I'm not a metaethicist, but I am a moral realist (I think there are facts about what really is morally right and wrong) and also -- bracketing some moments of skeptical weirdness -- a naturalist (I hold that scientific defensibility is essential to justification).  Some people think that moral realism and naturalism conflict, since moral truths seem to lie beyond the reach of science.  They hold that science can discover what is, but not what ought to be, that it can discover what people regard as ethical or unethical, but not what really is ethical or unethical. Addressing ..read more

My teenage daughter's car earns a lot of attention on the street: People honk and wave, strangers ask to add their own art, five-year-olds drop their toys and gawk.  A few people look annoyed and turn away.  (Kate describes her car as a "personality tester".) A couple of years ago, I had promised my 2009 Honda Accord to Kate when she earned her driver's license.  But knowing that Kate cares about appearances -- stylish clothes and all that -- I promised that I'd have it repainted first, since the paint jobs on these old Hondas age badly in the southern California sun ..read more

Since 2003, I've regularly taught a large lower-division class called "Evil", focusing primarily on the moral psychology of evil (recent syllabus here).  We conclude by discussing the theological "problem of evil" -- the question of whether and how evil and suffering are possible given an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God.  Over the years I've been increasingly intrigued by a secular version of this question. I see the secular "problem of evil" as this: Although no individual or collective has anything close to the knowledge or power of God as envisioned in mainstream theologica ..read more

It is, I suspect, an accident of vertebrate biology that conscious subjects typically come in neat, determinate bundles -- one per vertebrate body, with no overlap.  Things might be very different with less neurophysiologically unified octopuses, garden snails, split-brain patients, craniopagus twins, hypothetical conscious computer systems, and maybe some people with "multiple personality" or dissociative identity. Consider whether the following two principles are true: Transitivity of Unity: If experience A and experience B are each part of the conscious experience of a single subjec ..read more

According to "longtermism" (as I'll use the term), our thinking should be significantly influenced by our expectations for the billion-plus-year future.  In a paper in draft, I argue, to the contrary, that our thinking should be not at all influenced by our expectations for the billion-year-plus future.  Every action has so vastly many possible positive and negative future consequences that it's impossible to be justified in expecting that any action currently available to us will have a non-negligible positive impact that far into the future.  Last week, I presented my argument ..read more

The field of Artificial Life (ALife) aims to create artificial life forms with increasing levels of sophistication from the bottom up. A few years ago, ALife researcher Olaf Witkowski and I began talking about whether and under what conditions people might begin to have obligations to such artificial life forms. The issues, of course, overlap with the recently hot topic of robot rights. Our first collaboration won the best paper award at the ALife 2022 conference. Our follow-up paper (a substantially revised and expanded version of the conference paper) appears today, open ..read more

Formal decision theory is a tool -- a tool that breaks, a tool we can do without, a tool we optionally deploy and can sometimes choose to violate without irrationality.  If it leads to paradox or bad results, we can say "so much the worse for formal decision theory", moving on without it, as of course humans have done for almost all of their history. I am inspired to these thoughts after reading Nick Beckstead and Turuji Thomas's recent paper in Nous, "A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities and Enormous Values". Beckstead and Thomas lay out the following scenario: On your deathbed, God brings ..read more

In about 45 minutes (12:30 pm Pacific Daylight Time, hybrid format), I'll be commenting on Mark Coeckelbergh's presentation here at UCR on AI and Democracy (info and registration here).  I'm not sure what he'll say, but I've read his recent book Why AI Undermines Democracy and What to Do about It, so I expect his remarks will be broadly in that vein.  I don't disagree with much that he says in that book, so I might take the opportunity to push him and the audience to peer a bit farther into the radical future. As a society, we are approximately as ready for the future of Artificial I ..read more

In virtue of what do human beings have conscious experiences?  How is it that there's "something it's like" to be us, while there's (presumably) nothing it's like to be a rock or a virus?  Our brains must have something to do with it -- but why?  Is it because brains are complex information processors?  Or because brains guide the sophisticated behavior of bodies embedded in rich environments?  Or because neurons in particular have a special power to give rise to consciousness? In a paper in progress with Jeremy Pober (partly anticipated in some previous blog posts ..read more

Daniel Dennett has died, and the world has lost possibly its most important living philosopher. [Image: Dennett in 2012] My most vivid memory of Dennett is from a long face-to-face meeting I had with him in 2007 at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC).  Dennett was at that time among the world's most eminent philosophers, and I was a recently-tenured UC Riverside professor of no particular note.  It was apparently typical of Dennett's generosity toward junior scholars to set aside plenty of time for me.  At this meeting and in subsequent interactio ..read more