Standard quantum theory is inadequate to explain the mechanisms by which potential becomes actual. It is inadequate and therefore unable to describe generation of events. Niels Bohr emphasized long ago that the classical part of the world is necessary. John Bell stressed the same point: that “measurement≓ cannot even be defined within the standard quantum theory, and he sought a solution within hidden variable theories and his concept of “beables.≓Today it is customary to try to explain emergence of the classical (...) world through a decoherence mechanism due to “environment.≓ But, we believe, as it was with the concept of measurement, “environment≓ itself cannot be defined within the standard quantum theory.We have proposed a semiphenomenological solution to this problem by introducing explicitly, from the very beginning, classical degrees of freedom, and by coupling these degrees of freedom, through a Lindblad type coupling, to the quantum world. The resulting theory, we call “event-enhanced quantum theory.≓ EEQT allows us to describe an event-generating mechanism for individual quantum systems under continuous observation. The objections of John Bell are met and precise definitions of an “experiment≓ and of a “measurement≓ have been given within EEQT. However EEQT is, essentially, a nonrelativistic theory.In the present paper we extend the ideas of L. P. Horwitz and C. Piron and we propose a relativistic version of EEQT, with an event-generating algorithm for spin one-half particle detectors. The algorithm is based on proper time formulation of the relalivistic quantum theory. Although we use indefinite metric, all the probabilities controlling the random process of the detector clicks are nonnegative. (shrink)

Peer disagreement presents religious believers, agnostics, and skeptics alike with an epistemological problem: how can confidence in any religious claims (including their negations) be epistemically justified? There seem to be rational, well-informed adherents among a variety of mutually incompatible religious and non-religious perspectives, and so the problem of disagreement arises acutely in the religious domain. In this paper, we show that the transformative nature of religious experience and identity poses more than just this traditional, epistemic problem of conflicting religious beliefs. (...) In encountering one another, believers, agnostics, and skeptics confront not just different beliefs, but different ways of being a person. -/- To transition between religious belief and skepticism is not just to adopt a different set of beliefs, but to transform into a different version of oneself. We argue that the transformative nature of religious identity intensifies the problem of pluralism by adding a new dimension to religious disagreement, for there are principled reasons to think we can lack epistemic and affective access to our potential religious, agnostic, or skeptical selves. Yet, access to these selves seems to be required for the purposes of decision-making that is to be both rational and authentic. Finally, we reflect on the relationship between the transformative problem of religious disagreement and what it shows about the epistemic status of religious conversion and de-conversion, in which one disagrees with one’s own (transformed) self. (shrink)

Drawing on the writings of the Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel, I defend a partial response to the problem of divine hiddenness. A Jewish approach to divine love includes the thought that God desires meaningful relationship not only with individual persons, but also with communities of persons. In combination with John Schellenberg’s account of divine love, the admission of God’s desire for such relationships makes possible that a person may fail to believe that God exists not because of any individual (...) failing, but because the individual is a member of a larger community that itself is culpable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 401-423 [Access article in PDF] Petrarch and the Genealogy of Asceticism W. Scott Blanchard The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor detached. --Theodor Adorno Perhaps no author within or outside of the canon of Western literature wrote as extensively on the topic of solitude as did Francesco Petrarch. While many of our modern associations (...) with the term may find some of their origins traceable as far back as Petrarch's career, the term "solitude" carried with it much different associations in his century than it does for us today, influenced as we are by the Romantic tradition and especially by Wordsworth's absorption with the idea of solitude as an ideal state for self-conscious reflection on the individual's personal history and its meaning. No less than three of Petrarch's major prose works--the De otio religioso, the De vita solitaria, and the Secretum--confront the topic of solitude directly, and we can also point to many letters, poems, and portions of his treatises that either directly or indirectly reflect Petrarch's virtual obsession with solitude. In Petrarch we are confronted with an author who was at once the most politically connected intellectual of his century--we are even tempted to call him a "public intellectual"--and yet who constantly invoked his desire for solitude, for an escape from the many distractions and seductions that the cities and courts of his society offered. For Petrarch these were invariably places where desire lurked and power held sway, so that the life of solitude was often invoked as an alternative--a counter-cultural locus, perhaps--where freedom from temptation and subjection was imagined as an escape from the negotium of worldly life. There is much in Petrarch's writings on the solitary life that is wishful and that we might characterize as merely compensatory in a life that was otherwise quite active and engaged, but there is also a [End Page 401] strain of thought in these works that indicates a certain intransigence beneath Petrarch's overdetermined attachment to the idea, if not the practice, of withdrawal and detachment. An inquiry into Petrarch's idealization of the solitary life may even yield a somewhat reactionary aspect of his complex mind, a conservative strain in an author who was in almost every other way the literary herald of a humanism that was at the center of the cultural avant-garde of the Trecento. Is the Petrarch that in so many accounts of his character is construed as the "first modern man" actually something else, a reluctant ascetic holdover from the Middle Ages? How did Petrarch use his unique understanding of the life of solitude, of ascesis, as a pose from which to construct his sense of himself as an author and intellectual? Or are we simply confronted in the figure of a worldly and an ascetic Petrarch with yet another set of contradictions so appropriate to the "immensely complex" author whose poetic signature was the oxymoron? 1"Asceticism" and "solitude" are of course not synonymous terms, but any examination of a number of Petrarch's works as they fall within what might be called a genealogy of asceticism must recognize from the start that Petrarch's brand of asceticism was somewhat unique, especially insofar as it was deeply influenced by ancient Stoicism as well as by his reading in authors from the early Christian era. The most useful expression for our purposes may be the medieval concept of the "contemplative life," since much of the analysis in what follows will focus on how Petrarch often used his self-proclaimed pose of detachment and withdrawal as a technique for carrying on what were otherwise quite engaged dialogues with those worldly formations of power and authority that are normally conceived of as belonging to the "active" sphere of human existence. 2 For despite Petrarch's participation in or association with a number of political and civic ventures during his long and productive career, he likely never would have freely chosen... (shrink)

