Ethics Untangled
Ethics Untangled is a series of conversations about the ethical issues that affect all of us, with academics who have spent some time thinking about them. It is brought to you by the IDEA Centre, a specialist unit for teaching, research, training and consultancy in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds.
Find out more about IDEA, including our Masters programmes in Healthcare Ethics and Applied and Professional Ethics, our PhDs and our consultancy services, here:
ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics
Ethics Untangled is edited by Mark Smith at Leeds Media Services.
Music is by Kate Wood.
Ethics Untangled
1: How Should We Behave Online? With Joe Saunders
Dr Joe Saunders is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham. He primarily works on ethics and agency in Kant and the post-Kantian tradition. He also has interests in the philosophy of love and media ethics.
In this episode we talk about how we should behave online. How bad is social media as a forum for discussion, for example of political or social issues? What specific pitfalls can we fall into and how should we avoid them? What are our responsibilities to each other? And is civility the answer?
Here's Joe: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/joe-saunders/
And here he is on Twitter (be nice!): https://twitter.com/Saunders_Joe
Some of the books and papers which Joe mentions in the episode:
Levy, Neil (2021). Virtue signalling is virtuous. Synthese 198 (10):9545-9562.
Nguyen, C. Thi (2020). Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme 17 (2):141-161.
Olberding, Amy. The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy. 2019. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-wrong-of-rudeness-9780190880965
Olberding, Amy. Righteous Incivility. Online at: https://aeon.co/essays/whats-the-difference-between-being-righteous-and-being-rude
Ronson, Jon. So You've Been Publicly Shamed. 2015. Riverhead Books. https://www.amazon.co.uk/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed/dp/1594487138
Tosi, J. and Warmke, B. Grandstanding: The use and abuse of moral talk. 2020. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/grandstanding-9780190900151
By the way, at one point in the episode I talk about the practice on social media of finding the worst possible version of your opponent's argument in order to dunk on it. I've since become aware of the very useful term 'nutpicking' to refer to this phenomenon: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
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