Dropping Anchor in Rough Seas: Co-Reasoning with Personalized AI Advisors and the Liberalism of Fear
Philosophy & Technology 38 (170): 1–7. 2025. Invited commentary. doi:10.1007/s13347-025-01006-z
A political critique of personalized AI advisors through the lens of the liberalism of fear. Highlights the asymmetries of power involved and argues that personalization risks stabilizing domination by translating structural injustices into individualized aspirational challenges. Three political constraints on personalized AI are then proposed: the priority of non-domination, the public contestability of operative norms, and the recognition of non-personalizable civic burdens.
AI, AI ethics, deliberation, liberalism, liberalism of fear, non-domination
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Revealing Social Functions through Pragmatic Genealogies
In Social Functions in Philosophy: Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives. Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael Van Riel (eds.), 200–218. London: Routledge. 2020. doi:10.4324/9780429435393
This paper argues that state-of-nature stories, read as dynamic models rather than history, can reveal how key normative practices meet collective needs of coordination, conflict-management, and non-domination. Drawing on Hume’s genealogy of justice, Williams’s genealogy of truthfulness, and related work, it shows how concepts like property, knowledge, and testimonial justice underpin social cooperation and political legitimacy. In doing so, it offers social and political philosophers a way to explain both the persistence of ideas and institutions and the grounds on which they can be criticized.
coordination, genealogy, history, Hume, Nietzsche, political philosophy
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