Recent ucr_chass_philo_oapolicydeposits items

Sacrificing Humans for Insects and AI

Thu, 7 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sacrificing Humans for Insects and AI

Aristotle On Two-Way Powers

Thu, 7 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract This paper offers a reading of Aristotle’s view of two-way powers and points out where related views about Aristotle and two-way powers can go wrong. It argues that Aristotelian two-way powers consist in, and are based in, systematic knowledge; that they are all, without exception, principles of change in another, or in oneself as other; and that the topic of voluntary action in Aristotle is a quite different topic. It follows from this that the Aristotelian view of two-way powers has nothing much to do with freedom. The paper also argues that Aristotle’s view of two-way powers is the best in the history of Western philosophy, because it’s the only view on which both contrary exercises of the power are explained as no accident, relative to the power. Subsequent views of two-way powers tend to violate the general principle that powers explain their actualizations as no accident, relative to the power.

Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need for rigorous methods to assess AI systems for consciousness, but significant uncertainty about relevant issues in consciousness science. We present a method for assessing AI systems for consciousness that involves exploring what follows from existing or future neuroscientific theories of consciousness. Indicators derived from such theories can be used to inform credences about whether particular AI systems are conscious. This method allows us to make meaningful progress because some influential theories of consciousness, notably including computational functionalist theories, have implications for AI that can be investigated empirically.

The Moral Habitat, by Barbara Herman

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Moral Habitat, by Barbara Herman

Finding Her Beat ed. by Dawn Mikkelson and Keri Pickett (review)

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Finding Her Beat ed. by Dawn Mikkelson and Keri Pickett (review)

Drumming Through Princess of China: Intercultural Encounters in a Hollywood Music Video

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Drumming Through Princess of China: Intercultural Encounters in a Hollywood Music Video

The Funeral of King Rama IX: Mourning and the Thai State

Mon, 7 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Funeral of King Rama IX: Mourning and the Thai State

Does the Heart Revolt at Evil? The Case of Racial Atrocities

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Does the Heart Revolt at Evil? The Case of Racial Atrocities

Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes versus Extending Your Concern: Empirical & Ethical Differences

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: According to the Golden Rule, you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Similarly, people are often exhorted to “imagine themselves in another's shoes.” A related but contrasting approach to moral expansion traces back to the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi, who urges us to “extend” our concern for those nearby to more distant people. Other approaches to moral expansion involve attending to the good consequences for oneself of caring for others, expanding one's sense of self, expanding one's sense of community, attending to others’ morally relevant properties, and learning by doing. About all such approaches, we can ask three questions: To what extent do people in fact (for instance, developmentally) broaden and deepen their care for others by these different methods? To what extent do these different methods differ in ethical merit? And how effectively do these different methods produce appropriate care?

Let's hope we're not living in a simulation

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: In Reality+, David Chalmers suggests that it wouldn't be too bad if we lived in a computer simulation. I argue on the contrary that if we live in a simulation, we ought to attach a significant conditional credence to its being a small or brief simulation. Our existence and the existence of many of the people and things we care about would then unfortunately depend on contingencies difficult to assess and beyond our control. Furthermore, all the badness of the world would appear to reflect the gods’ intentional cruelty or callous disregard. A large, stable rock is a more dependable and less axiologically troubling fundamental ground for reality.

LAP 50 th Anniversary Reflection

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

LAP 50 th Anniversary Reflection

The Ethics of Life as It Could Be: Do We Have Moral Obligations to Artificial Life?

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The field of Artificial Life studies the nature of the living state by modeling and synthesizing living systems. Such systems, under certain conditions, may come to deserve moral consideration similar to that given to nonhuman vertebrates or even human beings. The fact that these systems are nonhuman and evolve in a potentially radically different substrate should not be seen as an insurmountable obstacle to their potentially having rights, if they are sufficiently sophisticated in other respects. Nor should the fact that they owe their existence to us be seen as reducing their status as targets of moral concern. On the contrary, creators of Artificial Life may have special obligations to their creations, resembling those of an owner to their pet or a parent to their child. For a field that aims to create artificial life-forms with increasing levels of sophistication, it is crucial to consider the possible ethical implications of our activities, with an eye toward assessing potential...

Dehumanizing the Cognitively Disabled: Commentary on Smith’s Making Monsters

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dehumanizing the Cognitively Disabled: Commentary on Smith’s Making Monsters

Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a possible 'ancillary mind' modelled on a system envisioned in Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between a communicating group of individuals and a single, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a grey zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither determinately one person or subject nor determinately many persons or subjects, and thus some of its processes might be neither determinately introspection within a mind nor determinately communication between minds. If ancillary minds defy discrete countability, the same might be true for some actual minds on Earth. Kammerer and Frankish's research programme can be extended to include not only the study of possible forms of introspection, but also the study of possible mental activity intermediate...

