CONCEPT
The Ethics of Analogy
Midgley's insight that analogies are not innocent — they import the moral framework that applies to one side of the comparison onto the other side, and the import is often unwarranted.
An analogy does not merely describe a resemblance. It imports the moral framework that applies to one side of the comparison onto the other side. When Descartes compared animals to machines, he imported the moral framework of machines — they can be used, broken, discarded without compunction — onto animals, authorizing centuries of vivisection. When the contemporary discourse compares AI to human intelligence, it imports the moral framework of human intelligence — it deserves respect, its products have meaning, it has standing — onto AI. Midgley devoted a substantial portion of her career to showing that both imports are unwarranted, and that the unwarranted imports are where most of the moral damage gets done. The ethics of analogy is the discipline of noticing what moral framework a given comparison is quietly transporting, and asking whether the transport is justified.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Cartesian case is the paradigm. René Descartes proposed in the seventeenth century