philopapers

Imadaldin Al-Jubouri on the medieval Islamic philosopher who pioneered the scientific understanding of history. Some consider the Italian philosopher Vico (1668-1744) to have been the founder of philosophy of history; others give the credit to the French philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755). In fact, the Arabic philosopher and historian ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was the first pioneer to […]

Thomas M. Powers on how a computer might process Kant’s moral imperative. Philosophers have worried about how to compare humans and machines ever since Alan Turing proposed his famous ‘intelligence test’ in his 1950 Mind article ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. If the successful imitation of a human conversation is one sufficient condition for intelligence, as

James H. Moor defines different ways in which machines could be moral. Could we ever teach robots right from wrong? Can we afford not to try? I wish to defend the idea that robot ethics is a legitimate, interesting, and important field of philosophical and scientific research. I believe it’s possible that someday robots will

Jesse Tomalty considers what human rights are and how they’re justified. A few months ago there was a spate of headlines announcing that the UN had made internet access a human right. It turns out that this claim was rather misleading. What the UN did was pass a resolution emphasizing the importance of internet access

Mary Midgley argues that Security is not about the size of your military. The Shock of Khaki During a series of colonial wars in the nineteenth century, the British army gradually changed the colour of its soldiers’ uniforms from the traditional scarlet to khaki. Its reasons for doing this are perhaps fairly obvious, but the

Eric Dietrich looks forward to the extinction of humanity. Recently on the History Channel, artificial intelligence (AI) was singled out, with much wringing of hands, as one of the seven possible causes of the end of human life. I will argue that this wringing of hands is quite inappropriate: the best thing that could happen

Russell Powell says it’s not easy using genes to enhance humanity, even in theory. On display in the National Portrait Gallery of London is a ‘DNA portrait’ of geneticist Sir John Sulston. The work is billed by the artist as “the most realistic portrait in the gallery” because it “carries the actual instructions that led

Michael Selgelid offers a cautionary perspective on genetic enhancement. Revolutionary developments in biomedical science, particularly in genetics, may lead to new cures or preventative therapies for a wide variety of human diseases. Just about everyone agrees that this would be a good thing. However, the very same kinds of developments that may be used to combat

Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue that artificial moral enhancement is now essential if humanity is to avoid catastrophe. For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we lived in small, close-knit groups, working hard with primitive tools to scratch sufficient food and shelter from the land. Sometimes we competed with other small

Maria daVenza Tillmanns argues that we need to be holistic in our approach to solving complex problems. In this article I would like to highlight a distinction between two essentially different orientations of thinking. One looks from the inside out, the other from the outside in. To focus from the inside out is to start