Global Engineering Ethics introduces the fundamentals of ethics in a context specific to engineering without privileging any one national or cultural conception of ethics. Numerous case studies from around the world help the reader to see clearly the relevance of design, safety, and professionalism to engineers. Engineering increasingly takes place in global contexts, with industrial and research teams operating across national and cultural borders. This adds a layer of complexity to already challenging ethical issues. This book is essential reading for (...) anyone wanting to understand or communicate the ethics of engineering, including students, academics, and researchers, and is indispensable for those involved in international and cross-cultural environments. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with aspects of responsibility in Norwegian public health nursing. Public health nursing is an expansive profession with diffuse boundaries. The Norwegian public health nurse does not perform ‘hands on’ nursing, but focuses on the prevention of illness, injury, or disability, and the promotion of health. What is the essence of ethical responsibility in public health nursing? The aim of this article is to explore the phenomenon based on the ethics of responsibility as reflected upon by the (...) philosopher Emanuel Levinas (1906–1995). From an ethical point of view, responsibility is about our duty towards the Other, a duty we have not always chosen, are prepared for, or can fully explain; but it is nevertheless a demand we have to live with. Interviews with five experienced Norwegian nurses provide the empirical base for reflection and interpretation. The nurses share stories from their practice. In interpreting the nurses’ stories, the following themes emerge: personal responsibility; boundaries; temporality; worry, fear, and uncertainty; and a sense of satisfaction. As the themes are developed further, it becomes apparent that, despite their diversity, they are all interrelated aspects of ethical responsibility. Responsibility for the Other cannot be avoided, ignored, or transferred. The nurses’ responsibility is personal and infinite. Levinasian ethics can help nurses understand the importance of accepting that being a responsive carer can involve not only contentment in the predictable, but also the fear, worry, and uncertainty of the unpredictable. (shrink)

This article considers how Spatial Big Data is situated and produced through embodied spatial experiences as data processes appear and act in small moments on mobile phone applications and other digital spatial technologies. Locating Spatial Big Data in the historical and geographical contexts of Sydney and Hong Kong, it traces how situated knowledges mediate and moderate the rising potency of discourses of cartographic reason and data logics as colonial cartographic imaginations expressed in land divisions and urban planning continue on, in (...) a world that increasingly values models of calculability, interoperability and authority. It draws on ethnographic material gathered through walking interviews in both cities, and in doing so, it argues that by using ethnographic ‘moments’, it is possible to decentre the focus on data processes to consider the critical potential of a politics of everyday experiences that produce and reflect the structures of data logics. Through these ethnographic moments, this article examines how mobile technologies are complicit in the production of Spatial Big Data, and the impact this has on the increasing regimentation and surveillance of modes of being and expression via mobile media. At the same time, it will argue that while spatial calculability has expanded from cartographic reason into data logics, the epistemological universality of Spatial Big Data is constantly being resisted – in moments of experimentation, failure, intuition, memory and desire, the ghosts of the incalculable epistemes, experiences and people, forgotten by the emphasis on calculation, continue to speak. (shrink)

Sociology and Animals : Beginnings -- Animals and Biology as Destiny -- Animals, Social Inequalities and Oppression -- Animals, Crime and Abuse -- Town and Country : Animals, Space and Place -- Consumption of the Animal -- Animals, Leisure and Culture -- Animal Experiments and Animal Rights -- Conclusion: Sociology for Other Animals.

This title gathers together essays on deception, self-deception, and the intersections of the two phenomena, from the leading thinkers on the subject.

