Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have made wars less costly and potentially more dangerous than wars using legacy weapons. We want to develop weapons or defense systems in preparation for these threats. At the same time, we don’t want to agitate other global actors, making war more likely. Here, I outline a set of jus ante bellum criteria that allow us to balance these considerations. I begin by providing a brief overview of the current literature. Next, through an analysis of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, I show the importance of a criteria of jus ante bellum. Then, I outline the six demands of jus ante bellum: foreseeability, proportionality, clarity, testing, necessity, and intentionality. Lastly, I show how new AI weapons might make the demands of jus ante bellum more difficult to fulfill.

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If we have justified beliefs, they are justified because they stand in inferential relation to other beliefs. In this paper, I reconsider “garbage” foundationalism—the view that inferential justificatory claims for p can terminate at any point, regardless of the justificatory status of the belief(s). By viewing epistemic justification as an entitlement to believe, an award won by our epistemic labor, I make crucial amendments to garbage foundationalism on three fronts: justificatory status, epistemic responsibility, and contextual adaptability. Put together, these amendments to “garbage” foundationalism might allow for a more commonsensical internalist solution to the problem of forgotten evidence.

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Epistemologists have long struggled to make sense of what it means for a belief to be well-grounded. Luckily, grounding, the hottest new dependence relation in the metaphysician’s toolkit shows some promise. It’s clear why, too: its implications are far-reaching. In the philosophy of mind, Dasgupta (2014) has used the grounding relation to suggest a new formulation of physicalism. In the philosophy of religion, Whitcomb (2012) has used grounding to show that omniscience is impossible and that god does not exist. In the history of philosophy, Della Rocca (2013) has used grounding to shed light on Bradley's Regress. Such enthusiasm has led some scholars like Hall (2023) to suggest that grounding can be understood as an epistemic phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that if we suppose that for a belief b1 to be well-grounded, it must be based in the right sort of way on another belief b2, we may encounter some absurd consequences

Send me an email at casey-scott@uiowa.edu for a full draft.