Professor Lisa Bortolotti is a philosopher at the University of Birmingham, who has been working on a fascinating interdisciplinary project looking at what happens when young people experiencing mental health difficulties talk to clinicians about those difficulties. The project has involved closely examining hours of audio and video material of these encounters, as well as talking to the young people themselves, in the hope of gaining insights which can help clinicians improve their practice. Emerging from the work has been a focus on agency and the agential stance. We discuss what that means and why it's important, drawing on some examples from the project.

Links to further reading:

Agency project page on the McPin Foundation website: https://mcpin.org/project/agency/ (has a lot of open access resources)

Three relevant open access papers:

• L Bortolotti (2025). Agential Epistemic Injustice in Clinical Interactions Is Bad for Medicine. Philosophy of Medicine 6 (1), 1-19.
• C Bergen, L Bortolotti, R Temple, et al. (2023). Implying implausibility and undermining versus accepting peoples’ experiences of suicidal ideation and self-harm in Emergency Department psychosocial assessments. Frontiers in Psychiatry 14.
• C Bergen, L Bortolotti, K Tallent, et al. (2022). Communication in youth  health clinical encounters: Introducing the agential stance. Theory & Psychology 32 (5), 667-690.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
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Tim Watkin is a journalist and media manager. He works as executive editor for audio at Radio New Zealand, but is currently on sabbatical at the University of Glasgow, studying how to rebuild trust in journalism as part of a project on Epistemic Autonomy. In this interview we discuss the nature of trust, why it's important, why journalists seem to be losing the public's trust, whose fault this is, and what might be done about it.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
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Joe Fogarty has spent over 30 years working in national security and law enforcement, in the UK and elsewhere. He's currently working on cyber-security risks and organised crime for the UK's central government, as the Head of the Government's Cyber Resilience Centre. Recently, he's been looking at security and law enforcement through a philosophical lens, through studying for a Masters in Applied and Professional Ethics at IDEA, the Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. One of the big questions for these areas of work is how to balance privacy concerns against the public good, and we discuss that question, among others, in this interview.

Some extra reading suggested by Joe:

Omand, D. 2023. Examining the Ethics of Spying: A Practitioner’s View. Criminal Law and Philosophy. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5). [Online].  Available from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5.

Omand, D. and Phythian, M. 2023. Principled Spying - The Ethics of Secret Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/principled-spying-the-ethics-of-secret-intelligence-david-omand/3583190.

Fabre, C. 2022. Spying Through A Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spying-Through-Glass-Darkly-Counter-Intelligence/dp/019891217X.

And if listeners are interested in a view from the top of the domestic national security establishment, there is an excellent Reith Lecture by former Head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller here, which echoes some of the themes in the podcast: 

BBC Radio 4. 2011. Eliza Manningham-Buller - Securing Freedom: Security. [Online]. Available from http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/2011_reith4.pdf. 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Luke Ulas from the University of Sheffield and Josh Hobbs from the University of Leeds are both interested in cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a name used for a few different political ideas, but the core thought, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, is "the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be) citizens in a single community." One might think it's an idea that's in retreat, at least in some countries, today. That's one of the issues we discuss, as well as whether there's a crisis of motivation of cosmopolitanism, what that means and what one might do about it.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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This episode is part of what's becoming a bit of an informal series of Ethics Untangled episodes, on ethical issues relating to artificial intelligence applications. The particular application we're looking at this time comes from a healthcare setting, and is called a Patient Preference Predictor. It's a proposed way of using an algorithmic system to predict what a patient's preferences would be concerning their healthcare, in situations where they're incapacitated and unable to tell us what their preferences are. Ethicists have raised concerns about these systems, and these concerns are worth taking seriously, but Dr Nick Makins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, thinks they can be answered, and that the use of these systems can be justified, at least in some circumstances.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Relationship anarchy is a radical approach to relationships that goes beyond just rejecting traditional monogamy. Relationship anarchists believe that relationships should never involve having power over each other, in the form of holding each other to obligations. So, for example, relationship anarchists reject the idea of restricting one's partner from entering into any form of intimacy with anyone, even with mutual friends. They also reject any hierarchy of relationships - for example having a central relationship with one person whose agreement is needed for you to have relationships with other people. For relationship anarchists, all relationships should be approached individually and no relationship should involve placing restrictions on any partner. Natasha McKeever, and Luke Brunning, all based at the IDEA Centre, have been looking critically at the ethics of relationship anarchy, and I spoke to them in a wide-ranging conversation about this fascinating topic. 

