- Mon, Oct 22, 2018
Author Meets Critics
Author Meets Critics: Hilary Evans Cameron
Refugee Law’s Fact-finding Crisis: Truth, Risk, and the Wrong Mistake (Cambridge 2018)
☛ please register here
Hilary Evans Cameron
Postdoctoral Affiliate, Centre for Ethics
University of TorontoCommentators:
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Amar Bhatia (Law, York University)
Catherine Bruce (Refugee Law Office, Toronto)
Graham Hudson (Criminology, Ryerson)
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Tue, Oct 23, 2018
Ethics & the Arts, Ethics & Film: Lights, Camera, Ethics!, Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of AI Film Series
Ethics & Film: WALL-E (Ethics of AI Film Series)
☛ please register here
06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Wed, Oct 24, 2018
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Colin Grey
Cosmopolitan Pariahs: Exploring the Moral Rationale for Withholding Protection from Criminal Refugees
Article 1F of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees excludes from refugee protection persons guilty of serious international and domestic crimes. Excluded persons are not eligible for refugee status even if they face a well-founded fear of persecution. This paper asks whether a coherent rationale for such exclusion is available, focusing on the influential—and strikingly unexamined—suggestion by UNHCR that Article 1F serves to exclude persons who are “undeserving” of refugee protection. If refugees are persons threatened with violations of their basic human rights, as several philosophical and legal accounts hold, we must ask: What could possibly justify abandoning them to their fate? I will argue that exclusion of refugees for past criminality is best explained as the institutional expression of a form of blame that is appropriate if we accept that all human beings on the Earth exist in a juridical relationship of cosmopolitan right, a Kantian construct that is plausibly seen as the animating idea behind the international refugee regime. The construal of the exclusion clauses as an institutional expression of blame, however, is ultimately inconsistent with a strong human rights reading of the international refugee regime. Instead, the exclusion clauses suggest refugee law represents an institutionalized form of humanitarianism. In other words, the ultimate claim of this paper is that we must choose between exclusion and a strong human rights reading of refugee law. We cannot have both.
☛ please register here
Colin Grey
Université du Québec à Montréal
Faculty of Political Science and Law
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 24, 2018
Events on Campus
Peter Alilunas, Closed (to the Profane) Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad: The Cinema 2000, Porn Studies, and Cultural ConsecrationPeter Alilunas, Closed (to the Profane) Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad: The Cinema 2000, Porn Studies, and Cultural Consecration
The growth of Porn Studies has been accompanied by an exciting surge in research related to adult film history, which has started to fill in long-neglected gaps in traditional film histories. With this growth, however, the field has also slowly begun constructing familiar boundaries and barriers, valuing and foregrounding some objects of study as worthy of scholarly interest while dismissing or ignoring others. To explore these tensions, this presentation explores a wide variety of historical moments, spaces, and places, and foregrounds the Cinema 2000, the legendary Yonge Street adult theater originally created by Max Allen. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s formulations of “legitimate” cultural pleasures—and the ways in which they must be “closed to the profane”—this presentation will ultimately argue for an open and reflexive approach to studying adult film history.
Peter Alilunas
University of Oregon
Cinema Studies
☛ please register here
co-sponsored by:
Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
04:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Cinema Studies Institute | Centre for the Study of the United States
Canadian Studies Program | Centre for Ethics
Faculty of Information
140 St. George St. - Thu, Oct 25, 2018
Perspectives on Ethics
Perspectives on Ethics: Derrick Darby
Du Bois’s Defense of Democracy
I will reconstruct W. E. B. Du Bois’s argument for democracy in Darkwater and draw a lesson about how to address America’s democratic crisis.
