Philosophical Disquisitions #7

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Welcome to the seventh edition of the Philosophical Disquisitions newsletter. It's been just over two months since the last instalment. So it seems like my commitment to send a newsletter once a month is, like all my other commitments, perpetually unfulfilled. On the plus side, there's also lots of stuff catch up on so let's get to it. (Remember: if you like the newsletter, please spread the word and encourage others to sign up...)

Thought Experiment of the Month: Punishing the Innocent

This is a classic from the philosophy of punishment debate:

Sheriff Case: You are a consequentialist when it comes to the justification of punishment. You think that punishing people is only permissible if it can achieve positive outcomes. Imagine that you are the sheriff in an unruly town that has recently been struck by a series of murders. The townspeople are convinced that a certain person (call them “Jack”) committed the murder. They call upon you to execute Jack in your official capacity. But you are pretty sure that Jack is innocent. You try to tell the townspeople your reasons for thinking this, but they don't seem to care. You know that if you do not carry out their wishes, the town is likely to descend into anarchy and violence. These outcomes are contrary to the goals you seek to achieve by having a system of punishment in the first place which are to maintain law and order. Should you punish Jack in order to keep the peace?

Read more about it in 'The Problem of Punishing the Innocent'.

New Paper: Why we should create artificial offspring

This is an unusual paper, but I'm oddly proud of it, probably because it is unusual. It's being published in Science and Engineering Ethics.

Abstract: This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful (i.e. satisfy more meaning-relevant conditions of value). By ‘artificial offspring’ is meant beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife — i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue in this universe after we die — is likely to be an important source and sustainer of meaning in our present lives (Scheffler 2013). The second is that the creation of artificial offspring provides a plausible and potentially better pathway to a collective afterlife than the traditional biological pathway (i.e. there are reasons to favour this pathway and there are no good defeaters to trying it out). Both of these arguments are defended from a variety of objections and misunderstandings.

Read it for free on Philpapers or Academia.edu. If you want the official version, drop me an email.

Best of the Blog

Free Will Skepticism and Meaningful Personal Relationships - If we have no free will, will our relationships be less meaningful? This is a surprisingly common belief, with some people arguing that certain reactive attitudes are essential for mature relationships. I look at Derk Pereboom's criticism of this view.

Extended Cognition and Extended Personal Assault - If our minds extend into the physical objects in our environment, does it make sense to view damage to those objects as a form of personal assault? Maybe.

Cognitive Scarcity and Artificial Intelligence: How Assistive AI Could Alleviate Inequality - This is a piece I co-authored with Miles Brundage, arguing that AI assistants could help to address the problem of cognitive scarcity.

The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction - We are living through a crisis of attention caused largely by digital technologies. Is it time to recognise a legal right to attentional protection? In this post I argue that it might be. This turned out to be one of the more popular pieces I have ever published.

Advice on Publishing Peer Review Articles - A short piece I prepared for a presentation to PhD students. Could be useful to those of you who spend your lives on the 'publish or perish' treadmill.

Can we derive meaning and value from virtual reality? - My critique of Yuval Noah Harari's argument that virtual reality can provide meaning to human life. I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I disagree with how he gets there.

Understanding Ideologies: Liberalism, Socialism and Conservatism - A look at James Alexander's interesting attempt to explain competing political ideologies in terms of one single idea.

The Tell-Tale Brain: The Effect of Predictive Brain Implants on Autonomy - Predictive brain implants are already a reality. They record and predict neuronal events. They have been successfully tried on patients with epilepsy, helping them to avoid seizures. How does this affect their autonomy? Here's my complicated answer to that question.

Podcast

I am still doing a podcast and have recorded quite a lot of episodes in the past two months. You can subscribe here and here. Here the most recent episodes:

Episode #22: Wellman and Rajan on the Ethics of Automated Trading - In this episode, I am joined by Michael Wellman and Uday Rajan. Michael is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan; and Uday is a Professor of Business Administration and Chair and Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the same institution. Our conversation focuses on the ethics of autonomous trading agents on financial markets. We discuss algorithmic trading, high frequency trading, market manipulation, the AI control problem and more.

Episode #23: Liu on Responsibility and Discrimination in Autonomous Weapons and Self-Driving Cars - In this episode I talk to Hin-Yan Liu. Hin-Yan is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests lie at the frontiers of emerging technology governance, and in the law and policy of existential risks. His core agenda focuses upon the myriad challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics regulation. We talk about responsibility gaps in the deployment of autonomous weapons and crash optimisation algorithms for self-driving cars.

Episode #24: Bryson on Why Robots Should be Slaves - In this episode I interview Joanna Bryson. Joanna is Reader in Computer Science at the University of Bath. Joanna’s primary research interest lies in using AI to understand natural intelligence, but she is also interested in the ethics of AI and robotics, the social uses of robots, and the political and legal implications of advances in robotics. In the latter field, she is probably best known for her article, published in 2010 entitled ‘Robots Should be Slaves’. We talk about the ideas and arguments contained in that paper as well as some related issues in roboethics.

Episode #25: McNamara on Utility, Fairness and High Frequency Trading - In this episode I am joined by Steven McNamara. Steven is a Professor of Law at the American University of Beirut, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Florida School of Law. Once upon a time, Steven was a corporate lawyer. He is now an academic lawyer with interests in moral theory, business ethics and technological change in financial markets. He also has a PhD in philosophy and wrote a dissertation on Kant’s use of Newtonian scientific method. We talk about the intersections between moral philosophy and high frequency trading, taking in the history of U.S. stock market in the process.

Distributed on a Creative Commons License (Non-commercial-attribution)

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