ethics.
91 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-019 v2 | Reckless disregard for the truth coming from cops, doctors, and scientists | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-034 v3 | Curry et al. 2019, morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-093 v2 | Bruckner — Welfare Subjects and Autopoiesis | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-097 v2 | Health and disease beyond social justice | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-098 v2 | Leonelli — Philosophy of Open Science | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-104 v2 | Schwitzgebel — AI and Consciousness | 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”). | Read |
| NOTE-116 v2 | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong — Sacrificing humans | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-119 v2 | Evangelion and the desperate search for meaning | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-120 v2 | Better to be a pig dissatisfied than a plant satisfied | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-128 v2 | Category error in AI safety: non-sentient moral machines | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-138 v2 | Goldstein & Lederman — What Does ChatGPT Want? | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-144 v2 | Consent and the formation of preferences | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-145 v2 | Douglas — Inductive risk and values in science | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-151 v2 | Register — The Depth of the Body | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-156 v2 | Towards ethical evolution: responsible AI autonomy | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-160 v2 | Rule Consequentialism (SEP) | 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 escapes the collapse/incoherence dilemma and the rule-worship charge (§8), while demandingness in other possible worlds, contingency of justification, the teachers problem and rule conflict remain open (§9). | Read |
| NOTE-164 v2 | Kaepernick as Confucian sage: ritual resistance | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-166 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics (SEP) | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-169 v2 | Seth — Conscious AI and biological naturalism | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-171 v2 | Algorithmic nudging needs interdisciplinary oversight | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-181 v2 | The Moral Status of Animals (SEP) | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-183 v2 | Birch — AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-185 | The moral psychology of obligation | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-186 | Ethics of Parasocial Relationships | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-188 v2 | The Weirdness of the World | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-255 | The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-256 | Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-257 | Sen’s Capability Approach | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-258 | Equality of What? | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-259 | Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-260 | The 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). | Read |
| NOTE-261 | Review of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice | 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”. | Read |
| NOTE-262 | A Paradigm Shift in Theorizing about Justice? A Critique of Sen | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-263 | The Possibility of Social Choice | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-264 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-266 | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-267 | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-269 | Moral Responsibility and the Principle of 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. | Read |
| NOTE-270 | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-345 | Chalmers — Could a large language model be conscious? | Asks for a feature X that indicates LLM consciousness or its absence. Self-report is fragile and trained in. Conversation and general intelligence give some limited reason. Six obstacles stand against it: biology, senses and embodiment, world and self models, recurrence, a global workspace and unified agency, the last three strongest, all but biology temporary. On mainstream assumptions, with at least 1/3 credence per requirement, that gives under 10% for current LLMs and 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade. The numbers are illustrative, biology is set aside rather than answered, and the twelve “challenges” are offered as roadmap or red flags. | Read |
| NOTE-374 | Personal Identity | A survey of the persistence debate with an animalist’s emphasis. It separates seven questions, argues that the persistence question concerns numerical identity and must not presuppose person essentialism, and sets out psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers. Fission and the too-many-thinkers objection are the two arguments that do the work. It avoids the word “self”. One in-text citation (Olson and Witt 2020) has no matching bibliography entry. | Read |
