Paul Showler

This reply address two issues raised by Nancy Jecker’s commentary, “Robots With and Without Sophisticated Cognitive Capacities: Are They Persons?”. The first issue concerns the criteria for ascribing moral personhood to social robots. Whereas standard property-based accounts of personhood claim that sophisticated cognitive capacities are necessary conditions for personhood, Jecker contends that personhood is a cluster concept that may include various configurations of sufficient, but not necessary, conditions. While I am sympathetic to aspects of this proposal, I suggest that it potentially conflicts with some of Jecker’s other stated theoretical commitments. The second issue concerns how to best characterize relational approaches to moral personhood. Elsewhere, I have argued for a constrained moral relationalism which accepts that non-moral properties can play a limited role in justifying moral status ascription. Jecker contends that this intervention is unnecessary because relational views are already suitably constrained. In response, I suggest that moral relationalism is best described as a family of theoretical positions, some of which do not make sufficient room for appeals to properties in moral reasoning.

In a recent commentary, John-Stewart Gordon points to the need for further elaboration of the pragmatic approach to moral status that I have defended. On the one hand, Gordon points to the need for a clearer account of when individualist and relational deliberative strategies should be employed. On the other hand, he observes that the pragmatic account appears to conflate two theoretical tasks that are typically understood as distinct: the task of determining the grounds of moral status, and the subsequent task of ethical decision-making. This article offers a reply to Gordon’s critical remarks.

Debates about the moral status of social robots (SRs) currently face a second-order, or metatheoretical impasse. On the one hand, moral individualists argue that the moral status of SRs depends on their possession of morally relevant properties. On the other hand, moral relationalists deny that we ought to attribute moral status on the basis of the properties that SRs instantiate, opting instead for other modes of reflection and critique. This paper develops and defends a pragmatic approach which aims to reconcile these two positions. The core of this proposal is that moral individualism and moral relationalism are best understood as distinct deliberative strategies for attributing moral status to SRs, and that both are worth preserving insofar as they answer to different kinds of practical problems that we face as moral agents.

Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational requirements that originate well outside of the clinic, in particular in health insurance records systems. Although this dependency of today's electronic medical records on billing requirements is widely lamented by clinical providers, its history remains little studied. Following the archaeology of medicine developed by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic and expanding his methodology in light of more recent contributions to the field of media archaeology, this article excavates some of the underexplored technological conditions that help constitute today's electronic medical record. If in some contexts, it is true that data drive health, then an archaeology of medical records helps reveal how health insurance records often impact clinical care and, by extension, health and disease.

Abstract:Moral prophets are agents who aim to transform the customs and practices of their community. They are critics of the social order whose calls for change are often met by skepticism, resentment, and hostility from those around them. This paper takes up the phenomenon of moral prophecy as a way of elucidating the relationships between three key features of a pragmatist ethics: fallibilism, hope, and sociality. I begin by discussing a problem that moral prophecy poses for pragmatists, wherein their commitment to evaluative fallibilism appears to conflict with the fact that moral prophecy requires resolve in the face of disagreement. I then look to the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey to develop a pragmatist account of moral prophecy and argue that it can overcome this problem. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts about how a pragmatist account of moral prophecy presents a challenge to forms of evaluative realism.

This commentary critically examines two facets of Tracy Llanera's recent book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. First, it considers her interpretation of Richard Rorty's redemptive project. It argues that, while Llanera succeeds in resolving tensions in Rorty's public‐private distinction, her account downplays the role of abnormal discourse within projects of self‐creation. Second, it raises several questions about Llanera's strategy for situating this redemptive project within debates concerning existential nihilism. On her view, one ought to follow Rorty in addressing the problem of egotism instead of the problem of nihilism, since the former is prior to the latter. But it is not clear who counts as an egotist, or why egotists are especially prone to becoming nihilists. Moreover, there are reasons to think that egotism and nihilism are fundamentally different kinds of problems.

This book contains diverse and critical reflections on Richard Rorty’s contributions to ethics, an aspect of his thought that has been relatively neglected. Together, they demonstrate that Rorty offers a compelling and coherent ethical vision. The book's chapters, grouped thematically, explore Rorty’s emphasis on the importance of moral imagination, social relations, language, and literature as instrumental for ethical self-transformation, as well as for strengthening what Rorty called "social hope," which entails constant work toward a more democratic, inclusive, and cosmopolitan society and world. Several contributors address the ethical implications of Rorty’s commitment to a vision of political liberalism without philosophical foundations. Others offer critical examinations of Rorty’s claim that our private or individual projects of self-creation can or should be held apart from our public goals of ameliorating social conditions and reducing cruelty and suffering. Some contributors explore hurdles that impede the practical applications of certain of Rorty's ideas. The Ethics of Richard Rorty will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in American philosophy and ethics.

Huw Price’s subject naturalism has emerged as a leading pragmatist position within recent debates surrounding philosophical naturalism. Unlike orthodox views which tend to be guided by metaphysical questions about the “place” of, for instance, the mind, meaning, and morality within the natural world, subject naturalism focuses philosophical attention on language-users and the functions that certain concepts play within discursive practices. This paper considers two objections to subject naturalism and argues that they can be overcome by looking to the methodological insights of philosophical genealogy. Although Price occasionally characterizes his project as a kind of genealogy, he offers little explanation of what such a methodological orientation is supposed to involve. I suggest that subject naturalists ought to remedy this theoretical lacuna by looking to the work of Bernard Williams. On the one hand, doing so can serve a diagnostic function: Williams’ conception of genealogy affords a perspective from which subject naturalism’s explanatory inadequacies are more clearly understood. On the other hand, Williams’ elaborated conception of genealogy represents a path by which the subject naturalist can overcome the shortcomings discussed in this paper.