Jonathon VandenHombergh

There is increasing interest in the use of artificial intelligence for companionship (Lederman 2023; Jecker et al. 2024). Most resistance to this proposal appeals to the risk of deception: the idea that, because they lack the relevant mental states (Sparrow 2002; Turkle 2005; Montemayor et al. 2021; Meadi et al. 2024), artificial companions cannot authentically befriend their users (Matthias 2015; Sparrow 2016; Johnson and Verdicchio 2018; Mlonyeni 2024; cf. Weber-Guskar 2021). In this paper, I argue that it would be morally impermissible to befriend artificial companions even if there was no deception involved in doing so. This is because, without deception, such befriending would become exploitative: it would require users to take unjust advantage of certain vulnerabilities required for authentic friendship. I make the premises of this argument explicit and defend each in turn, both positively and from various objections. The resulting view is one on which—barring some interesting alternatives raised by those objections—non-deceptive artificial companionship is analogous to knowing participation in an arranged marriage.

The phenomenon of euthanasia and/or assisted suicide (EAS) in unjust conditions has received much attention in the popular press, along with a handful of responses in academic venues. These responses typically defend the permissibility of EAS in unjust conditions by appeal to anti-discrimination or harm reduction arguments, which frame the issue in terms of exclusion from current EAS law. We first briefly examine these arguments within such a framing, and then argue that it fails to account for the deep moral concern elicited by EAS in unjust conditions. To address this moral concern more fully, we compare the policy of allowing EAS in unjust conditions to a hypothetical EAS policy which requires a guarantee of basic care—and thus avoids the EAS cases of moral concern from the start. We argue for the moral superiority of the latter policy and respond to several potential objections.

The expressivist objection argues against the legalisation of euthanasia and/or assisted suicide (EAS), on the grounds that EAS laws express a disrespectful judgement of certain classes of people: roughly, that they are better off dead. Recently, some ethicists have argued that laws which require only an informed, competent and voluntary request for EAS would avoid the expressivist objection, since that objection depends on the further requirement of irremediable suffering. In this paper, I argue that—for better or for worse—this response fails to address the expressivist objection. This is because reasoning parallel to the original expressivist objection demonstrates that even EAS laws with an informed, competent and voluntary request as the sole requirement express a disrespectful judgement: that it is reasonable to believe that certain classes of people are better off dead. Objections to this argument depend largely on a conception of autonomy which minimises the role of motivations—specifically, motivations which we ought to recognise as reasonable. Although this conception is supported by some bioethicists, it faces challenges of its own. Until those challenges are addressed, therefore, an appeal to less demanding EAS laws does not by itself avoid the expressivist objection.

The problem of the many is a paradox, on which many candidates are individually and equally well-suited to uniquely constituting an object. In this dissertation, I defend a novel solution to the problem of the many: typism. According to typism, the object in question is constituted by the type to which the many candidates belong as tokens, rather than any of the tokens themselves. Just as it is not paradoxical to claim that “rose” is the longest word in “a rose is a rose is a rose”—despite the presence of three longest words therein—it is not paradoxical to claim that the candidate constitutes an object—despite the presence of many candidate constituters. After the introduction, I present in chapter 1 a synoptic description and defense of typism, in the process comparing it with alternative solutions. The remainder of the dissertation elaborates on key issues from this first chapter, its centerpiece. Chapter 2 provides an account of distinctively metaphysical arbitrariness, and explains why such arbitrariness occasionally—as in the problem of the many—warrants rejection. Chapter 3 clarifies the resemblance between types and their tokens which (among other things) underlies the defense of typism, specifically by appeal to the generic features of pluralities of said tokens. Chapter 4 addresses an explanatory challenge to typism—how can abstract types constitute non-abstract objects?—by outlining a model on which constitution is, in this case, a form of projection (e.g., as occurs in augmented reality technology). Finally, I conclude the dissertation by pictorially summarizing the typist’s response to the problem of the many, and pointing toward future work on the relationship between perception and metaphysical determinacy.

Relationalism is the view that perception is partly constituted by external objects (McDowell 1994; Campbell 2002; Martin 2004). Faced with the hallucination argument, and unsatisfied with the standard disjunctivist reply, some ‘new wave’ relationalists explain away the possibility of hallucinations as mere illusions (Alston 1999; Watzl 2010; Ali 2018; Masrour 2020). In this paper, I argue that some of these illusions (as in Chalmers 2005; Ali 2018) are perceptions of internal objects which appear as external ones. Then, in response to the obvious screening-off objection, I argue for a novel reply called ‘intrameralism’: roughly, external objects are ordinarily perceived because they gain internal parts—they ‘grow into the head’. The preceding hallucinations are thus ultimately explained away as a kind of perceptual synecdoche, in which internal parts appear as their (ordinarily perceived) external wholes. The paper concludes by addressing some objections.

Conceivability arguments constitute a serious threat against reductive physicalism. Recently, a number of authors have proven and characterized a devastating logical truth centered on these arguments: namely, that their soundness entails the inconceivability of reductive physicalism. In this paper, I demonstrate that this is only a logical truth when reductive physicalism is interpreted in its stronger, intrinsic sense, as opposed to its weaker—yet considerably more popular—extrinsic sense. The basic idea generalizes: perhaps surprisingly, stronger forms of reduction are uniquely resistant to the conceivability arguments opposing them. So far as the modal epistemology of reduction is concerned, therefore, it pays to go intrinsic.

Using his two-dimensional semantics, I demonstrate that David Chalmers’s 2010 ‘two-dimensional argument against materialism’ is sound only if a wide swath of reductive physicalist theses – crucially, those involving identity and other intrinsic reductive relations – are inconceivable. 2DA therefore begs the question against its opponents and undermines its argumentative relevance. Comparisons are drawn to similar arguments in Marton and Sturgeon; the present account differs in its formal and philosophical simplicity, as well as its specific application to reductivist doctrines beyond the ineffective and merely supervenient.