John Basl (NEU): Why Everyone Has It Wrong About the Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles
Seminar
Many of those thinking about the ethics of autonomous vehicles believe there are important lessons to be learned by attending to so-called Trolley Cases, while a growing opposition is dismissive of their supposed significance. The optimists about the value of these cases think that because AVs…
Mario Guenther (ANU): An Analysis of Actual Causation
Seminar
Abstract: Lewis (1973) analysed actual causation in terms of counterfactual dependence. Roughly, c is a cause of e only if, had c not occurred, e would not have. The counterfactual approach has been developed further by Hitchcock (2001) and Halpern and Pearl (2005) who use causal models to deal…
Alexandra Oprea (ANU): Counterproductive Altruism: The Other Heavy Tail
Seminar
Effective Altruism (henceforth EA) is an influential new social movement and philosophical approach “which applies evidence and reason to working out the most effective ways to improve the world” and is dedicated to asking “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” (MacAskill 2016, Singer 2015…
Atoosa Kasirzadeh (ANU): “Causal and mathematical faces of explainable AI"
Seminar
Abstract: Recent conceptual discussion on the nature of the explainability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has largely been limited to causal investigations. This paper identifies some shortcomings of this approach to help strengthen the debate on this subject. Building on recent philosophical work…
Francois Kammerer: “‘But it’s right there!’ Our sense of acquaintance with experiences and the meta-problem of consciousness"
Seminar
Abstract: Solving the ‘meta-problem of consciousness’ (Chalmers) means explaining why we have certain problematic intuitions regarding consciousness. Amongst these intuitions arguably features a sense of acquaintance: we tend to think that our conscious experiences are presented to us in a way…
MSPT Public Policy Lecture: Immigration and Freedom with Prof. Chandran Kukathas
Lecture
Immigration is frequently identified as a danger to western liberal democracies because it threatens to undermine fundamental values, most notably freedom and self-determination. I argue that the greater danger is not immigration but immigration control. Controlling outsiders—immigrants or would-be…
Liz Jackson (ANU): On the Independence of Belief and Credence
Seminar
Abstract: Much of the literature on the relationship between belief and credence has focused on the reduction question: that is, whether either belief or credence reduces to the other. This debate, while important, only scratches the surface of the belief-credence connection. Even on the anti-…