Anthony Beavers

The ethical philosophies of Kant and Levinas would seem, on the surface, to be incompatible. In this essay. I attempt to reconcile them by situating Levinas’s philosophy “beneath” Kant’s as its existential condition thereby addressing two shortcomings in each of their works, for Kant. the apparent difficulty of making ethics apply to real concrete cases, and, for Levinas, the apparent difficulty of establishing a normative ethics that can offer prescriptions for moral behavior. My general thesis is that the existential ethical terrainunearthed by Levinas turns Kantian when transposed into the rational order.

The goal of this paper is to locate the precise moment in which reason becomes endowed with an ought. In stating the goal in this way, something has already been said about Kant and his project of grounding the metaphysics of morals. But in speaking of a moment (or an instant or an event or an occasion) in which reason becomes endowed with an ought, that is, a moment in which pure reason becomes practical, we have already headed off in a direction beyond the metaphysics of morals. For by invoking the moment, we have invoked something concrete. This distinguishes the current project from the Kantian enterprise in that Kant sought the universal conditions of morality as they followed from a rationality already endowed with an ought. In so doing, he could identify that the ideas of morality and freedom were concomitantly related (along with reason itself), but he could not show that any of these ever materialized in concrete experience. Toward the end of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes, "we have finally traced the determinate concept of morality back to the idea of freedom, but we could not prove freedom to be something actual in ourselves and in human nature" (GMM 51). On the next page, he writes:... we are not as yet able to have any insight into why it is that we should divorce ourselves from such interest, i.e., that we should consider ourselves as free in action and yet hold ourselves as subject to certain laws so as to find solely in our own person a worth that can compensate us for the loss of everything that gives worth to our condition. We do not see how this is possible and hence how the moral law can obligate us. One must frankly admit that there is here a sort of circle from which, so it seems, there is no way to escape. (GMM 52. Emphasis is mine.) Even though Kant can align the concepts of freedom, reason and the moral law, it would seem that the obligating force of morality has slipped beneath his grip, and he is left to analyze the idea of moral obligation in its place.1 The present study seeks to return this idea of obligation to its origin..

In this paper, I examine a variety of agents that appear in Kantian ethics in order to determine which would be necessary to make a robot a genuine moral agent. However, building such an agent would require that we structure into a robot’s behavioral repertoire the possibility for immoral behavior, for only then can the moral law, according to Kant, manifest itself as an ought, a prerequisite for being able to hold an agent morally accountable for its actions. Since building a moral robot requires the possibility of immoral behavior, I go on to argue that we cannot morally want robots to be genuine moral agents, but only beings that simulate moral behavior. Finally, I raise but do not answer the question that if morality requires us to want robots that are not genuine moral agents, why should we want something different in the case of human beings.

This special issue of Minds and Machines contains a number of responses to Luciano Floridi’s groundbreaking Philosophy of Information (Oxford 2011). The essays contained here have been grouped by topic; essays 1–5 concern epistemological features of Floridi’s approach, and essays 6–8 address his metaphysics.In “On Floridi’s Method of Levels ofion”, Jan van Leeuwen addresses Floridi’s operational definition of a level of abstraction. Emphasizing the link between Floridi’s notion of abstraction and that used in computer science, van Leeuven notes that the method of levels of abstraction may require supplementation in the form of annotation. Annotations, which exist “outside” the formal limits of the levels of abstraction to which they are attached, specify what perspective should be taken towards those levels. Annotations so understood both facilitate the expression of semantic information and elucidate the relationship between levels of abstraction. van Leeuwen then uses a case.

In this paper, I examine a variety of agents that appear in Kantian ethics in order to determine which would be necessary to make a robot a genuine moral agent. However, building such an agent would require that we structure into a robot’s behavioral repertoire the possibility for immoral behavior, for only then can the moral law, according to Kant, manifest itself as an ought, a prerequisite for being able to hold an agent morally accountable for its actions. Since building a moral robot requires the possibility of immoral behavior, I go on to argue that we cannot morally want robots to be genuine moral agents, but only beings that simulate moral behavior. But then, if that is what we want for robots, why should we want something different for human beings? Robot ethics, it seems, presents something of a reductio of Kant’s ethics that points to hidden assumptions that hide in the very fabric of the Kantian moral enterprise, not the least of which is that Kant presumes humans to be fallen creatures. Religious doctrine, in other words, infects Kant’s attempt to derive morality from reason. This paper will demonstrate that this is so.

