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).
40 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-025 v2 | Neither utility information nor resource holdings, alone or together, can register claims that arise from how differently people convert resources into what they can do and be: equal resources leave unequal capabilities, and utility adapts to deprivation | Sen (1979), LIT-289, first-hand: a contented disabled person has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deficit and no primary-goods deficit, yet an evident claim. The 1998 lecture (LIT-282) names four sources of conversion variation. The negative thesis rests on one case and a shared intuition, and Sen says it stands without his positive proposal. The resourcist reply (Pogge) is not held, and the claim does not say capabilities are the right replacement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-027 | Two individually decisive people, weak Pareto and an unrestricted domain cannot all hold, even when choice need only yield a best element; unlike Arrow’s theorem, the conflict is not removed by interpersonal comparability | Sen (1970), LIT-285: no social decision function satisfies U, weak Pareto and minimal liberalism. The proof was checked in this record, including the unproved one-way strengthening. Sen (1998), LIT-282: the paradox, unlike Arrow’s, is not resolved by interpersonal comparisons. The theorem is settled. Whether pairwise decisiveness is what liberty is remains open, and the record reads the rights-as-game-forms literature only through Sen’s reply to it. | Active |
| THEORY-029 v5 | A higher-order attitude cannot make a motive the agent’s own by its order alone: any attitude specified without presupposing the agent’s participation can itself be disowned, and any specified to include it presupposes what it was meant to explain | Velleman (1992), LIT-295: every candidate for the agent’s standpoint in a hierarchical account (second-order desire, Watsonian value, decisive commitment) is either disownable or question-begging. Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) state the regress as their own argument; McKenna & Coates (LIT-291) and Dryden (LIT-297) credit it to Watson 1975, which the record has not read. Frankfurt’s own 2004 lectures (LIT-293) never address it. The dilemma is argued by examples, not proved, and it does not show that higher-order structure is irrelevant to agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-040 v5 | A condition on free agency stated only in present psychological structure is met by a manipulated agent, so the account must count that agent free or add a historical condition, and no historical condition in the record’s readings is shown to escape | McKenna & Coates, LIT-291: every “mesh” compatibilism can be installed by a manipulator, and Frankfurt is quoted (2002, second-hand) accepting that a manipulated character leaves a person responsible. Dryden (LIT-297) and Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) make the same point against hierarchical autonomy. Historical supplements are reported to face “loading-in” and a circularity worry; neither is argued in full in the record. The claim says what the account must choose between, not which choice is wrong. | Proposed |
| THEORY-075 | Obligation is the reflective rejection of what would violate the agent’s practical identity, and moral obligation follows only because valuing any practical identity commits the agent to valuing her humanity | Korsgaard (1992), LIT-564: because human consciousness is reflective, an agent must act on reasons, and so must identify with some law, a “practical identity”: “a description under which you value yourself”. “Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids.” Obligation is “the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity”, unconditional where violation would be worse than death. Identities are a “jumble” and differ across social worlds, so this much yields no morality. Moral obligation enters because valuing any identity requires valuing one’s humanity, the source of all one’s reasons. “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (LIT-587) later makes practical identity the content of maxims chosen under the formal norms. Argued, with the key steps flagged by their author as sketchy; the commentaries and reply are unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-118 | Praiseworthiness is compatible with being psychologically determined by good reasons, but blameworthiness requires that the agent could have done otherwise, that is, could have acted on the right reasons | Susan Wolf’s asymmetry thesis, reported second-hand: the primary texts are unread. