Responsibility for Justice: NEE book club goes digital

March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Emma Moormann

In light of the COVID-19 outbreak, the NeuroEpigenEthics team members decided to stay in touch through video conferencing. Our online team meetings take place at least once a week. This week, we organized our first online book club on Iris Young’s Responsibility for Justice.

The concept of responsibility is one of those central to the NeuroEpigenEthics project. Each of our researchers is grappling with issues related to responsibility in their own way. To start a conversation on issues of structural injustice and collective responsibility in particular, we decided to read Young’s 2011 work Responsibility for Justice. The work of this prominent feminist political philosopher proved to be a very rich ground for discussion and further thought.

In our discussion we touched upon the main concepts in the book and tried to apply them to our own research. We appreciated Young’s project of shifting the focus away from a liability model of responsibility towards a social connection model of responsibility. Rather than pointing fingers, ascribing blame or guilt, or isolating those who did something wrong, we believe it might be useful to choose a more collective and forward-looking approach to responsibility. Young explains that “all those who contribute by their actions to structural processes with some unjust outcomes share responsibility for the injustice” (p. 96). Crucially, individuals can only discharge their responsibilities of this kind by taking collective action.

We discussed how Young’s ideas and those of other authors working on forward-looking responsibility might be applied to our own project(s). We talked, for example, about the tension between responsibilities that may be felt by a clinician diagnosing people with neurodevelopmental disorders. Wanting to be responsible for both the individual well-being of a patient and improving social structures that are currently unjust (for example because they are stigmatizing) may lead to inner conflicts. Others mentioned how insights from epigenetics influence our thinking about the relation between forward-looking and backward-looking dimensions of responsibility, and vice versa.

The picture below provides those interested with an overview of the points that were raised in this thought-provoking book club.

Iris Young, 2011, Responsibility for Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

An overview of our book club discussion — An overview of our thoughts and the subsequent discussion

From Bergson over Bohr to Barad Session 4: Bohr and/vs. Whitehead

March 13, 2020March 13, 2020 by Jo Bervoets

Context:

We started our journey towards Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway” by reading Bergson’s “Time and Free Will” (see report here). We then saw Bergson’s initial challenge to psychophysics morphing into the Einstein-Bergson debate about the primacy of physics over philosophy (see report here). We saw that Bergson was not the only one contesting a classical-corpuscular view of mechanistic physics as the ideal for science (and, therefore, philosophy). We discussed A. N. Whitehead’s proposal (see report here) of a more holistic interpretation of the universe based on physico-mathematical interpretations. Although this ‘process philosophy’ was largely ignored in contemporary analytic philosophy, it serves as direct inspiration to a lot of contemporary thinkers outside of that tradition. Our last stop will be dedicated to the philosophical ideas of Niels Bohr explicitly discussed in Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. Bohr also contrasted his ideas explicitly with those of Einstein which made it interesting to look at (the many) alignments and (some) discrepancies of his views, as founding father of quantum physics with the philosophy proposed by Whitehead.

Scratching a brick wall

March 13, 2020March 6, 2020 by Leni Van Goidsenhoven

Katrien Schaubroeck and Leni Van Goidsenhoven
(Centre for Ethics, University of Antwerp)
Original blog: A* Antwerp Gender & Sexuality Studies Network

On February 18th, on Audre Lorde’s birthday (to whom the lecture was dedicated), feminist killjoy Sara Ahmed talked to a full Kaaitheater about doors. More precisely about closing, slamming, hitting doors. The title of her lecture was “Closing the door. Complaint as diversity work.” She did not only talk about closing doors, but also about revolving doors, about brick walls and long corridors. She talked about how doors can be slammed upon you when you try to enter as being invited but not welcomed, or how you can feel trapped in a revolving door, hit by a brick wall, and disoriented in endless corridors.