- Wed, Oct 9, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Martina Favaretto, Kant on Emotions and Moral Worth (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Oct 7, 2024
Jacob Levy, To Promote an Injustice Which Was no Part of Their Intention► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
McGill University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Oct 4, 2024
Race, Ethics + Power
Melvin Rogers, On James Baldwin: History, Responsibility, and Atonement (REP)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political ScienceBrown University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Sep 30, 2024
Michael Randall Barnes, Responsibility for Recommendations► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Australian National University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Sep 27, 2024
Conferences
Relational Ethics Conference► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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 obligations2:00-3:10 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 ConstructivismSaturday, 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 Direction2:00-3:10 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=fin6bYFl7wEDWyOZqyD09OeguF4Yi6.1Meeting ID: 959 3712 7666
Passcode: 830472Register here.
09:00 AM - 07:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 25, 2024
Ethics at Noon
David Benatar, The Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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:
- If animals have rights, then we have a duty to save wild animals from predators and other evils.
- We have no duty to save wild animals from predators and other evils.
- 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
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Philosophy
University of Cape Town
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Sep 20, 2024
Robin Dembroff & Issa Kohler-Hausmann, But-for What? When Anti-Discrimination Law Tried to Borrow from Tort Law and Missed Something► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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 UniversityIssa Kohler-Hausmann
Associate Professor
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Law & Sociology
Yale University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Sep 20, 2024
Radical and Critical Approaches to Mental Health II► 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 Mental Health II
► this workshop is online. Register here.
Speakers & Abstracts
- Sofia Jeppsson: Different dissociations and philosophical distinctions
When philosophers go mad, we tend to use our philosophical tools to analyze our madness. These philosophical analyses may compete with or merely complement psychiatric ones. In any case, philosophy often carves up psychopathological phenomena along different lines than psychiatry does. I have already discussed and published on experiencing reality falling apart and different realities. There’s an interesting philosophical distinction, with some clinical implications, between doubting regular facts and doubting the very bedrock on which regular beliefs depend. In this talk, I will discuss two other, and related, philosophical distinctions; retaining or losing your self, and retaining or losing a sense of (direct) agency. When diagnosing someone with derealization/depersonalization, psychiatry places great weight on “reality-testing” being intact, the person isn’t full-out psychotic or delusional. However, the DSM criteria run together a bunch of phenomena that are quite different from a philosophical standpoint. Derealization might occur even if you experience your self as intact. Moreover, you may experience your mental self as intact while feeling estranged from your body. Finally, you may be estranged from certain parts of your mental life while retaining a strong core self. There are also corresponding agency problems. For the person who tries to handle themself, to plan and act and navigate the world while suffering strange experiences, these differences may be as important as the difference between having or losing one’s “reality-testing” capacity.
- Mikaela D. Gabriel: Kisapniaq: Exploring the evidence for ceremony and mental health care for Indigenous Peoples in Canada
Kisapniaq is the Mi’kmaq word for dawn, indicating an advancing and growing insight into the presence and importance of ceremony in mental healthcare interventions for Indigenous Peoples. This talk will inform, address, discuss, and promote the importance of ceremony within, and for, mental health care delivery and perspectives for Indigenous Peoples in Canada. This talk will have key highlights and insights from my own research that identifies the many ways ceremonies assist in emotional arousal and regulation; promotes mental clarity; impacts and supports positive identity and belonging; assists in trauma healing and post-traumatic growth and meaning-making; and how these approaches help Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners alike. I will add clinical reflections and perspectives, and a review of substantiating literature to support evidence and claims.
- Alexandre Baril: Radical and Critical Approach to Rethinking Suicidality: Reconceptualizing Suicide Prevention Through the Lens of Suicidism
I argue that suicidal people are oppressed by structural suicidism. Suicidism and its preventionist script, founded on what I call “compulsory aliveness” aiming to save lives at all costs, reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death through forms of silencing, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups, such as Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans, disabled and neurodivergent people, for whom suicide prevention increases the structural violence they experience. I also argue that suicidism aims to impose a will to live that makes suicidal people’s desire for death abnormal, irrational and unintelligible from a sanist perspective, except for those cast, based on ableist, ageist and capitalist norms, as “unsalvageable” subjects, such as disabled/sick/ill/old people. In their case, the desire for death is considered normal and rebranded as medical assistance in dying. Through an argument according to which supporting assisted suicide for all suicidal people can better prevent unnecessary deaths, I propose to rethink our conceptualizations of both suicide and assisted suicide. Drawing on trans-affirmative approaches, I propose a suicide-affirmative approach that allows for genuine accompaniment of suicidal individuals. By offering a queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, I invite us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an antisuicidist and intersectional framework.
The workshop, organized by Larisa Svirsky, 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), and the Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency (CRC-IAE).
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 18, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Alice Pinheiro Walla, Is there a Right to Travel? Kantian Hospitality as a Communication Right (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Philosophy
McMaster University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Sep 10, 2024
Technophilosophy September Soiree, Can we ensure AI is safe?► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Can we ensure AI is safe?
► this event is in-person. Register here.
05:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Isabel Bader Theatre
93 Charles St W - Wed, May 1, 2024
Randall Curren, From Sustainable Development Goals to Sustainable Flourishing Goals► 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
The UN’s widely influential Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework is set to expire in 2030 and an important strand of its current thinking is that the post-2030 agenda should take the form of a Sustainable Flourishing Goals (SFG) framework. The concern about the language of development is that it may be too strongly associated with an orientation to economic growth to be compatible with a path to sustainability. The thinking is that the term flourishing would provide the right focus for cross-sectoral global policy, both ethically and with respect to sustainability. Defending this as the basis of global policy would require a publicly defensible theory of eudaimonic, intergenerational justice, one that is impartial with respect to reasonable conceptions of a good life, empirically viable, and actionable. The task of this talk is to outline the basis for such a theory.► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
Randall Curren
Philosophy and Education University of Rochester
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Apr 19, 2024
Race, Ethics + Power
Lucien Ferguson, The Spirit of Caste (REP)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor
Boston College Law School
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Apr 9, 2024
David Benatar, The Curious Case of Absent Injustice► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Apr 5, 2024
Anton Ford, The Objectification of Agency► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
The Objectification of Agency
Agents are subjects and objects of thought: subjects, because in order to act they think; objects, because they are among the things that thinking is about. This double-relation to thought raises a question of method for any investigation of agency. If, as Wittgenstein claimed in the Tractatus, “the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts,” then which thoughts is it the primary task of practical philosophy to clarify? The thoughts that agents think, or those that are about them? The thoughts of which they are subjects, or those of which they are objects? Overwhelmingly, analytic philosophers have pursued the latter course. This is what I call the objectification of agency. It has historically taken two main forms, one in action theory, the other in value theory. The first, which I call explanationism, is the practice of accounting for the nature of action in terms of how an action is explained. The second, which I call normativism, is the practice of theorizing agency in terms of how it satisfies, or fails to satisfy, one or another “norm.” (Value theory is standardly divided into moral and aesthetic theory, according to whether the operative norms are moral or aesthetic; in the first domain, normativism takes the specific form of moralism, in the second, that of aestheticism.) Taken together, explanationism and normativism comprise a considerable portion of practical philosophy as it has been practiced in the analytic tradition, and their influence is widely felt even outside boundaries of what is normally considered practical philosophy. My aim is to bring the pattern to light, and thereby to expose it to critical scrutiny.
► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Apr 3, 2024
Katie Stockdale, Resentment and Self-Respect► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Apr 2, 2024
Matthew Sussman, Literary Criticism and the Ethics of Pluralism► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Literary Criticism and the Ethics of Pluralism
What is the relationship between literary appreciation and attitudes toward diversity in modern liberal democracies? This presentation discusses how literary criticism has contributed to the advancement of pluralism by tracing its origins in the aesthetic and moral thought of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It describes how an awareness of aesthetic diversity relativised standards of taste, and discusses the emergence of a form of dispassionate appreciation that called for understanding without subjective liking. Taken together, these developments show how aesthetic criticism predicated itself upon reasoned disagreement, cultivating the attitudes and habits of mind that are characteristic of liberal tolerance.► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
Matthew Sussman
English
University of Sydney
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Mar 28, 2024
AI as Moral Patient► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
AI as Moral Patient
► This event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
Parisa Moosavi
Philosophy
York UniversityKarina Vold
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
University of TorontoJoshua Skorburg
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Philosophy
University of Guelph
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Wed, Mar 27, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Faisal Bhabha, Kant's Theory of Parental Authority (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 25, 2024
Tom Angier, Human Enhancement and Human Nature► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 18, 2024
Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers
Michael Blake, Climate Migration, Moral Psychology, and the Demands of Liberal Democracy (Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Climate Migration, Moral Psychology, and the Demands of Liberal Democracy
Many contemporary theorists of justice take climate-induced migration to be a problem of justice in distribution: the problem of how to care for those individuals displaced by climate change, that is, is best understood as a question of how to allocate responsibility for fixing a global political problem. In this paper, I want to argue that such migration entails a much more serious problem – one related to the moral motivations we take to be required by those citizens responsible for supporting and sustaining just political institutions. Liberal theory implicitly rests upon a particular view of moral psychology – about, that is, how much we can expect liberal citizens to be motivated by such moral considerations as the interests of others. There is some threshold of moral decency, we imagine, below which we imagine liberal politics becomes difficult or impossible. What moral motivations we can rightly expect, however, is at least partly an empirical question, and so makes reference to what we can expect actual people to do in response to claims of justice made by others. The claims of climate migrants, however, have two distinct aspects which make them likely to be more easily resisted. The first is that these claims are made by those with whom reciprocal political relationships have seemingly not yet been built; in contrast to the claims of fellow citizens, there is no background of mutual support here against which the claims of justice are to be evaluated. The second is that these claims emerge against a background in which the sedentary residents of wealthier states are likely to experience lower levels of wages and longevity than their parents; due to the psychological relevance of such comparative poverty, it is likely that such lowered expectations would become relevant for the perception of how much is owed to those displaced by climate migration elsewhere. It is possible to resist these two thoughts through philosophical engagement – but such engagement may not alter the motivational effects such thoughts often have. The power of bad, but attractive, ideas may be enough to lead many people to refuse to engage philosophically – a refusal which is likely to be catered to by political entrepreneurs, including populist and authoritarian anti-liberals. In the end, I suggest, one of the most significant wrongs done by the present generation to its future counterparts might be understood as the wrong of making democracy more difficult for them than it was for us; our descendants will have to demonstrate greater empathy, under worse circumstances, than we ourselves found necessary.
► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
Michael Blake
Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance
University of Washington
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 13, 2024
Ethics at Noon
William Paris, Undisciplining Time?: Critique, Utopia, and the Prospects of Life beyond Capital (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 8, 2024
Race, Ethics + Power
Inder Marwah, Eugenic Democracy: Du Bois, Darwin, and the Politics of Race (REP)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Associate Professor, Political Science
McMaster University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 6, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Larisa Svirsky, What Are We Agreeing To?: Opioid Treatment Agreement Requirements and the Physician-Patient Relationship (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 4, 2024
Ella Street, Taming the Tyrant► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Taming the TyrantThis talk considers the figure of the tyrant in 5th and 4th century Athenian politics and culture and the surprising similarity between the tyrant and the demos (the people) in terms of their political unaccountability. Despite Athenian democracy’s impressive “culture of accountability,” the demos ruled supreme precisely because it was accountable to no one: in a democracy, the people – like a tyrant— is not subject to any higher institutional check or power that might constrain its rule.
Scholars of Athens have used the tyrant-demos identification to clarify the nature of democratic rule. While illuminating, I argue that the identification ultimately fails to capture the character of the demos and its distinctive form of political power. I introduce the concept of “reflexive accountability” to describe a distinctive accountability practice in Athenian democracy that relies on (and indicates) the plural and individuated nature of the demos. The talk will consider the promise and pitfalls of democratic (un)accountability in Athens and today.
► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
Ella Street
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 28, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Yang-Yang Cheng, Reading with Compassion: A Theory of Democratic Readership (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 27, 2024
Alisabeth Ayars, Sex, Preference, and Consent► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Sex, Preference, and ConsentSometimes people consent to sex not because they want to have it, but because they find refusal intolerably costly. These encounters seem to involve sexual wrongings–but why? The consent theory holds that they are not fully consensual. I object to this theory on grounds that the wrongfulness persists even when the conditions that ordinarily diminish consent’s transformative power are not met. I propose an alternative theory, the preference theory, which holds that the sex is wrong because it opposes the consent-giver’s preference, which is distinct from his or her willingness. Consent simply prevents the violation of one duty (the duty not to have sex with someone who doesn’t consent), but not another (the duty not to have sex with someone who’d rather not have it.)
► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or online here.
Alisabeth Ayars
Philosophy
UBC
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 14, 2024
Brendan de Kenessey, Deontological Constraints as the Norms of Relationships► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Deontological Constraints as the Norms of RelationshipsI outline a novel theory of deontological constraints, based in the idea that these are the constraints we must abide by to participate well in interpersonal relationships. I understand deontological constraints as moral principles that forbid actions even when those actions cause no independent harm, or are even beneficial. Paradigm cases are the constraints against killing, promise-breaking, lying, stealing, and sexual assault. But why are these actions subject to constraints, rather than some other set? I suggest that we can explain the contours of constraints by looking at the nature of relationships. More specifically, I propose that relationships are best understood as activities of shared agency, and that if we unpack the norms one must obey to participate well in shared agency, we will find that these norms align neatly with the intuitive content of constraints. The upshot is that our reason to abide by constraints might be explained in terms of the value of interpersonal relationships.► this event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
Brendan de Kenessey
Philosophy
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Feb 12, 2024
Luke Davies, Aiding the Impermissible: Kant and the Morality of Assisted Dying► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Aiding the Impermissible: Kant and the Morality of Assisted DyingKant’s claim suicide is in every case contrary to moral duty makes him an unlikely figure to turn to when mounting a defence of physician-assisted dying (PAD). This is because it is plausible to assume that the permissibility of suicide in at least some cases is a necessary condition for support of PAD.The aim of this talk is to suggest an alternative to this picture. I argue that Kant’s account of moral virtue and the duties we have towards the moral perfection of others are both compatible with a commitment to PAD. The prohibition on suicide sets limits to the way in which this practice may be carried out but does not forbid it altogether. Moreover, I argue that there are good reasons to support the limits suggested by the Kantian view.► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Feb 9, 2024
Race, Ethics + Power
Jerome Clarke, The Data of Blackness (REP)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Assistant Professor, Philosophy and Religion
American University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 7, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Yukiko Kobayashi Lui, Feminist and Queer Legal Theory Toward Family Abolition (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 24, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Caitlin Hamblin-Yule, Kant's Aesthetics of Race (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 10, 2024
Ethics at Noon
Miko Zeldes-Roth, Escape from Politics: Personal Responsibility and White Citizenship in American Society (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 29, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Anthony Sangiuliano, Discrimination and Psychological Harm (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Nov 17, 2023
Race, Ethics + Power
Jeta Mulaj, Balkanization and The Racial Order (REP)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Balkanization and The Racial Order
Balkanization is understood to be a state of fragmentation characterized by perpetual ethnic conflict. It is often invoked in social, political, and legal theories as a shorthand for ethnic hatred, animosity, and conflict. It is also invoked in theories of race and racial relations in the U.S., where it is argued that balkanization is avoided through the shared oppression of Black people. Prominent scholars, like Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell, contend that without Black people as a scapegoat, the U.S. would descend into Balkanization. This talk analyzes the uses and abuses of the term Balkanization as well as the limitations and consequences of employing racialized metaphors for understanding racial relations.
