Mitigation—preventative actions to reduce the human forcing of climate change with the goal of keeping climate change within a range to which humans can adapt—must be prompt, rigorous, and focused on eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide, beginning with rapid cessation of the use of coal. Carbon dioxide is by far the most threatening greenhouse gas because it remains in the atmosphere for millennia longer than any other major greenhouse gas, and the heat retained on the planet by atmospheric carbon dioxide (...) will continue to emerge from its transitional storage in the deep oceans for millennia after the atmospheric carbon finally dissipates. Sustainable development can be increased and ocean acidification can be stopped only if the dominant fossil fuel regime is promptly replaced by an affordable and accessible alternative energy regime. Poorer countries cannot be reasonably expected to cooperate with vigorous mitigation unless they are assisted with necessary adaptation. (shrink)

An eminent philosopher explains why we owe it to future generations to take immediate action on global warming Climate change is the supreme challenge of our time. Yet despite growing international recognition of the unfolding catastrophe, global carbon emissions continue to rise, hitting an all-time high in 2019. Unless humanity rapidly transitions to renewable energy, it may be too late to stop irreversible ecological damage. In The Pivotal Generation, renowned political philosopher Henry Shue makes an impassioned case for taking (...) immediate, radical action to combat global warming. Shue grounds his argument in a rigorous philosophical analysis of climate change’s moral implications. Unlike previous generations, which didn’t fully understand the danger of burning carbon, we have the knowledge to comprehend and control rising carbon dioxide levels. And unlike future generations, we still have time to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. This generation has the power, and thus the responsibility, to save the planet. Shirking that responsibility only leaves the next generation with an even heavier burden—one they may find impossible to bear. Written in direct, accessible language, The Pivotal Generation approaches the latest scientific research with a singular moral clarity. It’s an urgently needed call to action for anyone concerned about the planet’s future. (shrink)

This paper examines the subversive role of statistics paleontology at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In particular, I will focus on German paleontology and its relationship with statistics. I argue that in paleontology, the quantitative method was questioned and strongly limited by the first decade of the 20th century because, as its opponents noted, when the fossil record is treated statistically, it was found to generate results openly in conflict with the Darwinian theory (...) of evolution. Essentially, statistics questions the gradual mode of evolution and the role of natural selection. The main objections to statistics were addressed during the meetings at the Kaiserlich-Königliche Geologische Reichsanstalt in Vienna in the 1880s. After having introduced the statistical treatment of the fossil record, I will use the works of Charles Léo Lesquereux, Joachim Barrande, and Henry Shaler Williams to compare the objections raised in Vienna with how the statistical treatment of the data worked in practice. Furthermore, I will discuss the criticisms of Melchior Neumayr, one of the leading German opponents of statistical paleontology, to show why, and to what extent, statistics were questioned in Vienna. The final part of this paper considers what paleontologists can derive from a statistical notion of data: the necessity of opening a discussion about the completeness and nature of the paleontological data. The Vienna discussion about which method paleontologists should follow offers an interesting case study in order to understand the epistemic tensions within paleontology surrounding Darwin’s theory as well as the variety of non-Darwinian alternatives that emerged from the statistical treatment of the fossil record at the end of the 19th century. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

I. Three Basic rights. This book is about the moral minimum--about the lower limits on tolerable human conduct, individual and institutional.

This paper proposes a formal top-level model of explaining the outputs of machine-learning-based decision-making applications and evaluates it experimentally with three data sets. The model draws on AI & law research on argumentation with cases, which models how lawyers draw analogies to past cases and discuss their relevant similarities and differences in terms of relevant factors and dimensions in the problem domain. A case-based approach is natural since the input data of machine-learning applications can be seen as cases. While the (...) approach is motivated by legal decision making, it also applies to other kinds of decision making, such as commercial decisions about loan applications or employee hiring, as long as the outcome is binary and the input conforms to this paper’s factor- or dimension format. The model is top-level in that it can be extended with more refined accounts of similarities and differences between cases. It is shown to overcome several limitations of similar argumentation-based explanation models, which only have binary features and do not represent the tendency of features towards particular outcomes. The results of the experimental evaluation studies indicate that the model may be feasible in practice, but that further development and experimentation is needed to confirm its usefulness as an explanation model. Main challenges here are selecting from a large number of possible explanations, reducing the number of features in the explanations and adding more meaningful information to them. It also remains to be investigated how suitable our approach is for explaining non-linear models. (shrink)

