Thirty-five stakeholder representatives and six observers from thirty organizations, interested in anticipating the adoption of energy efficiency for the Pacific Northwest, identified and described one hundred and seventy-eight national and regional trends extending to the year 2015 impacting energy efficiency, and proposed more than ninety actions for addressing these trends at the regional level. The representatives were engaged in a collaborative action planning workshop that was facilitated with the CogniScope methodology founded in the systems sciences. Convergence was achieved on eight (...) highly influential actions as the highest priority. (shrink)

It has long been known that people’s causal judgments can have an impact on their moral judgments. To take a simple example, if people conclude that a behavior caused the death of ten innocent children, they will therefore be inclined to regard the behavior itself as morally wrong. So far, none of this should come as any surprise. But recent experimental work points to the existence of a second, and more surprising, aspect of the relationship between causal judgment and moral (...) judgment. It appears that the relationship can sometimes go in the opposite direction. That is, it appears that our moral judgments can sometimes impact our causal judgments. (Hence, we might first determine that a behavior is morally wrong and then, on that basis, arrive at the conclusion that it was the cause of various outcomes.). (shrink)

Apocalypse, it seems, is everywhere. Preachers with vast followings proclaim the world's end and apocalyptic fears grip even the non-religious amid climate change, pandemics, and threats of nuclear war. But as these ideas pervade popular discourse, grasping their logic remains elusive. Ben Jones argues that we can gain insight into apocalyptic thought through secular thinkers. He starts with a puzzle: Why would secular thinkers draw on Christian apocalyptic beliefs--often dismissed as bizarre--to interpret politics? The apocalyptic tradition proves appealing in part (...) because it theorizes a special relation between crisis and utopia. Apocalyptic thought points to crisis as the vehicle to bring the previously impossible within reach, thus offering apparent resources for navigating challenges in ideal theory, which tries to imagine the best and most just society. By examining apocalyptic thought's appeal and risks, this study arrives at new insights on the limits of ideal theory and utopian hope. (shrink)

This paper defends the simple view that in asserting that p, one lies iff one knows that p is false. Along the way it draws some morals about deception, knowledge, Gettier cases, belief, assertion, and the relationship between first- and higher-order norms.

Efforts to promote equitable public policy with algorithms appear to be fundamentally constrained by the “impossibility of fairness” (an incompatibility between mathematical definitions of fairness). This technical limitation raises a central question about algorithmic fairness: How can computer scientists and policymakers support equitable policy reforms with algorithms? In this article, I argue that promoting justice with algorithms requires reforming the methodology of algorithmic fairness. First, I diagnose the problems of the current methodology for algorithmic fairness, which I call “formal algorithmic (...) fairness.” Because formal algorithmic fairness restricts analysis to isolated decision-making procedures, it leads to the impossibility of fairness and to models that exacerbate oppression despite appearing “fair.” Second, I draw on theories of substantive equality from law and philosophy to propose an alternative methodology, which I call “substantive algorithmic fairness.” Because substantive algorithmic fairness takes a more expansive scope of analysis, it enables an escape from the impossibility of fairness and provides a rigorous guide for alleviating injustice with algorithms. In sum, substantive algorithmic fairness presents a new direction for algorithmic fairness: away from formal mathematical models of “fair” decision-making and toward substantive evaluations of whether and how algorithms can promote justice in practice. (shrink)

This is the first work to apply complex systems science to the psychological interplay of order and chaos. The author draws on thought from a wide range of disciplines-both conventional and unorthodox-to address such questions as the nature of consciousness, the relation between mind and reality, and the justification of belief systems. The material should provoke thought among systems scientists, theoretical psychologists, artificial intelligence researchers, and philosophers.

