•  29
    Spot the bot
    AI and Society 1-3. forthcoming.
    Developers of generative machine learning models have pledged to enable users to identify model-generated content -- that is, to "spot the bot". In this short note, I explain why this promise is based on a bait and switch.
  •  305
    Large Language Models and Biorisk
    with William D’Alessandro and Harry R. Lloyd
    American Journal of Bioethics 23 (10): 115-118. 2023.
    We discuss potential biorisks from large language models (LLMs). AI assistants based on LLMs such as ChatGPT have been shown to significantly reduce barriers to entry for actors wishing to synthesize dangerous, potentially novel pathogens and chemical weapons. The harms from deploying such bioagents could be further magnified by AI-assisted misinformation. We endorse several policy responses to these dangers, including prerelease evaluations of biomedical AIs by subject-matter experts, enhanced …Read more
  •  54
    Do epistemic requirements vary along with facts about what promotes agents' well-being? Epistemic instrumentalists say 'yes', and thereby earn a lot of contempt. This contempt is a mistake on two counts. First, it is incorrectly based: the reasons typically given for it are misguided. Second, it fails to distinguish between first- and second-order epistemic instrumentalism; and, it happens, only the former is contemptible. In this book, Nathaniel P. Sharadin argues for rejecting epistemic instr…Read more
  •  356
    Predicting and Preferring
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    The use of machine learning, or “artificial intelligence” (AI) in medicine is widespread and growing. In this paper, I focus on a specific proposed clinical application of AI: using models to predict incapacitated patients’ treatment preferences. Drawing on results from machine learning, I argue this proposal faces a special moral problem. Machine learning researchers owe us assurance on this front before experimental research can proceed. In my conclusion I connect this concern to broader issue…Read more
  •  2
    Patient preference predictors take us from known demographic descriptors to unknown facts about patients’ preferences over treatment options. However, the use of PPPs to make treatment decisions on behalf of incapacitated patients faces an apparent normative problem: their use in certain contexts appears to involve treating patients paternalistically. In this paper, I consider whether PPPs can find a home in the context of military medicine. On the assumptions that military organizations sometim…Read more
  •  268
    Epistemic Consequentialism: Haters Gonna Hate
    In Christos Kyriacou & Robin McKenna (eds.), Metaepistemology: Realism & Antirealism, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 121-143. 2018.
    Epistemic consequentialism has been charged with ignoring the epistemic separateness of propositions and with (thereby) allowing trade-offs between propositions. Here, I do two things. First, I investigate the metaphor of the epistemic separateness of propositions. I argue that either (i) the metaphor is meaningfully unpacked in a way that is modeled on the moral separateness of persons, in which case it doesn’t support a ban on trade-offs or (ii) it isn’t meaningfully unpacked, in which case it…Read more
  •  310
    Is Deontic Evaluation Capable of Doing What it is For?
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 19 (3). 2021.
    Many philosophers think the distinctive function of deontic evaluation is to guide action. This idea is used in arguments for a range of substantive claims. In this paper, we entirely do one completely destructive thing and partly do one not entirely constructive thing. The first thing: we argue that there is an unrecognized gap between the claim that the function of deontic evaluation is to guide action and attempts to put that claim to use. We consider and reject four arguments intended to bri…Read more
  •  324
    Patient preference predictors aim to solve the moral problem of making treatment decisions on behalf of incapacitated patients. This commentary on a case of an unrepresented patient at the end of life considers 3 related problems of such predictors: the problem of restricting the scope of inputs to the models (the “scope” problem), the problem of weighing inputs against one another (the “weight” problem), and the problem of multiple reasonable solutions to the scope and weight problems (the “mu…Read more
  •  97
    Ecumenical epistemic instrumentalism
    Synthese 198 (3): 2613-2639. 2021.
    According to extant versions of epistemic instrumentalism, epistemic reasons are instrumental reasons. Epistemic instrumentalism is unpopular. I think it’s just misunderstood. Rather than saying epistemic reasons are instrumental reasons, epistemic instrumentalists should only say that if there is an epistemic reason, there is also an instrumental reason. This is the view I call ecumenical epistemic instrumentalism. In this paper, I first motivate, next sketch, and finally highlight the advantag…Read more
  •  164
    Consequentialism and Moral Worth
    Utilitas 31 (2): 117-136. 2019.
