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What we Owe to Each Other
... I may also find the nuanced distinction, if any, between 'someone in fact values something' and 'someone has reason to value something' lacks elucidation, regardless of the 'someone' being referred to either the valuer oneself or someone else. 24 Scanlon (1998) Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved. ...
... 60 For another thing, if we take a closer look at those 'other properties', they are more or less of some value, being valuable in certain way, or at least overlapped with the 53 Vayrynen (2006) 296 (fn3). 54 Scanlon (1998) 56 Rowland (2019: 3-4 (fn7)) gives a non-exhaustive list of the 'pro-attitudes', such as desire, respect, admire, promote, praise, commend, protect or approve of that thing or person, among which he further gives a detailed account of the distinction between non-instrumental pro-attitudes (for-its-own-sake proattitudes) and instrumental pro-attitudes (not-for-its-own-sake pro-attitudes). 57 As for the distinctions between 'prima facie' and 'pro tanto' as well as 'sans phrase' and 'all-thingsconsidered', see e.g. ...
... 58 See also n9. 59 Scanlon (1998) ...
... If we could characterize the method of reasoning through which we arrive at judgments of right and wrong, and could explain why there is good reason to give judgments arrived at in this way the kind of importance that moral judgments are normally thought to have, then we would, I believe, have given sufficient answer to the question of the subject matter of right and wrong (Scanlon 1998, 2). ...
... As Amartya Sen writes: well, and in particular the need to avoid being influenced by our respective vested interests or by personal priorities or eccentricities or prejudices … (Sen 2009, 54). Impartiality presupposes in turn the recognition of parties to any moral claim as moral equals and that any claim must be reciprocal in the sense that one party cannot rightly claim for itself what it denies others and that all parties affected by the claim have a right of reasonable rejectability (Scanlon 1998). ...
... This requirement constitutes reciprocity, which requires that the terms that regulate the relationship between citizens must be acceptable to all affected. The terms must be such that no reasonable person would have grounds to reject them (Rawls 1993(Rawls , 2001Scanlon 1998;Forst 2012). Reciprocity therefore requires that we" … arrange our common political life on terms that others cannot reasonably reject" (Rawls 1993, 124). ...
A pdf copy of the article can be accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YD72BXM7WWFHT75G4J9Y/full?target=10.1080/10402659.2024.2416041
In a telegram to prominent Americans on May 23rd, 1946, Albert Einstein made the following statement:
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive (cited in Ionno Butcher 2005, 12; Times 1946).
Here Einstein was pointing to the emerging existential threat unleashed by the development of atomic weapons, a threat that was greatly magnified with the development of thermo-nuclear weapons, and importantly articulating the need for a transformation in our mode of thinking. This issue remains with us and has been heightened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its justification. Regarding this manner of thinking, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto published on July 9, 1955, stated the following:
We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt. … we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire … We appeal, as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest … (Russell and Einstein 1955).
In a letter to Einstein exploring the possibility of drafting the manifesto Russell wrote:
In any attempt to avoid atomic war the strictest neutrality is to be observed… Everything must be said from the point of view of mankind, not of this or that group… (cited in Ionno Butcher 2005, 13).
The purpose of this paper is to interpret and further articulate the nature of the above proposed manner of thinking as a mode of moral thought in response to the existential risk of nuclear conflict, a risk that has been exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine justified by its underlying thinking in the form of the Putin Doctrine, and to suggest the need for and the method of educating global citizens as a way to minimize that risk.
A pdf copy of the article can be accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YD72BXM7WWFHT75G4J9Y/full?target=10.1080/10402659.2024.2416041
... C. Gálvez Bermúdez 3 By "non-Razian understandings" I am referring to those conceptions of the metaphysics of reasons for action that are not the one defended by Joseph Raz. Opposite, by "Razian reasons for action" I am referring to reasons according to the conception of the metaphysics of reasons for action defended by Joseph Raz. 4 With non-reducible concepts, I have in mind the views of Parfit and Scanlon. Owens call them "Reasons Fundamentalism", which is, according to Owens, the view that "(…) the property of being a reason cannot be explained or analyzed further" Owens [44, 54]; On Scanlon's non-reductive understanding of reasons, see his Scanlon [61,17]; On Parfit's view, see his Parfit [45,31]; On the discussion around the common features beyond the metaphysical disagreements about what reasons are, see Olson [43,[255][256][257][258]. 5 To describe what reasons are and how they work is one of the main projects of the philosophy of reason that obviously cannot, and need not be, be covered here. 6 Wiland [74,71]. 1 Joseph Raz's practical account of norms is the main example of this kind of exclusionary understanding of "mandatory rules" such as the legal ones. ...
... Think, for example, on the work of Robertson, [57,[263][264][265][266][267]. 21 The label "primitivist" I take from the description of reasons given by Scanlon in his Scanlon [61,17]; Parfit [45,31]. relation to exclusion: a self-explained fact defeats another self-explained fact. ...
... The first possibility is to follow Williams in assuming that a consideration needs a subjective relationship to motivate an agent's action and take the form of a 61 Exclusionary reasons have been mainly developed as defeater for motivating reasons. Explaining the differences between motivating, explanatory and normative reasons see Alvarez [2,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]; Also in her Alvarez [3]; Showing a way to differentiate between justification and explanation, see Redondo [56,; Showing the division between motivational and normative reasons in the case of legal reasons, see Ehrenberg [29,[150][151][152]]; Gur's vocabulary on the topic helps us to understand better that this division is not a metaphysical one but one of how a reason for action is being used. ...
