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9726.350454
Organ sale – for example, allowing or encouraging consenting
adults to become living kidney donors in return for money – has
been proposed as a possible solution to the seemingly chronic shortage
of organs for transplantation. Many people however regard this idea as
abhorrent and argue both that the practice would be unethical and that
it should be banned. This entry outlines some of the different
possible kinds of organ sale, briefly states the case in favour, and
then examines the main arguments against.
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38130.350542
This paper considers the mundane ways in which AI is being incorporated into scientific practice today, and particularly the extent to which AI is used to automate tasks perceived to be boring, “mere routine” and inconvenient to researchers. We label such uses as instances of “Convenience AI” — that is situations where AI is applied with the primary intention to increase speed and minimize human effort. We outline how attributions of convenience to AI applications involve three key characteristics: (i) an emphasis on speed and ease of action, (ii) a comparative element, as well as (iii) a subject-dependent and subjective quality. Using examples from medical science and development economics, we highlight epistemic benefits, complications, and drawbacks of Convenience AI along these three dimensions. While the pursuit of convenience through AI can save precious time and resources as well as give rise to novel forms of inquiry, our analysis underscores how the uncritical adoption of Convenience AI for the sake of shortcutting human labour may also weaken the evidential foundations of science and generate inertia in how research is planned, set-up and conducted, with potentially damaging implications for the knowledge being produced. Critically, we argue that the consistent association of Convenience AI with the goals of productivity, efficiency, and ease, as often promoted also by companies targeting the research market for AI applications, can lower critical scrutiny of research processes and shift focus away from appreciating their broader epistemic and social implications.
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155000.35056
A. I guess because I'm exploring the format in some of my own writing. Q. A. It's not ready to show to anyone. In fact the project is more notional than actual—a few notes in a plain text file, which I peek at from time to time. …
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211094.350578
Following the lead of heterogeneous and invariably brilliant thinkers as Thucydides, Arnold J. Toynbee, Winston Churchill, Carl Sagan, Philip K. Dick, and Niall Ferguson, I consider a virtual history – or an alternative Everettian branch of the universal wavefunction – in which the ancient materialism and atomism of Epicurus (and heliocentrism of Aristarchus, for good measure) have prevailed over the (Neo) Platonist-Aristotelian religious-military complex. Such a historical swerve (pun fully intended) would have removed the unhealthy obsession with mind-body dualism and dialectics, which crippled much of the European thought throughout the last millennium. It is at least open to serious questioning whether quasireligious totalitarian ideologies could have arisen and brought about so much death, suffering and pain in this virtual history as they did in our actual history.
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211134.350589
It has been argued that non-epistemic values have legitimate roles to play in the classification of psychiatric disorders. Such a value-laden view on psychiatric classification raises questions about the extent to which expert disagreements over psychiatric classification are fueled by disagreements over value judgments and the extent to which these disagreements could be resolved. This paper addresses these questions by arguing for two theses. First, a major source of disagreements about psychiatric classification is factual and concerns what social consequences a classification decision will have. This type of disagreement can be addressed by empirical research, although obtaining and evaluating relevant empirical evidence often requires interdisciplinary collaboration.
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240405.350599
The uses of the word “ideology” are so divergent as to
make it doubtful that there is any conceptual unity to the term. It
may refer to a comprehensive worldview, a legitimating discourse, a
partisan political doctrine, culture, false beliefs that help support
illegitimate power, beliefs that reinforce group identity, or
mystification. It is often used pejoratively, but just as often it is
a purely descriptive term. When authors criticize ideology, they may
be criticizing complicity with injustice, confirmation bias,
illusions, self-serving justifications, or dogmatism. When authors
identify ideology, they may locate it in forms of consciousness,
propositional attitudes, culture, institutions, discourses, social
conventions, or material rituals.
