Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of “circularity” for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties without already invoking their presence at the level they emerge. That is, how does evolution by natural selection commence in the first place? Recent results in experimental evolution suggest a (...) way forward: Paul Rainey and his collaborators have shown that Darwinian properties could be exogenously imposed via what they call “ecological scaffolding.” This could solve the “black box” dilemma faced by Darwinian explanations of new levels of organization. Yet, despite “scaffolding” recently becoming a popular term in the study of cognition, culture, and evolution, the concept has suffered from vagueness and ambiguity. This article aims to show that scaffolding can be turned into a proper scientific concept able to do explanatory work within the context of the major evolutionary transitions. Doing so will allow us to once again extend the scope of the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection. (shrink)

In his 2009 monograph, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith accuses biologists of demonstrating ‘Darwinian Paranoia’ when they engage in what he dubs ‘agential thinking’. But as Daniel Dennett points out, he offers neither an illuminating set of examples nor an extended argument for this assertion, deeming it to be a brilliant propaganda stroke against what is actually a useful way of thinking. Compared to the dangers of teleological thinking in biology, the dangers of agential thinking have unfortunately rarely (...) been discussed. Drawing on recent work by Samir Okasha, I attempt to remedy this omission, through analyzing the nature of agential thinking, and providing a philosophical treatment of the unexamined dangers in this peculiar, yet tempting way of thinking. (shrink)

In analytic philosophy, the concept of trust is often considered primarily to be a three-place relation between trustor, trustee, and the domain of trust. The analysis of trust is unsatisfactory, however, if such a relationship is derivative of other forms of trust, and consequently the analysis has only succeeded in explaining a particular branch of trust rather than explaining the root. Annette Baier considers a climate of trust, with all the moral perils of intimacy, explanatorily superior to contract-based, rational trust (...) between non-intimate equals in modern Western philosophy and thus provides an example of how the traditional analytic model is problematic. In this paper, I propose another account on which the conventional three-place trust relationship investigated in analytic philosophy is derivative. Based on Heidegger's fundamental ontology, humans are constitutively hermeneutic. If Heidegger's fundamental ontology or a similar hermeneutic anthropology is accepted, then trust relationships between humans are explanatorily subordinated to trust relationships between readers and texts rather than the other way around, as traditional accounts suggest. This reversal has a significant impact not only on our analysis of trust, but also on moral theory, personal identity, and scientific method. My paper details both the reversal in explanatory primacy and the implications for these philosophical disciplines. (shrink)

This paper is an essay published under the title A Critical Praxis from the Americas: Thinking about the Zapatistas in Chiapas with Herbert Marcuse, Bolívar Echeverría, and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, in Lamas, A. T .; Wolfson, T. & Funke, P. N. (Eds.). (2017). The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (pp. 329-342). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. The author kindly authorized the publication in Spanish version by Jhoan Sebastian David Giraldo and Cristian Leandro Sánchez Marín.

Shamik Dasgupta (2016) proposes to tame the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) to apply to only non-autonomous facts, which are facts that are apt for explanation. Call this strategy to tame the PSR the taming strategy. In a recent paper, Della Rocca (2020a) argues that proponents of the taming strategy, in attempting to formulate a restricted version of the PSR, nevertheless find themselves committed to endorsing a form of radical monism, which, in turn, leads right back to an untamed-PSR. Suppose, (...) for the sake of argument, that Della Rocca is right. My question is this: Is there reason to believe the principle of sufficient reason (in its untamed version)? In this paper, I argue that it is impossible for there to be a reason to believe the untamed-PSR. (shrink)

