Ethics Untangled

This episode is an exploration of the relationship between love and time with Troy Jollimore. As well as being a Professor in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Troy is a successful poet. His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for 2006. His third, Syllabus of Errors, appeared on the New York Times' list of the best books of poetry published in 2015. He's also a literary critic, and in this interview he illustrates his ideas with examples from films and literature, as well as real life. You can find out more about Troy's work - the philosophy, the poetry and the literary criticism - here: https://www.troyjollimore.com/ There's a list of his philosophical papers here, including things he's written about films including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vertigo and The Big Lebowski, all of which are referred to in the episode: https://www.troyjollimore.com/philosophy-papers You can read the Song of Solomon (King James version) here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song%20of%20Solomon%201&version=KJV ...and you can listen to 'Endless Love' by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bwwo7ctG10 Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Dr. Munamato Chemhuru is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, Zimbabwe, and a Senior Research Associate in Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He has been working on a project entitled Conceptualising Environmental Justice through Epistemic Justice in Africa, collaborating with former podcast guest Jamie Dow. Munamato's research highlights the way Africans have been subjected to epistemic injustice in the debate around environmental ethics and the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. That's to say, African voices are often ignored, misinterpreted or not taken seriously. This injustice extends to the theoretical frameworks which are used to conceptualise environmental ethics, and towards the end of the interview, Munamato introduces unhu/ubuntu as an alternative ethical framework which promises to enrich our understanding of the ethical terrain in which environmental responsibilities are grounded. Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Politicians sometimes have to make decisions where there is no option that looks good, morally speaking. They may have to get their hands dirty, acting in a way that looks immoral - sometimes powerfully so - in order to avoid some greater evil. This is called the problem of dirty hands, and it's long been of interest to philosophers. However, most of the philosophical work about dirty hands has focused on the person whose hands are dirty: have they acted wrongly, are they blameworthy, how should we respond to them? Christina Nick, a philosopher based at the IDEA Centre, is more interested in the victims of dirty-handed politicians. These victims may have been subjected to quite profound harms as a result of the actions of politicians who were trying to avoid some even worse harm. What does it look like to treat these victims justly? Specifically, are they owed reparations? And if so, what form should these reparations take, and should these reparations be made by, or on behalf of, the politicians who made the decision? Christina Nick is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics atthe IDEA Centre at the University of Leeds. Her PhD thesis “The Problem of Democratic Dirty Hands” examined how we should understand the occurence of moral conflict for public office holders and how we ought to ascribe moral responsibility for the outcomes of such actions in modern democracies. Here's an article about the Claudy bombing on the BBC website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-62332152 ...and the Police Ombudsman's report into the bombing: https://www.policeombudsman.org/Investigation-Reports/Historical-Reports/Police-Ombudsman-s-Claudy-report Here's an introduction to the philosophical problem of dirty hands in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/ Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Finn MacKay on queer identities and attraction. https://www.drfinnmackay.co.uk/about Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Tom O’Shea on whether we can be responsible for our attractions. https://www.tomoshea.org/ Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Finn MacKay and Tom O'Shea. Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Troy Jollimore on whether we love for reasons. https://www.troyjollimore.com/ Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Professor MM McCabe on love and desire in Plato’s symposium. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/mm-mccabe Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A with MM McCabe and Troy Jollimore. Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Brian Earp on the ethics of psychedelically-assisted relationship therapy. https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/people/brian-d.-earp Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Robbie Arrell on consent issues raised by teledildonic technology. https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics/staff/2728/robbie-arrell Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Brian Earp and Robbie Arrell. Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Kate Lister talking about whether we evolved to be monogamous. https://leedstrinity.academia.edu/KateLister Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Pilar Lopez Cantero talking about experiences of breakup and how to move on well. https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/p-lopezcantero Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Kate Lister and Pilar Lopez Cantero. Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A quick introduction to our special series of episodes featuring recordings from the Leeds Love Month live events organised by the Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships at the University of Leeds. In October 2023, Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships at the University of Leeds ran a series of events under the Love Month banner. There were some really interesting talks, and we thought we'd release them as a special series of Ethics Untangled episodes. So we're giving you them all in one go, and they won't affect the standard episodes, which will carry on going out according to the usual schedule. Here's a list of episodes: Finn MacKay on queer identities and attraction Tom O’Shea on whether we can be responsible for our attractions Kate Lister on whether we evolved to be monogamous Pilar Lopez-Cantero on experiences of breakup, and how to move on well Troy Jollimore on whether we love for reasons MM McCabe on love and desire in Plato’s symposium Brian Earp on the ethics of psychedelically-assisted relationship therapy Robbie Arrell on consent issues raised by teledildonic technology Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Jules Holroyd