Learning, Planning, Agency

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Humans attune to social norms and regularities, treating conformity with these norms as intrinsically rewarding, and deviance from these norms as errors to be corrected. But we live in a world that's thick with structural racism, sexism, ableism, trans*phobia, and xenophobia. And since many forms of practical competence are subserved by statistical learning systems that only adjust their behavior when things do not go as expected, biases tend to become calcified in the ongoing practices that we rely on to do academic philosophy, to navigate interpersonal interactions, to make medical decisions, and more. In this seminar, we will examine the forms of learning and behavior shaping that help to calcify such biases, and we will try to figure out how we can get the learning systems we rely upon to be attuned to ethically preferable values. Over the course of the semester, we will try to find plausible resources for developing an account of human freedom anchored in liberation from calcified patterns of bias, marginalization, and exclusion. Our readings will be drawn from the cognitive sciences, action theory, and moral psychology - and we will read things that lie within and outside of the familiar Anglo-European philosophical canon.