Philosophy Department's 2024/25 Speaker Series is happy to have Dr. Jeffrey Bishop. Jeffrey is a Tenet Endowed Chair in Bioethics; professor of philosophy, professor of health care ethics; professor of theology Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University, MO.

Talk Title:  "Are you and your digital moral twin morally identical? Moral Identity, Cultural Imaginaries, and the Work of Human Hands"
 

Abstract:  In the world of bioethics, there are calls for the use of a Personal Patient Preference Predictor AI that would (supposedly) be able to make healthcare decisions more in line with one’s own than those one’s family could make. This raises the question: Is your “digital moral twin’s” decision your decision? This talk will argue two points. The first is that you are not identical with your digital moral twin, because unlike the moral twin you are not an algorithmic decision-making machine. The second point is that human identity is a recursive and iterative process that often requires technics and tools. When we make our tools, we inevitably say something about ourselves; and in using the tools, we habitually reinforce that imagined self-identity. Thus, however seemingly narrow in scope a decision-making tool may appear to be (“the digital moral twin is just deciding what to do in this case”), we at the same time are externalizing and materializing our thoughts about ourselves. So, even if we do not wholly believe that the human animal is an algorithmic decision-making machine like the digital moral twin, the use of the tool will result in the culture falling into a habit of the use of this tool, and the use of the tool will recursively shape what we believe ourselves to be.