Walter Barta

The longtermist argument that the long-term future is much more valuable than the near-term future may fail on the grounds that we may be living in a Malignant World. Assuming that it is possible for civilizations to have the equivalent of a malignant mutation, and that this mutation then could spread tumescently through spacetime, two conclusions follow. First, assuming malignancy, because risk of catastrophic mutation scales with the number of sites of possible mutation, there may be no civilizational benefit to indefinite expansion, besides perhaps redundancy, meaning total welfarist projections should not assume astronomical expansion into the future. Second, assuming malignancy, the total welfarist should both prioritize reducing the probabilities of mutations and also discount the future according to aggressive exponential growth of risk. Hypothesizing a Malignant World is shown to be consistent with scientific observation and theoretically parsimonious in several respects. It also has the added benefits of giving indirect accounts of both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Fermi Paradox.

In his book Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit proposes the search for a self-consistent theory of population ethics, a theory capable of answering questions about the welfares of populations in a manner that satisfies all of our ethical intuitions, what he calls “Theory X.” But in the same work, Parfit offers what he sees as a major obstacle to that goal, the so-called “Repugnant Conclusion”, worrying whether the most well-off population is an increasingly large population. This problem, along with Roderick Ninian Smart’s “Negative Utilitarianism” and Robert Nozick’s “Utility Monster” belong to a special class of ethical cases dealing with the mathematical limits of zero and infinity: trivial and unreal ethical solutions. These kinds of problems have plagued population ethics since Thomas Malthus first recognized the problem of exponential growth and its deleterious effects on personal wellbeing. In an attempt to answer Parfit, some, such as T. Sider, T. Hurka, and Y. Ng, have suggested formulations of marginal wellbeing without undermining core ethical principles. Other authors, like G. Arrhenius et al., have suggested that Parfit’s problem fundamentally undermines the possibility of a self-consistent population ethics. Here we will suggest that these problems result from an improper inclusion of trivial and unreal numbers into the ethical domain, making what Parfit calls “mistakes in moral mathematics,” and are thus resolved by an exclusion of trivial and unreal numbers from the ethical domain by carefully specifying a welfare function to exclude them.

Analyses of cultural artifacts may be systematically vulnerable to misattributions, in two converse forms: either 1) due to attributing relevance to irrelevant features, or 2) due to attributing irrelevance to relevant features. These misattributions are caused by two formal features of cultural artifacts, skeuomorphs, features inherited from a broader class, and shibboleths, features distinguishing a narrower class. Because skeuomorphs and shibboleths do not distinguish themselves as such, their interpretation as such is dependent upon the discernment of the observer, and thus are easily misattributed. These misattributions have several culturally important effects, including aesthetic disagreements and political divergences, as well as a generalized condition of interpretive indeterminacy. Several solutions to these uncertainties are available, including default interpretive doubts, reasonable interpretive ranges, and scientific interpretive methods, though all of these solutions have tradeoffs. These considerations have special importance for the analysis of popular culture, where these features intersect in a manner that is both especially uncertain and especially impactful.

Here we introduce a formulation for describing welfare based on a hyperbolic secant function, derived from certain intuitions about the nature of material and experiential conditions, that satisfies a number of normatively critical constraints, making for an elegant and satisfactory welfarist axiology. We first introduce intuitions about experiential conditions, material conditions, and their valences; we second make a mathematical formulation of our hedonic calculus consistent with these intuitions; we third make several manipulations of our formulation in order to make calculations in population ethics; and we fourth show how the calculations are consistent with several critical normative constraints.

Children are a group of persons whose political interests are systematically underrepresented. Here we will lay out the basic argument for proportionally representing children in political arenas, including some options for how children can best be politically represented. We will support our assumptions: 1) that people’s interests should be proportionally politically represented and that 2) children are people. Then we will discuss the possibly large impact that the enfranchisement of children promises, especially in its relation to the interests of the long-term future.

DRAFT In what follows, we will attempt to point out two technical loopholes in the proof of the “Impossibility Theorem for Welfarist Axiologies” as proposed by Gustaf Arrhenius (Arrhenius, 2000). The two problems arise from different principles, one from an application of the “Addition Principle” and one from an application of the “Dominance Principle” after a counterintuitive combination of the “No Repugnant/Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion” criteria, the former non-fatal and latter fatal. We will show that these problems arise via two methodologies. 1) We appeal to intuitions with counterexample cases. 2) We replace ordinal priority-ordering with cardinal utility functions (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944). If correct, our critique shows that at least one avenue is available to welfarist axiology, which reopens the possibilities of the search for a “Theory X” (Parfit, 1984). DRAFT.

DRAFT Several philosophers have suggested that it is impossible to formulate a theory of population ethics that simultaneously satisfies all of the necessary conditions set by our ethical intuitions (Arrhenius, 2000; Blackorby et al., 2004). However, we will attempt to demonstrate that, using the Stone-Weierstrass method, starting from scratch with a completely underspecified polynomial approximation function for commensurable cardinal utility (used here as a synonym for welfare) in a domain of commodities and populations, there are possible sets of functions that satisfy many if not all of our ethical intuitions (avoiding the Repugnant and Sadistic Conclusions, and others), thus providing a self-consistent welfarist axiology. DRAFT.

Various thinkers have been attempting to align artificial intelligence (AI) with ethics (Christian, 2020; Russell, 2021), the so-called problem of alignment, but some suspect that the problem may be intractable (Yampolskiy, 2023). In the following, we make an argument by analogy to analyze the possibility that the problem of alignment could be intractable. We show how the Tri-Omni properties in theology can direct us towards analogous properties for artificial superintelligence, Tri-Opti properties. However, just as the Tri-Omni properties are vulnerable to metaphysical incompatibility, we will show that the Tri-Opti properties are vulnerable to a corresponding physical incompatibility, because optimal physical systems exist on the Pareto Frontier. We will explain that, while Tri-Omni incompatibility thus seems metaphysically soluble, the Tri-Opti incompatibility seems physically insoluble due to the constraints of multi-variable optimization. Finally, we will provide some scenarios by which this incompatibility may be realized. Besides for the primary purpose of its theoretical considerations, this analysis has the secondary interdisciplinary purpose of communicating to the theologically literate the potential importance of AI safety work, and the gesturing towards the possibility of the collaboration in both fields on topics in ethics, epistemology, and ontology.

Modern philosophy is divided, apparently. The two apparent divisions are commonly referred to as “Analytic” and “Continental” (Prado). The former division is often seen as Kantian, ahistoricist, scientific, and logical; the latter division is often seen as Hegelian, historicist, conversational, and rhetorical (Rorty). In this paper, we attempt to use the principles of experimental philosophy and comparative computational techniques against a corpus of self-identified “analytic” and “continental” texts in order to test various hypotheses about the analytic/continental divide from the philosophical literature: some hypotheses are supported, some opposed, and others left open to further research. This project was funded by the 2022 University of Houston MD Anderson Library Digital Research Commons Special Projects Grant.