Equal Justice explores the role of the idea of equality in liberal theories of justice. The title indicates the book’s two-part thesis: first, I claim that justice is the central moral category in the socio-political domain; second, I argue for a specific conceptual and normative connection between the ideas of justice and equality. This pertains to the age-old question concerning the normative significance of equality in a theory of justice. The book develops an independent, systematic, and comprehensive theory of equality (...) and egalitarianism. The principal question is about the importance of equality in a theory of justice. More precisely, we should pose questions in four contracting circles: 1. Is justice the supreme value guiding our setup of the basic structure of society, or are there other, equally important values, such as recognition, care, communal belonging? 2. If justice is the highest guiding principle, which competing ideals—especially equality and freedom—ought to have precedence in a policy oriented toward justice? What status does the ideal of equality have in that framework? 3. If equality is a basic ideal of just policy, how should it be practically realized? What sort of equality (equal opportunity, equality of welfare, resource equality) should be demanded? 4. What patterned distribution of which specific goods does the ideal of equality demand? Which principles of distribution can be justified according to our justice ideal? To conclude and summarize: 5. What is the essential core of an egalitarian theory of justice, as opposed to an inegalitarian theory? These five questions structure the work’s order of argumentation. Part A elaborates the conceptual foundations and basic moral principles of justice and equality. Chapter I sets out to install justice as the central moral category in the socio-political domain. At the beginning of the first chapter, the conceptual foundations of justice are clarified. While not eliminating the classical distinctions between different forms of justice, I argue that the distributive paradigm is of primary importance. The primacy of justice in the socio-political domain is developed out of a confrontation with alternative positions, those which maintain either that justice generally, or distributive justice in particular, are subsidiary virtues. At the end of Chapter I, the first of the questions mentioned above is answered in a way that establishes justice as the guiding normative concept for the foundation and evaluation of any social order. To clarify the role of equality in a theory of justice, Chapter II separates the idea of equality into four different principles. They are organized in a way that begins with the most general and uncontroversial principle of equality, and progresses towards increasingly detailed and contested principles. There are two theses that articulate and defend the significance of equality for justice: First there is a conceptual connection between justice and equality, in that principles of formal and proportional equality are necessary in order to explicate the concept of justice. These two principles establish an unbreakable bond between justice and equality. Justice can only be explained—or so I argue—by reference to these and other (normative) principles of equality. The second thesis posits a normative relationship between justice and equality, which is disclosed by three substantive principles of equality: moral equality, the presumption of equality, and the principle of responsibility. I argue that the normative core of an egalitarian theory of justice is expressed by the latter two principles, which are themselves based on the first principle, that of moral equality. When we view one another as persons, what form of equality or equal treatment is normatively demanded? I argue that the answer to this question is given by the procedural principle of the presumption of equality: regardless of their apparent differences, all persons deserve strictly equal treatment, unless certain kinds of differences have whatever particular relevance would justify, on generally acceptable grounds, unequal treatment or unequal distribution. The justification of the presumption of equality is central to this work and has considerable importance. If the presumption principle’s validity can be justified by enlisting the principle of general justification, then the primacy of equality, and the essential argument for an egalitarian theory of justice, is established. This would likewise provide a procedure for the construction of a material theory of justice. The second question is answered thereby at the end of Chapter II: Equality should have primacy over competing ideals within a justice-oriented policy. The presumption of equality establishes this primacy and, at the same time, offers an appropriate metric and guideline for the construction of a material theory of distributive justice. The presumption of equality in Part B offers an elegant procedure for the development of a theory of distributive justice. Chapter III clearly sets out the necessary prerequisites that a theory of distribution must satisfy in order to determine a liberal-egalitarian distributional framework. We need to specify in which situation the distribution takes place; which goods are and are not to be distributed; in which respect the presumptive equality is to be produced; and by and to