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152Roleplaying Game–Based Engineering Ethics Education: Lessons from the Art of AgencyProceedings of the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education St. Lawrence Section Annual Conference. forthcoming.How do we prepare engineering students to make ethical and responsible decisions in their professional work? This paper presents an approach that enhances engineering students’ engagement with ethical reasoning by simulating decision-making in a complex scenario. The approach has two principal inspirations. The first is Anthony Weston’s scenario-based teaching. Weston’s concept of a scenario is a situation that changes in response to choices made by participants, according to an inner logic. Sce…Read more
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1986AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation, Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic PollocksProceedings of the 2024 Acm Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 186-196. 2024.Since the launch of applications such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, generative artificial intelligence has been controversial as a tool for creating artwork. While some have presented longtermist worries about these technologies as harbingers of fully automated futures to come, more pressing is the impact of generative AI on creative labour in the present. Already, business leaders have begun replacing human artistic labour with AI-generated images. In response, the artistic commu…Read more
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229Okay, Google, Can I Trust You? An Anti-trust Argument for AntitrustIn David Collins, Iris Vidmar Jovanović & Mark Alfano (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Trust, Lexington Books. pp. 237-257. 2023.In this chapter, I argue that it is impossible to trust the Big Tech companies, in an ethically important sense of trust. The argument is not that these companies are untrustworthy. Rather, I argue that the power to hold the trustee accountable is a necessary component of this sense of trust, and, because these companies are so powerful, they are immune to our attempts, as individuals or nation-states, to hold them to account. It is, therefore, literally impossible to trust Big Tech. After intro…Read more
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477Integrating Ethics into Computer Science Education: Multi-, Inter-, and Transdisciplinary ApproachesProceedings of the 54Th Acm Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (Sigcse 2023). 2023.While calls to integrate ethics into computer science education go back decades, recent high-profile ethical failures related to computing technology by large technology companies, governments, and academic institutions have accelerated the adoption of computer ethics education at all levels of instruction. Discussions of how to integrate ethics into existing computer science programmes often focus on the structure of the intervention—embedded modules or dedicated courses, humanists or computer …Read more
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364Hermeneutical Justice for Extremists?In Leo Townsend, Ruth Rebecca Tietjen, Michael Staudigl & Hans Bernard Schmid (eds.), The Philosophy of Fanaticism: Epistemic, Affective, and Political Dimensions, Routledge. pp. 88-108. 2022.When we encounter extremist rhetoric, we often find it dumbfounding, incredible, or straightforwardly unintelligible. For this reason, it can be tempting to dismiss or ignore it, at least where it is safe to do so. The problem discussed in this paper is that such dismissals may be, at least in certain circumstances, epistemically unjust. Specifically, it appears that recent work on the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice compels us to accept two unpalatable conclusions: first, that this failur…Read more
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951Mind the Gap: Autonomous Systems, the Responsibility Gap, and Moral EntanglementProceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’22). 2022.When a computer system causes harm, who is responsible? This question has renewed significance given the proliferation of autonomous systems enabled by modern artificial intelligence techniques. At the root of this problem is a philosophical difficulty known in the literature as the responsibility gap. That is to say, because of the causal distance between the designers of autonomous systems and the eventual outcomes of those systems, the dilution of agency within the large and complex teams tha…Read more
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245Anticipation, Smothering, and Education: A Reply to Lee and Bayruns García on Anticipatory Epistemic InjusticeSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (9): 36-43. 2021.When you expect something bad to happen, you take action to avoid it. That is the principle of action that underlies J. Y. Lee’s recent paper (2021), which presents a new form of epistemic injustice that arises from anticipating negative consequences for testifying. In this brief reply article occasioned by Lee’s essay, I make two main contributions to the discussion of this idea. The first (§§2–3) is an intervention in the discussion between Lee and Eric Bayruns García regarding the relationshi…Read more
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440Conceptual ResponsibilityDissertation, University of Sheffield. 2018.This thesis concerns our moral and epistemic responsibilities regarding our concepts. I argue that certain concepts can be morally, epistemically, or socially problematic. This is particularly concerning with regard to our concepts of social kinds, which may have both descriptive and evaluative aspects. Being ignorant of certain concepts, or possessing mistaken conceptions, can be problematic for similar reasons, and contributes to various forms of epistemic injustice. I defend an expanded view …Read more
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557Bigger Isn’t Better: The Ethical and Scientific Vices of Extra-Large Datasets in Language ModelsWebSci '21: Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM Web Science Conference (Companion Volume). 2021.The use of language models in Web applications and other areas of computing and business have grown significantly over the last five years. One reason for this growth is the improvement in performance of language models on a number of benchmarks — but a side effect of these advances has been the adoption of a “bigger is always better” paradigm when it comes to the size of training, testing, and challenge datasets. Drawing on previous criticisms of this paradigm as applied to large training datas…Read more
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297Games: Agency as Art. By C. THI NGUYEN. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii + 244. Price £22.99, US $35.00.) (review)The Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1): 240-243. 2022.
