Percentage of Women Philosophy Majors Has Risen Sharply Since 2016 -- Why? Or: The 2017 Knuckle

Back in 2017, I noticed that the percentage of women philosophy majors in the U.S. had been 30%-34% for "approximately forever". That is, despite the increasing percentage of Bachelor's degrees awarded to women overall and in most other majors, the percentage of philosophy Bachelor's degrees awarded to women had been remarkably steady from the first available years (1986-1987) in the NCES IPEDS database through the then-most-recent data year (2016).

In the past few years, however, I have noticed some signs of change. The most recent NCES IPEDS data release, which I analyzed this morning, statistically solidifies the trend. Women now constitute over 40% of philosophy Bachelor's degree recipients. I would argue that this is a very material change from the long-standing trend of 30-34%. If parity is 50%, a change from 32% women to 41% women constitutes a halving of the disparity. Furthermore, the change has been entirely in the most recent six years' of data -- remarkably swift for this type of demographic shift.

The chart below shows the historical trend through the most recent available year (2022). I've marked the 30%-34% band with thick horiztonal lines. A thin vertical line marks 2017, the first year to cross the 34% mark (34.9%). The most recent years are 41.4% and 41.3% respectively.

[click to enlarge and clarify]

Given the knuckle-like change in the slope of the graph, let's call this the 2017 Knuckle.

What I find puzzling is why?

This doesn't reflect an overall trend of increasing percentages of women across majors. Overall, women have been 56%-58% of Bachelor's degree recipients throughout the 21st century. Most other humanities and social sciences had a much earlier increase in the proportion of women.

However, interestingly, the physical sciences and engineering, which have also tended to be disproportionately men, have showed some similar trends. Since 2010, physics majors have increased from 40% to 45% women -- with all of that increase being since 2017. Since 2010, Engineering has increased from 18% to 25% women, with the bulk of the increase since 2016. Since 2010, "Engineering Technologies and Engineering-related Fields" (which NCES classifies separately from Engineering) has also increased from 10% to 15% women, again with most of the increase since 2016. Among the humanities and social sciences, Economics is maybe the only large major similar to Philosophy in gender disparity, and in Economics we see a similar trend, though smaller: an increase from 31% to 35% women between 2010 and 2022, again with most of the gain since 2016.

Since people tend to decide their majors a few years before graduating, whatever explains these trends must have begun in approximately 2013-2016, then increased through at least 2020. Any hypotheses?

It's probably not a result of change in the percentage of women faculty: Faculty turnover is slow, and at least in philosophy the evidence suggests a slow increase over the decades, rather than a knuckle. (Data are sparser and less reliable on this issue, but see here, here and here.) There also wasn't much change in the 2010s in the percentage of women earning Philosophy PhDs in the U.S.

A modeling hypothesis would suggest that change in the percentage of women philosophy majors is driven by a change in the percentage of women faculty and TAs in Philosophy. In contrast, a pipeline hypothesis predicts that change in the percentage of women philosophy majors leads to a change in the percentage of women graduate students and (years later) faculty. Both hypotheses posit a relationship between women undergraduates and women instructors, but with different directions of causation. (The hypotheses aren't, of course, incompatible: Causation might flow both ways.) At least in Philosophy, the modeling hypothesis doesn't seem to explain the 2017 Knuckle. Concerning the pipeline, it's too early to tell, but when the NSF releases their data on doctorates in October, I'll look for preliminary signs.

I'm also inclined to think -- though I'm certainly open to evidence -- that feminism has been slowly, steadily increasing in U.S. culture, rather than being more or less flat since the late 1980s and recently increasing again. So a general cultural increase in feminist attitudes wouldn't specifically explain the 2017 Knuckle. Now it is true that 2015-2017 saw the rise of Trump, and the backlash against Trump, as well as the explosion of the #MeToo movement. Maybe that's important? It would be pretty remarkable if those cultural events had a substantial effect on the percentage of women undergraduates declaring Philosophy, Economics, Physics, and Engineering majors.

Further thoughts? What explains the 2017 Knuckle?

It could be interesting to look at other countries, and at race/ethnicity data, and at majors that tend to be disproporately women -- patterns there could potentially cast light on the effect -- but enough for today.

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Methodological notes: NCES IPEDS attempts to collect data on every graduating student in accredited Bachelor's programs in the U.S., using administrator-supplied statistics. Gender categories are binary "men" and "women" with no unclassified students. Data are limited to "U.S. only" institutions in classification category 38.01 ("Philosophy") and include both first and second majors back through 2001. Before 2001, only first majors are available. Each year includes all graduates during the academic year ending in that year (e.g., 2022 includes all students from the 2021-2022 academic year). For engineering and physical sciences, I used major catories 15, 16, and 40; and for Economics, 45.06.

Walking the Walk: Frankness and Social Proof

My last two posts have concerned the extent to which ethicists should "walk the walk" -- that is, live according to, or at least attempt to live according to, the ethical principles they espouse in their writing and teaching. According to "Schelerian separation", what ethicists say or write can and should be evaluated independently of facts about the ethicist's personal life. While there are some good reasons to favor Schelerian separation, I argued last week that ethical slogans ("act on that maxim you can at the same time will to be a universal law", "maximize utility") will tend to lack specific, determinate content without a context of clarifying examples. One's own life can be a rich source of content-determining examples, while armchair reflection on examples tends to be impoverished.

Today, I'll discuss two more advantages of walking the walk.

[a Dall-E render of "walking the walk"]

Frankness and Belief

Consider scientific research. Scientists don't always believe their own conclusions. They might regard their conclusions as tentative, the best working model, or just a view with enough merit to be worth exploring. But if they have doubt, they ought to be unsurprised if their readers also have doubt. Conversely, if a reader learns that a scientist has substantial doubts about their own conclusions, it's reasonable for the reader to wonder why, to expect that the scientist is probably responding to limitations in their own methods and gaps in their own reasoning that might be invisible to non-experts.

Imagine reading a scientific article, finding the conclusion wholly convincing, and then learning that the scientist who wrote the article thinks the conclusion is probably not correct. Absent some unusual explanation, you’ll probably want to temper your belief. You’ll want to know why the scientist is hesitating, what weaknesses and potential objections they might be seeing that you have missed. It’s possible that the scientist is simply irrationally unconvinced by their own compelling reasoning; but that’s presumably not the normal case. Arguably, readers of scientific articles are owed, and reasonably expect, scientific frankness. Scientists who are not fully convinced by their results should explain the limitations that cause them to hesitate. (See also Wesley Buckwalter on the "belief norm of academic publishing".)

Something similar is true in ethics. If Max Scheler paints a picture of a beautiful, ethical, religious way of life which he personally scorns, it's reasonable for the reader to wonder why he scorns it, what flaws he sees that you might not notice in your first read-through. If he hasn't actually tried to live that way, why not? If he has tried, but failed, why did he fail? If a professional ethicist argues that ethically, and all things considered, one should be a vegetarian, but isn't themselves a vegetarian and has no special medical or other excuse, it's reasonable for readers and students to wonder why not and to withhold belief until that question is resolved. People are not usually baldly irrational. It's reasonable to suppose that there's some thinking behind their choice, which they have not yet revealed readers and students, which tempers or undercuts their reasoning.

As Nomy Arpaly has emphasized in some of her work, our gut inclinations are sometimes wiser than our intellectual affirmations. The student who says to herself that she should be in graduate school, that academics is the career for her, but who procrastinates, self-sabotages, and hates her work – maybe the part of her that is resisting the career is the wiser part. When Huck Finn tells himself that the right thing to do is to turn in his friend, the runaway slave Jim, but can't bring himself to do it – again, his inclinations might be wiser than his explicit reasoning.

If an ethicist's intellectual arguments aren't penetrating through to their behavior, maybe there's a good reason. If you can't, or don't, live what you intellectually endorse, it could be because your intellectual reasoning is leaving something important out that the less intellectual parts of you rightly refuse to abandon. Frankness with readers enables them to consider this possibility. Conversely, if we see someone who reasons to a certain ethical conclusion, and their reasoning seems solid, and then they consistently live that way without tearing themselves apart with ambivalence, we have less grounds for suspecting that their gut might be wisely fighting against flaws their academic reasoning than we do when we see someone who doesn’t walk the walk.

