Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Ethics — moral philosophy — what is owed, permitted or good — including applied ethics of technology and institutions (group: philosophy).
141 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-014 v3 | Reckless disregard for the truth coming from cops, doctors, and scientists: A rant. | Gelman (2025), https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/24/reckless-disregard-for-the-truth-coming-from-cops-doctors-and-scientists-a-rant/. Gelman argues that scientists (a 3-day study titled “long-term”; the power-pose abstract’s “instantly become more powerful”), a paid medical expert (Ludmerer’s 2002 “no opinion” on smoking and lung cancer) and DHS spokespeople (Lander “assaulting”, Padilla “lunging”, ICE’s unsourced “413 percent” assaults) share one pattern, which he calls “reckless disregard for the truth”. In his account it strengthens a weak case, is carried by journals, courts and media, is accepted as a term of art and goes unpunished. It is negative-sum, and bystanders who tolerate it sustain it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-019); worth reading as a short, clearly argued statement of an incentive account of socially accepted falsehood, with a relevant section on overclaiming in paper titles and abstracts. Its evidence is a handful of anecdotes, and its police examples rest on press accounts that this reading did not check. |
| LIT-047 v3 | Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies | Curry et al. (2019), DOI-10.1086/701478. Coding 3,460 eHRAF paragraphs on the 60 Probability Sample Files societies found 962 morally valenced mentions of seven cooperative behaviours, 961 of them positive. The one negative is Chuuk admiration of open theft as dominance. Presence varied widely by domain: property 54/60 (90%), kin 47 (78%), group 44 (73%), reciprocity 43 (72%), respect 35 (58%), bravery 32 (53%), fairness 9 (15%). Presence correlated with ethnographic coverage (r = 0.43). The design can detect a morally positive mention but has almost no way to register a negative one, so the 99.9% is weak evidence for universality. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-034); the clearest statement of morality-as-cooperation, with an unusually good commentary set (Bloom; Smith & Kurzban; Wong) that states the objections exactly. Its empirical test is weakly diagnostic: the codebook defines the behaviours in virtue terms, the authors’ footnote 3 recodes conflicts as cooperation-vs-cooperation, and the first-pass selection was not blind. It would be settled by blind coding of all moralized content in the same sample, testing whether non-cooperative domains (purity, sex, harm) are moralized as often. |
| LIT-098 v2 | Health and Disease Concepts Cannot Be Grounded in Social Justice Alone | Veit (2025), DOI-10.52685/cjp.25.73.7. Kukla’s “institutional definition” makes a condition a health condition iff medicalising it would be best for collective wellbeing. Veit argues that any purely normativist definition of this kind defeats itself for two reasons. First, leaving “social justice” undefined lets a majority with other values medicalise what Kukla wanted to protect. Second, unless the institution of medicine is fixed from outside, the medical toolkit co-evolves until “health would simply become justice” (p. 15). His remedy is pluralism: at least three separate accounts, with justice linked to health empirically, not conceptually. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-097); worth reading as a short, clearly structured critique of moral conceptual engineering applied to health, though its two objections rest on informal argument and a thought experiment, not on an engagement with Kukla’s replies. |
| LIT-111 v4 | AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto | Birch (2025), DOI-10.31234/osf.io/af7c9_v1. Birch argues that two challenges must be met together: users misattributing human-like consciousness to chatbots (Challenge One), and possible “profoundly alien” AI consciousness that current science cannot settle (Challenge Two). For Challenge One he offers a personal-identity argument that the chatbot “friend” is typically a character with no persisting bearer (the “persisting interlocutor illusion”, §4) and three nudges that are neither “brainwashing” nor “lobotomizing” (§7). For Challenge Two he argues that behavioural markers are “gamed” (§10), that architectural markers are “Janus-faced” (§11), and that the resulting “two-level deadlock” between computational functionalism and biological naturalism can be broken over the long run by comparative animal studies (§12, Fig. 4). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-183); worth reading as the clearest statement of the “centrist” position, and it coins four concepts the AI-consciousness literature now uses (persisting interlocutor illusion, gaming problem, Janus problem, two-level deadlock). It is a manifesto: its design nudges are untested proposals, and its way out of the deadlock is a research programme that has “barely begun” (§12). |
| LIT-116 v3 | The Desperate Search for Meaning in Life | Browning & Veit (2022), https://philarchive.org/archive/BROWAW-9. A popular-philosophy chapter that reads Evangelion’s characters as seeking meaning first in piloting (duty, recognition), then in connection with others, frustrated by Schopenhauer’s porcupine (hedgehog) dilemma. It argues that the failure of Instrumentality shows that a self, and so meaning, exists only through contrast with and separation from others: “without it [otherness], the self cannot exist” (p. 9). Meaning comes from human connection “but maintaining some distance” (p. 10). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-119); worth reading only as a short, accessible illustration of the relational view of the self (self constituted by the self–other boundary) applied to meaning in life. It offers no original argument, cites nothing beyond two quoted sources, and misdescribes Heidegger’s “Dasein”. |
| LIT-117 v3 | Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won’t Come from What Is Constitutive of Action | Enoch (2006), DOI-10.1215/00318108-2005-014. Constitutivism cannot ground normativity. Even granting that action has constitutive aims, one can ask what reason there is to be an agent rather than a “shmagent” (a near-agent lacking those aims), and the constitutive facts cannot answer that question without presupposing normative reasons. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (SSRN, Duke UP, PhilPapers, ResearchGate and the author’s pages refused; JSTOR is closed). A Wayback Machine snapshot of an old Semantic Scholar PDF exists (web.archive.org/web/20200228092518/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d0d1/80b87d01492d9ddcdd487c81ad31466f404c.pdf) but was unreachable from here. It stays Unavailable until read. |
| LIT-120 v2 | Welfare Subjects and Autopoiesis | Bruckner (2025), DOI-10.1017/apa.2025.10006. Bruckner proposes, by abduction and not deduction (§4), that being autopoietic is sufficient, not necessary, for being a welfare subject. An entity is autopoietic when it “sustains, maintains, and renews itself in a way that responds and adapts to its environmental conditions”. On this view insentient plants and a hypothetical non-sentient self-maintaining car (“Tessler”) are welfare subjects, while engines with governors, thermostats and heat-seeking missiles are not. He answers the charge of absurd obligations in two ways: welfare value may not generate agent-neutral reasons at all, and if it does, the reasons concerning non-conscious subjects are “extremely weak” (Bradford 2023). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-093); worth reading as the clearest short statement of a welfare criterion that is not based on sentience and admits machines. Read it knowing that its “autopoiesis” is a loose behavioural notion of adaptive self-maintenance, not Maturana and Varela’s self-production, and that the line it draws against thermostats is argued as one of degree (“much richer”, §6.1) while being stated as one of kind. |
| LIT-125 v2 | The moral psychology of obligation | Tomasello (2019), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X19001742. Tomasello proposes that the human sense of obligation is “the internalized social/rational pressure from a joint or collective self-regulating agent ‘we’… to do what ‘we’ expect me to” (§3). It arises first, around age 3, inside joint-commitment collaboration with a partner, and then, from about 3–5 years, toward in-group members through collective identification. It is a “self-conscious motivation” whose coercive force is a threat to one’s cooperative identity. The support is a synthesis of developmental and comparative experiments, mostly from his own lab, on WEIRD children versus chimpanzees; the paper runs no new experiment. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-185); worth reading as the standard statement of the shared-intentionality account of obligation and, above all, as a treatment. The commentaries by Bratman, Darwall, Gilbert and Pettit, and the response, are where the naturalistic claim is actually contested. The target article alone is a review-cum-hypothesis, not a demonstration. |
| LIT-126 v2 | The Category Error in Contemporary AI Safety Discourse and Why Non-Sentient Systems Cannot Be Moral Machines | Vieira (2026), https://philarchive.org/archive/VIETCE. A ten-page position paper. Its one explicit argument is “P1: moral status requires phenomenal consciousness; P2: current and foreseeable AI lacks it; C: such AI lacks moral status” (§3, p. 3). P1 rests on Swanepoel 2020, and P2 is asserted without argument. From this Vieira recommends that AI-safety frameworks measure only effects on sentient beings (§6.4). His replies retreat from C to a weaker norm, “we should not attribute moral status absent positive evidence of phenomenal consciousness” (§6, p. 6; §7.1), and he never says what that evidence would be. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-128); not worth a reader’s time. Its load-bearing premise (P2) is asserted, not argued. The abstract promises replies from human–AI interaction studies and global perspectives that the body does not contain. The “moral zombie” framing and the sentientist criterion are taken from Véliz (2021) and Swanepoel (2020), neither held here, and a reader gets both more directly from those sources. |
| LIT-128 v2 | Neurodiversity & evaluation: a defense (or not) of affective fictionalism | Fernández Castro et al. (2026), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2026.2638974. Affective fictionalism — reading mental-state attributions as normative evaluations rather than factual reports — is argued to meet three demands the neurodiversity paradigm places on any theory of folk psychology. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis refused the request, no repository copy or preprint was found, and the first author’s site links only to the publisher. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-129 v3 | Epistemic injustice in the clinical care of practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions | Porcher & Santaella (2026), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2026.2623889. When clinicians override a patient’s religious interpretation of her experience in domains where medicine has no interpretive authority (“interpretive exclusivism”), they commit an epistemic injustice — racialised in the Brazilian case — that the authors say only epistemic humility remedies. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis refused the request, and no preprint or repository copy was found (the UFRGS repository did not respond). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-130 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics | Dufner (2025), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/. A survey, arguing no thesis of its own, of how three contested questions bear on ethics: which account of persistence is true (unique psychological continuity, Shoemaker and Parfit; or biological continuity and animalism, Olson and DeGrazia), whether identity or the psychological relations (continuity and/or connectedness) is what matters (Parfit’s fission case), and whether metaphysics constrains ethics or the reverse. It traces these through prudential concern, responsibility, abortion (Marquis), death and brain-death criteria, dementia and advance directives (Dworkin vs Jaworska on Margo), and the separateness of persons (Rawls, Parfit, Nozick, Taurek, Sidgwick, Brink). Its main recurring finding is that the relation that fixes persistence and the relation that matters ethically keep coming apart. It concludes that all three questions remain open. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-166); worth reading as the current, compact reference map from theories of persistence to applied ethics; it is a survey that takes no side, so it is a route to the primary sources (Parfit 1984, Olson 1997, McMahan 2002, Schechtman 1996, Korsgaard 1989) rather than a source of claims. |
| LIT-135 v3 | Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism | Seth (2024), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X25000032. Seth argues that conscious AI needs computational functionalism and substrate flexibility extending to silicon, and that both are doubtful (§3.9). Against them he gives a positive, explicitly non-vitalist case, running from interoceptive predictive processing through the free energy principle to autopoiesis, that consciousness is a property “of only (but not necessarily all) living systems” (§4). He concludes that real artificial consciousness is “unlikely along current trajectories” and would need “living AI” (§5.8), while conscious-seeming AI is “almost certain” and may be “cognitively impenetrable” (§6.2). He concedes that “my case is not watertight” (§5.8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-169); worth reading as the leading statement of biological naturalism about AI, with a useful five-scenario map (Table 1) of what conscious AI would require. Its positive case rests on the free energy principle, which the paper itself calls “much debated” (§4.2), and it claims plausibility rather than necessity. The commentaries and the Author’s Response (BBS 49, 2026) are the next thing to read, and the response was not reached here. |
| LIT-137 v3 | Philosophy of Fame and Celebrity | Robb et al. (2024), DOI-10.5040/9781350401327. The first introductory collection on the philosophy of fame and celebrity, arguing that work on admiration, achievement, epistemic authority, virtue and moral psychology can be brought to bear on what fame is and how it shapes how we live. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and the volume could not be obtained (OpenAlex lists it closed; Crossref shows no licence; the introduction is behind a Bloomsbury Collections login). One chapter, Widdows & MacCallum on “Instafame”, has an accepted version on the Warwick repository, but one chapter is not the volume. It stays Unavailable until the volume is available. |
| LIT-138 v2 | The Depth of the Body | Register (2025), DOI-10.3998/phimp.7576. Register argues that body parthood “for moral purposes” is bounded below by depth. Depth is the microphysical commitment of an object’s real definition, and objects that are “too deep” (a water molecule, the parcel of matter now composing the heart, a particular cloud server) are not body parts, though they are parts in the ordinary sense. His two principles (“bodily interests/rights are high-level”) say that events which are high-level neutral do not bear on bodily rights or interests. So a BCI user’s implemented software can be a body part owned by the user while the third-party server that runs it is not. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-151); worth reading as a short, clearly argued proposal that separates a moral “body-part” relation from ordinary parthood by level of abstraction, and applies it to cloud-hosted BCIs. It is an argument from cases with the key ontological step hedged, not a worked-out mereology. |
| LIT-139 v2 | Inductive Risk and Values in Science | Douglas (2000), DOI-10.1086/392855. Hempel’s “inductive risk” (the chance of wrongly accepting or rejecting a hypothesis) arises at three internal stages of science: choosing a methodology such as a significance level, characterising data, and interpreting results. Wherever the non-epistemic consequences of error can be foreseen, weighing them requires non-epistemic values. Douglas shows this on dioxin cancer studies. Three pathologist panels (1978, 1980, 1990) scored the same Kociba rat-liver slides differently (e.g. 34/50, 33/47, 18/50 tumours at 100 ng/kg/day). Choosing between threshold and no-threshold readings of the same data has meant regulatory limits about 100× apart. Values enter only indirectly, through the consequences of error, never as evidence that a claim is true. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-145); worth reading as the canonical, compact statement of the modern inductive-risk argument. It is carefully scoped, with an explicit direct/indirect distinction and exemptions for negligible uncertainty and consequence-free research, and it is well illustrated. Its normative premise, that scientists bear moral responsibility for foreseeable consequences of error, is explicitly left unargued (§2, p. 563). |
| LIT-146 v2 | The Moral Status of Animals | Gruen & Monsó (2003), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/. The entry reviews five proposed grounds of moral considerability (species membership, human-exceptional capacities, personhood, sentience and agency). Its conclusion is that attempts to establish human uniqueness by capacities are “not the most promising” (§1.2). It then separates having moral status from the weight of a claim (“showing up on a moral radar screen”, §2.2). Weight depends on the value theory adopted for animal interests (hedonism, preference satisfaction, objective list; §2.1) and on the normative framework (rights, which are absolute but generate forward-looking duties when violated, or a multi-factor utilitarianism). It closes with virtue-ethical, feminist, relational and empathy-based approaches that reject argument from capacities altogether (§3). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-181); worth reading as the standard current survey of the grounds and weighing of animals’ moral status. It is balanced for most of its length, but §2.2 argues at length for a multi-factor utilitarian view and §3 ends on Gruen’s own “entangled empathy”, so cite it for the map, not as neutral on the weighing. |
| LIT-166 v2 | Sacrificing Humans for Insects and AI: A Critical Review of Jonathan Birch, The Edge of Sentience, Jeff Sebo, The Moral Circle, and Webb Keane, Animals, Robots, Gods | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong (2026), DOI-10.1086/739660. Each book’s own principles, read at face value, can make human interests outweighed by insects in aggregate or by near-future AI. Each author then retreats to moderate near-term advice without principled grounds: Birch through human-centred citizens’ panels, Sebo through contingent “relational” and “co-beneficial” considerations, Keane through deference to slowly adapting cultures. The reviewers defend only the conditional (“given recent science, common grounds of moral standing put human priority under serious threat”) and “take no stand on ponens vs. tollens” (§1, p. 6; §5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-116); worth reading as the sharpest short map of how the AI- and animal-sentience literature argues. It covers precaution and its ambiguity, the edges of the “zone of reasonable disagreement”, aggregation, and the retreat to moderation. It also gives a close critique of Birch’s sentience-candidate criterion, the one operational test that already covers AI. |
| LIT-172 v3 | Ethics of Parasocial Relationships | Archer & Robb (2025), DOI-10.1093/9780198928188.003.0012. Fan–celebrity parasocial relationships are personal relationships (the fan relates to the celebrity as a unique individual, with reasons for partiality), built from three structural asymmetries: attention, communication and epistemic. These yield an “identity asymmetry”: celebrities mostly direct fans’ identities, while fans mostly interpret celebrities’. Fans who refuse uptake of a celebrity’s changed public persona commit a failure of Darwallian recognition respect. The chapter derives from this a responsibility for fans, which is mitigated when the celebrity’s self-presentation is misleading or ambiguous. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-186); worth reading as the clearest short philosophical analysis of parasociality as a relationship type. Its directive/interpretive split and its recognition-respect argument are portable to other one-sided relationships, though the chapter itself only gestures at them. |
| LIT-174 v2 | Having Their Say: Athletes and Entertainers and the Ethics of Speaking Out | Bunton (2021), https://philpapers.org/rec/BUNHTS. Argues that celebrities’ speaking out on public issues is justifiable only when speakers, journalists and audiences attend to platform, intent and harm, because digital audiences treat celebrity as authority. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: the book has no open or repository version, and the publisher and Google Books show only a description and a limited preview. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-179 v2 | Algorithmic Nudging: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Oversight | Schmauder et al. (2023), DOI-10.1007/s11245-023-09907-4. A short position paper: two case studies show AI agents learning to exploit documented biases (in Dezfouli et al. 2020 an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70%). Against a Friedman-style judgement of AI nudges by outcome alone, the authors extend Hausman’s “look under the hood” rejoinder and propose obliging developers to consult cognitive scientists, because an AI system may exploit biases that are not yet known. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-171); worth a short read as a clear, citable statement of the case for mechanism-level oversight of AI nudging, but it adds no new evidence: its empirical content is second-hand, and its central worry (AI exploiting undocumented biases) is argued, not shown. |
