Public Understanding of Climate Science and the Ethics of Expertise

Public understanding of climate change turns significantly on epistemic trust and distrust of those claiming rational-social authority. Attending to the ethics of expert/non-expert trust relations and to argumentation and rhetoric in popular climate discourse, I argue, illustrates the importance of epistemic trustworthiness for the social propagation of climate scientific knowledg

What We Owe Owls. Nonideal Relationality among Fellow Creatures in the Old Growth Forest

Though many of us have constructed our lives (or have had them constructed for us) such that it is easy to ignore or forget, human lives are entangled with other animals in many ways. Some interspecies relations would arguably exist in some form or another even under an ideal model of animal ethics. Others have an inescapably non-ideal character – these relationships exist as they do because things have gone wrong. In such circumstances we have reparative duties to animals we have wronged because we have wronged them. Here I draw upon Christine Korsgaard’s “Fellow Creatures” (2018) and other nonideal approaches to animal ethics to critically assess the United States Fish & Wildlife Service practice of killing barred owls to protect endangered spotted owls in the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. This is a difficult case to be sure, but one that can benefit from non-ideal moral assessment in terms of interspecies relational repair. I argue for increased spotted owl habitat preservation and forest restoration as an alternative to barred owl removal that better aligns with both nonideal relational animal ethics and stated US Fish & Wildlife Service values

Nontoxic: Masculinity, Allyship, and Feminist Philosophy

This open access book argues for allyship masculinity as an open-ended, intersectional model for feminist men. It provides a roadmap for navigating between toxic masculinity on one side, and feminist androgyny on the other. Normative visions for what men should be take many forms. For some it is love and mindfulness; for others, wildness and heroic virtue. For still others the desire to separate a healthy manhood from toxic masculinity is a mistake: better to refuse to be men and salvage our humanity. Though Ben Almassi challenges the visions that Mary Wollstonecraft, bell hooks, and others have offered, he shares their belief that masculinity can be grounded in feminist values and practices. Almassi argues that we can make sense of relational allyship as practices of feminist masculinity, such that men can make distinctive and constructive contributions to gender justice in the unjust meantime

Conflicts of Interest, Community-based Research, and Trustworthy Science Communication

Disclosure of authorial conflicts of interest have become a cornerstone of scientific publication, championed as a sensible middle ground between extremes of categorical prohibition of for-profit research or acceptance of findings regardless of origins. Elliott argues that while some interests may be biasing, others are not; so we must assess how interests affect research credibility, and Elliott proposes criteria to refine disclosure policies. Here I evaluate Elliott’s proposed criteria as they apply to community-based research, drawing on the United Church of Christ’s study on toxic waste and race as a paradigm case of interested yet trustworthy research

Nontoxic: Masculinity, Allyship, and Feminist Philosophy

This open access book argues for allyship masculinity as an open-ended, intersectional model for feminist men. It provides a roadmap for navigating between toxic masculinity on one side, and feminist androgyny on the other. Normative visions for what men should be take many forms. For some it is love and mindfulness; for others, wildness and heroic virtue. For still others the desire to separate a healthy manhood from toxic masculinity is a mistake: better to refuse to be men and salvage our humanity. Though Ben Almassi challenges the visions that Mary Wollstonecraft, bell hooks, and others have offered, he shares their belief that masculinity can be grounded in feminist values and practices. Almassi argues that we can make sense of relational allyship as practices of feminist masculinity, such that men can make distinctive and constructive contributions to gender justice in the unjust meantime

Logos, Pathos, Ethos: Intersections of Philosophy and Rhetoric

This interdisciplinary presentation examines human culture and thought through the lenses of both philosophy and rhetoric. Dr. Athon’s work explores rhetoric and social justice, Dr. Almassi discusses ethics and interpersonal trust, and Christopher Brennan examines decision-making processes. Through philosophical frameworks, these research areas explore how society constructs social values, judgments, and norms

Relationally Responsive Expert Trustworthiness

Social epistemologists often operationalize the task of indirectly assessing experts’ trustworthiness to identifying whose beliefs are more reliably true on matters in an area of expertise. Not only does this neglect the philosophically rich space between belief formation and testimonial utterances, it also reduces trustworthiness to reliability. In ethics of trust, by contrast, explicitly relational views of trust include things like good will and responsiveness. One might think that relational aspects can be safely set aside for social epistemology of trust in experts, that such considerations may be relevant for personal relationships but not for expert trustworthiness. Against these claims I argue for the social-epistemic relevance of relational aspects of trust in experts, and to that end I discuss three sorts of considerations – responsively positive, neutral, and negative factors – that can make a difference for expert trustworthiness