Poverty, Intention, and Prospective Agency

Prospective agency is our ability to form commitments and coordinate actions with ourselves and others through time. Philosophers have reflected on prospective agency as it manifests in contexts of relative affluence: mostly predictable environments where agents enjoy some economic stability and functioning institutions. Of course, that kind of context is not representative of most people’s realities. How would our understanding of prospective agency change once we consider environments of poverty, characterized by scarcity and structural unpredictability? In this talk I will use new work in the sociology and psychology of poverty to reinterpret the key philosophical notion of intention. While intention has often been seen as intimately linked to plans, I will argue that this link is contingent and that intention can take multiple forms that differ significantly from standard plans in response to the structure of the agent’s practical environment.

Juan-Pablo Bermudez
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/65mgqy/doctor-juan-pablo-bermudez
Lecturer (Assistant Professor)
Department of Philosophy
University of Southampton

About the Speaker:

I am a philosopher and cognitive scientist working on the issue of control: How do we exert control over our actions? What are the limits of that control? And what are the ethical and political implications of our limitations, as they intersect with social contexts and new technologies? My work currently focuses on two areas:

• Understanding the link between self-control and poverty in the Global South. Most work on self-control has studied populations in the Global North. What can we learn from the nature of human agency and rationality by studying the skills and strategies people develop in a broader set of contexts?
• Creating tools to design autonomy-supportive artificial intelligence. This involves identifying the ethical boundaries of AI-based influence, building a classification of mental harms, and building tools that developers and designers can use to check whether their AI systems support or hinder human autonomy.

I am Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in Technology, TU Hamburg. I have been visiting scholar at the Human Abilities Centre (Berlin), University of Oxford, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, and Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). I am also Philpapers editor of the ‘trying’ and ‘habit’ categories.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Free refreshments will be provided at the event. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai