Calendar

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to automate and scale solutions to perennial accessibility challenges (e.g., generating image descriptions for blind users). However, research shows that AI-bias disproportionately impacts people already marginalized based on their race, gender, or disabilities, raising questions about potential impacts in addition to AI’s promise. In this talk, Cynthia Bennett will overview broad concerns at the intersection of AI, disability, and accessibility. She will then share details about one project in this research space that led to guidance on human and AI-generated image descriptions that account for subjective and potentially sensitive descriptors around race, gender, and disability of people in images.

Well-being, also known as prudential value, refers to whatever makes a life non-instrumentally good for the person living it. Well-being is the object of immense practical, philosophical, and scientific concern. Assessments of well-being help to guide our decisions in everyday life, from relationships, to health decisions, to education and career choices. Well-being is increasingly the object of governmental and institutional policy, and even policies that are not aimed directly at promoting it can be evaluated in terms of their impacts on well-being. Colleges and universities routinely offer programs designed to help students maintain their well-being in the face of academic and personal stress. However, debates over the nature of well-being have raged since the beginning of philosophical inquiry, leaving us in a bad position when it comes to making headway on addressing those practical and scientific concerns. The goal of this talk is to show how the application of naturalistic methodology can help us to resolve the philosophical stalemate and thus to make progress in our practical and scientific projects relating to well-being. 

• Talk link — Email cruzdavis <at> umass.edu or jrc2266 <at> columbia.edu for the passcode

Comparative philosophy is gaining traction in professional academic philosophy, with specialist journals, organizations, books, and public campaigns. These inroads have been made in canonical areas of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and value theory. Yet comparative philosophy still plays little role in practical applied ethics, an interdisciplinary research area in which work with practice and policy implications are dominated by the anglophone world. In this article, I explain why comparative work might be especially difficult in this type of applied ethics, and I suggest how comparative philosophers might overcome these challenges to connect their theoretical work with contemporary practical issues.

With responses from Wenqing Zhao (CUNY Baruch)

NOTE ON ENTRY FOR NON-COLUMBIA GUESTS: The door to Philosophy Hall will only open with a Columbia University ID card. If you do not have this card please arrive early where someone will be standing outside until the meeting begins. If you arrive late, you can ask someone walking nearby to let you in or contact Cole at cf2798@columbia.edu. Please only contact Cole as a final resource so as not to interrupt the talk. 

RSVP IS REQUIRED FOR DINNER:. Dinner will take place at a nearby restaurant. Please contact Cole at cf2798@columbia.edu for further information. RSVPs are limited.

Comparative Philosophy Seminar:

• January 19 – Alex Watson (Ashoka University)
• February 2 – Davey Tomlinson (Villanova University)
• April 5 – Laura Specker (Fordham University)
• May 3 – Daniel Stephens (University at Buffalo)

CANCELLED – RESCHEDULED FOR NEXT SEMESTER

ABSTRACT: Spurred partly by recent attempts to ethically assess various negative effects of the attention economy, philosophers have begun to pay more attention to the role that attention plays in our ethical lives. This has included some more general discussion of the ethics of attention. In this talk, I add to this recent discussion by outlining a proposal for a comprehensive ethics of attention. On my proposal, an ethics of attention includes norms that stem from the role that attention plays in the formation of our character, in constituting our relationships and social roles, and in our other ethical decision making and behavior. Because of attention’s nature as a finite resource, and because our various roles and relationships involve interpersonal expectations for how others allocate their attention, an ethics of attention should provide norms that govern how we collectively allocate our attention among these morally important purposes. Because these morally important purposes are all competing for our attention, one goal of an ethics of attention should be to find practices that help to synergize how people meet these demands. I call such a set of practices a “social-attentional scheme”, and propose that the ultimate goal of an ethics of attention is to find an optimal social-attentional scheme. I conclude by discussing the various ways in which we can understand early Confucian ethics as providing us with one such social-attentional scheme, and propose some lessons we can take from this Confucian example as we try to continue developing a contemporary ethics of attention.

With responses from Elizabeth Edenberg (CUNY Baruch)

Presented by THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

NOTE ON ENTRY FOR NON-COLUMBIA GUESTS: The door to Philosophy Hall will only open with a Columbia University ID card. If you do not have this card please arrive early where someone will be standing outside until the meeting begins. If you arrive late, you can ask someone walking nearby to let you in or contact Cole at cf2798@columbia.edu. Please only contact Cole as a final resource so as not to interrupt the talk. 

RSVP IS REQUIRED FOR DINNER:. Dinner will take place at a nearby restaurant. Please contact Cole at cf2798@columbia.edu for further information. RSVPs are limited.