Just last week (October 4, 2022), the U.S. White House released a blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights, consisting of “five principles and associated practices to help guide the design, use, and de...

While experience often affords important knowledge and insight that is difficult to garner through observation or testimony alone, it also has the potential to generate conflicts of interest and unrepresentative perspectives. We call this tension the paradox of experience. In this paper, we first outline appeals to experience made in debates about access to unproven medical products and disability bioethics, as examples of how experience claims arise in bioethics and some of the challenges raised by these claims. We then motivate (...) the idea that experience can be an asset by appealing to themes in feminist and moral epistemology, distinguishing between epistemic and justice-based appeals. Next, we explain the concern that experience may be a liability by appealing to empirical work on cognitive biases and theoretical work about the problem of partial representation. We conclude with preliminary recommendations for addressing the paradox and offer several questions for future discussion. (shrink)

In this paper, classical pragmatism is used as a method, not as a substantial ethical theory, to develop “moral pragmatics.” Moral pragmatics offers a constructive approach for making progress where traditional ethical theories converge, and it innovates ethical deliberation. Assuming widespread agreement that real moral problems need practical solutions, the paper addresses two related problems: the missing link between ethical theories and moral practice, and the question of who is in charge of finding such solutions. It argues that “conscience” can (...) create a link between ethical knowledge and moral practice, and that this partly discharges “the ethicist” from the task of solving problems that are not really, or not only, hers. Two specific methodological innovations are suggested that go beyond admonitions to render ethics sensitive to context. Instead, a reevaluation of “casuistry” and a sensitivity for “finding the right words” give an idea of how to achieve this goal. (shrink)

Allow me to begin by thanking Alex Klein, Bjorn Ramberg, Alan Richardson, and Robert Talisse for providing such an excellent set of commentaries on The American Pragmatists, as well as Henry Jackman, for organizing the session at the Canadian Philosophical Association meetings that provided the first forum for the discussion. In this response, I will speak to the general meta-philosophical questions posed by the four commentators, as well as to the more local challenges set to me.All the authors, in different (...) ways, suggest that the very distinction between the history of ideas and philosophy is misplaced. The identification, demarcation and description of philosophical ideas is freighted with what one thinks is.. (shrink)

Katie Watson describes her article in this special issue as “a call to bioethicists to recognize the ways we may have undervalued the moral status of women in our analytic frameworks, and to delibe...