Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

This chapter is an investigation of the morality of medical deportation, the practice of returning undocumented migrants, despite their ill health and/or injuries, to their countries of origin. In Sect. 16.1, I look more closely at the nature of medical deportation. In Sect. 16.2, I argue that understanding the morality of medical deportation requires nonideal theory. In Sect. 16.3, I outline contractualism as a nonideal theory. In Sect. 16.4, I apply contractualism to medical deportation and make the case that, first, (...) there are in principle some cases in which medical deportation is morally permissible but, second, the standards that must be met in cases of morally permissible medical deportation are very high. In Sect. 16.5, I consider stakeholders other than the patient and the medical care facility and examine the ways in which effects on them might render medical deportation morally impermissible. I conclude that real-world cases of morally permissible medical deportation are rare at best, and there is little prospect of this situation changing. (shrink)

If a machine attains consciousness, how could we find out? In this paper, I make three related claims regarding positive tests of machine consciousness. All three claims center on the idea that an AI can be constructed “ad hoc”, that is, with the purpose of satisfying a particular test of consciousness while clearly not being conscious. First, a proposed test of machine consciousness can be legitimate, even if AI can be constructed ad hoc specifically to pass this test. This is (...) underscored by the observation that many, if not all, putative tests of machine consciousness can be passed by non-conscious machines via ad hoc means. Second, we can identify ad hoc AI by taking inspiration from the notion of an ad hoc hypothesis in philosophy of science. Third, given the first and the second claim, the most reliable tests of animal consciousness turn out to be valid and useful positive tests of machine consciousness as well. If a non-ad hoc AI exhibits clusters of cognitive capacities facilitated by consciousness in humans which can be selectively switched off by masking and if it reproduces human behavior in suitably designed double dissociation tasks, we should treat the AI as conscious. (shrink)

Since Mueller’s 1958 article calling Hegelian dialectics a “legend,” it has been fashionable to deny that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. But in truth, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has 28 dialectics hidden on four outline levels, and The Philosophy of History has 10 more on three outline levels. In Phenomenology’s macrodialectic, Hegel’s nonsupernatural Spirit–all reality, everything in the universe, including man and artificial objects–advances from unconscious + union (thesis) to conscious + separation (antithesis) to a synthesis of conscious (from the antithesis) (...) + union (from the thesis). Previous interpretations of Phenomenology have missed this dialectic: they have assumed that Spirit’s journey begins with consciousness, whereas the journey actually begins in the primordial state of nature, before man arrives and provides Spirit with its Mind (the collective mind of man). Mind then misperceives itself as a multitude of separate alien “objects”–things other than itself. The macrodialectic and all other dialectics are based on Christianity’s Johannine separation-and-return mythology; all Hegelian dialectics separate from a concept in the thesis, going to that something’s opposite (antithesis), and then return to the thesis concept. Thus, in Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectic (God = master, man = slave), man advances from potential + freedom to actual + bondage (religiosity) to actual + freedom (atheism). Only Marx and Tillich understood Hegelian dialectics. Marx’s basic dialectic (one of four) saw history separating from and returning to Communism, going from communal ownership + poverty (primitive communism, or gens) to private ownership + wealth (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) to communal ownership + wealth (final communism). Tillich’s basic dialectic (one of many) separates from and returns to God, advancing from Yes to God + Yes to supernaturalism (theism) to No to God + No to supernaturalism (atheism) to Yes to God + No to supernaturalism (humanism: humanity is the nonsupernatural “God above the God of theism”). (shrink)

The author offers perspectives that can assist healthcare managers in achieving the highest ethical standards as they face their roles as healthcare providers, employers, and community service organizations. He also examines how to comply with relevant laws and regulations, provide high quality patient care with limited resources, and more.