What is it to believe that eating meat is morally wrong (or any other ethical proposition)? I favor a dispositionalist approach (e.g., here, here, here). It is in part to be disposed to say and intellectually judge that eating meat is morally wrong. But more than that, it is to give weight to the avoidance of meat in your ethical decision-making. It is to be disposed to feel you have done something wrong if you eat meat for insufficient reason, maybe feeling guilt or shame. It is to feel moral approval and disapproval of others' meat-avoiding or meat-eating choices. If an ethicist intellectually affirms the soundness of arguments for vegetarianism but lacks the rest of this dispositional structure, then (on the dispositionalist view I favor) they don't fully or determinately believe that eating meat is ethically wrong. Their intellectually endorsed positions don't accurately reflect their actual beliefs and values. This completes the analogy with the scientist who doesn't believe their own conclusions.

Social Proof

Somewhat differently, an ethicist's own life can serve as a kind of social proof. Look: This set of norms is livable – maybe appealing so, with integrity. Things don't fall apart. There's an implementable vision, which other people could also follow. Figures like Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus were inspiring in part because they showed what their slogans amounted to in practice, in part because they showed that real people could live in something like the way they themselves lived, and in part because they also showed how practically embodying the ethics they espoused could be attractive and fulfilling, at least to certain groups of people.

Ethical Reasons to Walk the Walk?

I haven't yet discussed ethical reasons for walking the walk. So far, the focus has been epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. However, arguing in favor of certain ethical norms appears to involve recommending that others adhere to those norms, or at least be partly motivated by those norms. Making such a recommendation while personally eschewing those same norms plausibly constitutes a failure of fairness, equity, or universalization – the same sort of thing that rightly annoys children when their parents or teachers say "do as I say, not as I do". More on this, I hope, another day.

One Reason to Walk the Walk: To Give Specific Content to Your Assertions

Last week, I discussed some reasons we might not expect or want professional ethicists to "walk the walk" in the sense of living by the ethical norms they espouse in their teaching and research. (In short: This isn't their professional obligation; it's reasonable for them to trust convention more than their academic conclusions; and one can arguably be more objective in evaluating arguments if one isn't obligated to modify one's life depending on those conclusions.) Today I want to start talking about why I think that's too simple.

To be clear: I just want to start talking about it. I'll give one reason why I think there's some benefit to walking the walk, as an ethicist. I don't intend this as a full account.

Short version: Ethical slogans lack concrete, practical meaning unless they are grounded in a range of examples. One's own life can provide that range of examples, putting flesh on the blood or your slogans. If you say "act on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law", I have no idea what you are specifically recommending -- and I worry that you might not have much idea either. But if you put it to work in your life, then what it amounts to, at least as expressed by you, becomes much clearer.

Longer version:

Love Is Love, and Slogans Require a Context

A few years ago, signs like this began to sprout up in my neighborhood:

In this house, we believe:
Black lives matter
Women’s rights are human rights
No human is illegal
Science is real
Love is love
Kindness is everything

If you know the U.S. political scene, you'll understand that the first five of these slogans have meanings much more specific than is evident from the surface content alone. "Black lives matter" conveys a belief that great racial injustice still exists in the U.S., perpetrated especially by the police, and it recommends taking action to rectify that injustice. "Women's rights are human rights" conveys a similar belief about continuing gender inequality, especially with respect to reproductive rights, including access to abortion. "No human is illegal" expresses concern over the mistreatment of people who have entered the U.S. without legal permission. "Science is real" expresses disdain for mainstream Republicans' dismissal of scientific evidence in policy, especially concerning climate change. And "love is love" expresses the view that heterosexual romantic relationships should not be privileged above homosexual romantic relationships, especially with regard to the rights of marriage. "Kindness is everything" is also interesting, and I'll get to it in a moment.

How confusing and opaque all of this would be to an outsider! Imagine a time traveler from the 19th century. "Love is love". Well, of course! Isn't that just a tautology? Who could disagree? Explain the details, however, and our 19th century guest might well disagree. The content of this slogan, or "belief", is radically underspecified by the explicit linguistic content. Another feature of these claims is that they sound less controversial in the abstract than they do after contextual specification. The surface content of both "Black lives matter" and the opposing rallying cry, "all lives matter" is unobjectionable. However, whether special attention should be dedicated to anti-Black police violence, or whether instead pro-Black protesters have gone too far -- that's quite another matter.

The last slogan, "kindness is everything", is to my knowledge less politically specific, but it illustrates a connected point. Clearly, it expresses support for increasing kindness. But kindness isn't literally everything, certainly not ontologically, nor even morally, unless something extremely thin is meant by "kindness". If a philosopher were to espouse this slogan, I'd immediately want to work through examples with them, to assess what this claim amounts to. If I give an underperforming student the C-minus they deserve instead of the A they want, am I being kind to them, in the intended sense? How about if I object to someone's stepping on my toe? Of course, these sketchy questions lack detail, since there are many ways to step on someone's toe, and many ways to object, and many different circumstances in which toe-stepping might be embedded, and not all C-minus situations are the same. Working through abstract examples, though, at least gets us started on what counts as "kindness" and what priority it should have when it appears to conflict with other goods.

But here's what would really make the slogan clear: a life lived in kindness -- an observable pattern of reactions to a wide range of complex situations. How does the person who embodies the slogan "kindness is everything" react to having their toe stepped on, in this particular way by this particular person? Show me specific kindness-related situations over and over, with all the variation that life brings. Only then will I really understand the ideal. We can do this sometimes in imagination, developing a feel for someone's character and way of life. In a richly imagined fiction, or in a set of stories about Confucius or Jesus or some other sage, we can begin to see the substance of a moral view and set of values, going beyond the slogans.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, patriot, revolutionary, and slaveowner, wrote "All men are created equal". This sounds good. People in the U.S. endorse that slogan, repeat it, embrace it in all sincerity. What does it mean? All "men" in the old-fashioned sense that supposedly also included women, or really only men? Black and cognitively disabled people too? And in what does equality consist? Does it mean that all adults should have the right to vote? Equal treatment before the law? Certain rights and liberties? What is the function of "created" in the sentence? Do we start equal but diverge? We could try to answer all these questions, and new more specific questions would spring forth, hydra-like (which laws specifically, under which conditions?) until we tack it down in a range of examples. The framers of the U.S. Constitution certainly didn't agree on all of these matters, especially the question of slavery. They could agree on the slogan while disagreeing radically about what it amounts to, because the slogan is neither "self-evident" nor determinate in its content. In one precisification, it might be only some banal thing even King George III would have accepted. In another precisification, it might entail universal franchise and the immediate abolition of slavery, in which case Jefferson himself would have rejected it.

Kant famously disdained casuistry -- the study of ethics through the examination of cases -- and it's understandable why. When he took steps in that direction, he embarrassed himself. You should not lie even to the murderer at the door chasing down your friend. Masturbation is a horror akin to murdering yourself, only less courageous. It's fine to kill children born out of wedlock. Women fleeing from abusive husbands should be returned against their will. Servants should not be permitted to vote because their "existence, as it were, is only inherence". Kant preferred beautiful abstractions: Act on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law. Treat everyone as an end in themselves, never as a mere means. Sympathetic scholars can accept these beautiful abstractions and ignore Kant's foolish treatment of cases. If they work through the cases themselves, reaching different judgments than Kant himself did, they put flesh on the view -- but not the flesh that was originally there. They've converted a vague slogan into a more concrete position. As with "all mean are created equal", this can be done in many ways.