whom, and for what period, the relevant goods are to be distributed. The distribution is based on resources understood as general-purpose means. It is necessary to divide goods into different categories, since the justification for unequal treatment in one domain will not carry over into another. This makes presumptive equality necessarily complex. To that end, four spheres of justice are distinguished: (1) the political sphere, which involves allocating rights through the distribution of civil liberties; (2) the democratic sphere, in which political power and the rights of political participation are regulated; (3) the economic sphere, in which income and property are distributed; (4) the social sphere, in which social positions and opportunities are distributed. This framework of distributive justice answers the third of our guiding questions, about the nature of equality, in terms of equality of resources. Chapters IV and V set out the egalitarian distributive criteria for each sphere. I argue that the generally accepted, fundamental rights of classical liberalism are more effectively reconstructed by reference to the equal resource distribution presumptively required in those spheres. Chapter IV shows that when it comes to the first two spheres, those involving basic rights and freedoms and entitlement political participation, there can be no justified exceptions to the equal distribution of the relevant goods. That section argues, contrary to what we commonly find in theories of freedom or popular sovereignty, that the value of freedom and self-determination as the political basis of autonomy is best realized through the presumption of equal distribution. Chapter V deals with the other two spheres, those of economic goods and social positions, and argues for justified exceptions to equal distribution. In the economic sphere we find one principal reason favouring unequal distribution of resources, and three restrictions and compensations limiting that inequality. The basic exception to equal economic distribution arises from the unequal consequences of personal responsibility. From a suitably egalitarian standpoint, the principle of responsibility is the normative principle that determines which reasons justify economic inequality. Here the basic idea is that unequal shares of social goods are fair if they result from the choices and deliberate actions of the relevant parties. That individuals have to bear the costs of their own choices is a condition of autonomy. However, benefits or disadvantages arising from arbitrary and unmerited differences in social circumstances or natural endowments is unfair. The unequal consequences of independent decision-making and action must therefore be limited by compensating first for preferences, secondly for disadvantages, and thirdly by redistributing wealth in aid of the worse-off. I situations of emergency, compensating for disadvantages has priority over all other claims, owing to the urgency of the situation. Social inequalities go beyond the permissible limit if it is possible to improve the long-term social or economic situation of the worse-off by redistributing wealth to them. These exceptions lead to a complex system of free economic action within a framework of compensatory tax and transfer mechanisms. Finally, in the social sphere, the distribution of social positions, offices and opportunities must be structured to ensure that equally talented and motivated citizens have roughly equal chances of obtaining those offices or positions, irrespective of their economic or social class backgrounds. This compromise is permissible for reasons of freedom and prudence, and it makes a certain measure of inequality acceptable. The fourth of our guiding questions is answered accordingly. There are five principles of justice for the basic structure of society, and five legal principles that govern the special distribution of goods in the respective spheres—all are ranked according to their most defensible grounds of priority, ensuring that everyone is accorded equal justice. Chapter VI recapitulates the initial question of equality’s value. The conception of equal justice developed in this work postulates five principles of equality and five principles of law; these constitute an egalitarian framework because they support and promote social justice. Equality has value with respect to them, but is not given any independent, intrinsic value. That is why I call the account developed here a form of constitutive egalitarianism: justice is realized through the realization of equality, itself accomplished by applying the five postulates of equality and five distributive principles of law. This is an egalitarianism on two levels. The first level is involves the claim that morality or justice is conceptually connected with equality. The second level gives equality a substantial weight in what is conceptually validated at the first level, namely the presumption of equality, and constructs an appropriate interpretation and conception of distributive justice through principles of distribution for the individual spheres. The weight and importance of equality is shown by the distributive criteria applied to those spheres. This answers our final guiding question about the nature of an egalitarian theory. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...) of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)

