Howard Nye | University of Alberta (original) (raw)

Papers by Howard Nye

Dialogue

Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P i... more Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's “basic desires” to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it by restricting “basic desires” to sensory inclinations that cause us to do things independently of our beliefs about their contents.

Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue Canadienne De Philosophie, 2023

Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P i... more Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's "basic desires" to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it by restricting "basic desires" to sensory inclinations that cause us to do things independently of our beliefs about their contents.

La sémantique du succès soutient, en gros, que ce qu'il faut pour qu'un état d'un agent soit une croyance en P, c'est que cet état soit disposé à se combiner avec ses désirs pour provoquer un comportement qui répondrait à ces désirs si P. J. T. Whyte complète cela par un compte-rendu du contenu des « désirs de base » d'un agent pour fournir une théorie naturaliste attrayante du contenu mental. Nous soutenons que la stratégie de Whyte peut éviter les objections qui lui sont faites en restreignant les « désirs de base » aux inclinations sensorielles qui nous font agir indépendamment de nos croyances sur leur contenu.

In David Plunkett & Billy Dunnaway (eds.), Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Work of Allan Gibbard. Ann Arbor, MI: Maize Books. pp. 125-144 (2022) , 2022

It is often assumed that the best explanation of why we should be moral must involve a substantiv... more It is often assumed that the best explanation of why we should be moral must involve a substantive account of what there is reason to do and how this is related to what morality requires and recommends. In this paper I argue to the contrary that the best explanation of why we should be moral is neutral about the content of morality, and does not invoke an independent substantive account of what there is practical reason to do. I contend that an act’s deontic status as recommended or required by morality is best understood as its being fitting for us to feel obligated to perform it, which essentially involves motivation to perform it. I argue, moreover, that our having reason to do something is a matter of its being fitting for us to be motivated to do it. Since an act’s being favored by morality conceptually entails the fittingness of our being motivated to perform it, and the fittingness of this motivation conceptually entails that there is reason to perform it, it is actually a conceptual truth that there are reasons to do what morality requires and recommends, whatever that turns out to be. I contend, finally, that this kind of account best explains why, although moral considerations are not always overriding, we necessarily have conclusive reasons to do what morality requires. I argue that an act counts as morally required only if the reasons to feel obligated to perform it are conclusive, which entails that it is unfitting to fail to be most strongly motivated to perform it. This, together with my account of the connection between fitting motives and practical reasons, entails that whatever considerations are weighty enough to make the act morally required are conclusive reasons to perform it. I believe that this conceptual account of reasons to be moral is important, because it removes the explanation of why we should be moral as a desideratum on normative ethical theories, which may significantly decrease the attractions of some and increase the attractions of others.

CSDH-SCHN 2020, May 28, 2020

Currently, AI ethics is failing in many cases. Ethics lacks a reinforcement mechanism. Deviations... more Currently, AI ethics is failing in many cases. Ethics lacks a reinforcement mechanism. Deviations from the various codes of ethics have no consequences. And in cases where ethics is integrated into institutions, it mainly serves as a marketing strategy. Furthermore, empirical experiments show that reading ethics guidelines has no significant influence on the decision- making of software developers. It is a boom time for artificial intelligence (AI) and ethics. All sorts of groups have launched manifestos, declarations, toolkits and lists of principles to set the ethical agenda. There are so many lists of principles that now other groups are providing guides to all the lists. You would think that having all these principles and checklists would be a good thing, but many of them are being generated by industry or by scientists. We risk ignoring other approaches to ethics that come from the humanities. In this panel we will present a dialogue of philosophical perspectives and informatics approaches on artificial intelligence (AI). These reflect an interdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Alberta between faculty and students across Digital Humanities, Philosophy, Communications, and Library and Information Studies

Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene, Geoffrey Rockwell, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier (eds.), Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021

Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive... more Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive, if our individual acts seem almost certain to make no difference? According to the expected consequences approach, we should refrain from doing these things because our individual acts have small risks of causing great harm, which outweigh the expected benefits of performing them. Several authors have argued convincingly that this provides a plausible account of our moral reasons to do things like vote for policies that will reduce our countries’ greenhouse gas emissions, adopt plant-based diets, and otherwise reduce our individual emissions. But this approach has recently been challenged by authors like Bernward Gesang and Julia Nefsky. Gesang contends that it may be genuinely impossible for our individual emissions to make a morally relevant difference. Nefsky argues more generally that the expected consequences approach cannot adequately explain our reasons not to do things if there is no precise fact of the matter about whether their outcomes are harmful. In the following chapter, author Howard Nye defends the expected consequences approach against these objections. Nye contends that Gesang has shown at most that our emissions could have metaphysically indeterministic effects that lack precise objective chances. He argues, moreover, that the expected consequences approach can draw upon existing extensions to cases of indeterminism and imprecise probabilities to deliver the result that we have the same moral reasons to reduce our emissions in Gesang’s scenario as in deterministic scenarios. Nye also shows how the expected consequences approach can draw upon these extensions to handle Nefsky’s concern about the absence of precise facts concerning whether the outcomes of certain acts are harmful. The author concludes that the expected consequences approach provides a fully adequate account of our moral reasons to take both political and personal action to reduce our ecological footprints.

The International Review of Information Ethics, 2021

In this paper, we defend three claims about what it will take for an AI system to be a basic mora... more In this paper, we defend three claims about what it will take for an AI system to be a basic moral patient to whom we can owe duties of non-maleficence not to harm her and duties of beneficence to benefit her: (1) Moral patients are mental patients; (2) Mental patients are true intentional systems; and (3) True intentional systems are systematically flexible. We suggest that we should be particularly alert to the possibility of such systematically flexible true intentional systems developing in the areas of exploratory robots and artificial personal assistants. Finally, we argue that in light of our failure to respect the well-being of existing biological moral patients and worries about our limited resources, there are compelling moral reasons to treat artificial moral patiency as something to be avoided at least for now.

International Review of Information Ethics 28, 2020

Many economists have argued convincingly that automated systems employing present-day artificial ... more Many economists have argued convincingly that automated systems employing present-day artificial intelligence have already caused massive technological displacement, which has led to stagnant real wages, fewer middleincome jobs, and increased economic inequality in developed countries like Canada and the United States. To address this problem various individuals have proposed measures to increase workers' living standards, including the adoption of a universal basic income, increased public investment in education, increased minimum wages, increased worker control of firms, and investment in a Green New Deal that will provide substantial employment in transitioning to green energy, buildings, and agriculture. In this paper I argue that both left-wing and right-wing positions in political philosophy, such as John Rawls's Justice as Fairness and Robert Nozick's Entitlement Theory, are committed to the conclusion that we should take political action to counteract the effects of technological displacement by undertaking such measures to increase workers' living standards.

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods

Philosophers Imprint

4. As we will use the phrases, "practical reasons to do A" (or just "reasons to do A" with no fur... more 4. As we will use the phrases, "practical reasons to do A" (or just "reasons to do A" with no further modifier) are considerations that count in favor of doing A in the most general normative sense, while "moral reasons to do A" are considerations that contribute to A's deontic status as morally permissible, right, or good to do. We can understand the question 'Why care about morality?' as nye, plunkett, & ku Non-Consequentialism Demystified philosophers' imprint-3-vol. 15, no. 4 (january 2015

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 2014

Agent-centered constraints on harming hold that some harmful upshots of our conduct cannot be jus... more Agent-centered constraints on harming hold that some harmful upshots of our conduct cannot be justified by its generating equal or somewhat greater benefits. In this paper I argue that all plausible theories of agent-centered constraints on harming are undermined by the likelihood that our actions will have butterfly effects, or cause cascades of changes that make the world dramatically different than it would have been. Theories that impose constraints against only intended harming or proximally caused harm have unacceptable implications for choices between more and less harmful ways of securing greater goods. This leaves as plausible only theories that impose constraints against causing some unintended distal harms. But, I argue, given the distal harms our actions are likely to cause through their butterfly effects, these theories entail that any way of sustaining our lives is overwhelmingly likely to involve unjustified killing, and that we are therefore morally required either to allow ourselves to waste away or kill ourselves.

Utilitas, Dec 2014

In this paper I attempt to show conclusively that the apparent intrinsic difference between causi... more In this paper I attempt to show conclusively that the apparent intrinsic difference between causing collateral damage and directly attacking innocents is an illusion. I show how eleven morally irrelevant alterations can transform an apparently permissible case of harming as a side-effect into an apparently impermissible case of harming as a means. The alterations are as obviously irrelevant as the victims’ skin color, and consistently treating them as relevant would have unacceptable implications for choices between more and less harmful ways of securing greater goods. This shows not only how the principles philosophers have proposed for distinguishing between these cases cannot withstand scrutiny, but how we can be sure that there are no relevant differences yet to be discovered. I conclude by considering reasons to think that there are deontological constraints against harming, but that they apply just as forcefully against collateral harms as they do against intended harms.

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, 2013

In their paper, “Trade, Growth, and Poverty,” 4 Dollar and Kraay claim to present evidence that t... more In their paper, “Trade, Growth, and Poverty,” 4 Dollar and Kraay claim to present evidence that trade liberalisation leads to faster growth in average incomes, and that this growth in average incomes in turn increases the incomes of the poor “proportionately”, thus leading to decreased absolute poverty. The paper suggests that one of the surest ways for less developed countries to alleviate poverty is to pursue policies of trade liberalisation. We argue, however, that the arguments and evidence presented by Dollar and Kraay are unconvincing. The record of the effects of trade on growth and poverty appears to be considerably more mixed than claimed by Dollar and Kraay.

Abstract: I argue that it is actually a conceptual truth that we have reason to be moral. I defen... more Abstract: I argue that it is actually a conceptual truth that we have reason to be moral. I defend analyses of moral concepts in terms of the fittingness of moral emotions. I argue, for instance, that we can analyze an act’s moral wrongness in terms of our having reason to feel obligated not to perform it. Moral emotions like feelings of obligation involve motivations to do certain things, so the fittingness of these emotions determines the rationality of the motivations they involve. I proceed to argue that having reason to perform an act is a matter of the act’s satisfying a rational motive, or contributing to an end that it is fitting to be motivated to pursue. Because morality is a matter of fitting motives, and fitting motives determine rational acts, morality entails reasons for action. I use this strategy to explain why we have intrinsic reason do what is moral, or reason to do so as an end in itself and quite independently of its serving other rational ends. I argue that an ...

Railton, who provided me with invaluable assistance when this material was in its formative stage... more Railton, who provided me with invaluable assistance when this material was in its formative stages, and who have been terrifically helpful in so many ways ever since. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to those of my graduate student colleagues with whom I have had many very helpful discussions about this material and topics that bore directly upon it, including Michael Allers,

Discussion Papers, Feb 1, 2002

This paper provides simple, transparent intuition for the perhaps surprising and certainly widely... more This paper provides simple, transparent intuition for the perhaps surprising and certainly widely debated empirical findings of "environmental Kuznets curves", i.e. U-shaped relationships between per-capita income and indicators of environmental quality. We consider one possible component of such relationships: the linkage between income and household choices that impact upon the environment. Our explicit model emphasizes two features. First, degradation of the environmental endowment is a by-product of household activities. We present a household production model in which consumption of marketed commodities generates both a "good", desired non-environmental services, and a "bad", degradation of the environment. Second, while households can not directly purchase environmental quality, they can reorganize their activities so less degradation results. If environmental quality is a normal good, one expects substitution towards less degrading commodities, so that increases in income will increase environmental quality. We show that natural constraints on the desirability and feasibility of such substitution can produce non-monotonic relationships between household income and environmental quality, and in particular can produce household-level environmental Kuznets curves. * We would like to thank for their helpful comments Matt Kahn, Arik Levinson, two anonymous reviewers, and participants in AERE/ASSA, NBER, NEUDC and Harvard Environmental Economics and Policy seminars. Needless to say, we alone are responsible for any remaining errors.

