On the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

by Denis Larrivee

Complex technologies are shaping the manner by which we frame relations with an external world, as Heidegger forewarned, not only with its mechanical materiality, but socially in the manner of our interactions with others, and inwardly in how we ourselves are changed. New technologies pose questions about the nature of technology, human nature, and the relation between the two, and so how we view technology and what we wish it do to and for ourselves. These concerns are awakening broader interest in the technical communities that are their source. The ‘Ethically Aligned Design project documents concern thinking by members of the IEEE community on the impact of artificial intelligence on human wellbeing (see multiple topics within). Significantly its motivations bring to the fore the centrality of the human being in a classical anthropocentric perspective that has old thinking in the role of handmaiden for a revival from the new Manicheism.’

Ethically Aligned Design

A Vision for Prioritizing Human Wellbeing 

with Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)

Or even, Ethics: not just an afterthought with principles so self-evident that there’s no need to think too hard about them because basically anyone can work it out even if they’ve never even studied philosophy before…

by Simon Smith

Last time, we concluded with the rather bad-tempered assertion that neuroethicists, and by extension all other practitioners of applied ethics, should not be allowed to get away with imagining that their training in their original discipline is sufficient to qualify them to make substantive moral judgements about it. Indeed, it is one thing for normal people to pass moral judgement on a whole range of issues about which their knowledge is lacking in detail. It is, however, another thing altogether for supposedly serious scholars to do so.

I would not be able to get away with pontificating on the metaphysical implications of Soft Matter Physics without being able to demonstrate, at the drop of a scientific hat, that I knew a good deal about Soft Matter Physics. This, it seems to me, is a good thing, since it is only by being able to demonstrate such knowledge that anyone could be sure of the quality of my work. This is the essence of peer review and, as such, it is essential to progress in any and every field of study. A scholar who insists on holding forth on a subject in which he or she is not trained runs the risk of making grave errors, or worse, being regarded as a charlatan.

Fortunately, as mentioned before, we have Drs Beauregard and Larrivee to fight that fight and remind their neuro-colleagues that there’s more to philosophical thinking than meets their unphilosophical eye.

And so we come back to the central point. That is, whether neuroethics, or business ethics, or ethics and the computer, or personal ethics, or any other kind of ethics is really anything more than just ethics. Do these worlds of human activity really add anything or change anything when it comes to moral thinking? To put the point a little differently, have these modes of thought and action actually created any new moral problems for us to think about? Or are we, in fact, simply faced with the same old questions about how we relate to one another, how treat one another; how we govern our actions and our impact on others, how we think about those actions and their impact?

Coming back to the matter of technology, where the moral point is often at its sharpest, we can say that our reach and the range of opportunities for behaving badly has certainly been hugely extended. I can now threaten and abuse people all over the world without leaving my nice little study. But if we consider, for example, the recent reports of online abuse suffered by female politicians, it seems as though the question facing those who would indulge in such abuse is the same as ever: are you going to be a massive bell-end? Well, are you?

Oh, you are.

Of course, those who choose the way of the bell-end are very likely bell-ends anyway. They may have found another outlet for their bell-endery, but the bell-end was always there, always a part of them. And, as if explicit bell-end-itude isn’t enough – as it surely is – our modern bell-ends have left us feeling something like sympathy for the politicians who suffer it. I don’t mind feeling sorry for ordinary human beings who suffer unwarranted abuse, but I resent, deeply resent, being made to feel sorry for politicians who cop it.

In the end, it’s not at all clear whether or not the context, however complex and difficult it may be, really adds anything substantial to the development and working-through of ethical theories. The context may be of vital importance, but the ethical principles we apply will always be the same; they must be if they are to be genuine ethical principles. To change one’s morals depending on whether one is conducting business deals, spending time with one’s family and friends, or analysing MRI scans, is a sure sign that moral thinking as gone awry. It boils down to something like this: how I treat people depends on what I want from them, be that money, company, research material, or what have you. Whatever else this might be, it is not moral thinking.

Moral thinking depends, not upon the kind of activity we’re engaged in, or what we want to gain from those others who are engaged in it with us. It is about doing, obviously, but not the particular kind of doing. Rather, moral thinking depends, to some degree, on whether or not we are persons; which is to say, it depends on whether or not we’re the kind of creatures which can be charged with deliberate action and, therefore, at least some degree of responsibility. Are we, moreover, the kind of creatures to which dignity – as problematic as that notion may be – can fairly be imputed? Are we capable of flourishing or developing, in some sense; and are we capable of participating both constructively and destructively in that development? If we are any of these things, then moral demands and obligations will inevitably lie upon us.

