Past Events
Our events are sponsored by the Philosophy and Religion Department, PPE Program, and CSSH.
Programs and Workshops
Organizers: Branden Fitelson & Maureen Eckert
Time Period: July 29th to August 2, 2024
Location: RP 909
Information: PIKSI-Boston is an organization that runs philosophy summer schools for under-represented undergraduates from around the US. The Logic Summer School is a 5-day summer school, offered to 11 students and given by leading logicians from all over the country. Undergraduates from underrepresented groups are invited to study logic — five topics over five days, with ten top international instructors — at Northeastern University for one week in the summer.
Link to Ethics Institute PIKSI-Logic Page
Link to Program Website
Organizers: John Basl, Meica Magnani, Vance Ricks, Matt Kopec, Kevin Mills, Alison Simmons.
Time Period: July 26th and July 27th, 2024
Location: TBA
Information: Tech Ethics eXchange NorthEast (teχnē), a collaboration between Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at MIT, The Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, and The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and Embedded EthiCS @ Harvard University, brings together educators and researchers to foster collaboration and exchange on issues related to the ethics and philosophy of computing. The conference aims to showcase foundational and translational research, pedagogy, and practice.
Link to program website.
Organizers: Vance Ricks & Meica Magnani
Time Period: July 21st – July 31st 2024
Location: RP 310
Information: The Summer Training Program on Responsible Computing Education will spread robust, quickly deployable responsible computing education to a more diverse range of schools. For ten days, a cohort of two- person interdisciplinary teams who teach at minority-serving institutions interested in building responsible computing curricula will learn about strategies used at other institutions. The program will provide opportunities to learn, discuss, and exchange educational and institutional know-how. Participants will develop concrete plans for programs suited for their own institutions.
This program is generously funded by the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computing Challenge.
Link to Webpage
Organizers: Sina Fazelpour and Marina DiMarco
Time Period: July 1st to July 12th, 2024.
Location: RP 310
Information: The IDEAS residential summer program will provide an opportunity for undergraduates to spend 2 weeks in Boston to learn from world experts on data science, ethics, computer science, philosophy, law, and more. The program will help the next generation learn how to think critically and systematically about the ethical risks posed by these technologies, and how to responsibly develop AI and data science systems that benefit the many, not only the few.
Link to Program Website.
Organizers: Candice Delmas, Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Getty Lustila, Joseph Len Miller
Time Period: June 24th- June 28th, 2024
Location: RP 909
Information: The Northeast Workshop to Learn About Multicultural Philosophy (NEWLAMP) project is a yearly week-long summer workshop that aims to broaden philosophy undergraduate curricula, by equipping professors with the tools required to successfully integrate a traditionally underrepresented area of philosophy in their courses. In June 24-28, 2024, NEWLAMP is an NEH Institute for Higher Education Faculty hosted at Northeastern University, and focused on Native American, Indigenous and Land-Based Philosophy. Four Indigenous philosophers are leading the workshop, which will center on 5 key concepts in Indigenous resistance work: Sovereignty, Land, Decolonization, Indigenous Feminisms, and Cultural Reclamation.
Link to Ethics Institute NEWLAMP 2024 Page
Link to Program Website
Organizers: Candice Delmas, Marta Giunta Martino. Emanuela Ceva.
Time Period: June 6th and June 7th, 2024
Location: Renaissance Park 909
Information: Resistance to and contestation of such institutional failures as injustice, illegitimacy, and corruption play crucial roles in shaping the life of a polity. Philosophers have extensively discussed the conceptual and normative contours of different forms of resistance and contestation, such as principled (civil and uncivil) disobedience, direct action, rioting, conscientious objection, whistleblowing. However, the vast majority of such discussions have concentrated on the justification of the rights and duties of resistance and contestation of citizens. A lesser attention has been devoted to the rights and duties of resistance and contestation of public servants. Talks in this conference remedy this lacuna by investigating forms of internal or external reactions to institutional failures, shedding light on the (remedial) duties of the members of dysfunctional institutions, examining the impact of institutional dysfunctions for the quality of institutional action (e.g., institutional trustworthiness), and exploring the emotional landscape such dysfunctions may elicit.
