Tag: #philosophy

‘Who else belongs to my moral circle?’: The Foundations of Longtermism

Posted on by George Thomas

By Professor Richard Pettigrew, Department of Philosophy, School of Arts

To celebrate World Philosophy Day, Professor Richard Pettigrew tells us about a new project which will challenge the radical philosophical view of Longtermism—the idea that the impact of our actions on the far future is the most important consideration today. The project recently received a Leverhulme Trust Grant and runs until August 2027.

Should I tell a friend a lie to save them from upset? Should I spend my latest pay check on something for myself, or should I use it to treat a family member who’s been going through a tough time? In ethics, we ask questions like this. We ask what we should do when the different things we might do affect others in different ways. But this raises a question: Which others? Who else belongs to my ‘moral circle’? Many arguments in ethics in recent years have tried to show that our moral circle is larger than we often take it to be. Animal welfare advocates argue animals other than humans should be included in our moral circle; and, more recently, people have argued that, at some point in the future, artificial intelligences might become sufficiently sophisticated that they too should be included. Those who study philanthropy and charitable giving argue that people in countries far from our own, people we have never met, should be part of our moral circle. And, more recently, some have argued that people who will exist in the future should also be included, and not only the next generation or two, but all people who live in the future, whether in the next hundred years or the subsequent million years.

‘If you have to choose between doing something that has a small chance of improving the lives of every future person by quite a small amount, or doing something that will certainly improve the lives of all existing people by a very large amount, morality will often demand you do the first thing.’

‘The Foundations of Longtermism’ is a research project funded for three years by the Leverhulme Trust. The project aims to scrutinise an argument that begins with the claim that people in the near and far future should be included in our moral circle. This argument hopes to establish a dramatic conclusion. It points out that there will most likely be vastly more future people than current people. If there are a little over 8 billion current people, there might easily be 8 trillion future people. And if all those future people are in our moral circle, then morality says we must take them into account when we decide what to do. But the sheer number of them suggests that trying to do things that benefit them is a higher priority than doing things that benefit people who are living now. So, the argument goes, if you have to choose between doing something that has a small chance of improving the lives of every future person by quite a small amount, or doing something that will certainly improve the lives of all existing people by a very large amount, morality will often demand you do the first thing. That’s the dramatic conclusion, and it strikes many as implausible. The Foundations of Longtermism considers the various ingredients in this argument and asks whether they stand up to scrutiny: Does morality really require that we weigh up probability of great gains against certainty of moderate gains in the way the argument does? What are the consequences of such a principle, and should we accept them? Must we really include a person living in a million years’ time in our moral circle, and must we give them the same weight we give people with whom we inhabit the world now?

Professor Richard Pettigrew is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy whose research covers a number of different areas, from the philosophy of mathematics and the epistemology of uncertainty, to the theory of rational decision-making and the politics of consent. To find out more about The Foundations of Longtermism project, contact richard.pettigrewbristol.acuk.

Cognitive Biases in Describing Biological Evolution: A Study of Popular Science and Social Media

Posted on by George Thomas

By Calum Sims, PhD Philosophy candidate, School of Arts

In the penultimate entry to our series spotlighting PGR summer internship projects, PhD Philosophy candidate Calum Sims tells us about working with Professor Samir Okasha to study the ways biological evolution is explained on social media. Taking for their subject crows, jays and ravens—birds known for their remarkable cognitive abilities—the pair examined Instagram videos to identify evidence for the presence or absence of bias when describing their behaviours, an important question in the study of philosophy of science.

Do you watch shorts and reels on social media? If, like me, you participate in this recently emerging trend, you have likely come across videos of animals. Carrying on the lineage from shows like ‘Animals do the craziest things’ and ‘Animal Planet’, videos abound of animals doing attention-grabbing stuff. Sometimes they’re being silly; sometimes they’re being cute; sometimes they’re being remarkably intelligent. What makes these videos attention-grabbing? What, if anything, do these videos have in common? And, perhaps most importantly, what effect do they have on popular understanding of scientific ideas?

Professor Samir Okasha and I chose to focus on corvids (crows, jays and ravens) because they are both prevalent on social media and a key research topic at the forefront of animal cognition. In this field, researchers document the ‘surprisingly intelligent’ behaviour of corvids and debate the nature of the cognitive machinery supposed to support it.

Corvids engage in a range of behaviours that suggest cognitive similarity to humans. To give a few examples:

  • They engage in pair-bonding ‘rituals’
  • They interact with other species for mutual benefit
  • They cache food in a way that is sensitive to the presence (and perhaps intentions) of members of the same species
  • They successfully solve multi-step puzzles for food rewards

Debate concerns whether the exhibition of these behaviours warrants attributing human-like cognitive capacities to corvids, and while intellectual currents seem to be moving in the ‘yes’ direction, the question is far from settled. Hence, we were curious to see whether videos of corvids on Instagram reflected this complexity, and hence how they bear on popular understanding of scientific ideas.

It soon became apparent that the videos, which showed animals engaged in surprising and interesting behaviours, contained some well-known biases that traditional biology education normally attempts to mitigate away. In somewhat romantic fashion, the language in the videos treated the animal’s behaviour in anthropomorphic, teleological and essentialist terms: that is, it uncritically assumed that the behaviours on display were caused by the animals having certain intentions and goals and acting for the same sorts of reasons as humans.

This allowed us to connect our research to a prominent debate in the philosophy of science education concerning whether this sort of language use should be conceptualised as ‘biased’. The patterns of speaking outlined above (which, according to the debate, could either be called ‘biases’ or ‘cognitive construals’) lead systematically to errors in biological thinking. Because of this, researchers have traditionally attempted to structure science education in such a way as to eliminate them. However, a growing counter-current argues that these thinking patterns, while sometimes problematic, are a useful and maybe even essential part of human reasoning, to be accommodated by educational strategies rather than eliminated from them.

The novelty of our contribution consists in applying this question to the domain of social media. Here, biases appear to have a dual role: they seem to get in the way of good biological thinking, but they also seem to drive attention and engagement towards scientific topics. So, how do we get the good without getting the bad? A prominent line of reasoning (Coley and Tanner 2012) suggests that supplementing these construals with opportunities for reflection and critical analysis – essentially, asking viewers to reconstruct, query and debate their explanations of behaviour – could improve scientific understanding without detracting from engagement. We concluded by suggesting that such interventions could be made in the descriptions of the videos in question, by pointing to areas of uncertainty in the research field or asking questions to viewers directly.

On the whole, this project was incredibly useful for clarifying the role of social media in science communication and beginning to systematise the contribution of videos to this goal. Going forward, we will continue to look at ways that boosting metacognition can help to promote the benefits outlined above.

Calum Sims is a PhD Philosophy candidate with research interests in animal cognition, metacognition and cultural evolution. To find out more about the project with Professor Samir Okasha and view the data captured as part of the research, please contact cs15522@bristol.ac.uk. To read more PGR summer internship projects, visit ArtsMatter.