Hunter Kallay

Recent academic discourse about artificial intelligence (AI) has largely been directed at how to best morally program AI or evaluating the ethics of its use in various contexts. While these efforts are undoubtedly important, this essay proposes a complementary objective: deploying AI to enhance our own ethical conduct. One way we might do this is by using AI to deepen our understanding of human moral psychology. In this paper, I demonstrate how advanced machine learning might help us gain clearer insights into “common sense” morality—shared moral convictions that underpin our reflective judgments and inform central aspects of moral philosophy. Pinpointing such convictions has proven challenging amid widespread moral disagreements. Current approaches to understanding these commitments, although exhibiting some key strengths, ultimately struggle to capture relevant features of reflective moral judgments espoused by John Rawls, leaving room for methodological improvement. Modern advances in AI offer a promising opportunity to make progress on this task. This essay envisions the gamified training of a “collective moral conscience model,” able to render judgments about moral situations that align with the deep-seated principles of the human collective. I argue that such an AI model might make progress in overcoming obstacles of disagreement to aid in philosophical theorizing and foster practical applications for the moral life of AI agents and ourselves, such as offering us guidance in time-constrained dilemmas and helping us to reflect on our own biases.

There is an underexplored puzzle in the philosophy of religion that presents a _prima facie_ reason to believe God does not exist: the problem of blameless moral ignorance. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect, then he would desire and ensure that all non-blameable rational agents have sufficient moral knowledge to act rightly. Yet cases of sincere moral ignorance persist. Drawing on a recent formulation of this problem by Elbert (Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8:32, 2022), this paper proceeds in three stages. First, I critique Elbert’s argument by identifying unsupported theological and epistemic assumptions. Second, I develop a more defensible version of the argument that better aligns with its underlying commitments. Third, I evaluate the revised argument and argue that, even in its improved form, the challenge fails to demonstrate that God does not exist. In the end, I draw out an implication of this discussion for understanding moral knowledge within a theistic framework: not as a static set of propositions to be disclosed, but as a process of moral transformation and discovery.