Using Trevor Hedberg’s consequentialist argument for population control, I consider some historical and modern arguments against such control, and suggest responses that address those concerns. In particular, I will argue that economic concerns and anti-colonialist anxieties are misguided. Despite this and even with the best adaptive policies, the world’s environment and climate cannot survive the number of human beings currently on the planet, much less more. While acknowledging legitimate restrictions on coercion and acknowledging the problems of effectiveness, I will suggest that there is value in recognizing a problem even where we have limited solutions. Contrary to Hedberg, I will also argue that modern industrialized societies have special obligations to restrict their procreation rates.
Started out interesting in Bioethics and the Ethics of War. Now I'm interested in Environmental Ethics. (I'm interested in AI only if to the degree that I can't tolerate spruikers)
An increasing number of prominent ethicists (McMahahn, Nussbaum) and effective altruists are advocating for 'wild animal suffering interventionism’ (WASI): that humanity has a strong duty to intervene into natural ecosystems to ameliorate wild animal suffering not caused by humans. Fulfilling this project requires intergenerational governance of all animal populations on earth and the development of powerful bio and surveillance technologies. These same technologies are also being developed for the purposes of ecological conservation. I argue that WASI and ecological conservation are fundamentally at odds as WASI must aim to eventually destroy ecosystems and wild animal populations. The nascent field of 'interspecies population ethics', posits that all moral subjects must be included in counterfactual populations, irrespective of species membership. I explore the population ethics accounts of McMahan, Parfit and O'Brien. This shows that WASI does not aim for a garden of Eden full of vast happy animal populations structured like natural ecological systems, as is claimed by WASI authors and their critics, but a world of (post)humans. This marks the encroachment of WASI into ecological conservation discourse as inherently anti-ecological. Emerging conflicts between WASI and conservationists are identified in New Zealand and Australia.
This paper outlines and assesses current arguments for and against the ethical hedonist claim that pleasure is the only good, and that pain is the only bad. It outlines and appraises some recent moves in ‘heterogeneity’ arguments against hedonism, and some moves in recent arguments for hedonism that appeal to an experience requirement or a resonance requirement. It also analyses contest between attitudinal and phenomenal accounts of pleasure and pain, and some differences among such accounts that matter in experience/resonance arguments for hedonism, and in heterogeneity arguments against hedonism.
In virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, someone’s exercise of “intellectual” virtues such as open-mindedness, curiosity, and intellectual humility is understood as key to responsible and knowledge-conducive belief formation. “Moral” virtues such as generosity, courage, and kindness are largely treated as distinct and separate from their intellectual counterparts.
However, recognition of our ubiquitous dependence on others for not only information but also norms for finding and interpreting such undermines individualist approaches and implies a more complex relationship between so-called intellectual and moral virtue. This paper argues that given our beliefs are often formed by knowledge from others and are mediated through social practices of knowing, our regard and treatment of others is necessarily implicated in belief-formation and the pursuit of knowledge.
Drawing primarily on work on social epistemic dependence and Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice (2003), I propose that social epistemic dependence suggests efficacious epistemic practices rely to some extent on ethical regard for and treatment of others. This claim motivates a reconsideration of the traditional distinction between moral and intellectual virtues and provokes a need for a virtue ethic of belief which unifies moral and intellectual concerns and practices.
Proponents of the “inquisitive theory of mind” argue that intentions are among the attitudes which are question sensitive. Understood this way, to form an intention is to settle on an answer to a ‘practical questions,’ a question about what to do. But what is an answer to a practical question, and what is it to “settle” on one answer over others? In this paper I argue that, contra the extant question-sensitive theory of intention (Beddor & Goldstein 2023), settling on an answer to a practical question involves being in a mental state with imperative content. Hence, the question-sensitivity of intention recommends against the standard view on which intentions are attitudes toward propositional contents. On the view I defend, Imperativism, to intend to φ is to occupy a mental state with content akin to the imperative “φ!” in natural language. Imperativism is closely related to the most widely discussed non-propositionalist theory, the “do-ables view,” on which the content of an intention is an infinitival clause (e.g., “to φ”). While both the do-ables view and Imperativism capture the intuitive sense in which the objects of our intentions are acts, I show that only Imperativism can be plausibly squared with question-sensitivity.