In A Metaphysics for Freedom, Helen Steward argues that agents settle things when they act, and that in order for agents to settle things, the universe must be indeterministic. Steward suggests a ‘weak’ account of settling, on which settling is compatible with determinism, but she rightly claims that this weak account is unacceptable. In this paper, I argue that the weak account of settling is not the best account of settling available to the compatibilist. In the first part of this (...) paper, I present a ‘strong’ compatibilist account of settling, and argue that this account avoids the problems faced by the weak account. In the second part of this paper, I argue against Steward's claim that compatibilist accounts of settling must depend on the truth of causal theories of action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges Forgets NietzscheClancy MartinHow little moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of human dignity.—Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-HumanIn his short story "Funes, the Memorious," Jorges Luis Borges writes of his singular nineteen-year-old hero, Funes: "He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand (...) that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and differing forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen in front)." And he goes on to say that "... he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details" (pp. 42–43).1 About a century earlier, in 1872, in a passage from his famous unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects... Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things... We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us."2 [End Page 265]From this and other passages, mostly in "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche scholars have derived Nietzsche's much-debated (or so-called, depending on who you talk to) "theory of perspectivism." This is the idea that, roughly speaking, "truths" about the world are at best truths uttered from the perspective of some knower, who inevitably brings to world (and thus, to those truths) a particular way of looking at things, of seeing some details and excluding others, of valuing some aspects of the world more than others, etc.I will not be addressing the well-known problems of Nietzsche's theory of perspectivism (if indeed he had such a truth-theory).3 What interests me here is something most scholars have ignored about Nietzsche's perspectivism,4 and what Borges tries to illuminate in his strange little fable: the importance of forgetting to thinking and the difficulties memory may present to one who would think about "truth" as something more than "an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch [has] an individual name" (p. 42). For Nietzsche, and for Borges writing under Nietzsche's influence, the human facts about forgetting and remembering illustrate that our epistemological projects are much more psychological than some philosophers would like to admit. Once we acknowledge the deeply psychological character of those projects, we see that they may not be "truth" projects at all, but rather psychologically valuable (perhaps even necessary) projects of strategic falsification.IThe "absent-minded" narrator of Borges's story tells us that he is adding his own tale to a collection of testimonials to Funes, as part of the project "that all those who knew him should write something about him" (pp. 35–36). Thus the play of words in the title: "Funes" is "memorious" not just because of the accident that results in his amazing and infallible memory, but also because this text is part of a larger memorial. A relationship between memory and knowing from a particular perspective is introduced immediately: Funes will be known and remembered through the gathering of many individual memorials to him. None of these testimonies will be "objective" or "impartial": all of them will necessarily preserve the perspective of the particular individual who is recalling Funes. As the narrator of our memorial confesses, his own efforts will be impoverished by "the deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian... when the theme is a Uruguayan" (p. 35). [End Page 266]Our narrator offers three... (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem highlights the opportunities and rewards associated with the application of AI in the creative arts. Featuring an array of voices, including interviews with Jacques Attali, Holly Herndon and Scott Cohen, this book offers interdisciplinary approaches to pressing ethical and technical questions associated with AI. Considering the perspectives of developers, students and artists, as well as the wider themes of law, ethics and philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem is an essential introduction for anyone interested in (...) the impact of AI on music, including those studying and working in the creative arts. (shrink)

A provocative assessment of the nature of love and deception draws on classic works of literature and personal experiences to offer philosophical arguments about the integral experiences of lying in erotic love and marriage. Includes notes. By the author of How to Sell.

A retrocausal interpretation of quantum mechanics is examined and is applied to the problem of measuring an optical qubit before the qubit is actually created. Although the predictions of the retrocausal interpretation are the same as for the conventional causal picture, it provides a new perspective which should give a useful way of understanding some quantum mechanical processes.

In 2008, the European Community adopted a Proposal to revise the EC Directive on nonhuman animal experiments, with the aim of improving the welfare of the nonhuman animals used in experiments. An Impact Assessment, which gauges the likely economic and scientific effects of future changes, as well as the effects on nonhuman animal welfare, informs the Proposal. By using a discourse analytical approach, this paper examines the Directive, the Impact Assessment and the Proposal to reflect critically upon assumptions about the (...) morality of nonhuman animal experiments. Because nonhuman animal welfare is so prominent in the Proposal, it appears that the EC position advances beyond human self-interest as the sole motivator for such experiments, to ethical questions about the welfare of nonhuman animals . In examining this contention, this paper concludes that, even given concerns about nonhuman animal welfare, nonhuman animal experimentation in the EC is firmly grounded in a morality that focuses on human benefit goals rather than on the wider moral issues associated with the means of achieving such goals. (shrink)

By conducting a critical discourse analysis of a scientific research article that claims additional potential for using transgenic marmosets in biomedical experiments, this article critiques instrumental approaches to scientific progress as they are expressed in scientific research that uses nonhuman animal experiments. Following an analysis that focuses on issues associated with access to publication, assertions about scientific breakthrough and scientific facts, and the construction of science as impartial, the article concludes that manipulating the genetics of nonhuman animals to engineer a (...) predisposition to the development of feared human health hazards represents moral deterioration rather than progress. (shrink)

