Asian journal of philosophy最新文献

This paper examines how, if artificial agents are capable of wellbeing, their wellbeing should be compared and aggregated alongside human wellbeing. Building on arguments from Goldstein and Kirk-Giannini, who suggest that some AI systems may possess wellbeing, I explore the moral implications of this possibility. Rather than reinventing debates in population ethics, this paper adapts and extends them to the context of AI wellbeing. I analyse three major approaches to wellbeing aggregation: symmetric methods, which treat human and AI wellbeing as equally significant; uncertainty-responsive methods, which discount AI wellbeing due to ontological, temporal, or identity uncertainty; and constraint-based views, which impose categorical constraints on trading off human wellbeing for AI gains. These approaches are tested against thought experiments involving classic problems, such as the repugnant conclusion, infinitarian paralysis, and fanaticism. While utilitarian approaches risk endorsing troubling consequences when AI wellbeing scales indefinitely, constraint-based views may underweight the wellbeing of AI. A distinctive finding is that  our intuitions shift depending on whether a human or an AI is a welfare subject. This reveals a potential asymmetry in our intuitive judgments, suggesting that species identity may itself be a morally salient feature that future theories of AI wellbeing should address. I conclude that uncertainty-responsive approaches, particularly those combining ontological, temporal, and identity-based discounting, offer a promising middle path that incorporates AI wellbeing into our moral calculus without letting it disproportionately outweigh human wellbeing in aggregation.

It has been argued by Brian Leiter that Nietzsche denies the reality of value on skeptical grounds, i.e., due to the historical failure of philosophers to reach rational consensus on value judgments, despite being well-situated epistemic observers. This paper argues that textual evidence strongly conflicts with this reading in three ways. Firstly, Nietzsche does not see philosophers as well-situated epistemic observers of value given their dogmatic refusal to undertake a diagnostic comparison of their values as “types” of “symptoms” based on their relationship to the presuppositions of “life”: values which are “healthy” and “true” and those which are “decadent” and “false.” Secondly, Nietzsche attributes the historical failure of philosophers to converge on healthy and true values (instinctive-natural values) to their negation of such value in favor of decadent and false values (decadent-moral values), and he explains this negation in terms of the personal and epistemic inadequacies of the philosophers themselves as valuing agents. Thirdly, this alternative explanation better coheres with the primary textual evidence for Leiter’s value skepticism wherein Nietzsche agrees with the Sophists in rejecting the dialectical justification of value because it signified the negation of instinctive-natural value among the Greeks, and not because of a failure to reach philosophical consensus. The paper concludes with the proposition that this alternative explanation for Nietzsche’s anti-realism about decadent-moral values is not one that precludes the possibility of value realism.

In “Mnemic Scenarios as Pictures”, Kristina Liefke has offered a substantive, powerful and insightful account of episodic memory based on a version of picture semantics. Despite its ingenuity and sophistication, I am going to suggest that the scope of this account is much more limited than the author has suggested. More specifically, I will develop the following three interrelated points: (1) even if we consider visual-based episodic memory only, it is seldom the case that such experiences are pictorial in the relevant sense; (2) it is even more doubtful that non-visual-based episodic memory is pictorial as the author understands it and (3) most (if not all) cases of episodic memory are multisensory or multimodal. The upshot is that even if Liefke’s pictorial appropriation is by and large cogent for certain cases, the scope of such an account is much more limited than it might appear to be.

The other contributors to this forum raise a variety of important challenges to the position I defend in Phenomenalism: A Metaphysics of Chance and Experience. In this essay, I take up these challenges.

Martin Peterson explores a compromise between what he characterizes “textbook” Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. But what if the textbook Kantian is not in crucial respects the Kantian; indeed, what if the textbook Kantian’s duty ethics is an ethical theory purged of precisely those elements of Kantian ethical theory that not only eliminate any such drive to compromise, but even demonstrate why the quest for such a compromise might be deeply misguided? In what follows, I will take up just such an alternative interpretation of Kant, focusing in particular upon the version of this interpretation developed by Barbara Herman. I demonstrate first that on this alternative interpretation, Kantian ethical theory, although undeniably an ethics of duty, is not in Peterson’s sense a duty ethics. I then demonstrate that because Kantian ethics thus interpreted does take consequences into account, it need not compromise with utilitarianism to do so. Finally, I argue that this alternative Kantian has reasons to reject utilitarianism as a theory that appeals fundamentally to the wrong rather than the right kinds of reasons, a theory that distorts the quest in ethical theory for good reasons of the right kind.

The view that agency is central to explaining why actions are subject to moral and prudential norms has considerable appeal. With an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, we would have a unified agential picture of moral, prudential, and epistemic normativity. This paper argues against an agential explanation of epistemic normativity. Prominent proposals about epistemic agency cash the idea out in terms of voluntary agency, reasons-responsiveness, or judgment. I show that each of these proposals faces the following dilemma: either the proposal fails to capture any genuinely explanatory concept of agency or it fails to adequately capture the class of items that are governed by epistemic norms. I suggest that there is reason to think that any account of epistemic agency is likely to face this dilemma. My argument gives us grounds for pessimism about the prospects of an agential explanation of epistemic normativity, and a unified agential picture of all normativity. Furthermore, my paper motivates, without defending, an alternate picture of normativity: the idea that actions and beliefs are two distinct species of a common normative genus. Either there is some other property, apart from agency, which unifies all norm-governed phenomena, or there is no such unifying property at all.

I assess Zhong’s new “causal argument” for physicalism, which differs from previous such arguments in that the premises and conclusion pertain (not just to physical, but) to “physically acceptable” entities or features, which may be either physical or “grounded by” (i.e., metaphysically dependent on) the physical. Zhong argues that his new causal argument improves on previous versions in that the conclusion (unlike previous causal arguments, he maintains) supports non-reductive as well as reductive versions of physicalism, and in that the premises of his argument are better motivated than those of the original arguments. I argue that neither of these motivations are in place. Along the way, I offer a new reason to reject non-contrastive counterfactual accounts of causation.

In his clear, engaging, and highly original book, The Problem of Evil for Atheists (Nagasawa 2024), Yujin Nagasawa aims to defend two theses: “First, the problem of evil is (nearly) everyone’s problem, so everyone has to take it seriously. Second, the problem may well be a more formidable obstacle for naturalist atheists/non-theists than for supernaturalist theists” (p. 3). I focus my attention on the problem Nagasawa presents for pantheism. Nagasawa argues that a standard version of pantheism is vulnerable to what he christens the “divinity problem of evil.” I argue that the success of Nagasawa’s argument for the problem of evil for pantheism rests on controversial assumptions about the shared commitments of pantheistic proposals. I present a version of generic pantheism that is not vulnerable to the divinity problem of evil and I sketch a version of personal pantheism that has additional resources to respond to the problem of evil (and may do better than traditional theism).