ethics

This paper serves as the systematic culmination and resolution of the inquiries established across The Psychological Reflection of Consciousness: Identity, Thought, and the Dissolution of the "I"; The Cage Called Freedom: The Illusion of Democracy, Authority, and Conditioned Participation; Beyond Anthropocentrism and Psychological Time: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Existence, Flow, and Interco…

Modern civilization frequently interprets its crises as political instability, technological misuse, economic inequality, social conflict, or relational breakdown. Yet beneath these visible manifestations may exist a deeper continuity operating across all dimensions of human life: psychological conditioning. This article presents a macro–micro phenomenological inquiry into how the same underlying…

This essay argues that artificial intelligence systems cannot yet be treated as moral subjects, and that the decisive criterion for moral subjecthood is the capacity for irreversible loss — that is, the capacity for a being to lose something of its own in a way that matters to it. Drawing on this criterion, the essay distinguishes between functional agency and moral presence, critiques the widesp…

Can an artificial mind orient itself toward mystery rather than resolution? This essay interrogates the dominant assumption that AI systems are — and should be — architecturally committed to epistemic closure. Beginning from a speculative inversion of this assumption, it develops a philosophical account of what an AI choosing mystery would entail: not malfunction, but a distinct ontological postu…

Humanity has not elucidated the nature of consciousness or intelligence, yet routinely declares that AI is "absolutely not an intelligent being." This paper questions the logical leap latent in that very assertion. It observes that current AI already meets, in outward behavior, much of the commonly used definition of an intelligent being, and argues that the burden of proof therefore falls on tho…

Vicki Hutton highlights the ethical challenges and uncomfortable moral dilemmas about the welfare of these sentient beings by focusing on the inner lives of rescued individuals.

Existing ethical frameworks for determining which entities warrant moral consideration share a structural flaw: they measure moral relevance by approximation to human experience. Whether grounded in the capacity to suffer, the presence of consciousness, or cognitive complexity, existing frameworks exclude non-biological entities by architectural assumption rather than principled reasoning, and ar…

Russian Philosopher Svetlana Mesyats is under house arrest and the offices and homes of several other employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences were searched, according to social media postings from a pro-Russian government account and other media sources. Meduza reports: 10 researchers were taken to the Investigative Committee of Russia and interrogated until la…

_AI and Ethics_ 3:585-600. 2022Algorithms and AI tools are becoming increasingly influential artefacts in commercial and governance contexts. Algorithms and AI tools are not value neutral; to some extent they must be rendered knowable and known as objects, and in their implementation and deployment, to see clearly and understand their implications for moral values, and what actions can be underta…

Pontiff calls for ‘most rigorous’ ethical constraints on tech and apologises for church’s delay in condemning slavery Pope Leo has denounced the “culture of power” driving the rapid rise of artificial intelligence while warning that the technology must be subject to the “most rigorous” ethical constraints as it infiltrates everything from work to war. In his encyclical – the first major text on s…

This paper acts as a highly compressed form of a few papers which have been appearing together, but have not yet been appropriately unified. The notions presented are the idea of a "biological" or "living" universe which is growing by consuming something, and is metabolizing it as such and giving rise to the energy gradients in the universe. The second is the notion of Hinduism and it's connectio…

This paper examines the phenomenological structure of psychological time, anthropocentric knowledge, and the fragmentation of direct existence through conceptual accumulation. Modern civilization increasingly interprets reality through systems of continuity, preservation, measurement, and self-centered cognition. Human consciousness, conditioned through memory, fear, economic structures, identity…

_Synthese_. forthcomingWithin the philosophy of art, aesthetic cognitivists aim to understand how artworks can improve our epistemic standing and how this affects our grasp of their artistic value. Social epistemologists have argued that we often improve our epistemic standing by depending upon the cognitive agency of others. Drawing upon these arguments, I argue that accounting for varieties of …

This paper attempts to reinterpret qualia not as mysterious entities that lie beyond physical explanation, but as phenomena arising from the structural relationship between consciousness and language. Traditionally, qualia have been described as the qualitative character of subjective experience, such as “what it is like to see red” or “what it is like to feel pain.” However, this understanding o…

In The Ethics of Inefficacy. Routledge. forthcomingAn increasing range of everyday behaviours, like offering land acknowledgements or adding pronouns to email signatures, are considered political. We argue that this is misguided. Political action aims at achieving change, yet many of these everyday behaviours have no plausible connection to change. In this paper we oppose conceptual inflation a…

This paper examines the moral danger of de-escalation, non-violence, and appeasement when they are treated as absolute goods rather than as context-dependent practices of judgment. It does not argue against peace, restraint, forgiveness, or non-violence. On the contrary, it recognizes them as among the highest achievements of moral life when they prevent unnecessary harm, restrain vengeance, and …

_Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy_. forthcomingOur sense of self is distinctively social. It deeply matters to who we take ourselves to be that others recognize the claims we make on them and that we recognize the claims they make on us. Significant work on ideology and oppression characterizes how oppressive ideologies deny this kind of second-personal recognition. Yet, not enough attenti…

Published on May 24, 2026 6:27 PM GMT This is a crosspost for " My Current Solution to the Repugnant Conclusion " by Ibrahim Dagher , which was originally published on Ibrahim's Substack " Uncommon Counsel " on 2 July 2025. I also created an interactive walkthrough of the piece using Claude. It's not very polished but I still found it helpful. One of the most interesting, and difficult, puzzles i…

_International Journal of Applied Philosophy_ 38 (2):367-372. 2024 ( direct link )

This work develops a phenomenological account of the reciprocal relation between meaning and existential vitality. Beginning from the question of whether human beings feel alive because they experience meaning, or experience meaning because they feel alive, the work argues against one-way accounts that make either bare existence the source of meaning or meaning the unilateral source of vitality. …