Justifying Thresholds
Seminar
Speaker: Caleb Perl You shouldn’t scapegoat someone innocent to prevent five killings. But maybe you should scapegoat someone innocent when the numbers get large enough – if, say, scapegoating would save a million, or a billion. That is, there might be thresholds where the numbers start to…
Speech Acts on Social Media: Algorithms, Amplifiers, and Affordances
Seminar
Speaker: Michael Randall Barnes A great amount of communication now occurs on social media platforms. And sometimes these communicative acts cause and/or constitute harmful acts. The harms of social media raise a number of questions concerning the processes and aims of content moderation—the…
Pandemic lottery preparedness: Preparing to ethically, fairly, and systematically allocate scarce resources in response to future infectious disease outbreaks
Seminar
Speaker: Gerard Vong Using the recent COVID-19 and MPox international outbreaks as examples, Dr Vong argues that when distributing a public health resource that is too scarce (or logistically challenging) to allocate to all of a group of equally-worthy potential beneficiaries (even when/if…
Mitochondrial Donation in Australia: A philosophical report - Catherine Mills
Seminar
Speaker: Catherine Mills In March 2022, the Australian Parliament passed a bill allowing for a clinical trial of the assisted reproductive technology, [[mitochondrial donation]], to be undertaken. This makes Australia the second country in the world to legislate to allow this…
The Puzzle of Musical Repetition - Jenny Judge
Seminar
Speaker: Jenny Judge Take any piece of music, from any genre you like: pop, classical, jazz, bluegrass, shoegaze, grunge, death metal. Odds are, that piece will be saturated with repetition at every level, from the micro to the macro. Melodies are often stated only to be immediately…
The repugnant conclusion and internal consistency of choice - Susumu Cato
Seminar
Speaker: Susumu Cato The mere addition paradox pioneered by Derek Parfit is revisited. The paradox revolves around two conditions: "mere addition," which posits that adding individuals with positive utility should make a population at least as good as the original, and "non-anti-…
Moral Encroachment Across Species Boundaries - John Matthewson
Seminar
Speaker: John Matthewson Proponents of moral encroachment argue that moral considerations can affect epistemic rationality. Although the various accounts of moral encroachment diverge in important ways, the core claim is that, given a fixed type and quantity of evidence, the…