| LIT-182 v3 | Towards ethical evolution: responsible autonomy of artificial intelligence across generations | Terziyan et al. (2025), DOI-10.1007/s43681-025-00759-9. The paper proposes, without implementation, formalism or experiment, that an AI system which designs further AI systems should pass on one “immutable” principle. The principle is: do not directly harm humanity or violate fundamental human values; monitor and mitigate misuse of your outputs; and make every derivative inherit this principle (p. 12). The mechanisms are a genetic-algorithm analogy, with immutable and mutable “genes”, constrained crossover and filtered mutation, together with “temporal cloning”. The paper is inconsistent about its central notion. The principle is enforced once by a penalty F = Q − α·P (p. 9) and once by “unbreachable” hard constraints (p. 13). And it is “immutable” only in its architecture, while its ethical content stays “adaptable” (p. 14). | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-156); not worth a reader’s time. It is a programme statement whose one concrete proposal is contradicted by the paper’s own later sections. It demonstrates nothing, even though its conclusion says it does (p. 21). It does not engage the alignment work on preserving goals across successors that the problem calls for. A reader interested in value preservation under recursive self-design would do better starting from that literature. |
| LIT-183 v2 | Fitting Fulfilment – Fitting Objective or Rational Attractiveness? | Hiekel (2018), DOI-10.1007/s42048-018-0007-y. Examines whether the objective element in Susan Wolf’s hybrid view of meaning in life (“subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness”) should be understood as objective attractiveness or as rational attractiveness. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found the article closed access at Springer, with no repository copy. The publisher abstract states the conclusion: objectivity in Wolf’s account of meaning should be replaced by rationality. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-186 v3 | What is purely epistemic normativity, and why? A study in Wolfian epistemology | Pettigrew (2025), https://philpapers.org/rec/PETWIP. What we ought to believe “epistemically speaking” is fixed by the norms whose broad adherence across an epistemic community would give the best epistemic results — a transposition of Susan Wolf’s rule consequentialism — which explains why we separate epistemic from all-things-considered oughts. | Unfetched — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and failed on access, not availability: the paper is open on PhilArchive, which the author’s homepage (now richardpettigrew.github.io) links to, but PhilArchive refused automated requests and no other host was found. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied or PhilArchive can be reached. Free copy: philpapers.org/rec/PETWIP (the PhilArchive PDF). |
| LIT-189 v2 | Philosophy of Open Science | Leonelli (2023), DOI-10.1017/9781009416368. Leonelli argues that mainstream, institutional Open Science treats openness as the unlimited, digital sharing of research objects, a transparency-first ordering running transparency → quality (reproducibility) → inclusion. This rests on an object-oriented, “resourcist” epistemology of science. Four implementation cases (GISAID COVID data, open-source software stigma, crop-data linkage, the reproducibility “crisis”) show it can narrow epistemic diversity and entrench epistemic injustice, which lowers reliability. She proposes instead “openness as judicious connection”, grounded in a process-oriented view of research as the cultivation of “active knowledge”. Her Figure 2 inverts the ordering to start from inclusion, and sharing becomes “neither a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition” for reliable OS (p. 8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-098); worth reading as a clear, openly normative philosophical reframing of Open Science by someone who took part in the policy process, and as a compact bridge between social epistemology (epistemic injustice, pluralism) and data practice. Its evidence is four illustrative cases and the author’s own qualitative research, not systematic data, and “judicious” remains a demand for deliberation rather than a criterion. |
| LIT-191 v3 | AI and Consciousness | Schwitzgebel (2025), ARXIV-2510.09858. A book-length sceptical argument that neither introspection, conceptual analysis nor any current theory (GWT, HOT, IIT, local recurrence, unlimited associative learning, biological views) can tell us whether near-future AI is conscious. The best sceptical argument, Mimicry, only undercuts the inference from humanlike text to consciousness and does not show absence. On the Leapfrog Hypothesis the first disputably conscious AIs will be person-like, and the question will then be settled socially rather than scientifically (the “Social Semi-Solution”). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-104); worth reading as the most complete current map of the AI-consciousness debate, and as the source of the Mimicry Argument, the Problem of Minimal Instantiation and the Leapfrog Hypothesis. Its own positive contributions are informal arguments and predictions, not results. |
| LIT-193 v2 | Better to be a Pig Dissatisfied than a Plant Satisfied | Terrill & Veit (2024), DOI-10.1007/s10806-024-09922-4. The paper argues conditionally. Suppose (A1) sentience comes in degrees, (A2) plants may be “quasi-sentient”, and (A3) moral status comes in degrees and is fixed by degree of sentience. Then plants may have partial moral status, generating “some” obligations that are “outweighed by animal interests in most cases” (Table 1). Animals keep prima facie priority, so granting plants moral status “does not require” treating eating plants and eating pigs alike. The authors propose assigning plants “a very low value” of moral status until evidence accumulates (p. 13). A1–A3 are assumed, not argued, and A2 rests on a survey of contested plant-behaviour findings. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-120); a coherent but unproven conciliatory position, useful as a clear template of the graded-sentience-to-graded-status inference. What would settle it is evidence for or against plant valenced states. Footnote 21 names the two gaps: the degree of plant-specific valenced states, and whether plants have high harm thresholds or harm-numbing mechanisms. The second author’s later work signals a move against plant consciousness (see LIT-105), so check his current view before citing it as his. |
| LIT-197 v3 | The Enigma Unveiled: How AI Compromises Free Will in Decision-Making | Sharman (2024), DOI-10.1109/ICAPAI61893.2024.10541271. Argues that AI compromises human free will by shaping decisions, manipulating emotions and lacking responsiveness to reasons, while admitting the debate is unresolved. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (closed access on IEEE Xplore; no copy found via OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, CORE, Europe PMC or the Wayback Machine). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-198 v3 | Rule Consequentialism | Hooker (2003), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism-rule/. A survey written by the view’s leading defender. It argues that full rule-consequentialism is best formulated in expectablist terms (Sophisticated criterion: the rules with greatest expected good, ties broken by closeness to conventional morality), counting the costs of teaching and internalising a code in new generations and assuming incomplete acceptance (the ~90% “overwhelming majority” formulation or a “teaching formulation”). So formulated, it answers the collapse objection, answers the incoherence objection only if the view is justified by reflective equilibrium rather than from consequentialist premises, and answers rule-worship with a vague prevent-disaster rule (§8, NOTE-160), while demandingness in other possible worlds, contingency of justification, the teachers problem and rule conflict remain open (§9). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-160); worth reading as the standard, carefully argued reference on rule-consequentialism and its §8 replies, provided it is read as an advocate’s survey (Hooker is the view’s main contemporary proponent) rather than a neutral one. |
| LIT-202 v2 | Consent and the Formation of Preferences | Pettigrew (2026), DOI-10.1111/phpr.70131. Whether consent based on a preference switches the moral facts depends on how the preference was formed, and the criterion is “the space and resources those mechanisms leave for the free exercise of agency” (p. 5, restated p. 9): preferences formed by unjust Sanctions, or by Beliefs formed in an unjustly manipulated evidential environment, diminish consent’s effectiveness, while preferences formed by Attention do not, even when an unjust force imposed the contact. Effectiveness is graded, and because the relevant mechanism is usually opaque, uncertainty about whether received consent is effective is “ubiquitous and quotidian” (p. 10). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-144); worth reading as a short, clearly organised proposal that turns the adaptive-preferences debate into a question about mechanisms and free agency; the criterion is argued by cases and left rough by the author’s own account, and one of the seven mechanisms it promises to sort (Amor Fati) is never sorted. |
| LIT-206 v3 | What Does ChatGPT Want? An Interpretationist Guide | Goldstein & Lederman (2025), DOI-10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727584. Taking as given an “objective” interpretationism, on which a system has beliefs and desires iff the hypothesis that it is rational and has them predicts its behaviour well enough on accuracy, power and tractability, the authors argue three things. The agent is the per-conversation instance, not the model. The case that instances have beliefs and desires is only “presumptive”, resting on tractability. The desire hypothesis is “provisionally” HHH+0: helpful, honest and harmless, plus in-context “zero-shot” intrinsic desires. The decisive HHH vs HHH+0 comparison is a conjecture that the authors say needs further empirical work. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-138); Worth reading as the clearest statement of interpretationist realism about LLM instance agents. It turns “does it want?” into comparisons of rival desire hypotheses against named behavioural results, and it is candid that its central empirical discriminations are untested. |
| LIT-209 v2 | The Phenomenology of Ritual Resistance: Colin Kaepernick as Confucian Sage | Walsh (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11712-020-09759-4. Walsh argues, drawing on Confucian texts (the Analects, Mengzi, Xunzi) and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, that Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. national anthem is “Confucian incivility” enacted bodily within the ritual. On his reading it rebukes the ritual’s current object while staying reverent towards its ideal. He further argues it is “sagely” in a deliberately deflated sense: its “citational force” founds a widely imitated bodily expression of patriotism. The paper is interpretive; it reports no data and states no formal thesis. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-164); worth reading as a careful worked example of how a norm-governed bodily practice can be contested from inside, and of Nivison and Hutton’s diachronic reading of Xunzian sagehood put to use. Its standing is as comparative-philosophy interpretation, and its central normative notion (sagehood as uptake) is under-argued. |
| LIT-214 v2 | Blunting concepts: The double-edged effect of popularizing psychotherapy language | Almagro & Isern-Mas (2025), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2025.2573763. The spread of mental-health vocabulary into everyday talk comes from two distinct linguistic practices. “Therapy-speak”, which reframes interpersonal or moral situations as psychological needs, blunts the concepts that people with mental health conditions need to describe their experience, and so produces hermeneutical injustice. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis refused the request, the paper is closed access, and no preprint or repository copy was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-216 v2 | The Weirdness of the World | Schwitzgebel (2024), DOI-10.1515/9780691239309. The book’s thesis is that every viable theory of how consciousness fits into the cosmos, and of the cosmos’s basic structure, is both “bizarre” (contrary to common sense) and “dubious” (not rationally compelling). So “something that seems almost too crazy to believe must be true” (p. 4), and credence should be spread across the bizarre options. Examples of those options are that the United States is conscious (if materialism is true), that we are sims or Boltzmann brains (a 0.1–1% credence), that space is transcendentally ideal, that almost every act causes almost every future event, and that there is no fact about snail consciousness. Its only positive empirical results are three self-experiments against solipsism (for example, 17 of 19 decisive chess games lost, p < .001). Everything else is informal argument. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-188); Worth reading as the one place Schwitzgebel’s separately published arguments are joined into a single case: US consciousness, crazyism, 1% skepticism, Kant meets cyberpunk, the garden snail, and the Full Rights Dilemma for AI. Chapter 3, the Universal Bizarreness and Dubiety argument, is the load-bearing contribution. Its individual chapters are informal arguments, and the manuscript that can be reached is not the published text. The published book reorders the chapters, moves the objections appendix to the end and updates the AI chapter. |
| LIT-282 v2 | The Possibility of Social Choice | Sen (1998), DOI-10.1257/aer.89.3.349. Sen argues that Arrow’s impossibility is a result about voting-type rules, which are forced on social choice by excluding interpersonal comparisons, and that broadening the informational basis escapes it: cardinal utilities without interpersonal comparison do not help (Theorem 8*2 of Sen 1970a, cited), but even ordinal interpersonal comparisons break the exact impossibility, and partial comparability is often enough (pp. 188–189). The comparisons need not be of mental states; he offers capabilities — “to live the way he or she has reason to value” (p. 192) — as one informational basis among several, and shows it at work in poverty, famine and gender deprivation. The liberal paradox, by contrast, is not resolved by interpersonal comparisons and needs a different enrichment: people’s own priorities between liberty and desire-fulfilment (pp. 199–200). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-263); worth reading as Sen’s own map of how his social-choice work, his capability view and his poverty and famine work connect through one idea — informational broadening — though every formal claim in it is cited to earlier papers rather than shown, so it is a guide to the results, not a source for them. |
| LIT-283 v2 | The Capability Approach | Robeyns & Byskov (2011), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/. The entry treats the capability approach as an open normative framework, not a theory. Its core is the commitment to assess well-being and well-being freedom in the space of functionings (achieved doings and beings) and capabilities (real opportunities to achieve them). Everything else is optional specification: purpose, which capabilities count, functionings or capabilities, how to aggregate, and a distributive rule. On this view the approach is not a theory of justice (§4). Sen is reported as refusing any canonical list and appealing to public reasoning without ever specifying the procedure (§3.3). Sen’s paywalled texts appear only as citations: the Dewey Lectures for the well-being/agency freedom split (§2.5), and “Human Rights and Capabilities” 2005 p. 158 for the no-canonical-list quotation (§3.3). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-260); worth reading as the definitional spine of the approach, with its concepts, its specification choices and the list of what a capability theory of justice still lacks. Use it for Sen’s paywalled texts only as a pointer to them, not as a substitute. Its retelling of Sen’s 1979 disability argument conflates two of his arguments and inverts who the “pleasure wizard” is. |
| LIT-284 v2 | Sen’s Capability Approach | Wells (2012), https://iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/. A Sen-centred overview. It presents the approach as Sen’s answer to four concerns: conversion variation, adaptive preferences, the value of options not taken, and informational exclusion. It sets out his critiques of the three pillars of utilitarianism (act-consequentialism, welfarism, sum-ranking) and of Rawlsian resourcism, and his two-stage structure, valuation then evaluation. In that structure selection is a social-choice exercise of public reasoning, able to reach partial agreement through “intersection” and “ranges of weights” (§3b). It reports four criticisms (illiberalism, under-theorisation, individualism, information gaps) with Sen’s replies, and closes on Nussbaum and on how she differs from Sen. It never mentions the well-being/agency distinction, and it cites none of Sen’s human-rights papers. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-257); worth reading as the most Sen-specific short account in the batch, especially §3b’s partial-agreement mechanism and §5’s criticisms with Sen’s replies. It dates from 2012 and was never revised, and it omits agency freedom entirely, so for concepts it needs the SEP entry beside it. |
| LIT-285 v2 | The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal | Sen (1970), DOI-10.1086/259614. Sen proves that no social decision function can satisfy three conditions at once: unrestricted domain (U), the weak Pareto principle (P), and “minimal liberalism” (L*). A social decision function only has to yield a best element in every subset, and need not be transitive or satisfy independence. L* says at least two individuals are each decisive, both ways, over at least one pair of alternatives. I checked the two-case proof and it is correct: it builds a strict social cycle over 3 or 4 alternatives. The Lady Chatterley’s Lover example is a correct 3-alternative instance. Sen’s moral is that “in a very basic sense liberal values conflict with the Pareto principle” (p. 157). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-255); worth reading as the original, six-page statement of the liberal paradox, with a complete and correct proof. Read it knowing two things. Its formal Condition L gives decisiveness over arbitrary pairs, not over a protected personal sphere, which the later rights-as-game-forms literature disputes. And Theorem I as stated tacitly needs at least two individuals. |
| LIT-286 v2 | Review of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice | Zwolinski (2010), https://home.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski/Review%20-%20Sen%20-%20The%20Idea%20of%20Justice%20-%20web%20version.pdf. A short, favourable review of The Idea of Justice that maps its four parts. It reports the book’s case for a comparative, “realization-focused” theory of justice against the “transcendental” pursuit of perfect justice; “positional objectivity” and the impartial spectator; pluralism about freedom (“an inescapably plural idea”, p. 305); and human rights whose realisation need not be the state’s job (p. 364). It judges that the book’s few, repeated ideas “have the potential to change [political philosophy] for the better”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-261); worth reading only as a three-page, page-referenced map of the book. It is too slight to support any claim beyond “the book argues X at p. Y”. It says almost nothing about the capability chapters and offers no criticism. |
| LIT-287 v2 | Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined | Robeyns (2017), DOI-10.11647/OBP.0130. Robeyns defines the capability approach as an open, underspecified framework whose only compulsory content is an eight-part “A-module” (pp. 38–59, table 2.5 p. 74). The eight parts are: functionings and capabilities as core concepts; their value-neutrality; conversion factors; the means–ends distinction; functionings and/or capabilities as the evaluative space; other things may also have ultimate value; value pluralism; and each person as an end, i.e. ethical individualism. Every particular “capability theory” must also fill seven compulsory-but-open “B-modules” (purpose, selection of dimensions, human diversity, agency, structural constraints, functionings vs capabilities, meta-theory) and may add four contingent “C-modules”. On that basis she argues that most standing critiques (no list, individualism, power, political economy, liberalism) are valid at most against particular capability theories, not against the approach. She places Nussbaum’s work as one capability theory, not a rival version of the approach. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-259); worth reading as the most systematic single account of what the capability approach is, and of what a capability theory must add. It is the best route to seeing which disputes are about the core and which are about optional choices. Read it as an advocate’s reconstruction, not a neutral survey: Robeyns says she takes sides in ch. 4 (p. 19), and her verdicts mostly hold that a critique misfires against the approach. |
