New Methods for Ethics

PhD candidate: Giovanni Prins (g.r.prins@utwente.nl)

Supervisors: Dr. Naomi Jacobs (n.jacobs@utwente.nl, Dr. Janna van Grunsven (j.b.vangrunsven@tudelft.nl)

Promoter: Prof. Dr. Philip Brey (p.a.e.brey@utwente.nl)

Project Description

The aim of my research project is to develop a new approach for ethically assessing the disruptive impact of technologies on individuals. The project centres on two key ideas.

The first is that the personal interests of individuals centre on not only the protection of rights, but also on support for the development of capabilities. Therefore, we need to develop an ethics of capability development in relation to technology.

The second key idea is that one should take into account human diversity in ethically assessing capabilities. Ethics too often assumes a generic individual with generic needs and capabilities as the subject of ethical analysis. Therefore, we need an ethics of diversity and technology that considers human differences, both social, psychological and physiological, and allows us to identify and analyse ethical issues in relation to different individuals and groups, rather than ‘the human being’ in general.

My objective is thus to develop a theoretical and methodological framework for ethically assessing the differential and disruptive impact of technology on individuals

Post-doc: Dr. Giles Howdle (g.h.howdle@uu.nl)

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Joel Anderson (j.h.anderson@uu.nl), Dr. Jeroen Hopster (j.k.g.hopster@uu.nl) 

Project Description
A key part of what makes the emergence of new technologies particularly disruptive is the moral disorientation and uncertainty that they often produce. Socially disruptive technologies can challenge the applicability of established principles to changed circumstances, the foreseeability of future consequences, and even the viability of key ethical concepts, leading to uncertainty, instability, and ambiguity about ethical judgments and intuitions.

Circumstances of moral disorientation pose special difficulties for what is, arguably, a key feature of ethics: the aim of mutually justifying our judgments, policies, and actions to one another. The central aim of this project is to examine the potential for 1) approaches to normative ethics which foreground mutual justification and 2) the field of ethics of technology to learn from each other, particularly in addressing the following questions, broadly construed:

How can we best understand the obligation to mutually justify our responses to socially disruptive technologies and the moral dynamism, moral uncertainty, and moral disorientation associated with them? And, more generally, how can we come up with robust moral justifications if morality is subject to change?

PhD candidate: Haizea Escribano (h.escribanoasensio@utwente.nl)

Daily supervisor: Dr. Adam Henschke (a.henschke@utwente.nl)

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Philip Brey (p.a.e.brey@utwente.nl)

Project Description
This project investigates how we can conceptualize the role of technological products in moral and immoral acts and events, and how this conceptualization can result in new and better approaches to ethical analysis.  The focus is not just on single technological products with single users, but also on larger systems with multiple technological components and human operators.  These include both sociotechnical systems – predominantly technical systems with human operators and enablers, such as an electricity networks, industrial production systems and the internet, and technosocial systems – predominantly social systems that rely on technology, such as modern organizations and associations.

The PhD candidate will investigate the different causal and moral roles that technology can take in morally consequential actions and events involving technologies with single users, autonomous technologies, and sociotechnical and technosocial systems.  She will do so, initially, by studying and critiquing approaches in ethics (especially ethics of technology) that conceptualize the role of technology, and by making explicit what roles are assigned to technology.  Also considered will be descriptive approaches to technology, users and society   in STS, technology assessment and impact assessment and their possible translation to ethics. This is followed by the development of a new approach for ethical analysis which includes a vocabulary and methodology for understanding and assessing the various roles of various types of (socio)technological products and systems in moral actions and events.  The approach will mostly be theoretical but will also involve a number of (smaller) case studies.

There will be a particular focus on socially disruptive technologies: technologies that transform everyday life, social institutions, cultural practices, and potentially even fundamental beliefs and values.

Post-doc: Dr. Björn Lundgren (b.a.lundgren@uu.nl)

Daily supervisor: Prof. Dr. Joel Anderson (j.h.anderson@uu.nl)

Co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sven Nyholm (sven.nyholm@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)

Project Description
The aim of this postdoc project is to investigate the following research question:
“Which methods in practical philosophy are best suited (and on what grounds) for (1) understanding the normative concerns that are raised by emerging technologies (particularly, their socially and conceptually disruptive character) and for (2) justifying revised philosophical approaches to those concerns?”

This project addresses a complex and multi-faceted range of issues. Some socio-technological developments may require fundamental rethinking of our normative accounts, while others can be addressed using familiar frameworks.  Emerging and socially disruptive technologies may share distinctive ethical characteristics, but they may also differ fundamentally in the methods needed to analyze them. And the discussion of these issues occurs against a background of ongoing disputes about methodological pluralism and the relationship between more contextual methods and more principled methods in ethics, political philosophy, and related fields of philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Post-doc: Dr. Kevin Scharp (k.a.scharp@utwente.nl)

Supervisor: Prof. dr. Philip Brey (p.a.e.brey@utwente.nl)

Project Description
The aim of this postdoc project is to investigate conceptual disruptions, especially those caused by socially disruptive technologies (SDTs), require responses in the form of conceptual engineering.  What is conceptual engineering, what are appropriate methods, and how can conceptual disruptions caused by SDTs be responded to?