https://meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more-players/
Sellars book, also various SEP articles like recognition, personhood, etc.
To be morally responsible, the agent must take the fact they acted upon as a reason for action across a large range of relevant cases, and their action must covary with the presence/absence of that fact across those cases. in both situations, this covariance is somehow necessary for the action/belief to express anything about the agent themselves, and hence warrant the application of a normative status, (knowing, being culpable) to the agent themselves, rather than just attributing the event/correctness of the belief to various disparate parts of the situation without the agent getting any credit. We could also say that this modal robustness is necessary for the action/belief to show anything ABOUT the agent, (in Yablo’s subject-matter sense). This would open the door to use a self-expression account of moral and epistemic responsibility and then use the tools of determining subject matter to determine when moral/epistemic responsibility is present. Why is this modal robustness needed for an event/belief to be ‘about’, (expressive of) the agent in question though? Does this lead into a generalised modal, (possible an IRS?) account of semantics, wherein analogous rules apply to the semantics of concepts and the ‘semantics’ of actions and beliefs? The knowledge side at least leads into the safety account of knowledge, (Hawthorne and others, plus gives hints why the reliabilist account isn’t sustainable and collapses into virtue epistemology (check the selection problem re dispositions?? in my knowledge and reality notes?)).
- Pretty sure this is just saying expressive action is somehow essential to responsibility, and for actions to be expressive of the self, the self and the action must have high joint information/low entropy or whatever (maybe in a stronger modal sense than usual)
Of course we claim people are responsible for the actions of their counterparts. If we didnt our concept of moral responsibility wouldn’t serve its function. One function is dividing people into sorts based on their moral goodness, they are the sort of person who would do good actions, or the sort that would do bad actions. We need to do this to know how to treat people, especially whether to trust them. Because we don’t know which possible world we are in, especially regarding future contingents, in order to trust people to act in a particular way in future, we need to know they’d act well across a much broader range of possible circumstances than those which are/will be actual. Because of this ignorance, and the function of our concept of responsibility as tracking trustworthiness, praiseworthiness, blameworthiness, (essential for making moral learning easier - dont analyse each action morally, just ask ‘what would an exemplar do?’), we need attributions of responsibility to supervene on the actions of a persons counterparts as well.
I think there’s also a sense in which, since information is a two-way street, we also want to identify good people, because they will pick out good things in the world.
How can we have a concept of responsibility without one of desert?
Consent is the power the delegate, extend, pause, restrict, etc. the scope of positive or negative autonomy.
- Hypothetical Consent - Arthur Kufli
- Autonomy and Consent - Tom L. Beauchamp Continuity of Responsibility Account of Personal Identity Suggests the power of autonomy is somehow both necessary for passing on your personal identity via consenting to transfer your autonomy (positive)/destroying your autonomy (negative) (or maybe just passing it on as well?). Covers various accounts of autonomy and voluntariness including multi-level theories.
- Hinchman’s work on intrapersonal trust/intention as self-trust is very similar.
McDonald’s Your word against mine discusses the difference between positive and negative autonomy, (distinction drawn from dougherty’s work on consent)
(below is from Kevin Simler essay)
The right to be sued is an important part of personhood, inc. of corporations. If you have nothing to lose because you can’t be sued/punished. You actually become more of a person the more willing others are to punish you, (at least in consistent ways, or when there’s common knowledge about the bounds of punishment. Why exactly would CK be necessary (if it even is))
So is acting in the name of something else, or being a slave. You become less autonomous, less able to be reasoned with.
- This vaguel connects with the weird stuff around submission to an ideal, or even another person, instead of slavery to your desires, can in some sense be autonomy enhancing.
Sometimes you lose more personhood by not being ashamed when you should than by braking down in shame.
The contract of personhood must be sticky and contagious for it to spread like it has. It must exhibit network effects, such that the more people there are/the greater proportion of a group are persons, the better it is to be a person.
- Are network effects the opposite of competitively positional goods? Cooperatively positional goods?
- Shame was the first civilising emotion that appeared after the fall in Eden.
More specific roles like husband/wife can relax some of the contract of personhood, but still not entirely.
- Why not entirely? Is it like personhood is the safety net for when more specific roles break down. You can still fall back to the personhood norms, e.g. by reprimanding, or punishing, to keep people within the bounds of both personhood and more specific roles.
Seems like aspie personhood is reflexive and transitive, but schizophrenic personhood isn’t, weird.
Seems like desert is suspect due to its role in political coordination. We could get rid of desert and just say if someone is vicious wrt some range of reasons, they can’t be benefited by getting any resources there. Praiseworthiness is the opposite. So it’s just benevolence? What if someone did something virtuous, and another person did something vicious, yet it would take less resources to make the vicious person virtuous and reward them than just reward the virtuous person. Is that possible?
The connections between moral epistemology; how do we find out moral truths, and what are the social aspects of this, e.g. trust, testimony, recognising expertise, communication, honesty, being loved, interacting with other morally committed people, life experience, practice at trying to be a saint, being confronted with opposing views, natural moral sense, natural proto-moral emotions, introspection, epistemic humility and moral humility, the connection between moral epistemology generally and virtue epistemology, what does all this imply about moral and non-moral expertise, how will it be related to the moral and epistemic virtues someone has?
Consider Callard’s Art is for seeing evil as relevant for the role of art in a special kind of social recognition that is important for personhood in this sense. Aesthetics and disinterested liking
How does literature fit in with moral epistemology? e.g. Shijing, indian, hebrew, chinese holy scriptures, poetry, Iris Murdoch on novels, de Beauvoir I guess :/
keeping a diary vs. mere reflection? check Montaigne and other essayists on this, Essays in idleness may be useful, or commentaries on it.
- diaries with imperatives vs mere reflections
See SEP on explanation and Yudkowsky’s fake explanations
- Corrigibility
- Links between personhood, commitment, speech, and punishing the whole vs parts of agents. Why can’t you punish a single leg, or a single person slice? Can actual fission cases or temporal breaks make subagents individually punishable? Damn so personhood, sub-agents, speech, and commitments are all linked with game theory and preference change. See railton and maybe Lewis I guess
- Also lewis’ work on convention/score-keeping in language games with how laws and rules are revised via negotiation between players that stops much of the gaming you get with AIs/literalist agents.
See Praise, Blame and the Whole Self - Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder, great article, dowloaded it now. About expressivity and integration of the self and all that.