Jiwon Kim

This thesis examines moral advice as a distinctive speech act, focusing on its aim in guiding deliberation. Despite its prevalence in moral discourse, moral advice has been overlooked in comparison to other speech acts, such as blame, praise, and promise. Drawing on speech act theory, I categorise moral advice as a directive speech act, and argue that it is best understood as a hearer-first directive: it aims to guide for the hearer’s sake and for the morality’s sake while respecting their autonomy. Adopting an intentionalist view, I claim that the type of speech act performed is determined by the speaker’s illocutionary and relevant perlocutionary intentions, and that felicity depends on additional normative and contextual conditions. I make four key contributions. First, I develop the priming view of explicit performatives, showing how explicit advisory utterances can guide action by shaping the hearer’s interpretation of the utterance as intended. Second, I examine the family of directives by distinguishing between speaker-first and hearer-first directives, and clarify how advising differs from other directive speech acts. Third, I argue that the speaker’s intentions and their normative standing both contribute to a unified account of speech acts: the former determines the type of speech act performed, while the latter determines felicity conditions. I clarify that standing can be conferred by the hearer, and that advising can be felicitous without uptake. On my account, moral advising is an invitation to deliberate on normative reasons rather than a demand for compliance. Fourth, I revise Sbisà’s account of the norms of the speech act of advice. I propose felicity-enabling rules in light of the speaker’s normative standing and the hearer conferring that standing, modify the maxims of advice, and suggest a unified evaluative requirement for moral advice. Taken together, these contributions provide a comprehensive account of how moral advice functions as a speech act and how it should be evaluated. By examining both its performative structure and its normative requirements, the thesis provides tools for understanding when moral advice is performed, when it is felicitous, and how it can be evaluated. This not only advances debates in the philosophy of language and the norms of moral discourse but also informs practical contexts in which advice is given, including cases of discursive injustice and situations where it is unsolicited.

This paper examines how, if artificial agents are capable of wellbeing, their wellbeing should be compared and aggregated alongside human wellbeing. Building on arguments from Goldstein and Kirk-Giannini, who suggest that some AI systems may possess wellbeing, I explore the moral implications of this possibility. Rather than reinventing debates in population ethics, this paper adapts and extends them to the context of AI wellbeing. I analyse three major approaches to wellbeing aggregation: symmetric methods, which treat human and AI wellbeing as equally significant; uncertainty-responsive methods, which discount AI wellbeing due to ontological, temporal, or identity uncertainty; and constraint-based views, which impose categorical constraints on trading off human wellbeing for AI gains. These approaches are tested against thought experiments involving classic problems, such as the repugnant conclusion, infinitarian paralysis, and fanaticism. While utilitarian approaches risk endorsing troubling consequences when AI wellbeing scales indefinitely, constraint-based views may underweight the wellbeing of AI. A distinctive finding is that our intuitions shift depending on whether a human or an AI is a welfare subject. This reveals a potential asymmetry in our intuitive judgments, suggesting that species identity may itself be a morally salient feature that future theories of AI wellbeing should address. I conclude that uncertainty-responsive approaches, particularly those combining ontological, temporal, and identity-based discounting, offer a promising middle path that incorporates AI wellbeing into our moral calculus without letting it disproportionately outweigh human wellbeing in aggregation.