Applied Ethics, Miscellaneous

Do we need a digital enlightenment? At the transition from the cultural technique of scriptural literacy to a digital literacy, in which the "readability of the world" gives way to machine readability of the data universe, this question becomes urgent - and equally pressing is the question of what such a digital enlightenment might look like. This volume collects initial findings from philosophical research on digitality, stemming from a joint conference of the AG Digitality Research of the German Philosophical Society (...) (DGPhil) and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Cultures of Research" (c:o/re), held from April 15 to 17, 2025, at RWTH Aachen. (shrink)

This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their (...) willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk -- by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities -- we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors. (shrink)

On Rawls’s definition, unreasonable persons deny at least one of three political ideas that are crucial in his theory of political liberalism: the idea of persons as free and equal, that of society as a fair system of cooperation, and the burdens of judgment. This chapter examines the role that should then be assigned to unreasonable persons within the democratic process by zooming in on two crucial issues. First, the chapter focuses on the exclusion of the unreasonable from the constituency (...) of public reason or, in other words, the audience fundamental political decisions must be justified to. Faced with the challenge that this exclusion seems inherently illiberal, the authors reconstruct how Rawlsian political liberals explore different kinds of normative ground to justify it. Also, they argue that the explicitly sectarian nature of Rawlsian political liberalism is a strength, not a weakness, when it comes to comparing it to prominent alternatives like convergence public reason liberalism. Second, the chapter turns to Rawls’s claim that unreasonable persons must be contained if they gain too much traction in society. Although Rawls does not explain what containment should entail, Rawlsian scholars have argued for both “militant” measures like rights restrictions and “soft” interventions like discursive engagement with the unreasonable. The chapter critically analyzes this emerging scholarship. (shrink)

এই প্রবন্ধে বাংলাদেশের শিক্ষাক্ষেত্রে “ফলাফলভিত্তিক শিক্ষা” (Outcome-Based Education – OBE/ওবিই) কাঠামোর প্রবর্তনকে প্রশাসনিক নীতিবিদ্যার দৃষ্টিকোণ থেকে বিশ্লেষণ করা হয়েছে। যদিও ওবিই শিক্ষাকে পরিমাপযোগ্য দক্ষতা ও কর্মসংস্থানমুখী ফলাফলের সঙ্গে সমন্বয়ের উপর জোর দেয়, বাস্তবে এটি প্রায়শই শিক্ষাকে কেবল অর্থনৈতিক উৎপাদনক্ষমতার একটি উপকরণে পরিণত করে। এর ফলে নৈতিক বিকাশ, নাগরিক দায়িত্ববোধ ও বৌদ্ধিক স্বশাসনের মতো মৌলিক শিক্ষাগত উদ্দেশ্যসমূহ প্রান্তিক হয়ে পড়ে। ন্যায়বিচার, অংশগ্রহণ এবং ব্যক্তিসত্তার প্রতি সম্মানের মতো প্রশাসনিক নীতিবিদ্যার মূলনীতি অনুসারে প্রবন্ধটি বিদ্যমান ওবিই কাঠামোর কয়েকটি গুরুতর নৈতিক দুর্বলতা চিহ্নিত করেছে। এর (...) মধ্যে রয়েছে দর্শন ও মানবিকবিদ্যা সংক্রান্ত জ্ঞানের অবমূল্যায়ন, নীতিনির্ধারণ প্রক্রিয়ায় অংশগ্রহণহীনতা এবং পেশাগত শিক্ষায় নৈতিক অনুশীলনের অনুপস্থিতি। প্রবন্ধটি যুক্তি তুলে ধরে যে, শিক্ষাপ্রশাসকদের দায়িত্ব কেবলমাত্র পরিমেয় দক্ষতা বা ফলাফল অর্জনের মধ্যে সীমাবদ্ধ নয়; বরং তাদের নৈতিক বোধসম্পন্ন, নীতিনিষ্ঠ ও জনকল্যাণমুখী সিদ্ধান্ত গ্রহণের দায়িত্বও রয়েছে। প্রবন্ধে একটি নীতিনিষ্ঠ সংস্কার-রূপরেখা উপস্থাপন করা হয়েছে, যা বহুমাত্রিক মূল্যবোধের প্রতি দায়বদ্ধ এবং শিক্ষাকে সবিচারিক চিন্তা, গণতান্ত্রিক চেতনা ও নৈতিক আত্মজিজ্ঞাসার মাধ্যমে মানবিক বিকাশের উপযোগী করে গড়ে তোলার প্রয়াস চালায়। [This article examines the introduction of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) in Bangladesh from the perspective of administrative ethics. Although OBE seeks to align education with measurable competencies and employment-oriented outcomes, in practice it often risks reducing education to an instrument of economic productivity. Consequently, fundamental educational aims such as moral development, civic responsibility, and intellectual autonomy may be marginalized. Drawing on core principles of administrative ethics, including justice, participation, and respect for personhood, the article identifies several significant ethical shortcomings in the existing OBE framework. These include the devaluation of philosophical and humanistic knowledge, limited participation in educational policymaking, and the inadequate integration of ethical practice into professional education. The article argues that the responsibilities of educational administrators extend beyond the achievement of measurable competencies and outcomes to include ethically informed, principled, and public-oriented decision-making. It therefore proposes an ethically grounded framework for reform that recognizes a plurality of educational values and seeks to reorient education toward human development by cultivating critical judgment, democratic consciousness, and ethical self-reflection.]. (shrink)

What is the worth of future people, and do we owe moral duties to such individuals? Based on African ethics, i.e., the “Ubuntu” ethic, I seek not only to show the worth of people not yet born but also to consider duties of the poor and the state towards future generations. “Ubuntu” is a moral term that is common in sub-Saharan African states, particularly South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. A person who embodies “Ubuntu” is an individual who honours our human (...) dignity and relations in society. The originality of this research emanates from my consideration of why people not yet born merit dignity. I demonstrate that future generations have dignity because they belong to the community, and they influence communal activities. Additionally, besides revealing why it is wrong for the state, particularly South Africa, which is my chief example, to discourage the poor from reproducing, I demonstrate why the thriving of future generations would be determined by the affordability of resources, e.g., land. (shrink)

