This book serves as an interdisciplinary base of scholarly contributions on the subject of technoethics, a field that deals with current and future problems that arise at the intersection of science, technological innovation, and human life and society.

This book offers a unique description of how phenomenology can help professionals from medical, environmental and social fields to explore notions such as interaffectivity, empathy, epoche, reduction, and intersubjective encounter. Written by a group of top scholars, it uniquely covers the relationship between phenomenology and bioethics, and focuses not only on medical cases, but also on the environment and emerging technologies. This variety of themes, whilst including techno-ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, and medical ethics, is conducive to appreciating broadly how (...) phenomenology can improve our quality of our life. Despite its difficult themes, the book appeals to an audience of both academics and professionals who are willing to understand how to increase the quality of care in their professional field. (shrink)

In the case of synthetic biology, the responsibility of humanity for the creation of new technologies that interfere with the processes of natural selection and evolution of species can be invoked, thus annihilating the complex ecological balances and possibly leading to uncontrollable genetic mutations. The big ethical questions are raised by the fact that viral genetic material is hybridized with synthetic genetic material, as well as with the genetic material that underlies the DNA of various living cells, that might interfere (...) with synthetic genetic material - either due to errors in the handling of genetic content or the inability to predict the evolution of synthetic biological systems, an evolution beyond any mathematical modeling that would allow the estimation of biological risks given by the appearance of new species - partially or totally synthetic - and especially by their spread in ecosystems. In this article we will plead for an ethical modeling of technology and a wider communication between ethicist and bio-engineers in order to estimate the directions of technological evolution, especially in the case of synthetic biology. (shrink)

Friendship is an important part of the good life. While many roboticists are eager to create friend-like robots, many philosophers and ethicists are concerned. They argue that robots cannot really be our friends. Robots can only fake the emotional and behavioural cues we associate with friendship. Consequently, we should resist the drive to create robot friends. In this article, I argue that the philosophical critics are wrong. Using the classic virtue-ideal of friendship, I argue that robots can plausibly be considered (...) our virtue friends - that to do so is philosophically reasonable. Furthermore, I argue that even if you do not think that robots can be our virtue friends, they can fulfil other important friendship roles, and can complement and enhance the virtue friendships between human beings. (shrink)

Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in practices, new ethical and social issues emerge due to how these systems nudge users into making decisions and changing (...) behaviours. This article discusses how these AI-driven systems pose particular ethical challenges with regards to nudging. To confront these issues, the value sensitive design approach is adopted as a principled methodology that designers can adopt to design these systems to avoid harming and contribute to the social good. The AI for Social Good factors are adopted as the norms constraining maleficence. In contrast, higher-order values specific to AI, such as those from the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are adopted as the values to be promoted as much as possible in design. The use case of Amazon Alexa's Healthcare Skills is used to illustrate this design approach. It provides an exemplar of how designers and engineers can begin to orientate their design programs of these technologies towards the social good. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the three intertwined notions central to Mario Bunge’s thought, emergence, systems and mechanism. It draws lines that contact or diverge from his counterparts and wider uses in recent philosophical work. Bunge’s status as an early pioneer of the systemic approach, emergence and mechanismic explanation means that his work may be fruitfully supplemented or complemented by these recent advances. The chapter then moves on to discuss Bunge’s philosophy of technology as the additional central theme in his overall opus. (...) His insistence on technology being inherently philosophical, as technophilosophy, and his related thesis, technoethics, are further analyzed and expanded upon. It is proposed that along with neurons, at the physical level, and what Bunge has dubbed “psychons” at the level of the mental, there may be a notion of “technon” at the emerging level of modern technological convergence. (shrink)