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292176.350609
As always, please ‘like’ this post via the heart below and restack it on notes if you get something out of it. It’s the best way to help others find my work. Of course, the very best way to support my work is with a paid subscription. …
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384151.350619
This paper examines the tension between the growing algorithmic control in safety-critical societal contexts—motivated by human cognitive fallibility—and the rise of probabilistic types of AI, primarily in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although both human cognition and LLMs exhibit inherent uncertainty and occasional unreliability, some futurist visions of the “Singularity” paradoxically advocate relinquishing control of the main societal processes–including critical ones–to these probabilistic AI agents, heightening the risks of a resulting unpredictable or “whimsical” governance. As an alternative, a “mediated control” framework is proposed here: a more prudent alternative wherein LLM-AGIs are strategically employed as “meta-programmers” to design sophisticated–but fundamentally deterministic–algorithms and procedures, or, in general, powerful rule-based solutions. It is these algorithms or procedures, executed on classical computing infrastructure and under human oversight, the systems to be deployed–based on human deliberative decision processes–as the actual controllers of critical systems and processes. This constitutes a way to harness AGI creativity for algorithmic innovation while maintaining essential reliability, predictability, and human accountability of the processes controlled by the algorithms so produced. The framework emphasizes a division of labor between the LLM-AGI and the algorithms it devises, a rigorous verification and validation protocols as conditions for safe algorithm generation, and a mediated application of the algorithms. Such an approach is not a guaranteed solution to the challenges of advanced AI, but–it is argued–it offers a more human-aligned, risk-mitigated, and ultimately more beneficial path towards integrating AGI into societal governance, possibly leading to a safer future, while preserving essential domains of human freedom and agency.
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394436.350632
I’ve been watching the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” lately. The series is an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same title. For the readers who have never heard about it, this dystopia takes place in the context of worldwide infertility where the United States of America has disappeared following a civil war. …
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482558.350641
According to the model of exchange as mutual assistance, an exchange can be perceived as a joint activity for mutual benefit – and needn’t involve any self-directed motives at all. This essay pushes back against this new defence of market motives. The essay develops an alternative ideal of production as caring solidarity, in which production is a joint activity of caring about one another. Points of overlap and difference are developed in some detail. The essay concludes by discussing the implications for an economics of caring solidarity, with discussion of the limitations of various market socialist strategies.
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499192.350655
For Karl Marx, ideological forms of consciousness are false, but how and in what respects? Ideologies must include some beliefs in order to be false, even if not all the beliefs that are inferentially related in the ideology are false, and even if there are (causally) related attitudes in the ideology that are neither true nor false. “Ideological” beliefs, however, are not simply false; their falsity has the specific property of not being in the interests of the agents who accept the ideology. One can make two kinds of mistakes about interests. One can mistake what is in one’s intrinsic interest or one can mistake what is in one’s extrinsic interest (that is, the means required to realize one’s intrinsic interests). Marx is mostly, but not exclusively, focused on mistakes about extrinsic interests; this is important in understanding how “morality” (which is not a matter of beliefs, but attitudes) can be ideological for Marx. I illustrate this analysis with some of Marx’s paradigmatic examples of ideological mistakes and offer an account of Marx’s conception of “interests.”
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543212.35067
Attachment is deeply important to human life. When one person becomes ‘attached’ to another, their sense of security turns on their emotional, social, and physical engagement with that person. This kind of security-based attachment has been extensively studied in psychology. Yet attachment theory (in the specific sense studied by psychologists) has not received adequate attention in analytic theories of social justice. In this paper, we conceptualize attachment’s nature and value, addressing when and why attachments place justice-based claims on individuals and institutions, in an attempt to establish the centrality of attachment theory to liberal political philosophy. We first characterize security-based attachment and differentiate it from related phenomena (§1). We then explore its value, theorizing the connection between attachment, care, and companionship, drawing on the ethics of care (§2). We explain when and why security-based attachment generates claims of justice within liberal theory, noting some important difficulties (§3). Finally, we sketch some implications in three domains: the rights of those who have suffered pregnancy loss, the rights of grandparents vis-à-vis grandchildren, and the rights of attached friends to social and political recognition (§4).
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557161.350681
Although several accounts of scientific understanding exist, the concept of understanding in relation to technology remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a philosophical account of technological understanding—the type of understanding that is required for and reflected by successfully designing and using technological artefacts. We develop this notion by building on the concept of scientific understanding. Drawing on parallels between science and technology, and specifically between scientific theories and technological artefacts, we extend the idea of scientific understanding into the realm of technology. We argue that, just as scientific understanding involves the ability to explain a phenomenon using a theory, technological understanding involves the ability to use a technological artefact to realise a practical aim.
