Stephane Chauvier

This chapter distinguishes two concepts of an individual: the logical-cognitive concept of a discrete particular and the ontological concept of what has ontological autonomy (_ens per se_), formal unity, and qualitative singularity. It then shows that ontological individuality matters, first because not every particular object of thought, even of scientific thought, is a real individual: what is individuated by us, by our way of conceptually dividing the world, is not necessarily individuated in itself. But individuality also matters because not every real being is a real individual or is an individual to the same degree. The ontological concept of an individual can therefore be used as a basis for a complete division of real beings, by distinguishing individuals and nonindividuals (aggregates), but also by distinguishing various degrees of individuality as of aggregativity.

Sometimes we do good or bad to those we live with. But it also happens that we do certain things which turn out to do good or harm to other people, more or less distant from us in space and time, whose faces and lives are unknown to us. Do these goods and evils, which are collateral or external effects of our actions, support a moral treatment comparable to that which we reserve for the goods and evils that we deliberately do to others? Can the traditional ethics of face-to-face interactions be applied without injustice to collateral or external interactions? Doesn't the mixture of innocence and responsibility which is characteristic of both external nuisances and benefits plead for the development of an ethics of externalities, an ethics made for life in the Great Society, an ethics which does not more systematically pay the polluters, but also, and perhaps first of all, the polluted?

The ethics of autonomous vehicles has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident situations in which human harm is a likely consequence. Starting from the assumption that human harm is unavoidable, many authors have developed differing accounts of what morality requires in these situations. In this article, a strategy for AV decision-making is proposed, the Ethical Valence Theory, which paints AV decision-making as a type of claim mitigation: different road users hold different moral claims on the vehicle’s behavior, and the vehicle must mitigate these claims as it makes decisions about its environment. Using the context of autonomous vehicles, the harm produced by an action and the uncertainties connected to it are quantified and accounted for through deliberation, resulting in an ethical implementation coherent with reality. The goal of this approach is not to define how moral theory requires vehicles to behave, but rather to provide a computational approach that is flexible enough to accommodate a number of ‘moral positions’ concerning what morality demands and what road users may expect, offering an evaluation tool for the social acceptability of an autonomous vehicle’s ethical decision making.

Why is there a specific problem with biological individuality? Because the living realm contains a wide range of exotic particular concrete entities that do not easily match our ordinary concept of an individual. Slime moulds, dandelions, siphonophores are among the Odd Entities that excite the ontological zeal of the philosophers of biology. Most of these philosophers, however, seem to believe that these Odd Cases oblige us to refine or revise our common concept of an individual. They think, explicitly or tacitly, that to be a living, evolutionary entity is to be a living individual. In this paper, we explore an alternative proposal: the variety and oddity of the forms of the living realm might be ontologically regimented through an increase in the categorial complexity of the living realm, by admitting, beside living individuals, living non-individuals or by acknowledging, more generally, that the evolutionary development of the living forms is not necessarily a process of building individuals, that life is not necessarily individuals-oriented. We claim that, from an ontological point of view, the spectacle of the living realm obliges us to take aggregativity seriously.