One prominent argument in international law and religious thought for abolishing capital punishment is that it violates individuals’ right to life. Notably, this _right-to-life argument_ emerged from normative and legal frameworks that recognize deadly force against aggressors as justified when necessary to stop their unjust threat of grave harm. Can capital punishment be necessary in this sense—and thus justified defensive killing? If so, the right-to-life argument would have to admit certain exceptions where executions are justified. Drawing on work by Hugo (...) Bedau, I identify a thought experiment where executions are justified defensive killing but explain why they cannot be in our world. A state’s obligations to its prisoners include the _obligation to use nonlethal incapacitation_ (ONI), which applies as long as prisoners pose no imminent threat. ONI precludes executions for reasons of future dangerousness. By subjecting the right-to-life argument to closer scrutiny, this article ultimately places it on firmer ground. (shrink)

An overview (about 8,000 words) of act utilitarianism, covering the basic idea of the theory, historical examples, how it differs from rule utilitarianism and motive utilitarianism, supporting arguments, and standard objections. A closing section provides a brief introduction to indirect utilitarianism (i.e., a Hare- or Railton-style view distinguishing between a decision procedure and a criterion of rightness).

The historical sciences, such as geology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, appear to have no means to test hypotheses. However, on closer examination, reasoning in the historical sciences relies upon regularities, regularities that can be tested. I outline the role of regularities in the historical sciences, and in the process, blur the distinction between the historical sciences and the experimental sciences: all sciences deploy theories about the world in their investigations.

It is often thought that some version of what is generally called the publicity condition is a reasonable requirement to impose on moral theories. In this article, after formulating and distinguishing three versions of the publicity condition, I argue that the arguments typically used to defend them are unsuccessful and, moreover, that even in its most plausible version, the publicity condition ought to be rejected as both question-begging and unreasonably demanding.

This article identifies an argument in Hobbes’s writings often overlooked but relevant to current philosophical debates. Political philosophers tend to categorize his thought as representing consent or rescue theories of political authority. Though these interpretations have textual support and are understandable, they leave out one of his most compelling arguments – what we call the lesser evil argument for political authority, expressed most explicitly in Chapter 20 of Leviathan. Hobbes frankly admits the state’s evils but appeals to the significant disparity (...) between those evils and the greater evils outside the state as a basis for political authority. More than a passing observation, aspects of the lesser evil argument appear in each of his three major political works. In addition to outlining this argument, the article examines its significance both for Hobbes scholarship and recent philosophical debates on political authority. (shrink)

Defenses of political obligation—the pro tanto obligation to obey the law because the state commands it—often operate at or near the level of ideal theory. Critics, though, increasingly question that approach’s relevance for the imperfect states that exist. This article develops a lesser evil framework to evaluate political obligation with several advantages over more ideal approaches: (1) avoids the questionable assumption that some actual states are reasonably just, (2) recognizes that context matters for political obligation, (3) captures the complicity involved (...) in obeying the state, and (4) identifies a basis—varying intuitions on lesser evil justifications—to distinguish philosophical anarchism from conceptions of political obligation without the former collapsing into the latter. We remain agnostic on whether this framework establishes political obligation to any state but argue that it offers a compelling account of the moral dilemma of obeying the state under nonideal conditions. (shrink)

“Only a small community has concentratedon general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine... The bottom line is that we really haven’t progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack.... We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence... ” –MarvinMinsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000. Our goal (...) in creating this edited volume has been to?ll an apparent gap in the scienti?c literature, by providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has hitherto kept a very low pro?le within the scienti?c and intellectual community. This body of work has not been given a name before; in this book we christen it “Arti?cial General Intelligence”. What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “arti?cial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI?eld for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI?eld, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas of the papers in the subsequent chapters. (shrink)

We develop the general theory of topometric spaces, i.e., topological spaces equipped with a well-behaved lower semi-continuous metric. Spaces of global and local types in continuous logic are the motivating examples for the study of such spaces. In particular, we develop Cantor-Bendixson analysis of topometric spaces, which can serve as a basis for the study of local stability (extending the ad hoc development in Ben Yaacov I and Usvyatsov A, Continuous first order logic and local stability. Trans Am Math Soc, (...) in press), as well as of global ${\aleph_0}$ -stability. We conclude with a study of perturbation systems (see Ben Yaacov I, On perturbations of continuous structures, submitted) in the formalism of topometric spaces. In particular, we show how the abstract development applies to ${\aleph_0}$ -stability up to perturbation. (shrink)

