applied ethics
TagAmerican Philosophers Should Condemn the War in Gaza (guest post)
“American academic philosophers should speak out to condemn the Israeli assault on Gaza.” (more…)
Moral Philosophy as War Propaganda (guest post)
“The hellish reality of this war is transfigured by philosophers into abstract thought experiments and technical prose.” (more…)
Disproportionate and Intended Harm to Innocents in Israel’s War in Gaza (guest post)
“Experts on just war disagree on what precisely counts as permissible proportion. But clearly this is grossly disproportionate.”
Israel, Hamas, and “Blowback” (guest post)
“The proportionality constraint is backward-looking in the following sense: to determine how bad a prospective harm is for a potential innocent victim, we sometimes need to look at what that victim has suffered in the past, and whether we’re responsible for what they’ve suffered” as well as “whether we should have acted differently in the past thereby avoiding the n..
Proportionality, Psychic Harm, and the Day After (guest post)
“Once we count psychic harm, it looks like Israel’s war might be proportional. But it could be proportional only if the Israelis aren’t imposing on basically all Gazans a greater psychic burden than the psychic burden that Israelis hope to avoid,” which could be the case “if Israel takes it upon itself, as soon as possible, to reassure the Gazans that Gaza will not ..
Condemnations, Moral Guidance, and Gaza (guest post)
“The absence of moral guidance by philosophical condemners conveys that they do not think of Israelis as friends whom they want to morally improve. Perhaps, worse, it reflects the sense that there is something morally improper about providing Israelis with guidance and advice…” (more…)
NEH Creates New Funding for Ethics & AI Research
The Biden administration yesterday called for legislation about and regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), the development and implementation of which will involve expertise in the the ethics of AI.
Just afterwards, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) launched a new program funding research on that subject.
Legislation Makes Ethical and Societal Issues Part of NSF Award Process
Philosophers may find new opportunities for working with scientists owing to legislation passed last year that makes how projects address their ethical and societal effects a more important factor in how the National Science Foundation (NSF) awards grants. (more…)
How Applied Ethics Has Changed
Some thoughts on how “applied ethics” has changed over the years:
hen I was in grad school, ‘applied ethics’ was an embarrassment. It basically involved feeding concocted, simplistic, depoliticized case studies mechanistically through static, caricatured versions of ethical theories. It was also completely ghettoized, and no one else in philosophy paid the slight..
Philosophy’s Impact (updated)
The applied philosophy literature is full of insights about practical problems. But in our survey of the literature we find essentially no accounts of how a philosopher is supposed to ensure that these insights have an impact. It’s a bias rooted in the discipline: one has exhausted one’s intellectual task and professional obligation when one deposits a peer-reviewed..