Many of us are unmoved when it is objected that some morally or intellectually suspect source agrees with our belief. While we may tend to find this kind of guilt by epistemic association unproblematic, I argue that this tendency is a mistake. We sometimes face what I call the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. This is the problem of encountering agreement about the content of your belief from a source whose faults give you reason to worry about the belief's truth, (...) normative status, etiology, or implications. On the basis of an array of cases, I elaborate four distinct kinds of problems that unwelcome epistemic company poses. Two of these are distinctly epistemic, and two are moral. I canvass possible responses, ranging from stubbornness to an epistemic prudishness that avoids unwelcome company at all costs. Finally, I offer preliminary lessons of the problem and distinguish it from the problem of peer disagreement. (shrink)

An ageing population and increased life expectancy are a characteristic of the Western world. Nevertheless, as Roger Fontaine writes, “although we should be glad about this fact, it should also be stressed that old age reveals profound discrepancies between individuals. In fact, we should not speak of ‘old age’ but ‘old ages’. Specialists make a distinction between normal old age, successful old age, and pathological old age.”Catherine Guchet points out that, at the end of the twentieth century, two images of (...) old age coexist, utilitarian in conception: that of ‘flamboyant’ old age and that of ‘dependent’ old age. The latter is associated with a loss of autonomy and dignity, especially for subjects affected by senile dementia, described as ‘unconscious’. We shall focus on these more problematic forms of old age. (shrink)

Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explanation, namely identifying possible interventions that would have changed the explanandum.

In a previous volume of Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, Melis Erdur defends the provocative claim that postulating a stance-independent ground for morality constitutes a substantive moral mistake that is isomorphic to the substantive moral mistake that many realists attribute to antirealists. In this discussion paper I reconstruct Erdur’s argument and raise two objections to the general framework in which it arises. I close by explaining why rejecting Erdur’s approach doesn’t preclude normative criticism of metaethical theories.

In this article, we focus on the attribution of moral responsibility for the actions of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). To do so, we suggest that the responsibility gap can be closed if human agents can take meaningful moral responsibility for the actions of AWS. This is a moral responsibility attributed to individuals in a justified and fair way and which is accepted by individuals as an assessment of their own moral character. We argue that, given the unpredictability of AWS, meaningful (...) moral responsibly can only be discharged by human agents who are willing to take a moral gambit: they decide to design/develop/deploy AWS despite the uncertainty about the effects an AWS may produce, hoping that unintended and unwanted or unforeseen outcomes may never occurs, but also accepting to be held responsible if such outcomes will occur. We argue that, while a moral gambit is permissible for the use of non-lethal AWS, this is not the case for the actions of lethal autonomous weapon systems. (shrink)

