Questions about meaning, ethics, and how we understand the world.
Generative AI and moral judgment meet before any verdict is argued, a paper published 25 October 2026 argues: machine-made stories select, pre-structure and orient interpretation, delivering pre-shaped explanatory closure instead of interpretive work.
A new paper on human dignity and personhood argues that a person is not someone who passes a test of awareness or autonomy: dignity rests on what a human being is, and tying it to capacities leaves the most vulnerable unprotected.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons sounds like a riddle, but a Mount Holyoke student shortlisted for the John Locke prize used it to test Kant against outcomes — and to ask what a good act is worth.
Superorganismic human morality and free will are reframed in Yeonbo Jung's book: morality evolved inside groups, desire sits at the mind's centre, and freedom survives inside a caused world.
An AI is not conscious Nature essay by Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi argues that today's systems have no inner experience — and that treating them as if they do could make them harder to govern.
What do we owe workers when AI reshapes jobs? Britain's new £600m package pays to study displacement before it happens — an Ideas essay on dignity, work and the state's duty to understand first.
A Doha town hall asked who should set the moral rules for AI — companies, faith traditions, or the public — and found no easy answer, only a narrowing window to argue about it in public.
At the Fifth Kaoting Forum in Nanping on 17–18 October, scholars applied Zhu Xi's distinction between heavenly principle and disordered appetite to AI: using AI is neutral, Fang Xudong argued, but surrendering your judgement to the algorithm is a moral failure — an idea now doing work in debates about override, education and governance.
A Southampton philosopher's October essay asks why we assume matter starts out unconscious at all. Panpsychism — consciousness as a fundamental property of matter — dissolves one mystery by creating others, and its critics and defenders now agree on at least one thing: the easy answers have run out.
A new paper argues that even a safe, free and universally accepted technology for making people behave morally would cost too much: the free will that makes a good act a choice at all.
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