Tag: Ethics
Pages tagged with ethics.
- Empathy as a Second-Person Standpoint / 作为第二人称观点的同理心
Part I of this bilingual series, adapted from *Life-Care Education Based on Improved Mental Models*, Chapter 8, Section 1. The English column is an AI translation revised for student readers; this part focuses on empathy, Hume, Singer, and the case for a second-person account.
- Care as a Concept-Mediated Relationship / 关怀：以概念为中介的关系
Part II of this bilingual series, adapted from *Life-Care Education Based on Improved Mental Models*, Chapter 8, Section 2. The English column is an AI translation revised for student readers; this part discusses Noddings, relational feedback, and the structure of care.
- Freedom and the Evolution of Care / 自由与关怀的演化
Part III of this bilingual series, adapted from *Life-Care Education Based on Improved Mental Models*, Chapter 8, Section 3. The English column is an AI translation revised for student readers; this part addresses how care evolves with changing relationships and practical freedom.
- Adaptive Virtue and the Aim of Care Education / 关怀教育的宗旨
Part IV of this bilingual series, adapted from *Life-Care Education Based on Improved Mental Models*, Chapter 8, Section 4. The English column is an AI translation revised for student readers; this part compares Gilligan and Kohlberg and frames care education as adaptive virtue.
- Positive Psychology and Caring Practice / 积极心理学与关怀实践
Part VI of this bilingual series, adapted from *Life-Care Education Based on Improved Mental Models*, Chapter 8, Section 6. The English column is an AI translation revised for student readers; this part links care education to action, resilience, self-interpretation, and positive psychology.
- Care and the Four Quotients / 关怀教育与四商
Part VII of this bilingual series, adapted from *Life-Care Education Based on Improved Mental Models*, Chapter 8, Section 7. The English column is an AI translation revised for student readers; this part explores the relation between care and the four quotients together with the tensions internal to care.
- Limits of AI Moral Enhancement
A representative conference presentation on the ethical limits of AI-based moral enhancement and the philosophical assumptions that shape enhancement debates.
- An Ethical Analysis of Moral Enhancement: A Free-Will Perspective
Moral bioenhancement (MB) is the use of biomedical technology to improve people's moral cognitive ability and enable them to achieve certain moral purposes. On the basis of the bioconservative thesis, one major criticism of MB is that it would undermine people's "freedom to fall," but this objection may itself lead critics into difficulty. In response, we replace "freedom to fall" with "alternative possibility," while noting that supporters of MB can still avoid falsification by adopting a compatibilist position. Starting from a new moral-conservative perspective informed by Dennett's theory of the evolution of consciousness representation, this paper argues that supporters of MB will ultimately fall into the paradox of "MB uselessness" and the "abolition of the moral meaning of direct human conscious control."
- Building an Interdisciplinary Knowledge Cultivation System: The Case of PPE Education
The specialty PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) was originally established with the aim of constructing a modern philosophical discipline that could, to some extent, cast off the constraints of liberal arts education, and it later developed into a comprehensive discipline spanning philosophy and the social sciences. It allows students to choose different research directions, but requires them to maintain a broad academic horizon. The essence of PPE lies in erudition as the basis, general education as the form, philosophy as the guide, and "heterogeneous innovation." Its purpose is not only to cultivate in students a pursuit of excellence akin to the "freedom of the ancients," but also to develop their integrated capacity for self-selected interests and multidisciplinary cooperation. PPE education may therefore offer valuable experience for the reform of liberal education in China, for the deepening of moral education in colleges and universities, and for the cultivation of comprehensive professional talent.
- Limits of AI Moral Enhancement
Artificial intelligence moral enhancement is a sub-topic subordinate to the "human moral enhancement" trend. It is hoped that human moral cognition can be improved through the "artificial moral advisor (AMA)", which is capable of "objective" moral representation and strong information acquisition. However, since AMA cannot meet the "ideal observer (IO)" standard after all, it will inevitably fall into the embarrassment of expertism. In addition, researchers who resort to the construction of "moral machines" also presuppose an IO perspective by constructing learning algorithmic frameworks for automatic ethical classification and decision making. Through the experimental study of Guarini's Moral Case Classifier (MCC), we have found that the hypothetical function without pre-classification could not be fitted, which means that the generalist AMA that fits the IO cannot be built. In view of this, we propose another different "AI moral enhancement" scheme - an "AMA as The Other", and hope that the artificial general intelligence (AGI) will become the basis for its realization.
