Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society (4th ICTs and Society Conference 2012)
From May 2nd to May 4th, I will be at Uppsala University (Uppsala, Sweden) taking part in the 4th ICTs and Society Conference. The conference features a fantastic lineup of plenary talks as well as a wide array of submitted papers/presentations (full program here [PDF]).
For my part, I’ll be contributing to the “Philosophy and Ethics of Information: The Good and the Evil in the Information Society” panel (2:30 - 4:30 PM, Seminar Room B159). My talk -“Rewiring Rawls: Social Justice, Technology, and the Information Society” (based on a chapter of my in-progress dissertation) - revisits the foundations of Rawls’ justice as fairness and interrogates the theory’s appropriateness (or, rather, inappropriateness) for conceiving of social justice in contemporary information societies. In particular, I ask whether certain Rawlsian model-conceptions (of “moral persons” and “well-ordered societies”) are helpful in addressing issues of justice in the face of large-scale and pervasive sociotechnical systems, like the Internet. My answer to that question is, more or less, “I don’t think so,” and I hope to lay out my thoughts on the ways in which Rawls is both right and wrong for thinking about justice and technology today.
Btw, this presentation is why I’m in Sweden. Also: I moved my semi-professional blogging-related activities to Tumblr, and if you are interested in that part of me/my stuff/what I do, then you can follow me at this address! (Fwiw, I’ll probably be moving more of my tumblring activities over there in the coming months.)