☛ please register here
Derrick Darby
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
University of Michigan
Department of Philosophy
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Oct 26, 2018
Events on Campus, Ethics & the Arts, Ethics of AI in Context
Reading Frankenstein: Then, Now, Next. A Celebration of the 200th Anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818-2018)Reading Frankenstein: Then, Now, Next. A Celebration of the 200th Anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818-2018) (October 26-31, 2018)
12:00 AM - 11:59 PM
- Tue, Oct 30, 2018
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: John Vervaeke
Why the Creation of A.I. Requires the Cultivation of Wisdom on Our Part
Abstract: Most considerations concerning the ethics of A.I. are concerned with the ethical issues posed by the potential threat of the machines or concerning their ambiguous moral status and the resulting unclarity of our ethical obligations towards them. However, a cognitive scientific approach suggests an additional ethical issue. There is converging theory and empirical evidence that while necessary, intelligence in not sufficient for rationality. Rationality requires acquiring skills for overcoming the biases and the self-deception that inevitably result from any cognitive agent using optimization strategies. These heuristic strategies often reinforce each other because of the complex and recursively self-organization nature of cognitive processing. As our A.I. moves increasingly into Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I), these patterns of self-deception increasing become possible in our machines. This vulnerability is pertinent to us because we are often unaware of our biases or how we are building them implicitly into our simulations of intelligence. Since self-deception and foolishness are an inevitable result of intelligence, as we magnify intelligence will may also magnify the capacity for self-deception. Our lack of rational self-correcting self-awareness could very well be built into our machines. The examination of a couple of historical examples will add plausibility to this argument. Given this argument, i will further argue that we have an ethical obligation to seriously cultivate a cognitive style of self-correcting self-awareness, i.e., wisdom, in individuals and communities of individuals who are attempting to create A.G.I.☛ please register here
John Vervaeke
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
University of Toronto
Cognitive Science
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Nov 13, 2018
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: Avery Slater
Kill-Switch: The Ethics of the Halting Problem
Two centuries of dystopian thought consistently imagined how technologies “out of control” can threaten humanity: with obsolescence at best, with violent systemic destruction at worst. Yet current advances in neural networked machine learning herald the advent of a new ethical question for this established history of critique. If a genuinely conscious form of artificial intelligence arises, it will be wired from its inception as guided by certain incentives, one of which might eventually be its own self-preservation. How can the tradition of philosophical ethics approach this emerging form of intelligence? How might we anticipate the ethical crisis that emerges when machines we cannot turn off cross the existential threshold, becoming beings we should not turn off?
☛ please register here
Avery Slater
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
University of Toronto
Department of English
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 14, 2018
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Nicola Lacetera
Ethical Concerns and the Reach of Markets: Paying Kidney Donors
Legislation and public policies are often the result of competition and compromise between different views and interests. In several cases, strongly held moral beliefs voiced by societal groups lead lawmakers to prohibit certain transactions or to prevent them from occurring through markets. However, there is limited evidence about the specific nature of the general population’s opposition to using prices in such contentious transactions. We conducted a choice experiment on a representative sample of Americans to examine preferences for payments to kidney donors. We found strong polarization, with many participants in favor or against payments regardless of potential supply gains. However, about 20% of respondents would switch to supporting payments for sufficiently large supply gains. Preferences for compensation have strong moral foundations. Participants especially oppose systems with payments by organ recipients, which they find in conflict with principles of fairness and dignity. We corroborate the interpretation of the findings with the analysis of a costly decision to donate money to a foundation that supports donor compensation.
☛ please register here
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Nicola Lacetera
University of Toronto
Department of Management UTM &
Rotman School of Management
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 14, 2018
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics in the City
Ethics in the City: Ken Greenberg
A Human-centred Use of Technology in Cities
Advances in technology inevitably play a critical part in the evolution of cities. How they are absorbed, and what impacts they have are open questions. We have good examples and uncomfortable ones. The uncritical euphoria with which we embraced the internal combustion engine in the decades after World War II led to many unforeseen consequences as we reshaped the urban world around the needs of the car. As we recover from that excess, we now have a new and pressing set of challenges in the digital area. The questions for me often come down to how a ‘human-centred’ urbanism could be aided by technology, not be subverted by it. Can we assess potential solutions against human values and decide when to say no, not exactly, bend, inflect and choose.
