| Room B Monday Online Presentation Session 2

Philosophy

Session Chair: Srecko Koralija

11:20-11:45

67496 | Ethics, Entropy, Neosecuritization: An Analysis of North Korean Border Crossers

Dosol Lee, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

This paper aims to propose a novel approach to studying ethics and securitization of border crossing by employing middle-range theory, situating empirical cases of North Korean border crossers. Elucidating on the justification practice in legal identification of North Koreans in five states (South Korea, China, Russia, the UK and the US) vis-à-vis North Koreans’ predicaments as refugees sur place, this paper presents North Korean “border crossers” as human agents and their border crossing as a self-emancipation practice in response to the body management of the states. In this view, human agency is conceptualized as ability and answerability drawn on biopolitics and chronotope upon this paper’s theoretical foundation, Ethics of Coexistence (EoC). EoC is elaborated by the Entropy of Peace (EP) which delineates the power to restore the politics of migration against the mechanism of scapegoating, fitness of deviance for constructive social changes, and resilience of human agents to risk. This paper then develops Mobility-Identity-Security Analysis (MISA) and Biopolitical Risk Analysis (BRA). In MISA, dimension intersections and reverse of MIS are described. BRA provides, inter alia, an ecological understanding of risk, a risk transformation strategy interacting with peace and agency, and a matrix of urgency. The two sets of analytical tools, MISA and BRA are to propose ‘Neosecuritization’, a critique of traditional security discourses on migration. This paper concludes with ethical, methodological, legal and policy-relevant reflections on primarily but not limited to the border crossing of North Koreans.

11:45-12:10

66416 | Metaphysical Agency and Virtues in Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Activism

Roxanne Kurtz, University of Illinois Springfield, United States

Examining the role of conceptual engineering and conceptual activism to ameliorate normative concerns around AI design demonstrates the existence of metaphysical agency and the need for virtue metaphysics. Conceptual engineers and activists take seriously that concepts shape reality. Rather than taking the world as given, they use the practice and products of metaphysical theorizing to exercise metaphysical agency, with the world as a metaphysical patient that deserves consideration. Metaphysical agents exercise their agency in the metaphysical domain through their capacities to involve metaphysical principles, norms, and theories to reason, to make decisions, and to act to shape their metaphysical outlooks and reality. They are metaphysically responsible and accountable for exercising this agency well and succeed to varying degrees. On this sketch, metaphysical agency differs from moral and epistemic agency: it involves how theorizing metaphysically shapes our world. This is precisely the interest of conceptual engineers and activists. One might object that accounts of moral and epistemic agency suffice to describe the agency of conceptual engineers and activists. However, because conceptual engineers and activists design and deploy concepts that carve up the world, the mistakes they may make are different than those made by moral or epistemic agents. The performance of conceptual engineers and activists seeking to ameliorate normative problems matters to their success. Thus, we ought to have a theory of virtue metaphysics, to identify virtues of excellent metaphysical agents grounded in the good of making the world a better place.

12:10-12:35

69029 | Moral Leadership Between Language and Meaning Srecko Koralija, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands

The paper discusses organisation as a coexistence of various value systems inherent to moral leadership. It is based on the presumption that value systems also include religious beliefs that are nourished by religious narratives. The value systems demonstrate a constant relationship /or tension/ between how something is expressed (language) and what is meant (meaning). The paper explores to what extent the semantic properties of the concept ‘king’ as used in biblical narratives overlap with the concept ‘leader’ as used in organisational leadership. It is examined how the people (moral agents) whose value systems are rooted in religious narratives, create their own semantic environment of the ‘leader’ which correlates their religious beliefs to understanding of moral leadership in an organisation. Finally, the paper investigates to what extent metaphor, charisma and autocracy, when applied to the concepts ‘king’ and ‘leader’, shape perceptions and enactment of dark and bright sides of leadership. The method applied in the paper is semantic analysis based on texts and social networks.