Fichte's Deduction of the Moral Law

It is often assumed that Fichte's aim in Part I of the System of Ethics is to provide a deduction of the moral law, the very thing that Kant – after years of unsuccessful attempts – deemed impossible. On this familiar reading, what Kant eventually viewed as an underivable 'fact' (Factum), the authority of the moral law, is what Fichte traces to its highest ground in what he calls the principle of the 'I'. However, scholars have largely overlooked a passage in the System of Ethics where Fichte explicitly invokes Kant's doctrine of the fact of reason with approval, claiming that consciousness of the moral law grounds our belief in freedom (GA I/5:65). On the reading I defend, Fichte's invocation of the Factum is consistent with the structure of Part I when we distinguish (a) the feeling of moral compulsion from (b) the moral law itself

Schiller on Evil and the Emergence of Reason

Schiller was one of many early post-Kantians who wrestled with Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, a doctrine that continues to puzzle commentators today. Schiller’s own explanation of why we are prone to pursue happiness without restriction is, I argue, subtle and multilayered: it offers us a new genealogy of reflective agency, linking our tendency to egoism to the first emergence of reason within human beings. On the reading I defend, our drive for the absolute does not lead us directly to moral autonomy; rather, it misleads us to seek the absolute in the field of our own impulses and inclinations. However, since this detour is the result of cognitive error, it involves no willful subordination of the moral law to self-love, and so nothing that bears the guilt of evil

Adaptive Statistical Evaluation Tools for Equity Ranking Models

A major challenge in the investment management business is to identify which stocks are likely to outperform in the future, and which are likely to perform relatively poorly. To this end the strategy adopted by Genus is to identify factors (auxiliary information about the stock such as earnings-to-price ratio or dividend yield) that they believe are associated with future out-performance (i.e. factors that have predictive ability). The best of these factors are then combined (Genus use a weighted average) into a model which is used to rank the universe of stocks month-by-month. This ranking is then used to as the input to a trading strategy, resulting in a modified portfolio. Genus had provided us with sample data, consisting of just over 12 years worth of monthly returns on a universe of 60 stocks, along with time series of 34 factors for each of the stocks. Using these data, the approach was to build software (MATLAB) models for: 1. ranking the stocks based on factor information; 2. implementing a trading strategy based on a stock ranking and assessing the performance of a given trading strategy by looking at measures such as hit ratio, information ratio and spread. The IPSW team implemented a simplified trading strategy of selling the entire portfolio each month, and using the proceeds to invest equally in the top 20% of stocks as given by the computed ranking. They also implemented the following measures of portfolio performance: excess return, hit ratio and information ratio

Fichte’s method of moral justification

While Kant’s claim that the moral law discloses our freedom to us has been extensively discussed in recent decades, the reactions to this claim among Kant’s immediate successors have gone largely overlooked by scholars. Reinhold, Creuzer, and Maimon were among three prominent thinkers of the era unwilling to follow Kant in making the moral law the condition for knowing our freedom. Maimon went so far as to reject Kant’s method of appealing to our everyday awareness of duty on the grounds that common human understanding is susceptible to error and illusion. In this paper I shall examine how these skeptical reactions to Kant’s position shaped the background for Fichte’s method of moral justification, leading up to his own deduction of the moral law in the System of Ethics. By way of conclusion, I shall propose a new interpretation of how consciousness of the moral law serves as an entry-point to Fichte’s form of idealism

Kant’s Deductions of Morality and Freedom

It is commonly held that Kant ventured to derive morality from freedom in Groundwork III. It is also believed that he reversed this strategy in the second Critique, attempting to derive freedom from morality instead. In this paper, I set out to challenge these familiar assumptions: Kant’s argument in Groundwork III rests on a moral conception of the intelligible world, one that plays a similar role as the ‘fact of reason’ in the second Critique. Accordingly, I argue, there is no reversal in the proof-structure of Kant’s two works

Fichte’s Normative Ethics: Deontological or Teleological?

One of the most controversial issues to emerge in recent studies of Fichte concerns the status of his normative ethics, i.e., his theory of what makes actions morally good or bad. Scholars are divided over Fichte’s view regarding the ‘final end’ of moral striving, since it appears this end can be either a specific goal permitting maximizing calculations (the consequentialist reading defended by Kosch 2015), or an indeterminate goal permitting only duty-based decisions (the deontological reading defended by Wood 2016). While I think each interpretive position contains an element of truth, my aim in this paper is to defend a third alternative, according to which Fichte’s normative ethics presents us with a unique form of social perfectionism

Can Artificial Intelligence Alleviate Resource Scarcity?

During summer 2017, I explored the implications of the potential application of artificial intelligence (AI) to resource management at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Alongside my mentor, Dr. Simon Beard, I sought to determine the most noteworthy risks and benefits associated with developing AI that could offer agricultural guidance and that could someday offer insight into more efficient, effective, and equitable resource distribution. My research, funded by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) grant, involved discussing AI-related issues in the context of resource scarcity with academics and experts in the fields of AI, climate science, data analytics, economics, ethics, and robotics. I found that while AI could present a solution to the problem of scarcity by harnessing data and algorithms to increase agricultural yield, the technology also must be considered in the context of risks—including bias and a lack of trustworthiness. If the positive potential and risks associated with AI for resource management are thoughtfully considered throughout development, the technology could improve food security and ultimately contribute to a better future