{"title":"Compensating beneficiaries","authors":"Linda Eggert","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02150-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02150-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper illuminates a typically obscured ground for rectificatory obligations: harms justified as ‘lesser evils.’ Lesser-evil harms are not the result of overall morally prohibited acts but of acts permissibly carried out to prevent significantly greater harm. The paper argues that harms caused as unintended side effects of acting on lesser-evil justifications, notably in military rescue operations, may give rise to claims to compensation, even if (1) the military acts that caused the harms in question were justified on lesser-evil grounds and (2) the victims in question are no worse off as a result; they may even owe their survival to the act of rescue. The paper defends three claims. First, being better off as a result of a harmful rescue than one would otherwise have been does not preclude claims to be compensated for harms suffered as a side effect. Second, identifying the relevant counterfactual for purposes of compensatory justice is sometimes a prescriptive, rather than a descriptive, matter. Rather than relying on empirical speculations about what <i>would</i> have happened had a harm not occurred, we must, in certain cases, consider what agents <i>ought</i> to have done. Finally, duties of compensation need not fall on those who caused the to-be-compensated harms. That infringing rights is permissible in certain cases does not imply that no compensation is owed, but merely that it is not necessarily rights-infringers on whom duties of compensation fall.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141326916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Peter Verdée, Pierre Saint-Germier, Pilar Terrés Villalonga
{"title":"Connecting the dots: hypergraphs to analyze and visualize the joint-contribution of premises and conclusions to the validity of arguments","authors":"Peter Verdée, Pierre Saint-Germier, Pilar Terrés Villalonga","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02141-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02141-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A detailed analysis of joint-contribution of premises and conclusions in classically valid sequents is presented in terms of hypergraphs. In (Saint-Germier, P., Verdée, P., & Villalonga, P. T. (2024). <i>Relevant entailment and logical ground. Philosophical Studies</i> (pp. 1–43). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02101-1), this idea of joint-contribution is introduced and motivated as a method for characterizing four kinds of relevant validity, in the sense of selecting the relevantly valid sequents among the classically valid sequents. The account in (Saint-Germier, P., Verdée, P., & Villalonga, P. T. (2024). <i>Relevant entailment and logical ground. Philosophical Studies</i> (pp. 1–43). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02101-1) is built on a calculus, called <span>(textsf{GLK}^{hbox {a}})</span>, which proves grounding claims for (enthymematically) valid sequents. In the present paper an adequate representation of <span>(textsf{GLK}^{hbox {a}})</span> is given in terms of hypergraphs. The hypergraphs are a kind of diagrammatic proofs for Classical Propositional Logic, entirely based on the grounds of premises and conclusions. The hypergraphs and their visualization provide insights into the relations between premises and conclusions and into the way validity is produced by the binding of premises and conclusions via their partial grounds. They visualize the network of elements of the sequent that contribute to its logical validity. Non-contributing (i.e. irrelevant) premises and conclusions are then specified to be those that are disconnected from the network, however one constructs the graphs.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141320043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bread prices and sea levels: why probabilistic causal models need to be monotonic","authors":"Vera Hoffmann-Kolss","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02112-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02112-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A key challenge for probabilistic causal models is to distinguish non-causal probabilistic dependencies from true causal relations. To accomplish this task, causal models are usually required to satisfy several constraints. Two prominent constraints are the causal Markov condition and the faithfulness condition. However, other constraints are also needed. One of these additional constraints is the causal sufficiency condition, which states that models must not omit any direct common causes of the variables they contain. In this paper, I argue that the causal sufficiency condition is problematic: (1) it is incompatible with the requirement that the variables in a model must not stand in non-causal necessary dependence relations, such as mathematical or conceptual relations, or relations described in terms of supervenience or grounding, (2) it presupposes more causal knowledge as primitive than is actually needed to create adequate causal models, and (3) if models are only required to be causally sufficient, they cannot deal with cases where variables are probabilistically related by accident, such as Sober’s example of the relationship between bread prices in England and the sea level in Venice. I show that these problems can be avoided if causal models are required to be monotonic in the following sense: the causal relations occurring in a model M would not disappear if further variables were added to M. I give a definition of this monotonicity condition and conclude that causal models should be required to be monotonic rather than causally sufficient.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141319804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social kind realism as relative frame manipulability","authors":"Yorgos Karagiannopoulos, Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02164-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02164-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper we introduce the view that realism about a social kind K entails that the grounding conditions of K are difficult (or impossible) to manipulate. In other words, we define social kind realism in terms of relative frame manipulability (RFM). In articulating our view, we utilize theoretical resources from Epstein’s (Epstein, <i>The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of the Social Sciences</i>. Oxford University Press, 2015) grounding/anchoring model and causal interventionism. After comparing our view with causal and principle-based (Tahko, <i>Synthese</i> 200(2):1–23, 2022) proposals, we motivate RFM by showing that it accommodates important desiderata about the social landscape (such as recognizing the context-relativity of social properties and the emancipatory dimension of social practice). Finally, we consider three objections. First, we tackle frame-necessitarianism (FN), the view that social kind frames are metaphysically necessary (and thus unmanipulable). Secondly, we engage with what Epstein (Epstein, <i>Philosophy and Phenomenological Research</i>, 99(3):768–781 2019a) calls UNIVERSALITY (the view that social kinds can hold in the absence of anchors) and we argue that it should also be resisted. Finally, we tackle a recent objection from Mason’s (Mason, <i>Philosophical Studies</i>, 178(12):3975–3994) essentialism about social kinds.