When does hate speech cross the line into incitement of violence? And how does incitement get prosecuted around the world when it leads to violent atrocities like genocide? Are legal categories like incitement to genocide in international law all that effective at preventing or deterring this kind of speech? In her paper, Shannon Fyfe walks us through these complicated legal and philosophical questions as they played out in the trial of three media executives held by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for incitement during the Rwandan genocide. She also discusses incitement in domestic jurisdictions and the January 6 attacks in Washington DC. Links and Resources Shannon Fyfe The paper Rwanda Genocide: 100 days of slaughter International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Genocidal Language Games by Lynne Tirrell Background in Austin's Speech Act Theory Speech Acts by Mitchell Green Holocaust and genocide denial Genocide: A Normative Account by Larry May Paper Quotes The judgements handed down by the ICTR in the Media case established that certain types of speech can constitute or contribute to some of the most harmful crimes under international law. By distinguishing between genocidal hate speech, genocidal incitement speech, and genocidal participation speech, I have shown how speech act theory justifies the international criminal law that places individual criminal responsibility on the perpetrators of these forms of speech. My account responds to two debates that pervade the intersection of hate speech and international criminal law: namely, the balancing of freedom of expression with the prevention of violence, and the challenge in imposing individual criminal liability for the inchoate crime of incitement to genocide. Special Guest: Shannon Fyfe.
Disgust is often thought of as a negative emotion, and even moreso when it comes to morality. Many have argued that the feeling we have when we are morally disgusted by others has a questionable evolutionary history, is not always reliably produced, and has inspired acts of great evil in our past. In his paper, Victor Kumar argues that it's not all bad though, and that moral disgust can sometimes be a fitting response to moral wrongs. Specifically, he argues that disgust is fitting when it is evoked by moral wrongs that pollute social relationships by eroding shared expectations of trust. In these cases, moral disgust can help right certain wrongs, serve as a useful tool for social signalling, and enourage political organization. Links and Resources Victor Kumar The paper Is Disgust a "Conservative" Emotion? How Disgust Affects Social Judgments Martha Nussbaum, "From Disgust to Humanity" Steve Stich on disgust Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust By Daniel Kelly Does Disgust Influence Moral Judgment? by Joshua May Paper Quotes Many philosophers are skeptical of moral disgust, perhaps because they assume that it is tied exclusively to conservative norms and values. I have shown, to the contrary, that disgust is implicated in important moral norms and values that are shared by liberals and conservatives. Disgust is repurposed in ways that support these norms and values, by motivating an important form of punishment, tracking the spread of moral violations, and expressively coordinating collective action. Disgust accurately reflects the nature of certain wrongs that commonly elicit moral revulsion. Instead of ridding ourselves of disgust, then, we would do better to understand its fittingness and unfittingness, its uses and its hazards, and thus arrive at a richer appreciation of its suitability for moral life.Special Guest: Victor Kumar.
As we learn more and more about the brain, researchers are developing new neuroscientific methods that can help diagnose patients with traumatic brain injury. For example, some of these methods might even be able to tell us that patients who otherwise appear unresponsive are actually still "alive inside". That's an amazing idea, but the story doesn't stop there. As such technology develops, it raises a number of ethical questions about how it works and how to use. In this paper, Andrew and his coauthors investigate the benefits, harms, and costs of using neuroimaging to detect human consciousness. Links and Resources Andrew Peterson The paper Experiences of family of individuals in a locked in, minimally conscious state, or vegetative state with the health care system Ethical issues in neuroimaging after serious brain injury with Charles Weijer Practice guideline update recommendations summary: Disorders of consciousness Jason Karlawish Adrian Owen Paper Quotes The practice guideline update is a milestone in the history of neurology. Recommendations to use investigational neuroimaging methods are but one aspect of the guideline, and there is a need for further normative analysis of its rich content. We encourage continued debate on these issues. Bringing clarity to the underlying ethics of caring for brain‐injured patients can assist clinicians and health care institutions as they incorporate the guideline in clinical practice. We think that investigational neuroimaging could facilitate access to opportunity for DoC patients. As the guideline highlights, investigational neuroimaging could function as a gatekeeper for continued rehabilitation, and it might also be used as a neural prosthetic, based on future technical improvements. Neuroimaging assessment could also inform clinical decisions that best reflect a patient’s values, even if pursuing those values are inconsistent with standard notions of quality of life. Opportunity‐based frameworks for healthcare justice still require conceptual refinement, and further work needs to be done to thoroughly apply such a framework to the DoC context. However, we believe that this is a promising avenue of future research to explicate the justice claims that DoC patients (or other disabled populations) have to investigational neuroimaging and other novel therapies.Special Guest: Andrew Peterson.
An enormous amount of research in philosophy and cognitive science has been devoted to belief representation in theory of mind, or the capacity we have to figure out what other people believe. Because of all this focus on belief, one might be tempted to think that belief is one of the most basic theory of mind capacities we have. But is that really what the evidence shows? Jonathan and his coauthors argue that it doesn’t show that at all. Instead, they argue that it’s actually the capacity to figure out what others know—rather than what they believe—that’s the more basic capacity. Links and Resources Jonathan Phillips The Paper Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Knowledge wh and false beliefs: Experimental investigations Knowledge before belief : Response-times indicate evaluations of knowledge prior to belief Do non-human primates really represent others’ ignorance? How do non-human primates represent others' awareness of where objects are hidden? Laurie Santos and The Comparative Cognition Laboratory John Turri and the Philosophical Science Lab Fiery Cushman and the Moral Psychology Research Lab Ori Friedman and the UWaterloo Child Cognition Lab Alia Martin and the Infant and Child Cognition Lab Joshua Knobe Paper Quotes Since the 1970’s, research has explored belief attribution in a way that brings together numerous areas of cognitive science. Our understanding of belief representation has benefitted from a huge set of interdisciplinary discoveries from developmental studies, cognitive neuroscience, primate cognition, experimental philosophy, and beyond. The result of this empirical ferment has been extraordinary, giving us lots of insight into the nature of belief representation. We hope this paper serves as a call to arms for cognitive scientists to join researchers who have already begun to do the same for knowledge representation. Our hope is that we can marshal the same set of tools and use them to get a deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge. In doing so, we may gain better insight into the kind of representation that may— at an even more fundamental level— allow us to make sense of others’ minds.Special Guest: Jonathan Phillips.
