Hot Philosophy in Conversation: From Privacy in the Age of Pandemic to the Ethics of Justice with Professor Anita L. Allen
Professor Anita L. Allen joins the Hot Philosophy podcast!
[ If you have not had a chance to catch our Podcast episode with Professor Allen, check out a transcribed version here! If you want to listen, visit Hot Philosophy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Soundcloud. ]
Skye:
Hello and welcome back to Hot Philosophy with Saya and Skye! As always, the mission of Hot Philosophy is to bring philosophy into the every day by making it relevant and approachable. Philosophy is not the realm of the white haired men of ancient times, but a means of critical thinking that anyone can practice. We hope to do this in part by highlighting the voices of contemporary philosophers to give you guys proof that people actually do this! So we have a very special guest today and an interview with the absolutely incredible trailblazing Hot Philosopher Professor Anita L Allen.
Saya and I both read about her in a piece in The New York Times, "The Pain and Promise of Black Women in Philosophy" by George Yancey. This article is a must read. When you read about Professor Allen, she instantly becomes a role model, amplified by her prominence and work in a field that historically and currently lacks diversity. We cannot thank her enough for her time and willingness to hop on our little little podcast. Saya, why don't you give us a little background on Professor Allen?
Saya:
Professor Allen is an internationally recognized specialist on privacy law and ethics. She is currently the Henry R. Silverman, professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and just wrapped up her time as vice provost for faculty there. From 2010 to 2017 she served on President Obama's Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and in 2017 she was elected vice president, president elect of the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association and was the first Black woman to hold that role. She has published several works, including two that Skye and I read called Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide and The New Ethics, a guided tour of the twenty first century moral landscape. You can read more about Professor Allen and her work on Penn Law's website and another great interview with Professor Allen from whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com.
Professor Allen has expertise in topics that are so critical to our contemporary reality and that Skye and I were particularly interested in from privacy in the age of coronavirus to bioethics to the ethics of justice, we are so lucky to have had the opportunity to ask her about these issues and ideas and cannot wait to share her ideas with our listeners. So now let's get into the interview and see what she has to say.
Skye:
So grateful for your time and so, so excited to talk to you.
Professor Allen:
Thank you for having me. I'm really honored to have been asked to do this.
Skye:
Thank you! It's a small podcast, but we've got some awesome listeners, and incredible role models like you are exactly who we want to talk to. All right, Saya, kick us off with our first question.
Saya:
For the first question, we were just really curious to know how you discovered your talent and passion for philosophy.
Professor Allen:
So I was a reader as a child and I read all the standard books that kids read when I was a little girl. We read things like the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories and Cherry Ames nurse. I read all those stories, but around 10 or 11, I started going to the public library. In those days they used something called the Dewey Decimal System and under the Dewey Decimal System of organization in the library, philosophy and religion come first. So I started reading the philosophy and religion and I really enjoyed it. And I found that it was inspirational. It made me think harder and made me even more curious about the world. And I was particularly interested in questions of ontology, religion and values, questions like the existence of God. And how do you prove that values are objective or are they objective? Those kinds of questions really gripped me and the philosophers that I think I enjoyed the most in those early days were Sartre, Bertrand Russell and Kierkegaard. I think existentialism was kind of popular back in those days, but I think I did discover those. And I like a lot of people, I found that that literature very compelling. You know, questions of freedom and accountability and values. Very, very important questions.
Skye:
Those are some pretty incredible questions for an elementary school kid to be asking.
Professor Allen:
I think that a lot of young people have, I would say, profound questions on their mind that go unanswered. I've kind of felt like I wouldn't even have known how to start to have those conversations with my parents and my peers. So it was a very lonely, solitary activity. I think that I discovered I was good at it much, much later. I just was just all about passion and curiosity at first. And then eventually when I was in high school and late high school and college, I discovered that I actually had a talent for doing more original philosophical writing.
Skye:
Saya and I think are just kind of in those stages right now, ending up our undergraduate time and trying to figure out what the future holds.
Saya and I both read about you in the article, "The Pain and Promise of Black Women in Philosophy" by George Yancey in The New York Times. When we read it, it was like just instant inspiration. You're trailblazing on so many accounts. You were the first Black woman president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and the first African American woman to hold both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a law degree. So for those of our listeners that haven't read the article, we want to ask how being a Black woman has shaped your experience in philosophy.
