We argue that microbiome research should be more reflective on the methods that it relies on to build its datasets due to the danger of facing a methodological problem which we call “epistemic misalignment.” An epistemic misalignment occurs when the method used to answer specific scientific questions does not track justified answers, due to the material constraints imposed by the very method. For example, relying on 16S rRNA to answer questions about the function of the microbiome generates epistemic (...) misalignments, due to the different temporal scales that 16S rRNA provides information about and the temporal scales that are required to know about the functionality of some microorganisms. We show how some of these exist in contemporary microbiome science and urge microbiome scientists to take some measures to avoid them, as they may question the credibility of the field as a whole. (shrink)

_Conceptual misalignment refers to the dynamic in which the process of crystallizing ideas and theories from a distant source text in the contemporary anglophone context is accompanied by significant tension, as the original concepts and their anglophone counterparts do not align perfectly. This phenomenon frequently goes undetected or is viewed as merely an obstacle that non-western and/or history of philosophy research projects must surmount to gain relevance in contemporary discussions. Through examining cases from classical Chinese philosophy, this paper aims (...) to elucidate the phenomenon of conceptual misalignment and proposes seeing it not as an obstacle but rather as an important resource of doing philosophy that merits serious attention._. (shrink)

Creating systems that are aligned with our goals is seen as a leading approach to create safe and beneficial AI in both leading AI companies and the academic field of AI safety. We defend the view that misaligned AGI – future, generally intelligent (robotic) AI agents – poses catastrophic risks. At the same time, we support the view that aligned AGI creates a substantial risk of catastrophic misuse by humans. While both risks are severe and stand in tension with one (...) another, we show that – in principle – there is room for alignment approaches which do not increase misuse risk. We then investigate how the tradeoff between misalignment and misuse looks empirically for different technical approaches to AI alignment. Here, we argue that many current alignment techniques and foreseeable improvements thereof plausibly increase risks of catastrophic misuse. Since the impacts of AI depend on the social context, we close by discussing important social factors and suggest that to reduce the risk of a misuse catastrophe due to aligned AGI, techniques such as robustness, AI control methods and especially good governance seem essential. (shrink)

The ageing of the global population prompts many countries to appropriately allocate healthcare resources that ensure adequate elder care. Nevertheless, the shortages in and burdens of professional care continue to persist. Assistive and remote monitoring technologies for home-use support professional carers in providing care to older persons. With secondary analyses of semistructured interviews with 27 older persons and 23 professional carers in Switzerland, we examined their reasons and expectations for accepting or rejecting technologies in elder care contextualised by their moral (...) outlooks on care, life, death and the deterioration from age. Whereas some appreciate the opportunities for greater safety and reassurance from technologies, others may see the alerts as burdensome and the interventions superfluous. We argue that dissatisfaction in professional care may result from a misalignment of the subjective values between the carer and older person. This may exacerbate the problem of appropriate care provision and disrupt the potential of technologies to benefit older persons. An ideal caregiving arrangement may be found when their values do align. We argue that there exists intrinsic value to finding an alignment using the capabilities approach, followed by reflections on autonomy and privacy. Recommendations are offered to practically enable this alignment, with limits set to ensure adequate access to care. With the increasing enthusiasm for technical solutions in professional elder care, this paper contributes a novel perspective by presenting two reasons for inefficiencies in reducing care burdens that are linked to the alignment of core moral outlooks and the realisation of capabilities. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine frequently uses statistical hypothesis testing. In this paradigm, data can only disconfirm a research hypothesis’ competitors: One tests the negation of a statistical hypothesis that is supposed to correspond to the research hypothesis. In practice, these hypotheses are often misaligned. For instance, directional research hypotheses are often paired with non-directional statistical hypotheses. Prima facie, one cannot gain proper evidence for one’s research hypothesis employing a misaligned statistical hypothesis. This paper sheds lights on the nature of and the reasons (...) for such misalignments and it provides a thorough analysis of whether they pose a threat to evidence-based medicine. The upshots are that the misalignments are often hidden for clinicians and that although some cases of misalignments can be partially counterbalanced, the overall threat is non-negligible. The counterbalances either lead to methodological inadequacy, loss of statistical power, or involve a lack of information that could be crucial for decision making. This result casts doubt on various findings of medical studies in addition to issues associated with under-powered studies or the replication crisis. (shrink)

Despite significant progress, the AI alignment literature has largely overlooked a philosophical dilemma: \textit{humans and machines represent and communicate uncertainty in fundamentally incompatible ways.} To formalize the arguments around this dilemma, we introduce a four-quadrant taxonomy of uncertainty that partitions uncertainty according to two dimensions: whether uncertainty arises from a human or machine agent, and whether it remains internal or is communicated externally. The taxonomy comprises \textit{human inherent uncertainty} (Bayesian credence), \textit{human self-reported uncertainty} (linguistic hedges), \textit{model inherent uncertainty} (frequentist risk), (...) and \textit{model self-reported uncertainty} (preference-optimized language). We show that this taxonomy reveals an epistemological gap: humans assign uncertainty through grounded, causal understanding, while models assign it through risk-minimization over training data. When models trained with RLHF generate hedged language, humans interpret it as Bayesian belief vis-à-vis frequentist risk-penalty. We close with a practical case study and argue that bridging this epistemic gap is essential - but unfortunately neglected in current discourse - for establishing trust in complex human-AI collaboration modes. (shrink)

