School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemA Common Morality Approach for AI Ethics( 2023-12)Over the past ten years, more than 100 AI ethics documents have been published, each with their own unique framework of ethics principles. Recent research has shown, however, that these principles have been largely ineffective when it comes to providing moral guidance within the design and development of AI technology. What all these documents reveal philosophically is that the prevailing approach in AI ethics is the approach known as principlism. Principlism also happens to be the primary approach in bioethics. I start this thesis, therefore, by tracing the origins and history of principlism, which is found within the history of bioethics. In Chapter 2, I look at four different philosophical problems with principlism as an approach in applied ethics. In Chapter 3, I look specifically at one AI ethics document which has been developed explicitly around the four bioethics principles and therefore in accordance with principlism. I argue that the same four philosophical problems with principlism also pose problems for AI ethics as well. To overcome the problems in bioethics, some bioethicists have adopted the theory of common morality for grounding particular moral rules and principles and for developing a more systematic approach in applied and professional ethics. After examining one prominent version of the common morality in Chapter 4, I take the same approach by adopting the theory of common morality for AI ethics. In Chapter 5, I develop a theoretical framework that is designed specifically for the purposes of AI ethics. I then apply this framework to two different cases in AI ethics. Thus, Chapters 5 and 6 will be where I present a common morality approach to AI ethics. I conclude this thesis in Chapter 7 by critiquing the common morality approach against the four philosophical problems raised in Chapter 2. Ultimately, I argue that AI ethics ought to move beyond the approach of principlism and adopt the theory of common morality instead. By doing so, I believe AI ethics can overcome not only some of the philosophical problems facing principlism but can also be further developed into a more philosophically robust and systematic moral theory that can be used for addressing the ethics of artificial intelligence.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAbsolute Poverty and Human Rights: An Examination of Factual and Normative Issues surrounding Absolute World Poverty( 2023-11)In this thesis, I aim to explore factual and normative questions surrounding the problem of world poverty. In chapter 1, I ask the following questions: What is absolute poverty? What is the extent of absolute poverty? And what are the kinds of causes responsible for generating and sustaining poverty in the world? I define absolute poverty as material deprivation such that the individual lacks adequate access to the means of survival. These include lack of adequate drinking water, food, clothing, access to essential medical assistance, and shelter (adequate housing, in modern societies). I will now give an overview of each chapter in the thesis. In recent times, it has been popular among scholars to claim (1) that there is a negative duty not to benefit from injustice and that (2) this can be the basis of claiming that since the people and governments in western countries are harming the poor in some way, that therefore they must stop doing what is causing such harm and remedy the situation. The claim then consists of a theoretical question, that is, whether or not there is such a general duty of the kind that is claimed to exist; and the empirical claim that in fact the people and governments in western countries are implicated in harms that the world’s poor suffer from. Therefore, in chapters 2-3 I ask whether or not there is a general moral duty not to benefit from an injustice done by others. I argue that there is no such duty. But there is a duty not to harm others, which can give rise to a demand not to benefit from injustice on particular occasions, should other conditions also be met, which conditions I highlight in chapter 2. Chapter 3 is related to the negative thesis (denial of the claim presented that such a duty exists) of chapter 2, but also points out that claims of compensation for historical wrongs committed against peoples who may be appropriately linked to current victims is unlikely to be supported by sufficient evidence. Chapter 4 takes a look at relative poverty, or poverty relative to national standards, and draws on Rawlsian theory of primary social goods to argue that due to the nature of the work that many poor people are compelled (by lack of options) to do, they are greatly disadvantaged from gaining adequate amounts of essential goods such as self-respect, at least from their work, which is an important source of self-esteem in many people’s lives. In relation to the overall thesis, I point out that due to the role money plays in many societies in the world, that the link between possessing wealth and income of a certain degree has great impact on people’s self-esteem and also on their social status. In chapter 5, I present a case for the existence of a positive human right to be free from absolute