Ethics Untangled

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/0691160074You 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 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/

Happy new year!An unusual episode to kick off 2024 as I talk to Kevin Macnish, host of the Getting Technology Right podcast. If you aren't already a listener to that excellent podcast, I heartily recommend that you become one! In this joint episode, which is also appearing in the Getting Technology Right feed, Kevin and I quiz each other on what we're trying to do with our respective podcasts, and on our experience of working as consultants in ethics, me for the University of Leeds and Kevin for the technology company Sopra Steria. Also, some news! Ethics Untangled episodes will be coming out twice a month from now on. So the next episode, with Heather Widdows, will be out on 15 January, and from then on we'll be putting out episodes on the first and third Mondays of every month. Huzzah!As always, please subscribe and spread the word!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/

Traditionally, monogamy has been the form of romantic relationship which people have been assumed to want to pursue. But there has recently been a growing tendency among some to question this assumption, and instead to pursue polyamorous or other forms of romantic attachment. And this tendency has been reflected in philosophical debates too. Some have gone so far as to question whether monogamous relationships can be defended at all, prompting others to think more deeply about what the distinctive value of monogamous relationships, if any, might be. I spoke to Luke Brunning, a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, and we explored some of this fascinating ethical territory. Luke Brunning is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, and part of the Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships. His main research interests are romantic relationships, the emotions, applied ethics and moral life. Luke has a book on Romantic Agency coming out in May 2024, and available to order here:https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=romantic-agency-loving-well-in-modern-life--9781509551521... and his previous book on monogamy is here: https://thamesandhudson.com/does-monogamy-work-9780500295694 He was interviewed about that book here: https://mashable.com/article/does-monogamy-work-luke-brunning-book-interview He's also written this article (freely available) on jealousy: https://aeon.co/essays/love-without-jealousy-consider-the-benefits-of-compersion Finally, he also recommends this book on monogamy by Carrie Jenkins:https://www.routledge.com/Why-Its-OK-to-Not-Be-Monogamous/Clardy/p/book/9781032449784 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/

Duncan Sheehan is Professor of Business Law at the University of Leeds. He is interested in trusts and personal property law, especially secured transactions law. He has a particular recent interest in the application of the philosophy of action to the law, as well as a wider interest in private law theory more generally.  Unjust enrichment is a distinctive and, some might say, weird area of law. It is supposed to cover cases in which someone acquires a benefit of some kind at the expense of another person in a way that is unjust, and which leads to a requirement for restitution. It's not the same as fraud or theft, partly because the person who has been unjustly enriched might never have intended to be enriched. But it has proven surprisingly difficult for legal scholars to say exactly what it is, or what precisely links all the cases that are usually brought together under the heading of unjust enrichment, which has led some to call for it to be abolished. Nonetheless, Professor Sheehan does think it's a thing, and thinks it should continue to be a thing, and in this conversation he explains why.As someone who was once massively overpaid by my employer (and was honest enough to give the money back, otherwise I probably wouldn't be admitting to it here) I was interested to find out what the law thinks about this issue...Duncan's book, The Scope and Structure of Unjust Enrichment will be published in February 2024. Chapters 1 and 3 cover the issues discussed in the podcast.Duncan also recommends the following two articles:Hedley, S. 'What is Unjust Enrichment for?' (2016) 16 Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal 333 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2805475)Jaffey, P. 'The Unjust Enrichment Fallacy and Private Law' (2013) 28 Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 115 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3799149) 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/

Dr Jamie Dow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the IDEA Centre. He is particularly interested in Ancient Philosophy, and much of his research is concerned with what philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle can tell us about the ethical questions we face today. Recently, he's been thinking about the use of aesthetic features in persuasive speech. Sonorous, humorous or rhetorically elegant language can help us to get our message across more effectively and change people's minds. There are lots of ways of doing this. We might want to describe our opponent's position in a humorous way to invite our listeners to join us in ridiculing it. We might want to vary the rhythm and pitch of our speech to lend it musicality. We might want to begin successive sentences with a repeated phrase, in a sequence of three (a 'tricolon') where the final sentence cleverly subverts the expectation set up by the preceding two. Or pepper our prose with pellets of punchy alliteration.But is this stuff okay, or is there always something morally suspect about this kind of approach? If we want people to come round to our point of view for the right reasons, shouldn't we be focusing purely on the content of what we're saying? To try to answer this question, Jamie uses two examples of persuasive speech which use aesthetic approaches very effectively - speeches by Barack Obama and Martin Luther King. He also talks about the implications of his research for people who are using persuasive speech in everyday life.You can hear the Obama speech here (the section discussed in the podcast starts at around 21:25):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQnlnk6Y7Kk&t=207sThe King speech is here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgVrlx68v-0Jamie's paper, published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, is here:https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aesthj/ayac061/7187071Ethics 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/