Legal rules are often understood in terms of exclusionary reasons, and exclusionary reasons are normally understood as reasons for action according to Raz. In this paper, I engage with the literature on the metaphysics of reasons for action and explain how exclusionary reasons can be used in different conceptions of what reasons for action are (and not only by the one defended by Joseph Raz). To do that, I proceed as follows: In the first part, and after differentiating between factual and psychological conceptions of what reasons for action are, I engage with different approaches to reasons for action as facts (such as those claiming that reasons are explanation or evidence of “oughts”, primitive facts, and value-based instrumental and non-instrumental facts) to defend that exclusionary reasons can be accommodated inside all of those factual conceptions of reasons for action. In the second part, I engage with those claiming that reasons for action are grounded in mental states (such as will, desires, beliefs, and intentions) to explore whether exclusionary reasons can work inside those psychological conceptions of what reasons for action are. As a result, by showing how exclusionary reasons can be accommodated inside different factual and psychological conceptions of what reasons for action are, I defend that exclusionary reasons are an open concept that is not conceptually linked to Raz’s conception of what reasons for action are.
... Since the beginning of 2023 the AIID team have been explicitly recording one particular type of societal reaction to incidents -formal public acknowledgement from developers and deployers. The importance of response is a key aspect of interpersonal ethics -understanding that responsibility lies not only in the prevention of failure and wrongdoing, but in acknowledging their inevitability and examining the subsequent patterns of objection, protest, and response [Strawson et al., 2003, McKenna, 2012, Scanlon, 2000, 2008. When we accept that mistakes and wrongdoing are unavoidable parts of human interaction, our focus shifts to how we respond to the harms we cause. ...
... We take inspiration from interpersonal ethics in focusing not on the avoidance of wrongdoing, but on its inevitability. Once we accept that it is impossible to live a life completely devoid of mistakes and wronging others, what becomes central to responsibility is our responsiveness to the resulting harms we do [Strawson et al., 2003, McKenna, 2012, Scanlon, 2000, 2008. All responsible actors are subject to requirements not only to avoid wronging others where possible but to provide an adequate response when they inevitably fail to do so. ...
The AI Incident Database (AIID) was inspired by aviation safety databases, which enable collective learning from failures to prevent future incidents. The database documents hundreds of AI failures, collected manually from the news and media. However, recent criticism highlights that the AIID's reliance on media reporting limits its utility for learning about implementation failures. In this paper, we accept that the AIID falls short in its original mission, but argue that by looking beyond technically-focused learning, the dataset can provide new, highly valuable insights: specifically, opportunities to learn about patterns between developers, deployers, victims, wider society, and law-makers that emerge after AI failures. Through a three-tier mixed-methods analysis of 962 incidents and 4,743 related reports from the AIID, we examine patterns across incidents, focusing on cases with subsequent public responses tagged in the database. We identify common 'typical' incidents found in the AIID, from Tesla crashes to deepfake scams. Focusing on this interplay between relevant parties, we uncover interesting patterns in accountability and social expectations of responsibility. We find that the presence of identifiable responsible parties does not necessarily lead to increased accountability. The likelihood of a response and what it amounts to depends highly on context, including who built the technology, who was harmed, and to what extent. Controversy-rich incidents provide valuable data about societal reactions-including insights around social expectations regarding responses. Equally informative are cases where expected controversy is notably absent. This work shows that the AIID's value lies not just in preventing technical failures, but in documenting and making visible patterns of harms and of institutional response and social learning around AI incidents. These patterns offer crucial insights for understanding how society adapts to and governs emerging AI technologies.
... I show that based on these interests are three sexual-sphere-specific claims that individuals have against others: the claim to noninterference, the claim to equal standing, and the claim to choice improvement. These are the kinds of claims that theorists of justice have argued generally apply in society (compare, Kolodny 2023, 6-8;Scanlon 1998), but which have not previously been applied, explained, and explicated in the context of the sexual sphere. Because these claims-or something like them-best correspond to our general interests relating to the initiation of relationships involving sex, dating apps must be designed not to undermine them. ...
... According to many prominent theories of justice, social institutions that exercise significant power over individuals must be justified. They can be so justified if they exercise their power in line with individuals' interests (Rawls 1971;Raz 1986;Scanlon 1998). Many important debates in recent years have concerned which institutions this idea applies to. ...
The online dating application has in recent years become a major avenue for meeting potential partners. However, while the digital public sphere has gained the attention of political philosophers, a systematic normative evaluation of issues arising in the “digital sexual sphere” is lacking. I provide a philosophical framework for assessing the conduct of dating app corporations, capturing both the motivations of users, and the reason why they find usage unsatisfying. Identifying dating apps as agents intervening in a social institution necessary for the reproduction of society, with immense power over people’s lives, I ask if they exercise their power in line with individuals’ interests. Acknowledging that people have claims to noninterference, equal standing, and choice improvement relating to intimacy, I find that the traditional, nondigital, sexual sphere poses problems to their realisation, especially for sexual minorities. In this context, apps’ potential for justice in the sexual sphere is immense but unfulfilled.
... Other early proponents include: Frankfurt (1971), Taylor (1976) and Watson (1975). More recent defenses include Scanlon (1998), Shoemaker (2015), Smith (2005;, and Sripada (2016). See: Reis-Dennis (2018) for a recent criticism of the view. ...
... 7. In particular, I'm inclined to think that, when it comes to responsibility for doxastic attitudes, "answerability" views of the kind defended by Scanlon (1998) and Smith (2005; are quite promising. These views understand the basic condition for responsibility in terms of the inprinciple intelligibility of a certain kind of justificatory request, viz. a request for normative reasons. ...
A number of authors have argued that, in order for S to be appropriately held morally responsible for some action or attitude (say, via moral blame), that action or attitude must somehow reflect or express a negative aspect of S’s (“true,” “deep,” or “real”) self. Recently, theorists of “epistemic blame” and “epistemic accountability” have also incorporated certain “self-disclosure” conditions into their accounts of these phenomena. In this paper, I will argue that accounts of epistemic responsibility which require disclosure of an objectionable feature of a person’s self neglect central aspects of our responsibility practices. Specifically, I will argue that we can appropriately hold individuals epistemically responsible for things which do not reflect or express negative aspects of “who they are” in any way. While disclosure of an objectionable feature of (what I will call) a person’s “doxastic self” isn’t altogether irrelevant when it comes to holding that person epistemically responsible, it also isn’t necessary. One lesson I wish to draw is that, insofar as our epistemic responsibility practices are capable of shedding light on the nature of epistemic normativity itself, theorists interested in the latter should be focused on more than just accountability responses which track objectionable features of a person’s self.