This article analyzes the present status, development trends, and problems in the ethics of nuclear technology in light of a possible revision of its conceptual foundations. First, to better recognize the current state of nuclear technology ethics and related problems, this article focuses on presenting a picture of the evolution of the concepts and recent achievements related to technoethics, based on the ethics of responsibility. The term ‘ethics of nuclear technology’ describes a multidisciplinary endeavor to examine the problems associated (...) with nuclear technology through ethical frameworks and paradigms. Second, to identify the reasons for the intensification of efforts to develop ethics in relation to nuclear technology, this article presents an analysis of the recent situation and future prospects of nuclear technology deployment. This includes contradictions that have aggravated nuclear dilemmas and debates stimulated by the shortcomings of nuclear technology, as well as the need for the further development of a nuclear culture paradigm that is able to provide a conceptual framework to overcome nuclear challenges. Third, efforts in the field of nuclear technology ethics are presented as a short overview of particular examples, and the major findings regarding obstacles to the development of nuclear technology ethics are also summarized. Finally, a potential methodological course is proposed to overcome inaction in this field; the proposed course provides for the further development of nuclear technology ethics, assuming the axiological multidisciplinary problematization of the main concepts in nuclear engineering through the basic ethical paradigms: analytical, hermeneutical, and poststructuralist. (shrink)

The concept of artificial intelligence is not new nor is the notion that it should be granted legal protections given its influence on human activity. What is new, on a relative scale, is the notion that artificial intelligence can possess citizenship—a concept reserved only for humans, as it presupposes the idea of possessing civil duties and protections. Where there are several decades’ worth of writing on the concept of the legal status of computational artificial artefacts in the USA and elsewhere, (...) it is surprising that law makers internationally have come to a standstill to protect our silicon brainchildren. In this essay, it will be assumed that future artificial entities, such as Sophia the Robot, will be granted citizenship on an international scale. With this assumption, an analysis of rights will be made with respect to the needs of a non-biological intelligence possessing legal and civic duties akin to those possessed by humanity today. This essay does not present a full set of rights for artificial intelligence—instead, it aims to provide international jurisprudence evidence aliunde ab extra de lege lata for any future measures made to protect non-biological intelligence. (shrink)

Biomimicry is a rising popular ecology movement and method that urges the derivation of innovative and environmentally sound design from organic systems. This essay explores the notion of nature in biomimicry as articulated by the movement’s founder, Janine Benyus, and the nature of biomimicry as practiced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology media ecologist Neri Oxman. Benyus’s approach, I show, promotes biomimicry as a science of nature in which nature is treated as a source for innovative design that can be (...) emulated in technological apparatus. Such an approach is problematic, I argue, for its valorization of organic form, which results in both a rigid system of ethics demanding absolute separation of nature and technology. By contrast, Oxman’s work, I show, pursues biomimicry as a technology of nature. In so doing, I argue, it mobilizes a neomaterialist style of interaction with organic materials that ultimately enjoins a radically different way of thinking nature, technology, and technoethics. (shrink)

This addendum expands upon the arguments made in the author’s 2020 essay, “Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligence: Citizenship as the Exception to the Rule”, in an effort to display the significance human augmentation technologies will have on (feasibly) inadvertently providing legal protections to artificial intelligence systems (AIS)—a topic only briefly addressed in that work. It will also further discuss the impacts popular media have on imprinting notions of computerised behaviour and its subsequent consequences on the attribution of legal protections to (...) AIS and on speculative technological advancement that would aid the sophistication of AIS. (shrink)

Telerobotically operated and semiautonomous machines have become a major component in the arsenals of industrial nations around the world. By the year 2015 the United States military plans to have one-third of their combat aircraft and ground vehicles robotically controlled. Although there are many reasons for the use of robots on the battlefield, perhaps one of the most interesting assertions are that these machines, if properly designed and used, will result in a more just and ethical implementation of warfare. This (...) paper will focus on these claims by looking at what has been discovered about the capability of humans to behave ethically on the battlefield, and then comparing those findings with the claims made by robotics researchers that their machines are able to behave more ethically on the battlefield than human soldiers. Throughout the paper we will explore the philosophical critique of this claim and also look at how the robots of today are impacting our ability to fight wars in a just manner. (shrink)

