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Join us for a special live taping of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Host Spencer Greenberg and guest Jeff Sebo will discuss the moral status of insects and AI systems, as well as other thorny questions in global priorities research.

About the speakers

Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. He is the author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also an executive committee member at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.

Spencer Greenberg is an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human well-being. He’s the founder of ClearerThinking.org, which provides 70 free, digital tools to help people make better decisions and improve their lives, as well as the host of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Spencer is also the founder of Spark Wave, an organization that conducts psychology research and builds psychology-related products designed to help benefit the world. He has a Ph.D. in applied math from New York University, with a specialty in machine learning, and his work has been featured by numerous major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the Independent, the New York Times, Gizmodo, and more.

Thank you to Effective Altruism New York City for their generous support of this event.

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.