Calendar

New technologies increasingly mediate our interactions with each other and the institutions on which we depend. What special moral problems do these new technologies pose? Are existing moral categories and practices up to the task? For the April edition of Philosophy in the Library, three philosophers–Joanna Smolenski, Tony Doyle, and Samir Chopra–present short talks on the ethics of ongoing developments in genetic engineering, big data, and artificial intelligence, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Part 1: Editing the Genome–How CRISPR/CAS9 is Changing the Game
Joanna Smolenski of CUNY Graduate Center discusses CRISPR technology, and how it can be used to modify both somatic cells and the germline (i.e., reproductive cells). Our talk will consider the pros and cons of such modification, as well as unique ethical challenges it could present. For instance, could we ever legitimately consent to the editing of our germlines? Ultimately, it would seem that our existing consent protocols are inadequate to ensure robust informed consent to germline editing, and so we should hold off on such interventions until we have a better understanding of their downstream impacts.

Part 2: Big Data & the Future of Privacy
Tony Doyle of Hunter College considers how big data, with its massive collection, thorough aggregation, predictive analysis, and lightning dissemination of personal information has produced previously unfathomable benefits and insights. Analysis is replacing intuition; the gut is yielding to algorithm. However, as our digital wake ripples out, big data is putting privacy on the run with unnerving inferences about our preferences, commitments, aspirations, and vulnerabilities. How we are sorted by big data’s analytics can determine the opportunities that come our way: a reasonable mortgage, a good job, or a decent apartment. Privacy matters because it promotes autonomy, that is, our ability to make choices, free of coercion or manipulation, in the light of our considered conception of the good life. But ultimately, is privacy doomed to be a lost cause?

Part 3: Artifacts & Agency
Samir Chopra of Brooklyn College considers how thinking about the agency–both moral and legal–of artifacts can be helpful in thinking about the puzzles that artificial intelligence creates for us. Thinking about agency lets us think about actions and powers and ends–the kinds of things we should be thinking of, in considering how to ‘fit’ AI into our world.

https://www.facebook.com/events/207736016496883/

At the core of Kantian liberalism is a conception of the independent autonomous subject. On the other hand, the most central and distinguishing feature of Buddhist philosophy is the doctrine of no-self. It thus seems that Buddhists should reject Kantian liberalism. My larger project develops the connections between Buddhist perfectionism, liberalism, and principles of justice. In this paper, I focus on Buddhist and Kantian conceptions of self-constitution, but my ultimate concern is the significance of the doctrine of no-self to theories of justice.

Buddhists need some conception of a minimal self to account for the karmic-continuity of persons and also to provide an adequate account of the subjectivity of experience. I argue that we should reject the (Abhidharma) reductionist view of the self as a mere fiction that is reducible to its simpler and more basic parts. As is often noted, the Buddhist reductionist approach is similar to Derek Parfit’s view. Parfit also argues that there is no deep metaphysical self and that relations of personal identity are reducible to relations of psychological connectedness and causal continuity in a series of experiences. Christine Korsgaard has responded to Parfit’s reductionist view by developing a non-metaphysical account of Kantian agency and self-constitution. I argue that the Buddhist doctrine of no-self is consistent with a more minimal, non-substantial, emergent, view of the self. This approach, which is more fully developed by Evan Thomson, Matthew MacKenzie, Georges Dreyfus, and others, is surprisingly similar to Korsgaard’s practical conception of the self. As a result, the non-reductionist Buddhist approach is also not vulnerable to Korsgaard’s objection to reductionist views. In addition, I argue that the process of self-constitution is embedded in a recursive nexus of dependent origination, and reject Korsgaard’s conception of the independent autonomous subject, which she refers to as “over and above” its ends. In short, a Buddhist can accept Korsgaard’s basic account of self-constitution but nonetheless reject the Kantian idea of the independent autonomous subject. For Buddhists, the Kantian autonomous subject is instead part of the “primal confusion” that projects a reified subject-other division on experience. This confusion is the source of existential suffering, anxiety and stress, which characterizes too much of the human condition. The goal is to transcend the Kantian subject and internalize the pervasive interdependence of persons. Instead of the autonomous self, Buddhism embraces a perfectionist ideal, of a non-egocentric reorientation and re-constitution of the self.

Buddhists thus have reason to reject Kantian liberalism, if it is based on the autonomy and independence of persons. In his shift to Political Liberalism, John Rawls recasts the conception of the person, as “a self-originating source of valid claims,” and emphasizes that this conception is restricted to the political domain. It is part of a narrow conception of the “moral powers” of a free and equal citizen; it is not a metaphysical conception or comprehensive ideal. I conclude by exploring the contrast between Buddhist Perfectionism and Political Liberalism.

