Parts and Labour: Morality, the Market, and the Human Body  by Dr. Vida Panitch, Department of Philosophy, 杏吧原创 University

• When: Tuesday, May 3, 2016, 6:00 pm
• Where: Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West, Toronto

This is a free event open to all 杏吧原创 alumni, donors and friends.

Please join us for an open reception at 6:00 p.m. featuring hot and cold hors鈥� d鈥檕euvres and cash bar.

The presentation will begin at 7:00 p.m.

Register: 

In this talk, Professor Vida Panitch will discuss the moral boundaries of a market economy. Why are some things wrong to buy and sell? Why should our market choices be restricted when it comes to selling things like citizenship, prizes, friendship, and particularly human body parts and intimate labours? Join us as we explore and evaluate a variety of philosophical arguments to see if they can justify regulations on the sale of organs, payment for sperm and eggs, commercial surrogacy, and prostitution.

CU in the City Lecture Series

Co-hosted by 杏吧原创鈥檚 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Department of University Advancement, as part of its CU in the City lecture series, this lecture is the third CU in the City event to be held in Toronto and the first to be held at the Gladstone Hotel.

Dr. Vida Panitch鈥檚 research interests lie in the areas of distributive justice and bioethics. Her work explores the extent to which the concepts of equality, exploitation and commodification can serve as normative guides to the just distribution of health-related goods and services, both domestically and internationally. While her doctoral work addressed the normative foundations of liberal welfare programs geared to basic need satisfaction (including the need for health), her current work applies the concepts of equality, exploitation and commodification to assessing the moral permissibility (or impermissibility) of emerging commercial global health practices.

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In Canadian politics, values seem important. Justice and fairness are concerns that can wreck any political campaign that seems to ignore them. Not only do we have a museum of human rights (in Winnipeg), but we are sufficiently proud of Canadian diplomat John Humphrey鈥檚 role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to place a statue commemorating this at a prominent location in Ottawa.

Wearing values for political colours is fashionable, and, frankly, I would rather live with this than with a politics of cynicism, 鈥榬ealism鈥�, or patronage. But there is a worry: is it real, or is it show? To paraphrase Plato, are these political values mere images flashed in the political shadows, or are there some actually good ideas here that would bear inspection in the light of day?

Philosophers are not insensitive to these worries, and contemporary analytical philosophers began waking up to them in the 1970s, with some cutting examinations of social injustice, duties across borders, and environmental ethics. The 鈥榮ocial philosophers鈥� among them have focused especially on what is right and wrong about our social relations and institutions.

The state of the art in this critical and analytical brand of social philosophy will be on display in Ottawa this July, as the holds its here at 杏吧原创.

Power is the focus of this year鈥檚 conference. The conference theme, Power and Public Reason, presupposes that anyone who exercises power owes an explanation and justification to those over whom it is exercised.

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Power and Public Reason

Since when is power a topic of interest to philosophers? At least since 1784, actually, when Kant discussed 鈥榯he public use of reasoning鈥� in his famous essay, 鈥榃hat is Enlightenment?鈥� While Kant urged rulers of his time to regard the public use of reasoning not as a threat to their power but rather as an aid to good governance, he did not go so far as to state publicly that rulers are in any way accountable to public reason. Now, 250 years later, social philosophers contend that the legitimacy of power and its exercise depend on public reason, which has become a central topic for such intellectual luminaries as John Rawls, J眉rgen Habermas, and Amartya Sen.

One of the plenary addresses, by Prof. Noelle McAfee of Emory University, assesses gaps between public reason and the current state of public opinion on duties to assist refugees. In many (or perhaps all) countries, feelings of obligation to fellow citizens are stronger than feelings of commitment to outsiders, yet people鈥檚 need for protection is greatest when they cannot count on fellow citizens for protection.

In another plenary, Prof. Gerald Gaus (University of Arizona) raises a persistent theoretical problem. Given what Rawls acknowledged as 鈥榯he fact of pluralism鈥�, how can public reason forge agreement on important public issues when its premises are supplied by so many conflicting conceptions of what is right and good?

Parallel sessions will include upwards of 120 presentations on topics ranging from the theory and practice of public reason to specific issues concerning climate change, democratic deliberation, disability, First Nations, gender justice and feminism, hate speech and slurs, migrants and refugees, and racism.