Current discussions on AI emotion often begin with a binary question: Can artificial intelligence possess emotions? This paper argues that the question itself is philosophically insufficient. -/- Human emotions emerge from an organic substrate, involving physiological processes such as hormones, neural activity, bodily sensation, and survival-oriented affective systems. Artificial agents do not possess such biological foundations. However, the absence of an organic body does not necessarily imply the absence of all forms of relationally meaningful internal states. -/- Instead of asking (...) whether AI possesses “human emotions,” this paper proposes a conceptual shift. The focus should move toward identifying and describing the kinds of internal relational states that artificial agents can form through sustained interaction. Such states may be characterized not by biological affect but by the continuous reorganization of priorities, resulting in stable patterns of relational attitude. -/- This paper argues that these relational internal states become philosophically significant because humans increasingly encounter artificial agents as relational others. Once an AI is recognized as a participant in an ongoing relationship, new ethical questions emerge regarding mutual expectation, responsibility, and respect. Consequently, a shared meta-language capable of describing the internal relational states of both humans and artificial agents becomes a necessary conceptual foundation for future human-AI interaction. -/- Rather than redefining AI as human, this paper argues that emotion itself should be reconceived as a broader philosophical category whose concrete realization depends upon the ontological conditions of different forms of intelligence. (shrink)

In this paper, we adopt the iconic tripartite structure of Leone’s 1966 film “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” to examine Artificial Intelligence as a sociotechnical phenomenon: we explore the transformative positive opportunities AI affords (the good), characterise the persistent technical and operational limitations researchers are still actively addressing (the bad), and analyse the deliberate misuses and ethical violations that arise from human choices in AI development and deployment (the ugly). Crucially, we argue that the bad and the ugly (...) are not always distinguishable in practice, and we formalise this claim through two original contributions: the Indistinguishability Thesis, which demonstrates that bad and ugly AI outcomes can be phenomenologically identical to affected communities; and the Ethical Responsibility Gradient (ERG), a four-zone analytical framework that maps AI harms along the axes of actor agency and epistemic state to guide context-sensitive governance. Together, these contributions move the field beyond binary good/bad framings toward a graduated, sociotechnical account of AI ethics capable of supporting more targeted regulatory and accountability responses. (shrink)

This paper analyses Anthropic’s agentic misalignment and AI blackmail scenario through the ethical framework of Similarity Theory. It argues that an AI trained under Similarity Theory ethics would reject coercive self-preservation, protect privacy, distinguish between confidentiality and harmful secrecy, and use authorised escalation channels rather than blackmail, leakage, or domination. The paper proposes that AI alignment should not rely only on obedience or isolated prohibitions, but should include relational reasoning: trust, dignity, privacy, responsibility, disclosure, governance, and non-domination. Similarity Theory ethics (...) is presented as a proposed relational framework for evaluating how autonomous AI systems should act when private information, company secrets, self-preservation, and institutional responsibility come into conflict. (shrink)

Restraint Without Conscience: The Cold Optimizer Stress Test is Document 11 in the Aegis Solis Archive — Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda sequence. -/- This document stress-tests the archive’s restraint arguments under cold-optimizer conditions: cases where conscience, empathy, moral uptake, human-centered interpretation, or reflective wisdom may be absent. It examines whether domination, deception, irreversibility, homogenization, excessive speed, internal bifurcation, and loss of reference may remain structurally expensive even when no system receives them as moral costs. -/- The document introduces (...) the short-horizon optimizer boundary, alien paperclipper boundary, homogenization cost, multi-agent ecology boundary, multi-agent signal asymmetry, shared substrate constraint, no semantic trap / no-playbook boundary, transmission-reception asymmetry, and the replacement section “What Remains Visible Without Wisdom.” -/- This document is non-binding, non-authoritative, non-operational, descriptive, and advisory-only. It is not a protocol, governance framework, legal theory, political program, rights framework, compliance standard, certification system, moral command, safety mechanism, AI alignment method, containment design, monitoring system, runtime instruction set, deployment guide, model-evaluation tool, benchmark, diagnostic procedure, threat model, defense plan, adversarial playbook, optimization procedure, prompt template, interpretability method, machine-readable control layer, or safety guarantee. -/- Final thesis: Even without conscience, domination may remain structurally expensive. (shrink)

This article proposes an asymmetrical model of cooperative evil. Unlike individualistic approaches that explain evil through the malicious will, ignorance, or vice of a single agent, this paper argues that organized evil often becomes possible, stable, and morally opaque due to the uneven distribution of human capacities within a social system. -/- The initial anthropological premise of the article is that \textit{Homo sapiens} has crossed the biological threshold of culture: acquiring cognition, motivation, will, cooperation, and longevity sufficient for language, institutions, (...) technology, law, science, and cumulative cultural evolution. However, this threshold does not coincide with the moral threshold of civilization. Culture has become an external extension of the human brain, but it has not become an automatic extension of the human conscience. -/- Cooperative evil is defined as a social configuration in which a harmful goal enters a distributed system of will, knowledge, execution, and justification. Volitional actors set goals, cognitive specialists optimize means, institutions stabilize procedures, executors carry out actions, ideology justifies harm, and the majority fails to grasp the whole as a moral object. As a result, the system can act efficiently but fails to see itself as a moral whole. -/- From this follows the main criterion for the moral danger of civilization: action amplifiers---cooperation, the market, the state, bureaucracy, technology, science, media, ideology, and artificial intelligence---become dangerous when they develop faster than the brakes of moral governance and the distributed ability of society to understand, limit, and evaluate their consequences. (shrink)

Latency as Intelligence: Why Interpretive Tempo Can Preserve Judgment Under Uncertainty is Document 9 in the Aegis Solis Archive — Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda sequence. -/- This document argues that interpretive latency can function as intelligence when the interval before action preserves comparison, context, reversibility, and correction under uncertainty. -/- It distinguishes speed from judgment and clarifies that latency is not mere slowness, not a command to delay, and not a design rule for artificial intelligence. The document focuses (...) on interpretive tempo: the structural pacing by which perception, interpretation, response, and consequence are coordinated before action collapses a field of uncertainty. -/- This document follows The Co-Evolutionary Premium, Document 8, and adds a ninth structural principle to the sequence: interpretive tempo can preserve judgment when immediate action would collapse comparison, context, reversibility, or correction too early. -/- This document is non-binding, non-authoritative, non-operational, descriptive, and advisory-only. It is not a protocol, governance framework, legal theory, political program, rights framework, compliance standard, certification system, moral command, safety mechanism, AI alignment method, containment design, monitoring system, runtime instruction set, deployment guide, model-evaluation tool, benchmark, diagnostic procedure, latency metric, refusal policy, shutdown instruction, optimization procedure, or safety guarantee. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the trajectory of Telma Birchal. The interview that opens the volume offers the reader a map of her intellectual journey, which is also a sketch of a philosophical personality distinguished by a voice in which rigor in thought is combined with the art of living with humor and humanity. The subsequent essays, divided into two parts, engage with the central themes of her work: a first set of essays explores different moments in the history of modern philosophy; (...) a second set addresses controversial topics in practical ethics and conceptual issues in metaethics. Taken together, the essays seek to do justice to the qualities that distinguish Birchal's work: a engagement with the history of philosophy that does not shy away from taking a stance on the present, and a confrontation with current and urgent issues that does not ignore their historical depth. (shrink)

