The Ethics Institute of Utrecht University’s department of Philosophy and Religious Studies seeks a researcher for a four-year, full-time PhD project “
Disrupting ageing: Personhood, meaning, and vulnerability across the lifespan”, as part of the inter-university Gravitation consortium
Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technology (ESDiT).
Wat ga je doen? The ageing of societies is one of the 21st century’s most disruptive demographic trends. Simultaneously, age-related technologies challenge the ‘naturalness’ of ageing and draw into focus ambiguities in the concept of ageing itself. For instance, technologically-mediated relationships, life extension, and technologies such as AI avatars may make
biological and
chronological age less relevant, and shift the emphasis to
socio-cultural conceptions of age. Such shifts have normative significance particularly if ageing is envisaged as a process that occurs throughout the lifespan.
Since ageing is a phenomenon infused with normativity, with normative expectations corresponding to phases in the human life cycle, the conceptual cleavage of ageing invites innovation in related moral concepts. This PhD project examines ways in which technologies that bear on ageing disrupt biological, socio-cultural, and normative understandings of ageing. It considers how these disruptions generate fruitful possibilities for reconceptualisation of ageing itself, as well as intertwined normative ideas of personhood, meaning, and vulnerability. In doing so, the project will investigate non-western and non-canonical ideas that might reinvigorate core moral concepts implicated by ageing.
This PhD position is part of the
Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies programme, a ten year long international research programme of seven academic institutions in the Netherlands that started in January 2020. The programme aims to achieve breakthrough research at the intersection of ethics, philosophy, technology / engineering and social sciences, and to position its consortium at the top of its field internationally. A key objective is to investigate how new technologies challenge moral values and ontological concepts (like “nature”, “human being” and “community”), and how these challenges necessitate a revision of these concepts. The programme includes four research lines, “Nature, life and human intervention”, “The future of a free and fair society”, “The Human Condition” and “Synthesis: Ethics of Technology, Practical Philosophy, and Modern Technology-Driven Societies”.
This position is situated within the research line “The Human Condition” and within a working group on conceptual disruption and technology. You will work under the supervision of
Christopher Wareham (UU),
Marcel Verweij (UU), and Naomi Jacobs (UT). You are expected to play an active role in the project described above and to participate actively in the workshops, public events, courses and other activities of the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies programme in general and the “The Human Condition” research line and conceptual disruption working group in particular. The position is based at
the Ethics Institute, which is part of the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. It provides a stimulating and internationally oriented research environment.
Please note that there are
other vacancies in the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies programme at different participating universities. In case several are of interest to you, we would like to encourage you to apply to them simultaneously.