We report three experiments investigating whether people’s judgments about causal relationships are sensitive to the robustness or stability of such relationships across a range of background circumstances. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that people are more willing to endorse causal and explanatory claims based on stable (as opposed to unstable) relationships, even when the overall causal strength of the relationship is held constant. In Experiment 2, we show that this effect is not driven by a causal generalization’s actual scope of (...) application. In Experiment 3, we offer evidence that stable causal relationships may be seen as better guides to action. Collectively, these experiments document a previously underappreciated factor that shapes people’s causal reasoning: the stability of the causal relationship. (shrink)

In this report we focus on the definition of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). We provide a comparative analysis of existing official definitions of AWS as provided by States and international organisations, like ICRC and NATO. The analysis highlights that the definitions draw focus on different aspects of AWS and hence lead to different approaches to address the ethical and legal problems of these weapons systems. This approach is detrimental both in terms of fostering an understanding of AWS and in facilitating (...) agreement around conditions of deployment and regulations of their use and, indeed, whether AWS are to be used at all. We draw from the comparative analysis to identify essential aspects of AWS and then offer a definition that provides a value-neutral ground to address the relevant ethical and legal problems. In particular, we identify four key aspects—autonomy; adapting capabilities of AWS; human control; and purpose of use—as the essential factors to define AWS and which are key when considering the related ethical and legal implications. (shrink)

Occam's razor—the idea that all else being equal, we should pick the simpler hypothesis—plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. But why are simpler hypotheses better? One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam's razor is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible—they can accommodate a wider range of possible data—and that flexibility is automatically penalized by Bayesian inference. In two experiments, we provide evidence that people's intuitive probabilistic and explanatory judgments follow the prescriptions of BOR. In (...) particular, people's judgments are consistent with the two most distinctive characteristics of BOR: They penalize hypotheses as a function not only of their numbers of free parameters but also as a function of the size of the parameter space, and they penalize those hypotheses even when their parameters can be “tuned” to fit the data better than comparatively simpler hypotheses. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the scholarly and policy debate on autonomous weapon systems and particularly on the objections to the use of these weapons which rest on jus ad bellum principles of proportionality and last resort. Both objections rest on the idea that AWS may increase the incidence of war by reducing the costs for going to war or by providing a propagandistic value. We argue that whilst these objections offer pressing concerns in their own right, they suffer (...) from important limitations: they overlook the difficulties of calculating ad bellum proportionality; confuse the concept of proportionality of effects with the precision of weapon systems; disregard the ever-changing nature of war and of its ethical implications; mistake the moral obligation imposed by the principle of last resort with the impact that AWS may have on political decision to resort to war. Our analysis does not entail that AWS are acceptable or justifiable, but it shows that ad bellum principles are not the best set of ethical principles for tackling the ethical problems raised by AWS; and that developing adequate understanding of the transformations that the use of AWS poses to the nature of war itself is a necessary, preliminary requirement to any ethical analysis of the use of these weapons. (shrink)

Much recent work on explanation in the interventionist tradition emphasizes the explanatory value of stable causal generalizations—i.e., causal generalizations that remain true in a wide range of background circumstances. We argue that two separate explanatory virtues are lumped together under the heading of `stability’. We call these two virtues breadth and guidance respectively. In our view, these two virtues are importantly distinct, but this fact is neglected or at least under-appreciated in the literature on stability. We argue that an adequate (...) theory of explanatory goodness should recognize breadth and guidance as distinct virtues, as breadth and guidance track different ideals of explanation, satisfy different cognitive and pragmatic ends, and play different theoretical roles in helping us understand the explanatory value of mechanisms. Thus keeping track of the distinction between these two forms of stability yields a more accurate and perspicuous picture of the role that stability considerations play in explanation. (shrink)

This paper defends pro-realism, the view that it is better if moral realism is true rather than any of its rivals. After offering an account of philosophical angst, I make three general arguments. The first targets nihilism: in securing the possibility of moral justification and vindication in objecting to certain harms, moral realism secures something that is non-morally valuable and even essential to the meaning and intelligibility of our lives. The second argument targets antirealism: moral realism secures a desirable independence (...) for moral justification that is qualitatively different from the anti-realistic construal of independence that is only explicable in terms of degrees of distance from our subjective responses and attitudes. Finally, I argue that while the pan-expressivist semantic program of quasi-realism has significant effects on what can be appropriately said in meta-ethical discourse, it provides no comfort to the pro-realist who is already angsty about anti-realism. (shrink)