Some of our most fundamental moral rules are violated by the practices of torture and war. If one examines the concrete forms these practices take, can the exceptions to the rules necessary to either torture or war be justified? Fighting Hurt brings together key essays by Henry Shue on the issue of torture, and relatedly, the moral challenges surrounding the initiation and conduct of war, and features a new introduction outlining the argument of the essays, putting them into context, (...) and describing how and in what ways his position has modified over time. The first six chapters marshal arguments that have been refined over 35 years for the conclusion that torture can never be justified in any actual circumstances whatsoever. The practice of torture has nothing significant in common with the ticking bomb scenario often used in its defence, and weak U.S. statutes have loop-holes for psychological torture of the kind now favoured by CIA in the 'war against terrorism'. The other sixteen chapters maintain that for as long as wars are in fact fought, it is morally urgent to limit specific destructive practices that cannot be prohibited. Two possible exceptions to the UN Charter's prohibition on all but defensive wars, humanitarian military intervention and preventive war to eliminate WMD, are evaluated; and one possible exception to the principle of discrimination, Michael Walzer's 'supreme emergency', is sharply criticized. Two other fundamental issues about the rules for the conduct of war receive extensive controversial treatment. The first is the rules to limit the bombing of dual-use infrastructure, with a focus on alternative interpretations of the principle of proportionality that limits 'collateral damage'. The second is the moral status of the laws of war as embodied in International Humanitarian Law. It is argued that the current philosophical critique of IHL by Jeff McMahan focused on individual moral liability to attack is an intellectual dead-end and that the morally best rules are international laws that are the same for all fighters.Examining real cases, including U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991, the Clinton Administration decision not to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, and CIA torture after 9/11 and its alternatives, this book is highly accessible to general readers who are interested in the ethical status of American political life, especially foreign policy. (shrink)

A new research programme conceives of consciousness as a natural kind. One proposed virtue of this approach is that it can help resolve the methodological puzzle of consciousness, which involves distinguishing consciousness from cognitive access. The present article raises a novel problem for this approach. The problem is rooted in the fact that there may be episodes of conscious experience that have not been classified as such. I argue that conceiving of consciousness as a natural kind cannot distinguish consciousness from (...) cognitive access. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 32-42, September–October 2022.

Bringing together evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, Henry Plotkin presents a new science of knowledge, one that traces an unbreakable link between instinct and our ability to know.

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory, and classics. An active promoter of higher education for women, he founded Cambridge's Newnham College in 1871. He attended Rugby School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained his whole career. In 1859 he took up a lectureship in classics, and held this post for ten years. In 1869, he moved to a lectureship in moral (...) philosophy, the subject where he left arguably his greatest mark when he produced this work, regarded as his masterpiece. Published in 1874, the book argues the utilitarian approach to ethics, and a systematic and historically sensitive approach to ethical research that influenced utilitarian philosophers well into the twentieth century. It remains a valuable introduction to the philosophy, practice and history of ethics. This reissue includes the 1877 supplement. (shrink)

