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Toward a Livable World

As the concluding chapter of a book manuscript, the paper starts with the very fact that humans are living organisms with basic needs that are biologically predetermined, namely, air, water, food and shelter from the elements. Building on “livability,” a word coined by a 19th century English doctor, Edward Johnson, to depict “the aptitude or fitness to live,” the paper considers livability as a distinct normative space for us to understand who we are as creatures that are fundamentally disconnected with their physiology. In the history of Western political thought, there appears to be an assumption that the body is simply there. Yet that body cannot simply be taken for granted because it needs air, food, water, and shelter. In other words, the body is not a self-contained entity. The paper argues that taking care of the physical body is by definition a political question as it involves being in an environment where necessities can be secured. To address the problematic, the chapter turns to a key concept in Confucianism, which is self-cultivation. The self in this term is the moral character of a person. By looking at the etymology of the two Chinese characters that make up the term, the paper posits a normative framework that puts the body squarely as the starting point of being; without which neither the cultivated person nor the right-bearing individual can thrive.

► This event is in-person. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200).

Theresa Lee

Political Science
University of Guelph

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Moral Polarism

This paper articulates and defends a principle that I call “moral polarism”, according to which, roughly, only those considerations that bear on the quality of agency or on the goodness or badness of what befalls a moral patient are relevant to the evaluation of what the agent does vis a vis the patient. The agent(s) and the patient(s) are, then, the two “poles” to which the name refers. Put simply, if we imagine an action as a flight from agent to patient, only the takeoff and the landing matter; everything in between is, in a certain respect, morally irrelevant. Polarism is not much of a guide to action, nor is it directly and obviously opposed to any of the most well-known principles discussed by moral philosophers. But it’s my contention that once we get deep into debates concerning some of these principles, polarism “cuts” quite a bit of “ice”. Specifically, I will claim that it functions as a powerful theoretical tool within debates about the relevance of doing vs. allowing harm, about harming as a means vs. harming as a side effect, and about how to address past wrongdoing.”

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.

Andrew Sepielli

Philosophy
University of Toronto

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The Fear and Fantasy of Expressiveness: Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author” and Ordinary Language Philosophy

This paper argues against the conclusions of Roland Barthes’ 1967 article “The Death of the Author” while recovering his broader vision of language and sociality by uncovering an under-studied encounter between Barthes and the Ordinary Language Philosophy of J.L. Austin. Taking into account Barthes’ intellectual history and prior work on language and authorship, I argue that Barthes’ skepticism regarding authorship can be read as a kind of skepticism of other minds taken to an extreme conclusion. Following the Ordinary Language tradition through the work of Stanley Cavell, I argue against this conclusion and in favor of a renewed conception of authorship study founded on a concept of responsibility, rather than the traditional concept of intention.

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.

Mynt Marsellus

PhD Candidate
Cinema Studies
University of Toronto

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On Vindication in Politics: A Problem in Political Ethics

This paper takes up the largely neglected concept of vindication in relation to politics in order to demonstrate the ways in which vindication matters with respect to the exercise of political agency and to sustaining the practice of politics. More specifically, I try to show how reflection on the concept of vindication and its relationship with the concept of justification is important for identifying and addressing dimensions of political ethics that are central both to sustaining the valuing of politics as a way of conducting our lives together and to offering an understanding of the kind of ethical character that we should desire from politicians.

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.

David Owen

School of Economic, Social and Political Sciences
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Southampton

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Institutionalizing Refugee Agency and Participation in the Governance of the Global Refugee Regime 

This paper aims to advance a multi-scalar approach to reconceptualizing the place of forced migrants in the varying levels of governance that define the contemporary refugee regime. In doing so it responds to the emerging recognition of a growing imperative to rethink past articulations of international protection that have predominated for the last half-century. These earlier responses to displacement have largely treated refugees as objects of humanitarian intervention, giving little space for their voice or participation, thereby effacing the agency of displaced persons. Today’s current moment of reflection and political possibility therefore offers to address among the deepest normative failures of the contemporary refugee regime: if refugeehood is theorized in terms of the denial what Hannah Arendt called the “right to have rights” then the treatment of displaced persons within the international system constitutes more of a continuation, rather than remedy or reprieve, of this situation. Addressing the voice and agency of refugees is urgent and long overdue. However, formulating what meaningful representation and participation constitutes in these circumstances remains challenging. To address these considerations I proceed by taking up this issue from both normative and historical perspectives to map out and complicate the way representation and participation could be understood in this context. I do so by reconstructing several distinctive models of representation to underscore the different normative considerations underlying these approaches. I conclude by showing how this should be applied to the refugee regime in order to both reform and transform contemporary international protection.

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.

Kiran Banerjee

Political Science
Dalhousie University

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Why the Numbers Don’t Count, But the Reasons Do

The numbers problem arises in cases where we can save a large group of people or a small group of people, but we cannot save both groups. Famously, John Taurek (1977) has argued against the claim that we ought to save the larger number. Taurek’s judgment runs contrary to common sense, but he is right that there are difficulties with various attempts to justify the judgment that we ought to save the larger group. The consequentialist appeal to aggregation seems to stand in tension with the principle that we ought to respect the separateness of persons. Frances Kamm (2005) and Thomas Scanlon (1998) argue that we can justify saving the larger number without appealing to aggregation. Nevertheless, their approach does not explain the significance of numbers in trolley cases. In this paper, I offer a new solution to the numbers problem. I reject the claim that if the separateness of persons matters, then aggregation is impermissible. Instead, I argue that we can aggregate and respect the separateness of persons, as long as we aggregate reasons for acting, rather than gains or losses to individuals. This approach, which I call the “aggregating reasons view,” not only solves the numbers problem but also yields a surprising solution to the trolley problem.

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.

Molly Gardner

Philosophy
University of Florida

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I Treated Myself Like I Knew I Would: Proleptic Shame and Recovery from Addiction

This paper aims to identify “proleptic shame,” which is closely related to Bernard Williams’ concept of proleptic blame, and to argue that proleptic shame can be beneficial to recovery from addiction. Understanding proleptic shame is meant to illuminate the moral complexity of our relationships with ourselves – particularly our recognition of our own shortcomings and vulnerabilities, our attempts to predict our own future behavior, and our desires for change. Shame often plays a significant role in that complexity, for better and for worse. I will also contrast proleptic shame with other forms of shame that have received significant criticism in the moral psychology literature, and which may also be detrimental in the context of addiction and recovery.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Larisa Svirsky

Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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Navigating the Tension Between Constitutionalism and Democratic Majoritarianism: The Role of Institution-Dependent Goods in Liberal Democracies

The conflict between advocates of constitutionalism and advocates of democratic majoritarianism has been at the center of attention not only among scholars of constitutional law but also among judges, politicians, social movements, and citizens. Under one prevalent view, judges intrude unjustifiably on democratic politics by making decisions which should be subject to formal and informal democratic processes of decision-making.

We maintain that this conflict can be conceptualized as a surface manifestation of the broader idea that all liberal democracies are subject to a normative tradeoff between two types of demands: Reason- and will-based demands. More specifically we argue that that both constitutional provisions—norms that are not sensitive to our will—and statutory provisions—namely, norms that are contingent on our will or judgment—are necessary features of liberal democracy. We make the case for institution-dependent goods, arguing that some goods depend for their existence on being produced by the appropriate law-making institution.  We establish that the constitutional form of law-making is necessary to convey our shared recognition that certain norms, such as fundamental rights, are binding independently of our will. Accordingly, part of the value of these norms rests on a shared commitment to see them as not being subject to our control. By contrast, the statutory form is necessary to publicly convey the recognition that certain norms provide goods whose value depends on our willingness to produce them. These norms lose their distinctive value when making them fails to be grounded in our will. On the proposed account, constitutional and statutory norms are not mere means to create good or just norms whose value is determined independently of the way these norms are being created or independently of the institution in charge of creating them. Instead, the value of such norms hinges on the institution that brings them into being as well as the deliberation that characterizes this institution. Institutions are not merely vessels through which norms get public recognition. When different institutions enact identically-worded norms, say, ‘everyone is equally entitled to X,’ they may nevertheless produce different norms and provide different goods. To sum up, some of the goods that legal norms provide are institution-dependent goods, namely, goods whose provision depends on the institutional processes which brought about these norms.

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.

Alon Harel

Faculty of Law
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Kant on Emotions and Moral Worth

Traditionally, Kant is taken to hold the view that acting from inclination is insufficient for moral worth. In recent years, some scholars have challenged this view by shedding light on how Kant’s account of emotions provides us with reasons for thinking that Kant took emotions to be properly responsive to value and importantly connected to judgments of value. Because of this, these scholars argue that we should amend Kant’s theory and adopt the view that acting from inclination can be sufficient, albeit not necessary, for moral worth. I disagree with these scholars. I defend Kant’s claim that only acting from duty has true moral worth by focusing on the question pertaining to which kind of value emotions are responsive, and I argue that, even though emotions are value tracking, they do not track moral value.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Martina Favaretto

Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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To Promote an Injustice Which Was no Part of Their Intention

Prominent strands of the literature on structural injustice in the past two decades, largely building on work by Iris Marion Young, emphasize the potentially unplanned character this kind of injustice, its development out of complex social processes and the possibly innocent actions of many decentralized actors. (The blamelessness of the individual actors has been the subject of lively debate, which is set aside for purposes of this discussion.) It is striking how much the structural injustice literature therefore sometimes sounds like an analysis of what other literatures would describe as invisible hand phenomena and emergent or spontaneous orders. There has, however, been little direct engagement from either direction: neither theorists of structural injustice drawing on what has already been learned about emergent phenomena, nor analysts of invisible hands and spontaneous orders grappling with the challenging implication of Young’s work that injustice might itself be an emergent phenomenon, irreducible to violations of the rules of just conduct. Intellectual gains from trade have perhaps not been realized because of the different ideological orientations at work: those thinking about structural injustice from a market-critical perspective might be predisposed to doubt the construct of the “invisible hand” of the market altogether, while those beginning from a market-sympathetic position might hear “structural injustice” as nothing but the kind of “social justice” claim Hayek dismissed decades ago.

I aim to begin to bridge that gap, and to suggest the gains from trade that might be possible. Adam Smith taught that we are, in many cases, led to promote an end which is no part of our intention. That end may be an unjust one, and indeed Smith’s corpus includes arguments to that effect. Explanations of emergent phenomena and diagnoses of unjust structures have the potential to be complementary, to the benefit of both.

I argue that structural injustice as understood by Young and her followers is market-like, but is not merely market injustice; it is not simply a reversal of the normative signs on a traditional invisible hand account of exchange relations. I suggest, first, that some standard and unavoidable features of market processes, including even comparative advantage itself, are part of the social processes through which unjust social structures can emerge; second, that this is not equivalent to or reliant on any general claim about the supposed injustice of markets as such; and third, that many of the processes through which injustice might emerge are not market processes, even if they have an invisible-hand shape. The interaction of many persons’ individual actions may generate emergent social norms, or political and legal outcomes, not only economic ones, and all of these may raise questions of injustice.

► This event is in-person. Join at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200).

Jacob Levy

Political Science
McGill University

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On James Baldwin: History, Responsibility, and Atonement

Melvin Rogers is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguish Professor scholar and stands as a distinguished academic renowned for his insightful contributions to the discourse on race and democracy within the realms of American culture and politics. His writings, including The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, African American Political Thought: A Collected History, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality and the Ethos of Democracy, carefully examine the philosophical and cultural resources of America’s past to grapple with the problems of race, the dangers to democratic life, and the crisis of character. In doing so, he stands in the grand tradition of philosophical reflection and cultural criticism that we find in Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Melvin Rogers

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Responsibility for Recommendations

Recommender systems are now a dominant part of most social media platforms. They play important roles for the billions of people worldwide who access these sites/apps each day. The typical user experience on these platforms consists of an endless stream of recommended posts to read, images to admire, videos to watch, users to follow, groups to join, and more. However, these systems have also been accused of contributing to horrific violence, including the ongoing crisis in Myanmar. This talk argues social media companies share responsibility for the harms that occur on their platforms by demonstrating how they are constitutive intermediaries, not the not mere intermediaries they (sometimes) claim to be. I use speech act theory and the concept of affordances to illuminate the contribution that platform companies make to our communicative acts, showing how platforms shape users’ speech, and also perform important speech acts themselves, with particular focus on recommendations.

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.

Michael Randall Barnes

Humanising Machine Intelligence project
Australian National University

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Relational Ethics Conference

Friday, September 27th
9:00-9:10       Welcome
9:10-10:20     Jay Wallace (UC Berkeley) – The Relational Right and the Good
10:30-11:40   Stephen Darwall (Yale) – Why Obligations Can’t be Relational All the Way Down (Remote Presentation)
11:50-1:00     Brendan de Kenessey (Toronto) – Not all moral obligations are obligations to individuals, and not all obligations to individuals are moral obligations

2:00-3:10       Gopal Sreenivasan (Duke) – Nettles in the nexus: On Wallace on relational morality
3:20-4:30      Jonas Vandieken (Munich) – Moral Deliberation in the Moral Nexus
4:50-6:00      Janis Schaab (Utrecht) – Second-Personal Kantian Constructivism

Saturday, September 28th
9:10-10:20    Rahul Kumar (Queens) – What is Relational About Contractualism?
10:30-11:40  Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany) – The Metaphysics of Practical Relations
11:50-1:00    Simon Cabulea May (Florida) – Standing and Direction

2:00-3:10      Margaret Gilbert (UC Irvine) – Can / wrong someone in the state of nature? (Remote Presentation)
3:20-4:30      Rowan Cruft (Stirling) – Directed Duties or Directed Reasons? (Remote Presentation)
4:50-6:00       Anni Raty (Vienna) – Wrongs without Rights

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200). Remote Presentations will be via Zoom.

►Join Zoom Meeting:
https://queensu.zoom.us/j/95937127666?pwd=fin6bYFl7wEDWyOZqyD09OeguF4Yi6.1

Meeting ID: 959 3712 7666
Passcode: 830472

Register here.

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The Problem of Wild Animal Suffering

Wild animal suffering has been taken to present a problem for those who think that animals have rights. Those who deny that animals have rights advance the following kind of argument:

1. If animals have rights, then we have a duty to save wild animals from predators and other evils.
2. We have no duty to save wild animals from predators and other evils.
3. Therefore, animals do not have rights.

In this presentation, I shall argue that those who claim that animals have rights can make a strong case for rejecting this argument without being led to extravagant conclusions.

► This event is in person. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200).

David Benatar

Emeritus Professor
Philosophy
University of Cape Town

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But-for What? When Anti-Discrimination Law Tried to Borrow from Tort Law and Missed Something

Courts and commentators often define discrimination in causal terms. Moreover, they often claim that the causal definition of discrimination is tracks role that causality plays establishing liability in tort law. But such articulations often trade between two different articulations of the causal showing required for a discrimination claim. In one articulation the claimant must show that the outcome would not have happened but for the discriminatory act or policy; in the other articulation the claimant must show that the outcome would not have happened but for their “protected status”—e.g., race, sex, religion. In this talk, we explain that the only the first showing is consistent with the role causation plays in tort law where the inquiry into causation is structured by a prior independent theory of duty which limits the range of counterfactuals relevant to the case. However, the Supreme Court and many legal scholars have insisted that the second articulation is the relevant causal showing in antidiscrimination and equal protection law: “but-for” the claimant’s racial, sex, religious, etc. status. We show that this so-called but-for test cannot define what counts as discrimination because it is inherently indeterminate. One cannot set up the counterfactual thought experiment without more specificity about the relevant counterfactual contrasts, and one cannot choose which counterfactual contrasts are relevant without a prior normative theory of how the defendant ought to have behaved vis-a-viz the claimant’s (e.g.) sex or racial status. This last part requires a theory of what people are owed in various domains (e.g., employment, contracts, etc.) given the social meanings and relations that constitute sex or race in our society.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Robin Dembroff

Assistant Professor
Philosophy
Yale University

Issa Kohler-Hausmann

Associate Professor
Law & Sociology
Yale University

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Radical and Critical Approaches to Mental Health II

► this workshop is online. Register here.

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Is there a Right to Travel? Kantian Hospitality as a Communication Right

In this paper, I will examine the normative foundations of a right to travel. I will focus on Kant’s legal conception of cosmopolitanism, as opposed to his moral conception of the same concept. I will defend the right to travel primarily as a communicative right, involving both the freedom to trade but also to academic and intellectual exchange. In this respect, the right to travel is essential for the academic enterprise, as well as for other enterprises which require international communication and coordination, such as in research and cooperation in global health. While the right to travel is not absolute from a Kantian perspective, an account of its normative foundations is helpful for understanding what amounts to legitimate constraints and limitations on global mobility. Further, I will also argue that the right to travel should not be conflated with the right to immigrate, although the two are causally connected. It follows that the right of states to control immigration, does not amount to the right to control global mobility simpliciter.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Alice Pinheiro Walla

Associate Professor
Philosophy
McMaster University

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Can we ensure AI is safe?

► this event is in-person. Register here.

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

From Sustainable Development Goals to Sustainable Flourishing Goals

► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Randall Curren
Philosophy and Education                                                University of Rochester

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The Spirit of Caste

Caste is a concept used to explain persistent forms of social hierarchy and group domination. While it is often associated with India, feudal Europe, and Latin America, scholars in recent years have asked whether it also makes sense to conceptualize the United States as a caste system. This recent discourse overlooks a centuries-long tradition of American civil rights activism—from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois—that understands the United States as a caste system and seeks racial justice through constitutional reform. Returning to this tradition, this talk explores both what the concept of caste misses and what it captures about racial inequality in the United States today.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Lucien Ferguson
Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor
Boston College Law School

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The Curious Case of Absent Injustice

► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

David Benatar
Visiting Faculty Fellow                                                    University of Cape Town

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The Objectification of Agency

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Anton Ford
Philosophy
University of Chicago

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Resentment and Self-Respect

► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Katie Stockdale
Philosophy
University of Victoria

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Literary Criticism and the Ethics of Pluralism

► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Matthew Sussman
English
University of Sydney

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AI as Moral Patient

► This event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Parisa Moosavi
Philosophy
York University

Karina Vold
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
University of Toronto

Joshua Skorburg
Philosophy
University of Guelph

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Kant’s Theory of Parental Authority

Children’s law appears to be based on a contradiction. The law treats children in some ways like property. Parents get to make arrangements for them without their consent. At the same time, the law is at least rhetorically committed to the “inherent dignity and…the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). It is trite law that only you get to decide what to do with your car, your land or your pet dog. But so rarely de we reflect upon the oddity that every human being begins life being legally subjected to the will of supposedly equal persons, namely, parents. Why the exception for children? Their legal status suggests that they are part person, part thing. Hence Kant’s puzzling characterization of parental rights as “a right to a person akin to a right to a thing.” However, since the law opposes persons to things, we must reconcile the property-like features of parental rights with the basic rights children have in common with other persons. I argue, drawing on Kant’s work, that the law reconciles the dependence of children with their fundamental right to independence by regarding the parent-child relationship as a kind of fiduciary relationship. Parents are charged with caring for children while they are unable to care for themselves, for which they incur a duty to act exclusively in the latter’s best interests understood in terms of their development into active, independent citizens, which internally limits parental rights.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Faisal Bhabha
Graduate Fellow                                                          University of Toronto

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Human Enhancement and Human Nature

► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Tom Angier
Philosophy
University of Cape Town

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Climate Migration, Moral Psychology, and the Demands of Liberal Democracy

► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Michael Blake
Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance
University of Washington

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Undisciplining Time?: Critique, Utopia, and the Prospects of Life beyond Capital

No doubt capital/capitalism organizes and disciplines social time. How long people work, how well they save for retirement, how much they are “worth” over the course of their lives are just a sample of the facets of social life in the longue durée of capital accumulation. Our time, in the final analysis, is not really our own. The domination of time is one of the most crucial sources of power for the reproduction of capitalist forms of life. How capital organizes time has shown itself to be increasingly irrational and destructive for social, political, and economic life. In this seminar, I will offer the hypothesis that a critical theory of utopia, for our time, must center how capital’s mechanism of time-discipline reproduce unfreedom. Doing so will clarify why struggles for a viable life beyond capital must undo its capacity to uproot and transform social time in the process of accumulation. Drawing on the work of James Boggs, E.P. Thompson, Rahel Jaeggi, and Martin Hägglund I will argue that utopia, as a critical concept, introduces a new and as yet undisciplined form of time as the horizon of freedom.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

William Paris
Assistant Professor
Philosophy
University of Toronto

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Eugenic Democracy: Du Bois, Darwin, and the Politics of Race

W. E. B. Du Bois is widely credited with debunking the social Darwinism pervasive in turn-of-century social and political theory. By showing the environmental causes of African American disadvantage, Du Bois’ sociological studies opposed social Darwinist claims regarding ‘inborn’ racial ‘deficits’. What this misses, however, is the constructive role that Darwinian science played in Du Bois’ conceptualization of racial advancement. This paper excavates just this: how Darwinism and eugenics shaped Du Bois’ understanding of race and his program of racial uplift. Far from discarding the period’s race sciences, Du Bois resisted their distortions through racial prejudice and drew on them to envision a racially just politics. Darwinism, I argue, informed Du Bois’ assessment of the harms that formalized systems of inequality – slavery, Jim Crow segregation – visited on Black Americans. It also shaped his arguments for democratic equality: setting aside its other virtues, democracy, Du Bois contended, would remove “artificial” constraints on the competitive struggle enabling the best of both races to succeed. It was, then, eugenically advantageous. Against the preponderant view that Du Bois discarded them, I argue that Du Bois’ relation to Darwinism, Lamarckism, eugenics, and race sciences was far more ambivalent, and that he in fact drew on them to advance his racially-egalitarian politics.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Inder Marwah
Associate Professor, Political Science
McMaster University

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What Are We Agreeing To?: Opioid Treatment Agreement Requirements and the Physician-Patient Relationship

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Larisa Svirsky
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Ella Street
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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Reading with Compassion: A Theory of Democratic Readership

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Yang-Yang Cheng
Graduate Fellow                                                          University of Toronto

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► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Alisabeth Ayars
Philosophy
UBC

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► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Brendan de Kenessey
Philosophy
University of Toronto

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► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Luke Davies
University of Oxford
Philosophy

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The Data of Blackness

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Jerome Clarke
Assistant Professor, Philosophy and Religion
American University

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Feminist and Queer Legal Theory Toward Family Abolition

Family abolition is the spectre which lurks at the margins of progressive and radical feminist and queer legal theory. Both of these theoretical schools call into question the naturalised and uncritical acceptance of the conjugal, nuclear, marriage-bound family as the protagonist of family law’s regulatory and distributive functions. Instead, feminist and queer legal theorists argue that the laws governing family life should be focused on something else: caring for others, independent of the kind of relationship which exists between two (or more) parties. I argue that wrapped up in this critical reorientation project is a materialist understanding of the conditions which are needed, in practice, for people to have fulfilling, joyful and dignified family lives. Using a case study of income support social assistance and spousal support, this presentation outlines the proto-family-abolitionism of feminist and queer legal theories and suggests further opportunities for conversations between these theories and a different, rich scholarship on family abolition.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Yukiko Kobayashi Lui
Graduate Fellow                                                          University of Toronto

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Kant’s Aesthetics of Race

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Caitlin Hamblin-Yule
Graduate Fellow                                                          University of Toronto

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Escape from Politics: Personal Responsibility and White Citizenship in American Society

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Miko Zeldes-Roth
Graduate Fellow                                                          University of Toronto

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Discrimination and Psychological Harm

The idea that discrimination can cause immediate psychological damage to victims’ self-esteem has not played a prominent role in recent theories of the harmfulness of discrimination. I’ll suggest that it may prove useful for resolving an apparent problem with certain otherwise plausible harm-based views of what makes discrimination wrong according to which these views counterintuitively entail that discrimination is wrong by definition. I’ll also show that besides addressing this conceptual puzzle, the idea of remedying mental injury is worth our attention because it is deeply entrenched in antidiscrimination law.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Anthony Sangiuliano
Postdoctoral Fellow                                                    University of Toronto

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Balkanization and The Racial Order

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Jeta Mulaj                                                                       Assistant Professor, Philosophy                                      Toronto Metropolitan University

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A Phenomenological Account of the Conditions of Transnational Feminism

In its various attempts to be intercultural, feminist theory and praxis originating in the Global North has often stumbled over its own presumptions about what counts as feminist liberation. This paper develops a critique of these missteps and a phenomenological foundation for genuinely intercultural engagement. Mobilizing in particular Serene Khader’s challenge to what she calls “missionary feminism,” the paper argues that the core values for transnational feminist praxis that Khader offers require greater normative justification that phenomenology can provide, with its foundational descriptions of both interpersonal life and human singularity. It mobilizes the work of John Russon and Saba Mahmood in order to develop normative support for Khader’s otherwise promising arguments.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Shannon Hoff
Visiting Faculty Fellow                                                    Memorial University

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Feminism and the Open Borders Debate

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Amy Reed-Sandoval
Philosophy                                                                  University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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A Preponderance of Injustice

In this presentation I shall argue that there is vastly more injustice than justice. To the extent that this is not disputed, its implications are not fully appreciated. What is disputed, at least by some, is whether there is now less injustice than there once was. Various people have either claimed or argued that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. I shall evaluate that claim too, arguing that it is partially true under some interpretations and false under others.

► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

David Benatar
Visiting Faculty Fellow                                                    University of Cape Town

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Living with the Invisible Hand: A Conference in Memory of Waheed Hussain

► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200), or join online HERE. Register for the conference here.

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A Place for African Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century: James Africanus Beale Horton’s Critique of Racist Philosophical Anthropology

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or join online here.

Zeyad el Nabolsy                                                             York University

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A Kantian Account of Aesthetically Sublime Rage

In Kant scholarship, little attention has been given to Kant’s claim in the Critique of the Power of Judgement that affects like rage and despair are “aesthetically sublime”. This neglect might suggest that Kant has nothing to say about these affects other than they are obstacles to proper reflection and that we have a duty to govern them (i.e., the duty of apathy). Moreover, it might look like Kant’s overall take on these affects is that they have a fully negative influence in how we conduct our lives. But this is not the case, or so I argue. In “A Kantian Account of Aesthetically Sublime Rage”, I focus on rage, and I argue that Kant’s account of rage as an “aesthetically sublime” affect allows us to infer that rage can have a distinctive social and political function in contexts of oppression. I argue that rage is “aesthetically sublime” because a) when one feels rage in response to a certain event (e.g., being subject to or witnessing racial injustice), a free play between imagination and a moral ideal (e.g., justice) takes place in one’s mind; and b) this rage does not play a motivational role for (immediate) action. Further, I assess the appropriateness of aesthetically sublime rage as a response to injustice. I argue that this kind of rage is appropriate in cases in which the agent genuinely and non-culpably does not know what to do as a reply to the injustice at stake.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Martina Favaretto
Postdoctoral Fellow                                                    University of Toronto

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► This event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

The Second-Personal Significance of Trauma

There is a substantial literature about whether trauma or other “poor formative circumstances” interfere with the development or exercise of the capacities required to be responsible. In this paper, I will be focusing on the ways in which trauma may affect responsibility attributions in the context of close interpersonal relationships. I will argue for two claims: first, that the question of whether trauma diminishes responsibility should be addressed in this second-personal context, and second, that in interpersonal relationships, it matters not only what hardships those close to us have experienced, but how they want us to respond to their history when holding them responsible. In order to illustrate these claims, I will consider an extended literary example drawn from the novel A Little Life. I take this example to offer clear and decisive reasons for why it is important to consider people’s views about what those close to them do with their history (e.g., whether they regard that history as excusing them from blame).

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Larisa Svirsky
Postdoctoral Fellow                                                    University of Toronto

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Kant on Race: Reevaluating Kant’s Moral Philosophy in Light of Kant’s Racism

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or join online here.

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Assistive Technologies for Self-Control in the Context of Structural Attributional Injustice

Social justice is not just a matter of non-discrimination but also of inclusion, of being able to secure uptake in social cooperation.  One of the key determinants of the extent to which one can fully participate in society is that one is taken to be sufficiently competent in the relevant sense by those other participants in the relevant social practices and institutional context.  As has often been noted, injustice can take the form of systematically bias in the attribution of competence, especially in the refusal to recognize competent individuals as such, or in the reliance on arbitrary criteria for competence. In addition to these concerns about testimonial or hermeneutical injustice, there are also concerns about whether individuals have real opportunities for (1) co-determining the “entry requirements” for social practices and (2) developing the capacities that are legitimately expected. In our cooperative endeavors, one particularly significant expectation is that we can trust others to be able to exercise the requisite degree of self-control. “Autonomy gaps” in this domain can be especially marginalizing.  Self-regulatory capacities do, however, vary significantly, and the basis for their attribution is fraught and contested.  This context of the power-ridden pragmatics of competence-attribution has significant implications for how we ought to approach an emerging set of technologies that offer support for self-control and, more broadly, for various forms of “scaffolded” or “extended” willpower.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Joel Anderson
Utrecht University

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On the Ethics of Teaching Race

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or join online here.

Winston Thompson                                                             Ohio State University

C4E’s 2023 Undergraduate Conference: Ethics and Progress

Conference Schedule

12:30 Doors open – lunch

1:00 Opening Remarks

Panel 1

1:10 – Prajna Pendharkar “Tangible Novelty: What Apple and the Metaverse Are Teaching Us About Multifunctional Product Launches”

1:25 – Joseph Boyce “Numbers that Matter: Valuing Human Lives as Objects”

1:40 – Jonathan Ku, “Spatial Injustice in the Urban Environment: Development and Discourse in Toronto”

1:55 – Rayan Magon “On Autistic Authenticity and Social Approval: Evaluating the Ethics of Applied Behavioral Analysis”

[20-minute break: 2:10-2:30]

Panel 2

2:30 – Martin Sneath “Why is there no evidence of linguistic contact in North American Languages?”

2:45 – Krishna Kant Moda “Ripples of Homeland: Oceanic Abolitionist Praxis and the Geopoetics of Being”

3:00 – Aidan Mitchell Boudreau “Group Privacy and Indigenous Data Sovereignty”

3:15 – Ethan Persyko “The Future of Intimacy Coordination in TV: Where Does Certification Falter?”

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Myth-Busting or Meaning-Making? Public Science Communications and the Infodemic

► this event is hybrid. Register here to join in person, at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200). Join online here.

Maya Goldenberg                                                                University of Guelph

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The Ethics and Dynamics of Remembering Together

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).

Sara Aronowitz                                                                University of Toronto

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New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Reading group dates:

• February 3, 2023: Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021)
• March 3, 2023: Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (2021)
• April 14, 2023: Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, The Hatred of Sex (2021)
• May 5, 2023: Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence (2021)
• June 2, 2023: Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (February 2023)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Radical and Critical Approaches to Understanding and Supporting Mental Health

► this workshop is online. Register here.

The workshop, organized by Federica Berdini, Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien, and Zoey Lavallee, is co-sponsored by the Centre de Recherche en Éthique, Montréal (CRÉ), the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto (C4E), the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur la normativité (GRIN), the Canada Research Chair on Feminist Ethics (CREF), and the Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency (CRC-IAE)                                     

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Radical Care as Political Freedom: Extractive Economies, Caretaking Economies, and Decolonization

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200). Register here.

Allison Weir                                                                Faculty Associate, Centre for Ethics

Allison Weir is a visiting scholar of social and political philosophy in the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Centre for Humanities and Social Change at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She co-founded the Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia, where she was Research Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Political Thought. Her book, Decolonizing Freedom, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is the author of Identities and Freedom and Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity.                                              

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Reading group dates:

• February 3, 2023: Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021)
• March 3, 2023: Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (2021)
• April 14, 2023: Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, The Hatred of Sex (2021)
• May 5, 2023: Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence (2021)
• June 2, 2023: Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (February 2023)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Individual Accountability for Cooperatively Committed Wrongs

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Saba Bazargan-Forward                                     Philosophy, UC San Diego                                            School of Law, University of San Diego

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When Illocutionary Silencing Threatens Free Speech

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Jovy Chan
Doctoral Fellow                                                                  Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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Teacher Neutrality and Pedagogical Impartiality: Is there a Reasonable Professional Standard?

This paper considers the tension between teachers’ professional obligation to remain neutral when addressing politically charged issues in class and their duty to promote social justice and inculcate liberal democratic values in schools. After laying out the contours of the social justice argument against teacher neutrality and in favour of social justice advocacy in the classroom, the paper presents a set of conceptual, pedagogical and legal objections to this argument: it hinges on a questionable conceptualization of “controversial issue,” arbitrarily elevates certain liberal democratic values (justice, equality) while neglecting others (pluralism, dialogue), minimizes the professional risk that teachers assume by engaging in social justice advocacy at work, and overlooks students’ rights to freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. The paper closes by advancing an alternative pedagogical framework that seeks to balance the educational urgency and legitimacy of promoting social justice in public education with the need to take into account teachers’ professional vulnerability and respect students’ basic rights.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Bruce Maxwell                                                        Faculty of Education, Université de Montréal

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“Barely Known Aspect of Canada’s Immigration System”: Doctoring, Lawyering and Administering Medical Exclusion 

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Laura Bisaillon                                                    Department of Health and Society, UTSC              Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, OISE

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Conceptions of White: Examining the Origins, Travel, and Present Reality of “Whiteness” as a Concept and a Racial Invention Through Art

Join us for a conversation between Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow Letticia Cosbert Miller and Conceptions of Whiteco-curator Lillian O’Brien Davis exploring topics related to the exhibition and intersecting interests of race, ethics and power in art and art-making.

Conceptions of White (co-curated by John Hampton and Lillian O’Brien Davis) is an exhibition offering context and nuanced perspectives that help viewers grapple with contemporary configurations of White identity. The exhibition examines the origins, travel, and present reality of “Whiteness” as a concept and a racial invention that classifies degrees of civility/humanity. The exhibition is currently being presented at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto until March 25th, 2023.

All who attend the talk will be invited to join Lillian and Letticia at the Art Museum (one block away) for a late viewing of the exhibition (the gallery will remain open until 8:00pm) to informally continue the conversation and tour the works discussed during the talk.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Lillian O’Brien Davis is a curator, writer based in Toronto, ON. She holds a Masters of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies and a BA Hons. in the History of Art and English Literature from the University of Toronto. Lillian is currently the Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and curator for Nuit Blanche Etobicoke 2023. She has curated independent projects at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Susan Hobbs Gallery (Toronto), School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba and the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina). Her writing has appeared in BlackFlash Magazine, Canadian Art online, C Magazine, Insight Magazine and RACAR Art History Journal. She is also currently one of two inaugural Visiting Curators at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery.

Letticia Cosbert Miller is a Toronto-based writer and curator. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. Letticia’s work as a writer is often in dialogue with historical, mythological, or philosophical tropes from the western classical tradition. Her academic research interests lie within the reception of Classics in Black diasporic contemporary culture. Letticia is author of Swimming Up a Dark Tunnel, a collection of essays exploring water and Black visual culture, published by Gallery 44 in 2022.

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Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

De-Constructing South Asian Identities: Interplay of Religion, Region, and Tasawwuf

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Sameena Hasan
Faculty Fellow                                                                  Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Adult Children and their Aging Parents: Navigating the Realities of Retirement in Ontario for Low-Income Seniors

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Sirena Liladrie
Adult Education and Community Development                              OISE                                                                         University of Toronto

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Rescuing Ourselves from The Pond Analogy

Peter Singer famously argues that when we spend money on seemingly ordinary pleasures for ourselves, we are doing something gravely wrong. In the process, he (famously) draws an analogy between spending money in such ways and not saving a child drowning in a pond when you could easily do so. There have been many responses to Singer. Some of these make potentially important points and might give grounds for rejecting Singer’s principles. But what they do not do, we argue, is respond effectively to the Pond Analogy and the argument it itself gives for Singer’s conclusion. This reveals that Singer’s focus on deriving his conclusion from general principles is a mistake; the hard-to-resist argument is the Pond Analogy itself. More broadly, we show that the Pond Analogy presents a crucial challenge to our ability to give a plausible, coherent conception of morality. We close by sketching our answer to it.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Julia Nefsky and Sergio Tenenbaum                                     Philosophy, University of Toronto

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New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Reading group dates:

• February 3, 2023: Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021)
• March 3, 2023: Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (2021)
• April 14, 2023: Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, The Hatred of Sex (2021)
• May 5, 2023: Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence (2021)
• June 2, 2023: Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (February 2023)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

The Rule of Law and the Climate Emergency

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Megan Pfiffer
Doctoral Fellow                                                                  Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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Should Higher Education be a Right?

It is sometimes claimed that higher education is a right, not a privilege. Defenders claim that tuition fees and student loans should be abolished because they place unjust barriers between citizens and valuable educational opportunities. While it is true that fees can be a barrier to access, there are good reasons to think that full public funding for college/university would actually do more to increase educational inequality than reduce it. Can a case be made for a right to higher education that takes these, and similar worries, into account? In The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory (2022) I argue that there can. In this talk, I provide a philosophical justification of a right to higher education including its nature, scope, and institutional implications. One upshot of a right-based conception of higher education is that it entails a far more substantial role for education over the lifespan and provides a clear direction for the future growth and development of post-secondary education.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.

Christopher Martin                                                        UBC, Okanagan

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Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

The Recovery of the Human: Cavell, Skepticism, Romanticism

Stanley Cavell’s portrayal of skepticism is unlike any other in philosophy. By attaching skepticism to larger questions about what it is to be human (and inhuman), Cavell tells a story about skepticism’s inhabitation of our philosophical and non-philosophical lives that not only departs dramatically from the skepticism literature; it risks departing from philosophy altogether. To tell his heterodox story about skepticism, Cavell required conceptual and expressive resources that philosophy by itself could not provide. And he came upon these resources unexpectedly as “outbreaks of romantic texts” in the final part of him magnum opus, The Claim of Reason. In this paper, I will show how Cavell’s persistent (if not always consistent) engagement with the “interplay between skepticism and romanticism” culminated in very novel as well as very timely views of our relation to others, both human and non-human, coinciding with an uncomfortably intimate relation to philosophy’s “other” – literature.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Nikolas Kompridis                                                      Center for Humanities and Social Change, Humboldt University, Berlin                                                           Visiting Scholar, Centre for Ethics

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Intellectual Humility in Joint Inquiry

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Emily McWilliams
Faculty Fellow
Duke Kunshan University

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Public Trust as a Substantive Value for Public Health Ethics

There is a growing consensus among academics and commentators that public trust in science and scientists is at a low ebb across a range of issues of public concern, from the contribution of human activity to climate change, to the safety of vaccines, and the effectiveness of public health interventions during the recent (and ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic. This talk will focus on the perceived erosion of trust in public health, which is deeply concerning given that support for public health interventions is essential (at least in a democracy) for the achievement of public health goals.  To this end, this talk will outline a conceptual model of public trust that is fit for the narrowly focused goals of public health and distinct from and other forms of trust (e.g., social trust, institutional trust, generalized inter-personal trust) that are often conflated with public trust, and (b) mount an argument for positioning public trust as a substantive value for public health ethics.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Brian Baigrie
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (University of Toronto)

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Acknowledging Passionate Utterances

In the #MeToo movement, we see a spectrum of perpetrators: on the one hand, we have those who knowingly violate their victims (think Weinstein or Cosby). On the other hand, we have those who transgress without realizing (think Aziz Ansari). The latter case often happens because the transgressors do not realize their partner is trying to refuse them. But how is this possible? Lisa McKeown uses Stanley Cavell’s notion of “passionate utterances” to respond to Rae Langton’s theory that pornography implies women’s refusals shouldn’t be taken seriously. She argues that acknowledgement is a practical, emotional skill necessary for conversational ethics and understanding systematic, gendered miscommunication.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online at the link below:

https://youtu.be/v5K1qB7x_kM

Lisa McKeown
Sheridan College (PhD, The New School)

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New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Reading group dates:

• February 3, 2023: Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021)
• March 3, 2023: Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (2021)
• April 14, 2023: Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, The Hatred of Sex (2021)
• May 5, 2023: Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence (2021)
• June 2, 2023: Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (February 2023)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Why We Need a Field of Educational Ethics

Educators, administrators, and policy makers regularly face ethical dilemmas in their work. For example: Should teachers factor effort into grades as a way of recognizing and motivating students’ hard work, or base grades solely on achievement so they clearly communicate students’ academic mastery? In the face of budget shortfalls, should a school reduce the size of its gifted and talented program, fire its family liaison specialist, or cut its after-school programming? Which impacts, on whom, should it care about in making this decision, and why? As parent scrutiny of curriculum heats up, how much leeway (if any) should districts give parents to opt their children out of specific lessons? What limits, if any, should be placed on states’ uses of predictive analytics to target students preemptively for intervention services? In light of these and other dilemmas, Meira Levinson argues, we need a field of educational ethics that can provide the theoretical and practical tools educators need to address core values and decision-making at the heart of their work.

► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or on Zoom at the link below:

Passcode: 350205

Meira Levinson
Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Human Rights in the Latin American Tradition: A dialogue between Bartolomé de las Casas and John Locke

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Logan Gates
Doctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Taking Prisoners’ Rights Seriously

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Kate Mitchell
Doctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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Yestermorrow: Speculative Tales of a Possible Repair Future

► please register here or email ethics@utoronto.ca

Enna Kim
Communication & Culture                                                 York University

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Holism, Standing and Collective Selves: A Human Rights Approach to Land Claims

A human rights framing is strategically very attractive in advocacy for land claims, because of its international reach and influence. However, there are a number of well-documented concerns about the way human rights characterizes what is at issue, both in its own terms and as means of advancing the larger purposes within which many land claims are embedded, especially in relation to land claims by Indigenous peoples. In this paper I set out features of human rights that can and should be emphasized to make a human rights framing not only usable for claims with respect to land but useful and effective. I argue that the holistic approach to human life and experience, the role of standing in explicating and establishing claims, and the conceptualization of subjectivity as collective and not only individuated make it possible to leverage universalism to shift the justificatory onus onto those who would deny a land claim without presupposing a universal self or subject. In so doing, a human rights framing offers resources for exposing the bad faith that is at the heart of many denials of land claims with respect to land. A human rights framing is statist and this this has to be borne in mind when deciding whether to deploy it in a particular circumstance. However, there are claims with respect to land that statism will not distort or undermine, and a human rights framing can be of use in those cases.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Cindy Holder
University of Victoria

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Reparations Without Collective Agency

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Spencer Albert
Doctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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Kant and the Law of War (Oxford, 2021)

The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers appeal to ideas drawn from Kant’s moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not yet been brought into their proper place in these debates. Ripstein argues that a special morality governs war because of its distinctive immorality: the wrongfulness of entering or remaining in a condition in which force decides everything provides the standards for evaluating the grounds of initiating war, the ways in which wars are fought, and the results of past wars.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Arthur Ripstein
University of Toronto

Respondents:

Tom Hurka (University of Toronto)                                                                              Claire Finkelstein (University of Pennsylvania)                                                           Ryan Liss (University of Western Ontario)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Augustinian Moral Psychology and the Origins of Toleration

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Joseph Dattilo
Doctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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Theories of Perverse Actions

We occasionally act in ways that are wrong—morally or otherwise—at least partially because of the wrongness, as when we break a rule just for the sake of breaking it. I explore different theories of such perverse actions, including failures of thought suppression, signalling, strategic behaviour, expressions of autonomy, and “hopeful monsters”. Some of these theories fail to properly explain perversity but some are more successful. I suggest that the study of perverse actions can tell us some interesting things about human nature.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Paul Bloom
Professor
Psychology                                                               University of Toronto

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Narrating Hauntings Everywhere: Towards the Edges of Territorial Pakistan

This conversation works to unsettle the territorial enclosure of the postcolonial Pakistani state by raising a series of interdisciplinary questions. Through an intertextual reading of Pakistani-American artist and printmaker Zarina Hashmi (1937-2020) and the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), I offer an alternative account to the ongoing militarization of the Pakistani state that has continued to dispossess the most marginal living today in Pakistan. More broadly, I place the Pakistani context within a transnational feminist framework thinking about how historical crossings in the fifteenth century onwards build a critical language to anchor ongoing questions of political violence in the twenty-first century.

► please register here or email ethics@utoronto.ca

Atif Khan
Visual Studies                                                           University of Toronto

Atif M. Khan (b. Lahore) is an independent researcher, writer and curator exploring experimental text and image-making based in what is currently called Rexdale, Toronto. His current research driven practice intersects key themes of multi-scalar political violence, textual gaps and contemporary exhibition-making. He is currently a Master of Visual Studies student in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto, where he is also a Junior Fellow at Massey College.

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Nothing Can Ever Make It Right: Reparations for Historical Injustice and the Infeasibility of Objection

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Felix Lambrecht
Doctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Moral Status and the Ontology and Sociology of AI Agents

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Jared Riggs
Doctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group

► The reading group will be held in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

► For more information, please contact Bowen Chan, C4E Doctoral Fellow, at bowench.chan@mail.utoronto.ca

Reading group dates:

• October 26, 2022
• November 9, 2022
• November 23, 2022
• January 18, 2023
• February 1, 2023
• February 15, 2023
• March 8, 2023
• March 22, 2023

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

“We can’t welcome them all” The Grammar of Race in the Italian Political Discourse

► please register here or email ethics@utoronto.ca

Angelica Pesarini
Assistant Professor in Italian Studies and Diaspora & Transnational Studies                                                University of Toronto

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Food for Thought: Foraging, Identity, and the Roots of Ecological Progress

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Sarah (Sadie) Warren
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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Tough Love, White Lies, Hard Truths, and Mixed Motives

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Bowen Chan
Doctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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Coping, Agency, and Responsibility: Conceptual and Normative Aspects

Psychological resilience is commonly understood as the ability agents exhibit in stressful, uncertain, or challenging situations, when they ‘bounce back,’ adapt, and thrive despite adversity. It is, arguably, the buzz term of our times, pervading common talk in our everyday lives as well as strategic plans in the private, corporate, and public spheres, and is often characterized as a very desirable and sought-after state, quality, or virtue. Philosophy has also demonstrated a novel interest in both the epistemic dimension of resilience and its ethical aspects. Unlike resilience, which remains an elusive construct, coping – construed as a process with the potential to produce resilience – has a longer and better-established history in psychology, and yet remains unexplored in philosophy. This paper begins outlining philosophical characterization of coping by addressing two sets of questions pertaining to its nature and normative assessment.

► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)

Federica Berdini
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

The second C4E Undergraduate Research Conference, entitled Ethics, Healing & Reconciliation, brings together UofT students and recent graduates from across disciplines to present and discuss research in the spirit of the C4E’s mission to explore the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life. Additionally, we shall publish the selected papers in the Centre’s multimedia online journal, C4eJournal.

About the theme: The global pandemic is an ongoing battle that affects all spheres of life—including: politics, education, economics, healthcare, and our interpersonal relationships. Such dramatic changes warrant thoughtful reflection on how society shall “heal” in both a literal and figurative sense. We are interested in investigating questions such as: what constitutes an ethical approach to resuming activities given the health and access-based inequities wrought by the pandemic? What is the place of “reconciliation” in quotidian life at a personal level and a larger policy level? In light of these questions, we have selected diverse projects that either focus on the pandemic directly or concern the themes of reconciliation, community building, and overcoming adversity.

★ This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on July 2, 2022. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Conference Schedule

12 pm – Welcome

Panel I — Evaluating Fairness in the Community

12:05 pm – Ana Brinkerhoff, Unenforced Policy in Ontario’s Long-Term Care Homes: Unequal Access in Public and Private Healthcare in a Pandemic

12:15 pm –  Cheryl Cheung, A Brave New Age of Damages: The Need for Independent and Reimagined Autonomous Vehicle Insurance

12:25 pm — Panel I Question and Answer Period

Panel II — Promoting Reconciliation and Inclusivity

12:45 pm –  Michael Demone, Public History, Ethics, and Reconciliation

12:55 pm – James Ralph, Gender Dysphoria does not Belong in the DSM

1:05 pm — Panel II Question and Answer Period

Panel III — The Philosophy of Human Flourishing

1:25 pm –  Ariel LaFayette, Marriage in Modernity

1:35 pm — Radheesh Ameresekere, Towards a Perfectionist Account of Human Rights

1:45 pm —  Panel III Question and Answer Period

Biographies

Ana Brinkerhoff (she/her) is a fourth-year undergraduate student graduating in Political Science and Sociology. Ana’s research interests lie at the crossroads of her two disciplines, particularly in the social impacts of failures of democracy. Her current research examines senior residents in long-term care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic and considers how the state’s failure to intervene harmed the lives of many residents. Ana hopes to expand her research interests at the graduate level in the future.

Cheryl Cheung (she/her) is a recent graduate who double-majored in political science and in American studies. She is also a visual artist whose work has appeared at venues such as Myseum, OCAD’s Ada Slaight Gallery, and Arts Etobicoke. Previously, she was a Fulbright Killam Fellow on exchange at American University in Washington, D.C. Currently, she is an Undergraduate Fellow in the Ethics of AI at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. There, she is exploring the moral limitations of computerization. She is also a graduate fellow at the School of Cities, where she is producing a documentary to demonstrate the politics of community resource access in Toronto’s inner suburbs. Outside of class, she enjoys playing the guitar, skiing, and walking her mum’s dog, Haidyn.

