Michael Haiden

I defend my analysis of Kenneth Waltz’s position against two points of criticism. First, my view that Waltz proposes a “hybrid account” of moral agency applies to fewer phenomena than a human-centered explanation. However, I show that this is by design. Waltz exclusively writes about international relations, which, as a special field of inquiry, requires distinct explanations. Second, even though technological artifacts shape human moral agency, they are not moral agents themselves. I agree with this point, but note that we should not underestimate how drastically the mere existence of nuclear weapons has shaped human moral responsibility.

We examine people’s attitudes toward AI-based algorithms as a means to allocate scarce resources. Through a vignette experiment, we confront respondents with five scenarios in which an AI-based algorithm allocates various goods and ask them if they find this morally desirable. We compare people’s moral attitudes toward AI with their attitudes toward a friend, a waiting list, a lottery, and the market. Our results show that people rank allocations through AI as morally clearly less desirable than most alternatives. This is especially true for goods that are nonessential to a person’s survival. One potential explanation for the identified algorithm aversion is that AI is considered more opaque than its alternatives, and that an allocation mechanism’s moral rejection increases if its working is less well understood. Together, our results suggest that using AI to allocate resources, especially nonessential ones, is likely to meet substantial social resistances. To understand the reasons, researchers should systematically study laypeople’s moral intuitions about algorithms, a field we call folk algorithmics.

Kenneth Waltz argued that more states should have nuclear weapons. This remains a controversial position in international relations theory, while in philosophy of technology, it is largely unknown. This is regrettable, because Waltz offers interesting arguments for why nuclear weapons have a positive influence on the world. In short, he implies that nuclear weapons contain morally desirable values. Because of this, Waltz should be a more prominent voice in philosophy of technology, especially in the debate on the values embedded in technological artifacts. Waltz offers a convincing account for why nuclear weapons are not value-neutral, and I argue that his works imply a strong version of this position: that nuclear weapons co-act together with humans. The paper will outline and defend this position. However, I note that Waltz’s analysis is narrowly focused on international relations. For him, nuclear weapons are good because they foster peace. Philosophy of technology should expand on this thesis. To integrate Waltz into the field, scholars should interrogate the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear weapons based on a variety of values – including, but not limited to, those that Waltz proposes. Value neutrality thesis; nuclear weapons: international relations; history of ideas; ethics of technology.

Jürgen Habermas has defended Germany’s cautious support for Ukraine against the ongoing Russian invasion. Instead of trying to defeat Russia on the battlefield, he argued that Western nations should seek a compromise with the attacker. Critics worried that this would lead to more suffering than the war, encourage further Russian aggression, and ignore the concerns of the Ukrainian population. However, one question that has not been addressed is if Habermas’s pleas are part of a wider pacifist commitment—and if so, what kind of pacifist he is. Examining Habermas’s writings on the Ukraine War, his cosmopolitan views and his idea of a “constitutionalization of international law,” I argue that Habermas can be called a political pacifist—someone who seeks to abolish the institutions that provide the ultimate causes of war. While one can still criticize his vision, it deserves to be taken seriously as a pacifist account.