This article considers the ethical dimension of technological science (technoscience), namely, the problem of the applicability of the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to the functioning of new technologies. Aspects of evil brought about by the introduction of new technologies (i.e. lack/scarcity of resources, devaluation of human labour, ignorance of/inability to use technical tools, violations of the measure and harmony of life, etc.) are highlighted. Particular attention is paid to a new form of evil, namely artificial/technological evil. The article argues (...) that the emergence of such evils is associated with the growing scale of human intervention in the natural course of things and with recent advances in technology. Dangers related to the uncontrolled development of technological science along many axes of human existence are analysed. The authors conclude that overcoming artificial evil is possible via a transition from a man-made to an anthropogenic (intellectual and humanistic) form of civilisation in which the achievements of technoscience serve not the self-destruction of mankind but the discovery of essential human forces. (shrink)

It's clear that robodogs in Metalhead are deadly and dangerous, but exactly what makes them so? Using Daniel Dinello's examination of technophobia and our cultural fears of technologies, this chapter explores different aspects of our fears of robodogs and, indeed, other robots that we might encounter. On one level, for example, the robodogs present a concrete threat to Bella and her ill‐fated troupe, but the robodogs also present us with a challenge to how we think about humans, including our ability (...) to remain in control. How can we characterise this relationship, or lack thereof, between humans and robots, and what can we learn from this to help us understand the roots of our technophobia? (shrink)

Abstract The ethics of technology use has tended to arise from the theory of the role of technology in human life and society and thus introduces a bias into moral assessment of such use. I propose a dialectical method of morally assessing a technology use without such a preset notion. Instead the assumption is that the moral agent is as responsible for use of a technology as for any other moral action of the agent, that is, the individual’s use of (...) a technology is a moral action that can be morally assessed. I apply this outlook to automobile use, weighing its moral pros and cons, such as in terms of autonomy, environmental degradation, land use, health hazards, and other moral drawbacks arising from the technology’s use or non-use. Although the conclusion leaves the final moral assessment undecided, the method points to a way fairly to assess morally the use of technologies in terms of human betterment and environmental and health concerns, minimizing biases from assumptions of the role or nature of technologies. Content Type Journal Article Category Articles Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9320-8 Authors Lantz Miller, CUNY, New York, NY, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863. (shrink)

Que la tecnología nos ha cambiado la vida es una verdad de perogrullo. Y, la pertinencia de una reflexión científica sobre la tecnología, a estas alturas, tampoco plantea dudas. La técnica nos rodea y no es posible ignorarla ni detenerla, ya no hay vuelta atrás, a menos que se produzca una catástrofe. Pero, ¿es posible que se produzca? En esta comunicación pongo de manifiesto la necesidad de congeniar dos puntos que suelen presentarse enconados: la naturaleza y la tecnología. Esta necesidad (...) no viene impuesta por un deseo romántico de contemporizar a los partidarios de ambos extremos, sino de poner de manifiesto que este enfrentamiento y ruptura es uno de los peligros que pueden impedir la prolongación de la vida de la especie humana. Deseo a toda costa evitar el catastrofismo, pero también mostrar que con la tecnología, en poco tiempo, hemos llegado muy lejos y es perentorio asumir responsabilidades. (shrink)

Projects of radical life extension have been discussed amongst scientists for years. Some bioethicists express reservations about this endeavor. A common objection appeals to demography: if the human lifespan is dramatically expanded, humanity would face an overpopulation problem. In this essay, the authors reply to this objection. They posit that radical life extension is unlikely to lead to overpopulation because overpopulation is determined more by fertility rates than by longevity, and as a result of the advanced phases of industrialization, fertility (...) rates are likely to be reduced, and therefore, population size would become stable. However, they argue that although overpopulation is not a concern for the foreseeable future, it is still important to acknowledge its potential harms. Finally, they argue that even if overpopulation becomes a problem caused by radical life extension, there are plausible ways to solve it. (shrink)

In this paper, I am concerned with certain phenomenological contributions to person-centred practices in healthcare. I propose a meaning-centred phenomenological approach to illness and contrast it with certain body-centred and feeling-centred accounts. I suggest that the proposed approach complements, rather than competes with, these other accounts in the area of phenomenology of illness. This is illustrated, for example, by the way the proposed meaning-centred approach tackles certain general challenges to the phenomenology of illness. I pursue this approach to develop an (...) account of illness as involving a loss of meaning. However, I point out that at the heart of illness lies the possibility of resilience. Resilience is existentially understood as enacting a reconstruction of meaning. I point out that resilience and certain related cognitive mechanisms make well-being possible. Here, to be well is existentially understood as being able to find meaning in life. The phenomenological analysis of existential resilience and well-being I offer in this paper indicates that resilient ways of being which enable well-being can be learned; the analysis thus brings to light deep motivations for supporting resilient learning through healthcare practices and policies. (shrink)

