Social media technologies are routinely identified as a strong and pervasive threat to digital well-being. Extended screen time sessions, chronic distractions via notifications, and fragmented workflows have all been blamed on how these technologies ruthlessly undermine our ability to exercise quintessential human faculties. One reason SMTs can do this is because they powerfully affect our emotions. Nevertheless, how social media technology affects our emotional life and how these emotions relate to our digital well-being remain unexplored. Remedying this is important because (...) ethical insights into and open the possibility of designing for social media technologies in ways that actively reinforce our digital well-being. In this article, we examine the way social media technologies facilitate online emotions because of emotional affordances. This has important implications for evaluating the ethical implications of today’s social media platforms, as well as for how we design future ones. (shrink)

Global lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic have offered many people first-hand experience of how their daily online activities threaten their digital well-being. This article begins by critically evaluating the current approaches to digital well-being offered by ethicists of technology, NGOs, and social media corporations. My aim is to explain why digital well-being needs to be reimagined within a new conceptual paradigm. After this, I lay the foundations for such an alternative approach, one that shows how current digital well-being initiatives can (...) be designed in more insightful ways. This new conceptual framework aims to transform how philosophers of technology think about this topic, as well as offering social media corporations practical ways to design their technologies in ways that will improve the digital well-being of users. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed what may soon become a permanent digital transition in the domains of work, education, medicine, and leisure. This transition has also precipitated a spike in concern regarding our digital well-being. Prominent lobbying groups, such as the Center for Humane Technology, have responded to this concern. In April 2020, the CHT has offered a set of ‘Digital Well-Being Guidelines during the COVID-19 Pandemic.’ These guidelines offer a rule-based approach to digital well-being, one which aims to mitigate (...) the effects of moving much of our lives online. The CHT’s guidelines follow much recent interest in digital well-being in the last decade. Ethicists of technology have recently argued that character-based strategies and redesigning of online architecture have the potential to promote the digital well-being of online technology users. In this article, I evaluate the CHT’s rule-based approach, comparing it with character-based strategies and approaches to redesigning online architecture. I argue that all these approaches have some merit, but that each needs to contribute to an integrated approach to digital well-being in order to surmount the challenges of a post-COVID world in which we may well spend much of our lives online. (shrink)

Value-sensitive design theorists propose that a range of values that should inform how future social robots are engineered. This article explores a new value: digital well-being, and proposes that the next generation of social robots should be designed to facilitate this value in those who use or come into contact with these machines. To do this, I explore how the morphology of social robots is closely connected to digital well-being. I argue that a key decision is whether social robots are (...) designed as embodied or disembodied. After exploring the merits of both approaches, I conclude that, on balance, there are persuasive reasons why disembodied social robots may well fare better with respect to the value of digital well-being. (shrink)

Does a flourishing life involve pursuing passionate attachments? Can we choose what these passionate attachments will be? This book offers an original theory of how we can actively cultivate our passionate attachments. The author argues that not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self-cultivation. He uses Pierre Hadot's and Michel Foucault's accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation as vital conceptual tools to formulate a (...) theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self-cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life and offers theoretical and practical accounts of how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change. Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working in virtue ethics, moral philosophy, and ancient philosophy. (shrink)

The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic are yet to be calculated, but they include the loss of millions of lives and the destruction of countless livelihoods. What is certain is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has changed the way we live for the foreseeable future. It has forced many to live in ways they would have previously thought impossible. As well as challenging scientists and medical professionals to address urgent value conflicts in the short term, COVID-19 has raised slower-burning value questions (...) for corporations, public institutions, governments, and policymakers. In simple terms, the pandemic has brought what we care about into sharp relief, both collectively and individually. Whether this revaluation of our values will last beyond the current pandemic is unknown. Once COVID-19 has been tamed, will the desire to return to our previous lives be irresistible? Or will living under pandemic conditions have taught us something that will be incorporated into how we design our future lives and technologies? These are hard questions for the ethics of technology, which this volume aims to explore and address. (shrink)

Digital technologies are changing our understanding of ethical emulation. In this article, Matthew Dennis proposes that some social media technologies have given rise to a strikingly new set of ethical ideals, often concerned with the ideal of self-cultivation. While there is relatively little philosophical discussion of these kinds of ideals, Dennis suggests that scrutiny of Friedrich Nietzsche's ethical philosophy offers a guiding account of why the ideal of self-directed character change is important. He concludes by speculating on how the digital (...) affordances of social media technologies will change the way in which ethical exemplars influence future generations. (shrink)

This Open Access book shows how value sensitive design (VSD), responsible innovation, and comprehensive engineering can guide the rapid development of technological responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Responding to the ethical challenges of data-driven technologies and other tools requires thinking about values in the context of a pandemic as well as in a post-COVID world. Instilling values must be prioritized from the beginning, not only in the emergency response to the pandemic, but in how to proceed with new societal precedents (...) materializing, new norms of health surveillance, and new public health requirements. -/- The contributors with expertise in VSD bridge the gap between ethical acceptability and social acceptance. By addressing ethical acceptability and societal acceptance together, VSD guides COVID-technologies in a way that strengthens their ability to fight the virus, and outlines pathways for the resolution of moral dilemmas. This volume provides diachronic reflections on the crisis response to address long-term moral consequences in light of the post-pandemic future. Both contact-tracing apps and immunity passports must work in a multi-system environment, and will be required to succeed alongside institutions, incentive structures, regulatory bodies, and current legislation. This text appeals to students, researchers and importantly, professionals in the field. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the epistemological and ontological assumptions algorithmic hiring assessments make about job seekers’ attributes (e.g., competencies, skills, abilities) and the ethical implications of these assumptions. Given that both traditional psychometric hiring assessments and algorithmic assessments share a common set of underlying assumptions from the psychometric paradigm, we turn to literature that has examined the merits and limitations of these assumptions, gathering insights across multiple disciplines and several decades. Our exploration leads us to conclude that algorithmic hiring (...) assessments are incompatible with attributes whose meanings are context-dependent and socially constructed. Such attributes call instead for assessment paradigms that offer space for negotiation of meanings between the job seeker and the employer. We argue that in addition to questioning the validity of algorithmic hiring assessments, this raises an often overlooked ethical impact on job seekers’ autonomy over self-representation: their ability to directly represent their identity, lived experiences, and aspirations. Infringement on this autonomy constitutes an infringement on job seekers’ dignity. We suggest beginning to address these issues through epistemological and ethical reflection regarding the choice of assessment paradigm, the means to implement it, and the ethical impacts of these choices. This entails a transdisciplinary effort that would involve job seekers, hiring managers, recruiters, and other professionals and researchers. Combined with a socio-technical design perspective, this may help generate new ideas regarding appropriate roles for human-to-human and human–technology interactions in the hiring process. (shrink)

Virtue ethical interpretations of Nietzsche are increasingly viewed as a promising way to explain his moral philosophy, although current interpretations disagree on which character traits he regards as virtues. Of the first-, second-, and third-wave attempts addressing this question, only the latter can explain why Nietzsche denies that the same character traits are virtues for all individuals. Instead of positing the same set of character traits as Nietzschean virtues, third-wave theorists propose that Nietzsche only endorses criteria determining whether a specific (...) character trait is a virtue or vice for a specific individual. The article examines the criteria-based approaches of third-wave theorists Lester Hunt and Christine Swanton, showing how they urgently need revising to explain Nietzsche’s endorsement of non-acquisitive character traits. To do this I explore Nietzsche’s unpublished remarks on Spinoza, which I contend better explains why he understands non-acquisitive character traits as virtues. (shrink)