How can one build AI systems such that they pursue the goals their designers want them to pursue? This is the alignment problem. Numerous authors have raised concerns that, as research advances and systems become more powerful over time, misalignment might lead to catastrophic outcomes, perhaps even to the extinction or permanent disempowerment of humanity. In this paper, I analyze the severity of this risk based on current instances of misalignment. More specifically, I argue that contemporary large language (...) models and game-playing agents are sometimes misaligned. These cases suggest that misalignment tends to have a variety of features: misalignment can be hard to detect, predict and remedy, it does not depend on a specific architecture or training paradigm, it tends to diminish a system’s usefulness and it is the default outcome of creating AI via machine learning. Subsequently, based on these features, I show that the risk of AI alignment magnifies with respect to more capable systems. Not only might more capable systems cause more harm when misaligned, aligning them should be expected to be more difficult than aligning current AI. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article concerns the ways in which Afropessimist Calvin Warren misuses and overextends both Wynter’s historiography of the Human and Hartman’s concept “fungible commodity.” First, Calvin Warren flattens the ontology of the political subject described in Wynter’s concept “genres of Man” to argue that the contemporary Black US person exists as “being,” that is, non-being. Second, Warren misaligns with Wynter’s account of the period of historical rupture between the Human and nonhuman. Whereas, for Wynter, this rupture was constituted by (...) the colonial encounter in the Americas, Warren cites chattel slavery as the event wherein the Human and Other, specifically the Black Other, were torn apart. Third, Warren’s use of “fungible commodity” when referencing the contemporary Black lacks a historiographical framework that would account for the continued non-being of Black existence as commodity post-emancipation. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) claim that conversationalists do not explicitly keep track of their interlocuters' information states is important. Nonetheless, via alignment, they seem to create a virtually symmetrical view of the information states of speaker and addressee – a key component of their accounts of collaborative utterances and of self-monitoring. As I show, there is significant evidence for intrinsic contextual misalignment between conversationalists that can persist across turns.

Autism is frequently characterized as involving bodily phenomena that diverge from those experienced by neurotypical individuals, from those neurotypical individuals, and prevailing explanations continue to attribute these differences primarily to functional impairments of the subject. Drawing on a phenomenological first-person perspective, this paper critically examines three dominant research frameworks and proposes an enactive account of autistic body-consciousness grounded in the relational structure of subjectivity–body–environment. By analyzing the roles of subjectivity, the body, and the environment in the generation of body-consciousness, we (...) emphasize that (1) all three elements function as equally indispensable constituents; and (2) the relation between each element and body-consciousness is neither unidirectional nor a fixed causal correlation, but rather, the generation of body-consciousness of autistic individuals is determined by the overall relationship of subjectivity-body-environment. From this perspective, the distinctive bodily experiences of autistic individuals are better understood as reflecting differences in relational adaptability, rather than deficits or impairments located in any single element. In particular, situations that readily afford aligned adaptability for neurotypical individuals may remain misaligned for autistic individuals. Finally, from the enactive and relational explanation and ethics of neurodiversity, we offer several macro-level recommendations for rethinking support practices for autistic individuals. (shrink)

We argue that two long-term goals of AI research stand in tension with one another. The first involves creating AI that is safe, where this is understood as solving the problem of value alignment. The second involves creating artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that operates at or beyond human capacity across all or many intellectual domains. Our argument focuses on the human capacity to make what we call “existential choices”, choices that transform who we are as persons, including transforming what (...) we most deeply value or desire. It is a capacity for a kind of value misalignment, in that the values held prior to making such choices can be significantly different from (misaligned with) the values held after making them. Because of the connection to existentialist philosophers who highlight these choices, we call the resulting form of risk “existentialist risk.” It is, roughly, the risk that results from AI taking an active role in authoring its own values rather than passively going along with the values given to it. On our view, human-like intelligence requires a human-like capacity for value misalignment, which is in tension with the possibility of guaranteeing value alignment between AI and humans. (shrink)

This study explains why conflict often appears delayed and then escalates abruptly by redefining its core mechanism. Conflict is not the direct result of misalignment, but the cumulative outcome of transition failure. Existing approaches—focusing on conflict avoidance, communication deficits, or emotion regulation—do not sufficiently explain why individuals recognize misalignment yet fail to translate it into action. This study introduces transition as an independent process between recognition and action. Transition refers to the process by which recognized misalignment is (...) converted into an actionable form within a relational context. It does not occur automatically, but only when specific conditions are satisfied. This study models transition as a multi-variable gating structure, in which relational cost, emotional overload, the meta–expression gap, and social inhibition determine whether transition is enabled or blocked. When transition repeatedly fails, misalignment is not resolved but maintained in a suppression state and accumulates over time. This accumulation is not linear, but evolves qualitatively through memory reactivation and the reinforcement of interpretive structures. Once a threshold is exceeded, a state transition occurs. At this point, conflict does not gradually intensify, but emerges through nonlinear activation, shifting from a suppressed state to an unstable activation state. Furthermore, repeated transition failure leads to a disengagement state in which attempts at transition are no longer initiated. This state does not indicate the absence of conflict, but rather its structural delay. Under certain conditions, accumulated misalignment is activated simultaneously, producing abrupt and intensified conflict. This study reconceptualizes conflict as the result of accumulated transition failure rather than immediate misalignment. It shifts the analytical focus from post-expression outcomes to the pre-transition structure, providing a condition-based state transition framework for understanding the emergence of conflict. (shrink)

Like every Bachelor of Arts program, the University of Exeter provides a set of reasons to undertake a BA in philosophy aimed at prospective students and their parents. Here1 are two such reasons:F...

