Sinnott-Armstrong, Schaich Borg and Conitzer (SSC) have previously suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) could help us with moral decision-making in a medical context. Their reply to our paper engaging with their account of Moral AI clarifies several aspects of their view and indicates important overlaps between their position and the one we argue for. In this response, however, we elaborate briefly on three remaining concerns. First, we have concerns about their focus on prediction rather than moral judgement; the help we would like to have from Moral AI may call for a thicker kind of advice. Second, we challenge the plausibility of SSC’s metaethical agnosticism; maintaining neutrality on metaethics while using the metaethical concept of reason seems to us a very delicate balancing act. Third, we wonder about the way in which their approach really is akin to narrow reflective equilibrium, and more specifically, about the role of their approach when it comes to wide reflective equilibrium. The conclusion is that a substantialist approach to Moral AI may be both more theoretically plausible and useful from a practical point of view than a purely predictive model.

Introduction

by Elin Palm

Contributions

How can Swedish Universities get ready for Generative AI use in research?

Emma Rörby and Karin Axelsson 

pp. 12-13

Ethical considerations for research on sensitive personal data

Sara Belfrage

pp. 15-28

Machine learning, genetic privacy and health research

Kalle Grill

pp. 31-36

AI and sensitive personal data in research

Lars Lindblom

pp. 37-46

Large Language Models (LLMs) and research ethics

Davide Vega d’Aurelio

pp. 49-54 

How should scarce healthcare resources be distributed? This is a contentious issue that became especially pressing during the pandemic. It is often emphasised that studies exploring public views about this question provide valuable input to the issue of healthcare priority setting. While there has been a vast number of such studies it is rarely articulated, more specifically, what the results from these studies would mean for the justification of principles for priority setting. On the one hand, it seems unreasonable that public values would straightforwardly decide the ethical question of how resources should be distributed. On the other hand, in a democratic society, it seems equally unreasonable that they would be considered irrelevant for this question. In this paper we draw on the notion of reflective equilibrium and discuss the relevance and roles that empirical studies may plausibly have for justification in priority setting ethics. We develop a framework for analysing how different kinds of empirical results may have different kinds of implications for justification.

It is widely known that criminal punishment, especially imprisonment, has negative effects for innocent persons, most notably the families of prisoners. This is an issue attracting increasing attention from penal theorists and philosophers. Adding to this literature, this article examines the extent to which incarceration of a parent is consistent with fundamental rights that are often ascribed to children. In particular, we focus on children's rights against being separated from their parents. To this end, we begin with a discussion of the philosophical basis for children's rights against being separated from their parents against their will. Drawing from recent work by Kimberley Brownlee and Matthew Liao, we argue that children have such a right and that it is grounded in children's welfare interest and the importance of parent-child relationships for children to develop adequately into autonomous agents. We then examine three arguments why imprisoning a parent is justified despite the fact that children have a right against being separated from their parents. For each of these arguments, we argue that while they may show the imprisonment of a particular parent to be sometimes compatible with respecting the right against parent-child separation, an extensive use of imprisonment as punishment of the sort that persists in many states is not.