2024-2025 Events Archive

Fall 2024

SWIP-NYC Colloquium, Friday, September 20, 3:30-5:30 pm, Juliana Bidadanure (NYU), “Understanding Demonization”

Abstract: Demonization is commonly defined as the act of portraying individuals as wicked threats to the community. Although the term is widely used in public discourse, it is undertheorized and not well regimented. Social scientists don’t pay much attention to the concept, preferring overlapping notions like stigmatization, scapegoating, and stereotyping, as well as populism, propaganda, and polarization. While these concepts somewhat overlap with demonization, none of them are suitable replacements. My contention is that demonization is a distinctive practice associated with a delineable social function. Its unique quality is that it targets the  moral character of the demonized. I propose to understand demonization as a social practice in which A portrays B as (i) distinctly, intrinsically, and often entirely, bad and as (ii) constituting an immense peril to A’s core values and/or existence. I refer to (i) as moral othering and (ii) as moral panic and identify several faces of demonization.

Spring 2025

SWIP-NYC Colloquium, Friday, April 11, 3:30-5:30 pm, Frances Kamm (Rutgers), “Non-Consequentialism and Climate Change”

Abstract: This paper considers one attempt to develop a “non-consequentialist, person-regarding” ethic for climate change and examines how non-consequentialist the ethic is. For example, does it take account of a moral distinction between harming and not aiding that non-consequentialism typically emphasizes? What role do rights play in the ethic and is it non-consequentialist if it determines what rights to sacrifice in conflict situations based on the seriousness of the interests they protect? Does the view succeed in establishing an unending chain of intergenerational obligations based on person-affecting considerations, thus avoiding moral problems raised by the Non-Identity Problem?

SWIP-NYC Colloquium, Friday, May 9, 12:15-2:15, with the co-winners of the 2025 SWIP-NYC Graduate Student Essay Prize

Ashley Ding (Columbia University), “Do Large Language Models understand?”

Abstract: Do Large Language Models (“LLMs”) understand? We can engage in extensive conversations with them, ask them for advice, and even have them solve our homework problems. Yet, they have also been known to hallucinate non-existing sources of information, fail to answer simple logic problems, and refuse to follow user prompts. The question I seek to answer in this paper is the following: When we spell out the word “cat” in our text responses and reply to messages containing “cat,” we take ourselves to understand the concept of a cat – is this true also of LLMs? In a way, this question is similar to Searle’s classic example of the Chinese Room. (1999) I also share his answer that understanding is more than just symbol manipulation, but my articulation of the negative response is different, as my argument takes error correction to be the key factor. More importantly, I want to distinguish the weaker and stronger senses of this notion, and what matters is the stronger one for my argument: understanding requires strong error correction, which LLMs lack; consequently, LLMs lack understanding. This method is simpler and even more robust than typical approaches, such as symbol grounding and embodiment, to the topic of knowledge and understanding in LLMs

Ripley Stroud (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), “Moral Norms on Peer Disagreement”

Abstract: So far, the peer disagreement literature has focused on determining the  rational response to the discovery that a peer disagrees with you. I think we should also focus on determining the  moral response to peer disagreement. I argue that we have a  pro tanto moral reason to conciliate – lower confidence in our original belief – in cases of peer disagreement. This is the result of a three-premised argument. The first premise holds that open-mindedness involves thinking there is a serious possibility that you will rationally change your mind in the future. The second premise claims that open-mindedness is a  prima facie moral virtue and that it is particularly morally virtuous when practiced towards a peer. The third premise argues that, per Reflection principles, being open-minded at some time t rationally requires you to ‘price in’ that possibility to your current credence, and so actually lower your confidence at t. This gives us the conclusion that practicing the virtue of open-mindedness requires conciliating, and insofar as open-mindedness is a moral virtue, we have moral reason to conciliate with our peer.