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.

Thomas Pogge to mentor AdDU prof in ASAP Global Justice Fellowship at Yale

Professor Thomas Pogge of Yale University will be the mentor of Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc in the ASAP Global Justice Program Fellowship at Yale University. Prof. Pogge is the author of World Poverty and Human Rights. Dr. Maboloc will write his research on structural issues in Muslim Mindanao using the perspectives of Iris Marion Young and Thomas Pogge. ASAP is an acronym for Academics Stand Against Poverty. According to its website, it utilizes "scholarship to influence policy and public attitudes to poverty. Established in 2010, (ASAP) is a non-partisan, independent global organization aiming to eradicate severe poverty worldwide." It is based in New Haven, Connecticut. It is under the Global Justice Program at Yale. Fourteen scholars around the world were chosen for the ASAP Program. Pogge is the most prominent scholar on global justice. He proposed the global difference principle as a critique to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Rawls was Pogge's adviser at H

Ethics in Contemporary Philippine Society released

ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE SOCIETY. Edited by CRB Maboloc, PhD, Foreword by Darryl Macer, PhD, with an introduction by Daniel Mishori, PhD. WORD FROM GLOBAL SCHOLARS “This book is a timely contribution to practical ethics. It deals with challenging moral problems like environmental hazards and climate change, justice, democracy and violence, and relates these burning issues to the present state of the Filipino society. At the same time the book is firmly anchored in moral theory. It is written in a clear and accessible style and serves as an excellent educational resource.” Dr. Göran Collste Professor Emeritus of Applied Ethics Linköping University, Sweden “This is a highly original approach to teaching applied ethics. Focusing as it does on issues that are part of the lives of the students and written by local scholars, it cannot help but be engaging. I very much enjoyed reading it and am sure that the students will gain not just theoretical ethical knowledge

Doing Philosophy in the Philippines: My take

First, a distinction must be made between Filipino philosophy and Filipinos doing philosophy. It's not the case that to be a Filipino philosopher, one must be writing Filipino philosophy. A Filipino scholar can be considered a philosopher even if what he or she writes is about Kant or Hegel. What Filipino philosophy means is another matter. For now, I prefer that we simply do philosophy or that we philosophize. We must also distinguish philosophizing in terms of its formal character and in terms of what ordinary folks do. To me, the manner that I was raised by my father elicited so many questions in my mind and I believe that many among us who are into the business of thinking, also experience the same, e.g. whether you are loved, what's the meaning of life, or if there is really a god. Of course, there's nothing original about those questions. But the point is, I just want to emphasize, not all get to ask about those things because perhaps life for other people is comfor

Social Ethics Society

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