Re that post accusing people who talk about positive use cases for AI as being guilty of narcissism (morally condemning them) it’s worth noting that it started with a quote from X (Grok, anyone?) and was posted on Meta’s Facebook. If this isn’t precisely an example of a performative contradiction, it’s awfully close to one.
I completely agree on the substantive cases. But I see an issue for the idea of “reasonableness”. You say:
> But there’s a reason why blameworthiness norms track the target’s epistemic situation rather than objective consequences: an agent can only ever be guided by the former, so any attempt to inculcate reliable virtue via social incentives to conform to inaccessible facts is a non-starter.
Now there’s an issue about what exactly someone’s “epistemic situation” is and what exactly it means for facts to be “inaccessible”. You don’t mean this to be entirely internal, about what the person knows (Williamson notes that knowledge is partly external, but I think he doesn’t get at substantial enough external things). Your caveat about whether the person is being reasonable is meant to deal with cases where someone could have easily known something, but either willfully or carelessly failed to find out the truth.
It certainly makes sense to hold people responsible for things they could easily have known - especially if they plausibly *should* have known them - even if they don’t actually know these things, and the facts are therefore in that sense inaccessible.
This reasonableness condition really needs to encompass requiring people to do some relevant investigation and study when they are saying or doing something sufficiently important, not just believing the most reasonable thing to believe given the investigation and study they have in fact done. And I suspect that some disagreements about whether particular hostility is warranted involves disagreeement about what someone should have known in these cases.
Re that post accusing people who talk about positive use cases for AI as being guilty of narcissism (morally condemning them) it’s worth noting that it started with a quote from X (Grok, anyone?) and was posted on Meta’s Facebook. If this isn’t precisely an example of a performative contradiction, it’s awfully close to one.
"Of course, “Internet denizen angry, reasons poorly” is not exactly a newsworthy headline."
Perhaps, but this was still a very important topic to discuss. You challenge something deeply ingrained and calcified. Very important post. Thank you!
I completely agree on the substantive cases. But I see an issue for the idea of “reasonableness”. You say:
> But there’s a reason why blameworthiness norms track the target’s epistemic situation rather than objective consequences: an agent can only ever be guided by the former, so any attempt to inculcate reliable virtue via social incentives to conform to inaccessible facts is a non-starter.
Now there’s an issue about what exactly someone’s “epistemic situation” is and what exactly it means for facts to be “inaccessible”. You don’t mean this to be entirely internal, about what the person knows (Williamson notes that knowledge is partly external, but I think he doesn’t get at substantial enough external things). Your caveat about whether the person is being reasonable is meant to deal with cases where someone could have easily known something, but either willfully or carelessly failed to find out the truth.
It certainly makes sense to hold people responsible for things they could easily have known - especially if they plausibly *should* have known them - even if they don’t actually know these things, and the facts are therefore in that sense inaccessible.
This reasonableness condition really needs to encompass requiring people to do some relevant investigation and study when they are saying or doing something sufficiently important, not just believing the most reasonable thing to believe given the investigation and study they have in fact done. And I suspect that some disagreements about whether particular hostility is warranted involves disagreeement about what someone should have known in these cases.
Yeah, that sounds right.