Einstein Lectures 2024

Abstracts of the Lectures

Human Selves

A long tradition in philosophy identifies what it is to be human with rational agency, but this gives us a distorted and diminished conception of who we are and of what is important about us. There is so much more - including, for example, our capacities to create art, to appreciate beauty, to develop a sense of humor, and to wonder about the meaning of life. Artificial intelligences, extraterrestrials, even corporations may be rational agents, but this wouldn’t be nearly enough to make them ‘selves like us’, creatures with whom we can live in a rewarding sort of community, with whom we can be lovers and friends. A richer conception of what makes us distinctively human can help us recover an appreciation of aspects of ourselves whose value has been neglected and can help us develop more adequate conceptions of human responsibility, character, and freedom.

Lecture 1, Monday, 11.11.2024: On Being Distinctively Human

Since at least the seventeenth century, philosophers have distinguished membership in the species homo sapiens from moral personhood, a category which they take to be of considerable ethical and practical significance. But there are other nonbiological features that are of ethical and practical significance as well, suggesting that there is an ethical, non-biological conception of humanity that is different from the standard philosophical understanding of moral personhood. After reflecting on the benefits and dangers of focusing attention on the idea of “the distinctively human,” the lecture explores the variety of features and capacities that distinguish “selves like us” from other animals, artificially intelligent machines, and possibly imaginary divine and extraterrestrial rational individuals.

Lecture 2, Tuesday, 12.11.2024: Character and Agency

We often think of a person’s character as comprising what is deepest and most important about her, or indeed as comprising her core identity or ‘self’. But what is included in a person’s character, as distinct from the rest of her psychology? This lecture rejects a philosophically prominent account that identifies a person’s character with the set of dispositions and traits that reflect and express the individual’s values as being both too narrow and too vague. One’s character may well include features of oneself that one does not endorse or even know about. And endorsing a value and acting to express it may be too shallow to constitute an aspect of one’s character if it is not reflective of or responsive to the exercise of an active intelligence. Changing the way we understand character to incorporate these proposals will also lead to the recognition of an important sense of agency that has less to do with actions and intentions than we are accustomed to think.

Lecture 3, Wednesday, 13.11.2024: Freedom for Humans

Philosophers have long worried that if determinism is true, we lack the ability to do otherwise that is necessary to justify holding each other responsible. Yet we hold corporations and states responsible, and never seem to worry that determinism would undermine the justifiability of that. Why? This lecture will argue that the problem posed by determinism is misunderstood insofar as it has led us to focus on the ability to do otherwise. If anything is threatened by determinism, it is not our ability to do otherwise, but the meaning that is expressed by our doing what we do. More specifically, determinism makes salient the question of how it is possible for our actions to have the relevant kind of meaning, or, in the language introduced in the previous lectures, of how our actions can be properly interpreted as expressions of the kinds of selves we take ourselves to be.