and what they think is good. Experiment 1 found that the first quantities that come to mind for everyday behaviors and (...) events are quantities that combine what is average and ideal. Experiment 2 found, in a manipulated context, that the distribution of numbers that come to mind resemble the mathematical product of the presented statistical distribution and a (softmax-transformed) prescriptive distribution. Experiment 3 replicated these findings in a visual domain. These results provide insight into the process generating people’s conscious thoughts and invite new questions about the value of thinking about things that are both likely and good. (shrink)

This paper centers two complementary theoretical approaches to advance the debate about transgender women’s inclusion in elite women’s sports – namely, non-ideal theory and cultural studies. In doing so, the paper highlights divisions between ideal theory and non-ideal theory, normative internalism in sports and normative externalism in sports, and essentialist views of sports compared to non-essentialist views of sports. The paper’s main agenda is to show the value of applying non-ideal theory, externalism, and non-essentialism to the discourse over transgender inclusion.

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)

A ‘bad feminist’ is someone who endorses feminist ideals and values but finds themselves falling short of them. Since bad feminists exhibit an inconsistency between what they say and what they do, this can generate worries about hypocrisy. This article investigates whether and when members of political movements with certain ideals ought to worry they are being hypocritical. It first provides a diagnosis of why worries about hypocrisy seem common in the political arena. I argue that accusations of hypocrisy are (...) apt when one is in insufficiently committed to the values entailed by one’s pronouncements. It is particularly hard to assess what constitutes sufficient commitment in politics because many issues are multi-factorial, overdetermined, and involve numerous competing considerations, making it difficult to assess how genuine commitments to values should manifest in behaviour. Since there are many ways that one can act inconsistently with their pronouncements, mere inconsistency is not a signal of hypocrisy, particularly if one is disposed to take on costs to further that movement’s ends. I also consider and respond to a number of considerations against calling out hypocrisy, including worries about our accuracy, worries about the effects such accusations have on discourse, and worries about how accusations incentivise particular kinds of behaviour. (shrink)

Shavelson et al., argues that California’s End of Life Option Act (ELOA) violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), because the ELOA requires the patient to “self-administer” their prescri...

This paper considers the prospect of moral transhumanism from the perspective of theological virtue ethics. I argue that the pursuit of goodness inherent to moral transhumanism means that there is a compelling prima facie case for moral enhancement. However, I also show that the proposed enhancements would not by themselves allow us to achieve a life of virtue, as they appear unable to create or enhance prudence, the situational judgement essential for acting in accordance with virtue. I therefore argue that (...) moral enhancement technologies should take a limited or supporting role in moral development, which I call ‘moral supplementation’. (shrink)

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and recontextualized (...) as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

The author offers a comprehensive interpretation of Aquinas's claim that the human intellect is immaterial and assessment of his arguments on behalf of this claim, also positioning Aquinas's thought alongside recent work in hylomorphic metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

Many areas of frontier physics are confronted with the crisis of a lack of accessible, direct evidence. As a result, direct model building has failed to lead to any new empirical discoveries. In this paper I argue that these areas of frontier physics have developed common methods for turning precision measurements of known quantities into potential evidence for anomalies hinting at new physics. This method of framework generalization has arisen as a sort of model-independent method for generalizing beyond known physics (...) and organizing experimental searches. I argue that this method is well-justified given the current epistemic landscape, and that theory construction in general is much broader than simply building new dynamical models. (shrink)

Eloquent, urgent, and inspiring, _The Constant Fire_ tackles the acrimonious debate between science and religion, taking us beyond its stagnant parameters into the wider domain of human spiritual experience. From a Neolithic archaeological site in Ireland to modern theories of star formation, Adam Frank traverses a wide terrain, broadening our sights and allowing us to imagine an alternative perspective. Drawing from his experience as a practicing astrophysicist and from the writings of the great scholars of religion, philosophy, and mythology, (...) Frank locates the connective tissue linking science and religion—their commonality as sacred pursuits—and finds their shared aspiration in pursuit of "the True and the Real." Taking us from the burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600 to Einstein and on to today's pressing issues of global warming and resource depletion, _The Constant Fire_ shows us how to move beyond this stale debate into a more profound experience of the world as sacred—a world that embraces science without renouncing human spirituality. (shrink)