Organizers: John Basl, Kathleen Creel, Ronald Sandler
Time Period: June 3 – August 2nd, 2024
Location: RP 310 & 909
Information: This summer school is intended for graduate students with advanced training in applied ethics, ethical theory, philosophy of science, or other areas with potential research applications to AI and big data who would like to develop research capacities in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), data ethics, and the philosophy of technology. Designing AI and machine learning systems to promote human flourishing in just and sustainable ways will require a robust and diverse AI and data ethics research community. However, there are few graduate programs that train students in these areas. The aim of this summer long, in person training program is to supplement resources in students’ home universities with ethical and technical skills necessary to research in this area.
Link to Webpage
Organizer: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz
Time Period: March 22 and 23rd, 2024
Location: RP 909
Information: Radicalism in a variety of formations is on the rise in the United States and around the world. Often, the scholars who study radicalism do so through critical media discourse or political analysis. This workshop draws together leading anthropologists working in and on radicalized communities to talk about how we can reshape the trajectory of, support, and expand anthropological studies of radicalized communities. We intend for this event to be the start of a networked community that we will continue to build and expand in the coming years at Northeastern University, with a specific focus on supporting and mentoring young scholars, graduate students, and early career scholars working on these pressing issues.
Attendance is by invite only.
Link to Webpage
AI, data science, and machine learning are increasingly a part of everyday life, and every sector of society. The headlines are filled with examples of AI and data science used for great benefits, but also leading to great harms. The IDEAS residential summer program will provide an opportunity for undergraduates to spend a week in either Boston or San Diego to learn from world experts on data science, ethics, computer science, philosophy, law, and more. The program will help the next generation learn how to think critically and systematically about the ethical risks posed by these technologies, and how to responsibly develop AI and data science systems that benefit the many, not only the few. Topics covered include: values in AI design, justice and fairness, privacy, interpretability and transparency, and broader personal and societal impacts.
The Northeast Workshop to Learn About Multicultural Philosophy (NEWLAMP) is designed to equip philosophy professors with the competency to integrate modules on traditionally underrepresented areas of philosophy into their undergraduate philosophy courses. For its first edition, which will take place at Northeastern University in Boston, July 11-15, 2022, NEWLAMP will focus on African and Africana social and political philosophy.
Undergraduates from underrepresented groups are invited to study logic — five topics over five days, with ten top international instructors — at Northeastern University for one week in the summer of 2022.
There is a competitive application process for this Summer Program, and we will accept 10 students. Transportation to and from Northeastern, as well as room and board will be provided. And, a modest stipend will also be awarded to each participant.
By participating in this supportive program, undergraduates study logic in an inclusive setting and learn that there is a place for them in the field and that they have something valuable to offer the discipline.
2022-2023
Ethics Institute Speaker, Don Fallis
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, December 2, 2022
Location: Department Conference Room (428 Renaissance Park)
Speaker Bio: Don Fallis is a Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science at Northeastern University. His research interests include epistemology, philosophy of information, and philosophy of mathematics. His articles on lying and deception have appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. He has also discussed lying on Philosophy TV and in several volumes of the Philosophy and Popular Culture series.
Ethics Institute Speaker, Michael Hannon
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, November 18, 2022
Location: Department Conference Room (428 Renaissance Park)
Speaker Bio: Michael Hannon is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and Honorary Director of the Aristotelian Society. From 2022-23, he is an Edmond J. Safra Fellow-in-Residence at Harvard.
Hannon works in epistemology and political philosophy. He has published on topics such as: the role of truth in politics, political empathy, identity-expressive discourse, skepticism, fallibilism, and the value of knowledge. In 2019, Oxford University Press published his first book, What’s the Point of Knowledge?