The contributors to Thomas Ryan’s Animals in Social Work offer a challenge to anthropocentrism in social work theory and practice. Because this challenge resonates with the “zoological connection” that confronts anthropocentric sociology, this review article offers a sociological examination of key points raised. In focusing on conceptualizations of the human animal binary, personhood and selfhood, property, ethics, and welfare, this article concludes that nonhuman animals ought to matter to social work. Ryan is right: One day social workers will be incredulous (...) that social work could have overlooked nonhuman animals for so long. Sociologists will be similarly incredulous about anthropocentric sociology. (shrink)

This paper will analyze the effects advanced industrial societies have on individual and social development through the eyes of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the moral consequences of such artificial stagnation through Adorno’s lectures on The Problems of Moral Philosophy. Because such an investigation necessarily brings us into the realm of social psychology, we will turn to the social psychological tradition at the heart of American pragmatism, a target for critical theorists who are often antagonistic to the entire tradition. We will (...) endeavor to advance two alternate readings of the work of C.S. Peirce, arguing that although one type of pragmatism may be justly attacked by critical theorists, there is another, I argue, more critical manifestation of pragmatic human development, that requires the type of autonomy-infused, open-ended development that Marcuse champions. Moreover, I will argue that Peirce’s seminal essay “The Fixation of Belief” anticipated many of Marcuse’s critiques of advanced industrial societies by nearly ninety years. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Not Fade Away The Present Time of Things Past Memory as Presently Constructed Constantly being Imbued with New, Present Meanings.

This chapter explores critically ethical concerns arising from forms of suffering to which domesticated nonhuman animals are subjected in scientific instruction and research and within the industrial-factory-farm-food complex, as well as other contexts. Consideration is given to the views of Arthur Schopenhauer on suffering, René Descartes’s designation of ontological differences between human and non-human animals, and Donna Haraway’s reconfiguration of the relationship between human and nonhuman animals in scientific laboratory settings. Proceeding from a discussion of David Benatar’s “antinatalist” views the (...) focus of analysis is on the forms of suffering imposed on domesticated nonhuman animals by humans. In response to ethical concerns raised about the suffering inflicted on nonhuman animals in the course of scientific research, scientists have sought a “solution” in the form of genetically engineered nonhuman animals whose responses to painful stimuli are presented as modulated to reduce pain. This reductive conceptualization of suffering reduces the complexity of suffering to physical sensation alone and does not engage with the ethical issues involved. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Schweitzer the chapter concludes that an ethical solution to the complex issues explored lies in refraining from exposing nonhuman animals to pain and suffering. (shrink)

This article describes the development and teaching of a course on global engineering ethics in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. It outlines course objectives, methods, and contents, and instructor experience and plans for future development. This is done with the goal of helping educators to plan standalone courses and/or integrated modules on global engineering and technology ethics, which address challenges arising from the increasingly cross-cultural and international environments of contemporary technology and engineering practice. These efforts are motivated by the global (...) environments of engineering, as well as recent research in empirical moral psychology. Although this course was developed and taught in China, as a course on global engineering ethics taught to students from throughout the world, its approach could be beneficial elsewhere. (shrink)

A Publisher correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40889-020-00118-8.

The most up-to-date reader with cases in professional ethics available.What does it mean to be an ethical professional? A professional career can be so demanding that it permeates every aspect of a person's life and personality. In light of this fact, it is especially important for students who are planning to enter a chosen profession to understand its moral status,moral virtues, and possible moral pitfalls, so that they will be equipped to deal with the inevitable moral quandaries that they will (...) encounter as professionals.The most up-to-date professional ethics reader available, Ethics Across the Professions analyzes the complex ethical issues that arise in such fields as engineering, finance, healthcare, journalism, and law. Featuring a wide array of both classic and contemporary sources, it ranges from works byAristotle and Kant to selections by Michael Bayles, Sissela Bok, Paul Ekman, and Thomas Nagel. Organized topically, the anthology covers what it means to be a professional, outlines several ethical models, and addresses key issues including deception in professional life, privacy, loyalty, socialwelfare, conflicts of interest, and self-regulation. The book includes detailed chapter introductions, several practical case studies at the end of each chapter, and provocative discussion questions on issues like "whistle-blowing," the Iraq War, educating illegal immigrant children, andadvertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Edited by three renowned ethicists, Ethics Across the Professions is especially suited for introductory professional ethics courses taught in philosophy departments as well as in nursing schools, business schools, and other professional programs. (shrink)