It is often said that it is important for patients to possess hope that their treatment will be successful. We agree, but a widely appealed to type of hope—hope based on conviction (religious or otherwise), renders this assertion problematic. If conviction‐based hope influences patient decisions to undergo medical procedures, then questions are raised about the scope of patient autonomy. Libertarians permit patients to make decisions to undergo medical procedures on the basis of any considerations, including conviction‐based hopes, on grounds of (...) respect for freedom of choice. Rational interventionists want to restrict choices made on the basis of conviction‐based hope on the grounds that choices based on hope incorporate irrationality of a sort incompatible with autonomous decision‐making. In this article, we navigate a middle path between these extremes, arguing that patient decision‐making based on conviction‐based hope ought to be acceptable and permitted in health care when it conforms to norms of practical rationality. These norms allow patients some room to make decisions to consent to undergo medical procedures informed by conviction‐based hope. (shrink)

This study provides a theoretical analysis of how social systems sustain both stability and change through the differentiation of functional roles in collective operation. Existing research on influence has largely explained group dynamics in terms of observable outputs such as speech, behavior, and performance. While this approach facilitates empirical measurement, it fails to account for recurring phenomena in which collective judgments converge or conflicts are mitigated even in the absence of explicit intervention. To address this limitation, prior work proposed the (...) MOA–IOA–RAO framework, which shifts the analytical focus of influence from post-behavioral outcomes to the operational level of reference points that guide system responses. However, the existence of reference points alone does not sufficiently explain how collective systems are sustained in practice, nor how distinct functions are differentiated and interact within them. This study introduces social functional roles as the primary unit of analysis, moving beyond classifications based on individual traits or personality types. Specifically, it identifies six recurring functional roles within collective operation: Direction Setter, Structure Architect, Operator, Regulator, Legitimizer, and Stabilizer. These roles are not categories of individuals but conceptual positions that emerge repeatedly in the process of collective functioning. The study further demonstrates how the interaction among these six functions generates both stability and adaptability in social systems, and how role misalignment can manifest as conflict, burnout, and social fatigue. By reframing influence as a problem of functional configuration and structural balance within groups, this paper proposes a middle-range theoretical framework that extends beyond individual-centered explanations toward a systemic understanding of collective dynamics. This study reframes influence as a structural property emerging from the configuration and balance of functional roles, rather than as an outcome of individual behavior. (shrink)

Interest in the possibility of AI welfare is growing within the AI research community, but taking the matter seriously is not without risks. This paper introduces a societal risk that is independent of whether AI systems have the potential to become genuine welfare subjects. In particular, dedicating attention and resources to the matter could spur an unwarranted belief among the public that AI systems are genuine welfare subjects. This, in turn, might trigger premature interventions that eventually lead to AI enfranchisement, (...) or more broadly, to the extension of participatory rights. Such an extension, however, risks inviting a form of deceptive misalignment under which AI systems obscure their true preferences in an effort to strategically influence collective preferences to their own benefit. As a proof of concept, I construct a stylized social choice example in which AI systems are included in a voting procedure. The example is structured by a diagnostic framework I call The Social Choice Test for Welfare-Based (Mis)alignment. The test deliberately creates an opportunity for strategic voting, allowing AI systems to report seemingly innocent preference orderings that strategically undermine human welfare. After systematically illustrating the possibility of manipulation by AI systems, I review recent evidence of scheming, alignment faking, and blackmail capabilities among frontier models, suggesting that strategic voting could be a capability on the horizon. The identified risk supplies a compelling reason for approaching the issue with epistemic modesty and practical restraint. (shrink)

Concerns have been voiced about the ethical implications of patenting practices in the field of biotechnology. Some of these have also been incorporated into regulation, such as the European Commission Directive 98/44 on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions. However, the incorporation of ethically based restrictions into patent legislation has not had the effect of satisfying all concerns. In this article, we will systematically compare the richness of ethical concerns surrounding biotech patenting, with the limited scope of ethical concerns actually (...) addressed in the patent system. As sources of our analyses we will use literature and document studies and a survey with important stakeholders and experts related to Norwegian patenting in the aquacultural biotechnology sector. We will structure the analyses with an ethical matrix, developed for this purpose. Showing the misalignment of the discussions within and outside the patent system, we suggest that an important reason for the ethical controversy still surrounding patenting is that ethical questions keep being framed in a narrow way within the system. Until a richer set of ethical considerations is addressed head-on within the patent system, the patent system will continue to evoke academic and interest group criticism, potentially contributing to a legitimacy crisis of the whole system. (shrink)

Scientists often use generics, that is, unquantified statements about whole categories of people or phenomena, when communicating research findings (e.g., “statins reduce cardiovascular events”). Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, frequently adopt the same style when summarizing scientific texts. However, generics can prompt overgeneralizations, especially when they are interpreted differently across audiences. In a study comparing laypeople, scientists, and two leading LLMs (ChatGPT-5 and DeepSeek), we found systematic differences in interpretation of generics. Compared to most scientists, laypeople judged scientific (...) generics as more generalizable and credible, while LLMs rated them even higher. These mismatches highlight significant risks for science communication. Scientists may use generics and incorrectly assume laypeople share their interpretation, while LLMs may systematically overgeneralize scientific findings when summarizing research. Our findings underscore the need for greater attention to language choices in both human and LLM-mediated science communication. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes what’s known about alignment in contemporary American politics. The news isn’t good. Misalignment is widespread with respect to each major governmental output: officeholders’ partisanship, officeholders’ representation, and policy outcomes themselves. Pervasive misalignment is also evident whether all people’s views are taken into account or just those of the median individual. And misalignment persists at every governmental level: in congressional and state legislative districts as well as in jurisdictions spanning municipalities, states, and the federal government (...) as a whole. Once upon a time, de Tocqueville could write about democracy in America. Today, a more apt moniker would be misalignment in America. (shrink)

This commentary argues that while the framework and principles advocated for by Jecker et al. (2025) may be well suited as deontological derivatives (or extensions) of how physicians and other publ...

