Regina Rini’s research while affiliated with New York University and other places

It’s a privilege to publish a book, and it’s a privilege more for that book to receive time and attention from thoughtful interlocutors. I’m grateful for the care my critics have taken in their treatment of the book, and I hope that this exchange is as illuminating for them – and readers of this symposium – as it has been for me. The contributions span a helpfully wide range of viewpoints. Hrishikesh Joshi presents a sceptical challenge to the basis of my project, questioning whether the concept of microaggression has empirical tenability or social utility. Emily McTernan and I have a more intramural dispute; McTernan also takes microaggression seriously, but she disagrees with me about how it should be conceptualized. Jeanine Weekes Schroer’s view is probably the closest to mine; ours might be called a family dispute, in agreement on the big questions but still not quite identical on what to do with our shared conceptual resources. I’ll proceed from the outside in, from Joshi’s scepticism to McTernan’s internal critique to Schroer’s friendly amendments. I don’t have the space to address all of the many thoughtful points my critics raise, but I hope I’ve drawn out the most interesting places where we disagree.

Précis Regina Rini If you’re like me, you only heard about ‘microaggression’ in the last decade or so. You may have been sceptical. Perhaps it seemed like this was just a trendy campus buzzword, or you worried people were jumping too quickly to assign blame for small mistakes. That was my very first reaction. But when I turned a philosophical lens on the idea, I realized I’d been wrong. In fact, the concept of ‘microaggression’ has been around for more than 50 years, no mere campus trend, and philosophical attention quickly reveals deep and challenging questions. Microaggressions are small acts of insult or indignity that seem negligible in isolation but which take on ethical significance by constituting patterns of systemic marginalization. For instance: persistently asking people of colour (but not White people) ‘Where are you from?’ Or unthinkingly putting a hand over your purse when a young Black man walks by. These are small things by themselves, but microaggression theory stresses that in systemic, repetitive context, they form a weighty and morally troubling problem.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an “infodemic” of misinformation and conspiracy theory. This article points to three explanatory factors: the challenge of forming accurate beliefs when overwhelmed with information, an implausibly individualistic conception of epistemic virtue, and an adversarial information environment that suborns epistemic dependence. Normally we cope with the problems of informational excess by relying on other people, including sociotechnical systems that mediate testimony and evidence. But when we attempt to engage in epistemic “superheroics” - withholding trust from others and trying to figure it all out for ourselves – these can malfunction in ways that make us vulnerable to forming irrational beliefs. Some epistemic systems are prone to coalescing audiences around false conspiracy theories. This analysis affords a new perspective on philosophical efforts to understand conspiracy theories and other epistemic projects prone to collective irrationality.

Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that digitally fuses the parts of different women to create pliable characters incapable of giving consent to their depiction. Next, we develop the idea of ‘illocutionary wronging’, in which an individual is forced to engage in speech acts they would prefer to avoid in order to deny or correct the misleading evidence of a publicized deepfake. Finally, we consider the risk that deepfakes may facilitate campaigns of ‘panoptic gaslighting’, where many systematically altered recordings of a single person's life undermine their memory, eroding their sense of self and ability to engage with others. Taken together, these harms illustrate the roles that social epistemology and technological vulnerabilities play in human ethical life.

There are two problems with the logic of Cesario's argument for abandoning existing research on social bias. First, laboratory findings of decisional bias have social significance even if Cesario is right that the research strips away real-world context. Second, the argument makes overly skeptical demands of a research program seeking complex causal linkages between micro- and macro-scale phenomena.

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

It is a philosophical truism that we must think of others as moral agents, not merely as causal or statistical objects. But why? I argue that this follows from the best resolution of an antinomy between our experience of morality as necessarily binding on the will and our knowledge that all moral beliefs originate in contingent histories. We can address this antinomy only by understanding moral deliberation via interpersonal relationships, which simultaneously vindicate and constrains morality’s bind on the will. This means that moral agency is fundamentally social. I model an attitude toward our causal nature on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’; our social practice of agency requires that we give minimal attention to the contingent origins of moral judgments in ourselves and others. Understood this way, seeing ourselves as moral agents requires avoiding appeal to causal aetiology to settle substantive moral disagreement.