How does it come that a tiny, technical detail like the choice of the Bluetooth version, which at first glance looks as the incarnation of technological neutrality, raises mayor ethical concern? Why is it that the actors individually were not able to discern the discrimination of an AI app, but only in the collaborative act, facilitated by a reflection tool? In my contribution, I would like to show that this is precisely where the so-called principles-to-practice gap closes.

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.

Discussions of the welfare of non-human animals & artificial intelligence are dominated by two principles: pathocentrism & the precautionary principle. Pathocentrism is the view that a being’s moral status depends on its capacity to suffer (Metzinger 2021). Pathocentrism establishes a vital connection between philosophical/scientific investigations of consciousness & ethical/legal frameworks. Yet, it also leaves important questions unanswered– chief among them: /which/ beings are capable of suffering?

This article explores the identity and role of engineers through the lens of care ethics. Building on other attempts to develop engineering ethics based on normative moral perspectives that are similar to and consistent with the ethics of care (e.g., virtue ethics), we propose that engineering practices within small and medium scale projects present the conditions for developing moral relations based on care.

The paper delves into the intersection of virtue ethics, postphenomenology, and technology to explore the roles ethical virtues may play in technological design. It employs the neo-Aristotelian praxeological methodology from Alasdair MacIntyre, focusing on the virtues of the moral agent as an independent practical reasoner but also as a socially and biologically dependent animal. It also integrates contributions from Ihde’s and Verbeek’s Postphenomenology, which explore morally and technologically mediated agents. 

Considering the societal impact of artifacts from the early stages of design is crucial for realizing a better society. While humanities such as the philosophy of technology and applied ethics have accumulated knowledge about the social aspects of technologies, this knowledge is rarely referenced in actual technological development.

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. 

The field of AI ethics is said to be dominated by principilism approaches. Still, bridging the gap between theoretical and often ambiguous principles and their practical operationalization remains a challenge. Simultaneously, there are growing calls from within the field to include a more virtue ethics approach to AI ethics, focusing on cultivating practical wisdom in AI practitioners, without abandoning principles completely. Several approaches have been proposed, but empirical evaluations regarding their implementation and effects in practice are still lacking.

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is a comprehensive approach that integrates ethical, social, and environmental considerations into the research and innovation process. It prioritizes collaboration, transparency, and active stakeholder engagement to ensure that technological advancements align with societal values and needs. While RRI has predominantly focused on consumer-oriented innovations within the free market, there remains a significant gap in addressing the ethical and societal implications of large-scale infrastructures.

Public sector AI is examined through two primary lenses: public administration literature and ethics discourse surrounding AI. While the former emphasizes public values ensuring good order and organizational layers, it has yet to explore potential injustices or challenges to these values posed by AI. Second, the wildly prolific ethics of AI discourse has produced numerous frameworks on how AI use impacts human values such as trust, autonomy, and privacy over the last few years but has had a limited focus on the public sector.

Anticipation is increasingly seen as a valuable methodological dimension for promoting responsible science, technology and innovation (STI) practices. Normative approaches or frameworks such as "anticipatory governance," "anticipatory ethics," "responsible innovation," "responsible research and innovation," or "technology assessment" recognize that engagements with representations of the future are valuable means for fostering critique and/or reflection on emerging technologies and innovations that may have a potentially socially disruptive character.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a complicated system of systems that require a layered pluralistic ethical analysis. This paper beings by noting that the IoT cyber-physical system – it exists in both the physical and informational realms, and in order to give a comprehensive ethical analysis of the IoT, we have to be pluralistic in considering both physical and informational aspects. However, the paper will also suggest that the IoT requires a layered analysis.

One of the problems of science and technology policy is the entanglement of normative and factual questions. Empirical sciences identify social problems (climate change, antibiotic resistance, etc.) and develop ways to overcome them (vaccinations, risk assessments, etc.). However, they cannot answer normative questions just on the basis of empirical facts. One goal of science communication is to enable political actors to make informed decisions about science and technology. It also has to consider normative aspects, which are also called moralizations. 

Bioethics traditionally focuses on normative questions related to medical practice. The inquiry involves the moral permissibility of using new technologies for medical purpose and also existing medical technologies for non-medical purpose. While these inquiries probe into the ethical issues raised by the medical technologies, they take a rather reactive attitude towards the application of technologies.

In Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann, 1995), society is characterized by an array of functionally differentiated subsystems comprising of communication. Included among these subsystems are the scientific subsystem, the technological subsystem, the moral subsystem and so on. Each of these subsystems is unique and conceives of problems in society by making use of their own logic, resulting in a situation where each subsystem presents different solutions to problems in society.

Socially disruptive technologies have been described as technologies that disturb or significantly alter social practices. In terms of the social practice of ethical evaluation, new technologies can lead to misapplication or blurring of philosophical concepts. Consequently, ethics' function of practical guidance may be compromised, creating moral uncertainty.

In an influential paper, Verbeek has suggested to expand the (post-)phenomenological repertoire of describing human-technology relations with the cyborg relation to capture what is at stake when “the human and the technological actually merge rather than ‘merely’ being embodied” (Verbeek, 2008, p. 391). According to Verbeek, a new entity emerges when humans use implanted technologies such as neurotechnology, antidepressants, or pacemakers.

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.

In recent years, the concept of "smart cities" has emerged as a futuristic vision for urban development, driven by the integration of digital technologies into urban infrastructure and services. However, this approach often neglects fundamental considerations about the human and societal impact of technology on urban life. This study proposes a critical reflection on the intersections between the ideals of smart cities and the philosophy of technology, while exploring the concepts of the city of proximity and the city of caring, outlined by Ezio Manzini (2019, 2022).

How to understand new encounters between the living and the technological? Exemplary for such new encounters are the biotechnological creations of synthetic biology, where life and technology are related in increasingly complicated and intimate ways. This developing biotechnological field frames its new entities as ‘artificial life’, ‘living technology’, and ‘biohybrid systems’.

Throughout the history of moral philosophy, the theoretical postures have been privileged. Modern ethics is no exception and is indeed characterized by the predominance of voluntarist and universalist frameworks (Maesschalck, 2010), which are primarily concerned with the actions of the moral agent, with no real regard for the conditions of possibility necessary for the effective realization of moral actions (Fletcher, 1966).

This contribution will explore the methodological significance of value experiences for the ethics of human interactions with nature. I begin by detailing how environmentally disruptive technologies often pose “techno-environmental dilemmas.” For example, offshore windfarms enable us to mitigate global environmental harm. Simultaneously, they disrupt the environments in which they are built, negatively impacting human and nonhuman lives. How should we decide what to do in the face of these environmental dilemmas?

This contribution will provide a novel method for value deliberation on technologies, grounded in art and emotions. Philosophy tends to see itself as a rational discipline, emphasizing logical argumentation and seeing emotions as belonging to the realm of irrationality and subjectivity. This view of emotions has been challenged by philosophers and psychologists who emphasize the cognitive dimension of emotions. Emotions can then play an important epistemological role, providing us with insights into the evaluative dimension of our lived experience.

In this contribution, I explore why and how value experiences are relevant to Design for Values. In a value experience, something seems to the experiencer to be valuable (or disvaluable). Design for Values is a design approach that aims at systematically integrating value of moral importance in (technological) design.

In this talk I discuss how a capabilities approach (CA) can inform the deployment of carbon removal techniques (CDR) within climate mitigation projects as well as the broader sustainable development context. Specifically, CDR raises ethical concerns, especially issues of justice. I argue that the CA can offer a more accurate account of people’s quality of life in CDR implementation, expanding the discussion beyond the traditional distributive justice paradigm. Moreover, the CA can integrate a focus on recognition of human as well as non-human entities affected by CDR deployment.

When discussing transformations to sustainability, one is brought to employ a variety of foresight methods to create different versions of the future worth striving for. In part, these are anchored in data, trends, and realities of today. However, these also require going beyond trends, in other words, beyond the descriptive, towards the normative. This, however, is fraught with uncertainty, in particular, normative ambiguity, i.e. the lack of certainty on norms and values in the future. Issues of techno-moral change, or value change are easier to describe when looking back at history.

Socially disruptive technologies impact people differently. One’s social position, for example, may play a significant role in the way a disruptive technology has either positive or negative impact on one’s abilities. In this talk, I propose thinking in terms of capabilities as a metric for the moral assessment of equality of impact of socially disruptive technology on people’s capabilities.

This presentation is part of the panel Capabilities and transdisciplinarity in the ethics of technology

This workshop aimed to collect shared dilemmas, struggles and questions while operationalizing the CA in individual research. By discovering common experiences within different disciplines and sketching the outlines for generalised operational approaches, we aim to arrive at a shared methodology that can be useful across various disciplines aiming to develop technologies and related policies just and inclusively. Cases used for input include urban planning, global value chains and health technologies.