Following up on Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it like to be a bat?” and Alan Turing’s essay “Computing machinery and intelligence,” it shall be claimed that a successful interaction of human beings and autonomous artificial agents depends more on which characteristics human beings ascribe to the agent than on whether the agent really has those characteristics. It will be argued that Masahiro Mori’s concept of the “uncanny valley” as well as evidence from several empirical studies supports that assertion. Finally, (...) some tentative conclusions concerning moral implications of the arguments presented here shall be drawn. (shrink)

In their most informative text, Zuk et al. (2023) describe the perspectives researchers take on DBS and aDBS when discussing changes in patients’ personality, mood, or behavior. To this end, Zuk et...

Technology penetrates into all areas of our everyday and individual life and changes it in a considerable speed. This applies particularly to developments of information and communication technology since this technology shows its effects not only at our workplaces but transforms and sometimes determines the social behavior of people. Unfortunately, development and use of technology certainly doesn't go hand into hand with the acceptance of responsibility for consequences of effects of developing and using technology. Instead, the opposite behavior is quite (...) common. If this process of the rejection of responsibility shall be stopped, the sensibility of developers and users of technology for consequences of their own behavior have to be aroused and strengthened. In the following text at first I will describe some reasons to formulate ethical guidelines. After this, with the example of the ethical guidelines of the German Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. (GI), I will discuss, whether such ethical guidelines are ethical in the strict sense of the word and whether they actually can be a contribution to accomplish the striven aim of assignment of responsibility for the results of developing and using technolog. (shrink)

Technology penetrates into all areas of our everyday and individual life and changes it in a considerable speed. This applies particularly to developments of information and communication technology since this technology shows its effects not only at our workplaces but transforms and sometimes determines the social behavior of people. Unfortunately, development and use of technology certainly doesn't go hand into hand with the acceptance of responsibility for consequences of effects of developing and using technology. Instead, the opposite behavior is quite (...) common. If this process of the rejection of responsibility shall be stopped, the sensibility of developers and users of technology for consequences of their own behavior have to be aroused and strengthened. In the following text at first I will describe some reasons to formulate ethical guidelines. After this, with the example of the ethical guidelines of the German Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V., I will discuss, whether such ethical guidelines are ethical in the strict sense of the word and whether they actually can be a contribution to accomplish the striven aim of assignment of responsibility for the results of developing and using technolog. (shrink)

Simulation in the Social Sciences. Computer simulation—hereafter just called 'simulation'—more and more is getting an important tool in scientific research and development. Simulations provide powerful means for quite different scientific disciplines, for instance for cosmology as well as for economics, and it seems that they can help to extend the borderline of science. However, from a methodological point of view, besides their benefits one can identify several theoretical problems which can occur in the process of scientific research. Some of these (...) problems shall be discussed and consequences of these problems for the use of simulations shall be outlined. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 51-53, September 2012.

ML-HCAs have the potential to significantly change an entire healthcare system. It is not even necessary to presume that this will be disruptive but sufficient to assume that the mere adaptation of...

In addition to ethical aspects Citizen Science projects also involve social, economic and—not least—regulatory challenges that arise from their very openness and opportunities for participation. So...

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation. Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that (...) present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, intra methods, dealing with technology design, and ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 30-32.