Reading groups will be organized for interested faculty and students, and for interested members of the public (contact philosophy@carleton.ca). Conference support is being provided by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the and the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at 杏吧原创.

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The 33^rd International Conference on Social Philosophy sponsored by the North American Society for Social Philosophy will be held at 杏吧原创 July 21-23, 2016. For more information, visit the . 

is a Professor of Philosophy at 杏吧原创 who has specialized in globalizing the concerns of social philosophy. His books include Displacement by Development: Ethics, Rights and Responsibilities (with Peter Penz and Pablo Bose), Human Rights: India and the West (with Ashwani Peetush), Theorizing Justice: New Insights and Future Directions (forthcoming, with Krushil Watene), and the Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics (forthcoming, with Lori Keleher).

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NOTRE DAME, IN – On October 22-24, Jay Drydyk, professor of Philosophy at 杏吧原创 University, was a major contributor at the second international  hosted by the University of Notre Dame’s . The conference is part of a multi-year research initiative investigating the role of human dignity in the practice of international development.

Drydyk related the importance of human dignity to development. “Justice requires minimally that everyone is at capability levels which are environmentally sustainable for everyone,鈥� he said in discussing Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen鈥檚 capability approach to development. “Any inequalities beyond that do not satisfy human dignity.”

At the conference, development practitioners and scholars examined the implications of human dignity for development theory and practice, considering whether human dignity can serve as a common connector among predominant development frameworks, including the capability, wellbeing, and happiness approaches.

“Approaching human development from the perspective of human dignity serves as a locus across differences that might otherwise be intractable in the global environment,” said Kellogg Institute Director and legal scholar Paolo Carozza, who leads the initiative.

Part of a series of gatherings that make up the larger research initiative, the conference aspires to produce viable recommendations for implementing the emphasis on human dignity explicit in the United Nations鈥� post-2015 sustainable development agenda.

The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the University of Notre Dame’s new Keough School of Global Affairs, is an interdisciplinary community of scholars and students from across the University and around the world that promotes research, provides educational opportunities, and builds linkages related to two topics critical to our world — democracy and human development.

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Philosophy鈥檚 Jason Millar talks to FASS about the ethical implications of technology

The research of Jason Millar () examines the social and ethical implications of technology in our rapidly transforming and increasingly gadget-centric world.

Millar is an engineer who returned to University to study Philosophy, and now finds himself asking tough ethical questions such as 鈥渟hould your driverless car kill you to save the life of a child?鈥�

Millar recently sat down with FASS to discuss his work and the important role the arts and social sciences will play in assessing our reliance on Artificial Intelligence and semi-autonomous technology in our everyday lives.

Why did you make the decision to come back to school and study Philosophy? How does your background as an engineer influence your current research? 

JM: In engineering we don鈥檛 get to take many breadth electives, but I did take a couple, one of them was a course in Political Philosophy. A few years after graduating, while I was working as an engineer, I found that I couldn鈥檛 shake the philosophy course. It was in my head, so to speak. John Rawls鈥檚 thought experiment involving the veil of ignorance and original position impressed me in the way it provided a practical approach to addressing issues of social justice. I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 a far stretch to see why this would appeal to an engineer. I saw Rawls鈥檚 argument as a means of 鈥渄esigning鈥� society, a sort of social blueprint, and a lot of philosophy can certainly function in that way. You make an argument and, if it sticks, the world changes. It鈥檚 a slower change, and it isn鈥檛 as easy as designing a widget, but it鈥檚 a change nonetheless. In that sense I鈥檝e always thought that philosophy and engineering have a lot in common.

Being an engineer has had a huge impact on my research choices. Having designed different kinds of technology, when I read philosophy I always ask whether and how it can inform the engineering profession. How could a particular theory in ethics, for example, define appropriate goals for engineering practice? Does a particular argument problematize the kinds of activities that engineers take for granted? How, exactly, does technology come into the world and could we improve that process? What would it mean to improve that process? To what extent must we consider the user in our design activities? These kinds of questions strike me as a natural fit between philosophy and engineering.

Why is it important that we attain an understanding of the potential implications of these technologies?