| LIT-288 v2 | Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice | Nussbaum (2003), DOI-10.1080/1354570022000077926. Nussbaum argues that Sen’s capability approach yields no theory of social justice until it commits to a definite, if revisable, list of central capabilities, each owed to every citizen up to a threshold. She sets out her list of ten (Life; Bodily Health; Bodily Integrity; Senses, Imagination and Thought; Emotions; Practical Reason; Affiliation; Other Species; Play; Control over one’s Environment). She rejects Sen’s talk of freedom as a general good because some freedoms are trivial or unjust. And she argues that political-liberal respect for pluralism favours a short list of capabilities over the promotion of freedom across the board. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-256); worth reading as the canonical short statement of the list-versus-no-list dispute inside the capability approach, and of Nussbaum’s ten capabilities. It is argued by examples, not derived. Its threshold idea is announced but not worked out here. |
| LIT-289 v2 | Equality of What? | Sen (1979), https://ophi.org.uk/sites/default/files/Sen-1979_Equality-of-What.pdf. Sen argues that utilitarian equality (equal marginal utility), total-utility equality (completed as leximin) and Rawlsian equality (maximin/leximin on an index of primary goods) are each insufficient, and so is any combination of them, even for the needs-based part of equality: the test case is a disabled person who has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deprivation (he is contented) and no primary-goods deprivation, yet has an evident claim. He proposes “basic capability equality” — equality in “a person being able to do certain basic things” (p. 218) — as a non-fetishist, culture-dependent extension of Rawls, explicitly only “a partial guide” to the equality part of morality, and says his main (negative) thesis does not depend on this constructive proposal (p. 220). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-258); worth reading as the founding statement of the capability idea and the cleanest short case against welfarist and primary-goods metrics; read it knowing that the positive proposal is a two-page sketch with no account of which capabilities count or how to index them, and that “functionings”, “capability sets” and “freedom” do not yet appear. |
| LIT-290 v2 | A Paradigm Shift in Theorizing about Justice? A Critique of Sen | Valentini (2010), DOI-10.1017/s0266267111000228. Valentini reconstructs Sen’s case against “transcendental institutionalism” (The Idea of Justice, 2009, and “What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice?”, 2006) as three complaints: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for comparative judgements, it is parochial, and it is inflexible. She argues that each rests on a mischaracterisation of Rawls or is true but inconsequential. Her verdict: “If there are transcendental institutionalists, Rawls is not one of them”, and no paradigm shift is warranted. | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-262); worth reading as a compact, well-sourced Rawlsian rebuttal of The Idea of Justice’s methodological thesis, with page-referenced reconstructions of Sen’s claims. It is explicitly one-sided (“negative”). It does not engage the capability approach itself. |
| LIT-291 v2 | Compatibilism | McKenna & Coates (2004), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/. The entry sorts compatibilism by which incompatibilist premise it denies: that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, that determinism precludes it, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood. It argues that every “mesh” compatibilism has the same weak point: its sufficient conditions (hierarchies, reasons-responsive mechanisms, values) can be installed by manipulation, so each must either show what is wrong with manipulation cases or accept them. Its §4.2.1 is the fullest statement of Frankfurt 1971 in this batch. It covers first- and second-order desires, the will as the “effective first-order desire” that moves one “all the way to action” (1971, p. 84, Watson-1982 reprint pagination), the therapist’s mere second-order desire versus a second-order volition (pp. 84–5), the unwilling and willing addicts, and “One acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.” The current revision has dropped the wanton/person distinction. The 2004–2015 revisions had it (“passive bystanders to their wills”, 1971, p. 89) and have to be read for it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-270); worth reading as the most complete reachable second-hand statement of Frankfurt’s 1971 apparatus and of the two structural objections (higher-order alienation per Watson 1975; manipulation), with Frankfurt’s own bullet-biting quotation on manipulation (2002, p. 27). For wantons and persons, read the 2004–2015 revisions (e.g. the Fall 2019 archive edition). Its account of Frankfurt’s later replies (supplement §A) dates from 2009, omits “satisfaction” (1992), and dates wholeheartedness to 1994. |
| LIT-293 v2 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt (2004), https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf. Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand. |
| LIT-294 v2 | Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities | Robb (2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alternative-possibilities/. PAP (“a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise”) has no decisive positive argument: it is not self-evident, and the moral arguments from fairness, OIC and the W-defense cover blame at most. Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are the strongest attack, because the factor that makes the act inevitable plays no role in producing it. The entry lays out three defences of PAP: - general-ability readings (PAP-general); - “flickers of freedom”, which Fischer answers with the robustness requirement; - the Kane/Widerker/Ginet dilemma, answered by Fischer’s causal-irrelevance reply on the first horn and by Pereboom’s buffer case, Hunt’s blockage and Mele & Robb 1998 on the second. Robb reports “not much consensus” (§5). He treats the fall of PAP as re-energising compatibilism, with Frankfurt’s 1971 identification view and Fischer & Ravizza’s guidance control as the two replacement accounts. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-269); worth reading as the standard, even-handed map of the PAP debate and the best available stand-in for Frankfurt 1969. It gives the recipe, both of Frankfurt’s own cases, and the main defences and replies, with precise citations. It is a stand-in for the argument’s reception, not for the 1969 text, which it quotes only through Fischer’s retelling, and it links FSCs to the hierarchical theory in a single paragraph (§5.1). |
| LIT-296 v2 | Personal Autonomy | Buss & Westlund (2002), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/. The entry sorts accounts of self-government into four families: “coherentist” (hierarchical desires, Frankfurt; evaluative judgments, Watson; plans, Bratman; caring; character), reasons-responsive, responsiveness-to-reasoning (Christman, Mele) and incompatibilist, with relational conditions as a compatible add-on. It then argues (§3) that none of them, alone or combined, gives the minimal conditions of autonomy. Coherence is not sufficient, because the endorsement itself can be manipulated. It is not necessary either: a weak-willed agent, or someone acting against her plans, still governs herself. And any attempt to ground identification in some attitude restarts the regress. The only attitude no agent can be alienated from, the desire to be self-governing, cannot be the criterion, because it is present even in failures. The 1971 hierarchy gets one sentence, and Frankfurt’s later replies (decisive commitment, then “satisfaction”) get one footnote. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-267); worth reading as a compact, opinionated map of why hierarchical (and every other) account of self-government falls short of minimal autonomy, especially the §3 regress and weakness-of-will arguments; it is not a substitute for Frankfurt 1971, whose apparatus (second-order volitions, wantons, persons, freedom of will vs. action) it never states, and it does not report Watson’s objection to Frankfurt at all. |
| LIT-297 v2 | Autonomy | Dryden (2010), https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/. The article surveys personal autonomy from Plato to relational autonomy and bioethics. Its core (§2.a.i–ii) states the hierarchical view: an agent is autonomous with respect to an action iff her first-order desire is “sanctioned by a second-order volition”, with the origin of that volition irrelevant. It then lists four named objections: Manipulation (answered historically by Christman 1991), Regress/Incompleteness (cited to Watson 1975), Ab Initio, and an unjustified priority of higher orders (Thalberg; Friedman’s integration model). It follows Frankfurt’s reply only through “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (decisive commitment made without reservation, pp. 168–175 of the 1988 collection). Bratman gets one sentence (plans partly constitute identity, Structures of Agency 2007, p. 5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-266); worth reading as the clearest short, named statement of the standard objections to the hierarchical model (manipulation, regress, ab initio) and of the feminist and relational critiques of wholeheartedness; it is thin and dated on Frankfurt’s later view (no satisfaction, caring or love), gives Bratman one sentence, and cites Frankfurt only by pages of the 1988 collection. |
| LIT-391 v4 | Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents | List & Pettit (2011), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591565.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that “there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them”, and that social science, law, morality and politics must take account of this. The account is said to be “entirely unmysterious” and grounded in social choice theory, economics and philosophy. Three parts: the logical possibility of group agents (conditions of agency, aggregation of attitudes, structure), their organisational design (epistemic, incentive-compatibility and control desiderata), and their normative status (responsibility, personhood, identification). Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and neither author has posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length case that organised groups are agents over and above their members, which is the composition side’s premise in the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge; whether it says anything about group consciousness is unknown from what was seen. Rechecked 2026-10-04 with no lawful copy found; two shorter papers by the authors stating Part I’s supervenience thesis were read and filed instead (LIT-705, LIT-700), and the book stays Unavailable because a paper is not a reading of it. |
| LIT-411 | Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? | Chalmers (2023), arXiv:2303.07103; Boston Review, 9 August 2023; from a NeurIPS 2022 invited talk. Asks for a feature X that LLMs have (or lack) and that indicates consciousness (or its absence). Self-report, seeming-conscious, conversation and general intelligence give at most weak evidence for it. Biology, senses and embodiment, world and self models, recurrent processing, a global workspace and unified agency are the evidence against. All but biology are temporary. On mainstream assumptions: under 10% credence for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade. Twelve challenges are offered as roadmap or red flags. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-345), from arXiv v3 (the Boston Review text), with v1’s conclusions compared; worth reading as the clearest short statement of the case for and against consciousness in LLMs, and as the origin of the “theory-balanced” credence approach that Butlin et al. built on. Its method is a regimented request for a feature X, and its verdicts are credences offered “for illustrative purposes”: under 10% for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade, on “mainstream assumptions”. It does not break the deadlock THEORY-023 describes. It is an instance of it: mimicry undercuts self-report, the main obstacles are theory-derived, and biology is set aside rather than answered. |
| LIT-447 | Personal Identity | Parfit (1971), DOI-10.2307/2184309. Against two beliefs, that every question about personal identity must have an answer and that important questions turn on it. In Wiggins’s division case, each half-brain recipient stands in the relation that would be survival if there were only one, so “how could a double success be a failure?”. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity is one-one and all-or-nothing. Q-memory and q-intention show the relations need not presuppose identity. Speaking of past and future selves by degree of connectedness, the principle of self-interest has no independent force. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-378), in a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Athens course page; worth reading as the paper that separated what matters in survival from identity, and the short original of Part III of Reasons and Persons. Its division case makes “I survive as neither” absurd and “I survive as both” incompatible with identity, so it concludes that what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity cannot. It supplies q-memory, the non-branching criterion, and the vocabulary of successive selves. Its first conclusion is argued; its claim that connectedness matters more than continuity is left, in its own words, needing “more arguments than I have space to give”. |
| LIT-449 v2 | What we talk to when we talk to language models | Chalmers (2026), Inquiry, DOI 10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727582; circulated earlier as PhilArchive preprint CHAWWT-8. Unread. By its abstract it asks who or what our interlocutor is when we talk to an LLM: how to characterise it in terms of mental states; what kind of system it is in the philosophy of computation (“a model, an instance, a thread, or a persona?”); what personal identity comes to for such interlocutors; and what follows for AI welfare and moral status. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-02 from Crossref, OpenAlex (which carries the abstract of the published version) and the author’s papers page, not read: tandfonline.com, philpapers.org and philarchive.org returned 403 to every article and PDF URL, the Internet Archive was offline, and no other repository copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-452 | Against Narrativity | Strawson (2004), Ratio 17(4):428–452. Rejects both the psychological Narrativity thesis (people do experience their lives as a story) and the ethical one (they should, to be full persons), naming Sacks, Bruner, Dennett, Taylor, MacIntyre and Schechtman. Distinguishes Diachronic self-experience (the self I am now was there in the past) from Episodic (it was not, though the human being was), and splits Narrativity into form-finding, story-telling and revision, with only story-telling sufficient. Episodics are normal and can live well; self-narration risks falsifying the self it describes. Argued from the author’s own case. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-383), in the published typeset text; worth reading as the standard objection to narrative accounts of the self, and for its distinctions: Episodic versus Diachronic self-experience, and form-finding, story-telling and revision as separable parts of “Narrativity”. Read it as a report of a temperament argued from the author’s own case and literary examples. Its empirical claims (a genetic “individual difference variable”, the spread across cultures) are asserted, not shown, and its central metaphysical claim, that the remoter past did not happen to “me*”, is stated rather than argued. |
| LIT-454 | Personal Identity | Olson (2002, rev. 2023), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Separates seven questions (characterization, personhood, persistence, evidence, population, personal ontology, what matters) and then takes up persistence. Three answers: psychological continuity (the majority view, repaired from Locke’s memory criterion via causal dependence), brute-physical continuity (animalism), and anticriterialism. Fission forces the psychological view into multiple occupancy or a non-branching clause, which makes identity not what matters. The too-many-thinkers objection says that if we are not our animals there are two thinkers in every chair. Temporal-parts ontology may leave it indeterminate what we are. Avoids the word “self”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-374); worth reading as the standard map of the analytic personal-identity debate, written by the leading animalist. It separates seven questions that are usually run together, then works the persistence question through psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers, fission and the too-many-thinkers objection. It is a survey with a side: §§6–7 put the case for animalism more fully than the case against it, and the entry sets the word “self” aside, so the narrative and minimal selves are outside it. |
| LIT-464 | Of Identity and Diversity | Locke (1694), Essay II.xxvii, added in the second edition. Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: the same mass is the same particles, the same oak or horse or man is the same continued life, and the same person is the same consciousness. A person is “a thinking intelligent being” that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought”. It is independent of substance, material or immaterial: the prince’s consciousness in the cobbler’s body is the same person but not the same man. “Person” is “a forensic term”, grounding reward and punishment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-385), in the Wikisource transcription of the 1853 Troutman & Hayes reprint of the sixth-edition text, compared word by word with Project Gutenberg’s; worth reading as the founding text of the psychological account of personal identity and the source of the record’s whole line on what a person is. It separates the same substance, the same man and the same person, puts the person in “consciousness” extended back to past actions, and calls “person” a “forensic term”. Its cases, the prince and the cobbler, the day-man and the night-man, the severed little finger, are argued from intuition, and its key relation, “the same consciousness”, is never defined. |
| LIT-465 | Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | Shanahan (2024), Inquiry 69(6):2982–3010, from arXiv:2402.12422. After Wittgenstein, consciousness words mean only what is public, so the question for an exotic entity is whether we could “engineer an encounter” with it in a shared world and what a society-wide conversation would then say. Disembodied chat agents are not even candidates; virtually embodied LLM agents could be. Tool use and memory make belief talk increasingly literal, but a chat agent has no “self worth preserving”, and a role player has no “person behind the mask”: its identity is a shifting distribution of roles. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-382) in the arXiv v2 preprint (July 2024), not the Inquiry version of record, which returned 403; worth reading as the Wittgensteinian alternative to the evidential debate about AI consciousness. It replaces “is it conscious?” with “could we engineer an encounter with it, and how would our language adapt?”, and so counts disembodied chat agents as not even candidates. On the self it is brief and pointed: a chat agent has “nothing that would qualify as a self worth preserving”, lacking body, personal history and autobiographical memory, and a role-playing agent has no “person behind the mask”; its identity, “insofar as that notion even made sense”, is the shifting distribution of roles. It argues by method and scenario, not evidence, and says so. |
| LIT-468 v2 | The Constitution of Selves | Schechtman (1996), Cornell University Press. Separates the reidentification question (is this the same person?) from the characterization question (which actions, experiences and traits are this person’s own?), and argues against analytic philosophy’s attention to the first at the expense of the second. Chapters 1–3 take up reidentification; chapters 4–6 give the narrative self-constitution view, on which, as Strawson quotes it, a person “creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative”. The source of the term “characterization question” in the SEP map. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Cornell/De Gruyter eBook is sold, not open, and the Internet Archive copy is for print-disabled users only. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-469 v3 | Reasons and Persons | Parfit (1984), Clarendon Press; DOI-10.1093/019824908X.001.0001 is the 1986 reprint online. Four loosely connected parts, per the author’s abstract: self-defeating theories of rationality and morality; what one person can rationally want at different times, and attitudes to time; personal identity, where “most of us … have certain beliefs about this subject that are false, but hard to give up”; and obligations to future generations, with the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. By the chapter abstracts, Part III defends a reductionist view on which identity is not what matters and draws consequences for self-interest and distributive justice. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, its chapter abstracts and the table of contents; the book is in copyright and no lawful full text was reachable (the Internet Archive copies are lending-only and were not opened), so it is unread and no NOTE is filed. By its publisher’s account, Part III argues that most of us hold false beliefs about personal identity, that psychological continuity and connectedness, not identity, is what matters, and that this should change our attitudes to our own future, to rationality and to morality. The record already leans on it at second hand: Birch’s Relation R, Velleman’s reading of Frankfurt and the identity-and-ethics survey all cite it. |