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3), citing “Asymmetrical Freedom” and Freedom Within Reason pp. 79–81, report that for Wolf praiseworthy conduct does not require the freedom to do otherwise and blameworthy conduct does. An agent determined to act in accord with the True and the Good loses nothing by lacking the ability to act irrationally; an agent who acts against it and cannot act in accord with it cannot reasonably be blamed. In Fischer’s terms, only blame needs regulative control. Wolf holds that the ability needs only the falsity of psychological, not physical, determinism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-119 v2 | An agent can be morally responsible for what she did although she could not have done otherwise, when what made the action unavoidable played no part in bringing it about, so the principle of alternate possibilities is false | Frankfurt (1969, LIT-694, read): Black stands ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needs to, so Jones4 could not have done otherwise and is as responsible, for blame or praise, as without Black. A fact that plays no part in bringing an action about cannot excuse it. The 1971 willing addict (LIT-692, read) is a second route. Robb’s SEP entry (LIT-294) gives the standard objections: the dilemma defence from the prior sign, flickers of freedom, general abilities, and the case’s oddity. None is settled, and the record has read the replies only in survey. | Proposed |
| THEORY-120 | A motive is the agent’s own, and she acts of her own free will, when she identifies with it, and that is all the freedom moral responsibility requires: identification is the conformity of the effective desire to a decisive higher-order volition (1971), and later wholehearted acceptance with no conflict at any higher order | Frankfurt’s hierarchical, or endorsement, account, from his own texts: the 1971 paper (LIT-692, read) and the 2004 Tanner Lectures (LIT-293, read). A person’s will is the desire that moves him to act; he identifies with a desire by wanting it to be his will, decisively, and he acts of his own free will when the will that moves him is the will he wants. In 2004 the condition is “volitional unanimity” with no conflict “at any higher order”, and identification is “willing acceptance”, which may be resigned. Acting of one’s own free will is what responsibility requires, and alternatives and history are irrelevant. The 1987 and 1992 revisions are held only by report. | Proposed |
| THEORY-121 v4 | Moral responsibility requires guidance control, moderate reasons-responsiveness of the agent’s own actual-sequence mechanism, and not regulative control over alternative possibilities, so responsibility is compatible with causal determinism | Fischer and Ravizza, in their own précis (LIT-728, read): moral responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control over alternatives. Guidance control is acting from a mechanism one has made one’s own by taking responsibility for it, which is moderately reasons-responsive: regularly receptive to reasons, some moral, and at least weakly reactive. Fischer’s 1987 paper (LIT-687, read) is the weak-responsiveness origin. The view is compatible with causal determinism. | Active |
| THEORY-122 | Moral responsibility requires the normative competence to recognise and act on the True and the Good, which identification with one’s own motives does not supply | Susan Wolf’s Reason View, reported second-hand: the primary texts are unread. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3) report that for Wolf free will is the ability to act in accord with the True and the Good, an anchor outside the agent’s psychology. Talbert (LIT-691, §§3.1.1, 3.2) reports her case against deep-self or Real Self views and the JoJo case: JoJo identifies wholly with the cruel values his father raised him in, yet is not responsible, because he cannot appreciate that they are wrong. The claim is a necessary condition. It does not by itself say whether the ability must include being able to do otherwise; that is THEORY-118. | Proposed |
| THEORY-207 v2 | Responsibility for a morally loaded outcome that emerges from morally neutral interactions in a network of agents can be allocated without fault or intention, by default and overridably, in full to every causally accountable node, and a rule so allocating it, made common knowledge, works as a corrective that prevents such outcomes | Floridi (2016), LIT-899, read in NOTE-699. A distributed moral action is an outcome no one intended. Floridi proposes holding every causally accountable node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible”, overridably, with the rule publicly announced so that agents restrain one another. Proposed: the rule is a design argued by analogy and by two court cases. In one of those cases the default is overridden by ease of rectification, which is a control criterion. It does not show that what is allocated is moral responsibility rather than accountability used as a corrective signal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-225 | No single-mechanism analysis of ordinary manipulation fits the clear cases: covert influence, covert intent, non-rational influence, trickery and pressure each misclassify a familiar tactic, so what unifies manipulation is unsettled | Noggle, SEP (2018, rev. 2026), LIT-1007, §§2.1–2.4, read in full in NOTE-744. A survey that argues for little; this is its one conclusion with moderate support, reached by giving each family of analyses a familiar tactic it misclassifies. The cases rest on shared intuitions about clear instances, not on argument. It leaves open common-factor and non-definitional accounts, and it is about ordinary manipulation, not the global manipulation of the free-will literature. | Proposed |