Ethics Institute Speaker, Robert Hughes
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, November 4, 2022
Location: Department Conference Room (428 Renaissance Park)
Ethics Institute Speaker, Kay Mathiesen
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, September 23, 2022
Location: Department Conference Room (428 Renaissance Park)
Speaker Bio: Kay Mathiesen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy with a research focus on information and computer ethics and justice. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of California, Irvine. She uses her expertise in social epistemology, ethics, social philosophy, and political philosophy to analyze ethical issues related to persons and communities as seekers, sources, and subjects of knowledge and information. She has written a number of papers on human rights and democracy as they relate to information access and control.She is currently working on a book project titled Informational Justice. This project seeks to answer such questions as: Do we have a right to know? If so, what? And what duties does that right place on ourselves, other citizens, and governments? Is freedom of expression sufficient to allow for full participation of marginalized groups in the public infosphere? If not, how can we foster greater inclusion?
Ethics Institute Speaker, Deborah Hellman
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, October 7, 2022
Location: Department Conference Room (428 Renaissance Park)
Ethics Institute Speaker, David Friedell
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, September 23, 2022
Location: Department Conference Room (428 Renaissance Park)
PPE Speaker, Margaret Burnham
Time: 10:00am-11:30am, September 20, 2022
Location: Curry Student Center, Senate Chambers
2021-2022
Ethics Institute Speaker: Justin Bruner
Date: April 22, 2022
Time: 3:30pm-5:00pm
Location: Renaissance Park 426
Title: Risk, rules and agreement
Abstract: What does it mean to divide fairly? One approach popular in computer science and economics begins with a fairness rule, a procedure or algorithm that determines how to allocate various goods. Normative criteria are then invoked to compare different rules. Yet no rule satisfies all normative criteria. We outline an alternative approach that draws inspiration from the social contract tradition. Briefly, contractarians take the ideal rules to be those rules rational individuals would agree to in certain circumstances. With the help of a computer simulation, we explore the fragility of agreement and consider whether consensus still exists when individuals have different attitudes toward risk and, alternatively, have drastically different beliefs about the extent to which their interests overlap.
PPE Speaker, Regine Jean-Charles
Date: Thursday, April 21st
Time: 11:45am-1:25pm
Location: Renaissance Park 909 and on Zoom (Register for the Zoom event here.)
Speaker: Alicja Dobrzeniecka and Rafal Urbaniak
Time: 3:30pm-5:00pm
Location: Renaissance Park 310
Title: Taking uncertainty seriously: a Bayesian approach to bias estimation in natural language processing
Speaker: Espen Stabell
Location: Renaissance Park 426 (Common Room)
Time: 3:30pm-5:00pm
Abstract: It has been argued that under uncertainty about which first-order moral theory or view is correct, decision-makers should employ a distinct, ‘second-level’ theory for decision-making under moral uncertainty. I call this the two-level view of decision-making under moral uncertainty. In the paper, I discuss a version of the two-level view which says that decision theory should be employed on the second level: if you are uncertain between two (or more) theories, you should ‘hedge your bets’: you should decide based on your preferences and beliefs (credences) with regard to the theories in question. I point out a worry regarding this view: that it can lead to a kind of ‘moral laziness’, where decision-makers avoid work on the first-level and move too quickly to the second level. I connect this worry to a more general issue: how the work on the first level might affect the legitimacy and strength of the ‘second-level oughts’ of moral uncertainty. This, I argue, must be clarified in order to put something like the two-level view to work in our actual decision making.
The Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (PHRGE) at the Northeastern University School of Law invites you to attend a virtual book event: The Coming Good Society: A Conversation with the Authors, William F. Schulz and Sushma Raman! Detailed information and a Zoom registration link are available on the Northeastern University event site. The event is co-sponsored by the Ethics Institute and the Department of Philosophy and Religion of Northeastern University.
