This project goal is to bring the academy more close to people and we think that art is the way for that. With that in mind, we want to produce a bounty in which the NEAR community can express its creativity by creating art from philosophical thought experiments.
benefit/justification: the benefits of the project are: (1) to spread philosophy and its thought experiments through the artistic NEAR community; (2) to create products that could be sold by the DAO and be used to get resources; (3) to integrate The Philosophers DAO more deeply with the community of creative artists on NEAR and to spread The Philosophers DAO’s Community; (4) to produce art NFTs and transactions on the blockchain; (5) to bring university professors to the ecosystem, who could be the next collectors when they understand well how web 3 works.
the project
The project is to give an acquisition prize of 100 usd in near or dai for each of the 4 best pieces of art produced by the community in our bounty. The pieces of art must not be minted, because they are going to be minted by us, with the due credits, in our store and with royalties and revenue splitted equally between the artist and The Philosophers DAO; they must come with a cover image (an associated image - if the art is an image, it can be itself) they can be pictures, including memes, videos, poetry, 3d objects, gifs, and should express the following thought experiment:
Thought experiment: The Famous Violinist
This thought experiment was created by Judith Jarvis Thompson in the famous paper “A Defence of Abortion” (1971) and aims to recreate some of the conditions of pregnancy in a different scenario. The goal is to test how some of the moral claims around abortion apply to a morally similar, contextually different situation. Thomson will argue that the fetus has a right to life, but defends the permissibility of abortion.
The thought experiment was originally proposed as follows:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
The big questions are: Is it permissible, from a moral point of view, for a person to disconnect from the violinist even if it causes his death? Does the right to life include the right to use another person’s body? If not, disconnecting from the violinist does not violate his right to life, but merely deprives him of something (using someone else’s body). In Thomson’s words: “If you allow him to continue using your kidneys, that is a kindness on his part, not something he can claim from you as his due.” Likewise, abortion does not violate the fetus’s legitimate right to life, but only deprives the fetus of something (the non-consensual use of the pregnant woman’s body to which it has no right).
Consultant: Thomson, J. “A Defense of Abortion”. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1:1 (Autumn 1971): 47–66.
timeline
week 1: to launch the bounty and publicize it.
week 2: to publicize the bounty.
week 3: to choose 4 winners, to mint the NFTs.
week 4: report and accountability.
budget
4 winners (best art chosen by council) x 100USD (100 USD in NEAR or DAI, whichever is more convenient for the DAO, and NEAR value will be measured according to the exchange rate used by NEAR to pay the DAO)
Subtotal: 400 USD