Critical counter-conducts -- Who is the subject of (Foucault's human) rights? -- The ambivalence of rights -- Rights between tactics and strategy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) remains one of the most enigmatic works of twentieth century thought. In this bold and original new study, Ben Ware argues that Wittgenstein's early masterpiece is neither an analytic treatise on language and logic, nor a quasi-mystical work seeking to communicate 'ineffable' truths. Instead, we come to understand the Tractatus by grasping it in a twofold sense: first, as a dialectical work which invites the reader to overcome certain 'illusions of thought'; and second as a (...) modernist work whose anti-philosophical ambition is intimately tied to its radical aesthetic character. By placing the Tractatus in the force field of modernism, Dialectic of the Ladder clears the ground for a new and challenging exploration of the work's ethical dimension. It also casts new light upon the cultural, aesthetic and political significances of Wittgenstein's writing, revealing hitherto unacknowledged affinities with a host of philosophical and literary authors, including Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Kafka. (shrink)

The introduction (about 6,000 words) to _The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism_, in three sections: utilitarianism’s place in recent and contemporary moral philosophy (including the opinions of critics such as Rawls and Scanlon), a brief history of the view (again, including the opinions of critics, such as Marx and Nietzsche), and an overview of the chapters of the book.

This article offers a normative analysis of some of the most controversial incidents involving police—what I call police-generated killings. In these cases, bad police tactics create a situation where deadly force becomes necessary, becomes perceived as necessary, or occurs unintentionally. Police deserve blame for such killings because they choose tactics that unnecessarily raise the risk of deadly force, thus violating their obligation to prioritize the protection of life. Since current law in the United States fails to ban many bad tactics, (...) police- generated killings often are treated as “lawful but awful.” To address these killings, some call on changes to departmental policies or voluntary reparations by local governments, yet such measures leave in place a troubling gap between ethics and law. I argue that police-generated killings merit legal sanctions by appealing to a relevant analogy: self-generated self-defense, where the person who engages in self-defense started the trouble. The persistent lack of accountability for police-generated killings threatens life, police legitimacy, and trust in democratic institutions. The article closes by identifying tools in law and policy to address this challenge. (shrink)

The devastating impact of the COVID‐19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic is prompting renewed scrutiny of practices that heighten the risk of infectious disease. One such practice is refusing available vaccines known to be effective at preventing dangerous communicable diseases. For reasons of preventing individual harm, avoiding complicity in collective harm, and fairness, there is a growing consensus among ethicists that individuals have a duty to get vaccinated. I argue that these same grounds establish an analogous duty to avoid buying and (...) eating most meat sold today, based solely on a concern for human welfare. Meat consumption is a leading driver of infectious disease. Wildlife sales at wet markets, bushmeat hunting, and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are all exceptionally risky activities that facilitate disease spread and impose immense harms on human populations. If there is a moral duty to vaccinate, we also should recognize a moral duty to avoid most meat. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this duty for policy. (shrink)

A book chapter (about 9,000 words, plus references) presenting an act-consequentialist approach to the ethics of climate change. It begins with an overview of act consequentialism, including a description of the view’s principle of rightness (an act is right if and only if it maximizes the good) and a conception of the good focusing on the well-being of sentient creatures and rejecting temporal discounting. Objections to act consequentialism, and replies, are also considered. Next, the chapter briefly suggests that act consequentialism (...) could reasonably be regarded as the default moral theory of climate change, in the sense that a broadly act-consequentialist framework often seems implicit in both scholarly and casual discussions of the ethics of climate change. The remainder of the chapter explores three possible responses to the threat of climate change: having fewer children to reduce the number of people emitting greenhouse gases; taxing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions (commonly called a “carbon tax”) to discourage GHG-emitting behavior; and reducing poverty to lessen personal, familial, and community vulnerability to the harms of climate change. (shrink)

A key question for research on the evolutionary origins of morality concerns just what the target of an evolutionary explanation of morality should be. Some researchers focus on behaviors, others on systems of norms, yet others on moral emotions. Richard Joyce (2006) offers an evolutionary explanation for the trait of making moral judgments. Here, I defend Joyce’s account of moral judgment against two objections from Stephen Stich (2008). Stich’s first objection concerns the supposed universality of moral judgments as Joyce conceives (...) of them. I respond by undermining the empirical evidence upon which this objection is based. Stich’s second objection concerns the extent of the moral domain, which he takes to include far more than the considerations of harm and fairness central to Joyce’s account. In response, I outline several strategies for reconciling Stich’s observations with Joyce’s account. (shrink)

