APA Announces Winners of the 2020 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest

The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest:

• Jonathan Ellis and Francesca Hovagimian, “Are School Debate Competitions Bad for Our Political Discourse?” The New York Times
• Carol Hay, “Who Counts As a Woman?” The New York Times
• C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams, “Why We Call Things ‘Porn’,” The New York Times
• Regina Rini, “Deepfakes are coming. We can no longer believe what we see.” The New York Times
• Yolonda Wilson, “For Black Shooting Victims, Sometimes Anger (Not Forgiveness) Is the Best Response,” USA Today

The APA committee on public philosophy sponsors a contest for the best opinion-editorials published by philosophers. The goal is to honor up to five standout pieces that successfully blend philosophical argumentation with an op-ed writing style. Winning submissions will call public attention, either directly or indirectly, to the value of philosophical thinking. The pieces will be judged in terms of their success as examples of public philosophy, and should be accessible to the general public, focused on important topics of public concern, and characterized by sound reasoning.

Jon Ellis is an associate professor of philosophy at UC Santa Cruz and the founding director of UCSC’s Center for Public Philosophy. He works primarily in epistemology and philosophy of psychology. Ellis has written on topics including perception, color, rationalization, interpretation, knowledge, Hume, and Wittgenstein. He is currently working on a book on the ethics and epistemology of motivated reasoning. In 2015, Ellis founded the Center for Public Philosophy (CPP) at UC Santa Cruz. CPP runs programs at middle schools and high schools, and at San Quentin State Prison, many involving the Ethics Bowl. CPP’s Outreach Invitational program brings the Ethics Bowl to under-resourced high schools in Northern California, training select undergraduates at UCSC to serve as coaches at the schools. Some participating teams practice and compete in Spanish. Beyond the Ethics Bowl, the CPP also works with elementary schools and conducts a variety of projects on ethics, technology, and the future. Ellis received his PhD in Philosophy from UC Berkeley in 2002.

Carol Hay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her most recent trade book, Think Like a Feminist: The Philosophy Behind the Revolution (W.W. Norton & Co., September 2020) has been called “a crisp, well-informed primer on feminist theory” by Publisher’s Weekly and “a winning mix of scholarship and irreverence” by Kirkus Reviews. Her public philosophy has appeared in venues such as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Aeon Magazine. Her academic work focuses primarily on issues in analytic feminism, liberal social and political philosophy, oppression studies, Kantian ethics, and the philosophy of sex and love. Her 2013 monograph Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism: Resisting Oppression received the APA’s Gregory Kavka/UCI Prize in Political Philosophy. She grew up in small-town Saskatchewan, Canada, and was a first-generation college student. She divides her time between Cambridge, MA, and San Francisco, CA.

C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research concerns the ways in which our social structures and technologies can shape our values, agency, and rationality. He’s written on games, trust, art, echo chambers, cultural appropriation, monuments, and group intimacy. He writes publicly oriented philosophy for venues such as Aeon Magazine and The New York Times; and is an editor at the aesthetics blog, Aesthetics for Birds. His first book is Games: Agency as Art (OUP). His current research project concerns how institutional metrics and gamification can capture our values and undermine our autonomy. Nguyen’s website is https://objectionable.net.

Bekka Williams is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She specializes primarily in ethical theory and political philosophy. Bekka has written on the intersection of luck egalitarianism and capability metrics of distributive justice, and she has co-authored work on both group moral obligation and group political obligation. She has also written pieces of popular philosophy for The New York Times and the Popular Culture and Philosophy book series. In addition to her ongoing “capability luck egalitarianism” project, her current research involves the moral status of carelessness in the formation of one’s moral views and other morally-relevant beliefs.

Regina Rini holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition and is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. She studies how social norms should be negotiated in democratic societies, particularly in response to technological change. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and she writes the regular ‘Morals of the Story’ column for the Times Literary Supplement. Her recent book is The Ethics of Microaggression, and she is currently writing a book about the effects of social media on democratic society.

Yolonda Y. Wilson earned the PhD in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Wilson’s work centers on race and gender justice, particularly in health care. Presently, Professor Wilson is working on a monograph, Black Death: Racial Justice, Priority-Setting, and Care at the End of Life. Additionally, Professor Wilson’s public scholarship on issues of bioethics, race, and gender has appeared in The Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum, USA Today, and The Conversation, and has been republished in outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, and The Philly Voice. Her media appearances include outlets such as Al Jazeera English and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio. Professor Wilson is a 2019–2020 fellow of the National Humanities Center (Durham, NC, USA) and a 2019–2020 Encore Public Voices Fellow.