QnA Global Ethics

Thank you for that, Dr. Akala. Let me just check. Uh h here. Okay. Uh guys, wait. Lanto, don't don't post your questions first. Post mo. Don't pose. This is what we're going to do. Okay. Uh you can uh just raise your hand. Okay? because uh when you raise your hand uh the first one who raises her hand raise his hand will be moved towards this party. So I'll call like this. Now if you don't mind I'll call first those who were not uh called a while ago because I see familiar hands. If you don't mind I'll prioritize those who have not spoken because uh others a while ago asked questions and they were not already they were not called. So I'll call first but anyway thank you very much for that lecture Dr. Akman I I can relate you know some of my professors they say that when they meet their old students those students would say oh sir ma'am I forgot the lesson but they remember the stories that you told in class so I I myself remember the stories fun stories actually so okay let's start uh we have uh of course Mr. Mr. Alvin Cervana. Okay. So the moment I call you guys, you can put down your hands. You can just unmute your audio and video. Okay. So from PUP, we have Mr. Alvin Cervana. Right. Hi uh Miss Sara, Dr. Akleman. Yeah. So as I stipulated my question in our chat box, I sense the tension of breath and depth in your discourse. My question is how much regional specificity is needed to ensure that globality of ethics is reached or even touchbased. Whereas experienceoriented matters of subjects as uh moral beings seem to be infinite albeit replicable and projectable. How do we know that or if the area an ethics researcher is exploring really expresses what needs to be expressed? and not just exoticizing, not oriental, if not orientalizing, moralizing or even gifying the obscure from his or her perspective but is actually lived and inhabited by his or her object of the study. What if these ethical, logical, philosophical uh fictions a researcher wants wants to explore are not a fiction at all to the culture that owns it or whence it originated and also on that narrativizing or what you call fictionalizing philosophy as a method of inquiry. What would you suggest are the platforms that welcome this method in lie of the rather traditional proessism among academic journals and Scopus and Rison of course. >> Yeah. Oh, thank thank you so much. This is a it's a I mean multiple questions all of which are are very good. the [clears throat] I think that uh to to kind of address some of the first um you know the regional specificity. I think it is very important that particularly when exploring you kind of the regionally specific philosophical issues that this is maybe not I don't want to say exclusively done by people from the region but it needs to be predominantly done and it needs to be done not at a level of uh let let me back up a bit. I find it really frustrating when I see phrases like African ethics or indigenous ethics because there is no such thing as African ethics. There is no such thing as a I even spent quite a bit of time kind of looking up people who use the phrase indigenous ethics. What do they mean by this? Is this like indigenous people from New Zealand? Is this indigenous people from the Americas? Is this indigenous people from other contexts? There is no single unified indigenous experience. And so on the question of regional specificity, I think it's very important. And we might even want to say does it make sense to be talking about a Filipino philosophy or should it be more fine grained? Is it more regional? you know, even within kind of the um you know, the dominant cultural context that I'm working in, we have to sometimes make decision distinctions between, well, are we talking about British idealism or are we talking about English idealism? Because a whole bunch of the Scottish people don't want to get lumped in with the English idealism because they think of themselves as doing something different. And as to the question of like how do we avoid the you know the exoticizing or mysticizing or orientalizing it's really hard and it the only you know there isn't like follow these three rules and you will avoid that trap. What we need to do is we need to constantly be asking ourselves, am I, you know, am I treating this fairly? Am I engaging with the right sources? And these kinds of questions are going to be different whether it's, you know, for somebody like me who's been kind of trained and brought up in the, you know, the the dominant philosophical cultural narrative as opposed to somebody who, you know, is situated outside of that. Um, yeah. And to the to the point of like how do we not treat as fictional something that isn't fictional in the cultural context that it comes from. This is a really important uh point which no one has ever actually pressed me on before and so I'm really pleased that that someone has that We don't want I don't want this method to become a way of merely telling stories, but as a way of taking things that hopefully we think are in fact true and are not themselves fictions and using stories as a way of of figuring out what the consequences are. So we can use kind of the the fictionalizing method as a way of exploring actual truths and not just exploring kind of hypotheticals or imaginations or things like that. As for methods of inquiry, there are a couple of journals. They're not going to be scopus one index. They're not going to be anything like that, but that do