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141320038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deontology and safe artificial intelligence","authors":"William D’Alessandro","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02174-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02174-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The field of AI safety aims to prevent increasingly capable artificially intelligent systems from causing humans harm. Research on <i>moral alignment </i>is widely thought to offer a promising safety strategy: if we can equip AI systems with appropriate ethical rules, according to this line of thought, they’ll be unlikely to disempower, destroy or otherwise seriously harm us. Deontological morality looks like a particularly attractive candidate for an alignment target, given its popularity, relative technical tractability and commitment to harm-avoidance principles. I argue that the connection between moral alignment and safe behavior is more tenuous than many have hoped. In general, AI systems can possess either of these properties in the absence of the other, and we should favor safety when the two conflict. In particular, advanced AI systems governed by standard versions of deontology need not be especially safe.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141320042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stable acceptance for mighty knowledge","authors":"Peter Hawke","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02103-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02103-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on the puzzling behavior of ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim, we tentatively conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse (i) an unfettered classical logic for epistemic language, (ii) the general veridicality of knowledge ascription, and (iii) an intuitive ‘negative transparency’ thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple negated ‘might’ claim to an epistemic claim without modal content. We motivate a strategic trade-off: preserve veridicality and (generalized) negative transparency, while abandoning the general validity of contraposition. We criticize various approaches to incorporating veridicality into <i>domain semantics</i>, a paradigmatic ‘information-sensitive’ framework for capturing negative transparency and, more generally, the non-classical behavior of sentences with epistemic modals. We then present a novel information-sensitive semantics that successfully executes our favored strategy: <i>stable acceptance semantics</i>, extending a vanilla bilateral state-based semantics for epistemic modals with a knowledge operator loosely inspired by the defeasibility theory of knowledge.\u0000</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141287049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shutdown-seeking AI","authors":"Simon Goldstein, Pamela Robinson","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02099-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02099-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key challenge raised by Soares et al. (2015), that shutdown-seeking AIs will manipulate humans into shutting them down. We conclude by comparing our approach with Soares et al.'s corrigibility framework.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"128 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Population, existence and incommensurability","authors":"M. A. Roberts","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02125-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02125-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Jan Narveson has articulated a deeply held, widely shared intuition regarding what moral law has to say about bringing additional people into existence: while we are “in favour of making people happy,” we are “neutral about making happy people.” Various formulations of the Narvesonian intuition (closely related to the <i>person-affecting intuition</i> or <i>restriction</i>) have been widely criticized. This present paper outlines an off-the-beaten-path alternate construction of the intuition—the <i>existence condition</i>—and argues that that particular construction has the resources to avoid some of those criticisms. But still other considerably more widely recognized alternate constructions have been offered as well. Thus John Broome outlines what he calls the <i>neutrality intuition</i>. While Broome finds the underlying intuition “strongly attractive,” he nonetheless argues that the neutrality intuition itself leads us quickly into inconsistency. Wlodek Rabinowicz disagrees. On his view, Broome’s inconsistency argument shows, not that the neutrality intuition is false, but rather that it doesn’t follow, from the fact that the outcome, or possible future or <i>world</i>, that includes the additional person is neither better nor worse than the (otherwise similar) world that excludes that person, that the one world is exactly as good as the other. The better view, according to Rabinowicz, is that, on occasion, and specifically when the coming into existence of additional people is at stake, the one world is <i>incommensurate</i> with the other. What is called the <i>principle of trichotomy</i> is, in other words, false. Difficulties arise, however, when we try to reject that seemingly compelling conceptual principle. This present paper concludes with the argument that the availability of the existence condition—which, together with certain other uncontroversial moral principles and a handful of conceptual principles, forms the <i>existential approach</i>—shows that we can maintain the most intuitive parts of neutrality intuition while avoiding both Broome’s inconsistency worry and Rabinowicz’s commitment to incommensurability. Incommensurability may be correct on other grounds—but not, this present paper argues, on the grounds provided by Broome’s inconsistency argument.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hilary Greaves, Teruji Thomas, Andreas Mogensen, William MacAskill
{"title":"On the desire to make a difference","authors":"Hilary Greaves, Teruji Thomas, Andreas Mogensen, William MacAskill","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02102-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02102-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>True benevolence is, most fundamentally, a desire that the world be better. It is natural and common, however, to frame thinking about benevolence indirectly, in terms of a desire to make a difference to how good the world is. This would be an innocuous shift if desires to make a difference were extensionally equivalent to desires that the world be better. This paper shows that at least on some common ways of making a “desire to make a difference” precise, this extensional equivalence fails. Where it fails, “difference-making preferences” run counter to the ideals of benevolence. In particular, in the context of decision making under uncertainty, coupling a “difference-making” framing in a natural way with risk aversion leads to preferences that violate stochastic dominance, and that lead to a strong form of collective defeat, from the point of view of betterness. Difference-making framings and true benevolence are not strictly mutually inconsistent, but agents seeking to implement true benevolence must take care to avoid the various pitfalls that we outline.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141251725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reasons, intentions, and actions","authors":"Randolph Clarke","doi":"10.1007/s11098-024-02165-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02165-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Several theorists maintain that a consideration is a reason to <i>ϕ</i> (where <i>ϕ</i>-ing is an act-type) if and only if that consideration is a reason to intend to <i>ϕ</i>, and some hold as well that a consideration is a reason not to <i>ϕ</i> if and only if that consideration is a reason to intend not to <i>ϕ</i>. The claims often stem from views about what it is to be a practical reason. Here it is argued that both equivalence claims are false. Although no view of practical reasons is advanced, views that imply either equivalence claim are shown to be mistaken.</p>","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141185402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}