This article describes the feasibility of researchinto the relation between values of farmers andsustainability for the Dutch Ministry of Agricultureand the Dutch Federation of Agricultural andHorticultural Organisations.Firstly, a theoretical framework describes differentlevels of motivation behind conduct and choices. Itenables exploration and analysis of individualinterviews with small groups of conventional andecological farmers. The aim is to find out what theirbasic convictions regarding nature and sustainabilityare, and to analyze the relation between theseconvictions and the actual choices they make in theirfarming practice. The (...) research shows that for somefarmers, differences in farming practice go back to themotivation level of moral convictions about what is`good farming'. For others, the motivations for aspecific farming practice are more pragmatic or`superficial'. This knowledge can be of significancefor the process of policy making. (shrink)

The Argument from Disagreement (AD) (Mackie, 1977) depends upon empirical evidence for ‘fundamental’ moral disagreement (FMD) (Doris and Stich, 2005; Doris and Plakias, 2008). Research on the Southern ‘culture of honour’ (Nisbett and Cohen, 1996) has been presented as evidence for FMD between Northerners and Southerners within the US. We raise some doubts about the usefulness of such data in settling AD. We offer an alternative based on recent work in moral psychology that targets the potential universality of morally significant (...) distinctions (e.g. means vs. side-effects, actions versus omissions). More specifically, we argue that a recent study showing that a rural Mayan population fails to perceive as morally significant the distinction between actions and omissions provides a plausible case of FMD between Mayans and Westerners. (shrink)

We describe research carried out as part of a text summarisation project for the legal domain for which we use a new XML corpus of judgments of the UK House of Lords. These judgments represent a particularly important part of public discourse due to the role that precedents play in English law. We present experimental results using a range of features and machine learning techniques for the task of predicting the rhetorical status of sentences and for the task of selecting (...) the most summary-worthy sentences from a document. Results for these components are encouraging as they achieve state-of-the-art accuracy using robust, automatically generated cue phrase information. Sample output from the system illustrates the potential of summarisation technology for legal information management systems and highlights the utility of our rhetorical annotation scheme as a model of legal discourse, which provides a clear means for structuring summaries and tailoring them to different types of users. (shrink)

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the Mass Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists. Individual chapters examine: * Theories of the everyday * Fragments of everyday life * Surrealism: the marvelous in the everyday * Walter Benjamin's Trash Aesthetics * Mass Observation: the science of everyday life * Henri Lefebvre's Dialectics of Everyday Life * Michel de (...) Certeau's Poetics of Everyday Life * Everyday life and the future of cultural studies. (shrink)

The evolution of cognition literature is dominated by views that presume the evolution of underlying neural structures. However, recent models of cognition reemphasize the role of physiological structures, development, and external resources as important components of cognition. This article argues that these alternative models of cognition challenge our understanding of human cognitive evolution. As a case study, it focuses on rehabilitating bipedalism as a crucial moment in human evolution. The australopithecines are often seen as “merely” bipedal chimpanzees, with a similar (...) suite of behaviors. But an embodied, developmental approach to understanding australopithecine cognitive abilities shows that the transition between australopithecines and the emergence of the Homo genus is less of a break than is often thought. Bipedalism on this view is not just a physiological and behavioral breakthrough: it represents a major cognitive leap as well. (shrink)

Two recent overviews of costly signalling theory—Maynard-Smith and Harper ( 2003 ) and Searcy and Nowicki ( 2005 )—both refuse to count signals kept honest by punishment of dishonesty, as costly signals, because (1) honest signals must be costly in cases of costly signalling, and (2) punishment of dishonesty itself requires explanation. I argue that both pairs of researchers are mistaken: (2) is not a reason to discount signals kept honest by punishment of dishonesty as cases of costly signalling, and (...) (1) betrays too narrow a focus on certain versions of costly signalling theory. In the course of so arguing, I propose a new schema for classifying signal costs, which suggests productive research questions for future conceptual and empirical work on costly signalling. (shrink)

