Lecture Series: Thinking Pluralisms
Pluralism is a powerful and ambivalent concept. Pluralism of knowledge, culture, and values is declared a political aim necessary to address pressing contemporary societal challenges. At the same time, people use pluralism to defend forms of relativism that undermine a sense of and commitment to a just common world. ETH Knowledge Section convenes the Thinking Pluralisms lecture series to investigate the forms, histories, and significance of epistemic, cultural, and normative pluralisms today.
Just Health?: Transformative Constitutionalism and Post-apartheid Democracy
A public lecture by Kaushik Sunder Rajan (University of Chicago)
In this talk, I think about the relationship between health and constitutionalism in post-apartheid South Africa. The South African Constitution, hailed as a hallmark vision for social and economic emancipation after decades of apartheid-era injustice, enshrines within it a fundamental right to health. The particular manifestations of this constitutional principle in the contemporary South African context are deeply consequential for understanding the politics of health. By attending to the co-productions of health and the law, I trace a certain story of bioconstitutionalism, one that is marked by transformative ideals, burdened by the challenges and failures in living up to them, and haunted by ongoing histories of racialized extractive capitalism that attach to the geopolitics of global, neoliberal, financialized capital. Thus, I consider the relationship between science, ethics and justice by thinking about the normative orders that are imagined and substantiated in transitional, constitutional moments, the racialized political economies within and out of which they are inscribed, and the consequent terrain of struggle over what democracy might even mean and how it might be instituted, preserved and rendered emancipatory. I do so by tracing a certain genealogy of case law and putting it in conversation with philosophies and critiques of constitutionalism as an inherently political modality, one that has a particularly important and contested place in the emergent and fragile democratic configurations of post-apartheid South Africa.
Bio:
Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology and a former co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) at the University of Chicago. He works on the global political economy of the life sciences and biomedicine, with an empirical focus on India, South Africa, and the United States. He is the author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (2006), Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine (2017), Multisituated: Ethnography as diasporic praxis (2021), and editor of Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets (2012). He is currently embarked on a research project that studies the intersections between health, law, and constitutionalism in South Africa.
Date & Time: October 20, 2023 from 10:15 – 12:00
Venue: ETH Zurich, Clausiusstrasse 59, 8092 Zürich, RZ F 21
Everybody is welcome to join!
No registration, no entrance fee.
Human Rights, AI Models, and the Quest for Pluralism
Prof. Dr. Iris Eisenberger
In its case law, the European Court of Human Rights considers plurality to be essential for a democracy. The court refers to media pluralism, cultural, spiritual and religious pluralism, socio-economic and political pluralism, amongst others. According to the court, pluralism requires institutional diversity and individual freedom of choice. The state has a duty to guarantee this pluralism. Plurality discourses have also reached the digital industry and AI legislators. Developers of AI models are experimenting with different concepts of plurality. The EU AI Act contains provisions that could ensure plurality, such as the newly introduced fundamental rights impact assessment or the provisions for foundation models. Do these forms of plurality protection meet the requirements of the European Court of Human Rights? Are there other or better instruments for protecting plurality? Are these even the right questions to ask?
Bio: Iris Eisenberger is Professor of Innovation and Public Law at the external page Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law at the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on innovation and technology law, the protection of fundamental and human rights and on the intersection of law, innovation and society. Her more recent publications in English include: Data Recording for Responsible Robotics. in 2023 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts, ARSO 2023. S. 103-109 doi: 10.1109/ARSO56563.2023.10187414 (together with Skerlj J, Braun M, Witz S, Breuer S, Bak M, Scholz S et al); An interdisciplinary understanding of energy citizenship: Integrating psychological, legal, and economic perspectives on a citizen-centred sustainable energy transition. Energy Research & Social Science. 2023. 97. 102959. doi: external page https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.102959 (together with Hamann KRS, Bertel MP, Ryszawska B, Lurger B, Szymański P, Rozwadowska M et al.); Regulatory sandboxes in the AI Act: reconciling innovation and safety? Law, Innovation and Technology. 2023. 15(2). S. 357-389. doi: 10.1080/17579961.2023.2245678 (together with Buocz T, Pfotenhauer S); Demystifying Legal Personhood for Non-Human Entities: A Kelsenian Approach. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. 2022. 43(1). doi: external page https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqac024 (together with Buocz T).
Date & Time: Thursday, March 14, 2024 from 18:15 – 19:45
Venue: ETH Zurich, Clausiusstrasse 59, 8092 Zürich, RZ F 21
Everybody is welcome to join!
No registration, no entrance fee.
Emergent Pluralisms: Ethics in the Age of Generative AI
Prof. Dr. Louise Amoore
The questions that confront us are many: what are the challenges for data ethics in the age of ChatGPT and generative AI models? Do we need to rethink what we mean by “ethics” when algorithms are extracting, selecting and generating the features that matter? The rapid rise of generative AI has posed new challenges for what I have elsewhere called a “cloud ethics”. That is to say, one cannot stand outside of the world of generative AI to adjudicate its ethics because it is actively remaking that world. In one sense generative AI appears to embrace pluralism and the multiplicities of governing societies. The computational paradigm shift – from the use of broadly structured, domain specific, labelled data for specific tasks, to the training of a general model on large corpora of data – embraces the discovery of emergent properties from data distributions. In this talk I will suggest that generative AI is challenging the idea of ethics in ways that amplify the already existing difficulties and limitations of historical statistical and machine learning models. The question of ethics does not reside solely or primarily with the output that is generated by a model, but rather with generativity as such – with the world-making capacities of algorithms that incorporate and foreclose plurality and diversity.
Bio
Louise Amoore is Professor of Political Geography and Deputy Head of Department. Her research and teaching focuses on aspects of geopolitics, technology and security. She is particularly interested in how contemporary forms of data and algorithmic analysis are changing the pursuit of state security and the idea of society. Her most recent book, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others, is published by Duke University Press in Spring 2020. Among her other published works on technology, biometrics, security, and society, her book, external page The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (2013)examines the governance of low probability, high consequence events, and its far-reaching implications for society and democracy. Louise’s research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, EPSRC, AHRC, and NWO. She is appointed to the UK independent body responsible for the ethics of biometric and data-driven technologies. Louise is co-editor of the Journal Progress in Human Geography.
Louise's previous projects include her RCUK Global Uncertainties leadership fellowship (2012-2015). Her project 'external page Securing Against Future Events' (SaFE): Preemption, Protocols and Publics' examines how inferred futures become the basis for new forms of security risk calculus.
She has also conducted ESRC projects on the techniques and technologies of biometric and data-driven borders: 'Contested Borders' (2007-2009), a project within the ESRC's non-governmental public action programme. The work has produced new insights into how contemporary security practices enter and reconfigure public space.
'external page Data Wars: New Spaces of Governing in the European War on Terror' (2008-12) was a three year ESRC bilateral project in collaboration with Marieke de Goede at the University of Amsterdam. Researchers at Durham and Amsterdam investigated how data elements from the mobilities of people and money become redeployed for preemptive security.
Date & Time: Thursday, May 30, 2024 from 11:15 – 12:45
Venue: ETH Zurich, Clausiusstrasse 59, 8092 Zürich, RZ F 21
Everybody is welcome to join!
No registration, no entrance fee.