The Ethics of Interacting — In Conversation with Dr. Kimberley Brownlee

21 Oct, 2026

What do we owe one another in our everyday interactions? And why do even brief encounters with strangers matter?

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Kimberley Brownlee, Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy. Her research focuses on loneliness, belonging, social human rights and freedom of association, examining fundamental questions about our social needs and our moral responsibilities toward one another.

She is the author of two books: Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (2012) and Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (2020), both published by Oxford University Press. Her more recent work includes “On the Ethics of Interacting” (2024) and “Interactional Equality” (2026).

Our conversation explores her research on our fundamental need for human connection, drawing on Being Sure of Each Other, her public lecture discussing its ideas, and her article “On the Ethics of Interacting.”

From ordinary encounters with strangers to questions of loneliness, vulnerability and belonging, we consider what follows, morally and politically, from recognizing that human beings are profoundly social creatures.

CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour

Recorded in person on October 20, 2026. Broadcast October 21, 2026.

Listen: CiTR | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. PT on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Transcript

Farha: Welcome to The Blue Hour. I'm Farha Guerrero. I'm here at UBC, and in fact, not in the CiTR studio today.

My guest is Kimberley Brownlee, but just at the moment we were about to go on air, a very loud alarm was heard in the studio. I thought I did something to activate it, but it turned out it was a fire alarm, and the entire AMS Nest had to evacuate.

We've moved places, and we're now here in Kimberley's office in Buchanan E, and we're going to do it the old-fashioned way. We're going to have a conversation using a voice recorder. How does that sound, Kimberley?

Kimberley: That sounds fantastic, far less intimidating than the big black microphone.

Farha: I want to start with this idea that, in fact, has moved us from the CiTR studio, where I really love doing live radio, and it's for this one strange reason. It's that I can sit in front of a guest, and I can make eye contact, and I can have this human interaction.

It means a lot to me. It means I have to commute from outside of Vancouver to do that, when I surely could have just Zoomed an interview with you.

I thought I would start with that. Why does someone like me feel the need to have this conversation in person?

Kimberley: That's an excellent question. We don't pay much attention to it, but we have a fundamental need to be in connection with each other, to be in face-to-face contact with each other.

We're much more conscious of our need for water. My thirst registers itself, and I know exactly what I have to go and get. Our need for food and our need for air, close your mouth and plug your nose for two minutes, and that need becomes very visible.

Our need for social contact, we're very sensitive to it when we're children. We're constantly bidding for connection when we're children, but as we mature, and especially if we live in a society that tells us this is not a need, this is maybe discretionary, this is optional, or even that social contact can be threatening, then we can teach ourselves, "Well, I don't really need that," or "I'll get the connection I need from my phone, from social media, or from a chat, from a call with someone."

But there's a growing body of evidence in social psychology and social neuroscience that shows that we are constituted to thirst for connection, for face-to-face connection.

Vivek Murthy, who's the former U.S. Surgeon General, has written a book called Together. He also produced a national advisory in 2023 on the epidemic of loneliness, and he says this need to connect is baked into our nervous system.

Our survival and well-being are inextricably linked with connecting with others.

One of my favourite social psychologists is Barbara Fredrickson. She's based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her work focuses on micro-connections.

You and I, we're getting much more than just one moment together, we're getting an hour together. But when you and I make eye contact, or we laugh at the same joke, or we have a bit of resonance between us, our brains and bodies actually synchronize.

Our heart rhythms briefly synchronize, our brain chemistries briefly synchronize. We really get each other in that moment.

If we don't have these moments with people, our bodies become less healthy, and we also become less able to have such moments.

It's these moments that are important in themselves, but they're also the foundation upon which we build closer ties.

Farha: One thing that struck me about some of your research brings us back a little bit to that moment of childhood. This is the idea that you describe, that we as a species have an extraordinarily prolonged period of dependency, and much of that could extend up to about 20 years of life, which is really long.

We'll talk about what happens also after we do become full adults, but from this evolutionary perspective, and I was just speaking with Sally Otto last week, it does seem that our survival requires an enormous investment of time and care.

Can you talk about that?

Kimberley: Absolutely. We have the longest period of abject dependency of any species. We can have a long debate over the definition of childhood.