Research ethics guidelines grew out of several infamous episodes where research subjects were exploited. There is significant international synchronization of guidelines. However, indigenous groups in New Zealand, Canada and Australia have criticized these guidelines as being inadequate for research involving indigenous people and have developed guidelines from their own cultural perspectives. Whilst traditional research ethics guidelines place a lot of emphasis on informed consent, these indigenous guidelines put much greater emphasis on interdependence and trust. This article argues that traditional guidelines (...) are premised on relationships of equal power, and that often the researcher has more power that is not fully equalized by providing information. Where there is a relationship of unequal power, then focusing on interdependence and trust is more likely to achieve ethical safety. We illustrate this thesis by describing the detail of a research project looking at the use of interpreters, where we video-recorded live consultations and then interviewed the patient, interpreter and doctor. We conclude by suggesting that mainstream research ethics guidelines should pay more attention to the development of a trustworthy relationship between subject and researcher, and that, following the lead from clinical medicine, we should develop a culturally competent ethical framework for research on human subjects. (shrink)

While it seems unlikely that any method of guaranteeing human-friendliness on the part of advanced Artificial General Intelligence systems will be possible, this doesn’t mean the only alternatives are throttling AGI development to safeguard humanity, or plunging recklessly into the complete unknown. Without denying the presence of a certain irreducible uncertainty in such matters, it is still sensible to explore ways of biasing the odds in a favorable way, such that newly created AI systems are significantly more likely than not (...) to be Friendly. Several potential methods of effecting such biasing are explored here, with a particular but non-exclusive focus on those that are relevant to open-source AGI projects, and with illustrative examples drawn from the OpenCog open-source AGI project. Issues regarding the relative safety of open versus closed approaches to AGI are discussed and then nine techniques for biasing AGIs in favor of Friendliness are presented: 1. Engineer the capability to acquire integrated ethical knowledge.2. Provide rich ethical interaction and instruction, respecting developmental stages.3. Develop stable, hierarchical goal systems.4. Ensure that the early stages of recursive self-improvement occur relatively slowly and with rich human involvement.5. Tightly link AGI with the Global Brain.6. Foster deep, consensus-building interactions between divergent viewpoints.7. Create a mutually supportive community of AGIs.8. Encourage measured co-advancement of AGI software and AGI ethics theory.9. Develop advanced AGI sooner not later. In conclusion, and related to the final point, we advise the serious co-evolution of functional AGI systems and AGI-related ethical theory as soon as possible, before we have so much technical infrastructure that parties relatively unconcerned with ethics are able to rush ahead with brute force approaches to AGI development. (shrink)

The Equal Weight View holds that, when we discover we disagree with an epistemic peer, we should give our peer’s judgment as much weight as our own. But how should we respond when we cannot tell whether those who disagree with us are our epistemic peers? I argue for a position I will call the Earn-a-Spine View. According to this view, parties to a disagreement can remain confident, at least in some situations, by finding justifiable reasons to think their opponents (...) are less credible than themselves, even if those reasons are justifiable only because they lack information about their opponents. (shrink)

Chalmers suggests that, if a Singularity fails to occur in the next few centuries, the most likely reason will be 'motivational defeaters' i.e. at some point humanity or human-level AI may abandon the effort to create dramatically superhuman artificial general intelligence. Here I explore one plausible way in which that might happen: the deliberate human creation of an 'AI Nanny' with mildly superhuman intelligence and surveillance powers, designed either to forestall Singularity eternally, or to delay the Singularity until humanity more (...) fully understands how to execute a Singularity in a positive way. It is suggested that as technology progresses, humanity may find the creation of an AI Nanny desirable as a means of protecting against the destructive potential of various advanced technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. (shrink)

This volume addresses the relationship between law and neoliberalism. Assembling work from established and emerging legal scholars, political theorists, philosophers, historians and sociologists from around the world, including the Americas, Australia, Europe and the United Kingdom, it addresses the conceptual, legal, and political relationships between liberal legality and neoliberal economics. More specifically, the book analyses the role that legality plays in the dominant economic force of our time: offering both a legal corrective to scholarship in economics and political economy that (...) has paid insufficient attention to legal ideas and, at the same time, a political economic corrective to legal scholarship which has only recently turned to theorizing neoliberalism. It will be of enormous interest to those working at the intersection of law and politics in our neoliberal age. (shrink)

In this rejoinder to Ben Colburn, I (1) further press, while modulating, my charge that his autonomy-minded anti-perfectionism is insufficiently novel, (2) articulate a new and distinct worry about the formal analysis that is at the center of his argument, and (3) enhance my criticism that the view Colburn defends is too permissive.

