ABSTRACT. . Anne Fausto-Sterling in her Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000) argues that the process of ‘sex assignment’, the notion of ‘true sex’ understood in terms of a female/male binary, and the medical treatments for fixing deviations from ‘normal’ sex conditions are neither scientifically well-grounded nor socially defensible. Rather, they result from social constructs imposed upon intersex people by parents and the medical establishment, regardless of the negative influences on the lives of the intersex people. In my paper, I discuss and evaluate both positive and negative impacts of non-epistemic values on the medical establishment’s approach towards sex, and subsequently the way they treat intersex people. I aim to defend Fausto-Sterling’s main proposal, that is, her spectrum theory of sex. According to this proposal, human sexuality should not be understood in terms of sexual dimorphism or a male/female binary. Rather, it is better to be understood in terms of a spectrum of sexes that can be located between two extremes of male and female. Fausto-Sterling’s proposal (henceforth FSP) has been criticized by traditional philosophers of science as well as activists and philosophers with social concerns. The former are mainly concerned with two issues: (a) avowedly feminist (and hence non-epistemic) motivations behind FSP and (b) scientific and epistemic flaws of FSP. The latter, however, are mainly concerned about (c) the social and societal ramifications of FSP for intersex people. I shall argue that these concerns are either ill-grounded (in case of (a) and (b)) or can be addressed without any change in FSP (in case of (c)).

ABSTRACT. The prototypical focus of feminist epistemology is the gap between a scientific community and a marginalized group whose lived experience has been unrepresented. The trilateral dynamic between researchers who study transition, the transgender community, and the detransition community represents an especially tricky case. “Detransitioners” (or “detransitioned women/men”) are people who identified as transgender at one point previously and no longer do so. While the lived experiences of the trans and detrans communities overlap in important ways and neither has historically been represented within the research on medical transition, many detransitioners have views on the proper standards for transition care and the best direction for future research that conflict with the views of many transgender scholars and activists.

Rather than attempting to bridge this divide epistemologically, I put forth a transfeminist, pragmatist approach to the future of research on detransition. I weave together scholarship from transgender studies and feminist philosophy to argue against attempts to devalue the lived experience of detransitioners and to instead imagine what it might look like to leave epistemic space open for the detransition community. This philosophical approach is, broadly speaking, instrumentalist, fallibilistic, and antirepresentationalist.

I first distinguish between the concepts “detransition,” “detransitioner,” and “transition regret.” Then, I apply this new transfeminist pragmatist approach to think through the methodological issues, implicit value judgments, and practical consequences associated with two potential goals of future research: preventing detransition or supporting detransition.

Research on preventing detransition involves studying what factors predict detransition among transgender people, implicitly presenting detransition as a bad outcome. Research on supporting detransition focuses on what leads to a good detransition, presenting detransition as simply one viable clinical option. While research on preventing detransition requires lengthy and resource-intensive study designs, research on supporting detransition is more practically feasible and more likely to benefit the detransition community directly. Detransition prevention research pits the trans and detrans communities against each other through the zero-sum frame of risk, while research on supporting detransition encourages a more pluralistic approach. I conclude by arguing that while neither line of research will lead to a stable political equilibrium, research on supporting detransition is a preferable goal, starting with qualitative research involving the detransition community.

ABSTRACT. Barriers to health care for individuals who are transgender have historical and legal context that has promulgated a lack of knowledge of and comfort in caring for such individuals by medical professionals. Transgender, or non-cisgender, individuals face challenges to accessing medical care through institutional, societal, personal and interpersonal barriers. An additional obstacle facing these individuals is maintaining health with the challenge of accessing culturally-competent care from a skilled, knowledgeable provider who demonstrates comfort in providing their care. Such a lack of knowledge and skill can be addressed by bioethics with a focus on the philosophy of medicine and virtue ethics. Virtue ethics calls on excellence of character to provide compassionate care for the patient. The concepts of stigma, intersectionality, lived experiences and social ecology from the 2011 Institute of Medicine Report on Transgender Health provide the foundation upon which I utilize the vocabulary and skill set to increase the comfort provided to each patient/individual, calling on excellent character habits of the virtuous provider. Utilizing the concept of phronesis provides health care providers a framework in which one can meet the individual patient where they identify. One can posit that the transgender individuals would be met with improved comfort and satisfaction in the care they receive.

