Biometric Identification, Law and Ethics

This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and...

Freedom of Political Communication, Propaganda and the Role of Epistemic Institutions in Cyberspace

This article provides definitions of fake news, hate speech and propaganda, respectively. These phenomenon are corruptive of the epistemic norms, e.g. to tell the truth. It also elaborates on the right to freedom of communication and its relation both to censoring propaganda and to the role of epistemic institutions, such as a free and...

The future of value sensitive design

Social Responsibility in Research Practice: Engaging applied scientists with the socio-ethical context of their work

How to encourage researchers to critically reflect on the ethical and social dimensions of their work? That is the central research question of this thesis. It starts from the assumption that the neutrality view of the social responsibility of the researcher – the view that researchers have no business with the social and ethical dimensions of...

What Values in Design? The Challenge of Incorporating Moral Values into Design

Recently, there is increased attention to the integration of moral values into the conception, design, and development of emerging IT. The most reviewed approach for this purpose in ethics and technology so far is Value-Sensitive Design (VSD). This article considers VSD as the prime candidate for implementing normative considerations into design...

Applying Rawlsian Approaches to Resolve Ethical Issues: Inventory and Setting of a Research Agenda

Insights from social science are increasingly used in the field of applied ethics. However, recent insights have shown that the empirical branch of business ethics lacks thorough theoretical grounding. This article discusses the use of the Rawlsian methods of wide reflective equilibrium and overlapping consensus in the field of applied ethics....

Machine Learning, Ethics and Law

Recent revelations concerning data firm Cambridge Analytica’s illegitimate use of the data of millions of Facebook users highlights the ethical and, relatedly, legal issues arising from the use of machine learning techniques. Cambridge Analytica is, or was – the revelations brought about its demise - a firm that used machine learning...

The Ecological Turn in Design: Adopting a Posthumanist Ethics to Inform Value Sensitive Design

Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based...

An Ethical Framework for the Design, Development, Implementation, and Assessment of Drones Used in Public Healthcare

The use of drones in public healthcare is suggested as a means to improve efficiency under constrained resources and personnel. This paper begins by framing drones in healthcare as a social experiment where ethical guidelines are needed to protect those impacted while fully realizing the benefits the technology offers. Then we propose an...

Emotions and Automation in a High-Tech Workplace: a Commentary

In a recent article, Madelaine Ley evaluates the future of work, specifically robotised workplaces, via the lens of care ethics. Like many proponents of care ethics, Ley draws on the approach and its emphasis on relationality to understand ethical action necessary for worker wellbeing. Her paper aims to fill a research gap by shifting away from...

Sociotechnical Infrastructures of Dominion in Stefan L. Sorgner’s We Have Always Been Cyborgs

In We Have Always Been Cyborgs (2021), Stefan L. Sorgner argues that, given the growing economic burden of desirable welfare programs, in order for Western democratic societies to continue to flourish it will be necessary that they establish some form of algocracy (i.e., governance by algorithm). This is argued to be necessary both in order to...