« Discussion entre les mathématiques et la philosophie sur le thème de l’équité algorithmique »

Mode hybride: lien zoom.

Pour la prochaine conférence midi éthique et IA CRÉ-Obvia, nous recevons Véronique Tremblay, scientifique de données experte en IA responsable chez Beneva et doctorante en sciences des données à HEC-Montréal.

Les grands principes d’IA responsable insistent tous sur la nécessité de construire des modèles équitables. Or, la notion d’équité ne fait pas consensus, tant sous l’angle philosophique que sous l’angle mathématique. Le modèle parfaitement et universellement équitable étant inatteignable, comment construire des modèles qui respectent le principe d’équité?

Statisticienne et scientifique de données chevronnée, Véronique Tremblay vous partagera le parcours qui l’a amené à réaliser l’importance de la philosophie dans la recherche d’un l’algorithme qu’on pourrait qualifier d’équitable, mais aussi dans l’ensemble du travail du scientifique de données. Elle présentera les défis rencontrés et quelques pistes de solution, dans l’objectif d’ouvrir un dialogue entre la mathématique et la philosophie.

Dans le cadre de cette conférence-midi CReSP-CRÉ, Muriel Mac-Seing, chercheuse au Centre de recherche en santé publique (CReSP) et Professeure adjointe au département de médecine sociale et préventive de l’École de santé publique de l’Université de Montréal (ESPUM) offrira une présentation intitulée « Équité en santé, handicap et déterminants structurels de santé dans un contexte d’injustices épistémiques et climatiques ».

La présentation sera suivie d’un commentaire par Ryoa Chung, co-directrice du Centre de Recherche en Ethique (CRÉ) et Professeure titulaire au département de philosophie de l’Université de Montréal.

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Dans le cadre des activités du Réseau de philosophie du travail, Anca Gheaus (Central European University) offrira une présentation intitulée: “One crisis to solve another? The place of care in the future of work”.

Plus de détails à venir!

Résumé

Two work-related crises are looming large: technological unemployment (possibly on mass scale) and a crisis of care (care for the elderly, healthcare, and the “loneliness epidemic”). I argue that we should think about these crises together, rather than separately, because each can provide practical and justificatory solutions to the other. On the practical side, we should aim to match the demand for care with the supply of labour freed by technological unemployment. On the justificatory side, the care crisis is relevant to the unemployment crisis because it fills in a gap in arguments to the conclusion that we should respond to automation by minimising involuntary unemployment. Reasons for the latter are: because the goods of work are important contributors to a good life; because work is integral to a good life insofar it is driven by the desire to serve others; and because, in a Dworkinian hypothetical insurance scheme, people would ensure against involuntary unemployment. If automation eliminated all necessary work, then realising some of the goods of work would be precluded, making the aspiration to serve needs unfulfillable, and providing re-training and new jobs would be very wasteful and hence unaffordable. The care crisis indicates there is, and there will always be, necessary work to be done. The unemployment crisis is relevant to the care crisis because we ought to meet emotional care needs in a politically legitimate manner. Alternative proposals are coercive, hence worrying for liberals. Moreover, coercion is corrosive to some aims of emotional care work, which is ideally motivated by caring about particular individuals.

Colloque organisé par Max Lewis (Yale) aidé de Christopher Howard (McGill) et de Mauro Rossi (UQÀM) sous l’égide du CRÉ, avec le soutien du Canadian Journal of Philosophy, du GRIN, du GRIPP et du Département de philosophie de l’UQÀM.

Horaire

9:30-9:40       Welcome

9:40-11:00     Julia Driver (UT Austin), “Misplaced Gratitude”
Commentary by Alex Carty (McGill)

11:00-11:10   Break

11:10-12:30   Arash Abizadeh (McGill), “Sorry, not Sorry: The Practice of Conditional Apologies”
Commentary by Guillaume Soucy (UQAM)

12:30-2:00     Lunch

2:10-3:30       Max Lewis (Yale), “The Annulment Thesis and The Dynamics of Gratitude”
Commentary by Melissa Hernandez Parra (UdeM)

3:30-4:00       Coffee Break

4:00-5:00       Stephen Darwall (Yale), “’Much obliged’: On Gratitude and Obligation”
Commentary by Jordan Walters (McGill)

Les membres du CRÉ et du GRÉEA sont heureux.ses d’accueillir Angie Pepper (University of Roehampton) et Richard Healey (LSE), qui nous offriront une présentation intitulée « Animals, Inferiority, and Abolition ». La présentation sera offerte an anglais, mais les questions posées lors de la période de discussion pourront l’être en français ou en anglais.

