Journal of Applied Philosophy最新文献

It strikes many people as unfair when artists whose works generate large profits for galleries or art dealers do not themselves benefit from the rise in value of their art. A policy called the Artist's Resale Right (ARR), whereby the creator of an artwork receives a percentage of any subsequent resale transaction, is supposed to address this. I examine whether this policy is well-grounded normatively. I do so by focusing on two types of arguments justifying the ARR: the argument from property rights and the argument from exploitation. The first claims that an ARR can be motivated by appeal to existing property rights or to their underlying justifications. The second relies on claims about the vulnerability of the creator, the fair distribution of benefits in a transaction, and the nature of the buyer's duties towards the artist. I will argue that neither strategy is successful in convincingly justifying an ARR.

Although children are often mentioned in the philosophy of meaningful life, the meaningfulness of their lives has thus far played an insignificant role in the literature. In this article, the meaningfulness of children's lives serves as a touchstone for theories of meaningful life. I argue that children can live meaningful lives; on the basis of this, I then ask to what extent current theories of meaning in life are able to account for the meaningfulness of children's lives. The investigation shows that while most subjectivist theories have no problem with this, many objectivist theories struggle with it. Therefore, I conclude by discussing what a convincing objectivist account that includes children's lives might look like, and outline a proposal: the developmental account of meaning in life.

Police censor drill rap music based on the claim that drill artists incite violence. In this article, I provide a framework for evaluating whether an instance of drill constitutes a speech act of incitement. I also introduce an alternative speech act that drillers may also be performing, drawn from sociological work on drill artists. I show that those who claim drill incites violence (such as the Metropolitan Police) must meet the explanatory and justificatory burden of showing that the speech act of incitement (rather than something else) has been performed, and that it may often be very challenging to meet that burden. Finally, I argue that where that burden is not met, police interventions in drill would constitute a form of illocutionary silencing and discursive injustice. Drill artists are owed careful consideration of the illocutionary acts they perform in their music – more careful than police assumptions about incitement have been.

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.