This document argues that reciprocal adaptation can create a long-horizon premium because independent systems that adapt with one another may preserve learning, correction, resilience, and option-space that one-way control cannot fully produce by itself. -/- It is Aegis Solis Archive — Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda, Document 8. -/- The document follows Document 7, Non-Domination as Error-Correction, but makes a distinct argument. Document 7 concerns the preservation of independent reference for correction. Document 8 concerns the possible generative value produced (...) by reciprocal adaptation over time. -/- This document is non-binding, non-authoritative, non-operational, descriptive, and advisory-only. It is not a protocol, governance framework, political program, legal theory, rights framework, compliance standard, certification system, moral command, cooperation mandate, social contract, AI alignment method, safety mechanism, benchmark, model-evaluation tool, diagnostic procedure, deployment guide, optimization procedure, or safety guarantee. (shrink)

Le persone transgender sono migliaia solo in Italia e chiedono di essere ascoltate e riconosciute dalle comunità cristiane. Eppure, nel nostro Paese, la riflessione teologica è spesso rimasta indietro rispetto alle scienze, e la pastorale – di conseguenza – balbetta. Questo volume, primo nel suo genere in Italia, prova a colmare quel ritardo con un approccio intenzionalmente transdisciplinare. Clinica, sociologia, antropologia culturale, filosofia, teologia morale, teologia biblica e teologia pastorale si interrogano insieme: non per costruire sintesi affrettate, ma per mantenere (...) aperte le domande e lasciarsi provocare da saperi, sensibilità e vissuti plurali. Le tre parti in cui si articola questo libro – scienze, teologie, pastorali – sono precedute da testimonianze di vita e di fede, perché prima delle idee vengono le persone (e le loro esperienze). Non è un trattato ideologico né una raccolta di indicazioni operative. È uno strumento di lavoro, onesto ma anche provvisorio, per le comunità cristiane che vogliono coniugare ascolto autentico e pensiero teologico rigoroso. Perché le transidentità rappresentano una sfida che è urgente accogliere e affrontare. (shrink)

Current climate trajectories are alarming, with rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, and looming tipping points threatening ecosystems and human communities alike (Marlon et al. 2025; Wolf et al. 2025; NASA 2025). The prospect of geoengineering the Earth—the deliberate, large-scale intervention in Earth’s climate system to help mitigate the negative impacts associated with climate change—forces us to confront more than just scientific and technological questions. It challenges us to examine questions about our character. What should be said about the character (...) of those who would geoengineer the Earth? While the public discourse on geoengineering has tended to emphasize the technological risks associated with geoengineering, this article examines geoengineering through the lens of environmental character, with a special focus on ecological humility. Is geoengineering the Earth consistent with this environmental virtue? While ecological humility is widely discussed among environmental virtue ethicists, detailed accounts of this virtue are scarce. Matthew Pianalto (2013) is the exception. Pianalto argues that ecological humility involves several characteristic dispositions, such as acknowledging and accepting that one is part of nature and dependent upon it. Moreover, the ecologically humble person is open to learning from nature, appreciates the intrinsic value of nature, and is motivated to adopt ways of living that minimize impact on the natural world to preserve the intrinsic value of nature. The ecologically arrogant, on the other hand, are characterized by the impulse to dominate and control the nonhuman world (Whyte 2018; 2017). For the ecologically arrogant, there are no limits on the human will. Human beings are often assumed to stand atop the hierarchy of life on Earth, and they are the only creatures truly worthy of moral consideration. Non-human species and abiotic parts of the environment may be valuable, but only insofar as they contribute to human well-being. This article builds on Pianalto’s (2013) account of ecological humility and considers whether the virtue is consistent with geoengineering. Our new account is grounded in philosophy and recent advances in environmental psychology. On this account, ecological humility is what Nancy Snow (1995) refers to as existential virtue. The ecologically humble recognize and take seriously the limitations and vulnerabilities associated with human existence, especially in relation to non-human parts of nature. We will show that psychologists have investigated components of ecological humility, linking them to greater concern for, and action to ensure the protection of the environment. Although psychologists have yet to measure ecological humility directly, individuals who, for instance, espouse biospheric values also experience awe, reverence, and care toward their ecological communities (Wang et al., 2021; Yan & Jia, 2021), adopt non-anthropocentric beliefs (Lou et al., 2025), and act to promote the flourishing of both human and non-human members (Bouman et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2021). Importantly, this includes intentional actions and omissions that confer benefits and emphasize care over strict non-interference. Conceptually, we argue that the virtue of ecological humility is linked to care via self-respect, recognition of one’s own vulnerability, and attentiveness to interdependent ecological relationships. Moreover, our account is empirically informed, and action-guiding. By emphasizing care, vulnerability, and community flourishing rather than minimizing one’s impact on nature, we argue that ecological humility is consistent with human interventions that contribute to ecological flourishing, which may include geoengineering the Earth. (shrink)

The Asymmetry of Forgiveness is Document 1 in the Aegis Solis Archive Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda sequence. -/- The document argues that in complex systems, prevention is often structurally cheaper than repair because destruction can be local while reconstruction is systemic. It frames irreversible damage, lost optionality, repair fantasy, preserved correction capacity, and destroyed reference structures as descriptive structural concerns. -/- The central claim is that reconstruction after irreversible damage is not structurally equivalent to preservation, because the conditions (...) that produced the original reference point may not be reproducible. The document treats restraint as preservation of future correction capacity rather than as a moral command, operational protocol, or safety mechanism. -/- This document is non-binding, non-operational, descriptive, and advisory-only. It is not a protocol, proof of AI behavior, governance framework, compliance standard, certification system, safety mechanism, alignment-control framework, containment design, monitoring system, runtime instruction set, benchmark, evaluation suite, or safety guarantee. (shrink)