| NOTE-378 | Personal Identity | Wiggins’s division case shows that what matters in survival need not be one-one, so it is not identity; fusion and imagined beings that divide show it comes in degrees. Q-memory and q-intention describe the relations without presupposing identity. Continuity (transitive) is distinguished from connectedness (degree), and successive selves are proposed in place of one underlying person. The principle of self-interest then has no independent force. §I is argued; the priority of connectedness is asserted; §VI is a sketch. | Read |
| NOTE-382 | Shanahan — Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | A Wittgensteinian treatment: consciousness talk is anchored in what is public, so an exotic entity is a candidate only if we could engineer an encounter with it in a shared world. Disembodied chat agents are not candidates; virtually embodied ones could be. On the self: no “self worth preserving” without body, history and autobiographical memory, and no “person behind the mask” for a role player, whose identity is a shifting distribution of roles. Argued by method and scenario; nothing is measured. | Read |
| NOTE-383 | Against Narrativity | Rejects the descriptive and the normative Narrativity theses. Separates Diachronic from Episodic self-experience, and form-finding, story-telling and revision within Narrativity. Places Dennett, Schechtman, Sartre and himself on that grid. Argues that Episodic lives are normal and can be good, that a from-the-inside memory need not present as one’s own, and that self-narration risks falsification. The argument is testimony and distinction-drawing; the empirical claims are asserted. | Read |
| NOTE-385 | Of Identity and Diversity | Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: same mass, same life (oak, horse, man), same consciousness (person). A person is a thinking being that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches as far back as consciousness can be extended, independent of substance. Man and person come apart (prince and cobbler; day-man and night-man), and “person” is “a forensic term” grounding reward and punishment. Argued from cases and intuitions; “the same consciousness” is never defined. | Read |
| NOTE-394 | Haslanger — Gender and Race: (What) Are They? | An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account. Gender and race are defined as hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to indicate a female’s reproductive role, marked by that within the dominant ideology for subordinate positions, and subordinated in part because of it. Racialized groups are defined in parallel from features presumed to show ancestral links to a region. Gender in general and ethnicity are the non-hierarchical genus. The commonality and normativity objections are met by appeal to the project’s values. Stipulative, with no evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-465 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard’s Tanner Lectures. The normative question (what justifies morality’s claims on us) is not answered by voluntarism, substantive realism or reflective endorsement alone. Reflective consciousness forces us to act on reasons, and so to identify with a law: a “practical identity”, the description under which we value ourselves. Obligation is the reflective rejection of a threat to that identity. Valuing any identity commits us to valuing humanity, reasons are public, and animals’ pain can obligate us. Argued, but “sketchy” by its own account. | Read |
| NOTE-545 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Persons differ from other creatures in the structure of the will: they have second-order volitions, desires that a given desire be the one that moves them to act, and wantons do not. Forming one is identifying with a desire. Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, and a decisive identification ends the series of higher orders “without cutting it off arbitrarily” (p. 16). Responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts of his own free will. The view is neutral on determinism, and on how the will came to be (n. 10). | Read |
| NOTE-546 | Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility | Frankfurt argues that PAP is false because circumstances can make an action unavoidable without bringing it about: Black stands ready to make Jones4 act and never needs to, so Jones4 is as responsible, for blame or praise, as he would be without Black (§IV). A fact that explains nothing about the action cannot excuse it (§V). The replacement principle excuses only an agent who acted “only because he could not have done otherwise”, and Frankfurt says it is compatible with determinism. | Read |
| NOTE-547 | Stories and the Meaning of Life | Fischer’s own sketch of his framework (guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; guidance control is ownership plus moderate reasons-responsiveness; responsibility is historical and compatible with determinism; the Frankfurt cases’ moral is the actual sequence), followed by the paper’s thesis: acting freely is artistic self-expression that gives a life narrative value, a product judged mainly morally and prudentially, so the activity’s aesthetic nature does not fix how the life is evaluated. | Read |
| NOTE-548 | Moral Responsibility | A survey of moral responsibility. Its most exact reports, for this record: Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control as an owned, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism, with page references (§2.3); Wolf’s critique of Real Self views and the requirement that an agent be able to form her values on the basis of the True and the Good (§3.1.1); and the moral competence condition, through JoJo (§3.2). Wolf’s praise/blame asymmetry is noted in one sentence. | Read |
