Having a Sense of Humor as a Virtue

Virtue Ethics for Responsible Innovation

Governments and companies are increasingly promoting and organizing Responsible Innovation. It is, however, unclear how the seemingly incompatible demands for responsibility, which is associated with care and caution, can be harmonized with demands for innovation, which is associated with risk-taking and speed. We turn to the tradition of virtue...

Before Responsible Innovation: Teaching Anticipation as a Competency for Engineers

This paper focuses on engineering ethics education utilizing Responsible Innovation (RI). As a forward-looking approach aiming to embed ethics within innovation practices, RI strives to align technology development with societal values. However, when teaching the concepts and methods of RI, we face two intertwined challenges. First, RI...

Engineers’ Moral Responsibility: A Confucian Perspective

Moral responsibility is one of the core concepts in engineering ethics and consequently in most engineering ethics education. Yet, despite a growing awareness that engineers should be trained to become more sensitive to cultural differences, most engineering ethics education is still based on Western approaches. In this article, we discuss...

Billy Cash: Digital piggy bank for meaningful saving behavior

Virtue is a fundamental aspect of well-being. Past research has proposed that emotional-driven design can be a powerful mediator towards supporting virtue. However, virtue-focused solutions generally target isolated actions. Here, using saving as an example of virtuous behavior we present a design cas —Billy Cash, a digital piggy bank that...

Varieties of responsibility: two problems of responsible innovation

The notion of responsible innovation suggests that innovators carry additional responsibilities (to society, stakeholders, users) beyond those commonly suggested. In this paper, we will discuss the meaning of these novel responsibilities focusing on two philosophical problems of attributing such responsibilities to innovators. The first is...

Design for Happiness Deck

To design for happiness sounds like a grand undertaking. Some might even say an overly ambitious one – but we disagree. We believe that explicitly focusing on customer happiness is an indispensable part of user-centred design and, ultimately, a reliable predictor of a design’s success.<br/><br/>As design researchers at the Delft Institute of...

Gossip as a Burdened Virtue

Gossip is often serious business, not idle chitchat. Gossip allows those oppressed to privately name their oppressors as a warning to others. Of course, gossip can be in error. The speaker may be lying or merely have lacked sufficient evidence. Bias can also make those who hear the gossip more or less likely to believe the gossip. By...

Using Aristotle’s theory of friendship to classify online friendships: A critical counterview

In a special issue of “Ethics and Information Technology” (September 2012), various philosophers have discussed the notion of online friendship. The preferred framework of analysis was Aristotle’s theory of friendship: it was argued that online friendships face many obstacles that hinder them from ever reaching the highest form of Aristotelian...

Gone with the Wind: Conceiving of Moral Responsibility in the Case of GMO Contamination

Genetically modified organisms are a technology now used with increasing frequency in agriculture. Genetically modified seeds have the special characteristic of being living artefacts that can reproduce and spread; thus it is difficult to control where they end up. In addition, genetically modified seeds may also bring about uncertainties for...

CO-Habit: Improving couples well-being through virtue

In the attempt to increase people’s subjective well-being, social connections are thus a pivotal component. The scope of this project will be to design for the character strength of ‘social intelligence’ that has been classified under the virtue of humanity.