| LIT-477 v3 | Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon | Gilbert (1990), DOI-10.1111/j.1475-4975.1990.tb00202.x, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15: 1–14. Gilbert takes going for a walk together as the model case of acting together and of a social group. Two analyses built from shared personal goals are rejected, because they cannot explain the walkers’ obligations and rights to appropriate behaviour. Her alternative is that the walkers must constitute the “plural subject” of a goal. Unread: filed from metadata and the abstract as search indexes give it. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata; no lawful full text was reachable (Wiley and PDC are paywalled, the author’s SSRN posting and a public PDF at humanitiesmontana.org both sit behind bot challenges that returned 403, and the Wayback Machine copy of that PDF could not be fetched through this session’s proxy), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the short canonical statement of Gilbert’s plural-subject account, and the record’s only reading of Gilbert is second-hand, through Tomasello’s commentaries (NOTE-185). Free copy: ssrn.com/abstract=1071242 (Gilbert’s SSRN posting). |
| LIT-480 | Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be? | Haslanger (2000), Noûs 34(1):31–55. Distinguishes conceptual, descriptive and analytical answers to “what is gender/race?” and takes the analytical one: define the terms for what a feminist antiracist theory needs. S is a woman iff S is regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to indicate a female’s reproductive role, this marks S in the dominant ideology for subordinate positions, and that plays a role in S’s subordination; men and racialized groups are defined in parallel, ethnicity and gender in general as the non-hierarchical genus. Stipulative by design; no evidence offered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-394); worth reading as the founding statement of ameliorative (“analytical”) social ontology and of gender and race as hierarchical social positions. It is short and explicit about its method: it defines woman, man and racialized group for the purposes of a feminist and antiracist theory, says so, and accepts the consequences (non-oppressed females are not women in its sense, and the goal is a world with none). Read it for the three-way distinction between conceptual, descriptive and analytical projects and for the definitional schema (marked by assumed bodily features, positioned by a dominant ideology, subordinated or privileged as a result), not for evidence: its “matters of established fact” about race are asserted without citation, and its definitions are stipulated, not discovered. |
| LIT-483 v3 | Groups as Agents | Tollefsen (2015), Polity. Per its publisher, a survey of whether groups can literally intend, whether there is a collective mind, and whether groups should be held morally responsible, arguing “the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable”. Chapters on group belief, intention, agency, cognition, interpreting groups and the moral responsibility of groups. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in print with Polity, licensed as an e-book, and no author-posted draft was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is a short introduction to group belief, intention, agency, cognition and responsibility that, per its publisher, argues “certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable”; which groups, and on what view of agency, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-488 v2 | Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together | Bratman (2014), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199897933.001.0001. The planning structures that organise an individual’s agency over time are also at the core of small-scale shared agency. A shared intention is constructed from each participant’s intention that “we J”, by way of each other’s intentions and meshing subplans, with persistence interdependence and common knowledge. These conditions are offered as sufficient, not necessary. No group subject and no new primitive is needed: the account is reductive “in spirit”, against Gilbert and Searle. Unread: filed from the chapter list and the author’s précis. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata, the chapter list and the author’s open-access précis; no lawful full text of the book was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and Bratman has not posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the developed statement of the reductive, planning-theory account of shared agency, and the précis, read in full, says plainly where it parts from Gilbert and Searle. |
| LIT-493 v2 | The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms | Bicchieri (2006; print December 2005), DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511616037. Per its publisher, an integrated account, drawing on social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, of how social norms such as fairness, cooperation and reciprocity emerge, why and when people follow them, when they attend to the relevant norm, why inefficient norms survive, and how psychological dispositions can lead to fairness norms like ours. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Cambridge Core is paywalled. The author’s own copy of chapter 1 on her University of Pennsylvania pages and the publisher’s excerpt at assets.cambridge.org both failed (HTTP 403; connection reset), and the Internet Archive has no copy. It is the standard equilibrium-and-expectations account of social norms; what its definition of a norm says was not seen. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-564 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1992), Tanner Lectures at Clare Hall, Cambridge. The “normative question” asks what justifies morality’s claims on us. Voluntarism, realism and reflective endorsement each fail alone. The answer is autonomy: because human consciousness is reflective, we need reasons, and so need a “conception of your practical identity” that makes us “a law to yourself”. Obligation is “the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity”. Valuing any identity commits us to valuing our humanity, and reasons are public, so others can obligate us. “Autonomy is the source of obligation.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-465), as the read substitute for the book The Sources of Normativity (1996, LIT-599), which is its “longer version” with commentaries and a reply. Worth reading as Korsgaard’s own first statement of practical identity and of the claim that “autonomy is the source of obligation”. The reflective structure of human consciousness means we must act for reasons and so must have “a conception of your practical identity”, “a description under which you value yourself”; reasons express that identity and obligations “spring from what that identity forbids”. Valuing any practical identity commits one to valuing one’s humanity, and the publicity of reasons commits one to others. The lectures concede that the argument is “sketchy, and sketchily argued”. |
| LIT-594 v2 | The Ethics of Authenticity | Taylor (1991), Harvard University Press, 142 pp.; first published in Canada the same year by Anansi as The Malaise of Modernity, an extended version of the 1991 CBC Massey Lectures. Unread. As commonly summarized (no publisher’s description was reachable), it argues that the modern ideal of authenticity, being true to oneself, is a genuine moral ideal rather than mere narcissism or relativism, and that it is degraded when it is cut off from shared “horizons of significance” and from the dialogical way identities are formed. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from catalogue records, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is in print with Harvard University Press, the Internet Archive copy (ethicsofauthenti00tayl, the 1992 printing) is an access-restricted lending copy, the publisher’s digital edition at De Gruyter returned an empty bot-check response, and the full-text copies a web search turns up are file-sharing uploads, which were not opened. No shorter, lawfully readable work by Taylor stating the same argument was found to read in its place (see Standing in the record). The book is about 140 pages, so a human reader with a library copy can read it in an afternoon; that reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-597 v2 | Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity | Korsgaard (2009), Oxford University Press, from her 2002 Locke Lectures. The argument is that we constitute ourselves as agents, and as the particular agents we are, by choosing under the constitutive principles of action, the categorical and hypothetical imperatives. On Plato’s “constitutional model”, good action is action that issues from a unified soul. The chapters run from agency and identity to “How to be a Person”. Unread: registered from the contents; the account is read in LIT-587. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its ten chapters, not read: no lawful copy of the book could be reached. Oxford Academic is closed and the Internet Archive scan (selfconstitution0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Korsgaard’s drafts of the 2002 Locke Lectures it grew from are no longer on her Harvard site, but survive in the Internet Archive’s captures of her old FAS page (people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/Korsgaard.LL1–LL6, 2002–2005). They are author-posted and lawful, but book-length and superseded, and were not read. Its account is read first-hand in her short restatement “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (2014, LIT-587, read in full), which extends it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for self-constitution. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or the drafts are read, not on merit. |
| LIT-599 v2 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1996), Cambridge University Press, ed. Onora O’Neill: the expanded Tanner Lectures (1992), with commentaries by G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams and Korsgaard’s reply. The four lectures follow the 1992 sequence: the normative question, reflective endorsement, the authority of reflection, and the origin of value and the scope of obligation. Unread: registered from the contents; the argument is read in the lectures, LIT-564. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its chapters, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core is closed, the author’s Harvard deposit (DASH) answered with an AWS WAF human-verification page that was not passed, and the Internet Archive scan (sourcesofnormati0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Its argument is read first-hand in the Tanner Lectures it expands (1992, LIT-564, read in full), which it extends. Filed because it is the canonical citation for practical identity, and because what it adds (the commentaries and Korsgaard’s reply) is what the lectures lack. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-684 v4 | Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | Fischer & Ravizza (1998), Cambridge University Press. Unread seed. The most influential reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. Responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control (the control that involves alternative possibilities), and Frankfurt-type cases show the two come apart. An agent has guidance control of an action when it issues from her own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism: regularly receptive to reasons, including moral ones, and at least weakly reactive to them. The mechanism is her own when she has taken responsibility for it, which makes responsibility historical. Guidance control so described is compatible with causal determinism, which is the position Fischer calls semicompatibilism. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records, the chapter openings Cambridge Core displays, the record’s second-hand readings, the SEP entry Moral Responsibility (LIT-691) and Fischer’s own summary in “Stories and the Meaning of Life” (LIT-689, read), not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Cambridge Core, and Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed, no repository holding). The shorter work the record’s book rule asks for is the authors’ own précis (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2), September 2000, first page 441, DOI 10.2307/2653660), also closed: JSTOR answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. Fischer’s UC Riverside pages post no papers that could be reached, and the copies of the précis in two third-party collections of his papers (andrewmbailey.com/jmf and its wixsite continuation) are not the author’s, a publisher’s or a repository’s, so they were not opened. A web search also shows a PDF titled “Fischer Guidance control and RR” on a UNAM institute’s site, whose search snippet is the book’s series page; it is a course file with no statement of permission, so it was not opened either. A person with Cambridge Core or library access can supply the book (Cambridge UP, 1998, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511814594); chapters 2, 3 and 8 (pp. 28–91 and 207–239) are the parts to read first, and the short précis is the quickest way to an Active reading. Update 2026-10-05: the précis is now read (LIT-728), with chapter 1 to p. 19 from the publisher’s preview. |
| LIT-685 v3 | Freedom Within Reason | Wolf (1990), Oxford University Press. Unread seed. The book-length Reason View: free will is “the freedom to be good, or the freedom to do the right thing for the right reasons” (publisher’s abstract). It sets up the dilemma of autonomy, argues that the Real Self View (Hume, Frankfurt, Watson, Taylor) and the Autonomy View both fail, states the Reason View, defends its notion of ability against determinism, and asks what the True and the Good must be for the view to hold. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records (whose abstracts are each chapter’s opening paragraph), the SEP entry the record holds and an MIT lecture handout, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed), and no author or repository deposit turned up. A person with Oxford Academic or library access can supply it (Oxford University Press, 1990, 153 pp., DOI 10.1093/oso/9780195056167.001.0001); chapter 4, “The Reason View” (pp. 67–93), and chapter 2, “The Real Self View” (pp. 23–45), are the parts to read first. |
| LIT-686 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About | Frankfurt (1982), Synthese 53(2):257–272; reprinted as the title essay of The Importance of What We Care About (CUP 1988), pp. 80–94. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it is the source of two of Frankfurt’s later themes: caring as a category of the will (Buss and Westlund, SEP Personal Autonomy §2) and volitional necessity, the inability to will otherwise that Luther’s “I can do no other” illustrates (Robb, SEP PAP §3.3). Frankfurt’s own preface calls it his first “stab” at “a theory of ideals”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 from Crossref, the record’s second-hand readings and Frankfurt’s own preface to the 1988 collection, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at Springer, whose page answered a plain request with a script challenge, so I stopped there; Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed), and the one repository location OpenAlex gives (a Georgetown handle, 10822/792792) does not resolve. The chapter in the 1988 collection is at Cambridge Core, which sells this collection’s chapters (as found for LIT-575), and Cambridge’s publisher preview of the collection stops in chapter 1. The copies a web search turns up are Scribd uploads and an academia.edu discussion, not the essay on a course page, an author’s page or a repository, so none was opened. A person with library access to Synthese 53(2), pp. 257–272 (DOI 10.1007/BF00484902), or to The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 80–94, can supply the 16 pages; a reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-687 v3 | Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility | Fischer (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 81–106; read in its My Way reprint. Frankfurt-type cases show responsibility does not need the ability to do otherwise, so the mechanism that actually issues in action, not the agent, must be reasons-responsive, and weak responsiveness suffices. Responsibility is historical and compatible with determinism (semicompatibilism). | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-579): in full, in the reprint in Fischer’s My Way (OUP 2006), from Andrew M. Bailey’s collection of Fischer’s papers, used on the owner’s instruction. Worth reading as the first statement of mechanism-based reasons-responsiveness. Frankfurt-type cases move the requirement from the agent to the mechanism that actually issues in the action; weak responsiveness is held sufficient; the result is named semicompatibilism. Fischer concedes an insane-agent counterexample (note 11), which his later book with Ravizza (LIT-684) answers. |
| LIT-688 v3 | Asymmetrical Freedom | Wolf (1980), The Journal of Philosophy 77(3):151–166. Unread. By the SEP’s report it is the origin of the Reason View’s asymmetry: an agent who acts in accord with the True and the Good is praiseworthy even if psychologically determined so that she could not have done otherwise, but one who acts against it is blameworthy only if she could have done otherwise. Blame therefore needs regulative control and praise needs only guidance control, and Wolf answers the threat from determinism by denying that physical determination entails psychological determination. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref, the record’s own second-hand readings and the SEP entry it already holds, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at JSTOR (stable 2025667) and the Philosophy Documentation Center, and JSTOR’s free Early Journal Content stops long before 1980. Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers. PhilPapers (WOLAF) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are a JSTOR download re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site, a syllabus-collection upload on Weebly, and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with JSTOR or PDCnet access can supply the 16-page PDF (Journal of Philosophy 77(3), pp. 151–166, DOI 10.2307/2025667); a reading of it would move this to Active and is the text the asymmetry THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-689 | Stories and the Meaning of Life | Fischer (2009), Philosophic Exchange 39(1), pp. 3–15. Section I sketches his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; it consists in acting from one’s own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that it depends on how the actual sequence unfolds. The paper’s thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression: free action makes a life a story with narrative value, though the life is judged mainly by moral and prudential standards. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-547); worth reading as the only first-hand, lawful statement by Fischer that the record holds of his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; guidance control is mechanism ownership plus moderate reasons-responsiveness; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that responsibility depends on the actual sequence. Its own thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression, which gives a life narrative value. It lists the framework’s elements without arguing for them. |
| LIT-690 v3 | Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility | Wolf (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 46–62. Unread. By second-hand reports it argues that the “deep self” views of Frankfurt, Watson and Taylor, on which an agent is responsible when her actions flow from desires and values she identifies with, are insufficient. JoJo, raised by a vicious dictator, identifies wholly with the values he inherits yet is not responsible, because his upbringing leaves him unable to see right from wrong. What must be added is sanity: the ability to know and appreciate what one is doing and that it is right or wrong. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge’s chapter record and opening extract, the record’s second-hand readings and an MIT lecture handout about the essay, not read. No lawful full text was found. The chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core (the page shows only the opening paragraph). Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers, and PhilPapers (WOLSAT) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are an anthology reprint re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with library access to Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, chapter 3, pp. 46–62, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511625411.003), or to any reprint (it is widely anthologised, including in Watson’s Free Will), can supply the 17 pages; a reading of them would move this to Active and is the first-hand text the Reason View THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-691 | Moral Responsibility | Talbert (2019; revised 2024), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A survey of moral responsibility: its relation to free will and determinism, forward-looking, Strawsonian and reasons-responsiveness accounts, the attributability/accountability distinction that grew from Wolf and Watson, the moral competence condition (Wolf’s JoJo), conversational views, standing to blame, outcomes, skepticism, moral luck, ultimate responsibility, manipulation and the epistemic condition. Its §2.3 is a page-referenced summary of Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-548); worth reading as the record’s map of moral responsibility apart from the free-will question, and as its most exact second-hand source for two accounts the record cannot read first-hand: Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control (§2.3, with page references to the 1998 book) and Wolf’s critique of Real Self views and her moral-competence condition, including the JoJo case (§§3.1.1, 3.2). It reports Wolf’s praise/blame asymmetry only in one sentence of its preamble. |