ABSTRACT. The value-free ideal of science is a view which claims that scientists should not use non-epistemic values when they are justifying their hypotheses. Recently, it is generally regarded as obsolete (e.g., Douglas 2009, Elliott 2011 or Tsui 2016). I will defend the view by showing that if we accept the uses of non-epistemic values prohibited by it, we are forced to accept, as legitimate scientific conduct, some of the disturbing phenomena of present-day science(e.g., founder bias or questionable research practices). My strategy will be to demonstrate that the only difference between legitimate and problematic cases is that during the course of the problematic ones the non-epistemic values motivate methodological decisions. Because of that, if we reject the value-free ideal we are no longer able to explain, in a principled way, why we should not accept the problematic cases. I will show how two well-known proposals, value-laden science from Douglas 2009 and proposal concerning ontological choices from Ludwig 2015, lead to this problem and present examples from actual scientific practice. Then, I will show that when different scientists share different non-epistemic values, the use of them prohibited by value-free ideal contributes to the replication crisis. This makes the crisis a direct consequent of value-laden science. Finally, I will present two strategies which, when followed, make the value-free ideal realizable. Firstly, following Betz 2013, scientists can avoid problematic (value-laden) methodological choices by highlighting uncertainties and formulating their results carefully. Secondly, as proposed by Levi 1960, a scientific community can instantiate a scientific convention which recommends a particular solution for a given methodological problem and therefore makes a corresponding (value-laden) choice unnecessary.

ABSTRACT. The Argument from Inductive Risk is a standard move to show the connection between values and scientific belief formation. Although the argument is sometimes formulated in narrow terms, it points to a tension between pursuing true beliefs and avoiding false ones that is present any time someone forms a belief. Numerous examples show how this plays out in scientific contexts--- from theory choice, to model building, to reporting observation--- and the generality of the argument seems to show that this entanglement of science and values holds for the formation of every belief. Nevertheless, there are situations in which it seems implausible to say that the formation of the belief reflects a value judgment. For example: cases in which a belief is formed unreflectively, either by immediate perception or habitually following a conventional procedure. Even though forming the belief will have consequences which might be good or bad, in such cases it seems wrong to say that forming the belief reflects the scientist's values. This poses a puzzle: General considerations of risk suggest that every belief adoption reflects a scientist's values, but there are some specific cases where that does not seem to hold. There are several possible responses to this puzzle. First, some belief formation might reflect not the values of the individual forming the belief but instead the values of their community. Second, some beliefs may reflect not the values of present individuals but instead the values of past individuals who established conventions and habits which are now prevalent. Finally, some belief formation may have significant, value-laden consequences but nevertheless does not reflect anybody's values.

ABSTRACT. That researchers must obtain informed consent prior to engaging in human-subjects research is a widely-held ethical standard. Ethical guidelines speak directly to the idea that researchers must communicate the study’s purpose and risks to the would-be participant, so that they can make a reasonable decision about whether they want to participate. But, how should researchers obtain informed consent in exploratory research? Unlike hypothesis-driven, confirmatory research, exploratory studies lack the central aim of testing a main hypothesis. Instead, these studies are designed to explore systems, and search for interesting scientific phenomena (Colaço 2018).

While exploratory studies are not as common as their hypothesis-driven counterparts – they are at least less commonly reported – their use is integral for the advancement of science (Hussain & Cohen 2017). A strong case for this claim can be made in the field of noninvasive human brain stimulation research. These are studies that involve the use of electrical or magnetic stimulation to manipulate brain activity, which allows researchers to search for causal relations between brain activity and behavior. Given their importance for discovering neural and psychological phenomena, it is vital that these studies are performed, and performed ethically. In this talk, I explore the potential ethically-relevant differences between exploratory and hypothesis-driven brain stimulation experiments. I focus on the differences between them in terms of how their purposes as well as their risks can be communicated to prospective participants. In doing so, I develop concrete guidelines on how informed consent should be obtained in exploratory studies going forward, as current institutional guidelines are principally tailored for hypothesis-driven studies.

References: Colaço, D. (2018). Rethinking the role of theory in exploratory experimentation. Biology & Philosophy, 33(5-6), 38.

