Public Philosophy

As I write, the 2024 U.S. federal election is in its final stretch, and it’s a nail-biter. A few thousand swing voters may well...

Ex Machina (2014) Arrival (2016) Annihilation  (2018) I Am Mother (2019) In the film Arrival, human exploration comes in the form of empathetic engagement by linguist Louise Banks....

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many scientists embraced the idea, based on past experience with other coronaviruses, that it was highly...

Vulnerability theory, which has gained considerable traction in Western legal and philosophical discourses, particularly in Europe and North America, remains relatively unknown in Chinese...

For millennia, bereaved people have tried to continue their relationship with the deceased through various artifacts, practices, and rituals. 2,300 years ago, the Confucian...

I am a professor of philosophy. I am also a gun owner. And I think that advocates of gun control need to stop all...

In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the landscape of scientific inquiry and public discourse, philosophers find themselves at a critical juncture....

Many philosophers, from Kant and Marx to Rawls and Angela Davis, take the nature of the economy to be central to the justification of...

This post was originally published on Filosofía en la Red. It has been translated as part of the APA Blog’s ongoing collaboration with Filosofía...

In the last post of this series, I introduced the issue of algorithmic bias. Inspired by the well-meaning but ultimately flawed efforts of Google’s chatbot, Gemini, towards inclusivity, I looked at the challenges of addressing bias—such as the conceptual ambiguity of terms like 'fairness' and the inherent subjectivity in correcting bias. This raised the fundamental question of how best to approach the issue: should we adopt a normative stance, based on how we think the world should be, or a descriptive one, reflecting how the world actually is? The former approach has subjectivity problems, risks distorting the truth, and importantly might deprive us of insights into inequality that we need to address. However, bias is damaging on so many levels and needs to be dealt with somehow.