The philosophical analysis of trauma has grown over the last ten years due to our need to elucidate the lived experience endured by an increasing number of human beings undergoing forced migration, abuses, war crimes, and traumatizing situations. The irreducibility of trauma renders the task of care ethics more and more difficult. Yet, this paper argues that a phenomenological analysis of the care relation with traumatized patients can help elucidate the inter-affective dynamics at stake in such encounters. First, I will (...) analyze the phenomenon of compassion fatigue and show how it differs from “emotional contagion” and how it relates to empathy. Relying on phenomenological approaches to empathy, I will assess the kind of “affective sharing” entailed by compassion fatigue. In the second section, I will reframe this conception of empathy by uncovering the existential feeling of vulnerability and the pre-reflective bodily resonance that frames our encounter with others. In the final section, I will argue that vicarious traumatization could be overcome thanks to a “creative kind” of compassion which links the sense of self to the sense of agency, the act of caring with the quest for justice, in a constant effort to restore balance through affective sharing and mutual recognition. (shrink)

Our increasingly sophisticated medical technological interventions yield numerous benefits. At the same time, there are dangerous trade-offs, particularly in the domain of digitized health communication and electronic medical records. These have become the rule of thumb, the default posture, in place of interpersonal, embodied, face-to-face interaction. This foremost stumbling block in our healthcare system generates an urgent moral imperative to resuscitate embodied presence in healthcare. Through applying a phenomenological lens, focusing particularly on insights from Emmanuel Levinas, this essay examines his (...) metaphysic of ethics that occurs through encountering the face of the Other, le visage. This encounter evokes an epiphany, a “rupture of being,” that constitutes a moral invitation, a beckoning that offers further ground for an ethics of embodied presence as a path to re-establish genuine communication with our patients. (shrink)

In this paper we will be discussing the ethical risks of the transcendental quality of virtual spaces as they apply to digital health, especially in relation to new attempts to construct a “social mediome.” As we will discuss in the following section, phenomenology has raised criticisms against the context-lessness and ethical opacity of technology. The creation of a social mediome seems to come as an answer to this criticism as it creates a context that gives voice and flesh to human (...) beings within their virtual lives. Yet, as we will discuss in this paper, the transcendental quality of this social mediome might involve the risk of normalizing health in a way that would prevent individuals from achieving well-being according to the meaning that they personally attribute to it. (shrink)

In response to the many social impacts of automated mobility, in September 2020 the European Commission published Ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles, a report in which recommendations on road safety, privacy, fairness, explainability, and responsibility are drawn from a set of eight overarching principles. This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary research where philosophers and engineers joined efforts to operationalize the guidelines advanced in the report. To this aim, we endorse a function-based working approach to support the implementation (...) of values and recommendations into the design of automated vehicle technologies. Based on this, we develop methodological tools to tackle issues related to personal autonomy, explainability, and privacy as domains that most urgently require fine-grained guidance due to the associated ethical risks. Even though each tool still requires further inquiry, we believe that our work might already prove the productivity of the function-based approach and foster its adoption in the CAV scientific community. (shrink)