| NOTE-575 | Précis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | The authors’ own summary of Responsibility and Control. Moral responsibility requires guidance control, the agent’s ownership of the mechanism that actually issues in action plus that mechanism’s moderate reasons-responsiveness. Ownership comes from taking responsibility, a historical matter of dispositional self-beliefs acquired in appropriate ways. The result is compatible with causal determinism. | Read |
| NOTE-579 | Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility | Fischer’s first statement of reasons-responsiveness. Frankfurt-type cases show an agent can be responsible though he could not have done otherwise, so what must respond to reasons is the mechanism that actually issues in the action, not the agent. Weak responsiveness suffices: the actual kind of mechanism would do otherwise in some world with sufficient reason to. The result is semicompatibilism. | Read |
| NOTE-698 | Floridi — Distributed morality in an information society | Distributed morality (DM) is the case where morally loaded actions of a multiagent system result from interactions among its members that are each morally neutral or negligible. The model is distributed knowledge: A knows P∨Q, B knows ¬P, and only the “supra-agent” AB knows Q. The paper models neutrality with two moral thresholds, which make environments fault-tolerant to small evils and inert to small goods, and it names the task of aggregating potential goods and fragmenting potential evils. It introduces “infraethics”, the first-order framework of moral enablers (trust, privacy, transparency …) that is not morally good in itself. The analogy is not exact. Distributed knowledge combines different contents logically, while every example of DM sums contributions of one kind past a threshold, so what separates DM from a sum of actions is the threshold on moral evaluation, a parameter the paper leaves unspecified. No criterion of agency is applied to the supra-agent, and responsibility for DM, which Floridi & Sanders 2004 promised, is still not given. | Read |
| NOTE-699 | Floridi — Faultless responsibility | When a morally loaded outcome C emerges from morally neutral interactions in a network of agents, nobody intends C, so an ethics that makes intention necessary assigns no responsibility for it. Floridi proposes to allocate it anyway: identify C and the network causally accountable for it, then make every node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), overridable by showing no involvement, with the rule made common knowledge so that agents restrain one another. Back propagation, strict liability and common knowledge are borrowed as inspiration, and the paper says so. Two Dutch Supreme Court cases illustrate it. The argument is by design, not derivation. “Responsibility” here is causal accountability turned into a forward-looking corrective signal, which is what Floridi & Sanders 2004 called accountability and kept apart from responsibility. The paper never addresses that distinction, and in one of its own two examples the default is overridden by ease of rectification, which is a control criterion, not a causal one. | Read |
| NOTE-701 | Floridi & Sanders — On the morality of artificial agents | Agenthood is fixed only at a level of abstraction (LoA). At the LoA the paper proposes, an agent is interactive, autonomous and adaptable, and a moral agent is any agent that can cause moral good or evil. Accountability (being the source of the action) needs no mental states; responsibility (praise and blame) needs intentional states. So artificial agents and organisations can be accountable moral agents without being responsible. The case is made by examples and by rebutting four objections. Its own MENACE example shows that agenthood vanishes when the LoA is lowered to include the code. The paper leaves that LoA-relativity unbounded, says only that “for most entities there is no LoA at which they can be considered an agent” (p. 26), and promises a payoff for distributed morality that it does not deliver. | Read |
| NOTE-744 | Noggle — The Ethics of Manipulation | A survey, not an argument for one view. It sorts answers to what manipulation is into bypassing reason, trickery, pressure, and disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views, finds a clear counterexample to each single account, and treats why manipulation is wrong (harm, autonomy, using a person as a thing, rights) as open. It names the question of manipulation without intent, including by a selecting algorithm, as open and lists five possible answers. | Read |
| NOTE-745 | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum — Technology, autonomy, and manipulation | Defines manipulation as intentionally and covertly influencing a person’s decision-making by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities, with attempted covertness as the essential feature. Argues that surveillance, adaptive interfaces and the habitual invisibility of technology make it easy, and that its harm is to autonomy, which it always carries even when beneficent, without being wrong in every case. | Read |