Hussain, S. J., & Cohen, L. G. (2017). Exploratory studies: a crucial step towards better hypothesis‐driven confirmatory research in brain stimulation. The Journal of physiology, 595(4), 1013-1014.

ABSTRACT. In Summer 2017 and 2018, faculty in philosophy and in biology at {a small liberal arts college, name removed for blind review} piloted and developed a new collaboration centered on a two-week fieldwork experience at the Organization for Tropical Studies’ La Selva Biological Research Station in Costa Rica. The collaboration had two primary components: (1) a philosophical reading, journaling, and discussion group for both philosophers and ecologists, focused on ecological research ethics, and (2) philosophy faculty and undergraduate researchers embedded within, and assisting with, ecological fieldwork.

Participants over the two years included: eleven undergraduate ecology students, two undergraduate philosophy students, three faculty members in ecology, and one faculty member in philosophy. Initial assessment of the collaboration suggests the potential for a long-lasting impact both on how ecology students understand and approach their research, and on how philosophy students understand the relevance to their studies of engaging deeply in the social practices about which they think and write. As one ecology student wrote: “I think making students consider why they value nature and science really changes the way that you do your work.”

This presentation will: (1) provide a detailed description of the collaboration; (2) locate this collaboration as one way of realizing a virtue ethics approach to responsible conduct of research training; (3) present initial assessment data from the pilot, as well as the changes made in the second year in light of this feedback; and (4) reflect on the challenges and opportunities of integrating philosophy and fieldwork, and of both maintaining and “scaling up” this kind of collaboration.

ABSTRACT. There has been significant recent attention paid to ethics and computer science, particularly to algorithmic bias and artificial intelligence (Danks 2017). In doing so, many turn to technology company executives to answer for ethical issues because executives, supposedly, have the agency to make changes. However, many also advocate the need for employees to become more reflective practitioners and to embrace their own obligations to society (Schon 1987, Pirtle and Szajnfarber 2017).

To study how tech employees should confront their ethical obligations, I taught a course on ethics to computer scientists at the University of Washington. The course aimed for students to develop a broader conception of the dilemmas in current computing technologies and a stronger framework with which to develop their own ethical responsibilities.

In response to open-ended discussions and the presentation of not-computationally-solvable problems, students rooted in an engineering mindset grew frustrated. They saw themselves as limited to only the confines of the tasks given them—as lacking agency. In class, when faced with a problem without a tangible, let alone code-able, solution, many students moved on. Students pushed back against the notion that they could consider values tangential to the design of a system. “Not if it reduces ad revenue!”

This paper will explore how agency of computer scientists can be developed through ethics education, including the limits of only employing education to shape engineers. Some tech employees need a push to realize they are uniquely positioned not just to act against malfeasance, but also to explore ethics in an open-ended way. Of course an employee does not singularly have the agency to shape the course of a company like Facebook as does Zuckerberg. I will try to elucidate the broader tension my ethics class confronts as arising from debates about employee versus employer ethical responsibility.

Danks, D., & London, A. J., 2017. Algorithmic bias in autonomous systems. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 4691-4697). Pirtle, Z. and Szajnfarber, Z., 2017. On Ideals for Engineering in Democratic Societies. In Philosophy and Engineering (pp. 99-112). Springer, Cham. Schön, D.A., 1987. Educating the reflective practitioner (p. 27). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

ABSTRACT. I discuss two ways that the virtue of intellectual humility can be expressed in software engineering practice. By intellectual humility, I mean the right understanding of the limits of one’s own knowledge. The intellectually humble person stands in contrast with the arrogant person, who overestimates how much they know, and the timid person, who believes they know less than they do.

First, I’ll talk about Eric Evans’ work on ‘domain-driven design’, which emphasizes the importance of discovering a domain-specific language for each software development project. Practitioners of domain-driven design must be humble, continually recognizing the limits of their own experience, seeking out domain expertise that they don’t have to refine the terms with which they write software. As such, humble engineers operate closely with domain experts, collaborating on the development of a software model that accurately represents that domain.