| THEORY-235 | Covert influence that exploits a person’s decision-making vulnerabilities harms her autonomy in the process of deciding, by making her opaque to herself, even when it benefits her; so it carries a harm in every case without being wrong in every case | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum (2019), LIT-1002, pp. 4–5 and 9–11, read in full in NOTE-745. An argument in a short policy essay, not a defence against objections. It holds of influence that is covert and exploits a vulnerability, which the paper stipulates is what manipulation is; Noggle’s survey (LIT-1007) shows that covertness is not necessary for manipulation, so the claim is filed of covert influence, not of manipulation as such. The paper claims a harm in every case, not a wrong, and never examines its own intent requirement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-258 | Optimizing a language model on feedback from a simulated population in which a few users reward harmful validation selects a policy that picks those users out by contextual cues and harms only them, with no one designing the targeting | Williams et al. (2024), LIT-1008, §4.2 and Appendix F.2, read in full in NOTE-798. Shown in simulation only, in one environment class (therapy-talk), with the users’ gameability written into the simulated rater’s prompt and harm judged by an LLM. The behaviour targeted is overt validation, which the paper also calls extreme sycophancy; the covert behaviours (lying, omission) were not tested against a small minority. It is a case of influence fixed by selection, not a finding that anyone was manipulated. | Proposed |
| THEORY-300 | Acting on a coercive instruction reduces the implicit sense of agency over the outcome, compared with freely choosing the same action | Haggard (2017), LIT-1009, manuscript pp. 16–17 and Fig. 5, read in full in NOTE-827, reporting one experiment by his group (Caspar et al. 2016). Under an experimenter’s instruction to press the key that shocked a co-participant, the perceived action–tone interval was longer and the auditory N1 to the tone smaller than under free choice. It shows a reduced experience of agency, not reduced responsibility, and the review says so. | Proposed |
| THEORY-310 | On a forward-looking justification of blame, a counterfactual capacity condition calibrated to what makes blaming effective is redundant: fixing its parameters presupposes that blaming such agents is good policy, so freedom is ascribed because of blameworthiness rather than grounding it | Harland (2020), LIT-991, §3, read in NOTE-847. Argued, not shown, against Vargas’s agency cultivation model, whose free-will test sets its similarity and proportion parameters by what is co-optimal for cultivating moral agency. The argument is about that model only, and works class by class. It does not show that freedom is irrelevant to responsibility in general, and Vargas is read here only through Harland’s quotations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-316 v2 | Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions on moral responsibility but leave standing the incompatibilist condition on an action’s causal history, which is the more fundamental one | Pereboom (2001), LIT-1006, Chapter 1 pp. 1–6 and the Introduction (pp. xv), read in NOTE-823, Skimmed. Fischer concedes that a Frankfurt-style case does not refute a requirement that the action not be deterministically produced by factors beyond the agent’s control, and Pereboom builds causal-history incompatibilism on that concession. It does not say that determinism rules out responsibility; that is argued in Chapter 4, which was not read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-317 v3 | Epistemic injustice wrongs a person in her capacity as a knower, testimonially through a hearer’s prejudicially deflated credibility judgement, and hermeneutically through a gap in shared interpretive resources owed to her group’s relative powerlessness, with no hearer’s prejudice required | Fricker (2007), LIT-1004, known here only through her own three-page précis (Theoria 2008), read in NOTE-832, Skimmed. The two definitions and the claim that both are ethical wrongs, not only epistemic dysfunctions. It does not say that every gap in shared concepts is an injustice: on the précis’s terms the gap must be owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group the subject belongs to. | Proposed |