We developed this study to examine the issue of parental refusal of treatment, looking at the issue through a cultural competence lens. Recent cases in Canada where courts have declined applications by clinicians for court orders to overrule parental refusal of treatment highlight the dispute in this area. This study analyses the 16 cases of a larger group of 24 cases that were selected by a literature review where cultural or religious beliefs or ethnic identity was described as important reasons (...) behind the refusal. The most significant finding was that nearly all of the cases cited unacceptable side effects as the main reason for declining treatment. We then analysed the detail of the cases and concluded that in the first instance a skilled clinical approach to develop an agreed management plan is by far the best approach. In the event that agreement cannot be reached we recommend engaging a mediator to help the clinician and parents/child to find an agreeable way forward. We argue that the option of se... (shrink)

: In “What is a ‘Real’ Argument?” Geoff Goddu (2009) suggests and rejects four candidates for what a real argument is, concluding that argumentation theorists should abandon the idea that there is a theoretically significant sub-class of arguments that should be called real. In this paper, I argue against Goddu’s conclusion, finding that real arguments are arguments that are used or that have prospective use in the practice of thinking about matters that call for reasonable and reflective judgment concerning what (...) to believe or do. What makes these arguments theoretically distinct from arguments in general is that they are used or that they may be used in the pragmatic endeavor of attempting to establish good reasons for beliefs and actions. Real arguments are therefore the arguments that should be treated in a course that aims to improve the skills of argumentation that students might use outside of the classroom in real-life. (shrink)

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom; in his recent and celebrated book Superintelligence; argues that advanced AI poses a potentially major existential risk to humanity; and that advanced AI development should be heavily regulated and perhaps even restricted to a small set of government-approved researchers. Bostrom’s ideas and arguments are reviewed and explored in detail; and compared with the thinking of three other current thinkers on the nature and implications of AI: Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute ; and David (...) Weinbaum and Viktoras Veitas of the Global Brain Institute. Relevant portions of Yudkowsky’s book Rationality: From AI to Zombies are briefly reviewed; and it is found that nearly all the core ideas of Bostrom’s work appeared previously or concurrently in Yudkowsky’s thinking. However; Yudkowsky often presents these shared ideas in a more plain-spoken and extreme form; making clearer the essence of what is being claimed. For instance; the elitist strain of thinking that one sees in the background in Bostrom is plainly and openly articulated in Yudkowsky; with many of the same practical conclusions. Bostrom and Yudkowsky view intelligent systems through the lens of reinforcement learning – they view them as “reward-maximizers” and worry about what happens when a very powerful and intelligent reward-maximizer is paired with a goal system that gives rewards for achieving foolish goals like tiling the universe with paperclips. Weinbaum and Veitas’s recent paper “Open-Ended Intelligence” presents a starkly alternative perspective on intelligence; viewing it as centered not on reward maximization; but rather on complex self-organization and self-transcending development that occurs in close coupling with a complex environment that is also ongoingly self-organizing; in only partially knowable ways. It is concluded that Bostrom and Yudkowsky’s arguments for existential risk have some logical foundation; but are often presented in an exaggerated way. For instance; formal arguments whose implication is that the “worst case scenarios” for advanced AI development are extremely dire; are often informally discussed as if they demonstrated the likelihood; rather than just the possibility; of highly negative outcomes. And potential dangers of reward-maximizing AI are taken as problems with AI in general; rather than just as problems of the reward-maximization paradigm as an approach to building superintelligence. If one views past; current; and future intelligence as “open-ended;” in the vernacular of Weaver and Veitas; the potential dangers no longer appear to loom so large; and one sees a future that is wide-open; complex and uncertain; just as it has always been. (shrink)

