Gregg Caruso on the Waide Center for Applied Ethics
APA Substack Newsletter: Public Philosophy Digest
This month’s newsletter builds on an ongoing dialogue in my Philosophy and Technology series assessing the implications of disrupting technologies roiling our culture and creating uniquely modern problems. We have previously spoken with John Tasioulas about the impact of technology in an interview exploring The Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as an APA Blog piece stressing the important role of contributions from the arts and humanities. This month, we feature an interview with Gregg Caruso as he assumes a new position to lead the Waide Center for Applied Ethics at Fairfield University. The Center addresses today’s leading ethics issues through advancing learning, research, and programming, preparing students to engage in a reflective and pragmatic way. As the initiative takes on the challenge of technology, it is important to place the effort in the history of the discipline and understand whether we have the philosophical tools to address today’s challenges.
Gregg, thanks very much for your willingness to discuss your new chapter as the Director of the Waide Center for Applied Ethics. To start, can you describe the genesis of the Center and what spurred your interest in the effort?
The origins of the Center go back to a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1980 to establish a Program in Applied Ethics at Fairfield University. At the start, it was not a Center, only a small program. Then, in 2002, Patrick J. Waide Jr., a former University trustee and distinguished alumnus of Fairfield University, generously established a continued fund to support invited speakers, program development, conferences, and various other activities related to applied ethics and public policy. In 2018, Patrick Waide made a major gift to establish Applied Ethics as a Center, which now bears his name. Up until now, the Center has been under the steady leadership of David Schmidt. But I will take over as Director starting in the fall.
There were several things that attracted me to the position, including the fact that it’s a university-wide center that collaborates with students, faculty, and national/international leaders across a wide variety of fields to develop strategies for addressing serious ethical challenges confronting society. The Center offers its own Applied Ethics courses and oversees its own program, which means I get to work closely with departments all across campus. I was also attracted by the opportunity to grow the Waide Center into a national and international hub for applied ethics. Fairfield University is fully committed to the work of the Center, as well as the betterment of society and preparing students to be socially responsible. With the support of the University and the continued financial support of Patrick Waide and other generous donors, I know I can expand the activities, reach, and influence of the Center over the next few years. My plans include organizing an annual Waide Center Seminar Series with six or seven nationally recognized speakers per academic year; hosting conferences, workshops, professional training programs, and student-oriented roundtables; and bringing in larger speakers for events in the Quick Center.
The first question is how the Center will approach the impact of technology generally. I have worked for 40+ years in large financial service companies embodying the corporate ethos, where AI is suddenly being assessed for virtually all processes. The rapid adoption will profoundly change our work and culture and represents a rich landscape for applied ethics. Given the ubiquity and impact of technology, please discuss the Center’s areas of focus and how your research and student engagement can make a difference.
As you say, the emergence of AI and the ubiquity of technology in all areas of our lives raises important ethical questions. In my own work, I have been especially interested in how big data and computer algorithms are being used in assessing risk of violence for the purposes of assigning bail, pre-trial detention, and sentencing within the criminal justice system. On the one hand, decisions about public safety and the prevention of violence are more likely to succeed when they are based on accurate predictions of who will engage in violence and under what circumstances. The problem, however, is that accurately predicting violence before it occurs is not easy and fraught with ethical concerns.
For instance, are we justified in restricting the liberty of individuals based on structured actuarial risk assessment techniques that are not a hundred percent accurate or that produce false positives? Additionally, if the data being used in these computational algorithms is already biased because of, say, the historical over-policing of black and brown communities or systemic biases elsewhere in the legal system, then the predictions produced by these tools will simply reflect and reinforce existing cultural biases. We really need to address these ethical challenges now and face them head on, since, as I explain in my recent book on Neurolaw, the use of structured actuarial risk assessment techniques is already ubiquitous in the legal system and not likely going away. In fact, twenty US States already require their courts to use these statistical tools in service of offender sentencing and placement decisions.
This is just one issue related to technology that I would like to explore in the Center. There are many others, of course. For instance, generative AI and LLMs (Large Language Models) have the potential to revolutionize business, healthcare, education, and a number of other industries. On the one hand, these tools have the potential to benefit society in a number of ways. They can enhance efficiency and productivity, facilitate knowledge transfer, and offer personalized assistance in education, e-commerce, and healthcare. On the other hand, serious ethical concerns exist. For instance, LLMs learn from vast amounts of data, and these datasets can inadvertently reflect societal biases. These biases have the potential to manifest themselves in the outputs of these models, perpetuating stereotypes or reinforcing discrimination. Other ethical concerns include privacy risks, loss of jobs, copyright infringement of authors and artists, and the increased ease of cheating and plagiarism.