... 6 Those who are sympathetic, if not in favor, include Carlsson (2017), Clarke (2016), Clarke and Rawling (2022), McKenna (2019), Portmore (2022), and Walen (2022). Those who are skeptical, if not opposed, include Achs (2024), King (2023), Macnamara (2020), Nelkin (2019), and Scanlon (2013). utivists, who find the idea that there is non-instrumental goodness or justice in anyone's suffering to be "morally repugnant" (Scanlon 2013: 102) and "completely implausible or even abhorrent" (Menges ms: 27), don't tend to share the intuitions that undergird claims of guilt's basic desert. ...
... 9 7 Achs's citations are to " Menges, L. (manuscript). Is it good when the guilty feel guilt?" and " Scanlon (2013). Giving desert its due. ...
I argue that the blameworthy deserve to suffer in that they deserve to feel guilt, which is the unpleasant experience of appreciating one’s apparent culpability for having done wrong. I argue that the blameworthy deserve to feel guilt because they owe it to those whom they’ve culpably wronged to (a) hold themselves accountable, (b) manifest the proper regard for those whom they’ve wronged, and (c) appreciate their culpability for, and the moral significance of, their wrongdoing. And I argue that the blameworthy must feel guilt to satisfy a–c. What’s more, I argue that, in thinking about whether the blameworthy deserve to feel guilt, we need to compare the world in which the blameworthy feel guilt to the world in which the non-blameworthy feel guilt, for, as I argue, it’s insufficient to compare only the world in which the blameworthy feel guilt to the world in which the blameworthy don’t feel guilt.
... The idea of constraining the behavior of rational moral agents (us) is old and resonates in the writings of many contractualists [496,264,476,368,514,475,16,205]. ...
... These modifications are what we call impact, and preventing them is the act of impact mitigation [537]. 4 In the spirit of propositions made by authors like Hadfield-Menell and Hadfield [244], Bai et al. [23], and Nay [423], we can conceptualize these ideas and constraining factors in an alignment process within a contractual framing [496,264,476,368,514,475,16,205]. This perspective allows us to understand the relationship between AI and human agents as one governed by implicit agreements that ensure mutual respect for pre-established human values. ...
The critical inquiry pervading the realm of Philosophy, and perhaps extending its influence across all Humanities disciplines, revolves around the intricacies of morality and normativity. Surprisingly, in recent years, this thematic thread has woven its way into an unexpected domain, one not conventionally associated with pondering "what ought to be": the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Central to morality and AI, we find "alignment", a problem related to the challenges of expressing human goals and values in a manner that artificial systems can follow without leading to unwanted adversarial effects. More explicitly and with our current paradigm of AI development in mind, we can think of alignment as teaching human values to non-anthropomorphic entities trained through opaque, gradient-based learning techniques. This work addresses alignment as a technical-philosophical problem that requires solid philosophical foundations and practical implementations that bring normative theory to AI system development. To accomplish this, we propose two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that, we argue, should be considered in any alignment process. While necessary conditions serve as metaphysical and metaethical roots that pertain to the permissibility of alignment, sufficient conditions establish a blueprint for aligning AI systems under a learning-based paradigm. After laying such foundations, we present implementations of this approach by using state-of-the-art techniques and methods for aligning general-purpose language systems. We call this framework Dynamic Normativity. Its central thesis is that any alignment process under a learning paradigm that cannot fulfill its necessary and sufficient conditions will fail in producing aligned systems.
... The idea of constraining the behavior of rational moral agents (us) is old and resonates in the writings of many contractualists [496,264,476,368,514,475,16,205]. ...
... These modifications are what we call impact, and preventing them is the act of impact mitigation [537]. 4 In the spirit of propositions made by authors like Hadfield-Menell and Hadfield [244], Bai et al. [23], and Nay [423], we can conceptualize these ideas and constraining factors in an alignment process within a contractual framing [496,264,476,368,514,475,16,205]. This perspective allows us to understand the relationship between AI and human agents as one governed by implicit agreements that ensure mutual respect for pre-established human values. ...
The critical inquiry pervading the realm of Philosophy, and perhaps extending its influence across all Humanities disciplines, revolves around the intricacies of morality and normativity. Surprisingly, in recent years, this thematic thread has woven its way into an unexpected domain, one not conventionally associated with pondering "what ought to be": the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Central to morality and AI, we find "alignment", a problem related to the challenges of expressing human goals and values in a manner that artificial systems can follow without leading to unwanted adversarial effects. More explicitly and with our current paradigm of AI development in mind, we can think of alignment as teaching human values to non-anthropomorphic entities trained through opaque, gradient-based learning techniques. This work addresses alignment as a technical-philosophical problem that requires solid philosophical foundations and practical implementations that bring normative theory to AI system development. To accomplish this, we propose two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that, we argue, should be considered in any alignment process. While necessary conditions serve as metaphysical and metaethical roots that pertain to the permissibility of alignment, sufficient conditions establish a blueprint for aligning AI systems under a learning-based paradigm. After laying such foundations, we present implementations of this approach by using state-of-the-art techniques and methods for aligning general-purpose language systems. We call this framework Dynamic Normativity. Its central thesis is that any alignment process under a learning paradigm that cannot fulfill its necessary and sufficient conditions will fail in producing aligned systems.
... This renders everything incomparable to any other. The second response would along the line of invoking notion like reasonable threshold or potential justification to receiving party of risk [11], these accounts might pin down to postulate certain cut-off when probability appeared, say when there is more than 20% of violating principle like double effect or negative right, consequentialist reasons would be defeated. ...
