A Talk by Matthew Dennis

Room 814 Mahachakri Building, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University,

Monday, February 27, 2023, 1-2.15 pm

Topic: “Rethinking McMindfulness from an East Asian Perspective (co-authored with Joseph Sta Maria)”

Matthew Dennis is an assistant professor in ethics of technology at TU Eindhoven, specialising in artificial intelligence and persuasive technologies. He is also Senior Research Fellow in Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies with the ESDiT consortium. He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (2023), University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Advanced Studies (2022), University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Intelligence (2020). He is also a researcher at Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics for a Horizon Europe project on algorithmic fairness, “Fairness and Intersectional Non-Discrimination in Human Recommendation” (FINDHR). His research focuses on how we can live well with emerging and future technologies (data-driven algorithms, recommender systems, virtual assistants, wearables, apps), as well as how the use of these technologies is affected by gender, income, and intercultural factors. So far he has published 20 research papers, including articles in Journal of Value Inquiry, Philosophy & Technology, Ethics & Information Technology, Science & Engineering Ethics, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Digital Society, Journal of Moral Education, Journal of Social Epistemology, Journal of Mind & Society, and book chapters by Bloomsbury, Routledge, and Springer. I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with several non-academic partners, including Royal Bank of Scotland & Natwest Group on fairness in algorithmic credit-scoring, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions on autonomous vehicles, and EIT Digital on gender stereotypes in self-care apps. 

About the Talk

Mindfulness apps are increasingly popular in the self-care app market. Since 2018, when Apple announced that self-care apps were the App Trend of the Year, the popularity of these products has increased exponentially (Apple 2018). Nevertheless, many mindfulness apps have also been accused of “McMindfulness,” a catch-all term to signify their superficiality and propensity to make users subservient to the socioeconomic status quo (Hyland, 2017, Purser, 2019, Slunecko and Clouba, 2021). Critics of McMindfulness contend that mindfulness apps merely serve as palliatives that help people cope and integrate with unjust structures, instead of aiding them in evaluating and critiquing these structures. This is because the meditative practices promoted by McMindfulness apps are devoid of any ethical orientation (Cannon, 2016, Simão, 2019). In contrast to this, the non-Western traditions (Buddhism, Confucianism) from which mindfulness originated understood meditative practices as having a necessary and distinctive ethical orientation (Garfield, 2017, Peng and Zhang, 2022). In other words, mindfulness apps threaten to make users less sensitive to unjust socio-ethical contexts by promoting practices that result in an amoral and asocial state of mind (Leggett, 2022). For this reason, there have been numerous calls from the critics of McMindfulness for a more ethical and socially critical formulation of mindfulness (Stanley, 2012, Magee, 2016, Walsh, 2016, Leggett, 2022). Some scholars claim that this can be achieved if mindfulness practices promoted by apps return to their originary ethical principles (Purser and Loy, 2013, Hyland, 2017). However, there are those that argue that, even from the Buddhist perspective, mindfulness practices were never meant to evaluate socio-ethical issues or structures (Repetti, 2016, Analayo, 2020). This article aims to respond to McMindfulness critics. While the Buddhist tradition is useful, the article argues that Confucian philosophy can be a more ready resource for formulating an ethical and socially critical mindfulness practice. This is because Confucianism has an explicitly morally-imbued and inquisitive conception of mindfulness (Tiwald, 2018, Tan 2019, 2021). The article will explore how Confucian ideas on mindfulness can offer insights for improving the design of the next generation of mindfulness apps such that they avoid the pitfall of McMindfulness, and instead help actuate mindfulness’s socio-ethical potential. Keywords: Mcmindfulness, Confucianism, Buddhism, Mindfulness app.

For more information contact jerdonly AT gmail.com