poverty, which entails secure access to minimal material provisions. There I contrast different conceptions of human rights (Pogge’s institutionalist conception, Joseph Raz’s functionalist account, and James Griffin’s personhood account) and argue that using Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium we can reach a more or less coherent set of human rights one of which includes the right to be free from poverty of the kind that afflicts about half the world’s population. In chapter 5, I explore the institutionalist account by Pogge and point out some ways that institutions can be said to play an important role in realising human rights for all. Chapter 6 considers the impact of some global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF, for short) on exacerbating the condition of the poor. I also argue that understanding the story of how poverty has decreased over time requires our taking into account non-global developments such as China’s efforts in the 20th century to urbanise and reduce poverty in their country, but also reduction of poverty in parts of south-east Asia which were accelerated by their joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO) but which also had non-global components and preceded the creation of the WTO. I examine a thesis advanced by Thomas Pogge called the Feasible Alternative Thesis (FAT for short) and argue that for our global institutions to be just, we must ensure that the only human rights deficits that exist are those which fall outside the control of our institutions and which thus cannot be either reasonably avoided or foreseen (or both). This implies that our global institutions, such as the World Bank, and World Trade Organisation are unjust and harmful to the poor if they allow human rights deficits (e.g. lack of adequate material goods for people on whom this global order is imposed) to occur which these institutions could foresee and reasonably prevent. Let us begin with settling some factual questions concerning the nature of poverty and the kinds of causes which generate it (chapter 1) before taking a look at some related normative questions in chapter 2.
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ItemThe Sun Rising to the West: The Racialisation of Japan in the US during the Early 20th Century( 2023)'The Sun Rising to the West' traces how the United States understood Japan's rise from an insular nation into a powerful empire before the Second World War and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour which galvanised American understandings of the Japanese. This thesis specifically focuses on how Americans framed the Japanese as a race. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, this thesis shows how Japan's development into an industrialised and militarised nation forced both politicians and American anthropologists to reconsider the position of the Japanese with American conceptions of a racial hierarchy. Next, 'The Sun Rising to the West' explores a direct confrontation between American citizens and Japanese immigrants in California during the 'California Crisis', analysing how xenophobic attacks against the Japanese race were influenced by the growing power of Japan as a state. Finally, the thesis explores how African Americans reacted to Japan's proposal for a racial equality clause at the Paris Peace Conference, and how Black press understood Japan as a non-white power before the onset of the war. In doing so, 'The Sun Rising to the West' traces how significant race was to Americans in understanding the nation that would become their enemy.
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ItemFictions, Knowledge, and Justice( 2023-10)Fictions are a cornerstone of human cultures: they are created, shared, discussed, modified, and valued. Yet, philosophical accounts which privilege the ‘classical knower’ struggle to explain how fictions can affect us so deeply. Further, the fact that fictions seem to impact broader society and whole populations is largely overlooked, despite being observed in other disciplines. In this talk, I will draw on theories from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and epistemology to argue that fictions offer us epistemic resources of a unique kind, and that these resources lead to knowledge practices which can eventuate in harm."
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ItemBe a body: from experiential self-awareness to a truly bodily self( 2023-08)Dan Zahavi has defended a systematic and influential account of our most basic form of experiential self-consciousness, pre-reflective self-awareness (PRSA). For Zahavi, PRSA explicates the subtle way in which we are always immediately aware of the experiences we are having, are aware of them as being our experiences, and, in being so aware, are minimally self-aware. Zahavi’s model of PRSA (hereafter Z-PRSA) has proven influential in contemporary debates on the nature of self-consciousness and selfhood across analytic, Buddhist and continental philosophical traditions. However, one aspect of Zahavi’s model that is underdeveloped is its relation to the body. In his first major work, Self-Awareness and Alterity ([1999] 2020), Zahavi argued that Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily by drawing on the analyses