Our brains don't stop developing until we're about 25, and then they immediately start to deteriorate. We are prepubescent for over a decade. We're learning how to function for close to 20 years.

That's an incredibly long time to have a committed set of caregivers devoted to nurturing you.

What's really striking is, if you look at standard accounts of human rights, they centre on the fully formed, able adult.

If you asked a human rights theorist to name five key human rights, they would say, "Well, the right to vote, the right to stand for office, the right to express yourself, the right to practise religion, the right to marry," and you see a portrait taking shape.

In order for someone to assert their right to vote as an adult or their right to express themselves, someone else had to spend close to 20 years teaching them a language, teaching them how to articulate their thoughts, teaching them what a religion might be and how to join a congregation, teaching them what political participation means, just basically feeding them so that they could later in life assert themselves as an adult.

Of course, we don't do it just so that we can function as adults. We do it because childhood is enormously important, but that piece of the story tends to fall to the side.

Many human rights theorists tend to present our social needs as luxury goods, as debatable. Those are maybe of a different logical category. Those are maybe aspirations, but they're not human rights. Human rights are about the basics.

Well, we can't get going in any discussion about the supposed basics unless our social needs are secure.

One way I'm developing this work is in a new book that's forthcoming this fall with David Jenkins. It's titled The Social Heart of Human Rights.

We argue there that our social bonds and our social needs, these are the most potent weapon of oppression that a government can wield against us.

If you want someone to fall in line, you, the oppressor, are going to be much more successful if you threaten their family, if you disappear their husband, if you take their children.

As Indigenous communities in Canada know, how do you disrupt a people, how do you break intergenerational ties, how do you demoralize people? You take their children, you take their loved ones, or you threaten those bonds.

And so the story that our political rights are of paramount importance because that's what guards against oppression, we cannot exercise those unless our social rights are protected.

Farha: The title of your more recent book ties in with this idea of dependency, although it goes much deeper philosophically.

It comes from a small exchange between Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, in which Piglet simply wants reassurance that Pooh is there.

And the book is really lovely because your father painted the cover.

Oh, look at the painting! [Painting on the wall of Kimberley's office.]

Kimberley: That was the reason to come into the office!

Farha:

Kimberley: Yes, that's me with one of my children.

Farha: So that itself tells a lot. But tell us about Winnie the Pooh and Piglet and why that was such an important image for you to bring into this book.

Kimberley: Thank you for asking.

Each chapter in the book starts with a story or a vignette from a novel or a work of literature, and many of them are children's books.

I wrote this book in 2018, 2019, and I was reading a lot of children's literature, given who is most important in my life.

The book came out in 2020, during the start of the pandemic, when we're all being denied access to the people we love, and we're all being required to shelter, some people sheltering in isolation.

Canada wasn't quite as severe, but in the UK, during the first lockdown, 12% of the population were people living in single-person households. They were told, basically, "You live in solitary confinement behind your front door," which is very striking.

It's ironic, actually, because the UK has a loneliness minister, was the first government to adopt the position of a loneliness minister, and they sort of forgot they had such a minister during the pandemic.

But coming back to Piglet and Pooh, this little moment, they're walking in the woods, and Piglet takes Pooh's paw and basically just says, "I just wanted to be sure of you."

There's something so deep, so comforting, so supportive in knowing there's at least one person in your life of whom you can be sure, that you can be certain.

Usually it's a family member, if we're fortunate, it's a caregiver, it's a spouse, it's a sibling, it can be our own child.

But we can give and receive that sense of comfort, that assurance, even in our moment-to-moment connections.

I can remember a nurse in a hospital. I was about to come in for surgery, and she looked at me with such joy, such enthusiasm that, 30 years later, I still remember this moment of "I can feel sure of you, I can feel safe with you."

Feeling safe with others is crucial to our ability to give back.

A lot of the psychology literature on loneliness stresses the reality that when we experience loneliness, in small doses, this can be quite useful.

This is the evolutionary theory from John T. Cacioppo and Louise C. Hawkley.

They stress that over the course of evolution, we've developed certain mechanisms that keep us safe.

If I feel pain, I'm going to step away from what's causing my pain. If I feel thirst, I'm going to go and find water.