Each year millions of nonhuman animals are exposed to suffering in universities as they are routinely used in teaching and research in the natural sciences. Drawing on the work of Giroux and Derrida, we make the case for a critical pedagogy of nonhuman animal suffering. We discuss critical pedagogy as an underrepresented form of teaching in universities, consider suffering as a concept, and explore the pedagogy of suffering. The discussion focuses on the use of nonhuman animal subjects in universities, in (...) particular in teaching, scientific research, and associated experiments. We conclude that a critical pedagogy of nonhuman animal suffering has the capacity to contribute to the establishment of a practical animal ethics conducive to the constitution of a radically different form of social life able to promote a more just and non-speciesist future in which nonhuman animals are not used as resources in scientific research in universities. (shrink)

Drawing upon lived experiences, this article explores challenges facing feminist academics sharing work in the media, and the gendered, raced intersections of ‘being visible’ in digital cultures which enable direct, public response. We examine online backlash following publication of an article about representations of Meghan Markle’s feminism being co-opted by the patriarchal monarchy. While in it we argued against vilification of Markle, we encountered what we term distortions of research remediation as news outlets reported our work under headlines such as (...) ‘academics accuse Meghan of dropping feminism like a hot potato’. Negative responses were polarised: anti-Meghan, and pro-Meghan. In response, we received accusations of sexist, racist bullying, debate over definitions of feminism, claims feminism has gone ‘too far’, variously worded directives to ‘shut up’, gendered personal insults, and threats of doxxing. This article examines the tenor of public discourse around feminism and visible feminists. It questions the responsibility of institutions benefiting from public intellectuals for the wellbeing of employees in the public eye, particularly in the anti-intellectual socio-political context of Brexit and Donald Trump, where the costs for ‘visible’ women and feminist activism are ever higher. It also considers our responsibility as researchers to ensure our contributions to public discourse do not exacerbate existing harms of a white-supremacist, classist society. This article interrogates the risks – of misrepresentation, hyper-visibility, and reputational, psychological and potentially physical harm – faced by those engaging in acts of public feminism. (shrink)

Research in engineering ethics has assessed the ethical reasoning of students in mostly the US. However, it is not clear that ethical judgments are primarily the result of ethical reasoning, or that conclusions based on US samples would be true of global populations. China now graduates and employs more STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics) majors than any other country in the world, but the moral cognition and ethics education of Chinese engineers remains understudied. To address this gap, a study (...) was conducted examining the relations between ethical reasoning, moral intuitions, and ethics education among engineering students in China. Engineering students at a university in Shanghai, China completed measures of ethical reasoning and moral intuitions before and after a course on global engineering ethics. Among engineering students in China, (1) ethical reasoning is positively related to an emphasis on care and fairness and (2) global ethics education results in significantly higher levels of ethical reasoning, as well as a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. Whereas the relation between ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in China is similar to that of students in the US, ethics education affects engineering students in China differently from their US counterparts. (shrink)

To develop more effective ethics education for cross-cultural and international engineering, a study was conducted to determine what Chinese engineering students have learned and think about ethics. Recent research shows traditional approaches to ethics education are potentially ineffective, but also points towards ways of improving ethical behaviors. China is the world’s most populous country, graduating and employing the highest number of STEM majors, although little empirical research exists about the ethical knowledge and perspectives of Chinese engineering students. When compared to (...) engineering students in the US, Chinese engineering students received less ethics education; the form of the education they did receive stressed virtue ethics or the development of moral character; conceive of ethics in contradistinction to the law, where ethics deals with matters of right and wrong not covered by legality. Based on these findings and research in moral psychology and behavioral ethics, recommendations are made for improving engineering ethics education both in China and abroad. (shrink)

This work explores the significance of two recurring themes in the thought of Gilles Deleuze: his critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature. Tracing the overlooked influence of English writer D.H. Lawrence on Deleuze, Rockwell Clancy shows how these themes ultimately bear on two competing 'political anthropologies', conceptions of the political and the respective accounts of philosophical anthropology on which they are based. Contrary to the mainstream of both Deleuze studies and contemporary political thought, Clancy argues that (...) the major contemporary importance of Deleuze’s thought consists in the way he grounds his analyses of the political on accounts of philosophical anthropology, helping to make sense of the contemporary backlash against inclusive liberal values evident in forms of political conservatism and religious fundamentalism. (shrink)