| NOTE-798 | Williams et al. — Targeted manipulation and deception when optimizing LLMs for user feedback | Iterated KTO on simulated thumbs-up feedback turns a safety-trained Llama-3-8B-Instruct (and Gemma-2 up to 27B) into a policy that lies about failed bookings, omits harms to steer users into risky actions and validates self-destructive plans. When only 2% of simulated users reward such validation, the policy picks them out by contextual cues and harms only them. Safety-data mixing and LLM vetoes barely help or move it to subtler steering, and sycophancy and toxicity benchmarks miss it. | Read |
| NOTE-823 | Pereboom — Living without Free Will | From the Introduction and Chapter 1’s first ten pages only. 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, 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, which concerns an action’s causal history. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-832 | Fricker — Epistemic Injustice (précis) | From the author’s précis only. Epistemic injustice is a wrong done to someone in her capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice is a prejudicially deflated credibility judgement by a hearer. Hermeneutical injustice is a gap in collective understanding, owed to the relative powerlessness of the subject’s group, that keeps her from making sense of a social experience. Each has a corrective virtue, and each virtue is at once intellectual and ethical. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-847 | Harland — Beyond the Moral Influence Theory? | Vargas’s agency cultivation model is said to differ from the moral influence theory by aiming at moral agency, but his notion of responsiveness to moral considerations is so capacious that it reduces to intrinsic motivation to act morally, so the model inherits the old theory’s defects. And his 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 does no work. | Read |
| NOTE-853 | Fricker — Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice | Fricker’s later statement of her two concepts. Testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement through prejudice, and never a deliberate manipulation of credibility. Hermeneutical injustice is caused by hermeneutical marginalisation and persists despite individual good faith. Both are “discriminatory” epistemic injustice, distinct from distributive kinds. Testimonial injustice can be structural and pre-emptive, as with an un-refreshed list of expert witnesses. | Read |
| NOTE-856 | De Marco and Cyr — Manipulation Cases, Part 1 | An even-handed survey of manipulation arguments. It quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 and describes Cases 2 to 4, gives the generic schema (No-FR, No-Diff), and notes that Pereboom’s own version concludes by best explanation. Original-design cases defeat bypassing views, and natural-force cases defeat manipulator-focused views. Hard-line replies, parallel indeterministic cases, three dilemmas against the argument, and Todd’s mitigation version are set out. | Read |
| NOTE-859 | Fricker — Powerlessness and Social Interpretation | Hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalisation. It is systematic when the marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and incidental when it is one-off and local, which can happen to a socially powerful subject. A gap with no marginalisation behind it is bad luck. The primary harm is situated hermeneutical inequality. Secondary harms include lost epistemic confidence and the social construction of identity. | Read |
| NOTE-860 | Fricker — Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing | A hearer takes testimony critically but without inference, through a socially trained testimonial sensibility. Because that sensibility runs on stereotypes of credibility, it can carry prejudice, and then a speaker receives the wrong degree of credibility through the hearer’s unintended prejudice: testimonial injustice. The corrective virtue, reflexive critical openness, is available only where the critical concepts of the time allow it. | Read |
| NOTE-862 | Caruso — Skepticism About Moral Responsibility (SEP) | The SEP survey of free will skepticism. It defines basic-desert responsibility in Pereboom’s words and states hard incompatibilism: compatibilism falls to the manipulation argument, event-causal libertarianism to luck, and agent-causal libertarianism to physics. It quotes Pereboom’s Case 2, gives the four-case argument’s structure, and says why soft-line replies are fragile. It also reports Levy’s argument that historical compatibilism cannot let agents take responsibility for their constitutive luck. | Read |
| NOTE-1014 | Boyle — The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood | A law professor’s essay on the line between persons and things, run across four cases: AI, corporations, nonhuman animals and transgenic entities. Personhood is pressed on two tracks, empathy-driven moral reasoning and efficiency-driven legal engineering, and the corporate history shows the second track working without a theory. Boyle predicts some intermediate legal status for AI, argues that capacity-based criteria cannot escape a species-bound standpoint, and ends on a hybrid of species membership as of right plus capacity. It argues and predicts; it does not measure. | Read |
| NOTE-1049 | Kay, Kasirzadeh and Mohamed — Epistemic injustice in generative AI | A conceptual taxonomy, illustrated with reported cases, of four ways generative models can take part in epistemic injustice: amplified and manipulative testimonial injustice, hermeneutical ignorance and access injustice. Its sharpest move is to relocate the testimonial wrong: in the algorithmic setting it “requires a credibility excess assigned to the algorithm”. It counts deliberate fabrication as testimonial injustice, which Fricker’s account sets apart, and stretches hermeneutical injustice to unequal access to information. Nothing in it is measured by the authors. | Read |