This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for egalitarian ethics by integrating formal tools from economics and mathematics. We motivate the formalism by investigating the limitations of conventional informal approaches by constructing examples such as probabilistic variant of the trolley dilemma and comparisons of unequal distributions. Our formal model, based on canonical welfare economics, simultaneously accounts for total utility and the distribution of outcomes. The analysis reveals deficiencies in traditional statistical measures and establishes impossibility theorems for rank-weighted approaches. We derive representation theorems that axiomatize key inequality measures including the Gini coefficient and a generalized Atkinson index, providing a coherent, axiomatic foundation for normative philosophy.
... Es sind vielmehr diejenigen Pflichten ge meint, die a s einer Anerkenn ng der Gründe fließen, von denen wir den ken, dass sie a ch andere haben können. Scanlon (1998) hat es ngefähr so form liert: Wir müssen in nse rem Handeln anderen gegenüber diejenigen Prinzipien befolgen, von de nen wir annehmen können, dass die anderen sie nicht vernünftigerweise z rückweisen müssen. Eine Handl ng ist falsch, wenn sie gemäß einem Set an Gründen nd Prinzipien nz lässig wäre, welches nicht vernünftiger weise z rückgewiesen werden könnte. ...
Die australische Philosophin Janna Thompson (1942 – 2022) hat in einer Reihe von Schriften eine politische Ethik der intergenerationellen Gerechtigkeit entwickelt. Sie verbindet die historische Verantwortung Gegenwärtiger gegenüber dem Unrecht früherer Generationen mit der Verantwortung Gegenwärtiger für das Unrecht an den Noch-nicht-Geborenen. Darin findet sich eine Argumentation zur Begründung der intergenerationellen Sorge und Verantwortung, die von der Verletzbarkeit und Abhängigkeit in intergenerationellen Praktiken ausgeht. Sie kritisiert die Vorstellung von zukünftigen Generationen als mit uns unverbundene, noch nicht existierende Individuen und beschreibt die Gesellschaft stattdessen als ein diachrones Kontinuum von Angehörigen einander überlappender, miteinander verbundener Generationen, die füreinander Verantwortung tragen und voneinander abhängig sind. In diesem Beitrag wird der Versuch unternommen, Thompsons Argument für „temporale Vulnerabilität“, d.h. zur Begründung einer Verantwortung für das Wohl ungeborener Zukünftiger, im klimaethischen Kontext zu rekonstruieren. Im Zentrum stehen nicht nur die Handlungen oder Entscheidungen, die Normen unterstehen, oder die Rechte Zukünftiger, sondern soziale Praktiken, die, indem sie sich kollektiv fortsetzen, von der Zukunft her eine materiale Normativität in der Gegenwart enthalten. Die Pflichten Gegenwärtiger können erkannt werden, wenn geprüft wird, ob diese Praktiken Zukünftigen gegenüber rechtfertigbar sind. Es handelt sich um Pflichten der sorgenden Verantwortung, die sich aus den intergenerationellen Beziehungen ergeben. Dieses Argument wird mit zwei Fragen konfrontiert: 1) Hängt die Gültigkeit des Arguments wie Thompson andeutet, von vertragstheoretischen Vorannahmen ab? 2) Wie stark ist die normative Bindungskraft, die von ihrem Argument ausgeht und wie funktioniert diese Bindung? Thompson bietet einen diachronen Ansatz zur intergenerationellen Gerechtigkeit, der sowohl rückwärts in die Vergangenheit als auch vorwärts in die Zukunft blickt, zu einem differenzierten Verständnis der Verantwortung der gegenwärtigen Generation führt, die in Strukturen lebt, die von den Vorgängergenerationen bereits errichtet wurden. Ihre Verantwortung kann spezifiziert werden auf das, was in ihrer Macht steht zu tun, um eine schädliche Dynamik aufzuhalten.
... Another definition of values is the one presented by Scanlon [79] in the buck-passing theory. In his discourse about values, Scanlon states that "to call something good is to claim that it has other properties [...] which provide such reasons" for behaving in certain ways with respect to it. ...
Robots, as AI with physical instantiation, inhabit our social and physical world, where their actions have both social and physical consequences, posing challenges for researchers when designing social robots. This study starts with a scoping review to identify discussions and potential concerns arising from interactions with robotic systems. Two focus groups of technology ethics experts then validated a comprehensive list of key topics and values in human-robot interaction (HRI) literature. These insights were integrated into the HRI Value Compass web tool, to help HRI researchers identify ethical values in robot design. The tool was evaluated in a pilot study. This work benefits the HRI community by highlighting key concerns in human-robot interactions and providing an instrument to help researchers design robots that align with human values, ensuring future robotic systems adhere to these values in social applications.
... 12-19), which ensures a fair outcome. Accordingly, moral contractualism (Scanlon, 2000) involves thinking about whether any option of how to act may fall under a fair (moral) rule and, thus, cannot be reasonably rejected. ...
... Se fundamenta en las teorías contractualistas, que sostienen que los miembros de una sociedad comparten la voluntad de encontrar razones -es decir, argumentos racionales-que justifiquen nuestras demandas individuales ante los demás. En esta visión contractualista de la moral, los juicios de lo bueno y lo malo se transforman en evaluaciones sobre lo que está o no permitido, basadas en principios que no podrían ser rechazados racionalmente por los demás miembros de la comunidad, asumiendo que tienen las mismas motivaciones (Scanlon, 2000). ...
El centro del discurso populista contiene la simplificación del panorama político a una lucha dicotómica entre el pueblo como víctima histórica y la élite como corrupta e incorregible. Sin embargo, a pesar de que, constantemente, se enfatiza esta diferencia en términos morales, poca atención se ha puesto en las implicaciones que plantea el uso de la moral como referente discursivo o como factor explicativo para la forma en que los discursos populistas permean de manera eficiente el espacio público. Este artículo presenta un análisis sobre el ser humano como animal moral, desde los argumentos de Christian Smith, que permitirá dilucidar su acercamiento a las instituciones como empresas moralmente normadas, argumentando su importancia para el análisis de instituciones como la democracia o fenómenos como el populismo. A partir de ello, se identifican las dimensiones morales que entretejen la tríada pueblo-élites-líder populista y que permiten entender la manera en que los individuos reciben, adhieren e interiorizan el discurso, y cómo esto afecta su toma de decisiones y participación política.