This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to (...) deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

The word “populism” commonly elicits images of hordes of angry townspeople with pitchforks and torches. That is the classic picture of “the mob,” bolstered by countless movie and television productions, and it is clearly based on such historical events as the English civil wars, the sans-culottes’ terror, the Bolshevik revolution, and the recent genocides in Rwanda and Burundi. Many of the leaders involved in fostering such horrors are seen as radical democrats whose successors today should also be feared. In this (...) paper, I argue that any mob takeovers of the feared sort are actually antithetical to radical democracy. This is because an authentically democratic regime, even of the most extreme type, is necessarily inconsistent with “mobocracy” or any sort of “tyranny of the majority” given its essential procedural aspects. It is argued, in fact, that leaders of legitimately democratic movements have generally been quite vapid because of the fallibilistic, plebiscitary proceduralism inherent in any authentic attempt to require government policy to reflect the “general will.” And this vapidity is argued to inhere regardless of the extent of rhetorical powers of the advocate or advocacy. (shrink)

The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to (...) make sense of them both as natural phenomena. (shrink)

In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c ) to show that we can firmly ground a comparative study of animal consciousness by drawing on the resources of state-based behavioral life history theory. By (...) comparing the different life histories of gastropods and arthropods, we will be able to make better sense of the possible origins of consciousness and its function for organisms in their natural environments. (shrink)

Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper describes a perspectival pluralist account of (...) animal welfare, in which all three theoretical perspectives and their multiple measures are necessary to understand this complex phenomenon and provide a full picture of animal welfare. This in turn will offer us a better understanding of perspectivism and pluralism itself. (shrink)

How ought you to evaluate your options if you're uncertain about what's fundamentally valuable? A prominent response is Expected Value Maximisation (EVM)—the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. But the expected value of an option depends on quantitative probability and value facts, and in particular on value comparisons across axiologies. We need to explain what it is for such facts to hold. Also, EVM (...) is by no means self-evident. We need an argument to defend that it’s true. This book introduces an axiomatic approach to answer these worries. It provides an explication of what EVM means by use of representation theorems: intertheoretic comparisons can be understood in terms of facts about which options are better than which, and mutatis mutandis for intratheoretic comparisons and axiological probabilities. And it provides a systematic argument to the effect that EVM is true: the theory can be vindicated through simple axioms. The result is a formally cogent and philosophically compelling extension of standard decision theory, and original take on the problem of axiological or normative uncertainty. (shrink)

Imagine a world where everyone is healthy, intelligent, long living and happy. Intuitively this seems wonderful albeit unrealistic. However, recent scienti c breakthroughs in genetic engineering, namely CRISPR/Cas bring the question into public discourse, how the genetic enhancement of humans should be evaluated morally. In 2001, when preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF), enabled parents to select between multiple embryos, Julian Savulescu introduced the principle of procreative bene cence (PPB), stating that parents have the obligations to choose (...) the child that is expected to have the best life. In this paper I argue that accepting the PPB and the consequentialist principle (CP) that two acts with the same consequences are morally on par, commits one to accepting the parental obligation of genetically enhancing one's children. (shrink)

According to the standard account of forgiveness, you forgive your wrongdoer by overcoming your resentment towards them. But how exactly must you do so? And when is such overcoming fitting? The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel version of the standard account to answer these questions. Its core idea is that the reactive attitudes are a fitting response not just to someone’s blameworthiness, but to their blameworthiness being significant for you, or worthy of your caring, in virtue (...) of your relationship to it. Someone’s blameworthiness is significant for you to the extent you’re bound up with what grounds it––e.g. with the wrongdoer’s being a participant in human relationships, with their attitudes, or with the victim’s being a source of demands. So you may fittingly not care about someone’s blameworthiness if it’s sufficiently insignificant for you in this manner––e.g. if their wrong happened far off in place and time. And forgiveness revolves around this. You forgive your wrongdoer if and only if, partly out of goodwill towards them, you cease to care about their blameworthiness––a bit as if their wrong had happened far off. If I’m right, this agent-relativity-based account can resolve the apparent ‘paradoxy of forgiveness’, satisfies a number of desiderata, and is plausible on an intuitive level. (shrink)

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. In recent years, the phenomenology of health and disease has become a major topic in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, owing much to the work of Havi Carel (2007, 2011, 2018). Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to (...) the phenomenology of animal health and suffering. This omission shall be remedied here, laying the groundwork for the phenomenological evaluation of animal health and suffering. (shrink)

