Summary and Lecture Notes Ethics and Technology II (2)
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Course
Ethics and Technology 2
Institution
Universiteit Twente (UT)
This document contains 11.000 words summarizing the obligated readings and lecture notes for the course Ethics and Technology II (2) as it was taught as part of the first year of the Master Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society in 2020/2021.
Inhoudsopgave
Week 1...............................................................................................................................3
Alasdair MacIntyre – Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?.......................................................3
Ruth Macklin - Dignity Is A Useless Concept: It Means No More Than Respect For Persons Or
Their Autonomy............................................................................................................................5
Floridi et al. - AI4PPeople – an Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: Opportunities, Risks,
Principles, and Recommendations................................................................................................6
Week 2...............................................................................................................................8
Janet Davis & Lisa Nathan – Value Sensitive Design: Applications, Adaptations, and Critiques.....8
Week 3.............................................................................................................................10
Kloppenburg & Van der Ploeg – Securing Identities: Biometric Technologies and the Enactment
of Human Bodily Differences.......................................................................................................10
Matthias Leese – Fixing State Vision: Interoperability, Biometrics, and Identity Management in
the EU.........................................................................................................................................12
Avi Marciano – Reframing biometric surveillance: from a means of inspection to a form of
control.........................................................................................................................................13
Week 4.............................................................................................................................15
Satalkar, Elger and Shaw - Defining Nano, Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine: Why Should It
Matter?.......................................................................................................................................15
Philip Brey – Ethics of Emerging Technology................................................................................17
Week 5.............................................................................................................................19
Nancy Tuana – The Ethical Dimensions of Geoengineering Solar Radiation Management through
Sulphate Particle Injection...........................................................................................................19
Ashlee Cunsolo Willox – Climate Change as the Work of Mourning............................................21
Week 6.............................................................................................................................22
Christian Brown and Giles William Story in debate with Janaina Mourão-Miranda and Justin
Taylor Baker – Will artificial intelligence eventually replace psychiatrists?.................................22
Noel Sharkey & Lucy Suchman – Wishful Mnemonics and Autonomous Killing Machines...........23
Ronald Arkin – Lethal Autonomous Systems and the Plight of the Non-combatant....................24
Week 7.............................................................................................................................25
Vida Panitch - Global Surrogacy. Exploitation to Empowerment.................................................25
Claire Horn - Ectogenesis is for Feminists. Reclaiming Artificial Wombs from Anti-Abortion
Discourse.....................................................................................................................................27
Week 8.............................................................................................................................29
Agata Ferretti and Marcello Ienca - Enhanced Cognition, Enhanced Self? On Neuroenhancement
and Subjectivity...........................................................................................................................29
,Rafael Yuste, Sara Goering and colleagues - Four Ethical Priorities for Neurotechnologies and AI
....................................................................................................................................................31
,Week 1
Alasdair MacIntyre – Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?
Ethics as such, on the dominant view, has morality as such as subject matter. Morality imposes
requirements upon human individuals qua individuals. It is at a distance of social particularities, there
is no reference to particular social roles or institutional forms. Morality is neutral and impartial and
contains very general rules which everyone should rationally accept. But in real life we often have
different opinions. This can be because there is no agreement which can be reached, people haven’t
found out the facts yet, or there is a pluralism of good actions/lives.
Morality can have different general theories, but sometimes we need application of ethics to
a certain specific discipline with its own particular social and institutional rules. Applied ethics needs
to justify (1) the presupposed account of morality, (2) its account of the structures of institutional
and social relationship in a particular field, (3) its ability to derive its conclusions rationally from its
premises. MacIntyre focuses on 1 and 3.
The central requirement for a conception of ethics is that any rational agent would agree to
its moral rules. But general theories like Kantian ethics, utilitarianism or virtue ethicists are at odds
with each other. This disagreement should then logically also transfer to applied ethics, which we see
in the debate around abortion for example. But in many areas, large disagreement about rules of
morality is compatible with large agreement in the domain of applied ethics. There are three main
explanations for this:
- Rival and conflicting moral principles do often lead to the same answer in application. But it
would be weird to say that general moral principles thus aren’t really in conflict with each
other.
- People in this case are not really applying the moral principles, either misrepresenting the
nature of their own reasoning, or
- The conclusion is the result of a nonrational social transaction instead of a rational argument
This last option needs to be seriously considered. MacIntyre thinks the common idea that we first
comprehend the rules of morality as such and secondly look what they entail for application, is
wrong. We derive rules within the context of application and then apply them in one of these ways:
- The rule is broadened from a socially specific situation to a more independent rule. But in
this case, the rule does not have to be applied to different situations, it is simply already
clear.
- The rule is learned as belonging only to a specific situation and is broadened only by
referencing to this specific situation. Also then there is no task remaining for applied ethics.
Any regular rule goes along with a range of applications. For moral rules, there is movement between
rule and application through thought. When you grasp a moral rule, you have to know related
applications, but also how to extend the rule to yet unknown applications. But is a rule really the
same when it is extended to different applications?
It might be that extending a rule merely means that you reexamine to which instances the
rule was supposed to apply. Maybe other people would have also agreed to the rule. You could also
say have the case where the rule is reformulated to apply to a new situation. For example, from
different types of killing being prohibited to prohibiting killing altogether. The new rule becomes
more than a conjunction of previous ones. Hereby people need to appeal to some shared
background of evaluative beliefs, of what it means to for an action to be good or bad. This is likely to
exist in a big way to MacIntyre. Applied ethics is actually about problems with the application of
timeless moral principles and rules in particular social situations. The basic moral principles and rules
change in how they are understood through the history of its application, but retain a basic identity.
, Thus, applied ethics is about two things. But first: what is this basic morality? It is not
constituted by a set of principles or rule to which any rational agent would assent. Everyday ethical
practice has to be far removed from debates about conflicts about those sets of principles. We have
to acknowledge indeterminacy in our actual shared moral principles. There are always too many
exceptions to a rule to strictly hold on to it.
In many fields of life, we need to have some sort of public agreement, despite indeterminacy
and imprecision of shared moral principles. Examples are medicine, law, accountancy, engineering,
military. Here, we need to take determinate action, we need public confidence and warranted
expectations.
The dominant conception of applied ethics in a particular field can protect professional
autonomy from general moral scrutiny, or rediscover morality in that field. Applied ethics is generally
based upon the mistake of applying general rational moral theories, which enables sometimes power
to be protected from scrutiny.
Lecture
Morality is ground rule of what people actually believe in society, more about sociologists. Accepted
consensus.
Ethics is reflecting on those judgments/moral beliefs. Are the consensus rules good rules?
MacIntyre is a famous virtue ethicist.
See Floridi notes.
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