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the defence domain raises challenges for the ethical governance of these systems. A recent shift from the what to the how of AI ethics sees a nascent body of literature published by defence organisations focussed on guidance to implement AI ethics principles. These efforts have neglected a crucial intermediate step between principles and guidance concerning the elicitation of ethical requirements for specifying the guidance. In this article, we outline the key normative (...) choices and corresponding tradeoffs that are involved in specifying guidance for the implementation of AI ethics principles in the defence domain. These correspond to: the AI lifecycle model used; the scope of stakeholder involvement; the accountability goals chosen; the choice of auditing requirements; and the choice of mechanisms for transparency and traceability. We provide initial recommendations for navigating these tradeoffs and highlight the importance of a pro-ethical institutional culture. (shrink)

This textbook in Medical Ethics covers most of the standard issues. Each chapter begins with detailed comments by the editors, followed by the best available articles on each topic covered.

Defence agencies across the globe identify artificial intelligence as a key technology to maintain an edge over adversaries. As a result, efforts to develop or acquire AI capabilities for defence are growing on a global scale. Unfortunately, they remain unmatched by efforts to define ethical frameworks to guide the use of AI in the defence domain. This article provides one such framework. It identifies five principles—justified and overridable uses, just and transparent systems and processes, human moral responsibility, meaningful human control (...) and reliable AI systems—and related recommendations to foster ethically sound uses of AI for national defence purposes. (shrink)

Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive … understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which it relies. Instead, we find that laypeople are willing to count both a multiply realized property and its realizers (...) as causes, and regard the systematic overdetermination implied by this view as unproblematic. (shrink)

Ethics in business is the most urgent problem facing America today. Now two of the best-selling authors of our time, Kenneth Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale, join forces to meet this crisis head-on in this vitally important new book. The Power of Ethical Management proves you don't have to cheat to win. It shows today's managers how to bring integrity back to the workplace. It gives hard-hitting, practical, ethical strategies that build profits, productivity, and long-term success. From a straightforward (...) three-step Ethics Check that helps you evaluate any action or decision, to the "Five P's" of ethical behavior that will clarify your purpose and your goals, The Power of Ethical Management gives you an immensely useful set of tools. These can be put to work right away to enhance the performance of your business and to enrich the quality of your life. The Power of Ethical Management is no theoretical treatise Peale and Blanchard speak from their own enormous and unique experience, They reveal the nuts and bolts, practical strategies for ethical decisions that will show you why integrity pays. "So Vince Lombardi was wrong. Winning is not the only thing as headlines and hearings from Wall Street to Washington confirm. Now comes a better game plan from the powerful one-two punch of Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale in a quickreading new book, The Power of Ethical Management. Peale and Blanchard may be the best thing that has happened to business ethics since Mike Wallace invented 60 Minutes. -- JOHN MACK CARTIER Editor-in-Chief Good Housekeeping. (shrink)

More than a century ago, Russell launched a forceful attack on causation, arguing not only that modern physics has no need for causal notions but also that our belief in causation is a relic of a pre-scientific view of the world. He thereby initiated a debate about the relations between physics and causation that remains very much alive today. While virtually everybody nowadays rejects Russell's causal eliminativism, many philosophers have been convinced by Russell that the fundamental physical structure of our (...) world doesn't contain causal relations. This raises the question of how to reconcile the central role of causal concepts in the special sciences and in common sense with the putative absence of causation in fundamental physics. (shrink)

In this article we focus on the jus in bello principle of necessity for guiding the use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). We begin our analysis with an account of the principle of necessity as entailing the requirement of minimal force found in Just War Theory, before highlighting the absence of this principle in existing work on AWS. Overlooking this principle means discounting the obligations that combatants have towards one another in times of war. We argue that the requirement of (...) minimal force is an important requirement for considering ethical uses of force. In particular, we distinguish between lethal and non-lethal purposes of use of force and introduce the prospect of non-lethal AWS before reviewing a number of challenges which AWS pose with respect to their non-lethal use. The challenges arise where AWS generate unpredictable outcomes impinging upon the situational awareness required of combatants to ensure that their actions meet the requirement of minimal force. We conclude with a call for further research on the ethical implications of non-lethal uses of AWS as a necessary contribution for assessing the moral permissibility of AWS. (shrink)