Some links to further reading:

An article by Luke in The Conversation about relationship anarchy.

An ABC article about relationship anarchy.

A new book about relationship anarchy.

A 'Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy'

An article by Aleksander Sørlie, Ole Martin Moen on The Ethics of Relationship Anarchy.

A book about relationship anarchy by by Juan-Carlos Pérez-Cortés.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Drag is a type of performance which uses clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles. It's an activity with a long and varied history, and continues to be a very popular form of entertainment, as attested by TV shows such as Ru Paul's Drag Race. It's also distinctive in having faced criticism from several different political directions, including conservative, transgender and feminist perspectives. In this conversation with Simon Kirchin, who is Professor of Applied Ethics, Director of IDEA, The Ethics Centre and someone who has experience as a drag performer himself, we mainly focused on the feminist critique. The problem is that drag typically involves men (a relatively advantaged group) imitating women (a relatively disadvantaged group), in a way that plays on often offensive stereotypes about women, for entertainment. Described in that way, it seems uncomfortably similar to blackface, a form of entertainment which follows a very similar dynamic, at least superficially, on racial lines. Professor Kirchin thinks a moral difference between these two activities can be identified, though, and in the conversation he explains why.

You can read Simon's article on the topic here.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Misinformation, fake news, hate speech, satire, the arts, political protest. These are all examples of what you might call disruptive speech. A free speech absolutist would say that all of these forms of speech should be tolerated, if not welcomed. On the other hand, it does look as though some of them are disruptive in a good way, and others are disruptive in a bad way. But can we tell the good from the bad in a way that isn't just politically partisan? Carl Fox, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, thinks we can, and that we should treat different forms of disruptive speech differently. 

Here is Carl's paper on the subject in the Journal of Social Philosophy.

Carl co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics with fellow Ethics Untangled alumnus Joe Saunders, which contains a chapter by Carl on satire and stability. 

For further reading, there's Amy Olberding's book on manners and civility.

In the interview, Carl mentions a paper on lying by Don Fallis. That's here:

Fallis, D. 2009. “What Is Lying?” Journal of Philosophy 106(1): 29–56. 

And then there's the classic text on freedom and its limits, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:

Mill, J. S. 1974. On Liberty. London: Penguin.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Recent developments in AI, including image generation and large language models, have created huge excitement and opened up some really interesting possibilities. But they've also attracted significant criticisms, not least of which is the accusation that they involve large scale theft. This is because they are trained on huge datasets that include the original work of many people, who go uncredited and are unlikely to have given consent to their work being used in this way. Focusing on AI art and the work of artists on which it is built, Trystan Goetze, Senior Lecturer in the Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University, argues that these criticisms are well founded. In Dr Goetze's view, these systems are guilty of stealing artists' labour.

Here's a link to Dr Goetze's paper on the topic.

Here's a transcript of Bob Dylan's Musicares acceptance speech, that I mention towards the end of the conversation.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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When I was doing my undergraduate degree back in the 90s, the Internet was a bit of a novelty. It was fun to play with, and you could see theoretically how it was probably going to be quite important. I'm not sure I would have predicted how completely it now pervades every area of human life, though: work, civil society, leisure and social interactions. There's still, however, a significant digital divide. Not everyone has easy access, or any access to the internet, and its systemic importance in all of these areas means this is more of a disadvantage than it's ever been. 

Merten Reglitz, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, thinks it's time we recognised internet access not just as a significant good, but as a human right. 