The problem of translation confronts every English, or French-language reader of Geschlecht III, from its title page on, by way of Derrida’s decision not to translate the German noun Geschlecht. In this paper, I explore the stakes of Derrida’s refusal to translate, by situating it within the context of the 1984–5 seminar, ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism’, from which the text of Geschlecht III was taken. I show that the question of translation is already at the heart of that seminar, which (...) concerns the place of the idiom in philosophy, and why approaching the difficulty posed by the untranslatability of a term like Geschlecht might be the very objective of Derrida’s reading of Heidegger on Trakl. (shrink)

Epistemic trust in others frequently cannot be disentangled from interpersonal trust more generally, but the epistemic implications of how we affectively express our trust in others are under-investigated. This essay claims that gratitude, despite its empirically undeniable importance to human flourishing generally, is also important epistemically and in several intersecting ways. To be grateful to a person is to represent the world differently in key respects. Gratitude, even if it is for past non-epistemic benefits, should play an important role in (...) shaping who we epistemically rely on. Gratitude for specifically epistemic benefits is an important way in which we show our attunement to epistemic value and contribute to the incentive structures that make much of our public knowledge and informational ecosystems possible. Likewise, ingratitude is a crippling epistemic vice that renders our dependence on quality sources of information fragile and vulnerable to capture by misinformation. (shrink)

To see some of the ways of changing desires begin with a comparison with the rather different case of belief. In the case of belief there are 'rational' ways of changing the opinions, by considering arguments and evidence, and 'non‐rational' ones, such as being hypnotized or joining a religious sect. This chapter discusses cases in which someone wants to change their desires. There is then a conflict between their second order desires and their simple, first order, desires. The chapter also (...) describes how to resolve a conflict between first and second order desires. In evaluating the lives that would follow from possible changes in one's desires one can take account of the pattern as well as the amount or variety of desires that are satisfied. This is inevitable, really, since one's second order as well as one's first order desires have to come under the scope of the shift. (shrink)

People need strategies, to tell them either how to balance the preservation of life against the avoidance of pain or how to allocate the resources without having to balance them. This chapter describes a non‐balancing strategy. This strategy could be a helpful part of a society's decision‐making resources. The chapter also gives many non‐medical cases which present problems which are similar in one way or another. In all these cases the tension is between the preservation of life and various kinds (...) of welfare. The famine relief case could have been described also in terms of a slightly different tension, between avoiding misery as well as death and promoting only relatively trivial forms of welfare. The chapter suggests a revaluing of the aversion to death. In preventing a death one is preserving what one might call the fullness and the fillability of life. (shrink)

This chapter presents a model of risk‐taking behaviour. That is, it describes some simpler patterns of preference than real people ever have, and then discusses some strategies that would make sense for people with these simple preferences when faced with choices between risky options. These strategies can also make sense for people, with the more complicated preferences. The chapter also discusses some more detailed assumptions about snobs' preferences. There are several ways in which the Snobs can find their way through (...) risky situations. The chapter considers two. The first is, in effect, to refuse to reason probabilistically. Given every risky prospect they can decide what the most likely outcome is, equate it to a certainty of that outcome, and choose accordingly. In more complex situations something closer to real probabilistic reasoning will be needed. And this is the second way in which preferences such as those of the snobs can come to terms with risk. (shrink)

Family life and one's career are incomparable values for him/her. The whole topic of incomparability of desires is veiled in confusion and controversy. Some people deny that there are any incomparable desires. This chapter explains meaning of incomparability, discusses incomparability as a fact of life that many of the desires are incomparable, and also examines why incomparability makes an enormous difference to decision‐making what patterns of incomparability the desires exhibit. The first dimension of incomparability is depth: how much thought and (...) how many comparisons with other wants the inability to choose will survive. Another dimension is generality, whether the incomparability concerns just individual wants or also the values that usually underlie them. The significance of some patterns of incomparability becomes clearer if one add another ingredient to the brew: the influence of beliefs on desires. The chapter considers an example to illustrate this influence. (shrink)

This chapter contrasts moral motivation, as a problematic thing, with the apparently straightforward motives of self‐interest. It also contrasts moral dilemmas, in which one has to find an acceptable action in the midst of conflicting responsibilities and obligations, with practical or prudential dilemmas, in which the problem is getting as much as he/she can of what he/she want. The problem is that these contrasts are all different. They cut in different directions. For any two of the contrasts there are situations (...) which link the 'moral' side according to one contrast with the 'non‐moral' or merely self‐interested side according to the other. Thus in the case of the ageing addict self‐interest as getting what you want and self‐interest as getting a better life conflict. The chapter also gives the example that combines the plots of two famous novels (George Eliot's Silas Marner, and Balzac's novel Le Pe're Goriot), each clearly making a quasi‐moral point. (shrink)