In this article we focus on the jus in bello principle of necessity for guiding the use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). We begin our analysis with an account of the principle of necessity as entailing the requirement of minimal force found in Just War Theory, before highlighting the absence of this principle in existing work on AWS. Overlooking this principle means discounting the obligations that combatants have towards one another in times of war. We argue that the requirement of (...) minimal force is an important requirement for considering ethical uses of force. In particular, we distinguish between lethal and non-lethal purposes of use of force and introduce the prospect of non-lethal AWS before reviewing a number of challenges which AWS pose with respect to their non-lethal use. The challenges arise where AWS generate unpredictable outcomes impinging upon the situational awareness required of combatants to ensure that their actions meet the requirement of minimal force. We conclude with a call for further research on the ethical implications of non-lethal uses of AWS as a necessary contribution for assessing the moral permissibility of AWS. (shrink)

This paper argues that the interventionist account of causation faces a dilemma concerning macroscopic causation – i.e., causation by composite objects. Interventionism must either require interventions on a composite object to hold the behavior of its parts fixed, or allow such interventions to vary the behavior of those parts. The first option runs the risk of making wholes causally excluded by their parts, while the second runs the risk of mistakenly ascribing to wholes causal abilities that belong to their parts (...) only. Using as starting point Baumgartner’s well-known argument that interventionism leads to causal exclusion of multiply realized properties, I first show that a similar interventionist exclusion argument can be mounted against the causal efficacy of composite objects. I then show that Woodward’s (2015) updated interventionist account (explicitly designed to address exclusion worries) avoids this problem, but runs into an opposite issue of over-inclusion: it grants to composites causal abilities that belong to their parts only. Finally, I examine two other interventionist accounts designed to address Baumgartner’s argument, and show that when applied to composites, they too fall on one horn (exclusion) or the other (over-inclusion) of the dilemma. I conclude that the dilemma constitutes an open and difficult issue for interventionism. (shrink)

Proponents of IBE claim that the ability of a hypothesis to explain a range of phenomena in a unifying way contributes to the hypothesis’s credibility in light of these phenomena. I propose a Bayesian justification of this claim that reveals a hitherto unnoticed role for explanatory unification in evaluating the plausibility of a hypothesis: considerations of explanatory unification enter into the determination of a hypothesis’s prior by affecting its ‘explanatory coherence’, that is, the extent to which the hypothesis offers mutually (...) cohesive explanations of various phenomena. (shrink)

International regulation of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is increasingly conceived as an exercise in risk management. This requires a shared approach for assessing the risks of AWS. This paper presents a structured approach to risk assessment and regulation for AWS, adapting a qualitative framework inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It examines the interactions among key risk factors—determinants, drivers, and types—to evaluate the risk magnitude of AWS and establish risk tolerance thresholds through a risk matrix informed by (...) background knowledge of event likelihood and severity. Further, it proposes a methodology to assess community risk appetite, emphasizing that such assessments and resulting tolerance levels should be determined through deliberation in a multistakeholder forum. The paper highlights the complexities of applying risk-based regulations to AWS internationally, particularly the challenge of defining a global community for risk assessment and regulatory legitimization. (shrink)

Although critical reception of discourse markers (DMs) such as like and you know has often been noted, surprisingly little research has actually investigated this attitudinal perspective on usage. Moreover, a recent, rapidly expanding body of research on non-L1 speakers’ use of discourse markers in English has suggested that their more or less frequent use of specific markers may be due to familiarity with these markers and positive or negative marker perceptions. The present study presents the results of a survey measuring (...) British English L1 speakers’, English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners’, and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) speakers’ perceptions of the discourse markers so, like, well and you know and their reactions to either abundance or lack of DMs. The survey measured speaker attitudes by asking participants to evaluate the usage of other DMs. We found that L1, EFL, and ELF have varying attitudes about certain markers, and these markers are perceived differently for traits like politeness and friendliness. Generally speaking, L1 speakers were more positively disposed towards markers than either of the other groups, who in their turn rated the propositional functions of the markers as more acceptable than interactional functions. (shrink)