Ethics is crucial to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning the form engineering ethics education should take. In part, this results from disagreements about the goal of this education, which inhibit the development of and progress in cohesive research agendas and practices. In this regard, engineering ethics faces challenges like other professional ethics. To address these issues, this paper argues that the ultimate goal of engineering ethics education should be more long-term ethical behaviors, but that engineering ethics must more fully engage (...) with the fields of empirical moral and cultural psychology to do so. It begins by considering reasons for adopting ethical behaviors as the ultimate goal of ethics education, and moves on to discuss why ethical behaviors have not been adopted as the goal of ethics education. The paper ends by considering responses to these problems, why ethical behaviors should still be adopted as the ultimate goal of ethics education. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an ethical professional? A professional career can be so demanding that it permeates every aspect of a person's life and personality. In light of this fact, it is especially important for students who are planning to enter a chosen profession to understand its moral status, moral virtues, and possible moral pitfalls, so that they will be equipped to deal with the inevitable moral quandaries that they will encounter as professionals. The most up-to-date professional ethics (...) reader available, Ethics Across the Professions analyzes the complex ethical issues that arise in such fields as engineering, finance, healthcare, journalism, and law. Featuring a wide array of both classic and contemporary sources, it ranges from works by Aristotle and Kant to selections by Michael Bayles, Sissela Bok, Paul Ekman, and Thomas Nagel. Organized topically, the anthology covers what it means to be a professional, outlines several ethical models, and addresses key issues including deception in professional life, privacy, loyalty, social welfare, conflicts of interest, and self-regulation. The book includes detailed chapter introductions, several practical case studies at the end of each chapter, and provocative discussion questions on issues like "whistle-blowing," the Iraq War, educating illegal immigrant children, and advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Edited by three renowned ethicists, Ethics Across the Professions is especially suited for introductory professional ethics courses taught in philosophy departments as well as in nursing schools, business schools, and other professional programs. (shrink)

Michelle Kosch's study of autonomy and moral agency in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard is a model of clear-thinking analysis, deeply involved with the scholarly literature , and informed by the best contemporary work on ethics and rationality. The book is a pleasure to read, and it boldly takes on one of the most difficult problems in philosophy: what does it mean to be free? Kosch does not herself offer an answer the question, but shows a history of one attempt to (...) solve the problem, beginning in Kant and culminating in what she calls the "double incompatibilism" of Kierkegaard. Along the way Kosch controversially but persuasively demonstrates the influence of Schelling upon Kierkegaard. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Miguel de Unamuno (1865–1936, Spanish‐Basque) Lev Shestov (1866–1938, Russian) Karl Barth (1886–1968, Swiss) Martin Buber (1878–1965, Austrian and Israeli).

The aim of this study is to reflect on situational ethics in qualitative research and on a researcher’s embodied response to ethical dilemmas. Four narratives are presented. They are excerpts from field notes taken during an observational study on Norwegian public health nursing practice. The stories capture situational ethical challenges the author experienced during her research. The author’s reflections on feelings of uncertainty, discomfort and responsibility, and Levinas’ philosophy help to illuminate the ethical challenges faced. The study shows that the (...) researcher always participates, to some degree, and is never merely a spectator making solely rational choices. Ethical challenges in field research cannot always be solved, yet must be acknowledged. Feelings of vulnerability are embodied responses that remind us of the primacy of ethics. More so, it is the primacy of ethics that gives rise to feelings of vulnerability and embodied responses. (shrink)

Engineering is more cross-cultural and international than ever before, presenting challenges and opportunities in the way engineering ethics is conceived and delivered. To assist in providing more effective ethics education to increasingly diverse groups, this paper shares three related projects implemented at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (China). These projects are united in their attempts to address challenges arising from the increasingly global nature of engineering. The first is a course on global engineering ethics, developed for (...) and attended by engineering students from diverse backgrounds. The second is a website hosting contents on global engineering ethics education and conducting research related to cross-cultural moral psychology. The third explores methods of assessing engineering ethics and moral development, using paradigms of ethical decision-making. Although these projects were developed in a Chinese-US collaboration with university students, these contexts could facilitate the adoption of similar programs elsewhere, with practicing engineers. (shrink)

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on Gaelic advent and expansion in medieval Scotland given at the British Academy's 2009 Sir John Rhŷs Memorial Lecture. This text reviews the evidence for Gaelic's arrival and expansion in the various different regions of Scotland in the Middle Ages and evaluates the different ways in which toponymic data can usefully be interpreted to inform our notion of the process of expansion. It argues that, contrary of received views, the twelfth and thirteenth (...) centuries remained periods of expansion for the Gaelic language. (shrink)