    Sometimes, agents do the right thing for the right reason. What’s the normative significance of this phenomenon? According to proponents of the special status view, when an agent acts for the right reason, her actions enjoy a special normative status, namely, worthiness. Proponents of this view claim that self-effacing forms of consequentialism cannot say this plausible thing, and, worse, are blocked from having a perspicuous view of matters by the self-effacing nature of their consequentialism.…Read more
  •  50
    Patient preference predictors and the problem of naked statistical evidence
    Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (12): 857-862. 2018.
    Patient preference predictors (PPPs) promise to provide medical professionals with a new solution to the problem of making treatment decisions on behalf of incapacitated patients. I show that the use of PPPs faces a version of a normative problem familiar from legal scholarship: the problem of naked statistical evidence. I sketch two sorts of possible reply, vindicating and debunking, and suggest that our reply to the problem in the one domain ought to mirror our reply in the other. The conclusi…Read more
  •  69
    Nothing but the Evidential Considerations?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2): 343-361. 2016.
    A number of philosophers have claimed that non-evidential considerations cannot play a role in doxastic deliberation as motivating reasons to believe a proposition. This claim, interesting in its own right, naturally lends itself to use in a range of arguments for a wide array of substantive philosophical theses. I argue, by way of a counterexample, that the claim to which all these arguments appeal is false. I then consider, and reply to, seven objections to my counterexample. Finally, as a way…Read more
  •  28
    Rational Coherence in Environmental Policy: Paris, Montreal, and Kigali
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 21 (1): 4-8. 2018.
    In June 2017, President Trump announced that the US intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The decision was widely viewed as an abrogation of US leadership in confronting a changing climate. I’m not interested here in the decision to withdraw from Paris per se. Instead, I’m interested in Paris as a useful contrast for the administration’s attitude towards a different international environmental agreement: the Montreal Protocol.
  •  512
    Promotion as contrastive increase in expected fit
    Philosophical Studies 176 (5): 1263-1290. 2019.
    What is required for an action to promote the satisfaction of a desire? We reject extant answers and propose an alternative. Our account differs from competing answers in two ways: first, it is contrastive, in that actions promote the satisfaction of desires only as contrasted with other possible actions. Second, it employs a notion of expected fit between desire and world, defined as the weighted sum of the fit between the desire and the world in all possible outcomes, where each weight is give…Read more
  •  798
    Two Problems for Accepting as Intending
    Ethics 128 (3): 626-641. 2018.
    It’s possible to accept or to reject a promise. According to a new proposal by Abraham Roth, accepting a promise involves intending that the promisee perform the promised action. According to Roth, this view is supported by rational symmetries between promissory acceptance and intention. Here, I show how these symmetries actually generate two problems for the view.
  •  682
    The Beliefs and Intentions of Buridan's Ass
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (2): 209-226. 2017.
    The moral of Buridan's Ass is that it can sometimes be rational to perform one action rather than another even though one lacks stronger reason to do so. Yet it is also commonly believed that it cannot ever be rational to believe one proposition rather than another if one lacks stronger reason to do so. This asymmetry has been taken to indicate a deep difference between epistemic and practical rationality. According to the view articulated here, the asymmetry should instead be explained by the d…Read more
  •  769
    Schroeder on the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem for Attitudes
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7 (3): 1-8. 2013.
    Mark Schroeder has recently offered a solution to the problem of distinguishing between the so-called " right " and " wrong " kinds of reasons for attitudes like belief and admiration. Schroeder tries out two different strategies for making his solution work: the alethic strategy and the background-facts strategy. In this paper I argue that neither of Schroeder's two strategies will do the trick. We are still left with the problem of distinguishing the right from the wrong kinds of reasons
  •  90
    In his "May Belief Outstrip Evidence?" (1916) Durant Drake argues that beliefs may sometimes permissibly outstrip evidence. Drake's novel idea is that epistemic reasons are not the final arbiter of the justificatory status of beliefs. In this short note I motivate Drake's idea by suggesting an analogy between the epistemic justification of belief and the moral justification of intention.
  •  75
    Motivational Internalism (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2015.
    Motivational Internalism is a collection of thirteen new essays on exactly the topic you expect it to be, given the title. It also contains an introductory chapter, in which the editors attach an excellent overview of the current state of play to an intimidating bibliography. The essays in the volume are divided into three sections, each with its own, shorter, introduction by the editors. The first section concerns evidence for and against motivational internalism; the second concerns the releva…Read more
  •  64
    A Partial Defense of Permissivism
    Ratio 30 (1): 57-71. 2015.