This paper shall give a review of some recently published and some older books, which were published as second or third edition, on Information Ethics and Internet related topics: - Brennan, Linda L. & Victoria E. Johnson : Social, Ethical, and Policy Implications of Information Technology. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing, 2004. – 304 pages, paperback, $59.95 - Capurro, Rafael: Ethik im Netz. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2003. 278 pages, paperback, €26.00 - Cavalier, Robert J. : The impact of the Internet (...) on our moral lives. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. – 249 pages, paperback, $26.95 - Johnson, Deborah G.: Computer Ethics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, third edition, 2001. – 240 pages, paperback, $40.67 - Kuhlen, Rainer: Informationsethik. Umgang mit Wissen und Informationen in elektronischen Räumen. Konstanz: UVK , 2004. – 444 pages, paperback, €24.95 - Nyíri, Kristóf: Vernetztes Wissen. Philosophie im Zeitalter des Internets. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2004. – 179 pages, paperback, €19.95 - Spinello, Richard A.: Case Studies in Information Technology Ethics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, second edition, 2003. – 252 pages, paperback, $54.67 - Spinello, Richard A. & Herman T. Tavani : Readings in Cyberethics. Sudbury, NJ: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, second edition, 2004. – 697 pages, paperback, $54.95 - Tavani, Herman T.: Ethics & Technology. Ethical Issues in an Age of Information and Communication Technology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004. 344 pages, paperback, $53.95. (shrink)

Purpose Cybersecurity in healthcare has become an urgent matter in recent years due to various malicious attacks on hospitals and other parts of the healthcare infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to provide an outline of how core values of the health systems, such as the principles of biomedical ethics, are in a supportive or conflicting relation to cybersecurity. Design/methodology/approach This paper claims that it is possible to map the desiderata relevant to cybersecurity onto the four principles of medical (...) ethics, i.e. beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice, and explore value conflicts in that way. Findings With respect to the question of how these principles should be balanced, there are reasons to think that the priority of autonomy relative to beneficence and non-maleficence in contemporary medical ethics could be extended to value conflicts in health-related cybersecurity. Research limitations/implications However, the tension between autonomy and justice, which relates to the desideratum of usability of information and communication technology systems, cannot be ignored even if one assumes that respect for autonomy should take priority over other moral concerns. Originality/value In terms of value conflicts, most discussions in healthcare deal with the conflict of balancing efficiency and privacy given the sensible nature of health information. In this paper, the authors provide a broader and more detailed outline. (shrink)

Ultraviolet radiation is generally considered to have been discovered by Johann Wilhelm Ritter in 1801. In this article, we study the reception of Ritter’s experiment during the first decade after the event—Ritter’s remaining lifetime. Drawing on the attributional model of discovery, we are interested in whether the German physicists and chemists granted Ritter’s observation the status of a discovery and, if so, of what. Two things are remarkable concerning the early reception, and both have to do more with neglect than (...) with reception. Firstly, Ritter’s observation was sometimes accepted as a fact but, with the exception of C. J. B. Karsten’s theory of invisible light, it played almost no role in the lively debate about the nature of heat and light. We argue that it was the prevalent discourse based on the metaphysics of Stoffe that prevented a broader reception of Ritter’s invisible rays, not the fact that Ritter himself made his findings a part of his Naturphilosophie. Secondly, with the exception of C. E. Wünsch’s experiments on the visual spectrum, there was no experimental examination of the experiment. We argue that theorizing about ontological systems was more common than experimenting, because, given its social and institutional situation, this was the appropriate way of contributing to physics. Consequently, it was less clear in 1810 than in 1801 what, if anything, had been discovered by Ritter.Keywords: Johann Wilhelm Ritter; Carl Johann Bernhard Karsten; Christian Ernst Wünsch; Ultraviolet radiation; Conceptions of heat and light. (shrink)

I examine different arguments that could be used to establish indeterminism of neurological processes. Even though scenarios where single events at the molecular level make the difference in the outcome of such processes are realistic, this falls short of establishing indeterminism, because it is not clear that these molecular events are subject to quantum mechanical uncertainty. Furthermore, attempts to argue for indeterminism autonomously (i.e., independently of quantum mechanics) fail, because both deterministic and indeterministic models can account for the empirically observed (...) behavior of ion channels. (shrink)

