Events @ C4E

This Week’s Events

<< Previous weekNext week >>Sunday, March 24, 2024 -- Saturday, March 30, 2024

Tom Angier, Human Enhancement and Human Nature

Monday, March 25, 2024 - 04 pm - 06 pm

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

Since the millennium, philosophical work on human enhancement has burgeoned. Significant book-length treatments have been published by, among others, Nick Bostrom, Francis Fukuyama, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Sandel and Julian Savulescu. Clearly, the idea that technology affords or will afford monumental changes in our physical, cognitive and even moral constitution has excited deep and widespread interest. Whether this interest is accompanied by profound scepticism, mere ‘boosterism’, or something in between, the prospect of manifold enhancements in our bodies and their capacities is hard to ignore. In this paper, I will explore what I take to be the four main arguments in the literature against such enhancements: namely, the argument from autonomy, from dignity, from inequality and from mastery. While each raises legitimate concerns, I will conclude that none of them – taken either singly or jointly – is sufficient to render the project of human enhancement impermissible. At most, they point to the need for prudence and careful institutional oversight. The only argument which succeeds against that project is not moral, but rather formal in kind: that is, that the project of human enhancement is fundamentally incoherent. I will argue that in order to specify an enhancement of x, one needs to specify (and understand) the nature of x. But it is precisely a specification and understanding of human nature which the project of human enhancement lacks – and worse, which it tends to repudiate.
► 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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Faisal Bhabha, Kant's Theory of Parental Authority (Ethics@Noon-ish)

Wednesday, March 27, 2024 - 12 pm - 02 pm

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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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AI as Moral Patient

Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 04 pm - 06 pm

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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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