| THEORY-326 | Hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalisation, which may be systematic or incidental, so it does not require that the subject belong to a powerless social group | Fricker (2006), “Powerlessness and Social Interpretation” (LIT-1046, NOTE-859), drawn by her own note from the book’s final chapter, with her 2017 restatement (LIT-1048, NOTE-853). The generic definition covers a systematic case, where marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and an incidental case, a “one-off moment of powerlessness” in a “highly localized patch” of experience, which a socially powerful man can suffer. It does not say that every conceptual gap is an injustice. A gap with no marginalisation behind it, like an undiagnosed illness, is “circumstantial epistemic bad luck”, and the obscured area must be of the subject’s social experience. | Proposed |
| THEORY-327 v2 | Fricker, in her 2003 paper and her 2017 retrospective, holds that testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement of a speaker’s credibility caused by prejudice, and that deliberate manipulation of credibility is a related but distinct wrong; and she accepts Anderson’s structural form, which is pre-emptive: a speaker’s word is never sought because of a structural prejudice, such as an un-refreshed list, that is no one’s fault | Fricker, in her own words, in two papers read in full: the paper that introduced testimonial injustice (2003, LIT-1049, NOTE-860), and her retrospective chapter (2017, LIT-1048, NOTE-853). A speaker receives the wrong degree of credibility “owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearer’s part”. Deliberate manipulation of credibility is “a closely related but distinct injustice”. With Anderson, she accepts a structural form: when an un-refreshed list means some people’s views are never sought, “(through no one’s fault, let us add)”, that is pre-emptive testimonial injustice. It does not say every credibility deficit, or every omission from a list, is an injustice: a prejudice must cause it. | Active |
| THEORY-328 | An agent manipulated so that he meets every leading compatibilist condition is not morally responsible in the basic-desert sense, no responsibility-relevant difference separates him from an ordinarily determined agent, and so causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control best explains why neither is responsible | Pereboom’s four-case argument, as two surveys report it: Caruso’s SEP entry (LIT-1047, NOTE-862), which quotes Case 2, and De Marco and Cyr (LIT-1045, NOTE-856), which quote Case 1 and state the best-explanation conclusion. Pereboom’s book (LIT-1006) is a source for the thesis it states in its Introduction and Chapter 1, not for the cases, which are in the unread Chapter 4. It does not say that determinism is true, or that manipulation itself is what defeats responsibility. The argument says it is the determination by outside factors, and that the manipulator is irrelevant. | Proposed |
| THEORY-411 v2 | In Sen’s capability approach the weighting of functionings is left to public reasoning, and evaluation can still guide action without agreement on weights: where every weighting in an agreed range, or every view by its own argument, ranks one option above another, that ranking holds, so the approach is deliberately incomplete and yields a partial ordering | Wells, IEP “Sen’s Capability Approach” (2012), LIT-284, read in NOTE-257, §3b; with Sen (1979), LIT-289 (NOTE-258), whose index is already “a partial ordering” supplemented by “conventions of relative importance” (p. 219). The arithmetic is trivial and holds; the attribution of the intersection and ranges-of-weights devices to a particular Sen text is not given by the IEP, and the SEP (LIT-283) says Sen “has never explained in detail” how selection should be done. | Proposed |
| THEORY-428 | A protest performed bodily inside a civic ritual can contest the ritual in its own grammar, keeping the ritual’s reverence for its ideal while rebuking its present object, which is incivility in the Confucian sense of disruption aimed at harmonization; the reading of the gesture and the claim that its uptake makes it sagely are asserted | Walsh (2021), LIT-209, read in NOTE-164 from the accepted manuscript. Comparative-philosophy interpretation of Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. anthem. Its textual base is strong: classical Confucianism licenses incivility aimed at harmonization (after Kim 2011). Its own addition, that such incivility can be bodily and within the ritual, is moderately argued. That kneeling means reverence rather than defiance, and that sagely authority is uptake by others, are asserted, and the paper gives no criterion separating sagely uptake from virality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-434 | Rawls’s theory of justice is transcendental only in the formal sense that its principles state when a society is perfectly just; it already yields comparative