► 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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 15, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Shannon Hoff, A Phenomenological Account of the Conditions of Transnational Feminism (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Nov 13, 2023
Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers
Amy Reed-Sandoval, Feminism and the Open Borders Debate (Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Feminism and the Open Borders Debate
The motivating question of the open borders debate–namely, do states have a prima facie right to maintain coercive borders and restrict immigration into their territories?–has not been taken up from an explicitly feminist perspective, and this presents difficulties for understanding the complex relationships between borders and gender justice. I argue that there are many reasons for this, among them a reluctance on the part of many feminist and decolonial scholars to present their ethical positions in universal terms. In this paper, I begin to develop a universal border ethic that, I argue, helps us to consider the open borders debate from a feminist, decolonial perspective. First, I explore a series of important, possible objections feminists may make to the framing of the open borders debate. Second, I respond to these objections by recasting the open borders debate in terms of what Serene Khader has called “non-ideal universalism” in her recent book, Decolonizing Universalism. Reframed in this way, I argue that immigration ethicists should not argue for a bordered or borderless world as an idealized end-state. Rather, we should explore the complicated relationship between borders and oppression. In so doing, we should consider established open borders debate arguments not as universally-applicable theories, but rather, as possible policy goals that may, or may not, reduce oppression in particular contexts.
► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 1, 2023
Ethics at Noon
David Benatar, A Preponderance of Injustice (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Oct 27, 2023
Conferences
Living with the Invisible Hand: A Conference in Memory of Waheed Hussain► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Living with the Invisible Hand: A Conference in Memory of Waheed Hussain
9:00-9:10 Welcome and introductory remarks
9:10-10:10 Andrew Franklin-Hall, Does the Invisible Hand Threaten Freedom?
10:20-11:20 Chiara Cordelli, On the Republican Critique of Capitalism
11:30-12:30 Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Markets and Freedom
12:30-1:40 Lunch break
1:40-2:40 Joseph Heath, Hussain on the Market: Critique or Kvetch?
2:50-3:50 Martin O’Neill, Community, Solidarity and the Sense of Justice
4:00-5:00 Eric Orts, Toward a Theory of Plural Business Purposes
► 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.
09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Fri, Oct 20, 2023
Race, Ethics + Power
Zeyad el Nabolsy, A Place for African Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century: James Africanus Beale Horton’s Critique of Racist Philosophical Anthropology (REP)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
A Place for African Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century: James Africanus Beale Horton’s Critique of Racist Philosophical Anthropology
In this talk I attempt to show how one can go about integrating African philosophy into our accounts of developments in philosophy and science during the nineteenth century. In particular, I argue that focusing on the contributions of James Africanus Beale Horton allows us to bring into clear perspective elements which have been hitherto occluded from view. For example, Horton’s criticism of racist Victorian philosophical anthropology challenges the conventional narrative that race science was not seriously challenged on scientific grounds until the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, analyzing Horton’s contributions allows us to understand the manner in which the “naturalistic turn” in mid-nineteenth century philosophical discourse changed the terrain for those who wanted to argue for racial equality. Horton’s significance is that he offers us a way of understanding how one could challenge racist scientific discourse, in the mid-nineteenth century, without abandoning the naturalistic turn with its emphasis on establishing continuities between human forms of life and the forms of life that characterize non-human animals.
► 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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 18, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Martina Favaretto, A Kantian Account of Aesthetically Sublime Rage (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Oct 5, 2023
Conferences
Women in the History of Political Thought: Labor, Property and the Family► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Women in the History of Political Thought: Labor, Property and the Family
Speakers:
- Torrey Shanks (U of T)
- Allauren Forbes (McMaster)
- Geertje Bol (Ghent University)
- Mary Jo MacDonald (U of T)
- Luna Sabastian (Northeastern University London)
- Emily Nacol (U of T)
- Menaka Philips (U of T)
- Charlotte Sabourin (Douglas College)
- Kelsey Gordon (U of T)
- Marguerite Deslauriers (McGill)
► This event is in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
12:00 AM - 11:59 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Wed, Oct 4, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Larisa Svirsky, The Second-Personal Significance of Trauma (Ethics@Noon-ish)► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 27, 2023
Race, Ethics + Power
Kant on Race: Reevaluating Kant’s Moral Philosophy in Light of Kant’s Racism (REP)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Kant on Race: Reevaluating Kant’s Moral Philosophy in Light of Kant’s Racism
This panel features the following speakers:
- Cailtin Hamblin-Yule, University of Toronto, Speaker
- Pauline Kleingeld, University of Groningen, Speaker
- Huaping Lu-Adler, Georgetown University, Speaker
- Martina Favaretto, University of Toronto, Discussant
► this event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200) or join online here.
03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 20, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Joel Anderson, Assistive Technologies for Self-Control in the Context of Structural Attributional Justice (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Sep 18, 2023
Race, Ethics + Power, Educational Ethics
Winston Thompson, On the Ethics of Teaching Race (REP and Educational Ethics Series)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
On the Ethics of Teaching Race
Thompson’s talk focuses on race as a potential subject of instruction and analyzes ethical matters related to placing race on the curriculum in this way. In doing so, it highlights the possibility of coherence between some of the more popular approaches to teaching race as a subject. At its core, the talk considers whether and how these approaches to race as a subject of instruction might be compatible with one another. In doing so, it will explore varied understandings of race and the complexity of racial identity formation as a pedagogical goal. Given the bounty of existing work on the subject, it will also provide a brief overview of arguments for and against what is commonly understood as antiracist education.
► 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
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Sat, Jun 10, 2023
Conferences
Ethics and Progress (C4E Undergraduate Research Conference 2023)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?”
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Thu, May 25, 2023
Maya Goldenberg, Myth-Busting or Meaning-Making? Public Science Communications and the Infodemic► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Myth-Busting or Meaning-Making? Public Science Communications and the Infodemic
A growth area of public-facing science communications during the COVID years has been the counter-offence against misinformation, sometimes called the “infodemic.” Since the start of the pandemic, legions of well-intended healthcare practitioners, scientists, and concerned citizens have taken to social media platforms to debunk myths and provide corrective facts. These efforts were buoyed by emerging cognitive and social psychology research into strategies for addressing misinformation, such as debunking, pre-emptive inoculation, and nudging. Yet this concentrated focus on the epistemic status of propositional claims has serious limits. The field of communications research offers important insights that undermine the soundness of “myth-versus-fact” message frames as communications practice. Serious consideration of communication as meaning-making, especially in the fraught social context in which the infodemic has flourished, points to difficulties with the interpretive story line that the myth-busting message frame conveys. These considerations support an alternative focus on trust-building for science communications to the publics.
Lunch will be served.
► 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
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, May 5, 2023
Sara Aronowitz, The Ethics and Dynamics of Remembering Together► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
The Ethics and Dynamics of Remembering Together
Memories that are discussed and shared in groups seem to have different dynamics over time than those which we keep to ourselves. In this talk, we’ll first suggest that sharing memories induces stability, according to several prominent theories of shared action. Then, we ask: is stability in memory reappraisal a good thing? The second half of the talk puzzles through various answers to this question.
► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200).
Sara Aronowitz University of Toronto
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, May 5, 2023
Reading Series
New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group► 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
Organized by Professor John Paul Ricco (Comparative Literature, Art History, Visual Studies)
Graduate Students, Faculty, Postdoctoral Fellows, and Advanced Undergraduates are invited to join this Reading Group, where we will discuss some of the top books recently published on the topic of sex and ethics.
► 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)
Participants are asked to acquire their own copies of the books. The Hatred of Sex and Sexistence are available online through the University of Toronto library catalogue. The other books will be put on hold at Robarts. If you need help finding a copy of any book, please contact Lauren Bialystok at lauren.bialystok@utoronto.ca.
No RSVP required, but if you plan to participate for the term, it would help to let us know in advance. Please contact ethics@utoronto.ca.
► For more information, please contact ethics@utoronto.ca
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Apr 26, 2023
Radical and Critical Approaches to Understanding and Supporting Mental Health► 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.
Speakers & Abstracts
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Gen Eickers: ‘Pathologizing Trans Identities: Emotional Marginalization and Mental Health’
In recent years, an array of critical emotion theorists have emerged who call for change with respect to how emotion theory is done, how emotions are understood, and how we do emotion. In this talk, I draw on the work that some of these authors have produced to analyze how emotional marginalization of trans identities is experienced, considering in particular how this emotional marginalization results from the long history of pathologization of trans people. The past and current pathologization of trans people is produced through normative assumptions, values, and beliefs that uphold systems of normalcy, including assumptions, values, and beliefs about how we feel and express emotions. In order to examine these issues, I identify three different stages at which emotional marginalization may take place: emotion experience, emotional display, and emotion recognition. Emotional marginalization of trans people can occur at any of these stages. The central concern here is thus to show how emotional marginalization, at each of these stages, affects trans people, especially considering questions around the mental health of trans people.
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Sahanika Ratnayake: ‘What The Big Three Actually Said: Rosenzweig, Rogers and Frank on the Dodo Bird Problem and the Boundaries of Therapy’
In contemporary research, the “Dodo Bird Problem” or the “common factors” debate is a highly specific problem in research on talking therapy. It refers to the finding that most therapeutic modalities perform on par with with each other, raising the question of what the “active ingredients” of therapy are — whether they are factors common across various schools of therapy, such as an empathetic therapeutic relationship or factors specific to particular schools of therapy such as specialised therapeutic techniques or theoretical framings.
However, historical debates about the Dodo Bird Problem are far more nuanced, raising questions not only about research on therapy, but the exact boundaries and nature of therapy. In this talk, I will consider the work of three theorists — Saul Rosenzweig, Carl Rogers and Jerome Frank — who are cited as a matter of course in contemporary discussions of the Dodo Bird problem, with little regard for the complexities of what they actually said.
For instance, Rogers maintains that it is a therapeutic relationship with specific characteristics that is responsible for the efficacy of therapy. However, Rogers then goes on to say something far more controversial — that any relationship with these characteristics can be therapeutic or healing. This raises questions about the particular expertise of those delivering talking therapy and the boundaries of therapeutic relationships. Similar questions about expertise and what can be understood as “therapeutic” are posed by Rosenzweig and Frank.
In excavating historical discussions of the Dodo Bird problem, I hope to not only to interrogate what kinds of things and relationships can be considered therapeutic according to these thinkers, but also track the medicalisation of research into talking therapy by considering how the Dodo Bird problem was recast in contemporary literature.
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Bennett Knox: ‘Hermeneutical Pluralism in Psychiatry: Lessons from the Spectrum 10K Controversy’
“In this presentation I will develop a view I call “hermeneutical pluralism” in psychiatry, through critical engagement with a recent controversy in psychiatric science. Spectrum 10K—which promises to be the largest genetic study on autism in the history of the UK—was paused in 2021 after an outcry from autistic academics and activists, many of whom understand autism according to the neurodiversity paradigm. It is currently undergoing a consultation process with the autistic community, in an attempt to address some of these concerns. Utilizing the moral imagination framework of Matthew J. Brown from Science and Moral Imagination (2020), I will outline some lessons we can draw from Spectrum 10K that can help develop a theory of the proper relationship between psychiatric science and the neurodiversity movement. My central claim is that productive engagement between these two groups requires both: 1) psychiatric scientists who are themselves neurodivergent and subscribe to the neurodiversity paradigm, and 2) a robust knowledge system developed by neurodiversity activists and scholars which is somewhat independent of psychiatric science. It is this requirement of an independent neurodiversity knowledge system which makes my view pluralist: it is important that the interpretations of the neurodiversity movement not be fully assimilated by psychiatric science, as this would risk robbing the neurodiversity movement of the radical nature of its critiques.”
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Sujaya Dhanvantari: ‘Racism, Colonialism and Debilitation’
In this paper, I show that the unequal distribution of precarity moulds the racialized and colonized with forms of “undiagnosed” pain and trauma. Drawing on Alia Al-Saji’s concept of “racialized time,” I aim to reveal the ways in which racial and colonial pasts structure the present experience. I also weave in Saidiya Hartman’s work on the legacies of slavery shaping individual and collective bodies as pained. Critiquing Judith Butler’s term precarity, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of the specific historical markers of precarity that render racialized bodies more susceptible and exposed to illness and trauma. These markers, I contend, are borne intergenerationally. Finally, I suggest that the term “racialized precarity” can help us to elucidate these more prevalent exposures to chronic illness, disability, and death. Furthermore, it can help us to develop decolonial approaches for addressing the racial and colonial coordinates of debilitation.
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Sandrine Renaud: ‘Understanding Injustices related to Mental Health Care: Sanism as a Key Concept’
People categorized as having a mental health disorder experience injustices in their interactions with health care systems which contribute, among other things, to a degraded quality of care and services, a loss of agency, and even a denial of fundamental rights. To understand these injustices, many different concepts are used in the literature, such as stigma, social exclusion, epistemic injustice, occupational injustice and sanism. This presentation, based on my ongoing doctoral research, aims to (1) map the use of these concepts in the academic and activist literature and (2) situate sanism as a key concept to understand injustices related to mental health care. Sanism is defined as the systemic oppression of those categorized as having a mental health disorder or as not being “sane”. Building on the work of Mad activists and scholars, I argue that this concept is best suited to explain the structural mechanisms and social determinants that perpetuate mental health injustices, and thus, to propose relevant strategies to overcome them.
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)
09:00 AM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin -
- Fri, Apr 21, 2023
Allison Weir, Radical Care as Political Freedom► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Radical Care as Political Freedom: Extractive Economies, Caretaking Economies, and Decolonization
In this paper I consider the links between extractive economies, autocratic regimes, the conception of freedom as a right to property, and the extraction of care as a resource. And I contrast this constellation with a system of radical democratic governance organized around a conception of freedom as a practice of care for land, rooted in gift economies: caretaking economies.
Hannah Arendt argued that the privatization of freedom based in ownership of property ultimately upholds the right to destroy what one owns: freedom as autocracy. We can see this understanding of freedom as freedom not to care. The privatization of freedom is dependent on the privatization of feminized and racialized care: on the extraction of care as a resource.
In contrast, Anishinaabe theorists Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and John Borrows advocate the resurgence of freedom as a practice of active care for land, where land is understood as a system of relations among interdependent beings. I understand this as a distinctive political conception of freedom as a radically democratic practice: a mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in a field of uncertain, unpredictable, changing relations, to create and recreate the world in which we live together.
These practices of radical care and freedom can be taken as models for coalitional movements—what Simpson calls constellations of co-resistance—to support the risk of connection with a diversity of strange others, meeting conflict and potential danger with fierce care for the world.
► 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.
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Apr 14, 2023
Reading Series
New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group► 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
Organized by Professor John Paul Ricco (Comparative Literature, Art History, Visual Studies)
Graduate Students, Faculty, Postdoctoral Fellows, and Advanced Undergraduates are invited to join this Reading Group, where we will discuss some of the top books recently published on the topic of sex and ethics.
► 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)
Participants are asked to acquire their own copies of the books. The Hatred of Sex and Sexistence are available online through the University of Toronto library catalogue. The other books will be put on hold at Robarts. If you need help finding a copy of any book, please contact Lauren Bialystok at lauren.bialystok@utoronto.ca.