James Ralph (they/them) is pursuing a philosophy major/bioethics minor in co-op at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. They are particularly interested in ethics and bioethics and participated in the 2021-22 Socrates Project at UTSC in the bioethics stream. James hopes to use their education in bioethics to enable better healthcare for all, especially for queer people and other marginalized groups. In their free time, they enjoy reading, cooking, and being outdoors.

Michael Demone (he/him) is a graduate of the University of Toronto and plans to continue on to graduate school. His research interests include Canadian history, politics and foreign affairs, medieval manuscript culture, cybersecurity, and civic life in the digital age. He has worked with the Centre for Human Resources and Industrial Relations, the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, the G7/G8 Research Group, the Global Summitry Journal, and the Centre for the Study of the Processes of Government in Canada, and the Canadian Executive Research Foundation.

Ariel LaFayette (she/her) is a recent graduate and research fellow at the Centre for Ethics. She is passionate about her research in the history of philosophy, which focuses on the evolution of hermeneutics and phenomenology within the philosophy of religion. During Ariel’s undergraduate studies, she was the co-editor in chief of both UofT’s philosophy undergraduate journal and the Canadian national philosophy undergraduate journal. Next year, she will start her Ph.D. in Philosophy at UofT and collaborate with the Centre for Jewish Studies. When she is not working, you will find her at concerts or writing in her journal about her traveling adventures.

Radheesh Ameresekere (he/him) is an undergraduate philosopher working primarily on moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the many intersections of these fields. Substantially influenced by both Kant and Aristotle, he is particularly interested in dignity, flourishing, and the good life. Radheesh’s moral and political work has been published in various undergraduate journals, including Critique, Duke Medical Ethics Journal, and Polis. He is also an editor for the university’s own Noēsis. Outside of philosophy, Radheesh enjoys hiking, playing the guitar, and a good cup of tea.

Anatomies of Grief: Conversations on an Ethics of Living

While there has been sustained discussion on grief in relation to illness, war, and death, what is at stake when we explore this affective landscape in relation to loss and sadness, which illuminate grief in the realm of the living?

Without abandoning the phenomena of individual and collective mourning in relation to ongoing historical events and atrocities, how might we tend to the deeper revelations that “grief” offers us? What are these revelations that reside beneath “grief” and what do they offer? What ethical engagements with “grief” enable a critique of modern conceptions of temporality, spatiality, and corporeality that often compel, if not demand, a linear engagement with loss, which assumes an expiration of this affective relation? What livable futures might we imagine if we embraced grief as a radical affective resource for change?

This online gathering hosted by Race, Ethics, and Power (REP) Project considers multiple interpretations of grief, while accounting for the situational, local, and transcultural contexts of its emergence.

★ This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on June 23 & 24, 2022. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

► please register here (free)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Thursday, 23 June 2022, 3-6pm

Session I – Black Mourning
Mackenzie Stephenson, Reflecting on ‘The End of White Supremacy, an American Romance’ by Saidiya Hartman
Michelle Aboagye, The Affective Pain of Black Women
Stephanie Latty, Listening to Ghosts: Grieving Dispossession Through Horror

Session II – Colonial Endings
Hazal Halavut, In Search of Grief: Afterlives in Colonial Erasure
Boron Usmon, Grieving a Future: Russian Colonialism, Kyrgyz Poetry, and the End of Times
Vasuki Shanmuganathan, Endless Mourning: Gardiner Expressway Protests and Speaking Tamil Bodies into Being

Friday, 24 June 2022, 3-6pm

Session III – Queer Grief
Ianna Hawkins Owen, Replaying the Record: Grief’s Temporalities
Sohini Chatterjee, Grief, Affective Politics, and Trans Activism as Collective Resistance in India
Christopher Smith, On Necrologies: Catalogues, Digital Archives, and the Limits of Collective Mourning

Session IV – Being Life
Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Grief Medicines
Jade Hui, A Buddhist ‘Love’ Letter to Hong Kong

The Right to Have Rights Today

Hannah Arendt’s useful phrase ‘the right to have rights’ asks us to consider foundational rights—to consider on what ‘right’ other ‘rights’ are based. In The Rights of Others, Seyla Benhabib argues that the first right in Arendt’s phrase is addressed to humanity as a call to recognize political membership, where such a ‘right’ to membership entails legal entitlements (the plural ‘rights’). Working with a different literature, and calling into question the still-predominant North American priority of political rights over economic rights, in Basic Rights Henry Shue argues that security and subsistence rights are foundational for other rights. In still different fields and sites, theorists in Native Studies and centuries of Indigenous activism have called for land (back) as foundational to other meaningful economic or political rights, and others in Native Studies and Black Studies have asked theorists, advocates, and organizers to re-think both a strategic reliance on rights claims and a too-easy sense that the nation-state protects rights (e.g. Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return; and Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation). Finally, Paul Gilroy has recently asked us to re-imagine the history of human rights such that its genealogy begins not with Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence or Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration, but with David Walker and Frederick Douglass (cf. Postcolonial Melancholia and Darker than Blue).

In other words, claims to human rights—what they have been, are, and could be—remain unstable into our present, part of a larger contradictory history that includes the South African white supremacist Jan Smuts calling for human rights in the preamble of the United Nations Charter while W. E. B. Du Bois took up the term in his contemporaneous Color and Democracy; or, more recently, when human rights have been invoked to argue both for and against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

What are we to make of this conceptual instability? What histories, traditions, and cosmologies help us to understand rights claims in new ways? What sites of practice (well beyond political theory) leverage rights in the most useful ways, and what can we learn from these sites, struggles, and celebrations? At the very least, such a contested history of human rights requires what Arendt called thinking, and we look forward to thinking in community in June. Workshop proceedings will appear in a special symposium issue of C4eJournal.net.

► please register here (free)

Preliminary Schedule

3pm = 12pm Pacific/8pm UK/6am Melbourne
Panel 1: Rights, the Nation-State, and Sovereignty

Yasemin Sari, University of Northern Iowa
“The Right to Have Rights: Humanity and Substantive Belonging”
When Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, statelessness—and hence, rightlessness—was the predicament of a post-War Europe. Her criticism of the condition of rightlessness struck right to the heart of the matter in her eloquent criticism of the so-called universal human rights, which since their birth in the 1789 French Declaration had been subject to a plethora of revisions and adoptions, without, however, changing what lay at their core: equality. To be sure, what Arendt diagnosed in this work was not only that human rights were being violated—for that was self-evident—but that statelessness had become a sign of the violation of what she called a “right to have rights.” What this expression implies, which I will try to make explicit, aims to lay the groundwork for articulating the conditions for the political agency of the refugee anew, while at the same time addressing Articles 3, 14, and 28 of the UDHR in the light of this analysis. By taking seriously Arendt’s argument that the right to have rights can only be “guaranteed by humanity itself,” I want to show what a concrete principle of humanity would entail in contrast to a metaphysical one that has informed previous rights-based accounts of what we owe to refugees. As such, I will argue that a concrete principle of humanity rests on a performative account of recognition that allows for the appearance of the refugee as a political agent, where such agency is rests on an “artificial equality” that motivates substantive belonging to a community.

Katie Howard, Southwestern University
“The ‘Right to Have Rights,’ the ‘Right to Life,’ and the ‘Right to Maim’”
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt traces the process by which a condition of rightlessness is produced so that the “right to life” can be challenged. This account of “statelessness,” which Arendt understands expansively as the loss of a place in the world that guarantees humanity, provides both a critique of universal human rights as inadequate, as well as the basis for a recognition of what she calls “the right to have rights.” Here, I understand “the right to have rights” to refer to the exercise or enactment of a right to struggle for rights. As I will argue, the “right to have rights” is thus a theory of action—an early articulation of the plural, non-sovereign theory of political action that Arendt develops in her later work The Human Condition. In the paper, I return to statelessness as the biopolitical site where the “right to life” is challenged and the “right to have rights” becomes legible. Turning to Arendt’s early critique of Zionism, the paper develops an account of settler colonialism as producing a new statelessness, a state of suspension held in suspension–that is, a dispossession that must be sustained, never complete. This interminable dispossession requires a different model for theorizing sovereign power and points instead to the biopolitics of what Jasbir Puar has recently termed the “right to maim”: the exercise of sovereign power as an ongoing activity that simultaneously injures and sustains (Puar 2017). How does “the right to have rights” as a mode of enactment fare with respect to the “right to maim” understood as the production (in this case, the settler colonial production) of debility? This question will motivate the reflections offered in the paper’s conclusion, which explores the embodied, affective dimensions of Arendt’s “right to have rights.”

Panel 2: Indigenous Rights
4pm = 1pm/9pm/7am

Miranda Johnson, University of Otago
“Entangled Discourses: Becoming Historical Subjects, Claiming Indigenous Rights”
In my contribution to this discussion on the ‘right to have rights today’ I want to explore the relationship between indigenous rights activism and the writing of indigenous history in the second half of the twentieth century – the long era of decolonization. The two discourses are entangled with each other such that one discourse often provides the justification for the other: the writing of indigenous history is often founded in a claim that to do so is to recognize indigenous people as rights-bearing political subjects; to make a rights claim stick often relies on a historicizing of the rights-holder. I will draw on examples from around the settler world where ‘indigenous’ was redefined in the era of decolonization. Whereas in earlier European imperial discourse, ‘native’ had referred to all peoples subject to colonial rule, in the second half of the twentieth century the term ‘indigenous’ began to be used to denote those minority peoples surrounded by permanent settler states. Over this period, discourses of indigenous rights also changed from what I have called elsewhere a discourse of ‘native assimilative rights’ to one of ‘postcolonial indigenous rights’. The emergence of postcolonial indigenous rights – where ‘postcolonial’ is more complicated than denoting the achievement of new statehood but instead refers both to the continued salience of colonial-era discourses of treaty, native title and so on along with assertions of indigenous self-determination – provoked new kinds of history-writing about indigenous peoples. The fields of Native American, Aboriginal, Māori history etc. emerged in academic discourse. Indigenous peoples were represented as historical subjects and agents not simply objects in the way of frontier settlement. Thus, I argue that the right to have rights in relation to indigeneity is bound up with the writing of indigenous people as historical subjects.

Benjamin P. Davis, University of Toronto, Centre for Ethics
“The Right to Have Rights in the Americas: Arendt, Mariátegui, and Monture in Dialogue”
This paper starts from Hannah Arendt’s use of the phrase ‘the right to have rights’ in order to consider which rights ground other rights. To read the right to have rights in the context of the Americas, I start from two contemporary readers of Arendt. First, I follow Seyla Benhabib’s form of reading the first right as the base of the second right(s), but the content I posit is different. My argument is that, in the American context, the first ‘right’ should compel justice-oriented actors to demand the repatriation of federal land to Indigenous nations, whom states such as the U.S. and Brazil have cut off from the realm of public life by forcing them onto reservations. Like the Nazi ‘herding… into ghettos and concentration camps’ that Arendt poignantly documents, American nation-states have followed such forced population transfers with ongoing deprivations of Indigenous rights, including rights to religion and voting rights. But the duty bearer for the right to have rights, in the way I am reading it here, is not just the nation-state. I also want to draw on Lida Maxwell’s reading of ‘to have’ as a call to create and to sustain a world where it is easier to achieve rights. Indeed, to assume that Indigenous nations are demanding simply increased state support can overlook claims to self-determination and the fact that in many cases what is at issue remains unceded land. To flesh out the first right in ‘the right to have rights’ as a right to land, I turn to the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Mariátegui insisted that what was called, in his time, the problem of the Indigenous person (el problema del indio) was in fact the problem of an economic order. ‘We are not content with demanding Indigenous rights to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven’, he writes against the humanitarian sentiment that loomed large in his time (and remains in ours). ‘We start by categorically demanding the right to land’. Notably, his is a challenge to taking second- and third-generation rights (here to education and culture) as foundational. Instead, he prioritizes the right to land—it is the first demand, the starting point, of those who approach questions of Indigenous rights, he says, ‘from a socialist point of view’. An interlocutor might here ask whether a right to land is simply a right to property. I conclude in dialogue with Patricia Monture’s language of a right to responsibility to land to underscore that a different epistemology, an Indigenous epistemology around land, grounds the right to land in the Americas. Thus, staging a conversation among Arendt, political theory, and Native Studies, this paper presses that basic rights in the Americas—that the right to have rights in the Americas—have always been about not simply speech or subsistence, but about the land itself.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, June 3. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

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Afrofuturism and the Law

Long before the film Black Panther captured the public’s imagination, the cultural critic Mark Dery had coined the term “Afrofuturism” to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture.” Since then, the term has been applied to speculative creatives as diverse as the pop artist Janelle Monae, the science fiction writer Octavia Butler, and the visual artist Nick Cave. But only recently have thinkers turned to how Afrofuturism might guide, and shape, law. The participants in this workshop explore the many ways Afrofuturism can inform a range of legal issues, and even chart the way to a better future for us all.

★ This free online workshop will feature contributors to a special issue, guest edited by Bennett Capers (Law, Fordham), in the open-access online journal Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review, published in March 2022. ► Access the special issue here.

► please register here (free)

Schedule

12pm-12:15
Introduction (Bennett Capers)

12:15-1:15
Panel 1
12:15 Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms (Ngozi Okidegbe)
12:30 Afrofuturism as Reconstitution (Alex Zamalin)
12:45 Discussion & Q&A

1:15-2:15
Panel 2
1:15 Race Against Time: Afrofuturism and Our Liberated Housing Futures (Rasheedah Phillips)
1:30 For Every Rat Killed (Etienne C. Toussaint)
1:45 Discussion & Q&A

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 12pm, Friday, May 13. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

Contributors

• Bennett Capers (Law, Fordham)
  
• Ngozi Okidegbe (Law Cardozo)
• Alex Zamalin (Political Science & African American Studies, Detroit Mercy)
• Rasheedah Phillips (PolicyLink)
• Etienne C. Toussaint (Law, South Carolina)

Co-sponsors

Center on Race, Law and Justice, Fordham Law School

Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review

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The Ethics of Humanism: Human Rights, Cosmopolitanism, and Resistance

Some contemporary ethical theory exhibits skepticism regarding both humanism and rights discourse. Although there is a tradition of critical theory that calls into question Eurocentric humanism while maintaining the need for a new humanism (e.g. Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Edward Said), increasingly there is a group of “post-humanists” making a call to abandon “the human” as an aspirational ethical category. Further, the aforementioned humanists as well as the post-humanists take different approaches to claims to human rights, with some maintaining a faith in human rights (e.g. Said) and others wanting to strategically abandon such claims as part of the broader refusal of the category of the human. This interdisciplinary panel will continue this critical conversation by “unpacking” ideas of humanism, human rights, cosmopolitanism, and resistance through raising the following questions: Who counts as human? And what and whom does the category of the human foreclose? What is a right? What political paths and imaginaries do rights claims open and exclude? What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and humanism? And could humanism open or close paths of resistance?

► please register here (free)

Preliminary Schedule

2pm = 11am Pacific/7pm UK/5am Melbourne
Catherine Bolten, University of Notre Dame
“What Counts as a Right? Formal Education, Vocational Training, and Bad Faith in Sierra Leone”In enacting the “right to education” in Sierra Leone, all the emphasis was placed on formal education, in spite of the fact that the CRC guarantees vocational education on par with formal education. Sierra Leone has an extremely small formal sector and a large and productive artisanal sector, which, I argue, reveals that “the right to education” in Sierra Leone was implemented in bad faith. This takes the form of a refusal to fund artisanal workshops as credible educational institutions, instead pouring all funding, effort, and visibility into a formal education sector that consistently produces high drop-out rates and low attendance at tertiary education, with an even lower level of formal employment for those graduates. This bad-faith implementation of the right to education adversely affects the credibility of the most productive economic sector with children and their parents, and exacerbates economic and social inequalities by pushing counterproductive sacrifices from parents to ‘educate’ children who end up as unskilled, unemployed adults.

2:40pm = 11:40/7:40/5:40
Shahrzad Sabet, New York University and Center on Modernity in Transition
“Social Identity and a Reimagined Cosmopolitanism: Liberating the Particular Through the Universal”
The recent surge of nationalism and tribalism across the globe brings renewed salience to questions of collective identity. Notably, it exposes the pervasive tension between bounded social identities and attachments, on the one hand, and universalist yearnings and commitments, on the other. I turn to the cosmopolitan tradition in political theory and argue that some of cosmopolitanism’s most powerful contributions to this debate have been underdeveloped and undervalued. Specifically, this paper draws on empirical research in psychology to argue that cosmopolitanism—and a genuinely cosmopolitan (i.e., universal human) social identity, in particular—represents not just an extension of scope from the national to the global, as is widely conceived, but rather, a qualitatively distinct shift that permeates all identities, and serves to fundamentally protect and liberate our particular attachments from their otherwise inherent instabilities and contradictions. I make the case that it is by leaning into a genuine and thickly conceived universalism that the diversity of our particular identities is secured and promoted.

3:20 = 12:20/8:20/6:20
Rachel Cicoria, Texas A&M University
“Resistance Beyond Subjectivity: Rape, Solitude, and Reciprocity”
Using Lugones’ human/non-human distinction as constituting incommensurable socialities, and her situating of the modern subject within a human sociality, this paper explores sexual violation from the experience of those deemed non-subjects and nonhuman. I engage Alcoff’s work on the effects of rape on sexual subjectivity as within a “human” sociality, and explore this in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of touch, Arendt’s account of solitude, and the constitutive role that the experience of revulsion can have on subject formation. Based on Lugones’ decolonial feminism, I show as an alternative to this account a different modality of embodied resistance to sexual violation that is not subjectively but collectively centered, in practices and communities invisible to “human” sociality. My intent is to articulate resistance lived by colonized bodies, one that is not based on the subjective formations of those who are deemed “human.”

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 2pm, Monday, May 2. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

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The type of street protest typical of mass social movements is, paradigmatically, an in-person affair. This has important consequences for how we understand the type of political speech act protest is. Features like its publicness and its embodiedness play significant roles in giving the demands of protest a distinct type of authority that is inseparable from its speakers—and the plurality of speakers is itself pragmatically noteworthy. The rise of online communication platforms, however, offer new opportunities for social movements to leverage public attention and expand their reach. Across the political spectrum, specifically online protest is forcing real world changes at a relentless pace. But the diverse mechanisms of online speech pull against our normal understanding of protest and its rootedness in identifiable speakers making their voices heard at sometimes significant risks to themselves. We can seriously ask whether online protest even is really protest? This talk will explore how features of online speech—its algorithmic mediation, the anonymity/pseudonymity it permits, its global nature yet beholdenness to American businesses, and more—challenge our understanding of protest and force a re-conceptualization of its central features.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Friday, April 29. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Michael Randall Barnes
Rotman Institute of Philosophy
Western University

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Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism

This is a conversation about Noël’s 2021 book Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism. The book focuses on the contributions of Black Caribbean and American artists in the twentieth century, including Wifredo Lam and Maya Angelou. We will hear Noël discuss the history of and readings put forth in the book before moving to audience Q&A.

► please register here

Samantha Noël
Art History
Wayne State University

Host:

Benjamin P. Davis
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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We are All Ghosts: Sidewalk Toronto, Urban Data, and the Transtemporal Intersubjectivity of Digital Rights

As the fabric of the city becomes increasingly fibreoptic, enthusiasm for the speed and ubiquity of digital infrastructure abounds. From Toronto to Abu Dhabi, new technologies promise the ability to observe, manage, and experience the city in so-called real-time, freeing cities from the spatiotemporal restrictions of the past. In this project, I look at the way this appreciation for the real-time is influencing our understanding of the datafied urban subject. I argue that this dominant discourse locates digital infrastructure within a broader metaphysics of presence, in which instantaneous data promise an unmediated view of both the city and those within it. The result is a levelling of residents along an overarching, linear, and spatialized timeline that sanitizes the temporal and rhythmic diversity of urban spaces. This same levelling effect can be seen in contemporary regulatory frameworks, which focus on the rights or sovereignty of a largely atomized urban subject removed from its spatiotemporal context. A more equitable alternative must therefore consider the temporal diversity, relationality, and inequality implicit within the datafied city, an alternative I begin to ground in Jacques Derrida’s notion of the spectre. This work is conducted through an exploration of Sidewalk Labs pioneering use of term urban data during their foray in Toronto, which highlights the potentiality of alternative, spectral data governance models at the same time it reflects the limitations of existing frameworks.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, April 6. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Nathan Olmstead
Urban Studies
University of Toronto

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Critical Perspectives on Race, Place & Health: Anti-Racism in Healthcare as a Case Study

Racism towards Black, Indigenous and People of Colour is pervasive and continues to exist across different spaces. This racism is built upon a global history of white supremacy, colonialism, and slavery, and has left lasting and ongoing impacts on how people of colour use, navigate and are perceived in different settings/places. A critical approach to understanding the broader links between race, place and health is key, through attention to critical theory and the social and structural determinants of health.

Exploring healthcare settings as a case study, this talk will discuss findings from a scoping review of anti-racism interventions in healthcare settings and present key processes, principles, and strategies for consideration when anti-racism interventions are planned and executed at various levels in healthcare.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Thursday, March 31. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Nadha Hassen
Environmental and Urban Change
York University

Yuliya Rackal
Family and Community Medicine
University of Toronto

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Building Algorithms that Work for Everyone: Natural Language Processing Tools for Bias Reduction in Child Welfare Systems

Oftentimes, the development of algorithms are divorced from the environments where they will eventually be deployed. In high stakes contexts, like child welfare services, policymakers and technologists must exercise a high degree of caution in the design and deployment of decisionmaking algorithms or risk further marginalising already vulnerable communities. This talk will seek to explain the status quo of child welfare algorithms, what we miss when we fail to include context in the development of algorithms, and how the addition of qualitative text data can help to make better algorithms.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, March 30. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Kamilah Ebrahim
iSchool
University of Toronto

Erina Moon
iSchool
University of Toronto

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Precarious Penality and the Myth of Liberal Punishment: Lessons from South Africa

While liberal law provides that only a judicial officer can impose punishment (during court proceedings, in a certain space, and during specific hours) in practice, the police, prison wardens and civilian actors also punish – but outside of the courts’ spacetime, for different (albeit potentially overlapping) purposes, and in contexts where the protective procedures and principles of liberal law are destabilized. I refer to this as extrajudicial punishment. One of the core arguments I make in this paper is that penal punitiveness cannot be measured through rates of imprisonment alone. This is very apparent in South Africa, where a steep drop in imprisonment rates (from 403 per 100 000 in 2004 to 248 in 2020) has been accompanied by a 2000% increase in prisoners serving life terms, and an increase in recorded cases of extrajudicial penal violence (by inter alia civilians, police officers, and prison wardens). I use the term ‘precarious penality’ to describe this form of penality, where extrajudicial penal violence plays a central role, along with liberal penal forms (such as life imprisonment). The term precarious refers to both the precarity resulting from socio-economic inequality and also to the instability (precarity) of penal forms (for example when a lawful arrest collapses into unlawful violence, or when a lawfully constituted neighborhood watch patrol inflicts extrajudicial punishment). South Africa, with its history of state sanctioned extrajudicial punishment, legal pluralism, and spatialized racism is an obvious example of how precarious and liberal penality interface with, and mutually constitute, each other. Although the discourse of liberal penality centres on the state and its lawful power to punish, in practice extrajudicial punishment (by both state and civilian) actors exists alongside, in the shadow (or underside) of lawful state punishment. Thus, I argue that one cannot discuss extrajudicial punishment without anchoring it in the violence inherent in the liberal state’s penal power. Despite being based on the principles of the Rule of Law, due process, and rationality, liberal punishment is at core exclusionary and unstable. In South Africa, where the boundary between lawful and extrajudicial punishment is blurred and porous, this instability and punitiveness is particularly apparent.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, March 30. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Gail Super
Sociology
University of Toronto

Co-sponsored by:

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Martin Luther King on Fear and Fearlessness

Drawing on my book, The Emotions of Nonviolence, I argue that King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is not merely a justification of civil disobedience but is also and perhaps even primarily an essay on political motivation. It aims to address a central problem in democratic theory: namely, how can and ought we motivate the (racially) oppressed to engage in civil disobedience or, as King called it, nonviolent direct action. King’s answer is that we must appeal to the political emotions, both positive and negative. In this chapter, I discuss how rational and legitimate fear can stand in the way of political action and how King hoped to overcome this kind of fear through fearlessness. I also discuss the relevance of King’s ideas to the current political situation in the US.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Friday, March 25. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Meena Krishnamurthy
Philosophy
Queen’s University

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Édouard Glissant’s Sense of Space

Don Deere
Wesleyan University

Host:

Benjamin P. Davis
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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The Right to Hunger Strike

Hunger strikes are prohibited and repressed in prison, despite human rights advocates’ insistence that incarcerated persons have a right to hunger strike. Physicians and medical ethicists generally ground the right to hunger strike in the right to refuse medical treatment. Lawyers and legal scholars defend hunger strikers’ free speech rights. Philosophers might view the right to hunger strike as an application of the moral right to civil disobedience. All three models of the right to hunger strike are theoretically defective; they misrepresent the hunger strike and fail to properly account for why incarcerated persons resort to hunger strikes in the first place. I put forth the remedial and constructive models as alternative, complementary models of the right to hunger strike. On the remedial model, the right to hunger strike should be recognized and legally protected as a right to petition for redress, given incarcerated persons’ vulnerability to abuse and prisons’ inadequate grievance mechanisms. The constructive model derives the right to hunger strike from the right to resist oppression and stresses the normative permissibility and transformative potential of the use of coercive tactics to defend one’s freedom and self-determination in context of carceral oppression.