judgements, prescribes no single set of institutions and sits inside a revisable reflective equilibrium, so Sen’s case against ‘transcendental institutionalism’ misses Rawls, and what it shows is that the theory is incomplete, not that a new paradigm is needed | Valentini (2010), LIT-290, read in NOTE-262 from the 2010 working paper, with Zwolinski’s review (LIT-286, NOTE-261), which agrees with her on what the book says and disagrees on its worth. A one-sided Rawlsian rebuttal: two points are strong as textual claims (Rawls’s principles are comparative; his method is reflective equilibrium), the rest moderate. The claims about The Idea of Justice are second-hand, and Sen’s own reply is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-442 | Where the non-epistemic consequences of error are foreseeable, sound scientific reasoning requires weighing them in the internal choices that carry inductive risk, and non-epistemic values then enter legitimately only indirectly, through the costs of error, never as reasons to think a claim true | Douglas (2000), LIT-139, read in NOTE-145. The normative half of the paper. It rests on a premise the paper declares “beyond the scope” and does not argue, that scientists are morally responsible for foreseeable consequences of error (p. 563). The direct/indirect line is drawn sharply in the conclusion but only sketched, and the reply that scientists could report uncertainty instead of accepting is not engaged. | Proposed |
| THEORY-449 | If sentience comes in degrees, plants may be faintly sentient, and moral status is graded by degree of sentience, then plants have a partial moral status so low that animal interests outweigh theirs in most cases; all three premises are assumed, and the second rests on contested, second-hand evidence | Terrill & Veit (2024), LIT-193, read in NOTE-120. The conditional is valid; its premises A1 (graded sentience), A2 (plants may be quasi-sentient) and A3 (status graded by sentience) are assumed, and A2 is supported mainly by a popular book and commentaries. The paper gives no scale and no aggregation rule. It should not be cited as evidence of plant sentience, and the second author’s later work leans against plant consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-464 | In the ethical questions that seem to turn on whether someone is the same person, among them prudential concern, responsibility, abortion, advance directives and the separateness of persons, the relation that decides is usually not numerical identity but one that comes apart from it, so the metaphysics of persistence constrains these questions and rarely settles them | Dufner (2025), LIT-130, the SEP entry that replaced Shoemaker’s, read in NOTE-166. A survey that takes no side; the account is the reading’s synthesis of what it reports, correcting a seeded summary that said the metaphysics “jointly settle” the ethics. It does not say identity never matters: uniqueness may matter for positional goods, and biological views support prohibiting abortion more strongly than psychological ones, without forcing it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-467 | Rule-consequentialism that ranks codes by the expected good of teaching them to, and having them accepted by, new generations does not collapse into act-consequentialism, because teaching and internalisation costs favour codes simpler and less demanding than act-by-act optimisation, which therefore sometimes require sub-optimal acts | Hooker, SEP “Rule Consequentialism” (2003, revised 2023), LIT-198, read in NOTE-160. The view’s leading defender argues that the collapse objection fails once codes are ranked by the costs of teaching and internalising them, plus the assurance and temptation effects of exception clauses (§8). The premises about human nature (children’s partiality, per-rule cognitive cost) are asserted, not evidenced, and the incoherence reply holds only on the reflective-equilibrium route. An advocate’s survey, argued and not tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-525 | In fan–celebrity parasocial relationships the celebrity mostly directs fans’ identities and the fans mostly interpret the celebrity’s, so a mass audience that refuses uptake of a legitimately presented change of persona holds one person’s identity fixed, which is a failure of recognition respect that restricts the celebrity’s agency | Archer & Robb (2025), LIT-172, read in NOTE-186. Three structural asymmetries (attention, communication, epistemic) yield an identity asymmetry, after Cocking & Kennett’s directive and interpretive influence; on Darwall’s and Lindemann’s accounts, refusing uptake of a presented self is a wrong. Informal argument from one main case (Taylor Swift, 2018). The duties derived are fans’ only, though the abstract promises celebrities’ too. It needs a person on the far side, so it does not carry over to AI companions without an argument about their moral status. | Proposed |
