ABSTRACT The authors both accept the non‐consequentialist principle that prohibits an agent from killing one to save five. The authors argue about whether that principle similarly prohibits an agent from letting herself kill one in order to save five: Byrne insists it does; Sridharan insists it doesn't. The authors do not resolve much, but they consider a variety of cases along the way. In the end, the authors suspect that their disagreement stems from a deeper disagreement about whether the relevant moral facts are grounded in metaphysical facts or just further moral facts.
ABSTRACT This paper defends a view of what responsibility is, where responsibility is neither just the agential facts that make a person responsible, or is not the aptness of certain responses to those facts. Responsibility is the relevant agential facts, and the significance of those facts for the person. The fact that a person is responsible makes certain responses apt, and it grounds a range of other things, such as the person's duties and entitlements. But these are moral implications of being responsible; they are not constitutive of responsibility and they do not ground it. I have reason to care about whether my acts are mine as such, and not simply because of the implications of their being mine. Thus, responsibility matters in itself, independently of the responses that it is apt to make to it. This view can explain why ʻʻresponsibility’ is a thick normative term; why we appropriately use ʻʻresponsibility’ to refer to both positive and negative cases; why responsibility is unified, with a range of moral implications; and why we are responsible for trivial conduct that is not personally significant.
ABSTRACT The increasingly widespread use of generative artificial intelligence has begun to reshape the landscape of interpersonal communication. It is no longer unusual, for example, for co‐workers to reply to each other's emails, or even romantic partners and family members to respond to each other with AI‐generated messages. Yet the suspicion that one has received AI‐generated, rather than human‐authored content is often accompanied by strong negative reactions ranging from disgust to disappointment. Focusing on the case of AI‐generated apologies, my paper systematically examines the moral reasons we typically appeal to for resenting someone who uses AI to convey an apology. Interestingly, these moral reasons do not decisively prohibit the use of generative AI in interpersonal communication. Rather, the emergent social practice of apologizing through AI poses a distinctive risk to interpersonal relations themselves. Chiefly, this practice threatens to degrade our ability to engage in careful “translation” of each other's linguistic performances, or conversely, enact “performance” in a way that can be taken up by the other (Brandom 1979, 190). This is because AI‐generated messages aim to “optimize” communication and minimize conflict and friction that, while not always pleasant, is vital to our understanding of, and responsiveness in relation to each other as authentic subjects. Consequently, closer attention must be paid to these relational risks of generative AI.
ABSTRACT We argue the idea of “urban succession” provides an instructive lens through which to understand how cities change over time. We show how this model illuminates phenomena important to urban policymaking and reform, and we highlight several upshots that challenge conventional thinking about healthy cities’ constitutions. First, valuable urban conditions may be difficult or impossible to realize without allowing them to “grow” from prior conditions. Second, even when achieved, these conditions may be inherently unstable, predictably giving way to other conditions. Third, unwelcome urban phenomena can arise without being deliberately pursued and thus effective remedies must go beyond neutralizing or reforming the bad actors at the heart of theories from critical urban studies. Finally, when valuable urban conditions represent intermediate stages in succession‐like processes, this may illuminate new strategies for sustaining these conditions—as well as the folly of certain popular approaches to urban development, reform, and theorizing. We focus special attention on issues of gentrification and neighborhood decline, showing how our model helps contextualize these as predictable stages in long‐term processes of urban flux.
ABSTRACT We often accuse others, and sometimes ourselves, of engaging in, as psychologists are apt to term it, “motivated reasoning.” This is the charge that the collection, use, and interpretation of information have been warped by one'sdesires, andis often regarded as amounting to a charge of epistemic irrationality. In a 2015 paper in this journal, we appealed to this familiar charge of motivated reasoning to analyze the phenomenon of irrelevant influences on belief. There, we argued that motivated reasoning is indeed epistemically pernicious. Since then, a number of important objections have been made in different literatures. It has been argued that insofar as one's interests include defending one's prior beliefs, remaining internally coherent, defending one's social identity against threats from oppressive forces, or pursuing one's (otherwise reasonable) practical goals, such interests may permissibly influence reasoning, with no irrationality or “bad” reasoning implicated. In this paper, we address these recent objections and argue that, though the above points may illuminate important limitations of our original thesis, motivated reasoning is indeed a form of epistemic irrationality.
