Sublime

Barto and Sutton took Harry Klopf’s idea of organisms as maximizers and gave it a concrete, mathematical form. Imagine you are in an environment that contains rewards of some numerical value, which are available to you if you take certain actions and reach certain states. Your job is to get the most reward—the highest “score”—that you can.

Sen is the father of the Capability Approach, a critical contribution to welfare economics which has been hugely influential since the 1980s. Instead of crude financial measures or naive hedonism, Sen argued that the highest good was the freedom to choose a life one has reason to value—to have options, and thus be able to live deliberately.

This suggests a general operating principle similar to the Leopoldian land ethic, often summarized as “what’s good is what’s good for the land.” In our current situation, the phrase can be usefully reworded as “what’s good is what’s good for the biosphere.” In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive,

La sélection naturelle est un principe universel, qui s'applique à tous les êtres vivants, mais elle prend des formes très différentes. Elle existe même chez les végétaux ; mais dans ce cas elle est liée à l'accès aux nutriments du sol, à l'eau, à la lumière solaire… L'homme, lui, est un animal, c'est entendu ; mais ce n'est ni un chien de prairie,