Laura Valentini, Associate Professor of Political Science at London School of Economics ABSTRACTMany contemporary philosophers—of a broadly deontological disposition—believe that there exist some pre-i. In this paper, I defend this unpopular view. I argue that all rights are grounded in —namely, norms constituted by the collective acceptance of gives “oughts”—, provided the norms’ content meets some independent standards of moral acceptability. This view, I suggest, does justice to the relational nature of rights, by explaining how it is that right-holders acquire the authority to demand certain actions (or omissions) from duty-bearers. Furthermore, the view does not divest human beings of fundamental moral protections. Even if, absent some rights-grounding positive norms, obligations cannot be to others, we still have  (non-directed) placing constraints on how we may permissibly treat one Another.

White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford ABSTRACTMany people believe that collectives of certain kinds, such as corporations and states, are entities ca

Albert Weale, Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy at University College London.  AbstractMany democratically made choices involve commitments across time. International obligations,

Jules Holroyd, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham. ABSTRACTMany of us will have implicit racial biases: dispositions to certain affective or cognitive responses

Venue: Institutet för framtidsstudier, Holländargatan 13, 4th floor, Stockholm, or online.Research seminar with Martin O'Neill, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of York.Register here AbstraMy talk addresses the questions of the size of the public sector in a just society, and the range of goods and services which should be decommodified, and provided to citizens outside of market relationships, in such a society. I examine some of the different answers given to these questions by (a) liberal egalitarians (particularly Rawls) and (b) social democrats and democratic socialists (particularly Esping-Andersen). Then, making use of the work of theorists including Waheed Hussain and Ralph Miliband, I examine the plausibility of a 'left Rawlsian' position, which would marry socialist insights about the functions of public provision with a liberal egalitarian account of the principles of justice, in order to defend an institutional model of a just society which would embody a form of liberal democratic socialism."

 in: Journal of Numerical Cognition, Volume 6 (1).  AbstractAn important paradigm in modeling the complexity of mathematical tasks relies on computational complexity theory, in which complexity is measur

in: AI & SOCIETY  AbstractAn intelligent machine surpassing human intelligence across a wide set of skills has been proposed as a possible existential catastrophe (i.e., an event comparable in valueproductivedesires, or desires that can direct behavior across multiple contexts. However, productive desires cannotsui generisbe derived from non-productive desires. Thus, even though general agency in AI could in principle be created by human agents, general agency cannot be spontaneously produced by a non-general AI agent through an endogenous process (i.e. self-improvement). In conclusion, we argue that a common AI scenario, where general agency suddenly emerges in a non-general agent AI, such as DeepMind’s superintelligent board game AI AlphaZero, is not plausible.

Dr Malcolm Fairbrother, University of Bristol ABSTRACTMost people say they are concerned about the serious environmental problems confronting the world today and threatening the well-being of future ge

Dr Malcolm Fairbrother, University of Bristol ABSTRACTWhy have the governments of so many nations decided to globalize their economies in the last 30 years? The literature on this question is polarized

Bykvist, K., & Campbell, T. (2020). Persson's Merely Possible Persons. Utilitas,32(4), 479-487. doi:10.1017/S0953820820000199 AbstractAll else being equal, creating a miserable person makes the worl