Entitled University of Chicago Podcast Network

Animals suffer at the hands of humans every day. Not just in factory farms, but also in our homes, where pets don’t receive enough attention or exercise, and in our oceans, where humans disrupt their habitats and ecosystems. To what extent should animals have rights? In this special episode, we speak to world-leading philosopher Martha Nussbaum, professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and author of Justice for Animals. Nussbaum expands her theory into why politics and law should redirect our ethical responsibilities towards animals.

Artificial intelligence is all around us—it listens to us, even watches us, and waits for our daily demands. From Alexa to Siri, to Sophia, the social humanoid robot, AIs want to be our companions (at least, the companies who build them want us to think so). However, some people fear that the more sentient AIs become, the more they will have to be treated with basic rights. Do AIs deserve rights? And if they do, what would those rights entail?

In this episode, Tom and Claudia imagine a not-so-distant future where AIs have rights, what those rights could look like, and whether or not this would play out like a dystopian sci-fi novel. They get a myriad of perspectives from Andrew Stout, a robot software engineer; Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago; Aziz Huq, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago; and Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed A.I. Research Institute.

Sixty-one million adults in the United States live with a disability — that's one in four adults, a staggering number when you consider how widespread ableism is. In a society that largely operates without adequate infrastructure, accommodations, and services for disabled people, what does the right to equal opportunity look like?

In this episode, Tom and Claudia explore this question through the perspectives of three disabled individuals. Michael Stein is the executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, Elsa Sjunneson is a deafblind disability rights activist and science fiction writer, and Stephen Hallett is the Project Manager of the East Asia Disability Rights Project. Together, they help paint a picture of what it would really mean to take the rights of those with disabilities seriously.

While borders have the ability to divide countries both politically and socially, wealth drives an even bigger wedge between us. How do we make sense of the fact that the wealthiest country in the world, the United States, borders one of the poorest countries: Mexico? Despite efforts to mitigate this, global wealth inequality still appears to be growing. According to the World Inequality Report, the poorest half of the global population owns just 2% of the total global wealth.

In this episode of Entitled, Claudia and Tom learn some of the ways we could fix global wealth inequality. They speak with one of the world’s leading economists focused on inequality, Branko Milanović; University of Chicago economics and political science professor James Robinson; and Rebekah Smith, executive director of Labor Mobility Partnerships.

Fixing discrimination isn't as easy as putting anti-discrimination laws on the books. But, there is a tool that can at least chip away at the effects of discrimination: quotas. Over 130 countries have adopted gender quotas…and around one-quarter of the world uses some form of affirmative action programs. So, do quotas actually work at creating more diverse and equitable societies?

In this episode of Entitled, Claudia and Tom learn how quotas are working—or not working—around the world. They speak with Rumbidzai Kandawasvika-Nhundu, senior adviser for democracy and inclusion at International IDEA; Tarunabh Khaitan, professor of Public Law and Legal Theroy at the University of Oxford; and Jessie Majome, former member of the National Assembly of Zimbabwe.

There are two words that sound pretty similar, but they're not synonyms: equality and equity. While equality means that everybody should be given the same resources or opportunities, equity recognizes that we live in an unequal system, so we need to allocate more resources and opportunities to people without equal access. So, what does it really mean to live in an equitable society?

In this episode of Entitled, Claudia and Tom zoom out on what equity practices look like around the globe, and zoom in, to see if they're working in the US. They speak with Dian Shah, a constitutional law professor at the National University of Singapore; Cathy Cohen, a renowned political scientist at the University of Chicago; and South African anti-apartheid hero Albie Sachs.