Lecture series abstracts

Loving Strangers

The prevailing approach in moral theory treats good samaritanism and attendant concepts such as supererogation as issues within duty-based ethics. A samaritan is someone who “goes above and beyond” what a duty of beneficence requires to aid a stranger. This talk will argue that we can better understand samaritanism by treating it instead as a theory about the reasons one might have to love a stranger. Meghan Sullivan will argue for three advantages of this love-based approach. The first advantage concerns explaining the diversity of ways in which samaritanism is referenced in applied ethics. The second advantage concerns accounting for the historical basis for these concepts, in particular the ways contemporary moral theorists interpret the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Greatest Commandment in Jewish ethics. The final advantage concerns the ways in which samaritanism might better inform ongoing debates about the strength and grounds for our reasons of love.

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family Collegiate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She also serves as director of the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Study (NDIAS), which supports Notre Dame scholars and students researching ethics across disciplines and is currently administering a $2.97 million project sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Sullivan is also the director of the University Ethics Initiative based in the provost’s office to guide the university’s implementation of the 2033 Strategic Framework’s Ethics Priority. Sullivan has published in top philosophy journals, including Ethics, Philosophical Studies, and Nous, where she is a co-editor. Her two books are Time Biases (OUP 2018) and The Good Life Method (Penguin 2021, with Paul Blaschko). Her current book concerns the topic of this talk: the love of strangers.

It Is Impossible to be Morally Responsible for Irrationality: An Epistemic Regress Argument

People sometimes act as their own worst enemy in that they engage in irrational actions that hinder achievement of their own (sincerely held) aims. Additionally, it is widely thought, “aims-irrationality” of this kind is something for which people can be held morally responsible and blamed. It is here argued that, given a certain picture of human motivational architecture that is strongly supported in contemporary computational cognitive science, we must reject the second claim. I formulate an epistemic regress argument in which aims-irrational actions are necessarily accompanied by a certain serious form of ignorance, and, furthermore, this ignorance cannot be something for which the agent is culpable. It follows from this argument that if we come to believe that a person is acting in a genuinely aims-irrational way, we should next conclude that the irrationality of what they do is not something for which they are morally responsible.

Chandra Sripada is the Theophile Raphael Research Professor at the University of Michigan. He is a professor in both the departments of Psychiatry and Philosophy. Sripada's research interests are questions in ethics and moral psychology about agency and self-control. He integrates evidence from empirical disciplines – particularly psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry – with philosophical theorizing. Recent works on willpower, free will and related concerns appear in both philosophical and scientific journals. 

Nature’s Best Hope

Recent headlines about global insect declines and 3 billion fewer birds in North America are a bleak reality check about how ineffective our current landscape designs have been at sustaining the plants and animals that sustain us. Such losses are not an option if we wish to continue our current standard of living on Planet Earth. The good news is that none of this is inevitable. Choosing the right plants for our landscapes will not only address the biodiversity crisis but help fight our climate crisis as well. The author of Nature’s Best Hope will discuss simple steps that each of us can -and must- take to reverse declining biodiversity, why we must change our adversarial relationship with nature to a collaborative one, and why we, ourselves, are nature’s best hope.

Douglas Tallamy is T.A. Baker Professor of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology and professor of biological sciences at the University of Delaware. He researches the environmental effects of non-native plants in gardening. He is the author of the best-selling books Nature's Best Hope and The Nature of Oaks and Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants. His media mentions include the New York Times, National Public Radio and the Associated Press.

The Ethics of “Necessity” and the 1781 Zong Massacre 

This talk examines the 1781 Zong massacre and the broader transatlantic slave trade in the context of eighteenth-century medical ethics. The Zong massacre involved the drowning of 132 African captives at the command of the ship’s captain and surgeon, Luke Collingwood, ostensibly out of “necessity” to save the remaining passengers. I propose that this act of murder laid bare a heightening ethical conflict between the financial imperatives of the slave trade and the medical standards necessary to regulate the selection and sale of captives. Most discussions of the Zong focus on the insurance cases that followed the murders and the commercial logic that underwrote the massacre. While still considering the implications of these two issues, I argue that Collingwood deployed his medical expertise selectively, wielding a biopolitical authority over the captives’ bodies to calibrate the potential loss of “cargo” and protect against revolt. Collingwood’s attempt to reframe the murders as a necessity to preserve the remainder ultimately exposed the impossibility of turning captives into disposal commodities while simultaneously instituting contemporary practices of ethical care.  