explore things like science fiction and philosophy which will allow for these more imaginative forms of exploration. Another, you know, good way of doing this thing is blog posts and social media. And, you know, that's another way that you can kind of make this work available, get it into the kind of the conversation, and also make it accessible to non- philosophers cuz no one's going to be like, "Oh, yes, let me pay $100 in order to be able to get access to this book chapter that Springier has published." But if you give them a link and say, "Hey, read this story that I published. It's on my blog. People might do that. >> Okay. So, incidentally, Alvin is the guy in charge of the music and other stuff for our presentation. He's the one sharing these things now. But >> excellent. Thank you. >> Anyway, thank thank you Alvin. No. Okay. Let's call on another person. Let's have uh how about Mr. RJ Sutello from uh Saints Co. and DLSU. Okay. >> Uh, can I be heard po? >> Yes. Loud and clear. Loud and clear. >> Uh, hello Dr. Sarah. First off, I would like to personally thank you. You surely do not know this, but I am indirectly your student on the topic of reducio adaburdom thanks to your YouTube channel. My question is actually related to YouTube particularly on the social media and its function in globalizing philosophical and u moral discourses. For my fellow content obsessed uh people here, philosophers like the Stoics, NZA and Bordeaux are popular right now um in the Instagram YouTube space. Uh one noticed is that successful content creators apply these philosophies always through uh storytelling rooted in the real world. exactly similar to your lecture on fiction writing. I both from the academ and someone doing similar content like this, I'm actually torn every day between hyper philosophical accuracy versus doing third mission work to the everyday person. So I have really one question is uh what advice can you provide for example and I would just like to contextualize here in the Philippines that usually um the word morality here is often represented by theologians uh political analysts journalists and even historians and in in a more unfortunate context politicians >> um it's not like in the western world where there are people like Jek Daniel Dennett David Chalmer's and even to a lesser extent Alex O' Conor so it's one of my sort of personal dilemmas um about it. So that would be my question. >> Oh, thank you. Well, first it's wonderful to hear that I', you know, reaching my global audience, getting to meet people in person or at least mediated by Zoom. In response to the previous question, I really should have also said, you know, as a mode for conveying these stories and stuff, things like, you know, YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, these are also great ways for kind of exploring these things. The tension that you note between like the philosophical rigor and accuracy and still something making something accessible is one that I'm navigating every time that I'm making one of my logic videos. We are now kind of deep in the depths of some really complicated technical modal logic proofs and results. And you know, maybe like 20, 30 videos back, someone left a comment where he's like, "You really just need to get back to the basics. Everybody's going to be lost. You just, you know, pair things back, make it simple." And I sat and I thought, it's like, well, yes, but I if I did that, I would just be starting back at video number one. The whole point is it takes me 250 videos to get this far. But uh so I h I make my videos on the assumption that you don't have to necessarily give up the rigor and the precision in order to be accessible. I don't think that these have to be in conflict with each other. I think it requires making sure that you've got kind of good scaffolding and setup so that you don't just jump in at the deep end with all of the complicated technical stuff. There has to be you've got to lay the foundation, you've got to build on it, you've got to do all of this, but you know, in the end, if somebody's kind of been with you on the journey the whole way, they should be able to access the complicated rigorous stuff as well. Now, this kind of works in the case of my logic videos because I have kind of set them up in this kind of continuous narrative where if you want the whole thing, you've got like 40 hours worth of content to get through. If you're doing something that is more kind of oneoff, then you can't necessarily assume that whoever is watching what you're doing now has seen anything else. And so that is much more difficult because then you do have kind of this balance. And I think first of all it's a very good exercise for us as philosophers to have to go through the process of how can I explain this complicated thing without defaulting back to jargon. How can I make sure that what I'm saying is something that is genuinely understandable. But this can also be backed up with kind of helping your audience to recognize when you are kind of balancing accessibility and technical precision. You know, tell them this that you know I'm simplifying things because I want to make this particular point. If you would like more information, check out, you know, and then give some links in the video description or something because most of the people won't care, but there will be the one who's like, "Oh, yeah, actually, I want to know more." And they'll click on the link and they'll follow it. So, yeah, it's