Paula Satne is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre. Her research focuses on theoretical and applied issues related to human evil and the ethics and politics of forgiveness and memory.  Her recent research is on Kantian forgiveness, political forgiveness and public commemoration of politically motivated wrongdoing, punishment, pacifism, and conflict resolution, and our shared complicity and responsibility for structural injustice (i.e., climate change, poverty, and war). Krisanna Scheiter is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Union College. She specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Her research focuses on Plato and Aristotle's accounts of emotion, desire, imagination, and thinking. Most recently her work explores Plato and Aristotle's account of the mind, knowledge, and truth. In addition, she continues to examine Aristotle's account of revenge and why he thinks sometimes we are justified in seeking revenge against wrongdoers. In this episode I met with both of them to discuss the edited volume they have recently published on punishment, forgiveness and revenge. These are ideas that are interesting on a personal level: is it good to forgive? Are there any circumstances in which we might be required to forgive? Can there ever be any value in taking revenge on people who have wronged us? But they also arise on a societal or international level: should groups of people forgive or forget historic wrongs that have been perpetrated against them? What is the point of punishment, and does the state have the right to punish its citizens? Apologies for the slight sound issues with this episode, which was recorded remotely.This episode includes discussion of the death penalty in the context of a discussion of Seneca’s views. Both Krisanna and Paula want to make it clear that, unlike Seneca, they do not personally endorse the death penalty.Paula and Krisanna's book, Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge and Punishment is available here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1.A chapter from the book, written by Paula, is available open access here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1_16.Krisanna's chapter (not open access) is here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1_2Ethics 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/

Joseph Lacey is Associate Professor of Political Theory at University College Dublin. He is about to embark on a five-year project looking at the moral agency of participants in elections. That's politicians, special advisers, journalists and so on. But it's also you and me: people who engage with political messaging, perhaps take some interest in what's going on behind the scenes and, ultimately, vote in elections. In this episode Joseph talks about the questions he's interested in, his plans for the research, what's distinctive about the method he's going to use, and what he hopes to get out of it. Here are some readings suggested by Joseph as good and relevant to the topic:Beckman, Arthur. 2018. ‘Political Marketing and Intellectual Autonomy: Political Marketing & Intellectual Autonomy’. Journal of Political Philosophy 26(1): 24–46.Beerbohm, Eric. 2016. ‘The Ethics of Electioneering’. Journal of Political Philosophy 24(4): 381–405.Green, Jeffrey. 2010. The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipsitz, Keena. 2004. ‘Democratic Theory and Political Campaigns’. Journal of Political Philosophy 12(2): 163–89.Scammell, Margaret. 2014. Consumer Democracy: The Marketing of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.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/

Robbie Morgan is a lecturer and consultant here at the IDEA Centre. His research focuses on issues in the philosophy of sex, particularly as this intersects with feminist philosophy. As well as sexualisation, he's currently engaged in research about language change, the metaphysics of touch, conscientious objection in medicine, and the value of consensual sexual activity. In this conversation, we discuss sexualisation. Unwanted sexualisation is at the very least an inappropriate behaviour. At worst it can be an illegitimate exercise of power which involves harassing, bullying, or terrorising another person. But how exactly should we define sexualisation, and what if anything is distinctively harmful about it?Here are the readings Robbie mentions in the episode:Anonymous. 2011. “What It’s like to Be Pregnant in Philosophy.” What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? 2011. https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/what-its-like-to-be-pregnant-in-philosophy/.Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 1995. “Objectification.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 24 (4): 249–91.Olberding, Amy. 2014. “Subclinical Bias, Manners, and Moral Harm.” Hypatia 29 (2): 287–302.Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1781/1953), The Confessions. Translated by J.M. Cohen. Penguin Books: 108-109.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/

Ruby Hornsby is a PhD student at the IDEA Centre. Her research is about 'artificial friends' - robots and their interactions with humans - and whether these interactions can be part of a good human life. What do we get out of friendship and how much of that is possible when the supposed friend we're talking about is not a person with an inner life of their own, but an artificial being that has been programmed to act in a friendly way towards us? And what if our interactions with robots are a bit like our interactions with fictional characters? Does this mean we can't have friendships with them, or is there some form of quasi-friendship that might still be possible, and might have something to offer us? And what about the ethics of these relationships? Do we leave ourselves open to exploitation or deception by entering into them?Some links:Ai-Da House of Lords (2022)Care homes and social robots (2020)Sex robots and companionship (2023) Sony's AIBO dog (2023)Research Ruby did alongside IDEA's Natasha McKeever on sex robots (2022) 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/

For this episode I spoke to Professor Fiona Woollard. Professor Woollard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. She has research interests in normative ethics, applied ethics, epistemically transformative experiences and the philosophy of sex and pregnancy. She has published on topics including the distinction between doing and allowing harm, climate change and the non-identity problem, the moral significance of numbers, pornography and the norm of monogamy.Her recent research has led her to ask a question which turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer: what is a mother? Not necessarily, in her view, a woman with a child. In this interview she explains why she doesn't think this is the right way of defining a mother, and what she thinks is a better way. To get there, we tried to get to grips with some vexed questions about gender.Professor Woollard's page at Southampton is here.Here's the advert we refer to at the start of the interview.Some of the books and papers Professor Woollard talks about in the interview:Ashley, Florence. (forthcoming) ”What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? Gender Subjectivity and the Phenomenological Constitution of Gender Identity”  Mind.Bettcher, Talia Mae. (2009) “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority” In Laurie Shrage (ed.), You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hays, Sharon. (1998) The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. London: Yale University Press.Jenkins, Katharine. (forthcoming) Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender and Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Kukla, Quill and Lance, Mark. (forthcoming) “Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions” in ERGO.Ruddick, S. (1980). "Maternal Thinking". Feminist Studies, 6(2), 342–367. 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/