Conference Agenda

Bidding is one of the critical stages in complex construction procurement processes, encompassing the preparation of bid documents, evaluation of proposals, and awarding of contracts, which are key responsibilities of the employer. The bidding process is often time-consuming and energy intensive. However, electronic bidding can reduce these demands by improving efficiency, speed, and accuracy. In e-bidding, proposals are submitted in electronic format, streamlining the overall process. Additionally, transparency is crucial in bidding to ensure fairness and accountability, a requirement that aligns with the capabilities of blockchain technology. Blockchain’s decentralized, cryptography-secured, block-based architecture allows for the management of transactions with high transparency and clarity, such as providing an immutable record of who performed what action and when—valuable in resolving potential legal claims. By integrating blockchain and smart contracts, a transparent, decentralized, and secure bidding framework can be established. This framework facilitates real-time monitoring of the bidding portal's performance by all stakeholders. This essay explores the ethical implications of blockchain-based bidding from the perspective of three stakeholder groups: employers, bidders, and citizens. Ethical evaluations depend in part on the moral framework adopted. Broadly, actions can be analyzed through the lens of virtue ethics, which focuses on the character of the actors. An action is considered ethical if it promotes human flourishing and reflects virtuous character traits, such as honesty and fairness. From a deontological perspective, individuals are expected to follow specific rules, such as transparency and integrity, regardless of the outcomes. Lastly, consequentialism evaluates the morality of actions based on their outcomes, emphasizing benefits and minimizing harm to stakeholders. Using these ethical frameworks, this essay examines how blockchain technology can make the bidding process in construction projects more ethical by enhancing transparency, fairness, and accountability.

This essay is about how to manage terms introduced by folk psychology (or folk terms, for short). I examine what I call `the placeholder strategy', an approach that specifies the conditions under which folk terms are admissible by interpreting them as placeholders for causal roles within a given system. Kristin Andrews has advocated for a version of this strategy, aiming to preserve the use of folk terms within comparative cognition and showing the jobs they can fulfill within said discipline. In this essay I argue that this strategy also works for the field of AI, and I will motivate its adoption by showing how it can help manage the over-attributions often associated with folk terms.

The need to address folk psychology, and folk terms by extension, is common to both comparative cognition and AI. This need stems from the risk of folk psychology leading to weakly warranted or unwarranted forms of anthropomorphism, where our commonsense understanding of human psychological phenomena is projected onto non-human entities. As a result, terms like `beliefs', `intent', `desires', `goals', and `knowledge' are deployed in both fields to describe the behaviour of animals and artificial systems. The challenge, however, is that these terms need not accurately depict the inner going-ons of non-human entities, as they might have greater connotations or causal implications than appropriate for the target system.

As it will be shown in the essay, addressing these challenges by proscribing the admissibility of folk terms from scientific and engineering practices is impractical due to its deep-rooted presence in our descriptions and explanations of behavior. Instead, the essay argues for the adoption of the placeholder strategy in AI, which allows for the use of folk terms if they are explicitly defined as placeholders for specific causal roles within an artificial system.

The placeholder strategy is not about proving that folk terms are the best set of terms for AI. Rather, it is about ensuring that if they are used, their application adheres to a clear guideline. This involves explicitly stating the causal roles denoted by folk terms, thus avoiding the anthropocentric bias of fixing the meaning of the term according to the human-specific realizers of said causal roles. In support of this, the essay demonstrates how the placeholder strategy finds its roots in analytic functionalism; it provides examples, such as recent uses of `knowledge' in large language models, to illustrate how the placeholder strategy can be practically implemented; and, it shows how the anthropomorphism resulting from folk psychology need not be anthropocentric.

The upshot is that by adopting this strategy, stakeholders in AI tasked with describing and explaining the behavior of artificial systems can better manage the use of folk terms, balancing the recognition that folk attributions are common and pervasive with the challenge of avoiding unwarranted forms of anthropomorphism and the over-attributions that might come with them.

References (selection):

Andrews, K. (2016). A role for folk psychology in animal cognition research. In A. Blank (Ed.), Animals: Basic Philosophical Concepts (pp. 205–222). Philosophia: Munich.

Andrews, K. (2020). How to Study Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press.

Bermúdez, J. L. (2003). The domain of folk psychology. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 53 , 25–48.

Deroy, O. (2023). The Ethics of Terminology: Can we use human terms to describe AI? Topoi, 42 (3), 881–889.

Floridi, L., & Nobre, A. (2024). Anthropomorphising machines and computerising minds: the cross-wiring of languages between artificial intelligence and brain & cognitive sciences. Minds & Machines. 34, 5. .

Lewis, D. (1970). How to define theoretical terms. The Journal of Philosophy, 67 (13), 427–446.

Lewis, D. (1972). Psychophysical and theoretical identifications. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 50 (3), 249–258.

Phelan, M., & Buckwalter, W. (2012). Analytic functionalism and mental state attribution. Philosophical Topics, 129–154.

Ramsey, W. (2022). Eliminative Materialism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/.

Salles, A., Evers, K., & Farisco, M. (2020). Anthropomorphism in AI. AJOB neuroscience, 11 (2), 88–95.

Watson, D. (2019). The rhetoric and reality of anthropomorphism in artificial intelligence. Minds and Machines, 29 (3), 417–440.

Wynne, C. (2007). What are animals? Why anthropomorphism is still not a scientific approach to behavior. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2 .

The development of groundbreaking reprogenetic technologies such as human reproductive genome editing (HRGE) and in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) promises to transform the landscape of fertility and family creation (Pacesa, Pelea, and Jinek 2024; Saitou and Hayashi 2021; Merleau-Ponty and Le Goff 2025). HRGE makes possible the alteration of the genome of embryos or gametes while IVG aims at generating gametes using somatic cells. These technologies, both experimental at this point, hold the possibility of significant benefits, including preserving fertility, expanding reproductive options, reducing the burdens of genetic diseases, and enhancing desirable traits. They also raise profound ethical challenges affecting individuals and societies (Merleau-Ponty and Le Goff 2025; Baylis 2019). Some of those ethical challenges have commonalities with reprogenetic technologies that are now routinely used. For instance, they involve the potential destruction of human embryos, are likely to be accessible to limited numbers of people, challenge widely shared notions of parenting, and can contribute to the commodification of reproductive materials and the exploitation of women. Others, however, are unique to HRGE and IVG.

In this presentation I focus on one of such problems. I explore the ways in which the development of these technologies presents inescapable challenges to our traditional notion of informed consent in the context of clinical research. First, the novel potential consequences of these technologies and the radical uncertainties that they involve call into question our ability to offer meaningful disclosure of risks and potential benefits as well as our ability to determine how best to minimize risks and maximize benefits. Second, although usually prospective parents and parents have great latitude in making decisions on behalf of their future or current offspring, these technologies involve germline modifications that can affect future generations. Uncontroversially, prospective parents have authority to consent on their own behalf and, more controversially for at least some actions, they have authority to consent on behalf of their offspring. But it is not clear what authority they alone would have to consent on behalf of future generations whose genomes will by affected in unknown ways by these interventions. Third, appropriately assessing the safety and efficacy of these technologies calls for long-term, intergenerational clinical trials. But requiring those born by means of these technologies to participate in research conflicts with an essential element of informed consent to participate in research: voluntariness. Nonetheless, respecting the voluntariness of participating in follow-up research would prevent appropriate assessment of the risk-benefit profile of these technologies. I contend that judgments about the permissibility of developing these technologies must address these problems in satisfactory ways.

References

Baylis, Françoise. 2019. Altered inheritance : CRISPR and the ethics of human genome editing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, N, and A Le Goff. 2025. "The Emerging Field of In Vitro Gametogenesis: Perspectives in Social Science and Bioethics." CURRENT SEXUAL HEALTH REPORTS 17 (1):1-7. doi: 10.1007/s11930-024-00401-5.

Pacesa, M, O Pelea, and M Jinek. 2024. "Past, present, and future of CRISPR genome editing technologies." CELL 187 (5):1076-1100. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.01.042.

Saitou, M, and K Hayashi. 2021. "Mammalian in vitro gametogenesis." SCIENCE 374 (6563):47-+. doi: 10.1126/science.aaz6830.