Journal of Applied Philosophy最新文献

Housing studies often draw on what we will refer to as the capabilitarian assumption. However, this assumption – that the capability approach offers the right framework for analysing housing injustice – has received little to no philosophical scrutiny. In this article we aim to fill this lacuna. We examine the prospects of a capability approach to housing justice, focusing on Nussbaum's comprehensive list of basic capabilities. We argue that her list fails to capture fundamental concerns in housing justice and therefore requires further specification. An adequate capabilitarian view on housing justice must integrate relational egalitarian considerations. We draw on a relationally egalitarian informed conception of self-respect as a basic capability to integrate those relational aspects. In doing so we aim to provide the contours of a capabilitarian theory of housing justice.

Rights of nature (RoN) is an emerging legal tool for strengthening nature conservation, receiving increased scholarly attention and finding its way into domestic legislation. RoN is an innovation in legal thinking often justified with ethical arguments and concepts such as ‘intrinsic value’ or ‘interests’. But there are many challenges with justifying RoN based on such concepts which are rarely considered by RoN advocates, blocking the formulation of stronger arguments. Based on Mary Warnock's discussion of RoN, here I investigate two related claims: (1) that environmental entities can be said to have interests, but (2) while this means that they have moral status, it does not justify concluding that they are rights-holders. By way of critical engagement, I put Warnock's discussion in contact with scholarship on RoN and the scope and grounds of rights, scholarship that has expanded since Warnock's engagement with the concept. Warnock's observations are attentive to the relevance of concepts such as intrinsic value and interests to the environment, but also to their limits, in ways that can benefit RoN scholarship.

‘Mass incarceration’, as conventionally understood, refers to an imprisoned population that is both excessive in size and racially skewed in its demographics. However, in contrast to racial skew, the appropriate size of a prison system has largely escaped analysis. This article contributes to analysis of the scale of a prison system in two ways. First, I show why non-controversial principles linking crime to punishment, such as guilt and proportionality, are insufficient. Because incarceration rates are driven more by social policy than by crime, an adequate analysis of scale presupposes an account of what we hope to get out of punishing people in the first place. Second, drawing on a generic crime-prevention account of incarceration, I sketch three increasingly resolving, but also increasingly contentious, conceptions of excess: the Pareto, social welfare, and utilitarian conceptions. Along the way, I briefly consider the trade-off between how committal a theory of incarceration is and its ability to explain what is wrong with mass incarceration, as well as the concern that the social welfare and, especially, utilitarian concepts are excessively paternalistic. The ultimate aim of the article is to contribute to our understanding of mass incarceration as a distinctive normative concept.

Conversational AIs (CAIs) are autonomous systems capable of engaging in natural language interactions with users. Recent advancements have enabled CAIs to engage in conversations with users that are virtually indistinguishable from human interactions. The proliferation of advanced CAIs creates a significant risk of users misattributing human-like traits to CAIs. Such false beliefs can occur when the CAI's nature is not disclosed and users mistakenly believe they are interacting with a human, or even if the CAI is disclosed, through subconscious anthropomorphism. Existing literature on anthropomorphism and AI addresses the instrumental harms associated with anthropomorphism. I argue that anthropomorphizing CAIs might be bad in itself as it undermines user autonomy. My analysis focuses on how anthropomorphic false beliefs lead users to misapply behavioural norms, thereby affecting their autonomy. My argument will proceed as follows. I discuss the prevalence of CAIs, and establish the empirical claim that users are likely to form anthropomorphic false beliefs about CAIs. I explore existing accounts of how some false beliefs undermine autonomy and outline a plausible characterization to identify which false beliefs do so. I apply this characterization to CAIs and argue that misattributing human-like capabilities to CAIs is the kind of false belief that undermines autonomy.

The ambition to decarbonize societies calls for a normative theory of just transitions. An important aspect of such a theory is to scrutinize the moral entitlements of stakeholders whose status quo expectations get frustrated in the course of sustainability transitions. The concept of legitimate expectations (LE) has been advanced as a core constituent of such a theory but has also been criticized for the conceptual confusion it attracts. In this article I address this criticism by elucidating the concept and its normative grounds. This yields two theoretical insights that are novel to the debate on LE. First, I argue that there are three different kinds of claims that go by the name of LE, whose normative grounding structures differ. Second, I argue that warranted appeals to having LE should have some degree of justificatory support, but that the degree of justification may weaken over time. Accordingly, while LE are morally weighty and give rise to pro tanto duties, they may be superseded if circumstances change. In closing, I show how this account can help to interpret and evaluate claims about transitional climate justice.

In this article I develop an objection to Longtermism – the view that concern for the long-term future is a moral imperative – that is often gestured at, but not fleshed out. I call this the Far-Future Priority Objection: Longtermism may entail significant resource reallocation and systemic neglect of the worst off today. I argue that Longtermism's endorsement of efficiency leads to repeated priority of distributive allocations to the far-future, so Longtermists must allow for moral concerns in addition to efficiency in order to mitigate the objection. The two most promising ways of doing this are to eschew strong versions of Longtermism in favor of weaker versions or incorporate deontic side-constraints. However, I argue that neither of these responses successfully undermines the Far-Future Priority Objection without abandoning fundamental tenets of Longtermism itself.