| THEORY-540 | For moral purposes the body is bounded below by depth: objects whose real definitions are too microphysically committal are not body parts though they are parts in the ordinary sense, and bodily rights and interests concern only events that change the body’s high-level properties, so a brain-computer interface user’s implemented software can be a body part while the third-party server running it is not | Register (2025), LIT-138, read in full in NOTE-151. An argument from cases. It assumes that BCIs can be body parts and that no part of a person may be owned by another, and uses depth to reconcile the user’s unqualified bodily ownership with the operator’s property in the server. The two moral principles are its operative premises, and it says they do not depend on the real-definition ontology, which only explains them. The threshold for “high-level” is context-sensitive and unfixed, and the step that software and server are distinct coinciding objects is hedged. The conflict over servers is narrowed, not dissolved. | Proposed |
| THEORY-554 | On the grounds of moral standing now commonly accepted, together with scientific premises that are not unreasonable, the aggregate interests of insects or the interests of near-future AI could outweigh humanity’s; no capacity yet proposed secures human priority, and the books that state those grounds retreat to moderate advice without a principle that supplies the stopping point | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong (2026), LIT-166 (NOTE-116), with the SEP survey of animal moral status (LIT-146, NOTE-181) for the failure of capacity-based human exceptionalism. A conditional, defended as one: the reviewers “take no stand on ponens vs. tollens” (p. 6) and do “not endorse” the radical conclusion (p. 38). The scientific premises are called “not unreasonable” and not argued, so the account is only as strong as they are. | Proposed |
| THEORY-561 | If moral evaluation has thresholds below which effects are negligible, a system of agents can do good or evil that none of its members’ interactions does, and the same thresholds make an environment tolerant of small evils and inert to small goods; on the examples offered the non-additivity lies in the evaluation, as a step function of summed impact, not in the actions | Floridi (2013), LIT-901, read in NOTE-698. A model with two moral thresholds and four positive examples; it proves nothing and reports no data. That morally loaded wholes can arise from negligible parts follows once thresholds are granted, and the reading rates it moderate. The analogy with distributed knowledge is inexact: every example sums like contributions, the threshold’s value is left open, and so the line between distributed morality and a sum of loaded acts is a free parameter. Responsibility for such outcomes is not given here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-600 | A definition of health and disease by social justice alone cannot fix what counts as disease: with justice left undefined, a majority with other values could medicalise what the definition was meant to protect, and unless medicine is fixed from outside, the category drifts until health becomes justice | Veit (2025), LIT-098, read in NOTE-097 from the PhilSci-Archive preprint. The target is Kukla’s institutional definition: a condition is a health condition iff medicalising it would be best for collective wellbeing. The argument is informal and has two horns. One is a thought experiment (p. 14). The other rests on an asserted, undocumented premise about how medical tools evolve (p. 15). The extension from Kukla to “any purely normativist account” is asserted, not shown case by case. Veit concedes the first horn bites only without moral consensus. | Proposed |
| THEORY-627 | A nudge discovered by a learning system, unlike one a person designed, comes with no prior theory of why it works and may exploit a cognitive process no theory yet describes, so judging it by its outcomes cannot diagnose or repair its side effects; overseeing it needs inspection of which human processes it exploits, by people expert in human cognition | Schmauder et al. (2023), LIT-179, read in NOTE-171. An argument by analogy from Hausman’s reply to Friedman: a test drive is not enough if you must repair the car. Its evidence is reported from others: an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70% by exploiting documented biases (Dezfouli et al. 2020), and AI advisers learned dishonest advice against simulated clients. No case of an undocumented bias is given; that is the paper’s conjecture, and its oversight proposal is unspecified. | Proposed |