No RSVP required, but if you plan to participate for the term, it would help to let us know in advance. Please contact ethics@utoronto.ca.
► For more information, please contact ethics@utoronto.ca
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Mar 30, 2023
Saba Bazargan-Forward, Individual Accountability for Cooperatively Committed Wrongs► 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
Consider a group of individuals cooperating in a way that results in a collectively committed wrong. Some of the individuals contribute a lot. Others contribute little. Some fail to contribute anything at all. How do we make sense of individual accountability in such cases? We might think that each individual’s accountability is limited by her causal contribution. But this sort of account is infamous for its counterintuitive implications. I present an alternative account. I make the case for thinking that distinct aspects of human agency, normally “wrapped up” in a single person, can be “distributed” practically across different people. We “distribute” agency routinely, by forming promises, by making requests, by issuing demands, and by undertaking shared action. This resulting division of agential labor makes possible a distinctive way in which one person can be accountable for the actions of another. More specifically, cooperants have the function of constitutively determining the purpose for which the others act. I analyze such a purpose by invoking Joseph Raz’s conception of a ‘protected reason’. Where the purpose that a cooperant furnishes is morally bad, she can be accountable for that wrong-making feature of what the others do. I call this phenomenon “authority-based accountability” and argue that it helps make sense of individual accountability in cooperative contexts.► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 29, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Jovy Chan, When Illocutionary Silencing Threatens Free Speech (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 27, 2023
Educational Ethics
Bruce Maxwell, Teacher Neutrality and Pedagogical Impartiality: Is there a Reasonable Professional Standard? (Educational Ethics)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 24, 2023
Laura Bisaillon, “Barely Known Aspect of Canada’s Immigration System”: Doctoring, Lawyering and Administering Medical Exclusion► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
“Barely Known Aspect of Canada’s Immigration System”: Doctoring, Lawyering and Administering Medical Exclusion
If the late Stephen Hawking had wanted to settle in Canada, he would likely have been denied. This is because he was disabled. Federal immigration law is designed to exclude people with chronic illness and developmental or genetic difference from permanently settling on health grounds, referred to as medical inadmissibility, with some exceptions. I explore and critique the immigration system based on an ethnography of the medical, legal, and administrative practices governing this bureaucracy published as Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience. Using findings from people toward whom exclusionary health policy is directed, I argue that immigration medical practices trigger ethical, practical, and professional problems for migrant persons and for the doctors, lawyers, and other practitioners inside and outside Canada whose livelihoods tether them to the immigration program. I provide a series of do-able strategies for legal reform.► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 22, 2023
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Lillian O'Brien Davis, Conceptions of White: Examining the Origins, Travel, and Present Reality of "Whiteness" as a Concept and a Racial Invention Through Art (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 22, 2023
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 15, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Sameena Hasan, De-Constructing South Asian Identities: Interplay of Religion, Region, and Tasawwuf (Ethics@Noon-ish)► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 8, 2023
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 6, 2023
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Sirena Liladrie, Adult Children and their Aging Parents: Navigating the Realities of Retirement in Ontario for Low-Income Seniors (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► 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
05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
Adult Education and Community Development OISE University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 3, 2023
Julia Nefsky and Sergio Tenenbaum, Rescuing Ourselves from The Pond Analogy► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 3, 2023
Reading Series
New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group► 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
Organized by Professor John Paul Ricco (Comparative Literature, Art History, Visual Studies)
Graduate Students, Faculty, Postdoctoral Fellows, and Advanced Undergraduates are invited to join this Reading Group, where we will discuss some of the top books recently published on the topic of sex and ethics.
► 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)
Participants are asked to acquire their own copies of the books. The Hatred of Sex and Sexistence are available online through the University of Toronto library catalogue. The other books will be put on hold at Robarts. If you need help finding a copy of any book, please contact Lauren Bialystok at lauren.bialystok@utoronto.ca.
No RSVP required, but if you plan to participate for the term, it would help to let us know in advance. Please contact ethics@utoronto.ca.
► For more information, please contact ethics@utoronto.ca
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 1, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Megan Pfiffer, The Rule of Law and the Climate Emergency (Ethics@Noon-ish)► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Feb 27, 2023
Educational Ethics
Christopher Martin, Should Higher Education be a Right? (Educational Ethics)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 15, 2023
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Feb 13, 2023
Nikolas Kompridis, The Recovery of the Human: Cavell, Skepticism, Romanticism► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 8, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Emily McWilliams, Intellectual Humility in Joint Inquiry (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 7, 2023
Brian Baigrie, Public Trust as a Substantive Value for Public Health Ethics► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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)
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Feb 6, 2023
Lisa McKeown, Acknowledging Passionate Utterances► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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:
Lisa McKeown
Sheridan College (PhD, The New School)
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Feb 3, 2023
Reading Series
New Books in Sex and Ethics Reading Group► 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
Organized by Professor John Paul Ricco (Comparative Literature, Art History, Visual Studies)
Graduate Students, Faculty, Postdoctoral Fellows, and Advanced Undergraduates are invited to join this Reading Group, where we will discuss some of the top books recently published on the topic of sex and ethics.
► 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)
Participants are asked to acquire their own copies of the books. The Hatred of Sex and Sexistence are available online through the University of Toronto library catalogue. The other books will be put on hold at Robarts. If you need help finding a copy of any book, please contact Lauren Bialystok at lauren.bialystok@utoronto.ca.
No RSVP required, but if you plan to participate for the term, it would help to let us know in advance. Please contact ethics@utoronto.ca.
► For more information, please contact ethics@utoronto.ca
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 1, 2023
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jan 30, 2023
Educational Ethics
Meira Levinson, Why We Need a Field of Educational Ethics (Educational Ethics)► 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:
Meeting ID: 842 0877 8987Passcode: 350205
Meira Levinson
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 25, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Logan Gates, Human Rights in the Latin American Tradition: A dialogue between Bartolomé de las Casas and John Locke (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 18, 2023
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 11, 2023
Ethics at Noon
Kate Mitchell, Taking Prisoners' Rights Seriously (Ethics@Noon-ish)► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Dec 9, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Enna Kim, Yestermorrow: Speculative Tales of a Possible Repair Future (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Yestermorrow: Speculative Tales of a Possible Repair Future
► please register here or email ethics@utoronto.ca
Enna Kim
05:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Communication & Culture York University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Dec 9, 2022
Cindy Holder, Holism, Standing and Collective Selves: A Human Rights Approach to Land Claims► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Dec 7, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Spencer Albert, Reparations Without Collective Agency (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Dec 2, 2022
Author Meets Critics
Arthur Ripstein, Kant and the Law of War (Author-Meets-Critics)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
The book is a major intervention into just war theory from the most influential contemporary interpreter and exponent of Kant’s political and legal theories. Beginning from the difference between governing human affairs through words and through force, Ripstein articulates a Kantian account of the state as a public legal order in which all uses of force are brought under law. Against this background, he provides innovative accounts of the right of national defence, the importance of conducting war in ways that preserve the possibility of a future peace, and the distinctive role of international institutions in bringing force under law.► this event is in-person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin building, room 200)
Arthur Ripstein
University of TorontoRespondents:
Tom Hurka (University of Toronto) Claire Finkelstein (University of Pennsylvania) Ryan Liss (University of Western Ontario)
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 30, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Joseph Dattilo, Augustinian Moral Psychology and the Origins of Toleration (Ethics@Noon-ish)► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Nov 29, 2022
Paul Bloom, Theories of Perverse Actions► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 23, 2022
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Nov 18, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Atif Khan, Narrating Hauntings Everywhere: Towards the Edges of Territorial Pakistan (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► 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 TorontoAtif 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.
05:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 16, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Felix Lambrecht, Nothing Can Ever Make It Right: Reparations for Historical Injustice and the Infeasibility of Objection (Ethics@Noon-ish)► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 9, 2022
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 2, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Jared Riggs, Moral Status and the Ontology and Sociology of AI Agents (Ethics@Noon-ish)► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 26, 2022
Reading Series
Epistemic Injustice in Academia and Education Reading Group► 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Oct 21, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Angelica Pesarini, "We can't welcome them all" The Grammar of Race in the Italian Political Discourse (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► 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
04:30 PM - 06:00 PM
Assistant Professor in Italian Studies and Diaspora & Transnational Studies University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 19, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Sarah (Sadie) Warren, Food for Thought: Foraging, Identity, and the Roots of Ecological Progress (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 12, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Bowen Chan, Tough Love, White Lies, Hard Truths, and Mixed Motives (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 21, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Federica Berdini, Coping, Agency, and Responsibility: Conceptual and Normative Aspects (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Sat, Jul 2, 2022
Conferences
Ethics, Healing & Reconciliation (C4E Undergraduate Research Conference 2022)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.
► 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.
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.
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Thu, Jun 23, 2022
Conferences, Race, Ethics + Power
Anatomies of Grief: Conversations on an Ethics of Living (A Race, Ethics + Power Conference)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 HorrorSession 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 BeingFriday, 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 MourningSession IV – Being Life
03:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Grief Medicines
Jade Hui, A Buddhist ‘Love’ Letter to Hong Kong
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Mon, Jun 20, 2022
Conferences, Ethics of AI in Context
Conference: Trust and the Ethics of AITrust and the Ethics of AI
In the past few years, numerous policy documents have been crafted to ensure AIs are developed, used, and governed for the sake of the public. Many of these documents outline how we should establish trust in AI, offering ethical principles and guidelines.
The field of ethics of AI has pointed out the positive aspects and the limitations of these efforts. We have learned that AI-based technologies, commonly used by for-profit companies and oppressive law enforcement, often serve the powerful, further inequality, and exclude those who are affected from shaping them. At the same time, we see how research can inform activism and result in a meaningful change.
This workshop aims to address some of the insights that we have gained about the ethics of AI and the concept of trust. We critically explore practical and theoretical issues relating to values and frameworks, engaging with carebots, evaluations of decision support systems, and norms in the private sector. We assess the objects of trust in a democratic setting and discuss how scholars can further shift insights from academia to other sectors. Workshop proceedings will appear in a special symposium issue of C4eJournal.net.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 9am, Monday, June 20. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
► please register here (free)
Preliminary Schedule
9:00-9:10 Hellos and Opening Remarks9:10-9:40 Judith Simon (University of Hamburg): Can and Should We Trust AI?9:40-10:10 Vivek Nallur (University College Dublin): Trusting a Carebot: Towards a Framework for Asking the Right Questions10:10-10:40 Justin B. Biddle (Georgia Institute of Technology): Organizational Perspectives on Trust and Values in AI10:40-11:10 Sina Fazelpour (Northeastern University): Where Are the Missing Humans? Evaluating AI Decision Support Systems in Content11:10-11:40 Esther Keymolen (Tilburg University): Trustworthy Tech Companies: Talking the Talk or Walking the Walk?11:40-12:10 Ori Freiman (University of Toronto): Making Sense of the Conceptual Nonsense “Trustworthy AI”: What’s Next?12:10-12:30 Concluding Discussion and Closing Remarks
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Fri, Jun 3, 2022
Conferences
Conference: The Right to Have Rights TodayThe 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 SovereigntyYasemin 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/7amMiranda 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.
03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Fri, May 13, 2022
Conferences, Ethics of AI in Context, Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
Workshop: Afrofuturism and the Law► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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&A1:15-2:15
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&AThis 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-sponsorsCenter on Race, Law and Justice, Fordham Law School
Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Bennett Capers (Law, Fordham)
- Mon, May 2, 2022
Conferences
Workshop: The Ethics of Humanism: Human Rights, Cosmopolitanism, and Resistance► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
02:00 PM - 04:15 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Fri, Apr 29, 2022
Ethics of Protest
Michael Randall Barnes, Whose Tweets? Our Tweets!: The Challenges of Online Protest (Ethics of Protest)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Rotman Institute of Philosophy
Western University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Apr 11, 2022
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
Samantha Noël, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Monday, April 11. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Samantha Noël
Art History
Wayne State UniversityHost:
Benjamin P. Davis
06:30 PM - 07:45 PM
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Apr 6, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Nathan Olmstead, We are All Ghosts: Sidewalk Toronto, Urban Data, and the Transtemporal Intersubjectivity of Digital Rights (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Mar 31, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power
Nadha Hassen & Yuliya Rackal, Critical Perspectives on Race, Place & Health: Anti-Racism in Healthcare as a Case Study (Race, Ethics + Power)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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 UniversityYuliya Rackal
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Family and Community Medicine
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 30, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Erina Moon & Kamilah Ebrahim, Building Algorithms that Work for Everyone: Natural Language Processing Tools for Bias Reduction in Child Welfare Systems (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
iSchool
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 30, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Gail Super, Precarious Penality and the Myth of Liberal Punishment: Lessons from South Africa (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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:
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 25, 2022
Ethics of Protest
Meena Krishnamurthy, Martin Luther King on Fear and Fearlessness (Ethics of Protest)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Philosophy
Queen’s University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 21, 2022
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
Don Deere, Édouard Glissant’s Sense of Space (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Édouard Glissant’s Sense of Space
Édouard Glissant is known for articulating a number of concepts, including Relation, opacity, and the all-world or world entire (tout-monde). He also made an important distinction regarding time, insisting on the difference between History (as an official story) and histories (as the stories of peoples, often relayed orally as opposed to being put down in writing). But what about his theories of space, including land? This conversation considers what Glissant offers for thinking about space and place..► please register hereThis is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Monday, March 21. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Don Deere
Wesleyan UniversityHost:
Benjamin P. Davis
06:30 PM - 07:45 PM
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 18, 2022
Ethics of Protest
Candice Delmas, The Right to Hunger Strike (Ethics of Protest)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Philosophy of Religion and Political Science
Northeastern University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Mar 17, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power
The Long Emancipation: Readings, Reflections & Provocations (Race, Ethics + Power)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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, UofTRinaldo 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 UniversityWarren 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 CollegeSarah 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, UofTW. 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:
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 16, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Sharon Ferguson, Increasing Diversity in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: A Model of Student Persistence (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 9, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Julian Posada, The Coloniality of Data Work for Machine Learning (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Mar 8, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Tom Yeh & Benjamin Walsh, Is AI Creepy or Cool? Teaching Teens About AI and Ethics (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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 ColoradoBenjamin Walsh
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Education
University of Colorado
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 4, 2022
Ethics of Protest
Erin Pineda, An Entire World in Motion: Civil Disobedience as Decolonizing Praxis (Ethics of Protest)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Erin Pineda
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Assistant Professor of Government
Smith College
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Mar 3, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power
Jonathan Hamilton-Diabo, Fill the Earth and Subdue: Exploring Domination, Responsibilities and Relationships through Land Acknowledgements► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
Jonathan Hamilton-Diabo
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Theology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 2, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Mishall Ahmed, Difference Centric yet Difference Transcended (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
Mishall Ahmed
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Political Science
York University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Mar 1, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Dafna Dror-Shpoliansky & Yuval Shany, It’s the End of the (Offline) World as We Know It: From Human Rights to Digital Human Rights – A Proposed Typology (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
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
LawYuval Shany
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Hebrew University
Law
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Feb 25, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power, Ethics of Protest
Myisha Cherry, On James Baldwin and Black Rage (Ethics of Protest)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
Myisha Cherry
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of California, Riverside
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 23, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Clayton Chin, Recognition as Acknowledgement: Symbolic Politics in Multicultural Democracies (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Recognition as Acknowledgement: Symbolic Politics in Multicultural Democracies
Political symbolism is both integral to the social unity of democratic states and a source of deep controversy. Many of these debates concern the problem of symbolic inclusion: the extent to which democratic states should actively transform political identity to be more inclusive of their constituent groups. This article argues that the two dominant philosophical approaches to defending multiculturalism, liberal cultural rights theory and recognition theory, conceptualize recognition in ways that neglect the symbolic inclusion of immigrant groups. This is because members of minorities may formally enjoy individual rights and state accommodations of their cultures and yet still be symbolically marginalized. To address this, we develop a specifically multicultural concept of recognition as a form of acknowledgment. Such acknowledgement addresses the political belonging and democratic standing of immigrant communities, and takes general (e.g. valuing diversity) and specific (addressing particular communities) forms. The analysis suggests new lines of cross-national research.