Music-Evoked Nostalgia and Charitable Giving: A Cross-Cultural Study in the United States and Mexico

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Music-Evoked Nostalgia and Charitable Giving: A Cross-Cultural Study in the United States and Mexico

AI systems must not confuse users about their sentience or moral status

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One relatively neglected challenge in ethical artificial intelligence (AI) design is ensuring that AI systems invite a degree of emotional and moral concern appropriate to their moral standing. Although experts generally agree that current AI chatbots are not sentient to any meaningful degree, these systems can already provoke substantial attachment and sometimes intense emotional responses in users. Furthermore, rapid advances in AI technology could soon create AIs of plausibly debatable sentience and moral standing, at least by some relevant definitions. Morally confusing AI systems create unfortunate ethical dilemmas for the owners and users of those systems, since it is unclear how those systems ethically should be treated. I argue here that, to the extent possible, we should avoid creating AI systems whose sentience or moral standing is unclear and that AI systems should be designed so as to invite appropriate emotional responses in ordinary users.

Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat Ethics

Fri, 4 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the first controlled, non-self-report studies to show an influence of university-level ethical instruction on everyday behavior, Schwitzgebel et al. (2020) and Jalil et al. (2020) found that students purchase less meat after exposure to material on the ethics of eating meat. We sought to extend and conceptually replicate this research. Seven hundred thirty students in three large philosophy classes read James Rachels’ (2004) “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism”, followed by 50-min small-group discussions. Half also viewed a vegetarianism advocacy video containing factory farm footage. A few days after instruction, 54% of students agreed that “eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical”, compared to 37% before instruction, with no difference between the film and non-film conditions. Also, 39% of students anonymously pledged to avoid eating factory farmed meat for 24 h, again with no statistically detectable difference between conditions. Finally, we obtained 2828...

Timescales of developmental toxicity impacting on research and needs for intervention

Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Much progress has happened in understanding developmental vulnerability to preventable environmental hazards. Along with the improved insight, the perspective has widened, and developmental toxicity now involves latent effects that can result in delayed adverse effects in adults or at old age and additional effects that can be transgenerationally transferred to future generations. Although epidemiology and toxicology to an increasing degree are exploring the adverse effects from developmental exposures in human beings, the improved documentation has resulted in little progress in protection, and few environmental chemicals are currently regulated to protect against developmental toxicity, whether it be neurotoxicity, endocrine disruption or other adverse outcome. The desire to obtain a high degree of certainty and verification of the evidence used for decision-making must be weighed against the costs and necessary duration of research, as well as the long-term costs to human health...

What is Unique About Kindness? Exploring the Proximal Experience of Prosocial Acts Relative to Other Positive Behaviors

Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Previous research has identified a robust connection between prosociality and happiness, suggesting that kindness has both hedonic and eudaimonic benefits—in the short term and in the long term. By contrast, our experiment aimed to examine people’s momentary eudaimonic feelings while engaging in kind acts for others. To that end, we randomly assigned participants to one of four positively valenced conditions that varied in their inclusion of potential “active ingredients” of prosocial behavior. Namely, engaging in kind acts for others was compared to engaging in kind acts for oneself (social element removed), extraverted behavior (kindness element removed), and open-minded behavior (both social and kindness elements removed). Participants were assessed five times over 2 weeks, each time reporting on how they felt during their assigned activities. Multilevel models revealed that relative to all other conditions, participants assigned to do kind acts for others reported a greater...

A science-based agenda for health-protective chemical assessments and decisions: overview and consensus statement

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The manufacture and production of industrial chemicals continues to increase, with hundreds of thousands of chemicals and chemical mixtures used worldwide, leading to widespread population exposures and resultant health impacts. Low-wealth communities and communities of color often bear disproportionate burdens of exposure and impact; all compounded by regulatory delays to the detriment of public health. Multiple authoritative bodies and scientific consensus groups have called for actions to prevent harmful exposures via improved policy approaches. We worked across multiple disciplines to develop consensus recommendations for health-protective, scientific approaches to reduce harmful chemical exposures, which can be applied to current US policies governing industrial chemicals and environmental pollutants. This consensus identifies five principles and scientific recommendations for improving how agencies like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approach and conduct...

Current practice and recommendations for advancing how human variability and susceptibility are considered in chemical risk assessment

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A key element of risk assessment is accounting for the full range of variability in response to environmental exposures. Default dose-response methods typically assume a 10-fold difference in response to chemical exposures between average (healthy) and susceptible humans, despite evidence of wider variability. Experts and authoritative bodies support using advanced techniques to better account for human variability due to factors such as in utero or early life exposure and exposure to multiple environmental, social, and economic stressors.This review describes: 1) sources of human variability and susceptibility in dose-response assessment, 2) existing US frameworks for addressing response variability in risk assessment; 3) key scientific inadequacies necessitating updated methods; 4) improved approaches and opportunities for better use of science; and 5) specific and quantitative recommendations to address evidence and policy needs.Current default adjustment factors do not sufficiently...