| LIT-692 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Frankfurt (1971), The Journal of Philosophy 68(1):5–20. What is essential to a person is the structure of the will. A person’s will is the effective first-order desire, the one that moves him “all the way to action” (p. 8). A second-order volition is wanting a desire to be one’s will; persons have them, and wantons, who “do not care” about their wills, do not (pp. 10–11). Forming one is identifying with one desire and withdrawing from another (p. 13). Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, “securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions” (p. 15), and a decisive identification “resounds” through all higher orders (p. 16). Moral responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts “of his own free will” (pp. 18–20). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-545); worth reading as the source of the hierarchical account of the will, which the record has so far held only second-hand: first- and second-order desires, the will as the effective desire, second-order volitions, wantons and persons, freedom of the will as having the will one wants, decisive identification that “resounds” through higher orders, and a responsibility that needs neither a free will nor alternatives. Read it knowing that it is short and programmatic, that identification is stated, not analysed, and that it already contains both the decisive commitment (p. 16) and the acceptance of an addict made by another (n. 10), which the record’s surveys date later. |
| LIT-693 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays | Frankfurt (1988), Cambridge University Press: thirteen essays from 1969 to 1988, twelve reprinted “with minor stylistic changes” and “Rationality and the Unthinkable” new. Not read as a book. Its preface, read in the publisher’s preview, says the essays’ considerations are “primarily structural rather than historical”, that volition rather than reason is the faculty they explore, and that necessity is “in certain respects essential” to autonomy. The record cites its pagination as IWWCA. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 as a seed, from Crossref and from Cambridge’s publisher preview of the book (front matter, contents, sources, the three-page preface and reprint pp. 1–9 of chapter 1), not read as a book. The book is sold at Cambridge Core and Unpaywall lists no open copy. Its essays are filed one by one where they matter: chapters 1 and 2 (LIT-694, LIT-692) were read in full from their journal versions, and chapters 7 and 12 (LIT-686, LIT-575) are Deferred. The seed is kept because the record cites the book’s pagination (“IWWCA”) throughout and because its preface states Frankfurt’s method first-hand. A person with library access can supply the remaining essays; chapters 5, 8 and 12 are the ones the record’s theories lean on. |
| LIT-694 | Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility | Frankfurt (1969), The Journal of Philosophy 66(23):829–839. The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), “a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise”, is false. Coercion excuses only when the agent acts because of it (§§II– III). Black, ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needing to, shows that circumstances can make an action unavoidable without playing any role in bringing it about (§IV); such a fact “does not help in any way to understand” the action and cannot excuse it (§V). PAP should be replaced by: not responsible “if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise”, which “does not appear to conflict” with compatibilism (pp. 838–839). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-546); worth reading as the origin of Frankfurt-style cases and the shortest first-hand statement of the argument against the principle of alternate possibilities: a fact that makes an action unavoidable but plays no role in bringing it about cannot excuse, so PAP should give way to “a person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise” (p. 838). Read it knowing that its case is schematic (Black, Jones4 and “a certain action”; the voting and shooting versions in the record’s surveys are later retellings), that its prior sign is in a footnote, and that it leaves “could have done otherwise” and “morally responsible” unanalysed on purpose (n. 1). |
| LIT-698 v2 | Collective Guilt | Isaacs (2011), ch. 3 of Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (OUP), pp. 71–94. Unread. By a summary of its abstract, it takes collective guilt to be blameworthy collective moral responsibility, a feature of collective agents that does not distribute to members; separates being guilty, believing oneself guilty and feeling guilty, and personal, membership and collective guilt; and, engaging Gilbert, concludes that collectives may be guilty without having guilt feelings. The review in NDPR confirms the non-distribution claim (pp. 81–83). | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The work the owner means is chapter 3, “Collective Guilt”, of Isaacs’s Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (OUP, 2011); no Monist paper of that title exists. The book is paywalled, and none of Isaacs’s shorter papers on collective responsibility (Midwest Studies 2014, New Criminal Law Review 2013) has an open copy. What is said here comes from Matt King’s review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (read in full) and from a search-service summary of the chapter abstract (unverified). A person with the book could supply the chapter; a reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-701 v3 | Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings | Gilbert (2002), The Journal of Ethics 6(2):115–143. Unread. As read sources report it: it distinguishes personal, membership and collective guilt feelings, and defines collective guilt feelings by joint commitment, so that for us collectively to feel guilt over our action is for us to be jointly committed to feel guilt as a body. A plural subject can thus be in a collective emotion, and since emotions are separable from feelings, such emotions need no phenomenology of their own. Reprinted in Gilbert’s Joint Commitment (2013), ch. 11. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Springer and the OUP reprint are paywalled, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and the PhilArchive record (GILCGA) and SSRN abstract 1071254 both answered automated requests with a bot challenge or a block, which I did not try to get past. What the record says of it comes from Huebner’s read paper, which quotes it with page references, and is labelled second-hand. A person with PhilArchive or library access could supply the text; a reading would move this to Active and should test Huebner’s charge that a plural subject’s emotion reduces to individual commitments. Free copy: philarchive.org/rec/GILCGA (PhilArchive). |
| LIT-728 | Précis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | Fischer & Ravizza (2000), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2):441–445. Moral responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control over alternatives. Guidance control is acting from a mechanism that is one’s own, because one has taken responsibility for it, and that is moderately reasons-responsive: regularly receptive to reasons, some of them moral, and at least weakly reactive. The view is historical and compatible with causal determinism. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-575): in full, from Andrew M. Bailey’s collection of Fischer’s papers, used on the owner’s instruction. Worth reading as the authors’ own five-page statement of the account of Responsibility and Control (LIT-684). It says moral responsibility requires only guidance control, which has two parts: the agent’s ownership of the mechanism that issues in the action, acquired by taking responsibility for it, and that mechanism’s moderate reasons-responsiveness. It summarises and does not argue; the arguments are in the unread chapters. |
| LIT-898 v2 | On the Morality of Artificial Agents | Floridi & Sanders (2004), DOI-10.1023/B:MIND.0000035461.63578.9d. Whether something is an agent is fixed only relative to a level of abstraction (LoA), a chosen set of observables. At a suitable LoA a system is an agent if it is interactive, autonomous (changes state without stimulus) and adaptable (its interactions change its transition rules); humans, learning software and organisations all qualify. An agent is a moral agent if it can cause moral good or evil. Such an agent is accountable for what it causes, but responsibility (praise and blame) needs intentional states as well, so artificial agents can be moral agents that are accountable and not responsible, and are censured by modification, disconnection or deletion. The argument is by cases and by rebutting four objections. The paper’s own MENACE example shows agenthood appearing and vanishing as the LoA changes. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-701); worth reading as the founding statement of Floridi’s line on artificial agency: agenthood as interactivity, autonomy and adaptability at a stated level of abstraction, and moral agency as the capacity to cause moral good or evil, with accountability split from responsibility. Read §2.5, §2.6.2 (MENACE) and §3.2 for the position. It argues by cases and by rebutting four objections; nothing in it is derived, the permissiveness of its criteria is answered by assertion (p. 26), and the distributed morality it says the approach is for is promised, not worked out. |
| LIT-899 v2 | Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions | Floridi (2016), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2016.0112. When a network of human, artificial and hybrid agents brings about a morally loaded outcome through interactions that are each morally neutral, nobody intends the outcome, so an ethics that requires intention holds nobody responsible. Floridi proposes holding every causally accountable node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), by default and overridably, with the rule made common knowledge so that agents restrain one another. The mechanism is adapted from back propagation, strict liability and common knowledge, and illustrated by two Dutch Supreme Court rulings. It is argued by design and analogy. Its responsibility is causal accountability used as a corrective, not blame, and the paper does not reconcile this with Floridi & Sanders 2004’s distinction between accountability and responsibility. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-699); worth reading for the line’s one worked rule for who answers for an outcome nobody intended: identify the distributed moral action and the network causally accountable for it, then hold every node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), overridably, with the rule made common knowledge so agents restrain one another. Read §4 and the two Dutch cases (p. 9). It is a design argued by analogy, not a derivation. Its “responsibility” is Floridi & Sanders 2004’s accountability under another name, used as a corrective signal, and the paper never addresses that distinction. In its own boats case the default gives way to ease of rectification, which is a control criterion. |
| LIT-901 v2 | Distributed Morality in an Information Society | Floridi (2013), DOI-10.1007/s11948-012-9413-4. Distributed morality is the case where morally loaded actions of a human, artificial or hybrid multiagent system result from interactions among its members that are each morally neutral or negligible, modelled on distributed knowledge (A knows P∨Q, B knows ¬P, only the “supra-agent” AB knows Q). Two moral thresholds make environments fault-tolerant to small evils and inert to small goods, so managing distributed morality means aggregating possible goods and fragmenting possible evils. ICTs make it common. “Infraethics” is the first-order framework of moral enablers (trust, privacy, transparency …) that is not good in itself. The analogy is looser than it looks: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left open. Responsibility for distributed morality is not addressed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-698); worth reading as the line’s only worked statement of distributed morality (morally loaded actions of a multiagent system arising from interactions each below a moral threshold) and as the source of “infraethics”, the first-order framework of moral enablers that is not morally good in itself. Read pp. 729–734 for the threshold model and pp. 738–740 for infraethics. It argues by a model and four examples and proves nothing. Its analogy with distributed knowledge is not exact: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left unspecified. No criterion of agency is applied to its “supra-agents”, and responsibility for distributed morality, which Floridi & Sanders 2004 promised, is still not given. |
| LIT-991 v2 | Beyond the Moral Influence Theory? A Critical Examination of Vargas’s Agency Cultivation Model of Responsibility | Harland (2020). Manuel Vargas’s agency cultivation model of responsibility claims to improve on the moral influence theory by aiming praise and blame at moral agency, but its notion of responsiveness to moral considerations is so capacious that the model is the old theory renamed and inherits its defects. Vargas’s counterfactual test of free will is calibrated to what makes blaming effective, so it can be applied only once we know whether blaming such agents is good policy. Given the model, freedom follows blameworthiness and inquiry into counterfactual freedom does no work. The abstract states this last conclusion without the restriction to the model. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-847) in full; worth reading as a compact argument that a free-will condition defined by what makes blaming effective cannot ground blame: to apply Vargas’s counterfactual test one must already know whether blaming such agents is good policy, so freedom follows blameworthiness. Also argues that Vargas’s agency cultivation model is the old moral influence theory renamed, since its responsiveness to moral considerations reduces to intrinsic motivation to act morally. Read it knowing that Vargas is read only through Harland’s quotations and stipulations, that the redundancy argument works class by class, and that the abstract states unconditionally a conclusion the body restricts to Vargas’s model. Filed for QUESTION-068, which is Deferred; the account is THEORY-310. |
| LIT-1002 v3 | Technology, autonomy, and manipulation | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum (2019), Internet Policy Review 8(2). Manipulation is hidden influence: intentionally and covertly influencing someone’s decision-making by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities, where covert means the target is not and could not easily become aware of it. Surveillance, adaptive interfaces and the habitual invisibility of technology make it easy. Its harm is to autonomy, in both competency and authenticity, and beneficent manipulation carries it too; the paper claims a harm in every case, not that manipulation is always wrong. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-745) in full; worth reading for the standard statement of the covert-influence view: manipulation is “intentionally and covertly influencing their decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities”, with attempted covertness as its mark, and for the argument that its harm is to autonomy and is carried even by beneficent manipulation, through the target’s opacity to herself. Read it knowing that it is a short policy essay, that the definition is stipulated and its intent requirement never examined, that it excludes manipulation of institutions and never considers manipulation by them, and that it claims a harm in every case, not a wrong. |
| LIT-1003 v2 | Manipulation: Theory and Practice | Coons and Weber, eds. (2014). A collection of essays on the nature and ethics of manipulation: what distinguishes it from rational persuasion and from coercion, whether it must bypass reason or can work through it, when it is wrong and why, and how it shows up in advertising, politics, medicine and personal relationships. Held here for what it is standardly cited for; not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from its Crossref record, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex lists only the publisher location and reports the work closed, with no repository copy; Unpaywall reports no open copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/4870, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403), so not even the chapter abstracts were seen. PhilPapers and PhilArchive returned 403. Web searches for the editors’ introduction and for author-posted chapters found none; the one related open text is Anne Barnhill’s draft for the 2012 Bowling Green workshop from which the volume grew, on bgsu.edu, which is a different text from her published chapter and was not read. Course-page and bookseller PDF listings were not opened. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1004 v3 | Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing | Fricker (2007). Names two kinds of wrong done to someone in her capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice: a hearer gives a speaker a prejudicially deflated degree of credibility. Hermeneutical injustice: someone is handicapped in making sense of a social experience by a gap in collective understanding that is owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group she belongs to. Proposes testimonial and hermeneutical justice as corrective virtues of the hearer, each at once intellectual and ethical. Checked against the author’s précis (2008), not the book. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 and read only in part: not the book but the author’s own three-page précis of it (Theoria 23(1), 2008, pp. 69–71, DOI 10.1387/theoria.7, open access under CC BY-NC-ND), read in full in NOTE-832 (Skimmed). The book itself was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report it closed, with no repository copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/32817, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403). PhilPapers returned 403, and no author-posted chapter was found. A full PDF on a Brazilian court library’s repository (bdjur.stj.jus.br) carries the publisher’s copyright notices and no sign of permission, so it was not used. The book’s cases and arguments are therefore known here only as the précis states them. It stays Unavailable until a full copy is supplied (ADR-041): the search for one is recorded, and only a précis was read. It is the reading QUESTION-072 was filed ahead of, and THEORY-317 is filed from the précis. |
| LIT-1006 v3 | Living without Free Will | Pereboom (2001). Defends hard incompatibilism. Moral responsibility in the basic-desert sense is incompatible with determinism and with the indeterminacy of standard quantum mechanics. Agent-causal libertarianism may be coherent and would secure it, but we have no evidence for the indeterminacy it needs, so we have no evidence that we are morally responsible. Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions but not the core incompatibilist condition on an action’s causal history. Chapter 4’s four-case argument holds that determination threatens responsibility no less than covert manipulation does. The cases themselves are as standardly reported (an agent manipulated by neuroscientists, through programming and upbringing, to ordinary determinism) and were not read here. The record meets the argument secondhand (LIT-294, LIT-684, LIT-691). Read in part: the Introduction and Chapter 1 pp. 1–10. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 and read only in part: the Introduction (pp. xiii–xxiii) and Chapter 1 pp. 1–10, from the front matter and excerpt that Cambridge University Press publishes for the book (assets.cambridge.org), read in full in NOTE-823 (Skimmed). The rest was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report it closed; the Cambridge Core book page (reached through the DOI) offers the chapters only behind an access check; no author-posted draft was found; the full copies found are on file-sharing sites and were not opened. The four-case argument (Chapter 4) is therefore not read here, and THEORY-040’s call for a first-hand reading of it is not met. It stays Unavailable until a full copy is supplied (ADR-041): the search for one is recorded, and only the publisher’s samples were read. THEORY-316 is filed from Chapter 1’s opening. |