JM: I鈥檓 currently studying a set of design problems that seem unique to, or at least more prominent in relation to, sophisticated automation technologies. As robotics and other semi-autonomous technologies advance in their sophistication, more and more decision-making algorithms are embedded in them. It turns out that in some cases the kinds of automated decisions that technology can make have significant moral implications for users.

Here鈥檚 an example that illustrates the point. I call it the Tunnel Problem: 鈥淵ou are travelling along a single-lane mountain road in an autonomous car that is fast approaching a narrow tunnel. Just before entering the tunnel a child errantly runs into the road and trips in the centre of the lane, effectively blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The car is unable to brake in time to avoid a crash. It has but two options: hit and kill the child, or swerve into the wall on either side of the tunnel, thus killing you. How should the car be designed to deal with this kind of scenario?鈥�

From a technical perspective an engineer might think the solution is straightforward. She might say something like, 鈥渨e can just poll individuals to see what they would want the car to do and then hard code the majority鈥檚 answer into the vehicle.鈥� But that would be a mistake. The tunnel problem isn鈥檛 a technical problem; it鈥檚 a deeply personal ethical problem. And if you ask people the right questions, you can see the difference in action. The Open Roboethics Initiative, a group I鈥檓 involved with, polled people to see how they would want the car to respond and a surprising number of people, close to 40%, chose to hit the wall. We also asked readers whom they thought should make the decision, and the results were interesting. Only 12% of respondents thought that manufacturers should be making the decisions, while 44% thought the passenger should have the final say in the outcome.

I interpret these results as an indication that engineers need to think carefully about the ethics underlying certain automation design features. Even if the majority of people would want the car to save them and sacrifice the child, hard coding that decision into the car would confound the moral preferences of a significant number of users!

When I look around I find that this kind of problem comes up in all sorts of automation technologies, including medical implants and robotics, social robotics, Facebook and other social media鈥攖he list is growing. There are a growing number of technologies that have the capacity to make sophisticated, often deeply moral, decisions on behalf of the user in cases where, from an ethical perspective, the decision should be left to the user. By taking the decision away from the user, engineers and designers undermine users鈥� moral preferences.

Part of my work involves designing ethical evaluation frameworks that engineers and designers can apply in the design process in order to avoid falling into the hard coding trap. In the end, I believe that we can design automation technologies that account for users鈥� moral preferences, that are trustworthy, and trusted, so long as we take these kinds of ethical considerations into account during the design phase. Given the number of automation technologies that are in the design pipe, we need to get a handle on the ethics of automation sooner rather than later.

What do you believe are some specific areas of ethical concerns that we presently face, or are likely to confront in the foreseeable future? 

JM: In the Robot Ethics course I teach here at 杏吧原创, I underscore a number of areas that are of growing ethical concern. Military drones are raising important questions. To what extent should we automate them? Should military robots be able to target and fire without human oversight? Medical robotics is also raising interesting ethical issues. Who gets to have access to the vast data that a carebot working in a patient鈥檚 home generates in the course of caring for that patient? Is it ever ethical to design a carebot to deceive a patient? Is it ethically acceptable to replace human caregivers with robots? Social robotics, represented by robots like Jibo and Nao, are another emerging area. Given that those robots are designed to be embedded in a user鈥檚 social sphere, elicit trust and engage users in social relationships (e.g. friendships), to what extent can they be designed to function as an agent of the corporation selling them? What kinds of informed consent requirements are appropriate for those robots? Does the age of the user change these considerations? Autonomous cars are raising a number of issues. Who should decide how cars react in difficult moral situations? Can an autonomous car be designed to intentionally inure a passenger in order to 鈥渄istribute鈥� the overall harm in an accident more evenly? Should owners be able to pay to have their cars get them around faster than other people?

The truth is that the more automation technologies we imagine, the more ethical issues are raised. It鈥檚 a really interesting time to be thinking about the philosophy and ethics of technology.

What do you believe is our 鈥榖est practice鈥� as we prepare to deal with these newfound realities?