Kantian Constructivism and Kantian Constitutivism: Some Reflections

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: Is moral constructivism an account of the basis of the content of morality or of its authority? In fact, different writers have understood constructivism to be addressing different issues. In this paper I argue that Kant should be understood as a constructivist about the content of morality – or better about a limited set of general substantive principles – and as a constititutivist about its authority. After some general remarks in Section 1 about contemporary discussions of constructivism, in Section 2 I discuss Rawls’s understanding of Kant’s constructivism; Rawls takes Kantian constructivism to be a view about the content of morality. In Section 3, I give an overview of Kant’s moral conception as constructivist about the content of morality and as constitutivist about its authority. In Section 4 I address a worry whether certain features of Kant’s constitutivism rest his constructivism on a realist foundation, arguing that they do not.

Autonomy and the Idea of Freedom: Some Reflections on Groundwork III

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

AbstractThis article explores a set of questions about the ‘idea of freedom’ that Kant introduces in the fourth paragraph ofGroundworkIII. I develop a reading that supports treating it as a normative notion and brings out its normative content in some detail. I argue that we should understand the idea as follows: that it is a general feature of reasoning and judgement that it understands itself to be a correct or sound application of the normative standards of the relevant domain of cognition, not influenced by irrelevant or external factors. Reasoning and judgement are thus normatively committed to these standards of correctness. A second and related concern is to explore connections between the idea of freedom and Kant’s conception of autonomy and to identify different points at which autonomy plays a role in the argument ofGroundworkIII. In the final section, I mine the idea of freedom for a set of normative commitments specific to rational agency that play a foundational role...

Predictive models for identifying risk of readmission after index hospitalization for heart failure: A systematic review

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

AIMS: Readmission rates for patients with heart failure have consistently remained high over the past two decades. As more electronic data, computing power, and newer statistical techniques become available, data-driven care could be achieved by creating predictive models for adverse outcomes such as readmissions. We therefore aimed to review models for predicting risk of readmission for patients admitted for heart failure. We also aimed to analyze and possibly group the predictors used across the models. METHODS: Major electronic databases were searched to identify studies that examined correlation between readmission for heart failure and risk factors using multivariate models. We rigorously followed the review process using PRISMA methodology and other established criteria for quality assessment of the studies. RESULTS: We did a detailed review of 334 papers and found 25 multivariate predictive models built using data from either health system or trials. A majority of models...

Do ethics classes influence student behavior? Case study: Teaching the ethics of eating meat

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Do university ethics classes influence students' real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least...

A New Measure of Life Satisfaction: The Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale

Tue, 22 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) has been the dominant measure of life satisfaction since its creation more than 30 years ago. We sought to develop an improved measure that includes indirect indicators of life satisfaction (e.g., wishing to change one's life) to increase the bandwidth of the measure and account for acquiescence bias. In 3 studies, we developed a 6-item measure of life satisfaction, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale, and obtained reliability and validity evidence. Importantly, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale retained the high internal consistency, test-retest stability, and unidimensionality of the Satisfaction With Life Scale. In addition, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale correlated with other well-being measures, Big Five personality traits, values, and demographic information in expected ways. Although the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale correlated highly with the Satisfaction With Life Scale,...

The Graying of the Immigrant Dream The Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and Creating Culture in a Southern City . (Social Transformations in American Anthropology). By Samuel K. Byrd. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Graying of the Immigrant Dream The Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and Creating Culture in a Southern City . (Social Transformations in American Anthropology). By Samuel K. Byrd. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Sound, Silence, Music: Power

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract One afternoon in the mid-1990s, I walked past a bookstore in Berkeley, California and stopped to look at the window display. It featured a group of at least twenty books with wildly divergent subjects that were clearly meant to be viewed together, and I stared, puzzled, until I suddenly saw that each book title had the word "power" in it. They bore titles like Power and Accountability, Power and Beauty, Power and Civil Society, Power and Community, Power and Difference, Power and Empowerment, Power and Everyday Life, Power and Gender, and so on. Power was everywhere: Foucault had gone off like a bomb in the humanities and the social sciences.

Ethnomusicology without Erotics

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ethnomusicology without Erotics

“Autonomy, Taking One’s Choices to be Good, and Practical Law: Replies to Critics”

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“Autonomy, Taking One’s Choices to be Good, and Practical Law: Replies to Critics”