Emma Curran

In celebration of almost completing my PhD, I have added myself to the list of philosophers I have painted.

Do a PhD

Well done, Kyle! It's been a pleasure watching your work develop since I met you as a wee MPhil. Looking forward to seeing all the wonderful philosophy to come.

Today in @aeonmag Andreas Mogensen and I discuss animal welfare, AI welfare, and probabilistic ethics. We make the case for addressing the moral status of animals and AIs as we address health, climate, and other big issues: with probabilistic reasoning and proportional responses.

@KorbinianRueger A great overview of the literature! I will be sharing with my students in the future.

New paper out in Philosophy Compass! compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ph…

Wonderful news: Essays on Longtermism is officially out! It was a pleasure to contribute to the volume and I'm looking forward to reading the other contributions.

I feel like I've fallen through a wormhole and entered a world in which no one but my family remembers the OG fruit gums. I've asked so many people. Is this a generational thing? Why have people forgotten such an elite sweet?

@raphaelmilliere @JesusOxford @EthicsInAI @schmidtsciences Looking forward ti having you at the Institute!

A personal update -- happy to share that I'll be joining Oxford this fall as an associate professor, as well as a fellow of @JesusOxford and affiliate with @EthicsInAI. I'll also be establishing my AI2050 Fellowship from @schmidtsciences there. Looking forward to getting started!

Jen's video is now available on YouTube: youtu.be/xTlKK8Z9Ux0?si… Let us know what you think - can we teach ethics to machines? #AIethics #Ethics #LLMs #morality #MachineLearning @EthicsInAI @jensemler

@goingawoll @Duderichy I don't know why I've fully, and until now subconsciously, assumed you're at Hertford. Especially puzzling given I have a list of philosophy students at Hertford and you're not on it.

@EmmaJCurran @Duderichy Im at oriel, where each counts for one and two for more than one

there’s a philosophical mistake that ethics works like math it doesn’t lots of effective altruists / rationalists get this messed up

@goingawoll @Duderichy Hertford Philosophy needs more Taurek

@Duderichy Is killing two people worse than killing one person?

@dioscuri @FeepingCreature @morallawwithin Sure, but many people who think morality =/= axiology think that morality "should have a foot" in axiology (that if morality never tracked axiological concerns then it would be implausible). The same seems true of beneficence, without concluding that beneficence=axiology.

@EmmaJCurran @FeepingCreature @morallawwithin If beneficence doesn't have one foot in axiology (i.e., is grounded partly in making things better or worse), then I lose my grip on the concept. In particular, beneficence can *fail* (e.g., removing a cyclist's helmet after a crash), which presupposes underlying real interests.

The recent 10^100 shrimp post by @morallawwithin isn't really about shrimp welfare as a cause area, but about wider principles of commensurability and aggregation. People who are pattern-matching it to "another crazy EA thing" should do closer reading.

@dioscuri @FeepingCreature @morallawwithin *aggregative

@dioscuri @FeepingCreature @morallawwithin I don't think everyone would agree that beneficence = axiology (I don't). And there are certainly some who don't believe in aggregate axiologies.

Some great news this month! 1) Officially finished my philosophy PhD, examined by Elizabeth Anderson and Paul Billingham. 2) Starting a new job at King's College London in September as an Early Career Fellow at the YTL Centre in the Dickson Poon Law School.

This paper just came out with Mind. Open access link in next tweet. doi.org/10.1093/mind/f…

Interesting new paper from Aksel Sterri on risky COVID-19 vaccines (interesting, in part, because it criticises me!): link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Apologies to my students

The end of an era!

@tyler_m_john @GFuterman @RichardMCNgo @Benthamsbulldog Yep, I enjoyed reading your paper on offsetting for the seminar!

@GFuterman @RichardMCNgo @Benthamsbulldog @EmmaJCurran Oh nice, I made the list! This is one area I'm well acquainted with — Otsuka and Frick were some of my profs, and I wrote my writing sample contra Voorhoeve

I became a virtue ethicist after observing the failures of consequentialism and deontology in the real world. But I’ve seldom read academic philosophers analyzing such examples when arguing about which ethical theory to endorse. What are the best examples of that?

@ejjiott Academics: "we're not pedantic " Me: "I'd say there are definitely more escalators that escalate than those that don't; I see an upwards escalator without a corresponding downward escalator far more often than I see the opposite."

About half of escalators never escalate.