JM: I recently participated in a workshop at a large human robotics interaction conference. What struck me was the number of engineers and designers who recognize that our traditional way of conceiving engineering ethics鈥攁s professional ethics鈥攏eeds to be broadened in order to deal with the kinds of design issues that seem unique to the context of automation technologies. The workshop participants agreed that the only way to adequately address these issues is an interdisciplinary approach that puts traditional technical disciplines working alongside philosophers and ethicists, policymakers, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists and other experts in the humanities and social sciences.

From my own perspective I think what needs to happen is a broadening of what we consider within the domain of 鈥渆ngineering ethics鈥�, to include a more philosophically informed analysis of technology. When I look at the recent focus on privacy spurred by the Internet, and now the growing focus on robot ethics, I think the engineering profession is experiencing a shift in the way that engineering ethics is conceived. This happened in medicine. The medical profession experienced a broadening out from professional ethics, to reconceive medical ethics as requiring a philosophically informed bioethics in the mid to late twentieth century. Coincidentally, it was the introduction of new technologies鈥攆or example, artificial insemination, sophisticated life-supports, genetics, and so on鈥攖hat played a big role in ushering in that shift. Automation technologies are doing the same to engineering. The kinds of ethical issues I study, like the tunnel problem, require a fundamental shift in how we (engineers) conceptualize the ethical dimensions of technology and our design work. We can鈥檛 tackle these issues in a vacuum; we need to enlist other experts to get the work done.

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鈥淭he Truth will set you free.鈥�

It鈥檚 an age-old aphorism that never gets less annoying, in large part because most of us would rather reach for a cigarette or a bottle of wine than engage with that intimidating capital T. But, as Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Lynn Coady revealed in her 2014 Munro Beattie Lecture, there is another kind of mood-altering substance out there that is far more capable of distorting and embellishing Truth (and far less likely to fall under government regulation): storytelling.

Don鈥檛 be misled: Coady鈥檚 talk, appropriately titled 鈥淥n Storytelling and Discomfort,鈥� was no post-modern exegesis on scepticism鈥攖hough she did, incidentally, graduate from 杏吧原创 with a double major in English and Philosophy in 1993. Rather, it was a characteristically humorous, and occasionally irreverent, rumination on the various ways in which humans make use of narrative in their daily lives. Whether it鈥檚 settling into the sympathetic arms of a favourite sitcom (there鈥檚 something rather comforting in the knowledge that Coady, too, enjoys returning home after a miserable day and watching an episode of Nashville), or embracing the intellectual and emotional challenges of a proto-modernist text (like Chekhov鈥檚 maddeningly ambiguous stories, for instance), we cleave to stories like lifelines, demanding that they numb us, stimulate us, or generally just help us make sense of the chaos of our experiences.

Of course, the tricky thing about stories is that they don鈥檛 always tell us the truths that we want to hear: the painless, vindicating truths that fit in so very nicely with our conception of the world and our place in it. One minute, we might find ourselves getting covert pleasure out of recognizing the foibles of a relative or a co-worker within the covers of a Jane Austen novel. The next, the words become less like a window and more like a set of funhouse mirrors. And, according to Coady, it is when 鈥渨e recognize versions of ourselves in the stories of others鈥� that the real squirming sets in. 鈥淭he Truth,鈥� she says, 鈥渋s innately uncomfortable.鈥�

So, the question then becomes: what kind of cringe-inducing, hand-wringing, eye-contact-avoiding discomfort has Coady herself experienced in her years as a storyteller? Well, that鈥檚 a story in itself, and it鈥檚 one Coady continues to tell in the hopes that, the more she tells it, 鈥渢he less uncomfortable (she) will be with it.鈥� As it stands, she鈥檚 had no such luck.

It started with the publishing of Mean Boy (2006), a novel based on the life of. . .well, not of the Canadian poet and English professor John Thompson, but, in Coady鈥檚 words, 鈥渙f someone like him.鈥� The real story of Thompson鈥檚 life鈥攁 story marked by poetic brilliance wedded to depression, alcoholism, and stints in psychiatric-care facilities鈥攚as too despairing for the kind of story she wanted to write. And so she did exactly as her job description on Twitter suggests: she made stuff up. 鈥淪tuff鈥� that quickly became fodder for scathing criticism at Mount Allison University in Sackville, Nova Scotia, where John Thompson taught before his tragic death at the age of 38.