According to Civic Republicanism, the mere fact that someone could arbitrarily interfere with one... more According to Civic Republicanism, the mere fact that someone could arbitrarily interfere with one's life makes one unfree, even if it is known that such interference will never take place. While the view enjoys considerable intuitive support, it seems that we cannot assimilate the distinctive problems Republicanism identifies under our general concerns about the welfare of the unfree or our reasons to respect their autonomous control of their lives. I argue that the intuitions in favor of Republicanism support the intrinsic moral relevance of a third factor, namely the equality of agents' power over each other. I show how an interpretation of Civic Republican worries about arbitrary power as ultimately about unequal power best fits our intuitions and avoids problems faced by other attempts to explain the problematic form of arbitrariness. I also show how this version of Civic Republicanism can capture our intuitions about the importance of social equality that transcend our concerns about the just distribution of welfare and autonomy.

Dialogue

Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue Canadienne De Philosophie, 2023

Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P i... more Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's "basic desires" to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it by restricting "basic desires" to sensory inclinations that cause us to do things independently of our beliefs about their contents.

In David Plunkett & Billy Dunnaway (eds.), Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Work of Allan Gibbard. Ann Arbor, MI: Maize Books. pp. 125-144 (2022) , 2022

CSDH-SCHN 2020, May 28, 2020

Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene, Geoffrey Rockwell, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier (eds.), Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021

The International Review of Information Ethics, 2021

International Review of Information Ethics 28, 2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods

Philosophers Imprint

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 2014

Utilitas, Dec 2014

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, 2013

Discussion Papers, Feb 1, 2002

curves? Examining the desirability and feasibility of substitution ∗

to present evidence that trade liberalisation leads to faster growth in average incomes, and that... more to present evidence that trade liberalisation leads to faster growth in average incomes, and that this roportionately”. The paper suggests that one of the surest ways for less developed countries to alleviate ever, that the nvincing. (1) Post-1980 ‘globalisers, ’ or developing countries that undertook greater shifts in favor of a more 1990’s, have ers (2) More ceforth, trade omes; and (3)

Will economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development? This paper prese... more Will economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development? This paper presents a simple household-choice framework that emphasizes the tradeoff between pollution-causing consumption and pollution-reducing abatement expenditures. The framework yields a simple explanation for Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKCs, i.e. non-monotonic, upward-turning paths of environment while development continues) and facilitates analysis of household voting decisions that lead to public regulation of environmental externalities. Our sufficient conditions, more general than the literature, make clear that an asymmetric endowment (i.e. positive environmental quality but zero consumption at zero income) is sufficient for an EKC given standard preferences and a wide range of abatement technologies. The key is that the MRS leads the household to prefer not to abate (or to vote for whatever ‘abatement ’ implies) at low income levels. Without the endowment, abatement technologies alone ar...

The International Review of Information Ethics

Many economists have argued convincingly that automated systems employing present-day artificial ... more Many economists have argued convincingly that automated systems employing present-day artificial intelligence have already caused massive technological displacement, which has led to stagnant real wages, fewer middle- income jobs, and increased economic inequality in developed countries like Canada and the United States. To address this problem various individuals have proposed measures to increase workers’ living standards, including the adoption of a universal basic income, increased public investment in education, increased minimum wages, increased worker control of firms, and investment in a Green New Deal that will provide substantial employment in transitioning to green energy, buildings, and agriculture. In this paper I argue that both left-wing and right-wing positions in political philosophy, such as John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness and Robert Nozick’s Entitlement Theory, are committed to the conclusion that we should take political action to counteract the effects of techn...

I offer a way to distinguish between the kinds of reasons for attitudes that contribute to the in... more I offer a way to distinguish between the kinds of reasons for attitudes that contribute to the instantiation of ethical concepts and the kinds that do not, thus solving what Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen call the ‘wrong kind of reasons [WKR]’ problem for analyses of ethical concepts in terms of fitting attitudes. Intuitively, judgments about ethical-fact-making reasons for an attitude can, whereas judgments about other kinds of reasons cannot, directly cause one to have the attitude. I argue, however, that in order to clarify and defend this intuitive distinction, we should ultimately analyze judgments about fitting attitudes in terms of the acceptance of norms for attitudes. I contend that the best such analysis understands judgments about an agent’s reasons as judgments about the prescriptions of the system of norms she deeply accepts. I call this view ‘Norm Descriptivism’, and argue that it best explains how judgments about reasons both guide attitudes and can be determined to ...

Abstract: According to Civic Republicanism, the mere fact that someone could arbitrarily interfer... more Abstract: According to Civic Republicanism, the mere fact that someone could arbitrarily interfere with one's life makes one unfree, even if it is known that such interference will never take place. While the view enjoys considerable intuitive support, it seems that we cannot assimilate the distinctive problems Republicanism identifies under our general concerns about the welfare of the unfree or our reasons to respect their autonomous control of their lives. I argue that the intuitions in favor of Republicanism support the intrinsic moral relevance of a third factor, namely the equality of agents ' power over each other. I show how an interpretation of Civic Republican worries about arbitrary power as ultimately about unequal power best fits our intuitions and avoids problems faced by other attempts to explain the problematic form of arbitrariness. I also show how this version of Civic Republicanism can capture our intuitions about the importance of social equality that t...

We argue that consequentialism may seem attractive, despite the well-known case intuitions agains... more We argue that consequentialism may seem attractive, despite the well-known case intuitions against it, primarily due to the idea that it is clear how we have reason to bring about good states of affairs but entirely mysterious how we could have reason to do anything else. We show that a deep theoretical connection between good states of affairs and reasons to bring them about can indeed be vindicated by the conceptual connections between good states of affairs, fitting desires that they obtain, and reasons to act out of them. We argue, however, that the conceptual connection between fitting attitudes and reasons for action equally vindicates reasons to do things other than bring about the best states of affairs. The fittingness of motives other than desires for good states of affairs – some more intimately related to morality than such desires- undermines consequentialism whether as a theory of rationality or morality. I. Why Consequentialism? Consequentialism is the view that what ...

The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, 2017

Abstract: We argue that consequentialism may seem attractive, despite the well-known case intuiti... more Abstract: We argue that consequentialism may seem attractive, despite the well-known case intuitions against it, primarily due to the idea that it is clear how we have reason to bring about good states of affairs but entirely mysterious how we could have reason to do anything else. We show that a deep theoretical connection between good states of affairs and reasons to bring them about can indeed be vindicated by the conceptual connections between good states of affairs, fitting desires that they obtain, and reasons to act out of them. We argue, however, that the conceptual connection between fitting attitudes and reasons for action equally vindicates reasons to do things other than bring about the best states of affairs. The fittingness of motives other than desires for good states of affairs – some more intimately related to morality than such desires-undermines consequentialism whether as a theory of rationality or morality. 1

The Harm-Based Account of the Wrongness of Killing: All else held equal, the strongest, most cent... more The Harm-Based Account of the Wrongness of Killing: All else held equal, the strongest, most central reasons against killing someone are constituted by the harms that death inflicts upon her, or the extent to which it deprives her of future goods 1. Plausible in the abstract; compelling account of why killing is usually such a grave wrong 2. Compatible with a wide variety of views about death's harm • Plausible account of how determining which are most defensible settles controversial questions about the ethics of killing 3. Plausibly explains how, when future bads outweigh future goods, killing becomes not wrong but permissible or required • Can happen in principle (policeman's "dilemma"); gives plausible guidance on how to determine when assisted death is or isn't permissible in practice 4. Consistent with both the acceptance and rejection of constraints on harming