In my talk, I will examine Radder’s notion of public interest with respect to technologies with long-term effects, such as nuclear waste disposal. Radder proposes two criteria for public interest, namely the degree of inclusiveness of affected people and the quality of democratic decision-making. Both criteria are difficult, if not impossible, to meet with respect to technologies with long-term health and safety impacts.

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.

Background: A hallmark of the Anthropocene is that planetary, regional and local ecosystems are facing human-induced irreversible changes. These phenomena of 'irreversible changes' include global warming, crossing climate tipping points or ecological thresholds, and extinction. In environmental ethics, conservation biology and restoration management, human intervention is largely based on the assumption that it is possible to restore an ecosystem to its previous, qualitatively higher state.

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. 

Anxiety has become a defining feature of our time. Rapid technological change, growing migration flows, war, and pandemics are all feeding into a growing feeling of uncertainty, insecurity, and powerlessness. This paper investigates a new but rapidly spreading form of anxiety: ecological anxiety. 

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.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Socially Disruptive Technologies (Hopster 2021) and the phenomenon of conceptual disruption in the fields of philosophy and ethics of technology (Löhr 2023). Additionally, topics regarding conceptual engineering have risen to prominence. This presentation contributes to these areas of research by examining the categorization system of technology-induced conceptual disruptions, which could potentially limit conceptual engineering. This presentation has three objectives.

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. 

Work on value alignment focuses on ensuring that human values are respected by AI systems. However, existing approaches tend to rely on universal framings of human values that obscure the question of what values the systems should elicit and align with, given a variety of operational contexts. Here, many ethical guidelines exist, yet translating these into actionable steps to follow in developers' decision-making processes has proven to be far removed from the vast array of scientific, technical, and economic contexts, leading to confusion and negligible impact. 

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 argues that the concept of performativity can help us gain a better understanding of the relation between how we conceptualize ‘technology’ and our ways of doing technology ethics. In other words, we claim that technology ethics is performed by how ‘technology’ is defined in the first place. To substantiate this claim, we zoom in on classical philosophy of technology and the empirical turn, arguing that conceptualizations of technology in each respective cluster performed a different way of (not) doing technology ethics.

I will assess Radder’s reconstruction of the bridges between (Philosophy of) Science and (Philosophy of) Technology, and especially his terminological choice to refer to ‘application-oriented’ science. In doing so, I explore divergence and convergence with my terminological choice to rehabilitate ‘techno-science’. In this exercise, I explain the relevance for conceptual, practical, and axiological considerations, also beyond the case of the natural sciences that occupies a large part of Radder’s book.

In my talk, I want to discuss Radder´s description of commodification as it relates to technology. By using the examples drawn from the practice of patenting research, he is able to empirically trace the multiple ways that commodification concretely shapes sociotechnical decisions and actions. Commodification is also a critical concept against which one can articulate alternatives to measure, compare, and judge sociotechnical intentions; in Radder´s case the common good and public interest are these concepts.

I will present a brief overview of the background and general approach taken in the book, in line with the description of the topic sketched above. It aims to provide more information about the content of the book to the audience, and so offers the commentators more time to develop their views on the claims and issues they have chosen to discuss.

Part of the panel A Book Symposium on Hans Radder’s "From Commodification to the Common Good: Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society

Dealing with anthropogenic climate change through climate and energy policy requires an apprehension of the moral complexity of this challenge. Whereas scholarship advances in bringing moral and ethical insights into climate and energy policy, there is limited reflection on the exploratory questions such as in what way can the environment become an object of moral concern? This research employs an agent-based modelling approach to investigate the process of an expanding circle of moral concern in response to environmental challenges.