Recents debates within energy ethics have focused on the framework of energy justice. The justice framework is often linked to Western ethical ideas, especially the human rights framework and the ideas of Western individualism. The presentation ongoing debate between human rights and the rights of nature. The analysis highlights the frequent association of human rights with social contract theories, identifying both the strengths and limitations of contractualist individualism.

In this paper I will explore different notions of ‘environment’ to conduct an analysis of its current explanatory and descriptive power. By utilizing concepts from Philosophy of Technology, concretely from Postphenomenology (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2006), I aim to illuminate the non-neutral role of everyday tools, media, infrastructure, and technological systems and to highlight their existential and pragmatic relevance for human-environment relations.

Technology today is increasingly global, in the double sense that it is to be found all around the globe, and that it increasingly depends on global networks of production and information exchange. But what exactly is this globe, and how does technology relate to it? Is the globe on which globalisation occurred in the twentieth century the same planet which geo-engineering and sustainable technologies mean to preserve in the twenty-first century? In this article, we first consider the conditions of possibility for technological globalisation.

The year 2019 is commonly dubbed the “AI Ethics Year” as it marked a pivotal year in which previous discussions on the impact of AI in society were reflected in many documents endorsed by nations, international institutions, companies, and other organizations. Indeed, Anna Jobin and her colleagues already counted in 2019 more than 80 AI Ethics guidelines (Jobin et al., 2019) , and this number kept increasing in the following years.

Social media algorithms severely limit our interactions and exposure to other perspectives. However, individuals could still have a responsibility regarding their engagement online. Current literature focuses mostly on echo chambers, algorithmic control, and misinformation. Echo chambers are defined by manipulation whereas epistemic bubbles can be innocently or accidentally exclusive. Instead of algorithms, I consider the role people play in creating social media epistemic bubbles (SMEBs) and the consequential harms on one’s epistemic norms and status as a knower.

Various past and present conflicts suggest that energy can be used as a weapon (Tsafos 2022; LaBelle 2023). Affirming that energy is a weapon can mean and imply different things. It can refer to energy policies, energy and environmental laws and regulations, energy businesses, or energy socio-technical systems such as power plants or transmission lines. It can mean that a specific energy-related issue has been used to either start military hostilities or during warfare. It can indicate intrastate affairs or broader interstate geopolitical equilibria.

We live in a time of rapid, global, and long-lasting environmental and technological changes. On the one hand, technological innovation is a major driver of environmental degradation, as illustrated by the pollution caused by agricultural pesticides, ozone layer depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons, greenhouse gas emissions caused by fossil fuel combustion, and the radioactive waste of nuclear power plants.

Contemporary philosophy of technology has been drawing special attention to the claim that technology is not neutral, but it plays an important role in evaluating moral situations. In line with this premise, some ethicists of technology have developed theories which work under the assumption that ethics should be done in a way that incorporates technological artefacts to ethical assessment. Prominent examples of these theories are Verbeek’s technological mediation theory and Brey’ structural ethics framework. 

Under the looming specter of mass extinction and escalating climate change, life itself becomes the terrain of various justice struggles. As philosopher Eva von Redecker notes, many recent social justice movements, including climate (“Extinction Rebellion”), feminist (“Ni una menos”), anti-racist (“I can’t breathe”) and Indigenous (“Water is life”) mobilizations explicitly make reference to the politics of life. At the same time, technological developments in the life sciences challenge traditional philosophical accounts of the very meaning of life.

There is established concern that the deployment of autonomous weapons and information systems may lead to ‘moral deskilling’ of military professionals (Vallor 2013, 2015). Most of what has been written about the conditions needed to cultivate martial virtues has focused on kinetic operations, with comparatively little exploring the deskilling of intelligence practitioners and institutions (Meerveld and Lindelauf 2022). 

In recent work on conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology, conceptual engineering has been proposed as a meaningful way to bridge instances of conceptual disruption. Such proposals predominantly focus on conceptual engineering in terms of curative interventions of conceptual issues.