► 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.)
Social and Political SciencesUniversity of MelbourneCommentator:Political ScienceUniversity of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Feb 21, 2022
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
Romy Opperman, Sylvia Wynter’s Caribbean Critique (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register hereThis is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Monday, February 21. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Romy Opperman
New School for Social ResearchHost:
Benjamin P. Davis
06:30 PM - 07:45 PM
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Feb 17, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power
Chandni Desai, Disrupting Settler Colonial Economies Across Geographies (Race, Ethics, and Power)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Chandni Desai
Critical Studies of Equity and Solidarity
University of TorontoChandni 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.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 15, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Wendy Wong, Data You and the Challenge for Data Rights (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Political Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 9, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Rebecca Livernois, Why Set a Carbon Tax Rate at the Social Cost of Carbon? (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 1, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Algorithmic Adaptability and Ethics Washing: Appropriating the Critique (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Algorithmic Adaptability and Ethics Washing: Appropriating the Critique
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and, more specifically, machine learning analytics fuelled by big data, is altering some legal and criminal justice practices. Harnessing the abilities of AI creates new possibilities, but it also risks reproducing the status quo and further entrenching existing inequalities. The potential of these technologies has simultaneously enthused and alarmed scholars, advocates, and practitioners, many of whom have drawn attention to the ethical concerns associated with the widespread use of these technologies. In the face of sustained critiques, some companies have rebranded, positioning their AI technologies as more ethical, transparent, or accountable. However even if a technology is defensibly ‘ethical,’ its combination with pre-existing institutional logics and practices reinforces patterns of inequality. In this paper we focus on two examples, legal analytics and predictive policing, to explore how companies are mobilizing the language and logics of ethical algorithms to rebrand their technologies. We argue this rebranding is a form of ethics washing, which obfuscates the appropriateness and limitations of these technologies in particular contexts.
► please register here
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Tuesday, February 1. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Kelly Hannah-Moffat
University of Toronto
Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and Sociology
Vice-President, People Strategy, Equity and Cultureco-sponsored by:
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Jan 27, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power
Mark V. Campbell & Huda Hassan, Hip-Hop Futurities: Riddims, Resistance, Reading (Race, Ethics, and Power)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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?
► 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.)
Mark V. Campbell
Music and Culture
University of Toronto ScarboroughHuda Hassan
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Women and Gender Studies
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 26, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Muhammad Kavesh, Hospitality and Hostility: Rethinking Possibilities of Hosting Foreign Pigeons in South Asia (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Muhammad Kavesh
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jan 25, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics in the City
Kristen Thomasen, Suzie Dunn, & Kate Robertson: Algorithmic Policing Policies through a Human Rights and Substantive Equality Lens: The Case of the TPSB AI Policy (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Tuesday, January 25. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Kristen Thomasen
Law, University of British ColumbiaSuzie Dunn
Law, Dalhousie
LEAFKate Robertson
Markson Law
Citizen Labco-sponsored by:
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jan 21, 2022
Ethics of Protest
Kimberley Brownlee, Disobedience: The Rarest and Most Courageous of the Virtues? (Ethics of Protest)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Disobedience: The Rarest and Most Courageous of the Virtues?
George Bernard Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionists declares that: ‘Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.’ Yet, disobedience is often seen not as neglect, but as disrespect, offensiveness, and aggression. We tend to ‘shoot’ the dissenter in the moment and praise her only later, if at all. This talk teases out why we tend to find disobedience threatening and why genuine disobedience is radical, if not always virtuous. The talk considers seven types of disobedience, beginning with civil disobedience and then turning to six types that press at the boundaries of civil disobedience: 1. collective disobedience, 2. uncivil obedience, 3. globalized disobedience, 4. digital disobedience, 5. aesthetic disobedience, and 6. non-conscientious disobedience.
► please register here
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Friday, January 21. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Kimberley Brownlee
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Philosophy
University of British Columbia
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jan 18, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Ori Freiman, The Ethics of Central Bank Digital Currency (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jan 17, 2022
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
Tavia Nyong’o, Black Humanitarianism and the Human Rights Archive (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Tavia Nyong’o
African-American Studies
Yale UniversityHost:
Benjamin P. Davis
06:30 PM - 07:45 PM
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Jan 13, 2022
Race, Ethics + Power
Janelle Joseph, Race, Ethics, and Intersectional Social Justice in Kinesiology (Race, Ethics, and Power)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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 TorontoDr. 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.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 12, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Allison Weir, Indigenous Feminisms and Relational Rights (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
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.
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Dec 2, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Tsang, Kirubainathan, Igros, Senkiw, The Rising Problem of Homelessness in Later Life: Exploring Health and Social Service Provision in Toronto (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Amie Tsang, O.T. Reg. (Ont.), is an occupational therapist and freelance journalist whose career is dedicated to working in partnership with presently and historically marginalized populations, centring narratives of personal resilience in systemic oppression. She has frontline experience in mental health and housing and is most recently the Health Equity Facilitator at CMHA-Toronto. She is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of OS&OT at the University of Toronto and a recent graduate of the Dalla Lana Fellowship in Global Journalism.
Layana Kirubainathan is a recent graduate of the Master of Occupational Therapy program at the University of Toronto. She is also an alumna of the University of Waterloo’s Health Studies program. Her research interests lie in exploring social determinants of health, wellness, health equity and access for immigrant, refugee, and marginalized populations. Her masters level research project, completed with her research partner, Tiffany Igros, explored the experiences of service providers working with older adults at risk of or experiencing
homelessness in Toronto.Tiffany Igros is a recent graduate from the Occupational Therapy program at the University of Toronto. She has also received her bachelors of science in Physiology and Immunology at the University of Toronto. Together with her research partner, Layana Kirubainathan, they explored the experiences of service providers working within the aging and homelessness sector and received the Aging and Caregiving Award at the Thelma Cardwell Research Day. Her clinical experiences and interests involve working with older adults within rehabilitation and acute care settings.
Luba Senkiw is a Hons. Bachelor of Social Work graduate from X (Ryerson) University with a minor in politics. Luba also holds a diploma in Practical Nursing from Humber College. Her work was primarily in mental health and housing, and she loves being a part of both helping professions. Luba is currently a Leukemia Warrior. She is a volunteer at Positive Living Niagara, making safe inhalation kits, and she is an outspoken, mad-identified advocate. At the moment, being a caregiver to her dad and beating Leukemia take up most of Luba’s time.
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Dec 1, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Shozab Raza, The Sufi and the Sickle: Mystical Marxism in Rural Pakistan (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
Shozab Raza
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
PhD Candidate, Anthropology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Nov 30, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Frank Pasquale & Gianclaudio Malgieri, Unlawful AI…“until proven otherwise”: The New Turn on AI Accountability from the EU Regulation and Beyond (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Frank Pasquale
Law
Brooklyn Law School
Gianclaudio Malgieri
Law & Technology
EDHEC Business
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Nov 23, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Kiel Brennan-Marquez, The (Non)Automatability of Equity (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
Kiel Brennan-Marquez
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
University of Connecticut
Associate Professor of Law
Faculty Director of the Center on Community Safety, Policing and Inequality
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 18, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Manvinder Kaur Gill, Germs of Rot: Colonialism, Culture, and Immigrant Mental Health Discourse (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 17, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Aden Dur-e-Aden, Mobilization of Individuals within Radical Right-Wing Groups in Canada: Ethics of Researching Contentious Politics (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Political Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 4, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Maandeeq Mohamed, Every Discipline You're Practicing Ceases to Exist: Errant Reading and Black Visual Cultures► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.”
► please register here
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.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 3, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Henry Krahn, Between Persuasion and Coercion: Protest as Holding Accountable (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Henry Krahn
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Philosophy
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 27, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Mathew Iantorno, Automating Care, Manufacturing Crisis (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Mathew Iantorno
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
iSchool
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Oct 26, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Avery Slater, The Golem and the Game of Automation (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Avery Slater
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
English
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Oct 21, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Cornel Grey, (Call Me Something Other than 'Stranger') Call Me 'Human'/'Life-Form'/'Kin': Notes on Black Queer Diasporic Intimacies► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
(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.
► 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.)
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.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 20, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Benjamin P. Davis, Hannah Arendt’s Right to Have Rights in the American Context (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Benjamin P. Davis
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics Postdoctoral Fellow
Philosophy
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 13, 2021
Ethics of Songs
Juliet Palmer on "Down in the River" (The Ethics of Songs)► 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.)
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.
► 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Oct 7, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Michael Sooriyakumaran, Inventing the Asian Community: The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival as Discourse and Collective Performance (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► please register here
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.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 6, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Nikolas Kompridis, Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé: “Sacred Space” as Political Sanctuary and Political Agency (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Nikolas Kompridis
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics Visiting Scholar
Philosophy
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Oct 5, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Abdi Aidid, Legal Prediction and Calcification Risk (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
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.
► 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.)
Abdi Aidid
Law
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 29, 2021
Ethics of Songs
Joshua Pilzer on "Changbu taryeong" (The Ethics of Songs)► 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.)
Joshua Pilzer
Faculty of Music
University of Toronto► 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 15, 2021
Ethics of Songs
James Rolfe on "We Will Rock You" by Queen (The Ethics of Songs)► 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 1, 2021
Ethics of Songs
Chris White on "Circle of Song" by Tony Turner (The Ethics of Songs)► 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Aug 18, 2021
Ethics of Songs
Laura Risk on Ginger Smock (The Ethics of Songs)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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Aug 4, 2021
Ethics of Songs
Andrew Balfour on "I Pity the Country" by Willie Dunn (The Ethics of Songs)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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jul 23, 2021
Conferences, Ethics of AI in Context
POSTPONED … Conference: The Ethics of AI in Medicine► 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 Medicine1pm [= 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
11:00 AM - 02:00 PMThis 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.
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Sat, Jul 17, 2021
Conferences
Ethics, Intersections, Reflections (C4E Undergraduate Research Conference 2021)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.
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Thu, Jul 15, 2021
Conferences, Race, Ethics + Power
Unbound Questions / Ethical Interventions (Race, Ethics + Power Capstone Event)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.
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
03:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Fri, Jul 9, 2021
Conferences
CANCELLED … Conference: The Ethics of Human Rights► 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.
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Wed, Jun 9, 2021
Author Meets Critics, Ethics in the City, Ethics in Context
POSTPONED … Author Meets Critics: Mark Kingwell, The Ethics of Architecture (Ethics in Context)► This event has been postponed until further notice.
The Ethics of Architecture (OUP 2021)
Mark Kingwell
Department of Philosophy
University of TorontoParticipants
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.)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Fri, May 7, 2021
Conferences, Ethics of AI in Context
Conference: Transparency in the Digital EnvironmentTransparency 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&A11:30am [= 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:
10:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Wed, Apr 28, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Julian Posada, Disembeddedness in Data Annotation for Machine Learning (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)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
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Apr 21, 2021
Ethics of Songs
The Ethics of Songs: Deep River (African American spiritual, arr. H.T. Burleigh), with Ellie HisamaJoin 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 UniversityProduced 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.
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Apr 14, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Noam Kolt, Predicting Consumer Contracts with GPT-3: A Legal Case Study in Computational Language Models (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)Predicting Consumer Contracts with GPT-3: A Legal Case Study in Computational Language Models
Computational language models can perform a wide range of complex tasks by predicting the next word in a sequence. In the legal domain, language models can summarize laws, draft case documents, and translate legal jargon into plain English. While language models could potentially empower consumers, they could also provide misleading legal advice and entrench harmful biases. By exploring the extent to which GPT-3 can understand consumer contracts, this case study sheds light on the opportunities and challenges of using language models to inform consumers of their legal rights and obligations.► please register hereThis 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.)
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Noam KoltFaculty of LawSchwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and SocietyUniversity of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Apr 12, 2021
Public Lectures, Events on Campus
Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Translating Ethical Gestures: Notes on Language from Ethnographic PracticeTranslating Ethical Gestures: Notes on Language from Ethnographic Practice
This is an academic talk hosted online by the JHI Working Group on Tamil Studies at the University of Toronto.
Important ethical acts are often accomplished in short stretches of language. In interactional settings, word choices, substitutions, juxtapositions, and avoidances can perform acts of care, signal inclusion, communicate ethical stances, and keep open or foreclose possibilities for relationality. This talk explores the pleasures and challenges of getting at the ethical surround of such interactional speech in ethnographic settings. Based on his ethnographic fieldwork with thirunangai-maruladis (thirunangai trans women committed to ecstatic devotion to the goddess) in Chennai, India, Vasudevan’s talk will explore both the ethical accomplishments of everyday Tamil speech among his thirunangai interlocutors as well as the scales of social context that come into play. How do people seize the ethical affordances of situations they encounter and the language that is available to them? What happens when they fail to do so, or think they have failed to do so? Do particular words and expressions shimmer with ethical significance? What kinds of translation can help us see the ethical labor our interlocutors do with language? The talk will explore such questions through ethnographic vignettes.
Dr. Aniruddhan Vasudevan is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of gender and sexuality, religion, and ethics of relationality and care. He is also a translator of celebrated works of fiction by Tamil authors Ambai and Perumal Murugan. He is currently a Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Anthropology at Princeton University.
► please register here
- Wed, Apr 7, 2021
Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms
Ara Osterweil, The Aesthetics of Care (Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms)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 UniversityAra 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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Apr 7, 2021
Ethics of Songs
The Ethics of Songs: "Glück, das mir verblieb" from Die tote Stadt (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold), with Amanda HsiehJoin 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 KongProduced 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.)
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Mar 30, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Ben Green, Algorithmic Governance: The Promises and Perils of Government Algorithms (Ethics of AI in Context)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Postdoctoral Scholar
Michigan Society of Fellows
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Mar 25, 2021
Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
Michael Dawson, Why Race and Capitalism Not Racial Capitalism? (Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)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 20th 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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 24, 2021
Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms
Grace Lavery, Pleasure and Efficacy: Techniques of Trans Feminist Criticism (Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms)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.)
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.Grace Lavery
English
University of California, BerkeleyGrace 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:
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 24, 2021
Ethics of Songs
The Ethics of Songs: Collegiate A Cappella, with Roger MantieJoin 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 TorontoProduced 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.)
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 22, 2021
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, Édouard Glissant’s Ethics (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)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
06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Philosophy
University of North Texas
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Mar 18, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Jonathan Kwan, Transitional Legitimacy: A Framework for Theorizing Structural Racism, (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)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.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 10, 2021
Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms
Rey Chow & Austin Safar, "We Other Victorians"? Novelistic Remains, Therapeutic Devices, Contemporary Televisual Dramas (Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms)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 UniversityAustin 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.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 10, 2021
Ethics of Songs
The Ethics of Songs: Making Plans for Nigel (by XTC), with David JagerJoin 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 TorontoProduced 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 8, 2021
Perspectives on Ethics
Rima Basu, Normative Expectations (Perspectives on Ethics)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Philosophy
Claremont McKenna College
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Mar 5, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power
Ricky Varghese & Benjamin Weil, Privilege, Race & Imagined Immunities in the Time of COVID (Race, Ethics + Power Flash Event)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 UniversityRicky 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 LondonBenjamin 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.