Professor Allen:
The article was an incredible opportunity. Having The New York Times as a platform was very amazing and I got a lot of feedback about the article, a lot of positive feedback about the article. George Yancey asked me an important question, which was, do I think that things are better today than they were when I was a graduate student?
I told him some anecdotes about things that have happened to me since I've been a fully mature, full professor, that sound like the kind of things that happened to young people back in the 70s. And so I figured that if things are still happening to me that are negative, people like you guys are going to have negative experiences as well. So I tried in the article to to be positive, though, about the potential for the future. And I do see some, the fact that I was elected president of the year, the first Black elected president, any division of the APA, that to me shows that change is coming.
But, you know, being a being Black woman, it kind of shaped my my social experience as a philosopher. A lot of doubt. Can she actually do it? Does she have enough intelligence, subtlety to be a philosopher? Is she serious enough? All the stereotypes of Black women go against the stereotypes of the philosopher. I do not have a long beard, you know that I twirl as I think great thoughts. And so overcoming being a fully sexual, female, Black body and being in the spaces that are dominated by white men, that just created a whole social that dynamic that was pretty challenging. But I think I did pretty well and that now I think that being a Black woman helps me to understand the value actually of trying to get Black thought into the canon. And I spent some time in recent years trying to develop some bibliographies and coursework that could be added to the to the curriculum in undergraduate and graduate education.
Skye:
In the same New York Times article, you mentioned that you put together a course at Penn on African American philosophy since 1960. For other universities, other curriculums, how do you think that philosophy departments can work to include more diverse voices in their curriculums?
Professor Allen:
I think the primary thing that needs to happen is that senior and mid-career philosophers need to take a step back and to do some legwork so that they come to understand what the contributions of philosophers of color have been, that they didn't get in grad school, they didn't get in undergrad. They don't know what they need to find it out, but it's actually not that hard to do. So what I did was I first built a relationship with a reference librarian at my university. I told him that I wanted to do a course on Black philosophy, and I asked him to help me identify the scholarship of African American and Black philosophers in the United States since 1960. So I began developing my bibliography with the help of a librarian. And then my next step was to think about all the Black philosophers that I knew about and to research what they had contributed. Then my next step was to collect all the anthologies of Black philosophy that had been put together. They were four or five anthologies of reading that were put together mostly for undergraduate courses. And I collected those and I read those. And then I began to look deeper into some of the work of some of the authors who were represented in those anthologies. In that way, I was able to put together a picture of what we mean by Black philosophy, of what African American philosophy constitutes as a discipline. I was delighted by the quality and the variety. I discovered some things about Black philosophy that I didn't know. I didn't know how influential the whole existential phenomenological Marxist critical theory domain had been, how influential it had been over Black philosophy. I also discovered that almost every single Black philosopher writes about race and so that some departments don't have anybody on their faculty who are teaching, who are Black, for example, because they've not included race at a critical subject matter for their department. If you don't include race, you don't want Black people, essentially.
Skye:
You've pointed out some incredible action steps that I hope philosophy departments are taking on.
Professor Allen:
Clearly, it's not that difficult, right? It's not that hard with all the online resources that we have to come to get an understanding of the scope of philosophy that was not written by white men on traditional topics. It's out there for people to explore and hopefully to enjoy it. And it's not a huge amount, but it's something that is very worthwhile, including in order to help the next generation of scholars be even better at the things that they care about, right. They're coming into the discipline with concerns that are very different from the concerns that in the 1950s, 1960s that made just studying Aristotle, Kant a bit more acceptable. I think that that that the world has grown much more complex and we need to have philosophers who are prepared to deal with the world as we find it today. You know, even in the 1960s, John Rawls was this huge figure in philosophy in the 1960s and 70s and yet he barely spoke about issues of civil rights, gay rights, women's rights. I mean, you look at his book, The Theory of Justice, it's almost as if there was no civil rights movement, gay rights movement, women's rights movement, voting rights issues, burgeoning bioethical issues. It's as if he was writing for the world as if the world was just this sort of abstract thing in which people just cared about this thing called justice without any context and any flavor to it. So we have to stop thinking that we're doing philosophy well if we're not engaging the world in which we live.