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557204.350694
This paper examines cases in which an individual’s misunderstanding improves the scientific community’s understanding via “corrective” processes that produce understanding from poor epistemic inputs. To highlight the unique features of valuable misunderstandings and corrective processes, we contrast them with other social-epistemological phenomena including testimonial understanding, collective understanding, Longino’s critical contextual empiricism, and knowledge from falsehoods.
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766418.350704
If Moby Dick overflows with boundless energy, the narration in Billy Budd, written at the other end of Melville’s life, is carefully controlled. But neither book can simply tell its tale; both are driven by a need to pause over each moment’s significance, psychological, political, and spiritual. …
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788033.350714
Motivational trade-off behaviours, where an organism behaves as if flexibly weighing up an opportunity for reward against a risk of injury, are often regarded as evidence that the organism has valenced experiences like pain. This type of evidence has been influential in shifting opinion regarding crabs and insects. Critics note that (i) the precise links between trade-offs and consciousness are not fully known; (ii) simple trade-offs are evinced by the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mediated by a mechanism plausibly too simple to support conscious experience; (iii) pain can sometimes interfere with rather than support making trade-offs rationally. However, rather than undermining trade-off evidence in general, such cases show that the nature of the trade-off, and its underlying neural substrate, matter. We investigate precisely how.
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842613.350728
There is a genre of moral philosophy for which I have particular affection, in which a thinker subjects an aspect of ordinary life to rigorous scrutiny, revealing it to be more puzzling or more profound that is typically acknowledged. …
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900002.350738
Years ago, in ‘Expected Value without Expecting Value’, I noted that “The vast majority of students would prefer to save 1000 lives for sure, than to have a 10% chance of saving a million lives. This, even though the latter choice has 100 times the expected value.”
Joe Carlsmith’s essay on Expected Utility Maximization nicely explains “Why it’s OK to predictably lose” in this sort of situation. …
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961116.350747
The received view of scientific experimentation holds that science is characterized by experiment and experiment is characterized by active intervention on the system of interest. Although versions of this view are widely held, they have seldom been explicitly defended. The present essay reconstructs and defuses two arguments in defense of the received view: first, that intervention is necessary for uncovering causal structures, and second, that intervention conduces to better evidence. By examining a range of non-interventionist studies from across the sciences, I conclude that interventionist experiments are not, ceteris paribus, epistemically superior to non-interventionist studies and that the latter may thus be classified as experiment proper. My analysis explains why intervention remains valuable while at the same time elevating the status of some non-interventionist studies to that of experiment proper.
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1051345.35076
Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the play‑ ers’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are.
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1054749.35077
There is a near consensus among philosophers of science whose research focuses on science and values that the ideal of value-free science is untenable, and that science not only is, but normatively must be, value-laden in some respect. The consensus is far from complete; with some regularity, defenses of the value-free ideal (VFI) as well as critiques of major arguments against the VFI surface in the literature. I review and respond to many of the recent defenses of the VFI and show that they generally fail to meet the mark. In the process, I articulate what the current burden of argument for a defense of the VFI ought to be, given the state of the literature.
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1076417.350781
There is an "under-representation problem” in philosophy departments and journals. Empirical data suggest that while we have seen some improvements since the 1990s, the rate of change has slowed down. Some posit that philosophy has disciplinary norms making it uniquely resistant to change (Antony and Cudd 2012; Dotson 2012; Hassoun et al. 2022). In this paper, we present results from an empirical case study of a philosophy department that achieved and maintained male-female gender parity among its faculty as early as 2014. Our analysis extends beyond matters of gender parity because that is only one, albeit important, dimension of inclusion. We build from the case study to reflect on strategies that may catalyze change.
