29 Apr 2017 5:30pm - 6:30pm Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ

Description

This event is free and open to all. Booking is recommended.

“We live in a world full of emerging risk. We generate new capacities with the potential to reorder our world and we discover new risks from old practices. What responsibilities come with doing this work? How should we manage the attendant risks?”

Professor Heather Douglas (University of Waterloo) will describe the nature and boundaries of responsibility for the new in a risky world, and will argue that the responsibility to think through the risks that come with our knowledge production can never be fully removed from the experts doing that work, even if such responsibility can (and in many cases should) be shared. Further, the responsibility to work to avoid existential risks should make the fight for social justice and against inequality central to decisions about how to pursue projects. She will describe why tackling inequality is required, particularly as technological capacities increase.

Professor Douglas is a philosopher of science who focuses on the proper understanding of science given its important role in public policy. She has a particular interest in the role of values in scientific reasoning, the epistemic constraints which could help us weigh complex sets of evidence, the history of philosophy of science in the 20th century, and how to theorise science as a process embedded in society. Click here for a list of publications.  

This talk is organised by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Tel: +44 1223 766886
Email enquiries@crassh.cam.ac.uk