I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance and inscrutability of the indirect effects of our actions, conjoined with the plausibility of a permissive decision principle governing cases of deep uncertainty, known as the maximality rule. I conclude that (...) we lack a compelling decision theory that is consistent with a longtermist perspective and does not downplay the depth of our uncertainty, while also supporting orthodox effective altruist conclusions about cause prioritization. (shrink)

I consider the plausibility of discounting for kinship, the view that a positive rate of pure intergenerational time preference is justifiable in terms of agent-relative moral reasons relating to partiality between generations. I respond to Parfit's objections to discounting for kinship, but then highlight a number of apparent limitations of this approach. I show that these limitations largely fall away when we reflect on social discounting in the context of decisions that concern the global community as a whole, such as (...) those related to global climate change. (shrink)

People may disagree about moral issues because they have fundamentally different intuitions. I argue that we ought to suspend judgement in such cases. Since we trust our own moral intuitions without positive evidence of their reliability, we must necessarily extend this trust to the moral intuitions of others: a fundamental self-other asymmetry in moral epistemology is untenable. This ensures that disagreements in moral intuition are defeating. In addition, I argue that brute conflicts in moral intuition require suspension of judgement only (...) if we are required to exhibit this kind of default trust with respect to the moral intuitions of others. (shrink)

Many moral philosophers accept the Debunking Thesis, according to which facts about natural selection provide debunking explanations for certain of our moral beliefs. I argue that philosophers who accept the Debunking Thesis beg important questions in the philosophy of biology. They assume that past selection can explain why you or I hold certain of the moral beliefs we do. A position advanced by many prominent philosophers of biology implies that this assumption is false. According to the Negative View, natural selection (...) cannot explain the traits of individuals. Hence, facts about past selection cannot provide debunking explanations for any of our moral beliefs. The aim of this paper is to explore the conflict between the Debunking Thesis and the Negative View. (shrink)

Upon discovering that certain beliefs we hold are contingent on arbitrary features of our background, we often feel uneasy. I defend the proposal that if such cases ofcontingency anxietyinvolve defeaters, this is because of the epistemic significance of disagreement. I note two hurdles to our accepting thisDisagreement Hypothesis. Firstly, some cases of contingency anxiety apparently involve no disagreement. Secondly, the proposal may seem to make our awareness of the influence of arbitrary background factors irrelevant in determining whether to revise our (...) beliefs. I show that each of these problems can be successfully accommodated by theDisagreement Hypothesis. (shrink)

Many everyday actions have major but unforeseeable long-term consequences. Some argue that this fact poses a serious problem for consequentialist moral theories. We argue that the problem for non-consequentialists is greater still. Standard non-consequentialist constraints on doing harm combined with the long-run impacts of everyday actions entail, absurdly, that we should try to do as little as possible. We call this the Paralysis Argument. After laying out the argument, we consider and respond to a number of objections. We then suggest (...) what we believe is the most promising response: to accept, in practice, a highly demanding morality of beneficence with a long-term focus. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence systems are becoming increasingly autonomous and will soon be able to make decisions on their own about what to do, AI researchers have started to talk about the need to align AI with human values. The AI ‘value alignment problem’ faces two kinds of challenges—a technical and a normative one—which are interrelated. The technical challenge deals with the question of how to encode human values in artificial intelligence. The normative challenge is associated with two questions: “Which values (...) or whose values should artificial intelligence align with?” My concern is that AI developers underestimate the difficulty of answering the normative question. They hope that we can easily identify the purposes we really desire and that they can focus on the design of those objectives. But how are we to decide which objectives or values to induce in AI, given that there is a plurality of values and moral principles and that our everyday life is full of moral disagreements? In my paper I will show that although it is not realistic to reach an agreement on what we, humans, really want as people value different things and seek different ends, it may be possible to agree on what we do not want to happen, considering the possibility that intelligence, equal to our own, or even exceeding it, can be created. I will argue for pluralism which is compatible with objectivism. In spite of the fact that there is no uniquely best solution to every moral problem, it is still possible to identify which answers are wrong. And this is where we should begin the value alignment of AI. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that natural selection explanations debunk our moral beliefs or would do so if moral realism were true, relying on the assumption that explanations of this kind show that moral facts play no role in explaining human moral beliefs. Here I argue that this assumption rests on a confusion of proximate and ultimate explanatory factors. Insofar as evolutionary debunking arguments hinge on the assumption that moral facts play no role in explaining human moral beliefs, these arguments fall short.

This article addresses the sacredness of Ayahuasca from the perspective of the global shamanic vocation. If encounters with Ayahuasca are said to revitalize forms of sacredness in contemporary societies, this is perhaps clearest in cases where individuals understand themselves to be called to lead ceremonies. Recognizing the global scale of Ayahuasca shamanism, we compare facilitators of ceremonies in two societies to discern differences and similarities in how Ayahuasca vocations exist in differently modernized societies: Peru, a predominantly Catholic society with a (...) substantial Indigenous Amazonian population and an active Ayahuasca shamanism tourism sector, and Denmark, a secular society in Northern Europe, where Ayahuasca is illegal. Building on recent reappraisals of Weber’s reflection on vocation and Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, we argue that being called by Ayahuasca to follow shamanic vocations in contemporary societies leads to tensions around the need to both justify and resist the rationalization of Ayahuasca. (shrink)

Given the inevitability of scarcity, should public institutions ration healthcare resources so as to prioritize those who contribute more to society? Intuitively, we may feel that this would be somehow inegalitarian. I argue that the egalitarian objection to prioritizing treatment on the basis of patients’ usefulness to others is best thought of as semiotic: i.e. as having to do with what this practice would mean, convey, or express about a person's standing. I explore the implications of this conclusion when taken (...) in conjunction with the observation that semiotic objections are generally flimsy, failing to identify anything wrong with a practice as such and having limited capacity to generalize beyond particular contexts. (shrink)

Alm, Margit Review of: Countdown: Our last, best hope for a future on earth?, by Alan Weisman, First Published in the US by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group ISBN 978-1-4087-0267-3.

Alm, Margit Review of: Growing for broke: How the government has sold out to private interests, by Peter North, Published in 2016 by Tomorrow Press, PO Box 238, Berwick, Vic. 3806 ISBN 978-168418977-9.

Certain of our traits are thought more central to who we are: they comprise ourindividual identity. What makes these traits privileged in this way? What accounts for theiridentity centrality? Although considerations of identity play a key role in many different areas of moral philosophy, I argue that we currently have no satisfactory account of the basis of identity centrality. Nor should we expect one. Rather, we should adopt an error theory: we should concede that there is nothing in reality corresponding (...) to the perceived distinction between the central and peripheral traits of a person. (shrink)

Background: Education can be taken as a key factor in transmission of a value tradition in healthcare. In professional and educational contexts, transmission of values appears to be a kind of guarantee for an occupational group’s professional identity, awareness and ethical integrity. Given the positives of such transmission of value traditions, one can also pay attention to conflicts between the professional tradition and individuals who are brought into that tradition. Objectives: How does mediation of value tradition in healthcare education appear (...) out of the students’ perspective based on their own narratives? Research design and participants: Students’ texts were analysed through a combination of contrastive discourse analysis and sociohistorical description and then evaluated from an ethical perspective. Data were collected from the annual electronic feedback given by students after their clinical practice at a University Hospital. Ethical considerations: Organizational approval was received. Information about the voluntary nature of participation was a part of the feedback tool. Findings: The analysis points to the fact that there is a definite theme in the students’ experiences that both the previous research has neglected and that stands in conflict with the current tradition of healthcare education in Finland. That theme can be summarized in the experience of ‘losing one’s identity’, and it is expressed in a request to experience of ‘losing one’s identity’ and it is expressed in a request to have a right to ‘use one’s own name’ also as a healthcare professional. Discussion and conclusion: Being addressed by one’s name is to make the person directly involved and responsible, realizing that that person’s perspective is of importance to the way the world is. We argue that this theme (my name) is of ethical importance and could have empowering potentiality when used in an ethically sound way. (shrink)

This article provides a short survey of Joachim Kopper’s understanding of Kant’s theory of cognition in CPR. Kant’s critical thought is developed via a dogmatic method but marks a transition to transcendental thought delivered from dogmatic assertions. The assertion that cognition emerges from the relation between mind and objects is made at the beginning of CPR. Kopper holds that transcendental reflection starts not on the basis of this distinction but on the impossibility of logical assertion about existence as it is (...) reached in antinomic. The fact of experience must thus be explained otherwise than by dogmatic assertions of relations between objects or between objects and thought. Reflection on necessity, affirmed by the law of causality, enables transcendental inspection to understand experience and human life in one unrelational meaning. (shrink)