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Résumé

In The Pecking Order, Niko Kolodny argues that natural persons have an irreducible claim against inferiority: a claim “that we not be set beneath another in a social hierarchy” (p. 5).  Such social hierarchies, Kolodny suggests, are constituted by untempered disparities in power, authority, and regard. Though Kolodny acknowledges that the lives of many social animals are organised around the “pecking order” (p. 1, p. 87), other animals barely feature in his analysis of relations of inferiority. This omission is striking because many of our relations with nonhuman animals, especially those who have been domesticated, do not arise in “chance, one-off encounters”, but are rather “entrenched in an established, ongoing social structure” (p. 98). Think, for example, of our relations to livestock animals, laboratory animals, and pets. In each of these cases, animals are systematically subordinated by a pattern of social and legal norms that involve untempered asymmetries in power, authority, and regard.

These observations raise the question: Do non-human animals have a claim against inferiority within human-animal communities and hierarchies? In this paper, we argue that they do. Moreover, we suggest that nonhuman animals’ complaint against inferiority supports an abolitionist approach to animal rights. The basic idea is that to fully respect the rights of other animals, we must desist from using them as means to our ends. Importantly, the claim against inferiority not only supports the abolition of practices that clearly cause animals suffering but also those that need not, such as pet keeping.

The paper is structured as follows. First, we defend the claim that sentient nonhuman animals can have claims against inferiority against humans. We consider the view that only those capable of adequately recognising their position within a social hierarchy can have claims against inferiority. In response, we observe that while one’s ability to recognise one’s social position will likely have implications for what constitutes appropriate treatment, nothing in Kolodny’s account necessitates a recognition condition for the claim against inferiority. We further argue that the lack of a recognition condition is independently plausible if we wish to allow, for example, that young children in lower castes and individuals with severe cognitive disabilities can have claims against inferiority. Second, we argue that some nonhuman animals do have claims of inferiority against us. To illustrate this we show that animals have a complaint against being socially positioned as pets, which is grounded in a claim against inferiority. Specifically, we contend that the practice of pet-keeping is a socio-political institution which is constituted by untempered asymmetries in power, authority, and regard between humans and nonhuman animals. Furthermore, we argue that it is not possible to effectively temper these asymmetries while maintaining the practice of living with pets. This is because the tempering factors that undercut objections to social hierarchy in the human case (see Kolodny §5.2 and Ch. 8) either cannot be made to work for other animals (e.g., democratic governance) or otherwise require that the practice be dismantled. If our argument is correct, the implications are significant. Not only does this give us a further reason to abandon practices that harm other animals such as farming and biomedical research, but it suggests that the seemingly more benign practice of keeping animals as pets should be abolished.

Dans le cadre des conférences du midi du CRÉ, Julia D. Hur (NYU) nous offrira une présentation intitulée « Money on Mind: Performance Incentive, Attention to Money, Environmental Sustainability ».

Résumé

Environmental sustainability is one of the most pressing problems of our time, raising significant questions as to how to motivate organizational decision-makers to make substantive investments in environmental protection. The current work identifies performance incentives as a critical barrier that prevents organizational decision-makers from supporting sustainability initiatives. We also offer a novel psychological mechanism of how monetary incentives activate managers’ attentional fixation on money, intensifies their zero-sum mindset, and ultimately undermines commitment to investing in sustainability. Across two laboratory experiments (n = 702) and one archival study with a combination of data on executive compensation, corporate annual reports, and environmental performance (n = 14,126), we show that decision-makers whose pay is more contingent on financial performances are more likely to develop attentional fixation on money and less likely to support sustainability initiatives of their organization. Together, our findings demonstrate a novel pathway of how one of the most prevalently used types of financial incentives inadvertently undermine progress toward one of the most urgent organizational changes.