There is a reason why data privacy and protection have become such important political issues and have generated widespread support for stricter regulations: at heart, companies’ misuse of data is a profound ethical issue.
Buddhist teaching is radically egalitarian, and yet the need for a Buddhist feminism is pressing. How to address inequalities within a Buddhist philosophical framework? Is gender irrelevant to Buddhist teaching? Is anger necessary to effect change? And for women who have been denied agency or a sense of identity, how reasonable or ethically justifiable is the doctrine of non-self? [audio]
Human-animal hybrids, or “chimeras” are already being created and may one day become life saving hybrid-organ donors. How should we view this from an athical standpoint?
A view to the history of philosophy with philosopher A.C. Grayling. (audio)
Philosopher Philip Brey has been awarded a $19 million dollar grant from the Dutch government for a ten year project on the ethics of socially disruptive technologies.
At Brown University, CS is hiring special EThics TAs to integrate ethics into their regular course offerings. “What we realized was that while it’s important to have dedicated courses for these topics, its not sufficient, because sometimes students take these courses and think that they’re done.”
When I taught Augustine at the prison last semester, the discussions got so loud and intense that the correctional officers came to check on us.
Ángel Gurría, Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), said that to realise the huge positive potential of AI, ethics had to be at the centre of its use.
What should we do with literature and philosophy from a discredited moral past? Should we shun writers for holding racist or sexist views? Or is it important to read—and censure—them? Is it fair to judge authors of the past by today’s politically conscious standards? (audio)
Our inability to read dogs’ emotions well probably begins with our inability to understand our own emotions well.
As AI is deployed to sensitive areas like military, judicial and surveillance use, governments and companies have responded that so long as their algorithms are accurate, they are ethical, suggesting there is considerable confusion about the difference between AI correctness and AI ethics.
Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why. Philosopher Tim Maudlin reviews The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.
A previously unknown manuscript by John Locke has been discovered — surprisingly in a library which holds no other Locke artifacts. The document offers a list of reasons for tolerating Catholics, which at the time simply meant not actively persecuting them, and also a list of reasons not to.
What is fiction? What are fictional characters and where exactly do they come from? Sherlock Holmes arrives to help answer these questions with a little help from philosopher Kendall Walton and his theory of make-believe. (video)
While teaching children philosophy can help improve academic results, the main reason it should be used in schools is to help children make sense of the world.
Two philosophers set themselves up in a New York City subway station and take questions… Then what happens? (audio)
Philosophy has helped theologians better to understand problems, such as the existence of evil, free will, and the existence of the soul.
Perhaps the second most famous Danish depressive, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was a figure of fun in his hometown of Copenhagen, mocked and satirised in the local press, Kierkegaard lost his father and three of his siblings by age 27, had a disastrous love life, and wrote uncompromisingly difficult philosophical works. So it’s not surprising that he’s an outsize but rather remote figure in the popular cultural imagination. An interview with philosopher Clare Carlisle on the subject of her recent biography of Kierkegaard. (audio)
What if the data being collected is being used to save people’s lives? This moral question will only become more fraught, because the need for our data is never again going to diminish.
When caring for someone with dementia who won’t take their medicine or asks after their deceased spouse, “therapeutic deception” is a time-saver for carers, but like all lying, it’s morally problematic. (audio)
Philosopher Adriana Cavarero argues that when the ‘pursuit of happiness’ was enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right, it was not about personal well-being. It was about “public happiness”.
An interview with Andrew Curran, author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. (audio)
Has the march of technological development put us on a collision course with a world-threatening supervillain?
What is scientific truth? Some scientists and philosophers are saying that science can’t reveal everything, because we have ineliminable blind spots. If you have studied Kant, this might sound vaguely familiar. (audio)
Philosophers Saul Kripke and Timothy Williamson talk about language and philosophy, science and metaphysics, and the analytic tradition. (video)
Historian of Philosophy Peter Adamson reviews the relation of reason & revelation.
It is almost certain you are a subject of multiple studies and you don’t know it. For example, a new paper used YouTubers’ voices to guess what they looked like. Folks were naturally surprised when pictures of them showed up in the report as examples. As the use of social media posts for research intensifies, so do questions about the ethics of mining that data.
For criminal law, technology presents challenges in the form of new offences with little or no precedent. A discussion of possible future crimes committed via technology we already have. (audio)
A recent study confirms that philosophy classes can effect real-world behavior.
Prospect Magazine’s 2019 listing of the world’s top thinkers clocks in with five philosophers on its list.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on socialism. Both socialism and capitalism grant workers legal control of their labor power, but socialism, unlike capitalism, requires that the bulk of the means of production workers use to yield goods and services be under the effective control of workers themselves, rather than in the hands of the members of a different, capitalist class under whose direction they must toil.
An interview with philosopher Judith Butler about her recent book The Force of Non-Violence.
Philosopher Katherine Ritchie discusses the ontology of social groups. (audio)