This paper tries to explain why racial profiling involves a serious injustice and to do so in a way that avoids the problems of existing philosophical accounts. An initially plausible view maintains that racial profiling is pro tanto wrong in and of itself by violating a constraint on fair treatment that is generally violated by acts of statistical discrimination based on ascribed characteristics. However, consideration of other cases involving statistical discrimination suggests that violating a constraint of this kind may not (...) be an especially serious wrong in and of itself. To fully capture the significant wrong that occurs when racial profiling is targeted at black Americans or other similarly situated groups, it is argued that we should appeal to the idea that this basic injustice is exacerbated when it forms part of a larger pattern of similar actions that collectively realize a state of cumulative injustice. (shrink)

Neuroplasticity is a core feature of the brain throughout the entire life of the individual. And when injury to the adult brain destroys part of the circuitry mediating behaviour and/or conscious experience, neuroplasticity is required to bring about the highest possible degree of post-traumatic functional recovery. But is the brain able to recreate the lost circuitry? Scrutiny of the impressive plasticity seen during development and in the adult brain reveals many similarities -- but also some crucial differences. And studies of (...) the mechanisms of functional recovery demonstrate that even an apparently 'full recovery' of the surface phenomena of behaviour and/or conscious representations is accomplished without a recreation of the lost circuitry. Instead, the post-traumatic process utilizes mechanisms, which have evolved to mediate problem solving in the intact brain. The newly developed REF model suggests how such dynamic reorganizations occur in the intact and injured brain. (shrink)

Die Beiträge des Bandes untersuchen die Genese der Rechtsphilosophie Kants und zeigen auf, dass deren grundlegende Thesen lange vor der „Metaphysik der Sitten“ existierten. Das erfordert die Analyse der kantischen Vorlesungen zum Naturrecht in den handschriftlichen Quellen, die die Interpretation der veröffentlichten Werke entscheidend ergänzen können: Kant hielt in Königsberg von 1767 bis 1788 Vorlesungen zum Naturrecht, von denen nur eine einzige handschriftliche Abschrift aus dem Sommersemester 1784 erhalten ist – „Naturrecht Feyerabend“. Mit der philosophischen Analyse der Vorlesungsnachschrift, die bislang (...) von Forschern unter rechts-, moral- und kulturphilosophischen Aspekten nur in Ansätzen untersucht wurde, soll durch die Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Recht und Moral eine grundlegende theoretische Vorarbeit für einen internationalen Dialog über die normativen Grundlagen des modernen Rechtsstaates geleistet werden. Nach der Wiederentdeckung der normativen Ethik Kants sowie seines politischen Denkens in der internationalen Kantforschung und den „Humanities“ vervollständigt die Neubewertung der Rechtslehre die Renaissance der praktischen Philosophie Kants – sicherlich eines der wichtigsten Phänomene der moralischen und der Rechts-Kultur unserer Zeit. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there exist distinctive obstacles to relying on moral testimony. In this paper, I criticize previous attempts to identify these obstacles and offer a new theory. I argue that the problems associated with moral deference can't be explained in terms of the value of moral understanding, nor in terms of aretaic considerations related to subjective integration. Instead, our uneasiness with moral testimony is best explained by our attachment to an ideal of authenticity that places special demands on (...) our moral beliefs. (shrink)

How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that, in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion. The second is a principle according to which the addition (...) of any population of lives with positive welfare levels makes the outcome worse if accompanied by sufficiently many lives that are not worth living. I consider whether we should accept the conclusion of the argument and what we may end up committed to if we do not, illustrating the implications for the question of whether suffering in aggregate outweighs happiness among human and non-human animals, now and in future. (shrink)

This paper considers the argument according to which, because we should regard it as a priori very unlikely that we are among the most important people who will ever exist, we should increase our confidence that the human species will not persist beyond the current historical era, which seems to represent a crucial juncture in human history and perhaps even the history of life on earth. The argument is a descendant of the Carter-Leslie Doomsday Argument, but I show that it (...) does not inherit the crucial flaw in its immediate ancestor. Nonetheless, we are not forced to follow the argument where it leads if we instead significantly decrease our confidence that we can affect the long-run future of humanity. GPI Working Paper No. 1-2019. (shrink)

Kant, I. Hvad er oplysning?--Hartnack, J. Oplysning og fornuft.--Løgstrup, K.E. Videnskab og oplysning.--Favrholdt, D. Frihed og indotrinering.--Sløk, J. Fordummelsens tid.--Palle Hansen, F. Uvidenskabeligt efterskrift.

