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AI As A Writing Tool: Great Benefits, Major Pitfalls.

Written by Neil Levy

Large language models look set to transform every aspect of life over the coming decades. Some of these changes will be dramatic. I’m pretty unconcerned by the apocalyptic scenarios that preoccupy some people, but much more worried about the elimination of jobs (interestingly, the jobs that seem likeliest to be eliminated are those that require the most training: we may see a reversal of status and economic position between baristas and bureaucrats, bricklayers and barristers). Here, though, I’m going to look at much less dramatic, and very much near term, effects that LLMs might have on academic writing. I’m going to focus on the kind of writing I do in philosophy; LLMs will have different impacts on different disciplines.

Read More »AI As A Writing Tool: Great Benefits, Major Pitfalls.

Resisting Nudges

By Gabriel De Marco

Consider the following case:

Classic Food Placement (FP): In order to encourage healthy eating, cafeteria staff place healthy food options at eye-level, whereas unhealthy options are placed lower down. Diners are more likely to pick healthy foods and less likely to pick unhealthy foods than they would have been otherwise.

This intervention is a paradigmatic case of what are often called nudges. Though many will think that it is OK to implement this sort of intervention for these sorts of purposes, there is a large debate about when exactly this is OK.

One common theme is that whether such an influence is easy to resist is going to be relevant to when the intervention is OK. If the intervention is not easy to resist, then, at the very least, this counts as a strike against implementing it. However, though there is often reference to the resistibility of a nudge, there is rarely explicit discussion of what it is for a nudge to be easy to resist, or for it to be easily resistible.

To begin giving an account of what it is for a nudge to be (easily) resistible, we need to figure out what it is an ability to do. So, what is it to resist a nudge?

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‘Naming and Shaming: Responding to Lookism’

On the evening of Friday 9 June, Prof. Heather Widdows presented the inaugural Michael Lockwood Memorial Lecture, as part of a weekend of events to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the fifth of the MSt. in Practical Ethics, based in the Centre. The title of Prof. Widdows’ fascinating and suggestive lecture was ‘Naming and Shaming: Responding to Lookism’.Read More »‘Naming and Shaming: Responding to Lookism’

Video Interview: Introducing Academic Visitor Dr María de Jesús Medina Arellano

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An interview with academic visitor Dr María de Jesús Medina Arellano, Professor and Researcher at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), on her research focusing on the ethics and regulation of biotechnologies in developing countries, such as stem cell science, human genome editing and reproductive technologies.

Book Launch: Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X

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Press release and an interview with Prof Dominic Wilkinson on the new book, Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X, which he has co-authored with Prof Julian Savulescu.

Press Release: Are we ethically prepared for Disease X?


image of pandemic ethics book cover
Oxford University Press

1 May 2023

According to some estimates, there is more than a one in four chance in the next decade of another global pandemic. We don’t know whether this will be influenza, a coronavirus (like SARS and COVID), or something completely new. The World Health Organisation refers to this unknown future threat as “Disease X”.Read More »Book Launch: Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X

How Brain-to-Brain Interfaces Will Make Things Difficult for Us

Written by David Lyreskog

Four images depicting ‘Hivemind Brain-Computer Interfaces’, as imagined by the AI art generator Midjourney.
‘Hivemind Brain-Computer Interfaces’, as imagined by the AI art generator Midjourney

 

A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing, and hybrid and artificial intelligence, promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks. With implementations ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications, as these tools continue to improve, we need to anticipate and monitor their impacts – how they may affect our society, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, responsibility, and other concepts which ground our moral landscapes.Read More »How Brain-to-Brain Interfaces Will Make Things Difficult for Us

Moral Psychology at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics

Written by Joanna Demaree-Cotton

 

This last Michaelmas term marked the inaugural series of lab meetings for the Uehiro Centre’s BioXPhi lab (https://moralpsychlab.web.ox.ac.uk). Co-directed by myself and Dr. Brian Earp, the lab brings philosophers together with psychologists to conduct experimental studies in moral psychology and bioethics. Specifically, we investigate the contributing factors and psychological processes that shape:

 

  • Moral intuitions, judgments and reasoning
  • Moral agency, moral action and moral motivation
  • The structure and application of (bio)ethical concepts

… with an eye to contributing to substantive normative and philosophical debates in ethics.

(What’s a “lab meeting”, you ask? Our lab meetings are where members of our lab come together with colleagues and collaborators to present and get feedback on ongoing research relevant to the experimental study of ethics.)

 

Just because people reason in a certain way about morality, that doesn’t mean that this is how we should reason about morality. People get things wrong all the time. Concepts can be incoherent. Reasoning can be flawed. Judgments can be biased and self-serving. Moral motivation can be weak. Moreover, people can often be ignorant or mistaken about many of the morally relevant details and nuances that apply to some particular situation, resulting in moral judgments that are simply ill-informed.

 

Yet, investigating ordinary moral psychology is invaluable for ethics and moral philosophy for a number of reasons (Earp, Demaree-Cotton et al., 2020; Earp, Lewis et al., 2021).

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The Football World Cup in Qatar

 

By Alberto Giubilini

 

The forthcoming World Cup in Qatar is perhaps the most controversial in football history.  Qatari social, religious, and legal norms clash with values that many people from other parts of the world hold dear.  For example, things like extramarital sex, same-sex behaviour, and importation of religious books are illegal in Qatar. A Qatari ambassador for the World Cup said that homosexuality is a ‘damage of the mind’ and a ‘spiritual harm’. He added that people going to Qatar will have to accept their rules.

This flies in the face of the fact that many players, commentators, and other stakeholders who will go to Qatar have been openly condemning Qatari social, religious, and legal norms in many ways. For example, Australian footballers have released a video condemning human rights violations in Qatar, including the treatment of migrant workers. German defender Leon Goretzcka said that by displaying messages against Qatari norms players want to “set an example for the values we want to stand for”. Is this hypocritical?

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Does Moral Ignorance Excuse?

Written by Neil Levy

Everyone agrees that ignorance of fact can excuse. If I take your suitcase thinking it was mine, and my belief that it was mine was faultless (perhaps the coach driver handed it to me, saying “this is yours”, and it looked exactly like mine), I seem excused of blame for taking it. But philosophers and ordinary people have been reluctant to excuse people on the basis of their moral ignorance. Think, for example, about recent debates concerning memorials to people we now recognize as deeply racist. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to demand that such memorials be removed on the grounds that it’s inappropriate to laud bad people, but the demand is often combined with blame directed at the racist (conversely, those who defend the memorials often think it’s sufficient to deflect blame on the grounds that the person was “a man of his time”).Read More »Does Moral Ignorance Excuse?