•  6
    Radical Cognitivism about Practical Reason
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (1). 2023.
    Cognitivism about practical reason is the doctrine that certain aspects of practical reason are really instances of theoretical reason. For example, that intentions are beliefs or that certain norms of practical rationality just are, or reduce to, certain norms of theoretical rationality. Radical cognitivism about practical reason, in contrast, is the more heady view that practical reason just is a species of theoretical reason. It entails that what it is to be a motivational state (of any kind)…Read more
  •  2
    A new theory of the mind, the predictive processing model, is ascendant in recent work in cognitive science. According to this theory, all the mind ever fundamentally does is make hypotheses about the environment, generate prediction-errors by comparing its predictions with its sensory data, and use these prediction-errors to update its representation of the world. The theory of motivation and action to which the predictive processing model is committed has been the subject of lively debate in t…Read more
  •  48
    Can the predictive processing model of the mind ameliorate the value-alignment problem?
    Ethics and Information Technology 23 (4): 739-750. 2021.
    How do we ensure that future generally intelligent AI share our values? This is the value-alignment problem. It is a weighty matter. After all, if AI are neutral with respect to our wellbeing, or worse, actively hostile toward us, then they pose an existential threat to humanity. Some philosophers have argued that one important way in which we can mitigate this threat is to develop only AI that shares our values or that has values that ‘align with’ ours. However, there is nothing to guarantee th…Read more
  •  41
    Self-driving Cars and the Right to Drive
    Philosophy and Technology 35 (3): 1-15. 2022.
    Every year, 1.35 million people are killed on roads worldwide and even more people are injured. Emerging self-driving car technology promises to cut this statistic down to a fraction of the current rate. On the face of it, this consideration alone constitutes a strong reason to legally require — once self-driving car technology is widely available and affordable — that all vehicles on public roads be self-driving. Here I critically investigate the question of whether self-driving, or autonomous,…Read more
  •  61
    How Humeans can make normative beliefs motivating
    Philosophical Studies 178 (4): 1245-1265. 2020.
    Normative realism faces a problem concerning the practicality of normative judgment, the presumptive view that normative judgments are motivational states. Normative judgments, for the normative realist, must be beliefs. This is problematic because it is difficult to see how any belief could have the necessary connection to motivation required to account for the practicality of normative judgment. After all, the Humean theory of motivation has it that motivated action is only brought about by a …Read more