... At this point, defenders accept (as we may do) the above conceptual feature linking reasons to the natural world -but wonder at the same time how such necessary connections between reasons and natural features can be said to exist: be part of the 'fabric' or 'furniture' of the world -or perhaps less metaphorically, be ways that worldly objects can be (cf. Mackie 1977;Scanlon 1998;Streumer 2017). Being themselves unable to explain such connections, they invite those who believe in the existence of normative reasons to account for them (Olson 2014: 92, 172;Streumer 2017: 24). ...
... 3 Àqueles familiarizados com o trabalho de Derek Parfit em On What Matters, não será difícil perceber a relação existente entre ambas as visões. Mas embora trilhem um mesmo caminho, a principal diferença entre elas reside no fato de que Coitinho busca defender a possibilidade de haver objetividade moral sem aderir a um realismo normativo à la Parfit (2011) ouScanlon (1998;2014). ...
O objetivo do artigo é avaliar a força da tese defendida por Denis Coitinho de que a moralidade pública e a moralidade privada possuem naturezas normativamente distintas. Recentemente, Coitinho (2021) defendeu que teorias monistas são incapazes de explicar a complexidade da moralidade por não considerarem a dualidade normativa da ética. Ao tratarem o raciocínio moral como uma questão de tudo ou nada, elas ignoram o fato de que a autoridade normativa da moralidade pública é intersubjetiva e a autoridade normativa da moralidade privada é subjetiva. Apesar da atratividade da proposta de Coitinho, discuto quatro pontos que, julgo, merecem uma investigação mais detalhada. Primeiro, o argumento que a autoridade normativa da esfera privada parece excluir a possibilidade de se dirigir uma crítica racional ao conjunto de desejos e interesses de um agente. Em seguida, mostro que tomar como exemplo o trabalho de Dworkin sobre a integridade pode ser problemático considerando os fins do projeto de Coitinho, e defendo que a integridade é mais bem vista como uma virtude epistêmica do que uma virtude privada. Por fim, exploro cenários em que a tese da superioridade da normatividade pública sobre a privada parece levar a consequências contraintuitivas.
... Uma estratégia para encontrar a resposta desse enigma é perguntar: que resposta daria uma pessoa não identificada, ou seja, uma pessoa razoável qualquer (uma que não sabe em que posição de fato está)? Essa é a estratégia que Rawls propôs como método para obter uma resposta que não poderia ser rejeitada por nenhuma pessoa razoável (RAWLS, 1971;SCANLON, 2000). Então, o que uma pessoa qualquer (isto é, uma pessoa razoável sob um véu de ignorância) diria sobre as alternativas? ...
As triagens não são ordinariamente problemáticas. Elas só são problemáticas quando a decisão envolve uma distribuição de desigual de recursos com prejuízos significativos a alguém; em circunstâncias normais, a triagem apenas garante uma melhor eficiência na gestão de recursos sem causar danos significativos a ninguém. Contudo, há situações críticas, e dramáticas, em que não é possível prestar um mesmo serviço a todas as pessoas ao mesmo tempo sem deixar alguém em uma situação prejudicial. Nas situações ordinárias é preciso estabelecer prioridades que garantam priorização eficiente (máxima eficácia com o menor custo) de forma justa. Nessas circunstâncias, não há “problema de triagem”, pois mesmo que alguém esteja em desvantagem em relação a outro, a desvantagem não é significativa ou impossível de ser compensada. Um problema de triagem surge quando é necessário racionar o recurso, gerando um ônus significativo para alguma parte que não pode ser compensado. No caso das decisões sobre as prioridades de utilização dos recursos da UTI na recente pandemia, as decisões pareceram implicar aceitar que alguém possa receber um tratamento pior, com sério risco de morte ou dano, pela omissão do melhor tratamento disponível apenas para alguns. Neste artigo, pretendo investigar se a abordagem consequencialista que supostamente parece fundamentar as propostas para o problema da triagem na distribuição de ventiladores mecânicos a pacientes gravemente afetados pelo COVID-19 pode ser avaliado à luz de uma melhor interpretação do chamado princípio do dano. Mas por que pensamos que é correto alocar recursos vitais escassos para aumentar a chance de salvar mais pessoas em algumas circunstâncias, mas relutamos em aceitar como certo seguir esse mesmo princípio em outras situações? Por exemplo, seria correto redistribuir recurso vital já alocado para garantir o princípio consequencialista do melhor resultado agregado de mais vidas salvas? Pretendo avaliar porque é correto dar um leito de UTI para alguém com mais chances de sobreviver antes da alocação, mas errado aplicar esse mesmo princípio para remover alguém desse leito após a alocação ter sido feita. O estudo permitirá desenvolver um conceito de dano que seja capaz de equilibrar reflexivamente as intuições e princípios em jogo.
... But if one were to revise one's judgment, one's intentions would (ideally) change accordingly; and without revising such a judgment, intentions, it seems, cannot change. One could say, borrowing a term from Scanlon (1998), that intentions are "judgment-sensitive" attitudes. ...
Though addiction is a complex empirical phenomenon, some of the most pressing questions about it concern how we should evaluate agents who are living with it. To that end, a fruitful methodology is to tease out from our best sciences consequences at the level of moral psychology. Taking account of epidemiology, behavioral science, animal studies and, chiefly, neuroscience, I argue for a view according to which addiction involves dysfunctional motivational states (which I call “hybrid intentions”) as well as cognitive distortions. This argument can be made without needing to settle the traditional debate about whether addiction is a disease.
