Over the past year, a major topic of research among ESDiT members has been the role of “value experiences” in ethical deliberation about disruptive technologies. Ibo van de Poel defines value experiences as “experiences in which something seems valuable or disvaluable to the experiencer.” Examples of value experiences include emotions such as anger, in which something seems wrong or unjust to the experiencer, and—more speculatively—forms of perceptual experience that have evaluative content, akin to the perception of affordances.

This panel will explore the methodological significance of value experiences for ethical deliberation about disruptive technologies. In different ways, all three speakers defend the idea that we need to update our approaches to ethical decision-making, in order to take account of value experiences. This has wide-ranging significance for how ethics of technology should be practised, across the ESDiT network and beyond.

In Prof Ibo van de Poel’s contribution, we find a detailed argument for paying attention to the value experiences people have in response to new technologies. Moreover, van de Poel advocates using these experiences to enrich the ethical assumptions underlying the Design for Values and Ethics-By-Design approaches. Van de Poel makes a strong case that we need to move towards an experience-based approach to techno-ethical deliberation, especially in cases when our existing evaluative concepts are subject to change. He makes all this concrete with two compelling examples from the ethics of digital technology.

In the second contribution, Prof Sabine Roeser relates the idea of value experiences to her influential body of work on using emotions as sources of ethical insight in deliberation about risky technologies. Roeser spells out how artists working with technologies are already finding ways to elicit new and challenging emotional value experiences. Roeser articulates a method for deliberation in which emotional reactions to artworks are sought out and taken seriously as “unique epistemological vantage points” on the ethics of disruptive technologies. Her contribution thus provides a theoretical underpinning for the central assumption behind ESDiT’s Art Track: that engagement with artworks is not an optional luxury for philosophers of technology, but a key ingredient for sensitive ethical deliberation in times of technological disruption.

Finally, Dr James Hutton connects the methodology of value experiences with the topics explored by ESDiT’s Nature Line. He sets out a methodology in which a range of emotional value experiences are used as “defeasible starting points for ethical reasoning about human interactions with the nonhuman world.” Hutton proposes methods for applying this methodology to dilemmas such as the build-out of offshore wind. He also proposes a broader research-programme in which emotional value experiences are used to “reassess the foundations of environmental ethics.”

The panel will close with a plenary discussion, exploring the tensions and synergies between the different speakers’ proposals, articulating potential limitations and objections, and identifying ways forward.