If I feel a little bit lonely, I'm going to reach out, I'm going to call someone, I'm going to get out of my house, go join a group, I'm going to try to be social.

But the problem is that when I'm feeling lonely too often, in the same way that if I feel pain too often, or if I'm hungry too often, this protective mechanism can become corrosive.

If I feel lonely all the time, I will start to see social connection as threatening.

So having those little moments of social safety, those little reassurances, "You're accepted, I'm accepted, I have a place here," that can help me to have some confidence to stay connected and not to retreat in a way that's ultimately going to be very challenging.

Farha: Going back to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, there's this need to be needed, and you really make the argument for that.

But it's an interesting one, because it's not that we just want to give to another. Something has to be in place often for that giving to take place.

It seems simple to say, "Well, I'm going to do this for someone else," but it's not that simple, as you've discovered in your research, right?

Kimberley: No, thank you.

In order for me to be able to give to someone, I have to have some social abilities. Someone has to have nurtured me well enough in childhood that I could cultivate those abilities.

In preparing to write the book, I did some research related to some of the orphanages that were operative in Romania under the Ceaușescu regime.

The evidence is that these conditions were so privative. These children were not cuddled, they were not comforted, they were not socially nurtured. They might have been fed, but they were not kept clean, they were not made to feel safe.

As adults, most of these people are unable to take steps to initiate social connections. They're unable to make efforts to contribute to and sustain the connections they have. They're very stunted in their abilities to be social contributors.

Our deep need, this core of our constitution, this thirst for connection, it is not just a thirst to have others give to us, to have others make us feel safe, have others care for us. It is also a need to be of value.

A lot of the literature on loneliness, where people who are chronically lonely are interviewed and asked about their experiences, many of them report that they're struck that nobody needs them.

That's their perception. "Nobody needs me."

And that sense of, because we're so social, we can feel not just powerless, but useless.

"What's the point of me if nobody needs me, or if I think nobody needs me?"

One thing to know about loneliness is that psychologists define it as the subjective perception that I am socially isolated, or the perception that my connections are fewer or poorer than I wish they would be.

I might actually have good connections. I might have a loving spouse, I might have some friends and siblings and family. Nonetheless, I could perceive myself to be alone.

And that actually can be very detrimental to my health.

My perception, mistaken as it might be, is actually worse for my health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's Julianne Holt-Lunstad's statistic, and you'll find it everywhere now.

It is such a shocking one, that loneliness correlates with so many health risks: the progression of Alzheimer's disease, alcoholism, suicidal ideation, depression, despondency. The list goes on and on.

We have a need to be included, we have a need to be needed, to be of value in our connections. And we have a deep need to see ourselves as included and valued.

Farha: Something for people in Vancouver that's really challenging for us, and certainly this goes back to even when I was a child, is to see the homeless walking our streets.

You do talk about the idea of invisibility. There's a story about how a man who was homeless still preferred to have some interactions with, say, police, even if they weren't nice, because it made him feel that he was being seen.

Kimberley: That story is of a man who's now a lecturer at a university in Australia. His name's Gregory P. Smith.

He spent close to, I think, two decades, might have been slightly longer, drifting up the eastern coast of Australia.

He eventually retreated into the wilderness, lived as a hermit for a long time, because he found it so painful to be blanked, to feel invisible, to have thousands of passers-by walk past him on the street in cities, and no acknowledgement.

Your sense, "Am I actually here?" starts to become unstable because you're being ignored by so many people.

He did say that any acknowledgement was better than no acknowledgement.

So the passers-by who kicked at him, or the police who were aggressive, at least they were acknowledging him.

There's a psychologist named Kipling Williams whose work focuses on ostracism, and he stresses that when people act out, when they engage in antisocial behaviour, often that is a reflection of this deep desire to be seen.

It's much quicker to be seen if you're aggressive or antisocial than if you're behaving well.

He says we don't really appreciate just how painful it is to us to be ostracized, to be ignored.

We've all had a bit of a taste of it, and we've all been the kid on the playground who wasn't included.

But some people who know the experience of global rejection, he says, this is a jolt of social agony that runs through your brain.

Our brain registers social pain with the same neural pathways as physical pain. And so we're really left feeling like we've been punched or physically injured.

