This paper explores the possibility of a new philosophical turn in robot-ethics, considering whether the concepts of Emanuel Levinas particularly his conception of the ‘face of the other’ can be used to understand how non-expert users interact with robots. The term ‘Robot’ comes from fiction and for non-experts and experts alike interaction with robots may be coloured by this history. This paper explores the ethics of robots that is based on the user seeing the robot as infinitely complex.

We should all be concerned about the normalisation of torture. Exploration and critique of the ways torture is normalised by popular culture.

This article in the journal 'History of European Ideas', examines Jeremy Bentham’s treatment of taste in his essays on sexuality, in the context of the historical development of the idea of taste as a singular practice with a broadly social character. My analysis of Bentham’s comments on taste in these essays, also engages with Bentham’s criticisms of David Hume’s writing on social standards of taste. Bentham’s essays on sexuality enable us to understand why he condemns Hume’s critical, and avowedly unprejudiced, (...) analysis of good and bad taste, with as much vehemence as he does the anti-democratic attitudes of ‘aristo-cratical’ taste. In his essays on sexuality, Bentham defines taste as a disposition to derive pleasure, that assumes meaning in a social context where human beings transact with one another to secure and increase their enjoyment. By this definition, judgments on good and bad taste are aspects of an anti-social practice that exerts a negative influence on what Bentham calls ‘an uncontrolled choice’ that links pleasure to utility. (shrink)

One-day conference organised by Dr Malcolm Quinn This conference, organised by Quinn in collaboration with Tate Britain, was the latest in a series of engagements by Quinn with the legacy of JS Mill and the idea of an aesthetics of liberty, beginning with an address to Mill’s ‘On Liberty’in a co-authored book, then developed through a paper at the JS Mill Bicentennial conference at University College London and another at the conference ‘Liberty, Human Values and Utilitarianism,’ Yokohama National University, Japan. (...) This latter paper, initially delivered at a conference that included many of the most important researchers in the field, made a decisive shift from discussion of the epistemology of Millian liberty to an address to questions of art, sensibility and aesthetics. It formed part of Quinn’s development of ideas for the ‘On Liberty and Art’ conference at Tate Britain, which has initiated a WCA research project investigating frameworks and reference points for a discourse on liberty conducted through art practice, with presentations from the artists John Russell, Dave Beech, Bob and Roberta Smith, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Amanda Beech and Roman Vasseur. Quinn’s opening address isolated the question of aesthetic liberty as a ‘sensibility of freedom’ and discussed how artists are included within a current media conversation on the crisis of liberty and free speech. Quinn also discussed the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay as exemplifying a discourse on liberty developed through art practice that directly challenged the utilitarian model of liberty as non-coercion and equal distribution developed by Mill and Bentham. Quinn also included reference to the ‘rights to art’ cited in the UN Declaration of human rights of 1948, which produce a conflation of collective/moral and personal rights that have influenced current understanding of the relationship of liberty and art. (shrink)