Hobbes, Smith, and modern economoics.

 



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Is cancel culture democratic (with a small "d" even though it is also Democratic with a big "D")?

Regarding Kara's Post: I want to try and tease out how Kara's blog post fits the college into Anderson's image of a private government. It seems like Kara's suggesting that the college itself is the private government. The professors are the governors and the students are the governed. The college constitutes a government because a government "exists wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions" (Anderson 42). Professors can issue orders by assigning tasks students must perform, and professors can sanction students who fail to complete these tasks or fail to do them successfully by giving them poor or failing grades in courses. The college is a private government because the "governed are kept out of decision-making" (45). The students do not, for the most part, come up with their own assignments or come up with grading rubrics for those assignments.  I agree with Kara, based on the image of the college as a private...
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The inevitability of AI dominance

      The issue of ethics in the development of computer science and machine learning is not new and is perhaps one of the most researched areas in the field of ethics in recent years. This is due to the sheer level of advancement that AI has seen in the past two decades. Johnson's paper provides a scathing account of the rather naive notion that our society, inherently rife with bias and bigotry, could create computer programs that are inherently free of bias. Yet it begs the question, what is the alternative?      The development of AI has advanced to such a degree, that it has become nearly impossible to artificially correct biases in systems. During the 90s and early 2000s, machine algorithms and data sets were primitive enough that we can artificially play with datasets (such as the weighting of certain data, etc.) to correct for the outcome. This is no longer possible in the status quo due to the prevalence of the internet. When algorithms are constan...
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Legitimizing crime & women

  Shelby in the chapter on crime tries to seek an answer to the question: if the ghetto poor have an obligation to respect and abide by the law (204). He paints an image of the ghetto poor choosing crime, as a way of supporting oneself, because of the material deprivation and institutional racism (205). These two conditions combined with an unjust justice system does not allow the ghetto poor to get good jobs, which would allow them to gain an income, which would be enough for them. However, as they still need income, they turn to crime to sustain themselves (205). Shelby’s argument on if such behavior is reasonable rests on the idea of justice of the overall system (213). The USA can be agreed not to be a fully just society but rather should be considered either a society with some injustice but not fundamentally unjust or fundamentally unjust (213). To answer this question, Shelby wants to distinguish between civic obligations and natural duties (213). Civic obligations are owed ...
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