In light of recent breakneck pace in machine learning, questions about whether near-future artificial systems might be conscious and possess moral status are increasingly pressing. This paper argues that as matters stand these debates lack any clear criteria for resolution via the science of consciousness. Instead, insofar as they are settled at all, it is likely to be via shifts in public attitudes brought about by the increasingly close relationships between humans and AI users. Section 1 of the paper I (...) briefly lays out the current state of the science of consciousness and its limitations insofar as these pertain to machine consciousness, and claims that there are no obvious consensus frameworks to inform public opinion on AI consciousness. Section 2 examines the rise of conversational chatbots or Social AI, and argues that in many cases, these elicit strong and sincere attributions of consciousness, mentality, and moral status from users, a trend likely to become more widespread. Section 3 presents an inconsistent triad for theories that attempt to link consciousness, behaviour, and moral status, noting that the trends in Social AI systems will likely make the inconsistency of these three premises more pressing. Finally, Section 4 presents some limited suggestions for how consciousness and AI research communities should respond to the gap between expert opinion and folk judgment. (shrink)

Climate change is the most difficult threat facing humanity this century and negotiations to reach international agreement have so far foundered on deep issues of justice. Providing provocative and imaginative answers to key questions of justice, informed by political insight and scientific understanding, this book offers a new way forward.

There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstances an artificial intelligence would deserve moral consideration. This paper explores a particular type of moral status that the author terms psychological moral patiency, focusing on the epistemological question of what sort of evidence might lead us to reasonably conclude that a given artificial system qualified as having this status. The paper surveys five possible criteria that might be applied: intuitive judgments, assessments of intelligence, the (...) presence of desires and autonomous behavior, evidence of sentience, and behavioral equivalence. The author suggests that despite its limitations, the latter approach offers the best way forward, and defends a variant of that, termed the cognitive equivalence strategy. In short, this holds that an artificial system should be considered a psychological moral patient to the extent that it possesses cognitive mechanisms shared with other beings such as nonhuman animals whom we also consider to be psychological moral patients. -/- . (shrink)

This piece, which was revised greatly subsequent to the publication of the Methods of Ethics, appears in this collection in its original form. In it, Sidgwick distinguishes between Universal Hedonism and Egoistic Hedonism, the former espoused by Bentham, who nonetheless approves of individual self‐interest, which he regards as inevitable. Mill attempts to forge a connection between the psychological and ethical principles that he and Bentham share, maintaining that, since each person seeks her own happiness, she ought to seek the happiness (...) of others. Sidgwick endeavours to dissociate universal hedonism from the egoistic notions that appear in both Bentham and Mill's positions. (shrink)

Morain and Largent’s (2023) thorough and thoughtful article concludes that the partial-entrustment model of medical researchers’ ancillary-care obligations (Richardson and Belsky 2004; Belsky and R...

Here, Sidgwick discusses Bradley's main ethical principle that self‐realisation is the ultimate aim of practice, noting the oddity of Bradley's acknowledgment in another paper in Ethical Studies that he does not know what he means by ‘self’, ‘real’ or ‘realise’. In an essay comparing determinism and indeterminism, Bradley specifies the notion of ‘self’ by stating that each person has a definite character, which under certain circumstances expresses itself in actions of a particular kind. In his paper on why we ought (...) to be moral, however, Bradley starts afresh, arguing that the self we try to realise is a whole, that is to say, the ultimate end. Then again, in a third paper, he speaks of the person as a social being, stating that ‘we have found self‐realization, duty, happiness in one, when we have found our function as an organ in the social organism.’ Given these various attempts, Sidgwick holds that Bradley's main ethical argument lacks the coherence and completeness it would require to be tenable. (shrink)

In this essay, Sidgwick analyses Fowler's attempt to develop a scientific conception of morality that addresses practical applications rather than theoretical difficulties. After distinguishing the moral sanction from the legal sanction and the social sanction, Fowler turns to the central issue of how we are to justify the application of the moral sanction as the supreme and final sanction in cases of conflict. In his response to this question, Sidgwick suggests that Fowler oscillates between Hume's view, that moral sentiment or (...) strong feeling puts the final stamp of approbation or disapprobation on actions or character, and the incompatible view, that moral judgments or opinions determine the rightness of action. (shrink)

