Adam Briggle

Knowledge Kills Action: Why Principles Should Play a Limited Role in Policy-making

This essay argues that principles should play a limited role in policy-making. It first illustrates the dilemma of timely action in the face of uncertain unintended consequences. It then introduces the precautionary and proactionary principles as different alignments of knowledge and action within the policy-making process. The essay next considers a cynical and a hopeful reading of the role of these principles in public policy debates. We argue that the two principles, despite initial appearances, are not all that different when it comes to formulating public policy. We also suggest that allowing principles to determine our actions undermines the sense of autonomy necessary for true action.

Philosophy in the Age of Neoliberalism

This essay argues that political, economic, and cultural developments have made the twentieth century disciplinary approach to philosophy unsustainable. It (a) discusses the reasons behind this unsustainability, which also affect the academy at large, (b) describes applied philosophy as an inadequate theoretical reaction to contemporary societal pressures, and (c) proposes a dedisciplined and interstitial approach—“field philosophy”—as a better response to the challenges facing the twenty-first century philosophy.

Opening the Black Box: The Social Outcomes of Scientific Research

Society is increasingly asking federally funded science to demonstrate its returns on investment. This has spawned an emerging science of science and innovation policy community that seeks predictive knowledge to allow policymakers to more effectively steer the course of science toward social goals. This is a laudable effort, but it is making a “black box” out of the inevitable value judgments entailed in quantifying outcomes. A better approach would be to open the black box by engaging in fundamental inquiry about the good and we hope science will deliver. But this may be a utopian project.

The Ethics of Computer Games: A Character Approach

As growing influences in contemporary society, computer games are raising a host of ethical issues that have garnered both negative and positive appraisals. One promising approach to many of these issues focuses on the character of gamers as the relevant locus of ethically significant activity. This paper develops a character approach to the ethics of computer games. It frames the important question as one of conceptualizing and evaluating the normatively charged traffic between worlds (real and virtual) and develops the concepts of character and valuation as ways of addressing this question. The final section sketches four topics in computer game ethics for which the character approach shows promise.

The great impacts Houdini

ABSTRACTI argue that the broader impacts conversation in research evaluation is designed to look like it addresses difficult questions about progress and the good life, whereas in fact it avoids them. In so doing, this discourse does not stay neutral on these questions. Rather, it supplies a default, unexamined answer. The use of normative anchors, or principles, in talk about Responsible Research and Innovation is laudable but inadequate. The problem is, though, that any adequate conversation would seem hopelessly antiquated if not hostile to the assumed goodness of technoscience.

Research Ethics Education in the STEM Disciplines: The Promises and Challenges of a Gaming Approach

AbstractWhile education in ethics and the responsible conduct of research (RCR) is widely acknowledged as an essential component of graduate education, particularly in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math), little consensus exists on how best to accomplish this goal. Recent years have witnessed a turn toward the use of games in this context. Drawing from two NSF-funded grants (one completed and one on-going), this paper takes a critical look at the use of games in ethics and RCR education. It does so by: (a) setting the development of research and engineering ethics games in wider historical and theoretical contexts, which highlights their promise to solve important pedagogical problems; (b) reporting on some initial results from our own efforts to develop a game; and (c) reflecting on the challenges that arise in using games for ethics education. In our discussion of the challenges, we draw out lessons to improve this nascent approach to ethics education in the STEM disciplines .

Bioconservatism as Customized Science

Bioconservatism is a portmanteau of “biology” and “conservatism”. Thus, it implicates a certain customization of science, namely a conservative biology. Bioconservatives (or biocons) want a biology built according to conservative specifications. In the main, their customization work consists of drawing lines and limits for biological research and biotechnological applications-to reign in or prevent the disruptive potentials of technosciences that threaten the “known goods” of the present.

Nature or neoliberalism? Two views on science and the persistence of environmental controversies

Why is the growth of scientific research on environmental issues often accompanied by the exacerbation, rather than the abatement, of political dispute? This paper compares two answers to this question. The first theory explains persistent controversy as a symptom of the richness of nature. The second theory explains persistent controversy as a symptom of neoliberal or free market ideology. The two theories recommend opposite courses of action for making policy progress. To illustrate this debate, the last section sketches a brief case study of air pollution from natural gas drilling.

Strawmen at the Symposium: A Response

In this essay, we reply to the five commentaries offered of our 2016 book, Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st Century Philosophy. We argue that, in a recursive fashion, those commentaries exemplify the thesis of our book – that contemporary philosophy has a blind spot concerning the philosophical priors of its status as an institution. That is, 20th and now 21st century philosophy has limited metaphilosophy to being an exclusively theoretical exercise, neglecting to also pursue a ‘philosophy of philosophy’ in its material, bureaucratic, and Marxist dimensions. After making these points in the introduction, the article is divided into three parts that deal, in turn, with comments that are facile, earnest, and provocative. We then conclude by noting the unintentional irony of our contemporary situation, where the vast majority of philosophy departments are inhabited by sophists rather than philosophers.

The Policy Turn in the Philosophy of Technology

The empirical turn has been framed far too much in terms of what philosophers say and not to whom they speak. I apply the logic of the empirical turn to the very philosophers who carry its banner. I argue that once we look at them through their own lens, we discover that the empirical turn is not such a revolutionary thing after all. It is a turn within the disciplinary model of knowledge production. In other words, its own material culture and political economy look just the same as so-called classical philosophy of technology. In contrast, I sketch out what a policy turn looks like, which is a turn toward a new model of philosophical research, one that begins with real-world problems as they are debated in public and cashes out its value in real-time with a variety of stakeholders. I conclude by sketching some of the main ramifications of taking a policy turn in the philosophy of technology.