Farha: Or even numb.

Kimberley: That's right. Like bruised, traumatized, desensitized, when we're left out.

He says we appreciate bullying, right? We know that hurts. We have systems in place in our workplaces to guard against bullying. There's an effort to educate each other about the importance of not bullying, not tolerating bullying.

But his work shows that someone who is ostracized will actually remember the experience longer and will feel it more deeply later than the person who's bullied.

Farha: I really would love to delve into this article, On the Ethics of Interacting.

Beautiful writing, by the way.

The reason why is right in the beginning of your abstract. This article I will put on the blog as a link because it is open access, which is nice.

You start off by saying, "Ordinary interactions are the primary vehicle through which we show respect, give social pleasure and grease the wheels of healthy sociality."

Ordinary interactions, and this is at the heart of this article.

You hinted at this earlier, but I want us to think, for the people listening, about what's really fundamental that I felt in this piece, and you can correct me if I'm wrong.

What I felt was something that we often forget or neglect, that an interaction with another human being, as you said earlier, can be seconds. It can be a very short period of time.

But in that short period of time, a lot can happen.

In this paper, you actually break it down into stages.

But I want us to put ourselves into a scenario because you do give many examples. If you don't mind, I want to give one example that came to me when I read this.

I remember vividly, many years ago, I was in a grocery store. I was looking for an item and I couldn't find it. There was a person working, and I interrupted her and I asked for the item, "Where is it?"

And she responded, "Hello, how are you? How can I help you?"

It was really good, because she said it in a way that stunted me, I was jolted. And it was a good jolt.

I swear, after that day, to this day, I don't ever fail to acknowledge the presence of someone in those few seconds.

A cashier, anyone that we would interact with in places that maybe we think are not part of human interaction.

But what I've noticed, Kimberley, is that that little change of mind has also changed many things.

I have not ever felt that I wasn't engaging, even if it was a few seconds, with another human being, which you argue is so fundamental in this idea of human interaction.

It's not only about the people in our circle. It's those other people as well.

Kimberley: I love your story. That's fantastic.

It's amazing how little moments like that can ripple into our lives. We can change our conduct from one day to the next based on a really pivotal interaction.

I've got a story to give back that's not nearly as good as yours.

I was in the Vancouver Kidsbooks store.

This was a couple of weeks ago, and I was reading one of the New York Times stories related to the Cornell sexual assault case.

It was about Jane Doe, but it was also about the young men.

I just had this burst of sadness, not rage, other articles have made me feel rage, but this burst of sadness for the cultures we set up, the systems that are in place.

I'm in a public place, I start tearing up.

One of the Vancouver Kidsbooks clerks was stacking books next to me, and I had my back to her. But clearly, I was emanating enough emotion that she said, "Are you all right?"

I said, "Oh, my gosh." She was so tuned in to that.

I said, "Oh, I just read something sad."

But it'll probably stay with me, how perceptive she was, how kind and attentive she was, because she didn't see me, my back was to her.

But knowing in those tiny micro-connections, people can, I was about to say we can really reveal who we are, but that's not quite right.

We live in environments that nudge us to be hurried.

Unfortunately, when we are rushed and hurried, we are less thoughtful.

There's some interesting work by Kwame Anthony Appiah. He's one of my favourite philosophers.

He wrote a book on experiments and ethics where he cites some of the psychology literature that shows that when we're in a rush, we're going to be far less virtuous.

When we're feeling a bit more settled, a bit more patient, a bit more open, it speaks well for Vancouver Kidsbooks that the setting is sufficiently spacious and unhurried that people are able to register others' emotions.

One key task in this paper was to try to, while fully acknowledging my own flaws as an interactant, I think there's a footnote there that says I'm very aware of falling short so often.

But the point of the paper was to try to show that these tiny moments of interaction, these ordinary day-to-day interactions, are as important a moral site as our deep connections, our persistent bonds, our investments in our loved ones.

Farha: And that kind of interaction can accumulate to something, I think, right?

Because if we as human beings need human interaction, we know this definitively, we need it.

The pandemic is still in our very close memory.

These interactions, in some ways, really can 'make our day' in someways.