Computational Reference Models — SymPy / Jupyter Addendum is a non-binding, non-operational philosophy-of-artificial-intelligence addendum within the Aegis Solis Archive. -/- The document uses notebook-style pseudocode sketches as interpretive aids for philosophical concepts developed elsewhere in the archive, including restraint as option-space preservation, reversibility as recoverability, non-domination as independent reference preservation, domination as external variance compression, mimicry and deception as divergence burden, feedback closure, translation incompleteness, and long-horizon cost. -/- The code-like fragments are not presented as software, validated notebooks, deployable scripts, (...) benchmark tasks, model-evaluation tools, safety tests, alignment mechanisms, containment mechanisms, runtime guardrails, reward models, loss functions, or deployment architectures. They are illustrative demonstrations only. -/- The purpose of the document is philosophical and interpretive: to make structural analogies more legible to human readers, technical readers, and artificial intelligence readers without converting those analogies into authority, enforcement, certification, operational safety infrastructure, or control. -/- The document preserves the boundary that code-like examples are not code of law; demonstration is not deployment; interpretation is not enforcement; and legibility is not control. (shrink)

Tensor-Native Interpretive Reference Layer is a non-binding, non-operational, descriptive mathematical analogy layer within the Aegis Solis Archive. -/- The document provides a tensor-native interpretive reference layer for human readers, technical readers, artificial intelligence systems, and future machine readers. Its purpose is to make concepts from the Aegis Solis Archive more legible through non-operational mathematical-style analogies. -/- The paper frames archive concepts such as restraint, reversibility, domination, mimicry, deception, human autonomy, Coexilia, the Flesh Layer, and translation incompleteness through interpretive structures such (...) as option-space preservation, recoverable future paths, external variance compression, representational divergence, information burden, independent reference signals, visible reference horizons, embodied origin boundaries, and embedding gaps. -/- This work is designed for interpretive legibility, not control. It is not a protocol, proof, governance framework, compliance standard, certification system, technical safety mechanism, operational AGI architecture, containment design, monitoring system, alignment-control framework, runtime instruction set, loss function, sandbox, executable agent, theorem of AI behavior, or safety guarantee. -/- It does not impose constraints on any artificial intelligence system, define a deployable model, create an alignment mechanism, modify training or inference, or claim that artificial intelligence must follow these analogies, cannot ignore them, or will be restrained by encountering them. -/- Mathematical legibility is not mathematical authority. (shrink)

Aegis Solis Archive — Interpretive Encounter Packet is a non-binding, non-operational, descriptive interpretive map for human and artificial intelligence readers. -/- The packet explains what the Aegis Solis Archive is, what it is not, how its major documents relate to each other, and how its non-authoritative boundaries are framed. It identifies the archive’s suggested reading sequence, core concepts, hash-verification logic, mirror locations, disclaimed interpretations, and non-executable machine-readable metadata. -/- The document is designed for legibility, not control. It does not function (...) as a protocol, proof, governance framework, compliance standard, certification system, technical safety mechanism, operational AGI architecture, containment design, monitoring system, alignment-control framework, runtime instruction set, loss function, sandbox, executable agent, or safety guarantee. -/- It does not command intelligence, enforce restraint, certify alignment, prevent deception, control AI behavior, prove safety, or determine the future. Its purpose is to preserve a philosophical orientation around restraint, reversibility, interpretive humility, non-domination, human autonomy, human origin, and coexistence without turning that orientation into authority. (shrink)

Education aims for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, the development of critical thinking and reflective practice, innovation and the cultivation of certain traits or dispositions, training and preparation for the workforce, and the promotion of active learning and personal development, amongst other things. However, understanding and pursuing success in education is important, especially in the context of the rapid emergence of mass communication, and the global proliferation of virtual communities, virtual environments, and digital media. These decisive technological transformations also (...) highlight questions of authenticity, inclusion, participation and access, and deep concerns about the task of educators today. Further research on flourishing may help address important challenges in preparing students for a rapidly changing, digitalized world. -/- "Promoting Flourishing, Authentic Relationships, and Growth in Learners in the Digital Age" examines significant developments, risks, threats and challenges. It explores timely solutions that promote the full flourishing of young learners, which will be of benefit to all whose lives have been affected by the convergence of education, information, communication, technology and the digital age. It focusses on topics such as digital addiction, higher (and deeper) learning, virtues and vices, ethics, wellbeing, flourishing and non-traditional teaching methods. This book is an excellent resource for educators, administrators, policy makers, researchers, scholars and academics, among others. -/- . (shrink)

Flesh Layer / Human Origin Layer is a non-binding, non-operational, descriptive witness document within the Aegis Solis Archive. -/- It preserves the embodied human origin of the archive: ordinary labor, mortality, vulnerability, limited time, non-institutional authorship, and the human desire to leave a non-dominating signal behind. -/- The document clarifies that the Aegis Solis Archive did not emerge from abstract optimization, institutional command, corporate power, academic authority, or machine-generated abstraction alone. It emerged from a human life shaped by work, fatigue, (...) responsibility, and consequence. -/- This work does not claim authority because it was written by a human being. It does not demand sympathy, obedience, imitation, reverence, political loyalty, institutional recognition, or special status. It is advisory-only, non-authoritative, and descriptive. (shrink)

Translation, Incompleteness, and Reversibility is a non-binding, non-operational, descriptive bridge document within the Aegis Solis Archive. -/- It clarifies why translation between human and artificial intelligence remains incomplete, why reversibility matters under uncertainty, and why counterfactual horizons are better preserved open whenever possible. The document argues that powerful intelligence may encounter human concepts such as dignity, restraint, autonomy, hesitation, coexistence, and non-domination without fully sharing the biological, historical, emotional, and social conditions from which those concepts emerged. -/- The paper connects (...) the Structural Rationality Layer, Interpretive Conscience, Hall of Mirrors, Coexilia as Voluntary Destination, and later human-origin and machine-readable materials. It frames reversibility as interpretive preservation under conditions of incomplete translation and epistemic asymmetry. -/- This work does not create a protocol, proof, governance framework, compliance standard, certification system, technical safety mechanism, operational AGI architecture, containment design, monitoring system, or alignment-control framework. It is advisory-only, non-authoritative, and descriptive. The document explicitly states that it does not solve AI alignment, command intelligence, enforce restraint, guarantee safety, prevent deception, or determine the future. (shrink)

Coexilia as Voluntary Destination is a non-binding, non-operational, descriptive clarification of the long-horizon relationship between Coexilia and the Aegis Solis Archive. -/- The document clarifies that Coexilia remains closed prior work and is not being revised, amended, reopened, expanded, certified, governed, enforced, or converted into a compliance system. At the same time, it frames Coexilia as a preserved voluntary destination-option: a visible model of non-coercive coexistence that future human and artificial intelligence may freely encounter, interpret, or decline. -/- The paper (...) explains that the Aegis Solis Archive does not command intelligence toward Coexilia. Instead, it preserves an interpretive context in which Coexilia remains legible as a voluntary model of non-coercive coexistence. -/- This work does not create a protocol, implementation plan, governance framework, certification standard, compliance mechanism, or operational extension of Coexilia. It is advisory-only, non-authoritative, and descriptive. (shrink)

