All posts tagged: martina valković

Evil in Narrative Fiction | Blog of the APA

Evil in Narrative Fiction | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Imagine you read Kant. You may disagree with him, you may be bored by his style, but you will persevere, for after all, he has important things to say. Now imagine any narrative fiction: You read a novel, watch a movie or TV series, or read a comic. It has something important to say, yet if you’re bored, you will probably close the book or switch off whatever device you’re using. This makes narrative fiction different from other texts. It is not that narrative fiction is not interested in truth. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum will tell you that novels explore complex ethical situations better than philosophical treatises. But they will not do so at the expense of their first aim, which is keeping readers engaged. Evil is constitutive of the kind of ethical situations Nussbaum considers, and, like narrative, it keeps us hooked. We’re fascinated by evil, and so evil is perfect for narrative fiction and engagement. In narrative, evil comes in all shapes: the evil of Elizabeth’s younger sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice …

Socrates Would’ve Absolutely Adored ChatGPT

Socrates Would’ve Absolutely Adored ChatGPT

Published by Jenni Sidey

Go on, admit it—you use ChatGPT (or something like it) more than you are willing to admit. You use it for all sorts of things, some of which you’re probably even hiding from yourself. No? Fine, then it’s just me. But let me share with you something that occurred to me regarding large language models. A potential justification for their use, if you will. Maybe you can use it one day….for a friend. I happen to believe that Socrates would’ve absolutely adored the concept of large language models. We all know Socrates never wrote a thing. And the main reason was, if I remember correctly, that “the written word cannot answer back.” And now, finally, we have writing that can. How many times have you waded through a text, looking for an answer to a single, solitary question? You skim the lines impatiently, getting more annoyed by the second because the author just won’t get to the point—the point you care about. It feels like the whole text is misaligned; the focus is all wrong. …

When Society Stops Knowing How to Know

When Society Stops Knowing How to Know

Published by Jenni Sidey

Photo by Alexander Grigoryev on Unsplash Over the past two decades, we have watched the pillars of public knowledge gradually weaken. John Stuart Mill is probably turning in his grave at this. From social media platforms creating echo chambers and filter bubbles to the flood of user-generated content drowning out expertise to online hostility and ideological policing driving censorship (self-imposed or otherwise), misinformation and disinformation abound. The epistemic principles that sit at the heart of Mill’s influential account of truth-seeking through public reasoning—the free flow of ideas, freedom from the “tyranny of the majority,” and the need for expert voices to rise to the forefront amidst the “noise and clamour of democracy”—are all under significant strain.  We have known about these epistemic “pathologies” for some time now, arising from the modern digital information environment. I am not usually someone who finds herself existentially alarmed by these kinds of technological harms —I generally believe that, once the implications become sufficiently visible and widely understood, societies eventually move to address them—but a recent and otherwise unremarkable event …

Immanence All the Way Down (and Across): Horizontal Transcendence in First Reformed

Immanence All the Way Down (and Across): Horizontal Transcendence in First Reformed

Published by Jenni Sidey

From https://pixabay.com/photos/church-faith-the-cross-348806/ Paul Schrader crafted his 2018 film First Reformed to be, among other things, an extended phenomenological argument that transcendence requires moving beyond the physical world. At the same time, First Reformed does something philosophically richer and stranger than what Schrader set out to do—and its most powerful moments point toward a very different account of what transcendence can mean. Schrader is not only the writer and director of First Reformed but also the author of an influential treatise on film theory: Transcendental Style in Film. This work provides the theoretical blueprint for a style of filmmaking that guides viewers into unfamiliar realms of conscious experience. Schrader’s argument for the relationship of the transcendent to the immanent is unambiguous: “The enemy of transcendence is immanence.” Transcendental films deploy an “austere toolkit”—a static camera, no non-diegetic sound, lingering shots that refuse to cut on action—to create a viewing experience that demands active participation. Where most movies lean toward you aggressively, transcendental movies require you to lean into them. This slow withholding creates a desire for …

2022 Pacific Division Presidential Address: Democratic Representation as Duty Delegation

2022 Pacific Division Presidential Address: Democratic Representation as Duty Delegation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Below is the audio recording of Seana Shiffrin’s presidential address, “Democratic Representation as Duty Delegation,” given at the 2022 Pacific Division Meeting. The full text is available on the APA website (member sign-in is required) as well as on JSTOR. The audio of the lecture is available here: “Democratic Representation as Duty Delegation,” by Seana Shiffrin Seana Shiffrin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at UCLA, where she has taught since 1992. She is the cofounder and codirector of the UCLA Law and Philosophy Program. Shiffrin received her BA from UC Berkeley, where she was the University Medalist. She attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and received the BPhil with distinction and the DPhil in philosophy. She earned her JD from Harvard Law School. Shiffrin teaches courses on moral and political philosophy as well as contracts, freedom of speech, and legal theory. Her recent book, Democratic Law (OUP, 2021), addresses the intimate connection between law and democracy and traces the implications of a democratic legal approach …