01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 3, 2021
Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms
Jodi Byrd, What Remains: Colonial Racial Capitalism, Videogames, and an Empire in Play (Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Illinois
English & Gender and Women’s Studies
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Mar 1, 2021
Perspectives on Ethics
Clare Hemmings, Unnatural Feelings: The Affective Life of ‘Anti-Gender’ Mobilisations (Perspectives on Ethics)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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Gender Studies
LSE
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Feb 25, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Gayathri Naganathan, Shadeism, Sexual Health, and Diasporic Women's Experiences (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)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.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 24, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Suzanne Kite and Scott Benesiinaabandan, Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)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 ArtistScott 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.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 23, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Elettra Bietti, From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: Viewing Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy (Ethics of AI in Context)From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: Viewing Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy
The word ‘ethics’ is overused in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or hands-off governance, “ethics” is increasingly identified with technology companies’ self-regulatory efforts and with shallow appearances of ethical behavior. So-called “ethics washing” by tech companies is on the rise, prompting criticism and scrutiny from scholars and the tech community at large. In parallel to the growth of ethics washing, its condemnation has led to a tendency to engage in “ethics bashing.” This consists in the trivialization of ethics and moral philosophy now understood as discrete tools or pre-formed social structures such as ethics boards, self-governance schemes or stakeholder groups.
The misunderstandings underlying ethics bashing are at least three-fold: (a) philosophy is understood in opposition and as alternative to law, political representation and social organizing; (b) philosophy and “ethics” are seen as a formalistic methodology, vulnerable to instrumentalization and abuse, and thus ontologically flawed; and (c) engagement in moral philosophy is downplayed and portrayed as mere “ivory tower” intellectualization of complex problems that need to be dealt with through alternative and more practical methodologies.
This talk argues that the rhetoric of ethics and morality should not be reductively instrumentalized, either by the industry in the form of “ethics washing,” or by scholars and policy-makers in the form of “ethics bashing.” Grappling with the role of philosophy and ethics requires moving beyond simplification and seeing ethics as a mode of inquiry that facilitates the evaluation of competing tech policy strategies. In other words, we must resist narrow reductivism of moral philosophy as instrumentalized performance and renew our faith in its intrinsic moral value as a mode of knowledge-seeking and inquiry. Far from mandating a self-regulatory scheme or a given governance structure, moral philosophy in fact facilitates the questioning and reconsideration of any given practice, situating it within a complex web of legal, political and economic institutions. Moral philosophy indeed can shed new light on human practices by adding needed perspective, explaining the relationship between technology and other worthy goals, situating technology within the human, the social, the political.
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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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Harvard Law School
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Feb 18, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Senthuran Varatharajah, Where Are You From? The Ethical Dilemma of Writing Dis/placed (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)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
NovelistSenthuran 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.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Feb 15, 2021
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
Kris Sealey, Creolizing the Nation: Nationalism and Caribbean Philosophy (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)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
06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Philosophy
Fairfield University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Feb 11, 2021
Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
Dorothy Kim, Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Premodern Critical Intersectionality (Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
English & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Brandeis University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 10, 2021
Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms
Anjo-Marí Gouws, “EXTREMELY BAD MONOLOGUE IN HEAD”: Failure and Form in Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Confessionals (Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms)“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.
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 10, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Miriam Hird-Younger, The Productivity of Mistrust: The Ethics of Development Partnerships in Ghana (Ethics@Noon-ish)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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Anthropology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 9, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context, Race, Ethics + Power
Devin Guillory, Combatting Anti-Blackness in the AI Community (The Ethics of AI in Context)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Computer Science
UC Berkeley
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Feb 5, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Ola Mohammed, The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada[s] (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s)
In “Black Like Who” cultural theorist Rinaldo Walcott suggests “settler colonies can be characterized by their struggles over race and space [and that] Canada is no exception” (43).
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
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Feb 4, 2021
Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
Yolonda Wilson, Death, Pandemic, and Intersectionality: What the Failures in an End-of-Life Case Can Teach About Structural Justice and COVID-19 (Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Health Care Ethics
Saint Louis University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jan 29, 2021
Author Meets Critics, Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics in the City
Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs (Author Meets Critics)Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs (Mariana Valverde & Alexandra Flynn eds., 2020)
Mariana Valverde
Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies
University of TorontoAlexandra 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.)
03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Thu, Jan 28, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Nisrine Rahal, A Real Battlefield for Emancipation: The Hamburg Kindergarten Movement 1849-1852 (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)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).
Nisrine Rahal
History
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 27, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Kamilah Ebrahim, The Limits of Anti-Trust Regulation: Reorienting Towards Considerations of Epistemic Power (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)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.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 27, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Juliette Ferry-Danini, What Is the Problem with the Opacity of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine? (Ethics@Noon-ish)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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Philosophy, Sorbonne Université
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jan 26, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Ishtiaque Ahmed, Whose Intelligence? Whose Ethics?: Ethical Pluralism and Postcolonial Computing (Ethics of AI in Context)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Computer Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jan 25, 2021
Perspectives on Ethics
Loubna El Amine, Status, Hierarchy, and the State: Women in the Confucian Classics (Perspectives on Ethics)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 3rd 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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Political Science
Northwestern University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 20, 2021
Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms
Joy James, Captive Maternal Love and War Stories (Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Africana Studies
Williams College
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jan 18, 2021
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
Zifeng Liu, Claudia Jones and China (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)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
06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Africana Studies
Cornell University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jan 12, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Robert Soden, Responsible AI in Disaster Risk Management: A Community of Practice Perspective (Ethics of AI in Context)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Computer Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Dec 10, 2020
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Laura Kwak, The Seat, the Table, the Terms of Incorporation: a Critical Discussion on Representation and the Roles of Racialized Political Elites (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)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.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Dec 9, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Muriam Fancy, Governance of Ethical AI: Methodologies to Procure Low Risk AI for Public Use (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
AI Ethics Researcher
Montreal Ethics AI Institute
uOttawa
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Dec 3, 2020
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Sarah Stefana Smith, Surface, Abstraction and Skin in Black Contemporary Art (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)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
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Gender Studies
Mount Holyoke College
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Dec 2, 2020
Ethics at Noon
Amanda Greer, Etiquette (Un)Seen: Post-WWII American Cinema and the Aesthetics of Politeness (Ethics@Noon)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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Cinema
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 25, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Anne-Marie Fowler, Differentiation Is Mechanics, Integration Is Art: Particularity, Community and the Digital Mind (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Religion
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Nov 23, 2020
Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy
David Scott, Stuart Hall's Ethics (Ethics & Caribbean Philosophy)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
06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Anthropology
Columbia University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Nov 23, 2020
Perspectives on Ethics
Iza Hussin, Translating Islamic Law: Mobility, History, Solidarity (Perspectives on Ethics)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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Cambridge University
Politics & International Studies
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Nov 20, 2020
C4E Flash Event, Race, Ethics + Power
Jonathan Kidd & Sonya Winton-Odamtten, Lovecraft Country: A Conversation on Afrofuturism, Black Aesthetics and the Endurance of Counter-Histories (Race, Ethics + Power Flash Event)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.► please register here
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 CountrySonya Winton-Odamtten
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Co-Executive Producer
Lovecraft Country
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 19, 2020
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Watufani Poe, Representação vs. Representatividade: Analyzing Black LGBTQ+ Identity Politics in Brazil (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)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.
► please register here
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.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 19, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context
Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Ethics of AI in Context)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.
► please register here
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
MITLauren F. Klein
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Director, Digital Humanities Lab
Quantitative Theory & Methods
Emory University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 18, 2020
Ethics at Noon
Morag M. Kersel, Legal or Right? The Negative Consequences of the Legal Trade in Antiquities (Ethics@Noon-ish)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?
► please register here
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
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Director of Museum Studies, DePaul University
Archaeology
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 12, 2020
Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Compound Crisis: Cops, Climate, and COVID (Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)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.
► please register here
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
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Georgetown University
Philosophy
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Oct 29, 2020
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Bianca Beauchemin, Sensuous Interdisciplinary Opening: Re-imagining Diasporic Black Radical Insurgency (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)Sensuous Interdisciplinary Opening: Re-imagining Diasporic Black Radical Insurgency
In his influential book Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot invites us to find out “how history works, rather than what history is”, thus insisting that what we call the “archive” is not only a repository site of information, but also constitutes a methodological concept. He attests that the Haitian Revolution entered history as being “unthinkable,” which suggests in part, a narrow and power-laden methodological framework, foreclosing the epistemic and liberatory promises of this world-altering insurrection. How can we ethically re-narrate this historical event? What can be uncovered to inform other and more current struggles for liberation? Informed by my current dissertation project, this talk seeks to unearth the possibilities of the Haitian Revolution through a queerly black feminist approach.
► please register here
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, October 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.)
Bianca Beauchemin is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her dissertation research explores the interplay of the unintelligibility of Black female sexuality and Black feminist possibilities through the spatial-temporal landscape of the Haitian Revolution. Some of her key sites of research interests also include Black diasporic studies, Black queer studies, Black feminism, postcolonial literature, feminist geography, histories of revolutions, Caribbean history, and histories of slavery.
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 28, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Vinith Suriyakumar, Chasing Your Long Tails: Differentially Private Prediction in Health Care Settings (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)Chasing Your Long Tails: Differentially Private Prediction in Health Care Settings
Machine learning has the potential to improve health care through its ability to extract information from data. Unfortunately, machine learning is susceptible to privacy attacks which leak information about the data it was trained on. This can have dire consequences in health care where protecting patient privacy is of the utmost importance. Differential privacy has been proposed as the leading technique to defend against privacy attacks and has had successful use by the US Census, Google, and Apple. This talk will present the challenges of using differentially private machine learning in health care and how future solutions might address them.
► please register here
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, October 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.)
Vinith Suriyakumar
04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 28, 2020
Ethics of Songs
Antía González Ben on "Que non mo neguen" (They Can't Deny It) (The Ethics of Songs)Join us for 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.)
► please register here
Dr. Antía González Ben
Faculty of Music
University of TorontoThis 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 28, 2020
Ethics at Noon
Lauren Bialystok, The Authority of Identity in Academic Practice (Ethics@Noon-ish)The Authority of Identity in Academic Practice
Academics increasingly feel obliged to “situate” themselves relative to the content of what they have to say and their presumed authority to say it, in both written scholarship and verbal dialogue or teaching. What kind of epistemic or ethical goods are secured by the use of positionality (“As a [race], [gender], [etc.], I…”) to attenuate our roles in political or philosophical discussions? Intended as a gesture of inclusion, these declarations – especially coming from those of us with greater unearned social privilege – can communicate self-awareness in a context where background conditions of unequal power are an exhausting, even prohibitive, hurdle to some people’s participation. Such intentions can also motivate includes pronoun checks, land acknowledgements, and other inclusion-oriented strategies. These practices have become culturally mandatory in some academic milieus, to the point that not partaking in them may immediately raise suspicions. I argue that positionality, while symbolically important, depends on implausible assumptions about identity and knowledge. Worse, it can function as a proxy for the deeper philosophical and educational work that we ought to do to further social justice. Self-positioning should be voluntary and calibrated to the epistemic value of having or not having a certain identity.
► please register here
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, October 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.)
Lauren Bialystok
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
University of Toronto
Social Justice Education, OISE
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Oct 22, 2020
Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
Eddie Bruce-Jones, Black Lives and German Exceptionalism (Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)Black Lives and German Exceptionalism
This presentation will address the issues of institutional and structural racism in Europe by using the legal situation of racism in Germany, and specifically racism against Black people, as a lens. The paper will touch upon discursive, linguistic and legal concepts that highlight the specificity of the German context as well as continuities in approaches across Europe. Ultimately, the paper argues that, contrary to a persistent notion that ‘race’ is a US-American obsession ill-fitted to European social life, race is a useful analytical category for understanding exclusion in Europe and that the structural dimension of racism must be acknowledged in order to address the pervasive forms of racism that affect the daily lives and interests of all of Europe’s residents.
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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, October 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.)
Eddie Bruce-Jones
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Birkbeck, University of London
School of Law
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Oct 20, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context, Race, Ethics + Power
Rodrigo Ochigame, Actuarialism and Racial Capitalism (Ethics of AI in Context)Actuarialism and Racial Capitalism
As national and regional governments form expert commissions to regulate “automated decision-making,” a new corporate-sponsored field of research proposes to formalize the elusive ideal of “fairness” as a mathematical property of algorithms and especially of their outputs. Computer scientists, economists, lawyers, lobbyists, and policy reformers wish to hammer out, in advance or in place of regulation, algorithmic redefinitions of “fairness” and such legal categories as “discrimination,” “disparate impact,” and “equal opportunity.”
But general aspirations to fair algorithms have a long history. This talk recounts some past attempts to answer questions of fairness through the use of algorithms. In particular, it focuses on “actuarial” practices of individualized risk classification in private insurance firms, consumer credit bureaus, and police departments since the late nineteenth century. The emerging debate on algorithmic fairness may be read as a response to the latest moral crisis of computationally managed racial capitalism.
► please register here
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, October 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.)
Rodrigo Ochigame
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
History, Anthropology, & Science, Technology, and Society
MIT
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Oct 19, 2020
Perspectives on Ethics, Race, Ethics + Power
CANCELLED – Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Perspectives on Ethics)Unfortunately, this event has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience, we hope to reschedule at a later date. Any and all updates will be posted here, on the Centre for Ethics website, ethics.utoronto.ca. We thank to all those who registered for your continued support.
Unpayable Debt
In this talk I sketch a black feminist poethical figure with which I seek to capture how coloniality and raciality operate in Global Capital. Framed as a dialectical image, it guides a reading of the notion of value that traces the continuous operation of coloniality in the modern economic and ethical scenes. With a focus on the philosophical infrastructure of the notion of value, Unpaybable Debt exposes global capital as a juridic-economic architecture and attendant ethical grammar, in which raciality (the symbolic figuring of coloniality) justifies otherwise ethically untenable deployments of total violence that allow for the continued expropriation (of labour) and extraction (of resources) of Europe’s racial others and their lands.
Denise Ferreira da Silva
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
University of British Columbia
Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Oct 16, 2020
C4E Flash Event, Race, Ethics + Power
#Say Her Name… Breonna Taylor! Race, Ethics & “Justice”? – A Dialogue with Beverly Bain, Idil Abdillahi, and El Jones (Race, Ethics & Power Flash Event)#Say Her Name… Breonna Taylor! Race, Ethics & “Justice”? – A Dialogue with Beverly Bain, Idil Abdillahi, and El Jones
With the recent grand jury decision to indict on a lesser charge of “wanton endangerment” in the death of Breonna Taylor, there is an urgency to examine the implications of these actions to fully understand future demands for justice. What does it mean to understand state-violence on, and against Black women’s bodies, and personhood, as a “wanton” act? What is the historicity of such a designation that exonerates the perpetrator of said violence against Black women’s personhood? “Wanton” as adjective, is defined as “of a cruel or violent action – that is deliberate and unprovoked.”
