In this paper, we take moral agency to be that context in which a particular agent can, appropriately, be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. In order to understand moral agency, we will discuss what it would take for an artefact to be a moral agent. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the paper, we take the artefactual question to be a useful way into discussion but ultimately misleading. We set out a number of conceptual preconditions for being a moral agent and then outline how one should-and should not-go about attributing moral agency. In place of a litmus test for such agency-such as Colin Allen et al 's Moral Turing Test-we suggest some tools from conceptual spaces theory for mapping out the nature and extent of that agency.
This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As before, we take moral agency to be that condition in which an agent can appropriately be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. We set a number of stringent conditions on moral agency. A moral agent must be embedded in a cultural and speci¯cally moral context and embodied in a suitable physical form. It must be, in some substantive sense, alive. It must exhibit self-conscious awareness. It must exhibit sophisticated conceptual abilities, going well beyond what the likely majority of conceptual agents possess: not least that it must possess a well-developed moral space of reasons. Finally, it must be able to communicate its moral agency through some system of signs: A \private" moral world is not enough. After reviewing these conditions and pouring cold water on recent claims for having achieved \minimal" machine consciousness, we turn our attention to a number of existing and, in some cases, commonplace artifacts that lack moral agency yet nevertheless require one to take a moral stance toward them, as if they were moral agents. Finally, we address another class of agents raising a related set of issues: autonomous military robots.
Abstract. In the context of the relationship between signs and concepts, this paper tackles some of the ongoing controversies over conceptual development and change -including the claim by some that concepts are not open to revision at alltaking the position that concepts pull apart from language and that concepts can be discussed on at least four levels: that of individual agent, community, society, and language. More controversially, it claims that concepts are not just inherently open to revision but that they, and the frameworks of which they form part, are in a state of continuous, if generally incremental, change: a position that derives directly from the enactive tradition in philosophy. Concepts, to be effective as concepts, must strike a careful balance between being stable enough to apply across suitably many contexts and flexible enough to adapt to each new context. The paper's contribution is a comparison and contrast of conceptual development and change on four time scales: that of the day-to-day life of an individual conceptual agent, the day-to-day life of society, the lifetime of an individual agent, and the lifetime of society and the human species itself. It concludes that the relationship between concepts and experience (individual or collective) is one of circular and not linear causality.
Theories of concepts address systematically and productively structured thought. Until the Unified Conceptual Space Theory (UCST), based on Peter Gärdenfors' Conceptual Spaces Theory, no one had attempted to offer an explicitly enactive theory of concepts. UCST is set apart from its competitors in locating concepts not in the mind (or brain) of the conceptual agent nor in the affordances of the agent's environment but in the interaction between the two. On the UCST account, concepts are never truly static: conceptual knowledge is always in the process of being ''brought forth'', such that neither agent nor environment can cleanly be separated from the other, and the preconceptual noumena cannot be reconstructed free of conceptual taint. Through such conceptual coloring, mind extends into the world. Concepts create binary distinctions -beginning, most importantly, with the self/non-self distinction -and discrete entities that mask what are, with respect to the conceptual framework, underlying continua. These distinctions -implying notions of e.g. internal and external, inner experience and outer world -are both conceptually necessary and, at the same time, lacking prior ontological status. They are meaningful only with respect to some identifiable observer (which could, in appropriate circumstances, be the organism itself). In consequence, phenomenology has a key role to play, and first-person methods are indispensable to any empirical investigation of concepts.
Understanding the relationship between concepts and experience seems necessary to specifying the content of experience, yet current theories of concepts do not seem up to the job. With Peter Gärdenfors's conceptual spaces theory as a foundation and with enactivist philosophy as inspiration, we present a proposed extension to conceptual spaces theory and use it to outline a model of the emergence of concepts and experience. We conclude that neither is ultimately primary but each gives rise to the other: i.e., that they co-emerge. Such a model can then serve as the anchor to a theory of concepts more generally. Concepts are most naturally understood in symbolic and representational terms, while much of experience, in contrast, is non-symbolic and non-representational; yet the conflict between the two will, herein, be shown to be more apparent than real. The main contribution of this paper is to argue for, by means of this account of co-emergence, a continuum between "low-level" mental content that is more appropriately understood in highly context-sensitive and directly sensorimotorbased terms, and "high-level" mental content that is more appropriately understood in context-free and representational or symbolic terms. In doing so we conclude that the extreme positions of representationalism and anti-representationalism are fatally flawed.
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