How will we assess the morality of decisions made by artificial intelligence—and will our judgments be swayed by what the law says? Focusing on a moral dilemma in which a driverless car chooses to sacrifice its passenger to save more people, this study offers evidence that our moral intuitions can be influenced by the presence of the law.
Essay
Sex robots are here. Created specifically to allow individuals to simulate erotic and romantic experiences with a seemingly alive and present human being, sex robots will soon force lawmakers to address the rise of digisexuality and the human–robot relationship. The extent to which intimacy between a human and robot can be regulated depends on how we characterize sex with robots—as a masturbatory act, an intimate relationship, or nonconsensual...
For more than fifty years, the problems endemic to municipal policing in the United States—brutality, racial discrimination, corruption, and opacity—have remained remarkably constant. This has occurred notwithstanding the advent of modern constitutional criminal procedure and countless judicial opinions applying it to the police. The municipal police can evade criminal procedure’s legality-based paradigm through formal and informal means....
The constitutionally mandated decennial enumeration of the U.S. population is indispensable to the equitable distribution of political and economic resources. As we approach the 2020 Census, however, several factors converge that both undermine how we count change in communities of color and conflict with shifting demographics and power dynamics, making accurate accounting especially urgent. Among these, perhaps most notable is the threatened...
In early 2018, the federal government announced that it would ask every person in the country about their citizenship status on the 2020 Census. Controversy immediately followed. The Constitution makes the decennial census the federal government’s very first express responsibility; it drove existential questions about representation and funding in 1790 and has become no less important in the centuries since. Many observers, including several...