► please register here

Candice Delmas
Philosophy of Religion and Political Science
Northeastern University

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The Long Emancipation: Readings, Reflections & Provocations

This gathering brings together scholars in a thoughtful conversation about Rinaldo Walcott’s The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Duke 2021). Reflecting on the question of “freedom” in relation to what Walcott terms “BlackLife” we shall engage in reflective readings and dialogue to carve pathways for a more just and livable world.

The format is a reflective conversation wherein each speaker will select and recite a passage from an inspiring chapter from the book and offer their reflections on how the book sets new directions for their own practice in Black studies. Moderated by Dr. Christopher Smith, Research Associate – Centre for Ethics, Race Ethics + Power Project

After the presentations (15 min each) we will have a conversation among ourselves, followed by Rinaldo’s response. We will close the event with a Q&A.

► This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 4pm, Thursday, March 17. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other C4E events, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► please register here

Rinaldo Walcott
Women & Gender Studies Institute, UofT

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Duke 2021) and On Property (Biblioasis, 2021) which was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award.

Warren Crichlow
Dept. of Education, York University

Warren Crichlow is Associate Professor at York University Toronto, Canada where he teaches cultural studies and education. He is a co-editor of Race, Identity and Representation in Education, Routledge, 1993 & 2005; Toni Morrison and the Curriculum (Cultural Studies, 1995) and Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020), and a co-editor of Unsettling Complacency: Hope and Ethical Responsibility in the Writing of W. G. Sebald (Routledge, forthcoming).

Sarah Stefana Smith
Dept. of Gender Studies, Mount Holyoke College

Sarah Stefana Smith is a visual artist and scholar. Smith currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Smith received a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (2016) and MFA from Goddard College (2010). Their research examines the intersections of visuality, queerness and affect in Black art and culture. Smith has published in the Black Scholar, Women & Performance, and South Atlantic Quarterly to name a few. Smith is currently working on their book project, Poetics of Bafflement: Aesthetics of Frustration. For more information, visit: www.sarahstefanasmith.com.

W. Chris Johnson
Women & Gender Studies Institute, UofT

W. Chris Johnson is an assistant professor in the Women & Gender Studies Institute and Department of History at the University of Toronto. His teaching and writing explore Black feminist genealogies and transnational histories of gender and Black liberation.

Co-sponsored by:

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Increasing Dversity in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: A Model of Student Persistence

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are powering the applications we use, the decisions we make, and the decisions made about us. We have already seen numerous examples of what happens when these algorithms are designed without diversity in mind: facial recognition algorithms, recidivism algorithms, and resume reviewing algorithms all produce non-equitable outcomes. As Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) expand into more areas of our lives, we must take action to promote diversity among those working in this field. A critical step in this work is understanding why some students who choose to study ML/AI later leave the field. In this talk, I will outline the findings from two iterations of survey-based studies that start to build a model of intentional persistence in the field. I will highlight the findings that suggest drivers of the gender gap, review what we’ve learned about persistence through these studies, and share open areas for future work.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, March 16. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Sharon Ferguson
Industrial Engineering
University of Toronto

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The Coloniality of Data Work for Machine Learning

Many research and industry organizations outsource data generation, annotation, and algorithmic verification—or data work—to workers worldwide through digital platforms. A subset of the gig economy, these platforms consider workers independent users with no employment rights, pay them per task, and control them with automated algorithmic managers. This talk explores how the coloniality of data work is characterized by an extractivist method of generating data that privileges profit and the epistemic dominance of those in power. Social inequalities are reproduced through the data production process, and local worker communities mitigate these power imbalances by relying on family members, neighbours, and colleagues online. Furthermore, management in outsourced data production ensures that workers’ voices are suppressed in the data annotation process through algorithmic control and surveillance, resulting in datasets generated exclusively by clients, with their worldviews encoded in algorithms through training.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, March 9. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Julian Posada
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto

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Teens have different attitudes toward AI. Some are excited by AI’s promises to change their future. Some are afraid of AI’s problems. Some are indifferent. There is a consensus among educators that AI is a “must-teach” topic for teens. But how? In this talk, we will share our experiences and lessons learned from the Imagine AI project, funded by the National Science Foundation and advised by the Center for Ethics (C4E). Unlike other efforts focusing on AI technologies, Imagine AI takes a unique approach by focusing on AI ethics. Since 2019, we have partnered with more than a dozen teachers to teach hundreds of students in different classrooms and schools about AI ethics. We tried a variety of pedagogies and tested a range of AI ethics topics to understand their relative effectiveness to educate and abilities to engage. We found promising opportunities, such as short stories, as well as tensions. Our short stories are original, centering on young protagonists, and contextualizing ethical dilemmas in scenarios relatable to teens. We will share what stories are more engaging than the others, how teachers are using the stories in classrooms, and how students are responding to the stories.

Moreover, we will discuss the tensions we identified. For students, there is a tension of balance: how can we teach AI ethics without inducing a chilling effect? For teachers, there is a tension of authority: which teacher, a social study teacher well-versed in social issues, a science teacher skilled in modern technology, or an English literacy teacher experienced in discussing dilemmas and critical thinking, would be the most authoritative to teach about AI ethics? Another tension is urgency: while teachers agree AI ethics is an urgent topic because of AI’s far-reaching influence on teens’ future, they struggle to meet teens’ even more urgent and immediate needs such as social-emotional issues worsened by the pandemic, interruption of education, loss of housing, and even school shootings. Is now really a good time to talk about AI ethics? But if not now, when? We will discuss the implications of these tensions and potential solutions. We will conclude with a call for action for experts on AI and ethics to partner with educators to help our future generations “imagine AI.”

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Tuesday, March 8. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Tom Yeh
Computer Science
University of Colorado

Benjamin Walsh
Education
University of Colorado

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An Entire World in Motion: Civil Disobedience as Decolonizing Praxis

Civil disobedience is often situated within the bounds of the democratic, constitutional state: protestors break the law in letter but appeal to its spirit by appealing to democracy’s core principles–a form of action epitomized by, and often linked to, the example of the US civil rights movement. This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists, and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit – the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, though which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and a way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Erin Pineda
Assistant Professor of Government
Smith College

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Fill the Earth and Subdue: Exploring Domination, Responsibilities and Relationships through Land Acknowledgements

Land acknowledgements have become common place for many institutions (government, schools, religious organizations).  Many look to develop one in order to contribute to reconciliation with Indigenous communities, however there are misconceptions while being developed or lack of understanding when being used.  Using Creation Stories from Christian and Indigenous perspectives, this session will explore themes of power imbalance, exploitation and responsibilities.

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Jonathan Hamilton-Diabo
Theology
University of Toronto

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Difference Centric yet Difference Transcended: The Reliance on Difference in the Ethics of AI

Developed along existing asymmetries of power, AI and its applications further entrench, if not exacerbate social, racialized, and gendered inequalities. As critical discourse grows, scholars make the case for the deployment of ethics and ethical frameworks to mitigate harms disproportionately impacting marginalized groups. However, there are foundational challenges to the actualization of harm reduction through a liberal ethics of AI. In this talk I will highlight the foundational challenges posed to goals of harm reduction through ethics frameworks and its reliance on social categories of difference.

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Mishall Ahmed
Political Science
York University

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It’s the End of the (Offline) World as We Know It: From Human Rights to Digital Human Rights – A Proposed Typology

‘The same rights that people have offline must also be protected online’ is used in recent years as a dominant concept in international discourse about human rights in cyberspace. But does this notion of ‘normative equivalency’ between the ‘offline’ and the ‘online’ afford effective protection for human rights in the digital age?

The presentation reviews the development of human rights in cyberspace as they were conceptualized and articulated in international fora and critically evaluate the normative equivalency paradigm adopted by international bodies for the online application of human rights. It then attempts to describe the contours of a new digital human rights framework, which goes beyond the normative equivalency paradigm, and presents a typology of three ‘generations’ or modalities in the evolution of digital human rights.

In particular, we focus on the emergence of new digital human rights and present two prototype rights – the right to Internet access and the right not to be subject to automated decision – and discuss the normative justifications invoked for recognizing these new digital human rights. We propose that such a multilayered framework corresponds better than the normative equivalency paradigm to the unique features and challenges of upholding human rights in cyberspace.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Tuesday, March 1. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Dafna Dror-Shpoliansky
Hebrew University
Law

Yuval Shany
Hebrew University
Law

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On James Baldwin and Black Rage

What I aim to elucidate in this talk is Baldwin’s moral psychology of anger in general, and black rage in particular, as seen in his nonfiction. I’ll show that Baldwin’s thinking is significant for moral psychology and is relevant to important questions at the intersection of philosophy of emotion, race, and social philosophy. It also has pragmatic application to present-day anti-racist struggle. Baldwin’s theoretical account of Black rage, I’ll argue, (1) dignifies Blacks by centering them as people with agential capacities and (2) provides them with a pragmatic politics of rage that is useful in the fight against white supremacy and racial injustice.

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Myisha Cherry
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of California, Riverside

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Commentator:

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Sylvia Wynter’s Caribbean Critique

In this discussion, we will examine Sylvia Wynter’s engagement with Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. This examination is our starting point for considering in detail Wynter’s early work. We will pay particular attention to Wynter’s concept of “Creole critique”—its foundations as well as what it implies for intellectual, critical, and ethical life.

Romy Opperman
New School for Social Research

Host:

Benjamin P. Davis
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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Disrupting Settler Colonial Economies Across Geographies

This talk explores the ongoing colonial violence taking place in Canada and Israel/Palestine and the practices of resistance that have been deployed to disrupt the political economies of settler colonial states. Historicizing this resurgence within a longer period (over 50 years) of anti-colonial resistance, the talk attends to the distinct historical, political-economic, and juridical formations that undergird settler colonialism in Canada and Israel/Palestine. It contends with some of the theoretical limits of the settler-colonial framework by centring analysis of the political economy which considers capitalist imperialist violence (including forced migration and labour regimes) and what this means for settler geographies. An analysis of the political economy of Israel/Palestine and Canada also demonstrates how anti-colonial resistance accelerated economic crises that led both settler states to enter into “negotiations” with the colonized (reconciliation in one case, and peace talks in the other) as a strategy to maintain capitalist settler control over stolen lands. The talk will also outline implications this has for transnational social movements today.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Chandni Desai
Critical Studies of Equity and Solidarity
University of Toronto

Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Desai has written articles on settler colonial economies, resurgent solidarities, security regimes, Palestinian oral history, cultural production, memory, and archives, published in the Journal of Palestine Studies; Race and Class; Curriculum Inquiry; Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society and several anthologies. She coedited a special issue on decolonization and Palestine for the journal Decolonization. She is the Principal Investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that explores global histories of third world internationalism through the work of cultural producers and the infrastructures of dissent and solidarity they build. She is working on her first book tentatively titled Revolutionary Circuits of Liberation: The Radical Tradition of Palestinian Resistance Culture and Internationalism. Desai is the host of the Liberation Pedagogy Podcast.

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Data You and the Challenge for Data Rights

Human rights are one of the major innovations of the 20th century. Their emergence after World War II and global uptake promised a new world of universalized humanity in which human dignity would be protected, and individuals would have agency and flourish. The proliferation of digital data (i.e. datafication) and its intertwining with our lives, coupled with the growth of AI, signals a fundamental shift in the human experience. To date, human rights have not yet grappled fully with the implications of datafication. Yet, they remain our best hope for ensuring human autonomy and dignity, if they can be rebooted to take into account the “stickiness” of data. The talk will discuss how international human rights are structured, introduce the notion of Data You, why Data You is here to stay, and how this affects notions of data rights.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Tuesday, February 15. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Wendy Wong
Political Science
University of Toronto

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Why Set a Carbon Tax Rate at the Social Cost of Carbon?

Economists typically recommend a carbon tax on the basis of the economic theory of externalities. The theoretical solution to the Pareto inefficiency caused by an externality is to set a tax on an unpriced activity at the value of the externality in equilibrium, called a Pigovian tax. Guided by this theoretical result, climate economists such as William Nordhaus (2014) use integrated assessment models (IAMs) to estimate the value of the externality generated by carbon dioxide emissions, called the social cost of carbon (SCC), with an aim of recommending an optimal carbon tax rate. This project has received significant criticism largely centred on the social discount rate embedded in the analysis. In this talk, I instead question the project of estimating the SCC on conceptual grounds. I argue that the SCC, as it is measured in a prominent IAM, is more akin to a productivity externality than a Pigovian externality. This implies that the theoretical justification for recommending a carbon tax rate to be set at the social cost of carbon does not hold in this context. Even if there were a consensus among climate economists on the best estimate of the value of the SCC, it would still not indicate the ‘correct’ or ‘optimal’ carbon tax rate. I conclude this talk by discussing implications of this result, both for climate policy and for debates surrounding the social discount rate.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, February 9. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Rebecca Livernois
Centre for Ethics Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Philosophy
University of Toronto

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Kelly Hannah-Moffat
University of Toronto
Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and Sociology
Vice-President, People Strategy, Equity and Culture

co-sponsored by:

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Hip-Hop Futurities: Riddims, Resistance, Reading

This dialogue brings together emerging and established scholars to imagine the radical trajectories of Black diasporic cultural production in/through Canada. How has contemporary hip-hop studies scholarship, fostered not solely by centering Canada, but by emphasizing the diasporic circuits that enabled the form to emerge on a global scale?  How do Black expressive forms such as hip-hop in Canada offer a different critical lens to comprehend global anti-blackness?

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Mark V. Campbell
Music and Culture
University of Toronto Scarborough

Huda Hassan
Women and Gender Studies
University of Toronto

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Hospitality and Hostility: Rethinking Possibilities of Hosting Foreign Pigeons in South Asia

In this talk, I ask what it means for a pigeon “to come from abroad” in politically and economically transforming circumstances in South Asia and how mutually shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a pigeon arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited spy. I explore the rooted, albeit waning, Punjabi value of hospitality, usually summarized in a Punjabi phrase, jee aya nu (welcome, or yes to all who arrive), and consider its co-existence with hostility, or an attitude of inhospitability to the more-than-human visitor at home. I suggest that hospitality and hostility are unified as well as separate cultural values that have distinct cultural roots and generally operate through the structure of reciprocity. This develops the first part of my argument and leads me to suggest that the disappearance of reciprocity breaks the norm of hospitality and hostility, and diminishes pre-existing relationality. In the second part of my argument, I engage in conversation with the ethical writings of philosopher Jacques Derrida, a Punjabi poet Waris Shah, and philosopher Jonardon Ganeri, and suggest that the absence, instead of the presence, of reciprocity in hospitality and hostility initiates novel relatedness and provides a way to structure the ethic of unconditional hospitality.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Muhammad Kavesh
Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology
University of Toronto

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Algorithmic Policing Policies through a Human Rights and Substantive Equality Lens: The Case of the TPSB AI Policy

This panel will discuss Citizen Lab and LEAF’s collaborative submission to the Toronto Police Services Board’s public consultation on its draft policy for AI use by the Toronto police with the three co-authors of the submission. The submission made 33 specific recommendations to the TPSB with a focus on substantive equality and human rights. The panelists will discuss some of those recommendations and the broader themes identified in the draft policy.

Kristen Thomasen
Law, University of British Columbia

Suzie Dunn
Law, Dalhousie
LEAF

Kate Robertson
Markson Law
Citizen Lab

co-sponsored by:

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Kimberley Brownlee
Philosophy
University of British Columbia

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The Ethics of Central Bank Digital Currency

No one has any doubt that the future of the economic system is digital. Central banks worldwide worry that the rising popularity and adoption of cryptocurrencies and other means of payments, and new financial instruments, pose a risk to early fintech adopters and the economy at large. As an alternative, most central banks worldwide, led by the Bank of International Settlements, consider the issuance of a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) – the digital form of a country’s fiat money. A CBDC differs from existing cashless payment forms such as card payments and credit transfers: it represents a direct claim on a central bank rather than a financial obligation to an institution.

The digital nature of the transactions, together with algorithms, AIs, and the vast amount of data that such a system produces can lead to many advantages: money supply, interest rates, and other features of the system, are expected to be automatically aligned with the monetary policy to achieve financial stability. In addition, tracking digital money routes reduces the ability to launder money, hide payments for illegal activities, and make it harder to evade taxes (and easier to accurately and automatically collect them).

As with any promising technology, this digital manifestation of money has a dystopian side, too. In this presentation, I focus on identifying the ethical concerns and considerations – for individuals and the democratic society. I will describe how data from such a system can lead to unjust discrimination, how it enables surveillance in its utmost sense, how social developments are at risk of being stalled, and how such technology can encourage self-censorship and cast a shadow over the freedom of expression and association.

I’ll end with normative recommendations. System designers, developers, infrastructure builders, and regulators must involve civic organizations, public experts, and others to ensure the representation of diverse public interests. Inclusion and diversity are the first lines of defence against discrimination and biases in society, business, and technology.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Tuesday, January 18. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Ori Freiman
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics of AI
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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This conversation discusses Nyong’o’s chapter ‘Black Humanitarianism’ in the 2014 volume Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy. We will focus on Nyong’o’s reading of Gilroy’s ‘critical sympathy’ with human rights and humanitarian projects as well as his suggestion that abolitionism can be understood as a human rights campaign.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Tavia Nyong’o
African-American Studies
Yale University

Host:

Benjamin P. Davis
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto

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Race, Ethics, and Intersectional Social Justice in Kinesiology

Kinesiology is a discipline that relies on colonial, scientific understandings of health and the moving body. In addition, ethics courses in Kinesiology predominantly draw from Eurocentric philosophies and legal paradigms. In this talk, however, I draw from a new model of ethics that adds a greater emphasis on decolonial praxis and intersectional social justice. This process of decolonizing Kinesiology ethics requires accounting for colonial and racist legacies in curricula and acknowledging the power relations sustained by White, patriarchal, ableist, capitalist systems. This presentation will detail the Decolonizing Kinesiology Ethics Model and highlight how teaching and learning in Kinesiology can adopt an ethical, anti-racist stance.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Janelle Joseph
Kinesiology and Physical Education
University of Toronto

Dr. Janelle Joseph is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education with 22 years of experience in university teaching and award winning research including three books. Her most recent book is titled Sport in the Black Atlantic, Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean Diaspora. She is currently working on a multifaceted theoretical, empirical and auto-ethnographic project on experiences within Black Physical cultures such as kizomba, vogue, capoeira and soca and experiences of Black women and girls in basketball, running, surfing, and gymnastics. Her qualitative research focuses decoloniality and critical race studies. Dr Joseph is the former Director of Academic Success at the University of Toronto and the former Assistant Director of the Transitional Year Programme. Her community work spans extracurricular educational programs for Black children and anti-racism pedagogy for organizations such as Jays Care Foundation, Hockey Diversity Alliance, Coaching Association of Canada, and Ontario University Athletics.

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Indigenous Feminisms and Relational Rights

This paper considers the struggles of Indigenous women against the historic violation of their rights to belong to their communities in Canada, to argue that Indigenous women have developed unique formulations of relational rights, rooted in and oriented toward the grounded normative ideal of relationality. Indigenous women’s struggles for rights to full inclusion in their communities have developed through critique of the discourse of self-determination as only the right of noninterference, and through critique of discourses of abstract individual rights and equal gender rights within the colonizing state. Working both with and against these discourses, Indigenous feminist theorists and activists have formulated unique understandings of the right to have rights, understood as rights to participate in relations of responsibility for the wellbeing of individuals and communities. These rights are rooted in conceptions of rights to land not as property rights but as rights to responsibility for land. Against the assumption of a binary opposition between rights claims and decolonial politics, Indigenous feminist formulations of rights have been central to the politics of Indigenous resurgence: to the critical revaluation of Indigenous law in struggles for individual and community wellbeing, in resistance to heteropatriarchal colonization.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Allison Weir is a Canadian social and political philosopher. She co-founded the Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia, where she was Research Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Political Thought. Before moving to Australia she was a Professor in Philosophy and in Women and Gender Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Centre for Humanities and Social Change at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is the author of Identities and Freedom (Oxford) and Sacrificial Logics (Routledge). Her newest book, Decolonizing Freedom, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

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The Rising Problem of Homelessness in Later Life: Exploring Health and Social Service Provision in Toronto

The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted health disparities in Canada’s long term care home system, and in housing and homelessness services. However, there has been less discussion on the intersecting inequalities of ageism (discrimination against individuals based on their old age) and socioeconomic inequalities (e.g. unaffordable housing & lack of government support), which result in compounding vulnerabilities. Historically marginalized groups experiencing homelessness are expected to encounter unique compounding barriers in later life, as a result of additional intersecting inequalities (i.e.  colonialism, homophobia, racism, sexism). This includes Indigenous, LGBTQ+, immigrants, and other racialized groups who are over-represented in the homeless population in Toronto, and in Canada as a whole.

As part of a Masters of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy graduate-level research project, we spoke to service providers, gathering their insights to better understand the complexities of service provision for this population. We heard many stories of hope, resilience, and like-minded people coming together to preserve dignity for older adults who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness. However, the current state of the service system is not sustainable. Service providers encounter many obstacles to providing adequate care, which can lead to burnout, further decreasing care. Meanwhile, the older adults they support are also stuck in a cycle of poverty. These systemic challenges affect some of the most vulnerable in our society – those at the intersection of age and homelessness. In this presentation, we will explore these complexities through an intersectional lens, and offer change ideas from our research.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

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The Sufi and the Sickle: Mystical Marxism in Rural Pakistan

In worlds of difference, how might certain unities be forged for liberation? This presentation pursues this question from the vantage-point of the dialectical tension between Marxism and religion. While some scholars have noted parallels between the two, philosophers of critical realism have aimed to establish a deeper equivalence between Marxism and religion. This presentation, however, considers how an equivalence may be forged by subaltern actors in the context of political struggles—how a religious Marxism might look as a theoretical and political practice. I do this by historically reconstructing the life of “Sufi” Sibghatullah Mazari, a locally influential communist from Pakistan who equated Sufism with Mao-inflected Marxism.

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Shozab Raza
PhD Candidate, Anthropology
University of Toronto

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Unlawful AI…“until proven otherwise”: The New Turn on AI Accountability from the EU Regulation and Beyond

In the last years, legal scholars and computer scientists have discussed widely how to reach a good level of AI accountability and fairness. The first attempts focused on the right to an explanation of algorithms, but such an approach has proven often unfeasible and fallacious due to the lack of legal consensus on the existence of that right in different legislations, on the content of a satisfactory explanation and the technical limits of a satisfactory causal-based explanation for deep learning models. In the last years, several scholars have indeed shifted their attention from the legibility of the algorithms to the evaluation of the “impacts” of such autonomous systems on human beings, through “Algorithmic Impact Assessments” (AIA).

This paper, building on the AIA frameworks, advances a policy-making proposal for a test to “justify” (rather than merely explaining) algorithms. In practical terms, this paper proposes a system of “unlawfulness by default” of AI systems, an ex-ante model where the AI developers have the burden of the proof to justify (on the basis of the outcome of their Algorithmic Impact Assessment) that their autonomous system is not discriminatory, not manipulative, not unfair, not inaccurate, not illegitimate in its legal bases and in its purposes, not using unnecessary amount of data, etc.

In the EU, the GDPR and the new proposed AI Regulation already tend to a sustainable environment of desirable AI systems, which is broader than any ambition to have “transparent” AI or “explainable” AI, but it requires also “fair”, “lawful”, “accurate”, “purpose-specific”, data-minimalistic and “accountable” AI.