Given its essentially social nature, the moral point here is not simply a matter of whether or not that with which I am interacting is a person or an object, someone, as Spaemann would say, to be recognised and engaged with or something to be utilised for some end. The dialectical or interconstitutive structure of ‘personhood’ means that how we interact with others and objects has significant consequences for what we are. Put another way, it’s not simply a matter of what my ‘other’ is, someone or something, that determines how I ought to treat them. This makes morality sound terribly self-centred, potentially sliding into some kind of Cartesian ego-isolationism. That is not at all what I’m driving at. It’s much to long and windy to go into here, but it ties up with a concept of the self that is essentially constituted by the other, that constructs itself in the image of the other, and so by the very nature of its existence is other-oriented or participatory.

Here, however, moving morality away from the question of identity (what someone or something is) was meant to convey a much more basic idea. It’s simply that, drawing a more or less clear-cut distinction between human and non-human animals is not a justification for cruelty or lack of care.

The underlying structure of this kind of moral thinking is obviously Kantian. The influence of Kantian ethics on personalism is hardly surprising, given the emphasis on duty and obligation, and the straight-up opposition to any kind of utilitarianism. That said, it is worth bearing in mind that many personalists regard the absolute reliance on reason, at the expense of and in radical opposition to emotions, to be profoundly unsatisfactory. Consider this, suppose I tell my wife that my fidelity to her is born, not of love and affection, but from an obligation to abide by the moral law within. Suppose I say that to do otherwise would fail the test of universalizability, committing me to willing a contradiction, and setting my face against reason itself. Not bloody likely.

However, this too, is not something I want to get into here; another time, perhaps. The point here is only to suggest that subdivision within the study of ethics do not, I think, bring anything new to the table. In doing the ethics of business or technology or what have you, we are ultimately just doing ethics. That’s not to say these subdivisions are not interesting or, in their own way, useful. Given the necessarily practical nature of ethics, it is always going to be a good idea to think through one’s principles in relation to concrete circumstances and real-life problems. And there are always so many of those.  In the end, however, ethics is always nothing more or less than ethics, no matter the circumstances.

At least, that’s what I always thought….

Inscriptions, Vol. 1, No. 1: 2nd Call for Papers

Consecrations: The Philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher and the Passing of the Human

Inscriptions, a journal of contemporary thinking on art, philosophy, and psycho-analysis, invites contributions to our inaugural issue on consecration, the philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher, and the notion of passing. We are looking for well-crafted and skilfully written scholarly essays and literary contributions that engage our mandate and the theme of this issue.

Passing: to pass for someone, to pass something by, to pass away; these are senses in which the term passing can be made meaningful in our lives, and in how we approach our lives in art. In psycho-analysis hold it possible to act in such a way that the subject leaves the domain of legal competency and enter into a state where we no longer can be held accountable for our acts, as well as protocols for the end of analysis, i.e., when the analysand passes into the analyst. In philosophy the term seems particularly apt as a description of the way we move from the world of humanism to that which lies beyond it. To Wolfgang Schirmacher the notion of Homo generator serves to address the uncertainties of our epoch of modern technology. It is a form that generates human reality in a climate of artificiality and ecocide. Homo generator is a media artist promising a Dasein without a need for Being, certainty or simple notions of progress. The lighting of truth (Heidegger) promised by Homo generator is supplemented by an art of forgetting: only in this manner can the media artist’s sanity remain in place.

Homo generator gives shape to just living under the aegis of an ethic that is forgotten or hidden: “Concealed from our consciousness, humans live ethically, a good life behind our backs. Only in feelings, in fascination, satisfaction, joy, but also in mourning do we get a hint of ethical worlds” (Schirmacher, “Cloning humans with media,” 2000). As with Heidegger’s claim that the light of consciousness needs to be shielded, Schirmacher’s ethical life-worlds are at their most present when they are hidden from view. This leads to a most unexpected thesis: that which we consecrate stands out as most worthy when it is hidden.

We seek academic papers and literary interventions that address questions such as:

• How can the term consecration make sense to art, literature, and philosophy?
• In what way can the work of Wolfgang Schirmacher, such as his figure of Homo generator, give reality to our epoch and our lived experiences?
• How can the term “passing” yield meaning in our approaches to art, psycho-analysis, and philosophy?

Submission instructions

• Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2018
• Deadline for full manuscripts: 15 April 2018

Academic essays should be 3,000 to 4,500 words. We also seek scholarship in the form of interviews, reviews, short interventions, disputations and rebuffals, and in these cases we are open to shorter texts. Inscriptions adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style (footnotes and bibliography). For other instructions, please see our website. We encourage potential authors to submit proposals for review prior to their writing/submitting entire full-length manuscripts. Include title, proposal (150 words), short biography, and institutional affiliation in your preliminary submission.

All academic submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.