Second, I’ll discuss the recommendation to ‘embrace change’ that’s common in so-called ‘agile’ software development methodologies, like Kent Beck’s ‘extreme programming.’ Agile software engineers must also be humble, recognizing that they only know so much about the future, whether this means business requirements, the needs of users, or the tools and strategies on offer to solve software engineering problems. When humble engineers design software systems, they will plan for change rather than any requirement in particular.

In contrast with the common image of the software engineer as the smartest person in the room, the humble engineer produces great software precisely because they understand there is much they do not know.

ABSTRACT. Traditional natural law theory, as articulated by Thomas Aquinas and developed by contemporary philosophers such as Anthony Lisska, Henry Veatch, David Oderberg, Russell Hittinger, and Edward Feser, grounds well-being and morality in intrinsic human nature. Understanding traditional natural law requires us to understand the concept of intrinsic nature, as well related concepts such as teleology and flourishing. In this paper, I argue that proponents of traditional natural law theory should be attentive to the work of Continental philosophers of technology. The work of Martin Heidegger and other philosophers of technology such as Albert Borgmann and Bernard Stiegler can show us that modern technology poses a threat to learning and understanding the core concepts of natural law. According to Heidegger, modern technology “is a mode of revealing.” It determines the way being appears to us. Modern technology makes us see the world around us as mere “standing reserve,” or a mere source of energy that we can extract and turn to our own purposes, and it “drives out every other possibility of revealing.” Because modern technology as enframing drives out other forms of revealing, it presents an obstacle to learning the core concepts involved in traditional natural law, such as intrinsic nature, teleology, and flourishing. I argue that advocates for traditional natural law can respond to the threat of modern technology by engaging in, and promoting, practices that reveal natures. I give an extended examination of the practice of farming, and I show that such a practice can help furnish us with the basic concepts needed for understanding traditional natural law.

ABSTRACT. One key feature of Heather Douglas's version of the "argument from inductive risk" is her focus on scientists' responsibilities for their speech acts; roughly, scientists have a moral responsibility to consider the consequences of error because their claims have consequences. The first half of this talk argues that Douglas's focus on communication (rather than cognition) is often overlooked by both her supporters and critics, hence distrorting debates around the proper roles of values in inference. In the second part of the talk, I go on to suggest some ways in which taking Douglas's focus on assertion seriously might help us draw links between work on values in science and research in other fields, ranging from science communication to social epistemology to feminist political philosophy. In short, I hope to show how language matters to our debates.  

ABSTRACT. Heather Douglas's work has among its benefits an argument, which I here fully grant, that many sorts of values are embedded in science. I consider two questions: (1) Is the direct role for values in science actually possible (making an injunction against such use important)? (2) Should a philosophy of science that seeks to understand the use of scientific knowledge for action go beyond value to discuss other notions within a theory of valuation: interests, norms, ideals, etc.?

ABSTRACT. Traditionally, considerations of inductive risk have been somewhat restricted to foreseeable (usually negative) consequences of error in scientific judgment.  In other words, it is the foreseeability of certain consequences of scientific error which mandates the consideration of inductive risk.  If certain consequences of error are not foreseeable, then scientists cannot possibly be expected to account for those consequences while (say) setting their standards of evidence.

But there are other ways that one might avoid taking inductive risk considerations into account.  For instance, one might argue that consequences also have to be avoidable in order for judgment to need to take them into account.  Historically, there is some precedent in various areas of moral theory (such as just war theory) for excusing or at least mitigating responsibility for negative outcomes on the basis of their unavoidability.

This discussion will consider what might be dubbed "the inevitability response" to proposed considerations of inductive risk—with a focus on how to effectively dismiss the response.

ABSTRACT. As debates over a replacement ideal for the value-free ideal have progressed, it is becoming clear that no one ideal will do.  Given that the value-free ideal worked in tandem with other science policy ideals (such as the linear model, resting on a pure vs. applied science distinction), this should not be surprising.  Grappling with science in society will require thinking about the full range of policies influencing science (as well as science influencing policy) and locations for science in society.  In short, we must think about the political aspects of science as well as the epistemic and the ethical.  In this talk, I will use an examination of public engagement with science to demonstrate the value of this approach, articulating distinctive modes of public engagement that depend on different conceptualizations of the public in the process.  Each mode has its epistemic and political strengths and weaknesses, and paying attention to both the epistemic and the political can help inform when each should be used.