Posing these questions invites us all, those that are willing, to consider conversations about the confluence of anti-black violence as it manifests in not only legal procedure and deliberation but also within popular discourse.
Centering Black women’s critical work on law-enforcement and the carceral state, our invited panelists will engage in a critical dialogue considering the following guiding questions;
1) What are the implications of “civil” rulings, such as wrongful death suits, in relation to what we conceive as “justice?”
2) How do such decisions undermine pursuits for accountability from law-enforcement in the realm of the criminal justice system?
3) How is “Black life” and social death deeply intertwined with questions of monetary value as seen in the wrongful death case that preceded the grand jury decision?
4) How do we grapple with this question of “value” in relation to Black women’s lives?
5) How does the above, set a precedent for how Black people will seek justice in the future?
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, October 16. 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.)
► please register here
Beverly Bain is a Black queer feminist scholar –activist and teaches in Women and Gender Studies in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She currently teaches and researches in the area of The Black Queer Feminist Radical Tradition, Black and Caribbean diasporic sexualities, Gender, Feminism and Post Colonial Theories and Gender, Violence and Resistance. Bain is the author of “Fire, Passion and Politics: The Creation of Blockorama as Black Queer Diasporic Space in the Toronto Pride Festivities.” In We Still Demand: Defining Resistance in Sex and Gender Struggles. Edited by Patrizia Gentile, Gary Kinsman and L Pauline Rankin. UBC Press, 2017; “Wake Work and The Coronavirus”. Tilting 2, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. May 2020, Blackwood Gallery as well as several other articles. Bain is currently working on a series of essays on Black radical feminist queer activism in Toronto from the 80’s to the present.
Idil Abdillahi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Disability Studies and the Advisor to the Dean in the Faculty of Community Services on issues of anti-Black racism. She is a founding member of the Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC) and currently serves as the vice-chair of the board of directors. Idil has published on a wide array of topics, such as mental health, prisons/policing, poverty, HiV/AIDS, organizational development, and several other key policy areas at the intersection of BlackLife and state interruption. In 2019 Idil co-authored “BlackLife. Post BLM and the Struggle from Freedom”, and she is completing, her forthcoming book “Blackened Madness: Medicalization, and Everyday Life in Canada” also published by ARP Books.
El Jones is a poet, educator, journalist and advocate. She was the fifth Poet Laureate of Halifax, and the 15th Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. El is a 2016 recipient of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission Burnley “Rocky” Jones award. El is a co-founder of the Black Power Hour, a radio show developed collectively with prisoners. Her advocacy and work fights anti-Black racism in Canada, walking in the path of our great-grandmothers who resisted relentlessly. Her book of poetry and essays on state violence, Canada is So Polite will be released in the winter from Gaspereau Press.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 14, 2020
Ethics at Noon
Teresa Heffernan, AI, the Immortality Industry, and the Ethics of Death (Ethics@Noon)AI, the Immortality Industry, and the Ethics of Death
This talk considers the far reaches of the multi-billion-dollar immortality industry and the money and power behind the scenes that fuels this fantasy science even as the planet teeters on the brink of collapse. After examining some contemporary fictions that challenge big tech and its paradoxical escalation of the end of all life even as it hankers after life without death in its relentless focus on a future that is always “future,” this talk then turns to archaeology and the future’s archaic longings. One of the oldest and longest surviving stories in the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is about a tyrannical king who wants immortality. In failing in his quest, however, Gilgamesh learns what it means to live as an ethical human being. Drawing on the lesson in this ancient epic, the talk ends with a reflection on the connection between mortality, responsibility, and freedom
► please register here
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, October 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.)
Teresa Heffernan
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
St. Mary’s University
English
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Oct 13, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context, Race, Ethics + Power
Andre Brock, Black Morpheus: Race in the Technocultural Matrix (Ethics of AI in Context)Black Morpheus: Race in the Technocultural Matrix
Where does Blackness manifest In the ideology of Western technoculture? Technoculture is the American mythos and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, and never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as-technology” to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things”. Hence, Black technoculture.
► please register here
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, October 13. 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.)
Andre Brock
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
School of Literature, Media, and Communication
Georgia Tech
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Oct 9, 2020
C4E Flash Event, Ethics of AI in Context
Mohamed Abdalla, The Grey Hoodie Project: Big Tobacco, Big Tech, and the Threat on Academic Integrity (Ethics of AI in Context)The Grey Hoodie Project: Big Tobacco, Big Tech, and the Threat on Academic IntegrityAs governmental bodies rely on academics’ expert advice to shape policy regarding Artificial Intelligence, it is important that these academics not have conflicts of interests that may cloud or bias their judgement. Our work explores how Big Tech is actively distorting the academic landscape to suit its needs. By comparing the well-studied actions of another industry, that of Big Tobacco, to the current actions of Big Tech we see similar strategies employed by both industries to sway and influence academic and public discourse. We examine the funding of academic research as a tool used by Big Tech to put forward a socially responsible public image, influence events hosted by and decisions made by funded universities, influence the research questions and plans of individual scientists, and discover receptive academics who can be leveraged. We demonstrate, in a rigorous manner, how Big Tech can affect academia from the institutional level down to individual researchers. Thus, we believe that it is vital, particularly for universities and other institutions of higher learning, to discuss the appropriateness and the tradeoffs of accepting funding from Big Tech, and what limitations or conditions should be put in place. (As featured in Wired.)
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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, October 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.)
Mohamed Abdala
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics & Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Oct 5, 2020
Perspectives on Ethics
Sophie Grace Chappell, Forgiveness in Classical Greece: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Their Background Culture (Perspectives on Ethics)Forgiveness in Classical Greece: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Their Background Culture
In the Christian tradition that we have inherited, there is a two-stranded conception of forgiveness: forgiveness is both kindness and grace about wrongdoing, and also cancellation of wrongdoing. Moreover, the focal Augustinian articulation of this tradition works with a very special (and specially problematic) conception of what the wrongdoing is that the forgiver forgives. None of these ideas are central to the classical Greek ethical tradition. Most of them are not there at all. In fact, we might plausibly say that in pagan ancient-Greek ethics there is not much evidence of any concept of forgiveness. The nearest approach is that there is some idea of gracious kindness towards those who do us wrong. But in its pagan Greek version this does not involve any contrastive narrative of moral or spiritual conversion or transformation; above all, there is in pagan Greek ethics no notion at all of the kind of wrongdoing that at least Augustinian Christianity later came to focus on.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, October 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.)
Sophie Grace Chappell
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Philosophy
Open University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Oct 2, 2020
C4E Flash Event, Ethics of AI in Context
To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada (Ethics of AI in Context)To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada
A collaboration between the International Human Rights Program and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada examines algorithmic technologies that are designed for use in criminal law enforcement systems in Canada. Algorithmic policing is an area of technological development that, in theory, is designed to enable law enforcement agencies to either automate surveillance or to draw inferences through the use of mass data processing in the hopes of predicting potential criminal activity. The report finds that the use of algorithmic policing technologies by law enforcement can raise many potential constitutional and civil liberties violations under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international human rights law. In their presentation, the authors of this report discuss their findings, including what steps governments and the public in Canada should consider taking in light of human rights dangers at stake.
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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, October 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.)
Kate Robertson
Markson Law
Citizen Lab Research FellowCynthia Khoo
Tekhnos Law
Citizen Lab Research FellowYolanda Song
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Stevenson Whelton LLP
IHRP Research Associate
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Oct 1, 2020
Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
Xine Yao, The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling: Considering Race and Affect From Below (Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling: Considering Race and Affect From Below
Dominant cultural fantasies of justice still depend upon reformed models of sympathy to recognize minoritized feelings. What if we considered unfeeling not as a strategy from above, but as a tactic from below? In my forthcoming book Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America (Duke University Press) I take an antisocial approach to affect theory. According to theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva, “affectability” is constructed as the intrinsic property of non-white others. Drawing from queer of colour critique, I refuse the usual move to recuperate unfeeling as legible feeling; instead I stress how unfeeling indexes disaffection in the political, causal, and affective senses. Unfeeling is a means of survival and a catalyst for the emergence of alternative structures of feeling. For my talk I will discuss Oriental inscrutability as a queer, racialized mode of unfeeling in its potential for what I call insurgent counterintimacies with the intertwined struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples. By discussing writings by early Black nationalist Martin R. Delany and the first Asian North American woman writer Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, I hope to model how Asian diasporic settlers like myself should refuse the colonial politics of recognition toward the hard work of BIPOC solidarity.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Thursday, October 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. For information on the Centre for Ethics, including upcoming events, visit ethics.utoronto.ca.
Xine Yao
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
English
University College London
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 30, 2020
Ethics of Songs, Race, Ethics + Power
George Elliott Clarke on "Ride On, King Jesus" (Ethics of Songs)Join us for 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.)
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George Elliott Clarke
Poet / Professor
University of TorontoThis 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 30, 2020
Ethics at Noon
Simon Stern, Reasonable Doubters: Cross-Examination, Detection, Mystification (Ethics@Noon)Reasonable Doubters: Cross-Examination, Detection, Mystification
The methods of the detective and the cross-examiner can help to get at the truth, but they can also cloud the truth, creating doubt where none existed. After a brief discussion of the rise of cross-examination, in the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, I will turn to a series of developments in the detective story that increasingly stressed the unreliability of evidence. These changes, accompanied by developments in forensic science, identified new ways to “de-authenticate” legitimate documents while justifying the skeptic’s questions as merely the expression of a reasonable observer’s doubts. Unlike those who freely attach the label of “fake news” to whatever they disagree with, the reasonable doubter makes a show of adhering to proof standards – but the results may be equally dangerous.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, September 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.)
Simon Stern
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Law & English
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Sep 22, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context, Critical Race Studies
Alex Hanna, Data, Transparency, and AI Ethics (Ethics of AI in Context)Data, Transparency, and AI Ethics
The interdisciplinary field of AI ethics has started new debates into the fairness of particular algorithms and the role of algorithms in automated decision making systems. In the first part of this talk, I introduce the reporting and transparency work that Google’s Ethical AI team has been pursuing around the models and data involved in these systems. A major assumption of this work is the stability of particular ontologies of socially salient characteristics. In the second part of this talk, I turn to critical race theory and sociological work on race and ethnicity to ground conceptualizations of race for algorithmic fairness and machine learning more broadly. Lastly, I outline a research program around the genealogy of data used in machine learning research. While machine learning has seen a rapid proliferation of new methods, the datasets which undergird these methods have received comparatively little attention. A research program around the genealogy of these datasets should be attentive to the constellation of organizations and stakeholders involved in their creation, the intent, values, and assumptions of their authors and curators, and the adoption of datasets by subsequent researchers.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, September 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.)
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Alex Hanna
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
ML Fairness
Google
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Sep 21, 2020
Perspectives on Ethics
Sally Haslanger, Systemic Injustice, Ideology, and Agency (Perspectives on Ethics)Systemic Injustice, Ideology, and Agency
Racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic injustice are more than just bad attitudes. In a stratified society, there are mechanisms – including law, policy, culture, technology, and the built environment – that stably position groups hierarchically. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? In this lecture Haslanger argues that social practices are patterns of interaction guided by social meanings that distribute things of value. In the case of unjust practices the network of meanings is ideological and is internalized in habits of mind that distort, obscure, and occlude important facts and result in a failure to recognize the interests of subordinated groups. How do we disrupt such practices to achieve greater justice? Haslanger argues that resistance to systemic injustice requires us to do more than just challenge false beliefs; social movements change the material and cultural conditions of agency.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Monday, September 21. 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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Sally Haslanger
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Philosophy
MIT
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 16, 2020
Ethics of Songs, Race, Ethics + Power
Elizabeth Gould on "Mississippi Goddam" (Ethics of Songs)Join us for 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.)
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Elizabeth Gould
Faculty of Music
University of TorontoThis 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 16, 2020
Ethics at Noon
Gail Super, Punitive Welfare on the Margins of the State: Narratives of Punishment and (In)Justice in Masiphumelele (Ethics@Noon)Punitive Welfare on the Margins of the State: Narratives of Punishment and (In)Justice in Masiphumelele
While there is an established literature on the relationship between political economy and state punishment, there is less work on how punishment is constituted from below in contexts of inequality. In this talk I analyse the discourse around incidents of lethal collective violence that occurred in 2015 in a former ‘black township’ in South Africa. I use this discourse as a lens for examining how punitive forms of popular justice interact with state punishment. Whether via the slow violence of racialized structural inequality or the viscerally corporeal high rates of interpersonal violence, my interviewees were intimately acquainted with violence. Although they supported long-term imprisonment, and the expulsion of ‘criminals’ from their communities, none of them came across as conservative right-wing populists. Instead, they adopted complex positions, calling for a type of punitive welfarism, which combined harsh solutions to crime with explicit recognition of the importance of dealing with ‘root causes’. I argue that when the state is perceived to be failing to both impose punishment and provide welfare, violence becomes a technology of exchange, which simultaneously seeks both more punishment and more welfare. The result is an assemblage of exclusionary penal forms, many of which stem from and/or overlap with the violence (penal and otherwise), that was deployed by colonial and apartheid rulers as a means to control their racialized subjects.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, September 16. 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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Gail Super
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Sociology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Sep 15, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context, Critical Race Studies, Race, Ethics + Power
I. Bennett Capers, A New Country: Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044 (Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)A New Country: Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044
In his presentation, Professor Capers will turn to Afrofuturism and Critical Race Theory as a way to imagine what policing could look like in a majority-minority future where people of color make up the majority in terms of numbers, and also wield the majority of political and economic power. In short, he imagines a new country
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, September 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.)
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I. Bennett Capers
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Law School
Fordham University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Sep 2, 2020
Ethics of Songs
David Fallis on "Tiny Perfect Moles" (Ethics of Songs)Join us for 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.)
➡︎ please register here
David Fallis
Faculty of Music
University of TorontoThis 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Aug 19, 2020
Ethics of Songs
Nasim Niknafs on "لالایی" (Lālāi) (Ethics of Songs)Join us for 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Dr. Nasim Niknafs
Faculty of Music
University of TorontoThe Ethics of Songs
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
August 19, 2020Credits:
Image
Rob Niebrugge, www.wildnatureimages.comCentre for Ethics
University of Toronto
ethics.utoronto.ca
July 2020
Produced and edited by Laura MenardThis 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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Aug 5, 2020
Ethics of Songs
Anna Shternshis on "Es geyen yesomim" ("Orphan's Walk") (Ethics of Songs)Join us for 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.)
Anna Shternshis
Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies
University of TorontoCredits:
“Es geyen yesomim” archival photo courtesy of Anna Shternshis
Video recording of “Es geyen yesomim” courtesy of Anna Shternshis
Vocals: Psoy Korolenko
Cello: Beth Silver Accordion: Sergiu Popa
Clarinet: Julian Milkis Part of the “Yiddish Glory Project”
Creators: Anna Shternshis and Psoy Korolenko
Producer: Dan RosenbergCentre for Ethics
University of Toronto
ethics.utoronto.ca
July 2020
Produced and edited by Laura MenardAdditional Resources:
For more on Yiddish Glory, see https://www.yiddishglory.com/
For press, see http://danrosenberg.net/press_yiddish_glory
For an academic article, “Hitler Hanging on the Tree: Humor and Violence in Soviet Yiddish Folklore of World War II,” in Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust, edited by Avinom Platt, David Slucki and Gabriel Finder, pp.15 – 37, Wayne State University Press, 2020 (http://tiny.cc/jnamsz)
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.)
