Walter Barta

University of Houston
Wharton County Junior College
  •  761
    Diminishing Marginal Utility is widely accepted as a law of human action, and therefor has become one of the primary premises of ethics, economics, and politics. In popular parlance, “diminishing returns” has entered into the cliches of common sense; in philosophical argument, it has achieved the status of an axiomatic assumption; and indeed, in terms of personal experience or folk psychology, it seems to largely hold true for goods in general over a range of consumption. However, a theory of di…Read more
  •  443
    The concept of the Utility Monster offers an influential critique of Utilitarian theories, forcing us to consider different theoretical fixes to escape monstrous implications (Nozick, 1999, pp. 26-53; Kennard, 2015, p. 322). However, many different breeds, a whole bestiary, of Utility Monsters are identifiable, and each breed reveals something slightly different about what we find monstrous. When dissected in depth, we observe that some breeds are probably acceptable, whereas other breeds are in…Read more
  •  345
    In his article “If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens are also Rare”, Robin Hanson proposes the Grabby Alien Hypothesis, which proposes that extraterrestrial civilizations (ETIs) exist outside of our observable universe and are gradually expanding to fill the universe. The existence of such grabby aliens in our future expanding to fill all available niches puts a cosmic deadline on independently originating sources of life. This cosmic cutoff offers an explanation for why human ob…Read more
  •  262
    The prestige of an academic institution may be determined as a function of affiliations with other academic institutions. Using digital tools to data-scrape, data-mine, and perform network analysis on university websites, an approximation of numbers of academic affiliations may be measured. Especially observing the alma mater institutions of the faculty of employed institutions, these numbers show the relative employment of alumni and a proxy metric for the relative prestige of their degree-gran…Read more
  •  221
    An indeterminate version of Henry Sidgwick’s “Dualism of Practical Reason” may offer a solution to Derek Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion”. Here we will outline the problem of Sidgwick’s Dualism and how to resolve it within the framework of practical reason and the problem of Parfit’s Repugnance and why it is irresoluble within the framework of pure utilitarianism. Then we will argue how Sidgwick’s Dualism, under certain formulations of indeterminacy, specifically under those Indeterminacy Views a…Read more
  •  179
    Attributions of certain speech-acts, like dog-whistling and wolf-crying, have an interesting complementary and antagonistic relationship that creates a kind of hostile dialectic and emergent divergence in political discourse. In the following, we will show how the wolf-cry and the dog-whistle are both epistemically difficult speech-acts to attribute, leading to asymmetric uncertainties in attribution. These uncertainties cause the attribution of wolf-cries and dog-whistles themselves to often be…Read more
  •  167
    Do the hard problem of consciousness and the simulation argument potentially resolve each other? Here we will argue for four possible views: that consciousness may be possible only (a) outside of, (b) inside and/or outside of, (c) inside of, or (d) interfacing with simulations. The first two of these views have been developed at length by David Chalmers and are used as jumping off points to introduce and develop the latter two views here. If any one of these views could be proven true, it would …Read more
  •  157
    Digital Monology: The Authority of the Search Engine
    Media and the Moving Image at University of Houston. 2019.
    2019 Applied Technology Award for the Media and the Moving Image Awards at University of Houston. The Google algorithm, as a ranking and ordering structure, cannot be “objective” as long as the page-ranking mechanism produces social effects and always inadvertently and inescapably affects social priorities. Imitable units of information (memes) on the internet change according to the laws of exponential growth, like other social phenomena, which include Google rankings. Mathematically and graphi…Read more
  •  151
    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”…Read more
  •  148
    Here we will argue that different kinds of friendships follow different kinds of scaling laws. First, we will review Aristotle’s three types of friendship. Second, we will review three different types of scaling laws. Third, we will show how the three types of friendship roughly map on to the three types of scaling laws. After this, we will discuss some of the consequences of the scaling laws of friendship. We hope that the use of these abstract scaling laws to describe social values will convin…Read more
  •  107
    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 propert…Read more
  •  75
    Here we will argue that Henry Sidgwick’s Dualism of Practical Reason, the paired imperative of being egoistic and/or utilitarian, follows from the epistemic barriers that arise when giving credence to skepticism about the external world, and particularly skepticism about other minds, and skepticism about reincarnation. We will argue that this is true whether we begin with the premises of universal utilitarianism or egoism.
  •  57
    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 …Read more
  •  47
    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 …Read more
  •  40
    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 s…Read more
  •  20
    Biting the Bullet on Toothlessness
    Southwest Philosophy Review 40 (1): 265-274. 2024.
  •  18
    This note introduces the word of “webjectivity,” to describe a concept that is well-known, the character of being epistemically dependence upon a situation within a network; and suggests that this word and its corresponding concept could be useful for clarifying discussions of the epistemic condition of the information age.
  • Post-Punk's Melancholy Melody
    with Candace Miranda
    In Joshua Heter & Richard Greene (eds.), Post-Punk and Philosophy: Rip it Up and Think Again, Carus Books. 2024.
  • The "Great Unread" and the "Black Box"
    International Review of Information Ethics 34 (34). 2024.