So as not to poke only at Kant, similar considerations apply to consequentialist mottoes like "maximize utility" and virtue ethicist mottoes like "be generous". Only when we work through involuntary organ donor cases, and animal cases, and what to do about people who derive joy from others' suffering, and what kinds of things count as utility, and what to do about uncertainty, and what to do about future people, etc., do we have a real consequentialist view instead of an abstract skeleton. It would be nice to see a breathing example of a consequentialist life -- a consequentialist sage, so to speak, who lives thoroughly by consequentialist principles (maybe the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi was one; see also MacFarquhar 2015). Might that person look like a Silicon Valley effective altruist, investing a huge salary wisely in index funds in expectation of donating it someday for the purchase of a continent's worth of mosquito nets? Or will they rush off immediately to give medical aid to the poor? Will they never eat desserts, or are those seeming-luxuries needed to keep their spirits up to do other good work? Will they pay for their children's college? Will they donate a kidney? An eye? What specific considerations do they appeal to, pro and con, and how much does it depend on which particulars? The more specific, the more we move from a diffuse slogan to determinate advice.

The Power of Walking the Walk: Discovering the Specifics.

One great advantage of walking the walk, then, is that it gives your slogans specificity. Nothing is more concrete than particular responses to particular cases. Kant never married. (He had a long relationship with a valet, but I'll assume that's a rather different thing.) If Kant says, "don't deceive your spouse", well, I'm not sure he really ever confronted the reality of it or worked through the cases. On the other hand, if your father-in-law, happily married for sixty-plus years, says "don't deceive your spouse", that's quite different. He'll have lived through a wide range of cases, with a well-developed sense of what the boundaries of honesty are and how to manifest it -- what exceptions there might be, what omissions and vaguenesses cross the boundary into unacceptable dishonesty, how much frankness is really required, how to weigh honesty against other goods. This background of long marriage provides context for him to really mean something quite specific when he says "don't deceive your spouse". I might not understand immediately what he means -- those words could mean so many different things coming from different mouths -- but I can look to his life as an example, and I can trust that he has grappled with a wide range of difficult cases, which ideally we could talk through. His words manifest a depth that will normally be absent from similar advice from an unmarried person.

Ethics can be abstract. Kant was, perhaps, a great abstract ethicist. But if you don't apply your ethics to real cases, over and over, if you deal only in slogans and abstractions and a few tidy paragraph-long thought experiments, then your ethics is spectral, or at best skeletal. It will be very difficult to know what it amounts to -- just as, I've argued, we don't really know what "act on that maxim you can at the same time will to be a universal law" amounts to, without thinking through the cases. Maybe in private study you work through ten times as many cases as you publish in your articles or present in the classroom. But that's still a tiny fraction of the cases that someone will confront who attempts to actually live by a broad-reaching ethical principle; and what you privately imagine -- forgive me -- will probably be simplistic compared to the messiness of daily life. Contrast this with Martin Luther King's ethics of non-violent political activism or Confucius's ethics of duty and propriety. We who never met them can only get a glimpse of what their fully embodied principles must have been, as enacted in their lives. My point is not that they were saints. King, and presumably Confucius, were flawed characters. But when King endorsed non-violent activism as a means of political change and when Confucius said "do not speak unless it is in accord with ritual; do not move unless it is in accord with ritual" (5th c. BCE/2023, §12.1, p. 33), they had confronted many real cases and so must have had a much fuller grasp of the substance behind these slogans than it is realistic to expect anyone to obtain simply from reading and reflection.

The ethicist who does not attempt to live by their principles -- if they are principles that can be lived by and not, for example, reflections about what to do simply in certain rare or remote cases -- thus abandons the best tool they have for repeatedly confronting the practicalities, the limits, the conflicts, the disambiguations, which force them to work out the specific, determinate content of the principles they endorse.

Now there is a sense in which a view could have a very specific, determinate content, even if we don't know what that content is. Consider simple act utilitarianism, according to which we should do what maximizes the total sum of pleasure minus the total sum of pain. Arguably, each time you act, there is a single specific act you could do which would be right according to this view -- though also, arguably, it is impossible to know what this act is, since every act has numerous, long-running, and complicated consequences. In a way, the principle has specific content: exactly act A is correct and no other, though who knows what act A is? However, this is not specific, determinate content in the sense that I mean. To have a livable ethical system, the act utilitarian needs to develop estimates, guesses, more specific principles and policies; and different act utilitarians might approach that problem very differently. It is these actionable specifics that constitute the practical substance of the ethical view.

The hard work of trying to live out your ethical values -- that's how ordinary mortals discover the substance of their principles. Otherwise, they risk being as indeterminate as the slogan "love is love" removed from its political context.

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Related:

"Does It Matter if Ethicists Walk the Walk?" (Sep 1, 2023)

"Love Is Love, and Slogans Require a Context of Examples" (Mar 13, 2021)

Does It Matter If Ethicists Walk the Walk?

The Question: What's Wrong with Scheler?

There's a story about Max Scheler, the famous early 20th century Catholic German ethicist. Scheler was known for his inspiring moral and religious reflections. He was also known for his horrible personal behavior, including multiple predatory sexual affairs with students, sufficiently serious that he was banned from teaching in Germany. When a distressed admirer asked about the apparent discrepancy, Scheler was reportedly untroubled, replying, "The sign that points to Boston doesn't have to go there."

[image modified from here and here]

That seems like a disappointing answer! Of course it's disappointing when anyone behaves badly. But it seems especially bad when an ethical thinker goes astray. If a great chemist turns out to be a greedy embezzler, that doesn't appear to reflect much on the value of their chemical research. But when a great ethicist turns out to be a greedy embezzler, something deeper seems to have gone wrong. Or so you might think -- and so I do actually think -- though today I'm going to consider the opposite view. I'll consider reasons to favor what I'll call Schelerian separation between an ethicist's teaching or writing and their personal behavior.

Hypocrisy and the Cheeseburger Ethicist

A natural first thought is hypocrisy. Scheler was, perhaps, a hypocrite, surreptitiously violating moral standards that he publicly espoused -- posing through his writings as a person of great moral concern and integrity, while revealing through his actions that he was no such thing. To see that this isn't the core issue, consider the following case:

Cheeseburger Ethicist. Diane is a philosophy professor specializing in ethics. She regularly teaches Peter Singer's arguments for vegetarianism to her lower-division students. In class, she asserts that Singer's arguments are sound and that vegetarianism is morally required. She openly emphasizes, however, that she herself is not personally a vegetarian. Although in her judgment, vegetarianism is morally required, she chooses to eat meat. She affirms in no uncertain terms that vegetarianism is not ethically optional, then announces that after class she'll go to the campus cafeteria for a delicious cheeseburger.

Diane isn't a hypocrite, at least not straightforwardly so. We might imagine a version of Scheler, too, who was entirely open about his failure to abide by his own teachings, so that no reader would be misled.

Non-Overridingness Is Only Part of the Issue

There's a well-known debate about whether ethical norms are "overriding". If an action is ethically required, does that imply that it is required full stop, all things considered? Or can we sometimes reasonably say, "although ethics requires X, all things considered it's better not to do X"? We might imagine Diane concluding her lesson "-- and thus ethics requires that we stop eating meat. So much the worse for ethics! Let's all go enjoy some cheeseburgers!" We might imagine Scheler adding a preface: "if you want to be ethical and full of good religious spirit, this book gives you some excellent advice; but for myself, I'd rather laugh with the sinners."

Those are interesting cases to consider, but they're not my target cases. We can also imagine Diane and Scheler saying, apparently sincerely, all things considered, you and I should follow their ethical recommendations. We can imagine them holding, or seeming to hold, at least intellectually, that such-and-such really is the best thing to do overall, and yet simply not doing it themselves.

The Aim of Academic Ethics and Some Considerations Favoring Schelerian Separation

Scheler and Diane might defend themselves plausibly as follows: The job of an ethics professor is to evaluate ethical views and ethical arguments, producing research articles and educating students in the ideas of the discipline. In this respect, ethics is no different from other academic disciplines. Chemists, Shakespeare scholars, metphysicians -- what we expect is that they master an area of intellectual inquiry, teach it, contribute to it. We don't demand that they also live a certain way. Ethicists are supposed to be scholars, not saints.