Skye:
Does philosophy have any kind of purpose or meaning if it's so detached from contemporary reality?
Professor Allen:
It does have purpose and meaning, even when detached from the contemporary. I mean, I love reading, I love reading Plato, I love reading Descartes. I love it. I love it. I'm actually I truly love it. But, you know, it's like to have a tool that's underutilized if all you do with that tool, is to deal with a layer of abstract questions, whether they're epistemological, metaphysical, ontological, theological, whatever, logical. If you're just dealing with the abstract level and not engaging real public concerns today, you're only using your tool for part of what that tool can do. It's wasting, you're wasting the resource. So by expanding the discipline to include more of what we now call public philosophy, critical philosophy, gender studies, et cetera, we are making philosophy more valuable and more powerful because it's dealing with much more of reality than just the abstract concerns that traditionally have dominated the profession.
Skye:
What you said about change in curriculum, enabling current students to study and better and do better in the things they actually care about, that is really striking to me as a current undergraduate student.
So, transitioning a bit, we now want to ask you about some of your published works. So Saya kick us off.
Saya:
I was reading your book on popular privacy and you have a section on seclusion, and you discuss quarantine as an instance of mandated physical isolation. And one line that stuck out to me from that chapter was a quote from Lawrence Gostin that you included, which is "In the modern United States, we are so focused on the salience of autonomy that we often forget the tradition of common good." Considering the pandemic we are all living through right now, I just had to ask, how do you think that privacy and surveillance in the US has been complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic. And we've seen abroad that other countries have dealt with it very differently than the US has? I was just wondering what your take on that was.
Professor Allen:
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that great question. I do think about quarantine as a kind of privacy issue in that it does literally physically put people apart from others, makes them less accessible to others. And so we have to think about quarantine as a privacy challenge in that it's forced privacy, right. So one angle on it, on privacy and the quarantine, is how do we think about the the ethics of forcing people to be isolated? So many of us have been isolated now for months on end and it's psychologically stressful. I mean, kids are stressing out, adults stressing out. People I think are violating good public health policy because we're just frustrated by being alone so much, isolated so much. That's one angle. Another angle that I think is important to think about is the conflict that the pandemic has raised between privacy and accountability. A lot of people think that what they do with their own bodies is a matter of private choice. If I wear a mask or not, if I stay home or not, if I wear a shield or not, if I quarantine that, those are my choices about what I do with my body. On the other hand, there are these public health needs. We need to be wearing masks. We need to be isolated for certain periods of time. And so you have a different kind of privacy issue there where it's about privacy as a threat to private choices, as a threat to public health surveillance and demand and contact tracing. Self isolation and doing certain things with your body and not with your body. So so that's another area, too, in fact I'm very interested in the second one more than the first one. The first one was idea of quarantine is isolation. I'm really interested in the conflict between private choices that we make about our bodies versus the demands of public health surveillance and accountability. One of the books that I've written is called "Why Privacy isn't Everything". And this book was written in 2003. I wrote because although I'm a real gung-ho privacy advocate, I believe privacy, the fundamental human right, it's really important. I also think that we are, as moral beings, accountable to other people for a lot of our so-called private behavior on a sort of cultural level.
We have demands of accountability built into our ethical codes. And so although we do have a right to to decide what we wear, for example, and how we use our bodies, we also have, are accountable to other people for the choices that we make. And we have to explain to other people and be accountable to them for why we're declining to do things that are going to be in the public interest and for the public good. So that's a very important set of issues that's raised by the pandemic and I hope to do some work in the next few months on that. Maybe write up a paper or an article or two about about this conflict between accountability and privacy?
Saya:
Especially I found since now it's becoming more of a personal choice, whether you are choosing to go out or whether you're choosing to social distance, it seems that that quote that you included seems very accurate
Professor Allen:
in some countries, the government is being much stricter. They're not letting people choose whether or not to accept public health surveillance. They will come to your house and see if you're there and they will come to your house and take your temperature. And they'll use technology to find out where you are and hold you accountable and find you. The United States is suffering in part because we do have this kind of libertarian, laissez faire philosophy where people are pretty much expected to be able to do what they want to do, even in times of crisis. And it's not clear that the kind of liberal theories that I know I normally subscribe to are working well for us right now. And how do we, as liberals in the liberal tradition, reconcile privacy and private choice with public health, because if you're dead, you don't have any privacy right? If you're dead, you don't have any freedom! The prerequisites of your freedom may well be a sacrifice of privacy in a limited context for a period of time.
