Title: Big Data and the Risk of Misguided Responsibilization Abstract: The arrival of “big data” promises new degrees of precision in understanding human behavior. Could it also make it possible to draw a finer line between individual choices and circumstances that operate in the background? In a culture in which individual responsibility continues to ... Read more
Title: Value Capture Abstract: Value capture occurs when an agent enters a social environment which presents external expressions of value — which are often simplified, standardized, and quantified — and those external versions come to dominate our reasoning and motivations. Examples include becoming motivated by Twitter Likes and Retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best ... Read more
Title: ‘The limits of ideology critique’ Abstract: The tradition of ideology critique promises a lot. It promises to be critical of the existing social order. (Good!) But it promises to generate this critique without appealing to ‘external’ normative standards. In this talk I argue on meta-normative grounds that ideology critique cannot make good on these ... Read more
Title: Ameliorative Skepticism and the Nature of Health Abstract: In this talk, I’ll give a brief overview of the project I call ‘ameliorative skepticism’. Sally Haslanger has argued that, in doing social ontology, we can sometimes approach the question ‘what is x?’ by asking question ‘what do we want x to be?’. I argue that ... Read more
Title: "Against 'Good For,' Against 'Well-Being'" Abstract: This paper challenges the widely held view that ‘good for’, ‘well- being’, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from ‘simply good’ as used by G.E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that there’s no philosophically useful good-for or well-being ... Read more
Title: “Epistemic Reparations and the Right to be Known” Abstract: In this paper, I provide an account of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations of the “right to know,” I argue that ... Read more
Event co-Hosted with ECT and FPST. Title: Extractivist epistemologies Abstract: This paper (which is very much a work in progress) will develop the concept of extractivist epistemology as a way to think through the effect of colonialism on knowing practices. Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism: seeking an epistemic resource of some sort---such as ... Read more
Climate Change, COVID-19, Justice, and Quality of Life Abstract: Justice would appear to require that those who are the principal beneficiaries of a history of economic and political behavior that has resulted in harmful global climate change should bear a correspondingly large share of the burden in contending with these harms worldwide. At the same time, ... Read more
Title: An Agential Account of Poverty Abstract: Poverty has traditionally been conceived as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something that is essential to human flourishing. How that something is conceived—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is to be measured—in absolute terms or as relative to a social ... Read more
Title: Justice Before Role Obligations Abstract: Many believe that agents in the justice system are morally constrained to follow certain assigned roles, understood as excluding the exercise of moral judgement: lawyers to serve the interests of their clients, judges to enforce the law as written by the legislature, and juries to assess the factual evidence ... Read more