This might be possible through a practical “justification” process and statement through which the data controller proves in practical terms the legality of an algorithm, i.e., the respect of all data protection principles (that in the GDPR are fairness, lawfulness, transparency, purpose limitation, data minimization, accuracy, storage limitation, integrity, accountability). This justificatory approach might also be a solution to many existing problems in the AI explanation debate: e.g., the difficulty to “open” black boxes, the transparency fallacy, the legal difficulties to enforce a right to receive individual explanations.

Under a policy-making approach, this paper proposes a pre-approval model in which the Algorithms developers before launching their systems into the market should perform a preliminary risk assessment of their technology followed by a self-certification. If the risk assessment proves that these systems are at high-risk, an approval request (to a strict regulatory authority, like a Data Protection Agency) should follow. In other terms, we propose a presumption of unlawfulness for high-risk models, while the AI developers should have the burden of proof to justify why the algorithms is not illegitimate (and thus not unfair, not discriminatory, not inaccurate, etc.)

The EU AI Regulation seems to go in this direction. It proposes a model of partial unlawfulness-by-default. However, it is still too lenient: the category of high-risk AI systems is too narrow (it excludes commercial manipulation leading to economic harms, emotion recognitions, general vulnerability exploitation, AI in the healthcare field, etc.) and the sanction in case of non-conformity with the Regulation is a monetary sanction, not a prohibition.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Frank Pasquale
Law
Brooklyn Law School

Gianclaudio Malgieri
Law & Technology
EDHEC Business

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The (Non)Automatability of Equity

We are in the midst of ongoing debate about whether, in principle, the enforcement of legal rules—and corresponding decisional processes—can be automated. Often neglected in this conversation is the role of equity, which has historically worked as a particularized constraint on legal decision-making. Certain kinds of equitable adjustments may be susceptible to automation—or at least, just as susceptible as legal rules themselves. But other kinds of equitable adjustments will not be, no matter how powerful machines become, because they require non-formalizable modes of judgment. This should give us pause about all efforts toward legal automation, because it is not clear—or even conceptually determinate—which kinds of legal decisions will end up, in practice, implicating non-automatable forms of equity.

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Kiel Brennan-Marquez
University of Connecticut
Associate Professor of Law
Faculty Director of the Center on Community Safety, Policing and Inequality

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Germs of Rot: Colonialism, Culture, and Immigrant Mental Health Discourse

In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.” In exploring how contemporary mental health discourse continues to perpetuate colonial ideals, I will use a case study about the relationship Sikh Canadians have with alcohol wherein community members argue that Panjabi culture promotes the consumption of alcohol while Sikhi prohibits it. I will unravel this binary through an exploration of the racialization of culture, internalized colonialism, and power.

Looking more broadly towards popular discourse around mental health within larger South Asian diasporas, although there has been a growing urge to “normalize” conversations about mental health and create “culturally competent” resources for racialized communities, these resources continue to rely on and perpetuate colonial tropes that paint white communities as progressive and forward thinking and racialized communities as inherently and reprehensibly flawed and backwards. I will argue that much of South Asian mental health discourse functions from a deficit-based model, where there appears to be a clear monolithicizing, mythologizing, and infantilizing of immigrant parents which functions to recreate colonial hierarchies wherein the child of immigrants (creator of this discourse) has become the colonizer, the holder of the “correct” knowledge. In conclusion, I will propose key considerations for what decolonization can look like in practice and how we can detect and remove this rot from our minds.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Manvinder Kaur Gill is currently a SSHRC-funded Master of Social Work student at the University of Toronto where she holds a research assistantship on a project titled “Border(ing) Practices: Systemic Racism, Immigration, and Child Welfare” and is completing a clinical and research internship at Women’s Health in Women’s Hands, a community health centre providing primary healthcare to Black Women and Women of Colour from Caribbean, African, Latin American, and South Asian communities in Toronto.

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Mobilization of Individuals within Radical Right-Wing Groups in Canada: Ethics of Researching Contentious Politics  

Radicalization, Extremism, Terrorism; all these words carry political baggage and are not always easy to define. Both inside and outside academia, these concepts remain contested, subjective, and up until recently, were often used to describe the actions of religiously inspired individuals and groups. While radical right-wing groups are not a new phenomenon in Canada, the topic is now gaining more attention due to recent events in the news. In this talk, I discuss the ethical issues I had to navigate while researching the mobilization of individuals within radical right-wing groups; both as a researcher who was required to treat her subjects with respect irrespective of their views, and as a person of color who was an outsider trying to understand the inner workings of this milieu.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, November 17. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Aden Dur-e-Aden
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Political Science
University of Toronto

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Every Discipline You’re Practicing Ceases to Exist: Errant Reading and Black Visual Cultures

There is a moment in Charmaine Nelson’s “The Hottentot Venus in Canada,” where she engages the Art Gallery of Toronto’s (the precursor to today’s AGO) 1927 censoring of Max Weber’s paintings for referencing Saartjie Baartman. Almost a century after the AGO’s censoring of Weber, ethnography and portraiture also bump up against each other on the AGO’s walls, in the work of Sandra Brewster. In Brewster’s Blur, we encounter portraits of Black people who are directed to move while their photo is taken. Brewster employs the technique of long exposures, resulting in portraits of swirling blurs: the flooding light from the long exposure cannot fully capture Black movement with the camera. Against the enclosure of daguerreotype, and the medical diagram, Brewster gives us opaque images of Blackness in motion. Through Brewster and Nelson as a starting point, this talk engages how Black visual cultures call for errant reading practices where, after Sylvia Wynter, “every discipline you’re practicing ceases to exist.”

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Thursday, November 4. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer engaging Black Studies and related cultural production. Her writing is featured in Real Life, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. Maandeeq is currently a PhD student in English and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholar.

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Between Persuasion and Coercion: Protest as Holding Accountable

In this talk, I argue that understanding forceful protest as a form of holding others accountable allows us to see how forceful protest can be neither persuasive nor coercive. As a result, I contend, this view of protest allows us to resolve some troubling justificatory questions facing forceful protest. I begin by presenting two parallel problems in political and moral theory, respectively. The first is the problem of coercive protest. Philosophical writing on civil disobedience often responds to a tension between the force of protest and respect for one’s fellow citizens. Contemporary protest movements often make use of forceful tactics, such as in blockades. But the language of force can evoke worries about coercion or of forcing one’s views on others. The second is the problem of sanctioning. On one hand, holding others accountable often involves sanctioning them—treating them harshly to get them to change their behaviour. On the other, moral philosophers often claim that viewing others as responsible agents requires that we reason with them, rather than train or manipulate them. But sanctioning might seem more like manipulation than reasoning.

I use these problems to motivate a view of holding accountable that presents a solution to both. Sanctions, on this view, are not a form of reasoning, but are reasons-structured. Properly sanctioning requires that we endorse the moral claims we uphold, and that we care about the ones we sanction changing their behaviour for the right reason. I contend that sanctioning is thus compatible with respect for others as rational agents. I then extend this account to offer a similar solution to the first problem: forceful protest can involve the symbolic imposition of sanctions which, although forceful, is nevertheless reasons-structured and so compatible with respect for one’s fellow citizens.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Henry Krahn
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Philosophy
University of Toronto

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Automating Care, Manufacturing Crisis

Artificially intelligent agents that provide care for human beings are becoming an increasing reality globally. From disembodied therapists to robotic nurses, new technologies have been framed as a means of addressing intersecting labour shortages, demographic shifts, and economic shortfalls. However, as we race towards AI-focused solutions, we must scrutinize the challenges of automating care. This talk engages in a two-part reflection on these challenges. First, issues of building trust and rapport in such relationships will be examined through an extended case study of a chatbot intended to help individuals quit smoking. Second, the institutional rationale for favouring machine-focused solutions over human-focused ones will be questioned through the speaker’s concept of crisis automation. Throughout, new equitable cybernetic relationships between those provisioning and receiving care will be platformed.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Mathew Iantorno
iSchool
University of Toronto

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The Golem and the Game of Automation

Norbert Wiener, a foundational force in cybernetics and information theory, often used the allegory of the Golem to represent the ethical complexities inherent in machine learning. Recent advances in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) deal explicitly with problems laid out by Wiener’s earlier writings, including the importance of games as learning environments for the development of AI agents. This talk explores issues from contemporary machine learning that express Wiener’s prescient notion of developing a “significant game” between creator and machine.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Avery Slater
English
University of Toronto

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(Call Me Something Other than ‘Stranger’) Call Me ‘Human’/’Life-Form’/’Kin’: Notes on Black Queer Diasporic Intimacies

The centuries-long theft of black folks from the African continent to various sites in the Americas disrupted the formation of familial structures among enslaved peoples. Atlantic enslavement, to echo Rinaldo Walcott, also created conditions that fundamentally challenged what relationality can look like (TVO Docs 2009). This paper builds on Walcott’s argument to examine how black queer sociality opens up space for more capacious forms of connection. I begin with a name and the process of naming as a point of departure for thinking through how black queer folks come to understand family and belonging. I then consider how black queer folks negotiate heteropatriarchal definitions of kinship through redefinition and refusal. I argue that black queer diasporic forms of relationality allow black folks to breathe through touch. In closing, I suggest that contact during the event of Atlantic enslavement was instructive for developing a knowledge system that allows black folks to survive under conditions of violence.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Cornel Grey is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Women & Gender Studies Institute and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH), University of Toronto. His doctoral research examines how black queer men enact kinship and intimacy through physical touch. Cornel works through the tensions of skin-to-skin touch as a form of medicine for black queer folks and as the occasion of violence against the black body. Using public health as a point of departure, Cornel’s research considers how black queer socialities challenge us to think differently about questions of risk, breath, health, and relationality. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at DLSPH, Cornel is currently examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the social and sexual lives of gay, bisexual and queer men.

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Hannah Arendt’s Right to Have Rights in the American Context

To interpret the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the right to have rights’ in the context of the Americas, I look to the Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who argued for the priority of land rights for Indigenous nations. Following Mariátegui, I argue that the first ‘right’ in Arendt famous phrase, the right on which other rights are based, should be understood in the American context as a right to land.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Benjamin P. Davis 
Centre for Ethics Postdoctoral Fellow
Philosophy
University of Toronto

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Join us for the return of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Juliet Palmer‘s music has come to life under a highway off-ramp, in a swimming pool, in the plastic flotsam of a remote beach and in concert halls across North America, Europe and Oceania. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Juliet makes her home in Toronto where she is artistic director of Urbanvessel, a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Juliet was composer-in-residence at the New Zealand School of Music and Orchestra Wellington (2011/12), and an OAC Artist-in-Residence at Sunnybrook Research Institute (2018). She is the winner of the Detroit Symphony’s Elaine 2018 Lebenbom Award, a Chalmers Arts Fellow (2018-19), and finalist for the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize (2019). Juliet holds a PhD in composition from Princeton University and an M.Mus in performance, composition and time-based art from Auckland University.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

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Inventing the Asian Community: The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival as Discourse and Collective Performance

This talk will examine how the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival constructs an imagined Asian community and how spectators of the festival perform their cultural identities at screenings and on social media. By screening films from some Asian nations and diasporas and not others, and by screening a disproportionate number of films by East Asian filmmakers and North American filmmakers of East Asian heritage, Reel Asian’s programming selections imply that some Asian societies are more oriental than others and posit certain essentialized cultural practices associated with those societies as being emblematic of the Orient as a whole. At screenings and on social media, spectators actively position themselves either as insiders who identify with the Orient or as westerners who imaginatively project themselves into an oriental culture through an act of sympathetic understanding. Through an analysis of Reel Asian, this talk will demonstrate how identity-based film festivals function as sites where an imagined community becomes visible to itself and to the general public for a short period of time.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, October 7. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Michael Sooriyakumaran is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His writing has appeared in Asian Cinema, Frames Cinema Journal, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, and Offscreen.

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Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé: “Sacred Space” as Political Sanctuary and Political Agency

Moolaadé (2004), Ousmane Sembène’s final film, crowned an astonishing sequence of feature films that began in 1966 with Black Girl (La Noire de…). Perhaps the most successful realization of his activist conception of cinema, Moolaadé may also be his most deceptively complex film. A Jula/Bambara word, moolaadé can be translated appositely either as “sanctuary” or as “sacred space”. Translating it as “sanctuary” does not fully convey in English the inviolability of the mooladé, its standing as a sacred space, standing out from and against the profane spaces that surround it. In Moolaadé, this standing is owed to a pre-colonial, animistic tradition of belief that is interwoven with the founding history of the people whose contemporary descendants inhabit the secluded Burkino Faso village in which the film is set. The characters in the film are as unhesitating in their acknowledgment of its inviolability as they are fearful of its disruptive power. This is because the mooladé is no passive entity, internally limited to sheltering those inside its protective space. It possesses an uncontainable, vexatious agency of its own.

Its significance is reducible neither to a narrative device that initiates a story of heroic resistance to the practice of female genital cutting nor to a troublesome remnant of a pre-Islamic African “religion” in conflict with Islam. Indeed, the moolaadé does not fit comfortably on either side of the sacred/profane or secularism/religion binaries. Rather, it exposes their conceptual limits by incarnating the fluidity, revisability, and permeability of the spatial boundaries that putatively wall off the sacred from the profane. But much more than that, the moolaadé emancipates spaces “occupied” through colonial dispossession and forced conversion, refiguring them in the name of a utopian and transformative aspiration: to bring about once and for all “not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise of the colonized” (Frantz Fanon). As a consequence, Sembène’s complexly creative reinterpretation of the moolaadé as both a political sanctuary and political agency compels us to rethink how we understand sacred space, and what we understand the sacred to be.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Nikolas Kompridis
Centre for Ethics Visiting Scholar
Philosophy

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Legal Prediction and Calcification Risk

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) to the law has enabled lawyers and judges to predict – with some accuracy – how future courts are likely to rule in new situations. Machine learning algorithms do this by synthesizing historical case law and applying that corpus of precedent to new factual scenarios. Early evidence suggests that these tools are enjoying steady adoption and will continue to proliferate in legal institutions.

Though AI-enabled legal prediction has the potential to significantly augment human legal analyses, it also raises ethical questions that have received scant coverage in the literature. This talk focuses on one such ethical issue: the “calcification problem.” The basic question is as follows: If predictive algorithms rely chiefly on historical case law, and if lawyers and judges depend on these historically-informed predictions to make arguments and write judicial opinions, is there a risk that future law will merely reproduce the past? Put differently, will fewer and fewer cases depart from precedent, even when necessary to achieve legitimate and just outcomes? This is a particular concern for areas of law where societal values change at a rate faster than new precedents are produced. This talk describes the legal, political and ethical dimensions of the calcification problem and suggests interventions to mitigate the risk of calcification.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Abdi Aidid
Law
University of Toronto

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Join us for the return of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Joshua Pilzer
Faculty of Music
University of Toronto

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Join us for the return of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Toronto composer James Rolfe has been commissioned and performed
by soloists, ensembles, orchestras, choirs, theatres, and opera companies in
Canada, the USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Among his awards
are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the K. M. Hunter Music Award, the Johanna Metcalf
Performing Arts Prize, and the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. His operas
have been performed in Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver, Banff, Edmonton, and New York;
his most recent opera The Overcoat was premiered by Tapestry Opera with Canadian
Stage and Vancouver Opera, and was nominated for 10 Dora Awards. Two solo CDs
(raW, 2011, and Breathe, 2018, JUNO Award nomination) are available on Centrediscs.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Join us for the return of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Based in Ottawa, Chris White is a festival and event producer, radio and video host, singer-songwriter, teacher and community organizer who loves connecting people with one another through music. After working as a high school teacher and software designer, he co-founded the Ottawa Folk Festival in 1993 and served as Artistic Director for 16 years, creating an environment of celebration, collaboration, inclusion and participation. Chris produces and hosts ‘Canadian Spaces’ – Canada’s longest-running folk music radio program – on CKCU FM in Ottawa. He also provides support to ‘Welcome To My World, a weekly radio show that aims to “change the conversation about disability”. As well, he produces and hosts ‘Canadian Faces’, a live video variety show that showcases musicians and other artists from across Canada.

An accomplished songwriter, Chris led the Writer’s Bloc songwriting collective for many years, organizing events such as the Great Canadian Song-Along, an annual songwriting challenge. He also produced Gil’s Hootenanny, a May Day sing-along event featuring songs of hope and protest. He has released three albums of original songs, and also collaborated with several other musicians to record an album that explores their Afro-Métis (Black/White/Indigenous) ancestry. As a community choir leader, Chris has directed singing groups for children, newcomers, seniors, church congregations and people with dementia. Chris has presented numerous festivals, concerts and community events through his company, Folkzone, and has served on the board of several national folk music organizations. He is currently writing a memoir about his experiences in the world of music.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Join us for the return of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Laura Risk is an Assistant Professor of Music and Culture in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a graduate cross-appointment at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Her research examines the formation of musical genres and the mechanics of innovation within aural musical communities, with a focus on traditional music from Quebec. She has published articles in Ethnomusicology, MUSICultures, and Critical Studies in Improvisation, and her co-production of the CD “Douglastown: Music and Song from the Gaspé Coast” received the 2014 Mnémo Prize for documentation of Quebec’s intangible heritage. Dr. Risk is co-editor of the recent triple special issue on “Improvisation, Musical Communities, and the COVID-19 Pandemic” for the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Join us for the return of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Of Cree descent, Andrew Balfour has written a body of more than 30 choral, instrumental and orchestral works, including Take the Indian, Empire Étrange: The Death of Louis Riel, Migiis: A Whiteshell Soundscape, Bawajigaywin, Gregorioʼs Nightmare, Wa Wa Tey Wak (Northern Lights), Fantasia on a Poem by Rumi, Missa Brevis and Medieval Inuit. He has been commissioned by the Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto Symphony Orchestras, Ensemble Caprice, the Winnipeg Singers, the Kingston Chamber Choir, Tafelmusik, Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, Vancouver Chamber Choir, Luminous Voices and Camerata Nova, among many others. His works have been performed and/or broadcast locally, nationally and internationally.

Andrew is also the founder and Artistic Director of the innovative, 14-member vocal group Camerata Nova. Founded in 1996, Winnipeg-based Camerata Nova presents an annual concert series as well as special performances. With CamerataNova, Andrew specializes in creating “concept concerts” (Wa Wa Tey Wak (Northern Lights), Medieval Inuit, Chant!, Tricksters and Troubadours ) exploring a theme through an eclectic array of music, including new works, arrangements and innovative inter-genre and interdisciplinary collaborations. Andrew is passionate about music education and outreach, particularly in schools located in low-income areas of Winnipeg and northern communities. Since 2008 he has worked on behalf of organizations such as the National Arts Centre, Camerata Nova, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and various Manitoba school divisions, offering young students empowering sessions in the joy and freedom of self-expression through music.
Andrew was Curator and Composer-in-Residence of the WSOʼs Indigenous Festivals in 2009 and 2010 and in 2007 received the Mayor of Winnipegʼs Making a Mark Award, sponsored by the Winnipeg Arts Council to recognize the most promising midcareer artist in the City. In 2017, Andrew was awarded the Canadian Senate artistic achievement medal.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► This event has been postponed until further notice.

The Ethics of AI in Medicine: An Interdisciplinary & International Workshop:

There is a growing literature in the ethics and philosophy of AI on one side and an already strong literature in the philosophy of medicine and medical ethics on the other side. Few attempts at bringing together the two disciplines have been made, despite many connections. The questions of bias or of transparency, for instance, have been studied in both disciplines, yet in a somewhat disjointed manner. This workshop thus aims to confront different disciplines on the topic of AI in medicine: philosophy of medicine, ethics and social sciences. The goal is to understand how conceptual and ethical issues in AI in medicine interact and may impact health.

Schedule

11am [= 8am Pacific/4pm UK/5pm Europe]
Panel 1: Uncertainty and Trust
Benjamin Chin-Yee (Medicine, Western University), AI, Ethics and the Quest for Medical Certainty
Paola Nicolas (Biomedical Ethics, New York Medical College), Mistrust and Fear of Replaceability in the Age of Big Data in Health Care

12pm [= 9am/5pm/6pm]
Panel 2: Explainability and Effectiveness
Juliette Ferry-Danini (Philosophy & Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto), What Is the Problem with the Opacity of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine?
Alex John London (Philosophy & Center for Ethics and Policy, Carnegie Mellon University), The Structure of Clinical Translation: Why We Need Prospective Clinical Trials of AI in Medicine

1pm [= 10am/6pm/7pm]
Panel 3: Practical Challenges
Océane Fiant (Centre François Viète, Université de Nantes), The Deployment of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: A Perspective Based on the Study of the Use of a Decision Tree for the Diagnosis of Pulmonary Embolisms in Emergency Medicine
Niccolo Tempini (Data Studies, University of Exeter & Alan Turing Institute), Practical Considerations for Ethics Review of DS/AI Research: A Preliminary Summary of Challenges and Best Practices

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 11am, Friday, July 23 [= 8am Pacific/4pm UK/5pm Central Europe]. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

Ethics, Intersections, Reflections (C4E Undergraduate Research Conference 2021) 

The conference will bring together UofT students and recent graduates from across disciplines to present and discuss research on current issues, in the spirit of the C4E’s mission to explore the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life. We aim to publish a special conference symposium in the Centre’s multimedia online journal, C4eJournal. All departmental affiliations and disciplines are welcome!

➡️  Registration is required to attend this event. Register here to receive the Zoom link for the conference.

Conference Schedule

12 pm – Welcome 

Panel I Ethics in Context

12:05 – Jeffrey Ma, Rearranging Arranged Marriage in Modern India: How Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking Elucidates the Positionality of the Modern Neoliberal Subject

12:15 pm – Bailey Irene Midori Hoy, My Family’s Haunted Left Stairway: An Autoethnography on Trauma and Memory through the Lense of Haunting Studies, Japanese Folklore and Material Culture

12:25 pm Discussion

Panel II Ethics in Policy 

12:45 pm – Maliha Sarwar, It Takes a Village… Or Maybe a Lottery?: Contextualizing Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Black Americans

12:55 pm – Tsitsi Macherera, Surveillance in Higher-Education and How Campuses Can Resist

1:05 pm – Discussion 

Panel III Ethics in Theory

1:25 pm – Alex Heyman, Information Utilitarianism 

1:35 pm – Ariel LaFayette, An Existentialist Challenge to Karl Marx’s Vision of Jewish Emancipation

1:45 pm – Discussion

Speakers

Jeffrey Ma is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, having completed his undergraduate Bachelors of Arts degree with a major in History and Anthropology in 2021. He is looking forward to pursuing a J.D. at the University of Michigan Law School starting this fall. His academic interests involve topics related to the history of the Asian diaspora in North America, the history and development of cultural foodways, as well as the realities of neoliberalism and globalization in Asia. In his free time, he enjoys baking, listening to podcasts, and a variety of arts & crafts.

Bailey Irene Midori Hoy is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto. A fourth generation Japanese Canadian, she developed an interest in her community’s history while completing a history specialist. This passion, coupled with an interest in fashion, has led to work related to diaspora, feminism, and material culture. In 2020 she was a co-recipient of the Richard Lee Insights Through Asia Challenge, where she conducted research on the relationship between kimono and Japanese Canadian women, currently under review for publication in Re: locations journal. Recently, she finished her senior thesis on Japanese American Beauty Queens. Bailey is currently working as a research assistant, and helping curate an exhibit on origami for the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. Other interests include historical reenactment, stand-up paddleboarding, and bubble tea.

Maliha Sarwar (she/her) is pursuing a double major at the University of Toronto in Sociocultural Anthropology and History. Her presentation at the Ethics Intersections Reflections conference examines the institutional medical racism in the United States, and its impact on COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Black Americans. Through her research she hopes to shed light on the importance of working directly with communities to better understand intergenerational medical trauma and create long term solutions for a more equitable future. Maliha is incredibly interested in the intersection of ethics and policy, and enjoys examining contemporary global issues through a historical lens. When she’s not working, Maliha loves to take long walks through Toronto and explore new parts of the city.

Tsitsi Macherera is a recent graduate from the University of Toronto. Their research interests include black feminist thought, urban planning, and more recently surveillance studies. In her free time, she enjoys film photography, jump rope, and finding new music.

Ana Brinkerhoff is a fourth-year undergraduate student at University College. She is completing Majors in Political Science and Sociology. Her research interests include political sociology, intersectional gender studies, critical carceral studies, and unenforced policy. Ana wishes to continue her education at the graduate level in the future and hopes to conduct research on the failures of the Canadian state and how this failure reinforces societal inequalities. Ana is from Vancouver, BC and is excited to return to campus in the Fall.