is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her teaching and research focuses on understanding the nature of, and addressing, injustices. In this conversation, she turns her attention to praise. Philosophers have given a lot of attention to blame in the past, but not so much to praise. This might be because praise looks fairly unproblematic on the whole. Praising people is nice! It boosts people's self-confidence, strengthens social bonds, and if we occasionally praise people who don't deserve our praise, who cares? According to Jules Holroyd, a philosopher working at the University of Sheffield, while this attitude is probably right overall, there can be instances in which we praise people in ways that are morally problematic, harmful even, and we should be on the lookout for these cases. In this conversation, we talked about some of the moral norms that govern praise - when it is and isn't appropriate to praise someone - and in particular we looked at the ways in which our acts of praising can signal a commitment to wider social norms, some of which we might not want to endorse. Jules's paper which forms the basis of this conversation is here: Holroyd, J. (2021) Oppressive Praise. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/13967 She also has this more recent paper on praise: Holroyd, J. (2023) Proleptic praise: a social function analysis. Noûs. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12482 Here are some of the papers Jules refers to in the episode: Coates, Justin. (2019). Gratitude and Resentment: Some Asymmetries. In R. Roberts & D. Telech (Eds.) The Moral Psychology of Gratitude(pp. 160–175). London: Rowman & Littlefield. Jeppsson, S., & Brandenburg, D. (2022). Patronizing Praise. The Journal of Ethics, 26, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09409-2 Khader, S., & Lindauer, M. (2020). The “Daddy Dividend”: The Gender Division of Labour and Regression Towards Patriarchy.APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy,19(2), 6–8. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/ resource/collection/D03EBDAB-82D7-4B28-B897-C050FDC1ACB4/FeminismV19n2.pdf Lippert-Rasmussen, K. (2022). Praising without standing. The Journal of Ethics, 26,229–246. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10892-021-09374-2 Shoemaker, D., & Vargas, M. (2019). Moral torch fishing: A signaling theory of blame. Noûs, 55, 581–602. https:// doi.org/10.1111/nous.12316 Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Rob Lawlor, a philosopher at the IDEA Centre, has been involved in an inter-disciplinary collaboration looking at one possible response to climate change, which is the introduction of rationing. With Nathan Wood and Josie Freear, he's been looking at the history of rationing as well as the ethics. So - not just whether rationing would be morally permissible, but also how it might be received by the public. And what we can learn about this from public attitudes to rationing of food during and after the second world war. When it was first published, the paper got an unusual amount of attention in the media for an academic paper, including lots of positive coverage, but also some disparagement from the likes of Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn. As well as discussing the content of the paper, we talked about what that reaction has been like and I gave Rob a chance to respond to some of the ways the paper has been discussed in the media. Here's Rob, Josie and Nathan's paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21550085.2023.2166342 A short paper on a similar topic by Mark Roodhouse: https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/rationing-returns-a-solution-to-global-warming In the interview, Rob mentions he thought the best of the news articles about the paper was in the New Republic. Here it is: https://newrepublic.com/article/170914/climate-case-rationing And finally, here's what Nigel Farage thought of it: https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1627606639711817728 Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Doctors are bound by the ethical requirement to first do no harm. Unfortunately, harm is not something that they can always avoid. Sometimes harm comes about through the actions of doctors, but at other times it comes about because of things they haven't done. David Molyneux is a doctor of medicine who is also working on a doctorate in philosophy, and his PhD thesis is about the difficult ethical questions that arise because of this distinction. Is there a moral difference between doing and allowing harm? But to answer this question, he first needed to get to grips with a prior question: when we allow harm do we thereby cause that harm? And more generally, do allowings, or omissions, cause? Here are some introductory readings on the topic recommended by David: Foot P (1984), Killing and Letting Die, in Steinbock and Norcross, Killing and Letting Die, Second Edition. pp 280-290. New York: Fordham University Press. McGrath S (2003) Causation and the Making/Allowing Distinction. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 114: 81-86 Woollard F (2012). The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing I: Analysis of the Doing ⁄Allowing Distinction. Philosophy Compass 7: 448–458 Woollard, F and Howard-Snyder, F. 2021. Doing and Allowing Harm. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 edition), Edward N Zalta (ed) URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/fall2021/entries/doing-allowing/ Accessed 15th January 2024. Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Heather Widdows is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick, with expertise in applied ethics, global ethics, bioethics, moral philosophy and feminist philosophy. She's interested in the demands that the beauty ideal places on people, particularly women. Her book Perfect Me was described as 'ground-breaking' by Vogue, and listed by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2018. In it, she argues that beauty is now an ethical ideal. Not only are women held to an impossible standard, but failure to live up to that standard is seen as a failure of moral character. In this interview, we talked about several topics connected to beauty, including whether it's reasonable to expect women to refuse to conform to the beauty ideal, and what other effective responses there might be. We also talked about why Heather thinks 'lookism' should be recognised as a form of discrimination based on looks, comparable with sexism or racism. Perfect Me is available to buy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perfect-Me-Beauty-Ethical-Ideal/dp/0691160074 You can find other pieces of writing, talks, interviews etc. featuring Heather here: http://www.heatherwiddows.com/ If you want to join the #everydaylookism campaign, you can do so here: https://www.everydaylookism.com/ Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. Twitter: @EthicsUntangled Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/