Ethics Untangled

Cancelling and cancel culture are terms that we hear a lot these days, and it's one of the many areas where there seems to be more heat than light. The phenomenon of cancelling has become a front in the so-called culture wars, with one side claiming it's a healthy form of protest, or simply confronting people with the consequences of their actions, while the other side sees it as persecution by an unaccountable mob. Philosophers Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) and Georgie Mills (TU Delft) have tried to disentangle some of the different actions that sometimes get called cancelling, and to help us better understand the ethics of this complex phenomenon.The paper this conversation is based on is available here. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Words such as 'woke', 'emotional labour' and 'gaslighting' get bandied around a lot, especially in online discourse. And as they get bandied around, their meaning can change over time. Of course, changes in the meaning of words are natural, inevitable and, usually harmless. However, Robbie Morgan, back for his record-setting third appearance on Ethics Untangled, thinks we should be worried about these changes in meaning, at least sometimes. This isn't just pedantry - it's a concern about the way changes in meaning can rob us of the means to express important concepts, and also about the way these moves can serve political motivations in an illegitimate way.Here's Robbie's paper on the topic:Morgan, Robert (2025), "Hermeneutical Disarmament", ​The Philosophical Quarterly 75(3): 1071-1093.Here's Robbie's website.And here are the other sources we discuss in the episode:Beck, Julie (2018), “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor’”, The Atlantic.Bloomfield, Leonard (1983), Introduction to the Study of Language. Amsterdam/Philidelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, p.240.Brownmiller, Susan (1990), In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. 1st ed. New York: Dial Press, pp.182, 280-285.Déjacque, Joseph, Hartman, Janine C., and Lause, Mark A. (2012), In the Sphere of Humanity: Joseph Déjacque, Slavery, and the Struggle for Freedom. Cincinnati, Ohio: University of Cincinnati Libraries.Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hamilton, Patrick (1939, Gas Light. 1st ed. London: Constable.Hochschild, Arlie Russell (2012), The Managed Heart. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.Lead Belly (2015) “Scottsboro Boys.” In Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, 4:26. MacGuill, Dan (2021), “Did People Refer to Gaslighting During the Era of 'I Love Lucy'?”, Snopes. Norri, Juhani (1998), “Gender-Referential Shifts in English.” English Studies 79 (3): 270–87, p.281.Rothbard, Murray N. (2007), The Betrayal of the American Right. Edited by Thomas E. Woods Jr. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, p.83.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Epistemic injustice is a broad category of injustice relating to knowledge. It can involve people from marginalised or oppressed groups being excluded, silenced, misrepresented, or not taken seriously — in conversations, education, or professional settings — because of their membership to that group.In academic contexts, this kind of injustice can distort entire fields of study. Orla Carlin, a scholar at the University of Leeds, explores how this plays out in relation to class.She argues that the literature on epistemic injustice doesn’t adequately account for epistemic injustice that occurs in virtue of class. One reason, she suggests, is the underrepresentation of working-class voices in academia. Her research asks why this underrepresentation exists and points to deeper, systemic forms of epistemic injustice that affect working class people more broadly, perpetuating a vicious circle in which working class people find it more difficult to enter fields which are dominated by middle class voices, and thereby to shape those fields.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Gossip is an ethically interesting phenomenon when humans do it. It creates a bond between the people doing the gossiping, but it does so by implicitly excluding the person being gossiped about, and can cause harm, especially when the gossip is malicious, or simply isn't true. What I hadn't realised until I spoke to Lucy Osler, a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, is that large language models like ChatGPT and Claude can gossip, or at least they can do something which looks an awful lot like gossip. In this conversation with Lucy, we got into what might be happening, how it might harm people, and what we might be able to do about it.Following my conversation with Lucy, I had an interesting conversation with ChatGPT about the same topic.In the episode we discuss Kevin Roose's interaction with the chatbot Sydney. Here's Roose's own article about that experience:Why a Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York TimesAnd here are some academic articles that might be of interest:Fisher, S. A. (2024). Large language models and their big bullshit potential. Ethics and Information Technology, 26(4), 67.Hicks, M. T., Humphries, J., & Slater, J. (2024). ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics and Information Technology, 26(2), 1-10.Alfano, M., & Robinson, B. (2017). Gossip as a burdened virtue. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 20, 473-487.Adkins, K. (2017). Gossip, epistemology and power. Springer International Publishing AG, Gewerbestrasse, 11, 6330.