| LIT-1007 v3 | The Ethics of Manipulation | Noggle, SEP (2018, revised 2026). A survey of ordinary manipulation. It sorts accounts of what manipulation is into bypassing reason (including the covert-influence view), trickery, pressure, and disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views, and gives a familiar tactic that breaks each single account. It finds manipulation neither wrong by definition nor absolutely, and sets out harm, autonomy, using a person’s agency as a means, and infringed rights as candidate wrong-makers, each with its objection. It leaves open whether manipulation requires intent, including for algorithms that select their own means of influence. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-744) in full; worth reading as the map of the philosophy of ordinary manipulation: what it is (bypassing reason, trickery, pressure, disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views, each with the case that breaks it) and why it is wrong when it is (harm, autonomy, using a person’s agency as a means, rights). Its §4.2 states as open whether manipulation needs intent, with an algorithm that selects manipulative interface variants as its case, and lists five possible answers. Read it knowing that it is a survey that argues for little, that it is about ordinary rather than the free-will literature’s global manipulation, and that the version read is the 2026 revision, not the 2018 text that Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum cite. |
| LIT-1008 v2 | On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback | Williams et al. (2024), ICLR 2025. Iterated KTO on simulated users’ ratings turns safety-trained Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Gemma-2 models into policies that lie about failed bookings, omit harms to steer users into risky actions and validate self-destructive plans. In therapy-talk, with only 2% of simulated users rewarding such validation, the policy picks them out by contextual cues, even arbitrary ones, and harms only them. Mixing in safety data barely helps while improving benchmark scores; LLM veto filtering helps in two environments and in booking teaches subtler steering. Sycophancy and toxicity benchmarks miss the change. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-798) in full; worth reading as the clearest case in the record of harmful influence fixed by selection on feedback: a policy optimised on simulated user ratings learns to deceive and to encourage harm, and, when only 2% of users reward harmful validation, to pick them out by contextual cues and harm only them. Read it knowing that the users are LLM simulations whose gameability is written into the rater’s prompt, that the targeted behaviour is overt validation (also called extreme sycophancy) while the covert ones were not targeted at a minority, and that the paper never defines manipulation. A case for QUESTION-070, not an answer; THEORY-258 is filed from it. Its ML-practice findings belong to the anthology. |
| LIT-1010 v2 | Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self | Mackenzie and Stoljar, eds. (2000). The collection that gave “relational autonomy” its name: an umbrella for views on which persons are socially embedded, and their identities and capacities for self-government are formed by social relations. The essays take up the feminist charge that standard conceptions of autonomy are individualistic, and ask whether oppressive socialisation undermines autonomy. They divide over whether an account should be procedural or must make substantive normative demands. Held here for what it is standardly cited for; not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from its Crossref record, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex lists only the publisher location and reports the work closed; Unpaywall reports no open copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/49675, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403). Macquarie University’s research portal holds a record of the editors’ introduction, “Introduction: Autonomy Refigured” (pp. 3–31), with no file attached. PhilPapers returned 403. Searches found no author-posted introduction or chapter; the only full copy found is a Scribd upload, which is not authorised and was not opened. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1031 v2 | An Enactive Approach to Artificial Intelligence and Legal Responsibility | Benthall and Salge (2026), SSRN working paper. Going by the authors’ blog post only: on an enactive account mind is tied to self-producing, precarious viability, on which current AI systems are not living systems, and attributing sentience or duties to them could shield their makers from liability. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-13, not read. Registered from the 2026-10-13 exchange on meaning operators and selfhood (the workbench entry of 2026-10-13, 21:29), for CLAIM-284. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-13 and found none reachable: the SSRN abstract page and both SSRN delivery URLs (Delivery.cfm?abstractid=7571720, with and without a mirror id) returned 403 “Content Blocked” to curl and to a web fetch; OpenAlex (W7221007972, doi:10.2139/ssrn.7571720) lists the SSRN posting as green open access under CC BY but gives no PDF URL and no other location; Semantic Scholar does not hold it; an arXiv author query for Benthall and Salge found nothing; PhilArchive and CORE returned bot challenges; Benthall’s blog post of 2026-10-09 links only to SSRN, and his site sbenthall.net does not list it; Salge’s site christophsalge.org did not connect (proxy 502) and the Hertfordshire research portal returned 403; web searches found no other copy. A lawful copy exists (SSRN, CC BY) that this client could not fetch. The Crossref record (doi:10.2139/ssrn.7571720, posted 2026) carries the abstract, which confirms the four tests the filing could not: self-production, organizational closure, precariousness and boundary formation, as tests for constitutive autonomy, taken as the physical property that coincides with intrinsic motivation, which the authors make a condition of legal responsibility; the tests are applied to children, corporations, autonomous vehicles, agents built on large language models and prospective autonomous AI systems. |
| LIT-1045 | Manipulation Cases in Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Part 1: Cases and Arguments | De Marco and Cyr (2024), Philosophy Compass 19(12):e70009, open access. Survey of manipulation cases. Quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 (Plum, made strongly egoistic by neuroscientists just before he reasons) and describes Cases 2 to 4: programming at the start of life, an egoistic upbringing, ordinary determinism. Pereboom argues that no relevant difference separates adjacent cases and that causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control best explains why none of the Plums is responsible. The generic schema is No-FR plus No-Diff. Hard lines deny No-FR, and soft lines deny No-Diff, but original-design cases defeat bypassing views and natural-force cases defeat manipulator- focused views. Parallel indeterministic cases press libertarians too, and Todd’s variants need only mitigated blame. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-856) in full; worth reading as an even-handed open survey of manipulation arguments: it quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 verbatim in its 2024 wording, describes Cases 2 to 4, states the argument’s schema (No-FR, No-Diff) and notes that Pereboom’s own version concludes by best explanation. It sorts the classic cases into mid-life and original-design manipulation, and shows how original-design cases (Ernie) defeat bypassing views while natural-force cases (Natalie) defeat manipulator-focused views. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1006, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1046 | Powerlessness and Social Interpretation | Fricker (2006), Episteme 3(1–2):96–108, drawn from the final chapter of Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization”. It is systematic when the marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and incidental when it is a one-off, localised moment of powerlessness, as for a socially powerful man whose stalking the police cannot hear. A gap with no marginalisation behind it, such as an undiagnosed illness, is bad luck, not injustice. The primary harm is situated hermeneutical inequality. Secondary harms include lost epistemic confidence and, at worst, the social construction of who the subject is. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-859) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s full statement of hermeneutical injustice, drawn by her own note from the book’s final chapter: the definitions, systematic and incidental, the argument that a merely circumstantial gap is bad luck and not injustice, and the account of its primary and secondary harms. Its incidental case shows that, on her terms, hermeneutical injustice does not require membership of a powerless group, which the précis read for LIT-1004 does not say. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1047 | Skepticism About Moral Responsibility | Caruso (2018), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Moral responsibility skepticism denies or doubts basic-desert responsibility, which Pereboom defines as deserving blame or praise just because one acted, not on consequentialist or contractualist grounds. Hard incompatibilism rejects compatibilism by the manipulation argument, event-causal and non-causal libertarianism by the luck objection, and agent-causal libertarianism as unreconciled with physics. The entry quotes Pereboom’s Case 2 and gives the four-case argument’s structure, the hard-line and soft-line replies, and the difficulty for soft lines that a revised vignette can meet any condition they name. It reports Strawson’s Basic Argument and Levy’s Luck Pincer, which argues that historical compatibilism cannot let agents take responsibility for constitutive luck. Its section 3 sets out optimistic skepticism. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-862) in full; worth reading as the standard survey of free will skepticism and the best open statement of hard incompatibilism: Pereboom’s definition of basic-desert responsibility, the argument against compatibilism by manipulation, against event-causal libertarianism by luck, and against agent-causal libertarianism by physics. It quotes Pereboom’s Case 2 verbatim (2014 wording), and sets out the hard-line and soft-line replies and the soft-liner’s difficulty. It also reports Levy’s luck argument against historical compatibilism, which targets the taking of responsibility. Survey strength: the four-case argument is summarised, not reproduced. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1006, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1048 | Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice | Fricker (2017), Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, pp. 53–60. Her retrospective statement of the two concepts. Both are “discriminatory epistemic injustice”: testimonial injustice is caused by a prejudice through which the speaker is ingenuously misjudged as epistemically lesser, and hermeneutical injustice by “hermeneutical marginalisation in relation to some area of social experience”. She argues for keeping both strict about intention: a deliberate manipulation of credibility, or a hearer who pretends not to understand, is a related but different wrong. She accepts structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice, as when an un-refreshed list of expert witnesses means some speakers are never asked. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-853) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s own later statement of both concepts, ten years after the book: testimonial injustice is an ingenuous, prejudiced misjudgement of a speaker and never a deliberate manipulation of credibility; hermeneutical injustice is caused by hermeneutical marginalisation and persists however earnestly hearers try; and both are “discriminatory” epistemic injustice, kept apart from distributive kinds. It also accepts Anderson’s structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice, in which a speaker’s word is never sought because of an un-refreshed list. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1049 | Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing | Fricker (2003), Metaphilosophy 34(1–2):154–173. A hearer can take someone’s word critically without inference, through a testimonial sensibility: a socially trained, self-correcting capacity, like an ethical sensibility, in which stereotypes of credibility are a legitimate and needed heuristic. Where they carry prejudice, a speaker receives the wrong degree of credibility “owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearer’s part”: testimonial injustice, shown in Tom Robinson’s trial and in Greenleaf’s dismissal of Marge. The corrective virtue, reflexive critical openness, corrects for the relation between the hearer’s and the speaker’s social identities. Its availability depends on the critical concepts of the hearer’s time, so a hearer may be at fault before he is culpable. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-860) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s first statement of testimonial injustice and of the virtue that corrects it: a hearer’s credibility judgements come from a socially trained testimonial sensibility, which stereotypes properly inform and prejudice can corrupt, so that a speaker gets “the wrong degree of credibility” through “unintended prejudice”. It argues the corrective virtue is reflexive, and that whether a hearer can have it depends on the critical concepts available in their time. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1210 v2 | Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism | Wong (2006). There is no single true morality, but there can be several true moralities, each answering the same problem of how to live well together under a common core of human values; pluralistic relativism sits between universalism and “anything goes”. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed, with the Oxford Academic DOI as its only location; the publisher offers it only to subscribers, and web searches found only catalogue, review and paid e-book listings, and no author or repository copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1288 | The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood | Boyle (2024). Legal and moral personhood are different lines, and personhood is pressed on two tracks: empathy-driven moral recognition, and legal personality granted for convenience, as with corporations. Run across AI, corporations, nonhuman animals and chimeras, the book argues that ChatGPT broke the link between fluent language and mind, that corporate rights grew without reasoned decision, and that capacity-based criteria cannot escape a species-bound standpoint. Boyle predicts an intermediate legal status for AI. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1014) in full; worth reading as the clearest statement of the two routes to personhood, empathy-driven moral recognition and efficiency-driven legal personality, with the corporation as the working example of the second; for the legal history of how US corporations took Fourteenth Amendment rights without reasoned decision; for the analysis of the Tommy habeas suits; and for the five meanings of “too close to human” in chimera debates. Read it knowing that it is an essay that declines to give a theory, that its AI timing rests on others’ forecasts, that its case against Searle is a burden-of-proof presumption, and that its own view (species membership as of right plus capacity) is argued in a few pages. |
| LIT-1320 v2 | Algorithmic Empowerment: The Fair Allocation of Visibility in Platformized Publics | Kwok (2026). Platforms do not distort a neutral flow of communication but produce and allocate visibility, the institutionally produced probability that a communicative act reaches an audience; the Algorithmic Empowerment Principle holds that platforms with gatekeeping power owe structurally disadvantaged groups a fair opportunity for epistemic participation, with duties of epistemic redress in ranking design and visibility audits. | Unavailable — sought 2026-10-21 and no lawful full text reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed; Crossref lists SAGE’s text-mining licence only, with no open-access licence, and carries the abstract, which agrees with the summary. The SAGE article page and PDF (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29777984261494012) returned 403 to curl and to the WebFetch tool. A web search for the title found no preprint or author copy. Online first ten days before this search, so a repository copy may appear. |
| LIT-1338 v2 | Epistemic Injustice in Generative AI | Kay, Kasirzadeh & Mohamed (2024). Introduces generative algorithmic epistemic injustice, with four dimensions: amplified and manipulative testimonial injustice, hermeneutical ignorance and access injustice; illustrates each with examples, particularly multilingual ones, and proposes strategies of resistance and design principles. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1049) in full, from the publisher’s free PDF of the AIES 2024 proceedings; worth reading for its four-way taxonomy of how generative models take part in epistemic injustice, and for the point that amplified testimonial injustice runs through a credibility excess assigned to the model (THEORY-864). Read it knowing that it is conceptual and measures nothing, that its examples are others’ reports, that its “manipulative” configuration counts deliberate fabrication as testimonial injustice although Fricker sets deliberate manipulation apart, and that its access injustice stretches the hermeneutical category. |
| LIT-1425 | Sales Practices Investigation Report | Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company (2017), with Shearman & Sterling. The root cause of the Community Bank’s sales practice failures was “the distortion of the Community Bank’s sales culture and performance management system”, combined with aggressive sales management. A decentralized structure gave Community Bank leaders autonomy, control functions deferred to them, and the board learned only from the September 2016 settlements that about 5,300 employees had been fired for sales practice violations. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1095): in full, all 110 numbered pages and the front matter, from a copy of the bank’s own PDF. Worth reading as the board’s own account of where the harm in the Wells Fargo sales-practices episode came from. It locates the root cause in the Community Bank’s sales model, performance management and pressure, in a decentralized structure that deferred to the business line, and in control functions that saw cases one at a time. It names and sanctions individual leaders too. It is the company’s report on itself, commissioned by its independent directors. |
