Thinking Machines

This chapter investigates ethical questions surrounding the possible future emergence of self-aware artificial intelligence (AI). Current research into ethical AI and how this might be applied or extended to future AI is discussed. It is argued that the development of self-aware machines, or their functional equivalents, is possible in principle, and so questions of their ethical status are important. The importance of an objective, reality-based ethics in maintaining human-friendly AI is identified. It is proposed that the conditional nature of life and the value of reason provide the basis of an objective ethics, whose implications include rights to life and liberty, and which apply equally to humans and self-aware machines. Crucial to the development of human-friendly AI will be research on encoding correct rules of reasoning into AI and, using that, validating objective ethics and determining to what extent they will apply to and be followed voluntarily by self-aware machines.

Wobec tajemnicy i skandalu zła – teodycea Karola Ludwika Konińskiego

The article presents religious and philosophical views of journalist and writer Karol Ludwik Koniński (1891–1943), which he included in his intimate journal, written mostly during the war and the occupation period. He intertwines his observations of daily dramatic events with reflections on the metaphysical and ethical status of evil present in the world. Koniński was inspired in his theodicy, trying to reconcile the image of merciful God with the severity of evil present in the world, the views of Gnostics and Origen. He took the view that God was not fully omnipotent, and emphasized that on a cosmic scale the process of overcoming multiform evil by God, who is Love, is constantly taking place. Koniński’s theodicy therefore constitutes religious evolutionism. He combined Gnostic sensitivity to the presence and severity of evil with the belief in the ultimate, full apocatastasis. Koniński’s reflection does not accept some of the dogmas of Roman Catholicism, it also includes a critique of the views of St. Augustine and scholastic theology. The author of the article puts forward a thesis that Koniński, due to his in-depth analysis of the subject of evil and his sensitivity to the dramatic dimension of human and non-human existence, can be attributed to a particular current of the philosophy of the heart, in Pascal’s understanding of this concept.

The Importance of Vow

This chapter addresses the role of vows in Buddhist ethics. Vows generate new moral perspectives, as well as new agent-relative moral considerations. Among the vows addressed are the lay vows, monastic vows, bodhisattva vows, and tantric vows. The chapter discusses the diverse Buddhist interpretations of the metaphysical status of vows, and the ways that they transform one’s moral landscape, changing the ethical status of actions. Also addressed here are the binding power of vows, including the roles of both initial intention and admitted exceptions, and the effects of transgressions, including atonement and confession, and the phenomenon of returning vows.

Reading Postcolonial Animals with the Animist Code: A Critique of “New” Materialist Animal Studies

This article looks at the challenges that animist materialism offers to reading strategies in new materialist animal studies scholarship. Where Rosi Braidotti’s vitalist materialism calls for a neoliteral, anti-metaphorical mode of relating to animals, Harry Garuba identifies metaphor as a primary feature of animist materialist practice in African material culture. After critiquing Rosi Braidotti’s dismissal of the “old” metaphorical ways of relating to animals, the article offers a reading of animals and the animist code in two southern African novels, Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird (1979) and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000), to consider the potential of animist codings of animals for resisting colonial necropolitics. Animist materialism offers the potential to raise animals and humans into ethical status by affirming the very knowledges and worldviews that Cartesian, colonial humanism wrote off as nonsense and as a marker of inhumanity.

Identifying and prioritizing the factors affecting the Iranian Sports Refereeing Ethics Code

El propósito de esta investigación fue compilar un código de ética del arbitraje deportivo en Irán. El método de la presente investigación fue mixto (cualitativo y cuantitativo). Se entrevistó a un total de 15 expertos en el campo de la ética del arbitraje deportivo mediante el método de muestreo de bola de nieve. Los resultados obtenidos en la entrevista dieron lugar a un cuestionario válido y fiable que se distribuyó aleatoriamente entre los árbitros y árbitros asistentes de las principales ligas iraníes de deportes de equipo (fútbol, voleibol, balonmano y baloncesto) y deportes individuales (taekwondo, kárate, lucha libre y natación), con una muestra total de 224 personas. El análisis y la codificación se realizaron utilizando los softwares Max Kyoda, SPSS y Smart PLS. Los hallazgos de la investigación mostraron que en este campo se extrajeron 8 temas y 61 subtemas, que incluyen los componentes de comportamiento, corrupción, comunicación, aspecto sociocultural, familia, respeto, legalidad y justicia, en este orden de importancia. En general, prestar atención a los aspectos de comportamiento y corrupción juega un papel importante en la mejora del estatus ético de los árbitros deportivos en Irán. The purpose of this research was to compile a sports refereeing ethics code in Iran. The method of the present research was mixed (qualitative and quantitative). A total of 15 experts in the field of refereeing ethics in sports were interviewed by the method of snowball sampling. The results obtained from the interview led to a valid and reliable questionnaire that was randomly distributed among the referees and assistant referees of the Iranian premier leagues of team sports (football, volleyball, handball and basketball) and individual sports (taekwondo, karate, wrestling and swimming), with a total sample of 224 people. Analysis and coding were performed using the softwares Max Kyoda, SPSS and Smart PLS. Research findings showed that 8 themes and 61 sub-themes were extracted in this field, which include the components of behavior, corruption, communication, sociocultural aspect, family, respect, legality and justice, in this order of importance. In general, paying attention to the behavioral and corruption aspects plays an important role in improving the ethical status of sports referees in Iran.