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Adam Byfield is a Principal Technical Assurance Specialist at NHS England. After his previous appearance on the podcast, discussing providing ethical assurance for AI applications in healthcare, we were keen to get him back to dive into some more specific issues. We chose bias and accessibility, two related issues that are clearly central for anyone concerned with AI, including in healthcare applications. We talked about different forms of bias, how bias can affect accessibility and what forms of bias, if any, might be acceptable.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Professor Lisa Bortolotti is a philosopher at the University of Birmingham, who has been working on a fascinating interdisciplinary project looking at what happens when young people experiencing mental health difficulties talk to clinicians about those difficulties. The project has involved closely examining hours of audio and video material of these encounters, as well as talking to the young people themselves, in the hope of gaining insights which can help clinicians improve their practice. Emerging from the work has been a focus on agency and the agential stance. We discuss what that means and why it's important, drawing on some examples from the project.Links to further reading:Agency project page on the McPin Foundation website: https://mcpin.org/project/agency/ (has a lot of open access resources)Three relevant open access papers:L Bortolotti (2025). Agential Epistemic Injustice in Clinical Interactions Is Bad for Medicine. Philosophy of Medicine 6 (1), 1-19.C Bergen, L Bortolotti, R Temple, et al. (2023). Implying implausibility and undermining versus accepting peoples’ experiences of suicidal ideation and self-harm in Emergency Department psychosocial assessments. Frontiers in Psychiatry 14.C Bergen, L Bortolotti, K Tallent, et al. (2022). Communication in youth  health clinical encounters: Introducing the agential stance. Theory & Psychology 32 (5), 667-690.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Tim Watkin is a journalist and media manager. He works as executive editor for audio at Radio New Zealand, but is currently on sabbatical at the University of Glasgow, studying how to rebuild trust in journalism as part of a project on Epistemic Autonomy. In this interview we discuss the nature of trust, why it's important, why journalists seem to be losing the public's trust, whose fault this is, and what might be done about it.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Joe Fogarty has spent over 30 years working in national security and law enforcement, in the UK and elsewhere. He's currently working on cyber-security risks and organised crime for the UK's central government, as the Head of the Government's Cyber Resilience Centre. Recently, he's been looking at security and law enforcement through a philosophical lens, through studying for a Masters in Applied and Professional Ethics at IDEA, the Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. One of the big questions for these areas of work is how to balance privacy concerns against the public good, and we discuss that question, among others, in this interview.Some extra reading suggested by Joe:Omand, D. 2023. Examining the Ethics of Spying: A Practitioner’s View. Criminal Law and Philosophy. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5). [Online].  Available from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5.Omand, D. and Phythian, M. 2023. Principled Spying - The Ethics of Secret Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/principled-spying-the-ethics-of-secret-intelligence-david-omand/3583190.Fabre, C. 2022. Spying Through A Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spying-Through-Glass-Darkly-Counter-Intelligence/dp/019891217X.And if listeners are interested in a view from the top of the domestic national security establishment, there is an excellent Reith Lecture by former Head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller here, which echoes some of the themes in the podcast: BBC Radio 4. 2011. Eliza Manningham-Buller - Securing Freedom: Security. [Online]. Available from http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/2011_reith4.pdf. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Luke Ulas from the University of Sheffield and Josh Hobbs from the University of Leeds are both interested in cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a name used for a few different political ideas, but the core thought, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, is "the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be) citizens in a single community." One might think it's an idea that's in retreat, at least in some countries, today. That's one of the issues we discuss, as well as whether there's a crisis of motivation of cosmopolitanism, what that means and what one might do about it.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

This episode is part of what's becoming a bit of an informal series of Ethics Untangled episodes, on ethical issues relating to artificial intelligence applications. The particular application we're looking at this time comes from a healthcare setting, and is called a Patient Preference Predictor. It's a proposed way of using an algorithmic system to predict what a patient's preferences would be concerning their healthcare, in situations where they're incapacitated and unable to tell us what their preferences are. Ethicists have raised concerns about these systems, and these concerns are worth taking seriously, but Dr Nick Makins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, thinks they can be answered, and that the use of these systems can be justified, at least in some circumstances.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/