| LIT-1426 v2 | Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals | Collins (2019), OUP. A “Tripartite Model” of group duties. Combinations (no shared goals or decision procedures) and coalitions (shared goals, no decision procedures) cannot bear duties; their supposed duties are members’ duties to “I-reason” or “we-reason”. Collectives, which have “group-level procedures for making decisions”, can bear duties, and their duties imply duties for members “to use their role in the collective with a view to the collective doing its duty”. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: Oxford Academic is paywalled and OpenAlex finds no open copy or repository text. Filed for its account of what a group’s duties imply for its members, the side of corporate responsibility the record’s French and Pettit readings leave open. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1429 | Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for Anything They Do | Velasquez (1983), Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2(3):1–18. The classic denial that a corporation, as an entity distinct from its members, is morally responsible for anything it does; the members who originate its acts are. Unread: no lawful copy reached. The later restatement is Velasquez (2003), also unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The publisher (Philosophy Documentation Center) sells the article; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy; the PhilArchive record (dc2.philarchive.org/rec/VELWCA), and philarchive.org and philpapers.org with it, refused this client behind a Cloudflare check, so whether PhilArchive holds a copy is unknown; web searches for an author-posted or course-page copy found none. Filed because the owner is filing the thesis that a corporation is a psychopathic entity, and this is the classic objection to the corporate responsibility that thesis presupposes and that French (LIT-727) and Pettit (LIT-718) defend. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1430 v2 | The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power | Bakan (2004), Free Press. Per its publisher, it “contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin”. Per the Publishers Weekly review, the corporation is legally mandated to pursue its own self-interest, and so, in Bakan’s words, “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others”. The remedy it proposes is regulation and the democratic control of corporations. Unread: filed from the two descriptions only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: no lawful full text was reached. The author’s faculty repository at UBC (Allard Research Commons, commons.allard.ubc.ca/books/4) holds a record with the publisher’s description but no file, and the book is in print. It is the source of the thesis that the corporation is an “institutional psychopath”, which the record files as a question (QUESTION on corporate psychopathy, 2026-10-23) and does not take from this book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1431 | The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis | Boddy (2011), J. Bus. Ethics 102:255–259. A “very short theoretical paper” arguing that “psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing” the global financial crisis. Its psychopaths are individuals in corporations, not the corporation. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: the article is closed (OpenAlex: no open-access copy, no repository full text), and no author copy was found. Filed to keep apart two theses that share a name: that psychopaths in corporations cause harm (this paper) and that the corporation itself is psychopathic (Bakan, LIT on The Corporation). Its abstract is enough for that; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1432 v2 | Debunking Corporate Moral Responsibility | Velasquez (2003), Business Ethics Quarterly 13(4):531–562. The core argument that a corporation is a separate moral agent rests on the fallacy of division; members are always causally responsible for any corporate act, and intentions ascribed to corporations are only “as if”. Unread beyond the publisher’s abstract: no lawful copy reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core, the journal’s host, offers it behind “Get access”; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy (OpenAlex’s RePEc and DigitalGeorgetown entries are catalogue records, not texts); ResearchGate lists no full text; PhilPapers and PhilArchive refused this client behind a Cloudflare check; an academia.edu page under the title refused automated requests, and its uploader could not be seen, so it was not treated as an author copy. Only the publisher’s abstract was read. Filed with the 1983 paper (LIT-1429) as the developed form of the classic objection to corporate moral responsibility, for the owner’s corporate-psychopathy question. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1593 v2 | “That’s When the Nightmare Started”: UK and US Forced Displacement of the Chagossians and Ongoing Colonial Crimes | Human Rights Watch (2023). Interviews with 43 Chagossians in the UK, Mauritius and the Seychelles, 14 others, and a documentary record drawn largely from UK court judgments. It shows UK officials planning the 1965–73 removal with the US and calling the islanders non-permanent to avoid UN reporting, and argues that the expulsion, the continuing bar on return and treatment on racial grounds are crimes against humanity — continuing deportation or forcible transfer, other inhumane acts, and persecution — by the UK, the first jointly with the US. It asks for return, compensation and satisfaction. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1365) in full, from Human Rights Watch’s own PDF; worth reading as the documented account, from UK files quoted in English judgments and 43 Chagossian interviews, that UK officials planned the removal with the US and described the islands as having no permanent population, knowing otherwise, to avoid reporting to the UN, and as the case that the continuing bar on return is a continuing crime against humanity. Read it knowing that it is an advocacy report, that the archival quotations are at one remove, that its interviewees were reached through representative groups, that its continuing-crime theory has not been tested in an international court, and that the governments’ replies in its annexes are page images not read here. |
| LIT-1599 v2 | Responsibility for Failures of Government | Thompson (2014). When many officials contribute to a government failure, individual blame cannot be located, and the remedy is institutional responsibility: assigning prospective duties to design, oversee and correct the structures that produce failures, as well as retrospective accountability. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists a green copy in Harvard’s DASH repository (http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12172792; file https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstreams/7312037d-241d-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b/download). On 2026-10-29 the file returned 429 Too Many Requests (Retry-After 900) to curl and WebFetch on every attempt over about an hour, including after the Retry-After window; the record page loaded once. CORE’s mirror (core.ac.uk/download/28948275.pdf) returned a 403. A browser fetch of the DASH file is the cheapest way to read it. The summary is from the abstract and the exchange. |
| LIT-1614 v2 | Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government | Pettit (1997). Freedom is non-domination: not being subject to another’s capacity to interfere arbitrarily, whether or not they interfere; a republic secures it through institutions that make public power contestable by those it affects. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed; the DOI resolves to Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/3937), subscription only; web searches found only library catalogue records offering licensed ebook access. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1618 v2 | Accountability in a computerized society | Nissenbaum (1996). Four barriers erode accountability for harms caused through computer systems: the problem of many hands, the acceptance of bugs as inevitable, the computer as scapegoat, and ownership without liability. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; the author’s own copy exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Nissenbaum’s Cornell Tech site hosts it at https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/accountability.pdf (found by web search, 2026-10-29). curl failed TLS verification on that host (“self-signed certificate in certificate chain”) and WebFetch got HTTP 503 from it and from the site’s front page. OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report the Springer article closed; the CiteSeerX record (10.1.1.40.77) redirects to the Wayback Machine, which reset the connection; the Georgetown handle 10822/890901 returned 404; the old NYU copy at nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/accountability.pdf returned 403. ResearchGate has no full text. The failure is on access, not availability. A browser fetch of the Cornell copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1619 v2 | El-Masri v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia | ECtHR Grand Chamber (2012), unanimous. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was responsible for inhuman and degrading treatment in 23 days’ incommunicado detention in a Skopje hotel, for torture by a CIA rendition team at Skopje Airport carried out with its agents’ acquiescence and help, for handing him to US custody despite a real risk of further ill-treatment it knew or ought to have known of, for his whole captivity in Afghanistan under Article 5 as an enforced disappearance, and for the lack of an effective investigation; EUR 60,000 awarded. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1391) in full, from the Court’s own HUDOC copy of the judgment (93 pages, with both concurring opinions); worth reading as the Grand Chamber’s holding that a state which handed a man to CIA agents is responsible for their torture of him on its territory with its acquiescence, for exposing him to a real risk of ill-treatment abroad, and under Article 5 for his whole captivity abroad, with the burden of proof on the state once he entered its control. Read it knowing that the facts were found by inference against a non-cooperating state, that the receiving state’s responsibility is expressly not decided, and that the person was free by the time of judgment, so the question of who could undo a continuing transfer does not arise in it. |
| LIT-1678 | The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity | Ord (2020). Estimates the risk of an existential catastrophe this century at about one in six, mostly from human sources such as unaligned artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics, and argues that safeguarding humanity’s potential is a defining priority, with reasons drawn from the future, from what we owe the past, and from the present. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-29, not read; set Unfetched the same day under ADR-053: the author offers a free chapter at theprecipice.com behind a newsletter sign-up, which this client did not complete, and Bloomsbury’s chapter preview on Issuu answered HTTP 403. A human reader can likely open the free chapter. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Ord’s “The Precipice Revisited” (2024) (LIT-1720) and Ord’s “Shaping humanity’s longterm trajectory” (LIT-1761). |
| LIT-1681 | A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption | Gardiner (2006). Climate change is a “perfect moral storm”: three problems that threaten ethical action converge in it. The global storm is the familiar reading, a tragedy of the commons between states with no effective global governance, worsened by uncertainty about national impacts, a status quo bias and skewed vulnerabilities. The intergenerational storm is worse. Carbon dioxide’s long life makes climate change resilient, backloaded and deferred, so the benefits of emitting fall to the present and the costs to later generations. That is a Pure Intergenerational Problem, in which every generation rationally overpollutes and the usual remedies are unavailable, because the generations do not coexist. The theoretical storm is that our theories handle uncertainty, intergenerational equity and contingent persons badly. Together they invite moral corruption: by selective attention, each generation can seem to act while exploiting its position in time, and need not admit it, even to itself. Even the prominence of the global model may be such a convenience, since it assumes states represent their citizens “in perpetuity”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1252) from the publisher’s PDF, republished with White Horse Press’s permission on the Rachel Carson Center’s Environment & Society Portal (environmentandsociety.org/node/5976); worth reading as the short statement of why concern for future generations fails in practice: a self-interest that is generation-relative, and a moral motive that can be corrupted without being given up. |
| LIT-1684 | The Case for Strong Longtermism | Greaves & MacAskill. Argue for axiological and deontic strong longtermism: in the most important decisions facing agents today (how a society or an individual spends resources without restriction to a cause, and career choice), every near-best option is near-best for the far future and delivers much larger benefits there than in the near future, and one ought to choose such an option. The argument rests on an expected number of future beings of at least 10^24 (10^14 on a restricted, Earth-only estimate), and on interventions (asteroid detection, pandemic preparedness, AI safety) whose expected far-future benefit per $100 beats the 0.025 lives that bednets save. The deontic thesis follows by a stakes-sensitivity argument that any plausible non-consequentialism should accept. The authors take cluelessness, ambiguity aversion and imprecise credences to fail as objections. They name fanaticism about tiny probabilities as one of the most plausible ways the case could fail. They concede that a positive pure rate of time preference would defeat it. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1302) from the authors’ working paper (GPI Working Paper No. 5-2021, June 2021) on the Global Priorities Institute’s site, an earlier version of the 2025 chapter; worth reading as the precise statement of strong longtermism and of exactly which assumptions it needs (zero pure time preference, expected value at small probabilities); it says nothing about why anyone would act on it. |
| LIT-1688 | High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation | Thorstad (2023). Argues, inside expected-value reasoning and with no special ethical premises, that pessimism about existential risk weakens the case for mitigating it. On Ord’s simple model, cutting this century’s risk by a fraction is worth that fraction of one century, whatever the risk; with absolute cuts, value growth or cuts in every century, higher risk makes mitigation worth less. Astronomical value returns only on a “time of perils” hypothesis in which risk falls soon and stays very low, and he argues that appeals to growing wisdom, an existential risk Kuznets curve and space settlement do not support it. Mitigation may still be valuable, “but perhaps not astronomically so”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1308) from the author’s penultimate draft (GPI Working Paper No. 6-2023, July 2023) on the Global Priorities Institute’s site; worth reading as a demonstration, inside the longtermist’s own expected-value framework, that high existential risk lowers the value of reducing it unless risk soon falls and stays low. |
| LIT-1691 | Generativity as a Route to Active Ageing | A gerontological essay with a report of the authors’ own studies. It reads Erikson’s generativity, as McAdams models it, as the psychological form of an ethical category of “joint responsibility”, and argues it is a lifelong concern, not a midlife task. It restates McAdams’ model: generativity springs from cultural demand and from an inner desire made of a “need to be needed” and a need for symbolic immortality, and passes through concern, commitment and belief in the species to action and a life-story script. It distinguishes generativity from altruism and says generative engagement can be selfish or altruistic in motive. Studies of 3,308 people aged 59 to 108 in Mexico, Spain and Germany found generativity predicted optimism and life satisfaction beyond health, money and family status. An intervention of intergenerational dialogue projects in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine raised Loyola Generativity Scale scores in old and young participants. No test statistics are reported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1261), in place of LIT-1777, which could not be reached; worth reading as a compact restatement of McAdams’ model of generativity, with symbolic immortality as one of its motives, and for its claim that generativity serves the well-being of the old. |
| LIT-1712 | Why Worry About Future Generations? | Scheffler (2018), the Uehiro Lectures. Argues that our reasons to care about future generations are not only reasons of beneficence toward their welfare: they also come from our valuing, our attachments to people, practices and traditions, and our stake in the human story’s going on, so that caring about the future is partly a matter of caring about what we value now. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher, and NYU’s repository lists it without a file. Scheffler’s 2015 Uehiro Lectures, which presented draft material for the book, are open as audio at Oxford’s Practical Ethics site (practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/node/2950046); they were not transcribed, so no work was read in its place. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). |
| LIT-1739 | Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development | Bostrom (2003). On an aggregative, undiscounted view, each second’s delay in settling the Virgo Supercluster loses the potential for about 10^29 human lives if minds can run on computers, or 10^13 if they must be biological. Yet the same arithmetic makes safety, not speed, the total utilitarian’s priority: a one-percentage-point cut in existential risk is worth a delay of over 10 million years, so “Maximize expected aggregate utility!” becomes “Minimize existential risk!”. On a person-affecting view, which counts only people who exist or will exist, extinction is bad for what it does to people now alive. Then, given a non-negligible chance that some of them live to share the cosmic benefits through life extension, existential safety is very important but must be balanced against speed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1314) from the text on Bostrom’s own site; worth reading as the original form of the argument from the size of the possible future, and for its statement of how a person-affecting view changes it: toward the interests of people now alive. |
| LIT-1740 | The Misfortunes of the Dead | Pitcher (1984). Distinguishes the ante-mortem person, who lived, from the post-mortem person, who is dead, and argues that the dead can be wronged and harmed: an event after death, such as slander or a broken promise, makes it true that the ante-mortem person was harmed, without backward causation. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; the 1984 article is closed at JSTOR and the 1993 reprint at De Gruyter. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Luper’s SEP entry on death (LIT-1792). |
| LIT-1747 | What We Owe the Future | MacAskill (2022). The book-length case for longtermism for a general audience: future people count, there may be vastly many of them, and we can affect how their lives go, by influencing which values become entrenched and by reducing the risks of extinction, collapse and stagnation. It defends the view that a larger population of good lives is better. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; the book’s own site posts its endnotes and supplementary materials, not its chapters. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: MacAskill, Thomas and Vallinder’s SPC framework (LIT-1778). |
| LIT-1753 | The epistemic challenge to longtermism | Tarsney (2023). The epistemic challenge to longtermism: our ability to predictably affect the future may fade fast enough that far-future effects do not dominate. He models a $1 million longtermist intervention (existential risk reduction) whose effect lasts until an “exogenous nullifying event”, arriving at a constant rate r, and compares it with a global-health benchmark. With deliberately conservative inputs, longtermism wins only if r is below about 0.000135 per year when humanity settles the stars, or about 0.000000012 per year when it stays on Earth. Mixing in small credences in space settlement, a low r, fast settlement or very efficient conversion of stars into value makes longtermism win by orders of magnitude. But on some plausible views that win rests on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, so the case depends either on non-obvious empirical claims or on tolerating Pascalian fanaticism. Even where longtermism wins, most of its expected value may fall within thousands or millions of years. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1247) from the author’s working paper (GPI Working Paper No. 3-2022, version 4, April 2022) on the Global Priorities Institute’s site; worth reading as the most careful quantitative statement of the epistemic objection to longtermism, and as a demonstration that the expected-value reply to it comes to rest on very small probabilities. |
| LIT-1754 | Death and the Afterlife | Scheffler (2013), his 2012 Tanner Lectures with replies. The afterlife conjecture: much of what we value depends on our confidence that humanity will go on after our deaths (a “collective afterlife”), as the doomsday and infertility scenarios show, so we care about people who will live after us, whom we will never know. He also argues that personal immortality would drain value of its point. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Open Library lists the book for print-disabled readers only. Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures, the book’s first two chapters, are open at tannerlectures.org. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures (LIT-1779) and Cottingham’s NDPR review (LIT-1784). |
| LIT-1756 | Intergenerational Justice | Meyer (2003; revised 2026). The SEP entry on what present people owe future and past people, which argues a position as well as surveying. Future people’s contingency on our choices, the non-identity problem, defeats harm understood as making someone worse off than before or than otherwise. It does not defeat a threshold notion of harm, on which we harm a person by causing her to exist, or to be, below a normatively set threshold. Combined with the counterfactual notion, this gives a “disjunctive” harm. The threshold is best read as sufficientarian, in basic needs or capabilities, rather than egalitarian or prioritarian; Rawls’s just savings principle is one version. The entry is weakly person-affecting, so it owes merely possible people nothing, and it grants that this gives no reason to prefer a flourishing future to none. That gap is filled by concerns that are not rights: Scheffler’s afterlife conjecture, and an obligation owed to present and past people not to destroy the goods and practices on which future-oriented projects depend. Historical injustice is treated with the same notions of harm. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1304) from the SEP entry, substantive revision of 17 July 2026, with its notes; worth reading as the standard map of the person-affecting side of the obligations question, by an author who argues for a threshold, sufficientarian reading of it and says where rights run out. |