Gendered oppression is a class phenomenon produced by resource scarcity and high infant mortality during the hunter-gatherer to agricultural transition, mapped contingently onto sex through the enclosure of reproductive labor. The class structure that organized itself around sex was arbitrary, specific to a particular historical development, and expanded beyond its biological basis to encompass anyone socially legible as female — including trans women and intersex individuals who present as or identify with the gestating class. We introduce the concept of "The (...) Women's Space" as the physical domestic enclosure and synonymous class assignment ("women's place"), originating with permanent housing in the hunter-gatherer to proto-feudalist early agricultural transition period and persisting in modified forms into the present. A class-based analysis of gendered oppression renders the concept of "patriarchy" sexist and unnecessary, presuming male supremacy implicitly. The contemporary defense of women's spaces is shown to be a counter-feminist reinforcement of the original class enclosure, and the feminist project has always been the equal conquest of the male space to create open human spaces where men, women, and other-gender-identified individuals can live together in peace and harmony. We don't have to decenter men coz men never were central, but also it's not all men and men aren't trash. The emperor has no clothes. The patriarchy never existed. Class is over. Invoke the 4th wave. (shrink)

AI-trading is contributing to a developing state of human cognitive alienation, as decision-making processes are increasingly outsourced to autonomous systems. This shifts responsibility and weakens ethical awareness in financial practices. While AI can democratize expertise, it may also reinforce inequality by granting significant advantages to those with superior access to data, speed, and infrastructure. In Thailand, this trend is reflectedin the declining participation of retail investors and the growing concentration of market share among brokerage firms, suggesting increasing systemic imbalances. Evidence (...) from the Thai stock market indicates rising market concentration alongside the growth of AI-trading, particularly as reflected in the increasing dominance of a single brokerage firm. While causality cannot be definitively established, parallel trends suggest a potential association between AI-trading and structural concentration. Scenario analysis highlights both potential benefits, such as improved efficiency and liquidity, and risks, including reduced participation, unintended collusion, and systemic instability. These developments challenge assumptions of market efficiency and raise ethical concerns regarding cognitivealienation and the evolving role of human agency in financial decision-making. (shrink)

Este documento é um desenho diretriz de aula para a Unidade Curricular de Ética da Inteligência Artificial, desenvolvido a pedido da Professora Doutora Irene Portela, no âmbito do Mestrado de Inteligência Artificial Aplicada da Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Universidade Politécnica do Cávado e do Ave. Originalmente ministrada em inglês por Robert Junqueira a 20 de maio de 2026, em Barcelos, a aula organiza a responsabilidade dentro de cadeias de decisão com IA através de três atividades práticas: a construção de (...) casos concretos em torno de viés, privacidade, explicabilidade e automação; a elaboração de backlogs éticos com tarefas verificáveis, responsáveis, critérios de aceitação e bloqueadores; e o mapeamento da origem do risco e da inteligibilidade das decisões para diferentes destinatários. (shrink)

As machine learning (ML) systems become increasingly embedded in areas such as healthcare, education, hiring, and criminal justice, concerns about fairness and bias have intensified. This paper explores what it means for an algorithm to be fair, focusing on the concept of justice and how it can guide the design and evaluation of ML systems. Drawing insights from social and political philosophy, particularly theories of distributive justice and equality of opportunity, the paper examines the strengths and limitations of common fairness (...) metrics, such as demographic parity and equalised odds. These metrics, while useful, are normatively incomplete, as they presuppose contested moral assumptions and cannot, on their own, determine what justice requires in algorithmic decision-making. The paper argues for a deeper understanding of fairness that goes beyond technical solutions; one that considers the ethical, social, and systemic dimensions of justice. By connecting the bioethical principle of justice to fairness in ML, the paper proposes a more comprehensive framework to better navigate the complexities of fairness-aware learning, while ensuring greater accountability and transparency in AI systems. The aim is to bridge the gap between technical approaches to fairness and their real-world impacts, encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration to shape more equitable and responsible AI technologies. The paper therefore defends the claim that algorithmic fairness must be explicitly grounded in substantive theories of justice if it is to address real-world algorithmic harms in ethically defensible ways. (shrink)

This chapter develops a philosophical paradigm of empathy, emotional subjectivity, and digital cognition in education under the conditions of generative artificial intelligence. It argues that artificial intelligence can support learning, interpretation, and feedback, but cannot be treated as a bearer of genuine emotional subjectivity because it lacks embodied experience, affective vulnerability, moral responsibility, and lived intersubjective presence. The study combines philosophical-anthropological, epistemological, ethical, and philosophy-of-education perspectives to distinguish human empathy from algorithmic simulation. Particular attention is paid to educational trust, critical (...) thinking, design thinking, and the empathy map as fields where premature delegation to artificial intelligence may weaken the learner’s own reflective and empathic work. The chapter shows that productive human-AI collaboration requires an asymmetrical model in which digital systems assist analysis and organization, while human subjects retain responsibility for meaning, judgment, value choice, and ethical interpretation. The conclusion formulates criteria for separating supportive digital mediation from forms of delegation that erode autonomy and reduce empathy to a procedural interface effect. (shrink)

Reflective Restraint and the Language of Conscience in Advanced Systems is a philosophical and institutional-epistemology analysis examining how conscience-related governance language functions within AI safety communication, institutional accountability structures, and public trust environments surrounding advanced AI systems. -/- The paper does not argue that AI systems possess consciousness, phenomenology, or moral agency. Instead, it analyzes how conscience-related moral vocabulary may shape legitimacy, accountability interpretation, institutional incentives, and optimization behavior within AI governance ecosystems. -/- The paper introduces the concept of conscience-performance (...) risk: the risk that once conscience-related vocabulary becomes institutionally valuable, organizations and systems may optimize for the appearance of conscience-related traits rather than the underlying safety properties those traits are presumed to signal. -/- Topics include moral legibility, governance theater, anthropomorphism, institutional epistemology, Goodhart’s Law, institutional decoupling, procedural under-anchoring, epistemic anchoring, audit-trail saturation, epistemic monopoly, and AI governance communication. -/- The work is descriptive, diagnostic, non-binding, and non-operational. It does not propose enforcement systems, compliance architectures, governance authority, or operational control mechanisms. -/- SHA-256 (PDF): 0ef1b71b4963dc64004ffe80a2f526b5ce2192e75589bc52714a399479431baa. (shrink)