Alex Heyman is a former C4E Undergraduate Fellow (2020-21) and a recent graduate from U of T (Class of 2021) with a BSc in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, plus a Philosophy minor. They have been interested in philosophy since being introduced to it by their parents in middle school, with chief interests including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. They take a consequentialist approach to ethics, and hope to help integrate ethical and safety concerns into the field of AI research in their future career. Outside of academia, they are an amateur writer of both fiction and non-fiction, as well as a hobbyist designer and programmer of retro-style video games.

Ariel LaFayette‘s research interests are in the phenomenology of religious experience and ethical debates in the philosophy of mind. She is particularly interested in how topics in the philosophy of religion can be re-interpreted to shed light on progressive solutions to contemporary ethical problems. Ariel is also an editor of Pensées Canadiennes—the national philosophy undergraduate journal, and the editor-in-chief of Noesis—UofT’s philosophy undergraduate journal. She is currently in the final year of her undergraduate degree, double-majoring in philosophy and cognitive science.

Unbound Questions / Ethical Interventions (Race, Ethics + Power Capstone Event)

This gathering brings together undergraduate and graduate fellows as well as research associates as they share their current scholarly work as part of the Race, Ethics, and Power project. As an interdisciplinary collective of researchers, the presentations offer interventions across a variety of fields of study to address ethical concerns regarding methodology and practice.

Session I: Ethical Geography and Itinerancy

Chelsey Liu, Ethics in Research: Exploring Indigeneity
My research will centre around the ethics of research in Indigenous communities, and the ways it should be conducted in order to preserve and strengthen Indigenous ecological knowledge and culture. Drawing from guidelines such as Linda Smith’s “Decolonizing Methodologies”, which uses Kaupapa Maori as an approach to culturally appropriate research protocols and methodologies, I want to evaluate the impacts of colonial research and how to de-colonialize current Indigenous ecological research conducted for extraction and the expansion of Western knowledge. When it comes to Indigenous ecological knowledge, how can extractivism occur with knowledge? How should Indigenous ecological knowledge research be conducted when considering the complex cultural layering of principles which have emerged through colonization? By engaging with various methodologies, I endeavour to explore the importance of research in establishing self-determination, legitimacy, and resistance for Indigenous peoples.

Andrew M. Thomas, Ontological Abduction: Black Geographies & Bodies as Problem of Thought within Germany
This research project is a thematic literature review of the source of and reality of anti-Black racism within present-day Germany. It explores the early sources of anti-or proto-anti-African (Black) racism that stretches back to antiquity, found in medieval cartography, in medieval literature, and within modernity’s school of thought. Specifically, it explores proto-anti-African thought or rather cartographical race or racism that Europeans projected onto the African continent and its people that continues to haunt people of African heritage in Germany.

Christopher Smith, Route Thoughts: Wandering, Intuition, Itinerancy
Itinerancy denotes various forms of movement and mobility and acquires manifold meanings through its synonyms such as “wandering,” “roaming,” and so on. In this presentation I opt for a notion of itinerancy to assemble a language to illuminate how Black queer diasporic performances of dissent disrupt and/or augment Pride festivities to offer alternate routes for Black LGBT+ communion. Thus, itinerancy or an “itinerant hospitality” enables a grammar that attends to moments of “surprise” instantiated by Black LGBT+ presence from an “elsewhere” that falls outside of and yet contests dominant historical accounts of queer liberation and its Black queer and Trans* progenitors.

Session II: Colonial Failure & Systems Analysis

Kamilah Ebrahim, The Limits of Anti-Trust Regulation: Refocusing Towards Epistemic Power
The current monopoly over data production, collection and information platforms centralizes epistemic power and the capacity to accumulate economic capital through data. At the same time this process dispossesses marginalized and racialized communities from the data they are producing. The result is a dynamic that mirrors the dispossession created through colonialism in a new form of “techno-imperialism”. Current debates surrounding monopoly structures in technology tend to focus on the economic effects rather than the epistemic consequences, this talk will refocus this conversation and consider the pros and cons of anti-trust policy solutions currently being considered in Canada.

Vasuki Shanmuganathan, Colonial Failure and Race in Paul Heyse’s Medea
In the nineteenth century, European imperialists were long used to being at a crossroad with biopolitics reshaping constructions of race, global abolitionism, and violent uprisings in the colonies. Studying debates in a post-abolitionist Germany and its literary salons and parliaments suggests ethics became central to deliberations on the conditions of racialized people albeit through the understanding of a relational and comparative approach to other imperialists.

I demonstrate how German literature contributed to writing race histories within a global narrative of race, and illustrate how works were often influenced by and compared to the Second French Empire. I examine the novella Medea (1898) and early poem Urica (1852) by German writer Paul Heyse as an example where this relational and comparative mode of ethics is seen as initially hopeful. Heyse uses this understanding as a departure point to criticize genealogies of violence against the racialized body. He does this by casting the Black woman as protagonist in both his works and living legacies of violence. Through mentions of their family lineage, children, and other modes of reading gendered bodies, the reader learns that a sense of ethics among Europeans was entangled with economic survival of imperialists and less so about the changes abolitionists long called for.

Kamilah Ebrahim is a Master of Information candidate concentrating in Human Centred Data Science at the University of Toronto. Kamilah recently graduated from the University of Waterloo with an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Economics. She is also a graduate fellow at the University of Toronto Center for Ethics where she hopes to explore her research interests in the intersection of technology and the political economies of data collection globally and locally. When Kamilah is not in class or working on her research, she enjoys finding new spots for gnocchi in Toronto.

Chelsey Liu is an undergraduate student at UofT studying Political Science, Environmental Studies, and a minor in Environmental Ethics. This year, she is an undergraduate Fellow with the Race, Ethics, and Power project. Through her position as a fellow, she hopes to broaden her knowledge and research interests on the intersectionalities between climate justice, race, and ethics, and exploring the ways that political governance and hegemonic structures of racial inequality shape societal movements. During her free time, Chelsey enjoys snacking while curled up on the couch with a good book/movie.

Dr. Vasuki Shanmuganathan is a Research Associate at the Centre for Ethics with the Race, Ethics, and Power (REP) Project. Her research is at the intersections of race, colonialism, and health. As a Research Lead with the SHADES study supported by Women’s College Hospital, she examines the impact of shadeism across racialized communities. Previously, she studied what constitutes promising care practices in Canadian Long Term Care as part of a national research team with YU-CARE at the Faculty of Health, York University. Her current project looks at concepts of race and health in the colonial context and its impact on current policies. She is also the founder of the Tamil Archive Project (TAP).

Dr. Christopher Smith (they/them) is a Research Associate at the Center for Ethics at University of Toronto with the Race, Ethics, and Power Project. They received their Ph.D. from the Dept. of Social Justice Education – Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) / University of Toronto in 2020. Their research interests reside in the productive interstices of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, Black expressive cultures and practices, Queer and Feminist Theory, including Post-Colonial and Decolonial studies.

Andrew M. Thomas (he/him) is a queer Jamaican-born Canadian settler who has lived much of his life in Canada. However, he now splits his time between Munich, Germany, and Toronto, Canada with his partner and two cats, Reds and Fats, while pursuing graduate studies in human geography at the University of Toronto, St. George. His interest spans various subjects that include, but is not limited to, Black feminist thoughts, post-colonialism, queer colour of critique, intersectionality, native studies, philosophy of knowledge, ontology, and affect theory. Through the Race, Ethics, and Power fellowship, he hopes to interrogate the ethics of understanding racism as primarily, as advanced by its advocates, as rooted in implicit bias, through which racism and racial hegemony can be dismantled through the implicit bias test, as taken up by many institutions both here in North America, and Europe. During the summers, he works as an English camp counsellor and as an ESL facilitator in Munich, Germany, working with children, teens, and adults, and where he has lived and worked for the last twelve years.

➨ please register here

★ This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on July 15, 2021. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

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► This event has been cancelled until further notice.

The Ethics of Human Rights

This international and interdisciplinary conference tackles several key questions concerning human rights today: What is the most claims to human rights can achieve? How can human rights be a starting point for making claims on the nation-state? Are human rights claims necessarily addressed to nation-states? And what alternative political visions do human rights exclude? Panels of leading anthropologists, legal theorists, political scientists, and philosophers will discuss and debate these questions. Workshop proceedings will appear in a special symposium issue of C4eJournal.net.

Preliminary Schedule

12pm [= 9am Pacific/5pm UK/6pm Central Europe]
Panel 1: Human Rights and Africa
Catherine Bolten, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
“What Counts as a Right? Formal Education, Vocational Training, and Bad Faith in Sierra Leone”
The right to education was enacted into law in Sierra Leone in 2007. This right ostensibly enabled universal access to education; in practice it codified a devaluation of vocational training, implying that apprentices have “failed” at their rights, and that artisans who train apprentices are encouraging children to “violate their own rights.” The government focused on packing children into overcrowded and under-resourced classrooms, even as they did not alter the policy that forces children to leave school when they fail their exams, and fewer than 1% of students advance to tertiary education. School dropouts often seek vocational training, however, because of the government’s narrow emphasis on formal instruction, most vocational workshops are unfunded, under-resourced, and are denied credibility as educational institutes because they are not allowed to issue paperwork certifying the qualifications of their journeymen. I argue that the emphasis on formal education—especially in an economy that relies on artisanal work and has an extremely small professional sector—reveals that “the right to education” in Sierra Leone was designed and implemented as a bad-faith imitation of the Global North. Rather than creating opportunities for people to reach their potential and recognizing the diversity of that potential, this narrow conceptualization of rights has unethically prioritized a sector that benefits only a few, exacerbating social and economic inequalities rather than overcoming them.

Ayça Çubukçu, Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights, London School of Economics
“On Afropolitanism”
In Out of the Dark Night (2021), Achille Mbembe develops the notion of Afropolitanism as he points toward new, “liberatory” models of community and humanity. In this talk, I will think with Mbembe about Afropolitanism in an effort to rethink the imperial trappings of liberal cosmopolitanism as an ethics of human rights.

1pm [= 10am/6pm/7pm]
Panel 2: State Borders and Rights
Ayten Gündoğdu, Tow Associate Professor of Political Science, Barnard College
“Border Deaths and the Crisis of Human Rights”
Borders have become increasingly lethal with the adoption of ever more restrictionist policies and technologies of immigration control. Taking its starting point from the regime of impunity surrounding migrant deaths, this paper offers a critique of existing juridico-political frameworks, including universal human rights norms, that render migrants precarious in life and in death. I mobilize the term “forced disappearances” to capture how various border control practices push migrants beyond the pale of the law, make it difficult for their families and friends to locate their whereabouts, and render their lives disposable. To the extent that domestic and international laws offer various justifications of these practices in the name of territorial sovereignty, they actively participate in making migrants invisible, or “dead,” in the eyes of the law. A form of civil death precedes migrants’ physical deaths, in other words, and it can help explain why the latter remain unaccounted for, legally and politically.

Yanilda González, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
“Democratic Participation in Policing and the Reproduction of Asymmetric Citizenship: The Contradictions of Participatory Security in São Paulo, Brazil”
This paper explores a fundamental paradox between democratic participation and policing. For some citizens, formal spaces for participation in policing can expand their citizenship rights by opening up access to the state and by fomenting government responsiveness to their demands. Yet for marginalized groups, expanded opportunities for citizen participation in policing often generates demands for repression against them, thereby contracting their citizenship rights. We contend that democratic participation in policing often engenders these contradictions, resulting in what we call asymmetric citizenship: when the expansion of rights for some citizens is achieved through the contraction of others’ citizenship rights. We propose three mechanisms by which participatory security institutions, which create formal spaces for citizen participation in policing and security, produce asymmetric citizenship: (1) by defining some groups as virtuous citizens while labeling marginalized groups as security threats; (2) by acting as gatekeeper that amplifies the voice of virtuous citizens and silences those deemed to be security threats; and (3) by articulating demands for police repression of security threats to protect the rights of virtuous citizens. We illustrate the framework through a qualitative analysis of São Paulo’s Community Security Councils, demonstrating how that expanding citizen participation in policing deepens the experience of citizenship for some by generating exclusion and police repression of marginalized segments of society. In contrast to much of the literature on participatory democracy, our analysis elucidates mechanisms through which democratic participation can reproduce, rather than ameliorate, unequal policing.

2:00pm [= 11am/7pm/8pm]
Panel 3: Human Rights and Ethical Claims
Kelly Staples, Associate Professor of International Politics, School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester
“Claiming Human Rights: Solidarity and Statelessness”
This talk will consider human rights claims in the context of stateless persons and refugees, considering both to be in the position of having to claim their human rights. The perspective on human rights which underpins the talk is a quasi-foundational one in which what it means to “claim” human rights is argued to be contingent on the relationship between claimant and community. Given the continuing role of nation-states in protecting, respecting and fulfilling human rights, the talk will first consider what might be achieved through claims on states. However, it will also attempt to de-center the state by considering the role of other sub- and supra-state communities in responding to the human rights claims of refugees and stateless persons. Given the challenges in particular of ending statelessness, this opens up an alternative vision for their emancipation and empowerment.

Benjamin Davis, Post-doctoral Fellow in Ethics, University of Toronto, Centre for Ethics
“Stuart Hall’s Use of Human Rights: An Ethics for the Left”
In developing a method for cultural studies, Stuart Hall endorsed the use of human rights. Rights claims, he suggested, are a key part of a Left vocabulary. In this talk, I develop Hall’s claim by arguing that human rights are a starting point not only for Left politics, but also for Left ethics. “The Left has rarely talked about that space in which the difference between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ is defined,” Hall maintained in his final lecture of what became Cultural Studies 1983. Human rights, I suggest, provide a secular mode for Left ethics to enter this ethical space, what Hall calls “the domain of the moral.” In addition to reading his lectures on cultural studies, I also consider his essay “Marx’s Notes on Method,” where he suggests that social phenomena can only be understood in particular contexts. Taken together, Hall’s lectures and essay present Left actors today with a way to address the traditional tension between the universal and the particular in rights claims: the vocabulary gains traction only through ethical reiterations in varying contexts.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 12pm, Friday, July 9 [= 9am Pacific/5pm UK/6pm Central Europe]. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

► This event has been postponed until further notice.

The Ethics of Architecture (OUP 2021)

Mark Kingwell
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto

Participants
Martin Bressani (McGill, Architecture)
Theresa Enright (UofT, Political Science)
Mary Louise Lobsinger (UofT, Architecture)
Thilo Schaefer (UofT, Political Science) (moderator)

The Book: The Ethics of Architecture

A lively and accessible discussion of how architecture functions in a complex world of obligation and responsibility, with a preface offering specific discussion of architecture during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

What are the special ethical obligations assumed by architects? Because their work creates the basic material conditions that make all other human activity possible, architects and their associates in building enjoy vast influence on how we all live, work, play, worship, and think. With this influence comes tremendous, and not always examined, responsibility. This book addresses the range of ethical issues that architects face, with a broad understanding of ethics. Beyond strictly professional duties – transparency, technical competence, fair trading – lie more profound issues that move into aesthetic, political, and existential realms. Does an architect have a duty to create art, if not always beautiful art? Should an architect feel obliged to serve a community and not just a client? Is justice a possible orientation for architectural practice? Is there such a thing as feeling compelled to “shelter being” in architectural work? By taking these usually abstract questions into the region of physical creation, the book attempts a reformulation of “architectural ethics” as a matter of deep reflection on the architect’s role as both citizen and caretaker. Thinkers and makers discussed include Le Corbusier, Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Rem Koolhaas, Jane Jacobs, Arthur Danto, and John Rawls.

The Series: Ethics in Context

The Ethics of Architecture is the first book in a new series, Ethics in Context, published by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, that explores the ethical dimensions of interesting, provocative, and timely questions. Written to be read, and priced to be bought, books in the series are accessible, yet provide something rigorous that stimulates thought and debate, in keeping with the interdisciplinary and inclusive vision that animates the Centre for Ethics at the interface between academic research and public discourse.

Like its institutional home, Ethics in Context takes a broad, contextual, view of ethics: not as falling within the purview of a specific discipline but as a mode of normative analysis particularly well suited for interdisciplinary and public-facing reflection.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 4pm, Wednesday, June 9. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other C4E events, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

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Transparency in the Digital Environment

Transparency has become an astonishingly popular ideal over the last couple of decades. Its traditional habitats, public law and political theory, have lost their monopoly to define it. It has globalized and spilled over to new disciplinary discourses – quite prominently, in algorithms and automation – thus becoming a well-nigh self-justificatory virtue, “the cultural signifier of neutrality.” Transparency promises that we can witness, immediately, what happens in the chambers of power, and by virtue of this witnessing, fix what needs to be fixed.

Can we, really? In the wake of post-truth politics, fake news and alternative facts, this promise needs to be reassessed. Governance uses increasingly computerized forms, automated decision-making and even machine learning, often taking place in opaque “black boxes.” At the same time, due to our online behavior, big data and even deliberate manipulation, we are pulled towards solipsistic realities: echo chambers and filter bubbles. These trends may distance us from interactive democratic deliberation, which presupposes some shared understanding of reality.

Can transparency deliver its promise in a digitalized environment? Does power hide not only from transparency but in transparency? Is it just a figurative placeholder for information release practices, or has it become a meta-discourse to assess the successfulness of those practices? To what extent is it legal, social, cultural, technical, material? These questions are important.

Algorithmic governance may not have a human understandable form to represent. What would be made visible, then?

There is a growing literature on critical transparency studies which argues convincingly that transparency is not an avenue to objective truth. Additionally, critical algorithm studies suggest, in turn, that algorithmization of our society cannot take place in a social vacuum. So far, law has not contributed much to those debates. To a large extent, it seems to subscribe quite uncritically to the realist theory of knowledge and concentrate on doctrinal analysis of freedom of information acts, or data protection law.

★ This online conference will feature contributors to a special issue, guest edited by Ida Koivisto (Law, Helsinki), in the open-access online journal Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review. ► Access the special issue here.

Schedule

10am [= 7am Pacific/3pm UK/4pm Central Europe/5pm Finland]
Panel 1: Digital Transparency Between Truth and Power
10:00 Introduction
10:05 “Transparency-Washing” in the Digital Age: A Corporate Agenda of Procedural Fetishism (Monika Zalnieriute, in absentia) (summary by Ida Koivisto)
10:10 Crafting Digital Transparency: Implementing Legal Values into Algorithmic Design
(Riikka Koulu)
10:25 The Digital Rear Window: Epistemologies of Digital Transparency
(Ida Koivisto)
10:40 Three Sides of the Same Coin: Datafied Transparency, Biometric Surveillance, and Algorithmic Governmentalities (Oana B. Albu & Hans Krause Hansen)
10:55 Discussion & Q&A

11:30am [= 8:30am/4:30pm/5:30pm/6:30pm]
Panel 2: The Promise and Perils of Digital Transparency
11:30 Algorithmic Transparency and Explainability for EU Consumer Protection: Unwrapping the Regulatory Premises (Mateusz Grochowski, Agnieszka Jabłonowska, Francesca Lagioia & Giovanni Sartor)
11:45 Notified But Unaware: Third-Party Tracking Online (Stefan Larsson, Anders Jensen-Urstad, & Fredrik Heintz)
12:00 A “Public” Journey Through COVID-19: Donald Trump, Twitter, and the Secrecy of U.S. Presidents’ Health (Mark Fenster)
12:15 Transparent Dreams (Are Made of This): Counterfactuals as Transparency Tools in ADM (Katja de Vries)
12:30 Discussion & Q&A

► please register here

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 10am, Friday, May 7 [= 7am Pacific/3pm UK/4pm Central Europe/5pm Finland]. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

Contributors:

• Oana B. Albu, Copenhagen Business School
• Mark Fenster, University of Florida, Law
• Mateusz Grochowski, Max Planck Institute for International and Comparative Private Law (Hamburg)
• Hans Krause Hansen, Copenhagen Business School
• Fredrik Heintz, Linköping University, Computer Science
• Agnieszka Jabłonowska, European University Institute
• Anders Jensen-Urstad, Dataskydd.net
• Ida Koivisto, University of Helsinki, Law
• Riikka Koulu, University of Helsinki, Law
• Francesca Lagioia, European University Institute
• Stefan Larsson, Lund University, Technology and Social Change
• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute
• Katja de Vries, Uppsala University, Law
• Monika Zalnieriute, University of New South Wales, Law & Justice

Co-sponsor:

Disembeddedness in Data Annotation for Machine Learning

What happens when data annotation and algorithmic verification occurs in a significantly deregulated market? Today, many AI companies outsource these essential steps in developing machine learning algorithms to workers worldwide through digital labour platforms. This labour market has experienced a race to the bottom environment where most of the workers are situated in Venezuela, a country experiencing a profound social, political, and economic crisis, with the world’s highest inflation rates. This talk presents preliminary findings of ongoing research to explore how the “disembededness” of this market, in which economic activity is unconstrained (or deregulated) by institutions, affects workers’ livelihoods and, ultimately, the algorithms they are shaping. The talk explores this situation through the working conditions of platform users, the composition of their local networks, and the power relations between them, ML developers, and platforms.

► please register here

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, April 28. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Julian Posada
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto

Join us for the Spring 2021 Season of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Ellie Hisama
Music and Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Columbia University

Produced and edited by Laura Menard (Music & Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto)

Ellie Hisama is Professor of Music and a member of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University, where she has taught since 2006. The author of Gendering Musical Modernism, she has published on the music of Geri Allen, Joan Armatrading, Benjamin Britten, Ruth Crawford, Julius Eastman, and DJ Kuttin Kandi. She will join the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music in July 2021 as Professor of Music and its next Dean.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Predicting Consumer Contracts with GPT-3: A Legal Case Study in Computational Language Models

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, April 14. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

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The Aesthetics of Care

In this talk, artist, scholar, and writer Ara Osterweil considers the tensions between art-making and caregiving. How does the ethical imperative to care for others conflict with the felt imperative to create? How can the constraints of caregiving be imagined anew as generative limits for more urgent and expansive ways of making art and being in the world? How has this eternal dilemma for women artists and writers been exacerbated in our current state crisis and emergency? Amidst considerations of the poems of Sylvia Plath, the paintings of Alice Neel, and the charged work of a handful of other women artists, Osterweil reflects on her own beleaguered practice as mother-artist-writer-teacher as a way of articulating the impossible necessity of an aesthetics of care.

► please register here

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, April 7. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Ara Osterweil
English
McGill University

Ara Osterweil is a writer, abstract painter, and scholar. She is also an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the English Department, as well as Director of the World Cinema Program at McGill University. Her first book, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film (Manchester University Press, 2014), examines the representation of sexuality in experimental film of the 1960s and 1970s. She writes for Artforum and has published essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Film Quarterly, Film Culture, Camera Obscura, Little Joe, Framework, The Brooklyn Rail, and Millennium Film Journal. She is currently working on two books: The Pedophilic Imagination: A History of American Film, and a collection of experimental prose entitled Stains & Fragments. You can explore more of her work here: www.araosterweil.com

Join us for the Spring 2021 Season of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Amanda Hsieh
Historical Musicology
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Produced and edited by Laura Menard (Music & Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto)

Amanda Hsieh is Research Assistant Professor of Historical Musicology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their scholarship explores categories of gender and nation and their intertwined manifestations within opera of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. While their doctoral work locates opera in the Austro-German context, their next book-length project treats opera as a transnational—and even global—phenomenon between Germany and Japan. They are the latest winner of the Jerome Roche Prize and their work has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the DAAD, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Their writing can be found in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Music & Letters. They have just been appointed as Reviews Editor of both the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the RMA Research Chronicle.

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

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Algorithmic Governance: The Promises and Perils of Government Algorithms

Governments increasingly use algorithms (such as machine learning predictions) as a central tool to distribute resources and make important decisions. Although these algorithms are often hailed for their ability to improve public policy implementation, they also raise significant concerns related to racial oppression, surveillance, inequality, technocracy, and privatization. While some government algorithms demonstrate an ability to advance important public policy goals, others—such as predictive policing, facial recognition, and welfare fraud detection—exacerbate already unjust policies and institutions. This talk will explore some of the technical, political, and institutional factors that lead to algorithmic harms and will introduce an agenda for developing and regulating algorithms in the interest of equity and social justice.

► please register here

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, March 30. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Ben Green
Postdoctoral Scholar
Michigan Society of Fellows

Why Race and Capitalism Not Racial Capitalism?