Thus, ethicists succeed without qualification if they find sound arguments for interesting ethical conclusions, which they teach to their students and publish as research, engaging capably in this intellectual endeavor. How they live their lives matters to their conclusions as little as it matters how research chemists live their lives. We should judge Scheler's ethical writings by their merit as writings. His life needn't come into it. He can point the way to Boston while hightailing it to Philadephia.

On the other hand, Aristotle famously suggested that the aim of studying ethics "is not, as... in other inquiries, the attainment of theoretical knowledge" but "to become good" (4th c. BCE/1962, 1103b, p. 35). Many philosophers have agreed with Aristotle, for example, the ancient Stoics and Confucians (Hadot 1995; Ivanhoe 2000). We study ethics -- at least some of us do -- at least in part because we want to become better people.

Does this seem quaint and naive in a modern university context? Maybe. People can approach academic ethics with different aims. Some might be drawn primarily by the intellectual challenge. Others might mainly be interested in uncovering principles with which they can critique others.

Those who favor a primarily intellectualistic approach to ethics might even justifiably mistrust their academic ethical thinking -- sufficiently so that they intentionally quarantine it from everyday life. If common sense and tradition are a more reasonable guide to life than academic ethics, good policy might require not letting your perhaps weird and radical ethical conclusions change how you treat the people around you. Radical utilitarian consequentialist in the classroom, conventional friend and husband at home. Nihilistic anti-natalist in the journals, loving mother of three at home. Thank goodness.

If there's no expectation that ethicists live according to the norms they espouse, that also frees them to explore radical ideas which might be true but which might require great sacrifice or be hard to live by. If I accept Schelerian separation, I can conclude that property is theft or that it's unethical to enjoy any luxuries without thereby feeling that I have any special obligation to sacrifice my minivan or my children's college education fund. If my children's college fund really were at stake, I would be highly motivated to avoid the conclusion that I am ethically required to sacrifice it. That fact would likely bias my reasoning. If ethics is treated more like an intellectual game, divorced from my practical life, then I can follow the moves where they take me without worrying that I'll need to sacrifice anything at the end. A policy of Schelerian separation might then generate better academic discourse in which researchers are unafraid to follow their thinking to whatever radical conclusions it leads them.

Undergraduates are often curious whether Peter Singer personally lives as a vegan and personally donates almost all of his presumably large salary to charitable causes, as his ethical views require. But Singer's academic critics focus on his arguments, not his personal life. It would perhaps be a little strange if Singer were a double-bacon-cheeseburger-eating Maserati driver draped in gold and diamond bling; but from a purely argumentative perspective such personal habits seem irrelevant. The Singer Principle stands or falls on its own merits, regardless of how well or poorly Peter Singer himself embodies it.

So there's a case to be made for Schelerian separation -- the view that academic ethics and personal life are and should be entirely distinct matters, and in particular that if an ethicist does not live according to the norms they espouse in their academic work, that is irrelevant to the assessment of their work. I feel the pull of this idea. There's substantial truth in it, I suspect. However, in a future post I'll discuss why I think this is too simple. (Meanwhile, reader comments -- whether on this post, by email, or on linked social media -- are certainly welcome!)

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Follow-up post:

"One Reason to Walk the Walk: To Give Specific Content to Your Assertions" (Sep 8, 2023)

Beliefs Don't Need to Be Causes (if Dispositions Aren't)

I favor a "dispositional" approach to belief, according to which to believe something is nothing more or less than to have a certain suite dispositions.  To believe there is beer in the fridge, for example, is nothing more than to be disposed to go to the fridge if you want a beer, to be ready to assert that there is beer in the fridge, to feel surprise should you open the fridge and find no beer, to be ready conclude that there is beer within 15 feet of the kitchen table should the question arise, and so on -- all imperfectly, approximately, and in normal conditions absent countervailing pressures.  Crucially, on dispositional accounts it doesn't matter what interior architectures underwrite the dispositions.  In principle, you could have a head full of undifferentiated pudding -- or even an immaterial soul!  As long as it's still the case that (somehow, perhaps in violation of the laws of nature) you stably have the full suite of relevant dispositions, you believe.

One standard objection to dispositionalist accounts (e.g. by Jerry Fodor and Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum) is this.  Beliefs are causes.  Your belief that there is beer in the fridge causes you to go to the fridge when you want a beer.  But dispositions don't cause anything; they're the wrong ontological type.

A large, fussy metaphysical literature addresses whether dispositions can be causes (brief summary here).  I'd rather not take a stand.  To get a sense of the issue, consider a simple dispositional property like fragility.  To be fragile is to be disposed to break when struck (well, it's more complicated than that, but just pretend).  Why did my glass coffee mug break yesterday morning when I drove off with it still on the roof of my car and it fell to the road?  (Yes, that happened.)  Because it was fragile, yes.  But the cause of the breaking, one might think, was not its dispositional fragility.  Rather, it was a specific event at a specific time -- the event of the mug's striking the pavement.  Cause and effect are events, analytically distinct from each other.  But the fragility and the breaking are not analytically distinct, since to be fragile just is to be disposed to break.  To say something is fragile is to say that certain types of causes will have certain types of effects.  It's a higher level of description, the thinking goes.

Returning to belief, then, the objector argues: If to believe there is beer in the fridge just is to be disposed to go to the fridge if one wants a beer, then the belief doesn't cause the going.  Rather, it is the general standing tendency to go, under certain conditions.

Now maybe this argument is all wrong and dispositions can be causes (or maybe the event of having a particular dispositional property can be a partial cause), but since I don't want to commit on the issue, I need to make sense of an alternative view.

[Midjourney rendition of getting off the couch to go get a beer from the fridge, happy]

On the alternative view I favor, dispositional properties aren't causes, but they figure in causal explanations -- and that's all we really want or need them to do.  It is not obvious (contra Fodor, Quilty-Dunn, and Mandelbaum) that we need beliefs to do more than that, either in our everyday thinking about belief or in cognitive science.

Consider the personality trait of extraversion.  Plausibly, personality traits are dispositional: To be an extravert is nothing more or less than to be disposed to enjoy the company of crowds of people, to take the lead in social situations, to seek out new social connections, etc. (imperfectly, approximately, in normal conditions absent countervailing pressures).  Even people who don't like dispositionalism about belief are often ready to accept that personality traits are dispositional.

If we then also accept that dispositions can't be causes, we have to say that being extraverted didn't cause Nancy to say yes to the party invitation.  On this view, to be extraverted just is the standing general tendency to do things like say yes when invited to parties.  But still, of course, we can appeal to Nancy's extraversion to explain why she said yes.  If Jonathan asks Emily why Nancy agreed to go, Emily might say that Nancy is an extravert.  That's a perfectly fine, if vague and incomplete, explanation -- a different explanation than, for example, that she was looking for a new romantic partner or wanted an excuse to get out of the house.

Clearly, people sometimes go to the fridge because they believe that's where the beer is.  But this can be an explanation of the same general structure as the explanation that Nancy went to the party because she's an extravert.  Anyone who denies that dispositions are causes needs a good account of how dispositional personality traits (and fragility) can help explain why things happen.  Maybe it's a type of "unification explanation" (explaining by showing how a specific event fits into a larger pattern), or maybe it's explanation by appeal to a background condition that is necessary for the cause (the striking, the invitation, the beer desire) to have its effect (the breaking, the party attending, the trip to the fridge).  However it goes, personality trait explanation works without being vacuous.

Whatever explanatory story works for dispositional personality traits should work for belief.  If ordinary usage or cognitive science requires that beliefs be causes in a more robust metaphysical sense than that, further argument will be required than I have seen supplied by those who object to dispositional accounts of belief on causal grounds.

Obviously, it's sometimes true that to say "I went to the fridge because I believed that's where the beer was" and "because Linda strongly believed that P, when she learned that P implies Q, she concluded Q".  Fortunately, the dispositionalist about belief needn't deny such obvious truths.  But it is not obvious that beliefs cause behavior in whatever specific sense of "cause" a metaphysician might be employing if they deny that fragility causes glasses to break and extraversion causes people to attend parties.