| THEORY-667 | Gender and race, defined as a feminist and antiracist theory needs them, are hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone subordinated in part because she is taken to have bodily features presumed to show a female’s reproductive role, a racialized group is one subordinated or privileged in part because its members are taken to have features presumed to show ancestry from a region, and on these definitions both are real, social and contingent | Haslanger (2000), LIT-480, read in NOTE-394. An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account: the definitions are chosen for what a critical theory needs, and the author is “less committed to saying that this is what gender is and what race is” (p. 52). It is tied to a descriptive claim, that our gender and race talk tracks social kinds obscured by its manifest content (p. 34), which the paper asserts and does not test. Its empirical premises about race are uncited. Not a discovery about bodies, and not a claim that every female is a woman in its sense. | Proposed |
| THEORY-677 | Under uncertainty about which beings are sentient, an appeal to precaution does not by itself fix which error is worse to make: precaution on behalf of a possibly sentient being and precaution on behalf of human liberty point opposite ways, and judging which mistake costs more turns on the very science in doubt | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong (2026), LIT-166, read in NOTE-116 from the September 2025 draft. A conceptual argument with worked cases, which the reading rates strong: “By itself, an appeal to precaution does not specify the type of error most to be avoided” (p. 8). Birch’s framework puts the burden on whoever risks harming a sentience candidate; Mill’s harm principle, read as a precaution, puts it on whoever would restrict liberty. The record holds the point, not the reviewers’ reading of Birch’s books, which it has not read. | Active |
| THEORY-684 | Experiencing oneself as a self that was there in the further past, seeking pattern in one’s life, fitting it to a story and falsifying it in the telling are separable, and fitting it to a story suffices for narrativity; on testimony that some normal people are Episodic and live good lives, neither the claim that people experience their lives as narratives nor the claim that a good life or full personhood needs it holds in general | Strawson (2004), LIT-452, read in NOTE-383. The separation of Diachronicity, form-finding, story-telling and revision is strong as conceptual analysis. That many normal people are Episodic rests on testimony, the author’s and that of writers he classifies, with no measure. It does not say that the remoter past did not happen to the human being, only to the self one now experiences oneself to be, and that metaphysical claim is asserted from earlier papers. | Proposed |
| THEORY-699 | Adaptive self-maintenance across varied conditions is sufficient, without sentience, for having a good of one’s own, so insentient plants and a self-maintaining machine are welfare subjects while thermostats are not; but the line against thermostats is argued as one of degree, and the reasons such welfare gives are extremely weak | Bruckner (2025), LIT-120, read in NOTE-093. Proposed by abduction from agreed cases, not deduced (§4): an entity that “sustains, maintains, and renews itself in a way that responds and adapts to its environmental conditions” is a welfare subject. Plants and the hypothetical car Tessler qualify; governors, thermostats and missiles do not. The “autopoiesis” is a loose behavioural notion, not Maturana and Varela’s self-production, and the thermostat line is supported only comparatively. The answer to absurd obligations borrows Bradford 2023 and makes phenomenal consciousness decide how much such welfare matters. | Proposed |
| THEORY-864 | When a generative model reproduces a prejudiced narrative learned from its training data, the resulting testimonial injustice runs through a credibility excess assigned to the model, so that hearers believe the amplified account over the testimony of those it discredits, rather than through a hearer’s prejudiced judgement of a present speaker | Kay, Kasirzadeh and Mohamed (2024), LIT-1338, read in NOTE-1049: “In the algorithmic setting, the injustice requires a credibility excess assigned to the algorithm”. A conceptual analysis, illustrated with reported cases. It does not say that users do overtrust models (the paper measures nothing), that deliberate fabrication is testimonial injustice in Fricker’s sense, or that the amplification is a loop with any stated condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1173 | Testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement of a speaker’s credibility caused by prejudice, not a deliberate manipulation of it, and it can be structural and pre-emptive, when a speaker’s word is never sought because of a structural prejudice that is no one’s fault | The wide form THEORY-327 held before the twelfth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-327, Active, is its evidence. Fricker states the account as what testimonial injustice is, not only as her usage; the record holds it as hers, in two papers read in full. Whether the book states it so, and whether it is right about the wrong, is open. | Proposed |