of bodily self-experience developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Yet, in more recent works, Zahavi has either remained silent on the topic of the body or indicated newfound neutrality on the question of embodiment, without adequately accounting for this change. By contrast, over this period, body awareness has become the focal point of philosophical and empirical investigations into self-consciousness and minimal phenomenal selfhood. Various forms of body awareness have been proposed to play a foundational role in grounding self-consciousness: the sense of body ownership, proprioceptive self-awareness, interoceptive self-awareness, spatial self-awareness, and the implicit self-awareness we have in perceiving the world as ripe for bodily action. An important question arises of how these modalities of bodily self-consciousness relate to Z-PRSA. Should we identify Z-PRSA with one of these forms of bodily self-consciousness, in a deflationary move? Alternatively, does bodily self-consciousness constitute a phenomenological condition of possibility for Z-PRSA? To find an answer, in this thesis I examine a series of descriptive and transcendental phenomenological arguments to determine whether, as Zahavi originally claimed, Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily. I show first that Z-PRSA should not be identified with any of the above forms of bodily self-consciousness. Except for spatial self-awareness, they do not share with Z-PRSA its key phenomenological characteristics as a mode of awareness. While spatial self-awareness does, Zahavi’s strident opposition to any identity between it and Z-PRSA motivates me to consider an alternative connection between them: transcendental dependence. In evaluating Zahavi’s Husserlian enactivist argument from Self-Awareness and Alterity, I consider objections to its claim that object perception depends on spatial self-awareness, bodily movement, and kinaesthetic self-awareness. I show that Zahavi’s original argument for embodying Z-PRSA must be adapted to overcome an empirical challenge from cases of locked-in syndrome. While identifying a path for future research to more definitively determine the character of bodily experience in long-term locked-in syndrome, I provisionally conclude that the adapted argument succeeds in proving that Z-PRSA is only possible for a bodily subject of experience. Through my investigations, I aim to bring together a diversity of philosophical and empirical perspectives towards a perspicuous understanding of pre-reflective self-awareness and bodily self-experience.
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ItemThe Presence of Such Monsters: The Moral Arbitration of Sodomy Trials in Victoria's Colonial Press, 1859-1869( 2023)In the decade spanning 1859-1869, newspapers in colonial Victoria began telling lurid stories of sodomy trials and accusations. What provoked this shift from largely noting examples of this criminalised act, to engaging in extensive editorialising? "The Presence of Such Monsters" explores examples of nineteenth-century 'trial by media' as sites of moral arbitration intended, first and foremost, to establish and police the boundaries of the settler civic body: determining who could be reincorporated into respectable society, and who excised from it. Taking a case study approach to the trials of John Flannery, Dr. John Hulley, Ellen-John Wilson and Father Patrick Niall, it interrogates the significance of class in colonial formations of sexuality and gender.
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ItemEngage or balance? Competing visions for China in the George H. W. Bush administration’s national security strategy( 2023)This thesis examines the national security dimension of US China policy during the presidency of George H. W. Bush (1989-1993). In light of subsequent bilateral tensions, Bush’s controversial efforts to seek stable relations with Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the end of the Cold War warrant revisiting. Bush believed that Sino-American stability was necessary to resolve security issues such as non-proliferation. This served as the rationale for ‘engagement’ with Beijing, a policy continued by his successors. This thesis argues, however that segments of the intelligence and defence communities deviated from the president’s view after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In response to the display of US military supremacy over Iraqi forces in Kuwait, China quickly accelerated the modernisation of its own armed forces. With Russian support, it increased its power projection capabilities to a degree that shifted the regional balance of power to Taiwan’s detriment. With a surprising degree of foresight, intelligence analysts were already reporting on the potential implications of this new dynamic in early 1991. Possibly for electoral reasons, Bush acted on the advice of the Defence Department and reluctantly redressed the balance by rearming Taiwan’s air force in late 1992. By closely examining this period, this thesis sheds light on the origins of a persistent division in US national security strategy between those who believed in engaging Beijing and those who perceived Chinese military modernisation as a threat to regional stability.