The Phenomenological Mind, by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, is part of a recent initiative to show that phenomenology, classically conceived as the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and not as mere introspection, contributes something important to cognitive science. (For other examples, see “References” below.) Phenomenology, of course, has been a part of cognitive science for a long time. It implicitly informs the works of Andy Clark (e.g. 1997) and John Haugeland (e.g. 1998), and Hubert Dreyfus explicitly uses it (e.g. 1992). But where the former use phenomenology in the background as broad context and Dreyfus uses it primarily (though not exclusively) as a critique of conventional AI, Gallagher and Zahavi wish to indicate a positive and constructive place for it within cognitive science. They do not recommend that we simply accept pronouncements of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau‐Ponty and apply them to questions of cognition, but that we use revised forms of phenomenology to illuminate dimensions of cognitive experience that are missing in current research. The book is presented as an “introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science” written from a phenomenological perspective. It seeks to justify the use of phenomenology in cognitive science by showing what kinds of questions it asks and answers, the variety of uses to which it has recently been put and the fruitfulness of some of its findings. The catalog of topics, for the most part, matches other introductions to the philosophy of mind, such as questions of method, consciousness, perception, intentionality, embodiment, action, agency and other minds. One issue presented here that is not generally dealt with in existing philosophy of mind and cognitive science texts is temporality, a mainstay of the continental tradition. After an introductory chapter that places phenomenology in the context of other approaches, the book lays out the main tenets of phenomenological method. Here, one encounters expected components of phenomenology: the epoché (described below), phenomenological reduction, eidetic variation, and so on. This traditional fare is soon followed by some potential surprises, namely, attempts to “naturalize” phenomenology, a few attempts to formalize it, and the emergence of ‘neurophenomenology’. Each of these is a bit surprising because Husserl was a vocal critic of naturalism, seeing transcendental phenomenology as an alternative to the empirical study of consciousness. He was also skeptical about the possibilities of mathematizing phenomenology. Gallagher and Zahavi acknowledge these points, but since they are not repeating history or undertaking exegesis, strict adherence to canonical phenomenology is not required. Naturalizing phenomenology means recognizing that “the phenomena it studies are part of nature and are therefore also open to empirical investigation” (p..

The Internet allows for the efficient dissemination of texts, thereby creating a rich hypertextual environment that is potentially conducive to stimulating the free exchange of ideas in a manner worthy of the modern scholar. However, the fact that any user whatsoever may disseminate texts in this manner presents two distinct problems. First, finding relevant resources on the Internet may take a fair amount of time and, second, once resources are found, determining their reliability is often difficult if the user is not already an expert in the field of the resource under consideration. These problems -- efficiency in searching and academic quality-control -- are surmountable with existing technology, and many laboratories around the world are working hard to shape this technology into a variety of academic information retrieval services.

In his 1961 monograph, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, the late phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, noted that “everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality” (1961/1969, p. 21). What follows thereafter is an extensive attempt to ground a quasi-Kantian existential ethics based on interpersonal, face to face, relations (Beavers 2001). That philosophy should invite such an attempt already signifies that we might be in trouble where ethics are concerned. After all, when one looks back over history, it appears that we have not made much progress in this area.

Most students of philosophy, at one time or another, have worked through Descartes' Meditations and witnessed this reduction of the world to the res cogitans and consequent attempt to recover the real, or extra-mental, world through proofs for God's existence and divine veracity. Whatever our final assessment of the validity and soundness of these proofs may be, there can be no doubt that the judgment of history is that they fail, leaving Descartes' conception of the self forever confined to the horizons of thought. Without the proofs for God's existence, Descartes becomes an idealist. Indeed, Kant labels him a "problematic idealist" for whom "there is only one empirical assertion that is indubitably certain, namely that 'I am'", suggesting that, as far as Kant is concerned, Descartes' attempt to prove the real existence of anything outside of his mind, including God, does not work. And Schopenhauer, just before claiming that "true philosophy must at all costs be idealistic," praises Descartes for finding the "only correct starting point... of all philosophy". Husserl is so taken by this starting point that he will title one of his introductions to pure phenomenology, Cartesian Meditations, thus inviting his reader to repeat Descartes' Meditations, this time, without the proofs for God's existence and divine veracity. Due to the tradition in which he has been passed down to us, Descartes may be called not only the "father of modern philosophy," but also "the grandfather of transcendental phenomenology." Oddly enough, evidence for this claim is seen in the fact that, at least within contemporary continental circles, Heidegger's reworking of the Husserlian project gets conceived as a simultaneous reworking of the Cartesian project.