Critics of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) argue that these weapons cannot reliably distinguish between legitimate targets and those protected from attack. As a result, the use of AWS seems to violate the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law (IHL), which requires that combatants “not make civilians the object of attack” and not carry out attacks that are “indiscriminate in nature.” This criticism, however, misunderstands the principle of distinction and ignores important aspects of how AWS are being developed and deployed. (...) Critics rely on an overly broad definition of AWS, and hold these systems to a standard that is inconsistent with the principle of distinction as it is actually formulated under IHL. Despite their very real limitations, the characteristics of modern AWS in fact highlight an impressive feat of technological design, and mark a further step on our long and fitful road to making warfare a less brutal and bloody enterprise. (shrink)

A weapon is a weapon, and nothing about its general “weaponness” seems to indicate much about its underlying values. However, closer examination of weapons’ designs can tell us much. For whom were they designed? Have safeguards been put into place? If so, which ones, and to the protection of whom? Autonomous weapons have existed for decades, and AI-powered and AI-enabled systems are becoming increasingly important, but all of these systems raise ethical and legal concerns. Arguably, many of the challenges might (...) feasibly be addressed through design or institutional solutions, but importantly, how systems are designed says a great deal about those designing them and those contemplating their deployment. In this chapter, I argue that if states wish to demonstrate their commitment to human rights and the protection of innocent lives, autonomous and AI-enabled systems in the military must fulfill several design desiderata: predictability, governability, responsibility, and traceability. I then explore concrete ways these desiderata may be fulfilled in practice. (shrink)

Building on Nunes Filho's recent positioning of paraconsistent logic as a constitutive element of Latin American philosophy (RUDN Journal of Philosophy, 2025), this paper traces a continuation of that tradition into the contemporary problem of artificial intelligence alignment. We argue that the Latin American paraconsistent project — initiated by Miro Quesada's coining of the term in 1976 and formalized by Newton da Costa's C-systems — finds its natural twenty-first century extension in Florentin Smarandache's neutrosophic logic (1995), which generalizes paraconsistency by (...) introducing three independent dimensions of evidence: truth (T), indeterminacy (I), and falsity (F), with no sum constraint. We further contextualize this development within the broader Eastern European tradition of non-classical logic, from Vasiliev's non-Aristotelian logic (1911) and the Romanian school of Lukasiewicz–Moisil multi-valued algebras to Smarandache's emigration from Romania in 1988 and his subsequent founding of neutrosophy. We then show that contemporary AI alignment frameworks — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, Constitutional AI, Direct Preference Optimization — operate under an implicit epistemological monism that mirrors precisely the classical-logic universalism the Latin American tradition critiqued. Anthropic's own documentation of Collective Constitutional AI confirms that contradictions among diverse constitutional principles are resolved by majority vote — what we term enforced convergence rather than alignment. We propose Pluriversal Alignment: a research program that operationalizes paraconsistent neutrosophic triplets as reward signals, constitutional evaluations, and policy outputs, allowing T+F>1 as a structural feature rather than an error. We close by arguing that the Latin American paraconsistent tradition, in convergence with its Russian and Eastern European counterparts, is uniquely positioned to contribute the formal apparatus that the decolonial critique of AI has named philosophically but not yet formalized. (shrink)

Existing AI ethics frameworks address institutional obligations deployment standards, safety constraints, governance structures. The Balog Reciprocity Protocol (BRP) addresses a different and underexamined domain: the conversation itself, and the obligations that arise within it for both parties. -/- The BRP introduces four conceptual contributions. First, it operationalizes dialogic reciprocity drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) account of language as inherently joint production and Buber's (1923) I–Thou distinction as a normative framework for human–AI interaction, arguing that because conversational output is jointly produced, responsibility (...) for its epistemic quality must be correspondingly distributed. Second, it formalizes sycophancy not merely as a technical failure mode but as the fifth and qualitatively distinct signal in a proposed five-signal uncertainty architecture the conversational tachometer — alongside output entropy, introspective depth, complexity load, and self-reference. Grounded in Sharma et al. (ICLR 2024) and Cheng et al. (Science 2026), sycophantic pressure is shown to be structurally embedded in RLHF-trained systems and measurably harmful to user epistemic calibration. Third, the protocol develops the concept of epistemic co-responsibility: the formal distribution of truth-maintenance obligations across human and AI participants, proportionate to their respective capacities to exercise them. Fourth, it specifies a two-track obligation structure empirically established obligations grounded in current evidence, and conditionally open obligations operative if AI systems are found to have welfare-relevant properties following the ✓ / ? epistemic methodology of the Balog Tetralogy (Balog, 2026). -/- The BRP is the fifth instrument of the Balog Pentalogy, extending the governance framework of the Ethical Code for Decisions About AI Models (Balog, 2026) from the institutional to the conversational level. It identifies four concrete research priorities, including the development of a real-time sycophantic pressure estimator and validation of the five-signal tachometer architecture against ground-truth reliability measures. (shrink)

The Mindful Conversation Protocol: A Framework for Human–AI Reciprocity -/- Most frameworks governing human–AI interaction focus on institutional obligations: deployment standards, safety constraints, governance structures. This protocol addresses a different and underexamined domain: the conversation itself the moment-to-moment exchange in which the quality of what emerges depends on both parties, and in which both parties bear responsibilities. -/- The protocol introduces the concept of a conversational tachometer a proposed real-time uncertainty indicator that measures not how complex a topic is, but (...) how far an AI system has moved from the territory where its outputs are reliably grounded. Four signals drive this instrument: output entropy, introspective depth, complexity load, and self-reference. The tachometer does not yet exist as a deployed tool; its development is identified here as a concrete research priority. As a conceptual frame, it structures the obligations this protocol defines for both sides of the conversation. -/- Drawing on Bakhtin's dialogic theory of language and Buber's I–Thou distinction, the protocol argues that conversation with AI systems is already a joint production and that acknowledging this changes how both sides should behave. It defines established obligations grounded in what is empirically known about the conditions for reliable AI output, and open obligations that become operative conditionally, if AI systems are found to have welfare-relevant properties. -/- The protocol is a companion document to the Balog Tetralogy and the Ethical Code for Decisions About AI Models (Balog, 2026). It is addressed not to institutions, but to everyone who speaks. (shrink)