Purpose Online violence has been rampant in the past decade, intensifying the victims’ suffering owing to its rapid dissemination to vast audiences. This study aims to focus on online gender-based violence directed against young Bedouin women who have left their male-dominated home territory for academic studies. This study examined how the backlash against these students, intended to stop changes in traditional gender roles, is reflected in offensive TikTok videos. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a qualitative-thematic analysis of 77 questionnaires (...) and 30 semistructured in-depth interviews with first-year female Bedouin students aged 18–21 years. Findings The backlash was widespread, with young Bedouin men using offensive videos as “proof” that women have violated codes of honor and morality. The videos exhibited four types of gender-based violence: claims of immoral behavior, aggressive captions that take the footage out of context, allegations of immodest clothing and digital photo editing that produced fabricated results. Examining participants' reactions to the videos, this study revealed two patterns of response: passive acceptance of the situation and an active approach that included reaching out to powerful Bedouin men for solutions. Originality/value This research enriches the literature on online gender-based violence, particularly against women in traditional societies, and suggests practical steps: developing online media literacy in traditional societies, adopting a proactive approach and nurturing social self-competence in women who have been victims of online gender-based violence. (shrink)

Most arguments in support of act utilitarianism are elaborations of one of two basic strategies. One is the consequentialist strategy. This strategy relies on the consequentialist premise that an act is right if and only if it produces the best possible consequences and the welfarist premise that the value of a state of affairs is entirely determined by its overall amount of well-being. The other strategy is based on the idea of treating individuals respectfully and resolving conflicts among individuals in (...) whatever way best conforms to that idea. Although both of these strategies can be used to argue for the principle of act utilitarianism, they are significantly different from each other, and these differences cause them to have different strengths and weaknesses. It emerges that which argumentative strategy is chosen by a proponent of act utilitarianism has a large impact on which virtues her view has and which objections it is vulnerable to. (shrink)

As dominant liberal conceptions of the relationship between rights and freedom maintain, freedom is a property of the individual human subject and rights are a mechanism for protecting that freedom—whether it be the freedom to speak, to associate, to practise a certain religion or cultural way of life, and so forth. Rights according to these kinds of accounts are protective of a certain zone of permitted or valorised conduct and they function either as, for example, a ‘side-constraint’ on the actions (...) of others or as a ‘trump’ over governmental or community goals. In such accounts, of course, the emphasis is placed upon the forms of power against which rights protect the individual, whether that be the trespasses of others or the overweening attentions of the state. Such accounts famously do not themselves take much account of the multiple ways in which rights also function as forms of power, often delimiting the courses of action that a putative rights-holder can take and affecting the manner of its exercise, indeed often in the very name of freedom itself. Of course, there is a sizeable critical literature which does address itself to these kinds of question, most notably from the radical traditions of Marxism and critical legal theory, which see rights in terms of the relations of production, consumption and exploitation that they establish between legal subjects. For various reasons, Foucault has not figured as prominently in critical discussions of rights. Here I do not propose to enter into debates surrounding Foucault’s engagement with, or failure to engage with, law as an object of study, nor with the emergent literature on Foucault’s deployments of rights, indeed even of human rights. Rather, what I want to do in this paper is to articulate and defend the view that through a reading of Foucault’s work, both on rights and on power relations more broadly, we can discern an understanding of the political ambivalence of rights. For Foucault (and for some of the post-Foucaultian scholars whose work I shall address, below), rights are both political tools for the contestation and alteration of mechanisms of power and simultaneously mechanisms of inscription, both disciplinary and governmental, which work to conduct those who rely upon them. Far from being an unproblematic tool for the protection of the subject’s freedom, rights emerge in this account as conflicted and ambivalent mechanisms. In the first part of this paper I develop a Foucaultian account of rights along these lines and then hope to illustrate it by reference to several examples, from the constitution of gender and cultural identity via rights to the figure of the refugee, whilst in the final part of the paper I make a return to the idea of freedom in Foucault’s work and link the view of rights developed herein to a certain conception of freedom in his work. (shrink)

The 'Art of Life' is John Stuart Mill's name for his account of practical reason. In this volume, eleven leading scholars elucidate this fundamental, but widely neglected, element of Mill's thought. Mill divides the Art of Life into three 'departments': 'Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Æsthetics'. In the volume's first section, Rex Martin, David Weinstein, Ben Eggleston, and Dale E. Miller investigate the relation between the departments of morality and prudence. Their papers ask whether Mill is a rule utilitarian and, (...) if so, whether his practical philosophy must be incoherent. The second section contains papers by Jonathan Riley and Wendy Donner, who explore the relation between the departments of morality and aesthetics. They discuss issues ranging from supererogation to aesthetic pleasure and humanity's relationship with nature. -/- The papers in the third section consider the Art of Life's axiological first principle, the principle of utility. Elijah Millgram contends that Mill's own life refutes his claim that the Art of Life has a single axiological first principle. Philip Kitcher maintains that Mill has a dynamic axiology requiring us to continually refine our conception of the good. In the final section, three papers address what it means to put the Art of Life into practice. Robert Haraldsson locates an 'Art of Ethics' in On Liberty that is in tension with the Art of Life. Nadia Urbinati plumbs the classical roots of Mill's view of the good life. Finally, Colin Heydt develops Mill's suggestion that we regard our own lives as works of art. (shrink)

