Donald Davidson proposed an event ontology and considered events as entities to which people can refer and over which people can quantify. Davidson also proposed to interpret actions as events that are intentional under some descriptions. Recent years, some philosophers further developed his theory of action and extended their analysis to collective actions. It is an aim of this paper to contribute to this research program. In this paper, based on a four-dimensional event ontology, I propose an axiomatic theory for (...) actions and agents and analyze collective actions and extended agents. This paper mainly investigates individual and collective actions that involve tools. This investigation also aims to give a metaphysical characterization of the ontological status of tools. In this investigation, it turns out that the four-dimensional ontology is a powerful framework to semantically describe temporally extended actions and collective actions. In two appendixes, I give a precise description of the proposed theories. (shrink)

Human brain organoids are three-dimensional structures that reproduce the structure and function of the human brain in vitro. In this paper, I focus on the question of the moral status future human brain organoids will occupy. It is generally believed that the moral status a being occupies depend on sentience it possesses. However, in this paper, I argue that the presence or absence of a “consciousness” other than sentience may also have moral importance in the light of the features that (...) seem to be unique to human brain organoids, and assert that a new perspective on whether human brain organoids belong to “we” or not may be necessary for thinking abstractly about how they should be treated morally. I argue that even if future human brain organoids lack sentience, they can occupy a moral status when they have so-called phenomenal or access consciousness. On the other hand, I argue that as long as future human brain organoids are as much a part of the “we” in terms of family membership as patients in a persistent vegetative state are. This would imply that even if human brain organoids do not have any kinds of consciousnesses, they may occupy some moral status. (shrink)