The phenomenological starting point of this paper is the world of the bioethical subject, the person engaged in moral deliberation about practices of intervention on living bodies. This paper develops a perspective informed by the hermeneutic tradition in phenomenology, approaching bioethical thinking as situated within specific contexts of meaning and conceptuality, frameworks through which the phenomena of the world are interpreted and made sense of by the reasoning subject. It focuses on one dimension of the hermeneutic world of contemporary bioethics, (...) that of the relation between bioethics and biological science. This paper shows how taking a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective can highlight an important but often overlooked way in which biology helps to structure spaces of bioethical sense-making, with substantive consequences for moral judgement. Bioscientific discourse provides us with interpretive resources for making sense of the living world around us and within us. Different interpretive resources reflect different assumptions about the ontology of living beings, humans included. Since, as is argued here, judgements about moral significance in bioethics can depend upon suppositions about the ontology of life, the way that scientific discourse interpretively constitutes the phenomena of life as intentional objects can thereby channel moral thinking in particular ways. The central thesis of this paper is that critical engagement with this ‘hermeneutics of biology’ is vital for contemporary bioethics. To illustrate, the paper explores the hermeneutic constitution of the genome and its relationship to issues of human identity in the context of genetic technology. Alternative interpretations of the genome—as ‘programme’ or as ‘developmental resource’—differently shape bioethical reasoning in this context. Choices of description in bioscience are in this way partly ethical questions, questions about how we ought to comport ourselves towards each other and the living world beyond. (shrink)

‘Simulation Hypotheses’ are imaginative scenarios that are typically employed in philosophy to speculate on how likely it is that we are currently living within a simulated universe as well as on our possibility for ever discerning whether we do in fact inhabit one. These philosophical questions in particular overshadowed other aspects and potential uses of simulation hypotheses, some of which are foregrounded in this article. More specifically, “A Theodicy for Artificial Universes” focuses on the moral implications of simulation hypotheses with (...) the objective of speculatively answering questions concerning computer simulations such as: If we are indeed living in a computer simulation, what might be its purpose? What aspirations and values could be inferentially attributed to its alleged creators? And would living in a simulated universe affect the value and meaning we attribute to our existence? (shrink)

Phenomenology has a rich tradition of interpreting technology, medicine, and the life sciences. It has not yet had much to say about the medical devices which have always been central to bioethics. In this chapter, I outline what is meant by medical devices, and connect the sense of intention in made-object design with the notion of intentionality in phenomenology. I survey three basic ways of characterising medical devices grounded in the phenomenological literature: Albert Borgmann’s device paradigm, Don Ihde’s human-machine relations, (...) and Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject. Engaging with these approaches could help bring to analyses of medical devices the uniquely whole-of-context view of which phenomenology is capable, and better inform all stakeholders about their phenomenal consequences. (shrink)

Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) uses electronic devices which monitor and record health-related data outside a hospital, usually within the home. This paper examines the ethical issues raised by PHM. Eight themes describing the ethical implications of PHM are identified through a review of 68 academic articles concerning PHM. The identified themes include privacy, autonomy, obtrusiveness and visibility, stigma and identity, medicalisation, social isolation, delivery of care, and safety and technological need. The issues around each of these are discussed. The system (...) / lifeworld perspective of Habermas is applied to develop an understanding of the role of PHMs as mediators of communication between the institutional and the domestic environment. Furthermore, links are established between the ethical issues to demonstrate that the ethics of PHM involves a complex network of ethical interactions. The paper extends the discussion of the critical effect PHMs have on the patient’s identity and concludes that a holistic understanding of the ethical issues surrounding PHMs will help both researchers and practitioners in developing effective PHM implementations. (shrink)

Although most unmanned systems that militaries use today are still unarmed and predominantly used for surveillance, it is especially the proliferation of armed military robots that raises some serious ethical questions. One of the most pressing concerns the moral responsibility in case a military robot uses violence in a way that would normally qualify as a war crime. In this chapter, the authors critically assess the chain of responsibility with respect to the deployment of both semi-autonomous and (learning) autonomous lethal (...) military robots. They start by looking at military commanders because they are the ones with whom responsibility normally lies. The authors argue that this is typically still the case when lethal robots kill wrongly – even if these robots act autonomously. Nonetheless, they next look into the possible moral responsibility of the actors at the beginning and the end of the causal chain: those who design and manufacture armed military robots, and those who, far from the battlefield, remotely control them. (shrink)

Most unmanned systems used in operations today are unarmed and mainly used for reconnaissance and mine clearing, yet the increase of the number of armed military robots is undeniable. The use of these robots raises some serious ethical questions. For instance: who can be held morally responsible in reason when a military robot is involved in an act of violence that would normally be described as a war crime? In this article, we critically assess the attribution of responsibility with respect (...) to the deployment of both non-autonomous and non-learning autonomous lethal military robots. We will start by looking at the role of those with whom responsibility normally lies, the commanders. We argue that this is no different in the case of the above mentioned robots. After that, we will turn to those at the beginning and the end of the causal chain, respectively the manufacturers and designers, and the human operators who remotely control armed military robots from behind a computer screen. (shrink)