As scientific progress approaches the point where significant human enhancements could become reality, debates arise whether such technologies should be made available. This paper evaluates the widespread concern that human enhancements will inevitably accentuate existing inequality and analyzes whether prohibition is the optimal public policy to avoid this outcome. Beyond these empirical questions, this paper considers whether the inequality objection is a sound argument against the set of enhancements most threatening to equality, i.e., cognitive enhancements. In doing so, I shall (...) argue that cognitive enhancements can be embraced wholeheartedly, for three separate reasons. However, though the inequality objection does not sufficiently support the conclusion that cognitive enhancements should be prohibited, it raises several concerns for optimal policy design that shall be addressed here. (shrink)

For decades Darwinian processes were framed in the form of the Lewontin conditions: reproduction, variation and differential reproductive success were taken to be sufficient and necessary. Since Buss and the work of Maynard Smith and Szathmary biologists were eager to explain the major transitions from individuals to groups forming new individuals subject to Darwinian mechanisms themselves. Explanations that seek to explain the emergence of a new level of selection, however, cannot employ properties that would already have to exist on that (...) level for selection to take place. Recently, Hammerschmidt et al. provided a ‘bottom-up’ experiment corroborating much of the theoretical work Paul Rainey has done since 2003 on how cheats can play an important role in the emergence of new Darwinian individuals on a multicellular level. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, I argue for a conceptual shift in perspective from seeing cheats as a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved for multi-cellularity to evolve to the very ‘key’ for the evolution of multicellularity. Secondly, I illustrate the consequences of this shift for both theoretical and experimental work, arguing for a more prominent role of ecology and the multi-level selection framework within the debate then they currently occupy. (shrink)

Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations, for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor. Their use, however, has sometimes been deemed as useless, trivial and inadequate. The role of models (...) in the science of morality has been vastly underappreciated. This omission shall be remedied here, offering a much more positive picture on the contributions modelers made to our understanding of morality. (shrink)

There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston's free-energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free-energy minimization to organismal fitness.

Metaphors abound in both the arts and in science. Due to the traditional division between these enterprises as one concerned with aesthetic values and the other with epistemic values there has unfortunately been very little work on the relation between metaphors in the arts and sciences. In this paper, we aim to remedy this omission by defending a continuity thesis regarding the function of metaphor across both domains, that is, metaphors fulfill any of the same functions in science as they (...) do in the arts. Importantly, this involves the claim that metaphors in arts as well as science have both epistemic and aesthetic functions. (shrink)

We present the negative phenomena of understanding in relation to scientific explanations. We begin by formulating the distinction between genuine understanding and lack of understanding, to define the epistemic category of misunderstanding. We illustrate misunderstanding with a short meta-philosophical study on the current debates about distinctively mathematical explanations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique set of challenges for national governments regarding how to deal with a major international pandemic of almost unprecedented scope. As the pandemic consti...

We welcome Mikhalevich & Powell’s (2020) (M&P) call for a more “‘inclusive”’ animal ethics, but we think their proposed shift toward a moral framework that privileges false positives over false negatives will require radically revising the paradigm assumption in animal research: that there is a clear line to be drawn between sentient beings that are part of our moral community and nonsentient beings that are not.

As a result of the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic, an internal tension in the goals of medicine has come to the forefront of public debate. Medical professionals are continuously faced with a tug of...

We present the negative phenomena of understanding in relation to scientific explanations. We begin by formulating the distinction between genuine understanding and lack of understanding, to define the epistemic category of misunderstanding. We illustrate misunderstanding with a short meta-philosophical study on the current debates about distinctively mathematical explanations.