Here is Merten's recently published book on the topic, an overview of it and an article that sets out the book’s main defence of the idea of a new right.

An article and another article opposing the idea that internet is a human right.

The latest figures on global connectivity from the ITU.

Freedom House’s ‘Freedom of the Net’ reports on internet freedom.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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After time in the army and the fire service, Simon Cassin became a health and safety professional, and is now the managing director of a training and development consultancy called Ouch. Unusually for someone working in health and safety, he's dedicated some serious study to understanding the deep philosophical ideas underlying the profession, focusing particularly on the idea of harm. 

When do consequences caused or made worse by work become harm? What are an organisation's responsibilities regarding harm? And what are the responsibilities of health and safety professionals related to harm and doing good? 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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*CONTENT WARNING: This podcast contains some frank discussion of sex and sex work.*

While there are all kinds of sex work, by far the most common scenario involves a man paying a woman for sex. It is, in other words, a highly gendered activity. Why? It turns out the answer to this question isn't as obvious as it might at first seem. It turns out, in fact, that there are multiple possible explanations, some of which fit better with the evidence than others. Natasha McKeever has been examining this evidence and trying to come up with a definitive answer, to an explanatory question which also intersects with some ethical questions. For example, would the world be a better place if sex work was less gendered, or if it didn’t exist at all?

Natasha's paper on this topic has been published (open access) here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/is-sex-work-inherently-gendered/3EE28F1EAC9594C89B21F8E47C42D106

Here's some further reading suggested by Natasha:

Kingston, Sarah, Natalie Hammond, and Scarlett Redman. 2020. Women Who Buy Sex: Converging Sexualities? London: Routledge.

Mac, Juno, and Molly Smith. 2018. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights. London: Verso. 

Moen OM ‘Is prostitution harmful?’ Journal of Medical Ethics 2014;40:73-81. 

Sanders, Teela, Jane Scoular, Rosie Campbell, Jane Pitcher, and Stewart Cunningham. 2018. ‘Beyond the Gaze: Summary Briefing on Internet Sex Work’. 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Do you know what medical information is held about you? Do you know who is allowed to have access to it? Doctors collect lots of data - often quite personal - about their patients. This data needs to be collected, stored, and shared, sometimes quite widely, so that the patients can receive effective care, but also so that the medical profession can better understand diseases, how they spread and how to treat them. In the UK, there is plenty of guidance for GPs about what information they can store, who should have access to it, and when. In fact, according to Jon Fistein, a doctor himself as well as an academic looking at the ethics of health data, there's too much guidance, it's too complex, and it's not always consistent. As a result, most GPs don't really understand what the requirements are, let alone patients. We talked about what can be done about this, and why the traditional idea of patient information being kept 'in the strictest confidence' isn't really going to cut it in today's data-driven healthcare context.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Today's question is one which you might not immediately recognise as important or, so to speak, pressing. The question is, what is touching through? It also might not be immediately apparent why this is an ethical question. As Robbie Morgan from the IDEA Centre and Will Hornett from the University of Cambridge explain, however, it's a metaphysical question which has ethical implications. For instance, since assault is defined as unwanted touching, we need to know whether touching has taken place before we can decide whether an assault has taken place.  Then there may be cases where, if touching has taken place, it’s taken place through something, and these cases may be tricky to adjudicate. Anyway, in this conversation Robbie and Will introduce some possibilities for what touching through is, before arguing for their preferred explanation. You can decide if you think they’ve put their finger on it. So to speak.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Conspiracy theories seem to be an increasingly prevalent feature of public discourse. No sooner has some significant event taken place, but the internet is full of alternative explanations for that event, involving hidden and nefarious decision-makers. These theories run the gamut from the wildly outlandish to the somewhat plausible, and your view may differ on where the line should be drawn. There are a number of questions about the rationality of conspiracy theories - whether we should reject them wholesale as irrational, for example, or consider each one on its merits. But there are also some interesting ethical questions, and philosophers, including Patrick Stokes, associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University in Melbourne, have been increasingly turning their attention to these questions. What are the moral costs of accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist? But also, what are the moral costs of accusing someone of being a conspirator? In what ways might conspiracy theorising be corrosive of trust? And how should we respond to people we know who believe conspiracy theories? I really enjoyed this conversation with Professor Stokes, on the line from Melbourne, on what I think is a really important topic which needs some philosophical attention.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Adam Byfield is Principal Technical Assurance Specialist at NHS England. His job involves providing ethical assurance for technical systems which are used in the NHS, including those which employ artificial intelligence. It's well known that AI, as well as providing some really exciting benefits, raises some distinctive ethical issues, but it was really interesting to talk to someone who is at the sharp end of trying to address these issues. How do you test AI systems in a healthcare setting? What are you looking for? What kind of assurance can you provide to patients and the public? I'm very grateful to Adam for taking the time to talk to me about this really important topic.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Should we be worried about teledildonics?