... The first is the narrowness of their substantive content. Fairness, a rich philosophical concept intimately linked to justice, mutual respect and what we owe each other, and important for the well-being and flourishing of people in society [37,42], is frequently reduced to some statistical measure that can be satisfied via different technical solutions. In short, normative questions such as, "What notion of fairness ought we strive to satisfy?" or "How should affected stakeholder groups be involved in mitigating bias?" are often left unaddressed or overlooked (often for understandable reasons, such as resource limitations or lack of skills and capabilities within project teams). ...
Fairness is one of the most commonly identified ethical principles in existing AI guidelines, and the development of fair AI-enabled systems is required by new and emerging AI regulation. But most approaches to addressing the fairness of AI-enabled systems are limited in scope in two significant ways: their substantive content focuses on statistical measures of fairness, and they do not emphasize the need to identify and address fairness considerations across the whole AI lifecycle. Our contribution is to present an assurance framework and tool that can enable a practical and transparent method for widening the scope of fairness considerations across the AI lifecycle and move the discussion beyond mere statistical notions of fairness to consider a richer analysis in a practical and context-dependent manner. To illustrate this approach, we first describe and then apply the framework of Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance (TEA) to an AI-enabled clinical diagnostic support system (CDSS) whose purpose is to help clinicians predict the risk of developing hypertension in patients with Type 2 diabetes, a context in which several fairness considerations arise (e.g., discrimination against patient subgroups). This is supplemented by an open-source tool and a fairness considerations map to help facilitate reasoning about the fairness of AI-enabled systems in a participatory way. In short, by using a shared framework for identifying, documenting and justifying fairness considerations, and then using this deliberative exercise to structure an assurance case, research on AI fairness becomes reusable and generalizable for others in the ethical AI community and for sharing best practices for achieving fairness and equity in digital health and healthcare in particular.
... We've assumed they are items with representational content. It's the subject of further work exactly how that will work in the AI setting, because at least some of the literature has it that some reasons (normative ones) are non-representational entities like facts (Raz 1975 andScanlon 1998). Moreover, a popular view about motivating reasons is that they are mental states (e.g. ...
Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? 'Making AI Intelligible' shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they illustrate ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (for example, creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants). If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. This ground-breaking study offers insight into how to take some first steps towards achieving Interpretable AI.
... I believe the question of whether desire is a cognitive, conative, or affective state (or, indeed, a combination these, or some novel state) is still open. Work in the philosophy of desire evidences this, with some philosophers arguing that desire is a cognitive state [21,38,47], some claiming it is conative [6,35,36,48], and others proposing that desire is affective [50,58,64]. An answer to this question might allow us to make progress with various metaethical issues. ...
According to a widely accepted thesis, all rights violations wrong the right-holder. According to another widely accepted thesis, rights protect interests. But many conventional rights protect morally trivial interests. Hence, the two theses taken together lead to the puzzling conclusion that one can wrong another by frustrating a trivial interest. In this essay, I first introduce this “moral magic” problem and show why the interest theory of rights has no resources to address it.
Annette Baier’s 1986 essay “Trust and Antitrust” is widely recognized as the starting point of the philosophical literature on trust. However, references to it focus disproportionately on two claims Baier makes in the essay’s opening section. I argue that as a result of this lopsided attention, Baier’s critical engagement with the history of philosophy is obscured, and essential features of her account of trust are overlooked. To fill this lacuna, I offer a developmental interpretation of the essay and contextualize it within the wider trajectory of her work. My interpretation pulls Baier’s emphasis on the embodied experience of trust into focus and tracks the way she uses climate as a metaphor to describe how trust operates.
This article defends informed preference satisfaction theories of welfare against the most influential objections put forward in the economic and philosophy of science literatures. The article explicates and addresses in turn: the objection from inner rational agents; the objection from unfeasible preference reconstruction; the objection from dubious normative commitments; the objection from conceptual ambiguity; and the objection from conceptual replacement. My defence does not exclude that preference satisfaction theories of welfare face significant conceptual and practical challenges. Still, if correct, it demonstrates that philosophers/welfare economists are justified in relying on specific versions of such theories, namely informed preference satisfaction theories.
Sterba has argued that ethics does not require God and that an atheistic objectivist ethics is compatible with an evolutionary account of our development. This paper argues that though ethics does not require God specifically, it does require a god of some sort, for all normative reasons require a god and moral reasons are simply a subset of normative reasons. Sterba’s criticisms of more orthodox divine command theories of ethics are shown to raise no challenge to my view. Furthermore, even if Sterba’s alternative atheistic objectivist ethics is coherent, it would leave moral norms vulnerable to a particular kind of evolutionary debunking threat in a way that my theistic alternative does not.
Worship is central to the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet, despite the recent flourishing of analytical philosophy of religion, there has been very little attention paid to the philosophical questions raised by worship. This book is the first volume to explore the philosophy of worship. Written in a clear style that eschews unnecessary technical jargon, it considers the metaphysical, ethical, and psychological issues associated with worship, among them: What, if anything, is the point of worship? What, if anything, makes a being worthy of worship? Can worship hold value for atheists? What, if anything, might be wrong with idolatry? These questions, and more, sit at the heart of this book. With contributions from world renowned philosophers and important early career voices, this volume sets the agenda for future work in the philosophy of worship.
In a short span, this Element will delineate the general nature of legal and moral rights and the general nature of the holding of rights, and it will also sketch the justificatory foundations of rights. Hence, the Element will treat of some major topics within legal, political, and moral philosophy as it combines analytical theses and ethical theses in a complex pattern.
Joseph Raz is among the most celebrated and influential scholars in the Anglophone legal-philosophical debate. This author’s thought occupies a less central place in Italy and, more generally, in the non-Anglophone world. Beginning with a reconstruction of the causes that produced this difference, this essay proposes a wide-ranging – and, for this reason, necessarily partial and superficial – reconstruction of Raz’s thought and its main problematic cores. In particular, the following will be critically discussed: 1) the Razian notion of “reason for action”; 2) the distinction between reasons of different levels; 3) the notion of authority and its relevance to law; and, finally, 4) the way Raz reconstructs the relations between law and morality. In general, one can view Raz’s thought as an attempt to defend through moral arguments an a-moral law, that is, a law whose individuation prescinds (must prescind) from moral criteria. Raz’s is perhaps the best possible version of legal positivism in a historical period when this legal-philosophical perspective no longer expresses the esprit du temps.
