2022-2023 Events Archive
Fall 2022
September 23: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with JeeLoo Liu (California State University, Fullerton), “Human-in-the-Loop – Ethical AI for Care Robots and Confucian Virtue Ethics”
Abstract. With the advancement of AI technology, the appearance of intelligent autonomous care robots in our society is likely in the foreseeable future. My research focuses on the ethical dimensions in the autonomous care robots’ decisions and actions. In this paper I will first present the partial result of an online survey that I launched in March 2022. The survey, entitled “Human-in-the-Loop Ethical AI for Social Robots,” polls people’s opinions on what kind of virtues they would like our future care robots to demonstrate. I will then explicate how Confucian virtue ethics can respond to human expectations of what kind of virtuous care robots we want in our society.
November 4: SWIPshop with Tara Mastrelli (New School), “Hermeneutical Rebellion as Self Care – Breast Cancer Survivor Narratives and Identity Power”
Abstract. In this paper, I develop an under theorized concept in Miranda Fricker’s work—hermeneutical rebellion—defining it as a form of self-care that enables a person to explain her social experience to herself and construct her identity positively apart from the identity power embedded in a dominant narrative. On my definition, this type of rebellion aims at two epistemic interventions: (1) to reframe a dominant narrative as absurd, and (2) to cultivate the critical courage for further rebellion. When understood collectively, hermeneutical rebellion is inherently political, as it requires attending to the plurality of experiences which render a boilerplate narrative absurd and imagining and engaging with conceptual resources that do not rely on the same policing and control found in dominant narratives
December 16: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Sally Haslanger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “Ideology, Culture, and Social Meaning”
Abstract. My aim in this paper is to sketch a conception of ideology that draws on the critical theory tradition. This conception of ideology is a response to a particular challenge for those working on social justice: Why is it that most of us, most of the time, act in ways that perpetuate injustice? To begin to answer this question, I will develop an account, inspired by Althusser among others, that embeds ideology in social practices. Social practices enable both human and non-human animals to coordinate fluently and flexibly in response to each other and our environment; and they depend on something like a “language” – a system of signs and signals – that makes socially intelligible agency possible. I call such a framework of meaning and its material apparatus a cultural technē. I go on to argue that Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning is too coarse to provide us an account of social meaning, and drawing on Skyrms and others working on signals, I propose that a cultural technē is a framework or system of signs. I then consider how we might capture the publicity of social meanings in terms that don’t require complex metacognition. I conclude that account of ideology as a cultural technē “gone wrong” provides us the basics of a critical account of ideology.
Spring 2023
February 10: SWIPshop with Laura Di Summa (William Paterson University), “Touched by Fashion: On Feeling What We Wear”
Abstract. Fashion is immediately associated with looks. Its popularity and its most consumerist sides thrive in our current culture of image, further highlighting the connection between fashion and an aesthetic that is quintessentially visual. While it is impossible to deny such a connection, this paper explores the relationship between fashion and touch and fashion and “feel,” two terms that, albeit related, deserve independent consideration. I will begin by emphasizing the importance of seeing fashion in relation to a performative understanding of identity, which is experiential, embodied, situated, and, quite simply, “in movement.” Such an understanding, crucial for a better grasp of sartorial design, is inevitably linked to a tactile understanding of fashion: from the selection of fabrics to the silhouettes and cuts that allow a sketch to move to a garment in three dimensions.But, crucially, a performative understanding of identity is also the starting point for a reflection on touch and fashion in our everyday tasks and judgments, judgments that often move from the aesthetic sphere to other value areas and the broader socio-political context. To further cement my arguments, I will conclude the paper with two case studies: comfort clothing and maternity wear.
March 17, CUNY Graduate Center: Sue Weinberg Lecture “Grit and Imposter Syndrome,” featuring Jennifer Morton (University of Pennsylvania) and Leonie Smith (University of Manchester)
Jennifer Morton, “Interpreting Obstacles.” Abstract. The pursuit of challenging, long-term goals is characterized by our frequent encounters with setbacks and challenges that threaten our confidence. In other work, Sarah Paul and I have argued that it is in responding to these obstacles that the exercise of gritty agency is useful. Agents who can recognize the challenges in front of them but, nonetheless, maintain confidence in the continued pursuit of the goal when the evidence permits exercise an important agential capacity we term epistemic resilience. But how should the agent think of the obstacles in front of her? In this talk, I argue that there is an important role to be played by how agents interpret the setbacks they encounter. The evidence is often compatible with multiple interpretive frameworks. I draw on work in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science on perspectives to make the case. I aim to show that these interpretive frameworks play an important role in shaping the practical challenge we encounter, how we understand the evidence, and our practical and epistemic agency. This talk is drawn from a book manuscript I’m co-authoring with Sarah Paul on Striving.