☛ please register here
Ken Greenberg
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Principal, Greenberg Consultants
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Wed, Nov 14, 2018
Ethics & the Arts, Ethics & Film: Lights, Camera, Ethics!, Ethics in the City
Ethics & Film: Marshall McLuhan's The Burning Would (Ethics in the City Film Series)
☛ please register here
06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Mon, Nov 19, 2018
Perspectives on Ethics
Perspectives on Ethics: Murad Idris
Idealizations of Peace in Islamic Political Thought: The Case of Sayyid Qutb
“Before us today is the problem of universal peace,” Sayyid Qutb declares in the prologue to his much-neglected Universal Peace and Islam (1951). “Does Islam have an opinion on the matter? Does Islam have a solution?” Albeit popularly considered the ideologue of “Islamic jihad,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading theorist designed a plan for universal peace. Qutb’s plan pegs the emergence of universal peace to an immanent organization of individual states with laws in common. Its promise of peace is embedded in an Enlightenment script that claims to correct unjust savagery through the state and the law. This is a script that calls up Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes, specifically their predications of peace upon law and statehood. Drawing attention to Kant’s discussions of “the Arab” and Hobbes’s references to empire, this talk unpacks the unacknowledged salience of denials of law, political economy, and settler-colonialism for theorizations of peace. Qutb’s adaptations of that familiar logic unwittingly expose its limits, culminating with perpetual war against enemies whose laws and form are ‘wrong. This talk draws on a chapter of Idris’s book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought, published by Oxford University Press in Fall 2018. This book deconstructs dominant formulations of peace in the writings of Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Grotius, Gentili, Hobbes, Ibn Khaldun, Immanuel Kant, and Sayyid Qutb.
☛ please register here
Murad Idris
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
University of Virginia
Department of Politics
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Nov 27, 2018
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: Regina Rini & Leah Cohen
Deepfakes, Deep Harms
Imagine that an online video appears, showing you doing or saying something you would never do. You know it is fake, but not everyone believes you. This scenario may soon be possible, thanks to the use of machine learning to fabricate convincing video and audio recordings, so-called ‘deepfakes’. We look ahead to the dangers of this technology, distinguishing the variety of ways it can harm or wrong people: material, reputational, and existential.
☛ please register here
Regina Rini & Leah Cohen
York University
Philosophy
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 28, 2018
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: John Enman-Beech
Contract as an Ethical Frame for Employment, Tenancy, and Consumption
What happens when we think employment, tenancy, and consumption (ETC) through the ethical frame of contract? This frame sees ETC as a collection of individual deals that assign obligations to the deals’ parties. The ETC system is justified if the individual deals are justified, and a deal is justified if it is the product of voluntary and informed agreement. But deals are rarely if ever fully voluntary and informed in ETC. This calls the contractual frame into question, but it continues to be used everywhere, from legal doctrine to economic analysis to political rhetoric to individuals’ conceptions of their relationships to their cell providers. My hypothesis: contract perversely conscripts people into choosing and re-choosing the existing social order, entrenching patterns of preferences and entitlements, and thereby (through people’s desire to feel in control of their choices) to identify with their roles.
