The Challenge of Determining Whether an A.I. Is Sentient

By Carissa Véliz
Slate.com
Originally posted April 14, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Sentience is important because it warrants moral consideration. Whether we owe any moral consideration to things is controversial; things cannot be hurt, they have no interests, no preferences. Paraphrasing philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is nothing it is like for a thing to be a thing, an inanimate object. In contrast, there is something it is like to be a sentient being. There is a quality to experience; there is a comforting warmth in pleasure and a disagreeable sharpness in pain. There is something it is like to be thirsty, afraid, or joyful. Because sentient beings can feel, they can be hurt, they have an interest in experiencing wellbeing, and therefore we owe them moral consideration. Other things being equal, we ought not to harm them.

It is not easy to determine when an organism is sentient, however. A brief recount of past and present controversies and mistakes makes it clear that human beings are not great at recognizing sentience.

The article is here.

Why Be Good? Well, Why Not?

By Jay L. Garfield
Big Ideas at Slate.com

Here is an excerpt:

The central problem of ethics is to provide reasons to override rational self-interest—acting for the sake of others, perhaps, or for the sake of duty, or in accordance with divine commandment, or for the sake of some other transcendent value. Sometimes the argument for doing so involves showing that it is really in our own self-interest to do so (everlasting life in heaven, for instance). Sometimes it involves arguing that there are more important things than our own rational interest (duty, for instance). In any case, the burden of proof is taken to rest squarely on the moralist to convince the immoralist to do what is, at least at first glance, irrational.

But why take acting in one’s own narrow self-interest to be rational in the first place? It is not self-evident that it is. And why take our own interests to be either independent of those of others or in competition with them? That is not self-evident, either. If we can offer a more compelling account of rational choice than that offered by the economists and decision theorists, we might find that care for others is the default rational basis for action, not a value in competition with it.

The entire article is here.

The Point of Studying Ethics According to Kant

Lucas Thorpe
The Journal of Value Inquiry (2006) 40:461–474
DOI 10.1007/s10790-006-9002-3

Many readers of Kant’s ethical writings take him to be primarily concerned with offering guidelines for action. At the least, they write about Kant as if this were the purpose of his ethical writings. For example, Christine Korsgaard, in her influential article Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: The Argument of Groundwork I, writes that, ‘‘the argument of Groundwork I is an attempt to give what I call a ‘motivational analysis’ of the concept of a right action, in order to discover what that concept applies to, that is, which actions are right.’’  Similar comments are not hard to find in the secondary literature. This, however, is a fundamentally misguided way of reading Kant, since he repeatedly asserts that we do not need to do moral philosophy in order to discover which actions are right.  We already know how to behave morally and do not need philosophers to tell us this. ‘‘Common human reason,’’ Kant argues, ‘‘knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and what is evil, what is in conformity to duty or contrary to duty.’’  Because people with pre-philosophical understanding know how to act morally, the purpose of moral philosophy cannot be to provide us with a set of rules for correct behavior. If we take Kant’s claims about common human reason seriously, then his aim in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals cannot be to discover which actions are right.

The article is here.