According to an orthodox view, the capacity for conscious experience (sentience) is relevant to the distribution of moral status and value. However, physicalism about consciousness might threaten the normative relevance of sentience. According to the indeterminacy argument, sentience is metaphysically indeterminate while indeterminacy of sentience is incompatible with its normative relevance. According to the introspective argument (by François Kammerer), the unreliability of our conscious introspection undercuts the justification for belief in the normative relevance of consciousness. I defend the normative relevance (...) of sentience against these objections. First, I demonstrate that physicalists only have to concede a limited amount of indeterminacy of sentience. This moderate indeterminacy is in harmony with the role of sentience in determining moral status. Second, I argue that physicalism gives us no reason to expect that introspection is unreliable with respect to the normative relevance of consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for an account of the evolution of human values according to which it is only through the resolution of local conflicts that broader social values develop. Global issues can only be understood as issues of increasingly broadening our understanding of the local, our understanding of who are the neighbors with whom we must productively and amicably engage. My analysis argues primarily for open dialogue based on listening carefully and maintaining a strong awareness of our own (...) areas of systematic blindness to those with whom we disagree. While my approach offers no recipe here to guarantee successful resolution to value conflict, any other approach is far more likely to lead to failure. (shrink)

Environmental ethics uniquely challenges us to re-examine the foundations of ethical thought. Ethical frameworks that focus on individual ethical agents and ethical patients, ignoring their status as parts of interrelated communities, lead to strongly counterintuitive results in important cases. Ideas only hinted at in Aldo Leopold’s idea of “land ethic” can be developed fruitfully by extending a pragmatist ethical framework drawn from the work of William James. Such a framework is not without difficulties, but does offer a potentially valuable way (...) of framing our ethical obligations toward the encompassing environment within which we live. (shrink)

Thepurpose of Wissenschaft und Weltanschaunng,1 by Aloys Wenzl, is to provide a rational explanation of the world which shall give us greater insight into its nature than either common sense or the natural sciences can give us. Philosophy, Professor Wenzl says in his introduction, springs from the desire for a weltanschaunng, for insight into the significance of life. But it also springs from a desire for rational explanation, and aims at objective validity. It proposes to give a truer, more complete, (...) and more intelligible account of reality than appearances provide. This idea of a more intelligible explanation underlies the whole of Professor Wenzl's book. We want more than knowledge of empirical facts, we want knowledge of reasons, or, as he often puts it, insight. We want to see that though things seem to be contingent, they are really necessary. (shrink)

Analyzes the meaning expressed in music, the social and psychological sources of meaning, and the methods of musical communication This is a book meant for ...

Many researchers and intellectuals warn about extreme risks from artificial intelligence. However, these warnings typically came without systematic arguments in support. This paper provides an argument that AI will lead to the permanent disempowerment of humanity, e.g. human extinction, by 2100. It rests on four substantive premises which it motivates and defends: first, the speed of advances in AI capability, as well as the capability level current systems have already reached, suggest that it is practically possible to build AI systems (...) capable of disempowering humanity by 2100. Second, due to incentives and coordination problems, if it is possible to build such AI, it will be built. Third, since it appears to be a hard technical problem to build AI which is aligned with the goals of its designers, and many actors might build powerful AI, misaligned powerful AI will be built. Fourth, because disempowering humanity is useful for a large range of misaligned goals, such AI will try to disempower humanity. If AI is capable of disempowering humanity and tries to disempower humanity by 2100, then humanity will be disempowered by 2100. This conclusion has immense moral and prudential significance. (shrink)

The science of animal consciousness investigates (i) which animal species are conscious (the distribution question) and (ii) how conscious experience differs in detail between species (the quality question). We propose a framework which clearly distinguishes both questions and tackles both of them. This two-tier account distinguishes consciousness along ten dimensions and suggests cognitive capacities which serve as distinct operationalizations for each dimension. The two-tier account achieves three valuable aims: First, it separates strong and weak indicators of the presence of consciousness. (...) Second, these indicators include not only different specific contents but also differences in the way particular contents are processed (by processes of learning, reasoning or abstraction). Third, evidence of consciousness from each dimension can be combined to derive the distinctive multi-dimensional consciousness profile of various species. Thus, the two-tier account shows how the kind of conscious experience of different species can be systematically compared. (shrink)