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jul 15, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Daniel Loick & Vanessa E. Thompson, Breathing and Unbreathing: The Chokeholds of Racism (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Breathing and Unbreathing: The Chokeholds of Racism
The recent murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade have sparked resistance against policing and carcerality as articulations of racial gendered capitalism globally. Black, brown and migrant communities are protesting and trace the transnational connections and historical continuities of present murderous institutions such as the police, in their respective contexts and show that these protests are not only about the US. The systemic killings of black people in these various contexts present the most repressive and deadly function of policing. This is however only one part of the problem. The repression and oppression of black, brown and migrant folks is inextricably linked to the empowerment and normalization of dominant segments of the population.
In this input, we discuss the differential functionality of policing and how it plays out in the field of subjectivation and identification. We explore the condition of unbreathing for some (and inherent to the policing of blackness and race) in relationship to the breathability of others by drawing on accounts of the policing of black lives, black radical, feminist and critical social theory. Finally, we propose a subjective and collective dis-dentification with the police as a precondition for a world in which we all can breathe.
This conversation will take place in German language.
Atmen und Erstickenlassen: Die Würgegriffe des Rassismus
Die Morde an George Floyd, Breonna Taylor und Tony McDade haben einen weltweiten Widerstand gegen das System des Polizierens und Einsperrens als Ausdruck eines rassifizierten und vergeschlechtlichten Kapitalismus ausgelöst. Der Protest Schwarzer und migrantischer Communities verweist in seinen jeweiligen Kontexten auf die transnationalen Verbindungen und historischen Kontinuitäten der gegenwärtigen Gewaltinstitutionen wie der Polizei. Dieser Protest ist somit nicht allein auf die USA bezogen. Die systematische Tötung Schwarzer Menschen in diesen verschiedenen Kontexten sind der tödlichste und repressivste Ausdruck des Polizierens. Sie sind aber nur die eine Seite der polizeilichen Logik. Die Unterdrückung von Menschen of Color ist untrennbar verknüpft mit der Ermächtigung und Normalisierung dominanter Teile der Bevölkerung.
In diesem Input diskutieren wir die differentielle Funktionsweise der Polizei und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Subjektivierung und Identifizierung. Wir wollen den Ursachen dessen nachgehen, dass einigen die Luft zum Atmen genommen wird (ein Effekt, der dem Polizieren Schwarzer Menschen inhärent ist), während andere frei atmen können. Dafür konsultieren wir einige radikale Schwarze Ansätze sowie feministische und kritische Gesellschaftstheorien. Wir schlagen schließlich eine subjektive und kollektive Des-Identifikation mit der Polizei als Vorbedingung einer Welt vor, in der wir alle atmen können.
Das Gespräch findet in deutscher Sprache statt.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 10am EDT (= 4pm CET), on Wednesday, July 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Daniel Loick is associate professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam
Vanessa E. Thompson is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jul 13, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Charisse Burden-Stelly & Sandy Placido, Radical Ethics and Black Lives Matter: Pan-Caribbean Perspectives on Capitalism, Imperialism, State Violence, and Antiblackness (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Radical Ethics and Black Lives Matter: Pan-Caribbean Perspectives on Capitalism, Imperialism, State Violence, and Antiblackness
In this conversation Drs. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Sandy Plácido offer an internationalist and pan-Caribbean perspective on the radical ethics of Black Lives Matter though an analysis of capitalism, imperialism, state violence, and antiblackness. From the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rashard Brooks in the United States to the intensification of far-right anti-Haitian violence in the Dominican Republic to the contested elections in Guyana, profound questions are being raised about the relationship of Blackness to both domination and liberation.
The antagonism between Black life and “law and order,” of which the brutality and
dehumanization of policing is only one manifestation, provides insight into repression as a means of contending with constitutive lack emanating from histories of (neo-)colonialism and imperialism, capitalist exploitation and neoliberal austerity, and their rootedness in processes of racialization and regimes of antiblackness. Plácido and Burden-Stelly consider how this current iteration of uprisings and demands on the state require a disaggregation of “mass mobilization,” which is coming from both the left and the right; an interrogation of the peculiar appeal of fascist-like nationalism to populations historically subjected to imperial and colonial domination; and a consideration of the benefits and limitations of “popular front”—that is, ideologically heterogenous—demands for equality and justice. Additionally, the Professors take up the radical ethics of Black lives matter as a heuristic to interrogate state power as a function of ruling class interests, on the one hand, and the potential for people’s power to enact meaningful change, on the other hand.This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, on Monday, July 13. 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Charisse Burden-Stelly
Africana Studies & Political Science
Carleton CollegeSandy Placido
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
History
Queens College, City University of New York
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jul 8, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Norman Ajari & Vincent Lloyd, Black Dignity: The Moral Vocabulary of Black Lives Matter (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Black Dignity: The Moral Vocabulary of Black Lives Matter
The recent racial justice protests represent not only an intensification and broadening of longstanding anti-racist activism. They represent the introduction to mainstream political discourse of a new moral vocabulary, one that unequivocally centers Blackness, transforms how we understand dignity, and orients the virtues to struggle. With reference to the French and US contexts, Norman Ajari and Vincent Lloyd will discuss what is new and what is old in the moral vocabulary of today’s racial justice movements.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, on Wednesday, July 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Norman Ajari
Philosophy
Villanova UniversityVincent Lloyd
Theology and Religious Studies
Africana Studies Program
Villanova University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jul 3, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Emmanuel Blanchard, Black Lives Matter in France: The Colonial Legacy of French Policing (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Black Lives Matter in France: The Colonial Legacy of French Policing
This talk (given in French) will focus on a double riddle: the unique historical trajectory leading to a “French style of policing” characterized by its aggressive style in racialized communities, and the extreme circumspection of French policing studies when it comes to integrating post-colonial analyses and the colonial past into their analytical frameworks. The first to bring to the foreground the excesses of the colonial legacy were activists. This may explain why studies framed in terms of “internal colonialism,” as well as those highlighting continuities with policing practices shaped in colonial situations, were undervalued.
Domestic French policing was more directly impacted by its imperial legacy than was the case in Britain. The Algerian War (1954-1962) in particular considerably affected police-public relationships, leading to organizational, institutional, and practical innovations (an emphasis on “anti-crime” interventions; heavy reliance on stop-and-search; a tendency toward militarization) whose contemporary traces appear significant when it comes to comparing France to other European policing institutions.
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Black Lives Matter en France: les héritages coloniaux des pratiques de police
Cette contribution vise à proposer des pistes d’élucidation au sujet d’une double énigme : les trajectoire historique ayant conduit à un « style policier français » marqué par sa rugosité, en particulier en ce qui concerne les espaces et les populations racialisées ; la grande prudence avec laquelle les spécialistes français des police studies intègrent les analyses postcoloniales et le passé colonial des polices hexagonales à leurs grilles d’analyse. Les origines militantes de la dénonciation des héritages coloniaux ont contribué à mettre à distance les analyses en termes de « colonialisme interne » ainsi que celles relatives aux continuités ou aux rémanences de pratiques policières forgées en situation coloniale. Il reste que, pour en rester à comparaison franco-britannique, les polices hexagonales ont été plus directement touchées par les reconfigurations impériales que ne l’ont été leurs homologues d’outre-Manche. La période de la guerre d’Algérie (1954-1962) a ainsi considérablement infléchi les rapports police-population et conduit à des innovations organisationnelles, institutionnelles et pratiques (prégnance de « l’anticriminalité », des contrôle d’identité et de formes de militarisation…) dont les traces contemporaines apparaissent significatives quand il s’agit de comparer les polices françaises à d’autres institutions policières en Europe.
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This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 11am EDT (= 5pm CET), on Friday, July 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.)
Emmanuel Blanchard
11:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Political Science
University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Jul 2, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Amadou Korbinian Sow, Black Lives Matter in Germany: What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in White Jurisprudence? (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Black Lives Matter in Germany: What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in White Jurisprudence?
Jurisprudence need not be indifferent to matters of racial justice – even if its main perspective is a “white” one. Using the particularly palpable example of German “legal science”, the talk will explore how jurisprudence and the academy can be used as a lever (hypomochlium) for minoritarian issues.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 12pm EDT (6pm CET), Thursday, July 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Amadou Korbinian Sow
Bucerius Law School
Hamburg
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jun 29, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
A Conversation Between Rachel Herzing and Amna AkbarJoin the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
A Conversation Between Rachel Herzing and Amna Akbar
A conversation between Rachel Herzing and Amna Akbar on the organizing that came before, and the road ahead, toward prison abolition.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Monday, June 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Rachel Herzing
Executive Director, Center for Political Education
Co-Founder, Critical ResistanceAmna Akbar
Law
Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Ohio State University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jun 26, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Natasha Tusikov, Going Cashless in an Era of Digital Payments & Surveillance (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Going Cashless in an Era of Digital Payments & Surveillance
The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the shift toward a cashless society, with consumers and retailers turning to payment cards and digital payments in efforts to avoid the perceived contagion from cash. While this shift offers some benefits, including convenience, it also penalizes those who prefer or rely upon cash. Methods of digital payments, from PayPal and Apple Pay to Square, operate surveillance-intensive business models that collect, interpret, and commodify data in order to augment existing products and create new ones. Payment platforms also have a troubling history of denying services to those they label “high risk,” including people working in the sex industry and distributing sexual or erotic content. With surveillance an intrinsic feature of digital-payment systems, what are the possible repercussions of a cashless society? What lessons can we draw from payment platforms’ campaign against sex workers to address financial exclusion and discrimination in a post-pandemic society?
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, June 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Natasha Tusikov
Criminology Program
Department of Social Science
York University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jun 24, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Vincent Chiao & Corey Brettschneider, Rights, Solidarity and the Power to Punish in States of EmergencyJoin the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Rights, Solidarity and the Power to Punish in States of Emergency
Description: In the most urgent moments of the COVID-19 pandemic, apparently well-established discourses of individual rights collapsed immediately, with a wide array of social norms — e.g. concerning the use of public space, freedom of movement, freedom of contract and privacy — transforming almost literally overnight. Rights discourse proved ineffective, because unappealing; rights talk was replaced with calls for solidarity and deference to sweeping assertions of executive power, supplemented with formal and informal efforts to shame and punish those caught violating the new social norms. What lessons should we draw about how rights discourse functions in a theory of the modern administrative state? What is the place of punishment when in the face of disagreement about which social norms should prevail?
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Wednesday, June 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Vincent Chiao
University of Toronto
LawCorey Brettschneider
Brown University
Political Science
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jun 23, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Siddhant Issar, Reflecting on Black Lives Matter: Visions of Abolition Democracy (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Reflecting on Black Lives Matter: Visions of Abolition Democracy
In the wake of the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, longstanding activist demands to “defund the police” have finally gained traction. In this talk, I begin by situating contemporary demands for police abolition within the Movement for Black Lives’s (M4BL) critique of racial capitalism. The world-system of racial capitalism, for M4BL, is a foundational motor of historical and ongoing anti-Black violence. Subsequently, I argue that M4BL’s vision to contest racial capitalism—as found in their policy platform—revolves around an abolitionist democratic politics, including demands for the democratization of land and natural resources. I end by thinking about the political and normative implications of M4BL’s critique of and positive program to overcome anti-Black oppression.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Tuesday, June 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Siddhant Issar
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Political Science
UMass Amherst
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jun 22, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Abi Adams-Prassl & Jeremias Adams-Prassl, COVID-19: Three Challenges for Labour Market Regulation (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
COVID-19: Three Challenges for Labour Market Regulation
Drawing on new survey evidence of the impact of Covid-19 on international labour markets, in this workshop, we set out three key challenges for Labour Market Regulation going forward. First, a number of issues raised by the explosion of working from home, including the fact that it is highly unequal, with a clear correlation between income and education/occupation: in the short run, low-income earners face significantly higher risk exposure; in the long run, how will employment law standards, from privacy to working time, have to adapt to be applicable away from the workplace? The second challenge relates to the emergency policies put in place to soften labour market impacts (such as the UK furlough scheme, or German Kurzarbeit), the curious incentives created by its rules, and the on-going confusion about its interaction with other norms, such as paid annual leave. Finally, emerging evidence suggests that women have been impacted disproportionately, raising a series about issues about the applicability of equality and anti-discrimination law.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 12pm (5pm UK), Monday, June 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Abi Adams-Prassl
Department of Economics
University of Oxford
Jeremias Adams-Prassl
12:00 PM - 12:30 PM
Faculty of Law
University of Oxford
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jun 19, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Luvell Anderson, Hermeneutical Impasses, Hermeneutical Injustices, and Progress (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Hermeneutical Impasses, Hermeneutical Injustices, and Progress
With different voices and perspectives flooding the forum of public discourse over righting injustice, it is important to be reflective about the language of debate. The framing of public discourse can have implications for dialogue, substantive as opposed to symbolic justice, and progress.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, June 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.)
Luvell Anderson
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Philosophy
Women’s and Gender Studies &
African American Studies
Syracuse University
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jun 16, 2020
Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Ian Loader, Beyond Brutality: Political Visions in Black Lives Matter (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Beyond Brutality: Political Visions in Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter is a vibrant movement against racist brutality – in the US and far beyond. Its orientation is to expose, publicize and critique. But Black Lives Matter is also an idea. It is a movement that draws on ideas, that is animated by ideas, that is generative of ideas. So what ideas can be located in, and distilled from, the angry protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd? What different futures, what alternative political visions, animate Black Lives Matter?
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 10am EDT (5pm UK), Tuesday, June 16. 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Ian Loader
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Centre for Criminology
All Souls College
University of Oxford
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jun 15, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of COVID
Mireille Hildebrandt, Living with an Endemic Virus: EU Data Protection Law (The Ethics of COVID)➡︎ Unfortunately, this event has been cancelled. We hope to reschedule it in the future.
Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Living with an Endemic Virus: EU Data Protection Law
In this talk C4E-veteran Mireille Hildebrandt will discuss how EU data protection law is well suited to address the myriad balancing acts required when constitutional democracies face the prospect of hosting an enduring endemic virus. This concerns issues of human autonomy, confidentiality of communication, non-discrimination and freedom of information when preparing a return to the new normal, including workplace safety, physical distancing, contact tracing, immunity passports, and medical research. Focus of the discussion will be the aim of preventing infringements of all relevant fundamental rights, and the use of the purpose limitation principle as the core of the GDPR.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 10am (4pm CET), Monday, June 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Mireille Hildebrandt
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Vrije Universiteit Brussels
Law Science Technology and Society Studies
Faculty of Law and Criminology
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jun 12, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Nicola Lacetera, The Ethics and Economics of Paying Plasma Donors (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
The Ethics and Economics of Paying Plasma Donors
Compensation for plasma donors—specifically, for the supply of plasma to be used for fractionation—and the establishment of for-profit plasma centers are legal activities in several countries, such as the United States, Czech Republic, and Austria. Many other countries prohibit payments.14 A common feature of most countries that ban compensation is that they run a deficit of plasma for domestic uses; therefore, they rely on imports, most often of plasma collected in countries where compensation is legal because, typically, these countries have a surplus of available plasma. The different legal status of payments to donors around the world and the international plasma procurement and allocation patterns are somewhat exemplary of the challenges in defining contested trades and in determining the reasons for bans to compensation.