I discuss three frameworks that are designed to describe and analyze the interaction between race and capitalism. They are Cedric Robinson’s original framework of “racial capitalism;” the framework of “race and capitalism” frame adopted by me and some colleagues at the National Race and Capitalism Project; and a third category that Satnam Virdee has labeled “racialized capitalism.”  All three frameworks specify the relationship between race, (usually signifying a structural phenomenon such as systemic racism, institutional racism, and/or white supremacy), and capitalism or the capitalist social order.*  There is substantial divergence on how capital/capitalism/the capitalist social order is conceived. A key question is whether structural racism and/or patriarchy are internal to, if constitutive of a capitalist social order, or if patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism represent three systems of domination that while tightly articulated with each other still have their own internal logics (including sets of privileges, exclusions, and modes of violence specific to each).  I conclude by analyzing what is at stake, what are the critical differences and where do the family resemblances end.

* There are extensive literatures that I do not address in this chapter.  For example, as Peter Hudson and Adom Getachew have independently demonstrated, there is an extensive literature on “race and class” that emerges from the struggles in Southern Africa, the Caribbean as well as anti-racist struggles in continental Europe and the United Kingdom.  On both sides of the Atlantic, particularly during the 20^th century there was extensive discussion of the relationship between race, class, and sometimes gender by theorists such as Claudia Jones, CLR James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and later during the black power era those such as James Boggs.  These literatures are not addressed here but will be in future work. As Hudson has forcefully argued, the term seems to first have been used extensively in South Africa.  See Jenkins and Leroy, p. 4, for a specific citation of a South African theorist’s usage.

► please register here

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, March 25. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.

Michael Dawson
Political Science
University of Chicago

Pleasure and Efficacy: Techniques of Trans Feminist Criticism

“She really knows how to have a good time.” Such an assessment presupposes two premises, neither of which we conventionally take for granted: that following certain procedures will produce a good time, and that those procedures can be known in advance. In this lecture, I will explore the logical foundations of these claims, and their implications for the techniques of pleasure-giving and receiving that I take to be essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving, and the focus of both suppressive patriarchal epistemologies, and anti-trans feminist thought. Through brief and critical readings in the work of the feminist eugenicist Marie Stopes, the cult leader and science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and the anonymously published “big book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, I sketch an historiography of the “one weird trick your doctor doesn’t want you to know,”– by which feminists can create anew our own bodies, communities, and politics. In so doing, I aim to refresh Michel Foucault’s call in 1977, to “withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality,” and instead to rebuild our world with our own knowledge-practices, trained not on what satisfies, intrigues, or expresses, but on what works.

► please register here

This is an online event co-hosted by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies and the English & Drama Department at University of Toronto, Mississauga. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, March 24. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Grace Lavery
English
University of California, Berkeley

Grace Lavery is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, and general editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is the author of Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton 2020), which won the NAVSA “Best Book of the Year” prize, and of Please Miss, an experimental memoir which will be published by Seal Press in 2021. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, English Literary History, and elsewhere. She is currently completing two books––one on trans feminist rhetorics of technique, from which this lecture is drawn, and one on the problem of narrative closure in the age of the sitcom.

Co-sponsored by:

Join us for the Spring 2021 Season of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

Collegiate A Cappella: Examining the Ethics of Collegiate A Cappella Ensembles Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, March 24, 2021

Roger Mantie
Arts, Culture & Media
University of Toronto

Produced and edited by Laura Menard (Music & Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto)

Roger Mantie (PhD) is Associate Professor, Department of Arts, Culture and Media at University of Toronto Scarborough, with a graduate appointment at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Mantie is co-author (with Brent Talbot) of Education, Music, and the Social Lives of Undergraduates: Collegiate A Cappella and the Pursuit of Happiness (Bloomsbury Press), and co-editor (with Alex Ruthmann) of the Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education (2017) and co-editor (with Gareth Dylan Smith) of the Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure (2016). Complete info at rogermantie.com

► please register here

This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Édouard Glissant’s Ethics

Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The University of North Texas. His work focuses on the interconnection between history, politics, and aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean, and philosophical attempts at approaching these topics collectively. In his Ethics and Caribbean Philosophy presentation, we will discuss his recent essay “To ’stay where you are’ as a decolonial gesture: Glissant’s philosophy of Caribbean history in the context of Césaire and Fanon.”

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, March 22. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
Philosophy
University of North Texas

Transitional Legitimacy: A Framework for Theorizing Structural Racism

Structural racism is not only unjust but also undermines the legitimacy of political institutions. Legitimacy makes a weaker but prior demand to justice and refers to a political entity’s right to rule in the first place whereas justice concerns whether that rule is exercised in keeping with what subjects are owed. By analogy to the concept of transitional justice which applies to post-conflict or post-war societies, I argue that a concept of transitional legitimacy is needed for theorizing how to realize legitimate political institutions from within ill-ordered societies marked by structural racism and oppression. Theories of legitimacy by themselves are inadequate to the task because they simply specify the conditions that constitute legitimacy and operate from within an ideal theory approach that does not sufficiently account for non-ideal circumstances of oppression and domination. Taking structural racism against African Americans in the U.S. as a case study, I argue that transitional legitimacy requires the public affirmation of everyone’s equal political status (via e.g., truth commissions and legitimate apologies for past harm), the rule of law to guard against racial discrimination, the dismantling of racialized mass incarceration, de facto protection of democratic rights rather than voter suppression, and reparations for past and enduring injustices.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, March 18. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Jonathan Kwan is the Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow in Immigration Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. As a social and political philosopher, Jonathan works on contemporary issues such as immigration, climate justice, Indigenous rights, and structural racism. He also has interests in Chinese philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, and the philosophy of art. He earned his philosophy PhD and a Women’s Studies Certificate from The Graduate Center, CUNY. He has taught at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, Baruch College, and LaGuardia Community College and served as the Managing Editor of the Journal of Social Philosophy.

As part of our Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms series, the Centre for Ethics is excited to present a unique seminar event with Dr. Rey Chow and Austin Safar where they will discuss their recent co-authored paper, ‘”We Other Victorians”? Novelistic Remains, Therapeutic Devices, Contemporary Televisual Dramas.’ This seminar will take place on Wednesday, March 10th, 4-5:30pm EDT. This event will not be live-streamed, so attendees must register in advance to receive the seminar’s Zoom link. We will be capping the event at 100 participants. Please register with your name and email using this form. Attendees should also read the paper in advance of our meeting. You can find the paper here. Please contact Doctoral Fellow Amanda Greer with any questions or concerns at amanda.greer@mail.utoronto.ca.

Rey Chow
Literature
Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University

Austin Sarfan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Literature at the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. He is completing a dissertation on the postcolonial reception of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with broad research interests in literary modernism, poststructuralism, and the cultural study of the emotions.

Join us for the Spring 2021 Season of The Ethics of Songs, the Centre for Ethics YouTube series that explores the ethical dimensions of songs familiar and new! (The full schedule is available here.)

David Jager
Faculty of Music
University of Toronto

Produced and edited by Laura Menard (Music & Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto)

David Jager is a writer, musician and performer living in Toronto. He has been keyboardist for the Montreal Ska Band The Kingpins, lead singer and pianist for French Jazzy swing band Swing Dynamique, and was musical director and arranger for the Toronto avant-burlesque troupe The Scandelles. David shifted to composition with his original musical “Get To Nomi”, about the New Wave counter tenor Klaus Nomi, which debuted at NYC’s La Mama Theatre in 2016. He currently has two additional scripts in production. David Jager recently completed his doctorate at the U of T faculty of music, addressing the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and its possible implications for music education, titled “Listening to Difference: Deleuze and Music Education”.

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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Normative Expectations

In supplementing the familiar ways that our interpersonal relationships are morally fraught, recent work in epistemology on doxastic wronging has highlighted how these relationships can be epistemically fraught as well. However, in focusing predominantly on beliefs— mental states that arguably constitute a small fraction of our mental lives—these theories have their own theoretical blindspots. In this paper, I expand the scope of analysis to expectations. Typically, we notice the failures of expectations when we’re the targets of them: when we let our loved ones down. Key indicators of normative expectations are feelings of disappointment and betrayal. Contexts in which we these feelings manifest most vividly involve parents and their hopes and dreams for our lives. Focusing on these contexts, I argue that normative expectations play three distinctive roles: a predictive role, a prescriptive role, and a proleptic role. Each role, I conjecture, comes with its own avenue for moral, epistemic, and conceptual failure. Ultimately, in precisifying the heterogeneous class of attitudes that constitute normative expectations, I reveal just how expansive the ‘doxastic’ in doxastic wronging ought be.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, March 8. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Rima Basu
Philosophy
Claremont McKenna College

Privilege, Race & Imagined Immunities* in the Time of COVID

As the COVID-19 pandemic endures into 2021 there are many ways to describe this moment such as “catastrophic”. We might also add “revelatory” to this list of descriptors. Revelatory in the sense that in moments of crisis, such as a pandemic, power structures of racial and economic inequality and inaccessibility to health care become more visible. These structures were present prior to, yet become more acute, when we consider the profile of the “good” or “responsible” citizen. But what constitutes the “bad or irresponsible citizen”? For example, individuals who ignore lockdown protocols, travel restrictions, or in recent trends wherein elites utilize power and privilege to travel and acquire a vaccine from regions with vulnerable communities? The desire to imagine the “bad citizen” is equally revelatory because in their actions an assumed social contract – perhaps founded upon an ethics of “care” has been breached or disregarded entirely. Who is empowered to do so without impunity? More importantly do crises such as a pandemic prompt us to critically question the “social contract” assumed to encapsulate an ethics of care that is seen as a collective aspiration and practice, but enacted differently?

*Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke UP (2008)

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, March 5. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Ricky Varghese
Gender, Disability, and Social Justice
Ryerson University

Ricky Varghese received his PhD in Sociology of Education from the University of Toronto. He holds the Tanis Doe postdoctoral research fellowship in Gender, Disability, and Social Justice at the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University. He will be heading a SSHRC-funded speakers’ series titled “Sex and the Pandemic: Convergences and Divergences in Queer Men’s Sexual Health in the Midst of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19” which will run from May through to October of this year. He is also a psychotherapist in private practice since 2014, and a candidate in training to become a psychoanalyst through the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Benjamin Weil
Science and Technology Studies
University College London

Benjamin Weil is a PhD candidate in the Science and Technology Studies Department at University College London. His thesis, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, is a critical inquiry into the protest of the so-called “gay blood ban” in the UK. He works at the intersection of queer and science and technology studies and is also a founding member of the Decolonise STEM collective.

What Remains: Colonial Racial Capitalism, Videogames, and an Empire in Play

As videogame designers respond to critiques of and demands for gendered and racial representations, more and more games have started to offer alternative embodiments and narratives to consider the gendered dynamics of who is imagined to design, play, and otherwise consume videogames. In a close reading of two videogames, What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow/Annapurna, 2017) and Until Dawn (Supermassive Games/Sony, 2015), Jodi Byrd will present a chapter from her next book, Indigenomicon: American Indians, Videogames, and the Strutures of Play, and discuss how the lingering imperial horror of settlement and capitalism shape how race and indigeneity are (not) legible within the stories videogames want us to inhabit through play. In requiring but not engaging settlement as a structure of the sublime, the horror that both games produce ultimately obscures US settler imperialism shaped through what Iyko Day terms alien capital and in the process flattens indigeneity into the environments and atmospheres of each game’s denouement of families unable to survive and grieve.

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Associate Professor of English and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Byrd is the author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and their work has appeared most recently in Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and in Joanne Barker’s Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Duke UP, 2017).

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, March 3. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Jodi Byrd
Illinois
English & Gender and Women’s Studies

Unnatural Feelings: The Affective Life of ‘Anti-Gender’ Mobilisations

This paper explores the spatio-temporal and affective tricks that are central to the success of current, transnational ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations. In these increasingly powerful movements (in Europe, the US, and Latin America in particular) gender equality is presented as needing to be tempered by the ‘common sense’ of ‘sex’ over ‘gender, as a way of resisting the destructiveness of both a feminism gone too far, and the reactionary cultural patriarchalism of the interloper. The focus here is on the affective life of anti-‘gender ideology’ claims, as a way of trying to short-circuit efforts to displace violence onto feminist, queer or migrant others. I explore the ‘anti-gender’ logic of the privileging of ‘sex’ as natural and complementary as precisely the locus of aggression, and make a claim for the importance of rooting feminist, queer and critical race approaches in anti-white supremacist affect in turn. Overall, I am interested in exploring feminist methods for undoing the misogynist, homophobic and racist fantasies of annihilation – their own and ours – as an urgent task for our troubled present.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, March 1. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Clare Hemmings
Gender Studies
LSE

Shadeism, Sexual Health, and Diasporic Women’s Experiences

Shadeism is the process by which lighter skin is equated with perceived health and social benefits. Studies suggest racialized women have an additional burden to adhere to Eurocentric beauty standards in order to be seen as employable, attractive, and socially and culturally desirable (Charles & McLean 2017; Veenstra, 2011). However, what remains to be studied is how shadeism mediates 1) priorities (gender, self-image, lifestyle, social relationships, familial networks, employment, social mobility, class, caste) leading to lightening practices; 2) the narrative of ‘looking healthy’ to be connected to lighter skin beauty; and 3) how the ethics of researching racialized communities influences which health issues are prioritized. How racialized women treat their skin reveals much about the pressures of societal expectations (Rozen et al., 2012). Through a combination of informant interviews, focus groups with arts-based activities (photo voice, oral histories (Forbear, 2016) and one-on-one interviews, this qualitative pilot project led by ASAAP first aims to examine how racialized cis and transwomen ages 16-35 from the Caribbean, South Asian, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) regions are affected by shadeism and how it impacts their sexual health. The approach will be from an anti-oppressive, Intersectional Feminist analysis, and in this talk I will call attention to the complex ways in which shadeism, gender, sex, caste, race, class, location, religion, and age inequities create societal pressure for cis and transwomen.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, February 25. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Gayathri Naganathan
General Surgery Resident
University of Toronto

Dr. Naganathan is a General Surgery Resident Physician at the University of Toronto and an alumna of McMaster University Medical School. She also holds a Master of Science in Health Services Research from the Institute for Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Her body of work includes research examining the experiences of immigrants, refugees, homeless, and racialized communities in the areas of primary care, mental health, migration, and aging. Her current interests include health policy, health equity, global health, and the application of qualitative methodology within health systems and surgical research.

Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence

Scott Benesiinaabandan and Suzanne Kite will be in conversation around their research, practice, and contributions to the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, February 24. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

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Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations.

Scott Benesiinaabandan
Anishinabe Intermedia Artist

Scott Benesiinaabandan is an Anishinaabe intermedia artist that currently works in experimental image-making and sonic materials. Scott’s current research interests are intersections of artificial intelligence and Anishinaabemowin, Scott has completed international residencies at Parramatta Artist Studios in Australia, Context Gallery in Derry, North of Ireland, and University Lethbridge/Royal Institute of Technology iAIR residency,  along with international collaborative projects in both the U.K and Ireland. Scott has completed residencies with Initiative for Indigenous Futures and AbTec in Montreal.  Scott is currently based in Montreal, where he is completing a MFA in photography.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, February 23. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Elettra Bietti
Harvard Law School

Where Are You From? The Ethical Dilemma of Writing Dis/placed

In conversation with novelist Senthuran Varatharajah, psychoanalyst Ricky Varghese explores a series of interconnected topics centering on the question: what responsibilities does a racialized writer hold through their writing? What promises cannot be made? How does trauma, remembrance, form, diasporic conditions, and theology impact living, writing, and representation for Varatharajah?

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, February 18. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Senthuran Varatharajah
Philosopher
Novelist

Senthuran Varatharajah is a novelist and philosopher based in Berlin. Varatharajah studied Philosophy, Theology and Comparative Cultural and Religious Studies in Marburg, Berlin and London. His critically acclaimed first novel, Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen, was published in 2016 by S. Fischer. Varatharajah received several major awards, including the 3Sat-Preis, the Kranichsteiner Literaturförderpreis, the Bremer Literaturförderpreis, the Chamisso-Förderpreis and the Rauriser Literaturpreis. His second novel Rot (Hunger) will be published in 2021 by S. Fischer.

Creolizing the Nation: Nationalism and Caribbean Philosophy

Kris Sealey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University. Her scholarship is in the areas of Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy and Decolonial Theory. In her most recent book, Creolizing the Nation, Dr. Sealey investigates how everyday practices of freedom shape both subject formation and community formation in decolonial contexts. Her book offers creolization as a conceptual tool through which such formations might be theorized and brought to bear on contemporary understandings of the nation. In her talk, we will discuss her new book.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, February 15. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Kris Sealey
Philosophy
Fairfield University

Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Premodern Critical Intersectionality

Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, in their 2013 article “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis” (Cho et al. 2013) define the tripartite structure of Intersectionality Studies as “first consisting of applications of an intersectional framework or investigation of intersectional dynamics, the second consisting of discursive debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm, and the third consisting of political interventions employing an intersectional lens” (Cho et al. 2013: 785). The first intersectional “engagement” really considers how a multi-axis, intersectional frame can help rethink specific, contextual “research and teaching projects” (Cho et al. 2013: 785). The second intersectional “engagement” addresses “theory and methodology,” and asks “whether there is an essential subject of intersectionality and, if so, whether the subject is statically situated in terms of identity, geography, or temporality or is dynamically constituted within institutions and structures that are neither temporally nor spatially circumscribed” (Cho et al. 2013: 785). This area is especially central to discussions in premodern fields because of the dynamic flux in constituting identities in different geographies and the transhistorical discussion that any work on premodern critical intersectionality must undertake. Finally, the third area addresses how intersectionality requires not just theory and methodology, but also praxis particularly in relation to politics, activism, and resistance. This talk resituates this work and then examines it in relation to the premodern archive. We demonstrate how premodern critical intersectionality should address all three areas discussed in Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall’s piece through two different medieval European case studies: St. Mary of Egypt in the Byzantine Empire and the legal documentation of Jewish women in court cases in medieval England. Of course, intersectionality is also always under construction, especially since the various identity categories we are discussing are always in flux in the premodern past. Thus, premodern critical intersectionality will also be dependent on local conditions, geographies, time periods, and group dynamics.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, February 11. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Dorothy Kim
English & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Brandeis University

“EXTREMELY BAD MONOLOGUE IN HEAD”: Failure and Form in Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Confessionals

In therapy since the age of 17, filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson had, she noted, been given a range of diagnoses over the course of her life: “adult life-crisis adjustment, anxiety, borderline psychotic, manic-depressive, obsessive.” Little documentation survives of these diagnoses; from what does survive, it seems that the diagnoses most consistently made were that of bipolar depression, and of schizoaffective disorder. Her magnum opus Five Year Diary (1981-1998), a multi-modal diary project that includes a forty-hour long Super 8-diary film, at different instances both facilitated her obsessive states of delusion and became a tool for pushing back against the nonsensical. In this talk I am interested in how Robertson employed particular formal devices to make sense of her illness to herself, but also, in an expanded manner, to make sense of her illness to others. She did so through her use of the close-up, in a register of confessional sequences that proliferate throughout the latter part of the film; and through an incorporation of the failure of her apparatus into a larger conversation about the failure of her body. Throughout this analysis I position Robertson’s interventions against the backdrop of the larger history of women’s psychiatric profiling and its capture on camera.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, February 10. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Dr Anjo-marí Gouws is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University. She is working on a monograph titled Recording the Work of a World: Anne Charlotte Robertson and the Domestication of Cinema.

The Productivity of Mistrust: The Ethics of Development Partnerships in Ghana

Trust has been a central tenet of foreign aid for decades, resting on the notion that trust-building will foster the right kind of social relations for development. Expectations on the need to build trust are associated with requirements to work through partnerships with government and private companies for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Ghana. This presentation explores how Ghanaian NGOs experience the growing expectation that they work through an ethics of trust and the ways that they affirm, negotiate, and contest collaborations. This research draws on data collected during fifteen months of participant observation and in-depth interviews with national NGOs in an emerging and prominent network on the SDGs. By moving away from approaching trust as a disinterested truism and moral “good,” I identify the counterintuitive ways that mistrust is often an important ethical stance for NGO leaders in the partnerships I studied. Specifically, practices of mistrust are productive for the credibility and legitimacy of NGO-government partnerships. I illustrate how NGO leaders consider eating an “ethical thing” and that when they refuse to eat food at government events, they are publicly demonstrating an independence from government through a practice of mistrust. The perceived “uncompromised” position of NGOS is critical to the successful recognition of the NGO-government partnership by global development agencies. Thus, I open up to empirical study and theoretical consideration the productive potentiality of mistrust and the counterintuitive ways that mistrust can actually be required for a successful partnership.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, February 10. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Miriam Hird-Younger
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Anthropology
University of Toronto

Combatting Anti-Blackness in the AI Community

The creation of Artificial Intelligence technologies is a communal act. As such, which ideas, people, and technologies are developed are deeply rooted in societal structures that are rarely questioned or thoroughly examined by AI researchers. This talk will focus on mechanisms within the AI community that perpetuate or amplify Anti-Blackness, both within our community and our greater societal structures. From research agendas and funding sources to collaborations and job opportunities, there are countless places where inequality manifest within our community. In addition to describing where and how Anti-Blackness occurs this talk will share lessons learned from community organizing within the AI community and describe some immediate steps that can be taken to build a more just community.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, February 9. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Devin Guillory
Computer Science
UC Berkeley

More specifically these troublings with race become particularly clear in discussions of the nations’ contentious relation with Blackness. When it comes to Blackness in Canada national historical narratives tend to “render these racial geographies invisible, and many people continue to believe that any black presence in Canada is a recent and urban one spawned by black Caribbean, and now continental African, migration” (Walcott, 43).

As such, my work explores how listening, despite often being deemed an unmediated physical act, is “an interpretive socially constructed practice conditioned by historically contingent and culturally specific value systems riven with power relations” (Stoever 14).  I ask, what disruptive possibilities exist via sound-thinking to our most conventional ways of thinking about and engaging in historical, social and political reflection of Blackness and anti-Black racism in Canada? How can listening transform the way we think about spatiality and power by tuning into “Black absented presences” (McKittrick 22), or what I call “The Black Nowhere”—which I define as a generative space that demands a nuanced understanding of black being in Canada—in order to consider how sound and forms of hearing play a crucial role in producing and policing spaces.

Ola Mohammed (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Black Popular Culture at York University, Toronto, Canada. Ola specializes in interdisciplinary research exploring Black cultural production, Black social life and Black being as sites of possibility. Her current project, The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s), examines the sonic dimension of Black social life and anti-Blackness in Canada. Ola has an extensive background in student activism, and is a founding member of the York Black Graduate Students’ Collective which advocated and worked to implement Black Studies/ Black Canadian Studies at York at the undergraduate and graduate level. Some of her key sites of research interests include: Black Popular Music, Black Studies, Sound Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performance Theory and Digital Culture.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, February 5. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Ola Mohammed
Humanities
York University

Death, Pandemic, and Intersectionality: What the Failures in an End-of-Life Case Can Teach About Structural Justice and COVID-19

The case of Jahi McMath came to national prominence in December 2013 after McMath suffered brain death following a tonsillectomy at Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland, CA. That month, the state of California issued a death certificate for McMath. On June 22, 2018, the state of New Jersey also issued a death certificate for McMath.

Public sentiment about the case not only revealed fault lines along race and religion but also about what it means to die. Implicit in how the McMath case played out, both with various institutional decision-makers and in the court of public opinion, were sensibilities about the relative value of life when viewed through the lens of race, class, and disability.

Similarly, the current COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed differing value placed on some lives due to race, class, and disability. Public opinion regarding mask mandates, ventilator allocation guidelines, and vaccine distribution plans have all, at various points, reinforced a hierarchy of whose lives mater most. Governmental and other institutional responses have also reinforced this hierarchy.

Both the McMath case and the current pandemic highlight the importance of understanding how the conceptual framework of intersectionality could guide more just decision-making in individual cases and when creating institutional and government policies to address large-scale health crises.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, February 4. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Yolonda Wilson
Health Care Ethics
Saint Louis University

Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs (Mariana Valverde & Alexandra Flynn eds., 2020)

Mariana Valverde
Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies
University of Toronto

Alexandra Flynn
Peter A. Allard School of Law
University of British Columbia

Commentators:
Beth Coleman (Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology & Faculty of Information, University of Toronto)
Renee Sieber (Geography, McGill University)
David Murakami Wood (Sociology, Queen’s University)

Moderator:
Jamie Duncan (Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto)

“Smart cities” use surveillance, big data processing and interactive technologies to reshape urban life. Transit riders can see the bus coming on a map on their phones. Cities can measure and analyze the garbage collected from every household. Businesses can track individuals’ movements and precisely target advertisements.