We define two notions for intuitionistic predicate logic: that of a submodel of a Kripke model, and that of a universal sentence. We then prove a corresponding preservation theorem. If a Kripke model is viewed as a functor from a small category to the category of all classical models with morphisms between them, then we define a submodel of a Kripke model to be a restriction of the original Kripke model to a subcategory of its domain, where every node in (...) the subcategory is mapped to a classical submodel of the corresponding classical model in the range of the original Kripke model. We call a sentence universal if it is built inductively from atoms using ∧, ∨, ∀, and →, with the restriction that antecedents of → must be atomic. We prove that an intuitionistic theory is axiomatized by universal sentences if and only if it is preserved under Kripke submodels. We also prove the following analogue of a classical model-consistency theorem: The universal fragment of a theory Γ is contained in the universal fragment of a theory Δ if and only if every rooted Kripke model of Δ is strongly equivalent to a submodel of a rooted Kripke model of Γ. Our notions of Kripke submodel and universal sentence are natural in the sense that in the presence of the rule of excluded middle, they collapse to the classical notions of submodel and universal sentence. (shrink)

This paper discusses the Saudi Arabian case by Abdallah Adlan and Henk ten Have, published in a 2012 issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, regarding a congenitally disabled child enrolled in a research project examining the genetics of her condition. During the course of the study, her father was found not to be genetically related, and the case discussed the dilemma between disclosing to the family all findings as promised in consent documents or withholding paternity information because of the (...) likely severe social repercussions. Using Adlan and ten Have’s example, this paper proposes a framework to consider cases outside of the conventional bioethics frame of reference, splitting the bioethical task into three elements: understanding the problem from the patient’s and the clinician’s perspective and then engaging in dialogue to decide what to do next. The process of dialogue between affected parties is vital. Presuming that there is a common morality undermines the effectiveness of the dialogue needed to find a resolution. (shrink)

What will be the next huge leap in humanity's progress? We cannot know for sure, but I am reasonably confident that it will involve the radical extension of technology into the domain of thought. Ray Kurzweil (2000, 2005) has eloquently summarized the arguments in favor of this position.

A novel theory of reflective consciousness, will and self is presented, based on modeling each of these entities using self-referential mathematical structures called hypersets. Pattern theory is used to argue that these exotic mathematical structures may meaningfully be considered as parts of the minds of physical systems, even finite computational systems. The hyperset models presented are hypothesized to occur as patterns within the "moving bubble of attention" of the human brain and any roughly human-mind-like AI system. These ideas appear to (...) be compatible with both panpsychist and materialist views of consciousness, and probably other views as well. Their relationship with the CogPrime AI design and its implementation in the OpenCog software framework is elucidated in detail. (shrink)

The map is not the territory - from ontology to epistemology in knowledge construction -- Dialectics: a mechanism of knowledge construction -- Reflectivity reconsidered -- Reflectivity and the researchers' perspective -- Reflectivity and the participants' perspective -- Ethical differences and similarities as sources of reflection and knowledge construction -- Research relations and power differentials: from resistance to collaboration and in-between -- Frames of reference and the control of knowledge -- Reciprocity: the nature and attributes of research relations and power -- (...) Epilogue: from dialectics to dialog across liminal spaces. (shrink)

In The Dilemma of Context, Scharfstein contends that the problems encountered with context are insoluble. He explains why this problem lays an intellectual burden on us that, while remaining inescapable,can become so heavy it destroys the understandingit was created to further.

The adventure I am now undertaking is an appraisal of my profession, philosophy, of my fellow professionals, the philosophers, and, finally of myself at least ...