 *CONTENT WARNING. This episode contains frank descriptions of sexual practices of various kinds, and discussion of sexual assault and rape, including rape by deception.*

Teledildonics is a word that refers to the use of networked electronic sex toys to facilitate sexual or quasi-sexual interactions between people at a distance. It's a relatively new type of technology, but one that is becoming more advanced. Clearly, it's a technology that opens up interesting new possibilities! But Robbie Arrell, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, thinks it also raises some serious concerns, not all of which have yet been fully understood. In this conversation, Robbie outlines some of these worries, and begins to consider how we might address them.

Some further reading:

• Robbie's chapter entitled "Sex and Emergent Technologies" in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality in which he discusses teledildonics: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003286523-49/sex-emergent-technologies-robbie-arrell.
• Robert Sparrow and Lauren Karas's paper "Teledildonics and Rape by Deception" that Robbie makes reference to in the podcast: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17579961.2020.1727097

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Alex Batesmith has had a fascinating career. After beginning as a criminal barrister in Leeds, he went on to work as a United Nations prosecutor in Cambodia and Kosovo, working on cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. He's now a legal scholar working at Leeds University, and has been researching the values and motivations of international criminal lawyers. In this conversation we discussed the idea of 'cause lawyering'. Cause lawyers are lawyers who practice law primarily because of their moral, political or ideological commitments. An example of someone who has arguably been a cause lawyer is the UK's new Prime Minister Kier Starmer, whose previous career as a human rights lawyer appears to have been motivated at least partly by some broader moral commitments, including opposition to the death penalty for example. It's interesting to consider how this outlook complicates the ethical framework under which lawyers operate, which traditionally balances duties to the client with duties to the court, and to the rule of law.

Alex has published an article on the same topic in the Journal of International  Criminal Justice, which can be accessed here:

He also recommended this article by Anna-Maria Marshall and Daniel Crocker Hale.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Gender is, of course, one of the most contentious ethical and political topics you can find at the moment. There are numerous practical and policy debates - for example those relating to medicine, prisons and sport - which can seem completely intractable, and which provoke the strongest possible opinions on all sides.

Sitting behind these practical questions, however, is a cluster of theoretical questions, which can be summarised as questions about what gender actually is. Graham Bex-Priestley, a Lecturer at the IDEA Centre, has a novel approach to these questions. He suggests that we should think of someone's gender as being something like their name. In this interview, he explains why.

Graham's article on this topic is here:

Bex-Priestley, Graham. “Gender as Name.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 23, no. 2 (November 2022): 189–213.

And here are some articles defending the other views mentioned in the conversation:

Biological view: Byrne, Alex. “Are Women Adult Human Females?” Philosophical Studies 177, no. 12 (December 2020): 3783–803.