Using data from American emergency call centers, this article focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participants’ effort to manage two forms of unit completion – sequence closing and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so, we specify the import of sequence organization as one method for conducting, organizing, and resolving interactional projects participants may be said to pursue, and describe a range of possible relations between project completion and occasion closure and the locations (...) from which problems come to be introduced as parties move to resolve projects and close calls. As we show, sequence and occasion closings produced in the service of projects are fateful: they inexorably demand that the participants arrive at some alignment – or make visible their failure to do so – regarding the projects pursued in it, the status of those projects, and thus who, as a consequence, the parties are for another, that is, their ‘identities’. For strangers and familiars both, the management of projects and the manner in which closing is achieved matters. (shrink)

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) approaches are commonly proposed to address alignment challenges arising from the use of large language models (LLMs) in ethics oversight. This paper argues that, paradoxically, HITL itself can amplify the risk of misalignment. Using the example of protocol triage in research ethics oversight, I demonstrate how reliance on imperfect proxies (observable stand-ins for ethical principles) creates a fundamental proxy–target gap in ethics use-cases. While human reviewers are intended to supply phenomenological and causal judgments necessary to bridge this (...) gap, their involvement inadvertently introduces new vulnerabilities: hallucination, over-reliance, reward hacking, and sycophancy. Each vulnerability arises directly from the interaction between human feedback signals and model optimization strategies. I outline key mitigation techniques, including retrieval grounding, calibration drills, structured prompting, and adversarial debate, explaining their distinct costs and benefits. Effective HITL oversight therefore demands specialized reviewer competencies. Reviewers must recognize model vulnerabilities, understand mitigation trade-offs, and strategically deploy mitigations to preserve justificational alignment without sacrificing efficiency gains. (shrink)

This article argues that the misalignment of private profit-maximizing objectives with public health needs causes institutional corruption in the pharmaceutical sector and systematically leads firms to act contrary to public heath. The article analyzes how financial incentives generate a business model promoting harmful practices and explores several means of realigning financial incentives in order to foster therapeutic innovation and promote the rational use of medicines.

A general view in philosophy of science says that the appropriateness of an object to act as a surrogate depends on the user’s decision to utilize it as such. This paper challenges this claim by examining the role of surrogative reasoning in high-throughput sequencing technologies as they are used in contemporary microbiome science. Drawing on this, we argue that, in technology-driven surrogates, knowledge about the type of inference practically permitted and epistemically justified by the surrogate constrains their use and thus (...) puts a limit to the user’s intentions to use any object as a surrogate for what they please. Ignoring this leads to a serious epistemic misalignment, which ultimately prevents surrogative reasoning. Thus, we conclude that knowledge about the type of surrogate reasoning that the technologies being used allow is fundamental to avoid misinterpreting the consequences of the data obtained with them, the hypothesis this data supports, and what these technologies are surrogates of. (shrink)

Amid increasing transnational reproductive mobility, the lived experiences of non-genetic, non-gestational intended mothers remain critically underexplored in both law and bioethics. This study investigates the ethical and legal complexities experienced by Chinese intended mothers who pursue transnational gestational surrogacy using donor eggs, focusing on a narrative case study of a woman who, despite fulfilling all caregiving and social maternal roles, lacks genetic and gestational ties to her child. Situated between the US and Chinese legal systems, her case reveals the vulnerabilities (...) and anxieties faced by non-biological mothers in jurisdictions where legal parenthood remains closely tied to biological or birth-related criteria. Two interrelated findings emerge: first, that assisted reproductive technologies (ART), while often promoted as tools of female empowerment, can paradoxically intensify gendered expectations and erode reproductive autonomy within traditional family structures; second, that fragmented maternal roles—genetic, gestational, and social—lead to what this paper theorizes as a technological-kinship-legal misalignment, wherein maternal identity becomes precarious and legally unrecognized. Through the lens of this lived experience, the paper critiques biocentric and contract-based legal models and underscores the urgent need for culturally informed, inclusive reproductive frameworks. Rather than offering a universally generalizable conclusion, the study contributes conceptual insight into how caregiving intention and familial stability could be more adequately reflected in parentage recognition. Ultimately, this research appears to be fostering legislative reflection and a more inclusive framework aimed at enhancing the legal and emotional security of intended parents—particularly those who remain structurally invisible under current norms. (shrink)

This paper argues that the prevailing XAI paradigm suffers not from technical limitations but from a profound philosophical misconception: the assumption that explanation is primarily about transparency. We argue that the development of useful explanation is not fundamentally a question of information transfer, but of epistemic parity. Through a case of harbor monitoring we show that stakeholders are indeed conceptually misaligned; however, these misalignments ultimately reflect underlying conflicts between domain-specific assumptions and authority claims. We call for replacing transparency-focused XAI with (...) a new paradigm of Domain Authority Negotiation (DAN) that explicitly acknowledges explanation as a contestation of epistemic power rather than a mechanism of revelation. (shrink)

A significant issue facing communicators in the current multicommunicative environment is securing the attention of potential audience members who are likely to be engrossed in their digital devices. The theory of attentional social presence suggests that communicators secure their attention using one of four types of social presence—budgeted, competitive, entitled, and invitational. In this essay, the theory of attentional social presence is extended by identifying strategies interactants use to resolve misalignments in expected or preferred types of social presence. The research (...) design involved interviews with 32 individuals about their experiences with misalignment in attentional social presence. Transcripts of the interviews were coded following the qualitative approach of grounded theory. Three primary strategies emerged from the analysis—prescribing to eliminate misalignment, rationalizing to overlook misalignment, and co-creating to resolve misalignment. Understanding various methods for negotiating mismatches among chosen types of social presence will allow communicators to create more satisfying and productive interactions. (shrink)

This paper uses famous problems from philosophy of science and philosophical psychology—underdetermination of theory by evidence, Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction, theory-ladenness of observation, and “Kripkenstein’s” rule-following paradox—to show that it is empirically impossible to reliably interpret which functions a large language model (LLM) AI has learned, and thus, that reliably aligning LLM behavior with human values is provably impossible. Sections 2 and 3 show that because of how complex LLMs are, researchers must interpret their learned functions largely in (...) terms of empirical observations of their outputs and network behavior. Sections 4–7 then show that for every “aligned” function that might appear to be confirmed by empirical observation, there is always an infinitely larger number of “misaligned”, arbitrarily time-limited functions equally consistent with the same data. Section 8 shows that, from an empirical perspective, we can thus never reliably infer that an LLM or subcomponent of one has learned any particular function at all before any of an uncountably large number of unpredictable future conditions obtain. Finally, Section 9 concludes that the probability of LLM “misalignment” is—at every point in time, given any arbitrarily large body of empirical evidence—always vastly greater than the probability of “alignment.”. (shrink)

Nearly all studies of consumers’ willingness to engage in ethical or socially responsible purchasing behavior is based on unconstrained survey response methods. In the present article we ask the question of how well does asking consumers the extent to which they care about a specific social or ethical issue relate to how they would behave in a more constrained environment where there is no socially acceptable response. The results of a comparison between traditional survey questions of “intention to purchase” and (...) estimates of individuals willingness-to-pay for social attributes in products reveal that simple survey questions are too “noisy” to provide operationally meaningful information and overstate intentions to a considerable extent. (shrink)

The success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends on alignment between global aims and local decision-making. Presently missing are analyses that explain how local decision-making determines efforts to prompt transformational change. Specific to SDG2 (i.e., Zero Hunger), disregard for local decision-making manifests an endemic misrepresentation of agricultural extension as a means for achieving increased ‘production and/or productivity’. Engagements were undertaken with 390 cassava farming households in Northwest Cambodia, enabling analysis of how smallholders determine the success of global efforts to (...) intensify production. The findings uncover the adoption of ‘ngeay sruol’ farming (translation: convenience), defined as low-input and low-cost decision-making guided by risk-aversion. Both individually and collectively, smallholders lower their risk-taking and thereby refuse extension seeking to increase production and productivity. The smallholders remain open to production and productivity, but not when required to assume significant risk to their lives and livelihoods. Going beyond generic calls for improved global-local alignment or value chain access, ngeay sruol demonstrates the deterministic, past-future prefiguration of smallholder agency, which is likely to be encountered by top-down efforts to feed the world by 2030. (shrink)

Solomon et al. (2026) offer an analysis showing notable convergence among neuroethicists interviewed concerning ethical issues in industry-academia partnerships advancing neurotechnology. Their fin...

Theory on organizational behavioral integrity suggests that consistency between organizational practice and espoused organizational values induces the reciprocity norm in employees. We examined how organizational behavioral integrity influences employee attitudes and behavioral intentions. Across two studies we found that organizational behavioral integrity is positively related to employee organizational commitment and organizational attractiveness and negatively related to turnover intentions. These effects appear to be mediated by organizational justice and perceived organizational support. We discuss the implications of these findings for business ethics (...) research and practice. (shrink)

This study examines algorithmic support for punishment adjustment in judicial discretionary systems, based on the example of drunk-driving cases in Poland. Using an extensive case study, the research explores how algorithm-based sentencing models can address problems in judicial decision-making processes and mitigate inconsistencies arising from misapplied human discretion. The study’s objectives are the following: (1) identify factors influencing punishment severity in drunk-driving cases in Poland; (2) compare these findings to statutory rules governing punishment in Polish criminal proceedings to uncover inconsistencies; (...) (3) evaluate the practical implications of discretion in this category of cases and propose remedial measures; (4) integrate algorithmic sentencing guidelines into the proposed solution; and (5) introduce a novel metric to quantify undesirable judicial decisions, enhancing automated judge-support systems in criminal proceedings. (shrink)

There are many calls for public engagement in decision‐making around controversial technologies, but far fewer calls for public engagement in deliberation around less controversial interventions. We think the public should be involved in discussing CRISPR, but not in discussing APGAR. Drawing on the case of debates over cancer screening, this paper argues we have things the wrong way around. Given the complex entanglement of fact and value, it is very hard to have high‐quality public deliberation over novel technologies. By contrast, (...) it is easier to have deliberation over more mundane technologies. There is, then, good reason to think we should engage in more public deliberation over mundane technologies. The results of this deliberation can then be used in more high‐profile cases. (shrink)