It wasn鈥檛 until she arrived at Mount Allison to give a reading from Mean Boy that Coady became aware of just how much acrimony her novel had inspired in that community. There was a general feeling, it seemed, that she had appropriated Thompson鈥檚 life with little regard for Thompson the man, or for those who were close to him. And while Coady doesn鈥檛 deny the general selfishness of the authorial act, being welcomed to the university as a persona non grata took her off guard. Nonetheless, Coady soldiered on and came up with a plan, which included, among other things, choosing 鈥渢he funniest portion of my novel to read, to get the audience on my side.鈥� She鈥檇 fielded tough questions before. She could, in fact, handle it.

And, for the most part, she did. The reading itself went well; the subsequent questions were easy to answer. The real discomfort, the one that remains with Coady to this day, came afterwards, when a woman stood up and announced that her name was Sherrie 鈥� 鈥渢he Sherrie who knew John Thompson.鈥� And the Sherrie whose name, by sheer coincidence, had found its way into Coady鈥檚 novel.

At this point, the author realized she was trapped. 鈥淭here was no way that I was going to be able to convince her that it was a coincidence,鈥� Coady says. What is more, she instantly knew that neither a quick wit nor a long-winded apologia would have been particularly useful or appropriate at this moment. With few choices left to her, Coady remained silent as the Sherrie-who-knew-John-Thompson demanded to know just who Coady thought she was, exactly, to be taking someone else鈥檚 story and making it her own? What kind of person would do that?

Suddenly, the funhouse mirrors of Coady鈥檚 fiction were being turned towards her. And though every artist is aware of the inevitability of harsh criticism, the ire levelled against Coady by her Mount Allison audience felt shattering, for it questioned the very quality of her character. 鈥淚 never expected to be accused of being a shitty person,鈥� she admits. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not often that someone speaks your secret fears to you.鈥�

For her part, Coady tends to view the kind of deep-seated defensiveness that both she and her Sackville audience members displayed that night as symptomatic of a confrontation with the 鈥渢errifying depiction of something real,鈥� but a depiction that is 鈥榦ff,鈥� or distorted, in some way. It inspires an irrepressible need to combat one 鈥渧ersion of the truth鈥� with another, more palatable one鈥攖he one that we want to believe in.

And that鈥檚 the thing about the truth, Coady seems to suggest: it can鈥檛 be explained or elucidated without losing the capital T and making it a plural. Because as soon as it is being spoken or written, it is being narrated, and a narrative, by virtue of having a narrator, is unavoidably subjective. Indeed, during readings from her Giller Prize-winning short story collection Hellgoing, Coady drew a comparison between two stories in which Truth, unmoored from characters鈥� narrations, and even from the author鈥檚 own control, is reduced to an onomatopoeic 鈥淏oom.鈥� Pure, untainted experience, it would appear, is beyond the reach of words. So we alter, we distort, we 鈥渕ake stuff up鈥� in order to create an emotional trajectory for ourselves that is intelligible.

But is there any way to reconcile these various 鈥渧ersions of the truth鈥�? Is there some means by which we might stand face-to-face with (our and not our) Sherries without losing faith in the integrity of our narratives?

For Coady, the only solution has been to keep writing. Bruised but also inspired by the incident in Sackville, she began drafting The Antagonist, an epistolary novel about a young man named Rank who attempts to reclaim his life story from the pages of an old friend鈥檚 book, only to discover that telling the Truth is far more difficult than he had anticipated. According to Coady, the opening pages of the novel lost her a number of readers. But she was okay with that. 鈥淚t is called The Antagonist, after all鈥� she laughs. And, besides, where does the value of a story lie if not in its various capacities to hurt and comfort, heal and reveal?

In one of his more accessible poetic efforts, Wallace Stevens reflected on the violence of conflicting stories by arguing that 鈥淭here is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, like the clashed edges of two words that kill.鈥� But the very practice of storytelling is predicated on the existence of more than one narrative. We will spend our whole lives engaging with them, fighting with them, letting go of them, and learning how to accept them for what they are. The one thing Coady seems sure of, though, is that whatever we do with these stories, and whatever discomfort they provoke, we must continue to tell them.

Author is a fourth-year student in 杏吧原创 University鈥檚 .  She also blogs for FASS.

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