In the past weeks, there has been an increased attention toward the collection of convalescent plasma. Convalescent plasma is drawn from someone who has recovered from a virus. When a person is infected with a virus, their body produces antibodies to fight it. These antibodies could be the key ingredient for a treatment to help other people with the same virus. In particular, some research is showing that plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients may help treating infected individuals. This treatment, however, requires very large quantities of plasma from recovered patients.
Should various jurisdictions reconsider their ban of payments, in order to provide stronger incentives?
In this talk, Professor Lacetera will review the ethical and economic arguments for and against compensating plasma donors. He will also review the current evidence on the social support to payments. Finally, he will expand from this specific case to discuss the challenges of policy making in the case of ethically contentious transactions.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, June 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.)
➡︎ please register here
Nicola Lacetera
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
University of Toronto
Department of Management UTM &
Rotman School of Management
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jun 10, 2020
Ethics of COVID, Ethics of Black Lives Matter
Black Health Matters: Racism and Protest In the Midst of a Global Pandemic (The Ethics of Black Lives Matter)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of Black Lives Matter, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes.
Black Health Matters: Racism and Protest In the Midst of a Global Pandemic
In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, we are now witnessing an unprecedented uprising, sparked by the death of George Floyd, both against police brutality as well as against white supremacy. Protests have spread across the US and, more recently, globally. We will talk about the ways in which long standing racial health inequalities, as well as the way in which the burdens of the pandemic are distributed unequally, intersect the current uprisings, including the ideologies of underlying conditions, the idea of violence as a pandemic (metaphorical and literal), and more.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Wednesday, June 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.)
➨ please register here
Yolonda Yvette Wilson is a 2019-2020 fellow at the National Humanities Center and a 2019-2020 Encore Public Voices fellow. Her research interests include bioethics, social and political philosophy, race theory, and feminist philosophy. She is broadly interested in the nature and limits of the state’s obligations to rectify historic and continuing injustice, particularly in the realm of health care, and is developing an account of justice that articulates specific requirements for racial justice in health care at the end of life.
in conversation with:
Elena Comay del Junco is post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto. Her work spans ancient philosophy and philosophy of race, with an emphasis on race and medicine
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jun 8, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Anna Su, Keeping the Faith During a Pandemic: Religion and COVID-19 (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Keeping the Faith During a Pandemic: Religion and COVID-19
In this brief talk, I discuss how religion and religious liberty has been shaping comparative legal and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. I also examine some of the arguments underlying the cases filed by churches against closures in US and Europe. I argue both religious communities and the outside world will have to adapt to our new reality as we urgently acknowledge how the current pandemic highlights the need for a life beyond bare existence.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Monday, June 8. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➡︎ please register here
Anna Su
University of Toronto
Law
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, Jun 5, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics of COVID
Veena Dubal, Surveillance Is Not a Social Good: Technocapital, Public Health, and the Pandemic (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Surveillance Is Not a Social Good: Technocapital, Public Health, and the Pandemic
Technology companies are rapidly repurposing themselves amidst the global pandemic, leveraging and expanding existing surveillance economies in the name of public health. What are the potential implications and differential outcomes of these collaborations between health authorities and technocapital? This talk explores the nascent intersections of surveillance capitalism and public health and suggests a framework for anticipating and containing the anti-democratic and authoritarian practices that may emerge.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, June 5. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➡︎ please register here
Veena Dubal
UC Hastings Law
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jun 3, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Benjamin P. Davis, Internationalism Under Lockdown (The Ethics of COVID)Internationalism Under Lockdown
This talk will focus on vocabularies of internationalism, solidarity, and belonging amidst the pandemic. What is the “normal” to which so many desire to return? Why are some events officially declared a “crisis” and others casually deemed business as usual? By considering the terms of the present, and by providing examples across the Americas, this discussion will offer points of connection across our taken-as-natural lines: nations, states, political memberships, and so on.
Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Wednesday, June 3. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
Benjamin P. Davis
Emory University/University of Toronto
Philosophy/Centre for Ethics
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, Jun 1, 2020
Conferences, Ethics of COVID
Steps from the Frontlines: Medical Student Perspectives During COVID-19 (The Ethics of COVID)Steps from the Frontlines: Medical Student Perspectives During COVID-19
Three medical students at the University of Toronto, Vinyas Harish, Liam McCoy, and Nishila Mehta, discuss the sentiments, pressures and dilemmas associated with being a medical trainee during a global pandemic. Topics to be discussed include: (i) Learning medicine during COVID-19, (ii) “COVID competition” and pandemic productivity pressures (iii) what will change about medical education going forward.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Monday, June 1. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➡︎ please register here
Vinyas Harish
University of Toronto
Medicine and Public Health
Liam McCoy
University of Toronto
Medicine and Public Health
Nishila Mehta
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
University of Toronto
Medicine and Public Health
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, May 29, 2020
Ethics of COVID
John Ricco, Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together
In this brief talk I discuss how distance is the spacing of the ethical, isolation is the evacuation of that space, loneliness is the deprivation of the self, and solitude is what we need to reclaim as the only means by which an ethical sense of the common might take place. Drawing upon the work of Arendt, Agamben, Blanchot, and Foucault, I proceed to explicate how it is that the COVID-19 pandemic has actually brought us too close together.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, May 29. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
John Paul Ricco
University of Toronto
Art History &
Centre for Comparative Literature
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, May 27, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Alex Luscombe & Alexander McClelland, Policing the Pandemic: Counter Mapping the Expansion of COVID-19 Enforcement Across Canada (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Policing the Pandemic: Counter Mapping the Expansion of COVID-19 Enforcement Across Canada
Across Canada, there has been an extraordinary scaling-up of police powers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although initially, the idea circulated that COVID-19 impacted all people equally, this notion was quickly dispelled as the race and class dynamics of the pandemic became apparent. Concerned that these same dynamics would shape the application of laws and policing practices designed to contain illness, on April 4 2020, we began to monitor COVID-related police incidents across the country. Our project, called the Policing the Pandemic Mapping Project, has quickly grown into a living data repository of publicly accessible information and commentary about the emergent impacts of police responses to COVID-19. In this talk, we will reflect on the major findings of this project so far, situating them in a broader conversation about policing, inequality, and the criminalization of communicable disease. Particular attention will be paid to the dual crises currently faced by marginalized and racialized people across Canada, the crisis of COVID and the crisis of policing.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Wednesday, May 27. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
Alex Luscombe
University of Toronto
Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies
Alexander McClelland
Department of Criminology
University of Ottawain conversation with:
Jamie Duncan
Ethics of AI Lab, Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto
Centre for Access to Information and Justice
University of Winnipegco-sponsored by:
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, May 26, 2020
Ethics of AI in Context, Ethics in the City
Sidewalk Toronto Revisited: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (Ethics in the City)Sidewalk Toronto Revisited: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (Ethics in the City)
On January 24, 2018, the Centre for Ethics hosted what was billed as “a panel discussion of the [then nascent] Sidewalk Toronto Project, a collaboration of Google’s Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto.”
On May 7, 2020, Sidewalk Labs announced that it will no longer pursue the Sidewalk Toronto Project.
On May 26, 2020, C4E will host a follow-up to the 2018 event, featuring most of the original panel members (Mark Fox, Ruben Gaetani, John Lorinc, and Mariana Valverde), plus Mireille Hildebrandt, a leading European expert on law & technology, who has previously lectured on Sidewalk Toronto at C4E.
Join us for this online livestreamed event, as the panelists take this opportunity to look back and ahead, to see what’s changed, what hasn’t, what we (and others?) have learned, both about our local “smart city” project and the idea–and reality–of smart cities in general, elsewhere and in the future. (Videos of the original presentations are available in the Ethics in the City playlist, here.)
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 10am, Tuesday, May 26. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
Panelists:
Mark Fox
Industrial Engineering & Computer Science
University of TorontoRuben Gaetani
Department of Management
Rotman School
University of TorontoMireille Hildebrandt
Vrije Universiteit Brussels
Law Science Technology and Society StudiesJohn Lorinc
Freelance Author & EditorMariana Valverde
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building - Mon, May 25, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Rebecca Woods, No Magic Bullet: The COVID-19 Vaccine as Technological Fix (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
No Magic Bullet: The COVID-19 Vaccine as Technological Fix
In the throes of the current pandemic, many of us–the public, politicians, epidemiologists and other experts–are eagerly anticipating the development of a vaccine for COVID-19. As the virus migrates around the globe, and more and more people experience the disruption and hardships of lockdowns, the tendency to pin our hopes for salvation and deliverance to a vaccine–a tangible measure that promises to protect us all against the physical and economic risks of COVID-19–is more than understandable. But the impulse to approach complex societal problems (like the current pandemic) as if all they need for resolution or amelioration is a novel technology is itself problematic. Such “technological fixes,” often promoted as magic bullets, invariably produce problems of their own, creating a cascade effect in which challenge upon challenge seems to demand more and more novel fixes (often technological). In this conversation we will consider the hope and demand for a covid vaccine from this angle, examining the impulse to turn to a technological fix, why such an approach is almost destined to be a complicated and partial solution to the pandemic at most, and how thinking critically about the role of technology and society can help us come to grips with this aspect of the pandemic.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Monday, May 25. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
Rebecca Woods
Institute for the History & Philosophy of
Science & Technology
Department of History
in conversation with:
Catherine Evans
University of Toronto
Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies
Department of History
co-sponsored by:
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, May 22, 2020
Ethics of COVID
John Lorinc, The Ethics of Publishing COVID-19 Drug Research in Real Time (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
The Ethics of Publishing COVID-19 Drug Research in Real Time
The hype around hydroxychloroquine, an old malaria drug that has been informally used to treat COVID-19 , took off as rapidly as the virus spread. Inconclusive research about its efficacy spread from footnote to journal article, and finally to social media, pitched first by Elon Musk and later Donald Trump. The hype died down just as rapidly, partly due to overdose deaths but also because the Trump twitter circus moved on. Yet an abundance of serious medical research into hydroxychloroquine is ongoing, and will produce conclusive results later this year. John Lorinc will discuss his reporting about how the run on hydroxychloroquine backfired on legacy patients, exposed profound supply chain problems, and raised questions about the ethics of publishing, and then posting online, highly preliminary research results from small sample studies.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, May 22. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
John Lorinc
03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist and editor. He writes about urban affairs, politics, business and technology for national and local media, including The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Toronto Star and Walrus. He is a senior editor of Spacing Magazine and the Toronto non-fiction editor for Coach House Books, which has published five anthologies he’s co-edited, including The Ward. For 2019-2020, John holds the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy, and is researching the governance of smart city technologies.
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, May 20, 2020
Conferences, Ethics of COVID
Racial Inequality During a Pandemic: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives (The Ethics of COVID)Racial Inequality During a Pandemic: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives
Among the many axes of racial inequality, disparities in health and medicine remain particularly stark. The pandemic has only exacerbated this longstanding reality, especially in the United States, where the lack of publicly funded universal health care means that poor and working-class people – among whom, as everywhere, there are disproportionate numbers of non-white racial and ethnic minorities – are at a particular disadvantage within the healthcare system(s). And, in the US, even controlling for class-based metrics, African Americans, in particular, are more likely to suffer from a panoply of health risks at significantly higher rates than their counterparts. Across the country, Black and Latino people have been vastly overrepresented among COVID victims. This workshop brings together historical and philosophical perspectives, tracing the mutations of health inequality over time, reflecting on the roots and context of the currently unfolding crisis.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Wednesday, May 20. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
Elena Comay del Junco is post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto. Her work spans ancient philosophy and philosophy of race, with an emphasis on race and medicine.
Korey Garibaldi is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Notre Dame. Garibaldi studies the social and intellectual history of the United States, with a special interest in the history of late nineteenth and twentieth-century literary production. He also studies the cultural history of race and medicine in the 20th century.
Yolonda Yvette Wilson is a 2019-2020 fellow at the National Humanities Center and a 2019-2020 Encore Public Voices fellow. Her research interests include bioethics, social and political philosophy, race theory, and feminist philosophy. She is broadly interested in the nature and limits of the state’s obligations to rectify historic and continuing injustice, particularly in the realm of health care, and is developing an account of justice that articulates specific requirements for racial justice in health care at the end of life.
03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Mon, May 18, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Matthew Smith, Reproducing Freedom (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Reproducing Freedom
Contemporary political battles around COVID-19 have focused on the state-implemented lock-downs, which many on the Right are calling assaults on individual freedom. The response to these challenges is usually to gesture at “the science,” as if epidemiologists and medical doctors were obviously the philosopher-kings of the day. This talk explores how the pandemic helps us to see a richer conception of freedom – one that allows us both to challenge right wing resistance to lock-downs and to resist the simplistic medicalization of our politics as represented by the epidemiological models
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Monday, May 18. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
Matthew Smith
Northeastern University
Philosophy and Religion
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Fri, May 15, 2020
Conferences, Ethics of AI in Context
Conference: The Future of Work in the Age of Automation and AIThe Future of Work in the Age of Automation and AI
This international and interdisciplinary workshop, spanning nine timezones, is designed to explore the implications and complications that automation and AI have introduced into the work-leisure matrix, by considering possible futures of work that have been framed in terms of ideas and proposals such as post-work, the distribution of care-work, and the implementation of a universal basic income. The workshop aims to take a broad approach to its subject matter, by including a wide spectrum of disciplinary perspectives, ranging from moral and political philosophy to law and political economy. Workshop proceedings will appear as a symposium in the Centre’s open-access journal.
➨ please register here
Schedule
12pm [= 9am Pacific/5pm UK/6pm Central Europe]
Panel 1: AI, Autonomy, and the Future of Everyday Work
Aleena Chia (Simon Fraser, Communication), Self-making and Game-making in the Future of Work
Veena Dubal (UC Hastings, Law), The Time Politics of Digital Piecework1pm [= 10am/6pm/7pm]
Panel 2: AI Bosses and Autonomy
Jeremias Adams-Prassl (Oxford, Law), When Your Boss Comes Home: Three Fault Lines for the Future of Work in the Age of Automation, AI, and COVID-19
Valerio de Stefano (Leuven, Law), Algorithmic Bosses and How to Tame Them2pm [= 11am/7pm/8pm]
Panel 3: The Value and Valorization of Work
Cynthia Estlund (NYU, Law), Why Work Is a Social Good and Freedom Is Overrated
Igor Shoikhedbrod (U of T C4E, Politics), Revaluing and Re-Politicizing the Future of Work in the Age of Automation and AIThis is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 12pm, Friday, May 15 [= 9am Pacific/5pm UK/6pm Central Europe]. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
12:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
- Wed, May 13, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Trudo Lemmens, Pandemic Clinical Triage Protocols: Adding Insult to Injury for People with Disabilities (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
Pandemic Clinical Triage Protocols: Adding Insult to Injury for People with Disabilities
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, triage protocols and guidance documents have been drafted to facilitate decisions about access to critical care in situations of acute shortages. Several of these have evoked debate about their compatibility with human rights standards, even when they are presented as based on objective clinical criteria. For many people with disabilities, who feel already disproportionately affected by the pandemic and by measures to control it, some of these protocols add insult to injury. This presentation will explore why some of the Canadian documents are discriminatory and how the concerns they raise can be addressed.
This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Wednesday, May 13. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.
➨ please register here
Trudo Lemmens
University of Toronto
Faculty of Law
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, May 12, 2020
Ethics of COVID
Sophia Moreau & Sabine Tsuruda, The Moral and Legal Risks of Immunity Passports (The Ethics of COVID)Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.
The Moral and Legal Risks of Immunity Passports