Conceptual-Ethics ¹²

The Invented Inventor: Adapting Intellectual Property to Generative AI

Under review

As AI increasingly drives discovery, the concept of inventor faces severe strain. Recent judicial decisions, such as the Swiss Federal Administrative Court’s 2025 DABUS ruling, expose a deepening tension: courts demand intellectual creation by a natural person even as human contributions to AI-assisted discovery become increasingly nominal. This paper approaches the resulting tension from the standpoint of political philosophy rather than jurisprudence: the strain AI places on the concept of inventorship is too fundamental to be resolved by interpretative methods taking existing conceptual architectures for granted. Inspired by Hume’s genealogy of property, the paper reconstructs the historical “need matrices” that forged the concept of inventorship, tracing its evolution from Venetian guild economics through Romantic genius ideology to corporate R&D. This reveals the concept to be an overburdened bundle serving four social functions: incentivising innovation, disseminating knowledge, legitimating monopolies, and resolving priority disputes. It also clarifies the mismatch between the concept and the emerging realities of AI-driven discovery. To resolve this mismatch, we must disaggregate the concept of inventorship and develop specialised conceptual resources for each of these functions. If we invented the notion of inventor to perform certain functions, we can reinvent it to perform them better.

intellectual property rights, patents, inventor, genealogy, AI, conceptual adaptation

Reasons of Love and Conceptual Good-for-Nothings

In Themes from Susan Wolf. Michael Frauchiger and Markus Stepanians (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter. In Press.

Appealing to the instrumentality of concepts raises the worry of yielding the “wrong kind of reasons.” Drawing on Susan Wolf’s work on “reasons of love,” I argue this worry is misplaced. I further explore Wolf’s notion of “valuable good-for-nothings” to demonstrate how non-instrumental values ultimately reinforce the importance of reasons of love in concept use.

concepts, conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, motivation, reasons of love, normativity

The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need

Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780198926283.001.0001

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering.

Virtues, Rights, or Consequences? Mapping the Way for Conceptual Ethics

Studia Philosophica: The Swiss Journal of Philosophy 83 (1): 9–22. 2024. doi:10.24894/StPh-en.2024.83002

Maps out the ways in which moral and political reflection on which concepts to use might take its cue from virtue-ethical, deontological, and consequentialist traditions, flagging the main difficulties facing each approach.

conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, metaethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, virtue ethics

Debunking Concepts

Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 (1): 195–225. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.5840/msp2023111347

Argues that the debunking of concepts should extend beyond assessing their epistemological merits to include their evaluation on moral, social, and political grounds, based on their societal functions and effects.

concepts, conceptual ethics, genealogical debunking, genealogy, ideology critique, methodology

Conceptual Engineering and the Politics of Implementation

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3): 670–691. 2022. With Friedemann Bieber. doi:10.1111/papq.12394

Argues that how much control we have over conceptual change is itself something we can control, and while some domains require the institutionalization of the power to enforce conceptual innovations, because there are strong practical pressures to coordinate on a single harmonized technical terminology, there are also liberal and democratic rationales for making conceptual engineering hard to implement by default.

conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, conceptual change, coordination, liberalism, power

Function-Based Conceptual Engineering and the Authority Problem

Mind 131 (524): 1247–1278. 2022. doi:10.1093/mind/fzac028

Identifies a central problem for conceptual engineering—the problem of establishing the authority of engineered concepts—and argues that this problem cannot generally be solved by appealing to increased precision, consistency, or other theoretical virtues. Solving the problem requires engineering to take a functional turn and attend to the functions of concepts. This also helps us alleviate Strawsonian worries about changes of topic.

authority, conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, conceptual functions, hermeneutics, metaphilosophy

Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering

The Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010

Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.

conceptual engineering, legitimacy, genealogy, ideology critique, conceptual ethics, international institutions

Nietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics

Inquiry 66 (7): 1335–1364. Proceedings of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies. 2023. doi:10.1080/0020174X.2022.2164049

While Nietzsche appears to engage in two seemingly contrary modes of concept evaluation—one looks to concepts’ effects, the other to what concepts express—this article offers an account of the expressive character of concepts which unifies these two modes and yields a powerful approach to practical reflection on which concepts to use.

conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, genealogy, naturalism, revaluation of values, expressivism

Choosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche

The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 286–307. 2021. doi:10.1093/pq/pqaa026

Highlights enduring epistemic and metaphysical difficulties for any project of evaluating and improving the values we live by, including contemporary work in conceptual ethics and engineering, and argues that attempts to sidestep these difficulties fall prey to “Saint-Just’s illusion”—the mistake of believing that a set of values from one political context can be successfully transplanted into a different political context.

conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, conceptual change, genealogy, 19th century, 20th century

Left Wittgensteinianism

European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 758–77. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1111/ejop.12603

Focusing on the social and political conceptual practices that Wittgenstein neglected, the paper presents a novel, more dynamic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s model of conceptual change, on which conceptual change becomes intelligible not just as a brute, exogenous imposition on rational discourse, but as endogenous and reason-driven. This counters the socially conservative tendencies of existing interpretations and renders intelligible the possibility of radical critique within a Wittgensteinian framework.

conceptual change, conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, history, Bernard Williams, language games

The Points of Concepts: Their Types, Tensions, and Connections

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (8): 1122–1145. 2019. doi:10.1080/00455091.2019.1584940

By distinguishing four senses in which concepts might be said to have a “point,” this paper resolves the tension between the ambition of point-based explanations to be informative and the claim—central to Dummett’s philosophy of language, but also to the literature on thick concepts—that mastering concepts already requires grasping their point.

concepts, conceptual ethics, conceptual functions, conceptual engineering, metaphilosophy, normativity