Leonie Smith, “Class, Academia, and Imposter Syndrome.” Abstract. What is impostor syndrome? On Katherine Hawley’s account it involves a person holding negative mistaken beliefs or attitudes relating to her own competence and success in an area in which she is actually successful (Hawley 2019). These doxastic states are, Hawley also notes, typically related to negative “affective attitudes” and to negative behaviors. A typical experience of someone diagnosed with impostor syndrome, for example, includes the presence of ‘the impostor cycle’ (Clance 1985); a loop in which anxiety over an achievement-related task leads to either over-preparing or by procrastinating. Although often linked, it is at least conceptually possible for non-competence doxastic states and affective attitudes, to come apart. In this talk, I argue that it is not only a possibility that people might experience non-doxastic achievement reactions without these states being caused by non-competence impostor beliefs, it is the reality, for many of those who are successful but marginalized by their originating socioeconomic class within academia. And, further, that paying attention to these cases ought to lead us to re-assess the value of our concept of impostor syndrome for describing the experiences of this group at all, if we want our use of the concept of impostor syndrome not to undermine its own, presumed, ameliorative aims.
March 24, New York University: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Sarah McGrath (Princeton University), “(What) is Moral Experience? (What) do we want it to be?”
Abstract. The expression “moral experience” is not an expression of ordinary English, in the way that, say, “good experience” and “bad experience” are. (Compare: “I had a good experience at work this morning” with “I had a moral experience at work this morning.”) But “moral experience” does have currency in certain philosophical circles. One central goal of this paper is to taxonomize what different theorists might have in mind when they either affirm or deny that there is such a thing as “moral experience.” The other goal is to explore what we, as theorists, might want moral experience to be. I present a moral analogue of Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument in order to illustrate the thesis that the moral content presented in perceptual experience might be ineffable. I argue that understood in this way, moral experience is what’s missing from cases in which an agent has the intellectual grasp of the reasons before her, but fails to see them as reasons, and so lacks motivation to act in accordance with them.
April 28, New York University: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Japa Pallikkathayil (University of Pittsburgh), “Rethinking Rights”
Abstract. Despite the ubiquity of talk about rights in philosophical and legal discourse, there is little agreement about what it is to have a right. Assessing these debates requires a view of what normative concepts are. I draw on Rawls’s discussion of the concept of justice to provide such a view. On this view, normative concepts name practical questions and they get a grip on us insofar as those questions are our questions. Evaluating competing accounts of the concept of a right thus requires evaluating the practical questions with which they associate the concept. Which, if any, of those questions gives the concept of a right the kind of significance and role in our deliberations that we attribute to it? After arguing that the questions implicit in the existing literature on rights cannot do this, I propose and alternative question and show how it better captures the significance and role of rights in our deliberations.
May 21, New York University: SWIP-NYC Graduate Student Essay Prize talks, with Abigail Rose Breuker (Columbia University) and Lauren Somers (New York University)
Abigail Rose Breuker, “Plato on Community and Moral Luck: the stories of Gyges and the Cave.” Abstract. I offer an analysis of the story of Gyges in connection with the Allegory of the Cave. These two narratives contain many similar elements and, in many ways, address similar themes: community and luck in decision making. In light of these similarities, reading the two stories together provides an opportunity to better understand the ways in which community and isolation can either help or hurt an individual’s ethical development. Both stories feature protagonists who are picked, seemingly at random, from their communities and then isolated from those communities by their newfound moral codes. Taken together, the two stories seem to suggest that Plato addresses a dimension of moral luck that is not at the center of today’s discussions, namely, whether a particular person is “chosen” for a transformative experience that others lack, and that changes her ethical outlook. This element of these narratives has yet to be analyzed, and I think that it is by reading the two stories in comparison that Plato’s perspective on community and moral luck becomes clearer. I suggest that Plato uses the rich narrative of Gyges as a way of priming the audience for the later story of the prisoners in the cave. In this way, the Republic’s audience is best able to realize the metaphysical and epistemological conclusions about sense perception, truth, and learning presented via the allegory. By treating both stories not as vignettes but as genuine components of Plato’s argument, we come to see their connections, and in effect we understand dimensions of the cave metaphor that have not received much prior attention.
Lauren Somers, “Worries about Ameliorative Engineering.” Abstract. In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother and the Party systematically manipulate the conceptual resources of the citizens of Oceania to shape the society according to their own ends. Ameliorative conceptual engineers too aim at societal alteration via conceptual change. Despite the obvious distinction in moral worth of their ends, the similarity in method between Big Brother and the ameliorative engineer should give us pause. I argue that the objectionable similarity is that each is prone to a distinctive kind of hermeneutical injustice. The analogy, however, only holds between Big Brother and the ameliorative engineer of a particular stripe. Other reformative ameliorative projects are subject to systematic concerns about efficiency. The ameliorative engineer is, after all, an engineer; the justification for a particular reformative project is undermined by a more efficient alternative. Prospects for ameliorative projects that involve hermeneutical generation, rather than reform, are somewhat brighter, though they have a necessarily limited range of application. It is in, and only in, these kinds of generative projects that ameliorative engineering has a legitimate role to play.