Necro-Being and the Limits of Reason: A.I. et al.

What criteria should we use to justify ethical imperatives? As the philosopher Alain Locke once said about imperatives, "after all, we live by them.” If ‘anti-realism’ (sometimes described as non-realism or irrealism) about ethical and moral values is true and thereby relativism (or at least moral error theory) is warranted, then what criteria do we use to justify imperatives? I begin with a void: a conceptual space without concepts and argue that we have strong reasons to justify the defeat of the most morally egregious form of misery — necro-being — given that (a) there are no necessarily true ethical or moral values, (b) that this is a non-moral universe and (c) as J.L. Mackie puts it in Inventing Right and Wrong, there is no objective queer universe of moral properties. I argue that can warrant the imperative to defeat necro-being without relying on logical positivism, i.e., the use of A.I. decision theory algorithms, natural science, or logic reasoning models to explain social reality and warrant imperatives.

Leonard Harris
https://www.cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/leonard-harris.html
Professor
Department of Philosophy
Purdue University

About the Speaker:

Leonard Harris is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. His edited collection, Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917, is widely regarded as being the most important pioneering black American philosophy collection in helping to establish the field. (A radically revised second edition would be published in 2000.) More generally, Harris sees himself as the author of “struggle philosophy,” an approach to philosophy that is different from the Socratic dialogue method in highlighting the ethics of insurrection, critical pragmatism, advocacy aesthetics, and the concept of racism as “necro-being.” His other books include the edited The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); the edited Racism (Humanity/Prometheus, 1999), in the press’s “Key Concepts in Critical Theory” series; and American Philosophies: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2002), co-edited with Scott L. Pratt and Anne S. Waters. A collection of his essays edited by Lee A. McBride, A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic.

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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