The concept of a good life is usually assumed by philosophers to be equivalent to that of well-being, or perhaps of a morally good life, and hence has received little attention as a potentially distinct subject matter. In a series of experiments participants were presented with vignettes involving socially sanctioned wrongdoing toward outgroup members. Findings indicated that...
The paper critiques two recent suggestions, by Lei Zhong and Thomas Kroedel, about how to apply the interventionist theory of causation to cases where supervenient properties, particularly mental properties, are involved. According to both suggestions, we should hold variables corresponding to supervenient properties fixed when intervening on the subvenient properties with...
We present a new argument in favor of the Awareness Principle, the principle that one is always aware of one’s concurrent conscious states. Informally, the argument is this: (1) Your conscious states are such that you can attend to them without undertaking any action beyond mere shift of attention; but (2) You cannot come to attend to something without undertaking any action...
This paper explores how self-identity can be impacted upon by the use of digital and social media. In particular, drawing on a narrative account of selfhood, it argues that some forms of activity and interaction on the internet can support the capacity to be oneself, and foster transformative processes that are self-enhancing. I start by introducing different positions in the...
If a future AI system can enjoy far more well-being than a human per resource, what would be the best way to allocate resources between these future AI and our future descendants? It is obvious that on total utilitarianism, one should give everything to the AI. However, it turns out that every Welfarist axiology on the market also gives this same recommendation, at least if we...
Here is a crucial principle for debates about moral luck, responsibility, and free will: a subject is blameworthy for an act only if, in acting, she did what she ought not to have done. That is, ‘blameworthiness’ implies ‘ought not’ (BION). There are some good reasons to accept BION, but whether we accept it mainly depends on complex questions about the objectivity of ought and...
In this paper, we explore locative grounding harmony, according to which the location of the grounds mirrors the location of the grounded. We proceed in three stages. First, we clarify the notion of locative harmony and describe different locative harmony principles. Second, we offer two arguments for the claim that grounding between physically located entities obeys principles...
Does the assumption of a weak form of computational functionalism, according to which the right form of neural computation is sufficient for consciousness, entail that a digital computational simulation of such neural computations is conscious? Or must this computational simulation be implemented in the right way, in order to replicate consciousness? From the perspective of Karl...
Various decision theories share a troubling implication. They imply that, for any finite amount of value, it would be better to wager it all for a vanishingly small probability of some greater value. Counterintuitive as it might be, this fanaticism has seemingly compelling independent arguments in its favour. In this paper, I consider perhaps the most prima facie compelling such...
Brauer (Philos Stud 179:2751–2763, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01793-7 , 2022) has recently argued that if it is possible that there is nothing, then the correct modal logic for metaphysical modality cannot include D. Here, I argue that Brauer’s argument is unsuccessful; or at the very least significantly weaker than presented. First, I outline a simple argument for why it...
Moral options are permissions to do less than best, impartially speaking. In this paper, we investigate the challenge of reconciling moral options with the ideal of justifiability to each individual. We examine ex-post and ex-ante views of moral options and show how they might conflict with this ideal in single-choice and sequential-choice cases, respectively. We consider some...
David Lewis uses the problem of temporary intrinsics to motivate a perdurantist account of persistence in which four-dimensional individuals consist of temporal parts. Other philosophers use his argument to conclude that apparently persisting individuals are collections of temporal stages. In this paper, I investigate whether this argument is as effective in an ontology in which...
I explain and motivate the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I prove three theorems that make the difficulty precise. These theorems suggest that agents satisfying some innocuous-seeming...
In Felicitous Underspecification, Jeffrey King draws our attention to a rich and underexplored collection of linguistic data. These are uses of context-sensitive expressions which seem perfectly felicitous despite being such that, on plausible assumptions, the context in which they are used falls short of securing for them a unique semantic value. This raises an immediate puzzle...
This paper illuminates a typically obscured ground for rectificatory obligations: harms justified as ‘lesser evils.’ Lesser-evil harms are not the result of overall morally prohibited acts but of acts permissibly carried out to prevent significantly greater harm. The paper argues that harms caused as unintended side effects of acting on lesser-evil justifications, notably in...
A key challenge for probabilistic causal models is to distinguish non-causal probabilistic dependencies from true causal relations. To accomplish this task, causal models are usually required to satisfy several constraints. Two prominent constraints are the causal Markov condition and the faithfulness condition. However, other constraints are also needed. One of these additional...
In this paper we introduce the view that realism about a social kind K entails that the grounding conditions of K are difficult (or impossible) to manipulate. In other words, we define social kind realism in terms of relative frame manipulability (RFM). In articulating our view, we utilize theoretical resources from Epstein’s (Epstein, The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of...
The field of AI safety aims to prevent increasingly capable artificially intelligent systems from causing humans harm. Research on moral alignment is widely thought to offer a promising safety strategy: if we can equip AI systems with appropriate ethical rules, according to this line of thought, they’ll be unlikely to disempower, destroy or otherwise seriously harm us...
Drawing on the puzzling behavior of ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim, we tentatively conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse (i) an unfettered classical logic for epistemic language, (ii) the general veridicality of knowledge ascription, and (iii) an intuitive ‘negative transparency’ thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple...
We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key...
True benevolence is, most fundamentally, a desire that the world be better. It is natural and common, however, to frame thinking about benevolence indirectly, in terms of a desire to make a difference to how good the world is. This would be an innocuous shift if desires to make a difference were extensionally equivalent to desires that the world be better. This paper shows that...
How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view...
The Liar paradox arguably shows that a coherent and self-applicable notion of truth is governed by nonclassical logic. It then seems natural to conclude that classical logic is inadequate for defining a truth theory. In this article, we argue that this is not the case. In the spirit of Reinhardt (Math Logic Formal Syst 94:227, 1985; J Philos Logic 15:219–251, 1986), and in...