Cynthia Klekar-Cunningham, Ph.D., is director of the School of Communication and associate professor of English at Western Michigan University. Klekar-Cunningham’s research interests include the ethics of gift exchange, theories of biopolitical displacement, the Eighteenth-Century novel, and Leadership in Higher Education. She is co-author of Fictions of Displacement: 1740-1830 (forthcoming, Delaware University Press) and The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Palgrave, 2009). Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Philological Quarterly. Her current projects include a book on displacement in Daniel Defoe’s fiction and a co-authored book on the ethics of generosity and gift-giving in slave narratives. She is currently a MAC Academic Leadership Fellow for Western Michigan University.   

Yellowface Through an Ethics Lens 

This multidisciplinary panel discussion of Yellowface, presented by the WMU Center for the Study of Ethics in Society, will explore several of the major themes in the book, all of which involve the relationship between personal responsibility, morally compromised cultures, and questionable social norms.

The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide

In what ways does the treatment of women within society affect that society's levels of security, prosperity, and resilience?  Valerie Hudson and her co-authors performed the most comprehensive empirical investigation of that question under the auspices of the US Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative. This presentation will outline their research, its results, and its implications for policymakers.  What they found will convince you that "What you do to your women, you do to your nation-state."

Valerie Hudson is University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. She joined the faculty of the Bush School of Government and Public Service in 2012 as the holder of the George H. W. Bush Chair. An expert on international security and foreign policy analysis as well as gender and security, she received her Ph.D. in political science at The Ohio State University and held a senior faculty position at Brigham Young University before joining Texas A&M. Hudson directs the Bush School’s Program on Women, Peace, and Security and is the developer of a nation-by-nation database on women, the WomanStats Database. This database has triggered both academic and policy interest, including by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and various agencies of the United Nations. Using the WomanStats data, Hudson and her co-principal investigators have published a wide variety of empirical work linking the security of women to the security of states in International Security, American Political Science Review, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, and Politics and Gender. This data also informed her co-authored book Sex and World Peace (Columbia University Press, 2012). Her co-authored book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, and the research it presents, received major attention from the media with coverage in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, and numerous other outlets. The book also received two national book awards. Her newest co-authored book is The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 2020). In 2009, Foreign Policy named Hudson one of the top 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers.

Looking Through a Policy Window with Tinted Glasses: Agenda-Setting Dynamics in U.S. AI Policy

The policy agenda is currently being established for artificial intelligence (AI), a domain marked by complex and sweeping implications for economic transformation tempered by concerns about social and ethical risks. This article reviews the United States national AI policy strategy through extensive qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 63 strategic AI policy documents curated by the federal government between 2016 and 2020. Drawing on a prominent theory of agenda setting, the Multiple Streams Framework, and in light of competing paradigms of technology policy, this article reviews how the U.S. government understands the key policy problems, solutions, and issue frames associated with AI. Findings indicate minimal attention to focusing events or problem indicators emphasizing social and ethical concerns, as opposed to economic and geopolitical ones. Further, broad statements noting ethical dimensions of AI often fail to translate into specific policy solutions, which may be explained by a lack of technical feasibility or value acceptability of ethics-related policy solutions, along with institutional constraints for agencies in specific policy sectors. Finally, despite widespread calls for increased public participation, proposed solutions remain expert dominated. Overall, while the emerging U.S. AI policy agenda reflects a striking level of attention to ethics—a promising development for policy stakeholders invested in AI ethics and more socially oriented approaches to technology governance—this success is only partial and is ultimately layered into a traditional strategic approach to innovation policy.

Daniel Schiff is an assistant professor of technology policy at Purdue University’s Department of Political Science and the co-director of GRAIL, the Governance and Responsible AI Lab. As a policy scientist with a background in philosophy, he studies the formal and informal governance of AI through policy and industry, as well as AI's social and ethical implications in domains like education, manufacturing, finance, and criminal justice. His interdisciplinary and mixed methods research addresses topics such as industry standards and organizational practices for AI ethics, public and elite opinion and influence dynamics in the policy process, the development of social responsibility attitudes amongst future computing and engineering professionals, and the role of the public in governing emerging technologies. At GRAIL, he focuses on fostering interdisciplinary research collaborations to study AI's social, policy, and ethical implications using diverse theoretical approaches and rigorous methods. He works with many passionate and talented graduate and undergraduate students, academics, and practitioners. Schiff studied philosophy at Princeton University, focusing on robotics and intelligent systems, before completing a master’s degree in social policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in public policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology.