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About this talk

Inaugural Lectures are a celebration of our Professors, as they present an overview of their contribution to their field, as well as highlight its latest developments. The lecture is open to both members of the university community and the wider public, and is followed by a reception in the Great Hall. 'The Black Holes of Ethical Life: Habit, Critical Agency and the Design of Digital Worlds.' We like to think of ourselves as the authors of our choices, weighing options and deciding freely. Yet most of what lets us act well in the world happens beneath conscious awareness, in the habits that let us read a room, a patient, a page. These habits are the black holes of our ethical life: we rarely see them directly, only infer them from how we behave. This lecture argues that our capacity for critical agency is not a fixed possession but a fragile achievement. It rests on habits of thought and perception remaining supple enough to be interrogated. That suppleness is not guaranteed. It can be worn away, and today it is being reshaped at unprecedented scale by the digital environments we inhabit. Drawing on 25 years of work in the philosophy of law and ethics, the speaker asks what it takes for critical agency to flourish rather than rigidify, and why this question belongs at the centre of how we design our digital infrastructure. The stakes are practical. If the capabilities underpinning critical agency are cultivated rather than simply given, then the shape of our environments is never ethically neutral, and neither is our silence about how they are built. The lecture closes with a call to a more demanding kind of AI ethics, one prepared to get its hands dirty. It highlights some of the work underway at the Centre for Data Futures, where interfaces are being built that give communities a reason to keep refining how uncertainty is expressed by the systems they rely on. The point is not, in the first instance, to improve the systems, welcome though that is. It is to keep alive the human normative practices through which a community decides what matters to it. Programme: 18:00-19:00 Lecture, 19:00-20:00 Drinks Reception

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