Contents · PHIL 123 AI & Ethics

Six movements · 18 chapters

Move from philosophical practice and ethical theory into applied questions about data, delegation, relationships, creativity, future stakes, acceleration, and human capacity.

Philosophical Practice and AI

01
Practicing Philosophy: Argument, Judgment, and Intellectual Responsibility
A college student, Ashley, meets with three classmates to plan a group presentation. She worries that she will miss a deadline or forget who agreed to handle each task. The meeting app offers an AI assistant that can…
12 min
02
Testing Moral Arguments: Premises, Inferences, Objections, and Revision
A study-planning app offers a seven-day free trial. Unless the user changes a preselected option, the trial becomes a paid annual subscription. The price and renewal date appear in the terms.
17 min
03
How Generative AI Produces Answers: Prediction, Post-Training, and the Source Trail
A student opens a general AI chatbot and asks, What is an argument? The answer arrives within seconds:
21 min
04
AI as an Interlocutor in Philosophical Work
Philosophers often develop ideas through dialogue. A conversation partner can ask for a reason, question an assumption, offer a counterexample, or show that a conclusion reaches beyond its support. Language models…
20 min

Moral Authority, Character, and Practical Wisdom

05
Is It Good Because God Commands It? Divine Command, Natural Law, and Moral Authority
Imagine a student who is behind in the semester and considering something the syllabus explicitly forbids. The assignment is a short written response, and the instructions say the response must be completed without…
32 min
06
Commands, Constitutions, and Alignment: Natural Law in the AI Alignment Conversation
Anthropic is the company behind Claude and a major AI lab. In early 2026, it published Claude's Constitution, a long document that tells Claude how to weigh safety, helpfulness, honesty, manipulation, stakeholder…
26 min
07
What Are You Becoming? Aristotle, Character, and AI-Assisted Life
You said something cruel to a friend on Thursday night. By Friday morning you know you have to apologize. You sit down to write the message, and every draft comes out defensive, tangled, half-blaming her for making…
30 min
08
Practical Wisdom After Aristotle: Vallor, Askell, and the Problem of Machine Judgment
Imagine a student named Maya applying to a competitive nursing program. The application asks for a personal statement about a time she cared for someone during a hard stretch. She wants to write about her…
31 min

Duty, Consequences, and Moral Choice

09
Kantian Deontology
Imagine a student named Sam who is applying for a scholarship due Friday. The rough notes describe caring for a younger sibling while working part time, participating in a water-quality research project, and…
29 min
10
Utilitarianism: Consequences, Rules, and Two-Level Reasoning
Consider a fictional case with stipulated evidence. A community college like yours is deciding what to do about the AI tutor its Academic Affairs office piloted last term. The pilot went well by most obvious…
33 min

Data, Bias, and Delegated Judgment

11
From Data Trails to AI Systems: How Human Activity Becomes Prediction, Automation, and Generation
Rosa opens Canvas on her phone during a break at work. She checks the deadline for a philosophy discussion, downloads the reading, and closes the app before the page finishes loading. Later that night she watches…
36 min
12
Algorithmic Bias and the AI Mirror: When Prediction Becomes an Opportunity Gate
An adviser at a community college opens a student-success dashboard on Monday morning. Each student appears next to a color-coded risk score built by an AI system trained on years of grades, financial-aid patterns,…
44 min
13
Delegating Judgment: Automation, Robotics, Skill, and Answerable Control
A driver turns on Tesla's Full Self-Driving system, the version Tesla currently labels Full Self-Driving (Supervised). The car follows a route, changes lanes, slows for traffic, and handles turns. From the passenger…
48 min

Relationships, Creativity, and Co-Existence

14
AI Companions and Co-Existence: Relationship, Responsibility, and Moral Status
Ken Liu's story "The Perfect Match" follows a man named Sai in a world where an intelligent assistant called Tilly has become the normal interface for daily life. Tilly recommends what to eat, where to go, what to…
47 min
15
Creativity, Innovation, and AI: Authorship, Judgment, and the Ethics of Generated Work
In 2022, an image titled Théâtre D'opéra Spatial won first place in a digital arts category at the Colorado State Fair. The image looked like a dramatic scene from a strange opera house: robed figures, an ornate…
45 min

Future Stakes and Technological Movements

16
Existential Risk, Effective Altruism, and the Ethics of Future Stakes
Some AI leaders, safety researchers, philosophers, policymakers, and critics now argue that advanced AI could create catastrophic or even existential risks. Others argue that this framing exaggerates speculative…
61 min
17
Accelerationism, AI, and the Ethics of Speed
Guillaume Verdon is a physicist, entrepreneur, and one of the public faces of effective accelerationism, usually shortened online to e/acc. He is also the founder of Extropic, a company that says it is building…
54 min
18
Transhumanism, Enhancement, and the Ethics of Human Capacity
In early 2024, Noland Arbaugh became the first publicly identified human participant with a Neuralink brain-computer interface implant. Arbaugh had paralysis below the shoulders after a diving accident. In a public…
46 min