Nga-Yin Tam

Agnes Tam earned her Ph.D. from Queen’s (Philosophy) in 2020. She is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow with the Research Group on Constitutional Studies at McGill University in 2021-22, and has been appointed Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Calgary (beginning 2022). She is also a recipient of Hong Kong’s Sir Edward Youde Memorial Overseas Honorary Fellowship. Her doctoral research works at the intersection between political philosophy and social epistemology. It explores how humans collectively achieve moral learning in a non-ideal world where rationality is constrained by cognitive bias and relations of domination. While it applauds the “epistemic egalitarian model” of moral learning in correcting moral bias arising out of relations of domination, it argues that it is insufficient in correcting social bias arising out of our peer relations governed by social norms. Unlike moral bias, it argues that social bias can be morally benign, socially rational and practically valuable. Hence it need not and ought not be purged indiscriminately. The challenge is to overcome only those problematic social biases embedding moral bias. To that end, Agnes develops an “epistemic inegalitarian model” of social learning and reconciles its tensions with moral egalitarianism. The goal of the research is in part to enable moral learning of human-animal relations beyond the uses of hypothetical reason and democratic reason, and understand and defend the rationality and morality in non-deliberative and non-democratic means of activism. Prior coming to Queen’s, Agnes completed her LL.B. at University of Hong Kong and M.Sc. in political theory at London School of Economics and engaged in international animal advocacy.