Why Are We All Outraged? Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, all at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written an important new book—Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (2025). Gray […] View
AI Ethics: Feeding the Machine As is often the case, this blog post calls your attention to a new book we think is worth a peek—Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI (2024) by James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant (whom we will collectively refer to as “MGC”). As you can tell from the spelling of “labour” […] View
AI Ethics: Getting to Moral AI As you have been able to tell from recent blog posts, we here at Ethics Unwrapped, along with most other sentient beings who are paying attention, believe that ongoing developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) present ethical challenges that demand our careful attention. Fortunately, three prominent experts—philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, data scientist Jana Schaich […] View
Can Money Buy Happiness After All? In 2012, two soon-to-be Nobel Prize winners in economics, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, studied the relationship between money and happiness. They reported finding that income up to about $75,000 annually can increase your happiness, after which more money generally does not result in more happiness. That has been the received wisdom for the past […] View
AI Ethics: Is the Precautionary Principle Helpful? There is little question that artificial intelligence (AI)—if it continues to be developed as most experts foresee—will reshape our world. Some changes will be positive. Some will be negative. As we pointed out in a previous blog post (AI Ethics: “Just the Facts Ma’am”), having a firm handle on the facts is prerequisite to making […] View
AI Ethics: The Obligation to Design for Safety When architects design buildings or engineers design planes, they have a moral obligation to protect humans from harm. Think of the Hyatt Regency Walkway collapse in Kansas City or the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. Or think about Ford Motor Company which was in a race to match Japanese imports and beat domestic competitors General Motors […] View
AI and the Energy Issue Most scientists believe that climate change threatens mankind’s future and that human activity contributes mightily to that change, especially as it involves fossil fuels. A November 2024 update on climate progress found much reason for pessimism, particularly because fossil fuel subsidies are at an all-time high and funding for fossil fuel-prolonging projects quadrupled from 2021 […] View
Doctored: A Behavioral Explanation of Research Fraud and Alzheimer’s It is sobering for anyone teaching ethics that it can be just so darned hard for even well-meaning people to act as they know they ought. Even academics and scientists. For example, we have written before about Francesca Gino, a behavioral ethics scholar at Harvard who has come out on the bad end of an […] View
Ethical AI: Moral Judgments Swamped by Competitive Forces Many of us have watched enough movies on the topic–“2001: A Space Odyssey,” “War Games,” “Terminator,” “Blade Runner,” “Ex Machina,” “The Matrix,” and the like– to be viscerally concerned about today’s rapid-fire development of artificial intelligence (AI). And this concern is not unwarranted, for many of the most-knowledgeable experts are themselves very apprehensive. In March […] View
Techno-Optimist or AI Doomer? Consequentialism and the Ethics of AI As our glossary video on the term indicates, “[u]tilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes. It is a form of consequentialism.” A famous limitation of any form of consequentialism, as the video also indicates, is this: “because we cannot predict the future, it’s difficult to know with certainty […] View