Which artificial intelligence (AI) systems are agents? To answer this question, I propose a multidimensional account of agency. According to this account, a system's agency profile is jointly determined by its level of goal-directedness and autonomy as well as is abilities for directly impacting the surrounding world, long-term planning and acting for reasons. Rooted in extant theories of agency, this account enables fine-grained, nuanced comparative characterizations of artificial agency. I show that this account has multiple important virtues and is more (...) informative than alternatives. More speculatively, it may help to illuminate two important emerging questions in AI ethics: 1. Can agency contribute to the moral status of non-human beings, and how? 2. When and why might AI systems exhibit power-seeking behaviour and does this pose an existential risk to humanity? (shrink)

Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

Until comparatively recently the complete text of the Opus Postutmum has not been available to students of the Kantian philosophy.Prior to the publication of Adickes’ commentary on this material in 1920, students of Kant were almost wholly dependent upon Reicke's incomplete and markedly inadequate edition of 1882–84. 2 Adickes’ commentary, with its abundance of quoted passages, provided an access to a great deal of material hitherto unavailable. But it was not until the publication of the Academy Edition in 1936 that (...) the complete text became available for independent study. Because of the recent publication of the full text, most accounts of Kant's position in the Opus Postumum have depended upon Reicke's inadequate edition or, as has been more frequently the case, upon Adickes’ commentary. 3 In view of the considerable influence it has had upon Kant interpretation, Adickes’ analysis of the Opus Postumum warrants a careful and critical examination. (shrink)

Abstract“Force dynamics” refers to a previously neglected semantic category—how entities interact with respect to force. This category includes such concepts as: the exertion of force, resistance to such exertion and the overcoming of such resistance, blockage of a force and the removal of such blockage, and so forth. Force dynamics is a generalization over the traditional linguistic notion of “causative”: it analyzes “causing” into finer primitives and sets it naturally within a framework that also includes “letting,”“hindering,”“helping,” and still further notions. (...) Force dynamics, moreover, appears to be the semantic category that uniquely characterizes the grammatical category of modals, in both their basic and epistemic usages. In addition, on the basis of force dynamic parameters, numerous lexical items fall into systematic semantic patterns, and there exhibit parallelisms between physical and psychosocial reference. Further, from research on the relation of semantic structure to general cognitive structure, it appears that the concepts of force interaction that are encoded within language closely parallel concepts that appear both in early science and in naive physics and psychology. Overall, force dynamics thus emerges as a fundamental notional system that structures conceptual material pertaining to force interaction in a common way across a linguistic range: the physical, psychological, social, inferential, discourse, and mental-model domains of reference and conception. (shrink)

The Postlude, written for this edition, looks back at the predictions made more than twenty-five years ago and speculates about what the coming decades may hold ...

Heidegger is noted for his concern with the nothing, das Nichts, and this may be partially due to the way in which his ideas were first introduced. Whereas the positivists regarded his writings as nonsense, employing his references to nothingness to prove them so, other of his interpreters took his thought seriously but regarded it as fundamentally nihilistic. He was pictured as an irrationalist philosopher, preoccupied with death and negativity. It is this representation of Heidegger which still prevails to a (...) large extent among philosophers in this country. Unlike the positivists, they accept what he says as meaningful and important but as having consequences which must be rejected not only as mistaken but, perhaps, as immoral. That this appraisal requires careful examination is indicated by the fact that not a few theologians have borrowed heavily from Heidegger and found in his writings important positive suggestions. The impression that Heidegger is a nihilist or even an irrationalist is mistaken from the ground up; it is difficult to understand how it could be sustained by anyone who had struggled through any one of Heidegger's essays. (shrink)

