Judit Szalai is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her main interests are the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, philosophy of technology, and the history of seventeenth-century thought. Her recent publications include a co-edited Thematic Issue on Artificial Intelligence (Hungarian Philosophical Quarterly, 2019/4) and articles in Review of Philosophy and Psychology and Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology. She has given papers on artificial “mental states” and different aspects of the mind (such as externalism and the phenomenology of agency), ethics and moral psychology, and philosophical psychopathology. She also published a monograph on contemporary analytic theories of emotion.
This paper addresses the cultural sustainability of artificial intelligence use through one of its most widely discussed instances: autonomous driving. The introduction of self-driving cars places us in a radically novel moral situation, requiring specific, advance, reflectively endorsed, forced, and iterated choices, with yet uncharted forms of risk imposition. The argument explores the necessity and possibility of maintaining one of our most fundamental moral-cultural principles in this new context, that of the equal treatment of persons.