Ethical issues of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are important because they can have significant effects on human liberty, happiness, and people’s ability to lead a good life. They are also of functional interest because they can determine whether technologies are used and whether their positive potential can unfold. For these reasons, policy makers are interested in finding out what these issues are and how they can be addressed. The best way of creating ICT policy that is sensitive to ethical (...) issues pertain to being proactive in addressing such issues at an early stage of the technology life cycle. The present paper uses this position as a starting point and discusses how knowledge of ethical aspects of emerging ICTs can be gained. It develops a methodology that goes beyond established futures methodologies to cater for the difficult nature of ethical issues. The authors outline how the description of emerging ICTs can be used for an ethical analysis. (shrink)

Concepts of inter-personal relations are most elusive. They conceal assumptions, norms, beliefs and various associated notions, and become even more opaque and potent when they transcend the language in which they are used and come to reflect a culture or a tradition. Escaping the critical gaze of those “in” the tradition, these concepts and their theoretical baggage remain largely alien to those outside it. This gap fosters a sense of alienation, if not of exclusion, on the part of those living (...) outside what they often regard as a charmed circle. No doubt, friendship is unlikely to figure on the danger list of such concepts. Yet, the concept is not innocent. It reflects philosophical and social presuppositions accumulated in the course of its long history and bears the weight of the paradigm shifts it underwent. This essay identifies some of these presuppositions built into it, outlines major steps in its development, and offers reasons why this particulate inter-personal relation came to be conceived the way it is conceived in “the Western tradition”. (shrink)

Up to 70% of all watch time on YouTube is due to the suggested content of its recommender system. This system has been found, by virtue of its design, to be promoting conspiratorial content. In this paper, I first critique the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, showing it to be philosophically untenable. This means that technological artefacts can influence what people come to value (or perhaps even embody values themselves) and change the moral evaluation of an action. Second, I introduces (...) the concept of an affordance, borrowed from the literature on ecological psychology. This concept allows me to make salient how technologies come to solicit certain kinds of actions from users, making such actions more or less likely, and in this way influencing the kinds of things one comes to value. Third, I critically assesses the results of a study by Alfano et al. I make use of the literature on affordances, introduced earlier, to shed light on how these technological systems come to mediate our perception of the world and influence action. (shrink)

Although continued investments in nanotechnology are made, atomically precise manufacturing (APM) to date is still regarded as speculative technology. APM, also known as molecular manufacturing, is a token example of a converging technology, has great potential to impact and be affected by other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and ICT. The development of APM thus can have drastic global impacts depending on how it is designed and used. This paper argues that the ethical issues that arise from APM (...) - as both a standalone technology or as a converging one - affects the roles of stakeholders in such a way as to warrant an alternate means furthering responsible innovation in APM research. This paper introduces a value-based design methodology called Value Sensitive Design (VSD) that may serve as a suitable framework to adequately cater to the values of stakeholders. Ultimately, it is concluded that VSD is a strong candidate framework for addressing the moral concerns of stakeholders during the preliminary stages of technological development. (shrink)

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. In recent years, the phenomenology of health and disease has become a major topic in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, owing much to the work of Havi Carel (2007, 2011, 2018). Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to (...) the phenomenology of animal health and suffering. This omission shall be remedied here, laying the groundwork for the phenomenological evaluation of animal health and suffering. (shrink)

A very basic form of experience consists in feeling energetic, vital, alive, tired, dispirited, vigorous and so on. These feelings – which I call feelings of vitality or vital feelings – constitute the main concern of this paper. My aim is to argue that these feelings exhibit a distinctive form of affectivity which cannot be explained in terms of emotions, moods, background feelings or existential feelings and to explore different paths for their conceptualization. The paper proceeds as follows. After introducing (...) the topic (sect. 1), I show that these feelings cannot be subsumed under any of the current categories of the affective mind (sect. 2). Against this backdrop, I present and critically assess Scheler’s notion of vital feelings as an alternative model for capturing their distinctive nature (sect. 3). Next, I explore varieties of vital feelings by focusing on different levels of the bodily-felt experience (sect. 4) and analyze their specific form of self-involvement (sect. 5). Finally, I conclude by showing how the study of vital feelings might contribute to phenomenological bioethics (sect. 6). (shrink)