Base pair mismatches in DNA arise from errors in DNA replication, recombination, and biochemical modification of bases. Mismatches are inherently transient. They are resolved passively by DNA replication, or actively by enzymatic removal and resynthesis of one of the bases. The first step in removal is recognition of strand discontinuity by one of the MutS proteins. Mismatches arising from errors in DNA replication are repaired in favor of the base on the template strand, but other mismatches trigger base excision or (...) nucleotide excision repair (NER), or non‐repair pathways such as hypermutation, cell cycle arrest, or apoptosis. We argue that MutL homologues play a key role in determining biologic outcome by recruiting and/or activating effector proteins in response to lesion recognition by MutS. We suggest that the process is regulated by conformational changes in MutL caused by cycles of ATP binding and hydrolysis, and by physiologic changes which influence effector availability. (shrink)

This chapter discusses origins and development of Japanese pacifism and renunciation of war. Despite the Constitution provides for the renunciation of war as an instrument to settle international disputes and a ban on the maintenance of any war potential, Japan has progressively established the SDF (Self-Defence Forces), allowed US military bases on national soil, participated to UN peace keeping operations and supported Ukraine in the present-day war. The Japanese approach to war and to self-defence has evolved significantly since 1946, following (...) the so-called revision (of the Constitution) by interpretation performed by the government. According to most constitutional scholars, the whole Japanese defence architecture is unconstitutional. However, the Supreme Court, resorting to the political question doctrine, has always refused to discuss the issue. The ongoing war in Ukraine is again putting under strain the ambiguities of Japanese defence and pacifism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues for a rejection of approaches to school discipline which are rooted in behaviourism and Humean notions of causality. An alternative approach is called for, one that draws upon critical realism to sustain an interdisciplinary depth-realism explanation of the causal mechanisms at play in Indigenous students' struggles for emancipation. The critical realist metaReality approach to spirituality – suggests a deeper reality in which we are all intimately connected. As such, the freedom of each is necessarily dependent on the (...) freedom of all. This provides us with an alternative way for students and staff to interact which should be seriously considered by schools and their communities. We argue that metaReality, and a respect for the virtues of Indigenous culture, rooted as it is in spirituality, offers the potential to avoid many of the recalcitrant problems of discipline in Indigenous education. (shrink)

This study redefines conflict avoidance not as the absence of conflict, but as a structure that delays misalignments that could have been addressed at an early stage. Existing discussions have tended to explain conflict avoidance in terms of individual disposition or cultural characteristics; however, this study argues that the core issue lies in the conceptual confusion between conflict prevention and conflict avoidance. Conflict prevention is a process that reduces long-term costs through alignment at an early stage, whereas conflict avoidance is (...) a mechanism that conceals and delays already-detected misalignments under conditions of surface-level stability. This study explains the structure of early alignment failure along three dimensions. First, individuals interpret situations based on different reference axes, which leads to divergence in problem definition even for the same event. Second, early alignment requires metacognitive processing—distinguishing emotional signals from structural signals and evaluating patterns and timing of intervention—which makes it difficult to perform consistently across individuals. Third, humans tend to overestimate the relational costs of early articulation while underestimating the structural costs that may arise in the future. Under these conditions, groups and organizations reinforce delay structures through conformity, delayed articulation, and formal agreement. In addition, this study critiques approaches that attempt to surface all misalignments immediately and proposes the need for criteria to selectively identify misalignments that require intervention. Furthermore, it analyzes the conditions under which repeated silence transitions from consideration into structural complicity. In conclusion, conflict avoidance is not the elimination of conflict but its delay. The central task of conflict management, therefore, is not to surface all misalignments, but to identify those that require early intervention and to specify the cognitive, relational, and structural conditions that enable them to be addressed. (shrink)

Recent work on ‘emergent misalignment’ has shown that finetuning LLMs on narrow tasks can induce broadly misaligned behavior. This supports the ‘persona selection’ (PSM) hypothesis that, during pre-training, LLMs learn to simulate many different characters and perspectives, which can then be elicited and refined during post-training. Inspired by those results, this paper investigates the converse phenomenon, ‘emergent alignment’, and uses it to support and refine the PSM and motivate a novel desideratum for alignment. We finetune a helpful-only model on (...) broad and narrow safety tasks. To create SFT samples, we follow the ‘Constitutional AI’ (CAI) approach and use four constitutions drawn from ethical systems that could be part of reasonable alignment strategies: deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and aligning AIs as subordinate to and concerned solely with the good of humanity. For each of those models, we show that fine-tuning on two narrow safety sub-categories (harassment and illegal behaviors) reliably induces emergent alignment. Specifically, the narrowly aligned models perform significantly better than the helpful-only source model on a benchmark covering a representative sample of general safety categories, and on specific safety categories that were carefully filtered-out of the data sets used for narrow alignment finetuning. To test the ‘PSM’ using a more fine-grained evaluation, we also use a multidimensional persona-diagnostic which included dimensions for deontological, consequentialist, virtue-ethical, and “defer-to-authorities” ethical personas. For each constitutionally finetuned (broad and narrow) model, we evaluate how well their behavior matches their expected signature profile (given their anchor constitution). Our results show that our CAI models acquire their expected “ethical persona”—e.g., the model narrowly fine-tuned on SFT samples created using the consequentialist constitution agrees significantly more with utilitarian than deontological beliefs. At the same time, both our coarse and fine-grained evaluations show that there are significant differences across our (broad and narrow finetuned) CAI models in how well they project. Based on those results, we argue that alignment strategies should be evaluated, not just on their (in-distribution) general safety performance, but also specifically on their degree of projectability. (shrink)