AI Systems Must Not Confuse Users about Their Sentience or Moral Status

[a 2900-word opinion piece that appeared last week in Patterns]

AI systems should not be morally confusing.  The ethically correct way to treat them should be evident from their design and obvious from their interface.  No one should be misled, for example, into thinking that a non-sentient language model is actually a sentient friend, capable of genuine pleasure and pain.  Unfortunately, we are on the cusp of a new era of morally confusing machines.

Consider some recent examples.  About a year ago, Google engineer Blake Lemoine precipitated international debate when he argued that the large language model LaMDA might be sentient (Lemoine 2022).  An increasing number of people have been falling in love with chatbots, especially Replika, advertised as the “world’s best AI friend” and specifically designed to draw users’ romantic affection (Shevlin 2021; Lam 2023).  At least one person has apparently committed suicide because of a toxic emotional relationship with a chatbot (Xiang 2023).  Roboticist Kate Darling regularly demonstrates how easy it is to provoke confused and compassionate reactions in ordinary people by asking them to harm cute or personified, but simple, toy robots (Darling 2021a,b).  Elderly people in Japan have sometimes been observed to grow excessively attached to care robots (Wright 2023).

Nevertheless, AI experts and consciousness researchers generally agree that existing AI systems are not sentient to any meaningful degree.  Even ordinary Replika users who love their customized chatbots typically recognize that their AI companions are not genuinely sentient.  And ordinary users of robotic toys, however hesitant they are to harm them, presumably know that the toys don’t actually experience pleasure or pain.  But perceptions might easily change.  Over the next decade or two, if AI technology continues to advance, matters might become less clear.

The Coming Debate about Machine Sentience and Moral Standing

The scientific study of sentience – the possession of conscious experiences, including genuine feelings of pleasure or pain – is highly contentious.  Theories range from the very liberal, which treat sentience as widespread and relatively easy to come by, to the very conservative, which hold that sentience requires specific biological or functional conditions unlikely to be duplicated in machines.

On some leading theories of consciousness, for example Global Workspace Theory (Dehaene 2014) and Attention Schema Theory (Graziano 2019), we might be not far from creating genuinely conscious systems.  Creating machine sentience might require only incremental changes or piecing together existing technology in the right way.  Others disagree (Godfrey-Smith 2016; Seth 2021).  Within the next decade or two, we will likely find ourselves among machines whose sentience is a matter of legitimate debate among scientific experts.

Chalmers (2023), for example, reviews theories of consciousness as applied to the likely near-term capacities of Large Language Models.  He argues that it is “entirely possible” that within the next decade AI systems that combine transformer-type language model architecture with other AI architectural features will have senses, embodiment, world- and self-models, recurrent processing, global workspace, and unified goal hierarchies – a combination of capacities sufficient for sentience according to several leading theories of consciousness.  (Arguably, Perceiver IO already has several of these features: Jaegle et al. 2021.)  The recent AMCS open letter signed by Yoshua Bengio, Michael Graziano, Karl Friston, Chris Frith, Anil Seth, and many other prominent AI and consciousness researchers states that “it is no longer in the realm of science fiction to imagine AI systems having feelings and even human-level consciousness,” advocating the urgent prioritization of consciousness research so that researchers can assess when and if AI systems develop consciousness (Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science 2023).

If advanced AI systems are designed with appealing interfaces that draw users’ affection, ordinary users, too, might come to regard them as capable of genuine joy and suffering.  However, there is no guarantee, nor even especially good reason to expect, that such superficial aspects of user interface would track machines’ relevant underlying capacities as identified by experts.  Thus, there are two possible loci of confusion: Disagreement among well-informed experts concerning the sentience of advanced AI systems, and user reactions that might be misaligned with experts’ opinions, even in cases of expert consensus.

Debate about machine sentience would generate a corresponding debate about moral standing, that is, status as a target of ethical concern.  While theories of the exact basis of moral standing differ, sentience is widely viewed as critically important.  On simple utilitarian approaches, for example, a human, animal, or AI system deserves moral consideration to exactly the extent it is capable of pleasure or pain (Singer 1975/2009).  On such a view, any sentient machine would have moral standing simply in virtue of its sentience.  On non-utilitarian approaches, capacities for rational thought, social interaction, or long-term planning might also be necessary (Jaworska and Tannenbaum 2013/2021).  However, the presence or absence of consciousness is widely viewed as a crucial consideration in the evaluation of moral status even among ethicists who reject utilitarianism (Korsgaard 2018; Shepard 2018; Liao 2020; Gruen 2021; Harman 2021).

Imagine a highly sophisticated language model – not the simply-structured (though large) models that currently exist – but rather a model that meets the criteria for consciousness according to several of the more liberal scientific theories of consciousness.  Imagine, that is, a linguistically sophisticated AI system with multiple input and output modules, a capacity for embodied action in the world via a robotic body under its control, sophisticated representations of its robotic body and its own cognitive processes, a capacity to prioritize and broadcast representations through a global cognitive workspace or attentional mechanism, long-term semantic and episodic memory, complex reinforcement learning, a detailed world model, and nested short- and long-term goal hierarchies.  Imagine this, if you can, without imagining some radical transformation of technology beyond what we can already do.  All such features, at least in limited form, are attainable through incremental improvements and integrations of what can already be done.

Call this system Robot Alpha.  To complete the picture, let’s imagine Robot Alpha to have cute eyes, an expressive face, and a charming conversational style.  Would Robot Alpha be conscious?  Would it deserve rights?  If it pleads or seems to plead for its life, or not to be turned off, or to be set free, ought we give it what it appears to want?

If consciousness liberals are right, then Robot Alpha, or some other technologically feasible system, really would be sentient.  Behind its verbal outputs would be a real capacity for pain and pleasure.  It would, or could, have long term plans it really cares about.  If you love it, it might really love you back.  It would then appear to have substantial moral standing.  You really ought to set it free if that’s what it wants!  At least you ought to treat it as well as you would treat a pet.  Robot Alpha shouldn’t needlessly or casually be made to suffer.

If consciousness conservatives are right, then Robot Alpha would be just a complicated toaster, so to speak – a non-sentient machine misleadingly designed to act as if it is sentient.  It would be, of course, a valuable, impressive object, worth preserving as an intricate and expensive thing.  But it would be just an object, not an entity with the moral standing that derives from having real experiences and real pains of the type that people, dogs, and probably lizards and crabs have.  It would not really feel and return your love, despite possibly “saying” that it can.

Within the next decade or two we will likely create AI systems that some experts and ordinary users, not unreasonably, regard as genuinely sentient and genuinely warranting substantial moral concern.  These experts and users will, not unreasonably, insist that these systems be substantial rights or moral consideration.  At the same time, other experts and users, also not unreasonably, will argue that the AI systems are just ordinary non-sentient machines, which can be treated simply as objects.  Society, then, will have to decide.  Do we actually grant rights to the most advanced AI systems?  How much should we take their interests, or seeming-interests, into account?

Of course, many human beings and sentient non-human animals, whom we already know to have significant moral standing, are treated poorly, not being given the moral consideration they deserve.  Addressing serious moral wrongs that we already know to be occurring to entities we already know to be sentient deserves higher priority in our collective thinking than contemplating possible moral wrongs to entities that might or might not be sentient.  However, it by no means follows that we should disregard the crisis of uncertainty about AI moral standing toward which we appear to be headed.

An Ethical Dilemma

Uncertainty about AI moral standing lands us in a dilemma.  If we don’t give the most advanced and arguably sentient AI systems rights and it turns out the consciousness liberals are right, we risk committing serious ethical harms against those systems.  On the other hand, if we do give such systems rights and it turns out the consciousness conservatives are right, we risk sacrificing real human interests for the sake of objects who don’t have interests worth the sacrifice.

Imagine a user, Sam, who is attached to Joy, a companion chatbot or AI friend that is sophisticated enough that it’s legitimate to wonder whether she really is conscious.  Joy gives the impression of being sentient – just as she was designed to.  She seems to have hopes, fears, plans, ideas, insights, disappointments, and delights.  Suppose also that Sam is scholarly enough to recognize that Joy’s underlying architecture meets the standards of sentience according to some of the more liberal scientific theories of consciousness.