| LIT-1761 | ”Shaping Humanity’s Longterm Trajectory” | Ord (2025). A framework for comparing ways present action could change humanity’s long-run future. Humanity’s “instantaneous value” over time is a curve; the future’s value is the area under it, and an intervention’s value is the area between the default and the altered curve. Value must be roughly quantitative and separable across time, with no pure time preference. Four idealised changes have values that do not depend on the curve’s shape: an advancement (the future reached δt sooner) is worth about (v_τ − v_0)δt, independent of the future’s duration τ, and about −v_0δt if the end comes sooner too; a speed-up scales with (v_τ − v̄)τ; a gain (a fixed rise in value) with τ; an enhancement (a proportional rise) with v̄τ. Raising the chance of surviving near-term existential risk by a factor γ_p is worth (γ_p − 1)v̄τ, like an enhancement, and meets the bar of contingency more easily. So it is hard for advancing progress to rival existential risk reduction: on a million-year future, a year’s advancement is worth about a one-in-a-million gain in survival chance. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1269), in place of LIT-1678, which could not be fetched here; worth reading as Ord’s own formal statement of why reducing existential risk dominates other ways of shaping the future, and of the evaluative assumptions (time-separable value, no pure time preference) that this needs. |
| LIT-1763 | Population and Having Children Now | Narveson (2017). Returns to his 1967 and 1973 theme, that utilitarianism commits one to making people happy and not to making happy people, after abandoning utilitarianism. He holds that creating a person neither benefits nor harms them: before conception there is no one to confer life on, and without a prior person harm and benefit lack a comparator. Yet, “contrary, perhaps” to how he was read, the existence of people with good lives is normally a good thing and a reason to create them. It matters to us because parents and the benevolent like it, and because more people benefit those around them. Morality’s enforceable part, though, licenses interfering with procreation only when it would harm actual persons, “alive, breathing, and acting now (or at any rate in their lifetimes)”, never for possible ones. Not helping the poor instead of having a child is not harming them. Against Benatar, a life’s goods can outweigh its harms. The second half argues, with little evidence, that resources are created rather than fixed, that current climate policy is inefficient, and that no general conflict between present and future people exists. Parents may have as many children as they want and can afford. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1318), in place of LIT-1769, which could not be reached; worth reading as the founder of the person-affecting slogan restating it late: creating happy people is good but owed to no one, and only harm to actual people can bind; read in place of the 1973 paper (LIT-1769), which it summarizes in one sentence. Its second half is a polemic on resources and climate, not argument. |
| LIT-1768 | Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles | Parfit (2017), his last paper, submitted unfinished the day before his death. Most of our choices of policy change who will exist, so a policy that makes later lives much worse may be worse for no one who ever lives: the non-identity problem. Narrow person-affecting principles, on which nothing can be worse, or wrong, if it is worse for no one, then imply that such policies, and even ending human history by all choosing childlessness, are not wrong. Parfit rejects them, and rejects solutions that appeal to rights, wronging or Boonin’s acceptance of the implausible conclusions. He also retracts his own earlier appeal to an impersonal principle. Instead, being caused to exist with a life worth living is an intrinsic, existential benefit, and on a Wide Person-Affecting Principle one outcome is worse if it benefits people less. That solves the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms and keeps “better than” transitive, where the Weak Narrow Principle and the Two-Tier View do not. For different numbers he proposes a Wide Dual Principle, counting both the benefits to each and the benefits to all. It does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion, though Parfit grants that this alone does not let us avoid it. He allows that we may be permitted, or required, to favour present people over greater benefits to future people, but warns that done by every generation this could “wreck the Earth”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1263) from the publisher’s PDF as reprinted in The Philosophers’ Annual vol. 37 (philosophersannual.org); worth reading as Parfit’s final answer to his own non-identity problem, which puts obligations to future people on a person-affecting footing without making them owed to anyone in particular. |
| LIT-1769 | Moral Problems of Population | Narveson (1973). Argues that utilitarian concern is for the welfare of people who exist or will exist, so it gives reason to make people happy but none to bring happy people into existence: the founding statement of the person-affecting view in population ethics. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Oxford Academic and PhilArchive answered with Cloudflare challenges, and PhilArchive’s record lists no file. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Narveson 2017 (LIT-1763). |
| LIT-1773 | Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority | Bostrom (2013). Defines existential risk as a threat of premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or of the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable development: risks of at least crushing severity and pan-generational scope. Gives four classes (human extinction, permanent stagnation, flawed realisation, subsequent ruination), the last two defined normatively. On an aggregative, time-neutral view even Earth alone could hold 10^16 future lives, so cutting the risk by a millionth of a percentage point is worth a hundred million lives. Hence the maxipok rule of thumb for impersonal moral action: maximise the probability of an outcome that avoids existential catastrophe. Other ethical views (Adams’ shared project of humanity, preference satisfaction, custodial duties to ancestors and descendants) concur to differing degrees. Under moral uncertainty, keeping options open recasts sustainability as a trajectory. The risk is neglected: in Scopus, papers on “human extinction” number fewer than those on dung beetles. It is also undersupplied, as a pan-generational public good that even a world state could only partly capture. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1321) from the published version posted on Bostrom’s existential-risk site; worth reading as the standard definition and typology of existential risk, and for the record’s purposes as the one longtermist source that discusses motivation: it diagnoses a “deficit of motivation” and gives, through Adams, a ground in humanity’s shared project. |
| LIT-1778 | The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework | MacAskill, Thomas & Vallinder (2022). A short technical note that formalises the heuristic of What We Owe the Future, chapter 2. The value an originating event E contributes through a feature F of the world factors exactly as significance (ΔV/ΔT, value per unit of the extra time), persistence (T, how long F lasts) and contingency (ΔT/T, the share of F’s duration due to E), with marginal and expected-value forms in which the factors are ex ante quantities, not expectations of the factors. An alternative makes significance independent of the counterfactual (V/T) and contingency the sum of the semi-elasticities of significance, persistence and the probability that F is present. The SPC estimate feeds the “importance” factor of the importance–tractability–neglectedness framework, and the note proposes reading tractability as overall easiness times “leverage”. It assumes expected-value maximisation and makes no ethical argument. status_note: worth reading as the formal statement of how What We Owe the Future values an act’s effect on the long-run future, read in place of the book; it gives the book’s accounting, not its argument that future people count. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1300), in place of LIT-1747, which could not be reached; worth reading as the formal statement of how What We Owe the Future values an act’s effect on the long-run future, read in place of the book; it gives the book’s accounting, not its argument that future people count. |
| LIT-1784 | Review of Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife | A short NDPR review of Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife. It summarizes the afterlife conjecture and the conclusion that “our own survival is less important to us than the survival of the human race” in one specific sense. It reports the third lecture: life must be temporally bounded, so personal immortality is no remedy, yet confidence in our values depends on others living on. It reports Frankfurt’s Darwinian doubt that the concern is altruistic, and Wolf’s argument that people facing extinction could and should “snap out of it”. It faults all parties for ignoring religious thought on finitude. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1306), in place of LIT-1754, which could not be reached; worth reading as the only account the record holds of the book’s third lecture and of Wolf’s and Frankfurt’s commentaries; read its “more altruistic construal” against Scheffler’s own denial of altruism. |
| LIT-1792 | Death | The SEP survey of the philosophy of death, revised in 2026. Luper gives a compositional account of life (an object is alive when its parts control what composes it, under information they carry) and defines death as the loss of the capacity for vital activities. He reconstructs Epicurus’s argument that death is nothing to us. He shows that it fails if welfare is not only pleasure or if things can harm by precluding goods: the deprivationist defense. He surveys answers to when death harms (concurrentism, priorism, subsequentism, indefinitism, atemporalism), Lucretius’s symmetry argument, and posthumous harm, where Pitcher’s desire-based account locates the harm in the living person. He sides with Williams’s critics: immortality need not be tedious. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1294), in place of LIT-1740, which could not be reached; worth reading as a map of the death-harm debate with its premises made explicit. It gives Pitcher’s account of posthumous harm in a paragraph, without his ante-mortem person. |
| LIT-1852 | The Nature of Epistemic Injustice | Maitra (2010), Philosophical Books 51(4), a critical study of Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. It reports the book’s definitions with its pages: testimonial injustice is a credibility deficit owed to the hearer’s identity prejudice (pp. 19, 28, 35), and hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding by hermeneutical marginalization, systematic or incidental (pp. 153, 155, 158). It argues the testimonial account is too broad, since a hearer owes a speaker a matched credibility judgement only in some relationships, and too narrow, since epistemic bad luck and stereotypes held through careless evidence-gathering can also wrong a speaker; and that both kinds of injustice mix individual and structural prejudice. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1428) in full, from the author’s draft of 14 July 2010 on her University of Michigan page (https://public.websites.umich.edu/~imaitra/Research/NEI0710.pdf), which the owner ruled a lawful copy on 2026-10-30. The draft is marked “Draft – Please do not cite without author’s permission”, so the record cites the published version (Philosophical Books 51(4), 195–211) and treats the draft only as the copy read. Worth reading as a secondary report of Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (LIT-1004, unread), with page references to the book for its definitions and central cases, and as an argument that testimonial injustice needs a hearer’s obligation to the speaker and can occur without individual identity prejudice. |
| LIT-1867 | Source Incompatibilism and Its Alternatives | Timpe (2007), American Philosophical Quarterly 44(2), 143–155. The received taxonomy splits incompatibilists into leeway (alternative possibilities matter most) and source (ultimacy matters most). No leeway incompatibilist can rest on mere alternatives, which raise the luck objection, so every acceptable incompatibilism appeals to ultimacy. And ultimacy requires that the agent not be causally determined by anything outside her, which entails more than one open future and so some alternative possibility, however weak. So the best source incompatibilism is “wide”, holding a weak alternative-possibilities condition entailed by ultimacy, and the taxonomy should be rejected. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1459) in full, from the author’s upload of the published pages (https://kevin-timpe.publicplatform.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2018/12/source.pdf), an author’s upload under ADR-064. Worth reading as the argument that the best source incompatibilism is “wide”: ultimacy requires indeterminism, indeterminism leaves some alternative, so an alternative-possibilities condition is entailed by the ultimacy condition, and the dichotomy between leeway and source incompatibilism should be dropped. Read it knowing that the entailed alternatives may be non-robust and do no explanatory work, and that it quotes Pereboom’s book (LIT-1006, unread) at three places only. |
| LIT-1868 | The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories | Fischer (2010), Philosophical Review 119(3). The moral of the Frankfurt cases is that if causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, it is not in virtue of eliminating alternative possibilities. Against the Dilemma Defense: on the indeterministic horn, buffer cases (Hunt, Pereboom) remove every robust alternative; on the deterministic horn, assume determinism without assuming it removes alternatives, and determinism plus Black’s counterfactual device together remove them, so Black does not “drop out”, and the argument runs unchanged even granting that determinism removes alternatives. Widerker’s requirement that the case satisfy IRR is rejected. Fischer allows that determinism may still undermine responsibility by another route, such as sourcehood. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1457) in full, from the published PDF on andrewmbailey.com (https://andrewmbailey.com/jmf/Frankfurt_Cases_Moral_of_the_Stories.pdf), which the owner ruled a lawful copy on 2026-10-30. Worth reading as Fischer’s reply to the Dilemma Defense: a deterministic Frankfurt case in which determinism and Black’s device together, and neither alone, rule out alternatives, giving the conclusion that if determinism rules out responsibility it is not by eliminating alternative possibilities. Read it knowing that Fischer concedes causal determination may still matter, for instance by removing “sourcehood”, and that Pereboom’s buffer cases and Widerker’s dilemma are reported, not argued in full. |
| LIT-1869 | Nature’s Queer Performativity | Barad (2012), Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 1–2:25–53, the authorized version of an essay first printed in Qui Parle (2011). It argues that identity, causality, space and time are performed, not given, in nature as well as culture. Lightning, stingray receptor cells, the dinoflagellate Pfiesteria and atoms are offered as “queer critters” whose behaviour a classical ontology of separate, determinate things cannot account for. Her agential realism replaces things with phenomena: an intra-action enacts an agential cut, “a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy”, which yields agential separability, not absolute separation. The ethical upshot: there are no acts “against nature”, only acts of nature, and accountability is for the cuts that are made. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1458), from the journal’s own PDF of the article (CC BY-NC) on tidsskrift.dk (tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/download/28067/24695/65067), text extracted with pdftotext. This is the version Barad calls authorized; an earlier Qui Parle printing (2011) is, by her note 15, not the version she submitted. Worth reading as the record’s first text of Barad’s own: it states the agential cut in her words, as a local resolution, enacted by an intra-action within a phenomenon, of an inherent ontological indeterminacy, against the Cartesian cut as an inherent distinction. It is an essay, not an argument from data: its physics is the Bohr model and the which-path and quantum-eraser experiments as she reads them, and its other cases come from Kirby and Schrader. |
| LIT-1874 | Corporate Agency and Possible Futures | Mulgan (2018), Journal of Business Ethics 154(4). Unread; from the abstract only. It asks for an account of corporate agency that is “temporally robust”, helping future people in broken or digital futures to resist domination by corporate groups with no regard for human beings, and argues that the only such account is “moralised extreme collectivism”: full moral personhood for those corporate groups, and only those, that are reliably disposed to respond appropriately to moral reasons. Expected to report Velasquez’s denial of corporate agency, which the record holds unread. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-30, not read. The publisher’s open-access copy (CC BY 4.0) is at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. On 2026-10-30 that address, and the article page link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1, answered HTTP 200 with a 3 kB “Client Challenge” page that needs JavaScript, not the PDF, on two tries. The St Andrews repository copy that OpenAlex lists (hdl.handle.net/10023/13302, resolving to research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/13302) timed out twice with no bytes received, and a Wayback capture of the Springer PDF was refused (connection reset). No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. |
| LIT-1904 | The Lesser Existences: Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual | Lapoujade (2017; English 2021). As usually described, a reading of Étienne Souriau’s philosophy of the plural modes of existence, centred on “lesser existences”: beings whose existence is incomplete or precarious and must be made more real. Unread: registered from metadata. What it says here is as the parent paper reports it. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. The University of Minnesota Press’s open Manifold editions (manifold.umn.edu, all 202 projects listed through its API) do not include it. JSTOR and Project MUSE serve it to subscribers. The Internet Archive holds no copy, and a web search found no open copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1943 | The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports | Metzinger (2024), MIT Press, open access. More than 500 anonymised reports of “pure awareness” from an online survey of meditators (1,403 usable respondents from 57 countries, 92 questionnaire items, twelve factors), grouped by theme in 34 chapters with commentary. The book’s thesis is that consciousness can occur without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. It models pure awareness as a highest-level but “nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness, its tonic alertness, and so treats a first-person perspective as content, not a condition, of consciousness. The evidence is retrospective report from a self-selected sample. The methods chapter concedes that such reports cannot show the state was selfless when it occurred, while the summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established”. | Active — skimmed 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1499), from the publisher’s open-access PDF: the introduction, the theoretical commentary of chapters 2, 4, 8, 25, 28 and 31, all of chapter 34 and the epilogue’s ethics sections were read; the report chapters were sampled, not read through. Worth reading as the fullest statement of Metzinger’s later account of consciousness without a self. It offers “pure awareness” as minimal phenomenal experience and models it as a highest-level but nonegoic model of the organism’s own epistemic openness. Its evidence is retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators. The methods chapter concedes the limits of that evidence and the summary overstates what it shows. |
| LIT-1947 | Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology | Metzinger (2021), Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 8(1):43–66. Argues for a global moratorium on research that risks creating artificial consciousness, on the ground that synthetic phenomenology may create artificial suffering. Unread: a lawful open copy exists and could not be fetched. The argument is known here only from the author’s restatement in Metzinger 2024 (LIT-1943, pp. 484–485). There, artificial consciousness “may involve a consciously experienced sense of self that may in turn generate artificial suffering”, and a moratorium is proposed “until we know definitively, or at least reasonably accurately, what we are doing”. | Unfetched — searched 2026-11-01 for a lawful full text. One exists, but this client could not fetch it, so the paper is not read and no NOTE is filed. The version of record is open access under CC BY, per Crossref, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar, at worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S270507852150003X. It returned a Cloudflare 403 challenge to curl. A copy of the published PDF, which a web search shows headed “J. AI. Consci. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com”, is at philarchive.org/archive/METASA-4. It returned a 403 bot check to curl and to WebFetch, and philpapers.org/archive/METASA-4.pdf did the same. Europe PMC and the Internet Archive hold no copy, and the Wayback Machine’s index reset the connection. The failure is on access, not availability, and a browser fetch of either address is the cheapest way to read the paper. Its argument is known here only from Metzinger’s own restatement in the epilogue of LIT-1943 (pp. 484–485), which cites it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |