Against commitment

In his famous ‘Integrity Objection’, Bernard Williams condemns utilitarianism for requiring us to regard our projects as dispensable, and thus precluding us from being properly committed to them. In this paper, I argue against commitment as Williams defines it, drawing upon insights from the socialist tradition as well as mainstream analytic moral philosophy. I show that given the mutual interdependence of individuals (a phenomenon emphasised by socialists) several appealing non-utilitarian moral principles also require us to regard our projects as dispensable. This means that those who endorse those principles cannot appeal to Williams’s argument against utilitarianism. It also puts pressure on his thought that moral theories ought to permit commitment – in fact, it suggests that they ought not. Regarding one’s projects as dispensable may be alienating, and this may motivate us to hang onto commitment and reject these non-utilitarian principles along with utilitarianism. However, commitment also threatens a kind of alienation – from other people. Drawing upon the socialist tradition again, I argue that avoiding this form of alienation is necessary for proper engagement with our projects, and thereby with ourselves

Counting Euler Tours in Undirected Bounded Treewidth Graphs

We show that counting Euler tours in undirected bounded tree-width graphs is tractable even in parallel - by proving a $\#SAC^1$ upper bound. This is in stark contrast to #P-completeness of the same problem in general graphs. Our main technical contribution is to show how (an instance of) dynamic programming on bounded \emph{clique-width} graphs can be performed efficiently in parallel. Thus we show that the sequential result of Espelage, Gurski and Wanke for efficiently computing Hamiltonian paths in bounded clique-width graphs can be adapted in the parallel setting to count the number of Hamiltonian paths which in turn is a tool for counting the number of Euler tours in bounded tree-width graphs. Our technique also yields parallel algorithms for counting longest paths and bipartite perfect matchings in bounded-clique width graphs. While establishing that counting Euler tours in bounded tree-width graphs can be computed by non-uniform monotone arithmetic circuits of polynomial degree (which characterize $\#SAC^1$) is relatively easy, establishing a uniform $\#SAC^1$ bound needs a careful use of polynomial interpolation.Comment: 17 pages; There was an error in the proof of the GapL upper bound claimed in the previous version which has been subsequently remove

Repugnance and perfection

This article grew out of a BA thesis written several years ago under the supervision of Teruji Thomas. Many thanks to him for his thorough advice on both that thesis and this article. My thanks also to Simon Beard for comments and discussion on that thesis, and to Joe Horton, James Wilson, and two anonymous reviewers for Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments and discussion of this article. I am also grateful to receptive and probing audiences at the UCL Graduate Conference and the London Graduate Moral and Political Philosophy Workshop. This article is dedicated to the memories of Derek Parfit and Josh Parsons, both of whom inspired me to study philosophy

Utilitarianism and the Social Nature of Persons

This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of interpretations. In Chapter Two I give my interpretation of Williams’s Integrity objection; in Chapter Three I discuss one common response to it, and in Chapters Four and Five I give my own defence of utilitarianism against it. In Chapter Six I discuss a second objection: the problem of pre-emption. This problem is also found in Williams, but has received greater attention through the work of other authors in recent years. It suggests that utilitarianism is unable to deal with some of the modern world’s most pressing moral problems, and raises an internal tension between the twin utilitarian aims of making a difference and achieving the best outcomes. In Chapter Seven I discuss a third objection: that utilitarianism is insufficiently egalitarian. I find this claim to be unwarranted, in light of recent social science and philosophy. My responses to Williams’s objections draw upon resources from the socialist tradition – in particular, that tradition’s emphasis on the importance of social connections between individuals. Socialists have often been hostile to utilitarianism, in part for socialist-inflected versions of Williams’s objections. Thus, in responding to these objections I aim to demonstrate that socialist thought contains the means to defuse not only mainstream philosophy’s rejection of utilitarianism but also its own, and thus to re-open the possibilities for a productive engagement between the two traditions

A synthetic regulon enhances the fitness of yeast on non-native nutrients

Metabolic engineering has enabled production of bio-based chemicals in organisms, usually by overexpressing the genes (heterologous or native genes) involved in the biochemical pathway to debottleneck rate limiting steps. Recent studies have shown that engineered regulatory systems, such as removing feedback inhibition, can further improve the performance of engineered strains. We hypothesize that engineering a global regulatory system (regulon) could provide a new paradigm in engineering biological systems and complement current tools available for metabolic engineering. To demonstrate this, we use the assimilation of xylose by S. cerevisiae as a test case. Xylose is a non-native sugar to this yeast, but an abundant natural sugar. Currently, engineering xylose assimilation for biomass or ethanol production in S. cerevisiae has been limited to overexpression of initial genes in the pathway to convert xylose to xylulose-5-phosphate followed by expression of non-oxidative Pentose Phosphate Pathway genes to increase the flux towards glycolysis. However, growth involves coordinated control of multiple pathways involving carbon metabolism, cofactor regeneration, amino acid synthesis, nucleotide synthesis, cell cycle maintenance etc., and debottlenecking rate-limiting reactions in all of the necessary pathways required for growth in xylose would involve extensive pathway engineering. To get around this, we hypothesized that further enhancement in xylose utilization can be made by addressing the issue from a regulatory perspective rather than metabolic. To that end, we decided on a regulon engineering strategy whereby a sugar sensing regulon can be engineered to trigger transcriptional machinery when xylose is encountered thereby enhancing the growth and biocatalytic fitness in this non-native sugar. Previous studies have shown that presence of xylose weakly upregulates galactose catabolic genes (GAL). This suggested that xylose can mimic galactose as an agonist of the GAL regulon, and that this system could serve as a platform to develop a xylose-dependent regulatory system. We first engineered the signal transduction step that increases the sensitivity and response kinetics of the GAL regulon for xylose as well as its native ligand, galactose. We further show that by switching ON the regulon using a dual positive feedback loop system we could achieve growth rates comparable to current evolutionary engineered strains. In this process, we also enhanced the galactose sensing capabilities of the sensor, thereby achieving higher growth rates on galactose than the wild type strains. Finally, we also show that under non-inducing conditions, strains carrying the xylose regulon show better growth fitness than strains with constitutive expression of xylose metabolic genes. Further increase in growth rates, xylose uptake, and specific chemical (including biofuels) production can be achieved by expanding the genes under the synthetic xylose regulon. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Repugnance and Perfection

This article grew out of a BA thesis written several years ago under the supervision of Teruji Thomas. Many thanks to him for his thorough advice on both that thesis and this article. My thanks also to Simon Beard for comments and discussion on that thesis, and to Joe Horton, James Wilson, and two anonymous reviewers for Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments and discussion of this article. I am also grateful to receptive and probing audiences at the UCL Graduate Conference and the London Graduate Moral and Political Philosophy Workshop. This article is dedicated to the memories of Derek Parfit and Josh Parsons, both of whom inspired me to study philosophy. [Correction added on 27 May 2020, after first online publication: Throughout the article, there have been changes made to structure and grammar to improve clarity.

Surveillance Capitalism: a Marx-inspired account

Some of the world's most powerful corporations practise what Shoshana Zuboff (2015; 2019) calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. The core of their business is harvesting, analysing and selling data about the people who use their products. In Zuboff's view, the first corporation to engage in surveillance capitalism was Google, followed by Facebook; recently, firms such as Microsoft and Amazon have pivoted towards such a model. In this paper, I suggest that Karl Marx's analysis of the relations between industrial capitalists and workers is closely analogous to the relations between surveillance capitalists and users. Furthermore, three problematic aspects of industrial capitalism that Marx describes – alienation, exploitation and accumulation – are also aspects, in new forms, of surveillance capitalism. I draw heavily on Zuboff's work to make these parallels. However, my Marx-inspired account of surveillance capitalism differs from hers over the nature of the exchange between users and surveillance capitalists. For Zuboff, this is akin either to robbery or the gathering of raw materials; on the Marx-inspired account it is a voluntary sale. This difference has important implications for the question of how to resist surveillance capitalism. Joint winner of the 2020 Philosophy essay prize

Utilitarianism and the Social Nature of Persons

This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of interpretations. In Chapter Two I give my interpretation of Williams’s Integrity objection; in Chapter Three I discuss one common response to it, and in Chapters Four and Five I give my own defence of utilitarianism against it. In Chapter Six I discuss a second objection: the problem of pre-emption. This problem is also found in Williams, but has received greater attention through the work of other authors in recent years. It suggests that utilitarianism is unable to deal with some of the modern world’s most pressing moral problems, and raises an internal tension between the twin utilitarian aims of making a difference and achieving the best outcomes. In Chapter Seven I discuss a third objection: that utilitarianism is insufficiently egalitarian. I find this claim to be unwarranted, in light of recent social science and philosophy. My responses to Williams’s objections draw upon resources from the socialist tradition – in particular, that tradition’s emphasis on the importance of social connections between individuals. Socialists have often been hostile to utilitarianism, in part for socialist-inflected versions of Williams’s objections. Thus, in responding to these objections I aim to demonstrate that socialist thought contains the means to defuse not only mainstream philosophy’s rejection of utilitarianism but also its own, and thus to re-open the possibilities for a productive engagement between the two traditions

Comparative fire performance of high strength concrete columns with different types of fiber reinforcement

Reinforced concrete (RC) columns made of high strength concrete (HSC) experience faster degradation of capacity and spalling when exposed to fire. To mitigate such fire induced spalling and enhance fire resistance, fibers are often added to HSC mix. This paper presents results from fire resistance tests to illustrate the comparative fire performance of HSC columns with different fiber combinations. Four reinforced concrete (RC) columns made of HSC with plain, polypropylene, steel, and hybrid fibers were tested under design fire conditions and data from tests is utilized to evaluate the comparative fire behaviour of these columns. Results from these fire resistance experiments show that hybrid fiber reinforced HSC columns exhibit improved performance as compared to plain, polypropylene, and steel fiber reinforced columns

Risk, Non-Identity, and Extinction

This paper examines a recent argument in favour of strong precautionary action—possibly including working to hasten human extinction—on the basis of a decision-theoretic view that accommodates the risk-attitudes of all affected while giving more weight to the more risk-averse attitudes. First, we dispute the need to take into account other people’s attitudes towards risk at all. Second we argue that a version of the non-identity problem undermines the case for doing so in the context of future people. Lastly, we suggest that we should not work to hasten human extinction, even if significant risk aversion is warranted