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1076551.350793
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s latest book, Split and Splice, brings together and builds upon themes that are familiar from his previous works, in particular his highly in uential Toward a History of Epistemic Things ([1997]) and his Epistemology of the Concrete ([2010]). Characteristic of all of these books is Rheinberger’s skilful combination of a profound knowledge of the history of biology with careful attention to the details of experimental practices in microbiology, and an ambitious, often dazzling, overarching vision of how to analyse what he deems most exciting about the scienti c process, namely, that it can create novelty. It is this latter point, in particular, that sets his unique approach apart from much of contemporary history and philosophy of science in the Anglo-American tradition. Instead, his theoretical framework is deeply informed by the French tradition of historical epistemology, of which Bachelard and Canguilhem are particularly well-known gures. In addition, the book draws on a wealth of research from various other traditions and disciplines, often taking the accounts and observations of scientists as points of departure, combining them with concepts from philosophy, history, cultural studies, and STS, to weave together an evocative set of interlacing analyses of the scienti c process.
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1178902.350806
I’m back from a short trip to Oslo, Norway. Compared to other Scandinavian capitals like Stockholm and Helsinki (I’ve never been to Copenhagen, yet), I find Oslo more modern and “cold.” There is beauty in modernity of course, but it lacks the charm of Stockholm’s downtown. …
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1299835.350817
Moral arguments against the consumption of animal products from factory farms are traditionally categorical. The conclusions require people to eliminate from their diets all animal products (veganism), all animal flesh (vegetarianism), all animals except seafood (pescetarianism), etc. An alternative “reducetarian” approach prescribes progressive reduction in one's consumption of animal products, not categorical abstention. We articulate a much-needed moral defense of this more ecumenical approach. We start with a presumptive case in favor of reducetarianism before moving on to address three objections—that it falls short of our obligations to address such an egregious practice, is a rationalization of the status quo, and cannot fix systemic injustices in animal agriculture. We conclude that reducetarianism is a defensible approach for many people and is a promising route to moral progress on factory farming.
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1307331.350827
—This study examines how large language models (LLMs) transform knowledge and literature from a technocentric perspective. While LLMs centralize human knowledge and reconstruct it in a relational memory framework, research indicates that when trained on their own data, they experience “model collapse.” Experiments reveal that as generations progress, language deteriorates, variance decreases, and confusion increases. While humans refine their language through reading, machines encounter epistemological ruptures due to statistical errors. Artificial literature diverges from human literature; machine-generated texts are a literary illusion. LLMs can be regarded as a technological phenomenon that instrumentalizes human knowledge, tilting the subject-object balance in favor of the machine and creating its own “culture.” They signal a shift from a human-centered paradigm to a knowledge-centered approach. This study questions the boundaries of artificial literature and whether machine language can be considered “knowledge,” while exploring the transformations in the human-machine relationship.
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1336602.350838
Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was one of the most influential
pedagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
developing an educational method that currently guides over 15,000
schools in dozens of countries. Montessori was never merely a teacher,
however. She was a psychologist, anthropologist, doctor, cultural
critic, and philosopher. Her writings span a wide range of
philosophical issues, from metaphysics to political philosophy, but
she always discusses philosophical issues in ways that make use of
insights—what she calls revelations—gleaned from her work
with children. In recent years, philosophers have begun to attend to
her work.
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1364572.350848
In Family Values, Harry Brighouse and Adam Smith ask whether children need parents. That inquiry seems a wild project, but then philosophers are supposed to question everything and follow the argument where it leads. …
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1480424.350858
In epidemiology, an effect of a dichotomous exposure on a dichotomous outcome is a comparison of risks between the exposed and the unexposed. Causally interpreted, this comparison is assumed to equal a comparison in counterfactual risks if, hypothetically, both exposure states were to occur at once for each subject (Hernán and Robins, 2020). These comparisons are summarized by effect measures like risk difference or risk ratio. Risk difference describes the additive influence of an exposure on an outcome, and is often called an absolute effect measure. Trials occasionally report the inverse of a risk difference, which can also be classified as an absolute measure, as inverting it again returns the risk difference. Measures like risk ratio, which describe a multiplier of risk, are called relative, or ratio measures.
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1592454.350867
Bet On It reader Dan Barrett wrote these notes for his Book Nook book club on my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Dan’s idea:
I’m organizing reading groups packaged as the Book Nook to help colleagues (1) guide their own learning journeys, (2) connect with people they’d otherwise not meet, & (3) deepen their understanding of the Principles of Human Progress. …