    Permissivism is the view that sometimes an agent's total evidential state entails both that she is epistemically permitted to believe that P and that she is epistemically permitted to believe that Q, where P and Q are contradictories. Uniqueness is the denial of Permissivism. Permissivism has recently come under attack on several fronts. If these attacks are successful, then we may be forced to accept an unwelcome asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality. In this essay I clarify the…Read more
  •  51
    Checking the Neighborhood: A Reply to DiPaolo & Behrends on Promotion
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (1): 1-8. 2016.
    In previous work I argued that purely probabilistic accounts of what it takes to promote a desire are mistaken. This is because, I argued, there are desires that it is possible to promote but impossible to probabilistically promote. In a recent article critical of my account, Joshua DiPaolo and Jeffrey Behrends articulate a methodological principle -- Check the Neighborhood -- and claim that respecting this principle rescues pure probabilism from my argument. In this reply, I accept the methodol…Read more
  •  203
    Problems for pure probabilism about promotion (and a disjunctive alternative)
    Philosophical Studies 172 (5): 1371-1386. 2015.
    Humean promotionalists about reasons think that whether there is a reason for an agent to ϕ depends on whether her ϕ-ing promotes the satisfaction of at least one of her desires. Several authors have recently defended probabilistic accounts of promotion, according to which an agent’s ϕ-ing promotes the satisfaction of one of her desires just in case her ϕ-ing makes the satisfaction of that desire more probable relative to some baseline. In this paper I do three things. First, I formalize an argu…Read more
  •  150
    Nothing but the Evidential Considerations?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2): 1-19. 2016.
    A number of philosophers have claimed that non-evidential considerations cannot play a role in doxastic deliberation as motivating reasons to believe a proposition. This claim, interesting in its own right, naturally lends itself to use in a range of arguments for a wide array of substantive philosophical theses. I argue, by way of a counterexample, that the claim to which all these arguments appeal is false. I then consider, and reply to, seven objections to my counterexample. Finally, as a way…Read more
  •  498
    Fairness and the Strengths of Agents' Claims
    Utilitas 28 (3): 347-360. 2016.
    John Broome has proposed a theory of fairness according to which fairness requires that agents’ claims to goods be satisfied in proportion to the relative strength of those claims. In the case of competing claims for a single indivisible good, Broome argues that what fairness requires is the use of a weighted lottery as a surrogate to satisfying the competing claims: the relative chance of each claimant's winning the lottery should be set to the relative strength of each claimant's claim. In thi…Read more
  •  1312
    Epistemic instrumentalists face a puzzle. In brief, the puzzle is that if the reason there is to believe in accord with the evidence depends, as the instrumentalist says it does, on agents’ idiosyncratic interests, then there is no reason to expect that this reason is universal. Here, I identify and explain two strategies instrumentalists have used to try and solve this puzzle. I then argue that we should find these strategies wanting. Faced with the failure of these strategies, I articulate a h…Read more
  •  81
    Reasons and Promotion
    Philosophical Issues 25 (1): 98-122. 2015.
    A number of philosophers accept promotionalism, the view that whether there is a normative reason for an agent to perform an action or have an attitude depends on whether her doing so promotes a value, desire, interest, goal, or end. I show that promotionalism faces a prima facie problem when it comes to reasons for belief: it looks extensionally inadequate. I then articulate two general strategies promotionalists can used to solve this problem and argue that, even if one of these two strategies…Read more
  •  914
    Reasons Wrong and Right
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97 (3): 371-399. 2016.
    The fact that someone is generous is a reason to admire them. The fact that someone will pay you to admire them is also a reason to admire them. But there is a difference in kind between these two reasons: the former seems to be the ‘right’ kind of reason to admire, whereas the latter seems to be the ‘wrong’ kind of reason to admire. The Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem is the problem of explaining the difference between the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ kind of reasons wherever it appears. In this artic…Read more
  •  1044
    How You Can Reasonably Form Expectations When You're Expecting
    Res Philosophica 92 (2): 1-12. 2015.
    L.A. Paul has argued that an ordinary, natural way of making a decision -- by reflecting on the phenomenal character of the experiences one will have as a result of that decision -- cannot yield rational decision in certain cases. Paul's argument turns on the (in principle) epistemically inaccessible phenomenal character of certain experiences. In this paper I argue that, even granting Paul a range of assumptions, her argument doesn't work to establish its conclusion. This is because, as I argue…Read more