Annette Zimmermann is a political philosopher. Annette is currently a postdoc at Princeton University, working on the ethics of algorithmic decision-making, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Annette has additional research interests in moral philosophy (the ethics of risk and uncertainty) and the philosophy of law (punishment, rights), as well as the philosophy of science (models, explanation, abstraction). Annette holds a DPhil and MPhil from the University of Oxford and a BA from the Free University of Berlin.
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
A paper on criminal disenfranchisement and the concept of political wrongdoing (recently published in Philosophy & Public Affairs). I argue that widespread current disenfranchisement policies disenfranchise the wrong set of people. They are over inclusive, because they disenfranchise persons guilty of serious, but non-political, criminal wrongdoing — and that is particularly objectionable under circumstances in which criminal disenfranchisement has additional large-scale collateral consequences, for instance by perpetuating existing structures of racial inequality and exclusion. At the same time, existing disenfranchisement policies are also under inclusive, because they fail to disenfranchise some persons guilty of serious political wrongdoing such as large-scale corruption, bribery, electioneering, and conspiracy with foreign powers. Holding political wrongdoers accountable may require temporarily depriving them of particular democratic participation rights, such as the right to continue to hold office or the right to run of office in an upcoming election. Ultimately, I think that we have strong, yet under acknowledged reasons to question the underlying intuitions of those accounts of criminal disenfranchisement which currently dominate the philosophical debate and those reasons point us towards approaching the question of whether we ought to disenfranchise anyone with much more nuance and skepticism.
What do you like to do outside work?
Accumulating alarming numbers of house plants, and coming up with prank ideas which I rarely implement. Unsurprisingly, I am a prank theorist more so than a prank practitioner.
What are you working on right now?
I am working on a range of topics in the philosophy of AI and machine learning at the moment. Within that topic, I am primarily interested in normative questions: which new and unique questions, if any, does AI raise for moral and political philosophy? What do we owe to those subject to objectionable forms of algorithmic bias? What are the moral implications of opacity, risk, and uncertainty in machine learning? Do probabilistic decisions abstract away from the messy complexity of our world, and the people in it, in a way that is morally and politically objectionable and if so, why? All models are ‘wrong’ in some way but what makes a model good (enough)? Who should get to decide if, when, and where we deploy machine learning tools in our collective decision-making? (I recently wrote a ‘public philosophy’ piece on that last topic for the Boston Review with two other Princeton philosophers: Elena Di Rosa and Hochan Sonny Kim.)
What are your top 3 favorite books of all time? Why? To whom would you recommend them?
“Night Sky with Exit Wounds” by Ocean Vuong. A beautiful, haunting collection of poems. I was especially gripped by “Seventh Circle of Earth”. I think that philosophers should read more poetry, especially philosophers who are working on problems in political and moral philosophy.
“The Appointment” by Herta Müller. My parents grew up in Transylvania around the same time period as the author, during the time of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist dictorship. They recommended the book to me. The most powerful thing about the book is that it has this quiet, yet spellbindingly direct, way of exploring small acts of subversion against state repression, surveillance, and intimidation by the secret police that was omnipresent at that time.
“Beast Meridian” by Vanessa Angélica Villareal. Some of the defining topics in this poetry collection (for me) are justice, violence, memory, and identity. I find Villareal’s poems complex and experimental. I cannot think of any other contemporary poet who is able to write quite like this.
If you could have a one-hour conversation with any philosopher or historical figure from any time, who would you pick and what topic would you choose?
It would be fascinating to talk to Ada Lovelace about the algorithmic decision-making tools that are being used today. I wonder what she would say not only about the promise, but also about the limits of using technology for making decisions that have an immense moral and political weight. She famously said that “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” That resonates with me but possibly for different reasons than the ones that Lovelace was thinking about. The patterns that we see in society often get reproduced as patterns in our data, and machine learning models can often further magnify such patterns in a way that exacerbates inequality. Right now, a lot of people, including philosophers, are interested in the question of whether there are any types of decision problems which we simply shouldn’t attempt to solve by using algorithmic decision rules in the first place no matter how much we can improve the accuracy and (ostensible) objectivity of the technological tools available to us. I think that sometimes, a commitment to justice may require putting ourselves through the difficult process of arguing with each other as the fallible decision-makers that we are, rather than trying to settle questions of normative urgency by outsourcing them to technological tools. I wonder if she would agree.
If you could only use one condiment for the rest of your life, which condiment would you pick and why?
I am not sure if this counts as a condiment, but I put it on everything, because it’s the best food ever invented: Zacuscă. It’s a Romanian spread made out of gogoșari (a type of red pepper), grilled eggplant, bay leaves, onions and garlic. My family’s recipe also includes cloves and nutmeg. It’s amazing.
What excites you about philosophy?
I find it exciting that philosophy challenges us to think about our own thinking in a clear, structured way. I think that some moral and political philosophers (at least implicitly) buy into the view that acts or states of affairs that are obviously morally wrong — say, discrimination, disrespect, corruption are not really worthy of much philosophical scrutiny, precisely because of their obvious wrongness. Instead of doing ‘X is wrong — duh’-style philosophy, they seem to think that one should primarily pursue philosophical questions that are not morally straightforward in this way: doing moral and political philosophy, on this view, means hunting for tricky ethics puzzles and dilemmas, which demand novel, intricate philosophical solutions and elaborately construed thought experiments. But while I very much enjoy the ‘complex puzzle’ aspect of philosophy, I think that it is important not to adopt too narrow of a view about what philosophy is supposed to be like, and which topics count as distinctively philosophical topics.
The view that increasingly drives my own philosophical work is that it is often worth stating, emphasizing, that a state of affairs is wrong. It is worth explaining why it is wrong, and how wrong it is. It is worth examining alternative states of affairs, and examining our own inclination to label problems as obvious in the first place to declare the moral case closed. Doing so matters; morally and politically. In the meantime, we might well realize that whatever we consider obviously wrong or right is not philosophically obvious at all. I think that as philosophers, we are often (understandably) consumed by our search for big, ‘sexy’, dazzingly complex problems. But it is important to remember that we are already surrounded by them. The Small, the Clearly Wrongful, the Ostensibly Boring warrants our philosophical curiosity, our moral concern, and our political action.
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Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