Occupational Choice, Liberal Freedom, and Social Necessity

Occupational Choice, Liberal Freedom, and Social Necessity

Published by Jenni Sidey

Occupational choice is for many an existential and deeply personal matter. An avowed goal of liberal societies has always been to permit citizens to make a choice about occupation freely, according to their talents, but also according to their personal inclinations, values, and preferences—unconstrained by the state, the family, or another authority. Distinct from many socialist countries, liberal states do not postulate a duty to be socially productive, and they refrain from fostering a robust, detailed view of the common good. Occupational choice, according to a liberal understanding, can only be steered indirectly by incentives and market mechanisms. Originally intended as a freedom from authorities, the liberal freedom of occupational choice has started to produce structures that are increasingly disrespectful to people with a particular type of motivational psychology. Willingly stepping up for work that we all need but that is especially risky or burdensome gets increasingly difficult to rationalize in the highly individualized and economically complex societies of today. When stepping up for such tasks, people need to take their personal preferences to be …

Speaking Through Action: Open Rescue as Moral Assertion

Speaking Through Action: Open Rescue as Moral Assertion

Published by Jenni Sidey

Ridglan Farms in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin is a breeder of beagles for scientific research. It’s been a target of animal activism for about a decade, as the philosopher Aaron Yarmel details here. In mid-March of this year, activists broke into Ridglan and, in broad daylight, removed thirty of the two thousand dogs who were housed there at that time. Eight of those dogs were later recovered by police. After that raid, activists audaciously announced and widely publicized an intention to return to the facility about a month later to remove all of Ridglan’s dogs. A specific date was announced. There was even a website where anyone could sign up to join the action. I was one of the hundreds of activists who participated in that second, much larger, action. When we arrived at Ridglan Farms on the morning of April 18, police were there to meet us. Using tear gas, guns loaded with rubber bullets, and other “less-lethal munitions,” the police successfully repelled our attempt to invade Ridglan Farms. No dogs were saved that day. …

The Police Can Lie to You

The Police Can Lie to You

Published by Jenni Sidey

The police can either lie to Jane or they can be honest with her. If the police lie to Jane, it is probable that they will receive a crucial piece of information. If the police act honestly, they are unlikely to receive the information. What should the police do? Perhaps this sounds like an easy question. If we care about security and law enforcement, surely the police should be able to rely on deception and dishonesty. How else would they do their job? It seems difficult to imagine a world in which the police are required to shoot straight with conniving criminals. Of course, the question is not so easy if we are concerned about things such as fraud, consent, voluntariness, the rule of law, and trust. If the police can do anything to obtain a confession (beat a suspect, for example), then there is a good chance the suspect’s confession won’t be voluntary. One might object that force shifts the discussion from deception and dishonesty to brutality. However, concerns regarding political morality are relevant …

Words Without Knowledge: Augustine and the Use of Language in the Age of LLMs

Words Without Knowledge: Augustine and the Use of Language in the Age of LLMs

Published by Jenni Sidey

In 2022, when Blake Lemoine shared his experience with LaMDA 2, he took the AI’s responses seriously and claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) consciousness is real. Imagine the movie Her, in which a man falls in love with an operating system he converses with. With the growing sophistication of LLMs (large language models) and their conversational patterns, the temptation to attribute human characteristics to them no longer seems dystopian. However, while the question of what kind of entity AI is currently occupies the central stage of scientific and public debate, Lemoine’s claim needs to be carefully substantiated before it can be considered true. As Emily M. Bender and Alexander Koller point out in their position paper, an assessment of what AI is must draw an adequate distinction between language and meaning. If this distinction is successful, as demonstrated by some thought experiments in the paper, it will become evident that language is nothing more than a formal structure, whereas meaning implies an understanding of the relationship between objects and context. The belief that use and …

Who Controls the Future? On Capitalism, Democracy, and Social Alienation

Who Controls the Future? On Capitalism, Democracy, and Social Alienation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Who controls the future? The answer to this question concerns the role and politics of financial investment under capitalism. Through its mode of investment, capitalism distinctively values and creates our future. First, it does so by capitalizing the future, by means of economically valuing now certain goods and assets, while devaluing others, based on what investors expect their future returns to be. The fact that, say, car-sharing companies are now valued on the stock market billions of dollars represents the fact that investors believe in a future where such companies will be able to generate revenue, by achieving market dominance. The ownership of these companies’ shares is a claim, obtained in the present, to the profits that dominance, once achieved, will generate in the future. The main source of investors’ wealth, in the form of future returns, is thus not accumulation from the past, but rather the power to shape the future. Investment itself provides such a power. Indeed, the more investment there is in car-sharing companies now, as opposed to, say, public transportation, the …