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Steve Coyne

Moral and political philosopher

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Research

My main areas of research are moral and political philosophy, as well as philosophy of law and the ethics of technology. I have three current research projects. 

Project 1: Political Authority

I argue that liberal theories of political authority – theories that attempt to derive binding, pre-emptory political authority from liberal moral principles – cannot succeed given the role of political authority in resolving disagreement. 

Project 2: Civil Disobedience

 I defend a theory of certain forms of civil disobedience as a capacity of some citizens to give new reasons for action (e.g. to vote against certain policies) to other citizens. 

Project 3: Autonomy and Recommender Systems

Recommender systems (like Netflix and Facebook) use machine learning algorithms to determine which content to present to users. I distinguish between several different kinds of user controls that designers might implement in these systems, and argue that even in the best-case scenario, they do relatively little to address concerns that recommender systems infringe the autonomy of their users. 

 

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