Sidgwick offers a largely unflattering review of Fitzjames Stephen's critique of Mill's On Liberty. Sidgwick observes that, when discussing the legitimate influence of society over the individual, Stephen directs his argument against Mill and Comtism in turn, without seeming to notice that these thinkers hold opposing views on the issue. As a consequence, this generates inconsistencies in his position. Yet, despite the significant amount of wilful paradox and misplaced ingenuity in his work, Stephen does highlight the right arguments to challenge (...) Mill's position in On Liberty. Here, Mill seems to forget the essential limits of the utilitarian method by seeking to establish absolute practical maxims. (shrink)

According to Sidgwick, Green does not present a clear and consistent conception of an ethical system in Prolegomena to Ethics. In its most comprehensive form, Green's doctrine of morality is stated to be a ‘Theory of the Good as Human Perfection’. This pursuit of the ultimate end of rational conduct is taken to be realization of certain human faculties or capacities, that is to say, the self‐realization of the divine principle in man. Amongst other things, Sidgwick questions not only how (...) this relation of man to God is to be philosophically known, but also how the human spirit is to aim at any kind of perfection except the increase of knowledge. (shrink)

As in the preceding chapter, Sidgwick attempts to highlight some difficulties in the views of his Cambridge teacher John Grote. Although Grote has a keen insight, says Sidgwick, into the human element of a philosophy, he is a poor analyst of systems and methods at the abstract level. The value in Grote's work lies in his detailed presentation of two important critiques of Mill. First, he argues convincingly that Mill's qualitative distinction between pleasures either is reducible to a quantitative distinction (...) or causes pure utilitarianism to be abandoned. Second, he points to the peculiarity in Mill's proof of utilitarianism, which takes a Positivist line in arguing that since people pursue happiness, they ought to pursue the happiness of others. (shrink)

In this chapter, Sidgwick discusses the connection between value and psychology. Sidgwick points out that while ancient philosophers were concerned with the proper ultimate object of rational thought, modern thinkers have been interested in the basis and validity of a received code of restrictive, not directive, rules. Whereas modern philosophers concentrate on the general good, ancient Greek philosophers focused on an egoistic good, that is, the good for any individual seeking the true way of life. And yet, the old question (...) ‘What is the Ultimate Good?’ has arisen again. To this question of how to reconcile a desire for one's own Good with the dictates of duty by reason, Sidgwick argues that only Utilitarianism offers a rational account of the ideal subordination of individual psychological impulses to universal ends. (shrink)

This paper is Sidgwick's second critique of aspects of James Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory. Sidgwick begins by highlighting Martineau's unwarranted assumption that if his idiopsychological account is presented to a variety of individuals, they will each provide the same story as his on what the moral sentiment says about its own experience. In short, if presented with similar impulses or incentives to action, people's moral judgments will be similar. Concluding that Martineau's account is erroneous, Sidgwick adopts a view that (...) recognizes irreducible differences in people's moral judgments. (shrink)

Empirical philosophy, for Sidgwick, comprises those basic philosophical propositions espoused by Locke, Berkley, Hume, and Mill. He understands the theory to be, not a theory of being, but a theory of knowledge that sets out the criteria by which to distinguish true or real knowledge from merely apparent knowledge. According to Empiricism, all trustworthy cognitions are either immediate cognitions of particular facts or cognitions capable of being rationally inferred from these. On this understanding of empirical philosophy, Sidgwick maintains that he (...) is not an empiricist, as he finds it impossible to work out a coherent theory of the criteria of knowledge on an empirical basis. He concludes that it is possible to combine a complete trust in the method and results of empirical science with a complete distrust in the procedure and conclusions of empirical philosophy. (shrink)

