In pop culture, artificial intelligences (AI) are frequently portrayed as worthy of moral personhood, and failing to treat these entities as such is often treated as analogous to racism. The implicit condition for attributing moral personhood to an AI is usually passing some form of the "Turing Test", wherein an entity passes if it could be mistaken for a human. I argue that this is unfounded under any moral theory that uses the capacity for desire as the criteria for moral standing. Though the action-based theory of desire ensures that passing a rigourous enough version of the Turing Test would be sufficient for moral personhood, that theory has unacceptable results when used in moral theory. If a desire-based moral theory is to be made defensible, it must use a phenomenological account of desire, which would make the Turing Test fail to track the relevant property. / October 2015

This work is dedicated to the development of a unified account of both theoretical and practical rationality. I adopt a particular view of evaluative properties, according to which entities are evaluated as good or bad according to how well they fulfill the constitutive functions of their kinds. I argue that the function of belief is to accurately represent reality, while the function of action is to satisfy the agent’s desires. These functions fix the goodness- or success-conditions of belief and action. With these functions in place, I adopt a reliabilist conception of reasoning which evaluates reasoning processes by how well they allow us to achieve the constitutive aims of belief and action. Moreover, I argue that the process of determining which action will best satisfy our desires is a cognitive matter – non-cognitive states like desire do not actually provide the agent with reasons.

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Paul Grice has argued that a methodological procedure termed 'constructionism' is suitable to elucidate our folk-psychological concepts. The methodology is foundationalist: beginning with a psychologically simple creature a sequence of increasingly psychologically complex creatures is developed through the application of a set of construction routines and constraints. This thesis develops Grice's claim. My main aim is to demonstrate the methodology by producing a construction. My secondary aim is to illuminate the concepts of 'desiring' and 'valuing' by means of the described construction. In Chapter 1, I claim that constructionism provides an answer to problems associated with a certain form of holism which permeates the psychological. In Chapter 2, I discuss and criticise the detail of Grice's account for the development of a construction. In Chapter 3, I set out the foundations for my construction. In Chapter 4, I describe a simple creature with a single recurrent need inhabiting a simple environment consisting of four features. These features are manipulated to determine how the creature would need to develop in order to survive. The end of this chapter sees the ascription of a discriminatory capacity in response to the need to track and manipulate objects. This capacity might plausibly be described as 'presentational'. In Chapter 5, I attribute to the creature multiple needs and the capacity for Associative Learning. At this stage 'desires' emerge. The rest of the chapter is concerned with assessing the modified creature's capacity for continued survival. By the end of the chapter the creature is shown to lack the capacities necessary to form preferences suited to the specific contexts in which it acts. In Chapter 6, I claim that a creature with an objective conception can form the necessary preferences. I ascribe to the creature those capacities necessary to for objective conception. The upgraded creature is described as capable of 'valuing'.

The following is an analysis of the affinity between the accounts of value of Nietzsche and Levinas—two philosophers commonly thought to be antithetical. I propose an account of value, derived from the aforementioned authors, according to which an enigmatic phenomenon beyond or hither from being orients one toward an invisible good. The analysis suggests that despite the fundamental role of value in philosophy and thought, value necessarily remains obscure.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-122). Also available online (PDF file) by a subscription to the set or by purchasing the individual file.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2005.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Applied Science, 2005.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Liberty University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. L.)--Catholic University of America, 2008. / Description based on Microfiche version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-85).