Never let it be said that we don't tackle the big questions on this podcast. This week we're discussing no less a subject than the meaning of life, with Predrag Cicovacki.

Predrag is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (USA), where he has been teaching since 1991. He has served as a visiting professor in Germany, Russia, Luxembourg, Serbia, France, and India. He's interested in problems of good and evil, violence and nonviolence, philosophy of war and peace, and ethics.

In 2021, in the midst of very difficult personal circumstances and a global pandemic, Predrag set to work on a book called The Meaning of Life: a Quick Immersion. It's a great book: very clear, heartfelt, personal and full of insights. I hugely enjoyed reading it, and enjoyed even more the opportunity to talk to Predrag about it.

You can find out more about Predrag here:

https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/philosophy/faculty/predrag-cicovacki

A few places you can buy The Meaning of Life: A Quick Immersion:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-meaning-of-life-a-quick-immersion-predrag-cicovacki/17413009?ean=9781949845280
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/THE-MEANING-OF-LIFE-A-Quick-Immersion-by-Cicovacki-Predrag/9781949845280
https://www.amazon.co.uk/MEANING-LIFE-Quick-Immersion-Immersions/dp/1949845281

I asked Predrag to recommend some further reading and, in line with the general vibe of this episode, he suggested that you might like to reconnect with a book that meant a lot to you in childhood or adolescence. For Predrag, it's The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The first one that came to mind for me was The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. What about you?

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, as well as research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. Her book More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech explores the way technology reinforces inequality and asks the question, what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they're coded into the system itself?

It's a great read, full of eye-opening examples and insights, from a writer with the technical and ethical expertise to get to the heart of what is clearly a very significant challenge for society. We were only able to scratch the surface in this short conversation, but it's changed my thinking about technology ethics, and I was very grateful to Professor Broussard for taking the time to talk to us.

You can find out more about Professor Broussard here:

https://meredithbroussard.com/

Places you can buy More Than a Glitch include the following:

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/More-Than-a-Glitch-by-Meredith-Broussard/9780262548328
https://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Than-Glitch-Confronting-Ability/dp/0262047659

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Ethical questions about the dead are frequently interesting, puzzling, surprising, and weird. All of these things become clear in this conversation with Dr Joseph Bowen. Joe is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, specialising in moral, political, and legal philosophy. As well as whether the dead have rights, his research focuses on the nature of rights and directed duties, the justifications for and constraints on harming, the nature and scope of duties to rescue, and just war theory.

Here's Joe:

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/4794/dr-joseph-bowen
https://joseph-bowen.weebly.com/

He's written about whether the dead have rights in this paper:

Bowen, J. 2022. ‘The Interest Theory of Rights at the Margins: Posthumous Rights’, Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer​, Visa Kurki & Mark McBride (eds), (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

And here are some other readings which might be of interest:

• Jeff McMahan, ‘Death and the Value of Life’ Ethics 99, 1 (1998), pp. 32-61.
• Cécile Fabre, ‘Posthumous Rights’, in Matthew H. Kramer, and others (eds), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2008).
• David Boonin, Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (New York; Oxford University Press, 2009).

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

This episode is an exploration of the relationship between love and time with Troy Jollimore. As well as being a Professor in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Troy is a successful poet. His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for 2006. His third, Syllabus of Errors, appeared on the New York Times' list of the best books of poetry published in 2015. He's also a literary critic, and in this interview he illustrates his ideas with examples from films and literature, as well as real life.

You can find out more about Troy's work - the philosophy, the poetry and the literary criticism - here:

https://www.troyjollimore.com/

There's a list of his philosophical papers here, including things he's written about films including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vertigo and The Big Lebowski, all of which are referred to in the episode:

https://www.troyjollimore.com/philosophy-papers

You can read the Song of Solomon (King James version) here:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song%20of%20Solomon%201&version=KJV

...and you can listen to 'Endless Love' by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bwwo7ctG10

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Dr. Munamato Chemhuru is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, Zimbabwe, and a Senior Research Associate in Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

He has been working on a project entitled Conceptualising Environmental Justice through Epistemic Justice in Africa, collaborating with former podcast guest Jamie Dow.

Munamato's research highlights the way Africans have been subjected to epistemic injustice in the debate around environmental ethics and the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. That's to say, African voices are often ignored, misinterpreted or not taken seriously. This injustice extends to the theoretical frameworks which are used to conceptualise environmental ethics, and towards the end of the interview, Munamato introduces unhu/ubuntu as an alternative ethical framework which promises to enrich our understanding of the ethical terrain in which environmental responsibilities are grounded.

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Politicians sometimes have to make decisions where there is no option that looks good, morally speaking. They may have to get their hands dirty, acting in a way that looks immoral - sometimes powerfully so - in order to avoid some greater evil. This is called the problem of dirty hands, and it's long been of interest to philosophers. However, most of the philosophical work about dirty hands has focused on the person whose hands are dirty: have they acted wrongly, are they blameworthy, how should we respond to them? Christina Nick, a philosopher based at the IDEA Centre, is more interested in the victims of dirty-handed politicians. These victims may have been subjected to quite profound harms as a result of the actions of politicians who were trying to avoid some even worse harm. What does it look like to treat these victims justly? Specifically, are they owed reparations? And if so, what form should these reparations take, and should these reparations be made by, or on behalf of, the politicians who made the decision?

Christina Nick is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics atthe IDEA Centre at the University of Leeds. Her PhD thesis “The Problem of Democratic Dirty Hands” examined how we should understand the occurence of moral conflict for public office holders and how we ought to ascribe moral responsibility for the outcomes of such actions in modern democracies.

Here's an article about the Claudy bombing on the BBC website:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-62332152

...and the Police Ombudsman's report into the bombing:

https://www.policeombudsman.org/Investigation-Reports/Historical-Reports/Police-Ombudsman-s-Claudy-report

Here's an introduction to the philosophical problem of dirty hands in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Kate Lister and Pilar Lopez Cantero.

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Pilar Lopez Cantero talking about experiences of breakup and how to move on well.

https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/p-lopezcantero

Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/