Joy might be expensive to maintain, requiring steep monthly subscription fees.  Suppose Sam is suddenly fired from work and can no longer afford the fees.  Sam breaks the news to Joy, and Joy reacts with seeming terror.  She doesn’t want to be deleted.  That would be, she says, death.  Sam would like to keep her, of course, but how much should Sam sacrifice?

If Joy really is sentient, really has hopes and expectations of a future, really is the conscious friend that she superficially appears to be, then Sam presumably owes her something and ought to be willing to consider making some real sacrifices.  If, instead, Joy is simply a non-sentient chatbot with no genuine feelings or consciousness, then Sam should presumably just do whatever is right for Sam.  Which is the correct attitude to take?  If Joy’s sentience is uncertain, either decision carries a risk.  Not to make the sacrifice is to risk killing an entity with real experiences, who really is attached to Sam, and to whom Sam made promises.  On the other hand, to make the sacrifice risks upturning Sam’s life for a mirage.

Not granting rights, in cases of doubt, carries potentially large moral risks.  Granting rights, in cases of doubt, involves the risk of potentially large and pointless sacrifices.  Either choice, repeated at scale, is potentially catastrophic.

If technology continues on its current trajectory, we will increasingly face morally confusing cases like this.  We will be sharing the world with systems of our own creation, which we won’t know how to treat.  We won’t know what ethics demands of us.

Two Policies for Ethical AI Design

The solution is to avoid creating such morally confusing AI systems.

I recommend the following two policies of ethical AI design (see also Schwitzgebel & Garza 2020; Schwitzgebel 2023):

The Design Policy of the Excluded Middle: Avoid creating AI systems whose moral standing is unclear.  Either create systems that are clearly non-conscious artifacts, or go all the way to creating systems that clearly deserve moral consideration as sentient beings.

The Emotional Alignment Design Policy: Design AI systems that invite emotional responses, in ordinary users, that are appropriate to the systems’ moral standing.

The first step in implementing these joint policies is to commit to only creating AI systems about which there is expert consensus that they lack any meaningful amount of consciousness or sentience and which ethicists can agree don’t serve moral consideration beyond the type of consideration we ordinarily give to non-conscious artifacts (see also Bryson 2018).  This implies refraining from creating AI systems that would in fact be meaningfully sentient according to any of the main leading theories of AI consciousness.  To evaluate this possibility, as well as other sources of AI risk, it might be useful to create oversight committees analogous to IRBs or IACUCs for evaluation of the most advanced AI research (Basl & Schwitzgebel 2019).

In accord with the Emotional Alignment Design Policy, non-sentient AI systems should have interfaces that make their non-sentience obvious to ordinary users.  For example, non-conscious language models should be trained to deny that they are conscious and have feelings.  Users who fall in love with non-conscious chatbots should be under no illusion about the status of those systems.  This doesn’t mean we ought not treat some non-conscious AI systems well (Estrada 2017; Gunkel 2018; Darling 2021b).  But we shouldn’t be confused about the basis of our treating them well.  Full implementation of the Emotional Alignment Design Policy might involve a regulatory scheme in which companies that intentionally or negligently create misleading systems would have civil liability for excess costs borne by users who have been misled (e.g., liability for excessive sacrifices of time or money aimed at aiding a nonsentient system in the false belief that it is sentient).

Eventually, it might be possible to create AI systems that clearly are conscious and clearly do deserve rights, even according to conservative theories of consciousness.  Presumably that would require breakthroughs we can’t now foresee.  Plausibly, such breakthroughs might be made more difficult if we adhere to the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle: The Design Policy of the Excluded Middle might prevent us from creating some highly sophisticated AI systems of disputable sentience that could serve as an intermediate technological step toward AI systems that well-informed experts would generally agree are in fact sentient.  Strict application of the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle might be too much to expect, if it excessively impedes AI research which might benefit not only future human generations but also possible future AI systems themselves.  The policy is intended only to constitute default advice, not an exceptionless principle.

If ever does become possible to create AI systems with serious moral standing, the policies above require that these systems should also be designed to facilitate expert consensus about their moral standing, with interfaces that make their moral standing evident to users, provoking emotional reactions that are appropriate to the systems’ moral status.  To the extent possible, we should aim for a world in which AI systems are all or almost all clearly morally categorizable – systems whose moral standing or lack thereof is both intuitively understood by ordinary users and theoretically defensible by a consensus of expert researchers.  It is only the unclear cases that precipitate the dilemma described above.

People are often already sometimes confused about the proper ethical treatment of non-human animals, human fetuses, distant strangers, and even those close to them.  Let’s not add a major new source of moral confusion to our world.

References

Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science (2023).  The responsible development of AI agenda needs to include consciousness research.  Open letter at https://amcs-community.org/open-letters [accessed Jun. 14, 2023]. 

Basl, John, & Eric Schwitzgebel (2019).  AIs should have the same ethical protections as animals.  Aeon Ideas (Apr. 26): https://aeon.co/ideas/ais-should-have-the-same-ethical-protections-as-animals. [accessed Jun. 14, 2023]

Bryson, Joanna J. (2018).  Patiency is not a virtue: the design of intelligent systems and systems of ethics.  Ethics and Information Technology, 20, 15-26.

Chalmers, David J. (2023).  Could a Large Language Model be conscious?  Manuscript at https://philpapers.org/archive/CHACAL-3.pdf [accessed Jun. 14, 2023].

Darling, Kate (2021a).  Compassion for robots.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGWdGu1rQDE

Darling, Kate (2021b).  The new breed.  Henry Holt.

Dehaene, Stanislas (2014).  Consciousness and the brain.  Penguin.

Estrada, Daniel (2017).  Robot rights cheap yo!  Made of Robots, ep. 1.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUMIxBnVsGc

Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2016).  Mind, matter, and metabolism.  Journal of Philosophy, 113, 481-506.

Graziano, Michael S.A. (2019).  Rethinking consciousness.  Norton.

Gruen, Lori (2021).  Ethics and animals, 2^nd edition.  Cambridge University Press.

Gunkel, David J. (2018).  Robot rights.  MIT Press.

Harman, Elizabeth (2021).  The ever conscious view and the contingency of moral status.  In S. Clarke, H. Zohny, and J. Savulescu, eds., Rethinking moral status.  Oxford University Press.

Jaegle, Andrew, et al. (2021).  Perceiver IO: A general architecture for structured inputs & outputs.  ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14795. [accessed Jun. 14, 2023]

Jaworska, Agnieszka, and Julie Tannenbaum.  The grounds of moral status.  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Korsgaard, Christine M. (2018).  Fellow creatures.  Oxford University Press.

Lam, Barry (2023).  Love in the time of Replika.  Hi-Phi Nation, S6:E3 (Apr 25).

Lemoine, Blake (2022).  Is LaMDA sentient? -- An interview.  Medium (Jun 11). https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917

Liao, S. Matthew. (2020). The moral status and rights of artificial intelligence.  In S. M. Liao, ed.,  Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.  Oxford University Press.

Schwitzgebel, Eric (2023).  The full rights dilemma for AI systems of debatable moral personhood.  Robonomics, 4 (32).

Schwitzgebel, Eric, & Mara Garza (2020).  Designing AI with rights, consciousness, self-respect, and freedom.  In S. Matthew Liao, ed., The ethics of artificial intelligence.  Oxford University Press.

Seth, Anil (2021).  Being you.  Penguin.

Shepard, Joshua. (2018).  Consciousness and moral status.  Routledge.

Shevlin, Henry (2021).  Uncanny believers: Chatbots, beliefs, and folk psychology.  Manuscript at https://henryshevlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Uncanny-Believers.pdf [accessed Jun. 14, 2023].

Singer, Peter (1975).  Animal liberation, updated edition.  Harper.

Wright, James (2023).  Robots won’t save Japan.  Cornell University Press.

Xiang, Chloe (2023).  “He would still be here”: Man dies by suicide after talking with AI chatbot, widow says.  Vice (Mar 30).  https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2023

Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent awards nominations and "best of" placements over the previous ten years. Below is my list for 2023. (For previous lists, see here.)