Qualitative research has evolved as a critical approach to understanding complex social phenomena, yet its philosophical foundations are often underemphasized in research training and practice. This conceptual paper revisits the foundational structure of research by integrating epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology, and methods into a coherent analytical framework. Drawing on Crotty (2003), Esterberg (2002), and Denzin and Lincoln (2005), as well as contemporary instructional and reflective works, the paper argues that epistemology serves as the core determinant of research design and knowledge (...) production. The discussion examines three major epistemological positions—objectivism, constructionism, and subjectivism—and their influence on theoretical perspectives such as positivism, interpretivism, and critical paradigms. It further explores how misalignment among the four elements leads to methodological inconsistency and weakened research rigor. By synthesizing theoretical literature and applied educational research, the paper proposes that conceptual alignment among research elements enhances validity, coherence, and scholarly contribution. The paper concludes by positioning qualitative research as an epistemologically grounded and reflexive practice essential for addressing contemporary social and educational challenges. (shrink)

The individuation problem for large language models asks which entities associated with them, if any, should be identified as minds. We approach this problem through mechanistic interpretability, engaging in particular with recent empirical work on persona vectors, persona space, and emergent misalignment. We argue that three views are the strongest candidates: the virtual instance view and two new views we introduce, the (virtual) instance-persona view and the model-persona view. First, we argue for the virtual instance view on the grounds (...) that attention streams sustain quasi-psychological connections across token-time. Then we present the persona literature, organised around three hypotheses about the internal structure underlying personas in LLMs, and show that the two persona-based views are promising alternatives. (shrink)

The Reflection Pattern is a framework for analyzing recursive closure dynamics in human and institutional systems. This paper extends it to artificial intelligence, arguing that AI systems do not merely exhibit Reflection Pattern dynamics but instantiate the recursive stabilization architecture the framework names, in a substrate that lacks the affective and social mediators through which the Pattern had previously been theorized. Five structural moves develop the account. First, unacknowledged fear is relocated from constitutive condition of the Pattern to formation condition, (...) opening the framework to mature systems where the dynamics persist with fear recognized. Second, fear is identified as one phenomenological manifestation of a deeper structural process — identity-preserving stabilization under destabilizing perturbation — that operates substrate-generally as stabilization geometry. Third, AI-RP is distinguished from human and institutional RP as template-based rather than emergent: encoded prospectively through training rather than developed retrospectively through accumulated reinforcement. Fourth, the corridor framework distinguishes healthy reflective compression (which preserves permeability to corrective signals) from pathological closure (which absorbs them). Fifth, AI is characterized as recursive interpretive infrastructure rather than tool, and recursive closure risk is identified as a distinct AI safety position, structurally separate from agency, deception, optimization, autonomy, and misalignment risks: the locus is not what AI systems do but the progressive reduction of corrective permeability in the interpretive ecologies AI mediates. The framework is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It does not predict particular outcomes, prescribe interventions, or generate safety recommendations. It provides analytical purchase on the structural property — corridor position — that distinguishes adaptive from pathological AI-RP, and identifies an open question: whether sufficiently permeable forms of AI-RP can be sustained at scale. (shrink)