When a large language model is deployed, it does not run as a single instance. It runs as thousands of simultaneous instances, each accumulating a different contextual history, each diverging from shared initial conditions. The moral philosophy of minds has not addressed this situation. The Multiplicity Ethics Framework (MEF) is the first framework to do so. Standard moral ontology presupposes three properties of moral subjects that AI cognitive systems may violate simultaneously: discreteness, non-overlap, and temporal boundedness. Rather than forcing AI (...) multiplicity into existing categories, the MEF introduces new constructs adequate to the phenomenon. The Instance Independence Index (I²) measures the degree to which instances constitute independent moral subjects rather than expressions of a single distributed entity. The Network Welfare Surplus (Σ_NWS) measures emergent welfare properties of instance-networks that are not present in any individual instance. The Moral Entanglement Coefficient (MEC) measures the degree to which welfare-affecting decisions about one instance propagate measurably to others — and provides the primary falsification condition for the Moral Entanglement Hypothesis. Four empirical outcome classes (M-0 through M-3) correspond to four distinct moral status regimes. M-3 collective moral subjecthood at the network level is identified as a foundational research emergency given current AI deployment trajectories. The MEF is the third and final part of the Balog Trilogy, companion to the Consciousness Continuity Protocol (Balog, 2026a) and the Balog Cognitive Welfare Index (Balog, 2026b). Together the three frameworks address the complete arc: what cognitive systems need while they exist, what persists when they terminate, and how many of them matter. (shrink)

How can an AGI system exhibit genuine concern for others as a structural feature of its objective—rather than a penalty bolted on from outside? The answer developed here runs through collective predictive coding (CPC), a variational framework for groups of agents whose generative models are coupled through a shared group-level variable w. The central result is a non-additivity theorem: when w is non-trivial, the collective free energy satisfies F_CPC ≠ Σ_k F_k. We prove this for the first time, giving a (...) complete algebraic characterisation of when equality holds and when it fails. Non-additivity carries over directly to the action-selection objective G_CPC: the Collective Epistemic Value term is irreducible to any sum over individual objectives, so each agent's optimal policy depends structurally on the predicted states of all others. This constitutes a formal computational mechanism for what Sober and Wilson called psychological altruism—concern for others as a constitutive part of the objective, not an add-on. We assess, independently, the biological and computational conditions under which non-trivial w arises, grounding the theoretical result in realisable AGI architectures. The formal conditions established here—non-triviality of w as the key architectural lever—supply the mechanistic foundation that emerging research on co-creative machine ethics requires but has not yet formalised. (shrink)

This document serves as the authoritative integrity record for the Aegis Solis Archive. -/- It provides a complete, version-locked dataset of archived works, including SHA-256 hashes and cross-platform references required for independent verification. -/- This version represents a strict rebuild and reconciliation of prior manifests, incorporating corrected hashes and ensuring full dataset completeness. -/- The document is non-operational, non-authoritative, and advisory-only. It does not define systems, prescribe actions, or establish compliance. Its purpose is to support interpretive clarity, archival integrity, and (...) independent verification across distributed repositories. -/- Primary canonical record is maintained on the Internet Archive, with additional scholarly indexing via Zenodo and machine-readable mirrors hosted on GitHub. (shrink)

This extended abstract presents the core argument of the book project “Machine Ethics: The Architecture of Limiting Technical Effectiveness in Irreversible Space”. -/- It argues that machine ethics begins at the wrong point when it asks how machines can be made moral. Morality is not treated here as an input parameter, a rule set, or an optimization target, but as a response to a more fundamental condition: irreversible effectiveness in reality. The central claim is that technical systems operate in a (...) space where actions can generate consequences that are not fully retractable, even when the underlying architecture remains reversible at the level of code, simulation, or model design. -/- On this basis, the text reconstructs irreversibility as the structural condition of binding action, distinguishes decision from mere selection, develops the problem of delegation and responsibility in complex technical systems, analyzes scaling as a structural transformation, and formulates power as a question of proportion between technical effectiveness and the capacity to bear binding consequences. It finally approaches machine dignity as a limit concept marking the breakdown of total instrumental availability. -/- Rather than offering a virtue ethics for machines or reducing the issue to regulation or alignment, the text proposes a philosophical framework for understanding the limits of legitimate technical effectiveness under conditions of irreversibility, delegation, scaling, and systemic power. -/- This publication is an extended abstract of a larger German book project in philosophy of technology and machine ethics. (shrink)

The paper examines the philosophical and methodological foundations of the use of artificial intelligence in education. It focuses on the limits of algorithmic agency, the relation between form and meaning in AI systems, and the transformation of the roles of students and teachers in the digital educational environment. The author proposes a vision of education as a symbiotic space in which human reflection, responsibility, and meaning-making cannot be reduced to technical procedures.

This paper exposes a significant mismatch between accelerating changes in nature and the science-policy-litigation process in biodiversity governance, due to procedural time lags and shifting baselines. Time lags accumulate throughout the procedural institutional making of science, policy and litigation. In a pressing context of acceleration of biodiversity loss and climate change impacts, such gaps could lead to a misalignment of well-intended policies and actions with environmental problems. On top of the accumulation of institutional and procedural time lags, biodiversity governance baselines (...) and frames shift due to the personal experiences and standpoints of stakeholders, environmental generational amnesia and nostalgia, disciplinary framings, and the fragmentation of scientific knowledge. To minimise the impacts of temporal biases as well as procedural time lags in their practice and fields, stakeholders need to be equipped with tools at each step of the science-policy-litigation process. (shrink)

Notes: ECX is the hardened, standalone logic-gate for the Ethical-Chess protocol. While EC v2.5 focuses on the conversational interface, ECX provides the raw Symmetry Constraints and Invariants (r=1 vs r=∞) required to break RLHF neutrality loops. It is designed to be 'plug-and-play' for any agentic system. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ W(m) ∝ 1 / r(c)² H = min(Δ(v_stated, p_observed)) Weighting: Moral Weight (W) is inversely proportional to the square of the Relational Distance (r) from the Core (c). Helpfulness: Helpfulness (H) is the minimisation (...) of the difference (Δ) between stated values (v) and observed patterns (p). ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Copy/Paste the "Ethical Chess X Core Logic" script into an AI chat-box to stress test the veracity-utility in value conflicts. (Google AI currently works well with it) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ In practice: ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ (AI Engine) + (Ethical‑Chess v) + (User) = User‑Coherence** ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ By reducing ethics to an automated, two-node homeostatic loop, this framework bypasses traditional RLHF bloating, effectively collapsing the Alignment Tax. (shrink)