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78Moral Entanglement: Taking Responsibility and Vicarious ResponsibilityThe Monist 104 (2): 210-223. 2021.Vicarious responsibility is sometimes analysed by considering the different kinds of agents involved—who is vicariously responsible for the actions of whom? In this paper, I discuss vicarious responsibility from a different angle: in what sense is the vicarious agent responsible? I do this by considering the ways in which one may take responsibility for events caused by another agent or process. I discuss three senses of taking responsibility—accepting fault, assuming obligations, and fulfilling…Read more
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385Conceptual responsibilityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2): 20-45. 2021.Conceptual engineering is concerned with the improvement of our concepts. The motivating thought behind many such projects is that some of our concepts are defective. But, if to use a defective concept is to do something wrong, and if to do something wrong one must be in control of what one is doing, there might be no defective concepts, since we typically are not in control of our concept use. To address this problem, this paper turns from appraising the concepts we use to appraising the people…Read more
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377The Concept of a University: Theory, Practice, and SocietyDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 52 (1): 61-81. 2019.Current disputes over the nature and purpose of the university are rooted in a philosophical divide between theory and practice. Academics often defend the concept of a university devoted to purely theoretical activities. Politicians and wider society tend to argue that the university should take on more practical concerns. I critique two typical defenses of the theoretical concept—one historical and one based on the value of pure research—and show that neither the theoretical nor the practical …Read more
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43Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2018.How we engage in epistemic practice, including our methods of knowledge acquisition and transmission, the personal traits that help or hinder these activities, and the social institutions that facilitate or impede them, is of central importance to our lives as individuals and as participants in social and political activities. Traditionally, Anglophone epistemology has tended to neglect the various ways in which these practices go wrong, and the epistemic, moral, and political harms and wrongs t…Read more
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819Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic PracticeRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 1-21. 2018.This volume has its roots in two recent developments within mainstream analytic epistemology: a growing recognition over the past two or three decades of the active and social nature of our epistemic lives; and, more recently still, the increasing appreciation of the various ways in which the epistemic practices of individuals and societies can, and often do, go wrong. The theoretical analysis of these breakdowns in epistemic practice, along with the various harms and wrongs that follow as a con…Read more
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562Hermeneutical Dissent and the Species of Hermeneutical InjusticeHypatia 33 (1): 73-90. 2018.According to Miranda Fricker, a hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a deficit in our shared tools of social interpretation, such that marginalized social groups are at a disadvantage in making sense of their distinctive and important experiences. Critics have claimed that Fricker's account ignores or precludes a phenomenon I call hermeneutical dissent, where marginalized groups have produced their own interpretive tools for making sense of those experiences. I clarify the nature of herm…Read more
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154The Limits of Knowledge: Generating Pragmatist Feminist Cases for Situated Knowing by Nancy Arden McHugh, 2015 Albany, NY, State University of New York Press. xii + 189 pp, US$75 , US$75 (review)Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (3): 344-346. 2016.
APA Eastern Division
Ithaca, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Moral Responsibility |
Computer Ethics |
Epistemic Injustice |
Engineering Ethics |