VC-OBJ Objectivist / objective-list

Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment · Iason Gabriel · 2020

“the theory of human development argues that welfare stems from the ability to exercise certain core capabilities that both constitute and support human flourishing (Sen 2001). These capability-based metrics have found a measure of cross-cultural affirmation and consent (Nussbaum 1993).”

why coded: Capabilities/objective-list account of well-being as alignment target · unit #11, pp. 421

“Viewed from the perspective of a single person, the fact that something is in my interest doesn't mean I ought to do it or that I am morally entitled to do so. [...] First, we need a way of deciding how to manage trade-offs between the interests and claims of different people. [...] Second, we need principles for deciding whose interests or needs count for the purpose of AI alignment.”

why coded: Interests insufficient: entitlement and trade-off principles needed beyond well-being · unit #12, pp. 421

Beyond Preferences in AI Alignment · Tan Zhi-Xuan; Micah Carroll; Matija Franklin; Hal… · 2024

“if utility functions are used to represent aggregate value judgments, this effectively assumes that distinct human values are always commensurable in some way, and that our resulting preferences are always complete. Yet, as value pluralists argue, there are contexts where it seems hard or impossible to commensurate our values (Anderson, 1995), resulting in choices where our reasons run short, and we cannot say if one option is ultimately better than another (Chang, 1997).”

why coded: Value pluralism (Anderson, Chang) against complete orderings · unit #4, pp. 1824

Why human-AI relationships need socioaffective alignment · Hannah Rose Kirk; Iason Gabriel; Chris Summerfiel… · 2025

“We highlight three such dilemmas for the alignment community, grounding their significance in core aspects of psychological well-being as validated by Basic Psychological Needs Theory: competence, autonomy, and relatedness (Ryan and Deci, 2017). The first dilemma concerns the trade-offs between present and future selves: Should AI relationships cater to immediate preferences of their users, or challenge them if this supports their long-term benefit?”

why coded: Basic Psychological Needs Theory as objective well-being anchor; hedonic vs eudaimonic trade-off · unit #12, pp. 5

An Affective-Taxis Hypothesis for Alignment and Interpretability · Eli Sennesh; Maxwell Ramstead · 2025

“This paper proposes an affectivist approach to the alignment problem, re-framing the concepts of goals and values in terms of affective taxis, and explaining the emergence of affective valence by appealing to recent work in evolutionary-developmental and computational neuroscience.”

why coded: Affectivist grounding of value in valence - naturalistic alternative to preference and norm accounts (tentative) · unit #1, pp. 188

Agents, Alignment, and the Many Faces of Autonomy · Roberta Fischli; Matija Franklin; Arianna Manzini… · 2026

“prioritizing ideal preferences assigned by an AI system also carries substantial risk, since it assumes that there is something that a person ought to want irrespective of their own position in the matter (Hayek, 1960/2011). Taken to the extreme, the user ceases to be the authority on what they truly prefer.”

why coded: Ideal preferences = objective-list; paternalism risk - user loses authority · unit #8, pp. 8

“The key distinction is that capability-boosting requires voluntary user cooperation and active consent, whereas stronger forms of paternalism replace the user's independent judgment with what the user should want. Boosting tips into this stronger form of paternalism at the point where the agent begins overriding or bypassing explicit user preferences in favor of ideal ones, without seeking the user's endorsement or making its interventions transparent.”

why coded: Precise boundary where boosting becomes paternalism · unit #12, pp. 12

No value alignment without control · Björn Lundgren · 2026

“autonomy is standardly—and, as I will argue, unavoidably for otherwise it couldn't circumvent the control problem—understood as a form of self-control. [...] if the preservation of autonomy—or any other moral principle—would be a solution to the problem at hand, then it must provide the type of control that is needed in the given case.”

why coded: Autonomy as candidate alignment value, shown insufficient alone (tentative) · unit #11, pp. 8

“consider the list Martha Nussbaum provides in her Frontiers of Justice. One of the ten capabilities is 'Control over One's Environment' [...] the capability approach also seems to be unable to achieve value alignment while avoiding the catastrophic outcomes that underpin the control problem without ensuring sufficient control.”

why coded: Nussbaum capability approach: contains control implicitly · unit #12, pp. 8