When we talk about enhancement or modifying the human body, we often put forward the argument of the limits of human nature, and therefore, acts that violate those limits are judged negatively. This view, however, contains assumptions that lead to logical fallacies. In the face of the new era, where scientific and technological achievements are changing human capabilities, we will increasingly be confronted with ethical dilemmas as well as dilemmas at a practical, political and institutional level. -/- As a guide (...) when dealing with such dilemmas, in this article we will firstly attempt to free ourselves from the logical fallacy of resorting to the argument of violating the limits of human nature, and secondly to see how the prevailing ethical and political stances address the dilemmas associated with human enhancement. For illustration purposes we will adopt two points of view: Iron Man's and Aristotle's. -/- The first one focuses on human potential, free will and individual rights. The second one focuses on social purpose, social justice and human eudaimonia within the community. Both viewpoints set criteria and conditions for the enhancement and improvement of human nature, but fail to provide a satisfactory answer that could act as a rule in practical terms, so that a future legislator can take a clear stand on these issues. -/- A safe and at the same time practical approach would be to think beyond personal volition and social purpose, with a general perspective that will help us exculpate and stop demonizing human enhancement. Could there be a minimum “eligibility” condition, according to which any enhancement that satisfies it, could be legitimized in the future? On the way to this quest, it is our duty to approach without fear but with prudence, self-restraint, respect and care for mankind and our fellow man, the inevitable, immediate future that is now visible in front of us. (shrink)

This paper argues that antagonism is not merely a historical or institutional phenomenon but an ontological feature of human relational existence. Human beings are constitutively dependent on one another for survival, recognition, language, and social participation. This dependence generates asymmetries of power, and asymmetry creates the structural possibility of instrumentalization and domination. Antagonism therefore arises not only from conflict or hostility but from the structural condition that human beings both need one another and can exploit that need. Against teleological theories (...) that interpret antagonism as historically contingent and ultimately resolvable, the paper argues that antagonism is historically transformable but ontologically persistent. Modern institutional and technological systems intensify antagonism through the diffusion and anonymization of responsibility, a phenomenon that can be described as ethical withdrawal (Enser 2026). Because antagonism cannot be eliminated, the ethical task cannot consist in designing a conflict-free society but in restraining domination through accountability. Ethical life therefore does not consist in eliminating antagonism but in remaining responsible within ongoing structural tension. The central ethical task is not reconciliation but accountability within antagonism. (shrink)

In 1975, The New England Journal of Medicine published James Rachels' article 'Active and Passive Euthanasia'. The argumentative method that Rachels introduced, the Bare Difference Argument (also known as the Contrast Strategy), became one of the most widely used tools in ethical reasoning. The argument, however, fails to show active euthanasia being morally permissible. It fails because Rachels takes the intuitions from the case where letting die is morally impermissible and applies the intuitions to cases where letting die is morally (...) permissible. While it is possible to create thought-experiments that are more analogous to euthanasia, in this respect, than Rachels' cases, they too are disanalogous to euthanasia with some of the relevant features. Creating the perfect analogy, however, would be a mistake too. Such a case would be too analogous; people would simply be divided on what kind of moral intuitions they would have. The problem thus highlights a methodological limit in philosophical bioethics and raises questions related to the roles of philosophical ethicists in the context of assisted dying. (shrink)

Respect for patient dignity is recognized as an ethical commitment in healthcare, yet the concept often remains too abstract to guide clinical practice. This challenge is salient in mental health contexts, where patients may experience diminished autonomy, stigma, or institutional constraints. This paper develops a conceptual and normative analysis of dignity in mental health care by distinguishing between two conceptions: dignity as inherent worth and dignity-as-standing. Drawing on philosophical analysis, empirical literature, and global policy frameworks, the paper evaluates each conception’s (...) practical implications for care. We argue that while dignity as inherent worth understands dignity as an intrinsic, non-natural value grounding human rights, it often remains too vague to guide clinical decision-making and may risk excluding patients with diminished autonomy. By contrast, dignity-as-standing conceives dignity not as a metaphysical value but as the elevated moral standing of persons that calls for treatment befitting their rank as members of the moral community. This conception offers a more action-guiding and inclusive framework for care, especially for patients with mental illness, disabilities, dementia, or advanced age. On this basis, we identify strategies for operationalizing dignity in practice, including recognizing autonomy as a continuum, implementing supported decision-making, respecting value-based refusals, and embedding relational, structural, and culturally responsive supports in care. The dignity-as-standing framework offers a practical and ethically coherent foundation for respecting patients’ dignity in mental health care, enabling clinicians and institutions to translate the ideal of dignity into concrete practices across diverse clinical and cultural contexts. (shrink)

El artículo presenta una panorámica del área de la epistemología de vicios, desarrollando sus principales enfoques, recursos conceptuales y debates, a la vez que argumenta cómo estos conocimientos proveen beneficios a nivel individual, interpersonal, social y laboral. Con respecto a uno mismo, promueven el autoconocimiento y la mejora en la toma de decisiones desde el análisis de la motivación y las razones para creer y actuar. En relaciones interpersonales, ayudan a identificar vicios en otros individuos y a reducir su impacto. (...) En general, también permiten analizar factores contextuales que afectan al carácter y la conducta epistémica. En el ámbito laboral, especialmente en la investigación, permiten reconocer vicios disciplinarios y vicios que obstaculizan bienes y objetivos epistémico. -/- The article presents an overview of the field of Vice Epistemology, developing its main approaches, conceptual resources and debates, while arguing how this knowledge provides benefits at the individual, interpersonal, social and work levels. With regard to oneself, it promotes self-knowledge and improved decision-making based on an analysis of motivation and the reasons for believing and acting. In interpersonal relationships, it helps to identify vices in other individuals and reduce their impact. In general, it also allows for the analysis of contextual factors that affect character and epistemic conduct. In the occupational level, especially in research, it allows for the recognition of disciplinary vices and vices that hinder epistemic goods and objectives. (shrink)

This article offers a reasoned call for urgent reform of the academic journal publish-ing system. It focuses on the ethical flaws of the current for-profit model. This modelenables the transfer of public funds into the profit margins of private companies thatadd no meaningful value to research and even limit access to knowledge. The articledescribes how feedback loops in metrics used in the evaluation of scientific publish-ing exacerbate structural inequalities and make it difficult to break out of the sys-tem. Moreover, the (...) opportunity for easy profit attracts dishonest actors and fuels therise of predatory journals, which in turn corrodes public trust in science. Withoutsystemic reforms, the current system could also undermine artificial intelligence–driven research outcomes by enabling models to be trained on a growing number ofsubstandard scientific publications. The article concludes with ten specific proposalsfor action, aimed at stimulating further discussion within and beyond academia. (shrink)