Philosophically, it is very interesting when you start to go deep into it, which we will, but I also just want to say that it does help not being a hermit.

It can mean something to just talk with people that maybe you wouldn't even expect you would talk to, and to maybe jump on a leap of faith, doing this, even if you're shy, to make those connections.

Kimberley: I teach a course here at UBC titled Happiness, and one of the features of the course is that the students are asked to do take-home practices.

We discuss a theme, and then they're invited, a little more strongly than invited, to try out an idea related to the theme.

One take-home practice is to speak to a stranger.

I set up some parameters: make sure you're safe, make sure you choose the right setting for this. Office staff at UBC might be a good option.

But the lovely stories that come back of students getting up their courage and then finding it wasn't as scary as they thought it would be.

It seems, in one way, such a small ask, talk to a stranger. But in another way, we are making ourselves fully vulnerable to someone who owes us nothing.

My family, when I bid for their attention, they have some duty to acknowledge me.

When I bid for the attention of a stranger, I'm saying, "Please see me."

And in a way, all I have to root my appeal on is you and I are both people, and I'm standing in front of you.

Yet many of them come back with, "I connected with this other student in the class," or "This person at the bus stop, we had a nice chat."

I've written a couple of public-facing articles. One was in the New Statesman on the idea that we may have some obligation to acknowledge strangers.

Certainly not all the time.

It's by no means meant to be draconian, "This is what you should always be doing."

But given it can be such a gesture of humanity, and that we can meet a core need, even just making eye contact with someone can satisfy that need, we would do well not to view this as, "Well, I'm just going to be on my phone. This is safest for me. I don't owe anybody anything in this setting."

Especially when, if we do put the phone away and interact, we often receive so much gratitude.

These ideas, while I fully believe them, they're not always easy for me to act on.

I'm quite an introvert, as most academics are.

When you're battling your own shyness and social lack of dexterity, it's hard. But even I, in my bumbling efforts, usually am greeted with gratefulness when you reach out.

The other take-home practice in the same vein, which I present to students, and this one's much easier for them, but it has the same quality, is to spend some time, just as they're walking down the street or walking down a hallway, in their mind wishing well the people they pass.

"May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be well."

I did this myself after that lecture. We were just walking down the Buchanan hallway, there's like 100 students, and every one of them in my mind.

By the end, I had this enormous grin on my face.

I'm sure the students were thinking, "What's wrong with the professor?"

But that one, it's the tiny internal version of speaking to a stranger. It's seeing the people in our immediate proximity.

The philosopher Leslie Green has a nice paper on what it takes to show respect to someone.

He says sometimes it's not enough for respect that when I think about that person, I think about them respectfully. Sometimes, in order to respect someone, I must think about them.

So the homeless person we pass by without a thought, he's not even registering in my mind as someone to consider.

Or the students I just barrel past because I'm late for my next meeting, they don't even get this brief thought of, "I hope you're well, I hope your class is good."

One way to slow down and be a bit less hurried, a bit more virtuous, is just, "I see you."

I might not interact, but you're in my general sphere of concern.

I can see you. I can't see everybody, there's too many of us, but I can see the people around me.

Farha: That is really beautiful, because I think that even once in a while, you'll get that message or email from someone you might know, and they'll say to you, "I was thinking about you."

I like that, because I do that a lot as well. And I agree that has some value, even if it's not something that's actually released, it's just something internal.

Now, you break this down into three distinct stages: the initiation stage, the execution stage and the conclusion stage.

Can you break that down for us? What does that actually look like? Because it sounds technical, but it actually isn't.

Kimberley: Yes. The distinctive and slightly weird skill of the philosopher is once you find an object to analyze, off we go to the races, there's so much you can do.

A lot of my thinking actually starts in non-philosophical places.

It'll be a movie, a scene in the movie just really won't leave me alone. And I'm like, "Why do I keep thinking of this scene in this movie?"

Or even an encounter I had myself, or a story I read, and, "All right, clearly my brain thinks there's something philosophical to do in relation to this."

Even Piglet and Pooh get their moment.

But in thinking through these different little vignettes, the thing that struck me is that because we feel social agony when we register rejection, we have to attend to all the components of an interaction.