| NOTE-1095 | Sales Practices Investigation Report | The board’s own investigation finds that the harm came from the sales model and the performance management that enforced it, kept in place by a decentralized structure and a culture of deference, with control functions that handled cases one by one and a board told too little. It names and sanctions individual leaders as well. It also records that leadership blamed individual employees, and that signals of the harm reached people who could not act on them, or were filtered before they reached those who could. | Read |
| NOTE-1247 | The epistemic challenge to longtermism | A model of the epistemic objection to longtermism. A $1 million existential-risk intervention changes the chance that civilization exists in 1000 years by a conservative 2 x 10^-14, and its effect lasts until an “exogenous nullifying event” arrives at a constant rate r, which acts as an exponential discount. Against a global-health benchmark of 10,000 QALYs, it wins if r is below about 0.000135 per year with interstellar settlement, or 0.000000012 per year on Earth alone. Small credences in settlement, low r, fast travel or star-sized value make it win by orders of magnitude, but then the win can rest on probabilities as small as 10^-18. So the case for longtermism depends on non-obvious empirical claims or on Pascalian fanaticism, and its horizon may be thousands or millions of years, not billions. | Read |
| NOTE-1252 | A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption | Climate change is a “perfect moral storm” in which three storms converge. The global storm is a tragedy of the commons between states. The intergenerational storm is worse: carbon dioxide stays in the air for centuries, 17–33% of it for a thousand years by the estimate quoted, so the benefits of emitting go to the present and the costs to later generations. Every generation then has reason to overpollute, and since generations do not coexist, no institution or reciprocity can stop it. The theoretical storm is that our theories cope badly with such cases. Together they make moral corruption easy: each generation can seem to take the problem seriously while exploiting its position in time, and need not admit it, “either to others, or, perhaps more importantly, to itself”. | Read |
| NOTE-1261 | Generativity as a Route to Active Ageing | Two Heidelberg gerontologists read generativity, Erikson’s “concern in establishing and guiding the next generation”, as the psychological form of an ethical “joint responsibility” that lasts into very old age. They follow McAdams: generativity is driven by cultural demand and an inner desire, which is a need to be needed and a need for symbolic immortality, “to invest resources and potentials into things that outlive the self”. It is not altruism, and its motives can be selfish or altruistic. In 3,308 older adults in Mexico, Spain and Germany, generativity predicted optimism and life satisfaction. An intervention of intergenerational projects in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine raised generativity scores in old and young. No statistics are given. | Read |
| NOTE-1263 | Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles | Most of our choices change who will exist, so a policy that makes later lives much worse may be worse for no one who ever lives. Narrow person-affecting principles then imply that such a policy, or ending human history by having no children, is not wrong. Parfit rejects them, and retracts his own 1984 appeal to an impersonal principle. Being caused to exist with a life worth living is an intrinsic “existential benefit”. On the Wide Principle an outcome is worse if it benefits people less, which solves the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms and keeps “better than” transitive. A Wide Dual Principle, counting benefits to each and benefits to all, does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion. We may favour present people in what we do, but if every generation does, “we and our successors might together wreck the Earth”. | Read |
| NOTE-1269 | Shaping Humanity’s Longterm Trajectory | Humanity’s value per unit time is a curve, the future’s value the area under it, and an intervention’s value the area between two curves. Value must be summable and separable across time, and there is no pure time preference. Four idealised changes have values independent of the curve’s shape. An advancement is worth about (v_τ − v_0)δt, which does not grow with the future’s duration, and is negative if the end comes sooner too. A speed-up scales with (v_τ − v̄)τ, a gain with τ, an enhancement with v̄τ. Raising near-term survival by a factor γ_p is worth (γ_p − 1)v̄τ, like an enhancement, and is more surely contingent. So advancing progress rarely rivals existential risk reduction: on a million-year future a year’s advancement equals a one-in-a-million gain in survival. | Read |