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ItemSoft and Mechanical: Communicating theory and practice of puericulture through Giovanni Antonio Galli’s Supellex obstetricia( 2023)In 1746, Bolognese obstetrician Giovanni Antonio Galli commissioned the Suppellex obstetricia, a collection comprising approximately two hundred clay and wax models representing various conditions of pregnancy and childbirth. The collection was employed to teach midwives and surgeons in training at the School of Obstetrics in the University of Bologna, the first public school of obstetrics in Italy. This thesis examines the collection from a material culture perspective, arguing that the models convey powerful religious, philosophical and cultural ideas about the female body and the role of the midwife in eighteenth-century Italy. However, the thesis also considers the models as objects 'in motion,' arguing that their meanings and affective power changed as obstetrical discourses likewise changed towards the end of the eighteenth century. The final chapter therefore posits the value of a comparative approach in analysing eighteenth-century Italian obstetrical collections. By examining drastically different depictions of 'monstrous births' across obstetrical collections, the third chapter argues for the possibility of tracing changing medical and cultural discourses of the female body by analysing the material dimension of these objects.
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ItemSaturn and the Seeds of Evil: Spaceflight, Envirotechnical Thought, and Progress in 1960s and 1970s America( 2023)During the 1960s and the 1970s, inspired by a growing awareness of the effects unbridled technological progress was having on themselves and their environment, a politically disparate group of Americans searched for new relationships with technology, the environment, and the notion of national progress. “Saturn and the Seeds of Evil” explores the differing conceptions of technological progress that were projected on to spaceflight during this period of contestation over the course of America’s, and often the whole Earth’s, future. Some, including the patriotically minded editors of Life magazine and the chemical-industrialist Robert White-Stevens, turned to spaceflight as a glittering example of technological progress to convince doubters that the nation’s course was safe. Others, including pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, and alternative technology guru Stewart Brand, believed that space technology presented a path towards environmental salvation. “Saturn and the Seeds of Evil” uses three case studies to argue that at each stage of the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, spaceflight reinforced narratives of technological utopianism—the notion that technological progress is equivalent to societal progress—regardless of whether the visions of technological progress projected on to it were utopian or dystopian.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Painting is Broken: Understanding issues of authenticity and art attribution in contemporary Indonesia( 2023-07)The circulation of counterfeit paintings in the Indonesian art centres is a sensitive issue that threatens the cultural record and intellectual property of artists and their legacy. Since the beginning of Indonesia’s first art market boom in the late 1980s, paintings falsely attributed to prominent modern and contemporary Indonesian artists have slid into the secondary art market, changing hands through auction houses, galleries, art dealers and private transactions. While the unauthorised use of intellectual property that infringes on the copyright of the artist is a pervasive and longstanding issue in Indonesia, as it is globally, the study of painting attribution from a conservation perspective is limited. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in cross-cultural engagement, technical art history, archival research, and interviews with art world practitioners, to investigate the relationship between the booming art market and the circulation of counterfeit paintings falsely attributed to Indonesian artists. Reviewing current approaches for art attribution in Indonesia, this thesis asks, how is painting authenticity understood in the Indonesian context? This question is examined across six themed chapters focusing on: 1) terminology, 2) the Indonesian copyright framework, 3) the art market, 4) art market processes, 5) art archives and 6) technical art history. An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to this study enabled a nuanced exploration of knowledge representation, verification, and the societal implications of painting forgery in the Javanese arts communities of Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Bandung where this research is located. Key findings drawn from artist interviews, archival sources and technical art history highlight the extent to which contemporary living artists, in addition to the twentieth-century modern masters, have been victims of art fraud, from the early 1990s until today. These findings demonstrate the tangible impact of forgery on the individuals who are affected when counterfeit works are produced and traded. This study seeks to elucidate the strategies that contemporary Indonesian artists have adopted to protect themselves from intellectual property theft in the absence of a robust copyright framework, and examines integrated approaches to building secure artist records and archives for future studies of attribution. Overall, this thesis underscores the pressing need for interdisciplinary collaboration and ongoing discourse to address the particular challenges posed by painting forgery in the Indonesian art market. Inauthentic cultural material is harmful to Indonesian artists, communities, and the cultural record, and finding effective and empowering ways to manage this issue is of great interest to artists, curators, art historians, conservators and others. Painting forgery in Indonesia, and in the global art world, is an active and ongoing issue, and current understanding is continually evolving as new evidence is brought to light. This thesis is a scholarly contribution to advancing existing knowledge on art attribution and authenticity in Indonesia, deepening collective knowledge of the complexities inherent in the Indonesian art world and its broader implications for the global art community.