Upcoming Events @ C4E: Info & Registration

  • Mon, Mar 25, 2024

    Tom Angier, Human Enhancement and Human Nature

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    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

     

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Wed, Mar 27, 2024
    Ethics at Noon
    Faisal Bhabha, Kant's Theory of Parental Authority (Ethics@Noon-ish)

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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

     

    12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Thu, Mar 28, 2024

    AI as Moral Patient

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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

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto

  • Wed, Apr 3, 2024

    Katie Stockdale, Resentment and Self-Respect

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    Resentment and Self-Respect

    Many philosophers have defended the value of resentment to moral and political life. Resentment is thought to be a valuable expression of self-respect that stands up against moral wrongdoing and injustice. Although I have defended this conception of resentment in my own work, I’ve come to think that the emotion’s value has been overstated. Strong claims about the supposedly ‘close connection’ between resentment and self-respect can feel empowering for those of us whose lives have been marked by injustice. But they can also feel alienating to the moral agent who experiences resentment more as a destructive force in their lives than a motivating force for justice. This talk explores how we might make space for the self-respecting moral agent who does not feel resentful about wrongful acts and injustices done to them. I argue that people can have very good reasons to take a more sympathetic than resentful perspective on why people do what they do, interpreting wrongdoers’ acts to ‘mean’ much more about the wrongdoers’ attitudes toward themselves and the circumstances of their own lives than the moral worth of the people whom their actions affect.

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

     

    Katie Stockdale
    Philosophy
    University of Victoria

     

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Tue, Apr 9, 2024

    David Benatar, The Curious Case of Absent Injustice

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    The Curious Case of Absent Injustice

    Last year I presented an Ethics@noonish seminar entitled “A preponderance of injustice”, in which I argued that there is vastly more injustice than justice. In the discussion following that seminar, one interesting objection was that I had failed to account for a vast amount of justice – namely all those cases in which people refrain from doing what they should not do, and in which they do what they should do. In the forthcoming seminar I shall respond methodically to this objection, arguing that it does not upend my earlier conclusion.

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

     

    David Benatar
    Visiting Faculty Fellow                                                    University of Cape Town

     

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

  • Fri, Apr 19, 2024
    Race, Ethics + Power
    Lucien Ferguson, The Spirit of Caste (REP)

     

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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

    04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
    Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
    200 Larkin

Past Events