According to several recent studies, a big chunk of college students in North America and Europe uses so called ‘smart drugs' to enhance their cognitive capacities aiming at improving their academic performance. With these practices, there comes a certain moral unease. This unease is shared by many, yet it is difficult to pinpoint and in need of justification. Other than simply pointing to the medical risks coming along with using non-prescribed medication, the salient moral question is whether these practices are (...) troubling in and of themselves. In due consideration of empirical insights into the concrete effects of smart drugs on brain and behavior, our attempt is to articulate wherein this moral unease consists and to argue for why the authors believe cognitive enhancement to be morally objectionable. The authors will contend that the moral problem with these practices lies less in the end it seeks, than in the underlying human disposition it expresses and promotes. Some might ask, what is wrong with molding our cognitive capacities to achieve excellence, get a competitive edge, or, as the whim takes us? In all of these occasions, the usage of smart drugs serves a certain goal, a telos. The goal is, broadly speaking, this: outsmarting opponents in an arms race for limited resources and thereby yielding a competitive edge. In plain words: competition is valued higher than cooperation or solidarity. What is wrong with striving for this goal? The authors submit that the question whether people really want to live in a society that promotes the mentality ‘individual competition over societal cooperation' deserves serious consideration. In developing their answer, the authors draw on an ‘Ethics of Constraint' framework, arguing that widespread off-label use of smart drugs bears the risk of negative neural/behavioral consequences for the individual that might, in the long run, be accompanied by changing social value orientations for the worse. (shrink)

Artificial agents such as robots are performing increasingly significant ethical roles in society. As a result, there is a growing literature regarding their moral status with many suggesting it is justified to regard manufactured entities as having intrinsic moral worth. However, the question of whether artificial agents could have the high degree of moral status that is attributed to human persons has largely been neglected. To address this question, the author developed a respect-based account of the ethical criteria for the (...) moral status of persons. From this account, the paper employs an empirical test that must be passed in order for artificial agents to be considered alongside persons as having the corresponding rights and duties. (shrink)

Predicting terrorist attacks with prediction markets has been accused of being immoral. While some of these concerns are about the likely effectiveness of prediction markets on terrorism (PMsoT), this paper discusses the three main reasons why even effective prediction markets on terrorism might be considered immoral. We argue that these three reasons establish only that PMsoT cause offense and/or fleeting mild harm, and that, even taken together, they do not constitute serious harm. The moral issues considered are that PMsoT: 1) (...) create character-affecting perverse incentives, 2) desensitise society to tragic events, and 3) disrespect important ideals. In addition to arguing against the force of these three potential moral problems, it is also argued that societies and governments already endorse intelligence-gathering methods that are clearly more immoral than PMsoT in the relevant respects. We also argue that some circumstances require governments to cause non-serious harm to some people in order to protect and promote the rights and welfare of its citizens. We conclude that a government’s obligation to protect and promote the rights and welfare of its citizens outweighs the non-serious harm that could be caused by effective PMsoT. As a result, we recommend that the likelihood of PMsoT being effective is investigated more closely. (shrink)

This paper reviews the complex, overlapping ideas of two prominent Italian philosophers, Lorenzo Magnani and Luciano Floridi, with the aim of facilitating the nonviolent transformation of self and world, and with a focus on information technologies in mediating this process. In Floridi’s information ethics, problems of consistency arise between self-poiesis, anagnorisis, entropy, evil, and the narrative structure of the world. Solutions come from Magnani’s work in distributed morality, moral mediators, moral bubbles and moral disengagement. Finally, two examples of information technology, (...) one ancient and one new, a Socratic narrative and an information processing model of moral cognition, are offered as mediators for the nonviolent transformation of self and world respectively, while avoiding the tragic requirements inherent in Floridi’s proposal. (shrink)