Social evolution as moral truth tracking in natural law

Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarizing disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary view of natural law to defend the realist tracking account. It argues that we can identify objective moral truths through cultural group selection and that adaptive moral rules are likely to reflect such truths.

Social Evolution as Moral Truth Tracking in Natural Law

Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarising disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary view of natural law to defend the realist tracking account. It argues that we can identify objective moral truths via cultural group selection and that adaptive moral rules are likely to reflect such truths.

Ethical issues on artificial intelligence in radiology: how is it reported in research articles? The current state and future directions

Background. This paper evaluates the status of reporting information related to the usage and ethical issues of artificial intelligence (AI) procedures in clinical trial (CT) papers focussed on radiology issues as well as other (non-trial) original radiology articles (OA). Material and Methods. The evaluation was performed by three independent observers who were, respectively physicist, physician and computer scientist. The analysis was performed for two groups of publications, i.e., for CT and OA. Each group included 30 papers published from 2018 to 2020, published before guidelines proposed by Liu et al. (Nat Med. 2020; 26:1364-1374). The set of items used to catalogue and to verify the ethical status of the AI reporting was developed using the above-mentioned guidelines. Results. Most of the reviewed studies, clearly stated their use of AI methods and more importantly, almost all tried to address relevant clinical questions. Although in most of the studies, patient inclusion and exclusion criteria were presented, the widespread lack of rigorous descriptions of the study design apart from a detailed explanation of the AI approach itself is noticeable. Few of the chosen studies provided information about anonymization of data and the process of secure data sharing. Only a few studies explore the patterns of incorrect predictions by the proposed AI tools and their possible reasons. Conclusion. Results of review support idea of implementation of uniform guidelines for designing and reporting studies with use of AI tools. Such guidelines help to design robust, transparent and reproducible tools for use in real life.

Islam and Institutional Religious Freedom in Indonesia

By emphasizing that individual religious freedom depends for its realization on complex social embeddings, the concept of institutional religious freedom provides an important corrective to conventional, individualistic approaches to religious freedom. The concept also helpfully complicates the investigation of religious freedom by encouraging analysts to recognize that different societal and civilizational traditions define religion itself in significantly different ways. Tensions such as these between different social definitions of religion and between different manifestations of institutional religious freedom have been a chronic feature of religious life in Indonesia since the establishment of the republic in 1945. This paper examines these legacies in the context of contemporary Indonesia, especially in light of ongoing disputes over the legal and ethical status of spiritual traditions (kepercayaan) long barred from full state recognition. The essay also explores the theoretical and policy implications of the Indonesian example for the analysis of institutional religious freedom in the late modern world as a whole.

God’s Will as the Foundation of Morality: A Medieval Historical Perspective

Theological voluntarism places the foundation of morality in the will of God. The formulation of such a thesis warrants further refinement. Different formulations of theological voluntarism were put forward in medieval philosophical theology involving the relation of God’s will to the divine intellect (reason) in determining ethical status. The fourteenth century Franciscan Andrew of Neufchateau maintained a purely voluntaristic theory in which it is God’s will alone (and not the divine intellect) that determines ethical status. Subsequently Pierre d’Ailly worked with a divine will which is identical with the divine intellect in a strong sense while still maintaining that it is properly assigned to the divine will to be an obligatory law. Later, Jean Gerson, a student of Pierre d’Ailly, spoke explicitly of God’s will and reason together as involved in God’s activity in the ethical realm. In this paper, we set out these three different formulations of theological voluntarism, tracing the evolution of medieval formulations of theological voluntarism. Although the paper is historical in nature, we conclude with some reflections on how contemporary philosophers and theologians interested in theological voluntarism might profit from study of this historical literature.