With a Response From:

Carol Rovane (Columbia University)

——————

Also, please visit our website:

http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Co-Chairs

Professor Jonathan Gold

Associate Professor, Princeton University, Department of Religion

jcgold@princeton.edu

Professor Hagop Sarkissian

Associate Professor, The City University of New York, Baruch College | Graduate Center, Department of Philosophy

hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu

Rapporteur

Jay Ramesh

jr3203@columbia.edu

There are numerous books about the philosophy of science, but relatively few focus on the philosophy of engineering. Why has the philosophy of engineering been undeveloped in contrast to science? While many engineers prefer to build new things rather than philosophize, a key explanation for the neglect of engineering is an unjustified misconception about the importance of abstract theoretical and scientific knowledge versus engineering knowledge.

The speaker will talk about his experiences in engineering and policy, to show how these philosophical ideas shape engineering, which in turn shapes the world around us. Philosophical claims about engineering date back to at least Socrates, who argued for the value of abstract, theoretical knowledge. The history of U.S. science policy based its post-World War II funding policies off of the linear model of innovation, where advances in engineering are assumed to be traceable to earlier advances in science. Historians and philosophers have shown many of these philosophical views are wrong-headed. In particular, Vincenti’s What Engineers Know and How They Know It illuminates the richness of engineering knowledge, showing that it is not merely applied science. After reviewing how these philosophical ideas manifest in the real world of engineering, the presentation will show how a better understanding of what engineers know also offers a way to better push engineering towards more ethical ends.

Zachary Pirtle recently co-chaired the 2018 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology. He has worked as an engineer to support exploration systems for human space flight, and was previously a Fulbright scholar to Mexico and a Mirzayan science and technology policy graduate fellow at the National Academy of Engineering.

Co-presented with Brooklyn Public Philosophers.

Kant’s conception of action cannot be understood in purely causal terms. The internal structure of action can only be explained in terms of a two-level meaning structure involving both a priori and empirical components.

Short bio:

Alejandro G. Vigo (Buenos Aires, 1958) is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Navarra. Prof. Vigo earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy (1984) from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg (1993). He has been a fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET, Argentina), of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Between 1993 and 2006 he taught at the Universidad de los Andes and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has published over 120 articles in collective volumes and journals in Latin America, Europe and the United States, along with many books. In 2010 he won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn) and in 2017 the International Philosophy Award “Antonio Jannone” (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome).

In Philosophy in the Library, philosophers from around the world tackle the big questions. In February, we hear from Ethan Hallerman.

None of us today can avoid reflecting on the way our thoughts and habits relate to the tools we use, but interest in how technologies reshape us is both older and broader than contemporary concerns around privacy, distraction, addiction, and isolation. For the past hundred years, scholars have investigated the historical role of everyday technologies in making new forms of experience and senses of selfhood possible, from at least as early as the invention of writing. In recent years, philosophers have considered how our understanding of agency and mental states should be revised in light of the role that the technical environment plays in our basic activities. Here, we will look at how some models of the mind illuminate the results of the philosophy of technology to clarify the relationship between technology and the self.

Ethan Hallerman is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. He lives in New York where he prowls the sewers at night, looking for his father.

This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism” – that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat.

Response by César Cabezas Gamarra.

Presented by the German Idealism Workshop

Sjoerd van Tuinen and Jürgen Schaflechner will present their film “Toxic Reigns of Resentment” featuring Wendy Brown, Grayson Hunt, Rahel Jaeggi, Alexander Nehamas, Robert Pfaller, Gyan Prakash, Peter Sloterdijk, and Sjoerd van Tuinen. NSSR philosopher Jay Bernstein will respond after the screening.

After the fall of the Soviet empire and the triumph of global capitalism, modernity appeared to keep its dual promise of liberty and equality. The spreading of human rights and democratic forms of government were intrinsically linked to free flows of global capital and free markets. Supported by technological developments and an ever-increasing digitalization of daily life, the future contained the promise of abundance and recognition for all.

Only a few decades later, however, we witness an oppositional trend: A revival of nationalism paired with xenophobia, an increasing tribalization of politics, a public sphere oscillating between cruelty and sentimentality, and a Left caught up in wounded attachments. Social media, once the promise to give voice to the disempowered, link cognitive capitalism with a culture of trolling and hyper moralization. Algorithms programmed to monetarize outrage feed isolated information bubbles and produce what many call the era of post-truth politics.

How did we enter this toxic climate? Are these developments a response to the ubiquity of neoliberal market structures eroding the basic solidarities in our society? Has the spread of social media limited our ability to soberly deal with conflicting life worlds? And have both the left and the right given in to a form of politics where moralization and cynical mockery outdo collective visions of the future?