Through the Waide Center, I hope to encourage collaboration between students, technologists, ethicists, and policymakers to help develop comprehensive and nuanced ethical frameworks to address these and other challenges. By organizing roundtables, symposiums, conferences, and talks, the Center will promote public awareness and education regarding the ethical implications of AI, LLMs, big data, and other new technologies.
Let me now turn to your tools, so to speak, and understand the influence of the discipline in the practical implementation of applied ethics, as the Center draws on the Jesuit pragmatic tradition. How do you leverage the tapestry of ethical traditions as you wrestle with uniquely modern dilemmas? Can you distill prescriptions from the history of philosophy to address radically new problems? To cite two more outlandish examples, first, in a future APA Blog piece on the post-internet age, we will explore the proper interaction with individual’s digital remains, potentially commemorating the dead, without exploiting them. A second, distinctively modern question, reflected in a recent article by Eric Schwitzgebel, is whether AI systems deserve rights? Leaving aside the implementation of regulation or the means to shift norms, as a first principle, does philosophy have an overarching ethical framework or consensus for adjudication? For instance, John Tasioulas calls for an Aristotelian understanding with a humanist approach, focused on human flourishing. How do you think about the intellectual foundation for adapting to disruptive technological “advancement”?
First, let me say that in applied ethics there are many different ethical traditions one could draw on. Although Fairfield University is a Jesuit university, the Center is not ideological or committed to any one tradition. It will explore ethical issues from a multitude of perspectives. For instance, your example of digital remains and commemorating the dead without exploiting them, though a modern problem, is one that can be explored via the “tapestry of ethical traditions,” as you put it. A utilitarian approach would examine various policies on digital remains and weigh the overall aggregate consequences of each to determine which is best. On the other hand, deontologists, like Immanuel Kant, would prohibit treating people as a means to an end, demand respect for autonomy, and ask, what duties, if any, do we have to the dead? Other traditions that can be applied include virtue ethics and care ethics.
I do think, then, that the history of philosophy and ethics can be leveraged and applied to modern problems. That does not mean, of course, that new ways of thinking may also be required. When it comes to environmental ethics, I sometimes wonder if our current values are up to the task. Dale Jameison has argued, for example, that our current values evolved in low-population-density and low-technology societies, with seemingly unlimited access to land other resources, and so are ill-suited to a globalized world. He maintains that the heart of the problem is that these values contain an account of responsibility which presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can be readily identified, and that they are local in time and space. Since climate change fits none of these criteria, our current values are inadequate. In my more pessimistic moments, I fear he might be right—although I hope not.
Speaking just for myself, though, and not as Director of the Waide Center, I tend to agree with John Tasioulas that a humanist approach grounded in virtue ethics and focused on human flourishing and well-being may offer the best ethical approach. Where I may differ, however, is that instead of focusing on uniquely Aristotelian virtues, I propose that non-Western traditions should also inform our conception of virtues and how best to achieve human flourishing. Following Owen Flanagan, I propose that we adopt a multicultural, interdisciplinary approach to morality that brings into dialogue anthropology, empirical moral psychology, behavioral economics, and cross-cultural philosophy to examine, what Flanagan calls, the “varieties of moral possibility.” It’s my personal view that a multicultural, empirically informed inquiry into morality (and the virtues needed for a good human life) can greatly contribute to normative and practical ethics. I am currently working on a new book, How to Live Well Without Free Will, where I develop this kind of approach to virtue ethics and moral psychology. In the book, I also defend a capabilities approach to social justice, which maintains that well-being is the proper end of a theory of justice. I argue that these two approaches work best together.
To expand on characteristically modern dilemmas, I would like to explore the critical issue of expanding remote warfare and the implications of dealing with unlikely stakeholders, such as defense contractors and the Department of Defense. Indeed, I would like to draw on one of my favorite APA Blog pieces, Deadly Drones, Killer Trolleys by Christopher Kutz, where he makes the case that the discipline is complicit in moral calamity with “trolley logic”. In this case, philosophy has laid the groundwork for pernicious simplifications, reducing complex situations to reductive, God’s eye judgments about “who is liable to be killed”. Given the potential fraught alliance between philosophy and ethics in this arena, with remote technology becoming the new battlefield, how might the Center address such issues with grave consequences? Specifically, what role can academia and the Center play alongside private and public sectors to establish "humane" parameters?
