It is often thought that traditional recidivism prediction tools used in criminal sentencing, though biased in many ways, can straightforwardly avoid one particularly pernicious type of bias: direct racial discrimination. They can avoid this by excluding race from the list of variables employed to predict recidivism. A similar approach could be taken to the design of newer, machine learning-based (ML) tools for predicting recidivism: information about race could be withheld from the ML tool during its training phase, ensuring that the (...) resulting predictive model does not use race as an explicit predictor. However, if race is correlated with measured recidivism in the training data, the ML tool may ‘learn’ a perfect proxy for race. If such a proxy is found, the exclusion of race would do nothing to weaken the correlation between risk (mis)classifications and race. Is this a problem? We argue that, on some explanations of the wrongness of discrimination, it is. On these explanations, the use of an ML tool that perfectly proxies race would (likely) be more wrong than the use of a traditional tool that imperfectly proxies race. Indeed, on some views, use of a perfect proxy for race is plausibly as wrong as explicit racial profiling. We end by drawing out four implications of our arguments. (shrink)

Funds and positions in philosophy should be awarded through systems that are reliable, objective, and efficient. One question usually taken to be relevant is how many publications people have in a group of well-respected journals. In the context of significant competition for jobs and funding, however, relying on quantity of publications creates a serious downside: the oft-lamented demand that we publish or perish. This article offers a systematic review of the problems involved in contemporary academic philosophy, and argues that the (...) resulting situation is bad not just for individual philosophers but also for philosophy itself: we are not working as a discipline to as high a standard as we might. The article then suggests some potential solutions, including some more detailed considerations around what seems a particularly promising option: a professional code of conduct for philosophers. (shrink)

Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our (...) Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)

Some people are multi-billionaires; others die because they are too poor to afford food or medications. In many countries, people are denied rights to free speech, to participate in political life, or to pursue a career, because of their gender, religion, race or other factors, while their fellow citizens enjoy these rights. In many societies, what best predicts your future income, or whether you will attend college, is your parents’ income. -/- To many, these facts seem unjust. Others disagree: even (...) if these facts are regrettable, they aren’t issues of justice. A successful theory of justice must explain why clear injustices are unjust and help us resolve current disputes. -/- John Rawls (1921-2002) was a Harvard philosopher best known for his A Theory of Justice (1971), which attempted to define a just society. Nearly every contemporary scholarly discussion of justice references A Theory of Justice. This essay reviews its main themes. (shrink)

Vegans do not eat meat. This statement seems so obvious that one might be tempted to claim that it is analytically true. Yet several authors argue that the underlying logic of veganism warrants – perhaps even demands – eating meat. I begin by considering an important principle that has been important in motivating vegan meat-eating, related to an obligation to reduce or minimise harm. I offer an alternative, rights-based view, and suggest that while this might support an obligation to eat (...) meat in some cases, it fundamentally changes how we should view the arguments on offer. I consider such arguments with respect to three categories of animals: cows, crickets and clams. Rather than assigning importance to the particular choice of animal, readers should take each of these to stand for particular categorisations of non-human animals: animals who certainly have some capacities that we regard as morally relevant in humans, such as sentience, or the capacity for desires (‘cows’); animals who might have one or more of these capacities, but where current research is inconclusive (‘crickets’); and animals that are, according to our current knowledge, extremely unlikely to have any of these capacities (‘clams’). (shrink)

Patients are generally assumed to have the right to choices about treatment, including the right to refuse treatment, which is constrained by considerations of cost‐effectiveness. Independently, many people support the idea that patients who are responsible for their ill health should incur penalties that non‐responsible patients do not face. Surprisingly, these two areas have not received much joint attention. This paper considers whether restricting the scope of responsibility to pre‐treatment decisions can be justified, or whether a demand to hold people (...) responsible for 'usual suspect' choices such as smoking or failure to exercise commits us to also holding people responsible for their treatment choices. I argue that there is no good reason to support this restriction: those who advocate responsibility for (some) pre‐treatment choices should also advocate responsibility for (some) treatment choices. However, I also note that, as with pre‐treatment choices, patients may sometimes have reason to choose in ways that do not optimize their health. As such, I also consider a process, based on the idea of public reasons, for deciding which treatment choices patients cannot legitimately be held responsible for, along with a method for considering proposed changes to this category. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking accounts claim that the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs provide a problem for moral realists because evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs have more plausibility than realist accounts. A certain kind of response, which I term ‘rationalist’ offers a dual response to evolutionary debunking. First, they offer a supposedly plausible account of how we acquire objective moral knowledge through use of our rationality. Second, they claim that certain moral beliefs are not amenable to evolutionary explanation. I argue (...) that neither of these putative advantages survives further scrutiny. An appeal to ‘rational insight’, although it makes reference to a somewhat familiar faculty, gives no useful explanation of how we come to know moral facts. Moreover, the supposedly problematic moral beliefs are in fact amenable to evolutionary explanation. As such, rationalist accounts are, like other realist accounts, on the wrong side of the balance of justification against evolutionary debunking. (shrink)

Subjectivists about welfare face two problems that pull them in opposite directions. The Paradox Problem, outlined by Ben Bradley, is that, for an agent who desires that her life go badly, subjectivist theories are sometimes unable to give a determinate answer about how well her life goes. This problem demands that subjectivists choose a complex mental attitude to ground well-being. The Infant Problem, from Eden Lin, is that many subjective theories end up denying that infants (and some others) have welfare. (...) This problem demands that subjectivists choose a simple attitude to ground well-being. I argue that subjectivists should respond by adopting Disjunctive Subjectivism. Your welfare depends on your judgements that things are intrinsically good or bad for you (c.f. Dorsey), unless you are not capable of such judgements. In that case, it depends on your desires. I then defend DS against objections from Lin, and the potential charge of being ad hoc. (shrink)

Kieran Oberman argues that there is no such thing, in realistic circumstances, as an optional war, i.e. a war that it is permissible for a state to wage, but not obligatory. Regarding a central kind of war – humanitarian intervention – this is due to what Oberman calls the Cost Principle, which says that states may not impose humanitarian costs on their citizens that those citizens do not have independent humanitarian obligations to meet. Essentially, this means that if the seriousness (...) of a humanitarian crisis is sufficient to justify imposing a certain level of cost, it must be serious enough to ground a genuine obligation to intervene. This paper offers three cases where, even if we accept the Cost Principle, war may be reasonably described as optional. These include the state’s moral relationship to amassing support for voluntary contributions to a war that would otherwise exceed the threshold established by Cost Principle (the Voluntary War); a war where it is uncertain whether costs will exceed the threshold (the Forever War); and two wars whose costs would individually fall below the threshold, but which would collectively fall above it. While none of these examples is conclusive, I conclude that Oberman must defend some further, contestable moral claims to establish that the optional humanitarian war is a myth. The Cost Principle alone does not get us there. (shrink)