Literary submissions (short and long poems, aphorisms, short fiction, fables and literary essays of up to 1800 words) will be reviewed by our fiction editor.

Submit proposals and literary fictions through our online platform at:

https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/ by 15 March 2018.

Torgeir Fjeld, PhD

Editor-in-Chief, Inscriptions

https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

Or how about, Ethics: Not Just One of 18 First-Clath County Clubth within the Domethtic Cricket Thtructure of England and Waleth

by Simon Smith

Once again, combining a deeply and dangerously repressed nature with heavy medication has done the trick. Those chthonic memories of sex in the classroom are, once again, back in their mouldy old oblong boxes, where they belong. 

The point I was trying to get at last time – and missed by a country mile – is whether or not the specialisations and fragmentations of academic philosophy, and especially ethics, really amount to very much. Do these divisions demarcate a boundary line between kinds of principles and ways of thinking, or are they just contextual markers? In either case, it seems fair to say that, if nothing else, these divisions serve to focus the attention on some of the most basic moral questions, such as “is it acceptable to treat people as though they were objects in some way?” (In case you’re wondering, the answer is “no”; and if you are wondering, what on earth are you doing here?)

Take, for example, the relatively new and relatively exciting world of neuroethics. Now, this is a field that our friends Drs Beauregard and Larrivee have been ploughing for some considerable time and, naturally, we bow to their expertise in all matters pertaining thereto. Even if we leave aside all the frankly nonsensical claims that MRI scanners can read minds, the modern neurosciences still do throw up a number of serious ethical issues. Not a few of them seem to come back, ultimately, to the compatibility of neurosciences’ flattened materialism with the moral demands supposedly being made upon it.

I say “supposedly” because I’m reasonably confident that even the most hard-bitten materialist – he who denies the reality of anything other than physical forces colliding and conditioning one another all over the place – could be delivered of a genuine moral response with sufficient provocation. One would imagine that almost any item in the news at the moment would do the trick; but that might prove too abstract. Publicly declaring him or her to be an unprincipled, plagiarising purveyor of voodoo and snake oil might do it. Or you could just call him or her a ****.

The question, however, remains: ‘is neuroethics a real specialism?’ The argument seems to be that it must be, because, in order to do it properly, one has to know an enormous amount complicated neuroscience. But is that really true, I wonder. It depends, I suppose, on exactly what we mean when we say it.

On the one hand, the question seems to be whether we need to know and understand all the neuroscience – which, I’m assured by Dr. B, is very complicated indeed – in order to understand the moral issues and do the moral thinking required. Insist that we do, that sound moral thinking here depends on detailed knowledge of the neurological context, and the neuroscientifically uninitiated are surely entitled to ask precisely what and where are the special moral problems which only neuroscientists can grapple with. On present showing they don’t seem too much in evidence. More seriously, perhaps, given the tendency of neuroscientists to turn up in law courts, what special moral training does the neuroscientist have and where did he or she come by it? Philosophy in general and ethics in particular is not, as a rule, a part of the average neuroscientists’ education. No one doubts that many a neuroethicist is pretty hot stuff, neuroscientifically speaking – no one, except, perhaps other neuroethicists. But what, then, makes them so sure that they know what they’re talking about, when it comes to morality?

On the other hand, the question might be whether we need to know all the complicated neuroscience in order to identify the moral issues and fully understand their implications. A “yes” here would sound a lot more plausible. Obviously, it’s difficult to see or even imagine what problems might be raised in this context if one has no clue as to what actually goes on within it. Certainly, Dr. B has intimated to me that this is a common view among the initiated.

And yet, it doesn’t really change anything. It is, I think, still quite reasonable to ask what special moral training the neuroethicist has had which enables him or her to spot neuroethical problems and then tackle them. If, as often seems to be the case, the answer is “none at all”, then even as we admire the neuroethicist’s gung-ho attitude in being prepared to take on questions he or she is singularly unequipped to take on, we cannot help wondering what makes them so sure that their neuroethical questions really are so special after all.

One might even suppose, if one were being especially cynical, that neuroethics as a distinct discipline and, above all, publishing opportunity, has arisen owing to the spectacular inability of its practitioners to articulate their moral questions with sufficient clarity.

Chilly misanthropy towards fellow scholars is unbecoming, however; and does no one any good. The point here is not to suggest that the learning needed to understand the neurological context can simply be dispensed with, any more than the context itself can. Nevertheless, it should be clearly understood – more clearly than it evidently is – that Ethics is a field of scholarly enquiry in its own right, one that requires concentrated and lengthy study if it is to be understood in any depth and applied to any real purpose or value.  The application of moral reasoning to another context of scholarly research takes considerably more than the homespun common sense of even the most down to earth neuroscientist, if, that is, neuroethicists are to avoid talking a load of old toot.