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  1. F.E. Guerra-Pujol's avatar

    Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…

  2. Claudio's avatar

    I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…

  3. Charles Pigden's avatar

    Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…

  4. Mark's avatar

    I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…

  5. A in the UK's avatar
  6. Jonathan Turner's avatar

    I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…

  7. Craig Duncan's avatar

“Peter Singer is the philosopher of the status quo”

This is basically right (and I've written to similar effect previously), although parts of the piece are off base (e.g., Singer's terrible little book on Marx has not been influential).  An excerpt:

For Singer and his brand of moral philosophy, nothing fundamental can be changed. The forces that are in control of our lives and the manner in which we live and work are too powerful to be brought down. All that is left is to save those who suffer the most. Moral reflection, and philosophy more broadly, is reduced to an administrative role: do the most good you can do within a world that is broken.

Although Singer considers his moral approach to be grounded in the rational, unbiased concern for all, his brand of utilitarianism is inherently configured around the individual as the center of moral concern and action….

This general conclusion that each of us owes much more to those in need than we think is, of course, the Singer move par excellence: an imperative for individual responsibility that leaves unaddressed the question of how we might collectively begin to address the conditions that led to such suffering in the first place. In this view, the immediacy of poverty becomes a problem that is unmediated by social and collective justice….

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