Speaker: Daniela Gandorfer
Time: 3:30pm-5:00pm
Location: 326 Renaissance Park
Speaker: Alex Gourevitch
Time: Tuesday, March 1 from 10:00am-11:30am
Location: 909 Renaissance Park
PPE/Ethics Institute Speaker, Dr. Larry Blum
Time: 12:00-1:30pm
Location: In-person (240 Dockser Hall) and Zoom (register here)
Title:“Can School Integration Bring About Equal Education?”
Abstract: Racial integration has been oversold to the American public as a low-cost route to equality of education. Educational equality can be created only by reducing inequality—of both a class and a race nature—in the wider society. Serious reduction of poverty, and challenging the wealthy’s “opportunity hoarding” are necessary. Integration by itself is a diversion from the need to challenge white supremacy, requiring a reparative justice response, and the extreme class-based inequities of our current social order. However, integration is a vital component of the moral, civic, and social aspects of education that have been sidelined in our current neoliberal era. Bringing diverse populations into the same schools and classrooms, as a school like CRLS does, is a necessary foundation for preparing future citizens of our multiracial democracy.
PPE/Ethics Institute Speaker, Dr. Robert Talisse
Time: 12:00-1:30pm
Location: Renaissance Park 909 and on Zoom
Title: “Why We Need Political Enemies”
Abstract: When engaged in democratic politics, it often strikes us that our opponents are not only wrong, but in the wrong. We tend to see them as not merely mistaken, but ignorant, corrupt, and on the side of injustice. Most accounts of responsible citizenship contend that we must nonetheless uphold civil relations with them. But why? When the stakes are high, why not just dismiss our opponents? Why bother trying to maintain civil relations with them? In this talk, Robert Talisse draws on empirical work concerning belief polarization to argue that we must uphold civil relations with our political enemies, not because we are required to regard them as reasonable, but because in the absence of those relations our political alliances crumble.
Speaker Bio: Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He specializes in democratic theory, with an emphasis on justice, citizenship, public deliberation, and political disagreement. His most recent research is focused on polarization and partisan animosity. His new book is titled Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side. It explores the challenges of treating one’s political opponents as nonetheless one’s equals.
PPE/Ethics Institute Speaker, Sabelo Mhlambi
Abstract:
Big Tech and Universities have initiated several efforts to mitigate AI bias and the unintended harmful effects of AI in healthcare, social networks, and the criminal justice system through AI Ethics boards, Ethics AI research, Diversity & Inclusion efforts – however do these efforts address the disparities in the distribution of power, agency, and resources within society and between societies, and are they sufficient to produce tangible results especially for the communities who are most likely to be negatively impacted by ever increasing widespread use of AI? This talk will examine the driving forces behind AI, Ethics AI, and the question of power through a racial and Decolonial lens.
Mhlambi is the founder of Bhala, an AI startup that democratizes the advances of AI to millions of Africans through Natural Language Processing of African languages and African visual languages. This event is the first in our fall PPE/Ethics Institute Speaker Series. Mhlambi is also the founder of Bantucracy a public interest organization that focuses on ubuntu ethics and technology. Mr Mhlambi currently a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society, a Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, and a 2019-2020 Technology & Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
2020-2021
Title: Does Democracy Have A Future?
Abstract: Echoing Plato’s argument in Book VIII of The Republic, some thinkers contend that democracies have an unavoidable tendency to destroy themselves from within. Familiar Platonic concerns have been strengthened by the demise of print-journalism, the emergence of the “post-truth” era, the economic challenges of globalization and the digital economy, and the dangers of racist and xenophobic fear and resentment. But this talk will argue that even if democracy is on life support, the means of saving it from destruction are still within our grasp. We must be to reinvigorate democratic civic virtues such as collective compromise, civic sacrifice, horizontal trust, and allow mutual respect and compassionate concern to reshape our interactions in the “public square.”
Speaker Bio: Michele Moody-Adams is currently Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011. Before Columbia, she taught at Cornell University, where she was Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life. She has also taught at Wellesley College, the University of Rochester, and Indiana University, where she served as an Associate Dean.