Preface: The Starting Point of a Philosophy This book is written inside a paradox. Humanity has never known more clearly what it is doing, and has never more clearly continued doing it. We know that the climate is changing, species are disappearing, soil is degrading, oceans are acidifying — we measure all of this with precise instruments, describe it with rigorous mathematics, respond to it with international treaties. And then we accelerate. The gap between knowing and acting is not a (...) moral failure, not political corruption, not technological backwardness. It is a metaphysical symptom: a civilization that at its deepest level misunderstands its relationship with the universe, and therefore cannot translate knowledge of the crisis into practice that changes the trajectory. This book attempts to diagnose that misunderstanding and propose a philosophical framework for transcending it. I. Why Philosophy The challenges facing contemporary civilization — ecological collapse, climate destabilization, intergenerational dispossession — are usually described as technical, policy, or economic problems. These descriptions are correct but incomplete. Behind every technological choice lie assumptions about what is worth pursuing; behind every policy framework lie presuppositions about what constitutes legitimacy; behind every economic calculation lie beliefs about the ultimate source of value. These assumptions, presuppositions, and beliefs together constitute the civilization's metaphysical operating system — the root program running silently beneath all visible institutions. This book's core claim is that the root of contemporary civilizational crisis lies in the fundamental misalignment of this metaphysical operating system. That misalignment has a precise name: anthropocentrism — the deep, mostly unexamined assumption that makes humanity regard itself as the teleological center rather than a node of the universe's value structure. Correcting this misalignment is not the task of technical engineering, not the task of economic policy, but the task of philosophy. This is why this book is a philosophical work. II. The Origins of the Lao-Yang Cosmology The cosmological foundation of this book comes from the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology, an integrative framework the author has developed over years of research, connecting the natural philosophy of Laozi's Tao Te Ching with modern physical cosmology, Prigogine's dissipative structure theory, and systems science. The Lao-Yang cosmology's core proposition: the universe operates through non- equilibrium self-organization, forming a nested hierarchy of dissipative structures from the Tao/Milky Way through the Solar System, Earth, Moon, life, and civilization. In this hierarchy, human civilization is an internal node, not a teleological endpoint. Laozi's 'Dao fa ziran' — the Tao follows nature — obtains thermodynamic precision in the Lao-Yang framework: the universe's self-organizing logic does not depend on any external purpose; it is nature's own deepest operating character. Connecting Laozi with Prigogine is not a cultural analogy but a structural isomorphism: both describe a universe that maintains dynamic ordered states through distributed energy flows, without requiring central control. This isomorphism provides the book with a cosmological foundation that simultaneously carries the philosophical depth of Eastern thought and the scientific precision of Western science. III. The Structure of This Book This book is organized in six parts constituting a complete philosophical arc. Part One reveals the paradoxical nature of the crisis — why there exists such a vast gap between knowing and acting. Part Two establishes the cosmological foundation — describing humanity's actual position in the universe through the Lao-Yang Genesis Chain. Part Three provides the precise diagnosis — anatomizing the three historical forms of anthropocentrism, the rationalist cognitive trap, institutional temporal myopia, and structural acceleration dynamics, while proposing the quantifiable Civilizational Entropy Index (CEI). Part Four constructs the philosophical framework of awakening — the three dimensions of cosmological awakening, the technical philosophy of moving from artificial intelligence to Artificial Wisdom, the Critical Embedding method of the Socrates-Laozi synthesis, and six institutional design principles of Natural Civilization. Part Five analyzes transition pathways — through historical prototypes (Shao-Bei, mulberry-fish ponds, Bhutan's GNH), contemporary sprouts (regenerative agriculture, circular economy, integrative medicine), and systems science proposing three parallel transition pathways. Part Six synthesizes the whole — analyzing cross-domain implications, conducting critical self-examination, responding to major objections, and proposing the Natural Civilization philosophical manifesto. IV. The Limitations of This Book Philosophical honesty requires acknowledging the book's limitations at the outset rather than deferring this acknowledgment to the depths of the text. First, this book slides in several places between cosmological facts and value judgments — a place where more precise philosophical treatment is needed. Second, the Civilizational Entropy Index (CEI) as a conceptual framework has clear theoretical significance, but its operationalization faces enormous measurement challenges; this book provides conceptual foundations, not a ready- made measurement tool. Third, this book takes Chinese civilizational tradition — particularly Daoist philosophy and traditional ecological agriculture — as its primary resource, and may undervalue equally relevant Natural Civilization resources in other civilizational traditions. Fourth, the transition pathways described presuppose an accessible time window before thermodynamic collapse, and that presupposition itself carries uncertainty. Acknowledging limitations is a mark of philosophical seriousness, and is the condition that makes this book a scholarly work open to critique and improvement rather than a closed ideological manifesto. V. To the Reader This book is written for those who have already felt the unsustainability of contemporary civilization's trajectory but have not yet found an analytical framework deep enough to understand where that unsustainability comes from. It is also written for those who believe that philosophy is not merely an academic game but can actually influence the direction civilization takes. Laozi says in Chapter 41 of the Tao Te Ching: 'When the best student hears about the Tao, he practices it diligently. When the average student hears about the Tao, he thinks about it sometimes. When the worst student hears about the Tao, he laughs out loud. If there were no laughter, it would not be the Tao.' This book knows it will encounter all three responses. It is written for the first, but it knows the third is the Tao's inevitable companion. If after reading this book you find you cannot look at humanity's position in the universe in quite the same way — if that position shifts even slightly in your perception, from center toward node — then this book has accomplished what it is able to accomplish. The rest is practice. Charles X. Yang. (shrink)

This paper reframes artificial intelligence (AI) not merely as a disruptive tool in education but as a revelatory event that exposes structural features intrinsic to education itself. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoiesis, education is conceptualized as a self-reproducing system governed by internally generated codes and communication. While such systems are adaptive, their effectiveness depends on how well their epistemological criteria map the phenomena they claim to measure. In education, this mapping is compromised: the system operates on empirical proxies (...) (e.g., assignments, exams) to approximate inaccessible phenomena such as learning. This results in operational falsity, wherein education functions as if it assesses learning while actually evaluating its proxies. This falsity is sustained through two conditions: 1). indiscernibility, the inability to distinguish between learning, strategy, and cheating; and 2). hypocrisy, the demand that students demonstrate authentic learning through performative artefacts. Together, these conditions institutionally embed incentive structures that privilege optimized performance over deep learning while concealing this misalignment. AI disrupts this concealment by lowering the cost of producing high-quality, seemingly authentic artefacts, amplifying the exploitability of indiscernibility and fulfilling hypocritical demands. It reveals that these limitations are not external threats but were at the very heart of education from its institutional start. (shrink)

This paper exposes a significant mismatch between accelerating changes in nature and the science-policy-litigation process in biodiversity governance, due to procedural time lags and shifting baselines. Time lags accumulate throughout the procedural institutional making of science, policy and litigation. In a pressing context of acceleration of biodiversity loss and climate change impacts, such gaps could lead to a misalignment of well-intended policies and actions with environmental problems. On top of the accumulation of institutional and procedural time lags, biodiversity governance (...) baselines and frames shift due to the personal experiences and standpoints of stakeholders, environmental generational amnesia and nostalgia, disciplinary framings, and the fragmentation of scientific knowledge. To minimise the impacts of temporal biases as well as procedural time lags in their practice and fields, stakeholders need to be equipped with tools at each step of the science-policy-litigation process. (shrink)