School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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Start date: 2010 × End date: 2012 × Type: Journal Article × Author: LEVY, NEIL ×

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    Searle's wager.
    Levy, N (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2011-11)
    Nicholas Agar has recently argued that it would be irrational for future human beings to choose to radically enhance themselves by uploading their minds onto computers. Utilizing Searle's argument that machines cannot think, he claims that uploading might entail death. He grants that Searle's argument is controversial, but he claims, so long as there is a non-zero probability that uploading entails death, uploading is irrational. I argue that Agar's argument, like Pascal's wager on which it is modelled, fails, because the principle that we (or future agents) ought to avoid actions that might entail death is not action guiding. Too many actions fall under its scope for the principle to be plausible. I also argue that the probability that uploading entails death is likely to be lower than Agar recognizes.
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    Neuroethics: A New Way of Doing Ethics.
    Levy, N (Informa UK Limited, 2011-03-31)
    The aim of this article is to argue, by example, for neuroethics as a new way of doing ethics. Rather than simply giving us a new subject matter-the ethical issues arising from neuroscience-to attend to, neuroethics offers us the opportunity to refine the tools we use. Ethicists often need to appeal to the intuitions provoked by consideration of cases to evaluate the permissibility of types of actions; data from the sciences of the mind give us reason to believe that some of these intuitions are less reliable than others. I focus on the doctrine of double effect to illustrate my case, arguing that experimental results suggest that appeal to it might be question-begging. The doctrine of double effect is supposed to show that there is a moral difference between effects that are brought about intentionally and those that are merely foreseen; I argue that the data suggest that we regard some effects as merely foreseen only because we regard bringing them about as permissible. Appeal to the doctrine of double effect therefore cannot establish that there are such moral differences.
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    Capacities and counterfactuals: A reply to Haji and McKenna
    Levy, N (Verein philosophie.ch, 2012-12-01)