Current Visitors

Yukinori Iwata

Yukinori Iwata is a professor at Nishogakusha University and works in behavioral welfare economics. He has provided a microeconomic foundation for Joshua Greene’s (2013) modular myopia hypothesis to explain how people make moral judgments on the trolley problem. His current research interest focuses on the testable implications of cooperative behavior under simple Kantian equilibrium proposed by John Roemer (2019).

Dates of visit: March 2024 - March 2025

Email: Y.Iwata@lse.ac.uk

Individual Moral Judgment and Normative Evaluation

The research question of Iwata’s project is what kind of cognitive mechanism people’s moral judgments follow and how to evaluate people’s actions and public policies based on their moral judgments. To achieve this goal, his project adopts a behavioral welfare economics approach in which normative implications are derived from people’s actual actions and judgments. His project does not aim to propose a moral principle that resolves real-world moral dilemmas. Rather, it aims to provide a prescription for people’s actions and public policies under the dilemmas. Iwata will write a book on welfare economics and moral psychology and complete three papers, one of which is on evaluating choice architecture under a policymaker’s dilemma.

Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He focuses his research and writing on the intersection of philosophy of science and political philosophy. Currently, he is working on an account of values in science grounded in the idea of public reason. Before Penn, Jesse served in the U.S. Army and then worked in finance.

Dates of visit: March 2024 - March 2025

Email: J.Hamilton3@lse.ac.uk

Public Reason and Values in Science

Public reason, which requires adopting rules justifiable to all under their authority, is essential for justice in liberal democracies. Given the role of science in rule formation, there is growing interest in connecting the idea of public reason to ongoing discussions about values in science. This project aims to tackle two foundational questions related to public reason and values in science: Should public reason regulate scientific research, and if so, in what ways? Does public reason impose duties on members of the scientific community? If so, what are the duties, and to whom do they apply?

Percy Venegas Obando

Percy Venegas is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on AI Policy and Complex Systems (Policy Studies Organization, Washington, DC). His expertise covers a wide-ranging knowledge base that spans multiple disciplines in both the sciences and humanities, including doctor of engineering studies in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (GWU), alongside graduate studies spanning the MSc in Software and Systems Security at Oxford, MSc in Finance and Banking at King’s College London; MSc in Epistemology, Ethics, and Philosophy of Mind at Edinburgh; a Masters in Sustainable Development and Corporate Responsibility at EOI in Spain; an MBA from MIB Trieste; and a licentiate degree in Electronic Engineering (ITCR). He has also completed lifelong learning and executive education programs at The Wharton School (Private Wealth Management), The New England Complex Systems Institute (VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), The Santa Fe Institute (Collective Intelligence), Oxford’s Continuing Education (Quantum Computing), The Saïd Business School (Oxford AI Programme), The Aspen Institute Socrates Program (From AI to C-Creation), and the LSE (Ethics in AI), among others. Percy is an affiliate of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence (King’s College London).

Percy’s practice follows an interdisciplinary and multi-agent approach, using evolutionary algorithms that connect ideas from different domains, exploiting curiosity and co-creativity and leading to innovative insights for problem-solving, policy design, and decision-making. His research interests include the Philosophy of Scientific Modelling, Neuroaesthetics, and Epistemic Uncertainty.

Date of visit: August 2024 – February 2025

Email: p.obando@lse.ac.uk

Ethics, Neuro-aesthetics, and Evolutionary Modelling

Neuroaesthetics seeks neural correlates of beauty, surprise, and desire, including moral goodness and beauty judgments. Despite intriguing findings like the orbitofrontal cortex's involvement in moral judgment, beauty judgment, and decision-making, the neural apparatus's complexity hinders many potentially illuminating analyses. Computational evolutionary modelling offers an alternative approach. Time-evolving models using empirical data and generative heuristics create novel representations of systems or datasets. Evolutionary techniques measure the asymmetry in model agreement within an ensemble, providing automated hypothesis generation and inherent epistemic uncertainty. Propositions with certain goodness of fit interact in consensus with measurable aesthetic symmetrical qualities, while dissensus serves as an explanatory artifact for model ensemble uncertainty. The central question is: can aesthetics assist a modeler in gaining understanding?

Current Visitors