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

This paper is a response to a recent paper by Bobier and Omelianchuk in which they argue that the critics of Giubilini and Minerva’s defence of infanticide fail to adequately justify a moral difference at birth. They argue that such arguments would lead to an intuitively less plausible position: that late-term abortions are permissible, thus creating a dilemma for those who seek to argue that birth matters. I argue that the only way to resolve this dilemma, is to bite the (...) naturalist bullet and accept that the intuitively plausible idea that birth constitutes a morally relevant event is simply mistaken and biologically misinformed. (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)

The normative mechanics of promising seem complex. The strength and content of promissory obligations, and the residual duties they entail upon being violated, have various prima facie surprising features. We give an account to explain these features. Promises have a point. The point of a promise to φ is a promise-independent reason to φ for the promisee’s sake. A promise turns this reason into a duty. This explains the mechanics of promises. And it grounds a nuanced picture of immoral promises, (...) an argument against promissory bare wrongings, and a constraint on theories of why we have promissory obligations at all. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted in society, creating numerous opportunities but at the same time posing ethical challenges. Many of these are familiar, such as issues of fairness, responsibility and privacy, but are presented in a new and challenging guise due to our limited ability to steer and predict the outputs of AI systems. This chapter first introduces these ethical challenges, stressing that overviews of values are a good starting point but frequently fail to suffice due to the context (...) sensitivity of ethical challenges. Frequently, additional (ethical) values emerge for specific applications, as e.g. challenges with fraud detection are very different from those around language technologies. Second, methods to tackle these challenges are discussed. Main ethical theories (virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) are shown to provide a starting point, but often lack the details needed for actionable AI Ethics. Instead, mid-level philosophical theories coupled to design-approaches such as Design for Values, together with interdisciplinary working methods, offer the best way forwards. The chapter aims to show how these approaches can lead to an ethics of AI that is actionable and that can be proactively integrated in the design of AI systems. (shrink)

Landgrebe and Smith provide an argument for the impossibility of Artificial General Intelligence based on the limits of simulating complex systems. However, their argument presupposes a very contemporary vision of artificial intelligence as a model trained on data to produce an algorithm executable in a modern digital computing system. The present contribution explores what it means to be artificial. Current artificial intelligence approaches on modern computing systems are not the only conceivable way in which artificial intelligence technology might be created. (...) If there are conceivable routes by which an artificial intelligence might be developed that are not constrained in the same way as the current generation of artificial neural networks, then these might be plausible routes towards the engineered generation of artificial general intelligence that are not precluded by the Landgrebe and Smith argument against the possibility of artificial general intelligence. (shrink)

Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson (...) and Griffiths [J Med Philos 42(4):447–466, 2017], however, may bear the seeds for the revival of purely naturalist approach to health and disease. In this paper, I defend their idea of Biological Normativity against recent criticism by Schwartz [J Med Philos Forum Bioethics Philos Med 42(4):485–502, 2017] and hope to help it flower into a revival of naturalist approaches in the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

The pivotal role of the relation part-of in the description of living organisms is widely acknowledged. Organisms are open systems, which means that in contradistinction to mechanical artifacts they are characterized by a continuous flow and exchange of matter. A closer analysis of the spatial relations in biological organisms reveals that the decision as to whether a given particular is part-of a second particular or whether it is only contained-in the second particular is often controversial. We here propose a rule-based (...) approach which allows us to decide on the basis of well-defined criteria which of the two relations holds between two anatomical objects, given that one spatially includes the other. We discuss the advantages and limitations of this approach, using concrete examples from human anatomy. (shrink)

This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and modeling practices, more radical conclusions follow from this recognition than have previously been inferred. Going against the tendency within the literature to generalize from single models, I explicate and defend the following two core theses: any successful analysis of models must target sets of (...) models, their multiplicity of functions within science, and their scientific context and history and for almost any aspect x of phenomenon y, scientists require multiple models to achieve scientific goal z. (shrink)