Skye:
Something that you just mentioned is the climate, the culture of America. Is that working to our favor, to our detriment? Especially right now in this time.
Building off of that, I read your book, The New Ethics, A Guided Tour of the Twenty First Century Moral Landscape, published in 2004, which discusses these new challenges for our current century. In it, you identified three central challenges for American ethics, particularly, which were widespread ethical failure despite a rich background of resources, an ever-growing array of challenging ethical choices, and this inward-looking complacency among communities. Do you believe that these are still the same ethical challenges that we face 16 years later? How have they changed? What are your thoughts on that?
Professor Allen:
Another great question. When I think about it, I think, oh, my God, we're in the same space we were in 16 years ago. And maybe it's even gotten worse because on top of lying, stealing, cheating, the sort of traditional ethical or moral failings that seem to pervade American life, despite so many religious organizations and churches and charities and school training about around ethical values, we still have people who can't tell the truth, can't be honest, etc. That's still going on. And then we have things that are troubling us today, like police violence. I mean, the violence, the racism, the racist violence. I mean, these are other kinds of ethical failures that I don't really talk about in my book. I think if I were to rewrite the book today, I would definitely talk more about these kinds of not just lying, cheating, stealing, but killing and public execution and vigilantism. These are huge problems in our society that I think I would add to the list of ethical failings.
And then the problem of biotech and the ways in which it's hard to know what to do sometimes, because technology is creating new opportunities for us and we don't quite know what's right or wrong. So that's gotten worse because now, you know, we had cloning before at the beginning. We had things like preimplantation genetic testing. Now we have CRISPR. We can edit genes, should we be editing genes to edit out negative disease traits, socially negative traits? So the number of deep ethical questions that are raised by technology have even increased. The problems around ethical choices using social media have increased in the last 16 years. The opportunities for us to behave better or worse using technology are now just incredibly numerous and rich.
And then the final thing was that sort of a political lack of political engagement. People live in their own little little bubbles. That problem has gotten a lot worse. So if I were going to rewrite that book today, it would be like, oh my God. I mean, the ethical landscape is pretty bleak. How can we address it? And does ethics have a place in the modern world? In the contemporary world? And what should that place be really?
Skye:
Given the fact that it seems like we've deteriorated on a lot of accounts, do you have any insights on how to move forward or things we might do to improve or grow our ethics?
Professor Allen:
Well, you know, at the end of the book, I have like a little like almost like a Ten Commandments, things that I recommend. And I think that that the general lessons are still valid. But people have to want on some level, you want to be better. They have to perceive that it's not acceptable to care so little to show a little empathy for their fellow humankind. And, you know, if people are saying things like, well, you know, if I get sick from the virus, I'll just get a bad cold. And they don't care about their grandparents and their neighbors who maybe have vulnerabilities. We're lost forever. We have to care. And getting people to care is, I think, the most important thing we can do. And I think that people have to have their empathy challenged, their values challenged, and they have to have the resources, because it's not cheap to be ethical. I mean, for those who are wealthy, it's a little bit easier to do the right thing. But sometimes if you're struggling, it's going to look like maybe I should loot that store. Right, because I don't have any shoes and I don't have, you know, baby formula and diapers and I don't have a TV. Some of the things we think about as an ethical challenge also are there because we have such great economic disparities and so some people can be good and others are tempted constantly to violate the ethical social norms. One of the cool things about ethics is that if you're coming from like a Marxist point of view or critical theory point of view, you might view ethics as simply a tool that the elite and the powerful use to control the masses. So underneath this whole project of mine, around ethical betterment, is a question I have in my mind about whether ethics is anything other than just a bunch of rules that people in power use to control other people, whereas people in power don't follow the same rules that's an underlying concern of mine. I believe in ethics with a little voice in the back of my head is saying, is ethics just a tool of the elite? A power move on the part of the elite to control the masses? Maybe there's a little of that going on to people. People are calling ethics convenient rules that help to preserve the status quo.
Skye:
Continuing with this conversation on the place of ethics in twenty first century America, we want to ask you about social media.