☛ please register here
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
John Enman-Beech
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 29, 2018
Perspectives on Ethics
Perspectives on Ethics: Arlie Loughnan
Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility
The paper aims to make the case for a fresh examination of the topic of criminal responsibility. An assessment of the criminal law literature reveals that criminal responsibility is regarded as significant in three main ways: (1) as the normative heart of the criminal law; (2) as serving the coordination and legitimation needs of the criminal law; and (3) as a platform for the development of the modern criminal law. These three accounts of the significance of criminal responsibility correspond to the work of a group of scholars, or, in the case of (2) and (3), single scholars – Nicola Lacey and Lindsay Farmer – who have developed sui generis analyses. This is not all there is to the significance of criminal responsibility, however. I suggest that criminal responsibility is significant because it encodes keys sets of relations – between self, others and the state – as relations of responsibility. My account of criminal responsibility as encoding relations of responsibility assists in identifying the significance of criminal responsibility outside the criminal law. As I discuss in this chapter, on my account, the significance of criminal responsibility arises from the dynamic inter-relation between criminal responsibility and social ideas about responsibility, according to which considerations of power, subjectivity and relationality make themselves felt in the criminal law in particular ways.
☛ please register here
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Arlie Loughnan
University of Sydney
Law
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jan 14, 2019
Perspectives on Ethics
Perspectives on Ethics: Bonnie HonigBonnie Honig
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Brown University
Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science & Interim Director, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jan 15, 2019
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: Michael Kearns
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Michael Kearns
University of Pennsylvania
Computer Science
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 16, 2019
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Patti Tamara LenardPatti Tamara Lenard
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
University of Ottawa
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 16, 2019
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics in the City
Ethics in the City: Tracey Lauriault04:00 PM - 06:00 PMTracey Lauriault
Carleton University
Communication Studies
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Wed, Jan 23, 2019
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Étienne Brown
Misinformation and Freedom of Expression
With the rise of ‘fake news,’ European liberal democracies are currently in the midst of a debate about the value of laws that aim to regulate the spread of false information on the internet. One central objection directed against such laws is that they represent undue violations of our individual right to freedom of expression. In this presentation, I argue that they do not. More precisely, I contend that legal prohibitions against the intentional spread of false information can be justified on three main philosophical accounts of free speech: the epistemic account, the civic duties account, and the harm-based account. I then consider the objection according to which any legal prohibition against intentional misinformation will unjustly set back the interests of individuals who unintentionally misinform others.
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Étienne Brown
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jan 28, 2019
Perspectives on Ethics
Perspectives on Ethics: Rachel NolanRachel Nolan
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Columbia University
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jan 29, 2019
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: Kelly Hannah-Moffat
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Kelly Hannah-Moffat
University of Toronto
Criminology & Sociolegal Studies
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 30, 2019
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Brian Price
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Brian Price
University of Toronto
Cinema Studies
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 6, 2019
Ethics in the City
Ethics in the City: Robert VipondWhat Does It Take To Be ‘One of Us’? Lessons from the History of a Toronto Public School
Robert Vipond
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
University of Toronto
Political Science
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Tue, Feb 12, 2019
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: Sheila McIlraith
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Sheila McIlraith
University of Toronto
Computer Science
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 13, 2019
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Ashley RubinAshley Rubin
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
University of Toronto
Sociology
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 26, 2019
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: Chelsea Barabas
Chelsea Barabas
MIT
Media Lab
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 27, 2019
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Thilo Schaefer
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Thilo Schaefer
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 27, 2019
Ethics in the City
Ethics in the City: Theresa Enright04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Theresa Enright
University of Toronto
Political Science
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Mon, Mar 4, 2019
Perspectives on Ethics
Perspectives on Ethics: Jennifer MortonJennifer Morton
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
City College of New York
Philosophy
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Mar 12, 2019
Ethics of AI in Context
Ethics of AI in Context: Virginia EubanksVirginia Eubanks
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
SUNY Albany
Political Science
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 13, 2019
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Tom Parr
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Tom Parr
University of Essex
Department of Government
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 27, 2019
Ethics at Noon
Ethics@Noon: Benjamin Berger
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Benjamin Berger
York University
Osgoode Hall Law School
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Jun 27, 2019
Events on Campus
Media Ethics: Human Ecology in a Connected World12:00 AM - 11:59 PMThe 20th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association
International Conference
Toronto, 27-30 June 2019Presented by:
St Michael's College
81 St. Mary Street
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