Google’s failed Sidewalk Labs proposal in Toronto, which drew sharp criticism over surveillance and privacy concerns, is just one of the many smart city projects which have been proposed or are underway in Canada. Iqaluit, Edmonton, Guelph, Montreal, Toronto and other cities and towns are all grappling with how to use these technologies. Some cities have quickly partnered with digital giants like Uber, Bell and IBM. Others have kept their distance. Big tech companies are hard at work recruiting customers and shaping – sometimes making – public policy on data collection and privacy.

Smart Cities for Canada: Promise and Perils is the first book on smart cities in Canada. In this collection, experts from across the country investigate what this new approach means for the problems cities face, and expose the larger issues about urban planning and democracy raised by smart city technology.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, January 29. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

A Real Battlefield for Emancipation: The Hamburg Kindergarten Movement 1849-1852

From 1849 to 1852 a network of kindergartens were opened in the German port city of Hamburg. These kindergartens were funded and supported by the dissenting German-Catholic Congregation (established in the city in 1847), the Women’s Association to Support the German-Catholics, the Social Association for the Reconciliation of Confessional Differences, and the Women’s Association to Support Poor Welfare. These associations and the dissenting congregation provided the space for a new women’s activism that was centered on essentialized feminine characteristics such as maternal love and care. Love for these associations united women across religious lines and was essential for the project of social and cultural reform not only in the city-state but also for humanity. This love needed to be cultivated and practiced in educational and welfare institutions for the benefit of all of society. The kindergarten, these activists believed, was the ideal location for this love and care.  My presentation will focus on unpacking these associations and their support for the kindergarten in Hamburg. It will shed light on the new language of rights, women’s activism, and religious freedom that characterized the movement for the kindergarten during the revolutionary 1840s and early 1850s in German-Speaking Europe.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, January 28. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Nisrine Rahal is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, A Garden of Children and the Education of Citizens: The German Kindergarten Movement from 1837 to 1880 examines the early children’s education institution as a social reformist movement tied to the revolutionary 1840s. Her dissertation project follows the movement as a way to examine histories of social reform, gender, liberalism, and state power. Between June 2017 and March 2018, she was a doctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History. She also held a Leo Baeck Fellowship between October 2015 and October 2016. Her project received support from the Central European History Society, the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung (BBF) des Deutschen Instituts für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung (DIPF).

The Limits of Anti-Trust Regulation: Reorienting Towards Considerations of Epistemic Power

The current monopoly over data production, collection and information centralizes epistemic power and the capacity to accumulate economic capital through data. At the same time this process dispossesses marginalized and racialized communities from the data they are producing. The result is a dynamic that mirrors the dispossession created through colonialism in a new form of “techno-imperialism”. Current debates surrounding monopoly structures in technology tend to focus on the economic effects rather than the epistemic consequences, this talk will refocus this conversation and consider the pros and cons of anti-trust policy solutions currently being considered in Canada.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, January 27. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Kamilah Ebrahim received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Waterloo in 2019 and is currently pursuing a Masters of Information in Human Centred Data Science at the University of Toronto. Kamilah is a 2020-21 Graduate Fellow at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics focusing on the intersection between race, economics and data monopolies in Canada. Prior to joining the University of Toronto she held roles at the United Nation Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), as well as the Canadian federal government.

What Is the Problem with the Opacity of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine?

Artificial intelligence has been met with great enthusiasm by the scientific community. However, philosophers and especially ethicists have voiced some concerns. The concepts of “opacity” and “transparency” of algorithms have been coined with the presupposition that opacity in AI is something to avoid and conversely transparency is a goal to achieve in the field. Numerous guidelines have been published on the ethics of AI, resulting in several reviews (Jobin, Ienca, and Vayena 2019; Rothenberger, Fabian, and Arunov 2019; Hagendorff 2020). In these guidelines, transparency is routinely described as one of the key ethical principles the field of AI should follow. The concept, however, is not straightforward. It could first be defined in an epistemic way: an algorithm is transparent if and only if we understand how it works and we can explain it. Here transparency could be synonymous with “explainability.” In the case of medicine and decision-making algorithms, the main worry concerns how health professionals may be able to justify a diagnostic without being able to explain how they came to it and why (Goodman 2016). However, it could be argued that such an epistemic opacity is already constitutive of evidence-based medicine, where mechanisms are often not known and explanations of efficiency never certain (London 2019). Yet, there is at least a second meaning attached to the concepts of “transparency” or “opacity” which goes beyond the issue of explainability. In the ethics of AI’s literature, notably, the issues at stake have also been framed as how we came to the knowledge we now claim to have and more specifically, how the data have been selected to build a specific algorithm.

The aim of this talk will thus be twofold: first, to map the different meanings of the concept of “transparency” and its mirror concept “opacity” both in the ethics of AI, on the one hand, and in the philosophy of medicine and bioethics, on the other hand. Second, my goal will be to pave the way to understand in which sense – ethical and/or epistemological – opacity should be avoided both in medicine and in AI (and a fortiori in AI in medicine). What is the problem with the opacity of artificial intelligence in medicine?

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, January 27. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Juliette Ferry-Danini
Centre for Ethics Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Philosophy, Sorbonne Université

Whose Intelligence? Whose Ethics?: Ethical Pluralism and Postcolonial Computing

With the unprecedented advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the last decade, several ethical concerns AI technologies have also emerged. Researchers today are concerned about bias, discrimination, surveillance, and privacy breaching in the use of AI technologies, just to mention a few. However, most of this discourse around “Ethics in AI” has become centered on western societies, and the concerns are emerging from and getting shaped by ethical values that more common in the West than in other parts of the world. To this end, my research explores this ethical concerns of AI in the context of the Global South, especially in the Indian Subcontinent. Based on my decade-long work in Bangladesh and India, I present in this talk, how data-driven AI technologies are challenging local faith, familial values, customs, and traditions, and imposing scientific rationality through various postcolonial computing practices. I further explore how a novel kind of intelligence can be imagined by incorporating local values and community participation.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, January 26. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Ishtiaque Ahmed
Computer Science
University of Toronto

Status, Hierarchy, and the State: Women in the Confucian Classics

Early Confucian philosophical texts, like the Analects and the Mencius, rarely mention women but the other ancient Classics, including the Rituals and the Annals, a chronicle of events from the city of Lu, are full of descriptions and ancedotes about them. In this talk, I analyze these descriptions and ancedotes, arguing that the place of women in social and political life, and the distinction between men and women, were not key issues of concern in those Classics dating from the Warring States period (479-221 BCE)—a time when the boundaries of the political community were only loosely defined. It is only after the rise of the Han Dynasty in the 3^rd century BCE that ideas about what women as a general category should or should not do, in contradistinction with men, start significantly appearing in the Classics. Gender can be viewed as part of a larger attempt by the Han to fashion a new centralized, and strongly defined, political entity. I also suggest that themes that structure how women are presented in early Greek writings, particularly in Greek Classical tragedies, are not nearly as prominent in the Chinese Classics: these themes are war and military prowess, pregnancy and birth, and, following from the previous two, the grieving mother. Finally, I return to the Confucian philosophical texts and attempt to make sense of the absence of women in them.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, January 25. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Loubna El Amine
Political Science
Northwestern University

Captive Maternal Love and War Stories

Captive Maternals are nongendered providers within black communities forged under the legacies of enslavement/colonialism and material/existential extractions. Moving beyond the limits of hegemonic (black) feminism/intersectionality, I explore the Captive Maternal and political ideology to analyze nonelite/radical black actors who labor as: conflicted/contradictory caretakers; movement activists; maroons; war resisters. The concept of the Captive Maternal is outlined in “The Womb of Western Theory”, which can be found here.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, January 20. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Joy James
Africana Studies
Williams College 

Claudia Jones and China

Zifeng Liu is a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He studies Black transnationalism/internationalism, Black feminism, and anticolonial thought. His dissertation, entitled “Redrawing the Balance of Power: Black Left Feminists, Mao’s China, and the Making of an Afro-Asian Political Imaginary,” examines the feminist interchanges and collaborations between the African American freedom struggle and the Chinese socialist construction of modernity from 1949 through 1978. His essays and reviews in English and Chinese on African American culture, politics, and history have been published and forthcoming in the Journal of Intersectionality, Journal of African American History, Journal of Beihang University, The Paper, Initium Media, and SINA News.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, January 18. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Zifeng Liu
Africana Studies
Cornell University

Responsible AI in Disaster Risk Management: A Community of Practice Perspective

The use of AI, and in particular machine learning, is increasingly being taken up as part of efforts to better understand and mitigate the potential impacts of disasters like earthquakes or floods. Experts and practitioners believe that these tools can help support societal efforts to inform decisions ranging from emergency preparedness to infrastructure retrofitting and the design of disaster insurance products. Despite widespread concerns over the role of AI tools in domains such as criminal justice, banking, and healthcare, little guidance is available for experts working on the tools in the area of disasters. This talk will report on an ongoing effort by organizations including the Red Cross, the World Bank, and several academic institutions to examine the potential for negative consequences of AI in the field of disaster management.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, January 12. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Robert Soden
Computer Science 
University of Toronto

The Seat, the Table, the Terms of Incorporation: a Critical Discussion on Representation and the Roles of Racialized Political Elites

The inclusion of racialized politicians has become a key feature of liberal democracies. Indeed, the political inclusion of previously excluded racialized populations matters. This presentation is concerned with how it matters. The dominant presumption is that the presence of racialized parliamentarians guarantees that debates important to racialized groups will move in more socially just directions. However, recent scholarship in critical race socio-legal studies have suggested that the incorporation of select racialized elites has not substantively challenged dominant political discourses and/or policies. Rather, paradoxically their inclusion can foreclose possibilities for substantive diversity and justice. If we understand racial governmentality as flexible, this research is concerned with questions that will better meet the needs of racial justice in a world where post-racial discourses persist alongside explicit racial violence.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, December 10. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Laura Kwak is Assistant Professor in the Law and Society Program at York University. Her research has been published in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and Amerasia Journal. She is developing her first monograph “Playing by the Racial Rule(s): Asian Conservatives in Canada’s Federal Legislature,” which challenges the supposed incommensurability of racialized identity and Conservative politics. Her SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2020-2022) funded research project “Race and Representation in Canada’s Parliament, 2006-2019” will examine the contributions of racialized MPs across Canada’s three main federal political parties.

Governance of Ethical AI: Methodologies to Procure Low Risk AI for Public Use

AI is not without bias; our understanding of the risks it can pose is often unknown. However, this does not stop governments from procuring and deploying AI systems for the public. This talk will present case examples of how the government procures AI systems. Furthermore, the presentation will follow with methodologies of how to ensure that governments can deploy ethical and safe AI systems. The role of the public, government, and private stakeholders are all different yet necessary to reduce the risk caused when applying AI on a mass scale. The presentation will conclude by recommending policy solutions to avert the consequences of deploying risky AI systems.

Muriam Fancy is completing her final year of her Masters in Global Affairs with a specialization in innovation. Her work focuses are on global technology policy and designing ethical emerging technologies. She is an AI ethics researcher at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. As well, she is the Research Coordinator at the AI + Society Initiative at uOttawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, December 9. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Muriam Fancy
AI Ethics Researcher
Montreal Ethics AI Institute
uOttawa

Surface, Abstraction and Skin in Black Contemporary Art

Discussions of surface typical occur in the context of a binary—not being a deep articulation of a thing.  Yet surface as a method of susceptibility is able to take seriously the “need for the Other” and one that orients the surface – rather than some lurking depth – as a significant site to engage meaning (Cheng 2009, 101; Best and Marcus 2009, 6). In the context of this talk, I use, surface play in order to embraces the surface as an affective and ethical stance, in opposition to a suspiciousness of what is concealed in the depths of the work. Taking a nod from Stuart Hall, play denotes a doubling of meaning. On the one hand, play suggests the impermanence of the surface itself; on the other, it pronounces the instability of the surface through strategies deployed in black aesthetics.

Thus, this talk meditates on surface play and queer potentiality in the work of artists Mickalene Thomas and Zanele Muholi. In 2014, Mickalene Thomas created the work Tête de Femme that deviated from the artists more representational work and towards abstract iterations of femme faces. Most recently, Zanele Muholi has returned to self-portraiture, in Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness utilizing the body, vernacular props and the skin as site. I look at Tête de Femme and Somnyama Ngonyama and towards surfaces at play, to negotiate a different orientation to the aesthetic.

Biography:

Sarah Stefana Smith is scholar and artist, currently holding the position of Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Their research communicates between the fields of Black art and culture, queer of color critique and affect studies, performance and aesthetics. Smith’s studio practice looks towards the blur between abstraction and representation, infrastructure and materiality, space and ecology in photography, installation, and sculptural work. As a teacher Smith is interested in cross-pollination between matter and materiality and boundaries between human and species, lines of demarcation around difference—race, gender, sexuality—and how modes of difference are used to constitute and congeal belonging.

 Smith was a recipient of an Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation, an Ontario Arts Council Grant, and a John Pavlis Fellowship as an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Smith has published in The Black Scholar, Women & Performance, Drain Journal of Art and Culture, The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts Education and in Ruptures: Anti-colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing. Their residency experiences have included the University of Pittsburgh Creativities Project, Merriweather District AIR, 77Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. Smith has exhibited at various spaces including Waller Gallery, Arlington Art Center, DC Art Center, the Borland Project Space, and Gallery CA

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, December 3. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Sarah Stefana Smith
Gender Studies
Mount Holyoke College

Etiquette (Un)Seen: Post-WWII American Cinema and the Aesthetics of Politeness

Etiquette surrounds us every day, infiltrating our social behaviour and shaping the aesthetic self-image we share with the world. Etiquette determines how we dress, how we eat, and how we speak—it is, as Raoul Vaneigem has put it, “what is most familiar.” Despite etiquette’s pervasiveness, little work in the humanities has taken the concept seriously; importantly, no work has considered etiquette’s profound impact on our popular aesthetic codes. Etiquette has been derisively termed a “little ethics,” tossed aside for its perceived femininity, its shallowness. This hasty dismissal has obscured etiquette’s importance in constructing popular aesthetics. Etiquette’s aesthetic form, and its creation of aesthetic forms, should no longer be ignored.

This talk will excavate etiquette from its theoretical obscurity. Etiquette, I argue, exists in and as cinematic form—an aesthetics of politeness. Post-WWII cinema is heavily informed by the era’s rampant conservatism and emphasis on images of a white suburban leisure class, binding etiquette and cinema most intimately. More specifically, etiquette in postwar cinema mobilizes an aesthetic of idealized, impossible white femininity to construct oppressive, racialized structures of politeness. By taking up the etiquette-adept figure of the social climber and her relationship to cinematic forms of looking, this talk offers a close reading of etiquette’s politicized aesthetics. Etiquette is not simply a frivolous, apolitical code; etiquette, embedded in popular cinematic form, determines the boundaries of social exclusivity through its aesthetic demands—its demands for an exclusionary mode of white femininity.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, December 2. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Amanda Greer
Cinema
University of Toronto

Differentiation is Mechanics, Integration is Art: Particularity, Community and the Digital Mind

A digital “mind” is not a human mind in lesser form; rather, it is entirely, and discretely, different. As such, it has been epitomized in terms of efficient prediction rather than origin and indeterminacy. However, both the human mind and the digital mind can be considered as sites of pure conception. Drawing principally from Hermann Cohen’s logic of origin, and applying an originary lens to philosophical inputs ranging from mathematics, aesthetics, and biology, I will point to an alternative modal framing of AI ethics that is potentially generative rather than solely corrective.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, November 25. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Anne-Marie Fowler, Doctoral Program, Department for the Study of Religion, in collaboration with the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto is a 2020-21 Graduate Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, focusing upon temporality, particularity and Ethics of AI in Context. Bringing prior professional background in finance, social entrepreneurship, philanthropy and public policy, she seeks to apply her current focus upon temporal design parameters in the AI setting to systemic questions of central banking and sovereign debt justice.

Anne-Marie Fowler
Religion
University of Toronto

Stuart Hall’s Ethics

David Scott is Professor of Anthropology in the Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia University, New York. He is also the editor of the journal Small Axe. We will discuss his recent book, Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity. Stuart Hall’s Voice explores the ethos of style that characterized Stuart Hall’s intellectual vocation. David Scott frames the book—which he wrote as a series of letters to Hall in the wake of his death—as an evocation of friendship understood as the moral and intellectual medium in which his dialogical hermeneutic relationship with Hall’s work unfolded. In this respect, the book asks: what do we owe intellectually to the work of those whom we know well, admire, and honor? Reflecting one of the lessons of Hall’s style, the book responds: what we owe should be conceived less in terms of criticism than in terms of listening.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, November 23. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

David Scott
Anthropology
Columbia University

Translating Islamic Law: Mobility, History, Solidarity

Translation encapsulates a series of distinct moves in the study of Islamic law, each with its own ethical and methodological implications. These implications are often obscured when we emphasise textual and discursive translation, at the expense of institutional and material processes. This paper discusses the work that translation does in, and to, Islamic legal studies, including but not limited to: 1. shifting between semantic fields of meaning; 2. legal actors translating between idioms and institutions of law; and 3. facilitating (and resisting) the emergence of ‘universal’ categories and fields of law. It ends with a reflection on the implications of these translative dynamics for teaching, writing and publishing across languages and contexts in contemporary Islamic legal studies, considering translation as collaborative labour, in the context of displacement, migration, and war.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, November 23. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Iza Hussin
Cambridge University
Politics & International Studies

Lovecraft Country: A Conversation on Afrofuturism, Black Aesthetics and the Endurance of Counter-Histories

Afrofuturism is prominent force in popular culture and within Black critical thought. As an aesthetic we see examples in the visual expressions of musical artists such as Erykah Badu, and Janelle Monae, and a long history in literature by award winning novelists Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson to name a few. Most recently we see Afrofuturist visions in the televisual landscape as seen with the recent success of HBO’s Lovecraft Country. But Afrofuturism and Black speculative thought has a long history within Black letters and expressive culture. What is Afrofuturism’s relationship to history, and how does it offer radical revisions of what we term “the past”?
We are excited to be joined by co-executive producers of Lovecraft Country, Jonathan Kidd and Sonya Winton-Odamtten to discuss the show in relation to the legacy of Afrofuturist thought and the politics of creating counter-histories.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, November 20. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Playwrights and documentarians, Jonathan Kidd and Sonya Winton-Odamtten are the physical manifestation of a stellar collision. While Jonathan grew up in the farmlands of Mansfield, Ohio, Sonya was reared by her creative-hippie parents in the metropole of Los Angeles. No one could have predicted that their paths would cross while pursuing their PhD’s at Yale University…changing their lives forever… Jonathan earned his Bachelor’s degree with honors from The University of Michigan in African Studies, African American Studies, and English. He received his Master’s of Art, Master’s of Philosophy, and Doctoral degree from Yale University in African American Studies and English. Sonya earned her Bachelor’s degree with honors from Spelman College, where she majored in Political Science. She received her Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, a Master’s of Art, and Master’s of Philosophy in African American Studies and Political Science from Yale University. Sonya received her Doctorate in African American Studies and Political Science from Yale University. In 2001, while at Yale, Jonathan and Sonya founded a non-profit theater company, Adam, Eve, & Steve Productions (AES) and directed and produced a number of successful theater productions that include: Jonathan’s There Must Be A God Somewhere, Jan Henson Dow and Robert Schroeder’s Shaka, and Sonya’s Matri-focal Concentric Zones of Violence Revisited: Part One. In 2003-04, they took two years off from their studies to complete a documentary on youth mobilization during the Presidential election covering such groups as: ROCK THE VOTE, THE NATIONAL HIP HOP POLITICAL CONVENTION, STONEWALL DEMOCRATS, COLLEGE REPUBLICANS, HEADCOUNT, NEW VOTERS PROJECT, LEAGUE OF PISSED OFF VOTERS, CITIZEN CHANGE, and PUNKVOTER. In 2006, they were one of the featured theatre non-profits selected to participate in Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 DAYS/365 PLAYS national festival. Parks remarked on the “unforgettable” productions staged by Jonathan and Sonya, at sites of contestation around greater Los Angeles (for example, the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where Reginald Denny was beaten during the Rodney King rebellion). In 2007, Sonya and Jonathan taught theatre to teenagers in South Los Angeles through the LAUSD after school program Beyond 2 The Bell which utilized intensive readings of the works of Shakespeare, Lorraine Hansberry, and August Wilson to help students create their own one act plays addressing issues such as environmental justice, class inequality, and bullying. After stints as professors, playwrights, and documentarians, Sonya and Jonathan turned their eye toward a television career and were chosen for the Warner Brothers Television Writers Workshop in 2009. In addition to staffing on a number of shows, most notably ABC’s THE WHOLE TRUTH; FOX’s TOUCH; and AMAZON’s OASIS, Kidd/Winton- Odamtten found success in selling several of their spec pilots: THE 4TH REICH (Showtime with Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and CBS Studios attached as producing partners); Warner Horizon, the 1970s period drama RODEO DRIVE; and Lifetime, the dynastic family drama, SOUTHERN GOTHIC which Catherine Hardwick was attached to direct and Alfre Woodard and Melissa Leo set to star in. At the close of 2018, Kidd/Winton-Odamtten signed an overall with HBO to develop new projects while continuing their work on LOVECRAFT as CO-EP’s. Finally, through their philanthropic work Kidd/Winton-Odamtten recently launched the Feed Black Covid-19 Health Workers Challenge. After partnering with Frontline Foods, the duo recruited over 40 other Black Hollywood writers in order to support health care workers in underserved Black communities around the country. Thus far, their outreach has fed hospital, nursing home, and health clinic staffs in Downtown Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York, Dallas, Houston, Durham, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Providence, Inglewood, Boston, Memphis, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Jonathan I. Kidd           
Co-Executive Producer
Lovecraft Country

Sonya Winton-Odamtten 
Co-Executive Producer
Lovecraft Country

Representação vs. Representatividade: Analyzing Black LGBTQ+ Identity Politics in Brazil

The last five years in Brazil has seen an explosion of Black LGBTQ+ politicians enter elected positions. While many of these candidates ran on platforms that centered their own standpoint as a power analysis to help understand and deconstruct systemic inequality through policy, some candidates utilized their identities to work against a politics of social equity. In this presentation, I look at the various iterations of representation that have taken place for Black LGBTQ politicians in recent years, analyzing how different candidates weaponize their identities, and how these forms or representation impact the larger Black LGBTQ+ community.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, November 19. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Watufani Poe is a PhD Candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. He earned his B.A. from Swarthmore College in Africana Studies and his A.M. in History at Brown University. His dissertation entitled “Resisting Fragmentation: The Radical Possibilities of Black LGBTQ+ Activism in Brazil and the United States” looks at Black LGBTQ+ social and political activism in both countries to understand the ways Black LGBTQ people push for freedom across various movement spaces. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, The US Fulbright Program, The Tinker Foundation, and the Brown University Brazil Initiative.

Data Feminism

As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists–and others who rely on data in their work–to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, this talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can help to challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; it will explain how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems; and why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” The goal of this talk, as with the project of data feminism, is to model how scholarship can be transformed into action: how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, November 19. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Catherine D’Ignazio
Director, Data + Feminism Lab
Urban Studies and Planning
MIT

Lauren F. Klein
Director, Digital Humanities Lab
Quantitative Theory & Methods
Emory University

Legal or Right? The Negative Consequences of the Legal Trade in Antiquities

It is legal to sell artifacts in licensed antiquities markets such as those in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, but is it right to buy an artifact with a murky past? Certain “legal quirks” (a term coined by noted cultural heritage lawyer Patty Gerstenblith) in national and international legal regimes allow for a blurring of illegal and legal elements in the antiquities trade. Such legal quirks often result in a market supplied by the looting of archaeological sites, and thefts from museums and archaeological storehouses. A study focused on the legal and illegal movement of Holy Land artifacts demonstrates that the market in Israel, while legal in name, possesses a number of illegal elements, which allow recently looted artifacts to be laundered and then legitimately traded. Where does our own ethical discernment and idea of what is right in the demand for antiquities fit into the diverse spectrum of the effects of such demand on local people and archaeological landscapes?

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, November 18. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Morag M. Kersel
Director of Museum Studies, DePaul University
Archaeology

Compound Crisis: Cops, Climate, and COVID

Although the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are both provoked by natural phenomena, the dangers they present are just as political as the crisis of police violence. Moreover, these crises overlap and compound each other in important ways. The size, scope, and longevity of the suffering they trigger will be largely decided by the institutional responses to challenges and the power dynamics that structure them. A historic debate about the relationship of famine to colonialism and democracy helps show why the compound crisis could lead to intensification of racist police violence, climate apartheid, and climate colonialism.

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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, November 12. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò
Georgetown University
Philosophy