Journal of Applied Philosophy最新文献

Rights entail corresponding negative duties not to violate those rights. On this, all rights theorists agree. Yet, in our non-ideal world, these negative duties and thereby persons’ rights are pervasively violated. What duties are there to right-holders whose rights are under threat and are violated? There is substantial disagreement among rights theorists here on whether rights also entail positive duties to protect and assist the right-holder if and when their rights are threatened and violated. While the Interest Justification of Rights supports such positive duties, defenders of the Inviolable Moral Status Justification of Rights reject them. On this latter view, all persons have an inviolable moral status that gives rise to particularly robust rights and stringent negative duties, but not additional positive duties, which are not necessary to reflect inviolability. This article challenges that view by demonstrating that positive duties to protect and assist right-holders against rights violations are in fact grounded by that very same justification invoked to ground robust rights and stringent negative duties: the inviolable moral status of persons.

Murphy, Alex. “ A Species-Focused Approach to Assessing Speciesism.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 41 (2024): 714–730. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12725.

The article does not list the AHRC funder grant number AH/R012776/1 in the HTML or PDF version. It should be acknowledged as ‘This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership [AH/R012776/1]’.

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This article critically examines the moral arguments for restrictive policies regarding student use of generative AI in higher education. While existing literature addresses various concerns about AI in education, there has been limited rigorous ethical analysis of arguments for restricting its use. This article analyzes two main types of moral arguments: those based on direct difference-making (where individual university actions have measurable impacts) and those centered on non-difference-making participation (where symbolic participation in harmful systems matters regardless of direct impact). Key concerns examined include environmental harm from AI energy consumption, exploitative labor practices in AI development, and privacy risks. Through careful analysis, the article argues that these arguments face significant challenges when examined in depth. The difference-making arguments often fail to establish that individual university actions meaningfully contribute to claimed harms, while the non-difference-making arguments lead to impractical conclusions when applied consistently across university operations. Rather than supporting blanket restrictions, the analysis suggests universities should focus on fostering responsible AI engagement through ethical guidelines, licensed tools, and education on responsible use. The article concludes that a balanced approach considering both moral and practical factors is more effective than restrictive policies in addressing ethical concerns while preserving educational benefits.

This paper explores the morality of human content moderation. It focuses on content moderation of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as it takes place in commercial digital platforms, broadly understood. I select CSAM for examination because there is a widespread and uncontroversial consensus around the need to remove it, which furnishes the strongest possible argument for human content moderation. The paper makes the case that, even if we grant that social media platforms or chatbots are a valuable—or inevitable— force in current societies, and even if moderation plays an important role in protecting users and society more generally from the detrimental effects of these digital tools, it is far from clear that tasking humans to conduct such moderation is permissible without constraints, given the psychic toll of the practice on moderators. While a blanket prohibition of human moderation would be objectionable, given the benefits of the practice, it behooves us to identify the fundamental interests affected by the harms of human moderation, the obligations that platforms acquire to protect such interests, and the conditions under which their realization is in fact possible. I argue that the failure to comply with certain standards renders human moderation impermissible.

The procreative justice debate asks whether justice, and in particular whether a principle of fair play, requires that non-parents share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing. The principle of fair play demands that persons who benefit from the cooperative labor of others share in the burdens of producing that benefit. Non-parents should share in the costs of procreation and child-rearing if reproductive and parental labor count as cooperative labor, but they are not obligated to share in those costs if parents incur them as part of a personal project. I argue that parental labor counts as cooperative labor because becoming a parent involves knowingly assuming a social role whereby one incurs new moral and legal obligations. Even if parents are ultimately motived by personal reasons, they nevertheless constrain their liberty in order to comply with the rules of a cooperative scheme, and, in doing so, their labor plausibly counts as cooperative. Parents have a claim of justice on others, then, to consider whether the benefits and burdens of procreating and child-rearing are fairly distributed.