6:3:
Preface. Current Issues in Ethics
This interdisciplinary volume consists of papers on various problems in contemporary ethics. It presents the following issues: equalizing the level of positive liberty, the phenomenon of human cooperation, ethical questions related to artificial intelligence, extending ethical obligations toward artifacts, and soteriological threads of alienation criticism of religion.
An Analysis of the Equal Freedom
The article concerns selected problems related to the postulates of equalizing the level of positive liberty. The classic understanding of individual freedom, called as negative (freedom from), identified with a lack of compulsion, can be in opposition to the so-called positive liberty (freedom to). The last notion is generally defined by an ability, which brings its relation with a concept of power. The postulate of equality in “freedom to” can be justification for conducting a social redistribution of goods. The cases of voluntary and compulsory donation are considered in the text, whose aim is to visualize consequences resulting from a compulsory expansion of the scope of positive liberty.
Selfishness and Cooperation: Challenge for Social Life
Cooperation is a great challenge for natural selection. Some scholars assume that cooperation could not evolve within the framework of natural selection. It is undeniable that natural selection, at least at the individual level, favors selfishness and defectors. Nonetheless, this selfish tendency does not necessarily imply that cooperation could not evolve by means of natural selection. In this paper, we specifically acknowledge certain basic challenges for the evolution of the human ability to cooperate at the level of large groups. In this paper, we discuss topics like the human ability for “supercooperation,” the importance of repetition and reputation, and Multilevel Selection Theory as the basic mechanisms of evolution of cooperation.
Selected Ethical Issues in Artificial Intelligence,
Autonomous System Development
and Large Data Set Processing
Due to information technology development and its industrial adaptation, the dilemmas so far specific to philosophical speculations and science-fiction literature and films have become the real problems of the contemporary world. On one hand, these issues are related to an unprecedented scale on which computational algorithms are currently used as well as a level of complexity of mutual connections; on the other hand, these are linked to their autonomous behavior. States, industry, and users themselves demand formulation of understandable ethical categories and determination of transparency standards and legal norms for these algorithms' functioning in the near future.
Artifacts and The Problem
of Ethical Extensionism – Selected Issues
This paper addresses the problem of extending ethical obligations toward usable things. The first part reconstructs current debates on the metaphysical and ethical status of artifacts. Next, drawing upon Tadeusz Kotarbinski’s reism, I describe artifacts as concretes, focusing on the possibility of their damage and destruction. The core part of the article analyzes ethical implications of the following issues: 1) using artifacts, 2) their production, 3) purchase and sale of artifacts, and 4) the post-use period.
Salutary Meanings of Sublimation.
Selected Soteriological Threads of Alienation
Criticism of Religion
The article concerns a few soteriological threads of alienation criticism of religion whose feature is the creation of a new autonomous and transgressive subject. It focused on the presentation of this subject using Nietzsche’s philosophy perceived within Freudian perspective.
