John Weckert: Technology - Are we going in the right direction? (SES Webinar Series 3)

Technology: Are we going in the right direction?

Dr. John Weckert, Charles Sturt University

This talk will focus on four aspects of technology: technological optimism, the technological fix, the technological treadmill and the technological imperative. I will argue that we are overly optimistic about technology and this causes an overreliance on technology to fix problems, which in turn leads to the necessity of even more technology, the treadmill. This state of affairs gives us reason to consider carefully our development and use of technology and whether we are headed in the right direction. Using nanotechnology as an example, I will suggest that there are good grounds of reassessing the way we look at technology. Perhaps we need a new technological imperative.

Ethics and Social Media

Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc, Ateneo de Davao University

Social media in the next decade will determine how big tech firms will control politics and society, making states and governments less significant. The burning issues now include the right to privacy, surveillance and cyber-security, online profiling and hate speech. The question to ask is, should the future of human society be left to Facebook, Google or Twitter to decide? The threat to democracy is apparent with machine learning and algorithms influencing online behavior and our mobile devices taking over our lives in the technological world. It is for this reason that an ethics must identify a democratic direction and strategy for social media. Technological innovation is inevitable but the applications of modern devices must conform to good and acceptable ethical standards.

Date of Webinar: April 17, 2021 (Saturday), 2PM to 5PM. For the Zoom link, please email Dr. Roger Bayod at roger.bayod@gmail.com. This event is jointly sponsored by the Notre Dame of Marbel University and the Social Ethics Society.

Christopher Ryan Maboloc: An Intellectual Biography

By Menelito Mansueto (MSU-IIT) Christopher Ryan Maboloc is a Davao-based Filipino scholar known for his work in Social and Political Philosophy, Bioethics, Radical Democracy, and the Ethics of Technology. He is an Associate Professor at Ateneo de Davao University and a Visiting Professor at Silliman University. Dr. Maboloc was an ASAP - Yale Global Justice Fellow where he was mentored by the renowned philosopher Thomas Pogge. An Erasmus Mundus scholar, the author was trained in political party building and democratic governance at the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Bonn and Berlin, Germany. Dr. Maboloc finished AB Philosophy, cum laude, at Ateneo de Davao University under a Yuchengco Foundation scholarship. He has a Masters in Philosophy from Ateneo de Manila University. He holds an Erasmus Mundus Masters in Applied Ethics from Linköping University in Sweden and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. He was the Erasmus Mundus (EM) Representativ...

Statement of the SES expressing its opposition to the proposal to remove Ethics in the GE Curriculum

We, members of the Board of Directors of the Social Ethics Society, express our strong opposition to the proposal to remove ethics in college. Such move is bereft of merit and is ignorant as to the value and purpose of the teaching of the course, which is thoroughly rooted in the integral and critical function of higher education. The proposal to transfer it to Senior High School deprives college students of the teaching of ethics as a professional course, which is crucial in their civic engagements and the pursuit of a democratic society that can only be grounded in responsible citizenship and critical thinking. The direction of Edcom and its advisers from the technical panels of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) reduces our whole education system into a mode of creating docile workers who will constitute the labor force that will serve the whims and interests of a capital intensive and consumer driven globalized neoliberal economic order. It only breeds our subser...

Statement of the SES BOD Chair

The Social Ethics Society was founded in 2010 by the late Dr. Romulo Bautista, a professor at Ateneo de Davao University who did his doctorate on Marx at the University of Madrid in Spain, and Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc, then a young teacher at Ateneo de Davao. The first SES Conference was held at the University of Mindanao. Its original membership was only 15, consisting mainly of the masters students of the two founders. While in the peripheries of academia, the SES pursued its goals of helping teachers in Mindanao develop their craft in ways that is consistent with philosophy as an exercise of the human will and as the highest expression of the human intellect. When its proponents presented the concept, it was suggested that the Union of Philosophical Societies and Associations in the Philippines (USAPP) will lobby for a new bill that will professionalize philosophy in the country. That was in 2018. Top UST philosophy academics, upon the invitation of Peter Elicor, attended t...

Social Ethics Society

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