Vaughn Papenhausen

I'm a philosopher interested in questions about practical reason: what are our goals and values? Can we rationally change them? Do we have reasons to be moral, and are there kinds of agents who don't? These are questions in metaethics, but I suspect they matter a lot for AI alignment, which is what I've been thinking about lately.

Right now I'm writing about the feasibility of pausing the AI race from a game-theoretic angle, and about final ends and the reasons we might have to change them. My earlier work argued that nihilism—the view that some norm or value doesn't exist—isn't something we have good reason to feel angst about, because we can usually construct other norms that do the same work in our lives.

I teach ethics at Ohio State, most recently Engineering Ethics, where I try to help students avoid the pitfalls that can cause even well-intentioned people to do the wrong thing.

Outside of that, I love D&D and other tabletop RPGs (I'm working on designing one that's simple enough to introduce new people to the hobby). Some of my favorite fiction includes Avatar: The Last Airbender, most Ghibli movies, and Unsong.