- Meaning of Life and One Health
Edited volume on life, meaning, and the One Health framework.
- On Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty"
The main purpose of Isaiah Berlin's concept of the "two kinds of liberty" is not to distinguish negative liberty from positive liberty in order to criticize the latter and advocate the former. Rather, it is to reveal the incommensurability among a plurality of values and, on that basis, to show clearly that monism is the chief source of the misunderstanding of different forms of liberty and value.
- Research on Self-Deception: Intentionalism vs. Non-intentionalism
There are two ways to define self-deception, which are intentionalists' approach and non-intentionalists' approach. As an intentioanalist, Davidson emphasizes self-deception is intentional, and describes it as an interpersonal-deception. Intentioanalists claim that human mind can be divided into different self-nets, and we should use irrational mental causation to explain self-deception. Non-intentionalists argue against the model of interpersonal deception, and also argue against that self-deception is intentional. Mele treats self-deception as a phenomenon of human cognition, and regards it as a kind of non-autonomy. After Mele, the debates of self-deception have reached a new level. But the new opinions seem to have issues of themselves. And if we introduce some theories of self-knowledge, it may be helpful for both the intentionalists and Non-intentionalists to handle their problem.
- The Metaphysical Foundations of Rawls's Moral Constructivism
Rawls's moral constructivism is a basic theoretical method that emphasizes both objectivity and subjectivity. It argues that ethical norms are constructed by subjects within a rational procedure and under necessary initial conditions, so that norms are realized as the outcome of the procedure rather than deduced in advance. This implies that moral constructivism lowers the status of ethical theories that rely on the epistemic completeness of realism. It further holds that moral norms should be understood as the constructed result of the categorical imperative procedure, and that this procedure is possible because the human subject possesses a distinctive metaphysical characteristic: reflectivity. In this context, reflectivity integrates the mind's self-referentiality, purposiveness, absolute spontaneity, and living spirituality, thereby becoming at once theoretical and practical, conceptualist and German idealist. The core of constructivism, and of reflectivity itself, is manifested in Kant's account of the fact of reason, through which an almost scientific mode of representation seeks to unify ideality and living spirituality.
- The Second-Person Standpoint and Moral Machine
Given the need for Human-Machine moral Interaction, an AI system that focuses on moral theory involving intersubjectivity is worthy of attention. We will build a network knowledge representation framework based on the second-person standpoint moral theory to analyze the design philosophy of a general artificial intelligence (AGI) moral machine. We then use this framework to investigate an interactive moral machine designed by Bello and Bringsjord (2013). In constructing a feature of mindreading, their study faces philosophical challenges to combine the empirical source configuration of its inheritance function and the multi-world setting of the Polyscheme itself. We try to prove that the integrated structure of the Polyscheme based on a third-person perspective, multi-world setting cannot afford a continuous self that can accommodate enough diversity of the stimulation relationship between the concept of self and other. Moreover, we suggest that the psychological distance structure of mindreading should mainly come from the internal "self" of the system. This requires the system to have an intrinsic kernel, meaning a design philosophy completely different from the integrated style of Polyscheme.
- The Significance of a Second-Person Perspective for the Development of Humanoid AI
Anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism are a pair of basic directions in cognitive science and AI research. These directions correspond respectively to "first person" and "third person". The confrontation between these two concepts not only has guiding significance for the exploration of cognitive science but also has ethical importance. Human-like AI (for instance, Artificial General Intelligence, AGI for short) research hovers between them. I propose a second-person, or limited consensus perspective as a philosophical and ethical research context that is integrated with the first and third person to constitute a "trinity" relationship - what I call the "trinity of the contexts of intelligent artificiality", which could be represented by the relationship between emulation, simulation, and imitation. The consequences of the general loss of the first-person context will be explored, including the uncertainty of the ethical landscape of humankind - such as the fragmentation of the self - and the risk of going against the original intention of AGI research. This cannot be fixed by returning to a first-person perspective. The second-person context is an idea that is situated between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, and it may be employed to avoid these risks.