Muscle synergies reflect the presence of a common neural input to multiple muscles. Steering small sets of synergies is commonly believed to simplify the control of complex motor tasks like walking and running. When these locomotor patterns emerge, it is likely that synergies emerge as well. We hence hypothesized that in children learning to run the number of accompanying synergies increases and that some of the synergies’ activities display a temporal shift related to a reduced stance phase as observed in (...) adults. We investigated the development of locomotion in 23 children aged 2–9 years of age and compared them with seven young adults. Muscle activity of 15 bilateral leg, trunk, and arm muscles, ground reaction forces, and kinematics were recorded during comfortable treadmill walking and running, followed by a muscle synergy analysis. We found that toddlers and preschoolers utilize a “walk-run strategy” when learning to run: they managed the fastest speeds on the treadmill by combining double support and flight phases. In particular the activity duration of the medial gastrocnemius muscle was weakly correlated with age. The number of synergies across groups and conditions needed to cover sufficient data variation ranged between four and eight. The number of synergies tended to be smaller in toddlers than it did in preschoolers and school-age children but the adults had the lowest number for both conditions. Against our expectations, the age groups did not differ significantly in the timing or duration of synergies. We believe that the increase in the number of muscle synergies in older children relates to motor learning and exploration. The ability to run with a FP is clearly associated with an increase in the number of muscle synergies. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to investigate three fundamental issues of the new millennium: language, truth and democracy. The authors approach the themes from different philosophical perspectives. One group of authors examines the use of language and the meaning of concepts from an analytic point of view, the ontology of scientific terms and explores the nature of knowledge in general. Another group examines truth and types of relation. A third group of authors focuses on the current factors influencing our (...) concept of democracy and its legal foundations and makes reference to moral aspects and the question of political responsibility. The chapters provide the reader with an overview of current philosophical problems and the answers to these questions will be decisive for future development. (shrink)

It has sometimes been argued that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy is marked by relativism. According to this view people view general concepts in relative terms due to different considerations and perceptions. More specifically, there is a tendency among some philosophers to assign the Wittgensteinian concept of form of life to the idea of culture. The argument goes like this: as language games and forms of life develop within a particular culture and cultures are different they are no absolute phenomena but rather (...) relative depending on the frame within which they developed. I would like to take up this thought and examine whether we can find any relativistic position in Wittgenstein’s writings. The question is whether the existence of a multitude of forms of life points to any sort of relativism. Many philosophers have speculated over the significant concept of “form of life”. There has been an ongoing debate over the question whether the concept is to be understood in the singular or in the plural. The discussion here revolves around the question of whether there is only one prevailing form of life to which others can be subsumed. Or else, is there a variety of coexisting forms of life of equal value? (shrink)

This article focuses on healthcare ethics discussions in Estonia. We begin with an overview of the reform policies that the healthcare institutions have undergone since the region regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The principles of distributing healthcare services and questions regarding just what ethical healthcare should look like have received abundant coverage in the national media. An example of this is the exceptionally public case of V—a woman with leukemia whose expensive drugs the national health insurance fund (...) refused to compensate. In our subsequent discussion, we focus on a grand-scale local healthcare and research project—the Estonian Genome Project—that attempts to include 1 million DNA samples into one database. (shrink)

The paper presents a general critique of the use of conceptual frameworks in design, illustrated by the well known synchronous/asynchronous, co-located/non-co-located framework. It argues that while frameworks are a necessary and inevitable starting point for design, the business of tailoring and adapting them to specific situations need not be ad hoc.Triggering artefacts are a way of systematically challenging both designers' preunderstandings and the conservatism of work practice. Experiences from the Great Belt tunnel and bridge project are used to illustrate howtriggering (...) artefacts change themodality of designing for change. (shrink)