Tag: utilitarianism

Art Or Artifice: Agency And AI Alignment

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

The leader of the Luddites, the (possibly apocryphal) weaver Ned Ludd who is said to have broken two knitting frames in a ‘fit of rage’. Image Credit: Public Domain.

When the Luddites smashed automatic looms in protest, what they saw threatened was their livelihoods: work that had required the attention of a seasoned artisan could now be performed by much lower-skilled workers, making them more easily replaceable and thus without leverage to push back against deteriorating working conditions. Today, many employees find themselves worrying about the prospect of being replaced by AI ‘agents’ capable of both producing and ingesting large volumes of textual data in negligible time.

But the threat of AI is not ‘merely’ that of cheap labor. As depicted in cautionary tales such as The Terminator or Matrix, many perceive the true risk of AI to be that of rising up against its creators to dominate or enslave them. While there might be a bit of transference going on here, certainly there is ample reason for caution in contemplating the creation of an intelligence equal to or greater than our own—especially if it at the same time might lack many of our weaknesses, such as requiring a physical body or being tied to a single location.

Besides these two, there is another, less often remarked upon, threat to what singer-songwriter Nick Cave has called ‘the soul of the world’: art as a means to take human strife and from it craft meaning, focusing instead on the finished end product as commodity. Art is born in the artist’s struggle with the world, and this struggle gives it meaning; the ‘promise’ of generative AI is to leapfrog all of the troublesome uncertainty and strife, leaving us only with the husk of the finished product.

I believe these two issues are deeply connected: to put it bluntly, we will not solve the problem of AI alignment without giving it a soul. The ‘soul’ I am referring to here is not an ethereal substance or animating power, but simply the ability to take creative action in the world, to originate something genuinely creatively novel—true agency, which is something all current AI lacks. Meaningful choice is a precondition to both originating novel works of art and to becoming an authentic moral subject. AI alignment can’t be solved by a fixed code of moral axioms, simply because action is not determined by rational deduction, but is compelled by the affect of actually experiencing a given situation. Let’s try to unpack this. Read more »



Monday, March 18, 2024

The Vegetarian Fallacy

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Atelier ecosystemes des communs, Alima El Bajnouni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Vegetarian Fallacy was so dubbed by philosophy grad students in a well-oiled pub debate back in the 1980s. There is a fundamental conflict—so the argument went—between vegetarians and ecologists. The first principle of ecology—everything is connected to everything else (Barry Commoner’s first law)—is incompatible with the hands-off, “live and let live” ideal implicit in ethical vegetarianism. The ecologists took the match by arguing that, pragmatically, animals either have a symbiotic role in human life or else they compete with us for habitat, and those competitions go badly for the animals. In the long run, a moral stricture against eating animals will not benefit animals.

Now, pub debates are notoriously broad, and this one obviously was. A swirl of issues made appearances, tangential ones like pragmatism versus ethics, and central ones like holism versus atomism. In the end—philosophers being relatively convivial drinkers—all came to agree that pragmatism and ethics must be symbiotic as well, and that the practice of vegetarianism (beyond its ethical stance) could be more holistically approached and defended. Details, though, are fuzzy.

A fancy capitalized title like “Vegetarian Fallacy” may seem a bit grandiose, given the humble origins I just recounted. What justifies a grand title is when the bad thinking in a losing argument is also at work far beyond that one dispute. And that is my main thesis. So, although I will elaborate the two sides, it will be only a little bit. I am more interested in the mischief the Vegetarian Fallacy is perpetrating not in the academy but in wider political and cultural realms. Read more »

Monday, August 17, 2015

In Defense of Eating Meat

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

CowThere are many sound arguments for drastically cutting back on our consumption of meat—excessive meat consumption wastes resources, contributes to climate change, and has negative consequences for health. But there is no sound argument based on the rights of animals for avoiding meat entirely.

Last month, Grist's food writer Nathanael Johnson published an article in which he claims philosophers have failed to even take up, let alone defeat, the influential arguments against eating meat in Peter Singer's 1975 book, Animal Liberation.

My enquiries didn't turn up any sophisticated defense of meat. Certainly there are a few people here and there making arguments around the edges, but nothing that looked to me like a serious challenge to Singer.

I continue to be unimpressed with journalists' ability to do basic research. Even a simple Google search would turn up several arguments against Singer's view, including the well-known argument for speciesism by Carl Cohen. (No, a Google search isn't research but it's a good place to begin) Furthermore, Singer's arguments are based on utilitarian premises which have been subject to a host of substantive objections raised in the philosophical literature. I don't have current figures at hand but I doubt that even a majority of moral philosophers today are utilitarian. Thus, most moral philosophers would reject the foundations of Singer's argument; and indeed his argument is profoundly mistaken.

I don't want to get too deep in the philosophical weeds here, but essentially Singer argues that any being that suffers has full moral status. Since non-human animals suffer, their interest in not suffering should receive equal consideration to the interests of humans. To fail to give animals equal consideration is to be guilty of speciesism, which according to Singer is as indefensible as racism or sexism. There are many refinements that can be made to this argument but that is the basic idea.

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