Logical paradoxes – like the Liar, Russell's, and the Sorites – are notorious. But in Paradoxes and Inconsistent Mathematics, it is argued that they are only the noisiest of many. Contradictions arise in the everyday, from the smallest points to the widest boundaries. In this book, Zach Weber uses “dialetheic paraconsistency” – a formal framework where some contradictions can be true without absurdity – as the basis for developing this idea rigorously, from mathematical foundations up. In doing so, (...) class='Hi'>Weber directly addresses a longstanding open question: how much standard mathematics can paraconsistency capture? The guiding focus is on a more basic question, of why there are paradoxes. Details underscore a simple philosophical claim: that paradoxes are found in the ordinary, and that is what makes them so extraordinary. (shrink)

Max Weber (1864-1920), generally known as a founder of modern social science, was concerned with political affairs throughout his life. The texts in this edition span his career and include his early inaugural lecture The Nation State and Economic Policy, Suffrage and Democracy in Germany, Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order, Socialism, The Profession and Vocation of Politics, and an excerpt from his essay The Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia, as well as other shorter (...) writings. Together they illustrate the development of his thinking on the fate of Germany and the nature of politics in the modern western state in an age of cultural 'disenchantment'. The introduction discusses the central themes of Weber's political thought, and a chronology, notes and an annotated bibliography place him in his political and intellectual context. (shrink)

The principles of responsible bioentrepreneurship are a call for multiple stakeholders to engage in a manifold discourse driving a solution-oriented innovation process.

The recent literature on causality has seen the introduction of several distinctions within causality, which are thought to be important for understanding the widespread scientific practice of focusing causal explanations on a subset of the factors that are causally relevant for a phenomenon. Concepts used to draw such distinctions include, among others, stability, specificity, proportionality, or actual-difference making. In this contribution, I propose a new distinction that picks out an explanatorily salient class of causes in biological systems. Some select causes (...) in complex biological systems, I argue, have the property of enabling coherent causal control of these systems. Examples of such control variables include hormones and other signaling molecules, e.g., TOR (target of rapamycin), morphogens or the products of homeotic selector genes in embryonic pattern formation. I propose an analysis of this notion based on concepts borrowed from causal graph theory. (shrink)

In this timely and wide-ranging study, Karsten Stueber argues that empathy is epistemically central for our folk-psychological understanding of other agents--that it is something we cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds. Setting his argument in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and the interdisciplinary debate about the nature of our mindreading abilities, Stueber counters objections raised by some in the philosophy of social science and argues that it is time to rehabilitate the empathy (...) thesis.Empathy, regarded at the beginning of the twentieth century as the fundamental method of gaining knowledge of other minds, has suffered a century of philosophical neglect. Stueber addresses the plausible philosophical misgivings about empathy that have been responsible for its failure to gain widespread philosophical acceptance.Crucial in this context is his defense of the assumption, very much contested in contemporary philosophy of mind, that the notion of rational agency is at the core of folk psychology. Stueber then discusses the contemporary debate between simulation theorists--who defend various forms of the empathy thesis--and theory theorists. In distinguishing between basic and reenactive empathy, he provides a new interpretive framework for the investigation into our mindreading capacities. Finally, he considers epistemic objections to empathy raised by the philosophy of social science that have been insufficiently discussed in contemporary debates. Empathy theorists, Stueber writes, should be prepared to admit that, although empathy can be regarded as the central default mode for understanding other agents, there are certain limitations in its ability to make sense of other agents; and there are supplemental theoretical strategies available to overcome these limitations. (shrink)

Wie können Freiheit und Widerstand innerhalb von Foucaults Theorie der Macht und Subjektivierung konzipiert werden? Karsten Schubert liefert die erste systematische Rekonstruktion der sozialphilosophischen Debatte um Freiheit bei Foucault und eine neue Lösung für das Freiheitsproblem: Freiheit als die Fähigkeit zur reflexiven Kritik der eigenen Subjektivierung – kurz: Freiheit als Kritik – ist das Resultat von freiheitlicher Subjektivierung in politischen Institutionen. Der Band zeigt so die Konsequenzen von Foucaults Freiheitsdenken für die Demokratietheorie und die allgemeine sozialphilosophische Freiheitsdiskussion auf.