Still appreciating we are human, we have commitments, we are busy. No one should feel there's any demanding list of, "This is now how you must operate as an interactant." I would fall far short.

But when someone bids for my attention, they are making an overture, they are seeking to connect, they are making themselves vulnerable.

And as I mentioned before, children do this all the time. They actually take rejection pretty well.

We say, "I'm sorry, I can't, I'm making dinner," or "No, I can't read to you right now."

They come back, and they bid and bid and bid.

But that first little moment, that initiation moment, when someone's bidding for attention, that is a moment when we can cause someone social agony.

Gregory P. Smith, on the sidewalk in an Australian city, asking for money, or even asking for an acknowledgement, is getting that social jolt of pain again and again and again because he's initiating, he's bidding, and no one is taking up his bid.

Not all interactions require a bid. If you and I bump shoulders on the street, we'll probably have an interaction.

But many of them do. Many of them are one person bidding for another person's attention.

The execution part also can be very interesting, in that there's a certain arc to an interaction. We can delay someone, make them feel guilty for trying to end an interaction.

We can outsource a crucial interaction that we really should be executing ourselves.

In the paper, I give the example of a poor benighted groom who gets cold feet at the altar.

But instead of going back to the vestibule by himself and telling his fiancée, "I think we should pause this," he sends his best man.

So you can say, "Okay, we've got both an initiation problem, you should have initiated this," but he really should have executed this interaction himself.

It should have been done in private, with good grace. He should have absorbed her frustration and grief. He should have listened to her. There's so many things.

I talk in the paper about a practice that we engage in very often of interactional outsourcing.

Sometimes we do the right thing to outsource.

A boss probably acts kindly in telling her secretary, "Please ask this new employee to dress a bit more professionally," rather than telling the employee, the young new person herself, from the boss, "Please dress more professionally."

That kind of outsourcing can make the communication more gentle, more humane.

But other kinds of outsourcing are morally problematic.

I can outsource to a person like my best man, or I can outsource to a device.

I can make what should have been a face-to-face conversation a voicemail, or even a form of communication where the person cannot reach back to me, make it one-way communication.

I'm just scratching the surface, but there are lots of ways in which the way we execute an interaction, or fail to execute an interaction, can be problematic.

Farha: And then there's the art of ending an interaction. That was the most interesting to me.

Kimberley: Why was that one interesting?

Farha: Because I think people don't even think about this, that the interaction has a beginning, it has a middle, but the ending is really important.

Kimberley: The examples in the paper are, suppose you and I, mid-interview, I'm off to get a coffee.

And you're like, "Whoa, I don't think we're done."

Or if suddenly I turn and walk away.

I've certainly had those moments where I'm like, "Oh gosh, I'm suddenly beneath the notice. What did I do?"

It might well have been something.

But that kind of moment was actually what prompted Kipling Williams to start to study ostracism.

He was a graduate student. He knew this is what he wanted to study, but he hadn't figured out how.

He was in a park with his dog on a blanket, and there were two young men passing a Frisbee back and forth.

The Frisbee accidentally came over to his feet, and so he picked it up and tossed it back to them.

Then they tossed it to him again, and so he stood up and joined their Frisbee game.

This went on for a few minutes, and then they stopped passing to him.

He just stood there. Then he went back and sat with his dog and patted his dog.

But he said he was really struck at how he had this jolt of social agony, "What did I do? I was included, and now I've been..."

He was struck that it was so painful because he didn't know them. He had no expectation from them.

But in the end, he was so grateful for that moment because he then designed a computer game modelled on that and found that people will, even when it's just dots on a computer game, feel the social pain when their dot isn't included in the game.

So how we end interactions can really say quite a lot.

Sometimes there's no good way to end a certain interaction. Sometimes things just have to happen, and we can only be so dexterous.

But to give no thought to the ending of an interaction, we can end up causing each other some social pain.

In some settings, in enforced inclusion settings, two people sharing a cell in a prison, or astronauts in their closed environment, they have to manufacture ways to end interactions.

"Okay, I'm going to put my headphones on now," or "I'm going to sleep now."

They have to force them to end.

But thinking that through made me realize, they're actually interactions. We kind of bumble through them and probably do a lot of damage along the way.

