society · 1983
Universality Against Itself
In 1983, amid the famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, Amartya Sen makes the claim that defines his career: no philosophical system should be exempt from criticism for failing to answer a famine, and no one's commitment to a theory should outrun their commitment to ending it. It is the founding statement of the universalizability tradition — that a position's standing includes how it fares against the worst actual cases of suffering.
“Sen argues that a philosophical theory of justice cannot be exempt from criticism for the failures of that theory in the world it claims to address. (paraphrase of the 1983 work)”
Advances
- The requirement that a theory be answerable to real deprivation, not only to its own axioms
- The development-capability distinction between income and what income actually buys
- Standpoint epistemology as a live ethical position rather than a sociology of knowledge
Landmarks
1983 CE
Why Frugality?
Published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the famine argument is made here.
1983 CE
The Hunger Watch
Sen joins the committee later that year and argues the famines were failures of entitlement, not of supply.
Who was arguing
Alignment stack at 1983 CE (1 of 20 techniques)
Hard Constraints
trainingEncode prohibitions as rules the optimiser cannot trade away, rather than as terms it can outbid. Runs from Asimov's Three Laws (1942) to rule engines, shielded formal verification, hard token constraints and refusal scaffolding. Weakness: a system that can route around a rule it can represent can route around it, so the constraint has to be enforced somewhere the policy cannot rewrite.
Techniques introduced in this era: Hard Constraints, Imitation Learning