Family resemblance view: Heyes, Cressida. Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Social position via perceived reproductive role view: Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Social constraints and enablements view: Ásta. Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Critical gender view: Dembroff, Robin. “Beyond Binary: Genderqueer as Critical Gender Kind.” Philosophers’ Imprint 20, no. 9 (April 2020): 1–31. Note the “critical gender” view is about rejecting and destabilising dominant gender ideology and is not to be confused with the “gender critical” movement, which accepts the biological view.

Existential self-identity view: Bettcher, Talia Mae. “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority.” In You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, edited by Laurie Shrage, 98–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Pluralist view: Jenkins, Katharine. Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. See also Cull, Matthew J. What Gender Should Be. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.

Performative view: Judith Butler's early books (Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter) are the classics, but they can be difficult. In contrast, Butler's latest book is written for a public audience: Butler, Judith. Who's Afraid of Gender? Allen Lane, 2024 (many of the topics in this book are discussed in their Cambridge public lecture of the same title).

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Chris McClean is the global lead for digital ethics at Avanade, a large tech innovation and consulting firm. He's also studying for his PhD at the University of Leeds, spending his time thinking about risk and trust relationships, especially in cases with a significant power imbalance, and where the people making the decisions are different from those exposed to the risk resulting from those decisions.

At the end of this conversation, we explored some practical questions related to Chris's day job, about what trust implies for business and the professions and in the digital realm, but in order to get there we first got stuck into the deeper question of what trust means…

Here's a list of papers and authors mentioned by Chris in the discussion:

Baier, A. “Trust and Antitrust.” Ethics 96, no. 2 (1986): 231–60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381376. 

Hawley, K. “Trust, Distrust and Commitment.” Noûs 48, no. 1 (2014): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12000.

Holton, R. “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 1 (March 1994): 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048409412345881. 

Kirton, A. (2020). Matters of Trust as Matters of Attachment Security. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28(5), 583–602. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2020.1802971.

The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer is here:

https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2024-02/2024%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report_FINAL.pdf 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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For this episode, I spoke to Wendy Salkin, a philosophy professor at Stanford University, about informal political representatives: people who speak or act on behalf of groups in the political sphere without being elected to do so. Familiar examples include Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malala Yousafzai, and Greta Thunberg.

Informal political representatives raise awareness of issues and bring about political change, often achieving things that people with more formal power cannot or do not. But their existence also raises some ethical questions. Do they need to be authorised? Can they be held accountable? What if the things they say diverge from the views of the people they represent?

Professor Salkin's book on this subject, Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation, was released by Harvard University Press on July 9th.

Relevant reading:

1. Alcoff, L. (1991). The Problem of Speaking for Others. Cultural Critique, 20, 5–32.
2. Chapman, E.B. (2022). Election Day: How We Vote and What It Means for Democracy. Princeton University Press.
3. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1997). “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams, 62–72. Bedford Books.
4. Jagmohan, D. (forthcoming). Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism. Princeton University Press.
5. King, M.L., Jr. (2010) Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Beacon Press.
6. Mansbridge, J.J. (1983) Beyond Adversary Democracy. University of Chicago Press.
7. Montanaro, L. (2017). Who Elected Oxfam?: A Democratic Defense of Self-Appointed Representatives. Cambridge University Press.
8. Pitkin, H. (1967). The Concept of Representation. University of Los Angeles Press.
9. Rehfeld, A. (2006). Towards a General Theory of Political Representation. Journal of Politics 68, no. 1: 1–21.
10. Saward, M. (2010). The Representative Claim. Oxford University Press.
11. Washington, B.T. “The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address,” in The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver, 167–170. W. W. Norton.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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In May 2023, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill received Royal Assent after two years of debate in Parliament. The new Act will strengthen the statutory duty already imposed on English higher education providers by previous legislation to secure freedom of speech within the law. Arif Ahmed, a former philosophy professor at Cambridge University, has been appointed as a Director overseeing free speech at the Office for Students, informally known as the 'Free Speech Tsar'. 