Can the fact that something is morally wrong to believe affect whether the evidence you have justifies that belief? In her paper, Georgi Gardiner argues that the answer is "no". We should follow the evidence where it leads and align our beliefs with the evidence. And if we do that, she argues, we’ll discover that morally wrong beliefs—such as racist beliefs--simply don’t align with the evidence. On this view, racist beliefs are irrational because they are unsupported by evidence or reflect cognitive errors in statistical reasoning, not because they are immoral. Links and Resources Georgi Gardiner The paper On the Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias by Tamar Gendler Varieties of Moral Encroachment by Renée Jorgensen Bolinger Radical moral encroachment: The moral stakes of racist beliefs by Rima Basu Doxastic Wronging by Rima Basu & Mark Schroeder Beyond Accuracy: Epistemic Flaws with Statistical Generalizations by Jessie Munton Paper Quotes "Advocates of moral encroachment aim to de...
You've heard about "social-distancing" but what about emotional "self-distancing", can that help make you wiser? Are different people wiser than others and why? Is wisdom a stable trait and if so how should we measure it? In recent years there's been an explosion of research in cognitive science into answering these questions. But along with this there's also been many disagreements between researchers about what wisdom is, how best to measure it, how it develops, and how it manifests across different situations or cultures. In this episode, Igor Grossmann discusses the efforts of the Wisdom Task Force, a group of researchers who came together in the summer of 2019 to provide a systematic evaluation of dominant theoretical and methodological positions on wisdom, and to try and reach a common position or consensus on the state of the art in wisdom research in empirical psychology. Links and Resources Igor Grossmann The Paper Wisdom and Culture lab website On Wisdom podcast Toronto Wi...
Complaining about our pains is often viewed as weak or soft. Kant and Aristotle went so far as to say that it should never be done. And they say it's something a real man would never do. But could complaining actually be a virtue, even when you can't fix the thing that makes you sad or mad? When done well, complaining can expose our vulnerabilities, invite others to commiserate over share pains, affirm and validate experiences, and just maybe--help us all feel a little less alone. Links and Resources Kathryn Norlock The paper Self-respect and protest by Bernard Boxill Whining, griping, and complaining: Positivity in the negativity by Robin M. Kowalski Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics at 1171b10 Kant's Lectures on Ethics Recognition by Axel Honneth and Avishai Margalit Companions in Misery by Mariana Alessandri Paper Quotes Complaining offers important personal and interpersonal benefits, to oneself when one may other...
There is often resistance to the claim from feminist philosophy that knowledge is somehow "socially constructed", but what does that actually mean and is it really all that radical? Sometimes, our social situations or experiences dictate the kind of evidence we are likely to encounter and put us in a better position than others to know what's going on around us. Other times, these experiences can impact what we consider to be good evidence or what a community considers to be justified in the first place. Or maybe here's a simpler way to frame some of these ideas: when it comes to COVID-19 for example, who do you think knows best about what health care workers really need to do their jobs, CEOs or those on the front lines? Links and Resources Natalie Alana Ashton Robin McKenna The paper Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism by Paul Boghossian Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science Uses of value judgments in science: A general argument, with lessons from a ...
Are games art and if so, why? Are they important or valuable and if so, how? A lot of work tries to answer these questions in aesthetics by comparing games to various properties of traditionally acknowledged works that scholars already agree are art. But does this obscure basic features of what games are all about? Unlike most fictions, game designers don't just create a stable object, like a book or a movie. Insead, they create goals, rules, and abilities that people slip into when playing and that guide their experiences. In other words, to some extent games also recreate us, which both reveals what’s beautiful about them--and kind of like yoga--forces us to try out unfamiliar ways of being. Links and Resources C. Thi Nguyen The paper The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits Lady Blackbird: Adventures in the Wild Blue Yonder Games and the Good by Tom Harkin Achievement by Gwen Bradford Defining Game Mechanics by Miguel Sicart Spyfall Imertial Root: A Game of Woodl...
How well do you know your own feelings? Is our ability to know this about ourselves less reliable than what we know about the outside world around us? Is there anything we can do to make ourselves less "naive" and improve the reliability of introspection about conscious experiences? Links and Resources Eric Schwitzgebel The Paper The Splintered Mind Alison Gopnik Introspection Self-Knowledge Edward Titchener Introspective Training Apprehensively Defended: Reflections on Titchener's Lab Manual Paper Quotes Descartes, I think, had it quite backwards when he said the mind—including especially current conscious experience—was better known than the outside world. The teetering stacks of paper around me, I’m quite sure of. My visual experience as I look at those papers, my emotional experience as I contemplate the mess, my cognitive phenomenology as I drift in thought, staring at them—of these, I’m much less certain. My experiences flee and scatter as I reflect. I feel unpracticed, p...