A prominent position about moral responsibility claims that a necessary condition on accountability blame is that, at the time of action, the agent must be sufficiently reasons-responsive so as to be capable of acting differently by following the pertinent moral reasons and thus avoid wrongdoing. Call this the Accountability with Avoidability view (or AWA). In this paper I aim to show that AWA is false by doing three things. First, I argue that it badly contradicts moral commonsense concerning the moral responsibility of a particularly egregious kind of wrongdoer. Second, I show that AWA’s three most prominent rationales—based on the notions of desert, demands, and excuses—all fail to support a robust reasons-responsiveness requirement on accountability. Finally, I sketch an alternative conception of accountability—accountability without avoidability—that dispenses with robust reasons-responsiveness and appeals instead to the capacity of agents to convey moral meaning through their conduct as the key element in the moral psychology of responsible agency.
Can Kantians distinguish unfair free riding from innocent coordination? If they cannot, the whole approach is flawed. This paper develops a novel solution. Free riders, as I will put it, fail to make their conduct conditional on other people’s preferences. They refuse to do their part regardless of what others prefer. It is not just that other people share the same preferences - as alternative accounts have it - but that the free rider does not care whether they do or do not share the same preferences. The same does not carry over to innocent coordination.
Do not chew with your mouth open! Take your hat off when you enter a church! Do not skip the queue! Pay your taxes! Do not cross on a red light! These are familiar imperatives, and their immediate source are ‘socially constructed norms’: norms that exist as a matter of social fact. These range from informal etiquette and politeness norms to the complex norms making up our legal systems. While we often feel bound by these norms, we are also aware that they can be pernicious: the product of injustice and vehicles for its perpetuation. The question thus arises: when and why, if ever, does the fact that a socially constructed norm requires us to perform a certain action place us under a genuine moral obligation to comply? In Morality and Socially Constructed Norms , I answer that such an obligation, when it exists, is grounded in a broader, familiar duty, namely the duty to respect people’s permissible and authentic exercises of agency. This is what I call the ‘Agency-Respect View.’ The first part of the book outlines and defends the view, the second part considers relevant applications.
Laura Valentini’s novel theory, the Agency-Respect View, says that we have a fundamental moral duty to honor other people’s convictions, at least pro tanto and under certain conditions. I raise doubts that such a duty exists indeed and that informative conditions have been specified. The questions that Valentini faces here have a parallel in Kant’s moral philosophy, viz. the question of why one has a duty to value the other’s humanity and the question of how to specify the maxim of one’s action. Additionally, I discuss the concept of a social convention and Valentini’s use of it.
This Element surveys the main claims of Bernard Williams's ethical philosophy. Topics include ethical scepticism, virtue, reasons for action, the critique of the Morality System, moral realism and the nature of theorising in ethics.
The idea of developing a just and well-ordered society has been central both to western political theory and to Islamic thought. John Rawls is a contemporary philosopher who has revived Anglo-American political thought and offered one of the most comprehensive theories of society. The Rawlsian ideas of justice, public reason, and political liberalism have instigated many interesting discussions, some aspects of which I will try to highlight here. While the basic doctrines of Islam always remain sacred, it is also important to acknowledge the heavy influence of the modernity in the present-day Islamic ideologies. The principles of distributive justice in Islamic tradition have been debated and theorized extensively since the classical times. In the article, I will talk about these arguments and address the topics where these two distinct models interact.
Since the 1990s, meta-ethical constructivism has established itself as a serious contender in debates about the nature and sources of practical normativity. Roughly, constructivism’s core idea is that practical normativity or normative reasons neither exist independently of what we think and do, nor in virtue of the fact that we want and intend things, but because we engage in some distinctive sort of activity. How exactly to characterize that activity, and how to distinguish constructivism from its main rivals, are, however, contested issues. In this paper, I will suggest that constructivism in meta-ethics is best understood as explaining practical reasons through the possession and habitual exercise of the capacity of practical reason. This characterization offers a neat way of understanding what is at issue between constructivism and its rivals, realism and subjectivism, as well as the differences between important varieties of constructivism. It also promises to help resolve some important problems critics have pointed out for constructivism.
This paper argues that we can understand the practical philosophy of early Chinese thinkers like Zhuangzi by considering how they imagine the normative aspects of the world and how their existence can constitute reasons for action, how they can make certain actions appropriate or inappropriate. We can interpret these normative aspects of the world as ethical warrants for moral action and as the basis for evaluative attitudes. Although these normative dimensions of the world may not be readily apparent, many early Chinese thinkers believed that we could possess veridical access to them through forms of revealed knowledge or revelation. In other words, the perception of normative realities like Heaven or the Dao serve as grounds which make evaluative attitudes and practical reasons appropriate or inappropriate, more or less reflective of the Way. The paper concludes with some methodological reflections on the “asymmetry” that currently exists in comparative ethics and the reasons why this asymmetry continues to endure.
El propósito de este ensayo consiste en plantear el agotamiento de la noción moderna de los derechos humanos y exponer algunas propuestas para su actualización o substitución. En particular, se analiza la libertad religiosa dentro del espacio público actual, en donde la primera convive con una diversidad cultural y religiosa, así como con instituciones sociales aminoradas. Para justificar la idea propuesta se abordará el tema desde la filosofía y teoría del derecho, la sociología, la teoría del estado y la ciencia política.
This article develops an account of territorial justice to understand what is owed to people at risk of climate displacement. I argue that the aim of territorial justice is to secure a globally recognized status, the status of being an equal common possessor of the earth. As a common possessor, every inhabitant of the globe has a claim to a “place” in the world where they can access minimally just material conditions and political institutions, securely pursue their located practices, and exercise self-determination together with others. I apply this theory to generate prescriptions for a just policy response to the risk of climate displacement. Where possible, I argue that a just response should focus on mandatory global taxation to support in situ adaptation. In cases where relocation becomes inevitable, I outline the implications for how just relocation regime should be structured.
