Editor’s Notes: Volume 5 (2022)

Editor’s Notes: Volume 5 (2022)

Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t, and we have to take this with philosophy.

This year’s yearly theme, “Age of the Panopticon: Surveillance Technology and the End of Privacy” did not quite pan out. Given the amount of discussion this topic attracted during the previous couple of years, and its pervasiveness in science fiction during the past few decades, we thought it would inspire quite a number of submissions, yet none of the submissions we received this year addressed the yearly theme. So we were forced to publish this volume without any catchy subtitles.

Similarly, we tried to launch a sister publication for the JSFP, the International Journal of Fantasy and Philosophy. We worked on the design, developed the website, and launched a call for papers, yet here too we did not get enough submissions to justify its publication. We thus made the decision to open up, in future volumes, a section for strictly fantasy-based articles, contingent on getting articles for it.

But despite these drawbacks, we did receive a substantial number of submissions that developed into highly polished articles addressing a broad range of philosophical issues, and thus our fifth volume has a lot to offer to our readers.

Chinese science fiction has figured quite prominently in English-speaking countries these past years, and the translation of Liu Cixin’s work has had a lot to do with this. Readers wanting to find out more about the context in which Liu Cixin writes will hopefully find of great interest Lennon Zhang’s article, “The Politics of Truth in China: Ontological-Ethical Dimensions of Science and Science Fiction.” The article examines the importance given to curiosity, and the notion of truth as it emerges in Liu’s short novel Hearing Dao in the Morning, a spiritual predecessor of sorts to Liu’s The Three Body Problem. While doing this, the author regales us also with a fascinating historical account of the situation of science fiction in China.

Speaking of geopolitics, Orson Scott Card’s extremely popular Ender Series provides the background universe for an interesting theory on the long-term survival and cultural hegemony of political structures, based on the concepts of “Center” and “Edge” nations. In “Children of the Mind and the Concept of Edge and Center Nations” Steven Foertsch examines these categories through the lenses of international relations, and sociological and political theory.

Next year’s theme will focus on the promises and perils of artificial intelligence. These theme is anticipated in this volume by two articles. Harrison Jackon’s “Ex Machina: Testing Machines for Consciousness and Socio-Relational Machine Ethics” examines Alex Garland’s 2014 tense thriller, in which an engineer is tasked with determining the moral status of a highly advanced A.I. An intelligence test, Jackson proposes, is an insufficient determinant of machine ethics: from a consequentialist perspective the smart thing to do may be to treat machines ethically before they are determined to have consciousness, rather than after. Dealing with a similar set of topics, Jakob Stenseke’s “The Morality of Artificial Friends in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun” asks the questions, can artificial entities be worthy of moral considerations, and could they be capable of telling the difference between good and evil?—that is, the questions of moral status and moral agency. He does this by examining Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun. Like Jackson’s article, his approach gives primacy to the social-relational perspective over the epistemological approach. Beyond their specific philosophical approaches, both articles are excellent introductions to the more general questions surrounding the ethics of A.I.

The slow-burn, surprisingly complex 2016 film Arrival, by Denis Villeneuve, provided an interesting interweaving of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with the realities of time travel. Can the structure of our language influence how we experience time, and to what extent? A.G. Holdier’s “A Grammar in Two Dimensions: The Temporal Mechanics of Arrival and the Semantics/Pragmatics Divide” examines this question with an interesting twist: the semantics/pragmatics divide of philosophy of language, he proposes, are analogous with corresponding theories of philosophy of time which either deny or allow for the possibility of “temporal editing.” A discussion of this analogy can throw light on both sets of controversies.

And since inter-species relations seems to be an unofficial theme in this volume, it is fitting that it includes Eric Macedo’s “Jaws Within Jaws: A Cosmopolitical Ecology of Alien.” This innovative article applies the concept of “cosmopolitical ecology” to develop a tool to map relations between different kinds of beings, focusing on predation and domestication as modes of relationship. Using the Alien series as a sort of mirror, the article provides an original, insightful way of looking at such large issues as modernity and colonization.

Closing our article section, Andrew Dennis Bassford’s “Conscientious Utilitarianism; or, the Utilitarians Who Walk Away from Omelas” proposes a defense of classical utilitarianism from Le Guin’s subtly ironic (and surprisingly popular) critique in her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The author’s defense involves a careful examination of the role of conscience in Mill, proposing the view that, through a synthesis of utilitarianism with natural law ethics, a “conscientious utilitarian ethic” can escape Le Guin’s implied objections more satisfactorily than other popular forms of utilitarian ethics.

Ending Volume 5, our Book Review section will treat adventurous readers to Stefano Bigliardi’s review of Jörg Matthias Determann’s Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life. The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World (I.B. Tauris, 2021).

We hope you enjoy this volume of the Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy as much as we’ve enjoyed working on it!

About the Author

Dr. Alfredo Mac Laughlin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Ambrose University’s Department of Philosophy. He teaches applied ethics, philosophy of knowledge, history of ancient and medieval philosophy, and a course dedicated to philosophy in science fiction.

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Published: 2022-06-01; updated 2023-06-26