Saya:
We want to know what you thought about recent decisions. For example, Twitter's decision to censor Trump's post that glorified violence. We want to know what your take on that decision was. And more broadly, how do you believe that social media should be governed? I think that your interest in privacy is definitely relevant here. And there are a lot of questions these days about social media and privacy and censorship, especially with social media's new role in politics.
Professor Allen:
So I think I was one of the first people to begin to ask the question, does the individual have an obligation to protect their own privacy online? I wrote a couple of papers about that topic and and now you see quite a bit of discussion about that. But I think I was the first person to really focus on those issues. And the issue there is, we can point our finger at the government or industry, business sector and the people who run social media, the Facebook, et cetera, and say, you know, it's their fault.
But actually, there are things that we can do personally to mitigate the harm done to our privacy and our freedom actually, as well. But in recent years, I've come to believe that it's a lot harder. It's getting harder and harder for individuals to have an impact other than through politics, because right now, with big data and artificial intelligence, I don't even know half the time what is being collected about me and what's being profiled and how information about me is being shared. I can't control what I don't even understand or know about. So I think that while it's true that we can do things, not post nude pictures of ourselves online and protect our privacy that way and be a little bit less open about where we are, what we're doing, we can no longer, as individuals control our privacy completely or even significantly. I think we're increasingly unable to do that because of big data and AI. So only through, I think, political action can we be effective. We need to have better privacy laws. Most of our privacy laws that protect electronic communications date back to the 1980s, we need new privacy laws, or the ones they have in Europe to protect us from the things that are going on with our online privacy. And as for things like Twitter or Facebook, maybe censoring some speech on the platforms, I'm actually not opposed to those who manage platforms, making decisions about certain speech being intolerable. I believe people do have a right to freedom of speech. But those rights are, as a lawyer, I'd say, rights that that we have against the government. They're not rights we have against private actors. If someone wants to set up a platform, social media platform, they have a right to say we want certain kinds of discourse on our platform. And I think that the Twitters and the Facebook and the Instagram's etc. have been way too timid about stamping out hate speech, lies and falsehood. But there's a risk. In some countries the government is forcing social media to post correction notices on their websites. And that's also concerning because you don't want to intermingle the government too much with the private sector is doing. So I do think we have to figure out a way to allow for some, you might call it censorship or some correction or modification at the same time that we respect the rights of the private sector and the rights of individuals to make reasonable use of social media platforms. These are difficult questions to be sure.
Saya:
I had no idea that our privacy laws haven't been updated.
Professor Allen:
So I could just go down the list as so many of our privacy rights that were enacted way before the world became the world that it is right now. And so, you know, as a lawyer and as a philosopher, I'd say we need to think about how the world has changed, engage our values and use those values to help shape better laws, to protect people, and to empower people. I think that's what we need to be doing right now.
Skye:
Why hasn't there been much action towards innovation and change in these regulations?
Professor Allen:
I think it's because a lot of businesses do not want stronger privacy laws. So in Europe, before you can transfer personal data, you have to have consent and it cannot be just opt out consent. People have to opt in affirmatively to your being able to use their data. And in some cases, people are not allowed to give up their privacy rights. Whereas In the United States, we're encouraged to share, share, share, share, share and there's a lot of opting out required and it's too complicated to opt out. Everyone's opting in and they're sharing, sharing, sharing. And that's good for industry because data is a very valuable commodity right now.
Skye:
Yes, it is.
Professor Allen:
So, there hasn't been a lot of interest in data protection laws by industry. And that's been a huge problem because of course, you know, people can lobby Congress and Congress has had a lot to worry about in the last few years. But they just have not been focused on this. There are some interesting bills in Congress right now that I support that would update our privacy laws and make them at least come closer to the European model. California has stronger privacy laws than most states, and some people see the fact that California has strengthened its laws as being a positive sign of what's possible on the national level.
Skye:
This is definitely an interesting new area of study for myself and my first exposure to it was actually this past year when I listened to someone involved with the Cambridge Analytica case.
Professor Allen:
Back in Cambridge Analytica it was even so stunning that Mark Zuckerberg himself started to say, we need federal law. You know, I mean, that incident, that scandal was so impactful that people began to rethink whether or not it might be in the best interest of the country to have new regulation.