I don't think that you necessarily have to give up on, you know, that rigor and precision that we love just in order to make things accessible. And the you know honestly it'd be a really good challenge for anybody here pick some piece of research that you have worked on and see can you turn it into a maximum three minute YouTube video explaining it to somebody who knows nothing about what you're doing. >> Thank you doctor. >> Okay. Um a very quick question. Uh I read it here from Dr. Tan. I think it's it's a it can be answered in a very simple manner. So, Dr. Tan, would you like to ask your question? Okay, sir. Raymond, >> hello. Good afternoon. I I wanted to wait in line behind everyone else, but this is a quick question. Have you tried this as a pedagogical technique? >> Does it work? So I actually got to teach uh using this as my uh methodology in a two-week summer school for undergraduate philosophers. Um which indirectly was how I first came to Manila my first time because one of my students in that summer school was from Yoga Carta. I went there a year and a half ago to visit him and then was like but Manila's only a short flight away. And so that's how I first came to meet JJ in person. Um I have tried it. It was very interesting having taught it that way once. I would do things differently the second time. But as of about a week ago, I have just sent off the uh paper proofs for a paper that I wrote exploring the process of actually teaching this material. So that will be coming out in the next couple of months. >> [clears throat] >> Well, I look forward to having a quick discussion tomorrow in three dimensions with you. Thanks very much. Thank you. >> Okay. So, let's all pray that tomorrow the weather is going to be better so we can all meet each other in person. Uh guys, we have time for one more question. So, let me just call on Mr. Rex Belly Alejandro. Uh perhaps you can ask your question, sir. Mr. Alejandro. Yeah, go ahead. >> Hello. Good afternoon. Am I audible? >> Yes. Yes. I'm sorry I'm in a coffee shop. So my video is on busy. So thank you for this wonderful talk Dr. Sarah. My question is morality is the set of moral standards a person or a group of persons of moral custodial. As such morality may be constituted by certain cultural values that are not applicable or even reasonable to all. Thus a certain set of moral standards may be some parts of legal standards, religious standards, control standards. >> Now ethics of is the philosophical study of morality. It is an inquiry into the fundamental and ultimate principle right and wrong. This is the fundamental sense by which we can understand the globally understood and accepted principles of right or wrong. A global ethics. So how can cultural elements if possible for instance properties XYZ and a form ethics in its fundamental level or is it really the other way around? It's ethics trying to resolve cultural conflicts conflicts and values. Thank you. >> Thank you. That's yeah that's a it's a good and complicated question. the I I'm not sure that I like the characterization of ethics as kind of the study of kind of fundamental and ultimate principles of right and wrong because that presupposes the existence of fundamental and ultimate principles of right and wrong. Now I also don't want to be a moral relativist. I I have kind of issues with relativism in general. But I think that in doing ethical inquiry, it is important that we don't presuppose what the shape of the ethical landscape is. that we need to be open to the idea that there are global and fundamental uh and fundamental ultimate principles of right and wrong, but also open to the possibility that there are not. And keeping these both of these options open is is necessary when we are looking at questions of glo global ethics. In part because if we start from the starting point that there is a fundamental and ultimate principles of right and wrong. Even if we do not intend to the almost certainly the result is going to be that we will take as fundament and ultimate principles the principles of the dominant uh of the dominant voices and that just seems to me to be kind of a route towards bad philosophy. So if we start from a view that this is what ethics is all about practically speaking this is going to you know is not likely to lead us to the truth. Whereas if we were keeping a much more open mind as to whether there are and what they might look like and how we can find them, that's the point at which it becomes crucial that we are engaging with the um you know with kind of individual moral standards, culturally relevant moral standards and as you say kind of different ways about understanding what right and wrong can be. that I having that conversation and that kind of constant checking and that constant feedback within a context where we are not presupposing that there is going to be some fundamental principle that is shared by everything underneath. That's I think where we can be the most effective in trying to develop global ethics in the sense of all of the tools that we need to have in order to be able to have these global ethical conversations. Okay, thank you uh everyone. Uh Dr. Akalman has been kind to message us here in the chat area that if you have other questions, you can message her directly and she will try to uh answer you. Okay, because we have to go on now to our next speaker. Yes. So, thank you very much Dr. Akalan. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. Thank