The project aims to explore the philosophical tools required to deal with the great risks facing humanity. These concern, among others: pandemics, natural disasters, climate change, the unexpected and disastrous development of artificial intelligence, overpopulation, famine, and global injustice. There is a very influential picture that addresses such great risks departing from humanity's inability to conceive and respond to disasters. In the twentieth-century reflection on the atomic bomb, as well as on the Nazi horrors, this approach was taken by authors such as Hanna Arendt, Günther Anders and Hans Jonas. Humanity is portrayed as outdated compared to the technology it has produced (Anders) and is called upon to rediscover its constitutive, ontological ends (Jonas). This picture is found in the contemporary approach of existential risks (Bostrom) and in the wider literature of the critical social sciences where humanity is depicted on the brink of disaster. The project explores instead a number of philosophical approaches that focus on human rational and creative capacities to engage with great risks. The dimension of risk characterizes humanity as a form of life: it is not an external attack on it, as the mentioned conservative thinkers thought. Moreover, the dimension of risk brings into play reason and imagination as plastic capacities that respond to problems by redefining the context and envisaging new scenarios. Finally, the human mind is capable of cooperation and of inventing institutions capable to deliver answers on a collective level. The philosophical line here is one that values democracy as an epistemological, ethical and institutional context where problems can be faced and solutions proposed.
The project aims to investigate the philosophical axes that allow to deal with the theme of the global risks of humanity undermining the dimensions of threat and fear and working instead on the opportunities for improvement, recruiting the rational and moral resources that humanity has already employed in its recent history to achieve the great scientific, technological, democratic, and cultural advances of the last three centuries.
The project seeks to explore the following philosophical approaches: moral perfectionism; scientific and normative realism; ethical conceptions of democracy; freedom as human development; forms of life approaches to ethics and societal problems.
In contrast with the mentioned negativist approaches, the project explores human intellectual and moral capacities: the search for truth and the moral interest in improving the conditions of humanity. On the one hand, it focuses on the defense of the specialization characteristic of science and reason also in other areas such as ethics, which transcend the concepts of common sense and the natural dispositions selected by evolution. Contrary to the approach that works on the inadequacy of the human mind to face the great risks in a global dimension, the project seeks to investigate philosophical and scientific research that claims that the human mind can discover how things are in reality (realism) and can strive to improve the conditions of humanity (progress achieved through democracy). Moral perfectionism, ethical theories of democracy and forms of life approaches explore the contextual conditions in which intellectual and ethical research and practical commitment joint to political organization can flourish. Rationality is an activity, a practice, which can only flourish in appropriate contexts. Science and reason have their own concrete human forms of life (Wittgenstein, Cavell, pragmatism). Moreover, the democratic framework, not only in the institutional sense but also in the ethical sense conceived as an intellectual and moral community of experimentation and research, allows to host scientific and ethical research. It offers a model for addressing global risks. It does not follow the path of individualist negativism, but rather focuses on the social and political organization that facilitates the work of reason and the imagination. Social organization radically changes the way in which human beings deal with major crises. Sen's human development framework provides a comprehensive platform for thinking about the conditions in which people are free to have a moral and political interest in others and in the environments, as well as an intellectual interest in the search for truth. Democracy and human development are at the basis of the construction of the conditions in which intellectual and moral research can grow so to resonate with the interest and motivation of the ordinary individual who is not engaged in a specialized science. The problem of great global risks should not be dealt with by appealing to fear regarding apocalyptic scenarios that scale down human capacities and thus activates either an apocalyptic-religious dispositive or the search for an exit strategy from humanity, but by working on the social and cultural conditions that make intellectual and ethical rational research possible.
In terms of research outputs, the project envisions a number of events, both in presence and online, as well as publications stemming from them. In particular, two are the axes along which such events will be articulated and staged:
(a) the investigation of the specific philosophical perspective of forms of life (especially in the light of the Wittgensteinian tradition indicated) from which to approach the issue of global risks;
(b) some selected instances of such approach at work, especially in the debate over the ethics of artificial intelligence.
Here's a list of some of the activities planned:
1) Major events:
"A Forms of Life Approach to Global Risks Management", International conference, Sept. 2022;
"Transforming Reason and Imagination: Artificial Intelligence and the Democratic Humanistic Tradition", international conference, Sept. 2023;
"Individual Actions and Collective Choices: How and Why the AI Might Help Us Dealing with Climate Change Crisis", intern. conference, June 2024.
2) Publications:
"A Humanist Manifesto for Global Risks", book project;
"An Atlantis of Global Risks", book project;
"Nature Old and New: What is Left of Chance and Inevitability in our Dealings with the World", journal issue;
"Doing Without Humans? Democratic AI and the Wider Bases of Technological Advancements" journal issue.
3) Website:
registration and ongoing implementation of a public website where to publish and advertise the project's activities, also featuring a live blog and newsroom.
4) Preparation of an ERC Project on the topic of global risks, ethics, and democracy to be submitted in 2023.