Modern-day heirs of the Cartesian revolution have been fascinated by the thought that one could utilize certain hypotheses – that one is dreaming, deceived by an evil demon, or a brain in a vat – to argue at one fell swoop that one does not know, is not justified in believing, or ought not believe most if not all of what one currently believes about the world. A good part of the interest and mystique of these discussions arises from the (...) contention that the seeds of such arguments lie in our ordinary epistemic practices, so that external world skepticism can arise “from within”. But is this contention correct? I doubt it. Taking skepticism seriously requires that we address this question head on. To do so, I will approach skeptical arguments from a certain vantage point. I will try to stand, as far as possible, with both feet squarely in ordinary life. I will start out with all of our ordinary commitments about what is the case, about what we know or have reason to believe, about when someone knows, is justified, or has good reason to believe something, and about how one should proceed in deciding what to believe. My question, then, will be this. From within that vantage point can I somehow be moved in a reasonable way to accept the conclusion that I know far less about the world around me than I thought, or that epistemically speaking, I really ought not believe much of what I have believed about the world around me? In order for such movement to take place, I will have to find reason from within my ordinary standpoint to discount or reject much of what I ordinarily accept. And of course, that reason will have to come from some.. (shrink)

This paper provides a sustained investigation into ancient teichopolitics – the politics of constructing walls – and the question of whether the best city should be surrounded by walls. Plato’s Laws adopts the Spartan view that walls have a negative effect on national character and argues that they should be ‘left lying asleep and undisturbed in the ground’. Aristotle’s Politics puts forward a series of objections to Plato and adopts the more pragmatic view that walls are necessary. Although both philosophers (...) debate the status of walls and foreigners within the best city, they fail to draw the thoroughly modern connection between teichopolitics and immigration. (shrink)

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts‐based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist‐based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry (...) is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning‐making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

[Barbara Grabowska, Samotny egoista czy odpowiedzialny obywatel].

This article investigates the place of De magistro within Augustine’s developing theology of words and the Word through a reverse chronological reading. This is necessary because, despite its emphasis on words, De magistro never refers to Christ as the “Word.” It would be easy, therefore, to see it as unrelated to the theological emphasis on that title in later works such as De trinitate. A reverse chronological reading, however, establishes Augustine’s developing understanding of the relationship between words and the Word (...) in a way that moves us from a full-throated theology of divine and human speech backward into more exploratory engagements with nascent ideas. When this reverse trail is traced, we can begin to see De magistro as one key starting point for it by providing warrant for seeing the inner Christ as necessarily the Word of God, even if not explicitly named as such. Such a reading adds deeper theological significance to a text often read only in terms of its contribution to semiotics and epistemology. In this reading, De magistro is an essential text for understanding Augustine’s fuller theology of language not only because of its early sign theory but because it sets the soteriological stage for our growth into the likeness of Christ the Word. (shrink)

This chapter takes a closer look at the relationship between belief and judgment. It presents an argument for the output thesis—the thesis that conscious judgments give rise to occurrent beliefs. It is then suggested that the output thesis provides independent support for the transparency method and an independent explanation of why Moore’s Paradox arises. The output thesis stands in contrast to other views in the literature which do not posit such a close connection between judgment and belief. Along the way, (...) some of the implications of the output thesis for current characterizations of judgment and belief are discussed. Finally, a significant objection to the output thesis is considered—namely, the set of cases where subjects assert that P but behave in ways that suggest they believe not-P. It is argued that such cases do not undermine the output thesis. (shrink)

The article argues that Beckett's Trilogy stages the effects of a lobotomy operation on a potentially politically subversive writer, and that the consequences of the operation can be traced in both the retreat of the narrator of the Trilogy into the mind and into comatose mental states and in the detail of the operation itself, based on the 'icepick' lobotomies performed by neurologist Walter Freeman in the late 1940s and early 1950s. To write about extreme psychiatric situations in the post-war (...) period is necessarily to invoke the political uses of psychosurgery with which this article engages. The article goes on to consider the figure of the brain-damaged mind as a Cold War trope in the references to botulism and the motif of the penetrated skull in The Unnamable. (shrink)