But there's actually quite an art to navigating this space.

Or at least, according to the intentions we want to be honouring, that if I don't intend to cause social harm, I should attend to the initiation, the execution and the conclusion.

Farha: Looking at the time, I want to keep going. Just very quickly.

If you break it up like that, what's important, at least from what I understood, is that there's still that initiation, and you say the bidding word, but someone also initiates that ending as well, right?

And then there's that power dynamic as well that can play into these interactions.

Can you speak about that?

Kimberley: Thank you.

In some settings, only one person is empowered to end the interaction.

Let's think of past U.S. presidents. Someone in the Oval Office, you may not leave until they are dismissed, until they are released.

Someone in the presence of the Queen must wait to be dismissed.

You could say teachers and elementary school children, that the children must wait to be dismissed.

Our interactions are not always between equally positioned parties.

And so the person who holds the power has to exercise it with responsibility.

Some of it's social conventions and social norms and politeness and etiquette, all of which are moral matters, because we use etiquette to signal respect or disrespect.

But some of it, in these particular settings, these are formal requirements of one party in relation to another.

And so the powerful party has to be responsible.

Farha: I would love to ask you about a lecture that is coming up very soon at the Vancouver Public Library. Is that right?

Maybe we can end our conversation with that.

You will be participating in a public discussion titled Does AI Love Me Back? And this is at the Vancouver Public Library.

Could you, if you don't mind, give us a little bit of a preview of that, because the topic looks really interesting?

Kimberley: Thank you.

I'm getting to appear on a panel with several people who've thought very deeply about AI.

I, to this point, have written only one piece on AI and friendship, which will be coming out soon.

The thing that really strikes me is we have good reason to treasure human connections. I'll say a little bit more, we've said quite a lot about that, but I'll say a little bit more about that.

But we also have reasons not to view AI friendship, I'll stop short of love, but not to view AI friendship as wholly and unremittingly inadequate.

On the treasuring human relationships, part of our need to be needed is a need to be needed by someone.

And an AI is not a someone. Or not yet.

The plants in my care have a greater claim to be a someone. They need things to survive. They are mortal, they are living beings, they are perishable, they can fail to thrive, they can, I would say, be harmed.

An AI is not embodied. It's endlessly replicable.

And so, unless or until my colleagues convince me otherwise, there's no someone who needs me.

That is one of the most precious things about human connections. Not only do we benefit from the care and love of the people to whom we're connected, we get to offer that care and love to beings who can suffer, who can be harmed, who can die, and who need us.

But the other piece, the piece in defence of AI friendship, is there's two parts to that.

One is this observation we discussed before, that loneliness, the perception that I'm isolated, can be objectively detrimental to my health.

If an AI tool could be designed such that it helped to improve my sense of connection, it would objectively improve my health.

The other piece about AI friendship is that it's a regrettable reality, but it is a reality of human connection, that human connections are risky, that some connections are very dangerous for some people.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime issued a report in 2018 on mistreatment of women and found that the home is actually the most dangerous place for women.

A woman is more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone she knows than by a stranger, more likely to be assaulted by her spouse or another family member than by someone who's not close to her.

And so when that's our context, human relationships have thorns, they come with risks.

While I would never recommend that we abandon human relationships in favour of AI connection, for some people, an AI connection might be a therapeutic alternative.

It might be safer than what's available to them from some of the humans around them, and it might actually serve their ability to engage in healthy social connections.

I haven't yet figured out what I want to say on love, specifically.

But probably what I've just said will be some part of what I'll say on Monday.

Farha: There was something else I wanted to touch on, the idea that there is this continuation of our vulnerability even after those 20 years, right?

You discuss in your article, the idea that illness, injury, (pregnancy), bereavement, these circumstances can still make us dependent in our adult years.

I think that would probably be an interesting discussion to see where AI could fit into this reality.

But what a pleasure to be here in your office, in this Department of Philosophy. I really thank you for your time.

Kimberley: Thank you very much. Thank you for your preparation. My goodness, that was the best-prepared interview I've ever had.

Farha: Thank you!

The Hour is Blue

The Ethics of Interacting — In Conversation with Dr. Kimberley Brownlee

Transcript

Further Reading & Listening