Moody-Adams has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and the virtues, and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is also the author of a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (Harvard Press 1997). Her current work includes articles on academic freedom, equal educational opportunity, and democratic disagreement. Her next book, coming out in late 2021, is entitled Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope (under contract with Columbia University Press). . She is also working on a project entitled Renewing Democracy and a book on the thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. Moody-Adams has a B.A. from Wellesley College, a second B.A. from Oxford University, and earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University. She has been a British Marshall Scholar, an NEH Fellow, and is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.
**This event was recorded
Register here: https://forms.gle/92hdFiA5ddvPWeLLA
Information Ethics Roundtable Speaker Prof. Josh Simons, Harvard University
Title: “Regulating Informational Infrastructure: Are Facebook and Google utilities for democracy?”
Abstract: Now that the nation and the world have woken up to the manifold threats internet platforms pose to the public sphere and to democracy, we need a framework for understanding why internet platforms matter for democracy and how they should be regulated. This paper and talk aim to sketch out that framework.
Facebook and Google use algorithms to rank and order vast quantities of content and information, shaping how we consume news and access information, communicate with and feel about one another, debate fundamental questions of the common good, and make collective decisions. Facebook and Google are private companies whose algorithms have become part of the infrastructure of our public sphere. This infrastructure is a critical tool for communication and organization, political expression, and collective decision making. By controlling how this infrastructure is designed and operated, Facebook and Google shape the content and character of our digital public sphere, concentrating not just economic power, but social and political power too. Private powers who exercise unilateral control over vital information infrastructure should be held accountable to the public good.
I argue we should regulate Facebook and Google as a new kind of public utility – utilities for democracy. The public utility concept offers a dynamic and flexible set of regulatory tools to impose public oversight where corporations are affected by a public interest. Regulating Facebook and Google as public utilities would offer opportunities for regulatory innovation, experimenting with new mechanisms of decision making that draw on the collective judgement of citizens, reforming sclerotic institutions of representation, and constructing new regulatory authorities to inform the governance of algorithms. Regulating Facebook and Google as public utilities would be a decisive assertion of public power that would strengthen and energize democracy.
*This event is being held in collaboration with Bentley University and has been sponsored by The State Street Foundation.
*This will also be a pre-read talk, with the paper attached to registrants.
If you are interested please register here: https://bentley.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrcuiqrTwoHNe1Q_Dg2UjyKZ_dsWt5b5U2
PPE/Ethics Institute Speaker, Olufemi Taiwo
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
Title: The Case for Climate Reparations
Abstract: A partnered investigation between ProPublica and the New York Times has revealed the writing on the wall. We are at the beginnings of a “Great Climate Migration” that will transform the world. There are two ways forward: climate colonialism and apartheid or climate reparations. Climate apartheid describes the fact that we can expect a new kind of social division to arise within countries and communities: between those who can pay to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and those who cannot. Climate colonialism simply considers this same phenomenon on an international scale.
Reparations is a way forward through the climate crisis that doesn’t double down on these dismal precedents. A reparatory approach to climate migration would involve an overhaul of climate policy in both nation-states and multinational institutions. It would be broadly redistributive of wealth and power, both within and across countries. That redistribution would be historically informed: we would reject both the ‘rescue’ framing of state elites’ naked pursuit of self interest in refugee policy and the “voluntary repatriation” centered model that allows them to act on it with international authorization. Ultimately, we endorse the argument, developed and defended by legal scholar E. Tendayi Achiume, that corrective, distributive justice demands recognition of the entitlement of “Third World persons” to “a form of First World citizenship”.
However extreme this renegotiation of state sovereignty and citizenship may strike some readers, it’s nowhere near as extreme as the logical conclusion of the status quo’s violent alternative: mass famine, region-scale armed conflict. Compared to the horrors of climate apartheid and colonialism, having more neighbors is a small price to pay.
We suggest to read an article he wrote in Foreign Policy on this topic, The Case for Climate Reparations
Register here: https://forms.gle/vrDjEzpw7J72M5yw5
*This event was recorded