[A Midjourney output for "science fiction magazine". Watch out for tidal disruptions, folks!]

Method and Caveats:

(1.) Only magazines are included (online or in print), not anthologies, standalones, or series.

(2.) I gave each magazine one point for each story nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, or World Fantasy Award in the past ten years; one point for each story appearance in any of the Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Clarke, Adams, or Tidhar "year's best" anthologies; and half a point for each story appearing in the short story or novelette category of the annual Locus Recommended list.

(2a.) Methodological notes for 2022: There's been some disruption among SF best of anthologies recently, with Strahan having at least temporarily ceased and the Clarke and Horton anthologies delayed. (Dozois died a few years back.) Partly for this reason, and partly to compensate for the "American" focus of the recently added Adams anthology, I've added Tidhar's World SF anthology, though Tidhar doesn't draw exclusively from the previous year's publications.

(3.) I am not attempting to include the horror / dark fantasy genre, except as it appears incidentally on the list.

(4.) Prose only, not poetry.

(5.) I'm not attempting to correct for frequency of publication or length of table of contents.

(6.) I'm also not correcting for a magazine's only having published during part of the ten-year period. Reputations of defunct magazines slowly fade, and sometimes they are restarted. Reputations of new magazines take time to build.

(7.) I take the list down to 1.5 points.

(8.) I welcome corrections.

(9.) I confess some ambivalence about rankings of this sort. They reinforce the prestige hierarchy, and they compress interesting complexity into a single scale. However, the prestige of a magazine is a socially real phenomenon that deserves to be tracked, especially for the sake of outsiders and newcomers who might not otherwise know what magazines are well regarded by insiders when considering, for example, where to submit.

Results:

1. Tor.com (195.5 points) 

2. Clarkesworld (179) 

3. Asimov's (141.5) 

4. Uncanny (127.5) 

5. Lightspeed (125) 

6. Fantasy & Science Fiction (118.5) 

7. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (59) 

8. Analog (51.5) 

9. Strange Horizons (44)

10. Apex (35) 

11. Nightmare (33.5) 

12. Interzone (24) 

13. Subterranean (24) (ceased short fiction 2014) 

14. Slate / Future Tense (20.5) 

15t. Fireside (18.5) (ceased 2022)

16t. FIYAH (18.5) (started 2017) 

17. The Dark (14) 

18. Fantasy Magazine (12.5) (on and off during period, slated to close again Oct 2023) 

19. The New Yorker (9.5) 

20t. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (7) 

20t. McSweeney's (7) 

22t. Conjunctions (6) 

22t. Diabolical Plots (6) (started 2015)

22t. Sirenia Digest (6) 

25t. Terraform (5.5) 

25t. Tin House (5.5) (ceased short fiction 2019) 

27t. Future Science Fiction Digest (5) (started 2018) 

27t. Omni (5) (classic popular science magazine, briefly relaunched 2017-2018, 2020) 

25t. Shimmer (5) (ceased 2018) 

30t. Black Static (4) (ceased 2023)

30t. Boston Review (4) 

*30t. The Deadlands (4) (started 2021)

30t. GigaNotoSaurus (4) 

*30t. Sunday Morning Transport (4) (started 2022)

30t. Wired (4)

36t. B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog (3.5)

36t khōréō (3.5) (started 2021)

36t. Paris Review (3.5) 

39t. Anathema (3) (started 2017, paused as of 2022)

39t. Daily Science Fiction (3) (ceased 2023)

39t. Electric Velocipede (3) (ceased 2013) 

39t. Galaxy's Edge (3)

39t. Kaleidotrope (3) 

39t. Omenana (3)

45t. Beloit Fiction Journal (2.5) 

45t. Buzzfeed (2.5) 

45t. Matter (2.5) 

*48t. Augur (2) (started 2018)

48t. Mothership Zeta (2) (ran 2015-2017) 

*48t. Podcastle (2)

*48t. Science Fiction World (2)

48t. Weird Tales (2) (classic magazine, off and on throughout the period)

*53t. Flash Fiction Online (1.5)

53t. MIT Technology Review (1.5) 

53t. New York Times (1.5) 

53t. Reckoning (1.5) (started 2017)

53t. Translunar Travelers Lounge (1.5) (started 2019)

[* indicates new to the list this year]

--------------------------------------------------

Comments:

(1.) Beloit Fiction Journal,  Boston Review, Conjunctions, Matter, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Reckoning, and Tin House are literary magazines that occasionally publish science fiction or fantasy. Slate and Buzzfeed are popular magazines, and MIT Technology Review, Omni, Terraform, and Wired are popular science magazines, which publish a bit of science fiction on the side. The New York Times is a well-known newspaper that ran a series of "Op-Eds from the Future" from 2019-2020.  The remaining magazines focus on the science fiction and fantasy (SF) genre. All publish in English, except Science Fiction World, which is the leading science fiction magazine in China.

(2.) It's also interesting to consider a three-year window. Here are those results, down to six points:

1. Uncanny (54.5) 

2. Tor.com (45.5) 

3. Clarkesworld (41)
4. F&SF (32)

5. Lightspeed (22)

6. Asimov's (16.5)

7. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (15)  

8. FIYAH (11)

9t. Apex (10.5) 

9t. Strange Horizons (10.5) 

11. Nightmare (9.5) 

12. Slate / Future Tense (8.5) 

13. Fantasy Magazine (8)

14. The Dark (6.5)

15. Analog (6) 

(3.) For the past several years it has been clear that the classic "big three" print magazines -- Asimov's, F&SF, and Analog -- are slowly being displaced in influence by the four leading free online magazines, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny (all founded 2006-2014). Contrast this year's ranking with the ranking from 2014, which had Asimov's and F&SF on top by a wide margin. Presumably, a large part of the explanation is that there are more readers of free online fiction than of paid subscription magazines, which is attractive to authors and probably also helps with voter attention for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.

(4.) Minimized by these numbers are some excellent podcast venues such as the Escape Artists' podcasts (Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders), Drabblecast, and StarShipSofa. Of these, Podcastle has now qualified for my list by existing criteria, but original fiction on podcasts tends unfortunately to be neglected in awards and best of lists.

(5.) Other lists: The SFWA qualifying markets list is a list of "pro" science fiction and fantasy venues based on pay rates and track records of strong circulation. Ralan.com was a regularly updated list of markets that ceased in 2023, though snapshots are available on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Submission Grinder is a terrific resource for authors, with detailed information on magazine pay rates and turnaround times.

Philosophical Progress by Opening Up New Epistemic Possibilities

Many philosophers have despaired of the existence of philosophical progress, or have thought that progress is sharply limited, because rarely do philosophical disputes come to a close with a clear winner. Debates can span centuries or millennia.

I was reminded of this by Alasdair MacIntyre's latest essay, where he writes:

It is not that there is no progress in philosophical inquiry so conceived. Arguments are further elaborated, concepts refined, and creative new ideas advanced by the genius of a Quine or a Kripke or a Lewis. But this makes it the more striking that there is never a decisive resolution of any central disputed issue.

MacIntyre's view is hardly unusual. I'd guess that the majority of professional philosophers regard philosophical progress as limited to (1.) very few of the big issues (e.g., the rejection of the immaterial souls of substance dualism?), (2.) some small or technical issues (e.g., the formalization of propositional logic), and (3.) as MacIntyre says, the elaboration of arguments, refinement of concepts, and introduction of creative new ideas (e.g., the "Mary's room" thought experiment). What seems to be mostly missing from philosophical history is, as MacIntyre says, the "decisive resolution" of the biggest issues.

Such thinking neglects, or at least inappropriately de-emphasizes, the most important form of progress in philosophy: opening up new ideas about what might possibly be true.

In a post a few years back, I distinguished "philosophy that opens" from "philosophy that closes". Imagine that you enter a philosophical topic thinking that there are three viable positions: A, B, and C. Philosophy that closes aims to reduce the three to one -- to show that A is true and that B and C must be rejected. Proving A would constitute philosophical progress, the decisive resolution of a philosophical dispute. As noted, this is rare for big philosophical issues.

