On Sept. 29, approximately 25 students, faculty and staff sat diligently inside Sheldon Hall’s historic classroom for the annual Warren Steinkraus Lecture on human ideals. This year’s Steinkraus Lecture celebrated its 35th anniversary and was organized by the philosophy department.

The Steinkraus Lecture is named for Warren E. Steinkraus, a beloved professor of philosophy and member of Oswego’s campus community. A finding aid on a collection of his papers in Penfield Library’s University Archives includes a biography, which remarked that he was a member of several different clubs and organizations, spoke several languages and had many eclectic interests — including “conjuring, model railroading, stamp collecting, peaceful protests, anti-militarism, and the anti-nuclear movement.” 

Steinkraus died in February 1990, just after the 1988 beginning of the event to mark his retirement from academia the year before. Sometime between then and now, the lecture became a series, consisting of multiple guest speakers in a year, but then it was pared down to become an annual occurrence.

The speaker for the 2023 Steinkraus Lecture was Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, with a lecture entitled “How the Law Normalizes Surveillance.” Selinger specializes in the philosophy of technology, especially the ethical considerations of automated systems, according to his personal website. His presentation for the Steinkraus Lecture was based on a paper that he and two other collaborators had written that is soon to be published in an issue of the academic journal Washington University Law Review.

Selinger received his Bachelor of Arts with honors in philosophy from SUNY Binghamton in 1998 and then received his doctorate from SUNY Stony Brook in 2003, where he was an instructor and academic advisor during his graduate studies. 

His current work on the paper was interdisciplinary; his collaborators are Woodrow “Woody” Hartzog, a law professor at Boston University, and Johanna Gunawan, a doctoral candidate in cybersecurity at Northeastern University.

“I’d have to say that his theory makes me think a lot about police body cameras,” Alex Lachance, a senior criminal justice major, said. “It wasn’t too long ago that many were opposed to them because they saw it as a violation of rights. Face recognition and even recordings that go 24/7 — such as virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa or Ring doorbells, with microphones or cameras always on — are now normalized. He said something like ‘When you normalize something so often you don’t notice the abnormal things’ if that makes sense. It was really interesting just listening to his theory and it gave me a lot to think about.”

While technology has resulted in unprecedented advantages around the globe, its encroachment into the private lives of the public has brought about an air of distrust in further mechanization and the agencies that deploy these technologies. The current technological era has made it essential for the general population and technology to begin coexistence; however, this hopeful reality is quickly smothered when accounting for the unethical past and current-day uses of technology, both at a domestic and international level from multiple entities.

Photo by: Bryan Santiago