We investigate two formalizations of Optimality Theory, a successful paradigm in linguistics.We first give an order-theoretic counterpart for the data and processinvolved in candidate evaluation.Basically, we represent each constraint as a function that assigns every candidate a degree of violation.As for the second formalization, we define (after Samek-Lodovici and Prince) constraints as operations that select the best candidates out of a set of candidates.We prove that these two formalizations are equivalent (accordingly, there is no loss of generality with using violation (...) marks and dispensing with them is only apparent).Importantly, we show that the second formalization is equivalent with a class of operations over sets of formulas in a given logical language.As a result, we prove that Optimality Theory can be characterized by certain cumulative logics.So, applying Optimality Theory is shown to be reasoning by the rules of cumulative logics. (shrink)

In recent years the notion of biological specificity has attracted significant philosophical attention. This paper focuses on host specificity, a kind of biological specificity that has not yet been discussed by philosophers, and which concerns the extent to which a species is selective in the range of other species it exploits for feeding and/or reproduction. Host specificity is an important notion in ecology, where it plays a variety of theoretical roles. Here I focus on the role of host specificity in (...) biological control, a field of applied ecology that deals with the suppression of pests through the use of living organisms. Examining host specificity and its role in biological control yields several valuable contributions to our understanding of biological specificity. In particular, I argue that host specificity cannot be fully understood in terms of Woodward’s well-known account of causal specificity. To adequately account for host specificity, we need a notion of causal specificity that takes into consideration the extent to which a variable’s effects are similar to one another – a dimension not captured in Woodward’s account. In addition, the literature on host specificity in biological control highlights certain aspects in which causally specific relationships can be practically valuable that have not yet been addressed in philosophical discussions of specificity. That literature also reveals that in certain contexts specificity can hinder rather than foster effective control, thus leading to a nuanced assessment of the practical value of specific causes. (shrink)

Moral realism and some of its constitutive theses, e.g., cognitivism, face the following challenge. If they are true, then it seems that we should predict that deference to moral testimony is appropriate under the same conditions as deference to non-moral testimony. Yet, many philosophers intuit that deference to moral testimony is not appropriate, even in otherwise ordinary conditions. In this paper I show that the challenge is cogent only if the appropriateness in question is disambiguated in a particular way. To (...) count against realism and its constitutive theses, moral deference must fail to be appropriate in specifically the way that the theses predict it is appropriate. I argue that this is not the case. In brief, I argue that realism and allied theses predict only that deference to moral testimony is epistemically appropriate, but that the intuitive data plausibly show only that it is not morally appropriate. If I am right, then there is reason to doubt the metaethical relevance of much of the skepticism regarding moral deference in recent literature. (shrink)

An important question for the causal modeling approach is how to integrate non‐causal dependence relations such as asymmetric supervenience into the approach. The most prominent proposal to that effect (due to Gebharter) is to treat those dependence relationships as formally analogous to causal relationships. We argue that this proposal neglects some crucial differences between causal and non‐causal dependencies, and that in the context of causal modeling non‐causal dependence relationships should be represented as mutual dependence relationships. We develop a new kind (...) of model – “hybrid models” ‐ based on this suggestion, and formulate a set of axioms for those models. Our formalism has important implications for Kim's exclusion problem: whereas Gebharter's framework vindicates Kim's causal exclusion objection against nonreductive physicalism, our framework has no such implication, and can help non‐reductive physicalists vindicate the efficacy of high‐level properties. A further benefit of our formalism is that it yields a natural and plausible way of thinking about interventions in multi‐level contexts. (shrink)

Proposals by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) to use bomb disposal robots for deadly force against humans have met with widespread condemnation. Media coverage of the furore has tended, incorrectly, to conflate these robots with autonomous weapon systems (AWS), the AI-based weapons used in armed conflict. These two types of systems should be treated as distinct since they have different sets of social, ethical, and legal implications. However, the conflation does raise a pressing question: what _if_ the SFPD had (...) proposed using AWS for law enforcement purposes? This article argues that current debate on AWS takes place within a ‘killing paradigm’ that leaves us ill-placed to understand the implications of using autonomous force outside of armed conflict. This is because ‘lethality’ is taken as the paradigmatic form of harm, meaning that other harms are understood in a way that is derivative of lethal harm. The article calls for more research on how other sorts of goods, such as freedom from domination, are imperilled by the use of autonomous force. The article also suggests that bringing research on AWS into dialogue with the sorts of concerns that have typically motivated political theory—e.g. power, coercion, the state—provides a fruitful starting point for addressing these issues. (shrink)