Prioritarianism is a family of views comparing distributions of well-being. What unites prioritarians is the thought that when deciding whether a distribution is overall better than another, the worse off have priority. There are different ways of making this idea more precise. However, some of these views have extreme aggregative implications and others have extreme anti-aggregative implications. This raises the question: can prioritarians accommodate partial aggregation (aggregating in some but not all cases) and avoid both extremes? In this paper, I explore and focus on a neglected anti-aggregation condition. I identify a family of views I call ‘bounded prioritarianism’ that meet this condition by placing an upper bound on the moral significance of benefits. I argue that anyone sympathetic to partial aggregation ought to opt for a version of bounded prioritarianism.
We all have experiences in which it “seems clear” to us that something is true. This kind of clear experience can play significant roles in determining whether we believe something to be true. But what are the significant roles? So far, the literature has focused on optimal cases where a person's clear experience might provide prima facie justification for their belief. This article will develop the hypothesis that, in less optimal cases, these clear experiences can be epistemically damaging. Specifically, it will argue that, in certain cases, such experiences may causally compel belief even in the face of counterevidence.
Desire is a fundamental aspect of human motivation and agency, yet its complexities have proven challenging to capture in formal representations. This thesis addresses the study of desire using the algebraic language LogA(C)n.
Building upon previous work, we propose a formal framework that enables a more comprehensive representation and analysis of desire's properties. Our approach provides a rigorous and expressive language for describing desire, with potential implications for both philosophical inquiry into motivation and agency, and the development of more sophisticated and human-like intelligent agents in artificial intelligence research. This thesis systematically explores desire within LogA(C)n Language, proving key propositions about its properties and behavior.
If people are forced to make a choice between helping their loved ones and helping others, are they morally allowed to prefer their loved ones or should they have an impartial choice? This is the challenge that exists between the two views of ethical Impartiality and the ethics of care about social relationships. According to moral impartiality, all human beings are equal and it is an ethical act to be impartial. But the care ethics say that our most important moral responsibility is towards the relatives and those whom care is in our ability. His study focuses on the relationship between parents and children, with the aim of achieving a solution to the conflict, examines the arguments for and against the two views and in this direction has used the method of comparative analysis based on the model of George Bereday. The results show that the reasons for both views are insufficient. Proposed solutions of these two western perspectives are either unreasonable or limited to material issues. But the approach taken from the Islamic doctrine states that the specific obligations of parents and their support of their children are solely limited to the duties that religion has set for them, but outside the scope of these duties, they must maintain impartiality between their children and other children in all the material and spiritual things.
Many harms are collective: they are due to several individual actions that are as such harmless. At least in some cases, it seems imper-missible to contribute to such harms, even if individual agents do not make a difference. The Problem of Collective Harm is the challenge of explaining why. I argue that, if the action is to be permissible, the proba-bility of making a difference to harm must be small enough. This in turn means that both the probability of harm and the probability of avoiding harm have to remain below the corresponding threshold probabilities. I compare this threshold probability account to proposals that revolve around difference-making, NESS causation and security dependence, and I argue that they fail for reasons of scope. For instance, a moral principle that invokes NESS causation prohibits so many actions that compliance with it would have a stifling effect on human life.
Empirical legal studies are often challenged by traditional doctrinal legal scholars as irrelevant to normative legal reasoning. This article explores, through the lens of jurisprudence and by drawing on dozens of empirical works, the junction between empirical facts and normative arguments. Both teleological and consequential arguments, in one of their premises, employ “difference-making facts” which identify the causal effects of certain legal measures as reasons for normative claims. Empirical works make causal inferences and their findings thus constitute an essential part of teleological and consequential arguments, which are prevalent in normative legal reasoning. All causal-identifying empirical findings can be framed as the required empirical premise in teleological and consequential arguments. Finally, although some classical canons of legal interpretation, such as textual and systemic arguments, appear not to take the form of teleological or consequential arguments, the use of these specific legal arguments must nonetheless be justified by teleological or consequential arguments at the meta-level. Thus, normative legal reasoning, one way or another, must have empirical foundations.
Discusses the cognitive and the psychophysical determinants of choice in risky and riskless contexts. The psychophysics of value induce risk aversion in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. The psychophysics of chance induce overweighting of sure things and of improbable events, relative to events of moderate probability. Decision problems can be described or framed in multiple ways that give rise to different preferences, contrary to the invariance criterion of rational choice. The process of mental accounting, in which people organize the outcomes of transactions, explains some anomalies of consumer behavior. In particular, the acceptability of an option can depend on whether a negative outcome is evaluated as a cost or as an uncompensated loss. The relationships between decision values and experience values and between hedonic experience and objective states are discussed. (27 ref)
People ordinarily suppose that there are certain things they ought to believe and certain things they ought not to believe. In supposing this to be so, they make corresponding assumptions about their belief-forming capacities. They assume that they are generally responsive to what they think they ought to believe in the things they actually come to believe. In much the same sense, people ordinarily suppose that there are certain things they ought to desire and do and they make corresponding assumptions about their capacities to form desires and act on them. We chart these assumptions in this paper and argue that they entail that people are responsible and free on two fronts. They are free and responsible believers, and free and responsible desirers.
The purpose of this paper is to present an impossibility result that seems to have some disturbing consequences for principles of social choice. A common objection to the method of majority decision is that it is illiberal. The argument takes the following form: Given other things in the society, if you prefer to have pink walls rather than white, then society should permit you to have this, even if a majority of the community would like to see your walls white. Similarly, whether you should sleep on your back or on your belly is a matter in which the society should permit you absolute freedom, even if a majority of the community is nosey enough to feel that you must sleep on your back. We formalize this concept of individual liberty in an extremely weak form and examine its consequences. Economics Version of Record