How come, despite a series of troubling new reports and studies, the world has yet to respond adequately to the threat posed by global warming? In this article, published at the website Project Syndica

AI & Society (2020) Abstract An 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 val

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.

in: BioethicsAbstractRecently, Perry Hendricks argued that abortion is immoral even if the fetus is not a person. He did so by arguing that causing a future child to suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome

Adina Preda: Can there be positive human rights?

Research seminar with Adina Preda, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Abstract This paper aims to establish that there can be human rights to socio-economic goods or services

Research seminar with Adina Preda, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.AbstractThis paper aims to establish that there can be human rights to socio-economic goods or services, ; the worry is that positive rights cannot have correlative duties assignable to everyone in the world. I then clarify the notion of correlativity and raise doubts about this claim. The paper concludes that there is no conceptual reason why positive rights cannot be general although they would probably look different from the socio-economic rights currently enshrined in international legal documents; the paper does not, however, argue that there are such moral rights. 

Philosophical Studies Abstract In her ground-breaking and highly influential book Transformative Experience, L.A. Paul makes two claims: (1) one cannot evaluate and compare certain experiential outcomes  evaluate and compare certain intuitively horrible outcomes (e.g. being eaten alive by sharks) as bad and worse than certain other outcomes even if one cannot grasp what these intuitively horrible outcomes are like. We argue that the conjunction of these two claims leads to an implausible discontinuity in the evaluability of outcomes. One implication of positing such a discontinuity is that evaluative comparisons of outcomes will not be proportionally sensitive to variation in the underlying features of these outcomes. This puts pressure on Paul to abandon either (1) or (2). But (1) is central to her view and (2) is very hard to deny. We call this the Shark Problem.

Plos Climate Abstract Climate science has been deeply affected by social and political values in the last fifty years [1]. If we focus on climate denial and obfuscation, we might see the influence of va

Synthese, Volume 193, Issue 6,  pp. 1967–1981DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0823-0 Abstract This paper explores the different ways in which conditionals can be carriers of good and bad news. I suggest a general

Risk Analysis, https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13445 Abstract According to the class of de minimis decision principles, risks can be ignored (or at least treated very differently from other risks) if the ri