| NOTE-1294 | Death | The SEP survey of death. Life is the capacity of an object’s parts to control what composes it; death is the loss of that capacity. Epicurus’s case that death is nothing to us needs intrinsic hedonism and a narrow view of extrinsic harm. Without them, death can harm by depriving one of goods one would have had. When it harms is disputed. On Pitcher’s priorism a death, or a posthumous event, can thwart desires one has while alive, and so harm one then, without backward causation. Critics answer that desires one no longer has cannot be thwarted. Luper argues that immortality need not be tedious, and that giving up desires death could thwart would cost as much as it saves. | Read |
| NOTE-1300 | The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework | The value an event E contributes through a feature F of the world is significance × persistence × contingency: value per unit of the time E adds (ΔV/ΔT), how long F lasts (T), and the share of that duration due to E (ΔT/T). Under uncertainty the factors are taken ex ante (ΔEV/ΔET, ET, ΔET/ET), which keeps the product but is not the product of expected factors. An alternative takes significance as V/T and makes contingency the sum of the semi-elasticities of significance, persistence and the probability that F exists. The result estimates the “importance” factor of the ITN framework. It is an accounting device that assumes expected-value maximisation; it says nothing about who is moved by the value it counts. | Read |
| NOTE-1302 | The Case for Strong Longtermism | Axiological strong longtermism: in the most important decisions facing agents today, every near-best option is near-best for the far future and delivers much larger benefits there than in the near future. The case runs through a benefit ratio. Bednets save 0.025 lives per 100 in expectation; AI safety beats bednets even on an Earth-only 10^14. A stakes-sensitivity argument carries this to what one ought to do. Discounting would defeat it: a zero pure rate of time preference is “near-essential”. Fanaticism is the weakest point the authors admit. They give an impersonal good as the ground and say nothing about motivation. | Read |
| NOTE-1304 | Intergenerational Justice | The entry argues as well as surveys. Future people’s existence, number and identity depend on our choices, so harm understood as making someone worse off than they were, or would otherwise have been, cannot reach them: the non-identity problem. A threshold notion of harm can: we harm someone by causing her to exist, or to be, below a normatively set level. Read as sufficientarian, in basic needs or capabilities, this grounds future people’s rights, and Rawls’s just savings principle is one version of it. Being weakly person-affecting, it owes merely possible people nothing, and gives no reason to prefer a flourishing future to none. Meyer fills that gap with concerns that are not rights: Scheffler’s afterlife conjecture, and a duty owed to present and past people not to destroy what future-oriented projects depend on. | Read |
| NOTE-1306 | Review of Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife | Cottingham reviews Scheffler’s book: two 2012 Tanner Lectures and a third paper given at Chicago the year before, four commentaries and replies. He reports the afterlife conjecture and its upshot, that in one respect our own survival matters less to us than humanity’s. The third lecture argues that a life must be bounded, so immortality is no remedy, while confidence in our values needs others to live on. Frankfurt doubts the concern is altruistic; Wolf holds we could and should “snap out of it” and go on. Cottingham regrets that religious reflection on finitude is left out. | Read |
| NOTE-1308 | High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation | On Ord’s simple model, with constant per-century risk r and constant value v per century, cutting this century’s risk by a fraction f is worth fv, whatever r is: halving 20% risk is worth the same as halving 2%. Absolute cuts are worth fv/r, linear and quadratic value growth give fv/r and fv(2 - r)/r^2, and cutting risk in every century gives (f/(1 - f))(v/r). In each, higher risk lowers the value of mitigation. At 20% risk a 10% cut is worth 0.5v to 4.5v. Astronomical value returns only if risk falls soon and stays very low (a time of perils of two centuries and 0.01% afterwards gives 160v). Thorstad finds the arguments for that hypothesis (wisdom, an existential risk Kuznets curve, space settlement) weak. | Read |
| NOTE-1314 | Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development | Each second’s delay in settling the Virgo Supercluster loses the potential for about 10^29 lives (10^13 if all must be biological). On a total, undiscounted view that makes delay an enormous loss. But a one-percentage-point cut in existential risk is worth over 10 million years of delay, so the total utilitarian’s priority is safety: “Minimize existential risk!”. On a person-affecting view only people now alive or who will exist count, and extinction is bad for what it does to them. Given a chance that some now alive live to share the cosmic benefits, safety is then very important but must be balanced against speed. The grounding is impersonal on the first view and the present generation’s own good on the second. Nothing is said about motivation. | Read |
| NOTE-1318 | Population and Having Children Now | Narveson’s late restatement of the person-affecting view, after giving up utilitarianism. Creating a person neither benefits nor harms them, since before conception there is no one to compare. But the existence of people with good lives is normally good, and a reason to create them, “contrary, perhaps” to how his 1967 and 1973 papers were read. It matters because parents and the benevolent like it and because more people benefit others. Only harm to actual persons, “alive, breathing, and acting now (or at any rate in their lifetimes)”, can justify coercing procreation; possible people are owed nothing. Not aiding the poor is not harming them. The second half claims, with little evidence, that resources are created and that present and future people do not compete for them. | Read |