Skye:
I'm curious to see how Zuckerberg follows through on that kind of statement.
Continuing on with your book. So that third ethical challenge you mentioned, or this Complacent Island syndrome. You talk about how justice necessitates this individual contribution to society, civic engagement. Especially you focus on direct participation in Democratic via voting and the desegregation of our communities. So that was about 16 years ago. But If we look at the statistics, we see that voter turnout is down, voter suppression occurs in voter I.D. laws and systemic disenfranchisement with voting policies for ex-felons. And this one line in your introduction, it said, "we are threatening to become a nation of nonvoters who aggressively seek to keep willing fellow citizens from voting." When I read that, I was like, that is the state of our country right now. And then also in terms of segregation, the data on schooling and housing suggests that we still do live in these segregated communities. Do you believe that these are still the two most critical challenges to justice today? How have they changed since you wrote your book?
Professor Allen:
It's still the case that people who could vote aren't voting voluntarily. They don't think that's worth their while, to exercise their franchise. And I would encourage them to think of themselves as having duties of justice and goodness to actually exercise their vote. But then what's gotten so much worse are all the factors that are interfering with people's ability to vote. The voter ID laws and that kind of thing, cleansing the rolls, exaggerating the extent to which fraud is happening in the election, questioning whether paper ballots are good, whether electronic ballots are good. Is there any way for us to vote that's really secure? So I just feel like there's this whole movement afoot to minimize the ability of the average person to go to the polls with confidence and vote their conscience. And that means, that the laws that we have, the policies we have, the leaders we have, like a certain kind of authority and diversity, I think. So we're in big trouble. And I appreciate those people who have joined forces to try to fight the factors such as prisoner disenfranchisement, Hispanic disenfranchisement, fight those factors in order to free up people to be able to vote and to have an impact on the election, both federal elections and also state and local elections. I mentioned in my book how, that I was sort of an integrationist and that my ideal growing up was always that people live together in integrated communities, harmonious, racially harmonious communities. I grew up as a military brat, which means that I lived on army bases a lot, where I lived among people of all different backgrounds. And that seemed normal to me. And then it seems like as I grew up from first grade to Harvard Law School, the people around me became less and less and less diverse. I would like to go back to a world in which people were able to to live among one, live among people of different races, work among people of different races, etc., friendships, love, etc.. But I am becoming increasingly discouraged because it seems as though this process of our society becoming less segregated has stalled and we become ever more segregated as a nation as we were in the nineteen sixties. Many public high schools are single race high schools or white or Hispanic or Black, mostly Black, mostly Hispanic, mostly white, mostly Asian. And there's very little neighborhood residential integration across the United States. So I'm just worried that this idea that I had as a child, that I grew up with was just a fantasy. But I still hold out the belief that there's no inherent reason why people of different races and ethnicities can't live together in common communities, educate their children together, enjoy friendships and cultural activities together. It's still an ideal of mine.
Skye:
Certainly an ideal of mine, and I'm sure Saya as well. There's so much social action, movement among young people today and I just hope that momentum continues and shapes the future America that we all live in.
Professor Allen:
I would stress that so many young people go out in the midst of a Covid-19 pandemic to protest the police killings. On the other hand, I was really proud of the younger generation for stepping up and saying we will not accept this. We matter. We want a better world for ourselves and our future. And I do feel like our generation has sort of failed your generation. In the sense that I think we failed is that maybe we brought you up feeding you what were half truths about race, that we let you guys believes things were better than they actually were, because we thought we had done it. We made voting rights. We made the Civil Rights Act. We made gender equality. So we communicated, everyone is the same, everyone is equal. And I think a lot of people your age believed it, and I think we half believed it, too. But then to see a man being murdered in broad daylight while a Greek Chorus is saying "don't do that,” was a wakeup call for so many of us. We realized that, oh, my God, you know, it's like a public lynching is happening. And we thought that those days were long, long gone. Why is this even close to being something that some people think is acceptable? Why is this happening? We have to do something to stop it.
Skye:
I would say that was the kind of question I was also left with after reading your book is, have we deteriorated ethically or is more just coming to light that we just haven't improved as much as we thought?