I tend to agree with Kutz that “trolleyology”—the philosophical approach to moral dilemmas that applies the logic of the trolley problem and whether to sacrifice one person to save others—is overly simplistic, reductive, and unhelpful. I disagree, however, that philosophy itself is “complicit in moral calamity,” since trolley logic is by no means the only way of doing moral philosophy. In fact, many ethicists and moral philosophers agree that the logic of the trolley problem is improvised. In the case of drones and other military technology, I contest that we need to expand our ethical thinking to include, not exclude, philosophical theories of human rights, respect for persons, just war theory, and the like. In this way, important philosophical considerations can be used to remedy the shortsightedness of trolleyology. If I’m right, we do not need to abandon philosophy to avoid calamity, rather we need to go deeper philosophically and consider more than a cost-benefit analysis or the simple logic of trolley problems.
Warfare, in any form, costs lives and we should never lose sight of that. While drones have the potential to reduce casualties and prevent the deaths of soldiers that would otherwise have to be put on the ground, they also raise their own ethical concern. They include civilian causalities in targeted strikes, potential for misuse by governments or non-state actors, the erosion of traditional notions of warfare, increased militarization and surveillance, and the possibility of perpetuating a culture of remote warfare that dehumanizes both the operators and the targets. While I do not wish to offer any specific guidelines on the ethical use of remote warfare here, I do believe academia (in general) and the Waide Center (in particular) can aid the private and public sector by developing ethical frameworks for addressing such issues. It can also play a role in proposing specific policies, bringing stakeholders together, and educating students so they can then go out into the world and effect change. Educating students, after all, is one of core missions of the Center—and that’s important since they are the next generation of engineers, business leaders, policymakers, and voters.
My last question concerns regulating other brand-new forms of technology that change the course of lives - which introduce new dimensions of personal choice that further complicate applied ethics. First, with respect to accelerated death, we now see pods that will be flooded with nitrogen for assisted suicide. Relatedly, there are well-publicized developments in Canada where the depressed, elderly, or financially strapped may opt for suicide. I explored this new frontier in an earlier APA Blog post with Xavier Symons, in his piece on Conscientious Objection and Euthanasia, where he contends that euthanasia should be seen as outside of medicine and this disagreement should be tolerated as a basic tenet of liberal democracies. On the other hand, concerning technology to extend life, I talked with Christopher Tollefsen about his book, The Way of Medicine, where he argues that we need to de-emphasize the economic exchange framework in medicine - based on a neutral stance and service orientation - and focus on human flourishing and organizing a life around its virtues. In sum, given the powerful economic forces hastening these trends and technologies, are you confronted with greater challenges in addressing scientific advances that restrict “autonomy”?
Your question raises a number of important issues. One has to do with new technologies and how they may affect end-of-life decisions. Another has to do with personal liberty and when the state is justified in restricting it. A third issue, however—one that really complicates matters—has to do with how economic forces exert pressure on individuals in ways that restrict, or otherwise influence, their autonomy and liberty. It’s one thing, then, to ask whether individuals should have the right to end their own lives if, say, they are suffering from terminal cancer. It’s an altogether different question whether we should allow for-profit corporations to market suicide pods. Layer on top of this a broken healthcare system, poor mental health services, and systemic inequality, and serious questions emerge about the pressure financial necessity plays in such “autonomous” decisions.
This is why I believe—and again this is only my personal view—that certain societal goods, such as personal health, are too important to leave up to the forces of the free market. After all, this is the position society has adopted when it comes to public education, infrastructure, and police, fire, and military protection. If we had universal healthcare, as most other rich democratic societies do, it would not only be more humane, it would also alleviate economic pressure on individuals as well as remove the for-profit incentives of insurance companies. The short answer to your question, then, is yes. Powerful economic forces complicate questions about autonomy and the development, marketing, and availability of new medical technologies.
Gregg, thanks so much for your thoughtful responses, which reinforce the important work of the Center. I look forward to continuing the dialogue on the APA Blog and wish you great success in your new role.
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“Relatedly, there are well-publicized developments in Canada where the depressed, elderly, or financially strapped may opt for suicide.”
Quite the misrepresentation of the reality of the well-regulated medical assistance in dying regime here.