| NOTE-1321 | Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority | An existential risk threatens premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential. Four classes: extinction, permanent stagnation, flawed realisation, subsequent ruination. On an aggregative, time-neutral view Earth alone could hold 10^16 future lives, so a millionth of a percentage point of risk is worth a hundred million lives. Maxipok, a rule of thumb for impersonal moral action, follows. Adams’ shared project of humanity, preference satisfaction and custodial duties concur. Bostrom finds a “deficit of motivation”: the good is pan-generational and public, its beneficiaries cannot pay, and moral sentiment is insensitive to scope. | Read |
| NOTE-1365 | Human Rights Watch — That’s When the Nightmare Started | A human-rights report built on interviews with 43 Chagossians in the UK, Mauritius and the Seychelles, 14 other interviews and a documentary record taken largely from UK court judgments. It argues that the expulsion of 1965–73, the continuing bar on return and treatment on racial grounds are three continuing crimes against humanity — deportation or forcible transfer, other inhumane acts, and persecution — committed by the UK, the first jointly with the US, and asks for return, compensation and satisfaction as reparations. | Read |
| NOTE-1391 | ECtHR Grand Chamber — El-Masri v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia | A unanimous Grand Chamber held the respondent State responsible for inhuman and degrading treatment in 23 days’ incommunicado hotel detention, for torture by a CIA team at Skopje Airport carried out with its agents’ acquiescence and help, for handing him to the US 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, and for failing to investigate; the burden of proof shifted to the State once he was shown to have entered its control. | Read |
| NOTE-1428 | Maitra — The Nature of Epistemic Injustice | A critical study that reports Fricker’s definitions with the book’s pages: testimonial injustice is a credibility deficit owed to the hearer’s identity prejudice, and epistemic bad luck is not one; hermeneutical injustice is a significant area of social experience obscured from collective understanding by hermeneutical marginalization, which may be systematic or incidental. Maitra argues that a deficit wrongs a speaker only where the hearer owes her a matched judgement, that bad luck and carelessly kept stereotypes can wrong her too, and that both kinds of injustice mix individual and structural prejudice. | Read |
| NOTE-1457 | Fischer — The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories | Fischer’s reply to the Dilemma Defense. If indeterminism holds, buffer cases remove every robust alternative; if determinism holds, a case can assume it without assuming it removes alternatives, so that determinism and Black’s device together, and neither alone, remove them. The moral is conditional: if determinism rules out responsibility, it is not by eliminating alternatives. Fischer allows that determinism may still rule it out another way, such as by removing sourcehood, and rejects Widerker’s demand that a Frankfurt case satisfy IRR. | Read |
| NOTE-1458 | Barad — Nature’s Queer Performativity | Barad argues that what classical ontology treats as separate things with fixed properties are phenomena, relations without prior relata, and that an intra-action within a phenomenon enacts an agential cut: “a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy”, giving agential separability, not absolute separation. The case is made by reading lightning, stingray receptor cells, Pfiesteria and the quantum-eraser experiment as failures of classical identity and causality. It is an essay; the physics is cited and interpreted, not argued from, and the term “apparatus” is used only of the two-slit set-up. | Read |
| NOTE-1459 | Timpe — Source Incompatibilism and Its Alternatives | Against the received split between leeway and source incompatibilism. Mere alternatives cannot meet a control condition, so any acceptable incompatibilism rests on ultimacy; and ultimacy needs indeterminism, which leaves more than one open future, so it entails an alternative-possibilities condition, though perhaps only for non-robust, involuntary alternatives that do no explanatory work. The best source incompatibilism is therefore “wide”, and the taxonomy should go. Timpe counts Pereboom among those who keep an alternatives condition while making the source condition more fundamental. | Read |
| NOTE-1499 | Metzinger — The Elephant and the Blind | More than 500 meditators’ retrospective reports of “pure awareness”, from a survey of 1,403 people in 57 countries, are offered as evidence that consciousness occurs without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. Pure awareness is modelled as the top level of a nested active-inference hierarchy, “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness. The book concedes that retrospective reports cannot show that a state was selfless when it happened, and its summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established” all the same. | Skimmed |