Professor Allen:
You know, I don't have quantitative data that would show that we're more or less ethical so I'm a little bit afraid to say, but my feeling is that my sense is that our culture has become even less ethically sensitive, that it's now acceptable to be a bit rude or snarky or more cynical, less generous, less polite, less giving. It doesn't feel like there's a boundary on people's behavior. And some people will say and do things which I feel like they wouldn't have said 20 years ago. Now, some people think that that's a good thing, that we're more open, we're more honest than we used to be. And I think that, though, part of being a good person is not always being completely honest with whatever raw, nasty feeling that you might have at the moment, right. So raw nastiness to me, is not better than selective, cautious politeness and concern for other people's feelings.
Skye:
I'm so interested in all this. I'm actually writing my senior thesis on the philosophy behind civic engagement and education. So it's been a major treat to be able to ask ask about your perspective.
OK, so just our last question. This is just a fun one that I had to ask. So I was a former ballerina up until like a year ago, so most of college. So I'm curious to know how your experience with dance shaped your professional career and even your philosophy.
Professor Allen:
I love dance and I took dance lessons as an adult. I think I took my last dance class when I was 60 years old.
Skye:
Wow. Very impressive.
Professor Allen:
But it was always a hobby, a way of getting exercise, a way of reducing stress. Dance helped me to cope with the stress of being a Black woman in philosophy graduate school or being a Black woman at Harvard Law School, or being a young mother with two children trying to get through work and family. I have bad feet for dance. I don't have good point. My feet are terrible, and I have a very bad head for memorizing choreography. I get a little scatterbrained, you know, I just forget. So I was never going to be a dancer. I went to the University of Michigan for my PhD and I took a lot of dance classes. I think you may have read in Wikipedia, even with Madonna, I took dance classes.
Skye:
I saw that!
Professor Allen:
I did for a brief moment in grad school, maybe I could be like a dance teacher for children or something, you know? So I did briefly consider that and then I thought, you know, philosophy with my PhD. I think it was the right decision for me to make because I just am not a great dancer. But I love dance and so I have become more of a I'd say a supporter of dance. So I support through my patronage, I support dance companies. I love dance companies of color. We have some great companies in Philadelphia like PHILADANCO! and Ballet X.
Skye:
Ballet X!
Professor Allen:
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Of course, who doesn't love the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey. So the whole gamut, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, I mean, the whole history of dance of color in the United States has been really fascinating to me. But I also love Balanchine. I love Martha Graham. I mean, you name it. I love it I'm there. I did also have a brief moment when I was going to be a Wall Street lawyer. I went to Harvard Law School. I got my law degree and I went to work on Wall Street at a big law firm literally on Wall Street. And I thought I could become like a patronage. You know, I make a lot of money and I would like support the arts. And I could have a salon and all these dancers would hang out with me. Fantasy lasted about six months, moved on. But I do love dance. So I think that I have a student at Penn who just got his PhD in philosophy, who's a phenomenal hip hop dancer and dance teacher. And I've encouraged him to think about the connection between his interest in philosophy and his interest in dance because he's interested in neuroscience and the brain. And I think that there are ways to connect philosophy to dance. You can do it through aesthetics as a sub-branch of philosophy, the aesthetics of dance. You can also do it, I think, in more creative ways around neurology and neuroscience and movement and space and the philosophy of mind and philosophy of space. So there's ways to connect, dance to philosophy. I haven't done it. I leave it to you to do that.
Skye:
I just when you were speaking, it's exactly how I always felt about dance. It's like this awesome, just like form of expression and balance to like the struggles of daily life and just this great outlet. And like you, I mean, I don't know if I'll make it to ballet classes past 30, but I've already become just being a supporter of the arts. And I have so many friends now in companies. So watching them is like incredible. It's like they they've gone on to realize that dream and I'm just watching. But I'll always be a lifelong supporter.
Those are all of our questions we seriously cannot cannot thank you enough for doing this. An immediate role model for both Saya and I, and we can't thank you enough for your time. So we're just really, really grateful.
Professor Allen:
Well, Saya and Skye, I'm honored to have been asked to do this. I think you guys are terrific. And I wish all of our undergraduate and graduate students were as enthusiastic and fun as you are! So, thanks guys!
Skye:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Hot philosophy. Please make sure you check out the links in the show description and we hope you'll tune in next time!
*There have been slight modifications to this transcript for the sake of clarity.