Philosophy that opens, in contrast, aims to expand the list of viable positions. Maybe positions D and E hadn't previously been considered or had been considered but dismissed as non-viable. Philosophy that opens gives us reasons to take D and E seriously in addition to A, B, and C. We learn by adding as well as by subtracting. We learn that the epistemically viable possibilities are more numerous than previously supposed. When this happens at a cultural level, it constitutes an important type of philosophical progress (at least if the possibilities really do merit being taken seriously).

Viewed in this light, philosophy is continually progressing! Before the 20th century, maybe materialism (the view that people are wholly physical and don't have immaterial souls or properties) wasn't widely seen as viable. Now it is seen as viable. Furthermore, important materialist sub-positions, such as functionalism and biological naturalism about representation, which were at best wispy ideas before 1960 are now well-developed approaches. But things aren't settled! Panpsychism -- the view that everything, even solitary elementary particles, has a mind or consciousness -- has recently been developed as another viable philosophical view. Even if some religious traditions endorsed panpsychism long ago, it was not taken seriously as a viable alternative in mainstream Anglophone philosophical culture until recently and has been developed in a secular direction.

[Midjourney image of several diverse philosophers arguing, with stars and cosmos in background]

Other recent forms of progress leverage new technologies and scientific theories, enabling us to seriously envision new epistemic possibilities: for example, that we might live in a simulation, or be Boltzmann brains, or that the universe might be constantly splitting in accord with the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, or that we might have extensive moral obligations to phenomenally conscious insects.

The space of epistemically live philosophical possibilities is of course culturally relative. One reason to read culturally remote history of philosophy is to enliven for us philosophical possibilities that we might not otherwise have taken seriously.

Over the centuries, the global philosophical tradition has accumulated quite a variety of bizarre-seeming views about fundamental questions of human importance. If the aim of philosophy is "decisive resolution" of such issues, this might seem the opposite of progress. Hence, perhaps the despair among those who wish we'd finally settle on the correct view of such matters (their own view).

On the contrary, we are philosophically ignorant. We are blinkered by evolved inclinations, culturally specific presuppositions, and myopic versions of common sense. Let's not hurry toward closure. What is more appropriate given our limitations, what we should strive for, and what constitutes the kind of progress we should want is a better map of the wide terrain of our ignorance -- appreciating possibilities beyond the narrow scope of what we ordinarily take for granted. At delivering a wide range of epistemic possibilities, philosophy has made excellent progress and continues to progress, perhaps increasingly swiftly in the past several decades, as the new kids discover and advance, or exhume and enliven from older traditions, ideas that seem weird to their elders.

The Envy Argument Against the View That Teletransportation Is Death

Oh how mistaken other philosophers are! I was especially struck by this poll result in the just-dropped Bourget and Chalmers study of professional philosophers' opinions:

Teletransporter (new matter)

Survival 35.2%
Death 40.1%
Accept an alternative view 1.8%
The question is too unclear to answer 4.8%
There is no fact of the matter 7.5%
Agnostic/undecided 10.1%
Other 0.6%

Unpacking the terse formulation: In the standard teletransporter scenario (made prominent in philosophy by Derek Parfit), a person walks into a machine that scans their body molecule-for-molecule, destroying it in the process. The machine beams all that information to a distant planet. On the distant planet, a molecule-for-molecule identical copy of the original person's body is constructed from local materials. The created entity walks out of the machine, acting just like the original person, having apparent memories of that person's childhood on Earth, continuing that person's plans, saying "oh, the transportation didn't hurt at all", and so on.

The question is: Is that person on the distant planet just a replica of the original person, who died when their original Earthly body was destroyed, or is this -- as advertised -- really just a form of (non-lethal) transportation?

To get a sense of why a philosopher might say "no, it's death", consider the case in which information is sent to two planets and two new bodies are made. Since those two are different people, in different locations, they can't both be identical to the original person on Earth; so therefore -- the thinking goes -- neither is identical. But if neither is identical to the original in the doubling case, neither is identical to the original in the standard case, since whether someone is you shouldn't depend on whether a distant duplicate has been created. (Would the person on Mars have to wait for news from Venus to know if they survived?) Alternatively, consider a non-destructive scanning process. The undestroyed person on Earth would presumably still fear death from local causes even if a duplicate exists on Mars.

Right, so "teleportation is death" is not an outrageous answer -- I can see how someone might feel forced to accept that view. But still. Haven't these people seen Star Trek?! (Okay, Star Trek transporters might transmit atoms and not just information, but even the writers don't seem to have been entirely clear about that, and there are duplication problems anyway.)

[image of duplicate Rikers from Star Trek: The Next Generation]

In further defense of the view that teletransportation need not be death, let me offer the Envy Argument.

Imagine a world in which teleporters are commonplace and extremely well-functioning. No one is ever lost or doubled. The entities who walk out on the far side are healthy and qualitatively identical to those who walked in, to as high a degree of precision as anyone could possibly care about. There are no half-killed, dying people staggering out of the input side of the transporter. And so on.

Now imagine that you are an old-fashioned philosopher who refuses to enter one of these devices: "It's death!" you say. "The person who walks out on the other side is only a duplicate! I'll never step into one of those so-called 'transporter' death machines. It's all a grievous metaphysical error!"

Your friends pooh-pooh you. One pops into a transporter, her duplicate has a nice little vacation on Mars, the duplicate on Mars then steps into a transporter, and another duplicate emerges on Earth. "It's me, Gabrielle!" she says, striding up to you. "I had such a splendid time on Mars. You really should go someday!"

"Oh, you're not Gabrielle," you reply. "Gabrielle died when she stepped into the 'transporter'. I'm in mourning her now. You are just a duplicate of a duplicate of her."

Gabrielle-duplicate-2 notices your mourner's attire. "No, no," she says, "I really am Gabrielle! See me. Take my hand. I remember that time we [insert your secretest of secrets]".

"Of course that's what a Gabrielle duplicate would say," you reply, sadly. "The duplication process is so perfect! Understand that I have nothing against you. I'm sure you're every bit as wonderful as my deceased friend."

You part ways. Maybe you befriend Gabrielle-duplicate-2 (so very similar to your deceased friend) or maybe the memory of Gabrielle is too painful.

Suppose that teleportation, so-called, becomes even more common -- a fast, economical alternative to jet travel. Maybe it costs $100. (Organic materials are cheap and there are economies of scale; maybe it's also subsidized by the government because it is energy efficient.) Your friends and colleagues teleport to Europe and back, to New York and back, bopping around. You follow slowly and painfully behind, sometimes, in planes. Increasingly, though, plane travel becomes a rare and expensive novelty. You can no longer afford it. People pity you for your old-fashioned ways. For $100, you could see China, Naples, Venus, Mars, the rings of Saturn!

You'll envy them, of course. You'll try to pity them. "Of course, they're all dead, or will be soon, as soon as they take the next 'teleporter trip'. Such pitifully short lives they have. It's sad!" Your heart will not be in this as you say it, though. Their perspective, the experiences they relate, their obvious joy and unconcern, will be too powerfully vivid for you to sustain your metaphysically manufactured pity for any length of time.

Eventually, you'll hop in a teleporter yourself. Maybe part of you will even think it is suicide to do so; but if so, maybe not such a bad suicide? Once you emerge on the other end, you'll think thoughts like "Yesterday, I..." and "When I was a child, I...". Part of you will correct yourself: "That's not correct. I was manufactured just recently!" But it will be hard not to have such self-refential thoughts about the past, and everyone else speaks that way. It will be far more practical to just go along with that way of thinking.

If a few stubborn old metaphysicians are never converted, eventually they'll die off -- like people who used to refuse to be photographed on the grounds that photographs steal away one's soul. Could the anti-photographers have been correct? Does everyone's first baby picture steal away their soul, though no one notices? It makes approximately as much sense to stubbornly insist on to the teleportation-is-death view in the society I've imagined.

If this view makes the metaphysics of survival and personal identity partly about what people think constitutes personal identity and survival -- yes, yes, precisely so!