Title: Solving Certain Type of Conflicts – The Function of Moral Agency and The Role of Emotions
By Dilara Boğa (CEU, Philosophy)
Date: Thursday, October 31, 2024
Time: 1530-1700
Room: H232
Abstract: As part of a larger project which aims to answer the question of whether current artificial intelligences (AIs) are, or can be, emotional moral agents, here, in this talk, I will focus on what moral agency is and why emotions matter for it. I argue that understanding how morality evolved can help us understand its function which, I defend, is to solve certain conflicts. Oliver Scott Curry (2016) defines these conflicts as the problems of cooperation. I discuss Curry’s account and offer a revised version of it and then I look at the role of emotions in moral agency. I argue that emotions solve a specific conflict/problem of cooperation: the problem of trust. This problem is a crucial one and it is referred as the commitment problem by Robert H. Frank (1988). I discuss Frank’s account and will suggest that having emotions enables children’s moral development and makes them socially learn how to trust each other (Sterelny 2012; Tomasello 2016).
About the speaker: Dilara Boğa is a doctoral candidates at Central European University. Her research focuses on interconnected issues in the philosophy of action, ethics and moral responsibility, and the philosophy of technology. Her dissertation is on the role emotions play in the moral agency of human beings and the consequences this has for the design of morally good, artificial agents. She has been the recipient of CEU’s Write-Up Grant and the Society for Applied Philosophy’s Doctoral Scholarship Award. She is the co-founder of the Ethics and Technology Early-Career Group (ETEG).