This paper utilizes Derrida’s philosophy of tele-technology to examine how social media shapes perceptions of religious violence. Although Derrida did not witness the advent of social media, he already saw how the widespread ownership of television and the accessibility of portable cameras in the late 50s and 60s marked a turning point in our ‘access’ to events all over the world. Today, social media has intensified this access further, as the digitization of our lifeworld provides unparalleled access to free information.

If artificial intelligence agents are capable of being conscious or experiencing subjective well-being, it seems plausible that we should offer them moral consideration (Bostrom & Yudkowsky, 2014; Anthis & Harris, 2021). However, the hard problem of consciousness remains a major challenge in understanding the nature of genuine consciousness in AI (Chalmers, 1995).

When discussing digital surveillance phenomena, one image persistently comes to mind: the panopticon. In this paper, we aim to connect inquiries into AI's usage across political, economic, and social domains with the panopticon concept. Automated systems, fueled by data, monitor our preferences and desires, subtly shaping them. Through smartphones, computers, or smartwatches, individuals willingly, without knowing it though, carry their surveillance tools. 

The planetary boundary framework defines a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ that requires staying within certain biophysical boundaries of the Earth system (Rockström et al., 2009). Recently, Earth system scientists and social scientists have proposed to complement these biophysical boundaries with ‘just Earth system boundaries’, which encompass three dimensions of justice – intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice (the ‘3I approach’) – that are brought together under the concept of ‘planetary justice’ (Gupta et al., 2023).

Are social media companies responsible for disinformation? Studies of how algorithms prioritize information suggest that social media significantly contributes to the spread of disinformation. However, the theoretical resources for making sense of responsibility for spreading falsehoods are limited. A testimonial view of responsibility holds that information conduits like Facebook are not responsible. On this view, platforms are merely sources of information, and the proper locus of responsibility is rather with originators (Fricker, 2012).

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of calls for more inclusive local participation in decision-making on local energy infrastructures and projects. This also goes for energy technologies in the Netherlands, as the Dutch Climate policy includes a mandate for municipalities to organise participation in local energy projects. Including stakeholders (instead of shareholders) and their values is important for instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Still, there are important worries concerning local participation in decision-making in energy infrastructures.

There is an increasing awareness that normative issues pervade the energy transition, testified by the popularity of concepts like ‘energy justice’ and the ‘just transition’. In spite of this awareness, experts and practitioners have difficulty relating to the moral implications of their work that are relatively new to them, for three reasons. First, there is a widely held conviction that moral issues are subjective expressions of preference and, as such, do not fit the objective outlook associated with professional expertise.

In his re-interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Axel Honneth (2014) builds a theory of justice which places the political public sphere as a central component for establishing what he calls ‘social freedom’ (individual autonomy realized in institutions and practices of mutual recognition).

Currently, there is significant concern about how AI-driven media platforms feature a logic of reactive and affective interaction, emotional mobilization, and moral outrage rather than lucid, political argumentation. Further, there is rising debate about whether platform companies take advantage of the unrelenting human hunger for bonding, reward, and the bestowal of esteem, exploiting vital needs for recognition as a monetizable vulnerability.

This talk examines the limitations of recognition theory by arguing that it takes relations between adults as paradigmatic. It challenges how Honneth’s three modes of recognition apply to children and use the example of educational AI to question how technologies should recognize children’s needs, rights and social contributions. First, children may not have yet fully acquired the capacity to recognize their needs. They often require guidance and care to do so and express their experiences of neglect.

This discussion addresses the question of how being subjected to pattern recognition by AI affects the possibilities of identity formation. Recognition theory explores how a subject (individually and collectively) shapes the self, its sense of dignity and esteem in its relationships with others (Honneth, Taylor). If we replace the ‘Other’ in the recognition relationship with artificial intelligence, questions arise about what we lose and what we gain in terms of social recognition. Is pattern recognition equivalent to patterned identity?

Hegel’s analysis of the “struggle for recognition” can be used to understand human-technology relations from a political perspective. This political perspective can consequently help us to appreciate how technologies like robots can come to have a role in political life through our ability to experience solidarity with such technologies, due to the recognition that technologies serve roles in society functionally equivalent to the social roles of humans.