Sidgwick reviews what he regards as a thorough, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt by Leslie Stephen to establish an ethical doctrine that aligns with the theory of evolution. Stephen engages in discussions that fall under three categories. The first is subjective psychology; Stephen analyses from the individual's perspective the kind of consciousness that precedes and determines volition. The second is sociology; his aim here is to develop a positive morality understood as a property of the social organism. The third kind of (...) discussion falls under ethical theory; Stephen's purpose is to determine systematically the ideal code of morality. Although Stephen's work is to be praised for its abundance of pertinent observations and reflections, Sidgwick finds it lacking in ‘clearness of method and systematic arrangement.’. (shrink)

In his reply to Barratt's criticisms of his Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick states that Barratt misapprehends his position by overlooking the fact that he reviews various methods of ethics from a neutral and impartial standpoint. Following Butler, Sidgwick holds that reasonable self‐love and conscience are the two primary principles in human life. He differs from Butler on which precepts of conscience are reasonable, and maintains that the central formula of conscience holds that one ought not to prefer one's own good (...) to the greater good of another. To Barratt's challenge that this confutes the principle of Rational Egoism, Sidgwick replies that the principle is contradicted, not confuted. (shrink)

Sidgwick argues that Calderwood's criticisms of his view on Intuitionism presented in Methods of Ethics derive from a misunderstanding of Sidgwick's project. Sidgwick did not set out to criticize, from the outside, a particular school of thought, but rather to trace the phases and to estimate the scientific value of a specific method of reaching practical decisions. One phase in this process is intuitionism. According to Sidgwick, the only ultimately valid moral intuitions are those that provide the philosophical basis for (...) utilitarianism. (shrink)

In his writings on animal ethics, Spencer maintains that the ultimate end of human conduct as well as of animal conduct is the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of life; acts are good that are conducive to the preservation of offspring or the individual. In this article, Sidgwick considers Spencer's account of both ‘the law of sub‐human justice’ and ‘the law of human justice’. The former, which is recognized as being imperfect both in its general form and in its details, (...) involves the dictum that each individual shall receive the benefits and evils of its own nature and consequent conduct. The latter – the law of human justice – is seen by Spencer as an extension of sub‐human justice, and yet, the application of the law is modified by the condition of gregariousness in a way only faintly indicated in lower species. It is not obvious, says Sidgwick, that Spencer's principle is actually just since it is not the common sense view that justice requires a man to suffer for failures that do not result from wilful wrongdoing or neglect. Despite this, Sidgwick finds some truth in Spencer's account of the origin of the sentiment of justice, which begins with an egoistic sentiment of justice, and then introduces a fear of similar resentment and retaliation by others to create an altruistic sentiment of justice. (shrink)

This piece includes both Bradley's response to Sidgwick's critique of his Ethical Studies and Sidgwick's reply to that response. Bradley states that he has no pretension to solve the problem of the individual in general, and the origin of the Self in particular. Moreover, he says that he repudiates the doctrine that one's self‐realization is achieved when someone else brings about something one desires. To these and other defences, Sidgwick offers various replies: Bradley scarcely attempts to address the charge that (...) his exposition of the self lacks clarity and coherence; and Bradley misunderstands the position that the social organism of which the individual is said to be an essential part is a relative whole, not an absolute whole. (shrink)

Taking ‘what ought to be’ to include both what is commonly judged to be ‘good’ and what is commonly judged to be ‘right’, that is to say, ‘the duty’ of a person, Sidgwick observes that there is a rationally based recognition of the variation in people's duties. Given the failure of people on many occasions to do their duty, we must acknowledge that ‘what ought to be’ to a large degree ‘is not’, and that the former is independent of whether (...) it comes into being. Sidgwick asks if this distinction is ultimate and irreducible. He argues that, although no answer can be provided by considering moral judgements from a psychological or sociological viewpoint, adopting a philosophical or epistemological perspective may allow for the reduction between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’, as this perspective takes both duty and facts to be objects of thought, or knowledge, that exhibit similar relations in thought, relations like that between the universal and the particular, and between inductive method and deductive method. (shrink)