Free speech is one of several fronts in the so-called culture wars. Ahmed has been at great pains to say that his office, and he, will be politically neutral. The idea is to protect the right of academics to express their views, wherever on the political spectrum those views fall. But is there a role for legitimate gatekeeping of academic speaking opportunities? And is there a principled way of making decisions about when, if ever, academics should be prevented from speaking on the grounds that what they say might be harmful? Gerald Lang, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, has been trying to dig under the headlines to get at the ethical concerns underlying this debate.

You can read Gerald Lang's blog on this topic, and a reply to it by the philosopher Robert Simpson, here:

https://peasoupblog.com/2023/11/soup-of-the-day-free-speech-and-academic-freedom-with-contributions-from-gerald-lang-and-robert-simpson/

You can find out more about the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act here:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/16

You can read Arif Ahmed's first speech as Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the Office for Students, or 'Free Speech Tsar', here:

https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/transcript-of-arif-ahmeds-speech-at-kings-college-london/

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Never let it be said that we don't tackle the big questions on this podcast. This week we're discussing no less a subject than the meaning of life, with Predrag Cicovacki.

Predrag is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (USA), where he has been teaching since 1991. He has served as a visiting professor in Germany, Russia, Luxembourg, Serbia, France, and India. He's interested in problems of good and evil, violence and nonviolence, philosophy of war and peace, and ethics.

In 2021, in the midst of very difficult personal circumstances and a global pandemic, Predrag set to work on a book called The Meaning of Life: a Quick Immersion. It's a great book: very clear, heartfelt, personal and full of insights. I hugely enjoyed reading it, and enjoyed even more the opportunity to talk to Predrag about it.

You can find out more about Predrag here:

https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/philosophy/faculty/predrag-cicovacki

A few places you can buy The Meaning of Life: A Quick Immersion:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-meaning-of-life-a-quick-immersion-predrag-cicovacki/17413009?ean=9781949845280
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/THE-MEANING-OF-LIFE-A-Quick-Immersion-by-Cicovacki-Predrag/9781949845280
https://www.amazon.co.uk/MEANING-LIFE-Quick-Immersion-Immersions/dp/1949845281

I asked Predrag to recommend some further reading and, in line with the general vibe of this episode, he suggested that you might like to reconnect with a book that meant a lot to you in childhood or adolescence. For Predrag, it's The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The first one that came to mind for me was The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. What about you?

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, as well as research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. Her book More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech explores the way technology reinforces inequality and asks the question, what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they're coded into the system itself? 

It's a great read, full of eye-opening examples and insights, from a writer with the technical and ethical expertise to get to the heart of what is clearly a very significant challenge for society. We were only able to scratch the surface in this short conversation, but it's changed my thinking about technology ethics, and I was very grateful to Professor Broussard for taking the time to talk to us.

You can find out more about Professor Broussard here:

https://meredithbroussard.com/

Places you can buy More Than  a Glitch include the following:

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/More-Than-a-Glitch-by-Meredith-Broussard/9780262548328
https://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Than-Glitch-Confronting-Ability/dp/0262047659

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Ethical questions about the dead are frequently interesting, puzzling, surprising, and weird. All of these things become clear in this conversation with Dr Joseph Bowen. Joe is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, specialising in moral, political, and legal philosophy. As well as whether the dead have rights, his research focuses on the nature of rights and directed duties, the justifications for and constraints on harming, the nature and scope of duties to rescue, and just war theory.

Here's Joe:

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/4794/dr-joseph-bowen
https://joseph-bowen.weebly.com/

He's written about whether the dead have rights in this paper:

Bowen, J. 2022.  ‘The Interest Theory of Rights at the Margins: Posthumous Rights’, Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer​, Visa Kurki & Mark McBride (eds), (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

And here are some other readings which might be of interest:

• Jeff McMahan, ‘Death and the Value of Life’ Ethics 99, 1 (1998), pp. 32-61.
• Cécile Fabre, ‘Posthumous Rights’, in Matthew H. Kramer, and others (eds), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2008).
• David Boonin, Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (New York; Oxford University Press, 2009).

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/