In their paper Nothing but the Truth Andreas Pietz and Umberto Rivieccio present Exactly True Logic, an interesting variation upon the four-valued logic for first-degree entailment FDE that was given by Belnap and Dunn in the 1970s. Pietz & Rivieccio provide this logic with a Hilbert-style axiomatisation and write that finding a nice sequent calculus for the logic will presumably not be easy. But a sequent calculus can be given and in this paper we will show that a calculus for (...) the Belnap-Dunn logic we have defined earlier can in fact be reused for the purpose of characterising ETL, provided a small alteration is made—initial assignments of signs to the sentences of a sequent to be proved must be different from those used for characterising FDE. While Pietz & Rivieccio define ETL on the language of classical propositional logic we also study its consequence relation on an extension of this language that is functionally complete for the underlying four truth values. On this extension the calculus gets a multiple-tree character—two proof trees may be needed to establish one proof. (shrink)

The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring phenotype and the environment, which can have long-lasting health and welfare effects. Examples (...) include metabolic diseases resulting from maternal nutrition and behavioral changes from maternal stress. An understanding of these processes and their evolutionary origins will help in identifying and providing appropriate developmental conditions to optimize offspring welfare. This serves as an example of the benefits of using evolutionary thinking within veterinary science and we suggest that in the same way that evolutionary medicine has helped our understanding of human health, the implementation of evolutionary veterinary science (EvoVetSci) could be a useful way forward for research in animal health and welfare. (shrink)

Statements about the behavior of biochemical entities (e.g., about the interaction between two proteins) abound in the literature on molecular biology and are increasingly becoming the targets of information extraction and text mining techniques. We show that an accurate analysis of the semantics of such statements reveals a number of ambiguities that have to be taken into account in the practice of biomedical ontology engineering: Such statements can not only be understood as event reporting statements, but also as ascriptions of (...) dispositions or tendencies that may or may not refer to collectives of interacting molecules or even to collectives of interaction events. (shrink)

“Existential risks” are risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential: risks of nuclear wars, pandemics, supervolcano eruptions, and so on. On standard utilitarianism, it seems, the reduction of such risks should be a key global priority today. Many effective altruists agree with this verdict. But how should the importance of these risks be assessed on a Christian moral theory? In this paper, I begin to answer this question – taking Thomas Aquinas as a reference, and the risks of (...) anthropogenic extinction as an example. I’ll suggest that on a Thomist framework, driving ourselves extinct would constitute a complete failure to fulfil our God-given nature, a radical form of hubris, and a loss of cosmological significance. So the reduction of such risks seems vital for Thomists, or Christians more broadly. Indeed, I end with the thought that these considerations are not parochially Christian, or indeed specifically religious: everyone with a similar view of mankind – as immensely valuable yet fallen and fragile – should agree that existential risks are a pressing moral concern. (shrink)

Neo-Russellians like Salmon and Braun hold that: the semantic contents of sentences are structured propositions whose basic components are objects and properties, names are directly referential terms, and a sentence of the form ‘n believes that S’ is true in a context c iff the referent of the name n in c believes the proposition expressed by S in c. This is sometimes referred to as ‘the Naive Russellian theory’. In this talk, I will discuss the Naive Russellian theory primarily (...) in connection with a problem known as Schiffer’s puzzle. Schiffer first presented the puzzle as an argument against the Naive Russellian theory. Schiffer’s argument proceeds in two steps. In step one, Schiffer argues that the Naive Russellian theory is committed to two principles regarding de re belief; the special-case consequence and Frege’s constraint. Then, in step two, Schiffer argues that the special-case consequence is not consistent with Frege’s constraint. Salmon and Braun reply to Schiffer’s argument that although the Naive Russellian theory is committed to Frege’s constraint, it is not committed to the special-case consequence. However, in this paper, I will argue with a new Schiffer-case that even if the Naive Russellian theory is not committed to the special-case consequence, it is still not consistent with Frege’s constraint. Concluding, I will discuss the possibility to reject Frege’s constraint within the Naive Russellian theory. (shrink)

Considerable variation exists not only in the kinds of transposable elements (TEs) occurring within the genomes of different species, but also in their abundance and distribution. Noting a similarity to the assortment of organisms among ecosystems, some researchers have called for an ecological approach to the study of transposon dynamics. However, there are several ways to adopt such an approach, and it is sometimes unclear what an ecological perspective will add to the existing co-evolutionary framework for explaining transposon-host interactions. This (...) review aims to clarify the conceptual foundations of transposon ecology in order to evaluate its explanatory prospects. We begin by identifying three unanswered questions regarding the abundance and distribution of TEs that potentially call for an ecological explanation. We then offer an operational distinction between evolutionary and ecological approaches to these questions. By determining the amount of variance in transposon abundance and distribution that is explained by ecological and evolutionary factors, respectively, it is possible empirically to assess the prospects for each of these explanatory frameworks. To illustrate how this methodology applies to a concrete example, we analyzed whole-genome data for one set of distantly related mammals and another more closely related group of arthropods. Our expectation was that ecological factors are most informative for explaining differences among individual TE lineages, rather than TE families, and for explaining their distribution among closely related as opposed to distantly related host genomes. We found that, in these data sets, ecological factors do in fact explain most of the variation in TE abundance and distribution among TE lineages across less distantly related host organisms. Evolutionary factors were not significant at these levels. However, the explanatory roles of evolution and ecology become inverted at the level of TE families or among more distantly related genomes. Not only does this example demonstrate the utility of our distinction between ecological and evolutionary perspectives, it further suggests an appropriate explanatory domain for the burgeoning discipline of transposon ecology. The fact that ecological processes appear to be impacting TE lineages over relatively short time scales further raises the possibility that transposons might serve as useful model systems for testing more general hypotheses in ecology. (shrink)

In their thoughtful article, Malm and Navin (2020) raise concerns about a potentially unjust generational welfare tradeoff between children and adults when it comes to chicken pox. We share their c...

Kant wird oft als einer derjenigen großen Philosophen angesehen, dessen Werk wesentlich zum jetzigen Verständnis der Menschenrechte und Menschenwürde beigetragen hat. Kant scheint, wenn man in seine Schriften schaut, jedoch keine Theorie der Menschenrechte im modernen Sinne gehabt zu haben. Bei näherem Hinsehen zeigt sich folgender Grund: Kant unterscheidet zwischen dem bloß privaten Recht, das dem positiven Recht untergeordnet ist, und dem öffentlichen Recht, das die begrifflichen Bedingungen einer jeden legitimen, legalen Ordnung darstellt. Der Inhalt des öffentlichen Rechts wird bei (...) ihm weder direkt aus einer freistehenden Moraltheorie abgeleitet, noch aus vertraglichen Übereinkünften oder dem positiven Recht. Stattdessen soll es aus den Ermöglichungsbedingungen einer rechtmäßigen Verfassung expliziert werden, unter der allein Ansprüchen auf (ein) „Recht“ irgendeine verbindliche Autorität zukommt. Wenn man diesen Ansatz ernst nimmt, kann man kaum eine Lesart bei Kant finden, die sich mit der modernen Auffassung von Menschenrechten vereinbaren lässt. Warum aber denken dann manche, dass Kant etwas zum modernen Verständnis der Menschenrechte beizutragen hätte? So lauten denn die Leitfragen der Erörterung: Welche Auffassungen in Kants Werk kommen einem zeitgenössischen Verständnis von Menschenrechten am nächsten? Warum jedoch können diese menschrechtlich vielleicht ähnlich klingenden Auffassungen Kants den heutigen Befürwortern der Menschenrechte doch keine Quelle oder Stütze bieten? (shrink)

We present the negative phenomena of understanding in relation to scientific explanations. We begin by formulating the distinction between genuine understanding and lack of understanding, to define the epistemic category of misunderstanding. We illustrate misunderstanding with a short meta-philosophical study on the current debates about distinctively mathematical explanations.