Which animals have conscious experiences? Many different, diverse and unrelated behaviors and cognitive capacities have been proposed as tests of the presence of consciousness in an animal. It is unclear which of these tests, if any, are valid. To remedy this problem, I develop a list consisting of eight desiderata which can be used to assess putative tests of animal consciousness. These desiderata are based either on detailed analogies between consciousness-linked human behavior and non-human behavior, on theories of consciousness or (...) on methods from human consciousness science. If a test or set of tests satisfies more of these desiderata, passing it provides stronger evidence of consciousness. Moreover, one can design future tests of animal consciousness with the intention of satisfying these desiderata to ensure their evidential strength. (shrink)

Die Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds (1757-1823) findet heute vermehrt Beachtung. Während dieser Denker lange Zeit als Popularisator Kants, als Vorläufer Fichtes oder als tatsachenphilosophischer Antipode Schellings und Hegels wahrgenommen wurde und gemeinhin im Ruf eines unsteten und unselbständigen Geistes stand, ist seit einigen Jahrzehnten eine Gegentendenz feststellbar: Reinholds Denkentfaltung wird zunehmend in ihrem gesamten Umfang sowie als eigenwilliger und innovativer Ansatz innerhalb der postkantischen Systemphilosophie zur Kenntnis genommen. Mehr und mehr wird anerkannt, dass Reinhold entscheidende Anstöße zur Entstehung des deutschen (...) Idealismus gegeben und diese Strömung zugleich auf der Grundlage von Einsichten, die in die Richtung der Phänomenologie und Sprachphilosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts weisen, kritisiert hat. Die in diesem Band vereinigten Beiträge gehen auf die I. Internationale Reinhold-Tagung zurück, die vom 14. bis 18. März 1998 in Bad Homburg stattgefunden hat. Sie geben systematische Fragestellungen und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Kontexte aus Reinholds kantischer Phase der Elementarphilosophie, aus der Periode seiner Zusammenarbeit mit Fichte und Jacobi sowie aus seiner sprachphilosophisch orientierten Spätzeit wieder. Alles in allem spiegeln sie das gegenwärtige Bedürfnis, Reinhold zu entdecken, sein Denken und Schaffen in seinen Wandlungen und in seiner thematischen Breite aufzuarbeiten und nachzuvollziehen. Zudem sind sie repräsentativ für die aktuell bestehenden vielfältigen Zugänge zu diesem produktiven Philosophen. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus, this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

_Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze._.

According to a common view, sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral status. In other words, whether a being has intrinsic moral relevance is determined by its capacity for conscious experience. The _epistemic objection_ derives from our profound uncertainty about sentience. According to this objection, we cannot use sentience as a _criterion_ to ascribe moral status in practice because we won’t know in the foreseeable future which animals and AI systems are sentient while ethical questions regarding the possession of moral (...) status are urgent. Therefore, we need to formulate an alternative criterion. I argue that the epistemic objection is dissolved once one clearly distinguishes between the question what determines moral status and what criterion should be employed in practice to ascribe moral status. Epistemic concerns are irrelevant to the former question and—I will argue—criteria of moral status have inescapably to be based on sentience, if one concedes that sentience determines moral status. It follows that doubts about our epistemic access to sentience cannot be used to motivate an alternative criterion of moral status. If sentience turns out to be unknowable, then moral status is unknowable. However, I briefly advocate against such strong pessimism. (shrink)

Sensorimotor enactivism is the view that the content and the sensory modality of perceptual experience are determined by implicit knowledge of lawful regularities between bodily movements and patterns of sensory stimulation. A proponent of the explanatory argument for sensorimotor enactivism holds that this view is able to provide an intelligible explanation for why certain material realizers give rise to certain perceptual experiences, while rival accounts cannot close this “explanatory gap”. However, I argue that the notion of the “material realizer” of (...) perceptual experience is ambiguous. On a narrow construal, the explanatory gap cannot be bridged, not even by enactivism. On a wide construal, enactivism gets a grip on the explanatory gap, but to the same extent do established theories of consciousness. Thus, on both horns of the dilemma, the explanatory power of enactivism is not superior to more traditional theories of conscious experience. (shrink)

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

This book educates whilst also challenging the contemporary schools of thought within philosophical and religious ethics. In addition, it underlines the fact that the substance of ethics in general and bioethics/healthcare ethics specifically, is much more expansive and inclusive than is usually thought. Bioethics is a relatively new academic discipline. However, ethics has existed informally since before the time of Hippocrates. The indigenous culture of African peoples has an ethical worldview which predates the western discourse. This indigenous ethical worldview has (...) been orally transmitted over centuries. The earliest known written African text containing some concepts and content of ethics is the “Declaration of Innocence” written in 1500 B.C., found in an Egyptian text. Ubuntu is an example of African culture that presents an ethical worldview. This work interprets the culture of Ubuntu to explain the contribution of a representative indigenous African ethics to global bioethics. Many modern scholars have written about the meaning of Ubuntu for African societies over centuries. Some scholars have viewed Ubuntu as the greatest contribution of African cultures to other world cultures. None of the scholars, however has explored the culture of Ubuntu as providing a representative indigenous ethics that can contribute to global bioethics as discussed in this book.​. (shrink)

1. 1.1. Suffering is bad. This is why, ceteris paribus, there are strong moral reasons to prevent suffering. Moreover, typically, those moral reasons are stronger when the amount of suffering at st...

Illusionism about consciousness entails that phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist. The distribution question concerns the distribution of consciousness in the animal kingdom. Skepticism of animal consciousness is the view that few or no kinds of animals possess consciousness. Thus, illusionism seems to imply a skeptical view on the distribution question. However, I argue that illusionism and skepticism of animal consciousness are actually orthogonal to each other. If illusionism is true, then phenomenal consciousness does not ground intrinsic value so that the non-existence (...) of phenomenal consciousness would not have ethical implications. In this case, the adequate reaction is to reformulate the distribution question in terms of the quasi-phenomenal functional features associated with the illusion of phenomenal consciousness which do ground intrinsic value. Hence, either illusionism is false or the distribution question does not concern phenomenal consciousness. In any case, illusionism does not directly tell us anything about the distribution question. However, since illusionism forces us to revise our traditional conception of consciousness, it indirectly affects research on animal consciousness by questioning that consciousness is a unified and an all-or-nothing property. (shrink)

How can one build AI systems such that they pursue the goals their designers want them to pursue? This is the alignment problem. Numerous authors have raised concerns that, as research advances and systems become more powerful over time, misalignment might lead to catastrophic outcomes, perhaps even to the extinction or permanent disempowerment of humanity. In this paper, I analyze the severity of this risk based on current instances of misalignment. More specifically, I argue that contemporary large language models and (...) game-playing agents are sometimes misaligned. These cases suggest that misalignment tends to have a variety of features: misalignment can be hard to detect, predict and remedy, it does not depend on a specific architecture or training paradigm, it tends to diminish a system’s usefulness and it is the default outcome of creating AI via machine learning. Subsequently, based on these features, I show that the risk of AI alignment magnifies with respect to more capable systems. Not only might more capable systems cause more harm when misaligned, aligning them should be expected to be more difficult than aligning current AI. (shrink)

Art interprets the visible world, physics charts its unseen workings--making the two realms seem completely opposed. But in Art & Physics, Leonard Shlain tracks their breakthroughs side by side throughout history to reveal an astonishing correlation of visions. From teh classical Greek sculptors to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and from Aristotle to Einstein, aritsts have foreshadowed the discoveries of scientists, such as when Money and Cezanne intuited the coming upheaval in physics that Einstein would initiate. In this lively (...) and colorful narrative, Leonard Shlain explores how artistic breakthroughs could have prefigured the visionary insights of physicists on so many occasions throughtout history. Provacative and original, Art & Physics is a seamless integration of the romance of art and the drama of science...and exhilarating history of ideas. (shrink)